- AIR RAID SIREN - 75 years ago this week,
Britain became under the heaviest attack in its history.
This was Hitler's Blitzkrieg, or 'lightning war'.
LOUD EXPLOSIONS
London endured 57 nights of bombing, but the Blitz also spread
to towns and cities across Britain, including mine.
- NEWSREEL: - 'The Luftwaffe attack from places all along the coast.
'The struggle for the Western oceans has begun.'
I'm Ricky Tomlinson and I'm taking to the skies to discover
how my city survived the Blitz by the skin of its teeth.
Them docks are like a line of sitting ducks, really, aren't they?
- Exactly. - Because they're in a straight line,
and there's row after row after row.
I'll also find out just how high that price was
for those on the ground.
- I'd like to know what that man's thinking, there, standing amongst all that rubble. - Yes.
- He could probably be standing where his own house was. - Exactly.
Thinking, "What have I done to deserve this?"
And I'll meet the women of Liverpool who survived.
And the bomb came down.
You could hear it whistling down,
and we just grabbed each other in the bed,
the whole house on top of us,
and we both thought, "Oh, we're going to die."
MUSIC: There She Goes by The La's
I was raised in Liverpool and I've spent most of my working life here.
Not always as an actor, though.
No, I was a plasterer and trade unionist
long before I became a luvvie.
This city is my home and I don't think I'll ever move away.
My old neighbourhood was Everton, just outside the city centre,
and there was five of us in a small terraced house on Lance Street.
The neighbourhood's still there,
but it's very different to how it looked when I was little.
This is where I grew up during the war years.
And obviously, it's all changed now, but to see all these houses
with the space they've got, we didn't have that much space.
And in the middle of the street, with these brick air raid
shelters with the big, thick concrete ceiling on them.
And that's where we used to play, play of a day and of a night,
when the bombs came over, we would go inside them.
HE EXHALES DEEPLY
Hey...
Who'd have dreamed 50 years ago that I'd be sitting
here on someone's garden wall?
With all this shrubbery around me, it's as if...
I could be in the middle of an African jungle, really, couldn't I?
Because we never saw a blade of grass.
I could actually be sitting in what was our living room,
or the back kitchen.
That...
It's wonderful.
It's amazing and I'm so glad I've come back to see it.
This is more like how I remember it.
Cramped terraces.
Back alleys, gangs of kids playing in the streets.
The families here were poor, and it must have been
a struggle for our parents, even before the bombs started falling.
We never had a bath, or hot running water.
We only had a cold tap,
and my mum would fill the pan
and boil it, three or four of them, put us into a little tin bath,
and we took turns in getting bathed in front of the fire.
Albert being the eldest, then me, then our David.
And we'd be in one bed, upstairs,
because we were only a two-bedroom house,
and then we'd have a couple of blankets over us,
army blankets, and then a big army overcoat on top of us.
And everyone was the same.
No-one was too proud to admit that they had an army overcoat
on the bed to keep the kids warm.
That's the way it was.
It done us no harm, really, done us no harm.
I entered the world in September 1939,
the same month that Britain entered the war.
I don't remember much about the early years of the fighting,
so I've invited my big brother, Albert,
to meet me for a cuppa at my own cabaret club.
You must have been smelling the tea. Do you want one?
We never talk much about the war,
but as he's older, I'm hoping he remembers more than me.
Sort this tea out for us, will you, love?
Yeah, so, I'm busy at the moment.
I'm just...well, we're hoping to make a documentary about the Blitz,
so I'm looking for stories from old people,
- and just get some stories... - Old folks? That's why you brought me in, is it?
That's one of the reasons! You were older than me
- and I can remember quite a bit about the war, so you... - Well, you were the war baby, weren't you?
- I was born at the start of the war, wasn't I? - You caused the war, didn't you?
- Yeah, they reckon I was responsible for it, so... - THEY LAUGH
Heavy Blitz bombing raids began in London in September 1940.
Two months later, it was Liverpool's turn.
LOUD EXPLOSION
- NEWSREEL: - 'Never in history has an entire people borne
'so frightful an ordeal so bravely.'
At this point in the war, it was all going Hitler's way.
