AIR RAID SIRENS
75 years ago this week,
Britain came under the heaviest attack in its history.
This was Hitler's blitzkrieg, his "lightning war".
London endured 57 nights of bombing.
But then the Blitz spread,
devastating 16 cities in England, Scotland,
Wales and Northern Ireland.
So we're going to do now, as it were, a sort of dummy bombing run.
I'm John Humphrys
and I'm taking to the skies above my home city of Cardiff
to follow the flight paths of the Luftwaffe bombers.
What we're looking at now was just wiped out.
We had a direct hit and the bomb went right through the shop,
right through into the cellar and exploded.
I'll also fly over Swansea, where the "three nights Blitz"
destroyed its centre and changed the landscape forever.
It was burning from Swansea Castle down to St Helen's Road.
And people were running for the beach,
because, if the worst came to the worst,
they could get into the water, see?
I'll see the reminders of the war,
meet those who lived through the bombings
and discover how they changed the face of our cities.
I was born in 1943, a war baby.
I came into a world ravaged by conflict
and into a city shattered by bombs.
The fighting and the fear would last for another two years.
This is the house where I was born,
193 Pearl Street,
the middle of five children.
I THINK I remember the bombs dropping.
Certainly, I learned about it later.
And I know what happened to us when the bombs did fall.
We were taken to the shop on the corner.
It's a house now, but it was a shop then, a chemist's shop.
Vivian Morgan's chemist shop.
And they had a cellar and that's where we took shelter.
And I was told afterwards that they put me in a cardboard box -
I was only a baby, after all -
and took me down to the cellar and there we were safe from the bombs.
Those bombs fell everywhere,
first causing carnage in London,
then throughout Britain.
Any city with strategic or economic importance
was on the Luftwaffe's target list.
And that meant Cardiff was near the top.
This port was the reason.
In the years before the war,
more coal passed through here than almost anywhere else in the world.
The docks were a vital part of the British economy.
The Germans wanted to destroy them.
They didn't succeed.
But they got perilously close.
On January 2nd, 1941,
around 100 of their planes took off from airfields in occupied France
heading directly for South Wales.
The pilots were highly focused, with clear targets in mind.
And the reason for that was simple - they'd done their research.
These are the tools of the trade, if you like.
These are the documents they took with them.
You've got the docks, you've got the steelworks...
Chris Going is an aerial archaeologist.
He has the reconnaissance photographs
the Nazis rather chillingly took even before the war started.
This is Cardiff and they have very clearly delineated the targets
that they were going, ultimately, to try to hit.
Erm, this one is labelled 45 61.
Now, 45 is the code for dock targets.
And Cardiff, for the Germans and for the German intelligence,
was the ports.
Hence, what we're seeing down here?
Exactly what you're seeing down there.
They are analysing and pulling apart very carefully
the dock facilities and so on.
Obviously, they've got the steelworks there.
And I have a particular interest in those steelworks
because my father was ordered to work in them during the war,
because he'd lost his sight as a young man, as a boy.
And they made people like him work in the steelworks.
Which is what he did. He was working there.
So he was a target.
Your father worked in target GB 7032.
- There we are. - Hm...
And could easily have been one night under the aiming point.
- And I wouldn't have been here. - And you wouldn't have been there.
- A sobering thought. - Very chilling.
So, let's go to this picture, then.
And if I'm right...
and you can certainly tell me if I'm wrong,
my home, can't quite see the house, but that's Pearl Street.
That's Pearl Street.
Which is not that far from lots of targets,
which would explain, of course,
why many bombs dropped within the neighbourhood.
- We're talking about, what? - One kilometre.
You're talking about three quarters of a second of flying time, really.
Mm...
No wonder some of the bombs went astray.
Indeed, a lot of them went astray.
The Luftwaffe clearly had strong intelligence
and lots of accurate information
about the port and industrial targets.
So why did so many of their bombs drop on civilian homes?
I'm taking to the air to find out.
OK, everyone secure and happy?
Secure and happy, yep.
75 years after the German pilots flew over Cardiff,
I'm following their flight path to see the city as they saw it.
It's fantastic visibility.
