Blitz Street (2010) s01e04 Episode Script
Episode 4
1 TONY ROBINSON: It's 70 years since bombs fell on Britain during the Blitz.
For those of us who weren't there, it's hard to imagine what it was like.
So we built this.
It's not a film set.
It's real bricks and mortar.
(SIRENS WAILING) We've blown it up with real bombs, Just like the ones dropped by the Luftwaffe.
Using high-speed filming and modern blast gauges, defence scientists have been able to analyse the effects of these bombs for the first time.
It also gives us the unique opportunity to see what the bombs of the Blitz did to streets like this.
So far on Blitz Street, we've set off four bombs, the SC-50, the SC-500, and the SC-1000, and last time, Blitz Street got a taste of a V-1 doodlebug.
These bombs have left our streets shattered.
The whole of one terrace is now razed to the ground.
The other is only barely standing.
In this final chapter, we'll try to answer why the Blitz failed and examine how it shaped Britain today.
We'll also tell the story of Hitler's ultimate vengeance weapon, the V-2 missile.
We'll hear from the people who survived them.
And we'll detonate one here on Blitz Street.
It'll be the biggest explosion on British soil since the last real V-2 in the Second World War.
ALL: Roll out the barrel ROBINSON: After five years at war, Operation Overlord had succeeded and Britain and its allies were steadily advancing across Europe.
The tide had turned and the Nazis were in retreat.
They were fighting a war on two fronts.
And supplies were running out.
Despite this, Hitler showed he could hit back.
He launched his V-1 doodlebug, the first-ever guided missile.
It took the British people completely by surprise.
But, effective as they were, Hitler wanted something even bigger.
His top scientists were hard at work on this, the world's first long-range, supersonic rocket, and the deadliest weapon of its time, the terrifying V-2.
Ironically, the man who gave Hitler this deadly technical edge became famous for a completely different reason.
After the war, he helped President Kennedy win the race to the Moon.
His name was Wernher von Braun, and in the '60s he became the chief architect of the Saturn Vsuperbooster rocket that propelled the Apollo spacecraft.
However, few at the time knew that 30 years earlier, Wernher von Braun was not only a member of the Nazi party, but a fully commissioned SS officer.
His research began in the early '30s, as a precocious rocket scientist at the university in Berlin.
His dream was to build the first rocket to go into space.
But he needed money to develop it and accepted a research grant from Major Dornberger, of the German Army weapons division.
His work was classified.
Von Braun was probably well aware what his creation would be used for, but he was driven by his obsession.
Initially, his research went well.
However, in December, 1937, after a string of failed launches the weapons division lost confidence and the project was postponed.
Major Dornberger's diary recounts.
NARRATOR: "We were feeling subdued, almost despondent, but not hopeless.
"Despite all our failures, we were still convinced "that we should pull it off.
' ROBINSON: Von Braun's rocket project looked doomed, until the war was on, and Hitler began to dream of a V-2.
On Blitz Street, we're preparing to detonate our own equivalent of a V-2 rocket.
With a bomb this size there are concerns again that, like the V-1 charge, the weather might prevent us detonating it at full scale.
Unacceptable noise levels from the blast could be carried for miles by the wind or reflected from cloud.
Today, though, the signs are good.
For the V-2 charge, we're digging a hole.
They were designed to go off on impact.
But they travelled at such high speed that, by the time they'd detonated, they were about three metres underground.
Defence scientist, Robin Hiley, explains how this will affect the blast.
The energy of the explosion will be divided between a ground shock, which is like an earthquake, and the air shock that we've seen before.
The ground shock will travel faster than the air shock.
It will arrive at the structure first, shake it and then the air shock will follow on.
Why would the earth shock get there first? If it's travelling through earth, isn't it travelling through resistance and slowing it down, whereas if it was going through the air, it would have been much easier for it? Yeah, well, counter-intuitively, perhaps, the speed of sound in the ground and in water is faster than it is in air, because it's denser.
You must have seen projections of what will happen.
Well, I I honestly don't know about that.
I've had a look in various references to see modelling and predictions for the effect of ground shock in these circumstances, and I haven't been able to find it.
So I'm not really sure what effect the ground shock will have.
It will certainly teach me quite a bit, yeah.
ROBINSON: After the outbreak of war, the German Army had a renewed interest in von Braun's rocket project.
In Peenemünde, a small German village near the Baltic coast, he pressed on with his work.
Only this time he'd be working with Germany's top weapons scientists, who built the V-1.
Their job was to convince Hitler that von Braun's rocket could be the next vengeance weapon.
Between 1939 and 1942, von Braun continued to secretly test his rocket.
He tried to think of everything.
It was even painted in a black-and-white chessboard pattern, which helped to show if the rocket was spinning in flight.
However, testing such groundbreaking technology was inevitably dangerous.
He was pushing materials and avionics to the limit.
To stabilise the rocket in flight, he had to develop graphite rudders to withstand the temperature of the jet exhaust.
The fuel pipes were also modified to stop the rocket exploding.
Major Dornberger's diary describes one of the many failed launches.
NARRATOR: "Metal sheeting, fragments of steel and aluminium flew everywhere.
"Thick, black, stinking fumes filled the air.
"Von Braun and I stared at each other.
"We were unhurt, but the test stand had been wrecked.
' ROBINSON: As well as von Braun's many technical challenges, at one point, he also had to move his entire operation to Blizna in southeast Poland, after the Allies bombed Peenemünde.
As the testing continued, only four of the next twenty six launches reached their target.
The rest exploded.
Von Braun couldn't understand what the problem was.
Further tests discovered the rockets were overheating in flight.
He now knew the cause, but had no idea how to solve this major setback.
Von Braun appeared to have reached a technological barrier.
Then, as the Allies were advancing across France, von Braun tested the so-called "tin trousers'", a tube sleeve that fitted over the forward end of the rocket to stop it overheating in flight.
It worked.
The rocket now flew without exploding.
This design was the forerunner of a modern space shuttle heat shield.
Von Braun had finally cracked it.
This diary entry marks the moment when his rocket launched without failure.
NARRATOR: "So far we had succeeded only twice "in getting a rocket of this size off the ground at all.
"After about a second, the gleaming body of the rocket "rose vertically from the forests into the sky.
"The rocket kept to its course, as if running on rails.
"The projectile flew on.
"At that moment, supersonic speed was achieved for the first time "by a liquid-propellant rocket.
"The reddish flame had vanished "as it raced away at over 3,000 miles an hour.
