- 5/15/2025
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00:00On April 15th, 1935, a new type of film went on sale for the first time.
00:16It was aimed particularly at amateurs. This was part of a revolution in filmmaking,
00:24when small home movie cameras became increasingly available.
00:30As Europe descended into conflict, for the first time, ordinary people right across Britain
00:36were able to record all aspects of their lives, even at war.
00:42Nowadays, you can take it on a telephone or something or other, but it was very different then.
00:48I am conscious when I watch it that an awful lot of those guys were going to die.
00:56It seemed exciting to me. It was an exciting time to live.
01:02For the last 75 years, these extraordinary amateur films have lain undiscovered, unseen,
01:10in attics, libraries and the vaults of film archives all over Britain.
01:16Broadcast here together for the first time, these films reveal an entirely new
01:22and uncensored personal perspective on the greatest conflict in the history of Britain.
01:37Britain in 1939.
01:40With an estimated quarter of a million ordinary people now owning a camera,
01:45there was an explosion in amateur filmmaking.
01:49In Sussex, Londoner Sidney Hansford wanted to capture his family's excitement
01:55at their new life in the country.
01:58In the garden of his home in Ashford, Victor Don, a doctor, filmed his favourite pets.
02:08While in the garden of England, village shopkeeper Ernest Botting
02:12recorded a typical summer in Kent.
02:15Seen together for the first time,
02:17they paint a picture of a nation still seemingly at peace.
02:24But on 7th May 1939, one amateur filmmaker recorded a more menacing experience.
02:34In the garden of his home in Ashford,
02:37but on the 7th of May 1939, one amateur filmmaker recorded a more menacing event.
02:58A march through the streets of London by the British Union of Fascists,
03:02a party led by former Labour MP and cabinet member Oswald Mosley.
03:10They claimed to have over 50,000 members
03:13and were able to contest local and national elections.
03:20They were also part of a much larger, more dangerous movement in continental Europe.
03:26In Germany, Hitler's Nazis had been in power for over six years.
03:31They had already transformed the country into a totalitarian, fascist state.
03:37All dissent was brutally crushed, and under the new Nazi racial laws,
03:42Aryans were now viewed as the master race of the world.
03:49A new Nazi government was born.
03:51The master race of the world.
03:55A new world order was on the march.
04:04But that summer in Britain, for most people,
04:07events in Europe must have felt a world away.
04:12Pharmacist Francis Newman took his family and his new camera
04:17to the beach at Westgate in Kent.
04:22MUSIC PLAYS
04:29Amateur filmmaker Tom Brown, a dentist from Middlesbrough,
04:33was one of the few people who could afford to holiday abroad.
04:39And he took his camera with him,
04:41recording first-hand the chilling changes on the continent.
04:46Back in the 1930s, your average family would visit Blackpool or Scarborough,
04:52somewhere like that.
04:54In 1937, mother and father decided to do a tour of Europe.
05:00For over 60 years after it was made,
05:03Tom Brown's film was only shown to friends and relatives.
05:08This is the first time it has been publicly broadcast at length.
05:16Father was brought up in a dental family
05:19because grandfather had been the first dentist in the family.
05:23Whilst dentistry was his work, his real interest was his hobbies.
05:34Back in the 1930s, it was very, very unusual to take movies.
05:40It was very expensive.
05:42The equipment was difficult to use.
05:45And required a lot of work afterwards.
05:49Much more difficult than doing video these days.
05:52So they tended to group together so they could help one another and advise one another.
05:58So he joined the Teesside Cine Club,
06:02where there were a group of similar people who were interested,
06:05and also people who were interested in acting.
06:10So they were able to put on their own films.
06:15Mother wrote the scripts for several of the films.
06:19Father acted in them and sometimes acted as cameraman.
06:28When Tom Brown set out on his European holiday with his wife and daughter,
06:33they travelled by train and bus throughout Central Europe.
06:45They were some of the very few Britons who witnessed
06:49and filmed a continent in the last years of peace.
07:02We're talking now about the days before television.
07:05These days we see things that are going on throughout the world,
07:09very, very often.
07:10These days we see things that are going on throughout the world very, very easily.
07:16But when radio and newspaper were the only forms of communication,
07:22my parents were really quite privileged to see with their own eyes
07:26what was happening in Europe and what things were heading towards.
07:31So Father took the opportunity to make films
07:35and bring them back and show people what things were like in another country.
07:41At one point in Eastern Europe,
07:47he was photographing in a railway station.
07:50He didn't know that railway stations were considered part of the war effort,
07:54but he realised that somebody was running down the platform towards him
07:59whilst he was standing there with his camera.
08:02Surprisingly, rather than admit defeat,
08:06he ran off down the platform,
08:08jumped into a carriage and hid under the seat.