- Isn't it just. - Wonderful.
So that's the Millennium Stadium.
And this is Cardiff Castle grounds.
Yep. I think it is there, just by the river.
It has to be.
There's the river.
So we're...
We're going to do now, as it were,
- a sort of dummy bombing run. - Yep.
Because this is almost certainly how you'd have done it.
Looking at it now from this angle, Chris,
we can see the whole of the port over to the east.
It is so compressed, isn't it?
And you have so little time to get rid of your bombs.
- You have almost no time at all. - Almost no time at all.
You've got Victorian streets just there, which are, you know...
And they've been completely cleared and replaced to the north of them.
Yeah, but they were very heavily populated.
- They were very heavily populated. - Yep.
Erm, so this was the very reason why Cardiff was bombed,
all of the docks here.
You've got Queen Alexandra Dock just down below us,
which was a major aiming point.
But cheek by jowl, all of the workers' houses nearby,
which became targets, too.
What amazes me is that it looks so easy
when you're looking at a map, doesn't it?
You can imagine them sitting in Luftwaffe headquarters,
or whatever it was and, "Ah, yeah, we'll bomb that bit there
"and then we'll move on to bomb that bit there."
- But it ain't like that, is it? - It ain't like that.
And what is cynically called collateral damage,
a lot of the sort of descriptions mask the reality of what this was.
And it was high explosives on civilians.
Well, I'm trying to imagine
that I'm flying a German bomber at this stage.
And we're flying now at about 160mph.
The Germans would have been flying a bit more than that,
about 200, 220.
We're at about 2,000 feet.
They were way above that, 4,000 or 5,000 feet,
maybe even more than that.
It's a beautiful sunny day.
But then, for them, of course, it was pitch dark.
And they had...
In fact, we're just over the docks now.
They would have had literally seconds to get rid of those bombs.
Seconds.
And now, even as I speak, we're away from the docks.
And we're into some fairly heavily populated areas.
A lot of houses down there.
And they've got to get rid of their bombs.
Demonstrates, yet again, the random nature of aerial war.
Where would they drop? Who knows...?
Like many people in South Wales,
my parents may have thought
they'd escaped the worst horrors of the Blitz.
By December 1940, the Nazi bombardment was four months old
and the number of raids over other cities had started to wane.
At Christmas, they stopped altogether.
It was indeed a time for peace.
But then came the New Year, a new wave of attacks and renewed terror.
Thursday, January 2nd, 1941 was cold and clear with a full moon,
a so-called bombers' moon,
providing near-perfect visibility.
Sirens wailed as the advance bombers appeared in the skies
above the Bristol Channel.
The first bombs fell at 6.37pm.
And more followed, for ten hours.
If you were in Cardiff on January 2nd, 1941,
you'd probably remember what happened that dreadful night.
If you were here in Grangetown,
on the corner of Corporation Road and Stockland Street,
those events would surely be seared into your memory.
This dockland neighbourhood was the first to be hit.
Then, as now, it was densely populated with family homes
and small businesses.
On this corner, a local shop, Hollyman's Bakery,
became the setting for the worst single incident
of the Cardiff Blitz.
I used to go in there and I used to give him a hand kneading the bread.
John Williams is 89 now.
In 1941, he was a teenage delivery boy, working with a horse and cart.
On January 2nd, he called by Hollyman's on his way home.
I'd been out on my round, I'd come back and they said,
"Oh, come in and have some soup before you go home."
So I went down the cellar with them and I had my soup.
But this night, Bill Hollyman said,
"There's a lot of air activity coming across today."
He said, "I think you'd better go home,
"because I think your mother and father might be worried."
You were 14 at the time?
I was 14. So I went home.
Tragically, many didn't.
When the sirens sounded, they took shelter in the bakery cellar.
It took a direct hit.
I went to work the next day, didn't know anything had happened.
I turned the corner
and it was all flat.
They were bringing out bodies wrapped up in sacks
and things like that.
But it was never ascertained how many people were down there.
But probably more than 30? Certainly more than 30?
Well, they said there was about 30.
Bill Hollyman, the man who owned the bakery,
he was down in the cellar with everybody else.