' ROBINSON: The V-2 Rocket stood 14 metres high.
The main body of the rocket contains the jet-propulsion system.
The fuel was a mixture of liquid oxygen and alcohol, which were housed in separate tanks.
Its guidance system used four external rudders on the tailfins.
It travelled at 3,600 miles an hour and had a range of over 200 miles.
The warhead in the nosecone used one ton of the ammonium nitrate based explosive, Amatol.
On Blitz Street we've received the Met Office report on today's weather.
We've been given the all-clear to set off the full-scale equivalent of a V-2 warhead.
The bomb's being placed 33 metres away, in a bank next to Blitz Street.
The Amatol mix used in the V-2 warhead is no longer available, so our explosives team are using an equivalent, ANFO, or ammonium nitrate fuel oil.
Having perfected his rocket, von Braun finally got the chance to demonstrate it to Adolf Hitler.
Major Dornberger's diary entry from the time recounts the Führer's reaction.
NARRATOR: "Within minutes a strange, fanatical light "had flared up in his eyes.
"He was demanding 2,000 rockets a month.
"He shouted, 'What I want is annihilation!" ROBINSON: In the early evening of the 8th of September, 1944, there was a huge explosion in Staveley Road, Chiswick, west London.
We did not know anything about them and nobody told us anything about them.
I think the government had decided that they were so frightening that we couldn't be told.
I was working at this time, in the City and one girl came in and she said, "I had a dreadful night, the gas main has blown up.
" But then about two or three days later, another girl came in, and she said, "Gas main went up last night.
" And she said, it was what the other girl said, she said, "You've never seen anything like it in all your life.
" And we said, "It's Hitler.
" At first, the British government wasn't even certain what happened and released a cover story that the damage was due to exploding gas mains, which led some Londoners, who had actually seen the fire trails as they came in, to refer to flying gas mains.
The V-2 was really nasty.
It came flying through the air, launched from across the Channel, one ton of explosives, and when it got here it buried itself into the earth, and then exploded with terrifying force.
So we're gonna bury ours.
We've dug a three-metre hole down there.
We've filled it with explosives, covered it with earth and we're about to ignite it.
Explosives expert Charlie, who has demolished a lot of buildings in his time, has never let off anything as big as this before.
In all the other charges we've fired, up till now have been surface detonations, but this one, obviously, lots of the energy's gonna go into the ground.
So the houses are going to see a large ground movement.
Up to now, we've blown them down.
Now we're going to shake them.
(SIREN WAILING) ROBINSON: As with all the other bombs, the site is evacuated.
I'm going to be a lot nearer.
We're a couple of hundred metres from the houses here, so this bunker should give us some protection from the blast.
You'll notice I used the word "should".
Because of its size, I'm more nervous about this one than anything we've done before.
The worst V-2 attack of the war happened just over two months into Hitler's campaign.
The missile hit Woolworths in New Cross in London on a busy Saturday morning.
In the shop when it hit was schoolboy Derek Millen.
Two friends of mine and myself, we used to go up to the Laurie Grove Baths.
And when we come out there, we walked down New Cross Road into Woolworths, 'cause in there they had a tea bar, and we used to have a cup of Bovril afterwards and perhaps something to eat.
Next minute, I thought I was having a bad dream.
And then I thought, "Oh, Hitler's done this to us," you know.
'Cause I thought, "Hello, he's dropped something on us.
" And I couldn't move, couldn't feel me left arm, me eyes were all gunged up.
I was getting a bit panicky 'cause I couldn't breath, very small area, and I was (PANTING) All the time.
Kept going in and out of consciousness.
And then, at one stage, I seemed to come to and I heard a voice call, talk to me, "Are you all right? Can you hear me? Can you hear me?" And I couldn't talk, I'd lost me voice.
They were starting to lift all the rubble away from us, and a waft of fresh air come in, I thought, "Oh, bloody marvellous," you know.
They put me on a stretcher, took me to Lewisham Hospital.
And as I was coming to in the ward, uh, me mum was down the bottom of the bed with me sister.
And I heard them say, "Oh, both his mates got killed.
' They didn't want me to know, you know.
But I did hear it, and anyway, I said, "Is that right, they got killed?" And she said, "Yes.
" ROBINSON: In that one attack, 108 people were seriously injured, 160 were killed.
The V-2s, now, they were the most terrifying of all.
And these things would come over and just explode.
They were travelling far beyond the speed of sound, so you couldn't hear them coming.
You'd hear this awful, hollow roar, after it had gone off.
It was quite amazing.
They were very, very effective at destroying, um, morale.
I mean, you had a job to get to sleep at night, wondering if one was going to land.
It doesn't bear thinking about, so we tried not to think about it too much.
ROBINSON: So far, Hazel Hacking had survived the entire Blitz unscathed.
Then she found herself on the receiving end of a V-2 attack.
HACKING: It was getting on for 10pm.
The first thing that happened was, before any noises of any kind, was that the light went out.
Air, instead of it going out, started to come in.
And it swirled and it swirled round like a dust storm.
You would think that you would fall on the floor, but you didn't.
It seemed as though the circle of the wind was blowing round and keeping you up.
There were big lumps of wood, big lumps of brick, and shards of glass.
Tiny, tiny sparkles of light, like diamonds in the air, were flying round, and like you were standing in a hailstorm.
At that point, I thought, "Well, this is it.
"I can't breathe in or out.
" And if I did breathe in, it was all dust, so I think this is when I'm going to die.
ROBINSON: Hazel was badly injured.
Her body was hit by shrapnel, and she suffered a serious head wound.
Now we can see for ourselves the power of one of these missiles.
What did our V-2 do to Blitz Street? ROBINSON: As we approach the street from the bunker, we come across debris from the blast, and we're still some way from the bomb site.
Now, this is rubble, isn't it? HILEY: Yes, there's some brick there.
They've gone up pretty high and shattered when they've hit the ground.
- Look at that.
- See the hole there? Some heavy material has come down there and has thrown the soil out.
Would you believe it? It's virtually untouched, isn't it? It is.
It is.
Uh, the shockwave is obviously not strong enough to damage the brickwork.
ROBINSON: Our experts Charlie and Robin both thought the ground shock might actually cause the building to collapse.
Then we see where all the force from the blast went.
HILEY: That is a good deal bigger than the crater radius I was estimating, - but that was based on a surface charge.
- Yeah.
Buried charges produced a much bigger crater.
And I'm afraid that's where the energy went.
