The London raid of 19 March

On the evening of Wednesday 19 March 1941 hundreds of German bombers came in over London. For several hours they dropped high-explosive bombs and tens of thousands of incendiaries on the docks along the Thames and on the densely built working-class districts of the East End. According to figures cited by British historians, some 470 tonnes of high explosive and about 122,000 incendiaries fell on the city. According to British figures, some 750 people were killed. It was the heaviest raid on the British capital since the beginning of 1941 and one of the bloodiest of the whole Blitz. It closed three weeks in which the Luftwaffe, taking advantage of better weather, returned over Britain in full strength: on 8 March bombs fell on the Café de Paris nightclub in the West End and on Buckingham Palace, on 10 March Portsmouth burned, in mid-month the bombers struck Clydebank and Bristol, and the day after the London raid, a few hours after a visit by the King, the destruction of Plymouth began.

The spring wave of the Blitz

In the autumn of 1940 London had been bombed almost every night, and in the winter the weight of the raids shifted to industrial cities and ports. The last great raid on the capital, on the night of 29–30 December, had started the Second Great Fire of London in the City. In January and February 1941 frost, fog and snowstorms often grounded the German bombers, and many squadrons were sent away to rest and re-equip. London then suffered mainly smaller raids, though these too took a bloody toll, as on 11 January, when a bomb killed several dozen people at Bank Underground station.

On 6 February 1941 Adolf Hitler signed Directive No. 23, which named British seaborne imports as the most important target for the air force and the navy. The bombers were to attack above all ports, docks, warehouses and ships, and industrial centres only in second place. In February three nights of bombing destroyed the centre of Swansea. In March, with longer and brighter nights, a much bigger wave arrived. According to German figures, the Luftwaffe flew some 4,000 sorties over Britain that month, including a dozen or so raids classed as major and heavy. It usually ventured against inland targets on moonlit nights, while ports, lying by the water, were easy to find on darker nights too. The bombers of Luftflotte 2 and Luftflotte 3, under Field Marshals Albert Kesselring and Hugo Sperrle, took off from airfields in northern France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

The technique of the raids had also changed. The lead aircraft flew along the radio beams of the Knickebein (PL) and X-Gerät systems, which the British had been jamming ever more effectively since the autumn. The Germans responded with radio silence until the bombs were released, by setting up beams over dummy targets and switching them at the last moment, and by frequent changes of frequency. Night defences were still weak. The anti-aircraft guns fired thousands of shells for every aircraft brought down, and night fighters with airborne radar, such as the Bristol Beaufighter, were still few. Near the great cities and ports the British lit decoy fires meant to draw the bombs onto fields and marshes, and sometimes they did.

Saturday 8 March: the Café de Paris and Buckingham Palace

The first of the March raids on London came on the night of 8–9 March. Its most tragic episode was played out in the West End, in Coventry Street, between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square. In the basement beneath the Rialto cinema was the Café de Paris, one of the most fashionable nightclubs in the capital and in the 1920s a favourite haunt of the Prince of Wales, the future Edward VIII. The war had not closed London’s nightspots. On the contrary, they were full of officers on leave, newly-weds and everyone who wanted to forget the raids. The club’s manager, Martin Poulsen, advertised it as “the safest and gayest restaurant in town – even in air raids – twenty feet below ground”. In reality the only things above the ballroom were the glass roof of the cinema and the club’s own ceiling.

The star of the Café de Paris was the 26-year-old Ken “Snakehips” Johnson, a dancer and bandleader born in British Guiana. His West Indian Dance Orchestra, made up mainly of Caribbean musicians, was then one of the best swing bands in Britain and played regularly on BBC radio. That evening Johnson, despite the raid and his friends’ urging, ran through the blacked-out streets to be in time for his 9.45 p.m. appearance. As the band struck up his signature number, “Oh, Johnny”, bombs hit the building. According to the most frequently cited account, at least one, of about 50 kilograms, pierced the roof and fell down a ventilation shaft into the ballroom, where it exploded in front of the stage. At least 34 people were killed and some 80 injured; some studies give higher figures, of more than 80 dead. Among the victims were Johnson, his saxophonist Dave “Baba” Williams, Poulsen, waiters and guests. Among the injured was the band’s guitarist Joe Deniz, who later recalled that the stick of bombs ran across Leicester Square, through the club and on as far as Dean Street in Soho.

