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Blitz Street(2010)
April 19, 20101 Season · 4 Episodes
Ended
Documentary
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Network Channel 4
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Streaming availability information not available
Tony Robinson
2010
The first episode in the series focuses on the outbreak of the Blitz in September 1940. The first bombs used against Blitz Street, a row of terraced houses specially built on a remote military base and subjected to a frightening range of large-scale bombs and incendiaries similar to those dropped by the Luftwaffe - are the SC50 (25kg of TNT), the most common bomb dropped on the first day of bombing in London, and the SC500 bombs, which contained 250kg of TNT. The programme features emotional eye witness testimonies, giving a fantastic insight into day-to-day life on the home front and the immense psychological damage caused by the bombardment.
Blitz Street is on the receiving end of one of the largest bombs the Luftwaffe ever dropped on Britain: the SC1000, nicknamed 'The Hermann'. A bomb this large was designed to cause massive damage to the infrastructure of industrial Britain. With the aid of harrowing and moving eye-witness testimonies, the programme also recounts the Luftwaffe's horrendous bombing of Coventry on 14 November 1940 and the campaign to destroy Britain's manufacture of munitions.
In the summer of 1944, British hopes for an end to the war were raised by news of the D-Day landings. However, a few days later Hitler sent over the V1, the first of his new secret Vengeance weapons. Nicknamed the 'doodle bug', the V1 was a jet-powered pilotless plane packed with a powerful form of explosive containing RDX. The people who saw it talk about witnessing these buzzing planes pass over and the terror that came when the engine stopped, because that would mean they were about to fall. The V1 is the next bomb detonated over Blitz Street.
Blitz Street endures the most powerful bomb of World War II: the massive V2 rocket. Travelling at over 3,500 miles an hour and with a range of over 200 miles, the V2 was designed to deliver a knockout blow to Britain. Unlike the other bombs that have been detonated on Blitz Street, the V2 bomb is buried three metres below ground. Due to its supersonic speed, by the time the V2 detonated it was well beneath the surface. The programme also sums up why the Nazi blitz bombing campaign failed, the lessons to be learnt from the experiment, and, ultimately, how the people who lived on streets like Blitz Street faced the nightmare of total war but came out stronger.