The last night of the Blitz

On Saturday 10 May 1941 – the first anniversary of the German attack on France and the Low Countries, and also the first anniversary of Winston Churchill’s taking office as Prime Minister – the Luftwaffe sent several hundred bombers over London. The raid lasted from late evening until dawn on Sunday 11 May. Under a full moon and with the Thames at an exceptionally low ebb, more than two thousand fires broke out in the city, and the firemen, whose water mains had been smashed by bombs, had nothing to fight them with. According to the most commonly cited British figures, 1,436 people were killed – the highest toll of any single raid on Britain in the whole war. The chamber of the House of Commons burned down, and Westminster Abbey, the British Museum, the clock tower of Big Ben and almost all of the capital’s railway stations were damaged.

No one in London could know at the time that this was the end. It was the last of the great nights of the Blitz, the German bombing offensive that had begun on 7 September 1940. In the weeks that followed most of the German bomber units flew east, where the attack on the Soviet Union was being prepared.

Popular chronologies record under 10 May that the British House of Commons was “damaged” in a Luftwaffe raid, that “other targets” were Hull, Liverpool, Belfast and the shipyards on the Clyde in Scotland, and that this was almost the end of the Blitz, because the Germans were turning their attention to the Soviet Union and the east. The last of these statements is accurate. The first two need to be made more precise: the Commons chamber was not so much damaged as completely destroyed, and Hull, Liverpool, Belfast and the mouth of the Clyde were not targets on that same night – they had been bombed on the preceding days of May: Liverpool from 1 to 7 May, Belfast on the night of 4–5 May, Greenock on the Clyde on the nights of 5–6 and 6–7 May, and Hull on 7–8 and 8–9 May.

May 1941: the last effort

In the spring of 1941 Hermann Göring’s Luftwaffe was still waging its night offensive against Britain, but its commanders already knew that the campaign’s days were numbered. Since December 1940 Directive No. 21 had been in force, in which Adolf Hitler ordered preparations for the attack on the Soviet Union. Some bomber units had already been transferred to the Balkans in April, and most of the rest were to leave for the east in May and June. Until then the bombers of Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s Luftflotte 2 and Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle’s Luftflotte 3 were to strike as hard as possible at British ports and the capital. The German command hoped that the destruction, especially in the ports that received the convoys from America, would weaken Britain in the Battle of the Atlantic, and that the appearance of an unbroken offensive would hide the real direction of the next blow from the British and the Russians.

April brought the heaviest raids since the autumn: two great attacks on London on the nights of 16–17 and 19–20 April, in which more than two thousand people were killed, five nights of bombing on Plymouth, and the Easter raid on Belfast. May opened with a series of raids that the people of Merseyside would later call the May Blitz.

The ports: Liverpool, Belfast, Greenock and Hull

For seven nights, from 1 to 7 May, the bombers returned to Liverpool and Merseyside, the most important port for the convoys from North America. On the night of 3–4 May the burning ammunition ship Malakand blew up in Huskisson Dock, and according to British figures nearly half the cargo berths were put out of action for several days. Depending on the count, between about 1,700 and nearly 1,900 people were killed in the region that week.

On the night of 4–5 May the Luftwaffe struck Belfast in strength for the second time, this time chiefly the harbour and Queen’s Island, with the Harland and Wolff shipyard and the Short & Harland aircraft works. In this raid, dominated by incendiaries, some 200 people were killed (some studies give a figure of just over 150), and the following night came a fourth, smaller attack on the city.

The next two nights belonged to Greenock at the mouth of the Clyde, where Atlantic convoys assembled in the anchorage and the shipyards built merchant ships and warships. Two months after the Clydebank raid, bombers attacked the town on the nights of 5–6 and 6–7 May. According to local figures 271 people were killed and thousands injured; of the houses in the town and its surroundings, some 5,000 were destroyed and nearly 25,000 damaged. On the second night a burning distillery on Ingleston Street served as a beacon for the following waves of bombers. As at Clydebank, most of the bombs fell on residential districts, and the shipyards suffered less than the Germans had intended. Some of the bombers were misled by a decoy “burning town” – a site of fires on the moors beyond Loch Thom, lit by the British to draw the bombs onto it.

On the nights of 7–8 and 8–9 May it was the turn of Hull on the Humber estuary. Two attacks, each lasting five or six hours, destroyed the city centre with its great department stores, Riverside Quay, and the mills and timber yards in the docks. Nearly 400 people were killed. Hull, easy to find from the air thanks to the estuary, was after London one of the most heavily bombed cities in Britain, and over the whole war almost half its inhabitants were made homeless. British censorship, however, as a rule did not give its name: communiqués about the May raids spoke only of “the Humber area” or “a north-east coast town”. In Hull people still speak of the “forgotten Blitz”.

