The Blitz

• 1. Introduction

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  The Blitz began in earnest on the 7th of September 1940, when the German air force turned its full weight on London. For 56 of the next 57 days and nights, bombers returned to the capital. The campaign by Germany and Fascist Italy against the United Kingdom lasted eight months and ended on the 16th of May 1941. Its name is short for Blitzkrieg, a word the popular press used for German surprise attack. Blitz itself means lightning. By the end of the war, German bombing had killed more than 40,000 British civilians, almost half of them in London. How did an air force built to support armies end up fighting a long campaign against cities? What did Britons expect before the first bombs fell, and what did they find? And how did radio beams, fake fires and unreliable radar shape the danger of those nights?

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• 2. Airpower Dreams

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  In the 1920s and 1930s, theorists such as Giulio Douhet and Billy Mitchell argued that air forces could win wars alone. Their slogan was that the bomber will always get through, especially at night. Factories, government and communications could be destroyed, and bombed civilians would lose heart. Democracies, where public opinion mattered, seemed most fragile. The Royal Air Force and the United States Army Air Corps took on much of this thinking.

  The German air force took a more cautious view. Its leadership, the Oberkommando der Luftwaffe, doubted that air power could be decisive alone. It did not adopt an official policy of deliberately bombing civilians until 1942. German legal scholars in the 1930s drew careful lines. Direct attacks on civilians were branded terror bombing, but striking vital war industries was ruled acceptable, even if civilians would suffer.

  General Walther Wever, Chief of the Luftwaffe General Staff from the 1st of March 1935, championed strategic bombing and the aircraft to carry it out. He wanted officers schooled in war economics, armaments production and the mindset of possible enemies. Wever died in an air crash in 1936. His successors, Albert Kesselring and then Hans-Jürgen Stumpff, are usually blamed for turning the service toward close support of the army.

  Adolf Hitler was a poor guide for any of this. He liked the political threat of bombers, which had frightened smaller nations in the 1930s. He gave little firm direction for an actual campaign, and he gave the air staff scant warning that war with Britain was possible. Hermann Göring, who ran the Luftwaffe, made things worse by shielding it from the other services and by telling Hitler what he wanted to hear. In 1937 Göring dropped Wever's heavy bomber programme, explaining that Hitler only wanted to know how many bombers there were, not how many engines each had.

  The result was a force of medium bombers: the Dornier Do 17, the Junkers Ju 88 and the Heinkel He 111. They could fly strategic missions, but their small bomb loads limited the damage. Germany also lacked the resources and technical skill to build four-engined bombers before the war. In July 1939 Göring staged a display of the newest equipment at Rechlin, to suggest the air force was readier for a strategic war than it was. Intelligence was just as thin. The air staff was not told that Britain should be treated as a potential opponent until early 1938.

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• 3. Britain Braces

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  London held nine million people, a fifth of the British population, spread across 750 square miles. Planners knew this made the city hard to defend. Drawing on German raids in the First World War, the government estimated 50 casualties, about a third of them deaths, for every tonne of bombs dropped on the capital. The tonnage an enemy could drop in a day was thought to grow from 75 in 1922 to 150 in 1934 and 644 in 1937.

  The numbers turned into forecasts of catastrophe. In 1937 the Committee on Imperial Defence estimated that 60 days of attack would leave 600,000 dead and 1.2 million wounded. By 1938 experts expected Germany to try for 3,500 tonnes in the first 24 hours. Some feared poison gas and even bacteriological weapons. In 1939 the military writer B. H. Liddell Hart predicted 250,000 deaths and injuries in the first week, and London hospitals prepared for 300,000 casualties.

  Popular culture fed the dread. Newsreels showed Barcelona, Guernica and Shanghai under bombs. H. G. Wells imagined air war in The Shape of Things to Come, filmed in 1936. Harold Macmillan later wrote that he and others in 1938 thought of air warfare as people now think of nuclear war. In 1938 a committee of psychiatrists predicted three times as many mental casualties as physical ones, implying three to four million psychiatric patients. Winston Churchill had warned Parliament in 1934 that continuous attack would drive three or four million Londoners into the countryside.

  The government planned accordingly. It prepared to evacuate four million people, mostly women and children, including 1.4 million from London. A trial blackout was held on the 10th of August 1939. When Germany invaded Poland on the 1st of September, the blackout began at sunset. Lights stayed off after dark for almost six years, and civilians came to resent it more than rationing. Air raid sirens sounded for the first time just 22 minutes after Neville Chamberlain declared war.

