Towns closer to the centre of Birmingham, such as Dudley, which was approximately nine kilometres away from the centre of the explosion, had fared much worse than the towns in the outer ring. Dudley’s town centre was ablaze in many parts, while movement of fire and rescue appliances along its roads was severely handicapped and in many cases impossible. Again, a few items of earth-moving equipment had been assembled before the war and these now attempted to clear their way through the worst of the rubble. Many buildings had collapsed. People were trapped but little rescue effort was available. The local authority emergency services had remained reasonably intact but most of the telephone communication system had broken down; it was thus impossible to organize centrally any form of rescue effort. Rescue work continued on an ad hoc basis but was hopelessly inadequate to meet the town’s needs; this was also the case in other nearby towns like Halesowen, Walsall, Sutton Coldfield and Solihull. These towns were in the worst state of any in the area. Large numbers of those still alive had suffered severe injuries. Emergency services existed in some form or other but without organization. The towns struggling for survival in surrounding areas could provide no form of help to those in the inner ring. Still closer to the point of detonation conditions were so bad that no help was available at all. Thus the towns in the worst condition of all were left to their own devices. This was where help was most urgently needed. As it was, there was none.
Within the motorway boundaries the position inside the city of Birmingham itself soon became quite unmanageable. Movement was virtually impossible. Although the fire-storm itself had abated, fires still raged throughout the area. The area was a wilderness in which no help was to be had, surrounded by towns quite incapable of providing any.
As the day wore on Wolverhampton and Solihull continued to struggle with the impossible task facing their rescue and fire-fighting facilities. Most of the fires had to be allowed to burn themselves out. Rescue attempts were made where resources were available and where it appeared that some benefit would result. In many places no attempt could be made to rescue people trapped inside fallen buildings or to provide medical attention to the injured. Inevitably this meant that many people trapped in buildings died either as a result of the spread of fire or from the injuries they had received earlier.
By the end of the day on 20 August an area of 600 square kilometres centred on Birmingham was a scene still lit by innumerable fires burning themselves out, with pockets of activity where fire-fighting and rescue operations were going on and groups of people had formed themselves into rescue teams to try to extricate those buried beneath rubble. A small number of people had been able to obtain medical assistance but thousands were totally unable to get near a hospital because of the large numbers of injured requiring attention. By the end of the day almost all organized endeavour within the areas hit by the nuclear explosion had to be concentrated on attempting to cope with the enormous numbers of casualties. Hospitals were being inundated with requests for help and submerged by the wave of people appearing for treatment. Many were still lying where they had been injured; there was no way of collecting them up. The numbers of people appearing at hospitals were such that physical protection of the premises was required from the police. Even so, the anxiety of people to receive treatment themselves or have others treated was so great that violence began to develop and there were disturbances outside some of the surviving hospitals.
The movement of survivors out of the area, by vehicle or on foot, soon began to clog the remaining passable roads and severely hampered the emergency services. Further police effort was required to control this. The police manpower available for this task, and also for the protection of the hospitals, even with the help of reserve army units, was simply insufficient. Chaos began to develop on the roads, chiefly near hospitals and in areas which had suffered less damage than others and where people came to find food and shelter. As the night wore on the absence of electricity made matters worse, so that the day ended in a shambles of uncoordinated activity by fire-fighting and rescue teams doing what they could against the mountain of disaster facing them, in an environment where hundreds of thousands of people were seeking food and shelter and attention for severe injuries. The extent of the disaster and its aftermath was such that the local authorities were quite unable to control events.
During the day the situation in Birmingham had been in the minds of the entire country. Everyone was aware that a nuclear device had been exploded and most were convinced that it was only the first of many. This caused an element of panic everywhere as individuals sought either to protect themselves within their own homes or to move from urban areas out into the country, where they imagined they might be safer. The potential mass exodus of people was of great concern to the government, who strove to check it through broadcast messages. Fortunately no further nuclear attack took place. Nevertheless, local authorities everywhere were making preparations to ensure their own survival and might not have been receptive to requests to provide Birmingham with assistance, had these been made.
The government had ordered Headquarters United Kingdom Land Forces to take whatever action in support of Birmingham was possible without detriment to its ability to withstand further nuclear strikes. Headquarters West Midland District was ordered within minutes of the strike to provide what assistance it could in the Birmingham area.
By mid-afternoon that day twelve major units from the regular and volunteer armies, together with units of the RAF Regiment, amounting to some 10,000 men, with logistic and medical services and some fire-fighting equipment, were being deployed on emergency relief operations. Units drawn from West Midland, Eastern and Wales Districts, including the Mercian Yeomanry and men from the Light Infantry Depot at Shrewsbury, were deployed to Wolverhampton, Stourbridge, Halesowen, Solihull, Sutton Coldfield, Walsall and Brownhills. Here the local authorities had retained some semblance of local control and rescue and relief operations were therefore already under way in some form or other. The military units brought with them vehicles, communications, tentage, blankets, medical assistance, engineer equipment and fire-fighting equipment. Most important of all, they were organized bodies of men, capable and under disciplined control.
By the evening of the same day the emergency committees nominated in peacetime had come into operation. These committees included representatives from the police, fire-fighting services, ambulance services and medical authorities. With liaison officers from military relief units the emergency committees now took control of the deployment of rescue and relief operations during the recovery phase. It was evening before troop deployments were complete and before the emergency committees had a chance to take stock of the situation within their areas. With no electricity and fires still freely burning almost everywhere, little could be done other than attempting ad hoc rescue and relief operations with existing facilities, while plans were made for a major effort at recovery from dawn next day.
By the early morning of 21 August the Sub-Regional Headquarters at South Yardley had managed to establish radio and land communications with central government and with emergency committees in the surrounding towns. It was thus able to co-ordinate the activities of all the emergency committees, which were by now backed by their own surviving emergency facilities and military help.
All surviving hospitals were still being besieged by crowds of casualties needing treatment. There were few doctors available either in the hospitals or in the surrounding areas. Most of the roads were still impassable to vehicular movement, so fire-fighting, rescue and ambulance teams could not approach the scenes of worst damage. There were no telephones and no electricity. Gas supplies had by now been cut off. The water distribution system had failed in many places, which made fire-fighting more difficult still. There were many thousands of slightly wounded people with no accommodation and no means of feeding themselves. Looting of damaged commercial premises was becoming widespread as some looked for food while others hoped for material gain. Many people were trying to leave the area, clogging the roads with their vehicles and preventing the effective deployment of emergency services. Fires were still burning in many places, and the thousands of bodies littering the streets and lying amongst the destroyed buildings threatened a future hazard to health.