The night of 10–11 May

The weather and nature favoured the attackers. The moon was full and the sky cloudless, so the crews had no trouble finding the silvery ribbon of the Thames leading to the heart of the city. According to British accounts, the first bombers crossed the coast at about 10.45 p.m., and the first bombs fell on London just before 11 p.m. The raid lasted almost seven hours; the last bomb fell at 5.37 a.m., and the sirens sounded the all-clear at 5.52.

Figures for the strength of the attack vary from source to source. According to figures cited in British literature, 505 bombers – Heinkel He 111s, Junkers Ju 88s and Dornier Do 17s – flew to London and dropped more than 700 tons of high explosive and some 86,000 incendiaries. According to German figures, the two air fleets flew 571 sorties and dropped nearly 800 tons of bombs. Bombs fell across the whole city, from Hammersmith in the west to Romford in the east, but most thickly on the centre, the City, Westminster and the south-bank districts around the Elephant and Castle junction, which according to British analyses lay at the very centre of the German target area.

Fire proved the greatest enemy. High-explosive bombs had broken the water mains in many places, and the Thames was exceptionally low: at ebb tide the fire hoses and pumps could not reach the water, and the fireboats could not get in to the embankments. According to British figures some 2,200 fires broke out; an area estimated at nearly 300 hectares burned, and in some places the fires were still being damped down several days later. At Waterloo station, badly hit once again, the fires burned for four days. By morning every railway terminus in the capital but one was blocked, and according to British reports a third of London’s streets were impassable. On some lines traffic resumed only after several weeks.

In the morning it emerged that 1,436 people had been killed and more than 1,700 seriously injured. According to contemporary estimates some 11,000 houses had been destroyed and more than 12,000 people made homeless. It was the heaviest loss of life in a single night in the whole history of the bombing of London, greater even than in the April raids or on the night of 29 December 1940, when the City burned.

The House of Commons and Westminster Hall

The Palace of Westminster, the seat of the British Parliament, had been hit before – in the course of the war bombs struck it fourteen times – but this was its worst night. The palace took at least twelve hits. Three people were killed: two policemen and Edward Elliott, the resident superintendent of the House of Lords. Incendiaries set fire simultaneously to the Victorian chamber of the House of Commons and to the great oak roof of medieval Westminster Hall, the oldest part of the palace, dating back to the 11th century. The firemen had neither enough water nor enough men to save both. According to eyewitness accounts, it was decided that Westminster Hall must be saved, and the choice was made by the MP and former minister Walter Elliot, who was in the palace that night. The firemen succeeded in saving the roof, while the Commons chamber burned to the ground – all that remained were blackened walls and heaps of rubble. The Lords’ chamber and the clock tower were also damaged: a bomb (or, according to some studies, a British anti-aircraft shell) damaged the roof of the tower and two of the clock faces, but the clock kept going and Big Ben struck the hours throughout the war.

The Commons moved first to nearby Church House, which had served them as a reserve chamber since the autumn of 1940, and then, for the rest of the war, to the House of Lords chamber; the Lords meanwhile sat in the adjoining Robing Room. A new Commons chamber was built after the war to a design by Giles Gilbert Scott and opened in October 1950. Churchill insisted that it be rebuilt in its old form: oblong, with the government and opposition benches facing each other, and so small that not every member had a seat. “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us,” he told the House in October 1943, defending the idea. The arch leading into the chamber from the adjoining lobby was left unrepaired, with its cracked and scorched stones, as a memorial to that night; today it is known as the Churchill Arch.

The Abbey, the Museum and the churches

That same night incendiaries fell on the roof and buildings of Westminster Abbey. The Abbey’s volunteer fire watchers and firemen of the Auxiliary Fire Service prevented the fire from engulfing the whole church, but the lantern over the crossing collapsed, leaving the interior open to the sky, and the Deanery and three houses of the Abbey’s clergy and staff burned down. No one was killed, and services continued. The Coronation Chair and the archives had been taken out of London at the start of the war. At the British Museum incendiaries set fire to the south-west wing with its book stack; according to various figures, between 150,000 and 240,000 volumes were burned or destroyed by fire and water. The Royal Courts of Justice in the Strand, the Tower of London, the Royal Mint and, according to some accounts, the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police at Scotland Yard were also damaged.

The churches suffered particularly badly. The interiors of the Temple Church, the medieval round church of the Knights Templar, and of the whole complex of the Inner Temple around it – its hall and library – were gutted. St Clement Danes in the Strand, a work of Christopher Wren, burned down, leaving only its walls and tower. In the City fire consumed the interior of another Wren church, St Mary-le-Bow, and the flames, drawn up the tower as if up a chimney, destroyed its floors and brought down the famous Bow Bells, a recording of which the BBC used as an interval signal in its overseas broadcasts. By tradition, a true Londoner, a Cockney, is one born within the sound of those bells.