Him and his wife and his daughter
and one of his uncles and his sister.
And all the rest were people who got called down there.
Just neighbours, who were looking for somewhere to shelter?
That's right, yes.
So he thought, obviously, he was doing people a favour
by giving them shelter and they all got killed.
Oh, yes. Yes.
And what were you doing yourself
when the bombs were falling that night?
I was in an Anderson shelter with my mother and father
and my sister and brother.
In one of these Anderson shelters in 6 Devon Street.
And you could hear the bombs falling?
And we heard the bombs falling.
And we had a little, erm...
we had a gramophone in there.
We used to play records.
Oh, why do I come to think of it?
Were you not scared?
No.
Well, I mean, we went to work the next day.
Carry on with life, didn't you?
- But they weren't so lucky here, were they? - No, they wasn't.
# I'm going to love you like nobody loved you
# Come rain or come shine... #
This photo shows the gap at the end of the row of houses
where the bakery once stood.
What strikes you so powerfully
about a story like John's
is the sheer random nature of aerial warfare.
If John had gone down into the shelter that night,
as he very well might have done,
he would have been one of those 30-odd people
who were blown to bits by that bomb.
Instead, he was in another shelter,
in another place,
listening to music...
..and lived to tell us about it today.
# You're going to love me like nobody's loved me
# Come rain or come shine
# Happy together
# Unhappy together
# And won't it be fine? #
That first night of bombing claimed 165 lives
and caused around 430 casualties.
It also created memories that can never be erased.
Keith Flynn was a schoolboy at the time.
Fear is a strange thing.
Although we were in very dire circumstances,
we could have been killed at any moment
and although bombs passed quite close and fell quite close...
..I don't think we ever showed any outward sign
of distress in any way.
Certainly no crying or screaming.
Next morning, when the noises stopped,
it was a brilliant, lovely, crystal-clear morning.
I turned the corner into Glamorgan Street,
not knowing that a bomb had fallen there.
And this lady was standing to my right.
And as I say, she was standing there.
I remember it was a navy-blue overcoat over her nightclothes.
I do remember her rather long, dark hair.
And I noticed that she was staring at that rubble.
Just staring, not crying.
Not making a sound.
Until she suddenly said, "My mother's under that lot."
And then my aunt and I walked up to Llandaff Cathedral...
simply because we were told that it had been destroyed.
It hadn't been destroyed, but it was an awful mess.
Whether it was an accident or a deliberate attempt to damage morale,
the Luftwaffe did hit this famous city landmark.
A bomber dropped a parachute mine
and it floated down silently by the spire.
The parachute got caught on that spire,
caused some damage to the spire,
just because of the sheer weight of it,
but then it dropped.
And that's where it fell.
And you see that stone down there?
That is the point at which the land mine
hit the ground and exploded.
Dr John Kenyon is the cathedral archivist.
The most damaged part is the south aisle
and the south side of the nave roof,
because all this collapsed
and all the debris came down on part of the cathedral stalls.
Most of the windows were blown out, so the glass all went.
And, obviously, some of the tombs and other items in the cathedral
were damaged simply by the falling debris,
stonework and timberwork.
So it wasn't just the force of the blast, it was...
It was what then came down as a result of the blast.
And so photographs show just debris
occupying the whole of this area here.
So, we're going up to the archives now, John?
Yes, take care.
This is a...
This is a very old staircase.
- So this is how you get to the office, as it were? - Indeed.
Up in the rafters, I'm about to see a fragment
of what had caused so much destruction.
And here's the evidence for it,
with the part of the cord
and the parachute itself,
which has remained in the archives.
I'm sure most of it was taken away elsewhere for souvenirs.
Yes, I imagine there are little bits in lots of houses all over.
But they were into the cathedral fairly quickly
trying to remove as much as they could that was salvageable.
And, of course, Dean Jones here, the Very Reverend David Jones,
according to one of the local recollections,
the dean couldn't find a hard hat,
so he borrowed his wife's colander and came down.
No great dignity involved in it, but, hm...
And so here is the garden of remembrance,
which is where you were looking at.
- That's where the mine actually landed? - This is the crater here.
