BLITZ STREET

Channel 4

In 1940, prior to the planned invasion, Nazi Germany unleashed a ferocious bombing campaign on Britain, designed specifically to crush British morale. To mark the 70th anniversary of this key event in our history, Tony Robinson presents Blitz Street, a four-part science and history series which aims to give some idea of what it must have been like to live under constant bombardment and why the Blitz ultimately failed.

Blitz Street itself is a row of real terraced houses specially built on a remote military base with the help of the Ministry of Defence. The street is subjected to a range of large-scale high explosive bombs and incendiaries similar to those used by the Luftwaffe. With precise measurements of the supersonic blast waves and dangerous after-effects of flying shrapnel, Blitz Street reveals the impact of real explosives on bricks and mortar and for the first time allows government scientists to study the power and mechanics of Second World War bombs. High speed cameras operating at 1,000 frames per second reveal the detail of each blast to explain: houses could progressively collapse from one end to another; how it could be that people had their clothes ripped from them or could end up lifted onto the roof of their homes; why some people managed to survive in houses subjected to direct attacks by sheltering under the stairs; why so many people died instantly - simply from the power of the blast pressure on their lungs and with no other apparent injuries.

When asked to explain what the series is all about, Tony Robinsons says:
'I am now very much a middle-aged man, and I have no firsthand memory at all of a time when every night in our big cities for some years you would go out not knowing if you would be hit by a bomb or not. To try and recapture what that must have been like is extraordinary. My memory of bombs in our country has been terrorist bombs, which might go off once every six months or whatever, and then we all make, quite justifiably, a great big song-and-dance about that. But the idea of this carnage that happened night after night is totally outside our experience. So what we wanted to do is recall what happened. Because in the same way that now we've lost the final firsthand memories of the First World War with the death of the last two British soldiers last year, we're beginning to be in a situation where we're going to lose those firsthand memories of the Second World War. It seemed to me very important that we should get as much of that recorded as possible while we could, because it's such a central part of our history.'

This first episode focuses on the outbreak of the Blitz and the artillery employed and its devastating effects. The first bombs used against Blitz Street are the SC50 (25kg of TNT) , the most common bomb dropped on the first day of bombing in London, and the SC500 bombs which contained 250kg of TNT. These unguided missiles rained down from the sky for 12 hours on 7 September 1940 - 'Black Saturday'.

Emotional eye-witnesses describe the devastation and remember returning to their homes on days like that. Bryan, who was nine years old in 1940, remembers being collected by his mother in the East End of London: "We were walking through the streets with clothes everywhere, the smell of burning down one side - the lines of black bundles which I then realised were bodies…walking along with my mother holding my hand, she suddenly started to cry."

The programme details the immense psychological damage caused by this first attack and how Churchill rapidly reorganised and improved defences. Within four days, he'd made twice as many guns available to help lift the spirits of Londoners. Dorothy, one of Britain's first female gunners, recalls being told to fire, even when she was not on target, so as to give confidence to the people on the ground.


In the second programme, our authentic street is on the receiving end of one of the largest bombs the Luftwaffe ever dropped on Britain: the SC1000, nicknamed 'The Hermann'. A bomb this large was designed to cause massive damage to the infrastructure of industrial Britain. The programme recounts the Luftwaffe's horrendous bombing of Coventry on 14 November 1940 and the campaign to destroy Britain's manufacture of munitions.

Episode three focuses on the summer of 1944 when British hopes for an end to the war were raised by news of the D-Day landings. However, a few days later Hitler sent over the first of his new secret Vengeance weapons. The V1, nicknamed the 'doodle bug', was a jet-powered pilotless plane packed with a powerful form of explosive containing RDX. The people who saw it, talk about witnessing these buzzing planes pass over and the terror that came when the engine stopped, because that would mean they were about to fall. The V1 is the next bomb detonated over Blitz Street.

In the final episode we come face to face with the most powerful bomb of World War Two - the massive V2 rocket. Travelling at over 3500 miles an hour and with a range of over 200 miles the V2 was designed to deliver a knockout blow to Britain. Unlike the other bombs that have been detonated on Blitz Street, our V2 bomb is buried three metres below ground. With its supersonic speed, by the time the V2 detonated it was well beneath the surface.

Episode four also sums up why the Nazi blitz bombing campaign failed, what we have learned from our experiment and how the Blitz has informed military bombing campaigns ever since. But ultimately, why the people who lived on streets like Blitz Street faced the nightmare of total war and came out stronger.