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00:00On April 15th, 1935, a new type of film went on sale for the first time.
00:16It was aimed particularly at amateurs. This was part of a revolution in filmmaking when
00:25small home movie cameras became increasingly available. As Europe descended into conflict,
00:32for the first time ordinary people right across Britain were able to record all aspects of their
00:39lives, even at war. The feeling that if he was the next target and lost his life at least he'd
00:46have the film. Because he was so interested in filmmaking he thought he ought to make a
00:51documentary of what it was like here. All he saw coming towards him was a ball of fire and
00:57suddenly there was an explosion. For the last 75 years, these extraordinary amateur films have
01:07lain undiscovered, unseen, in attics, libraries and the vaults of film archives all over Britain.
01:16Broadcast here together for the first time, these films reveal an entirely new and uncensored
01:23personal perspective on the greatest conflict in the history of Britain.
01:28Hong Kong in 1939, one of the jewels of the British Empire.
01:51Britain was still a global superpower, controlling over 25% of the world.
01:59This empire was protected by the men and ships of the Royal Navy.
02:04Lieutenant Commander George Blundell was an officer on the heavy cruiser HMS Kent. He was
02:16also a keen amateur filmmaker. For four years he made a unique personal record of Britain's war at
02:23sea. He was an extremely charismatic person. People just seemed to gravitate towards him and
02:34so he was in the ideal career. It was something he set his heart on as a young boy. For 50 years
02:47after the war, George Blundell's films were only ever shown to family members. This is the first
02:55time they have been broadcast at length. When we were children in Suffolk particularly, it was a
03:02treat, especially in the winter. We would gather in the drawing room and the curtains would be drawn
03:06and Dad would set up his cine film thing with the great big reels and we would all sit on chairs
03:15and we'd be treated to a film show. Terrifying films during the Malta convoys of enormous seas,
03:23unbelievable, coming right over the bow of the ship. Taking the film was an extra effort. He felt
03:32that to document it would be a fascinating thing to do. The early scenes of George Blundell's film
03:41capture some of his charmed life as a Royal Navy officer in the British Empire, a world
03:47that would soon be destroyed by war. For Britain faced a powerful new rival in the Far East, Japan.
03:58In 1931, Japan had invaded China and began to carve out her own empire.
04:08The Japanese army made rapid advances and Western protests fell on deaf ears.
04:16Britain's response was to protect its colonies with the ships of the Royal Navy.
04:25HMS Kent was in the fifth cruiser squadron, part of the Far East fleet.
04:35In July 1939, as war clouds began to gather, George Blundell filmed in Hong Kong harbour
04:45as his ship underwent desperately needed repairs. It was also a time for the ship's crew to receive
04:54their wages, supervised by the ship's paymaster, Lieutenant Commander Coleman.
05:00Once repaired, the crew took the ship to sea to test her guns.
05:08HMS Kent had a formidable armament. Her 8-inch guns could fire a 256-pound shell almost 17 miles.
05:23The films that he took were probably against regulations, almost certainly against regulations.
05:33I think that possibly his senior officers who were aware that he was doing it were man enough
05:44to turn a blind eye. He used to say when he was showing the film, there'd be a cut, he would say,
05:51oh, the buggers have censored that bit. So there obviously, there was some censorship.
06:02On the 5th of November 1939, HMS Kent was ordered to investigate shipping in Yokohama Bay,
06:10part of Japan itself. At one point, George was even able to secretly film
06:16some Japanese naval officers as they toured the ship.
06:19Although war had broken out in Europe, Japan was not yet an enemy.
06:26Remarkably, George Blundell didn't just film his life at sea, he also kept a detailed personal
06:36diary. As news of the fighting in Europe began to filter through, he recorded the mood of his crew.
06:4518th of June 1940. After the first shock and a slight depression, the general feeling in the
06:55ship is fights to the death, and the sailors mostly think it is bound to come right in the end.
07:00Shan't see you for some time, lovey, is the usual comment in their letters to wife or sweetheart.
07:07Now the fight's on. I pray for our folk at home. Can they take it?
07:13I'm afraid the women and children may squeal.
07:22Then in July 1940, the crew of HMS Kent was ordered to sail for the Mediterranean.
07:30When they arrived three weeks later, they were almost immediately in action.
07:4117th of August 1940. Action stations. I collected my gas mask, life belt and camera and ran to the bridge.
07:49It really was most exciting. I've never been to a circus which I enjoyed so much.
08:00The captain was terrific in his battle bowler. I'm afraid we fired mostly for the sake of opening fire.
08:11The most exciting and awe-inspiring incident was when one of our fighters chased four Italians down our port side at a good height.