08:11But, of course, eventually he was dragged out from under the seat
08:15and, to his total distress,
08:17they opened his camera and pulled reels and reels of film out of it.
08:23So he lost quite a lot of film that way.
08:25But he was a very adventurous person.
08:32Eventually, the Browns reached the city of Munich
08:35with its ancient Karlstor, the Charles Gate.
08:41This is the birthplace of Hitler's Nazis,
08:44where his brutal path to power had begun 14 years previously.
08:57They filmed Hitler's stormtroopers on the street
09:00and even the anti-Semitic propaganda that marked his rise to power.
09:12My parents would have been very shocked, being polite English people.
09:16I'm sure they would hope that these attitudes would go away,
09:20but, of course, they didn't.
09:22In fact, Hitler's grip on Europe continued to grow.
09:30In March 1938, his troops marched into a jubilant Austria,
09:36adding it to his ever-expanding Third Reich.
09:43On 30 September 1938, in a desperate attempt to avoid war,
09:48the leaders of Britain and France came to Munich
09:51to sign a humiliating agreement,
09:53allowing Hitler to annex parts of Czechoslovakia.
10:00Just six months later, Hitler tore up the agreement.
10:06But his plans to dominate Europe had only just begun.
10:13By August 1939, international tensions were reaching a peak.
10:20But Tom Brown still decided to take his family and his camera
10:24on another continental holiday.
10:30With Central Europe now in turmoil,
10:33this time the family only ventured as far as Belgium,
10:37Holland and Luxembourg.
10:43My parents would realise, of course,
10:45that things were getting heated in Europe,
10:48but at that time nobody knew that there was going to be war,
10:52let alone when war could break out.
10:55When they arrived in Liège, Belgium,
10:57they came across an international design exhibition
11:01and filmed the delegation from Nazi Germany.
11:10Then, when they reached Belgium's border with Germany,
11:13they even saw concrete evidence of Hitler's war machine in action.
11:19They were really quite surprised to be able to film
11:22part of the Siegfried Line being built across the valley
11:25from where they were situated,
11:28which was Germany's defensive line in the west.
11:32And they were quite shocked to see this being built up.
11:39The war machine was a massive, massive machine.
11:42It was a massive machine that could carry a lot of people.
11:47This would draw their attention to the fact that things were
11:51progressing in Europe, perhaps faster than they'd imagined.
11:54On 1 September 1939,
11:58while Tom Brown and his family were still in Belgium,
12:02Hitler invaded Britain's ally, Poland.
12:10Panic broke out at the local port
12:13because everybody needed to get home.
12:16This would be quite a worry for them.
12:19The last frames of Tom Brown's film recorded their ferry
12:23leaving Europe for the last time as the world descended into war.
12:30This morning, the British ambassador in Berlin
12:34handed the German government a final note,
12:38stating that unless we heard from them by 11 o'clock,
12:44that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland,
12:49a state of war would exist between us.
12:54I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received
13:00and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.
13:13With the fear of bombing,
13:15the government began the mass evacuation of Britain's cities.
13:19In the first three days,
13:21more than 1.5 million people were moved to safety,
13:25including over 800,000 children.
13:29Amateur filmmakers recorded this unprecedented event,
13:33and the BBC sent out radio reporters to broadcast it to the nation.
13:39The evacuation of British children is going on smoothly and efficiently.
13:43The Ministry of Health says that great progress has been made
13:47with the first part of the government's arrangements.
13:51We're on number 12 platform at Waterloo station.
13:55Don't get worried about us, we're all very happy here,
13:59and I don't think anybody wants to go home yet.
14:03Official evacuation centres were set up around the country
14:07by thousands of volunteers.
14:09But just north of Lancaster, in rural Lancashire,
14:13a completely unique private school for evacuees
14:17was organised by a group of Quakers.
14:21Amateur film of it has lain unseen for over 75 years.
14:25This is the first time in the history of the country
14:29My father took the film.
14:33As long as he could get film, he would film most weekends.
14:37Quakers in Liverpool and Manchester got together
14:41over only a matter of a week or two
14:45and found that Yellen Manor, which was a Quaker guesthouse,
14:49was going to be emptied during the war,
14:53for the first time in the history of the country.
14:57It was going to be emptied during the war,
15:01so the place was rapidly turned into an evacuation place
15:05for the small children from Liverpool and Manchester.
15:09I was told we're off, and my father took me in the car
15:13from Liverpool in my little suitcase.
15:17I was dumped, and my father drove back to Liverpool, and that was it.
15:21I was 10, I'd just had my 10th birthday.
15:25Some of them were only sort of four or five.
15:29Now, the day after I arrived, I wrote a letter home
15:33saying that I was all right and all the rest of it.
15:37At the bottom of the letter, I said,
15:41PS, will you tell me what is the name of the town
15:45on the postmark on this letter?