His army had occupied much of mainland Europe
and they were within striking distance of Britain.
London's docks were under constant attack
and the English Channel was no longer safe.
PLANE ENGINES ROAR
But controlling Britain's West Coast, especially at the ports,
was also crucial for the Nazis.
'It is in shipping, and in the power to transport across the oceans,
'the crunch of the whole war will be found.'
Liverpool was the busiest port of all
and as the docks were just a couple of miles from Everton,
that meant our house was in the firing line too.
All I remember from when I was a young child was the air raid
shelters right outside the house, you know.
And then the sirens. We all remember the sirens, you know.
We hardly used the air raid shelters.
- You know, my dad only worked down the bottom of the street in the baker's? - Yeah.
And as soon as he heard the sirens, whether it was morning,
noon or night, he'd be home, grab me on his shoulders,
my mum would grab you and we'd be down to Gran's.
That's my dad's mother's, remember? And into the basement.
- But Granny's was, like, a Dickensian place. - Oh, yes.
Five foot tall, five foot one.
But I remember people telling me that after the air raids,
all the bodies would be picked up and taken
and lined out in her lobby, and she'd wash them.
Sometimes she'd have to wash them down with a sweeping brush.
- That's how tough she was. - She was.
I can remember one particular time, we were really getting blasted.
It must have been 1941.
And Gran used to have the big, black fireplace with the oven doors,
- where there was a big slab of slate with a gas ring on it. - I remember.
Anyway, the sirens went off. We were down there.
Everyone was in the cellar.
And there was one hell of an explosion during the night.
And the house shook.
I'll never forget it. Everyone was terrified.
The women were screaming, the kids were screaming.
Anyway, everything's settled down, we come up the next morning -
she'd had a pan of cockles on this gas ring on the table,
and they were all over the living room.
They were up the walls and on the ceiling and everywhere.
Cockles.
You know me mam and dad, I mean, were they stressed out or what?
Well, everyone was stressed.
I think me dad was the worrier, you know. He was the worrier.
To us, as kids, it was just another day, you know what I mean?
Because while the sirens were off, it was just normal life.
Everyone went to work, we went to school, you know what I mean?
Do you remember when me mam used to...?
Our David had been born in the meantime,
so she had three lads,
and then me dad would be in work,
and the bombs would go off, so she'd grab us all in her bed.
- She was too ill to get us down the stairs... - Yeah.
..and said, "If the bombs go, we'll all go together."
- Must have been awful. - Yeah. The thing is...
you just got on with it.
You know, it was something you had to do,
you just couldn't say, "No, that's it."
Who could have blamed people if they HAD reacted that way?
During nearly nine months of the Blitz,
the Nazis attacked ports all over the country,
from Hull in the East to Bristol in the Southwest
to Southampton, Plymouth and Portsmouth on the South coast.
They also bombed my neighbour, Manchester,
targeting its factories as well as the busy Ship Canal docks.
- NEWSREADER: - 'Day in, day out, the endless flood of crates and packages
'passes from ship to shore - foodstuffs essential to our needs.'
The men who caused the devastation
were the pilots of the Luftwaffe.
75 years after they first flew over Liverpool,
I'm about to discover how they carried out their attacks.
I'm at Hawarden Airport
meeting up with aerial archaeologist Chris Going
and pilot Bill Giles.
Just going through the flight plan to see if we can work out roughly
how we're going to pretend to be a German flight this afternoon.
Before we go up, Chris is showing me
some rarely seen target documents
used by the Luftwaffe to plan their attacks.
This is how the German intelligence saw Liverpool.
- It come across... - This stuff got captured in 1945.
Most of it was trashed or burnt, but we did capture some.
If you enlarge it and look at it...
So, what do all the numbers signify?
They're all related to specific individual targets.
These are all targets which have a number 45, which means docks.
If you could strangle the docks, if you could prevent
food being unloaded or you could prevent armaments being exported
to support the forces in North Africa and elsewhere,
you were well on the way to winning the war.
And that was just what the Nazis were determined to do
throughout 1940.
- NEWSREADER: - 'The Luftwaffe attack from bases all along the coast,
'from the Arctic to the Channel.
