The London raid of 19 April

On Saturday 19 April 1941, the eve of Adolf Hitler’s 52nd birthday, the Luftwaffe sent against London the largest force it had yet directed at a single city. According to German returns, 712 aircraft set out for the British capital and between dusk and dawn dropped more than 1,000 tons of high-explosive bombs and some 150,000 incendiaries. The blow fell above all on the docks and the districts of East London. According to the most frequently cited British figures, about 1,200 people were killed. Only three nights earlier, on 16–17 April, the city had endured an almost equally powerful raid in which more than a thousand people died and a bomb exploded above the north transept of St Paul’s Cathedral. Londoners remembered the two nights simply as “the Wednesday” and “the Saturday”. They were the two heaviest raids on London since the start of the war; only the last great raid of the Blitz, on 10 May, exceeded them.

Under 19 April, war chronologies record that London suffered “one of the heaviest raids of the war” and that St Paul’s Cathedral was “slightly damaged but remains closed”, while “other Wren churches were badly damaged or destroyed”. The first part of this is accurate. The rest needs refining: the cathedral was hit on the night of 16–17 April, not on 19 April, and it was not closed, while the great destruction of Wren’s City churches was caused above all by the raids of 29 December 1940 and 10 May 1941. Under 24 April, in turn, the chronologies note that Plymouth was enduring its “third night of heavy bombing”.

A birthday present for the Führer

After the winter lull the Luftwaffe returned over Britain in March, striking mainly at ports but also, on the night of 19–20 March, at London. In early April the bombers attacked Bristol, Coventry, Birmingham and Glasgow, and on the night of 15–16 April they devastated Belfast. By the spring of 1941 the Luftwaffe command already knew that most of its bomber units would soon leave for the east ahead of the attack on the Soviet Union, and some had already been transferred to the Balkans. According to some historians, Hermann Göring wanted to show Hitler beforehand what his air force could do, which is why the April raids on the capital were to be so large. For the night of 19–20 April every available bomber of Luftflotte 2 and Luftflotte 3 was sent, and some crews flew two or even three sorties in a single night.

The two air fleets then had hundreds of Heinkel He 111, Junkers Ju 88 and Dornier Do 17 bombers. The target was London as a whole – the port, railway junctions, power stations and gasworks – but in practice the bombs fell on entire districts. The night defences were stronger than in the autumn: there were more Bristol Beaufighter night fighters with airborne radar in the air, and ground radar stations were getting better at guiding them to their targets. Even so, German losses in each of the April raids amounted to only a handful of aircraft.

“The Wednesday”: the night of 16–17 April

The first of the two great raids began on the evening of Wednesday 16 April. According to German figures, 685 aircraft flew against London and dropped nearly 900 tons of high explosive and more than 150,000 incendiaries. This time the western and central districts suffered most: the West End, Chelsea, Marylebone and Holborn, as well as the area around Waterloo station on the south bank of the Thames. Trains and the station of the London Necropolis Railway, the funeral line, went up in flames, and the railway never ran again; Holborn Viaduct station was destroyed, and bombs hit the Selfridges department store on Oxford Street and the Victoria and Albert Museum. A parachute mine that failed to explode came down on the tracks of Hungerford Bridge just outside Charing Cross station; because of the danger the nearby War Office building was evacuated. A naval reserve officer, Ernest Gidden, spent six hours defusing it right next to a burning signal box and was awarded the George Cross for it.

In Chelsea a mine destroyed the medieval Chelsea Old Church on the Thames, where Thomas More had had his chapel; five volunteer fire-watchers were killed, among them a young Canadian woman, Yvonne Green. In St James’s, on Duke Street near Jermyn Street, a parachute mine killed Al Bowlly, the most popular singer of British dance music of the 1930s, who that evening had given up staying the night outside London in order to return to his flat. In suburban Bromley a bomb hit the garden shelter of Josiah Stamp, an economist, a director of the Bank of England and chairman of the great LMS railway company; he, his wife and his eldest son were killed. In the same area Bromley parish church was destroyed.

According to the figures cited in British studies, some 1,180 people were killed that night and more than 2,000 seriously injured. It was at the time the bloodiest raid on London of the whole war.

St Paul’s Cathedral

On the night of 16–17 April a bomb also struck St Paul’s Cathedral, the masterpiece of Christopher Wren, which had been guarded all winter by the volunteer St Paul’s Watch and which in December had survived the Second Great Fire of London. According to the cathedral’s history, the bomb exploded high up inside, above the north transept, and blew a hole in the floor through which the crypt could be seen. The force of the explosion was so great that the whole dome shifted slightly to one side. It was the cathedral’s second serious wound of the Blitz: on 10 October 1940 another bomb had pierced the roof of the choir and destroyed the high altar.

Descriptions of “slight damage” are therefore somewhat too mild, and of “closure” inaccurate. The wrecked north transept was taken out of use and was not rebuilt until 1962, but the cathedral remained open, and services were held there throughout the war. This mattered to Londoners: since December the surviving dome of St Paul’s had become a symbol of the city’s endurance. As for the other Wren churches, in the April raids the bombs fell mainly outside the City, where most of them stand. The greatest number of Wren’s churches burned on 29 December 1940, and more, including St Mary-le-Bow, on the night of 10–11 May 1941. In April the victims were above all other historic churches, such as Chelsea Old Church and Bromley parish church.