15:49Clearly, I was asking that question
15:54Yelland was completely different from other evacuation schools.
15:58Its organisers wanted to use it
16:02to test out new social and educational ideas.
16:09I think my mother was trying to create
16:13a stable atmosphere for children who didn't have one,
16:17in a time of great trouble.
16:21She was headmistress, but she was much, much more than that.
16:25She was really a sort of mother figure to us all,
16:29and it was she who made Yelland what it really was.
16:33Of course, the adults here were very protective of us.
16:37They were all very anxious and worried,
16:41and they didn't want us to be worried.
16:45The school was run on Quaker lines.
16:49The important thing about Quakers is
16:53that they believe that all people are equal.
16:57All the children here learnt
17:01to sit quietly and listen,
17:05whether it was in a meeting for worship
17:09or whether it was to listen to music
17:13or to listen to stories, and this must have had
17:17an important and calming influence on some of the children
17:21who were really quite troubled.
17:25Underlying the whole thing was this deep
17:29and very practical Christian ethos.
17:33It was a service. It wasn't what you could get out of it,
17:37it was what you could put into it, and this was all because of Elfrida.
17:41It was she who inspired all this.
17:45The toilets, scrub floors,
17:49prepare vegetables, particularly potato peeling.
17:53That went on for hours every morning.
17:57And we were given an education
18:01which apparently satisfied the educational authorities,
18:05but I don't specifically remember the lessons,
18:09but I did do a scholarship exam, so we must have had an education.
18:13But what I remember is the charging around in the woods
18:17and things like that, that's what I remember.
18:21At first, all the evacuees at Yelland came from Quaker families,
18:25but soon any child could apply,
18:29and there was even financial help for the needy.
18:33When I see the film again,
18:37I'm impressed by the happiness that the children show.
18:41There were very few miserable children.
18:45And here we were out in the country, and it's a magical country this.
18:49We had a considerable degree of freedom.
18:53The children were very free to walk in the woods when they wanted,
18:57so long as they turned up for meals.
19:01But there were children who had never been away from home before.
19:05There were children who were very anxious
19:09because it affects each child differently.
19:13Over the course of the war,
19:17Yelland Manor took in 198 evacuated children.
19:2115 of them were refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe.
19:27Hitler's anti-Semitic policies
19:31gradually expelled the Jews from society
19:35because of their rights and property,
19:39with increasing abuse, terror and violence.
19:51In late 1938, a delegation of British Jews and Quakers
19:55persuaded the government to allow the temporary admission of Jewish children
19:59on what was known as the children's, or kindertransport.
20:05The first party of almost 200
20:09arrived in Harwich on 2 December 1938.
20:13By the end, more than 10,000 children
20:17were rescued from the Nazis.
20:21Some of them were sent to Yelland.
20:25One or two refugee children started appearing.
20:29I remember particularly a little boy called Achim Littek, who was a Polish Jew.
20:33There's a lovely bit in the film of Achim
20:37from the top of a tree, swaying
20:41to and fro. That was his idea of
20:45getting away from everything.
20:49His father was an officer in the German army
20:53and rejected his wife and Achim
20:57because they looked Jewish.
21:01He rejected their daughter because she didn't look Jewish.
21:05He spoke very little English,
21:09but he was a good mixer and we welcomed him in
21:13and he settled in remarkably quickly.
21:17It's only looking back on it that we realise
21:21the sort of torments that must have been going on in his mind.
21:25Then I remember Renate Polger.
21:29I think she was very frightened
21:33when she arrived. She had come to a family
21:37who had a little boy and they wanted
21:41an older sister for him.
21:45They had her as a foster child.
21:49They had rooms in the village and came every day to the school.
21:53We were all there to help each other,
21:57to help the underdog.
22:01We were all definitely encouraged to think for ourselves.
22:05We were all treated as equals, actually.
22:09Elfride would ask us, what do you think about it?
22:13It wasn't just simply telling us what she thought.
22:17Since the war,
22:21I have met one or two of the refugee children.
22:25I met Achim Litek
22:29at the funeral of
22:33a woman with whom he,
22:37I think he lived with her straight after the war.
22:41He was exceedingly prosperous looking.
22:45And from being a very tall, skinny young boy,
22:49he was a large, comfortable looking man
22:53wearing a very beautiful overcoat.
22:57Renate Polger went back
23:01to Czechoslovakia, which was very difficult,
23:05she said, because she had grown to call
23:09her foster parents mum and dad.
23:13And she had forgotten most of her Czech language.
23:17She had to sort of rehabilitate herself.
23:21And she stayed and took her exams and qualified as a doctor.
23:31We weren't hiding away from all the dangers.
23:35We were aware of them.