From what I've read, it was actually the debris falling after a V-2 that caused more mayhem than the actual explosion itself.
I can well believe that.
This is relatively soft soil, although there are hard lumps in it, and all that coming down from a substantial height, it would cause a lot of damage.
ROBINSON: How big do you reckon that hole was? Well, we've done some measurements.
It's about twenty metres across and about eight metres deep.
Simple calculations suggest that something around 3,000 tons has been shifted out of that hole.
It took about 11 seconds for the last of the stuff to reach back down to the ground, and again a quick but of figuring suggests that it's gone 1,000 feet in the air, something like that.
ROBINSON: Imagine all that stuff coming down on London, except not mud, but concrete and brick, and not just once, but night after night.
As the V-2s fell on Britain, Churchill tried to hit back by attacking the launch sites.
It was a tall order, as the Nazis were using mobile launchers.
Churchill had to try something else.
He knew Britain couldn't stop these high-tech weapons.
Desperate to keep up British morale, he turned to Ml5 for help.
They already had a counterintelligence network used for deception purposes.
It was called "The Double-Cross System".
They'd turned German spies into double agents who they used to pass back false information to the Nazis.
So when the first V-2 missiles hit central London, Churchill shut down all publicity of the strikes and told these spies to say that the rockets were, in fact, overshooting their intended target.
It worked.
The Nazis then reprogrammed the rockets to fall short.
It meant that many now missed the highly-populated city centre, although they did still hit less populated suburbs.
Ultimately, the Allies had to find and destroy them on the ground.
As they pushed through Holland and Germany, they began to overrun the V-2 launch sites.
The Allies now stepped up their bombing of Germany.
Their aim was to support their advancing armies.
They targeted German cities with a massive bombing campaign.
On one raid alone, they sent 1, 100 bombers to unleash a massive 4,500 tons of high explosives and incendiaries.
ANNOUNCER: RAF heavy bombers assist Marshal Konev's drive into the Reich.
The target is Dresden.
It was being used to pump German troops into counterattacks against the Russian army, not many miles to the east.
ROBINSON: At least 25,000 civilians were killed.
Like the Blitz on Britain, it's thought to have had little impact on the outcome of the war.
Only the ground offensive could do that.
As the Allies marched through Europe, they reached the borders of the Harz mountains.
There, housed in a disused mine shaft, they discovered what they'd been searching for.
It was an underground V-2 rocket factory.
And they uncovered an even darker secret.
The Nazis had been using forced labour to build these rockets.
In the camps set up at each factory, some 20,000 prisoners of war died from disease or starvation.
Others were hanged or shot for refusing to work.
Soon, all the V-2 sites would be destroyed.
Hitler's vengeance weapon campaign was over.
It had lasted seven months, and brought terror back to the streets of Britain.
The last one crashed in Kynaston Road in Orpington, Kent, on March the 27th, 1945.
In all, these rockets seriously injured over 6,500 people and claimed the lives of more than 2,500.
Weeks later, as the Russians entered Berlin, Adolf Hitler's dead body was found in his bunker.
The war in Europe was finally over, and the era when the British people were carpetbombed passed into history.
Since then, historians have tried to make sense of it.
Why was it that bombing civilians didn't work? What did it do the people that lived through it? And how did it shape the Britain we live in today? Most analysts see the Blitz as one of Hitler's greatest blunders, and it happened almost by accident.
When the Luftwaffe missed their target on the Thames and hit civilians, we struck back by attacking Berlin and Hitler lost his temper.
He took revenge on the people of London.
This action diverted his attacks away from RAF bases.
If he'd stayed focused on his original target, he might have won the Battle of Britain.
But it meant that every man, woman and child became a potential target.
It ushered in a new kind of war.
The people of Britain endured five years of bombing.
Yet the country didn't collapse, the people didn't surrender.
So, was Britain really united by the so-called Blitz spirit? The country had a population of 48 million in the Second World War, and in that, I can find you 10 or 100 examples of absolutely any kind of behaviour.
There were people who sought to profit from the Blitz.
There were spivs, there were criminals, there were murderers.
There were people who were anti-Semites, there were people who were racists.
But, overwhelmingly, the Blitz spirit turns out to be a fact.
That, under the circumstances, the choices were very simple.
Either the British people gave in and told their government to give in, or they carried on.
They were prepared to risk their lives, quite literally, rather than admit defeat.
ROBINSON: What was the psychology behind this? Psychiatrists at the time actually studied those that lived through the Blitz.
Based on the experiences of soldiers from the First World War suffering from shell-shock, the government had believed that there would be millions of psychiatric casualties from a prolonged bombing campaign.
They even created large new psychiatric hospitals on the outskirts of towns and cities.
In reality, hardly any patients were admitted, and, astonishingly, suicide rates were lower than before the war.
The predictions of six million psychological casualties were never realised.
Principally because the Germans were never able to deliver such a powerful, concentrated attack on a single area.
So, although London took the vast, overwhelming number of casualties, almost 30,000 people were killed in London.
When you express that as a percentage of the total population, it's something like 0.
2%.
And it's also spread out across a very large area.
It's partly the natural resilience, the courage, the spirit of the people.
We're all in it together.
But people always had time to recover.
ROBINSON: Perhaps the best insight comes from the people who actually lived through it.
You've got to realise that human beings cannot live in terror permanently.
They'll either commit suicide or live through it, but they have to adjust.
You can put up with about three weeks of complete fear.
And then after that, your brain seems to do something, and you think, "Well, I can't worry this much," and so you stop worrying about it.
ROBINSON: A new mindset was born in post-war Britain.
The Blitz changed a great deal more than the landscape of Britain.
I think it changed a lot of people's attitudes, and it changed a lot of their expectations.
How was the sacrifice that they'd had to make during the Blitz, the danger they'd had to go through, how was that going to be rewarded, in terms of sort of social equality, um, in the peace? ROBINSON: Just six weeks after the end of the war in Europe, there was a general election.
Among the rubble of war-torn Britain, the people went to the polls.
And Churchill lost.
Never before have the electors shown clearly their desire.
ROBINSON: They voted overwhelmingly for the Labour Party, led by Clement Attlee, who won a majority of 146 seats.
The result was a major shock, given the heroic status of Winston Churchill.
But people believed he wasn't the man to rebuild the country following the war.
They voted for the welfare state, they chose healthcare over empire, but, in a broader sense, that something positive had to come out of the experience.
It was not enough simply to survive, you had to survive for a reason.
