London in WWII: The Horror of the London Blitz

“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender,” famously declared British Prime Minister Winston Churchill to the House of Commons on June 4, 1940. At the time of his speech, the Royal Navy had miraculously managed to evacuate the British forces trapped in Dunkirk by the Germans, boosting morale on the home front. Churchill, however, warned the civilian population of the peril that lay ahead. The Prime Minister’s prediction became true in September when the Luftwaffe began targeting British cities, especially the capital. Indeed, London in WWII suffered extensive damage. Thousands of its residents died and lost their homes while trying to “carry on.”

On September 30, 1938, a jubilant crowd greeted British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain at London’s Heston Aerodrome. Stepping out of the plane, Chamberlain waved a paper containing the nonaggression pact signed by Adolf Hitler and himself. Later, speaking by a window of the residence in Downing Street, the prime minister proudly claimed: “This is the second time in our history that there has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time.”

The statement was a welcome relief for the Londoners gathered outside the building. In the summer of the same year, Hitler had demanded the annexation of the Sudetenland (a Czechoslovakian region with more than 3 million ethnic Germans) to the Third Reich. As tensions over the issue developed into a full-blown crisis, Europe seemed to be on the brink of war. In London, people queued to receive gas masks while workers placed sandbags to protect buildings from air raids. Then, in September 1938, the Munich Agreement warded off the outbreak of a conflict, recognizing Nazi Germany’s claims on the Sudetenland.

However, in March 1939, Adolf Hitler, in blatant disregard of the terms signed in Munich, ordered the invasion of the rest of the Czechoslovakian territory. In September, Nazi Germany entered Poland, an aggression that marked the beginning of World War II. On September 3, Neville Chamberlain announced that Great Britain was “at war with Germany.” Shortly after his speech, Londoners heard the piercing sound of the air raid sirens for the first time since the end of World War I. As people rushed to see the arrival of enemy bombers, however, it soon became clear that it was a false alarm. Indeed, the first bombs fell on London only in September of the following year.

By the time Britain entered the conflict, the government had implemented several measures to protect the civilian population against attacks. The Air Raid Precautions, or ARP, recruited wardens to distribute gas masks and shelters. On September 1, the government also launched Operation Pied Piper to evacuate civilians, especially children, to rural areas. Despite the increasingly evident signs that the country was preparing for war, the situation overseas did not affect Londoners in the early months of the conflict.

On the contrary, during this period, known as the Phoney War, many residents of the English capital usually avoided talking about the war. As the anticipated air raids failed to happen, several Londoners stopped carrying their mandatory gas masks with them. Between October and December 1939, theaters were gradually allowed to reopen their doors. Ninotchka, an American comedy starring Greta Garbo, drew numerous Londoners to the cinema. Sport enthusiasts enjoyed the soccer league organized by London clubs, and animal racing. Some people who had previously opted to leave the city returned to their homes.

On September 7, 1940, the deceptive calm of the Phoney War ended. In the afternoon, around 350 bombers and more than 600 Luftwaffe fighters flew over London, dropping tons of explosives and incendiary devices. “The effect was catastrophic, large areas were blown apart and surrounded by a wall of fire,” recalled Ken Long in a retrospective account. Later in the evening, another group of German pilots returned to the capital. “The attack lasted 8 hours while people crouched in terror in shelters whilst an aerial pounding descended all night, the likes of which had never before been experienced,” wrote Long. During the first raid, commonly known as Black Saturday, more than 400 Londoners died. Many lost their homes.

The first series of attacks lasted 57 consecutive nights. The Luftwaffe mainly targeted the Docklands in the East End, hoping to hinder Britain’s industrial and military production. As the air raids continued, other areas were also affected. On December 29, 1940, for example, the bombers hit the City of London, the financial district of the capital. In the night, bombs and mines dropped from the planes burned buildings and tram lines. More than 160 civilians lost their lives. The raid, dubbed the Second Great Fire of London, also damaged St. Paul’s Cathedral. However, the famous landmark miraculously survived. “The smoke parted like the curtain of a theatre and there before me was this wonderful vista, more like a dream,” described Daily Mail photographer Herbert Mason.