23:39But I think Jelland was teaching us how to cope with them.
23:47On the war front,
23:51in late 1939,
23:55the British army was sent to France
23:59to support our allies.
24:03But it did little, actively,
24:07to deter Hitler's aggression.
24:11At home, there was a sense of uneasy calm
24:15as people awaited news of Hitler's next move.
24:19In Kent, pharmacist Francis Newman filmed his family
24:23as they went about their daily lives,
24:27while the government propaganda machine
24:31tried to prepare the people for what lay ahead.
24:35BBC Home Service. Here is General Sir Ernest Swinton
24:39to continue the war commentary which he's giving every Thursday evening.
24:43General Swinton.
24:47Now, I told you that time was against the Germans.
24:51I think, therefore, that they are likely to try to break the existing stalemate in the West.
24:55We know that they have already brought up a very large force
24:59behind the Siegfried position,
25:03with particular concentrations opposite Holland and Belgium.
25:07And now I'm going to finish on a lighter note.
25:11That is, there's no harm in extracting fun from life even now.
25:19This phony war was finally shattered in April 1940.
25:31This is the BBC Home Service.
25:35Here is a short news bulletin.
25:39We invaded Holland and Belgium early this morning by land
25:43and by landings from parachutes.
25:47It was the Allies' first taste of a new type of brutal lightning warfare,
25:51Blitzkrieg.
25:552,500 tanks, 7,500 guns
25:59and 3 million men of the German army
26:03blasted their way through the Allied defences.
26:07Within days, Holland and Belgium had fallen
26:11and the French and British armies were in full retreat.
26:15By late May 1940, the British army was surrounded,
26:19trapped in northern France.
26:23Its only hope was evacuation by sea.
26:27Over nine days, 338,000 Allied soldiers
26:31were evacuated from the harbour and beaches of Dunkirk.
26:37Despite the restrictions
26:41of wartime censorship,
26:45the evacuation was recorded by a young naval lieutenant
26:49with his own personal camera.
26:53This unique film lay hidden in a family archive for over 70 years.
26:57It's thought to be the only amateur film
27:01of this defining moment in British history.
27:05In those nights, ships of all kinds
27:09supplied to and fro across the channel
27:13under the fierce onslaught of the enemy's bombers
27:17and every one of them was crammed full of tired,
27:21battle-stained and blood-stained British soldiers.
27:25All of them were tired and some were completely exhausted.
27:29But the most amazing thing was that practically every man
27:33who saw bombs in Germany would never crush.
27:37We saw Dunkirk from the sky when we had time to look.
27:41I'd never seen so many ships as he would never him tell.
27:49My little crowd had five days fighting.
27:53We took off four and five times a day
27:57and most of the fighting was over and around Dunkirk.
28:01We never had a crack. We were always outnumbered except once.
28:17On 22 June, just six weeks after the fighting had begun,
28:21France surrendered to the Nazis.
28:25Now for the first time, the people of Britain faced Hitler.
28:31Alone.
28:35The news from France is very bad
28:39and I grieve for the gallant French people
28:43who have fallen into this
28:47terrible misfortune.
28:51We shall defend our island. We shall fight on,
28:55unconquerable, until the curse of Hitler
28:59is removed from the brow of men.
29:03As the fear of invasion grew,
29:07the men who were not already serving in the armed forces,
29:11particularly the young and the old, were now asked to form a new force.
29:15In the Yorkshire village of Thornton,
29:19the men of a Home Guard unit made their own uniquely comprehensive record
29:23of its formation and training.
29:27It came to light when the final surviving copy was found in a veteran's attic
29:31over 50 years later.
29:35Behind the regular army, we have more than a million
29:39of the local defence volunteers,
29:43or as they are much better called, the Home Guard.
29:47Should the invader come, there will be no placid lying down of the people
29:51in submission before him.
29:55There are many causes, there are vast numbers
29:59who will render faithful service in this war,
30:03but whose names will never be known, whose deeds will never be recorded.
30:07This is a war of the unknown warrior.
30:15Our local chemist, he was asked to form
30:19a company in our area.
30:23He had documents, they'd worked out who had served in World War I,
30:27and my father became the company commander.
30:35He hadn't talked about World War I, but obviously he'd kept the uniform
30:39from then, and he still had a Smith & Wesson .45
30:43and a German automatic pistol.
30:47At one point, Rob Brown is even caught on film,
30:51in March 9, with his younger brother, James,
30:55walking down a lane in the village.
30:59Much of the platoon's official business
31:03was conducted around the Brown family house.
31:07Two sergeants who were members of the Bradford Cine Circle
31:11thought that it would be a nice idea to record the activities of the Home Guard,
31:15so Sergeants Harold Whitehead and Sergeant Woodhouse
31:19filmed some of the Home Guard, and my father took it to heart.
