Seventy years ago, Manchester endured its own Blitz - two nights of bombing by Hitler's Luftwaffe which left 684 civilians dead, 2,364 wounded and swathes of the city centre in ruins.
In a far corner of Manchester's Southern Cemetery stands a memorial to mark a mass grave, immaculately kept yet seldom visited.
The list of names on the Memorial to the Civilian War Dead 1939 to 1945 tells its own story of whole families wiped out – eight Muirheads, five members of the Hopkins clan, four Woodcocks and so on. Among the 120 or so interred here are the bodies of 14 “unknown persons”, and five members of the Auxiliary Fire Service whose job it was to fight the fires during the Manchester Blitz of December 1940.
That would be quite a job. For when the German bombers flew back over London having unleashed their high explosives on Manchester, they were able to look back and still see the glow of blazing Manchester lighting up the night sky from 200 miles away.
Four hundred fires were started in Manchester alone, not counting the devastation in Salford. The main bus depot and two railway stations were badly hit. By the end of two nights of bombing, the Free Trade Hall, the Royal Exchange and Manchester Cathedral were all bomb-damaged. Shops, offices, theatres and houses were reduced to rubble, with 15,000 people made homeless, 684 killed and 2,364 injured.
“A couple of days later my brother and I went down to Manchester to take a meat and potato pie to my father who was engaged in the rescue service,” says Bob Wild, from Levenshulme, who, as a six-year-old had looked out of his bedroom window in Prestwich and seen the glow of Manchester city centre burning.
“The Deansgate Hotel and the Queen's Hotel had gone. They were in rubble. I can remember the hosepipes snaking across the roads, and there was a piano shop called Crane's, and all the pianos had been blown out and there were bits of them all over the road.”
Ida McNally, now aged 85, picked her way through the devastation to report for work as a 15-year-old office girl at a stockbroker's on Corporation Street on the morning after the first night's bombing.
“The hotels on Deansgate were on fire and there were firemen up ladders and policemen telling you which way to go, because it wasn't safe,” recalls Ida, from Bury. “Woolworth's had been bombed, but it was still there. But it was bombed again the following night and completely went then.
“We were walking on broken glass, hosepipes and water all over the place. We got to our building and it was still standing, but a lot of the buildings at the back in the Shambles had gone.
“Most of Corporation Street was flattened. There was a bank on the corner, and that had been bombed. You could see into the cellar and there were loads of rats running about.”
The Nazi bombardment of Britain had begun in September 1940 with London suffering 85 major raids, including bombing on 57 consecutive nights. In November, the bombing broadened out to other industrial and military centres, including Coventry, which suffered massive damage on the night of November 14.
Liverpool and Manchester were high on Hitler's hit list as major ports and industrial centres. Air raids on Liverpool began on December 20, and 3,500 members of Manchester's civil defence crews were dispatched there to help, which left our city's force depleted when the offensive switched to Manchester two days later.
At 5.15pm on Sunday December 22 1940, 270 German aircraft, including Heinkel 111s and Junkers 88s, crossed the south coast bound for Manchester, using the still-blazing fires of Liverpool to guide their way.
“The Germans were hampered. The radio direction-finding for the aircraft was pretty crude, so they often had to bomb visually. It was even difficult for them to find London on cloudy nights, let alone fly right up to Manchester,” says James Taylor, head of research at the Imperial War Museum.
Two waves of bombing, from 7.45pm to 1.20am and from 2am to 6.55am concentrated first on Manchester city centre, then the docks and industrial areas of Salford and Trafford Park. Pathfinder aircraft dropped incendiaries, and the bombers than bombed the fires.
When 170 aircraft returned the next evening, aiming bombs was made even easier by the still-burning fires of Manchester. Parachute mines were sent down – huge bombs on parachutes designed to rupture gas mains.
On that second night, the Luftwaffe found an important target – the Metropolitan-Vickers factory in Trafford Park which was building Avro Manchester bombers. Thirteen of the planes were destroyed.
But not all Hitler's targets were military or strategic.
“We have Luftwaffe target maps in the museum's collection and it's interesting that one of them has the meat and refrigeration facilities at Trafford Park as a target,” says Taylor. “These things seem small, but think of the effect that would have on morale.”
A total of 29,000 anti-aircraft shells were shot at the German bombers without any apparent success. But the Christmas Blitz of Manchester was not the crippling blow the pictures suggest. The parachute bombs failed to damage the city's infrastructure. Life went on.
Bob Wild's memories now include excitedly collecting shrapnel from the gutters of his home. Ida McNally says: “It was a very sad time, but if nothing happened to you, you got on with life. Everybody would help each other. We'd go dancing and go to the pictures.”