The bombing campaign, commonly known as the Blitz (after the German word Blitzkrieg, or “lightning war”), drastically changed the urban landscape of the British capital. Landmarks such as the Tower of London and Westminster suffered extensive damage. Some residential areas almost disappeared from the map. The government tried to protect London by implementing several defensive measures, including blackouts and barrage balloons, oval-shaped airships fixed to the grounds by large steel cables designed to prevent the Luftwaffe from flying directly above chosen targets.

As soon as the first bombs reached London, the city’s residents sought refuge from the seemingly endless raids in shelters. Before the war, the British government distributed millions of the so-called Anderson shelters (named after Sir John Anderson, head of the Ministry of Home Security), constructions made of corrugated metal sheets that people could bury in their gardens. Londoners who did not have a backyard used public shelters. Many civilians, however, disliked this kind of communal protection. “Our shelter was made of brick and housed a lot of people so it had a nasty smell,” recalled an East End resident, “it was very crowded and damp, and the toilet had sacking draped round it.”

Huddled together in tight spaces, Londoners constantly feared losing their loved ones and their homes during the endless night raids. “You’d see a house sliced in half as though cut with a knife, upstairs the floor would jut out in mid air still with the bed and mattress and a wardrobe etc, and the curtains flapping away,” Ken Long later wrote. Some people were reluctant to take refuge in the communal shelters after the sirens signaled the beginning of a raid, electing to remain in their houses. “There were some ferocious air raids and Grandfather would not join us, but would stand on the doorstep in his bare feet,” remembered an East Londoner. “And later, as we got used to it and the raids decreased, we all felt a bit easier in our own beds at home,” added the London resident.

Londoners’ dislike for public shelters largely stemmed from the fact that the flimsy constructions, often built above the ground, failed to protect them against bombs and incendiary devices. As a result, people started to look for more adequate places. Following a custom developed during the 1917/1918 bombing, many city residents began using underground railway stations to escape the death and destruction. Initially, officials opposed the habit, fearing it may lead to a “deep shelter mentality.”

However, as Londoners did not stop seeking refuge in the Tube (the common British term for the Underground), the government relented, equipping many stations with bunk beds and facilities. As the Blitz continued, people living in the tunnels created their own communities and rules. After the conflict, images of residents sleeping in the Tube stations became a powerful symbol of wartime London. British artist Henry Moore recorded the underground shelterers in a series of powerful drawings, where the rows of sleeping people, eerily similar to mummified corpses, embodied human fragility in the face of violence.

At the beginning of the 21st century, the owners of Barter Books, a bookshop in Alnwick, found a wartime propaganda poster in a box of secondhand volumes. On a red background, the slogan, written in white letters, read “Keep Calm and Carry On.” The placard dated back to 1939, when the Minister of Information (MOI) commissioned a series of posters to bolster morale on the home front. “Your courage, your cheerfulness, your resolution will bring us to victory,” recited another poster displayed almost everywhere in London during the Blitz. The wartime government, however, opposed the Keep Calm version, stating that “it seems to doubt the steadiness of [people’s] nerves.” As a result, the MOI halted the production of the posters.

After its discovery, the wartime placard gained enormous popularity. Today, its slogan appears on tea mugs, t-shirts, and towels. Most importantly, the catchphrase “Keep Calm and Carry On” embodies the so-called Blitz Spirit, a term coined to evoke people’s resilience and cheerfulness in the face of death and calamity. “Business as usual,” wrote shop owners on panels covering their damaged buildings. In London, working men and women picked their way through the rubble to reach their place of work.

