On the 29th of December 1940, London would experience one of its worst nights of the Blitz. German bombers dropped tens of thousands of incendiary bombs on this city and destroyed more of it than the Great Fire of London had done in 1666. The following morning, a photographer took a picture through the smoke and fire of St. Paul's Cathedral. It became an instant classic, one of the most famous photos ever taken, and for many people in war-torn Britain, it was a symbol of hope that their nation would survive this terrible war. Today, I'm going on a tour around London to learn more about what happened that night.

Clive, thank you for bringing me to this amazing viewpoint on top of the Tate Modern looking out at the city of London. What would we have seen if we'd been up here in 1940? Well, Dan, what we've got here is the center of the British Empire. This is the beating heart of it economically, architecturally, culturally. This whole area would have been a vibrant mass of people, and St. Paul's would have dominated. It kind of dominates today, but nowhere near as much as it would have done, and it's surrounded by those ring of Wren churches. And as more you look, the more you see. 20 plus, 19 of which are going to be badly damaged on the night of the 29th. The other big factor of the city were the livery

halls. You know, over 30 of the livery halls badly damaged on that night, and so it was absolutely essential that regardless of what was going on in the skies above, that this place kept moving. So, why is the German Luftwaffe trying to smash up the city of London in December 1940? Oh, there's a number of reasons. We could debate it for hours, couldn't we? I mean, is it a mistake by Hitler to turn his attention to bombard the, you know, civilian population when if he'd have kept on at the airfields, perhaps the Royal Air Force wouldn't have been able to recover, and we may have lost the Battle of Britain.

This is very much part of that Battle of Britain, and the fact that they turned their attention to these cities, we've started to bomb some of the German cities, so this is as an air of revenge around it. You know, we've had a year to get ready for this because from 1939 to September 1940, nothing had happened. First bombs drop in the capital, just a couple of them, August 24th, but it's not until September the 7th that it really gets going. Does Hitler think if he just trashes the imperial capital that Britain might just bow out of the war? He does from a point of morale and a point of economics as well. A lot of the firefighters on that first night had not seen a fire before.

They trained, but not actually seen a real fire. So, the Germans can see that they are starting to have successes in that they are covering it, the neutral press especially, the Americans are sending journalists over. This is frontline London, and this is where the story is on most of the newspapers of the day. And what makes it a legitimate target? Really, it's just the fact that in the First World War we put an anti-aircraft gun on top of Tower Bridge, which means we are arming the city, and therefore we are exceptionally vulnerable for attack. And of course, what we know 80 years on, it's very hard to break civilians' morale under any circumstances from air power. You know,

you just can't achieve it. Long nights at the moment, so plenty of darkness. What time did they take off from their base in France? Well, they take off 5:00, 5:30-ish. The first sirens are heard around about 6:00, and then 6:15 are the first not crumps of bombing because these are incendiary devices, and described often as sounds like someone emptying a coal scuttle onto a kitchen floor would be a contemporary description of it. So, you didn't get the screams of high explosive bombs coming down. You had the sirens going, you were aware that the raiders are overhead, and then the strange noise of these little incendiary bombs scuttling down. And of course, the idea was for them to set London alight, and then the

second wave with the heavy bombers to come across and flatten after the fires had taken hold. But of course, thankfully for us, that weather conditions closed in and meant that the second wave never came. It's really important to understand the different kinds of bombs that were being used cuz they're very, very different, aren't they? Incendiary bombs really were the story of the night. About 180 of these in each aircraft, and they would just tip the bread basket, and out would scuttle 20, 30 of these things. And importantly, they're designed to go through roof tiles and lodge themselves in roofs, and then start a blaze. It's a magnesium fire. That would be followed

up by high explosive bombs, 50 kg up to 250 kg. Some of them, the aircraft could only carry one bomb if it was the large 2,000. And they still wanted to cause more sort of superficial damage upstairs as opposed to structural damage downstairs in these buildings. So, parachute mines was another incident. You know, not land mines that we imagine, but large, great naval shipping mines, delayed action ones. So, if you had a parachute mine hanging in amongst the sort of telephone wires around buildings, the area could be sealed off for 48 hours, which becomes a real hindrance because one of the important things about the Blitz is we can't all take shelter. The city has got to keep moving because it's the economic powerhouse of the empire.

