235: The Blitz

Description

In this gripping episode, we explore the devastating German night bombing campaign known as the Blitz, which terrorized Britain from September 1940 to May 1941. While London bore the brunt of 57 consecutive nights of bombing that killed 40,000 people and destroyed over a million homes, many other British cities suffered similar devastation as the Luftwaffe attempted to break British morale and cripple the nation’s war effort. Despite the widespread destruction, the RAF’s Fighter Command was ill-prepared for night interceptions, lacking both aerial radar technology and adequate anti-aircraft defenses, leaving British civilians to endure the onslaught largely unprotected. From the famous use of London Tube stations as makeshift shelters to the remarkable grassroots organization of shelter committees, ordinary British citizens demonstrated extraordinary resilience in the face of nightly terror. Though the Luftwaffe dropped thousands of tons of bombs and caused immense suffering, their strategic goals remained unfulfilled – instead of breaking British spirit, the Blitz ultimately strengthened national resolve and became a defining symbol of wartime endurance that would echo through history.

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Transcript

Summary

Hello everyone and welcome to History of the Second World War Episode 235 - The Battle After Britain Pt. 3 - The Blitz. This week a big thank you goes out to Timothy for supporting the podcast by becoming members. Members get access to ad-free versions of all of the podcast’s episode plus special member only episodes roughly once a month. Head on over to historyofthesecondworldwar.com/members to find out more. The Blitz is one of those moments during the Second World War that is recognizable even outside of those groups with firm knowledge about the war. For those who listen to the podcast the the term The Blitz might conjure all kinds of different mental images. Broadly, the Blitz would be a strategic bombing campaign of Britain staged by the Luftwaffe through a series of night time bombing raids that lasted from roughly the second week of September until May 1941. The most well known target was London, which due to its size and importance would receive most of the attention from the British press . However, it was far from the only area of Britain bombed during late 1940 and early 1941. Many other cities were hit hard, with some reaching bomb concentrations that were similar to what fell onto the hardest hit areas of London. For the purposes of this podcast episode we will primarily focus on the bombing that occurred in late 1940 in the direct aftermath of the postponement of Sea Lion. Unlike the daylight battles over England, RAF Fighter Command would be ill prepared to meet the night bombing efforts of the Luftwaffe during these months. During the pre-war period, and then up until the summer of 1940 Dowding and Fighter Command had been solely focused on one thing, increasing the ability of the RAF to meet daytime bombing raids. Spitfires, Hurricanes, and radar were essential pieces of this effort. The idea of engaging enemy bombers at night did not receive the same amount of attention and this left them without the tools necessary to properly counter the new Luftwaffe threat. The only good news for the RAF was that the Luftwaffe was just as ill prepared for a truly strategic bombing campaign, whose success would be dictated not by the destruction of specific targets but instead just damage done to the wartime infrastructure of an entire nation. Their focus has been in providing tactical support for German ground forces, and now they had to try and deliver enough bombs to have an impact on British industry and morale. It was a difficult task, that no air force was truly prepared to conquer in 1940. But the Luftwaffe would try, and thousands upon thousands of tons of bombs would be dropped, primarily on population centers, around Britain. The hallmark of the Blitz was not the destruction of military targets, air fields, or radar stations, but instead the impact that it would have on normal British citizens, and the death and suffering that they would endure.