31:23He thought it was a brilliant idea, and indeed,
31:27it eventually paid for the film stock.
31:31The Home Guard was expected to act as a secondary defence force
31:35in the event of an invasion.
31:39But after the chaos of Dunkirk, real weapons were scarce,
31:43so many of the volunteers had to train with wooden guns.
31:47They were initially known as Look, Duck and Vanish,
31:51because that was the idea if we were invaded.
31:55The Home Guard were not expected to fight,
31:59they were expected to report to the existing system what was going on,
32:03because they know the area, they know the hiding places, they know the back streets.
32:07The barriers were not the rigid barriers that you'd find in a regular unit,
32:11they were friends. There was a significant difference
32:15between the fact that they were fellow residents of the local villages,
32:19and were just nice folks.
32:23After three months, the Thornton Home Guard were eventually sent real rifles,
32:27brought in especially from the United States.
32:35As far as the view of the war from the Home Guard point of view,
32:39this was it.
32:43The Germans were going to be invaded.
32:47The fear of a German attack from the air was very real.
32:51Just weeks earlier, in the defeat of Belgium and Holland,
32:55parachutists had been used to devastating effect.
32:59There were telephone calls as there had been a report
33:03of a German parachutist landing in our area.
33:07This was most exciting to the Home Guard,
33:11because they were in control of the Germans by parachute.
33:15And so Thornton scanned, scoured, searched,
33:19concentrating mainly on a wood called Sonwood,
33:23which lies in the valley between the two villages.
33:27But nothing was found.
33:31In fact, it was paper falling out of the sky.
33:35We have an Avro factory at Yeadon, where they were assembling some kind of airplane.
33:39Harry Ramstons, the well-known fish-and-chip shop,
33:43bought himself fish-and-chips to fly this plane from Leeds, Bradford, Yeadon
33:47to wherever it was that he was going.
33:51On the way, he finished his fish-and-chips and threw the paper out of the cockpit.
34:03Mr Whitehead, one of the makers of the film,
34:07had made dummy hand grenades with conventional fuses,
34:11a very small charge, covered in quite dry clay.
34:15And we would throw them in the garden, throw them into a holly bush,
34:19and they made the most gorgeous mess, dust everywhere,
34:23a loud bang, the tree covered in dust.
34:27It was absolutely great for kids.
34:31By the end of the war,
34:35the members of the Thornton platoon had never actually confronted a German soldier.
34:41I'm not sure how far the war impinged directly on us.
34:45It became much more of a family than a military organisation.
34:49But it was deadly serious.
34:53Behind it all, the social, the occasional drinking,
34:57the marches where they would sing rude songs and that sort of stuff,
35:01it was down to, this is us looking after our families.
35:05And so the Home Guard was serious.
35:09Although the Home Guard never faced a Nazi invasion,
35:13by the end of the war, over 1,200 of its volunteers
35:17had lost their lives due to bombing raids.
35:21My father was proud of what went on.
35:25And when the big parade in Bradford Blister Park,
35:29where he was commanding, was handed a trophy,
35:33and then dropped the base of the trophy on the ground.
35:37After the war, in the office of the family business, which I later joined,
35:41there was a small drawer with reference cards
35:45of the names of all the members of the Home Guard.
35:49And he followed them until they died.
35:53I'm afraid those cards have now gone once we closed the mill and we had to clear it out,
35:57and that's why I'm here.
36:01If the Home Guard was a last line of defence,
36:05the front line was manned by the pilots of the Royal Air Force.
36:09Hitler knew he would have to defeat them
36:13before he could attempt an invasion.
36:17So throughout the summer of 1940, the biggest air battle in history
36:21raged in the skies above southern Britain.
36:25But a German fighter in Kent was able to film the action from the ground.
36:43From the start, the odds were stacked against the RAF.
36:471,200 pilots faced over 2,600 planes of the Luftwaffe.
36:55I saw the order to take off, and I climbed hurriedly into the cockpit of my machine.
36:59I felt an empty sensation of suspense in the pit of my stomach,
37:03for I knew that that morning I was to kill for the first time.
37:07We ran into them at 18,000 feet.
37:11Twenty yellow nose measures made 109s, about 100 feet above us.
37:15Turned the gun button to fire,
37:19and let go in a four-second burst with full deflection.
37:25By the end of the battle,
37:29the RAF had lost almost 550 pilots,
37:33but the Luftwaffe had over 2,500 aircrew killed.
37:37An army major stationed in Kent
37:41filmed the end of one German fighter
37:45and its captured pilot.
37:55Having lost the Battle of Britain,
37:59Hitler now ordered his air force to turn their attention to a new target...
38:03Britain's civilian population.
38:11All over the country, in Britain's major cities and towns,
38:15people prepared for the expected onslaught from the air.