'But this is only the centre of a wider battle.
'The struggle for the western oceans has begun.'
In the Atlantic, the Royal Navy was battling to protect shipping
from the Germans' deadly fleet of U-boats.
- MAN WITH GERMAN ACCENT: - 'In the first two years of war,
'the Allies have admitted losing three million tonnes of shipping
'to our torpedoes and guns.
'In this way, we will slowly strangle them.'
Supplies of food and equipment vital to the war effort were under threat.
On 1 August 1940, Hitler issues a directive -
the Luftwaffe were to start preparations
for the aerial destruction of the UK ports.
If the British government wouldn't surrender,
then Hitler's plan was to starve the British people out.
Finally, just before we go off on our flight, I want to show you
a night map.
These were carried in the cockpits of the aircraft
and they were for reading under red or blue night lights.
And here you can see just what their interest in Liverpool was.
- That whole strip outlined in red... - That's the whole of the docks,
- isn't it? - ..of Liverpool Docks.
- So, you live...Everton, just there? - There, yeah.
- That's, what, a mile, mile and a half from the docks? - Yeah.
- If that. - That's it, yeah.
A few seconds' flying time, you're right in the firing line.
That's amazing, isn't it?
That'd send a shiver down your spine.
It's the main artery to the rest of the country,
to getting stuff abroad and getting stuff in.
If he'd have done that, that would have been the end of the war for us.
Just looking at them 70-odd-year-old maps,
with Liverpool all marked out in red as the target for the German bombs,
is quite disturbing, really.
It's not a very nice feeling, really, not nice at all.
Armed with our target maps,
the time's come to get into the plane and recreate history.
- OK, is everyone happy and secure? - Yep.
I've never been on a plane as small as this before.
Although it's a calm day, I'm still apprehensive.
Might just be a little bit bumpy as we climb out,
just because of the bit of turbulence off the hills here.
But nothing's going to stop me taking this opportunity
to look at my city in a completely new way -
through the eyes of someone trained to destroy it.
How long would their flight take, do you think?
From the minute they left to get here.
Well, they would take a couple of hours
to get from their base to Liverpool.
One of the big problems, of course, was navigation -
making sure you could get to the target.
There was a blackout in the UK, so there were no lights showing.
So really, they were flying blind, to a great extent.
What the Germans tended to do was use specialist units
who had the latest technological equipment -
a unit called a Beleuchtergruppe,
the Firelighter Group.
And the idea was to set fires
so that once those fires are alight,
the main force, other bombers coming with worse...
or not-so-good navigation techniques could home in on the fires.
- NEWSREADER: - 'These raiders were the elite of the German Air Force,
'groomed for victory.'
The British were aware that the bombers followed fire,
so they built decoy sites.
We fool Jerry sometimes, though.
We bend his radio beams so he flies on a duff course,
then we light decoy fires in the open country for him to bomb.
Fake towns and factories were set on fire
to fool the enemy into thinking they were real targets.
Just a few wasted bombs could save hundreds of lives.
One night we collected 230 AGs,
one oil bomb and a packet of incendiaries.
Our casualties were two cows and two chickens.
- Can you see those buildings in there? - Yeah.
Right, that's more or less where the decoy site was.
And if you look down, you've got a slight hint
that the coast mimics that further south round Liverpool.
Look to the right - can you see four gun positions?
- You can see four squares. - Yeah. - Yeah?
- Little sort of grey cubes. - Yeah!
That's anti-aircraft, so they had a gun site there as well.
Although the decoys had some success,
most planes made it down the River Mersey to their real target,
the Liverpool Docks - a narrow strip of land
that then employed nearly 20,000 people.
You know, really, them docks
- are like a line of sitting ducks, really. - Exactly.
Because they're in a straight line, row after row after row.
Absolutely. It's about six, seven miles long,
it's about half a mile wide,
and that was one of the most strategically important parts
of the entire United Kingdom.
So they must have dropped a third of a million incendiary bombs
on Liverpool during the war.
But one of the things that I find really amazing
is the air raids lasted a very long time.
So at any one time, there might be one or maybe two aircraft coming in
to drop bombs - it was like being, you know, in a bowling alley,
but a skittle at the wrong end.