The impact of the air war would begin months before the beginning of the Blitz, and in fact for much of the Battle of Britain there would be a lot of press time and energy devoted to both tracking the actions in the air and in finding fun ways to present them to readers. Most of our information about the thoughts and morale of normal citizens comes from the Mass Observation efforts of the British government as they tracked morale and the effect of various government propaganda efforts. One things that the M-O noted was that the ‘scores’ of the daily air battles became an area of interest to much of the country, tracking them in the same way that a sports score would be tracked. The new scores would be released almost daily, using the often high exaggerated numbers that were initially reported by pilots. General Ismay, one of the most important military advisors for Churchill, would later write ‘All London, nay, all England, could think of little else. ‘‘What is the score today?’’ was the question on every lip in bus, Tube, factory and office. The hall porters at hotels and clubs had to supply the answer a dozen times a day’. The inaccuracy of these estimates has been a major theme of the last few episodes of this podcast, but the flimsiness of the estimates were not known or communicated to the average individual in 1940. Instead they were just just shown the information distilled into a few numbers, which were often quite positive for the RAF. The story that these numbers told was one of tremendous victory for Fighter Command and disaster for the Luftwaffe, which we know today was inaccurate, but at the time was not understood.

Before we discuss the Blitz and its impact, we do have to dig just a bit deeper into the Mass Observation reports, because they are a critical source that is used so often in histories of this period. These reports were gathered based on individuals who lived within British society and who were working with the government to gather information. They would report on conversations they had with local leaders, business owners, just random people around them. These reports would then be summarized from local to regional to national level. But, as Brad Beaven and John Griffiths point out in their article The blitz, civilian morale and the city: mass-observation and working-class culture in Britain, 1940-41 the type of people who were often doing the data gathering, and then the collation and summarization process often resulted in problems with the data. “Since M-O represented a middle-class interpretation of working-class reaction to the blitz, the final reports tended to reflect a preoccupation with regional stereotypes, disregarding other possible facets of working-class life. […] In many respects, the M-O researchers simply reflected contemporary assumptions on the nature of working-class life. […] For example, researchers recorded a high level of morale in Liverpool which was explained by the unique ‘hardy’ character of the city’s population.”. This type of bias became worse the higher up the chain the reports went, with each step up the ladder taking it further away from the source and further away from individuals who understood the people and the location that the information was obtained from. This does not mean that the M-O reports are useless, just that they have to be interpreted and cannot always be just taken at face value.

While the Blitz as a distinct period of time during the war would not begin until around the middle of September, the night bombing of areas within Britain had been occurring for several months before. During those bombing efforts the Germans were greatly aided by their efforts at making radio navigation possible for their bombers, which was their attempt to solve the number one problem faced by bombers when trying to complete raids at night: how to find the target. The German usage of radio was discussed in detail back in episode 209, but as a summary: the Germans would use two different radio transmitters, which were setup to cross near where the bombers should drop their bombs. So all the German bombers had to do was follow one beam so that they flew in the correct direction, and then they could drop their bombs a few minutes after crossing the second beam. While this method was not perfect, and there would be British efforts to spoof and confuse the system, it did represent a major leap in terms of accuracy for night bombing efforts.

While London would go down in history as the primary target of the night time bombing campaign, the areas given greater focus before September were some of the major ports of south and southeast England. Liverpool and Birkenhead were high on the list of targets during August as the Luftwaffe saw them as dual purpose targets. By attacking and damaging the port facilities not only did they impact the critical British sea traffic but they also could impact the ability of the Royal Navy to use the ports in their efforts to counterattack any German invasion attempt. One very intense period for these port cities was during the last few days of of August and the first days of September during which the Luftwaffe bombers would visit them every night for four consecutive nights. During this time they would launch 629 sorties and drop almost 500 tons worth of bombs and a 1,000 incendiary devices. But even with all of those bombs and all of that effort the damage that would be sustained by the actual dock facilities in both Liverpool and Birkenhead were minimal. This would be a good example of how difficult it could be to achieve decisive effects during night time bombing raids for large and relatively hardy targets like dock facilities. They were not necessarily hard to hit due to their size, but it was hard to hit them enough or in the right place to cause just the right type of damage.