And over and over again, the people who survived the Blitz will tell that story.
ROBINSON: Out of this, a rebuilding programme began.
It created Homes for Heroes coming back from the front line, and provided badly-needed work, though it was a new challenge to an exhausted population.
Homelessness was a huge problem after the war, of course, because something like one in every seven houses had been damaged.
ROBINSON: After the chaos, a new Britain emerged, and the horrors of the Blitz faded into memory.
Today, 70 years later, there are still dangerous reminders that it happened.
Unexploded bombs lie scattered across our land.
In the sands of Holy Island, it's the RAF's job to dispose of them.
However, for the RAF, the Blitz also left a more fundamental legacy.
WING CMDR IAN GALE: Could the Blitz ever happen again? My feeling is no.
It was ineffective, so it actually united the population in a common cause, rather than destroying the will of a population.
And I think, looking to both sides of that campaign, that's what happened.
The world has become a different place, and I think that kind of activity is simply not acceptable.
With carpet-bombing, Blitz style, the aim is just to destroy everything.
Well, the modern warfare is not like that.
If you have got any idea that you are going to actually have any relations with that country, post the conflict, if there's going to be any kind of reconstruction, clearly, the more you can limit the damage you do to that country, the better.
ROBINSON: Today, the RAF goes to great lengths to protect civilians.
On TVnews, we see the footage from cameras on precision-guided weapons.
The RAF put them there to try to make sure they're hitting their military targets.
MAN: Firing now! ROBINSON: As this bomb disposal team makes safe these Second World War UXBs, we turn to Blitz Street to see what we've learned from our own bombs.
ROBINSON: Blitz Street gave defence scientists a chance to see what bombs do to ordinary houses.
It gave us a unique opportunity to bring the story of the Blitz to life, and put pictures to the memories of those that survived it.
Ultimately, we hoped to bring home the true horror of the Blitz.
Even the smallest bomb, like the SC-50, was a devastating weapon.
We saw how the shrapnel from its bomb casing travelled at over 7,000 miles an hour.
Survivors told stories of how they tried to hide from bombs like these under the stairs.
We'd dig them out and we'd find that, yeah, the whole family was sheltering underneath the staircase.
And, in a lot of cases, they survived.
ROBINSON: Our blast gauges under the stairs confirmed that if you'd been hiding there, even three metres away from a bomb, you'd have lived.
After that first bomb, I remember thinking how strange it was to see a house with no wall and everything inside it still there.
Our street was beginning to look Just like the archive of the time.
The only way I can describe it is if you open a doll's house.
To me, I didn't think anything of it.
I'd never known anything else.
ROBINSON: We could see how this damage was caused with our high-speed footage.
It helped us see the ghostly effects around the street, and inside the houses.
CHILD: You could feel the whole building move, from one side and back again, about nine or ten inches.
And we were shaking with fear.
It's hard to describe the horror.
Just utter, utter terror.
ROBINSON: We heard from the rescuers what it was like to deal with the aftermath.
You look at them, there's nothing wrong with them.
You thought, "Why aren't you awake? "Wake up, talk to me.
" No, no, they're dead.
WHEELER: There was mums, children, but the hardest part was babies.
Well, it's You just had to ignore what you saw.
If they weren't alive you just left them.
ROBINSON: As the bombing continued on Blitz Street, there were more images of the past.
Well, well, well.
The chimneys are still standing, aren't they? HILEY: That image of a building with just the chimneys standing is quite commonly seen in bomb-damaged areas from the Second World War.
ROBINSON: When we firebombed the street at night with incendiaries, I got a glimpse of what it was like to experience that threat.
Then we set of the Flam bomb.
Even behind a concrete blast shield, it was terrifying.
MAN: Three, two, one.
ROBINSON: When the Luftwaffe bombed Coventry, the whole fabric of society nearly collapsed.
At school, they would call a register, and all the kids would call their names out, and sometimes there'd be a pause.
"Where's so and so?" "Oh, they're dead, miss.
Their house was hit last night.
" (GASPING) ROBINSON: And we heard how some people did consider surrender.
You know, it's all right for people in authority, sitting down in their steel-lined dugouts to tell us, but to be there, in amongst it, it was just too awful.
ROBINSON: We saw how the Nazis developed different bombs for different jobs, like those they aimed at our factories.
Ammonium-nitrate based charges had a heaving effect that pushed walls over, while RDX had a greater brisance, and shattered them.
And these bombs, aimed at breaking the war effort, landed in our city streets and changed the lives of those that lived there.
EDGSON: It stopped me believing in God.
I don't believe in God.
And I think that's partly Partly down to that.
ROBINSON: And then there was the V-2, the biggest of our bombs.
It lifted several thousand tons of debris 1,000 feet in the air.
It's easy to see how impossible it was to shelter from it.
If you survived the blast and the shrapnel, the falling debris could kill you.
Before the war, it was predicted that the Blitz would kill 10 times the number of people it did.
So, why was this estimate so wrong? One theory was the success of the shelter policy.
Our authentic Anderson shelter showed it did indeed provide incredible protection from blast and shrapnel.
If you'd been inside it, you would have survived three bombs at close range, including a 500-kilogram charge detonated just 22 metres away.
Survivors also told us what it was like to be in one during a raid.
The earth moved.
It really did move the whole shelters.
And you got this sort of thump.
Almost like an earthquake.
It seemed to be coming up from underneath the earth.
ROBINSON: We'd dressed Blitz Street authentically, and, in amongst the rubble, one item survived every bomb.
Two tons of bombs, two thirds of the milk's missing, but it's still there.
Whether you lived or died in the Blitz was down to chance, and, in some cases, this helped people live through it.
Once they'd survived one raid, they began to believe they could survive them all.
The mindset of those survivors so often proves fascinating and unexpected.
I think it was a privilege, in retrospect, because I've a very different attitude to life than people who were born after the war, because I I just value every day, every minute of every day.
When I see those films that portray the war, and that sort of thing, it does have an effect on me watching it because it brings it back to me, and I think, "My God, to think I actually lived through that.
" I don't think it's blighted my life, by any means.
Not at all.
Maybe it's helped me in some ways, because I'm probably not as frightened of things as some other people may be.
(CHUCKLING) ROBINSON: In the end, the Blitz pulled communities together, rather than tearing them apart.
Bombs seemed so powerful, particularly when they cause the kind of structural devastation that we've seen on Blitz Street.
But they did far less damage to the mind than anyone thought possible.
