I don't know whether I have written about this before, and it's not strictly bombing Brum either, but I thought someone might be interested to read about what records they have of air raids in the National Archives at Kew. I few years ago I did a favour for someone interested in air raids over their home town, Magdeburg in Germany. He showed me a book that had already been published in raids in Freiburg in The Black Forest and asked what material I could find on the Magdeburg raids at Kew.
I was not entirely successful. They had a copy of the briefing notes for all raids after about 1940, but they were rather tatty and not as complete as the ones I had seen illustrated for Freiburg, and did not have as much detail ashe had got from a library in Germany for one particuler raid. They did produce record maps after the event showing routes and timings, with details of where bombs were dropped, location of German radar beams, incidents en route (eg AA fire from the ground, interception by enemy planes).
All in all, I didn't do as well as I had hoped, although I spent several hours there.
It would be in interesting to see the equivalent briefing given into German bomber crews before they came to British towns. Somewhere I have a copy of one of the copies of a small-scale British OS map superimposed with the location of 'strategic' targets, all colour coded. I was going to scan it a fewe years ago before presenting it to the Black Country Museum (the map covers the area around Swan Village and Hill Top), but it has got mixed with other papers.
The way I got this and other maps is fascinating - a fellow tramway enthusiast in Berlin gave me them about 40 years ago. He told me that in 1945 when he was about 14 or 15 he and other boys went scavenging round the many vacant ruined buildings, with an eye for what they could pick up. Although they had no value as barter at that time, he took as many as he could carry, and kept most of them. He also gave me a very simple map of the western Soviet Union, a bit of Norway, and also South East England (about 1/2 inch scale - mainly Kent, again with strategic targets overprinted).
Some years after that I was looking an old street plan of the Czech town of Plzen (Pilsen, where the beer comes from), and tried the Royal Geographical Society library in London. They let me photocopy an American copy of one of those German maps like the ones I had for England, but with the superimposed notes crudely translated into English.
Anyway, I'm afraid I have strayed far from the title, so I will say no more now.
Peter