Western Front

1940–1941: The Blitz

September 1940 – May 1941 · 1 battle

On 7 September 1940 the Luftwaffe, unable to destroy the RAF’s fighters, shifted the weight of its attacks to London. There followed months of bombing, mostly at night, which the British called the Blitz: the capital was attacked on 57 consecutive nights, and later Coventry, Birmingham, Liverpool, Glasgow, Belfast, Plymouth and other industrial cities and ports in turn. More than forty thousand civilians were killed and hundreds of thousands of homes destroyed, but neither war production nor the will to resist was broken. The raids slackened in May 1941, as the Luftwaffe moved its forces east before the attack on the USSR.