Although 60,000 civilians across Britain died in the Blitz – 40,000 of them in London – the German aircraft did not match the terrible havoc that Allied heavy bombers rained down upon Germany, with 42,600 civilians dying in raids on Hamburg in just one week in July 1943.
“The raids weren't concentrated enough,” Taylor says of the Blitz. “They didn't knock out industry. They didn't destroy the social fabric and to that extent they didn't succeed. The government had been expecting many more deaths, and they had even stockpiled cardboard coffins. They also expected a lot of psychological casualties – people going completely crazy – but it didn't happen.”
The Nazis made other sorties to Manchester, but nothing as sustained as that Christmas Blitz.. Fourteen nurses at Salford Royal died in an air raid in June 1941. As late as December 1944, V1 rockets were launched towards Manchester from Heinkel 111s over the North Sea, one landing in Oldham where it killed 32 people.
Those iconic buildings of Manchester were gradually rebuilt. The Royal Exchange rose again, with a smaller trading area and a less ornate clock tower. The Free Trade Hall finally re-opened as a concert hall in 1951.
It took almost two decades to finish the restoration of Manchester Cathedral. To this day, you can see a little reminder of the Blitz on the cathedral's statue of Sir Humphrey Chetham – a chunk of white marble gouged from his knee and three fingers of his left hand missing after a land mine ripped away a corner of the cathedral.
This old benefactor was chipped. But the stiff upper lip of Manchester remained intact.
The Imperial War Museum North, Trafford Wharf Road, Trafford Park, has a programme of Blitz-related events throughout December (see north.iwm.org.uk). On Sunday December 12 at 1pm, rarely-seen footage of the aftermath of the Manchester Blitz, assembled by the Co-operative Society, will be shown on the museum's main exhibition wall.
Also on Sunday December 12, from 11.30am to 2pm, Horrible Histories author Terry Deary will be signing copies of his new book Put Out The Light, which tells the story of a child in Sheffield at the time of the Blitz in 1940.
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Proud to be from Manchester, fortitude, determination, and humour are pre-requisites of anybody from this historic spot. Now living in Australia and not missing the weather, but missing the humour (and the warm beer).
My Mother narrowly survived the blitz whilst 'living in' at the Manchester Royal Infirmary as a laundry operative - she always said she was lucky to survive as parts of the hospital along Wilmslow Road were bombed out.
I lived through the blitz. What strikes me looking back. Manchester was already decimated from the slump of the 30s,we were surrounded by derelict factories.
The damage caused by one IRA bomb, compared with the destruction of the blitz.
Frightens what would happen with todays buildings.
When I started school in 1948 we played football on a bomb site in Portland street much of which is still there.
Piccadilly was still bomb sites until the building of the 1960s much of which was an even bigger eyesore. As my father said. The labour party did more damage than the Luftwaffe.
Poignant but fascinating article. Bob Wild and Ida McNally's stories especially are very touching.
My Nana cleaned the town hall steps throughout the war and had to walk back to Coalbrook Street in the blitz. Unbelievable how easy we have it now.
My father lived on Rylance Street, off Ashton Old Road, part of which was bombed during a raid in the area. My mother, who lived on Barmouth Street, got lost on her way to work, because she couldn't work out where she was, due to all the streets that had been bombed.
What has always stuck in my mind about this is my grandmother telling me how she could not endure another night of shredded nerves sheltering in a basement under flats in Salford during a night of bombing, and took her 3 children (one in a pram) and walked through the centre of Manchester and across into Fallowfield.
She is 95 and still going strong!
My Grandfather was a fireman in Manchester at this time with the Auxiliary Fire Service. Sadly, a memory that never left him was the time when a close friend and colleague was swept away by fire when on duty. Please post if you know where there are records of the Auxiliary Firemen - I have contacted the museum in Rochdale with no success. Thanks.
My Grandad fought in WW1 and he was in the Home Guard in WW2. Part of his duties during the Manchester blitz was to try and divert the bombers away from the city by planting decoy lights on the moors above Carrbrook and Mossley. It fooled some into releasing their bombs early, you can still see the craters, but once the city was ablaze, they were useless, but at least he tried.
Comparing society now and back then makes you realise just what a fragmented, whining selfish bunch we have become, and I wonder if he looks down and wonders if it was all worth it.
A real nasty business it was, but the Germans regretted it in the end. In Heilbronn alone, which is twinned with Stockport, over 7000 died in bombings by the Allies. May it never happen again.
It makes one wonder whether it was all worth it when one sees the mess this country is now in compared with Germany and France.
Perhaps we would have been better of "losing" the war and avoiding hundreds of thousands of unneccessary deaths.
We are still fighting throughout the world and never seem to realise war solves nothing.