The river's the artery of London, but it was also the way that the German bombers were able to find their way into the city, I guess. Absolutely. I mean, no river, no London. It's, you know, from when the Romans first crossed it, it was an important feature to this city. During the war, this place very hard to black out. So, a silver ribbon guiding those bombers onto their targets, using various things as target indicators. Cannon Street Station is one of those that is suggested the Germans would be looking for. But at same time, it offers us our only realistic chance of water supply. So, being able to pump water from the Thames up onto where the fires

are taking hold really, really quite integral to being able to fight these fires. So, the Thames is bringing the destruction upon London, but also potentially brings salvation. It is flirting with us, really, you know. And this raid took place during the lowest tide we'd seen for a long while. Alongside that, some of the economic cuts that were essential for the fire services meant that those copper gauzes, so reliable, had been replaced by wicker gauzes on the end of their pumps. They clogged up with the silt. So, your pump would stop, and people would have to come down and try and clean out all that mud and that silt, and then, you know, get it running again. What time was it

the first German bombers came over, and what were what was going on here? Well, the sirens went at 6:00, and it was about 6:15 that the first sort of bombs started to land, largely behind us. At the time, you'd have had the low moon bouncing off of the river, a bit like you can see today. The searchlights illuminating the sky, crisscrossing each other, again bouncing off of this river. Were they low enough they could actually see these buildings, things on the ground? Low enough to do that, but not low enough to be accurate in their bombing, and we need to remember that. That, you know, this was not strategic bombing where every single

individual target was hit. Other than the whole of the city is the target. If you can strike at the heart of that empire, economically it's going to damage us. From a morale point, it's going to damage us. It's actually anyone looking on is going to see London's in trouble. And at that time, remember, we are pretty much representing free Europe by this stage of the war. So, you know, that's what they're trying to do, start that firestorm that will go through. They'd had experiences of it. They'd had quite a successful raid in the First World War here with airships dropping incendiaries in and around St.

Paul's. Caused quite a lot of damage. The Kaiser wasn't happy. So, now they could do it on a grand scale. You know, even in the 21st century, that 300-year-old building still dominates, doesn't it? It must have been the sort of focal point in the 1940s. It would have been all you saw. As you looked up here, that was what was center screen, you know? It's the largest building in London at the time, and towered above the skyline. You know, the dome itself is I think it's one of the largest domes in Europe, right? But at the time, it was also perhaps the weak link in St. Paul's defense cuz we see it as like a shining metal dome. In fact, it's very thin lead roof, and it's actually held in place by lots of wooden timber structures. Now,

we spoke about incendiary bombs. If they get through the lead and in amongst the wood, the whole of this could actually collapse under the weight of the cross on the top. It's hard to imagine that St. Paul's Cathedral, one of the most beautiful buildings in Europe, was flirting with complete destruction that night. Planning. It's all down to planning, and the fire watchers here had actually been in existence since the First World War. So, they'd gone back to that and looked at how we defended it in the First World War, how we're going to do it in the Second World War, and it needed lots and lots of isolated positions where there were water on supply, sandbags, sand itself to put out

fires. So, they trained for it all the way through here. They'd gone through their drills. They had raids before. They knew what to expect. However, nothing could quite prepare them for the events of the 29th of December. Every time I get a view of St. Paul's from a place like this, I just think of that photo. It's just one of the most famous photos ever taken, and it was taken that night. Absolutely iconic photograph, actually. The guy, Herbert Mason, who was working for the Daily Mail at the time, very lucky. Just a glimpse of where the clouds parted, and there was the dome of St. Paul's there in to take that one shot. And they estimate the exposure time would have been absolutely minimal.