In fact, British willpower went head-to-head with this deadly technology and it won.
For those of us who weren't there, it's hard to imagine what it was like.
So we built this.
It's not a film set.
It's real bricks and mortar.
(SIRENS WAILING) We've blown it up with real bombs, Just like the ones dropped by the Luftwaffe.
Using high-speed filming and modern blast gauges, defence scientists have been able to analyse the effects of these bombs for the first time.
It also gives us the unique opportunity to see what the bombs of the Blitz did to streets like this.
So far on Blitz Street, we've set off four bombs, the SC-50, the SC-500, and the SC-1000, and last time, Blitz Street got a taste of a V-1 doodlebug.
These bombs have left our streets shattered.
The whole of one terrace is now razed to the ground.
The other is only barely standing.
In this final chapter, we'll try to answer why the Blitz failed and examine how it shaped Britain today.
We'll also tell the story of Hitler's ultimate vengeance weapon, the V-2 missile.
We'll hear from the people who survived them.
And we'll detonate one here on Blitz Street.
It'll be the biggest explosion on British soil since the last real V-2 in the Second World War.
ALL: Roll out the barrel ROBINSON: After five years at war, Operation Overlord had succeeded and Britain and its allies were steadily advancing across Europe.
The tide had turned and the Nazis were in retreat.
They were fighting a war on two fronts.
And supplies were running out.
Despite this, Hitler showed he could hit back.
He launched his V-1 doodlebug, the first-ever guided missile.
It took the British people completely by surprise.
But, effective as they were, Hitler wanted something even bigger.
His top scientists were hard at work on this, the world's first long-range, supersonic rocket, and the deadliest weapon of its time, the terrifying V-2.
Ironically, the man who gave Hitler this deadly technical edge became famous for a completely different reason.
After the war, he helped President Kennedy win the race to the Moon.
His name was Wernher von Braun, and in the '60s he became the chief architect of the Saturn Vsuperbooster rocket that propelled the Apollo spacecraft.
However, few at the time knew that 30 years earlier, Wernher von Braun was not only a member of the Nazi party, but a fully commissioned SS officer.
His research began in the early '30s, as a precocious rocket scientist at the university in Berlin.
His dream was to build the first rocket to go into space.
But he needed money to develop it and accepted a research grant from Major Dornberger, of the German Army weapons division.
His work was classified.
Von Braun was probably well aware what his creation would be used for, but he was driven by his obsession.
Initially, his research went well.
However, in December, 1937, after a string of failed launches the weapons division lost confidence and the project was postponed.
Major Dornberger's diary recounts.
NARRATOR: "We were feeling subdued, almost despondent, but not hopeless.
"Despite all our failures, we were still convinced "that we should pull it off.
' ROBINSON: Von Braun's rocket project looked doomed, until the war was on, and Hitler began to dream of a V-2.
On Blitz Street, we're preparing to detonate our own equivalent of a V-2 rocket.
With a bomb this size there are concerns again that, like the V-1 charge, the weather might prevent us detonating it at full scale.
Unacceptable noise levels from the blast could be carried for miles by the wind or reflected from cloud.
Today, though, the signs are good.
For the V-2 charge, we're digging a hole.
They were designed to go off on impact.
But they travelled at such high speed that, by the time they'd detonated, they were about three metres underground.
Defence scientist, Robin Hiley, explains how this will affect the blast.
The energy of the explosion will be divided between a ground shock, which is like an earthquake, and the air shock that we've seen before.
The ground shock will travel faster than the air shock.
It will arrive at the structure first, shake it and then the air shock will follow on.
Why would the earth shock get there first? If it's travelling through earth, isn't it travelling through resistance and slowing it down, whereas if it was going through the air, it would have been much easier for it? Yeah, well, counter-intuitively, perhaps, the speed of sound in the ground and in water is faster than it is in air, because it's denser.
You must have seen projections of what will happen.
Well, I I honestly don't know about that.
I've had a look in various references to see modelling and predictions for the effect of ground shock in these circumstances, and I haven't been able to find it.
So I'm not really sure what effect the ground shock will have.
It will certainly teach me quite a bit, yeah.
ROBINSON: After the outbreak of war, the German Army had a renewed interest in von Braun's rocket project.
In Peenemünde, a small German village near the Baltic coast, he pressed on with his work.
Only this time he'd be working with Germany's top weapons scientists, who built the V-1.
Their job was to convince Hitler that von Braun's rocket could be the next vengeance weapon.
Between 1939 and 1942, von Braun continued to secretly test his rocket.
He tried to think of everything.
It was even painted in a black-and-white chessboard pattern, which helped to show if the rocket was spinning in flight.
However, testing such groundbreaking technology was inevitably dangerous.
He was pushing materials and avionics to the limit.
To stabilise the rocket in flight, he had to develop graphite rudders to withstand the temperature of the jet exhaust.
The fuel pipes were also modified to stop the rocket exploding.
Major Dornberger's diary describes one of the many failed launches.
NARRATOR: "Metal sheeting, fragments of steel and aluminium flew everywhere.
"Thick, black, stinking fumes filled the air.
"Von Braun and I stared at each other.
"We were unhurt, but the test stand had been wrecked.
' ROBINSON: As well as von Braun's many technical challenges, at one point, he also had to move his entire operation to Blizna in southeast Poland, after the Allies bombed Peenemünde.
As the testing continued, only four of the next twenty six launches reached their target.
The rest exploded.
Von Braun couldn't understand what the problem was.
Further tests discovered the rockets were overheating in flight.
He now knew the cause, but had no idea how to solve this major setback.
Von Braun appeared to have reached a technological barrier.
Then, as the Allies were advancing across France, von Braun tested the so-called "tin trousers'", a tube sleeve that fitted over the forward end of the rocket to stop it overheating in flight.
It worked.
The rocket now flew without exploding.
This design was the forerunner of a modern space shuttle heat shield.
Von Braun had finally cracked it.
This diary entry marks the moment when his rocket launched without failure.
NARRATOR: "So far we had succeeded only twice "in getting a rocket of this size off the ground at all.
"After about a second, the gleaming body of the rocket "rose vertically from the forests into the sky.
"The rocket kept to its course, as if running on rails.
"The projectile flew on.
"At that moment, supersonic speed was achieved for the first time "by a liquid-propellant rocket.
"The reddish flame had vanished "as it raced away at over 3,000 miles an hour.
' ROBINSON: The V-2 Rocket stood 14 metres high.