Also destroyed was the Queen’s Hall in Langham Place, London’s foremost concert hall and since 1895 the home of the Promenade Concerts, the Proms. On the afternoon of 10 May Malcolm Sargent had conducted a concert there of works by Edward Elgar: the Enigma Variations and the oratorio The Dream of Gerontius. A few hours later a single incendiary started a fire that completely gutted the auditorium. The hall was never rebuilt, and the Proms moved to the Royal Albert Hall.

The defences, and the same evening

London’s night defences were much stronger in the spring of 1941 than they had been in the autumn. More and more Bristol Beaufighter night fighters with airborne radar were operating, guided by new ground radar stations, and the bright night made it easier for pilots to spot the bombers. British communiqués claimed far more aircraft shot down than were actually destroyed. According to German figures cited in the literature, the Luftwaffe lost between ten and fourteen bombers that night – more than usual, but still only a few per cent of the force committed. Over the whole of May, according to British studies, RAF night fighters shot down 38 German bombers. For the Luftwaffe this was a sign that the nights over Britain were ceasing to be safe, but it was not losses that ended the offensive; it was Hitler’s plans.

German propaganda presented the raid as retaliation for British bombing of German cities; in those same days RAF bombers were attacking Hamburg, Bremen and Berlin. On the same Saturday evening, as the bombs began to fall on London, Hitler’s deputy in the party, Rudolf Hess, flew alone across the North Sea in a Messerschmitt Bf 110 fighter and bailed out over Scotland, intending, as he claimed, to offer the British peace. Churchill was spending that weekend at Ditchley Park in Oxfordshire and learned only the following day who the airman captured in Scotland was. The coincidence of the two events meant that in the following days the world’s press wrote above all about Hess, rather than about the destruction in London.

The end of the Blitz

The next night, 11–12 May, the bombers returned to London in smaller numbers. A few days later, on the night of 16–17 May, came the last big raid of this period on the Midlands: the target was the factories of Birmingham, including the Wolseley motor works and the ICI chemical plant, but because of a navigational error most of the bombs fell on nearby Nuneaton, where according to local figures 130 people were killed. Then the great raids stopped. By the end of May the headquarters of Kesselring’s Luftflotte 2 and its bomber units had been moved east, to occupied Poland. In the west there remained only Sperrle’s Luftflotte 3, too weak to wage a great offensive. For several more weeks the British expected the bombers to return, and only on 22 June, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union, did it become clear why the skies over their cities had suddenly fallen quiet.

The night of 10–11 May is usually taken as the end of the Blitz, although some studies move it to 16 May, the last great raid on Birmingham. The toll of those eight months was terrible. According to the most commonly cited British figures, between about 40,000 and 43,000 civilians were killed, almost half of them in London, and some two million homes were destroyed or damaged. On the capital alone, according to London figures, some 20,000 tons of bombs fell and about 20,000 people were killed.

Place in the war

The night of 10–11 May 1941 closed the longest bombing campaign yet waged against a single country. From the German point of view the Blitz had failed. It did not break the British will to resist, did not bring Churchill’s government to make peace, and did not paralyse industry or the ports: the raids held up production and forced the dispersal of aircraft factories, but British arms production grew throughout, and bombed cities were usually back at work within two weeks. In eight months the Luftwaffe lost several hundred bombers and many experienced airmen, who would soon be sorely missed in the east. Britain, no longer overflown by great bomber formations, could in the years that followed become the springboard for the Allied air forces and armies.

For the people of London and the ports, however, the danger had not passed. The raids came back: in 1942, in retaliation for the British raid on Lübeck, the Luftwaffe attacked England’s historic cities in the so-called Baedeker raids; at the beginning of 1944 it struck London in Operation Steinbock; and in the summer of 1944 V-1 flying bombs, and then V-2 rockets, fell on the capital. Meanwhile the experience of the Blitz – incendiaries, burning city centres, no water to fight the fires – served British Bomber Command as a lesson, which from 1942 it applied against German cities on a far greater scale.

The destroyed Commons chamber became one of the most enduring symbols of that spring. Parliament went on sitting in the Lords’ chamber, and the new House was opened only in 1950, when Churchill was already Leader of the Opposition. The ruins of St Clement Danes were rebuilt as the church of the Royal Air Force, and members entering the chamber still pass beneath the Churchill Arch in the House of Commons, with its stones scorched on the night of 10 May.