This challenge was also found anytime the Luftwaffe would try to attack specific targets in London, as they would try to do when they bombed London over the course of 57 consecutive nights starting in the middle of September. Some of these raids would try and target specific infrastructure, but in other cases they were more structured around just terror bombing of the population and in these efforts they were both successful and unsuccessful. The bombing of civilians had occupied a very important position in war planning for many nations before the Second World War. The belief at the time was that a mass bombing raid of a city could have an absolutely devastating effect, with some strategic bombing zealots claiming that just a few raids with the bombing forces available in the mid 1930s could end a war due to the death and destruction that they would cause. These predictions had been a major driver in investments made into strategic bombing forces around the world. When the bombing of London started parts of these predictions would prove to be accurate, and the destruction of buildings and infrastructure was a problem. But the deaths caused by the bombing raids were actually far below estimates, and instead of hospitals overflowing with injured civilians and morgues bursting at the seams with those killed, instead the greatest problem became supporting everyone who survived but were without shelter. This left the British government unprepared for what they actually needed to do, which was to be prepared to address infrastructure damage on a massive scale over a period of months. To quote a Daily Herald article “In this ‘Battle of London’ I have seen ordinary people behaving with a coolness and resource in the face of danger which one would only have expected from veteran troops. But you do not expect front line troops to stand unarmed, without support, under bombardment.”. There were centers setup in the larger cities to try and help with this problem, but they were overwhelmed with people. Even during September, just at he very beginning of the Blitz, the London centers would fill with almost 26,000 people . Those that arrived after found the centers full and were forced to figure something out themselves, often by trying to live with relatives or friends. It is a great example of the power of social networks, but only due to the failings of the government systems put in place. During the 57 nights of bombing on London, sadly around 40,000 people were killed, also one million homes were either destroyed or damaged, leaving many people without adequate shelter. Even houses that were not destroyed completely would still be damaged to the point where they were at least temporarily uninhabitable. Near misses could result in roofs being blown off, or windows being smashed, or walls damaged. These would have been minor inconveniences if not for the fact that it was happening to so many homes simultaneously which overwhelmed all forms of organized support from the government or from local groups. An added complexity to these issues was the problem of unexploded bombs. Within any strategic bombing campaign, when thousands and thousands of bombs are being dropped in one area, some percentage of those will not explode. This could be due to a malfunction in the triggering mechanism or in the bomb payload, but was just part of the equation. At one point in late October there were more than 3,000 unexploded bombs just hanging out around London waiting for somebody to come take care of them. Moving a bomb was of course not an easy process and required delicate handling by trained teams, but there were only so many of those and so bombs just had to sit there sometimes, at times within homes which forced the surrounding area to be evacuated just in case they decided they wanted to explode at any moment.

There were bomb shelters to protect people during raids, but these were never designed for long term habitation, in fact just the fact that people were being forced to stay in them for long periods at night, every night, was beyond what they were initially designed for. Most of the shelters in London and around Britain were designed for short periods of sheltering from bombing raids, generally during the day. The theory was that there would be air raid warnings, people could stay in the shelter for maybe a few hours, then go about their day. But the night bombing raids were different because they could occur over a period of several hours, every night, and most of the shelters did not have any kind of sleeping accommodations or even toilet facilities. For the people who had built personal bomb shelters, the somewhat infamous Anderson shelters that were built in large numbers, the situation was even worse because they were small, cramped, and often very damp. The end result was that a lot of people chose to take shelter in one of two ways . The first was was simply to stay in their homes. For many people especially as the bombing raids every night became almost routine, staying in their home seemed like simply the best option. It helped people get rest, which was critical for those who were still having to work during the day, this desire and need for sleep only grew as the days and nights drug on. But there was also just the emotional comfort of being in their own home, around their own things, in their own space. There was also some amount of fatalism that would creep in, with the complete randomness of the bombing fostering a since of if not helplessness than acceptance that death could come at any time during a raid and the acceptance of that was the best path forward. The other path that some individuals took was to shelter not in dedicated shelters, but instead the London tube stations.

