The Blitz
For 57 nights in a row London was bombed, yet the most famous image of the Blitz was a photograph of a church still standing.
Published
Quick Facts
- What it was
- The German night-bombing campaign against British towns and cities
- Dates
- 7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941
- London's ordeal
- Bombed on 57 consecutive nights from 7 September 1940
- Civilian deaths
- Around 43,000 across the UK
- Other targets
- Coventry, Liverpool, Belfast, Clydebank, Plymouth, Hull, Birmingham, Sheffield, Bristol and more
- Name
- Short for Blitzkrieg, German for lightning war
- Iconic photograph
- Herbert Mason's St Paul's Cathedral through the smoke, 29 December 1940
- Why it ended
- The Luftwaffe turned east ahead of the invasion of the Soviet Union
Fifty-seven nights without a break
The Blitz was Germany's campaign of night bombing against Britain, running from September 1940 to May 1941. It began on 7 September 1940, when hundreds of bombers hit London's docks and the East End, and the capital was then raided every night for 57 nights in a row. The aim was to cripple ports and industry and to break the will of the people. Hitler's air force had failed to beat the RAF by day in the Battle of Britain, so it came by night instead, when British fighters, with their primitive airborne radar, struggled to find the raiders. The word Blitz was a British shortening of Blitzkrieg. The newspapers took it up almost at once, and it stuck.
It was not just London
On 14 November 1940 Coventry suffered a raid that destroyed much of its medieval centre and its cathedral, and killed hundreds of people. The Germans coined a grim verb for it, coventrieren, meaning to flatten a city. Sheffield, Birmingham, Bristol, Southampton, Plymouth and Hull were all hit hard. Liverpool and Merseyside endured a week of heavy raids in early May 1941, because the docks there kept Britain fed and armed. In March 1941 Clydebank on the Clyde was battered over two nights, and almost every home in the town was damaged. Belfast was bombed on Easter Tuesday, 15 April 1941, in one of the deadliest raids outside London, and the city had been woefully short of shelters and defences.
Life underground, and above it
Londoners did take to the Tube, and on peak nights in late September 1940 well over 100,000 people were sheltering in stations. The authorities had not wanted this, but they gave in and added bunks, toilets and canteens. Even so, the great majority of people stayed at home, in garden Anderson shelters or under the stairs. The blackout brought its own dangers. Road deaths shot up when streetlights went out and headlights were dimmed. Air raid wardens, firewatchers, nurses and the fire service worked through the nights, and the American broadcaster Ed Murrow sent reports of London under attack to listeners across the Atlantic. On 29 December 1940 the Daily Mail photographer Herbert Mason caught St Paul's rising out of smoke after a firestorm raid. The image became a symbol of defiance around the world.
Myth versus reality
The popular picture is of everyone singing in the shelters and pulling together. There was real courage and kindness, but there was also fear, exhaustion, looting and anger. East Enders resented that the rich had better shelters, and many thousands left their homes to sleep in the countryside each night. The campaign did not break morale, and that part of the legend holds up. Factories kept producing, and the government never came close to seeking terms. It did, however, cost lives on a huge scale and leave around a million London homes damaged or destroyed. The Blitz ended less because Britain won than because Hitler changed his plans. The last great raid on London came on 10 to 11 May 1941, when the Commons chamber was destroyed. Within weeks the Luftwaffe was moving east for the invasion of the Soviet Union.
Where the scars still show
At Coventry the ruined shell of the old cathedral stands beside its modern successor, left deliberately as a reminder. In the City of London, Christchurch Greyfriars is now a garden inside the bombed walls of a Wren church, and St Dunstan-in-the-East is another ruin turned into a quiet green space. The Victoria and Albert Museum on Cromwell Road still carries shrapnel pitting on its walls. The Churchill War Rooms and the Imperial War Museum tell the story of the home front in detail. The bombs are still turning up, too. In February 2024 a 500kg unexploded bomb found in Plymouth led to about 10,000 people being evacuated, and it was safely disposed of at sea.
Notable people
- Winston Churchill
- Hermann Göring
- Adolf Hitler
- Herbert Mason
- Ed Murrow
- King George VI
- Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother
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