The Blitz: The British Under Attack

The Columbia Road bomb had been a particularly tragic introduction to the events of the next few months. In what the Daily Herald journalist Ritchie Calder called ‘a million to one chance’, a bomb had crashed directly through a ventilation shaft measuring only three feet by one foot, below which lay a shelter containing more than a thousand people.

Mothers were killed outright before they had a chance to protect their children. Babies were swept from perambulators. Three or four support pillars were torn down and about 50 people lay in stunned heaps … Perambulators and corrugated iron lay entangled at the scene.

… Although explosions could be heard in all directions and the scene was illuminated by the glow of the East End fires, civil defence workers laboured fearlessly and feverishly among the debris, seeking the wounded, carrying them to safe places, tending their injuries.

Nine doctors answered an S.O.S. and saved lives by improvising tourniquets. They dressed wounds by the dim glow of torches. In one family three children were killed. Their parents escaped. One man, when the smoke and noise had died down, searched for his wife, found her lying on the ground and turned her over. She was dead.

However, as Ismay noted of ‘the big crowd, male and female, young and old, all seemingly very poor[, while] one might have expected them to be resentful against the authorities responsible for their protection … They stormed [Churchill] as he got out of the car with cries of “It was good of you to come Winnie. We thought you’d come. We can take it. Give it back.” ‘Or so Ismay remembered. ‘It was a very moving scene. You broke down completely and I nearly did, as I was trying to get you through the press of bodies, I heard an old woman say, “You see, he really cares, he’s crying …” Later we found many pathetic little Union Jacks flying on piles of masonry that had once been the homes of poor people.’

The point of the visit was to boost morale and show the nation that its leader was sympathetic to the East Enders’ ordeal, and Churchill was snapped by press photographers as he bounded tirelessly from one bomb site to the next. But the Ministry of Information, anxious that no information on the effects of the raids should be seen by German Intelligence, scratched anything from the negatives that might indicate the location and the full extent of the damage before a select few photographs of the prime ministerial tour appeared in the press.

It was getting dark when Churchill set off back to Downing Street, although the flames of the previous night’s fires still illuminated the sky. The Prime Minister’s car ‘had a long job getting through the narrow streets, many of which were blocked by houses having been blown across them’. While the East End had taken the main impact of the bombs, some had fallen elsewhere – near Victoria station, along the banks of the Thames from Vauxhall Bridge to Putney Bridge (Battersea Power Station was put out of action), and in parts of west London. The seat of government was bound to be a target, although Churchill was extremely reluctant to leave his official London home (he had been obliged to shut his family’s country house, Chartwell in Kent, during the Battle of Britain that summer). But 10 Downing Street was no longer regarded as a safe haven for Britain’s inspirational wartime leader, even though, in a flurry of works that had necessitated Churchill moving for a few nights to the Carlton Hotel in nearby Belgravia, a shelter had been built in the garden, and a dining room and sitting room set up in the basement, which Jock Colville thought resembled ‘third-class accommodation on a Channel steamer’. The question of where to keep Britain’s principal wartime asset led to a tussle that would continue between the obstinate Prime Minister and his staff and advisers throughout the early days of the blitz.

That Sunday, the second night of the blitz, bombs fell again on the docks, reigniting fires that were still smouldering, starting new ones, and stretching the line of fire and destruction along the banks of the Thames: soon twelve conflagrations were lighting up the sky, and testing the resources of the fire services to their limit once again. The two hundred German planes pounded the City too. Every railway line out of London to the south was put out of action, and factories and offices were destroyed, as were more homes. Four hundred and twelve Londoners were killed that night, and 747 seriously injured.

Gerry Knight, who had memorably thought ‘the whole bloody world’s on fire’ the previous night, was on duty again at Pageant’s Wharf fire station when the bombs started to drop. One fell on the station killing Knight and a colleague, Auxiliary Fireman Dick Martin. All that could be found to identify the forty-four-year-old Knight were his standard issue thigh-high fireman’s boots.

When the photographer Bert Hardy visited the East End two days later, ‘he said it was like the end of the world’, reported Alan Hutt. ‘Whole streets down and gone. East End soldiers deserting to rush home and frantically try to find their folks … A man and a woman sitting on a pile of wreckage staring listlessly in front of them without speech … Revolting stories of official red tape in dealing with refugees and bereaved survivors … climaxing in the hideous affair of the refugees bunged into one East End School on Saturday night to be all bombed to death on Sunday [sic].’