08:20Shortly afterwards, we witnessed three of them fall into the sea. Two were like flaming rockets.
08:29They came down like great red glows with a vast trail of black smoke. A terrible sight.
08:38The feeling that if he was the next target and lost his life, at least he'd have the film and the diaries to record the events.
08:48I never got the impression from him that fear was something that stymied him at all.
08:59He describes terror and fear among some of the men he served with, but he never expresses it in the diaries.
09:11He never expresses fear. He was a brave, brave man.
09:19On the 17th of September 1940, the crew of HMS Kent's Luck ran out.
09:28She was attacked by a swarm of Italian planes, and one of them scored a direct hit with a torpedo.
09:35The ship had to limp back into port, and only three days later could George record his experiences in his diary.
09:43It's a chillingly frank account.
09:4817th of September, 1940. I am completely hazy about the sequence of events.
09:55There was obviously a big fire raging inside as I could see it glow, and it was damned hot.
10:01I began to feel a bit choky and sleepy, and I sat down, but realised that the gas mask was pretty well useless.
10:09I felt I could sleep forever, and I remember taking a pull at myself and saying internally,
10:14No, George Blundell, you're not going to die yet.
10:20When it was happening, and the ship was terribly badly damaged,
10:26I think he was just concentrating, able to concentrate on what had to be done in order to save lives.
10:37The Kent had been hit by, around the area of the rudder, and all the electrics were out on the ship,
10:46and water pouring in, and the steerage had gone.
10:52His job was to keep calm, and try and keep other people calm, and organise these repair parties,
10:59especially the electrical repair, and he had to get some rams down to try and straighten the tiller.
11:08The full impact of the devastating torpedo attack only became apparent
11:13when George was able to get into the damaged parts of the ship.
11:18What he found was horrifying.
11:22As I stepped through the cabin door, I squelched on something flabby,
11:26and in the torchlight I saw it was the body of Petty Officer Masters.
11:31I remember thinking that's the first dead man I've ever seen.
11:37The half deck looked like the end of the world.
11:41A terrible stink of dead men and oil fuel.
11:45Bodies hanging over pipes and trunks, or huddled in a hapless heap.
11:52Thirty-three of his shipmates were killed that day.
11:57For his bravery in helping to save the ship, and its crew, George was awarded the OBE.
12:06He knew all the crew intimately by name, and he had some lifelong friends that had trained with him.
12:20HMS Kent was given temporary repairs, allowing her to return to the UK.
12:27George was then transferred to a new command.
12:31He was soon back on convoy duty.
12:37Final victory in the Battle of the Mediterranean cost the Royal Navy 140 ships and submarines sunk.
12:47The Battle of the Mediterranean
12:58While the Royal Navy was fighting it out in the Mediterranean,
13:02there was another bitter battle occurring on its southern shores, in North Africa.
13:10Hitler and his allies had spent the last two years trying to throw the British out of Libya and Egypt.
13:17His plans almost succeeded until 23 October 1942,
13:23when a massive artillery bombardment signalled the start of a new Allied offensive.
13:31Within hours, the BBC heralded a major breakthrough.
13:36The Battle of El Alamein was the first major British victory of the war.
13:54Despite the government restrictions, several soldiers used their personal cameras to record this turning point in the war.
14:02This is the first time they have been shown together.
14:07A sergeant in the Royal Horse Artillery filmed one of the more than 1,000 guns that pounded the German defenders.
14:23One of the men holds up an unexploded German shell for the camera.
14:28The speed of the British breakthrough can be seen through the camera of a signaller in the Middlesex Yeomanry,
14:34as he passed burning German vehicles.
14:38The Germans and Italians lost over 50,000 men, killed, wounded or captured.
14:44The sound you can hear now is the noise of British tanks moving into battle.
14:50The battle lasted for over ten days, and it was the beginning of the end for the Germans in North Africa.
14:56But Allied casualties were high too.
14:59Almost 14,000 men wounded or killed.
15:04One of them was George Blundell's brother, who was serving in the Royal Engineers.
15:11Dad was serving in the Mediterranean with the convoys, the Malta convoys,
15:16and Jack was only a short distance geographically away in North Africa,
15:23part of a team building a road.
15:28And he, unfortunately, was hit by a shell, lost both his legs,
15:36and before they could get help to him, he bled to death.
15:43Although you must know in a war that it could be inevitable,
15:48I think the loss of your elder brother is a terrible thing.
15:53And Dad always used to say that his mother rarely never got over it.
16:00It shook her to the core.
16:08By 1943, the war had been under way for over three years,
16:13and back in Britain, with almost all of life's essentials now rationed,
16:18everyone was expected to do their bit.