38:19In Sheffield, an amateur filmmaker recorded their efforts.
38:25Little is known now about him,
38:29but his extraordinary film provides a unique insight
38:33into the wartime lives of the people of Sheffield.
38:41One of the biggest fears was that Hitler would use poison gas.
38:45So, like many other cities,
38:49Sheffield held special drills.
38:53Even schoolchildren.
38:57Now, put your books down and get your gas masks out.
39:01Quietly. And take them carefully out of their boxes.
39:05No, no, Isabel, don't drag it.
39:09You'll show her how to do it, Margaret, will you?
39:13Now, they're all out, are they? But I want you to put them on,
39:17and let's see if everyone can get it right this time.
39:21Instead, the German Air Force started a blitz of Britain's cities.
39:25It began in London.
39:33From 7 September 1940,
39:37Hitler's Luftwaffe bombed the capital
39:41almost continuously for the next 56 nights.
39:45In turn, almost all the major industrial cities of Britain
39:49were attacked.
39:53On the nights of 12th and 15th December,
39:57it was the turn of the people of Sheffield.
40:01In the immediate aftermath, amateur filmmaker William Baker
40:05was out on the streets to record the damage.
40:09The old city centre was now in ruins.
40:13Walsh's department store,
40:17that had dominated Sheffield High Street since the 19th century,
40:21was completely gutted.
40:25And almost nothing remained of the Marples Hotel,
40:29where more than 70 people had been killed.
40:37Even Bramall Lane, home of Sheffield United Football Club,
40:41wasn't spared.
40:45But some of the worst damage was done in the residential districts.
40:49Palmer's Butchers in Walsden Home Road
40:53took a direct hit.
40:57In all, 78,000 houses were damaged,
41:0140,000 people homeless,
41:05660 people killed.
41:11The BBC interviewed some of the survivors.
41:15He was all hungry and thirsty.
41:19I had the baby in my arms and was never off my feet the whole night.
41:23He kept giving me a turn when I heard him breathing.
41:27It looked as if it was made of cardboard.
41:31It was horribly alarming while it lasted,
41:35and I found myself longing to be in the open.
41:39As the day went on, as men and women began to crawl out of their shelters
41:43to look for their friends and survey the ruins of their city,
41:47they could hardly recognise it. Hardly a building remained intact.
41:55Sid Path was just nine at the time of the blitz.
41:59His family home took a direct hit.
42:03But the bomb failed to explode.
42:07We'd learned that a bomber dropped on Gloucester Street
42:11and my father's sister lived on Gloucester Street.
42:15So we were anxious to find out if the family were safe.
42:19So we walked down the road.
42:23There was a big hole in the centre of the road.
42:27It was big enough to put a double-decker bus in.
42:31And I'm told that that was a 200-pound bomb.
42:35And it was a 200-pound bomb that had dropped on our house.
42:39So if it had made a hole as big as to get a bus in,
42:43well, we wouldn't have been here.
42:47The place my uncle lived was on the right,
42:51close, on the right-hand side.
42:55But the house at the bottom of there was flattened,
42:59and there was ARP men or soldiers, I don't know,
43:03waiting for some people who were buried under there.
43:07And my father and my brother-in-law said,
43:09we will stop and help to get these people out.
43:13They were moving the rubble, and the people were buried in the cellar.
43:17And I said to my father, can I stop and watch?
43:21And he said, no, don't be ridiculous.
43:27In many parts of the city,
43:29water and electricity were cut off for weeks,
43:33just as the worst winter weather set in.
43:39A couple of days later,
43:41my father and my brother-in-law went back into their own house.
43:45There was a hole in the wall.
43:49So my father and my brother-in-law
43:52walked through this hole into the cellar,
43:54and the bomb was still lying there in the house.
43:57There was no stairs. The stairs had gone.
44:00The cellar steps, nearly all had gone.
44:03So my brother-in-law climbed up the wall into the bedroom.
44:08My father was standing astride the bomb,
44:12and it was between his legs,
44:14and they were throwing things down, and he was catching them.
44:21So bad was Sheffield's devastation
44:24that just a few weeks after the bombing,
44:26a filmmaker recorded a morale-boosting trip
44:29by the King and Queen.
44:34I remember my mother taking me,
44:38and that area was very badly bombed.
44:41I remember standing opposite there
44:44and watching the King and Queen walk up.
44:46I was just excited because I'd seen them.
44:49But I think to adults,
44:51I think they appreciated the fact that they'd come.
44:57134 of the Blitz victims were buried in a mass grave
45:02in a cemetery in Sheffield.
45:07But as a kid at that age,
45:09I don't think I took it very seriously, quite honest.
45:13I can't ever remember feeling afraid.
45:17I was confident we were going to win the war anyhow.
