The raid which left city centre damaged 70 years ago

It wasn’t the first time the leader of Nazi Germany had left his calling card in the form of bombs.

Three of them had fallen on Heaton Woods on August 22. Six days later four bombs were dropped on the city, causing minor damage and six slight casualties.

Hitler’s third hello was on the Saturday night and Sunday morning at the end of August. Folklore has it that the raid took place between 11.13pm and 2.40am and that 116 bombs exploded in and around Bradford, killing one woman and injuring 111 other people.

This raid did almost as much damage to the city centre as the developers in the late 1950s and early 1960s, destroying Lingard’s department store, Rawson fruit market, part of a second market and making a big hole in the Odeon cinema.

By mid-May, 1940, the combination of Nazi air power, tank columns, artillery and infantry had overrun most of Western Europe. The Luftwaffe had airfields available to it from Bergen in Norway to Brest in France – a coastline of about 1,800 miles from which to launch massed bomber raids on Britain.

The supposed purpose was to clear the way for Operation Sea Lion, the invasion of Britain from part of that occupied coastline. Opposing the bombers and their fighter escorts were formations of Hawker Hurricanes and Spitfires from RAF’s Fighter Command, flown by a multi-national force of pilots.

The Battle of Britain, as Prime Minister Winston Churchill called it, took place between July 10 and October 31, starting with raids on shipping in the English Channel, then raids on coastal radar posts, Fighter Command airfields, and then towns and cities.

Within the limits of their fuel, Hitler’s bombers could come at Britain from north, east and south. The raid on Bradford on August 31 would have come from the east, probably an airfield in Norway, thinks Bradford writer Richard North.

He says: “The Germans didn’t have a fighter command and a separate bomber command; they had multi-purpose air fleets made up of bombers, fighters and reconnaisance aircraft.

“Air Fleet 5 was based in Norway and attacked the east coast and the north. Landfall was Hull and then the bombers would have followed the Humber inland.

“The aircraft were almost certainly twin-engined Heinkel 111s. They could carry a bomb load of up to 1,000 kilos or a mixture of high-explosive bombs ranging from 250 kilos to 50 kilos, as well as one kilo incendiaries, 36 of which were carried in a container.

“The raid on Bradford would have been by a small number of aircraft dropping a mixture of high explosive and incendiaries. The bombs blasted open buildings, the incendiaries, containing magnesium alloy and thermite – which could burn hot enough to melt steel – would set alight flammable materials inside.

“The raid would not have lasted for nearly four hours, though: that was probably the period covered by the air raid siren alert to the all clear.”

On the Monday morning, the T&A, a broadsheet with advertisements on the front page and topical news on the back, reported the raid on a “North-East town”. That very morning a delayed action high explosive bomb blew up in the garage of a bus company, leaving a crater 36ft wide and 15ft deep.

The acrid smell of burning mixed with the industrial fumes from Bradford’s engineering and textile factories. Tramlines were down, windows blown out, the streets scattered with debris.

Why was Bradford targeted?

“Probably to keep the RAF unsettled and over-worked. All of these raids spread all over the place were designed to create a significant workload for the fighters,” Mr North adds.

At 8.46pm, on March 14, 1941, bombers returned, reportedly dropping 595 bombs which demolished two houses and damaged eight others, plus a railway cabin in Clayton. Almost certainly, a large number of those bombs would have been incendiaries.

Two months later, a bomber crashed in Idle and exploded, killing three people and seriously injuring five. Two cottages were demolished, two others were damaged. All four crew members were captured.