I've been watching this series on BBC i-player:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b09gt9w0Makes a change from looking at images of shelled-out Syrian cities!
But seriously, it's astonishingly good, and very moving. Episode 3 is especially intersting, because it also looks at struggle for worker's rights that was happening, simultaneously with the town being blitzed.
I was born in 1959, 15 years after the War ended, and grew up with stories of the Blitz, told by the older generations, and played on the ruins of bombed-out houses, still standing (Reconstruction took a bloody long time) . My Mum told of sheltering under a kitchen table, as the bombs rained down ; and of the night when her grandfather unwittingly saved his entire family from certain death by taking too long to lace his boots! They were all planning to go to nearest bomb shelter; but before he'd finished putting his boots on, the shelter was hit. There were no survivors.
Nothing I'd heard as a kid had quite the same impact as this series. It uses eye witness accounts and all kinds of archive materal , plus interviews with families of the people affected by the Blitz to paint a highly intimate picture.
You also learn some pretty grim things about the cynism of the British Government at the time. e.g. research on the psychological impact on Blitz surcvivors was deliberately misrepresented, so as to justify the deliberate fire-bombing of German civilians. The rationale was that this would destroy the enemy's morale, and thus hasten the end of the war. The research did not actually support this conclusion. Indeed, it seems more likely that these actions prolonged the war instead, because it distracted the airforce's efforts from bombing actual military targets.
Hope you foreigners can find a way to watch it. The bloody BBC won't let you watch their programmes these days, unless you're resident here, have a TV licence and an account with them.