Help could not arrive at once, because many places in the West End were on fire that night and ambulances were being called to one bombed building after another. First aid was given by doctors and nurses who had been in the club as guests. In the darkness looters also entered the wrecked ballroom and stripped jewellery from the dead and injured, and soldiers of the Scots Guards had to be called in to cordon off the building. The Café de Paris remained closed until 1948. Johnson’s death and the break-up of his band were a great loss to British jazz, and according to some musicologists Ralph Vaughan Williams, shaken by it, introduced elements of jazz and a saxophone solo into his Sixth Symphony.

That same night a German high-explosive bomb hit the North Lodge of Buckingham Palace, which stood on Constitution Hill, and partly demolished it. Flying debris killed a policeman, Police Constable Stephen Robertson. A few hours later more bombs fell on the forecourt in front of the palace, without doing much more damage. War chronicles often remember this raid precisely as the one in which “Buckingham Palace was hit”. It should be borne in mind, however, that the bomb destroyed a lodge by the railings, not the palace itself, and that it was not the first hit. George VI’s residence had already been bombed several times in September, October and November 1940, and on 13 September 1940 bombs fell on the quadrangle and the chapel while the King and Queen were in the palace. According to the palace’s historians, bombs fell on its grounds more than a dozen times during the war, nine of them direct hits. The March strike was the last of these during the Blitz; the next came only from a V-1 flying bomb in the summer of 1944.

Portsmouth, 10 March

London was also the target the following night, 9–10 March, but on 10 March the bombers flew to the south coast. Portsmouth, with the largest dockyard and naval base of the Royal Navy on the Channel, was one of the most frequently bombed cities in England. The first bombs had fallen on it in July 1940; in August a raid killed more than a hundred people, and on the night of 10–11 January 1941 incendiaries and high explosive destroyed the city centre, the Guildhall and the main shopping streets, killing some 170 people.

On the night of 10–11 March some 240 bombers, according to German figures, came over the city. They dropped about 193 tonnes of high explosive and some 46,000 incendiaries. The attack covered the naval dockyard, the neighbouring residential districts, seaside Southsea and Gosport on the other side of the harbour entrance, where fire gutted the roof of the railway station. According to local accounts, bombs hit, among other places, the buildings of HMS Vernon, the navy’s mining and torpedo school, and shelters in which dockyard workers were taking cover. Firemen, wardens and volunteers turned out to fight the fires, including teenage fire-service messengers; one of them, a fifteen-year-old from the Drayton district, was awarded the British Empire Medal for his bravery that night. During the raids on Portsmouth the British also lit decoy fires on neighbouring Hayling Island, intended to draw the bombers away from the dockyard.

The death toll that night is uncertain. Some local publications speak of more than a hundred residents and dockyard workers killed, while other tallies do not count this raid among the three bloodiest in the city’s history (24 August 1940, 10 January and 27 April 1941). What is certain is that the raid was one of the heaviest Portsmouth suffered: the city, which went through 67 raids in the course of the war and lost 930 civilians killed, was bombed several times in March and April 1941. The dockyard nevertheless kept working, and Royal Navy ships continued to use it.

The night of 19–20 March

In mid-March the Luftwaffe struck with its greatest force at the ports and industrial centres of the north. On the night of 12–13 March the bombers attacked Liverpool and Birkenhead, and on the nights of 13 and 14 March they devastated Clydebank and the shipyards on the Clyde near Glasgow. The following nights brought raids on Sheffield and Bristol, among other places. On 19 March, under a moon that was still bright though already waning, London became the target once again.

The alert was sounded in the evening, and the bombers came in waves for several hours, until late at night. According to figures cited by historians of British air defence, several hundred aircraft reached the city and dropped some 470 tonnes of high explosive and about 122,000 incendiaries, released in containers that scattered them over the ground. The main target was the docks and wharves of the Thames, through which food and raw materials reached the capital. But the bombs fell above all on the densely built districts around them: Stepney, Poplar, West Ham and other parts of the East End, where since the autumn people had been bombed again and again and had often lost their homes. Across the river, in Greenwich, incendiaries fell on the eighteenth-century church of St Alfege, the work of Nicholas Hawksmoor. The roof collapsed into the interior and fire gutted the nave; the walls and tower survived, and the rebuilding took until 1953. The crypt of the church housed an air-raid shelter.