This ‘hideous affair’ made unbearably raw all the fears and many of the tensions of the blitz just a day after it started. A rest centre had been established at South Hallsville School in Agate Street, Canning Town, and it was there that six hundred men, women and children had been led on Saturday night after it had been decided to evacuate the local area. The refugees were in a state of acute shock. Most had lost their homes; for some, members of their family had been killed or wounded, or were missing; they had few if any possessions; their clothes were torn and dirty, their faces blackened by smoke and soot, often caked with blood, their feet burned and lacerated. They clung to each other, terrified, confused, some hysterical, others racked with uncontrollable anger, others traumatised and unable to speak. Rest centre staff, hopelessly unprepared for such a sudden influx, themselves shocked and anxious, bustled around offering cups of tea – that ubiquitous British panacea – trying to find blankets for the refugees, many of whom were only wearing thin nightclothes, offering reassurance as bombs crashed all around and shrapnel grazed the walls: ‘Don’t worry, you’ll be all right. We’ll get you away.’

That day Ritchie Calder had sought out the Reverend Paton, a popular East End priest known locally as ‘the Guv’nor’, whose dockland church had been bombed the previous night.

His pulpit still stood, but the roof and front wall had gone … I found ‘The Guv’nor’ at last, he was ashen grey with the anguish of the night. He had been out in the raids, helping his people throughout the night. His lips trembled and his eyes filled with tears when he spoke of his friends who were dead, injured or missing. But his main concern was for the living. He was dashing round the streets seeking out the survivors whose homes had been wrecked.

I went with him. We found many thousands sheltering in a school in the heart of the bombed area. I took a good look at the school. From the first glance it seemed to me ominous of disaster. In the passages and classrooms were mothers nursing their babies. There were blind, crippled and aged people … Whole families were sitting in queues perched on pitiful baggage waiting desperately for coaches to take them away from the terror of the bombs which had been raining down on them … these unfortunate people had been told to be ready for the coaches at three o’clock. Hours later the coaches had not arrived. ‘The Guvnor’ and I heard women, the mothers of young children, protesting with violence and with tears about the delay. Men were cursing the officials who only knew that coaches were expected. ‘Where are we going?’ ‘Can’t we walk there?’ ‘We’ll take a bus!’ ‘There’s a lorry we can borrow!’ The crowds clamoured for help, for information, for reassurance. But the officials knew no answer other than to offer a cup of tea.

One mother complained that her children had been forbidden to play in the playground … [the official showed me why]. In the playground behind the school was a crater. The school was, in fact, a bulging dangerous ruin. The bombs which had rendered these people homeless had also struck the building selected by the authorities as a ‘Rest Centre’… the school had already been bombed at the same time as ‘the Guv’nor’s’ church had been bombed. So had the parish church … So had other buildings and streets within a direct line with it. And then I knew that Sunday afternoon, that as sure as night would follow day, the bombers would come again with the darkness, and that the school would be bombed.

And so it was. ‘Filled with foreboding’, Calder ‘hastened back to central London. Three times I warned the Whitehall authorities during that evening that the people must be got away before more bombs dropped and certain disaster overtook them. Local folk back at the school were making equally frantic efforts to force the local authorities to act.’ But the displaced East Enders were still huddled in the ‘shelterless school’ at 8 p.m. on Monday when the alert sounded. At 3.45 on the morning of Tuesday, 10 September ‘the inevitable bomb’ scored a direct hit on South Hallsville School. Half the building was demolished, and hundreds of tons of masonry crashed down on its occupants. Rescue workers, frantically digging and scrabbling in the ruins, tried to free the injured, while a cordon was thrown around the area to keep people from seeing what was happening, and the censor warned the press that there were to be no reports or photographs of the tragedy, so injurious was it feared that it would be to the morale of the already disquieted city.

