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The Sedgebury Wallop platoon was on the job that night, and marched seventeen bewildered civilians to the local police station because they had forgotten their identity cards. But at 0700 the farmer in Walter Pocock woke up, and he suggested to his shepherd that he might abandon soldiering for shepherding for half an hour. ‘You’ll be wanting to see your sheep, but take your rifle and ammo,’ he advised. ‘The fold’s only ten minutes walk away, and I’ll send for you the moment anything happens.’ ‘I ’low me sheep’ll be all right eet awhile,’ reported Shep. ‘The day’s fold were pitched eesterday, an’ although young Arthur be but fifteen, I’ve a-trained ’im proper. Any road, I bain’t gwaine till the “All Clear” be sounded.’ At about 11 o’clock, when the word came through that the real or imaginary threat of invasion had passed, grumbling was rife. ‘Bain’t ’em reely comin’, sir?’ asked Tom Spicer wistfully. ‘’Fraid not, Spicer,’ replied Walter. ‘Jist wot I thought,’ growled Fred Bunce the blacksmith. ‘There bain’t no dependence to be put in they Germans.’

Those Wiltshire rustics enjoyed a luxury denied to the peoples of continental Europe: they could mock their enemies, because they were spared from the ghastly reality of meeting them: on 17 September Hitler gave the order indefinitely to postpone Operation Sealion, the Wehrmacht’s plan to invade Britain. The British people and the pilots of Fighter Command saw only a slow, gradual shift during October from massed daylight air attacks to night raids. Between 10 July and 31 October, the Germans lost 1,294 aircraft, the British 788. Hitler had abandoned hopes of occupying Britain in 1940, and also of destroying Fighter Command. He committed his air force instead to a protracted assault on Britain’s cities which was intended to break the will of the population. The Luftwaffe chose as primary targets aircraft factories, together with London’s docks and infrastructure. Due to the limitations of German navigation and bomb-aiming, however, in the eyes of the British people the attacks became merely an indiscriminate assault on the civilian population, a campaign of terror.

The ‘blitz’, which the defenders dated from 7 September, was far harder for Fighter Command to repel than daylight attacks, because the RAF had few night fighters and only primitive Air Interception radar. Churchill incited the feeble anti-aircraft gun defences to fire at will to hearten the population, as indeed they did – but with little impact on the raiders. Between September and mid-November, an average of two hundred Luftwaffe aircraft attacked every night save one. In that period, over 13,000 tons of explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on London, Bristol, Birmingham, Portsmouth and other major cities, at a cost to the Luftwaffe of just seventy-five aircraft, most of them victims of accidents.

The blitz imposed on city-dwellers mingled fascination, terror, horror and eventually acceptance of a new normality. A London woman wrote of one raid: ‘The bombs came down in a cluster, close together … Bomb explosions have a mesmeric attraction dating possibly from firework displays of one’s childhood, and I watched the first two explode. Unless it lifts an entire building in the air, the burst of an ordinary high-explosive bomb is not in itself a grand spectacle, as a major fire can be; its upward streaks of yellow or red look as crude and banal as a small boy’s painting of them.’ Muriel Green, a Norfolk village-dweller, wrote with notable sensitivity for a girl of nineteen about her thoughts as she heard German aircraft passing overhead, on their path to some British city, the night after the devastating 14 November attack on Coventry: ‘I wonder what the pilots feel. After all somebody loves them even if they are Nazis, and they are risking their lives and fighting for their country the same as our men that go bombing. Poor Coventry people. How bitter and hopeless they must feel today. How long can it go on? How many years