So you would hear the bombs, four or five,
and then you would think,
"OK, I survived that one, maybe the next one. The next one."
How brave were them dockers, getting up every morning
and going to work knowing, KNOWING,
that they were going to be under attack that night or that afternoon?
Kissing their kids goodbye, kissing their wives goodbye.
They didn't know if they'd see them again, and vice versa.
And yet they never stopped, they kept the docks going.
- Fabulous. - Absolutely.
From up here, it's obvious how vulnerable the docks were,
as bombs rained down night after night.
What's even more frightening is just how close my street was
to the focus of the bombing.
This is amazing for me.
I'm flying over where all this action took place during the war.
I've just gone past all sorts of landmarks
that I knew, not only as a grown-up, but as a child.
- And you can see the Liver Building. - Absolutely!
So that's... That's right within the vicinity of where we were reared.
Exactly. So if they've flown sort of 300 miles,
it's literally seconds,
and precision bombing is not really something you can achieve
at this sort of distance.
You know, by the end of the war,
most of the casualties here were not dock workers, they were civilians.
Something like 2,500, 3,000 people were killed.
About 50% of all the housing in Liverpool was damaged in the war.
So, I mean, you've got a population of what, 870,000 in 1940?
Just under a million.
That's an enormous economic and sort of human price that was paid.
I knew before we took off that this would be a unique journey.
But I didn't expect it to open my eyes as much as it has.
I always think of Liverpool as a tough city.
But when you see it from the point of view of an aerial bomber,
it looks helpless.
Now I'm back on the ground,
I want to get a sense of what that helplessness might have looked like.
Anne Gleave is curator of photographic collections
for the Merseyside Maritime Museum.
She looks after the Stewart Bale Collection -
almost 200,000 original glass and film negatives,
many taken during the war.
These are vivid images of the destruction of Liverpool,
its docks and surrounding areas.
The city centre didn't escape, either.
So, exactly what is that, what is "the monument"?
That's the Victoria Monument.
- The one that's still there now, today? - Yes, that's right.
And you can see...most of the buildings around it
- have been completely flattened. - Look at that!
There's nothing. There's nothing. Everything's gone.
I don't know what to say about that.
- That's... - No, it is amazing, isn't it?
Look how close the damage is to it.
That must be a symbol, there must be something there.
There must be a message there.
The only thing I can say is God Save The Queen!
Oh, that's amazing. That's amazing. Wonderful.
This one's the Liverpool Overhead Railway in 1941.
Again, bomb damage during the Blitz.
I remember, as bad as that damage was,
- they restored the overhead railway, didn't they? - Yes.
I remember going on it many, many times.
- And then this. - This was in Bootle,
which was hit very badly during the Blitz.
And as you can see, there's a lot of domestic housing there.
Yeah. My wife's from Bootle, her father worked on the docks.
During that time, obviously.
I lived in the Everton area of Liverpool
and we got bombed pretty bad.
And I didn't even know until now that Bootle got it as bad as this.
Bootle is home to the north end of Liverpool's docks.
Proportionately, it saw more destruction
than anywhere else in the UK.
Of its 17,000 houses, only 40 were undamaged.
I would like to know what that man's thinking,
standing there amongst all that rubble.
- He'd probably be standing where his own house was. - Exactly.
And thinking, you know, "What have I done to deserve this? Why?"
Just looking at them photographs frightens me to death.
I'm overwhelmed by the devastation, the hopelessness,
the look on them people's faces, the men with the flat caps looking,
the women huddled together,
one or two kids with their hands in their pockets
and their little stockings pulled up to their knees.
What must have been going through their minds
looking at that devastation? It was shielded from me.
It was shielded from my eldest brother.
We knew the bombs had gone off
because our own house nearly went up,
but that's all we knew.
We didn't know the devastation, the hopelessness,
people losing their homes,
nowhere to go to school and stuff like that.
I'm just lucky that I was...
Although I was in the war and I remember the bombs
and remember hiding under the stairs and me mam cuddling us in bed,
I wasn't old enough to realise
the hopelessness and the devastation that was going on all around me.