And, of course, where the land mine landed,
there were burials and there were bones
recorded as just scattered over Llandaff.
- So they had to be gathered up and... - Oh, they got blown up into the air?
Along with all the memorials, as well.
And so that caused a lot of damage to the houses with falling gravestones.
Within weeks, the cathedral was holding services again,
in part of the building, at least.
Today, of course, it's fully repaired.
Although, one scar remains.
The force of the explosion created a crater.
And you can see how big the crater is.
It's surrounded by those rosebushes
that were planted since then to mark out where it fell.
Here's the thing, though.
Had it fallen another 20, 30 yards
in any direction...
the damage to the cathedral would have been utterly devastating.
You could say,
"There, but for the grace of God..."
Near misses, tragedies, tales of incredible courage,
the Blitz and subsequent bombing campaigns
created them all.
And many of those stories and visual records
are preserved here at the Glamorgan Archives in Cardiff.
Rhian, these pictures are interesting material from that time.
I like the air raid wardens here,
because this is...
it gives us a nice idea
of the mix of people who were volunteers, in some cases.
In other cases, dragooned to become that.
Just run me through that.
It's interesting because, looking at the people who are in there,
you realise all the young men
would have been away serving with the forces.
So it's the older men who weren't in the army
and the women who were involved with the ARP system.
Right. So quite a mixture
- and a social mix and all the rest of it? - Definitely.
And here they are, all ready to go.
Yes, with their gas masks on, ready for action, I think.
- And looking terribly sinister. - Exactly.
But how important it was that they had those.
Now, this I find absolutely fascinating.
And I know I mustn't pick it up and wave it around,
because it might well fall apart.
But tell me what it is.
It's the log of a primary school, a particular primary school.
Yes, it's the logbook for the Splott Road Primary School.
Which is where I went from the age of four or nearly five, yes.
And so this was a diary that the head teacher kept.
We see here an alert at 11.30. All clear, 12.
Alert - 3.10. All clear - 3.30.
This would have been hugely disruptive for the school day.
And we see, as well, a note here that attendance was very low -
only 87 of the children present
owing to the raids the previous night.
So, if the children had been up all night in the shelters
with the bombing going on,
they weren't coming to school the next day due to exhaustion.
But it's as though they're sort of saying -
because it's all terribly formal,
and records must be kept under any, all circumstances...
It's as if they're saying
"Tut-tut-tut. Children weren't coming to school!"
There is that attitude coming in there a little.
- Extraordinary, isn't it? - Yeah, yeah.
- And you think, "My God, they're lucky to be alive." - Yes.
And here we are. Here's something else that interests me - this map.
Er, a bombing map. This was a bit after the Blitz.
This was in...?
This is 1943. May '43, this is.
Right. And...
It shows us what their target was,
which, obviously, was the docks, as we've been hearing.
That's what they were really after.
But this is the Splott area.
Yes.
Where, of course, I lived.
- And this is Pearl Street. - Yes.
And there's a bomb...
It looks as if it is just...
Right at the end of the street.
Right at the end of the street, which is where I lived.
It's quite chilling, actually.
Looking and seeing how close,
even though I knew about the bombsites,
looking at that map and seeing...
if that...
If that bomb had been delayed by
a fraction of a second,
well, I wouldn't be here talking to you now.
Exactly. Yes.
It's... It's scary.
Hm.
When the bombs were falling, people called on their own reserves
of courage and resilience,
but they relied on others, too.
The war brought out a spirit of selflessness,
typified by young women like Edith Shute.
She was 23 when the Blitz started.
She had a driving licence and basic first aid training
and so she volunteered for the ambulance service.
She's now 98.
I drove the ambulance twice or three times, I think,
before I went out on duty.
So you just did it.
We just did it.
- I think a lot of other people did the same. - Mm.
You did see some terrible things, didn't you?
Yes.
On one occasion we were called out to Violet Row in Whitchurch,
and we had to stand by while they dug somebody...people out.
Because the bomb had flattened their house.
Yes.
And we would...
They loaded up this patient,
and...
..we were instructed to go
to Whitchurch Hospital,
so we went into this hospital
and the man came out
and said, "Why have you brought this woman here?"
