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The Blitz was a German bombing campaign against the United Kingdom, in 1940 and 1941, during the Second World War. The term was first used by the British press and originated from the term Blitzkrieg, the German word meaning 'lightning war'. [4]
- Overview
- The Battle of Britain
- Preparation
- The raids
- Response
- Seeking shelter
- Impact and legacy
the Blitz, (September 7, 1940–May 11, 1941), intense bombing campaign undertaken by Nazi Germany against the United Kingdom during World War II. For eight months the Luftwaffe dropped bombs on London and other strategic cities across Britain. The attacks were authorized by Germany’s chancellor, Adolf Hitler, after the British carried out a nighttim...
The British government had anticipated air attacks on its population centres, and it had predicted catastrophic casualties. A Luftwaffe terror bombing attack on the Spanish city of Guernica (April 26, 1937) during the Spanish Civil War had killed hundreds of civilians and destroyed much of the town. On September 1, 1939, the day World War II began with Germany’s invasion of Poland, the British government implemented a massive evacuation plan. Over the course of three days, some 1.5 million civilians—the overwhelming majority of them children—were transported from urban centres to rural areas that were believed to be safe. The mass relocation, called Operation Pied Piper, was the largest internal migration in British history.
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Authorities quickly implemented plans to protect Londoners from bombs and to house those left homeless by the attacks. The national government also provided funds to local municipalities to construct public air-raid shelters. The Air Raid Precautions (A.R.P.) department distributed more than two million Anderson shelters (named after Sir John Anderson, head of the A.R.P.) to households. These shelters, made of corrugated steel, were designed to be dug into a garden and then covered with dirt. While Anderson shelters offered good protection from bomb fragments and debris, they were cold and damp and generally ill-suited for prolonged occupancy. Because basements, a logical destination in the event of an air raid, were a relative rarity in Britain, the A.R.P. devised the Morrison shelter (named for Home Secretary Herbert Stanley Morrison) as an alternative to the Anderson shelter. This type of shelter—essentially a low steel cage large enough to contain two adults and two small children—was designed to be set up indoors and could serve as a refuge if the building began to collapse.
The Blitz began at about 4:00 in the afternoon on September 7, 1940, when German planes appeared over London. For two hours, 348 German bombers and 617 fighters targeted the city, dropping high-explosive bombs as well as incendiary devices. Later, guided by the raging fires caused by the first attack, a second group of planes began another assault that lasted until 4:30 the following morning. In just these few hours, 430 people were killed and 1,600 were badly injured. The first day of the Blitz is remembered as Black Saturday.
Beginning on Black Saturday, London was attacked on 57 straight nights. Between Black Saturday and December 2, there was no 24-hour period without at least one “alert”—as the alarms came to be called—and generally far more. Nine were registered on three separate occasions, and from the start of the Blitz until November 30 there were more than 350 alerts. The nights of November 3 and 28 were the only occasions during this period in which London’s peace was unbroken by siren or bomb. After the first week of September, although night bombing on a large scale continued, the large mass attacks by day, which had proved so costly to the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain, were replaced by smaller parties coming over in successive waves. On occasion, forces consisting of as many as 300 to 400 aircraft would cross the coast by day and split into small groups, and a few planes would succeed in penetrating London’s outer defenses.
The A.R.P. sprang into action, and Londoners, while maintaining the work, business, and efficiency of their city, displayed remarkable fortitude. During the whole period, although the city’s operation was disrupted in ways that were sometimes serious, no essential service was more than temporarily impaired. No significant cut was made in necessary social services, and public and private premises, except when irreparably damaged, were repaired as speedily as possible. In many cases the daily life of the city was able to resume with delays of only hours.
The raids on London primarily targeted the Docklands area of the East End. This hub of industry and trade represented a legitimate military target for the Germans, and some 25,000 bombs were dropped on the Port of London alone. However, the Docklands was also a densely populated and impoverished area where thousands of working-class Londoners lived in run-down housing. The raids hurt Britain’s war production, but they also killed many civilians and left many others homeless. A charitable relief fund for the people of London was opened September 10. Contributions poured in from every part of the world in such profusion that on October 28 its scope was extended to cover the whole of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. By the middle of December it had reached nearly £1,700,000 (adjusted for inflation, this was the equivalent of roughly £100 million in 2020).
A modern bomb census has attempted to pinpoint the location of every bomb dropped on London during the Blitz, and the visualization of that data makes clear how thoroughly the Luftwaffe saturated the city. Air-raid damage was widespread; hospitals, clubs, churches, museums, residential and shopping streets, hotels, public houses, theatres, schools, monuments, newspaper offices, embassies, and the London Zoo were bombed. While some of the poorer and more crowded suburban areas suffered severely, the mansions of Mayfair, the luxury flats of Kensington, and Buckingham Palace itself—which was bombed four separate times—fared little better. Although casualties were heavy, at no time did they approach the estimates that had been made before the war, and only a fraction of the available hospital and ambulance capacity was ever utilized.
Author Lawrence H. Dawson detailed the damage to London’s historic buildings for the 1941 Britannica Book of the Year:
When the Blitz began, the government enforced a blackout in an attempt to make targeting more difficult for German night bombers. Streetlights, car headlights, and illuminated signs were kept off. People hung black curtains in their windows so that no lights showed outside their houses. When a bombing raid was imminent, air-raid sirens were set off to sound a warning. At the beginning of the Blitz, British “ack ack” gunners struggled to inflict meaningful damage on German bombers, but later developments in radar guidance greatly improved the effectiveness of both antiaircraft artillery and searchlights.
