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 130 high explosive bombs, but 4,000 incendiaries.
And they're kind of milk bottle sized.
If you remember your school chemistry lesson, Dan, where when you're burning magnesium and you can't put it out,
you have to deprive it of oxygen.
You can't put water on it.
It just makes it worse.
And so these things just burned and they then set fire to, you know, if they'd gone through the roofs of buildings, they set fire to the buildings, the buildings would be blasted apart.
So they set fire to the contents.
And then you're creating a firestorm, which of course, you remember the images from the Blitz with the firefighters, the firestorm created there.
It's what we did in Hamburg, notably within centuries.
So you're creating a firestorm to
burn the industrial heartland of a country, which sounds terrible, but that's what we were doing.
So they're dropping two different types of bombs, high explosive and incendiary.
Well, there was a community spirit.
You could call it the Blitz spirit, if you like.
And you can see plenty of examples of this.
The bombing of Coventry would probably be one of the classic examples.
And so November 1940, again, Coventry is one of the big images that people have of the Blitz, where you had 4,500 homes destroyed, the fires that destroyed Coventry.
And in the aftermath,
There are stories about women coming out and the fires are still burning the next morning and they've got tea urns on their strap to their back and they're going out and they've got sandwiches and they're feeding the firefighters and they're helping to rescue people when they're helping to clear the debris.
Showing 321–340 of 413 · page 17 of 21
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