  The Children's Overseas Reception Board offered parents a way to send children to Canada, Australia, New Zealand or South Africa. It evacuated 2,664 boys and girls aged 5-15. The programme ended in October 1940, after the sinking of the SS City of Benares cost the lives of 81 of the 100 children aboard.

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• 4. Underground and Above

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  Many areas, including Birmingham, Coventry, Belfast and the East End of London, did not have enough shelters. Responsibility had been left largely to local authorities. Because bombing was delayed during the Phoney War, the shelter programme was finished in June 1940, before the Blitz began. It favoured back garden Anderson shelters and small brick surface shelters, and many of the brick ones were later abandoned as unsafe. Officials had expected short daylight raids, not nights that forced Londoners to sleep underground.

  Deep shelters offered the best protection from a direct hit, but the government had not built them for large populations. It cited cost and construction time, and it feared that safe shelters would make people refuse to go back to work. It also suspected the Communist Party of Great Britain, which campaigned for them, of trying to damage morale, especially after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939.

  The London Underground became the most important communal shelter anyway. In 1939 the government refused to open the stations, and officials were told to lock the entrances during raids. By the second week of heavy bombing the government relented. Orderly lines formed daily until 4:00 pm, when people were let in. Around 150,000 people a night slept there in mid-September 1940. The peak was 177,000 on the 27th of September.

  Shelters were still dangerous. A single direct hit on a shelter in Stoke Newington in October 1940 killed 160 civilians. In March 1943, 173 men, women and children were crushed to death at Bethnal Green tube station after a woman fell on the steps. A November 1940 census found about 4% of Londoners in the Tube and other large shelters, 9% in public surface shelters and 27% in private home shelters. That left roughly 60% staying in their own homes.

  Inside the big shelters, life organised itself. Authorities added stoves and bathrooms, and canteen trains brought food. Bunk tickets reduced time spent queuing. Committees formed as informal governments, and the British Red Cross and the Salvation Army improved conditions. There were concerts, films, plays and library books. Class divisions did not vanish, and fights broke out over noise and space. Antisemitic graffiti and rumours appeared in the East End, though one observer found that the Cockney and the Jew worked together, against the Indian.

  The predicted collapse never came. An American witness wrote, "By every test and measure I am able to apply, these people are staunch to the bone and won't quit." Londoners spoke of a day as "very blitzy", as though raids were weather. Anna Freud and Edward Glover observed that civilians did not suffer widespread shell shock, and the special psychiatric clinics set up for bombing victims closed for lack of patients. London recorded only about two cases of "bomb neurosis" a week in the first three months. Suicides and drunkenness declined.

  Crowds visiting bomb sites grew so large they got in the way of rescuers. Pubs did more trade, since beer was never rationed, and 13,000 people attended cricket at Lord's. A Gallup poll in May 1940 found only 3% of Britons expecting to lose the war. Approval of Churchill stood at 88% in July and 89% in October. Workers took longer shifts, and strike days in 1940 were the fewest on record.

  Civilians also worked to protect their city. The Auxiliary Fire Service had 138,000 personnel by July 1939, compared with 6,600 full-time and 13,800 part-time firemen in the whole country a year earlier. The Scout Association guided fire engines to where they were needed, and the Scouts became known as the Blitz Scouts. The Women's Voluntary Services, created in 1938 by Home Secretary Samuel Hoare, organised evacuations, canteens and salvage. By the end of 1941 it had one million members. Yet the government's deep shelters, ordered in October 1940 to hold 80,000 people, were not finished until the heaviest bombing had passed.

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• 5. War of the Beams

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  In June 1940 a captured German prisoner was overheard boasting that the British would never find the Knickebein, even though it was under their noses. The remark reached Dr R. V. Jones, a technical adviser to the RAF Air Staff. He realised that German Lorenz receivers, normally blind-landing aids, were doing something else. Avro Ansons of the Beam Approach Training Development Unit flew up and down Britain with a 30 MHz receiver, and one beam was traced to Derby.

  The German system was clever. Knickebein, meaning Crooked Leg, used two powerful Lorenz beams from rotating ground aerials, converging over the target. A bomber followed one beam until it heard the second, and a continuous tone told the crew to drop. The X-Gerät, or X-Device, worked on 66-77 MHz and was fitted in He 111s flown by specially trained pathfinder crews. Cross-beams started a bombing clock that released the bombs when the target lay directly below. The Y-Gerät, the most complex of the three, tracked a bomber along its approach beam by autopilot while a ground controller monitored it.