45:20I mean, the films said so.
45:22We were better than the Germans.
45:24We'd got better planes, we were braver.
45:27It seemed exciting to me.
45:29It was an exciting time to live.
45:33Until 1944.
45:37And by that point, my brother-in-law was in the Navy
45:41and had been in the Navy, I think, two or three years
45:45before he had his own children.
45:48Took me around with him.
45:50I could swim when I was four.
45:52I couldn't stand up in the water, but I could swim
45:55because he took me and taught me.
45:57So the relationship was very much like my brother, really.
46:02And we got a telegram to say he was missing, presumed dead.
46:09And it destroyed my sister, that.
46:13She'd got two young children and she was 23, I think, at the time.
46:19And she was completely destroyed.
46:21She locked herself in her bedroom for five days and never came out.
46:26And that made me realise what a terrible thing war was.
46:31Until then, I never took it seriously, I don't think.
46:35And it changed my whole attitude to it.
46:39And I felt how awful it was.
46:42And whenever I've told this story to some schoolchildren
46:49and I wanted them to realise it wasn't an adventure, really, it wasn't.
46:54I changed my whole attitude to it.
46:56It was... I felt completely different about the war.
47:00And I have ever since thought that war should never be.
47:20With so many men called up to fight,
47:23women were now asked to play their part, too.
47:30More than 80,000 joined the Women's Land Army, known as Land Girls.
47:36650,000 joined the armed services.
47:40In the Navy, the Air Force, the Air Force,
47:45And with British industry at full stretch,
47:48women also took the place of men in the thousands of peacetime factories
47:53that were converted to produce ammunition and weapons.
47:57By the end, over seven million women were engaged in some form of war work.
48:03In Glasgow, there were more than 1,000,000 women.
48:08Over seven million women were engaged in some form of war work.
48:13In Glasgow, an amateur filmmaker recorded the new workers at the factory of H. Morris
48:19as they turned their hands to making guns for the first time.
48:24We are confident that the enemy will be beaten off.
48:28And I will tell you why.
48:31Your character is the first reason for my complete confidence.
48:36We know that you will never flinch.
48:39These are dangerous days.
48:41Days when the fibre of our race will be put to a hard test.
48:46Times like these, there are bound to be a few faint-hearted people.
48:52Never listen to them.
48:59In Belfast, an extraordinary amateur film has only recently come to light.
49:05After its original filmmaker gave it away, it lay forgotten, unseen for over 60 years.
49:15I knew this footage existed because Sean's widow, my Aunt Joan, had told me about it.
49:21And she told me that Sean was really keen to get rid of it
49:26because it was too painful for them to watch.
49:29They just had lost so many of their friends who were in it.
49:32So when I heard that it had turned up, I was both excited to see it and just so saddened.
49:40An awful lot of those guys were going to die.
49:46This extraordinary film reveals one of the war's hidden stories.
49:51The brutal effects of combat stress
49:54inflicted on so many of the participants in the war's longest episode,
49:59The Battle of the Atlantic.
50:03It was shot on a camera that Sean's brother, D.B., had acquired in the 1930s.
50:10Like many brothers, they borrowed each other's kit.
50:13Sean must have borrowed this camera in the summer of 1940.
50:19From the start of the war, in an effort to starve the British people into submission,
50:24Hitler ordered his submarines, U-boats, to create a blockade around Britain.
50:31The Allied command organized merchant ships into convoys
50:35to fight their way through to bring in desperately needed supplies of food and ammunition.
50:42The Battle of the Atlantic ran the full length of the war,
50:46involving thousands of ships and planes, tens of thousands of sailors,
50:51and a small band of British aircrew, the men of the RAF's Coastal Command.
51:01One such squadron was based in Belfast with 22 pilots.
51:06It was filmed by Herbie Edgar and Sean McNeill.
51:12The 502 Squadron was like all the Coastal Command squadrons.
51:16There were eight of them in total, and all of them were seriously ill-equipped.
51:20Because they got the sorts of planes that should have been pensioned off.
51:24Their planes were falling out of the sky,
51:27and they really were seeing nasty things happen out in the Atlantic.
51:33At the start of the war, Coastal Command had only 171 serviceable aircraft
51:39to patrol the millions of square miles of the Atlantic.
51:44It had a particularly high casualty rate
51:47that caused untold stress on its members.
51:51My uncle Sean joined the RAF in 1938.
51:55So in fact, by the time war started, he'd already accrued something like 42 hours flying.
52:01And I suspect, bearing in mind his engineering background,
52:05he would have been even more distressed at the number of casualties
52:09that were caused by mechanical failure rather than by enemy action.
52:13Imagine trying to go out in a tiny little two-propeller plane through the winter
52:19in the kind of weather the North Atlantic can beat you.