And I cottoned on to what it was all about,
and said, "Who am I to say she was dead?"
Because he thought you should have taken her straight to the morgue.
I said I'm not qualified to, you know, to...to...
express a person's life or death.
And when there were a lot of raids,
you were taking more people to the morgue.
Oh, I went more to the morgue than the hospital.
Because it was mostly bodies that were being pulled out.
Yes, that's right.
Because nothing had prepared you for this.
No, no, nothing had prepared us for it.
- And no training, proper training or anything. - No, no, no proper...
So you just had to...
You had to learn on the spot.
To people listening to you today,
they would just say, "Well, that's...
"That must've been terrifying! Awful!"
Well...
If, erm...
If you had somebody in trouble beside you,
you have to do what you can to help.
The bombing of Cardiff marked the start of a new phase in the Blitz.
Before January 1941, the Germans had targeted only English cities,
but now nowhere in the British Isles was safe.
For two nights in March, Clydebank near Glasgow -
home to munitions factories and shipyards -
came under intense attack.
More than 1,200 people were killed and as many injured.
The destruction was so great,
only seven properties in the town were left undamaged.
As a result, its population went from 60,000 to just 2,000.
The Irish Republic, which stayed neutral during the war,
was also hit.
'Houses at Rathdown Park, Dublin fall victims Hitler's bombs.
'Seven people were trapped when the Nazi raiders
'deliberately unloaded their bombs on these houses in Eire.'
Then, over Easter,
its northern neighbour felt the full force of the Luftwaffe.
In Belfast, in April,
900 people were killed in one single night of bombing.
Meanwhile, back in my home city,
the bombing continued sporadically for weeks.
After more than a dozen raids,
countless buildings and many lives were in ruins.
But the Luftwaffe wasn't finished with South Wales.
They'd already selected another target 40 miles to the west.
They'd launched a few attacks.
Now they were to return with unexpected ferocity,
and with devastating results.
AIR RAID SIRENS
Like Cardiff, prewar Swansea was a crucial port,
and a centre for military-based industries.
So it was inevitable the city would appear on the Nazi hit list.
This image, which is, I think,
quite the most chilling graphic
you can possibly look at of Swansea,
shows just how dense the dock facilities were,
and how close-by the housing was.
And, literally, if you press the button
a second late, two seconds late, your bombs will...
- Yeah. - ..without any doubt,
have gone into the town.
And, indeed, the early attacks in February 1941,
effectively destroyed the city centre.
Mm.
They missed the docks.
They really did miss the docks.
That is extraordinary, isn't it?
And they flattened the city centre.
Viewed from the air, you can see why this place
was a sitting duck for the Luftwaffe bombers.
Even without any modern navigational aids,
the Germans would've had absolutely no trouble finding Swansea,
even at night,
because, of course, you just come up the Channel,
you stick to the coast, and there it is.
You've got the hills behind to tell you where the port is,
even if you can't see the actual dock buildings.
So...an easy target to find.
And, as we now know,
tragically, a very easy target
to cause massive, massive damage to.
Swansea was so badly hit.
All of the focus...
..is just that area enclosed by that outer breakwater there.
Yeah, that's it.
We can see it in one sweep, really, can't we?
Absolutely.
That's the entire old centre, isn't it?
Which was completely flattened.
Yes, exactly, what we're looking at now.
In Feb, '41, there were three attacks in so many days,
and they destroyed the city centre.
I shudder to think what those few days must've been like, eh?
Oh.
Horrifying.
Just to give you an idea
of the concentrated nature of the bombing,
40 acres of Swansea town centre was flattened.
That is the most concentrated bit of bombing
of the war.
Between 19th and 21st February,
bombs fell for a total of 13 hours and 48 minutes.
They set whole districts ablaze.
This is the only known photograph taken during the three-night Blitz.
The attacks killed 230 people
and injured more than 400.
857 properties were destroyed, 11,000 damaged,
and 7,000 people were made homeless.
Elaine Kidwell was an air-raid warden
who lived through every moment.
We'd come running out and we'd be blowing our whistles and yelling.