The rescue services dug for twelve days, trying to find survivors under the slabs of concrete and piles of bricks that filled the crater where the bomb had fallen, before they had to concede defeat. The dead – or parts of the dead – were carefully transported to an emergency morgue at a nearby swimming pool. Soon the rumours flew as fast as the fires had taken hold: hundreds were dead, and the authorities had ordered the site to be concreted over with bodies still entombed in the wreckage. Calder was incandescent with rage at the authorities, not only for failing to organise transport for the refugees, but also for failing to provide what he and others, including most vociferously the scientist and author of the book ARP, J.B.S. Haldane, had urged was essential for London: sufficient deep shelters to provide safety for all those in vulnerable areas. Calder went again to the scene. ‘I saw the gaping bomb crater, where stood a school used as a shelter centre, containing still uncounted bodies – families wiped out while they waited for transport which never came … I saw the rescue men descending perilously into it, with ropes around them, saw them pause, every now and then, in a hushed painful silence listening for the sound of the living, saw the tomb of whole families … I spoke to the men, fathers of families, who had been cursing on the Sunday. They were speechless and numbed by the horror of it.’

It has never been established why the coaches did not arrive: maybe the address they had been given was inadequate. The George, a well-known pub in the area from which coaches from all over London set off for Essex, had been designated as the rendezvous point – but there are more pubs than one in the capital called The George. Maybe the coaches had been misdirected to Camden Town, rather than Canning Town. Or maybe the drivers, caught in the raid and seeing the devastation in the East End, simply turned back. Certainly it was a grievous dereliction of duty on the part of the West Ham authorities to leave so many people unprotected in the eye of the raid. And whatever the reason, the result was fatal – 450 dead, Calder claimed in the bitter account that appeared the following year in his admonitory book The Lesson of London. West Ham Council announced the death toll as seventy-three, but locals still believe that nearer two hundred people perished in South Hallsville School on the third night of the blitz. Many of the bodies remained unclaimed, despite the fact that the Metropolitan Police circulated photographs in the area of those it was still possible to identify, and were buried in a communal grave in the East London Cemetery at Plaistow.

‘They call it crater London now,’ read the trenchant journalist Hannen Swaffer’s column in the Daily Herald. Traffic in the capital was at a standstill, with streets roped off because of unexploded bombs, fires still smouldering and many City businesses closed. It was the King’s turn to go to the people on Monday, 9 September. Accompanied by Captain Euan Wallace, Senior Regional Commissioner for Civil Defence, George VI paid a visit to Shoreditch, Bethnal Green, Stepney and Poplar before crossing the river to see the devastation of Bermondsey, Southwark and Lambeth. In places a path had to be hastily cleared through the debris so the royal party could proceed. At one point the King peered down into a crater ringed with ‘backless houses, showing bedrooms and sitting rooms with furniture shattered, and every curtain hanging in shreds’. Twenty houses had stood there the previous night, but there was now nothing but a hole large enough to hold three or four buses. George VI – not at all displeased to have a clear-cut wartime role at last, as part of the ‘morale-boosting’ posse – conscientiously insisted on a thorough tour, taking in the docks as well as the devastated streets. Later that day, as he was working in his study at Buckingham Palace, a random bomb fell on the north side of the building, but did not explode until early the next morning, shattering windows and badly damaging the swimming pool. Each night the King and Queen trekked to Windsor Castle in an armoured Daimler. It had been planned that they would go to Worcester in the event of an invasion, and the by-now elderly Queen Mary, the Queen Mother, had decamped the previous year to Badminton, the Gloucestershire residence of her niece, the Duchess of Beaufort.

Monday night’s raids lasted for nearly ten hours, killing 370 people and injuring 1,400. But the next night, for the first time, it seemed as if the fightback had begun. ‘We had depended on anti-aircraft guns … and apart from a solitary salvo loosed at the beginning of the raids, no gun had been shot in our defence … we felt like sitting ducks and no mistake,’ wrote Violet Regan, wife of an ARP warden, who had sheltered in a Poplar school throughout the raids. ‘It was difficult for civilians to understand why there should be no more than spasmodic gunfire [from the anti-aircraft (AA, or ‘Ack-Ack’, from the staccato noise they made) guns*] when hordes of enemy aircraft streamed over London most of the night,’ wrote the Commander-in-Chief of Anti-Aircraft Command, General Sir Frederick Pile. ‘The intricate and enormous problems of night shooting were unknown to them, and impossible to explain. Londoners wanted to hear the guns shoot back; they wanted to feel that even if aircraft were not being brought down, at least the pilots were being made uncomfortable. It was abundantly apparent,’ the C-in-C concluded, ‘that every effort must be made to defend the Londoner more effectively, and to uphold his morale in so doing.’