16:22At Ellworth School in Cheshire,
16:25the children were filmed learning to scrimp and save anything that could be recycled.
16:31And also to grow their own food, to dig for victory.
16:37Another way that people were asked to help was by digging into their own pockets.
16:44In Cardiff, a local cameraman filmed the mayor as he appealed to his citizens
16:49to continue lending their own money for the war effort.
16:53You're only asked to lend this money to the government.
16:57They're not asking you to give it away for nothing.
17:00And you'll be getting interest on it right up to the end of the war.
17:07All over the country, special warship weeks encouraged people
17:11to raise money to sponsor new ships for the Navy.
17:16Amateur cameraman William Greenall recorded his own townspeople's efforts.
17:22Together they contributed over £200,000.
17:29Based on its population, each local region was given a savings target.
17:35Every community was expected to take part, even the smallest,
17:40such as Aspley Geese in Bedfordshire,
17:43where a special fundraising barometer was erected in the village square.
17:49The scheme was a huge success.
17:52Some communities exceeded their targets by a factor of three.
17:58By the end of the war, almost £1 billion had been raised to buy weapons and ammunition.
18:06A much-needed boost to morale.
18:11For some of the war news was still bleak.
18:18After their devastating strike against the American Navy at Pearl Harbour,
18:23the Japanese had extended their control over vast swathes of the Pacific and the Far East.
18:31Almost all of Britain's colonial territories had fallen.
18:36The future of Britain's empire was under threat.
18:41So in the small town of Louth in rural Lincolnshire,
18:45two amateur filmmakers took it on themselves to raise their neighbours' spirits
18:50by producing a series of comic local newsreels.
18:59They would film a serious subject and inject it with their own brand of humour.
19:05The amateur films they made are a unique insight into a local community at war.
19:10This is the first time they have been broadcast at length.
19:16Out of a population of 9,678,
19:20the little Lincolnshire town of Louth has 9,677 film actors.
19:26Mr G. H. Hallam, the director of the film,
19:31Mr Hallam and Mr Rawlings of the Playhouse Cinema
19:35make what they can of real, live, uncensored news.
19:39Mr Hallam owned the cinema and Dad was the projectionist at the cinema.
19:44They were local and that used to pull the people in
19:47because there were no televisions in those days.
19:50They liked to see themselves and friends on film, didn't they?
19:54That's right.
19:55But I think Mr Hallam, he had the equipment and the money
19:59and the lovely cameras and so on,
20:01and my Dad, he was the man, he was the technician, wasn't he?
20:04That's right.
20:05Behind the camera, he knew how to do it,
20:07and I think Mr Hallam recognised that between them.
20:09They were a good partnership, weren't they?
20:11They were very good.
20:12They complemented each other extremely well, I think.
20:15So I think they both had a bit of a dry sense of humour
20:18and were able to put a sort of a comic slant to these serious events.
20:23I met Bert Hallam on many occasions.
20:26He was a most delightful person.
20:29He liked to amuse people and entertain them.
20:38In one early film, they recorded the local emergency services
20:43demonstrating how, and how not, to deal with incendiary bombs,
20:48a real danger during Hitler's blitz of Britain's cities.
20:57As always, they had an eye for anything comic.
21:04They made a very good team
21:06because they both had the interest in film production.
21:10Bert was very much the showman.
21:15Bert Rawlings, he was the one
21:18who could actually deliver the technical side of it.
21:22He joined the cinema at a quite young age.
21:26I think he was only about 16 as the projectionist at the cinema.
21:30And Dad, as a person, he was very...
21:33He played with us a lot, didn't he?
21:36He allowed us to play with him.
21:39We used to dress his hair, which I know sounds silly,
21:42but we used to play with his hair, as girls sometimes do,
21:45and he was quite happy with that.
21:47The actual performance of these films was an amazing procedure
21:52and it involved the three people up in the projection box.
21:57Bert Rawlings was managing this amazing projector,
22:02which he had devised.
22:04Bert Hallam would then do commentary live on Mike.
22:11And he'd always be in the foyer as the audience arrived
22:15and he would always vary his script a little
22:19to include a mention to people that he knew was in the audience.
22:26The Berts saw events in the same way as the public saw them
22:32and that got the positive reaction.
22:37The film was so popular that fans wrote to say
22:40that it was better than Snow White.
22:42We kept the news from Walt Disney, said Mr Hallam,
22:44but it was good to get our own fan mail.
22:47I had no idea it made national news
22:49and I think it's something to be proud of, really.
22:52I didn't realise how, in such high regard,
22:57that the people of Laos regarded the two Berts.
23:06In the dark days that followed the fall of France,
23:09in an effort to disrupt Hitler's plans,
23:12Prime Minister Churchill had started a secret war.