And of course, being in black and white makes it all the more evocative, really, because color footage was not only expensive and hard to get hold of, but it was actually discouraged by the censor. They didn't want color photograph. So, here we are at the Firefighters Memorial. Commemorates people from all over the country, but the top half are those that were killed in the London Blitz especially. So, for the 29th of December was 12 firefighters were killed. Only three of those in the square mile. Most of them out in the suburbs Southeast London and the East End. One of the guys killed on that first night here, James Daley, he actually lived half a mile from where I live in Hertfordshire. He'd come in from Old Welwyn and was a volunteer

firefighter and it was up on the City Road where him and his oppo were both killed in a collapsing building. And another of the guys killed on that night was Sydney Holder. Holder, you'll all be familiar with the painting of the wall collapsing on them that you see in the Imperial War Museum. The memorial itself, look at these guys cooling water up from the Thames. Desperate to pour it down onto St. Paul's. So, hang on. They got a day job and they're coming in at night to do this. You got to think more like the army reserves really. When they join the AFS, they hadn't come from a firefighting background necessarily. A

lot of the people that went into the auxiliary fire service were people that were interested in the arts. Uh if they were pacifists and didn't want to directly be a combatant in the war, this was their way of still taking part in the war effort. Really good one on this, Dan, is they need to expand the amount of fire appliances. You needed people who had their own vehicles and who knew their way around London. Who are you going to call? Black cab drivers. Most of these fire appliances were black cabs driven by the taxi driver. Ladder on the roof, bell in the window and a trailer pump on the back operating four or five of them and that's how they were deployed. Battleship gray taxis. So,

these are not professional firefighters. No, some of them that would get to work with regular fire stations would be called red riders because they got to go on the side of a big shining red fire appliance at the start of the war. By 1940, everything was painted industrial gray for various reasons. Um but an auxiliary fire serviceman very proud of his role in the war and it's only in August of 1941 they become the National Fire Service. By the time of the Blitz, it's the AFS. So, as that raid unfolds, firefighters have been deployed. How quickly before what pretty much all these buildings just on fire? Uh within first hour. You know, once they get root, everything here is a blaze.

The churches are all ablaze, 19 of them are ablaze. And that's before we get to the warehouses and most importantly of all, Paternoster Row where the books are kept. These things are going to act as like kindling for this Luftwaffe flames. One of the things you would have seen here, certainly in the morning after the raid, was the amount of fire hoses that were just laying across roads. You'd almost be tripping up over them. You know, you're meant to make do and mend at the end of your fire shift, you pack up and go away. But these crews are relieved in situ. Some of them have been on duty for up to 12 hours. A new crew

takes over. There's bits of pipe laying around, hose pipe everywhere, generators have failed, pumps have failed. It would have resembled a battlefield. And a lot of them had experience of battlefields. They'd served in the First World War, remember? But Churchill gave them a wonderful title. He referred to these guys as heroes with grimy faces. It kind of summed it up really. I've actually got a photograph of the exactly the sort of character that you see, you know. You can see him in his AFS uniform wearing his Great War medals. And you mentioned about cab drivers.

There is, there's your London taxi with a fire crew and just a trailer pump tied around the back cuz there's no tow bars in those days. They literally just rope it through. Ladder on the roof and that's your London taxi ready to go to war. I noticed a woman in that photo with the women firefighters as well. Yeah, here we see them. They played many roles in the auxiliary fire service. On the left you can see them as reporting agent taking the calls at the switchboards, dispatching the units. And then, you know, right in the front line. These guys are up on street level running messages around. Communications is the first thing that goes down in a war and you have boy scouts volunteering as well to run messages around

from fire to fire. You know, this was a real community effort here and everyone played their role. And this is the list of female firefighters that were killed throughout the war. Uh the whole thing's been coordinated from the Guildhall. That's the control center there. And every single phone is ringing, all the lights are lit up and people are having to wait. And so, it's up to the individual fire watches to look after it. Now, these are the real volunteers. These are the guys that work in the offices and if your office place has more than 30 employees, you have to provide a fire picket every evening. So, the fire watches who end up fighting the fires as