If only Victoria could talk, eh?
She'd certainly be able to explain what it was like
to live through such a massive bombardment.
But there are others who are still around to do that.
People like Margaret Lunt.
She's 89 now, and can remember it all clearly.
- How are you? - I'm all right, fine, thank you.
Take me inside, tell me some of these lovely stories you've got.
We're meeting at St Luke's, a beautiful city centre church
gutted by fire on the morning of 6 May, 1941.
It's never been restored, and today it stands as a symbol
of what Liverpool went through during the Blitz.
Isn't it magnificent? What must it have been like in its heyday, eh?
Now, listen, Margaret, it's not very nice
for a man to ask a lady how old she is,
but tell me, how old were you when this church got bombed?
When this church got bombed, I was about 15.
A teenager, eh? Must have been terrifying for you.
Well, it was a bit frightening at the time.
It was all, like, adventure, to begin with.
So, where were you living when all this was going on, Margaret?
Just down the road, Blundell Street.
Not far from the Albert Dock, really.
They seen plenty of action, didn't they, the docks?
- You can remember it all? - Oh, yes.
We were in the air raid shelter in Jordan Street...
Wasn't your dad a docker?
My father was on the docks, and then he was the air raid warden
when the war started, along with two others in our district.
And we also had a lot of activity by what we called the Pioneer Corps,
who done a lot of hard work, and they don't get a mention, really.
You must have been worried when your dad was an ARP warden walking round.
Yes. One time he was a long time coming back in
and we wondered what happened.
But the horses were panicking because of the fire,
it was in the greaseworks,
and the grease was running down the street...
on fire.
So they had to let the horses out,
and the next thing was they were running along the street
and we thought it was a new secret weapon.
We didn't realise it was the horses.
You know, other little things like that.
So, at this time, Margaret, where were your brothers and sisters?
Were they still in Liverpool or had they gone by now?
My sister-in-law was in Wales, and my sister,
they all got evacuated because they had young children.
And then my brother was in the Tank Corps in the 8th Hussars.
The last time I saw my brother was in the air raid shelter,
and he came home on compassionate leave,
and...
We were learning him the words of
Yours Till The Stars Lose Their Glory,
because it had only just come out,
and so he was trying to learn it so that when he went back,
he could sing it.
- And so that's the last time I saw him. - Ah.
Never saw him after that.
How old would he be when he got killed?
Well, he'd be 30-something.
Young man.
Mmm.
- How sad. - Yeah.
When you think about it, it was very sad.
Talking to Margaret makes me appreciate how fortunate I was
not to have lost any close family members during the war.
Me dad was lucky enough to work in a protected industry as a baker,
although "lucky" was a word he probably didn't use himself.
So, just over there, to the right,
was Kelly's Bakery where my dad worked with another man.
It was just the two of them in the bakery.
One little nasty sort of incident that happened during the war
is me dad actually went away to join the Army,
and in fact he was away for three days,
but when they found out he was a bread baker,
they said he was more important to the local community
than to fighting in the Army, and they sent him home.
And he really wanted to go away and fight for his country.
And now and again he got a little bit of stick.
Having people making little skits made him very, very frustrated,
but I suppose the one thing he could take from it,
it wouldn't be people he knew
because all those who knew him knew that he'd been away,
signed up, wanted to join, and had actually
been sent back from Scotland to carry on his job.
My dad's bakery was near Everton Park,
which provides a perfect view of the port.
People used to come here and stand on this high point
and just see the flames all around the docks
when the bombing was going on.
And the skies used to light up and people used to stand here
and watch it as if you would stand and watch a bonfire.
Watching the bombing during the war must have been a harrowing sight,
especially in May 1941
when the docks burned for seven consecutive nights.
I've always been fascinated by our docks,
even more so now that I know what part they played in the war.
I'd still like to find out more, though,
so I've arranged a tour with a historian, Mike Royden.
We're starting at the highest point, on top of a grain silo.
Liverpool had taken a bit of a decline
just after the First World War
and when the Americans started to help us with supplies,
- this was going to be the major port. - All the different cargo -
munitions, food, hospital gear - coming in and out, going abroad,
looking after the soldiers and stuff like that.