52:23Conditions at the base were very primitive,
52:26and the crews were expected to fly operations around the clock.
52:31The strain began to tell.
52:34One particular thing that I did hear from Sean's widow, Joan,
52:41was how upset he was about the sinking of the Arandora star.
52:48Now, that set sail from British waters in July 1940.
52:54And on board were Italians who had tried to flee from Mussolini,
53:00and they were being taken for safety to North America.
53:04And Sean was meant to be providing air cover.
53:08But we had these diddly little Avaroensons.
53:11They couldn't fly for very long.
53:14So he followed them as far as he could,
53:17and then he waggled his wings to say goodbye and flew back to base.
53:24Shortly after Sean left the area, a Nazi U-boat sank the Arandora star,
53:30killing over 800 people.
53:37It was really a painful reminder of how ill-equipped they were to do their job.
53:44In the first ten months of 1942 alone,
53:47502 Squadron lost 37 aircraft and 77 crew members were killed.
53:54It was beginning to take a toll on everyone,
53:56and I think it was taking a toll on Uncle Sean as well.
54:00After the war, there was nothing.
54:02There was no reunions.
54:04It was sort of not mentioned, not talked about.
54:11Well, my mother would talk about my father taking Sinis,
54:15and her comment was always,
54:17we had to stop because we would play them back,
54:20and we'd say, oh, there's so-and-so, he's gone.
54:24There were times when he wouldn't get out of bed,
54:28and the people from the office would sort of say to my mum,
54:31is he coming in? She'd say, I don't know.
54:33I think there was one Christmas he burnt all the Christmas cards,
54:37so that it did have an effect.
54:39It probably was post-traumatic stress that he probably suffered from,
54:43but in those days you didn't really talk about things like that.
54:48When I was looking into my mother's war,
54:51I came across a letter that was written to her by Sean.
54:54It was written in August 1942.
54:57It basically said that he was called off active service,
55:01and I was quite curious to know a bit more about that.
55:09He was sent to Blackpool,
55:11which had been issued with Blackburn Botha planes,
55:16and nobody else wanted to touch them.
55:19They were underpowered, they had lousy visibility,
55:22they were laterally unstable,
55:24and according to the account of one ground crew mechanic,
55:27they had propellers that flew off mid-air.
55:30I mean, they were lethal.
55:33And yet, the instructors there were supposed to take trainees up in them,
55:38and it got to the point that Sean couldn't take it any more.
55:43And he went and he saw his commanding officer,
55:46and he said to him that he thought the planes were the wrong things to be used,
55:52and he said, I'm prepared to risk my neck going up in one of these,
55:57but I'm not sure I am prepared any more to take trainees up in them.
56:03The commanding officer got all the other people to come in,
56:08and basically said, you know, does anybody else feel like McNeil?
56:12And none of them were willing to put their hands up.
56:15That must have been a bit devastating.
56:18But I think he was principled.
56:20I think it didn't show lack of moral fibre.
56:23I think it showed somebody who was principled
56:27and thought he could make a small change.
56:31In order, as it were, to satisfy themselves that it was part of Sean
56:37rather than part of the situation,
56:39they then put him through a series of psychological and psychiatric tests,
56:45enabling him, ultimately, to be officially taken off active service.
56:52The RAF eventually told Sean that he was suffering from an anxiety neurosis,
56:58extreme combat stress, and removed him from active flying.
57:04He was not alone.
57:06By the start of 1943,
57:09more than 2,500 other aircrew had suffered the same fate.
57:15The term lack of moral fibre was used to suggest that somebody was a coward.
57:22And I don't think anyone could imagine that Sean McNeil was a coward.
57:27I think he was brave in voicing what was patently obvious,
57:31which is they had the wrong aircraft for the job.
57:35It was almost easier to label him as a coward
57:39than to say he raised a valid point.
57:43After the war, when you could collect your medals,
57:46he had no desire to collect them.
57:49He felt that he didn't deserve them.
57:51Well, he was a very sensitive man, a compassionate man,
57:55and that's probably why he sort of felt that he could go up in the plane,
57:59sacrifice himself, but not anybody else.
58:02And I suppose the thing is you've got all your friends
58:05that, in that film, that you had jolly good fun with, right?
58:11Well, you were lucky you survived. They didn't.
58:16Next time, as the news from the front worsened,
58:19we feature two filmmakers who attempted to raise their neighbours' spirits.
58:24A naval officer who defied regulations and took his camera to sea.
58:30And as the war finally reached its bloody climax,
58:33some brave Channel Islanders who recorded the Nazi occupation.
58:43See that next Thursday night at nine.
58:46And stay with us now for the story of the Cockleshell Heroes,
58:50an elite band of 12 commandos who paved the way for D-Day,
58:54the most courageous raid of World War II.
58:57Next.
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