Pile fully appreciated that ‘anti-aircraft guns take a little time to become effective after they have been moved to new positions. Telephone lines have to be laid, gun positions levelled, the warning system co-ordinated and so on.’ But as he lay in bed during those first nights of the blitz, when ‘despite the … very considerable increase in the number of guns by the second night of the battle, there did not seem to be much more anti-aircraft fire’, he became ‘both angry and frightened at the same time [much like the rest of the population of London] that our system was no good’. He lay awake ‘for the rest of the night thinking how to deal with this business’.

What Pile decided to do, though, had rather more to do with upping British morale than downing German planes. He gathered the senior AA officers together in the Signals Drill Hall in Brompton Road, and instructed them that ‘every gun was to fire every possible round. Fire was not to be withheld on any account. Guns were to go to the approximate bearing and elevation and fire. Searchlights were not to expose. R.A.F. fighters were not going to operate over London, and every unseen target must be engaged without waiting to identify the aircraft as hostile.’

The result, Pile found, was

as astonishing to me as it appears to have been to the citizens of London – and, apparently, to the enemy as well. For, although few of the bursts can have got anywhere near the target, the heights of aircraft steadily increased as the night went on, and many of them turned away before entering the artillery zone … It was in no sense a barrage, though I think by that name it will always be known.

Anyway, it bucked up people tremendously. The midnight news said some nice things about us, and when I put a call through to my wife the telephone operator said: ‘By God this is the stuff. All the girls here are hugging each other.’ Next day everyone said they had slept better, and for the first time A.A. Command hit the headlines. Apart from comforting the civilians, it stimulated the gunners, who had been feeling pretty frustrated during the long nights when they had been compelled to hear aircraft flying overhead and dropping their bombs without being engaged.

Although the barrage made sleep impossible in the crypt of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s official residence, Lambeth Palace, ‘with the noise continuing almost without intermission until 5.40 am’, those sheltering there were ‘much cheered by this offensive action’, which in the view of the Archbishop’s chaplain, the Reverend Alan Don, ‘had turned back many German planes and fewer bombs were dropped – at any rate in central London’.

The press was enthusiastic too. The Daily Herald wrote of ‘a curtain of exploding steel’, or ‘an effective patchwork quilt protecting the capital’, with ‘London really baring its teeth … Londoners sat up in their shelters and listened … “Spotters” on London roofs looked at one another and smiled. “That’s lovely music,” said one of them,’ while a nameless man taking shelter felt that it was ‘D—d heartening … it sounds like the answer to night bombing.’

Not everyone was pleased, of course. Spent shells falling back to the ground were hazardous, and ‘some angry voices were raised … in the southern and eastern suburbs, upon which the retreating Luftwaffe jettisoned their bombs’, while in another suburb the vibrations caused by the Ack-Ack guns were apparently cracking council-house lavatory pans, and ‘Would we mind very much moving the barrage elsewhere?’

‘The Blitzkrieg Spreads’, announced the press on 11 September: ‘Hitler’s murder squadrons make their most widespread attacks on the London area’. That was how it would be every night until fog and low cloud on 3 November made it impossible for the Luftwaffe to locate their targets, and for one night the capital was silent – no alert, no bombs, no Ack-Ack fire. Fifty-seven nights of continuous raids with no respite. ‘What a fantastic life we lead these days,’ wrote Phyllis Warner, a teacher who lived at the Mary Ward Settlement Centre in Bloomsbury, in the ‘Journal Under the Terror’ that she kept during the blitz and sent to the Washington Post to give the still neutral America some idea of the quotidian realities of wartime London. ‘Every night as the siren goes regularly at eight o’clock we scuttle down into the cellar, and are marooned there until six the next morning. My bedroom has never looked so invitingly comfortable as on these evenings when I hastily dive into a “siren suit” [an all-in-one outfit modelled on a workman’s boilersuit and much favoured by the rotund Winston Churchill] and retreat to the basement … And here we must spend every evening. Farewell to theatre, films, dances, dinner-parties and such pleasures; we pass our evenings in dugouts trying to read, write, talk or play bridge, so far as the rattle of planes and the crash of bombs will allow. Yet this part of the night is better than the long hours of darkness when we try to sleep through the horrors that surround us. This is the front line, this is the “Journey’s End” of this war, and men, women and children, we are trapped in it.’