“The Saturday”: the night of 19–20 April

Three days later, on Saturday 19 April, the Germans returned over London in still greater strength. This time the main targets were the docks and the districts of East London: the East End, Stepney, Poplar, West Ham and the riverside further down the Thames, already bombed many times since September 1940. According to the returns cited in the literature, the Luftwaffe dropped more than 1,000 tons of high explosive that night – the most in a single raid on London in the whole war – and some 153,000 incendiaries. In many places there was no water to fight the fires, and firemen, rescue workers and wardens worked until morning under the falling bombs. Among other things, the bombs destroyed the entrance to St Mary’s Underground station on Whitechapel Road.

The worst tragedy for the fire service came at the Old Palace School in Bromley-by-Bow, which had been turned into an auxiliary fire station. Because the local crews had gone out to fires, reinforcements had been brought into the East End from suburban Beckenham. The Beckenham firemen arrived at about 1.30 a.m. and were waiting in the school for orders together with crews from Homerton and Bow when, at 1.53 a.m., a high-explosive bomb scored a direct hit on the building. Thirty-four firemen and firewomen were killed, 21 of them from Beckenham. It remains the greatest loss suffered by the fire service in a single incident in British history.

According to British figures, about 1,200 people were killed and hundreds of buildings destroyed. Together the two April raids killed more than 2,000 people in London and left tens of thousands homeless. King George VI and the Queen, as after earlier raids, remained in the capital and visited the bombed districts, while in those same days the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, was following from London the defeat of British forces in Greece and the fighting for Tobruk.

Plymouth: five April nights

As the smoke cleared over London, the Luftwaffe turned west once more, against Plymouth and the naval dockyard at Devonport, the largest in the country. The city had already suffered badly: on the nights of 20 and 21 March, a few hours after a visit by the King and Queen, its centre had burned. On the night of 21–22 April, according to British studies, about 120 bombers arrived and for six hours bombed the dockyard, the port and residential districts – nearly 36,000 incendiaries and more than 700 high-explosive bombs, including several dozen one-ton bombs. According to some accounts, a direct hit on a naval barracks block killed several dozen sailors that night.

The bombers returned the next night. Just after midnight on 23 April a bomb struck the communal shelter at Portland Square, killing at least 71 people – the highest toll at a single spot in the whole history of the bombing of Plymouth. The third night in a row, 23–24 April, brought further fires in the city centre and in Devonport. It is this night that the chronologies record under 24 April as the “third night of heavy bombing”. The description is accurate for the April series, but it should be remembered that, counting the two March raids, it was already the fifth of the seven nights that the inhabitants later called the “Plymouth Blitz”; the last two came on 28 and 29 April.

After the April raids large areas of Plymouth and Devonport lay in ruins. Every evening thousands of inhabitants left the city to spend the night in the surrounding villages and on the edge of Dartmoor, returning in the morning to work in the dockyard and the port. The Lord Mayor, Waldorf Astor, and his wife, the MP Nancy Astor, organised relief and kept up the inhabitants’ spirits; on 2 May they received Churchill in Plymouth, who, witnesses recalled, was deeply moved by the scale of the destruction. Over the whole war at least 1,174 civilians were killed in the raids on Plymouth, most of them in the spring of 1941. Yet the dockyard kept working, and Royal Navy ships never stopped using it.

In the same days bombs also fell on other ports: on Sunderland on 25 April, on Liverpool on the night of 26–27 April, and on 27 April on Portsmouth, which then suffered one of the three bloodiest raids of its war.

Place in the war

April 1941 was the heaviest month of the Blitz since the autumn of 1940. The Luftwaffe showed that it could strike London with greater force than ever before, and for several weeks it bombed the capital and the ports, through which Britain brought in food and arms from across the ocean, by turns. British statistics recorded a marked fall in armaments production in April, attributed both to the raids and to the Easter holidays. Yet the cities kept working and the ports kept receiving convoys. On 27 April, in a broadcast reviewing the defeats in Greece and Libya, Churchill ended with a line from a poem by Arthur Hugh Clough: “But westward, look, the land is bright” – a clear pointer, for everyone, to the United States, which since March had been supporting Britain under the Lend-Lease Act.

The worst for London was still to come. On the night of 10–11 May 1941, under a full moon, the last great raid of the Blitz killed 1,436 people in the capital, the most in a single night of the whole war, and destroyed the chamber of the House of Commons. Before that, from 1 to 7 May, the “May Blitz” laid waste to Liverpool, and on 4 and 5 May bombs fell on Belfast for the second time. Then most of the German bomber units left for the east ahead of the invasion of the Soviet Union, and the great raids on British cities ceased. The April “Wednesday” and “Saturday” remained in Londoners’ memory as two of the three most terrible nights they lived through during the war.