The main body of the rocket contains the jet-propulsion system.
The fuel was a mixture of liquid oxygen and alcohol, which were housed in separate tanks.
Its guidance system used four external rudders on the tailfins.
It travelled at 3,600 miles an hour and had a range of over 200 miles.
The warhead in the nosecone used one ton of the ammonium nitrate based explosive, Amatol.
On Blitz Street we've received the Met Office report on today's weather.
We've been given the all-clear to set off the full-scale equivalent of a V-2 warhead.
The bomb's being placed 33 metres away, in a bank next to Blitz Street.
The Amatol mix used in the V-2 warhead is no longer available, so our explosives team are using an equivalent, ANFO, or ammonium nitrate fuel oil.
Having perfected his rocket, von Braun finally got the chance to demonstrate it to Adolf Hitler.
Major Dornberger's diary entry from the time recounts the Führer's reaction.
NARRATOR: "Within minutes a strange, fanatical light "had flared up in his eyes.
"He was demanding 2,000 rockets a month.
"He shouted, 'What I want is annihilation!" ROBINSON: In the early evening of the 8th of September, 1944, there was a huge explosion in Staveley Road, Chiswick, west London.
We did not know anything about them and nobody told us anything about them.
I think the government had decided that they were so frightening that we couldn't be told.
I was working at this time, in the City and one girl came in and she said, "I had a dreadful night, the gas main has blown up.
" But then about two or three days later, another girl came in, and she said, "Gas main went up last night.
" And she said, it was what the other girl said, she said, "You've never seen anything like it in all your life.
" And we said, "It's Hitler.
" At first, the British government wasn't even certain what happened and released a cover story that the damage was due to exploding gas mains, which led some Londoners, who had actually seen the fire trails as they came in, to refer to flying gas mains.
The V-2 was really nasty.
It came flying through the air, launched from across the Channel, one ton of explosives, and when it got here it buried itself into the earth, and then exploded with terrifying force.
So we're gonna bury ours.
We've dug a three-metre hole down there.
We've filled it with explosives, covered it with earth and we're about to ignite it.
Explosives expert Charlie, who has demolished a lot of buildings in his time, has never let off anything as big as this before.
In all the other charges we've fired, up till now have been surface detonations, but this one, obviously, lots of the energy's gonna go into the ground.
So the houses are going to see a large ground movement.
Up to now, we've blown them down.
Now we're going to shake them.
(SIREN WAILING) ROBINSON: As with all the other bombs, the site is evacuated.
I'm going to be a lot nearer.
We're a couple of hundred metres from the houses here, so this bunker should give us some protection from the blast.
You'll notice I used the word "should".
Because of its size, I'm more nervous about this one than anything we've done before.
The worst V-2 attack of the war happened just over two months into Hitler's campaign.
The missile hit Woolworths in New Cross in London on a busy Saturday morning.
In the shop when it hit was schoolboy Derek Millen.
Two friends of mine and myself, we used to go up to the Laurie Grove Baths.
And when we come out there, we walked down New Cross Road into Woolworths, 'cause in there they had a tea bar, and we used to have a cup of Bovril afterwards and perhaps something to eat.
Next minute, I thought I was having a bad dream.
And then I thought, "Oh, Hitler's done this to us," you know.
'Cause I thought, "Hello, he's dropped something on us.
" And I couldn't move, couldn't feel me left arm, me eyes were all gunged up.
I was getting a bit panicky 'cause I couldn't breath, very small area, and I was (PANTING) All the time.
Kept going in and out of consciousness.
And then, at one stage, I seemed to come to and I heard a voice call, talk to me, "Are you all right? Can you hear me? Can you hear me?" And I couldn't talk, I'd lost me voice.
They were starting to lift all the rubble away from us, and a waft of fresh air come in, I thought, "Oh, bloody marvellous," you know.
They put me on a stretcher, took me to Lewisham Hospital.
And as I was coming to in the ward, uh, me mum was down the bottom of the bed with me sister.
And I heard them say, "Oh, both his mates got killed.
' They didn't want me to know, you know.
But I did hear it, and anyway, I said, "Is that right, they got killed?" And she said, "Yes.
" ROBINSON: In that one attack, 108 people were seriously injured, 160 were killed.
The V-2s, now, they were the most terrifying of all.
And these things would come over and just explode.
They were travelling far beyond the speed of sound, so you couldn't hear them coming.
You'd hear this awful, hollow roar, after it had gone off.
It was quite amazing.
They were very, very effective at destroying, um, morale.
I mean, you had a job to get to sleep at night, wondering if one was going to land.
It doesn't bear thinking about, so we tried not to think about it too much.
ROBINSON: So far, Hazel Hacking had survived the entire Blitz unscathed.
Then she found herself on the receiving end of a V-2 attack.
HACKING: It was getting on for 10pm.
The first thing that happened was, before any noises of any kind, was that the light went out.
Air, instead of it going out, started to come in.
And it swirled and it swirled round like a dust storm.
You would think that you would fall on the floor, but you didn't.
It seemed as though the circle of the wind was blowing round and keeping you up.
There were big lumps of wood, big lumps of brick, and shards of glass.
Tiny, tiny sparkles of light, like diamonds in the air, were flying round, and like you were standing in a hailstorm.
At that point, I thought, "Well, this is it.
"I can't breathe in or out.
" And if I did breathe in, it was all dust, so I think this is when I'm going to die.
ROBINSON: Hazel was badly injured.
Her body was hit by shrapnel, and she suffered a serious head wound.
Now we can see for ourselves the power of one of these missiles.
What did our V-2 do to Blitz Street? ROBINSON: As we approach the street from the bunker, we come across debris from the blast, and we're still some way from the bomb site.
Now, this is rubble, isn't it? HILEY: Yes, there's some brick there.
They've gone up pretty high and shattered when they've hit the ground.
- Look at that.
- See the hole there? Some heavy material has come down there and has thrown the soil out.
Would you believe it? It's virtually untouched, isn't it? It is.
It is.
Uh, the shockwave is obviously not strong enough to damage the brickwork.
ROBINSON: Our experts Charlie and Robin both thought the ground shock might actually cause the building to collapse.
Then we see where all the force from the blast went.
HILEY: That is a good deal bigger than the crater radius I was estimating, - but that was based on a surface charge.
- Yeah.
Buried charges produced a much bigger crater.
And I'm afraid that's where the energy went.
From what I've read, it was actually the debris falling after a V-2 that caused more mayhem than the actual explosion itself.