In the burning districts firemen, wardens and rescue squads worked all night long, until morning. According to British figures, some 750 people were killed and hundreds injured. It was the heaviest raid on London since the beginning of 1941. Thousands of people lost their homes. According to figures cited in the literature, the two great March raids, on London and Plymouth, left a total of some 148,000 people homeless.

The city’s night defences could still do little. The anti-aircraft guns fired all night and night fighters circled over the capital, but German losses were small. The Luftwaffe’s losses in a single raid did not usually exceed a few per cent of the aircraft taking part, and many machines were lost not to British fire but in landing accidents in fog and bad weather. Only in the spring, when more Beaufighters with airborne radar appeared, together with ground radar stations guiding the night fighters, did the losses of the night bombers begin to rise markedly.

Bristol and Plymouth

In many war chronologies one can read under 19 March that on this day “Plymouth and Bristol were bombed again”. March did indeed bring both cities heavy raids, but on other days. Bristol, with its port at Avonmouth and the Bristol Aeroplane Company’s works at Filton, suffered one of the six great raids of its Blitz on the night of 16–17 March. German airmen found the city easily by the ribbon of the River Avon gleaming in the moonlight, which led from the estuary straight to the city centre. That night bombs fell on the docks at Avonmouth and on districts of the city. According to some local tallies, more than 250 people were killed; over the whole war, air raids killed nearly 1,300 people in Bristol.

Plymouth, with the great dockyard and naval base at Devonport, had been bombed since July 1940, but the real catastrophe came the day after the London raid. On Thursday 20 March the city was visited by King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. They were received by the Lord Mayor, Waldorf Astor, and his wife, the Member of Parliament Nancy Astor. The royal couple met townspeople and civil defence workers, and crowds greeted them in the streets. A few hours after they left, in the evening, the sirens sounded. First, pathfinder aircraft dropped more than 12,000 incendiaries on the city centre, and the fires they started showed the way to the following waves. According to British studies, about 125 bombers dropped some 159 tonnes of high explosive and 30,000 incendiaries on the city that night. The next night, 21 March, some 170 aircraft returned and over four hours dropped another 197 tonnes or so of high explosive and 36,000 incendiaries.

The centre of Plymouth burned down. Department stores, hotels, churches and offices around Guildhall Square were reduced to rubble, as were the Guildhall itself and the medieval church of St Andrew. Some 20,000 buildings were damaged. Firemen fought the flames with burst water mains and without communications, and crews sent from other cities were often unable to connect their hoses to the local hydrants. Over the two nights 336 people were killed. Above the door of the burned-out church of St Andrew the headmistress of a local school had a board nailed up bearing a single Latin word: “Resurgam” – “I shall rise again”. It became the city’s watchword. In April Plymouth endured five more nights of raids, and over the whole war at least 1,174 of its inhabitants were killed in the bombing.

Place in the war

The March raids showed that after the winter lull the Blitz was not dying down but entering its heaviest phase. The Luftwaffe was now striking alternately at London and at the ports through which Britain brought in food, fuel and weapons from across the ocean, including those promised to it on 11 March by the Lend-Lease Act. The cities paid for this with thousands of dead, but the ports, shipyards and factories kept working, and the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, and the King and Queen visited one bombed city after another to show that the government and the court shared the fate of their inhabitants.

The worst for London was still to come. On the nights of 16–17 and 19–20 April 1941 the capital suffered the two heaviest raids of the whole war, in which, according to British figures, more than two thousand people were killed in all, and on the night of 10–11 May came the last great raid of the Blitz and the bloodiest, in which nearly 1,500 people died. In the spring Belfast, Hull, Liverpool and Plymouth again were bombed as well. As early as the end of March, however, some German bomber units were transferred to Austria and the Balkans ahead of the attack on Yugoslavia and Greece, and in May and June most of the rest flew east ahead of the invasion of the Soviet Union. The offensive that since September 1940 had been meant to break Britain cost the lives of more than 40,000 civilians, nearly half of them in London. But it neither forced the British to make peace nor cut them off from supplies from across the ocean.