• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

The bomber assault, which continued until Hitler began to withdraw aircraft for the invasion of Russia in May 1941, inflicted heavy damage on British city centres and ate deep into the spirits of millions of people who endured many nights huddled in shelters with their families and fears. It cost the attackers, flying from airfields in northern France, only 1.5 per cent aircraft losses per sortie. This was a much lower casualty rate than the RAF later suffered bombing Germany, because the British had further to go. Some 43,000 British civilians were killed and a further 139,000 injured. But throughout the winter of 1940–41 the Luftwaffe lacked a credible strategic plan, together with the aiming accuracy and bombloads necessary to inflict decisive damage on British industry. The young scientific intelligence officer R.V. Jones played a critical role, by identifying the Germans’ radio navigational beams and showing the way to jam them. Production was disrupted by alerts, and some important plants were damaged; tens of thousands of homes were destroyed, along with ancient buildings, churches and other landmarks. But, to a remarkable degree, the population of Britain learned to get on with its business amid air bombardment. ‘Human casualties were quieter than I had expected,’ wrote Barbara Nixon, an actress turned Finsbury air-raid warden.

Only twice did I hear really terrifying screaming, apart from hysteria; one night a [railway] signalman had his legs blown off and while he was still conscious his box burst into flames; it was utterly impossible for anyone to reach him and it seemed an age before his ghastly, paralysing screams subsided. Usually, however, casualties, even those who were badly hurt or trapped, were too stunned to make much noise. Animals, on the other hand, made a dreadful clamour. One of the most unnerving nights of the first three months was when a cattle market was hit, and the beasts bellowed and shrieked for three hours; a locomotive had been overturned at the same time and its steam whistle released. The high-pitched monotonous tone, coupled with the distant roaring of the bullocks, was maddening.

In an age when much local transport was still horse-drawn, some city stables borrowed from country custom and acquired a goat, which horses would follow in an emergency. One night when the premises of a big City of London firm of carters were set ablaze by bombs, two hundred of its horses were led to safety. Yet while Britain’s ‘blitz spirit’ was real enough, so too were the misery and squalor that bombardment imposed. Bernard Kops, a small boy who later became a playwright and novelist, wrote: ‘Some people … recall a poetic dream about the Blitz. They talk about those days as if they were a time of a true communal spirit. Not to me. It was the beginning of an era of utter terror, of fear and horror. I stopped being a child and came face to face with the new reality of the world … Here we were back on the trot, wandering again, involved in a new exodus – the Jews of the East End, who had left their homes, and gone into the exile of the underground.’

A strand of traditional British silliness helped the afflicted: a London vicar once asked a fellow occupant of his basement shelter whether she prayed when she heard a bomb falling. ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘I pray, Oh God! Don’t let it fall here.’ The vicar said, ‘But it’s a bit rough on other people, if your prayer is granted and the thing drops, not on you, but on them.’ The woman replied, ‘I can’t help that. They must say their prayers and push it off further.’ Air-raid shelters in old buildings swarmed with lice and bugs. In the big subterranean shelters of the inner cities, there was ugliness generated by drunken men and women, bitter quarrels and fights, filth inescapable where there were no lavatories.

Most people agreed that the struggle bore hardest upon the elderly and the very young, alike uncomprehending. Barbara Nixon again: ‘Neither had any idea what it