The use of London Tube stations as bomb shelters is a topic that has become a very famous and well known part of the Blitz story. But at the time it was a very divisive topic. On one hand if you just think about what a London tube, or subway, station is it sounds like a perfect bomb shelter. They are underground structures with easy, but constricted, public access which were built out of large amount of concrete. Some of them were quite far underground due to London geography. Inside of the stations there were often wide stretches of flat floors designed for people to easy walk over. It was clear to everyone why they might be used as shelters during bombing raids, and it was because of this that the British government firmly rejected them for that purpose. The official policy was that they should not, and could not be used as shelters, first because there were concerns that civilians would refuse to leave them during the day . But more importantly because people using them for that reason would prevent people from using them for their intended purpose as a critical part of the London transportation network. There were fears that this would be too disrupted to business, and also military, processes in London and so during the initial bombing of London there were guards posted at Tube station entrances to deny entry to people during raids. Some people got around this by buying a ticket and then just not boarding a train, but efforts were also made to prevent this from happening. However, as the bombing continued and as public pressure continued to mount the official policies were forced to change, at some point it would become a serious public morale issue. And so the policies were changed and the stations were opened as shelters every night. Initially there was a bit of chaos in the stations and people just sort of packed themselves in and then tried to find ways to get some sleep while staying in the station all night. But eventually each station would begin to self manage, with committees established among the people who stayed in them to try and organize how people used them and also to ensure that everyone was doing their part to keep them workable. This included building out bunks, organizing sleeping areas, even opening canteens for people to use. These committees then even worked with similar committees in other tube stations to share ideas and information for the use of all, with around 30 stations even setting up a Tube Shelters Conference in December. This type of grass roots organization, in my mind, is one of the most encouraging parts of this period, of people coming together and working together for the betterment of all. There was some concern among the government though, as there were reports that these committees with one Home Intelligence report saying “people sleeping in shelters are more and more tending to form committees among themselves, often communist in character, to look after their own interests and to arrange dances and entertainments”. As far as I have found there is not actual evidence that there was any threats of some kind of Communist revolution coming from these committees, nothing of the sort. The closest type of action was a peaceful sit in demonstration that was led by a known Communist Phil Piratin at an underground shelter at the Savoy Hotel. However, Piratin’s sit in was mostly just in protest of the fact that the shelter at the Savoy was much better equipped and provisioned than other shelters, and it was reserved for only higher class individuals. The protest was not against the government, but instead the classist structure that still pervaded in London. And the fact that these fears would be present in reports is a great example of how wildly anti-communist the British government was at this point, but what it did do was prompt the government into action. By the end of the year they were providing both equipment and were doing work to enhance the facilities in many tube stations. This included providing food for people who were sheltering, replacing some of the need for the committees. But for many of the committees this was seen as a great victory, not as some sort of failure in their efforts, as one of their key goals was to prompt the government into action. Although oddly enough, the government had waited so long that they only took action after the period of greatest need had passed. This was because the usage of Tube stations as shelters peaked during the time where London was being bombed every night, for those 57 nights, and it would begin to drop when bombing raids became less frequent. This meant that by the time that the government’s actions were beginning to have an effect, most people had stopped using them. While the story of the Tube stations and their use as shelters is important, it is worth noting that most people did not shelter in the Tube stations, or really any public shelters. And the number of people who used them was quite small relative to the number of people who simply stayed in their homes and hoped for the best.

