Winston Churchill inspects damage.......

.......and considers doing some

" If Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons."

-Sir Winston Churchill

We were about halfway home when I saw Dad running in our direction waving his arms. The soldier handed us over, Dad thanked him, and we ran back to  Clive Lane, the three of us hand in hand. 

There was smoke and flames everywhere, A gas main had a direct hit and flames seemed to go up to the sky. Fire engines were hurtling along with their bells ringing. Eleven soldiers were killed with a direct hit just the other side of the railway bridge about 60 yards from our house. The whole scene was smoke, flames, bells ringing from ambulances and fire engines. When we were in sight of our house I could see that the roof was off.

There were plenty of empty houses in Filton. Lots of people who had relatives or friends away from Bristol just upped and went when the bombing started. I assume some of their homes were requisitioned for housing bombed out families. 

More than 900 houses were damaged or destroyed in the raid and 91 workers were killed inside the aircraft works. Most were killed as the result of direct hits on the air raid shelters within the works' boundary. 

These shelters were semi-submerged, of concrete construction and about forty feet long. One shelter allocated to the tool room department suffered a direct hit and I believe about 45 toolmakers were killed. (This was the reason that a year or so after starting work I was transferred to the tool room. They still hadn't made up the shortfall of skilled toolmakers lost in that fateful daylight raid).

58 people were killed outside the factory with 154 seriously injured and 118 slightly hurt. Filton church was used as a temporary mortuary and for the rest of the day and the following day there were explosions in the Filton area as delayed action bombs exploded.

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Hear Churchill's defiant speech. (225kb .wav)

Hear the hated Adolf Hitler speaking on January 30th 1939, translation below. (206kb .wav)

"...if the international Jewish financiers in and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevizing of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!"