Londoners who survived the Blitz often referred to this attitude in the stories and accounts of the war. “I was amazed as I talked to people who had lived in the East End through those hard, often terrifying times,” wrote Gilda O’Neill in Our Streets, “by how many of them managed to make their experience sound like little more than just a bit of a laugh, or perhaps a bothersome inconvenience.” Ken Long also emphasized the fortitude of Londoners during the bombings. “I do feel that during the war years the British People were at their best as never before or since,” he wrote in his account for the BBC. “It was indeed their finest hour,” he added, quoting a famous speech by Winston Churchill. “I remember the matter-of-fact way we got on with things, the sense of humour,” recalled an East End resident interviewed by O’Neill.

More recently, scholars have challenged the rhetoric behind the Blitz Spirit narrative, emphasizing that men and women went on with their daily lives because they had no alternatives but to adapt to the new situation. In this sense, the phlegmatic attitude of many Londoners “sprang from a pragmatic acceptance of the fact that there were things to be done … and that everyday life had to be lived despite the extraordinary circumstances.”

“Bombs show no class distinction,” declared an article in the Daily Mail on September 11, 1940. While the air raids affected the whole city, the poorest areas suffered more destruction than the more upscale boroughs such as Mayfair and Kensington. The East End, where working-class families lived in poorly constructed houses near the docks, was especially targeted during the Blitz. While wealthy Londoners left the city before the first bombings, evacuating to the countryside, residents from lower classes often became homeless when the bombs destroyed their only homes. “Beside us was a large gaping hole,” recalled Grace Foakes in her memoir, “everything we had possessed had gone into that hole.”

In particular, Grace Foakes, who lived in Hornchurch, a borough in East London, remembered her dismay at the loss of her “precious spinach.” As London suffered from several food shortages, home-grown vegetables were precious resources for many families. During the Blitz, the government even launched the campaign “Dig for Victory,” inviting people to repurpose backyards and other green areas as vegetable gardens. In 1940, as the bombings reduced the amount of imported goods, the authorities started rationing food.

While working-class Londoners struggled to find adequate shelters, the city elite flooded the basements of upscale hotels, where blackout balls and pink gin entertained the wealthy guests. On September 15, 1940, a group of East Enders, angered by the class inequality, burst into the Savoy, demanding access to its shelter, a luxurious dormitory with air conditioning which was also “equipped with its own maids and valets and waiters, with a room for coffee and a small bar one floor up.”

Between May 10 and 11, 1941, Londoners witnessed their last and most destructive raid. On the night of a full moon, more than 500 Luftwaffe airplanes targeted the city, dropping around 700 tons of explosives. On that night, about 1,500 died. More than one thousand lost their homes. Then, in the following months, the attacks decreased as Adolf Hitler turned his attention toward the eastern front with the launch of Operation Barbarossa.

As the Allied forces started to advance on all fronts, Londoners enjoyed a respite from raids. However, in the summer of 1944, shortly after D-Day, they heard a new unwelcome sound. “I will never forget that noise,” declared Ken Long. It was the sign of an approaching V1, also known as Vergeltungswaffe (Vengeance Weapon), a newly designed pilotless flying bomb. In the following months, the V1s, dubbed “doodlebugs,” terrorized Londoners. Toward the end of 1944, Nazi Germany introduced another weapon which caused massive damage in London and other British cities. Known as V2, the new ballistic missile was harder to detect.

With the advance of the Allies through continental Europe, the Germans were finally unable to use the launching sites for their Vengeance Weapons. By that time, around 43,000 people had died during the air attacks. More than 1 million residents had lost their homes. Exhausted by years of bombings and privations, thousands of Londoners flooded onto the city’s streets on May 8, 1945, commonly known as Victory in Europe Day.

“This is your victory,” declared Winston Churchill from the balcony of the Ministry of Health in Whitehall. “No, it is yours,” responded the thousand people gathered below. “Neither the long years, nor the dangers, nor the fierce attacks of the enemy, have in any way weakened the unbending resolve of the British nation,” continued the Prime Minister in his short speech. “You had to be there to really understand how it was. It was just the happiest day I can remember ever,” recalled Ken Long.