With one of Britain's major military dockyards in its modst, it was little wonder that Portsmouth became a prime target for the German Luftwaffe throughout most of the second world war and it annoys me that so many historians gloss over what happened here.

Of course London took more bombs, from more raids, but it is the capital city and the damage was spread over a much larger area - not that I would dream of making light of what Londoners endured through those terrible years.

However, once anyone has spent as much time as I have in researching this feature, wading through old photographs and fragmented accounts, remembering how, as a young boy, I wandered around bomb sites all over post-war 1950s Portsmouth, you start to realise just how terribly our city suffered and what a remarkable spirit it must have taken for its citizens to come through it and be able to smile at the other end.

From a slow start, I've ended up with a huge amount of material, but for the moment I've decided against just putting up a succession of old photographs with captions and descriptions, although there are old photos, of course and there are captions and there is a narrative, of sorts.

It wasn't intended - German bombers simply overshot their targets in the dockyard - and so the first building in Portsmouth to be bombed was the Blue Anchor, at Kingston Cross.

A temporary single storey building was erected - and it's still there in 2009!

In the first few months after the Blue Anchor was destroyed, it's unlikely that the further damage caused throughout the city outside of the dockyard walls, was particularly intentioned, although a bomb is still as deadly, whether it's intended to hit a particular target, or not!

However, as the war dragged on and on, and especially once Hitler and his cronies realised that Britain was not going to yield to them, the air raids became more and more brutal, and although the Nazi propoganda machine continued to tell the world that it was only targetting military and war essential etsbalishments, it got to a situation where German pilots would frequently loose their loads indiscriminately.

reduced to a twisted steel skeleton in little more than the blinking of an eye.

If the civilian death and injury toll was bad enough anyway, the only reason that it did not rise even higher is the bravery and organisation of the rescue and warning services - Dad's Army portrayed the air raid warden as a bossy little despot, but it was a vital job, making sure that there were no lights to guide in the marauding bombers.

Rescuers and medics braved still smouldering and unsafe buildings, treating the injured and pulling them to safety,often

with scant regard or consideration for their own safety. Many were awarded for their valour, but even more were not and we should never forget these unsung heroes and heroines - above we see rescue workers searching the wreckage in Green Road, Southsea..

Public shelters were few indeed, and most people relied upon the Anderson shelters, that had been issued to every household before the outbreak of war. In themselves, they were flimy-looking corrugated iron structures, but determined householders dug them into the earth in the garden and piled sandbags, spoil soil and just about anything else they could find on top of them.

No Anderson shelter would ever have withstood a direct hit, but

they did offer protection against shrapnel and falling masonry and there was a definite psychological benefit to having one in your garden.

The power of some of the German bombs was illustrated in one bizarre eye-witness report, from an American serviceman who apparently took the photograph on the right here, a few hours after an air raid.

According to his account, a local pub had been picked up by the force of a blast and deposited on the other side of the street, looking completely intact. However, the structure was clearly unsafe and it was cordoned off and quickly demolished.

I've not been able to find any record of the pub name, but perhaps someone reading this might be able to help?

Many well-known landmarks disappeared during the blitz, but there were also so many "anonymous" buildings, too - anonymous apart from to the poor people who called them home and then found themselves without a roof over their head, and very little in the way of walls, either.

The photgraph on the left is my sort of "unknown household" tribute - I found it with a caption that suggested it was in Portsmouth, but nothing else to identify it - but even if it was in London, Coventry, Liverpool, Southampton, or any one of the many other places where the Luftwaffe left their calling cards, it is just so representative of the heartbreak and anguish visited upon so many innocents.

Many of the better known buildings that succumbed were part of Portsmouth's history - St John's Church in Portsea (left) dated from 1789, but was largely a timber structure and incendiaries made short work of it.

As the war went on, the bombs got bigger, and a huge land-mine reduced around half of King's Street to little more than wasteland (right).

I then came across the right hand picture in a couple of places, obviously the same site, but taken from the right hand side of the first picture, and in both cases the captions confirmed that part of this devastation was all that remained

of the Three Marines pub, in Russell Street - yet another of the many pubs to disappear during the blitz.

There would be many more go the same way, before it was all over.

Despite the horror they saw happening all around them, it was astonishing how the vast majority of people were so determined to not just make the best of a bad job, but to actually try to restore some sort of air of normality to proceedings that were, quite frankly, surreal.

