John Nichol
speaker
413 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 27 Jul
John Nichol’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So started, I think, in September, November 1940.
Massive raids just before Christmas 1940, and then a huge series of raids in May 1941.
I think over eight days, the first eight days of May 1941, Merseyside attacked every single night.
So, I sometimes kind of feel bad about quoting these facts and figures, but it does help to put it into context.
So, eight days, first eight days of May 1941, 1,900 people killed, another near 1,500 seriously wounded, 70,000 made homeless, 70,000 made homeless.
In Butel, 8,000 of 17,000 houses destroyed or damaged.
And you're talking about almost half of a district, half of an area, half of a town on Merseyside.
It is so difficult for us to understand what it must have been like.
Well, huge power supplies, huge generating, coal, mining.
All of these places that you and I are talking about are all on a river, on an estuary, in a dock.
They all are major transport hogs as well.
And so again, being hit not on a regular basis-
but being targeted depending on what stage of the war they were at.
And also what we would now call de-housing, basically attacking the ability of the enemy.
And we were the enemy of the Germans, obviously, and they were the ability to wage war and the means of war production.
And so everything, I'm going to use this term advisedly,
was fair game.
And we did the same back to the Germans in the subsequent years when we opened that front bombing the Germans.
And so all of those places across the UK that were involved in the means of waging war, they were all back then legitimate targets.
So the Baidecker Raids were in response to some of our attacks on German historic towns.
Showing 261–280 of 413 · page 14 of 21
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