GENERATION BLITZ!

They experienced everything from being buried alive to losing friends and family. Today they proudly proclaim, 'We survived that, we can survive anything!' No wonder those doughty Britons who grew up in the deadly shadow of Nazi air raids think today's youngsters have been coddled

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how many had in fact stayed behind and witnessed the bombing close-up in cities around the UK — not just, famously, in London, but in Liverpool, Bristol, Coventry, Birmingham, Belfast and elsewhere.

Some were evacuated but came back, while others were too young to go, or their families decided it was best to stay together and take their chances.

This was a generation of children who spent their nights in cold, cramped air raid shelters, listening to the roar of enemy planes overhead and the crump of bombs falling.

A generation whose young minds had somehow to make sense of the death and destruction all around them. And whose parents had little hope of shielding them from the brutal reality of war, or its dangers: almost 8,000 children lost their lives as a result of enemy action in Britain. Others lost not only homes but school friends, siblings, parents or grandparents.

Young John Le Page was living in Halifax when his father volunteered for the Auxiliary Fire Service, determined to do his bit for the war effort. After spending a week fighting fires during the May Blitz in Liverpool in 1941, he returned home a shadow of his former self, three stone lighter and struggling to breathe. An ambulance was called, but before it even arrived, he was dead - killed by bronchial pneumonia brought on by the smoke he had inhaled.

"When he died, I was nine," recalls John, now 92. "I used to be very sad at night, saying, 'Why did it happen? Oh, why did it happen?' I was very, very miserable for a long time."