On the left we have Handley's Corner - the store was wrecked beyond salvation and the site was more or less cleared, with little chance of rebuilding a new store until after hostilities ceased.

Faced with such a large area of bleakness, the council, Handley's management and local people got together and constructed temporary gardens on the site, masking the remains of walls and foundations, with raised flower beds and winding walkways throughout.

It may seem bizarre to those of us who were either born too late to remember what was happening in their infancy, or who, like me, were born after the war, but it seemd to work.

The picture on the right shows a

family making good use of the garden paths, as a short cut through to wherever their final destination was - we shall probably know, but hopefully they all survived to find a true peace when Germany finally surrendered.

If Handley's had been a well-known landmark, popular with shoppers for a very long time before the war, the George Hotel in Old Portsmouth was a real piece of history - not only Portsmouth history, either.

Admiral Lord Nelson spent his last night ashore there, before sailing off

to death and glory at Trafalgar, in the autumn of 1805, and George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, also was reputed to have dined there, although he was not staying there on the night before he was assassinated by John Felton, in 1628, as there is a record that he slept overnight at 11 High Street, a little way away, outside which house he was stabbed to death.

On the left, we see a pre-war photograph of the George Hotel garage, almost certainly originally its coaching yard, and the sign on the left commemorates Nelson final stay in the main hotel, with details of his victory and death - one bomb was all it took to wipe out the entire structure.

On the night of 10 January, 1941, incendiary bombs fell through the roof of the Guildhall and the structure began to burn so fiercely that firefighters were helpless to prevent it being gutted.

It was weeks before the building had cooled enough to allow men inside to start clearing the debris, but servicemen were then drafted in from local duties to help sift through the rubble.

Meanwhile, St George's Square, in Portsea, also took a pounding and many building, including the famous St George's Hotel, were badly damaged, or even destroyed, which is why so few older building survive around the Square today.

When the war was over, Millgate House (below) was erected in the

Square, at the time the highest residential block in Portsmouth, where many of the former residents of the area of old Somerstown around Warwick Street and the Mystery pub were rehoused, when it was decided to redevelop that area in the early to mid 60s.

The bombing continued indiscriminately - the Connaught Drill Hall, opened in Stanhope Road in 1901, and another large building was reduced two less than two walls and a few girders, and eventually had to be totally rebuilt, but the offices of the Evening News, as it then was, survived, protected by the Connaughts walls from the blast, and can just be seen in the background of the picture on the right here..

Clearing individual sites was one thing, but disposing of the vast amounts of rubble was something else; much of it was taken across to Gosport, to be useda as hardcore in the rebuilding of the town on the other side of the harbour, which had also suffered badly from the bombing.

On the left, we can see several heavily laden lorries aboard the floating bridge Alexandra, about to make the crossing.

The clearance and rebuilding work was to contune for many years after the war; for instance, although an attempt was made to make the outer facade of the Guildhall look a

bit more presentable, especially as the then Princess Elizabeth was due to visit the city in 1951, it would be 1959, and she would have been queen for seven years, before she returned to open the finished Guildhall that we see today.

Other iconic buildings were not so fortunate; on the right, we see the original Prince's Theatre, opened in 1872, but with a facia modified by Frank Matcham around 1907, was badly hit, and although it would appear that it was only the uppermost storeys that were damaged, the truth was very different and the theatre building had to be demolished.

German bombing continued long after the Normandy invasion, and even after it had become clear to all but a handful of Nazi madmen that the game was up and the war was lost.

The flying bombs - V1s and V2s - were launched from sites in France, then Holland, and finally from within Germany itself, and caused extensive damage across the south of England, but fortunately the RAF managed to locate and bomb launch sites and advancing Allied troops finally drove the Germans back out of range.

On the right are the stark facts and figures of bombs dropped, civilians killed or injured and buildings destroyed,

but simple figures tell only a very small part of the tale.

The real story is one of courage, fortitude and endurance, of ordinary people thrown into an extraordinary situation, who refused to be cowed, refused to be beaten and battled on, despite everything, to see their city, their nation and their democratic pinciples emerge victorious.

Modern wars may be won by armies, navies and air forces, with all their deadly technology, but we should never forget that they are suffered by those who have nothing with which to fight back - except their enduring spirit, belief and fellowship.