The Manchester Blitz

Early in the evening of Sunday 22 December 1940, three days before Christmas, the sirens wailed over Manchester. Aircraft of a German pathfinder unit dropped flares and thousands of incendiaries on the city centre, and behind them, all night long, came wave after wave of Heinkel He 111 and Junkers Ju 88 bombers. The next evening, with fires still burning in the city, the Luftwaffe returned and bombed until dawn on Christmas Eve. The two nights, later known in Manchester as the “Christmas Blitz”, destroyed much of the city centre, including the textile warehouse district around Piccadilly and Portland Street, damaged the cathedral, the Royal Exchange and the Free Trade Hall, and in neighbouring Salford and Stretford struck workers’ homes and the factories of Trafford Park. According to the most frequently quoted estimates, some 684 people were killed in Manchester itself and more than 2,000 were injured.

War chronologies record “bombing raids on Manchester” under 22–24 December. The date is exact: both great raids began on the evenings of 22 and 23 December and lasted until the following morning, the last bombs falling in the early hours of 24 December. Manchester was the final link in a pre-Christmas series in which, within two weeks, the Luftwaffe attacked Sheffield, Liverpool and Manchester – the three great industrial and port centres of northern England.

The December pattern

After the destruction of Coventry on the night of 14/15 November 1940, the Luftwaffe waged its night bombing war according to a new plan. Instead of bombing London every night, as it had done since the start of the Blitz on 7 September, it struck in turn at the armaments centres and ports of the provinces: Birmingham, Bristol, Southampton, Liverpool. Its tactics were by now settled. In the lead flew the aircraft of the pathfinder unit, guided by the radio beams of the X-Gerät system, which dropped flares and incendiaries. The fires they started marked the target for the following waves, which dropped incendiary bombs, high-explosive bombs and parachute mines that smashed roofs, water mains and the gas network. In December bad weather restricted operations: according to figures cited in the literature, the Luftwaffe carried out 11 major raids (with more than 100 tons of bombs) that month, compared with 23 in November. But whenever the sky was clear and the moon bright, it struck with full force.

In early December the bombers returned to Bristol and to Birmingham, where on the night of 11/12 December a thirteen-hour raid took place, the longest in the city’s history. Then it was the turn of Sheffield, a city of steel and armaments, whose works along the River Don produced, among other things, armour plate and heavy shells for the navy. The German operation bore the code name Schmelztiegel (“Crucible”). On the afternoon of 12 December British listening stations detected X-Gerät beams intersecting over northern England and worked out that the target would be Sheffield. That evening, according to figures based on German documents captured after the war, some 280 bombers came over. Most of the bombs fell not on the steelworks in the east of the city, which were partly hidden by mist, but on the city centre and residential districts. Shortly before midnight a bomb hit the Marples Hotel in Fitzalan Square; 78 people died in its cellar, the largest number killed in a single place in all the raids on Sheffield. Bombs also damaged the cathedral. Three days later, on the night of 15/16 December, a smaller force, led this time by aircraft carrying only incendiaries, attacked the industrial district; the steelworks that were hit did not, however, stop production. In the two raids more than 660 people were killed in Sheffield, some 1,500 were injured and around 40,000 were made homeless.

On the night of 20/21 December a three-night pre-Christmas Blitz began on Liverpool and the whole Mersey estuary. By 22 December, according to local figures, some 365 people had been killed there. Several bombs scored direct hits on shelters: on 20 December about 40 people died under the arches of the railway viaduct in Bentinck Street, where local residents had taken refuge, and the next day 74 died in another shelter. Fire brigades from surrounding towns, Manchester among them, were sent to help fight the fires along the Mersey. So when bombs fell on Manchester on the evening of 22 December, some of its firemen were still fighting the flames in Liverpool.

Cottonopolis and Trafford Park

Manchester, with a pre-war population of more than 700,000, had been the capital of the English cotton industry since the Industrial Revolution. In the city centre, around Piccadilly, Portland Street and Mosley Street, stood dozens of great Victorian warehouses filled with bales of yarn and cloth. Thanks to the Manchester Ship Canal, opened in 1894, the city, though lying several dozen kilometres from the sea, was also a port for ocean-going ships. West of the centre, in Stretford, beside the canal, lay Trafford Park, one of the largest industrial estates in Europe. In wartime several tens of thousands of people worked there; the largest firm, Metropolitan-Vickers, made turbines and electrical equipment and was just starting licence assembly of Avro Manchester heavy bombers in a new hall. Next door a Ford factory was being built to produce Rolls-Royce Merlin engines under licence for Spitfires and Hurricanes, and later for Lancasters. At Chadderton, on the northern edge of the conurbation, Avro was assembling its own bombers.

Manchester had been bombed before. The first bombs fell on the conurbation in August 1940; in September the Palace Theatre on Oxford Street was hit, and in October a dozen or so tons of bombs fell on the Metropolitan-Vickers works. These, however, were small raids. The December attack was the first in which the Luftwaffe threw several hundred aircraft against the city.

The first night: 22/23 December

The raid of 22 December was carried out jointly by two German air fleets: Luftflotte 3 under Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle and Luftflotte 2 under Field Marshal Albert Kesselring. According to figures cited in local histories, some 270 bombers came over Manchester that night, and a dozen or so aircraft of one squadron dropped parachute mines. In the first few minutes the pathfinders scattered nearly 10,000 incendiaries, and the following waves, fanning out over the city, aimed at the glow of the fires. By morning some 270 tons of high explosive and tens of thousands of small incendiaries had fallen on the conurbation.