23:16Specially trained agents were sent to occupied Europe
23:20to sabotage and subvert the enemy's plans,
23:24part of an organisation known as the SIS,
23:27the Secret Intelligence Service.
23:32Despite the covert nature of his operation,
23:35amazingly, one of them made a film of his exploits.
23:42On 20 April 1943, secret agent Olaf Reed Olsen
23:48was one of three men who parachuted into Nazi-occupied Norway.
23:59He was later recorded recounting his secret mission.
24:05When all that was one parachute jump,
24:07I would just as soon never repeat.
24:10I had to be at a certain place in Norway on a definite date.
24:14Twice we flew over the place where I had to jump.
24:21During his jump, Olaf hit the tail of the plane
24:24and dislocated his knee.
24:27Fortunately, I came down on a forest of tall pines.
24:31I was scratched up rather badly.
24:33First I had to snap my right knee back into normal position.
24:36Then I was able to move about, though somewhat painfully.
24:43My first job was to climb the tree and remove the parachute
24:47so that no roaring German patrol plane would spot it
24:51and leave the Gestapo to me.
24:57Olaf's mission was to set up a secret radio station
25:00in the forests around Norway's capital, Oslo,
25:03and to make regular reports on German shipping in the fjord.
25:09It was more of a trip than we had bargained for.
25:12With two companions, I had been busy for several months
25:15taking pictures of German military installations.
25:18One day I was caught while snapping views of a naval base.
25:22The stupid German guard who stopped me
25:24was so flattered by my praise of the mighty German ships
25:28that made it keep my camera and phone.
25:32Olaf survived his mission
25:34and after the war was awarded Norway's highest medal for bravery.
25:41It's interesting to look back on,
25:43but it was far from pleasant at the time.
25:502,000 miles to the south,
25:52after defeating the Germans in North Africa,
25:55the Allies were then able to invade Sicily.
26:00And on September 3, 1943, the Italians surrendered.
26:06In Europe, Hitler now fought on alone.
26:13For the past three years,
26:15the Allies had been pounding Hitler's Germany from the air.
26:19In 1943, an amateur filmmaker at a base in Lincolnshire
26:23decided to make a training film for new recruits
26:26to prepare them for the rigours of the job.
26:30After the war, under government censorship,
26:33it lay hidden in a bank vault for 35 years.
26:41It's the most complete film of a bomber command squadron in action.
26:47EXPLOSIONS
26:51It began with showing Lancaster bombers as they were prepared for a raid.
26:59The planes were loaded with high-explosive bombs and incendiaries,
27:03up to ten tonnes at a time.
27:07EXPLOSIONS
27:11We do our operations in Lancaster A, A for Anzac,
27:15a wizard guide that has never let us down.
27:18My ground staff boys call it the pride of the squadron.
27:21And if I chance to bring it home with an occasional howl,
27:24I feel duly humiliated to have to report the fact to them.
27:30At first, the RAF's bomber command
27:33had restricted itself to attacking military targets.
27:38But after Hitler's blitz of Britain's cities,
27:41it began to target industrial areas and the workforce itself
27:46in an effort to undermine the morale of the German civilian population.
27:57There we go, we are clear.
28:00We are airborne and on our way to join the stream of bombers
28:04making towards Berlin.
28:08During the war, more than 125,000 men served in bomber command.
28:15One of them was Flight Sergeant Hayden Davies.
28:20He volunteered in 1939 for the Royal Air Force.
28:25And, of course, what I thought is very, very brave,
28:29like 58,000 other young men were brave, they were all volunteers.
28:37Before the war, he worked as an engineer in the power station at Swansea.
28:43And I used to wait for him to come home from work.
28:47And he would bend down, I would take his cap off,
28:51and there would be a bar of Fries chocolate for me.
28:56He went on 19 missions up to 1943.
29:01He went on bombing missions, the Thousand Bomber Raid, in fact, to Berlin.
29:07He went to Italy, to Turin, bombing the Fiat factory.
29:13And he did lots of interesting exploits.
29:19This extraordinary amateur film contains the only colour film
29:24of a 1944 raid over Germany, as Hitler's capital, Berlin, is bombed.
29:31Part of a controversial bombing campaign that, by the war's end,
29:35had killed between 350,000 and 600,000 German civilians.
29:42For its air crews, bomber command was also a highly dangerous posting.
29:48The casualty rate was one of the war's highest, at almost 50%.
29:55Can you shoot it down?
29:58Yes, bloody good.
30:01Keep waving, there's some black coming at me.
30:05OK, don't shout all at once.
30:19One day, I came home from school,
30:22and at the end of the street, there was my grandfather.