I can well believe that.
This is relatively soft soil, although there are hard lumps in it, and all that coming down from a substantial height, it would cause a lot of damage.
ROBINSON: How big do you reckon that hole was? Well, we've done some measurements.
It's about twenty metres across and about eight metres deep.
Simple calculations suggest that something around 3,000 tons has been shifted out of that hole.
It took about 11 seconds for the last of the stuff to reach back down to the ground, and again a quick but of figuring suggests that it's gone 1,000 feet in the air, something like that.
ROBINSON: Imagine all that stuff coming down on London, except not mud, but concrete and brick, and not just once, but night after night.
As the V-2s fell on Britain, Churchill tried to hit back by attacking the launch sites.
It was a tall order, as the Nazis were using mobile launchers.
Churchill had to try something else.
He knew Britain couldn't stop these high-tech weapons.
Desperate to keep up British morale, he turned to Ml5 for help.
They already had a counterintelligence network used for deception purposes.
It was called "The Double-Cross System".
They'd turned German spies into double agents who they used to pass back false information to the Nazis.
So when the first V-2 missiles hit central London, Churchill shut down all publicity of the strikes and told these spies to say that the rockets were, in fact, overshooting their intended target.
It worked.
The Nazis then reprogrammed the rockets to fall short.
It meant that many now missed the highly-populated city centre, although they did still hit less populated suburbs.
Ultimately, the Allies had to find and destroy them on the ground.
As they pushed through Holland and Germany, they began to overrun the V-2 launch sites.
The Allies now stepped up their bombing of Germany.
Their aim was to support their advancing armies.
They targeted German cities with a massive bombing campaign.
On one raid alone, they sent 1, 100 bombers to unleash a massive 4,500 tons of high explosives and incendiaries.
ANNOUNCER: RAF heavy bombers assist Marshal Konev's drive into the Reich.
The target is Dresden.
It was being used to pump German troops into counterattacks against the Russian army, not many miles to the east.
ROBINSON: At least 25,000 civilians were killed.
Like the Blitz on Britain, it's thought to have had little impact on the outcome of the war.
Only the ground offensive could do that.
As the Allies marched through Europe, they reached the borders of the Harz mountains.
There, housed in a disused mine shaft, they discovered what they'd been searching for.
It was an underground V-2 rocket factory.
And they uncovered an even darker secret.
The Nazis had been using forced labour to build these rockets.
In the camps set up at each factory, some 20,000 prisoners of war died from disease or starvation.
Others were hanged or shot for refusing to work.
Soon, all the V-2 sites would be destroyed.
Hitler's vengeance weapon campaign was over.
It had lasted seven months, and brought terror back to the streets of Britain.
The last one crashed in Kynaston Road in Orpington, Kent, on March the 27th, 1945.
In all, these rockets seriously injured over 6,500 people and claimed the lives of more than 2,500.
Weeks later, as the Russians entered Berlin, Adolf Hitler's dead body was found in his bunker.
The war in Europe was finally over, and the era when the British people were carpetbombed passed into history.
Since then, historians have tried to make sense of it.
Why was it that bombing civilians didn't work? What did it do the people that lived through it? And how did it shape the Britain we live in today? Most analysts see the Blitz as one of Hitler's greatest blunders, and it happened almost by accident.
When the Luftwaffe missed their target on the Thames and hit civilians, we struck back by attacking Berlin and Hitler lost his temper.
He took revenge on the people of London.
This action diverted his attacks away from RAF bases.
If he'd stayed focused on his original target, he might have won the Battle of Britain.
But it meant that every man, woman and child became a potential target.
It ushered in a new kind of war.
The people of Britain endured five years of bombing.
Yet the country didn't collapse, the people didn't surrender.
So, was Britain really united by the so-called Blitz spirit? The country had a population of 48 million in the Second World War, and in that, I can find you 10 or 100 examples of absolutely any kind of behaviour.
There were people who sought to profit from the Blitz.
There were spivs, there were criminals, there were murderers.
There were people who were anti-Semites, there were people who were racists.
But, overwhelmingly, the Blitz spirit turns out to be a fact.
That, under the circumstances, the choices were very simple.
Either the British people gave in and told their government to give in, or they carried on.
They were prepared to risk their lives, quite literally, rather than admit defeat.
ROBINSON: What was the psychology behind this? Psychiatrists at the time actually studied those that lived through the Blitz.
Based on the experiences of soldiers from the First World War suffering from shell-shock, the government had believed that there would be millions of psychiatric casualties from a prolonged bombing campaign.
They even created large new psychiatric hospitals on the outskirts of towns and cities.
In reality, hardly any patients were admitted, and, astonishingly, suicide rates were lower than before the war.
The predictions of six million psychological casualties were never realised.
Principally because the Germans were never able to deliver such a powerful, concentrated attack on a single area.
So, although London took the vast, overwhelming number of casualties, almost 30,000 people were killed in London.
When you express that as a percentage of the total population, it's something like 0.
2%.
And it's also spread out across a very large area.
It's partly the natural resilience, the courage, the spirit of the people.
We're all in it together.
But people always had time to recover.
ROBINSON: Perhaps the best insight comes from the people who actually lived through it.
You've got to realise that human beings cannot live in terror permanently.
They'll either commit suicide or live through it, but they have to adjust.
You can put up with about three weeks of complete fear.
And then after that, your brain seems to do something, and you think, "Well, I can't worry this much," and so you stop worrying about it.
ROBINSON: A new mindset was born in post-war Britain.
The Blitz changed a great deal more than the landscape of Britain.
I think it changed a lot of people's attitudes, and it changed a lot of their expectations.
How was the sacrifice that they'd had to make during the Blitz, the danger they'd had to go through, how was that going to be rewarded, in terms of sort of social equality, um, in the peace? ROBINSON: Just six weeks after the end of the war in Europe, there was a general election.
Among the rubble of war-torn Britain, the people went to the polls.
And Churchill lost.
Never before have the electors shown clearly their desire.
ROBINSON: They voted overwhelmingly for the Labour Party, led by Clement Attlee, who won a majority of 146 seats.
The result was a major shock, given the heroic status of Winston Churchill.
But people believed he wasn't the man to rebuild the country following the war.
They voted for the welfare state, they chose healthcare over empire, but, in a broader sense, that something positive had to come out of the experience.
It was not enough simply to survive, you had to survive for a reason.
And over and over again, the people who survived the Blitz will tell that story.