  The British answer was improvised. The first jamming used requisitioned hospital electrocautery machines. Later countermeasures came from units under Wing Commander Edward Addison of No. 80 Wing RAF. Up to nine transmitters were aimed at the beams to widen them subtly. The same wing also practised meaconing, in which German navigation signals were received and repeated to mislead crews. The method was not foolproof. A bomber closer to its own beam than to the meacon would still receive the German signal as the stronger one.

  Britain also tried deception on the ground. Throughout 1940 dummy airfields were prepared, convincing enough to survive skilled observation. Decoy sites nicknamed Starfish simulated targets or set fires to draw bombers away. Carbon arc lamps imitated flashes at tram overhead wires. Red lamps stood in for blast furnaces and locomotive fireboxes, and lights under angled wooden panels mimicked glinting factory skylights.

  Timing mattered. Fake fires could only begin once bombing had started on a nearby target and the real fires there were under control. Start too early and the ruse failed. Start too late and the true blaze would outshine it. The boiler fire fed oil and water from two tanks, injecting water to produce flashes like those of the German C-250 and C-500 Flammbomben.

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• 6. Defences in the Dark

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  In July 1940 only 1,200 heavy and 549 light anti-aircraft guns were deployed across all of Britain. About 200 of the heavy guns were the obsolescent 3 in type. Few had fire-control systems, and the underpowered searchlights were usually useless against aircraft above 12,000 ft. The guns did lift civilian morale, since people knew German crews faced a barrage. Historians now believe they achieved little, and falling shell fragments caused more casualties on the ground.

  The weakness had roots before the war. Until September 1939 the RAF lacked specialist night-fighting aircraft. Air doctrine since the days of Hugh Trenchard stressed offence as the best defence, and money after 1935 went into a ground-based radar system for day fighters. Hugh Dowding, who commanded Fighter Command, had defeated the Luftwaffe in daylight but left little for the night.

  On the 14th of October 1940, British guns under General Frederick Alfred Pile fired 8,326 rounds at a heavy night attack and shot down only 2 bombers. London's defences were reorganised, though the effect is questionable. Dowding was summoned on the 17th of October to explain the state of night defences. He was replaced by Sholto Douglas on the 25th of November. Douglas introduced more squadrons and spread the few gun-laying radar sets to create a carpet across the southern counties.

  The guns did improve. The shells spent per raider shot down fell from 20,000 in September 1940 to 4,087 in January 1941 and 2,963 in February. The Boulton Paul Defiant became the most successful night fighter of 1940-41, and the powerful Beaufighter was arriving in very small numbers. Airborne radar was unreliable, and some bombers were even flown with airborne searchlights, to little avail.

  Yet radar was already scoring. On the night of 22-the 23rd of July 1940, Flying Officer Cyril Ashfield, Pilot Officer Geoffrey Morris and Flight Sergeant Reginald Leyland of the Fighter Interception Unit brought down a Do 17 off Sussex. It was the first kill guided by onboard radar. On the 19th of November the night fighter ace John Cunningham shot down a Ju 88 the same way, as Dowding had predicted.

  Progress was slow. In February 1941 there were only seven squadrons with 87 pilots, under half the required strength. By May 1941 the figures had grown to 204 contacts and 74 combats in 643 sorties, up from 44 contacts and two combats in January. Even then, 67 percent of the sorties were visual cat's-eye missions.

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• 7. Raids and Firestorms

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  Hitler and Göring ordered the new policy on the 6th of September 1940, and the next afternoon Operation London, known as Unternehmen Loge, began. A force of 348 bombers and 617 fighters struck, with the docks as the target. About 107,400 gross tons of shipping in the Thames Estuary were damaged, and 1,600 civilians became casualties, around 400 of them killed. On the 8th of September, 412 people died and 747 were severely wounded.

  Battle of Britain Day, the 15th of September, brought two large daylight attacks along the Thames. The first only damaged the rail network for three days, and the second failed. The Luftwaffe lost 18 percent of the bombers sent and did not gain air superiority. Two days later Hitler postponed Operation Sea Lion, the planned invasion, and it was never revived. Bad weather and daylight losses gave the German command an excuse to switch to night attacks on the 7th of October.

