The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [59]
Dowding’s personal assistant, Flight Lieutenant Robert Wright, later recalled: ‘The Germans launched the heaviest raid we had ever known, but the attack didn’t go to the airfields, it went to London. So we were able to pull ourselves together, repair things, and, most important of the lot, it gave the pilots more of a chance for a little rest.’33 Bomb craters were filled in on runways, planes were repaired in hangars not now under immediate threat of bombing, and control and communication lines that had been damaged over the previous fortnight were put back into operation. In a short period, the hitherto heavily pressed RAF was fully restored on almost all its most important bases, and receiving more planes from the factories than it could fill with pilots. The RAF had more fighters operational at the end of the battle of Britain – despite the high attrition rates – than at the beginning.
Mid-September 1940 saw bombs fall on the West End of London, Downing Street, Buckingham Palace, the House of Lords, the Law Courts and eight Wren churches. Whereas Hitler never visited an air base or bomb-site throughout the war, probably fearful of being publicly connected to failure, Churchill, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth regularly did so, and were often cheered there (although on at least one occasion Churchill was booed by those whom the local authorities had failed to re-house quickly enough). General Lee recorded in his diary on 11 September that there was not one unbroken pane of glass in the Air Raid Precautions (ARP) and Civil Commissioner Headquarters in London, but the working area deep underground, which was gas-proof and air-conditioned, continued to function ‘quite undisturbed’. In Ovington Square in Knightsbridge he noted that two houses ‘had had their fronts blown out and pictures and carpets hung forlornly out in the open.’ The City had suffered heavily, and Threadneedle Street was roped off because of ‘a giant crater’ in front of the Bank of England. More severe was the damage to Whitechapel and Docklands. ‘When a bomb hits one of those dismal brick houses,’ Lee observed, ‘it goes on into the ground, blows a big hole and all the dreary fragments of the house fall into it.’ He noted that although people were ‘grubbing about in the wreckage to salvage what they could’, nonetheless ‘no one was complaining,’ and one workman told him: ‘All we want to know is whether we are bombing Berlin. If they are getting all or more than we are, we can stick it.’34
‘Successful landing followed by occupation would end war in short order,’ Hitler told a Führer-conference on 14 September 1940. ‘Britain would starve to death.’35 That day the bombing moved to the industrial area of the River Clyde. In all, between 7 September 1940 and the end of the first period of the Blitz on 16 May 1941, there were seventy-one major attacks on London – that is, attacks dropping more than 100 tons of HE – eight each on Liverpool, Birmingham and Plymouth, six on Bristol, five on Glasgow, four on Southampton, three on Portsmouth and at least one on a further eight cities. The Blitz is thus different from, but related to, the battle of Britain. The initiation of the London Blitz during the battle of Britain allowed the RAF to achieve victory in the air battle, although the Blitz continued long after that victory was won. In total 18,291 tons of HE were dropped on London during