well. These are They've been working all day and now they're serving a night shift. Absolutely. Yeah, it's fascinating in the long hours that they, you know, they had to work. And I've often thought about this whole idea of commuting into war. You know, you come in on your normal train, you go to your office if your office is still there. And then at the end of your shift, you volunteer to stay on the rooftops in case the Blitz is coming. And then when you go home, you don't know whether your house is standing. So, Clive, you've brought me into the Guildhall. What's the significance here of this place? This is where the battle was fought from. Underneath the Guildhall itself is where the auxiliary

fire service control center was. You can imagine this banks of male and female operatives waiting there. And initially 6:00, not a lot. Once things started falling, almost at the same time, every light on the switchboard lit up. 20 calls coming in, everyone queuing up what's going on, what's going on. And that's a window into that communications. It's not long before those communication lines start getting cut and then we're starting to guess for ourselves. Now, if that's not enough, that control room is right in the center of where the bombs are landing. So, they've got their own fire crews fighting fires on the roofs of their control center. It really is quite incredible what's going on here at the Guildhall at the time.

Big areas of it are gutted out. The place that's suffered most of all is the ancient church behind me, which is St. Lawrence Jewry. They had their own fire watches here because despite the fact they were so close to the control center, they couldn't get a fire appliance cuz they were elsewhere. So, you could only watch from the roofs of the Guildhall, see this place on flames and very fortunately we are left a good description of what was occurring. This is the Lost Treasures of London written in 1946. William Kent went around and interviewed people who were present. And this is one of the guys who was a fire watcher on top of St. Lawrence Jewry and he gave this information onto the BBC. And this is how he described the scene

the morning after the raid. Before going to the office, I went to St. Lawrence Jewry hoping that it was safe, but it was desolate. The four stone walls stood fast and the masonry of Wren's square-built tower had withstood the fire, but the roof had collapsed and the whole church was knee-deep in smoking, smoldering ash and wreckage. Some of the great oak beams were still burning when I got there. They were alarmingly close to the strongroom built into the tower walls where the ancient records and the plates were stored. I asked a party of firemen for help. They hacked away the burning timber and cooled the strongroom door and walls with water from their hoses. Then came days of anxiety. When at last the

strongroom was opened, the church beadle entered. There was a moment of suspense and then he handed out all the treasures within. And that was a scene that would have been replicated in all of these churches. You know, those priceless plates and silverware that locked away in the strongroom, has it survived? Are we going to get it back again? All under lock and key, no keyholders to be found. The church was entirely destroyed. You know, the stone still stood, but all of the wooden timbers in the roof was gone. And it's going to take good 10-15 years before we get it back to as we see it today. So, you're telling me that just meters

away from the control center, just a building is just burned to the ground. And that's your luck on the night. You've got to remember what Churchill said, St. Paul's is to be saved. These buildings are secondary. Obviously, lives are to be saved there, but it's up to the individual fire watches to save the buildings. And in this case, they just weren't capable of doing it. They didn't have the resources to put the fire out. By the early hours of the 30th of December 1940, had the authorities lost control of this fire? I think they'd lost the picture of what was going on.

They'd not lost control of the individual fires. You know, they were going to be places were going to be razed to the ground, but we still had a rough idea. We'd contained it. Um so, had they lost control? No. Had they run out of resources? Yes. One of the key indicators here then is when the all clear sounded, many of the people involved on the ground didn't know. They carried on fighting the fires. The bombers had left, but their job was still to fight those fires. And that's where we get back to that situation where what would have occurred had the heavy bombers arrived in another wave. But of course, as we know, weather closed in and that never occurred.

You know, Clive, very embarrassing. I've walked past here a hundred times. I've never fully clocked that this is a smashed up former church with now a garden. It's wonderful, isn't it? I mean, firstly it gives you the impression of what damage the Blitz caused to these churches around here. At the end of the war, there were so many of these burnt out. They had to make a decision about which ones they kept, which ones they turned into peaceful gardens. And in the end, three or four of them were turned into places like this for city workers to eat their sandwiches, probably not aware of you know, what surrounds them like yourself.