  The weight of bombs was heavy. About 8,200 tons fell in October, over 5,400 of them on London at night. By mid-November more than 11,600 tons of high explosive and nearly 1,000,000 incendiaries had fallen on the capital. Delayed-action bombs left between 5,000 and 6,000 railway wagons idle at one point. September alone saw 667 hits on railways. Yet observers for the Ministry of Home Security found no sign of broken morale, despite more than 13,000 civilians killed and almost 20,000 injured in two months.

  The bombing also spread to other targets. Liverpool and Hull suffered their own Blitzes, and Bristol, Cardiff, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Southampton, Sunderland, Swansea, Belfast and Glasgow were hit, along with Birmingham, Coventry, Manchester and Sheffield. Mines were dropped by Fliegerkorps X, which had released 3,984 by the 19th-the 20th of April 1941. Unexploded mines fell into British hands, which let the British develop countermeasures.

  The night of the 14th of November 1940 brought the raid on Coventry. Pathfinders from Kampfgruppe 100 led 437 bombers carrying 350 long tons of high explosive, 50 of incendiaries and 127 parachute mines. The historic cathedral was all but destroyed along with most of the city centre, and the verb "to coventrate" entered use. About 21 factories were seriously damaged, and aircraft production briefly dipped by 20 percent. The Germans were surprised by the result and made no follow-up raids.

  At 18:17 on the 29th of December, ten pathfinder He 111s released the first of 10,000 firebombs on the City of London, reaching 300 a minute. About 130 bombers destroyed the historic centre in a firestorm now called the Second Great Fire of London. By the war's end, London's casualties totalled 28,556 killed and 25,578 wounded, and the Luftwaffe had dropped 16,331 long tons of bombs on the city.

  In January 1941, around 100 bombers dropped some 32,000 incendiaries on Swansea in a single heavy raid. A further three nights of attack from the 19th to the 21st of February killed 230 people. Waves of 150 bombers hit Southsea and Gosport with 40,000 incendiaries, though the docks were largely untouched. At Southampton, morale briefly gave way, and civic authorities led people en masse out of the city.

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• 8. Terror and Failure

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  Kampfgruppe 100 became known as the Beleuchtergruppe, or Firelighter Group, because it marked targets with fire. Official German air doctrine did not espouse attacking civilians directly. But the tactic of Feuerleitung, or Blaze Control, used incendiary fields to mark targets, and then the SC 1000, SC 1400 and SC 1800 bombs, nicknamed Satan, flattened streets and housing. By December the 2500 kg SC 2500, called Max, was in use. Captured aircrews said workers' homes were deliberately targeted.

  The figures show the drift. Kampfgruppe 100 raised its share of incendiaries from 13 to 28 percent, and by December to 92 percent. British jamming of Knickebein had pushed the Luftwaffe toward firelight for navigation. Such fires were inherently inaccurate, so the attack became in effect an unrestricted area assault, a Terrorangriff, regardless of official policy.

  Italy joined late. Benito Mussolini created the Corpo Aereo Italiano, and it was formed on the 10th of September 1940 under General Rino Corso Fougier. It had 50 Fiat CR.42 biplane fighters, 45 Fiat G.50 Freccia fighters and a squadron of Fiat BR.20 bombers. Its first raid came on the night of 24-the 25th of October, when 18 BR.20s attacked Harwich and Felixstowe. Its last, on the night of the 2nd of January, was five bombers over Ipswich. In total it dropped 54.3 tons in 102 sorties.

  Germany's naval command pushed for a different aim. Erich Raeder, commander-in-chief of the Kriegsmarine, had long argued the air force should help the U-boats against British shipping and ports. He persuaded Hitler, who then ordered focus on convoys. On the 6th of February 1941, Directive 23 was published, giving aerial interdiction of British imports by sea top priority.

  The bombing never broke the country. It did not demoralise the British into surrender, and eight months of attacks never seriously hampered war production, which kept rising. The greatest effect was to push Britain to disperse aircraft and spare-parts factories. British wartime studies found that most cities took 10 to 15 days to recover from severe damage. Birmingham took three months.

  The German command had not developed a methodical strategy for destroying British industry. Poor intelligence led it to concentrate on tactics instead, and its attacks were spread over several industries rather than concentrated on the most vital. Hitler grew sceptical of the whole idea. He complained, "The munitions industry cannot be impeded effectively by air raids... usually, the prescribed targets are not hit."

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