ROBINSON: Out of this, a rebuilding programme began.
It created Homes for Heroes coming back from the front line, and provided badly-needed work, though it was a new challenge to an exhausted population.
Homelessness was a huge problem after the war, of course, because something like one in every seven houses had been damaged.
ROBINSON: After the chaos, a new Britain emerged, and the horrors of the Blitz faded into memory.
Today, 70 years later, there are still dangerous reminders that it happened.
Unexploded bombs lie scattered across our land.
In the sands of Holy Island, it's the RAF's job to dispose of them.
However, for the RAF, the Blitz also left a more fundamental legacy.
WING CMDR IAN GALE: Could the Blitz ever happen again? My feeling is no.
It was ineffective, so it actually united the population in a common cause, rather than destroying the will of a population.
And I think, looking to both sides of that campaign, that's what happened.
The world has become a different place, and I think that kind of activity is simply not acceptable.
With carpet-bombing, Blitz style, the aim is just to destroy everything.
Well, the modern warfare is not like that.
If you have got any idea that you are going to actually have any relations with that country, post the conflict, if there's going to be any kind of reconstruction, clearly, the more you can limit the damage you do to that country, the better.
ROBINSON: Today, the RAF goes to great lengths to protect civilians.
On TVnews, we see the footage from cameras on precision-guided weapons.
The RAF put them there to try to make sure they're hitting their military targets.
MAN: Firing now! ROBINSON: As this bomb disposal team makes safe these Second World War UXBs, we turn to Blitz Street to see what we've learned from our own bombs.
ROBINSON: Blitz Street gave defence scientists a chance to see what bombs do to ordinary houses.
It gave us a unique opportunity to bring the story of the Blitz to life, and put pictures to the memories of those that survived it.
Ultimately, we hoped to bring home the true horror of the Blitz.
Even the smallest bomb, like the SC-50, was a devastating weapon.
We saw how the shrapnel from its bomb casing travelled at over 7,000 miles an hour.
Survivors told stories of how they tried to hide from bombs like these under the stairs.
We'd dig them out and we'd find that, yeah, the whole family was sheltering underneath the staircase.
And, in a lot of cases, they survived.
ROBINSON: Our blast gauges under the stairs confirmed that if you'd been hiding there, even three metres away from a bomb, you'd have lived.
After that first bomb, I remember thinking how strange it was to see a house with no wall and everything inside it still there.
Our street was beginning to look Just like the archive of the time.
The only way I can describe it is if you open a doll's house.
To me, I didn't think anything of it.
I'd never known anything else.
ROBINSON: We could see how this damage was caused with our high-speed footage.
It helped us see the ghostly effects around the street, and inside the houses.
CHILD: You could feel the whole building move, from one side and back again, about nine or ten inches.
And we were shaking with fear.
It's hard to describe the horror.
Just utter, utter terror.
ROBINSON: We heard from the rescuers what it was like to deal with the aftermath.
You look at them, there's nothing wrong with them.
You thought, "Why aren't you awake? "Wake up, talk to me.
" No, no, they're dead.
WHEELER: There was mums, children, but the hardest part was babies.
Well, it's You just had to ignore what you saw.
If they weren't alive you just left them.
ROBINSON: As the bombing continued on Blitz Street, there were more images of the past.
Well, well, well.
The chimneys are still standing, aren't they? HILEY: That image of a building with just the chimneys standing is quite commonly seen in bomb-damaged areas from the Second World War.
ROBINSON: When we firebombed the street at night with incendiaries, I got a glimpse of what it was like to experience that threat.
Then we set of the Flam bomb.
Even behind a concrete blast shield, it was terrifying.
MAN: Three, two, one.
ROBINSON: When the Luftwaffe bombed Coventry, the whole fabric of society nearly collapsed.
At school, they would call a register, and all the kids would call their names out, and sometimes there'd be a pause.
"Where's so and so?" "Oh, they're dead, miss.
Their house was hit last night.
" (GASPING) ROBINSON: And we heard how some people did consider surrender.
You know, it's all right for people in authority, sitting down in their steel-lined dugouts to tell us, but to be there, in amongst it, it was just too awful.
ROBINSON: We saw how the Nazis developed different bombs for different jobs, like those they aimed at our factories.
Ammonium-nitrate based charges had a heaving effect that pushed walls over, while RDX had a greater brisance, and shattered them.
And these bombs, aimed at breaking the war effort, landed in our city streets and changed the lives of those that lived there.
EDGSON: It stopped me believing in God.
I don't believe in God.
And I think that's partly Partly down to that.
ROBINSON: And then there was the V-2, the biggest of our bombs.
It lifted several thousand tons of debris 1,000 feet in the air.
It's easy to see how impossible it was to shelter from it.
If you survived the blast and the shrapnel, the falling debris could kill you.
Before the war, it was predicted that the Blitz would kill 10 times the number of people it did.
So, why was this estimate so wrong? One theory was the success of the shelter policy.
Our authentic Anderson shelter showed it did indeed provide incredible protection from blast and shrapnel.
If you'd been inside it, you would have survived three bombs at close range, including a 500-kilogram charge detonated just 22 metres away.
Survivors also told us what it was like to be in one during a raid.
The earth moved.
It really did move the whole shelters.
And you got this sort of thump.
Almost like an earthquake.
It seemed to be coming up from underneath the earth.
ROBINSON: We'd dressed Blitz Street authentically, and, in amongst the rubble, one item survived every bomb.
Two tons of bombs, two thirds of the milk's missing, but it's still there.
Whether you lived or died in the Blitz was down to chance, and, in some cases, this helped people live through it.
Once they'd survived one raid, they began to believe they could survive them all.
The mindset of those survivors so often proves fascinating and unexpected.
I think it was a privilege, in retrospect, because I've a very different attitude to life than people who were born after the war, because I I just value every day, every minute of every day.
When I see those films that portray the war, and that sort of thing, it does have an effect on me watching it because it brings it back to me, and I think, "My God, to think I actually lived through that.
" I don't think it's blighted my life, by any means.
Not at all.
Maybe it's helped me in some ways, because I'm probably not as frightened of things as some other people may be.
(CHUCKLING) ROBINSON: In the end, the Blitz pulled communities together, rather than tearing them apart.
Bombs seemed so powerful, particularly when they cause the kind of structural devastation that we've seen on Blitz Street.
But they did far less damage to the mind than anyone thought possible.
In fact, British willpower went head-to-head with this deadly technology and it won.