30:27And I was so very, very happy to see my grandfather.
30:31But when I got up to my grandfather, he said,
30:34Raymond, I've come to tell you that your father has been shot down over Germany.
30:44Of course, at that time, I'm age six, I thought, well, he must have bailed out.
30:50He's probably a prisoner of war.
30:53I never, never thought of death.
30:57But when I got home, my mother had received a telegram,
31:02and my brother Geoffrey has got that telegram to this day.
31:07Obviously, at nine months old, when my father died,
31:11it's impossible to remember anything about him.
31:14But the interesting thing is, I built up a picture,
31:18a person of 26, I've got a grandson, 26 at the moment,
31:23and so it's close to home.
31:26And a brave man going off to war,
31:30like many, many thousands others, and not returning.
31:34And that is the picture I built up and continue to build up
31:39throughout my lifetime, effectively.
31:42All of us oldies used to listen to Lord Haw Haw.
31:47He was a traitor, and he used to broadcast from Germany
31:51the names of the prisoners of war at Stalag Luft III Prisoner of War Camp.
31:58Of course, as the months and the years went by,
32:01we did not hear my father's name.
32:04But it was a gradual process of acceptance that he wasn't coming back.
32:10It had a devastating effect on my mother.
32:14I imagine having two young boys, and she was only in her 20s.
32:22You realise that you haven't got a father,
32:25so you've got to sort of carry on life and build up from there.
32:30One day I went to the cenotaph with my mother and my brother.
32:34I was about three, four, Raymond six years older,
32:39and without saying anything to my mother or my grandmother,
32:44who we lived with at the time, I got my father's medals
32:48and I put them on my coat.
32:56I got my toy drum and put it round my neck
33:02and got to the back of the RAF marching
33:10and started to beat my drum.
33:14And I found the whole thing very emotional.
33:18So from that stage on, I knew what had happened to my father.
33:27Yes, we got over bereavement, I think,
33:30but we never got over the fact that we once had a father,
33:34a decent father, and we wanted to know what happened.
33:39The RAF didn't provide any additional information,
33:43so we could not pinpoint exactly what had happened.
33:47All we knew that he... And neither could my mother.
33:51She tried very hard to find out what had happened to my father.
33:56She got a closure letter from the Air Ministry.
34:00They confirmed that his aircraft was shot down over Hanover,
34:05but that was closure. They said they had no further information.
34:11So over the years, I took up the baton
34:15and later my brother took up the baton
34:18to try and find out exactly what did happen to the crew of EML.
34:23The years went by and I almost gave up
34:26until at my last effort, the year 2000,
34:30I put on Bomber Command's website a request.
34:35Does anyone know what happened to Lancaster Bomber EML of 207 Squadron?
34:43I didn't get one single reply.
34:46Until after 16 years, I get an email.
34:53And I get an email from a man, a German researcher called Dirk Hartmann.
34:58Dirk Hartmann said,
35:00I can tell you what happened to your father.
35:05In 2016, more than 70 years after their father's death,
35:10Ray and Geoff travelled to Germany with their families.
35:14A local researcher had painstakingly put together
35:17the last moments of their father's plane.
35:21We went to the actual field where Lancaster EML crashed.
35:27And we met a lovely old man, probably in his sort of early 90s,
35:33and he, when he was 12, had witnessed my father's plane coming down
35:40and all he saw coming towards him was a ball of fire
35:47and suddenly there was an explosion.
35:50We actually found four pieces of the Lancaster.
35:55I have got to this day the oil cap, which is very precious
35:59because that's all I've got of my father, really.
36:01And my brother's got the other three pieces of perspex and metal.
36:07And to be actually standing...
36:14..on the same spot where the father died
36:19and then to be told that in the German report
36:26that night they visited the site,
36:29found six bodies.
36:32Two, the pilot Negus, who was 19.
36:38Stringer.
36:40Stringer, another member of the crew, both identified
36:46and then they found four charred bodies.
36:52They'd been cremated.
37:00ENGINE ROARS
37:07We have got a copy of the German pilot's log
37:12when he said he approached the Lancaster over Ronnenberg
37:16at 8.30 in the evening
37:19and the aircraft was coned by four searchlights
37:25and he set the Lancaster on fire.
37:29In one hour, they shut down nine.
37:33Nine.
37:34War is a horrible, horrible thing.
37:40They took eight coffins to Ronnenberg Cemetery
37:43and then transferred them to Hanover War Cemetery.
37:48And to this day, the gravestones say,
37:51unidentified airmen.
37:53We now know who those airmen were
37:56and my father was one of them.