The shelters were open, but we'd stand and say,
"Come on, come on," you know. "Get in there."
And, er, they were machine gunning
the balloons down,
because they were over the docks, you see.
And I remember running along Quay Parade for my life,
because the bullets were coming behind me, you know?
And then I dived into a doorway
and they went past! You know?
Then I heard a whistle going,
blowing frantically.
I rushed down the steps
and over to, erm...where the whistling was coming from
and when I got there - this is in Quay Parade -
there was a warden leaning over a body on the ground.
So I went up and he said, "This is for you."
He said, "You know what to do."
"Where is it?" He said, "I don't know. He's bleeding from somewhere."
Anyway, it was black, you see? You couldn't tell.
And I said...
The man, he was unconscious, thank goodness.
Anyway, I felt around, and where his leg was, there was nothing.
"What is...? Oh, God, blood. The leg's gone."
So I put a tourniquet on him now,
and put everything right and, any case, this ambulance came along,
which was really a van,
and he said to me, "All right?"
I said, "Yes." I said, "I'm fine."
"Right," he said. "Now, listen, now," he said.
"You've saved his life.
"All right, he hasn't got a leg, but he's going to live."
Anyway, he came to see me some years later.
And he said, "How in hell did you get through the Blitz
"because you were always out in it?"
"Well," I said. "I'd rather have been out than been in."
Because your imagination can...
when you're in and you've the bangin' and the bangin'.
When you're out, you can see what's happening, you know?
So, there we were.
Elaine was 17 when she became an air-raid warden,
the youngest in Britain.
She was a girl seeing things most of us would hope never to see.
There was one thing I haven't forgotten,
but I'm coming to terms, even though it's a long time ago.
I was coming off duty
and they were bringing the dead from where
there was a lot of casualties.
And in the back of this car, now,
I could see - the hood was down -
and I could see two little babies
in a white box like that.
And one was...
The little girl was lying like this.
And the little boy, who was a bit older,
had his arm on her, but he was dead, too.
And I still can't get over it.
But I'm not grieving,
and I'm glad that they both went together.
You know what I mean?
But the sight, the waste of it! You know?
It was so wicked.
And they were still bombing us.
That night, I remember going up
and seeing that from Swansea Castle down to...
Oh, the bottom of St Helen's Road,
was burning.
The whole swathe of it?
Yeah. And it burned from...
one...
that side to that side, the same.
Everything was in flames.
And people were running for the beach,
because if the worst came to the worst,
they could get into the water, see?
The heat must have been tremendous!
Terrible.
It sounds like a hell.
It was hell. There was no other word for it.
RECORDING: 'Morning is breaking over Wales at war.'
The Swansea poet and writer Dylan Thomas,
who was haunted by the destruction of his home town.
'..but the terrible near war
'of England and Wales and her brothers and sisters...'
Thomas had been declared medically unfit for military service,
so he spent much of the war writing scripts
for government propaganda films.
'In the roaring cauldrons of the Swansea Valley, in the...'
Those who studied his life believe he was actually in Swansea
at the height of the Blitz.
There's testimony from a very close friend of his
who saw Dylan and his wife Caitlin
walking through the streets of bombed Swansea after the Blitz
in that February and Dylan turned to his friend and said,
"Our Swansea has died."
So parts of the town that he knew and loved,
and was so familiar with, had written about in his short stories,
were just flattened.
In a sense, what would one would love to see
is his chronicling of the terrible events of early 1941
here in Swansea.
But he didn't do that, did he? He wrote later.
That's right, it took him six years to absorb
those traumatic events of Swansea.
The destruction of the Swansea he knew and loved.
Return Journey was the great play that he wrote in 1947.
Yes, that's right. This is the original script.
- The actual broadcast script that he'd have read from? - Yes.
He was very keen to get every detail right in this script,
to the extent that he checked the order of all the shops
that had been bombed to make sure
that he had them in the correct order
when he was writing about them in this piece.
'Burton Tailors, WH Smith, Boots Cash Chemist, Lesley's Stores,
'Upson's Shoes, Prince of Wales, Tucker's Fish, Stead and Simpson...
'All the shops bombed and vanished.'