Um but this was completely razed to the ground as you can see. Only the tower survived as many of the Wren towers did. And it's right in the middle between, well, Guildhall's just around the corner. Behind is St. Bart's Hospital. Very important, if you're a civil defense worker and you're injured, you were taken there as a priority. And then in the shadow of St. Paul's, you can see the cross just behind us. And between us and there is Paternoster Row that we'll we'll learn about in a while, which was probably the large fire largest fire in this area. So, this is clearly going to be hit. It's just hard to imagine that in that one night, London and the world lose so many sort of cultural architectural treasures

like this. Well, that's right. I mean, I think post-war they've done not a bad job of keeping them as decaying splendor like you see today. So, they're reminders to it. But the landscape changed as we said from the start, you know. This 29th of December, couple hundred 200 people died. There's a lot of people died, but it's the landscape that changes in this raid. It's so of the recognizable buildings to Londoners at the time were gone as they remember them forever. We're standing in these ruins by the next morning, would it just been flattened this whole area? Well, the flattening has to take place after that because you can't leave buildings up that are dangerous. So, what's sort of a little bit

hazardous, a little bit dodgy, then the heavy rescue squad workers come in and they're the guys that firstly are looking for any survivors that are in the buildings, but then having it pulled down the buildings and make them safe. What we do know is this area here where we are just to the north of cathedral was an almost a desert landscape. Um and in fact, it wasn't long before they were flooding basements deliberately to use as emergency water supplies for the fire service should the Luftwaffe come back again. For me, what's so moving about the night is the idea of the professional fire fighters, the volunteer fire fighters, but also just normal civilians. Everyone had a role to play trying to stop this inferno. And

there were a number of public information booklets that were sent out, but one of my favorites is actually this was published by W. D. & H. O. Wills company, you know, the tobacco manufacturers. Effectively, if you smoked enough, it could save your life because you collected the cigarette cards, put them in the book, and this is air raid precautions. You again, there's the incendiary bomb as it comes through. Wouldn't advise water, but sand in the later editions. So, this was your step-by-step guide to how to fight the Blitz. Quite incredible really, isn't it? So, this is a nice little enclave, isn't it? Because even though it's obviously

terribly damaged, at least some parts of this church and then some parts of hospital survived. Absolutely, but where we're going to now, that's not the case. It was a scene of complete desolation and not a single building there today is contemporary with the Blitz. Wow. That's all looking pretty new in there. Well, that's Paternoster Square as it was now. It was Paternoster Row and it was home to most of the large publishing houses in London. They estimate that nearly 5 million books were destroyed that night in that square. Just in here? Just in here. So,

Hitchcock and Williamson company, good example, pretty much where you see the archway now, that was only moved here in recent times. The whole building was destroyed. It was famous building because it was in that building that the YMCA was formed. So, even before the war, Americans would come across to visit the birthplace of the YMCA as a movement. Um but it now belongs to Hitchcocks and Williams. They had their own fire team fighting the fires, but even they couldn't save the building that night. Once that paper and those books took hold, this whole area was destroyed. Then after that,

they flooded the basements as I said, they became emergency water supplies. This area was cleared of its rubble. We know that some of that rubble was actually used and recycled into the Mulberry Harbor that we used at Normandy as if to say, you bombed our cities, we're going to use it to build a platform back into Europe. So, that's millions of bits of paper that must have burned like an inferno. It did and of course, it would have added to the threat that was happening here at St. Paul's cuz we're back at the dome and we said 28 incendiary bombs landed on this that one night. Each of those an individual incident to deal with. It was such a battlefield scene here that prior to the Dieppe raids, some of

the Canadian troops trained live firing exercise on this ground as how to fight in and out of buildings. And then the final thing I should mention about this square is that in just after the war, immediately after the war, they cleared it again, they put up the grandstands, and they actually had a miniature Olympics here involving the civil defenses, the armed forces, prisoners of war, and various refugees. It was almost the blueprint for London hosting the Olympics in 1948 occurred here in 1945 at the end of the war. What about this building here? Well, this is the Chapter House. They couldn't allow the fire fighters to fight that because they were fighting the cathedral. So, this building completely burnt out.