38:09By December 1943, with Germany and Japan on the retreat,
38:14the three Allied leaders, Winston Churchill,
38:17American President Franklin Roosevelt
38:20and Russian leader Joseph Stalin,
38:23met together for the first time in Iran's capital, Tehran,
38:28and agreed to deal Hitler's Nazis a final blow.
38:44For the next six months,
38:46planning for an invasion of Europe, D-Day, began in earnest.
38:52An amateur filmmaker, a naval lieutenant,
38:55filmed the final preparations on his personal camera.
39:00It is one of the very few amateur films taken of these momentous events.
39:09On 6th June, the invasion fleet gathered in Southampton Harbour
39:14before starting to cross the Channel.
39:17D-Day has come.
39:19Early this morning, the Allies began the assault
39:21on the north-western face of Hitler's European forces.
39:24Under the command of General Eisenhower,
39:27Allied naval forces, supported by strong air forces,
39:31began landing Allied armies this morning on the northern coast of France.
39:37Lieutenant Sorrelien was serving on an infantry landing ship, HMS Queen Emma,
39:43one of the almost 7,000 ships that landed 133,000 Allied troops
39:49on five beachheads in Normandy, France.
39:56The fighting was brutal.
39:59Another amateur cameraman filmed some of the first casualties.
40:03On day one, over 5,000 Allied soldiers were killed.
40:11But the landings were a huge success.
40:14The liberation of Europe had begun.
40:19In the days after D-Day, the fighting was fierce
40:22as the Germans were forced on to the retreat on all fronts.
40:27In the west, British and American aircraft,
40:30In the west, British and American aircraft now had almost total superiority
40:36to attack German troops at will.
40:40By late 1944, France and Belgium had been liberated.
40:48In the east, huge Soviet armies were beginning to overwhelm Hitler's forces
40:53and were now approaching the borders of Germany itself.
41:00As the Allied advance progressed, several Nazi strongholds were bypassed.
41:08One of the biggest was the only part of the British Isles
41:11to be occupied by the Nazis, the Channel Islands.
41:17The invaders had arrived shortly after the fall of France in 1940.
41:24Before restrictions were imposed,
41:26one Jersey islander recorded the early days of the occupation
41:30as Jersey's beaches were used for German military exercises.
41:37And the island's capital, St Helier, became a Nazi parade ground.
41:44These fragments are some of the only uncensored film records
41:47of British life under Nazi occupation.
41:52This freedom didn't last long.
41:56Soon, cameras were banned under pain of imprisonment and even death.
42:06Michael Vautier was a schoolboy on Jersey during the German occupation.
42:12The farm we lived on, because of its isolation,
42:15we thought we were quite safe from prying eyes and from the Germans.
42:21But in fact, we were quite mistaken.
42:25Well, everything was closely monitored by the Germans.
42:29They took stock of how many cattle you had,
42:32how many hens you had, what crops you grew.
42:36You had to grow potatoes.
42:38You had to supply so much for the German troops.
42:43Certainly, after the landings of June the 6th,
42:48no food was coming into the island,
42:51so food had to be grown and supplied for the local population,
42:55for the German troops and for the prisoners.
43:00The Germans had banned all radios,
43:03but some people kept them secretly, including Michael's parents.
43:09My mother used to then go up to the bedroom
43:12every night to hear the news at a certain time.
43:15And she would come down and discreetly tell my father the news.
43:19Well, she thought discreetly,
43:21but my younger brother, in school one day,
43:25he told the teacher,
43:27Oh, please miss, every night my mother goes upstairs
43:31and she speaks to God,
43:33because she comes down and tells my father the news.
43:38Now, this was quite disturbing,
43:40because if they'd been found listening to the news,
43:42they would have been imprisoned.
43:44So the teacher was quite concerned about this,
43:46and she was a friend of the family.
43:48She cycled from St John's School down to Le Mourier, where we were,
43:51to warn my mother to be more careful in future.
43:56Despite the restrictions,
43:58a brave few of the island's filmmakers continued to film.
44:04At great personal risk,
44:06they uncovered their cameras and recorded the German occupiers.
44:11In Jersey's capital, St Helier,
44:13a local filmmaker secretly filmed a German parade
44:17as it marched past the town hall,
44:20and even recorded a British policeman saluting the Nazi occupiers.
44:27By the end of the war,
44:29Hitler had stationed over 36,000 troops on the islands.
44:35They took over Ronay Quarry, which was close to the farm.
44:40They installed a Russian prisoner of war camp near the quarry,
44:45so that these prisoners could work in the quarry.
44:49Hitler also imported over 16,000 slave workers
44:54to turn the islands into a military fortress.
44:57The conditions in the camps were horrifying.