Must have been absolutely amazing.
Of course, when the Blitz began, it suffered major damage
in those few days in May.
At least half of the berths had gone out of action
during that time. And in fact, when the bombing took place,
there were ships in being worked on and loaded.
Probably as soon as the siren went the all-clear,
they'd be back out loading the ships, getting munitions on and off.
- That's quite right. - So really, they must have had the heart of a lion,
mustn't they, to have worked under them conditions.
They must have been incredibly brave.
The courage of the dock workers was tested to the limit
during the May Blitz of 1941,
when the HMS Malakand, a large ship loaded with munitions,
was destroyed in Huskisson Dock.
It led to the largest explosion in the city's history.
This is where the Malakand was.
170-foot vessel that was berthed here on the night of 3 May 1941,
and an incendiary hit the deck, and the men
were struggling to try and stop the fire spreading everywhere else,
but what they were worried about, of course,
was it's going to spread into the ship itself,
because the vessel was carrying almost 2,000 tonnes of munitions.
2,000 tonnes?
Yeah, and if that was going to ignite,
the whole thing was going to explode.
You can see how frantic they were in their fight.
Who was in charge at the time, the captain of the ship?
Incredibly brave man called Captain Kinley.
He had a number of officers on board and 60-odd lascar sailors as well.
It was absolutely frantic, the scene you would have seen here -
the flames going everywhere, trying to get fire engines in,
men running all over the place trying to put things out,
it must have been unbelievable.
In the end, around about half seven in the morning,
Kinley said, "Abandon ship," and it was just as well he did,
because a few minutes later the whole thing went up.
Absolutely... It was the biggest explosion that the city had seen.
That was throughout the war, not just on that night.
2,000 tonnes, you can't imagine it, can you, going up?
When you can see the damage one shell can do or one grenade can do.
And the debris was flying all over the place.
It was hitting other ships - an anchor actually flew about 400 yards.
One piece even sliced through a horse that was pulling a cart
on the dock road.
But what was also worrying at that time,
they wondered how much longer Liverpool could withstand this,
especially the docks. Because much longer on that,
and maybe that would have brought Liverpool to its knees.
But thankfully, the Luftwaffe
didn't really have a particularly organised long-term plan,
and Hitler's attention then turned towards Russia,
and thankfully the Luftwaffe was shifted over there instead.
Their loss was our gain. It's a terrible thing to say,
but thank God it happened that way
because we mightn't be standing here now talking, mightn't we?
I never knew that Liverpool was literally days from being beaten.
But we got through,
thanks in large part to the resolve of the people.
And I'm not only talking about the dock workers,
but all the others too,
like the women of the city who worked tirelessly
to support the war effort.
Women like my mam, who struggled to keep the family alive at night
and feed them during the day.
Some of them were just girls at the time.
But I want to hear their stories,
so I've come to the Poppy Centre
to meet a group of women who all survived the Blitz.
- Cup of tea. - Cup of tea? - Cup of tea already for me!
- Oh... - What more do you want?
I want some lovely stories off you about the war.
I was 11 when it started, 16 when it finished.
And I can remember
the first day of the war, when we were at church
and the priest come and said the war had started.
Next thing was when we went out, my brothers were queuing up already
to go and join the Army.
When it first started we used to go down in the air raid shelter -
three of us, my mum and dad, the cat and the dog.
They'd stay there till morning.
Was it a brick air raid shelter?
No, it was the Anderson shelter in the garden,
and you covered it over so you couldn't see
and you had plants, flowers and things on.
What about the ones
in the street, all the way over...?
That's what we had.
- They were brick. - They were made of bricks,
and sometimes we stayed there all night.
Where I lived, in Lamb Street off Heyworth Street,
in the panic and the pandemonium in the pitch dark,
you couldn't find your way around.
There was an old man lived across the street called Mr Hart
and he used to get your hand and take you in.
And I could never understand how he could do it, but he was blind,
so he didn't need any lights!
One night my dad said, "Ooh, they seem to be getting awful close,"
so he said, "I'll go out and have a look." And as he did,
they dropped all the shrapnel and he got a big piece under his eye
and it went right through his eye and was there on his cheekbone,
it was a big square.