We're so close to St. Paul's here. The fact this was just a absolute inferno and yet that building survives. Somehow survived, absolutely. I mean, the Dean and his family would have lived in the Chapter House, so they would have been made homeless. Yeah. But all efforts had to be to save St. Paul's. Everything else was secondary. So, right up along the outside wall of St. Paul's. Now, if I can you hear the choir? I think we can hear the St. Paul's choir. We can, we can. The St. Paul's choir school just in the grounds here of course and they had to be evacuated, the actual choir for the Blitz period went down to the West Country and um when you read about it, it was said that

they didn't really feel St. Paul's was open again until that choir was brought back post-war and once again, this whole area echoed with the sound of choir people singing. Like it is now, but you've also got the damage here. Uh this is classic shrapnel damage. Not caused by incendiary bombs, but a number of high explosive bombs that were dropped on the evening or maybe later in the war and this is what happened. Shell splinters caused this. I've brought some shrapnel along with us so you can see exactly what it looks at. I've got a couple of parts there. If you feel how sharp that is.

Terrifying, isn't it? You know, and that flying off a building like that is exactly what would make that sort of damage. So, these have been scything through the air, wildly dangerous to buildings and obviously mortally dangerous to people. If they can do that to stonework, you can imagine it's quite horrific, isn't it? So, although this building does bear scars, they're pretty superficial. The rest of this area was completely leveled. How did this old girl survive? You could say there was a little bit of luck. There was certainly a lot of hard work involved. Remember we mentioned all of the fire watchers that were due to come on duty. Well, in fact, this raid occurred before they were due to start their shift.

So, it really relied on people saying, this looks like this is a heavy one. I'll get down to the cathedral and help out where I can. 28 different incendiary devices bouncing off the roof, landing in the gardens behind me, and getting caught up in these little sort of square alcoves. At one stage, there were four or five different fires burning inside the cathedral itself. Individual instance. The one that caused most concern way up in the rafters, no one could get to it. If that started burning away at the ancient oak, as we know, the whole thing may have collapsed. Now, by some sort of miracle,

it just dislodged itself before anyone got to it, fell down onto the flagstone flooring, and then it goes out, it dissipates. The surrounding area's on fire, there's bombs hitting this building. It must have been dangerous for the people on duty. Oh, it was dangerous. Not if you know, head for heights for one thing. Some of these domes when you're up there on a bit of rope, it's very dangerous indeed. But there was an added complication this night because the Germans continually innovating the way they would deliver their ordinance. And on this occasion, it's one of the first times where one in 10 of the incendiary bombs had an anti-personnel device. It meant if you approached it, it's likely to explode.

It's almost like a lottery. You didn't know if you had one of those or not. So, you had to urge your bit of caution as well as the need to just put the thing out. If it hadn't been for the bravery, the skill, and the speed of the people protecting this building, St. Paul's could have gone that night. Absolutely. And had we lost St. Paul's, you know, what sort of a London would we have woken up to? Would that have been the thing that affected the morale of the population? As it was, for whatever reason, a number of reasons, St. Paul's standing the next day and London can carry on. When I was a kid, every time I saw that photo, I thought, oh, isn't that amazing? Like, you know, it's it's luck

or God protected St. Paul's Cathedral. It was a sort of had a religious significance. And then when I learned more about it, actually, people, the government protected St. Paul's Cathedral. It was a decision that was made. It was very much a decision was made and also, it should be to the credit of the civil defenses that had trained and trained again, you know, and the volunteer fire fighters that were on the roof that night did an incredible job to keep St. Paul's alive. Right in the middle of that raid is when they get the message from Winston Churchill to say, St. Paul's is to be, you know, saved at all costs.

Now, I don't know how welcome that would have been at the time cuz they were doing their best. Um but we really put a high priority on this. And of course, the effect of that is all of the other churches and buildings that were lost that same night, but in the morning, St. Paul's stood. The photograph was across the media. Even the German press reporting it for different reasons saying St. Paul's had fallen. But it gives a lift to the British people because in America to meet with their news lines, they'd reported, you know, London has fallen, St. Paul's has been destroyed. And then of course, once the flames went out and she still stood there,

it was really the first time Londoners fell in love with this building. It became from that moment onwards, St. Paul's was London.