The Tube Stations, and their interaction with the Blitz, was an experience that was unique to London, but the Blitz occurred in many areas of Britain during late 1940 and early 1941. In fact, of the people killed or seriously injured by German bombing after November 1940 most of them would be outside of London. The general structure of these raids was for the Luftwaffe to attack a specific city or set of targets over multiple successive nights. The idea being that this would cause enough damage to cause lasting damage to the targets. However, this often proved to be inadequate and in most cases the areas targeted by the Luftwaffe would be back mostly to normal within a week. This was a testament to the resiliency of the local populations, but also to the inadequacy of the resources that the Luftwaffe had available to bring to bear on their targets. But this did not mean that individuals did not suffer serious damages, in many areas around Britain. This would eventually force the government to act, and while initially the policy of the British government was that if personal property was damaged the cost of those damages was to be handled by the individual this policy would shift greatly after the bombing of late 1940 and early 1941. A series of government bills and acts would be put in place often under the title of War Damages, which eventually set of a system of government sponsored insurance where individual property owners would pay some amount of tax on their property and then they could make damage claims on that property. The goal of this structure was to spread out the cost of the damage among all of society, with the government guaranteeing that they would make up for any shortfall between the money taken in and dispersed through the insurance process. This was greatly antithetical to the economic ideas of pre-war Britain, which was a highly individualistic society, but was essentially forced on the government by the scale of the destruction that the Luftwaffe inflicted upon average every day members of British society. It is a great example of how in times of great disaster, individualist policies are hard to sustain, when the destruction and damages are so random and disastrous. Eventually the War Damage Commission would handle 4 million claims and pay out more than 1.3 billion pounds of money to property owners.

Given the overall discussions form this entire series of the podcast you may have noticed that, up until this point in the episode I have not mentioned Fighter Command a single time in relation to the German night bombing. This is for a reason, during the pre-war years almost all of the time, money, and effort of Fighter Command was put into building up the ability to counter German daytime raids. They had not put the same amount of effort into building out the ability to intercept night time German raids. There were two basic problems that Fighter Command did not have the ability to solve in the summer of 1940 that they would have to solve if they wanted to successfully meet and deter the German raids. The first was the ability to track raids after the crossed the coast. The Chain Home system was designed and structured to track German raids over the channel and the North Sea. They did not have the capability of tracking raids after they were over land which was not a huge problem during the day because a series of watchers on the ground could track progress, and the aircraft themselves had the ability to search when they were in the air. These same abilities were not available in the darkness. Watchers on the ground could not see the German raids, and fighters did not have any ability to visually search for enemy aircraft once they were in the air. The second major problem was that the fighters themselves were basically useless at night. Aerial combat was a confusing mess of chaos even at the best of times, and at night it was almost impossible for any pilot to get into position to attack an enemy aircraft without the ability to see where they were. It was generally accepted that for a successful interception at tnight, the fighter had to be within about 250 meters of the target, which was just not within the range of possibilities from radar on the ground. It was difficult enough to get them within the 25 kilometers that was considered reasonable for daylight interception. The solution to this was known in the form of aerial radar, but this was not something that could be easily just thrown onto a fighter due to the size and weight requirements that such a system brought with it. The basic concept of aerial interception radar was understood, and in fact the first successful aerial interceptions using the radar would occur during late July 1940. Flying Officer Glyn Ashfield would be a part of the crew of a Blenheim that was equipped with such a radar and would make an interception during this time. It was somewhat remarkable with what it allowed the pilots to do, which was essentially get into position to engage without even being able to see the enemy. “We flew full throttle while inside own AI range and at about 400/500 [yards] I opened fire. As I could not see my fore-sight I closed with continuous fire and by the huge firework display which resulted from bullets making contact, I knew the aim to be OK. I continued to fire until, with the E/A looking the size of a house, it gave a lurch to starboard and nose fell. I attempted to follow it until while firing, when the whole of the cabin perspex was covered with oil from the E/A. In the next few seconds we were on our back and recovery was not made until 700 feet, by which time we had lost contact with the enemy.”. Unfortunately, research on this successful interception seems to show that they actually shot down a Blenheim which was returning from a night raid on the continent rather than the expected Dornier 17. Which at the same time displayed the effectiveness of the radar and the challenges that still had to be overcome. The problem for the RAF was one of volume though, there simply were never enough night fighters equipped with radars during the months of the Blitz, and really it would not be until the Beaufighter entered service in larger numbers during mid 1941 that the night time aerial interception problem was solved, just in time for the Luftwaffe to de-emphasize night time bombing raids of Britain in favor of activities in the East.