He used to say to us all, "Feel it there!"
And what did you say to him?
"That's what you get for nosing!"
THEY ALL LAUGH
Yeah. Yeah.
- So you could still have a laugh in the middle of the war. - Yeah.
Come on, Doreen, you can tell me your little story now.
Dad was on fire watch, and me mother had the poor boys
in the parlour, and me and my sister,
we sneaked up to bed. Nobody knew we'd gone up there.
And the bomb come down...
We could hear it whistling down.
And we just grabbed each other in the bed,
and the whole house on top of us,
- and we both thought, "Oh, we're going to die." - OTHERS: Yeah.
And then my father realised that we were still in there,
and he started moving the bricks one by one.
They heard us crying, and they finally found us,
and, er...
brought us out. We had no clothes on, they were blown off us.
One of the reporters came to take our photograph
and me dad chased them.
He said, "You're not photographing my daughters," he said,
- "they've got no clothes on!" - Quite right. Absolutely right.
Listening to these women talk, I recognised their resolve
in the memories of me mam.
But while we had parents looking out for us,
Nancy was a young mum herself.
What about you, young lady, what can you remember?
- Well, I lost my little boy, my baby. - Aww.
That was me saddest thing of the war.
I had a little girl, and I was having me second baby.
And it came early, it was seven weeks early.
It was a terrible night. It was in the Blitz,
and the nurse didn't want to come out, she was frightened.
And he only lived a couple of hours,
and then he had to be buried.
But, er, I didn't have a lot of money,
so I hadn't got enough money to pay for the funeral.
George got a box, they gave him a wooden box.
And I worry over it now, even although it's a long time,
thinking he didn't have a proper coffin.
He knows you loved him, it doesn't matter what they buried him in.
But that's the main.
And he was buried with a lady.
In his...in her coffin.
So that was lovely. I called him David George.
- Yeah. But he'd have been 74 now. - 74!
And me other daughter, she's 75 next month.
Your stories are unbelievable. They make me quite angry,
because of what's gone on,
but they make me feel very, very sad at the same time.
Honest to God, I can't thank yous enough.
What yous done, I mean, I was only a kid and it rolled over me,
you were wonderful! You were absolutely wonderful.
You were the bulldog breed, I mean that.
That meeting with them five wonderful old ladies
made me feel so humbled.
They were absolutely magnificent.
And do you know, no wonder we won the war,
because with people like that, camaraderie like that,
and a fighting spirit like that, how could you lose?
They were wonderful.
Before I finish my Blitz journey, I've decided to catch up with
an old mate of mine from Liverpool's comedy circuit, Stan Boardman.
I've known Stan for nearly 50 years,
and he's always good for a bit of banter and a few old jokes.
- I started at the MAA Club... - BOTH: ..in Sheil Road!
You know, it's funny.
We're about the same age and we were both brought up during the war,
just a mile or so apart, and yet
we've never spoken to each other about it.
That means I've never heard his incredible story -
until today.
- This is where me mam's house was, and see that tree? - Yeah.
That probably was in her front room, that tree.
Who'd ever thought that there'd be a tree...
where you live?
And I wish that this would have been here when I was a lad.
I would have loved it.
Just round the corner here, it was Morley Street,
and it was a shelter, a communal shelter,
and everybody in the street, when they heard the sirens going,
they'd all rush out the houses.
Gives me the creeps even now, when I hear the fire sirens
from the local fire station.
Them days, they used to say, "The Germans are coming."
I had a babysit...
I was being baby-sat by a girl called Mary Munroe,
my mother used to tell me about her.
And we ran to the thing and I sat...she sat me on her knee.
My mother was there, sitting on, like, stools,
and it was pitch-black and dark. She had a baby on her knee -
our Ada - and Tommy, my brother, was sitting next to them.
On that fateful night, the Germans did come and they bombed Liverpool.
And all the shelter was blown up
and all the people in the shelter were either killed or injured.
And I found out...
My mother told me when I was a little bit older
that the girl who...
I was sitting on her knee,
- Mary Munroe, she was killed. 14. - No way.