45:01I could see from lying in bed across the valley
45:06and seeing this trench being dug by Russian prisoners,
45:09and seeing them whipped and hearing the shouts and screams,
45:15that really leaves an impression on a young child.
45:21Every evening at milking time,
45:23five or six Russian prisoners used to come to the farm
45:27and were each given a glass of milk,
45:30and this went on for several months.
45:33And on one occasion,
45:35one of the prisoners, who was rather different to the others,
45:39he asked my mother for her hand, and he measured her finger,
45:43and asked my father for a coin.
45:46He came back with a ring
45:49made out of this silver two-shilling, or florin.
45:55Then the next one, he made one for my father out of half-crown,
45:59and he made one for each of us,
46:02and I still have that ring today.
46:06And after a while, he didn't come again,
46:08so we thought that he had died.
46:12By early 1945, Germany was on its last legs.
46:17The Allies had invaded from the west,
46:20and the Russians were now fighting in the streets of Berlin itself.
46:25Then, on May 1st, 1945,
46:28the BBC announced the news everyone had been waiting for.
46:33This is London calling.
46:35Here is a news flash.
46:37The German radio has just announced that Hitler is dead.
46:42I repeat that.
46:44The German radio has just announced that Hitler is dead.
46:50Over the following days, the German army surrendered.
46:56Back in Jersey, one filmmaker had kept a reel of unused film
47:01hidden under his floor, waiting for this long-hoped-for moment,
47:06as the Channel Islanders were finally liberated on May 9th, 1945,
47:12after five years of occupation.
47:16On Liberation Day, we were in St Helier.
47:19For our parents, certainly, it was a wonderful, wonderful day
47:23because they'd lived under this shadow,
47:26and out of the crowd stepped this well-dressed young man
47:31who turned out to be the Russian prisoner.
47:34He had obviously been killed by the Germans,
47:37but he was still alive.
47:39He was this well-dressed young man
47:42who turned out to be the Russian prisoner.
47:45He had obviously escaped and had been sheltered by someone
47:51well-fed and well-dressed,
47:54and he came and embraced my mother and thanked her.
47:58He had a few words of English,
48:00and he thanked her for having helped him during that time.
48:05The island's amateur filmmakers filmed the liberating troops
48:09as they landed desperately needed food and supplies.
48:13And the surviving Russian and Algerian forced labourers
48:17now freed from their Nazi guards.
48:20And the island's remaining German garrison,
48:23as it was forced to surrender,
48:26more than 36,000 soldiers and sailors
48:29as they were ordered to hand over their weapons.
48:35With the war in Europe now over and Germany defeated,
48:40the question arose as to what to do
48:43with the hundreds of thousands of German soldiers
48:46that had been captured.
48:50To accommodate them,
48:52the Allies had to construct a huge network of prisoner-of-war camps.
48:57In the UK alone, by the war's end,
49:00there were over 1,000, spread all over the country,
49:04containing over 400,000 German and Italian prisoners.
49:10The last camp wasn't closed
49:13until two years after the end of the war.
49:18POW camps 6th, 7th, and 8th
49:21were the last camps to be built.
49:26Camp 333 was located near the village of Boonton in Nottinghamshire.
49:33It was filmed by one of the guards on his own camera.
49:40My father volunteered to work in the POW camp at Boonton
49:44because he could speak German.
49:46Because he was so interested in filmmaking,
49:49he thought he ought to make a sort of documentary
49:53of what it was like here.
49:56Sergeant Reakin later recorded his own commentary.
50:01Our first task was to retain the 1,000 or so prisoners of war
50:06who were already there
50:08in accordance with the rules and regulations of the Geneva Convention,
50:12and secondly, to commence a rehabilitation programme
50:16to prepare them for their eventual repatriation
50:20to a denazified Germany.
50:23A key part of this policy was to confront the prisoners
50:27with first-hand evidence
50:29of the many atrocities committed in their name.
50:33The civilian gentleman walking with Major Wren was Dr Bruckner.
50:38He was a survivor from Belsen concentration camp.
50:42He was going around the different POW camps
50:45giving lectures about his experiences.
50:49My father was asked by the commanding officer, Major Wren,
50:53to go round the tents and listen in to the conversations
50:57after they had been to the lecture,
51:00and there was basically a lot of disgust
51:03and a lot of people didn't...
51:05Well, nobody seemed to know anything about what happened.
51:09Most of the POWs worked each day at the Royal Army Ordnance Depot,
51:14which wasn't very far from our camp.
51:19The POWs slept under canvas all the year round.
51:23Each tent took 12 men.
51:26They also had an area of ground outside each tent
51:30which they cultivated and used as a camp.
51:34They had an area of ground outside each tent
51:37which they cultivated as little gardens.