If fighters were not really an option for the British, the obvious second answer would be ground based anti-aircraft fire, but in this area there were also issues. The core issue for the British anti-aircraft guns throughout the entirety of the battle of Britain was simply that there were not enough of them. This was true during the daylight raids of London, and the sheer lack of volume of fire would hinder their ability to have an impact on the fighting during the day. When asked to fire at German bombers at night, there were additional problems to deal with that were not easy to find an answer for. The most important problem was that a major part of the targeting for anti-aircraft fire was through the use of sound. This was a more tried and true system, at a time when it was not possible to direct the guns via radar. Sound of course worked great at night, but only if the German bombers were in closely packed groups so that all of their sound came from one location. That was not how the night time raids were structured, and instead they were structured so that bombers would fly in loose formation and would strung out over a wide distance. This actually increased the impact of the German bombers because it kept the raid happening for longer, which kept the sirens on, which kept people in sheltering and kept people awake. It also made it almost impossible to use sound based targeting because the sound was coming from too many different sources. Large search lights could be used to try and pinpoint specific aircraft, but this also required a certain number to always be active because not every searchlight would find a bomber, and of course there were never enough searchlights. Without the ability to find the exact position of bombers and to properly aim the antiaircraft guns one option was to conserve ammunition due to the difficulty of hitting anything. But there were concerns that if the guns did not fire at all, civilian morale would drop because they would believe that they were not be protected. And so the opposite approach was taken, and instead of not firing the antiaircraft guns would simply be told to shoot even more. This was great for civilian morale, there was so much antiaircraft fire! But for the most part, due to its lack of effectiveness, it was really just a fireworks display . The anti-aircraft guns did hit German bombers, they were not worthless, in August for example they had destroyed 16 German bombers during night raids, but they did not necessarily make up for the resources they were spending in their large firing displays.

At times it was difficult for the British to determine what exactly the Germans were even trying to hit during their bombing raids, with hindsight allowing us to know that many of the raids were actually targeted on what could be considered valid targets, like dock facilities or factories. However, they were at times so inaccurate that the British had no idea what they actually trying to accomplish. For example one raid, that we know was trying to hit the dock facilities in Liverpool, had bombs dropping within a 65 kilometer area. This made it impossible to even determine what the epicenter was. On the German side, it was also difficult for some Luftwaffe leaders to determine what they were trying to do, with one Luftwaffe officer writing later in the war that in retrospect: “The bombing of Britain in 40/41 consisted neither of a policy nor a programme, although its basis consisted of plans and intentions of both a strategical and tactical nature”. There were moments where it was clear that German focus was shifting, with one of the more famous being the shift to a focus on bombing Coventry in mid November. This shift would be the start of 31 major night time raids of various industrial cities around Britain. These raids, of all types would continue to kill people, would continue to destroy some buildings and infrastructure, but the Luftwaffe was never able to mount the kind of continuous and concentrated campaign that would have a lasting impact.

The Blitz would drag on for months, into the spring of 1941, the death and destruction would continue, the slow steady attrition of Luftwaffe bombers would continue. But the Luftwaffe’s goals would never get closer to completion. Sure, they would kill 40,000 people, injure probably around twice that number, destroy millions of homes and other buildings. There would be many hours of lost sleep, there would be countless sleepless nights. But the goal of the Blitz, to break the spirit of Britain, would not only not be achieved, in some way the opposite would occur and the damage caused would only unite the British population to even greater support for final victory. The Blitz spirit of late 1940 and early 1941, the ability of everyday British people to just sort of soldier on would become legendary, a lasting legacy of not just the Battle of Britain but also the entirety of the Second World War. It gets called back to from time to time even in modern Britain, although at this point it has shifted into the mythical past of a nation that had changed greatly over the last 80 years. The Blitz would also be the final stage of the Battle of Britain, and so next episode we will close up the series by looking at numbers, results, and what both the British and the Germans planned to do next.