He even wrote to a former grammar school master of his
to get the names of those former boys who'd died in the war
who were on the role of honour
so he could include their names in this broadcast.
CHURCH BELL TOLLS
'Evans, KJ. Haynes, GC. Roberts, IL.'
CHURCH BELL TOLLS
'Moxham, J. Thomas, H. Baines, W.'
And it's not an attempt to put a gloss on what happened
in any sense at all.
It is not lyrical in that sense, is it?
- In fact it is brutally truthful. - Yes.
But there is... Well, there's a beauty in it.
Yes, it's an elegy. A very beautiful elegy, I think,
to a lost Swansea, a lost childhood,
which resonated with so many people.
'It was a cold, white day in the high street
'and nothing to stop the wind slicing up from the docks,
'for where the squat and tall shops had shielded the town from the sea,
'lay their blitzed-flat graves marbled with snow
'and headstoned with fences.'
It's a very, very long time since Dylan Thomas wrote that play -
he was in his 30s then -
and, obviously, nothing that he describes is as it was then.
This is the new Swansea.
None of the old remains.
But his words remain, and they are as colourful and evocative today
as they were when he wrote them.
Let's give you another flavour of it.
"Boys romped calling high and clear
"on top of a levelled chemist's and a shoe shop..."
THOMAS ON RECORDING: '..and a little girl wearing a man's cap
'threw a snowball in a chill, deserted garden
'that had once been the Jug and Bottle of the Prince of Wales.
'And in the falling winter morning
'I walked on through the white centre
'past the hole in space where Hodges the clothiers had been,
'down Castle Street past the remembered invisible shops -
'David Evans, Gregory Confectioners...
'Burton's, Lloyds Bank and nothing.'
One of the pubs reduced to dust and rubble was the King's Head.
It had been home to Marion Garnett's family.
She was just a baby at the time.
On the third night of the Blitz,
my mother was standing opposite our pub,
and a man came down and said to her,
"You'd better move from there,
"because that pub will be up in flames."
And then we all went down to the air raid shelter.
In walking down, my mother told me that she walked over bodies.
The family survived, but the pub was gone.
All they had left were the clothes they wore.
My mother was in quite a bad emotional state
because, of course, she had lost everything.
But she had a glimmer of hope
knowing my father would be coming home,
and then perhaps life would start as normal again.
But it never did.
Marion's father had been serving in Africa.
The year after the Blitz, the family received the worst possible news.
My mother and I had been to the Post Office to collect her army pay
and we came back, and Nana - I can see it now, in my mind's eye -
was waving a telegram.
And my mother took it,
she opened it, and she sat down on a big armchair near the fire...
..and started to cry.
And that scene is really my first memory.
And it's something that will always be with me.
The sadness was so intense.
Not only had my mother lost her house and home,
now she'd lost her husband, and my father.
A family devastated, a town destroyed.
In Swansea many lives were changed for ever.
But what the bombs and the flames never killed
was the spirit of the locals.
It survived.
And the place itself was rebuilt.
The centre is now full of tall buildings,
unrecognisable from what it was before the war.
Despite all the careful preparation and planning and boasting,
Hitler's "lightning war" failed to break Britain.
I know now just how close his pilots came to dropping a bomb on my house,
yet it, like the people and the nation,
stood firm against the onslaught.
You get a slightly different perspective
when you are looking down on it
and you see it there, this little clump of houses,
secure, safe.
It's, er...
It's quite a reassuring feeling, in a way, to know that
they're still there.
Back on the ground in Splott,
the bombsites that were once my forbidden playgrounds
are long gone.
In their places, family homes for the next generations.
Childhood produces a million false memories,
and, of course, I was a baby when the bombs were actually falling,
so it's been fascinating to talk to people who were older
and who really do remember
what it was like when the bombs were dropping.
What I remember, and this is a real memory,
is playing on the bombsites.
They were all around here
where the bombs dropped on these streets
and so there'd be that gap
and the house would be utterly destroyed.
And now, well, the streets are back to normal,
the houses are painted a little more brightly than they were then...
..and things have changed.
Everything has changed.
Our memories, though,
for those who really can remember,
are vivid.