Another defensive measure employed by the British was barrage balloons—large oval-shaped unmanned balloons with stabilizing tail fins—installed in and around major target areas. These balloons, the largest of which were some 60 feet (18 metres) long, were essentially an airspace denial tool. They prevented low-flying aircraft from approaching their targets at optimal altitudes and angles of attack. The higher the German planes had to fly to avoid the balloons, the less accurate they were when dropping their bombs. While the balloons themselves were an obvious deterrent, they were anchored to the ground by steel tethers that were strong enough to damage or destroy any aircraft that flew into them. Over 100 German planes made contact with barrage balloon cables during the Blitz, and two-thirds of them crashed or made forced landings on British soil.
The initial human cost of the Blitz was lower than the government had expected, but the level of destruction exceeded the government’s dire predictions. Very early in the German bombing campaign, it became clear that the preparations—however extensive they seemed to have been—were inadequate. Many of the surface shelters built by local authorities were flimsy and provided little protection from bombs, falling debris, and fire. In addition, there simply was not enough space for everyone who needed shelter in one of the largest and most densely populated cities in the world. In a survey of shelter use, it was found that, although the public shelters were fully occupied every night, just 9 percent of Londoners made use of them. Some 27 percent of Londoners utilized private shelters, such as Anderson shelters, while the remaining 64 percent spent their evenings on duty with some branch of the civil defense or remained in their own homes.
In the first days of the Blitz, a tragic incident in the East End stoked public anger over the government’s shelter policy. After the bombing began on September 7, local authorities urged displaced people to take shelter at South Hallsville School. Those who sought refuge at the school were told that they would quickly be relocated to a safer area, but the evacuation was delayed. On September 10, 1940, the school was flattened by a German bomb, and people huddled in the basement were killed or trapped in the rubble. The government announced that 77 people had died, but for years local residents insisted the toll was much higher. Revised estimates made decades later indicated that close to 600 men, women, and children had been killed in the bombing. It is believed that the wartime government covered up the death toll because of concern over the effect it would have had on public morale.
The South Hallsville School disaster prompted Londoners, especially residents of the East End, to find safer shelters, on their own if necessary. Days later a group of East Enders occupied the shelter at the upscale Savoy Hotel, and many others began to take refuge in the city’s underground railway, or Tube, stations. This option had been forbidden by city officials, who feared that once people began sleeping in Underground stations, they would be reluctant to return to the surface and resume daily life. As more and more people began sleeping on the platforms, however, the government relented and provided bunk beds and bathrooms for the underground communities. The use of the Tube system as a shelter saved thousands of lives, and images of Londoners huddled in Underground stations would become an indelible image of British life during World War II.
Dissatisfaction with public shelters also led to another notable development in the East End—Mickey’s Shelter. After his optician business was destroyed by a bomb, Mickey Davies led an effort to organize the Spitalfield Shelter. As many as 5,000 people had packed into this network of underground tunnels, which was dangerously overcrowded, dirty, and dark. Guided by Davies, the people of the shelter created an ad hoc government and established a set of rules. Davies also set up medical stations and persuaded off-duty medical personnel to treat the sick and wounded. The success of Mickey’s Shelter was another factor that urged the government to improve existing “deep shelters” and to create new ones.
The Blitz was devastating for the people of London and other cities. In the eight months of attacks, some 43,000 civilians were killed. This amounted to nearly half of Britain’s total civilian deaths for the whole war. One of every six Londoners was made homeless at some point during the Blitz, and at least 1.1 million houses and flats were damaged or destroyed. Nevertheless, for all the hardship it caused, the campaign proved to be a strategic mistake by the Germans. Hitler’s intention had been to break the morale of the British people so they would pressure their government to surrender. Morale did suffer amid the death and devastation, but there were few calls for surrender. The phrase “Business as usual,” written in chalk on boarded-up shop windows, exemplified the British determination to “keep calm and carry on” as best they could.
From a purely military perspective, the Blitz was entirely counterproductive to the main purpose of Germany’s air offensive—to dominate the skies in advance of an invasion of England. By mid-September 1940 the RAF had won the Battle of Britain, and the invasion was postponed indefinitely. Air power alone had failed to knock the United Kingdom out of the war. On May 11, 1941, Hitler called off the Blitz as he shifted his forces eastward against the Soviet Union.
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Learn about the sustained campaign of aerial bombing attacks on British towns and cities by the Luftwaffe from September 1940 to May 1941. See how the Blitz affected London, Coventry, Birmingham, Bristol, Southampton, Sheffield, Liverpool, Manchester and Cardiff.
- St Dunstan’s Church, London. Where the first bombs fell. Long before the Second World War began the British authorities were deeply concerned about the possibility of air raids in a future conflict.
- Chislehurst Caves, Kent. Where people hid from the bombers. This ancient cave complex has been gradually dug out of the rock over the course of several thousand years.
- Bethnal Green Tube Station, London. Where a tragedy of the Blitz occurred. One obvious place to shelter from the Blitz was London’s underground network, deep below the city.
- Coventry Cathedral, Coventry. Where a city was wrecked. Two months into the Blitz, the German bombers began to target Britain’s other industrial cities in earnest.
The Blitz as it became known in the British press was a sustained aerial attack, sending waves of bombs raining down onto British towns and cities. The attacks were carried out by the Luftwaffe and made up a larger campaign of attempting to destroy British infrastructure, cause devastation, destruction and lower morale.
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