51:40They made little model villages
51:43with water wheels that actually worked,
51:47aspects of their homeland
51:50where they hopefully will be home again soon.
51:55One of the camp's prisoners was 22-year-old Siegfried Amskamp.
52:00His granddaughter has been researching his story.
52:03He never talked about his experiences and died before she was born.
52:08All she has to go on are a handful of photographs and a few letters.
52:33Through the Imperial War Museum in London,
52:36Laura managed to track down Paul Reakin
52:39and to watch his father's film for the first time.
52:43On most Sundays, a church parade was organised.
52:47We had to march the POWs about three-quarters of a mile
52:51to the village church at Boonton.
52:53It must be said, it was quite a relaxed and enjoyable duty to perform.
52:59And to her amazement, Laura was even able to spot her grandfather.
53:07I'm so lucky in that I found Paul and met him
53:10and I could even find my grandfather in the village.
53:15Growing up as a German grandchild to a German prisoner of war,
53:19we never talked about it and my grandmother never talked about it.
53:23We have only five or six pictures
53:26from a whole decade between 1940 and 1950.
53:30And it's part of the family history we never talked about.
53:34This is the first time that Laura has been to the site of the POW camp
53:39where her grandfather was imprisoned over 70 years ago.
53:44I never knew my grandfather, actually.
53:46And what I wanted to do is I wanted to find out who he was and how he lived
53:51and this is very emotional for me as well to see where he's been
53:55and which ways he has walked and where on the fields where he's lived for some time
54:00to actually understand how he turned out to be the man he is
54:04and how he actually also formed his children, which is my father now.
54:10Being here in the place where he was in 1946,
54:14he somehow came closer to me and I really now have a connection to him.
54:20Siegfried Arms Camp was finally repatriated to Germany
54:24on November 30, 1947.
54:30But he returned to a country in ruins.
54:36Many of the cities and towns had been devastated by the Allied bombing campaign.
54:49An interpreter with the British occupying forces
54:52captured some of it on his own personal camera.
55:00He filmed in the industrial cities of Mainz and Essen,
55:03home to Germany's steel industry run by the Krupp family.
55:09Its head, Alfred Krupp, was later convicted for war crimes
55:13and sent to prison for 12 years.
55:17As German civilians picked through the ruins,
55:21even hardened BBC reporters were shocked by what they saw.
55:27An air of depression and hopelessness seems to charge the very atmosphere.
55:32They are no longer human habitations but mere stone husks,
55:37often blackened and burnt out from end to end.
55:42You have to keep reminding yourself that these are the people
55:45who at least permitted these appalling atrocities
55:48of which we are getting more ghastly proofs every day.
55:54Germany remained occupied by the victorious Allies until 1955.
56:05In Britain, the contrast in mood could not have been greater.
56:09After almost six years of war,
56:11there was a mass celebration of the long-awaited victory.
56:15In London, an estimated million people took to the streets
56:19as Winston Churchill announced the victory.
56:23In all our long history, we have never seen a greater day than this.
56:31Hurrah!
56:36We may allow ourselves a brief period of rejoicing,
56:43but let us not forget for a moment the toils and efforts that lie ahead.
56:49Japan, with all her treachery and greed, remains unsubdued.
56:56All around the country, people spontaneously went out onto the streets
57:01to share the good news with their neighbours,
57:04as here on the south coast in Brighton.
57:14In the north-east of England, in Gateshead,
57:17an off-duty policeman, John McHugh,
57:20used his own camera to record his neighbour's joy
57:23after years of blackouts, bombs and ration cards.
57:33But the war in the Pacific against Japan continued for another three months.
57:46The dropping of two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
57:52finally caused Japan to surrender, unconditionally.
58:01Total victory had only been won with a massive human cost,
58:06an estimated final death toll of between 50 and 80 million people.
58:17Despite the many wartime restrictions,
58:20Britain's amateur filmmakers recorded all aspects of their life at home
58:24and on the war front through six long years of conflict.
58:30From pre-war holidays in Nazi Germany,
58:34to the Blitz of Sheffield,
58:37from a Quaker home for child evacuees,
58:41to the war at sea,
58:44from the Home Guard to the Nazi occupation of the Channel Islands,
58:48these unique amateur films have provided us with a new personal insight
58:53full of fascinating, intimate stories and the most heart-rending tragedy
58:59that can only enrich our understanding of the greatest conflict in British history.
59:06Bringing you more breathtaking footage here on BBC4,
59:09meet Britain's greatest pilot, the extraordinary story of Captain Winkle Brown
59:14and his Second World War encounters with the Nazis, next.
59:35Subs by www.zeoranger.co.uk