All her family sat on that side of the shelter,
they were all killed, and my brother Tommy, he lost his life as well.
So the bricks and everything must have hit him on the head.
I woke up next morning...
on the side of the road here on a slate
and the sun was...morning was just coming up.
You could smell the burning, grit in my teeth,
and every time I feel a bit of grit in my teeth...
- It reminds you. - It reminds me of that night.
And my Uncle Arthur,
he came down cos he only lived up there.
He was 16, 17 and he came over and he found me in the morgue
because the place was just littered with bodies and people were...
And he found my brother Tommy, who was dead,
and he found me. Luckily enough, I wasn't injured,
only because Mary Munroe must have fell on me and saved my life.
- She took the blast, didn't she? - Mary Munroe, God bless you.
- Mary, if you're up there, thank you, love. - She will be, eh? Ah.
Around 4,000 people from Liverpool and its surrounding areas
lost their lives during the Blitz - more than anywhere outside London.
Like many victims, Stan's family didn't know where Tommy was buried.
But a few years ago, his sister traced their brother to
an unmarked grave in the Kirkdale Cemetery.
This is the one here. Look, this.
It's only a little plaque. We only put it down four years ago.
All my sisters came around here, said a prayer for Tommy,
for Mary Munroe and the rest of the people
who were all killed round the Kirkdale area.
This here is a trench...
and all the people in the street were buried in here.
I bet you there's a lot of relatives don't know
that their loved ones have been buried here.
So, your dad, he was in the army while all this was going on?
My dad was in the Royal Artillery.
He was in Woolwich in London, so he was protecting London
and I often wonder and think what it would have been like for him.
His house is gone, his family is gone, the streets have gone
and your son has been killed.
What it was like for him that day to get back to Liverpool on leave,
to come on a train, which probably took him hours and hours and hours,
and for him to sit on that train, wondering what he's going to expect.
Everything going through his mind. Was he finished with the war?
Well, the sad thing about it was he stayed.
He got two weeks' compassionate leave
to get his family housed and homed
and get my brother buried,
and he was three days over his leave.
So then the police came, they arrested him,
took him to jail in Liverpool and...
Just for staying three days over his leave.
That's scandalous, that's scandalous.
So he had to do his stint, even though he's lost his house,
he's lost his son.
Nearly lost his wife.
Nearly lost his wife, nearly lost me.
And he was a very quiet man - never spoke about the war,
never spoke about the air raids, never spoke about Tommy.
- Nothing? - Nothing. - Couldn't do it, couldn't bear it.
Couldn't bear to talk about it.
I think a lot of people couldn't talk about the war,
bring back bad memories.
I thought I knew my city, I thought I knew my friends.
But I've learnt so much on this journey,
I'm not sure I'll ever look at my home in the same way again.
And as I take to the sky for the last time, I can see how much
Liverpool has changed, how much rebuilding
and regeneration has gone on over the years.
But something that hasn't altered at all is the spirit
and the character of those below.
I've always been proud of the people of Liverpool.
In fact, I have the honour of being a Freeman of the City
and being up here now, I owe them so much.
They've gave me this honour, but it should be the other way round.
It's awful to know what went on and it must have destroyed
families for generations, torn about their lost ones
and those who have never seen their parents again
or their fathers again or their sons again.
But there's thousands and thousands of unsung heroes -
the ARP wardens, the nurses, the fellows patrolling the streets.
The way they banded together, the way they kept the morale up,
the way they made sure the children went to school...
Everyone, thousands and thousands of unsung heroes out there
and sometimes we forget...sometimes we tend to forget about them.
But being up here now just gives me a little... It makes me feel....
..quite emotional.
It was all so bloody futile, wasn't it?
They were doing what they were told to do,
and the fear and the horror and the sad stories,
there must be as many in Germany as there are here,
in Dresden and other places like that.
So while this has been a wonderful experience for me,
I don't want to do it again.
That experience I've just had has made me feel so humble.
They talk about the bulldog breed...
There's never been a truer expression made,
they must have all had that bulldog spirit.
They got Liverpool through and they got Great Britain through,
and thank God for that.
I can't praise them enough.
MUSIC: Yours by Vera Lynn