In shelters much less congenial than the one at Mary Ward House – in domestic cellars, under the stairs, in damp Anderson shelters in back gardens, in public shelters in reinforced basements or on the surface, on tube platforms or in muddy trenches dug in parks or other open spaces, in a margarine warehouse, under bridges and arches – those who remained in London through necessity or choice sat out those long, dark, dangerous nights. By the end of September, the month of the supposed ‘knock-out blow’ that the Luftwaffe hoped to deliver to Britain, 5,730 people had been killed in the London region. In July the War Cabinet had taken the decision that it would be ill-advised to make casualty figures public, but once the blitz started it became clear that rumours often exaggerated the number of deaths and serious injuries, so stark notices were posted outside town halls giving the number of those killed and injured, but without identifying the location of the ‘incidents’, and insisting that the information ‘must not be published in the press’, lest it prove helpful to the Germans by informing them how successful their raids had been.

On some nights that September and October the raids were relatively light, with as few as seven bombers coming over (on 6 October). On others there were as many as 410 (on 15 October), but usually between two hundred and three hundred Heinkels, Dorniers and Junkers filled the sky. The main targets were still the City and the docks, but poor visibility, not entirely reliable navigational aids, and encounters with fighter planes, barrage balloons and searchlights (both of which forced the planes to fly higher) and Ack-Ack fire, meant that it was impossible to be certain of hitting a specific target, particularly by night. By early October Luftwaffe pilots were being issued with maps that indicated a target area – that is, a zone of several square miles within which several targets lay, such as the land within the U loop of the Thames – rather than a specific building or installation, such as Battersea Power Station or the West India Docks, as had previously been the case.

‘Indiscriminate bombings’ is how Churchill referred to the blitz, declaring that Hitler hoped, ‘by killing large numbers of civilians, and women and children, that he will terrorise and cow the people of this mighty Imperial city and make them a burden and anxiety for the Government and thus distract our attention unduly from the ferocious onslaught he is preparing’. But although the bombing did seem indiscriminate, and its intention might have seemed to be to kill and maim civilians, in fact its intention was to devastate the London docks so that the food and matériel essential to the prosecution of the war could not be imported, and to destroy government offices in central London from where the war was being directed.

On 9 September, ninety bombers reached the capital and dropped some of their load on the suburbs: Kingston, Richmond, Malden, Surbiton, Purley, but as the Daily Express put it, ‘Acacia Avenue clips its hedges beside a crater and carries on.’ The first of the many London hospitals that would be devastated by the blitz, Queen Mary, in West Ham, had been bombed on 7 September, killing two nurses and six patients. On the night of 9 September a bomb fell on the London Hospital in Whitechapel Road, and St Thomas’s Hospital on the Thames hard by Westminster Bridge, which had been designated as a wartime casualty clearing station, took a direct hit. Three floors of a nurses’ home on the north side collapsed, and two nurses and four masseuses were crushed to death under the falling masonry. One of the masseuses, thirty-two-year-old Barbara Mortimer Thomas from Australia, was covered in debris and trapped in her bed forty feet above ground by a steel girder, with only her head and shoulders visible, and the floor supporting her likely to collapse at any minute. Her cries alerted the rescue squad, who started the hazardous task of building a scaffolding tower among the dislodged masonry to reach her, and carefully cut a hole in the wall so that drinks and a hot-water bottle could be passed to her and morphine injected into her one free arm. Mortimer Thomas joked with her rescuers, but just as they were about to free her after sixteen hours, a doctor crawled through the wreckage and found that she had died. The hospital’s X-ray department was put out of action, and twenty-five patients were carefully carried to another ward. Seventy others were moved to other hospitals or sent home, while the entire staff repaired to the basement – a ‘most incredible sight – one could hardly move without stumbling over a sleeping form’.