Inferno - Max Hastings [62]
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 antiaircraft-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 200 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 must all live in fear of the unknown horrors that so many of us have not yet experienced?”
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 percent aircraft losses per sortie. This was a much lower casualty rate than the RAF later suffered bombing Germany, because the British had farther 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 bomb loads 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,