Fire spread fastest through the cotton warehouse district along Portland Street, George Street and Piccadilly. Bales of cloth and yarn burned like torches, and the flames leapt from building to building. The fire brigade, weakened by the dispatch of men and equipment to Liverpool, was unable to bring the fires under control; in time the army was called in to blow up whole buildings to create firebreaks. Firemen were brought in from other towns, according to accounts from as far afield as Middlesbrough and Wolverhampton. The ruins of the district were still smouldering more than a week later. During the raids the blazing Victoria Buildings, a huge block of offices, shops and a hotel, collapsed into Deansgate. Bombs damaged Exchange and Victoria railway stations; at the former a limited service resumed only on New Year’s Day, and all the platforms of the latter were not reopened until April 1941.

Trafford Park and neighbouring Old Trafford also suffered badly that night. Bombs meant for the factories fell on Manchester United’s ground, Old Trafford, damaging it so badly that the Christmas match against Stockport County was moved to the opponents’ ground. The story of the Gibson public shelter in Erskine Street, in the working-class district of Hulme, ended happily: rubble trapped some 450 people inside, but all of them were brought out alive.

The second night: 23/24 December

On the evening of 23 December the Luftwaffe returned. The fires from the previous night were still burning and marked the target from afar. This time, according to the same figures, some 170 bombers came over and dropped about 195 tons of high explosive; the pathfinders scattered more than 9,000 incendiaries in little more than 50 minutes. At around three o’clock on the morning of Christmas Eve, just as the firemen, reinforced at last by crews from Liverpool, were beginning to get the situation under control, the wind fanned the fires in the city centre back into life.

Over the two nights the city’s most important buildings suffered. A bomb that exploded right by the north-east corner of the cathedral destroyed the medieval Lady Chapel and one of the side chapels, tore off roofs, blew out all the stained glass and wrecked the organ, while the medieval choir stalls toppled onto one another. The restoration of the cathedral took many years. A direct hit devastated the Royal Exchange, the cotton exchange, whose clock tower lost its upper storeys. The interior of the Free Trade Hall was gutted; built in the mid-nineteenth century to commemorate the repeal of the Corn Laws, it was the home of the Hallé orchestra, which from then on had to play in cinemas and other halls. The neo-Gothic Assize Courts were badly damaged, and Cross Street Chapel, one of the oldest nonconformist congregations in the city, was destroyed.

At Trafford Park bombs hit the new assembly hall at Metropolitan-Vickers. According to the company’s history and aviation studies, they destroyed a dozen or so (12 or 13, depending on the source) of the first Avro Manchester bombers being built there, which were already in final assembly. Licence production of the aircraft was delayed by several months as a result; the first machine from Trafford Park was not delivered until March 1941.

Casualties and damage

According to the most frequently cited figures, some 684 people were killed in Manchester over the two nights and more than 2,000 injured; other compilations put the number killed in the city itself at about 650. In neighbouring Salford, a town of Ship Canal docks and densely packed workers’ housing, more than 215 people were killed and 910 injured according to local estimates; more than 8,000 houses there were destroyed or damaged. In Stretford, where Trafford Park lay, 73 people died. These figures come from different compilations and cannot always simply be added together; some accounts give a general figure of “more than 800 killed” for the whole conurbation. Thousands of people lost their homes just before Christmas, and many families spent the holiday in rest centres or with relatives.

The defences were unable to hinder the attackers. Anti-aircraft guns fired blind into the night sky, and there were still only a handful of night fighters equipped with airborne radar. According to British data, in November and December 1940, out of some 9,000 German night sorties over Britain, night fighters claimed only a few aircraft shot down. According to British reports, only two German aircraft were lost over the British Isles on 24 December; losses on that scale could not induce the Luftwaffe to change its plans.

The Christmas lull

After the night of 23/24 December the skies over Britain fell quiet. From Christmas Eve and through the two days of Christmas, neither did the Luftwaffe make a major raid on British cities nor did Bomber Command raid Germany. There was no agreement; both sides simply, as if by tacit consent, suspended bombing for Christmas. This informal pause recalled, on a modest scale, the spontaneous Christmas truce on the Western Front in 1914, but it changed nothing in the logic of the air war.

And that logic was growing harsher. A week earlier, on the night of 16/17 December, British bombers had carried out the raid on Mannheim, the first in which Bomber Command deliberately targeted the centre of a German city, in reprisal for Coventry and Southampton. It had been approved by Winston Churchill’s War Cabinet. Both sides still declared that they were attacking military and industrial targets, but in practice night bombing of a “target area” increasingly resembled raids on the cities themselves. By December the German pathfinder units were dropping almost nothing but incendiaries, and fire in the dense buildings of city centres destroyed warehouses, churches and homes without distinction.

After Christmas the bombers returned. On the night of 29/30 December the Luftwaffe showered the City of London with incendiaries, starting a conflagration that became known as the Second Great Fire of London.

Place in the war

The Christmas Blitz was the heaviest attack on Manchester, but not the last. On 11 March 1941 bombs aimed at Trafford Park wrecked the stands and pitch at Old Trafford, so that until 1949 Manchester United played at Maine Road, the ground of their local rivals Manchester City. In June 1941 Salford Royal Hospital was bombed and 14 nurses were killed. Long before the end of the war German raids on northern England had died down, because in May 1941 most of the bombers were transferred east ahead of the attack on the USSR. On Christmas Eve 1944 Manchester was once more the target, this time of V-1 flying bombs launched from aircraft flying over the North Sea off the Yorkshire coast; none fell on the city itself, but in nearby Oldham one killed 27 people.

Strategically the December raids, like the Blitz as a whole, failed. The industry of Manchester and Trafford Park was back at work within days and weeks. The Ford factory at Trafford Park, bombed shortly after it opened in May 1941, produced some 34,000 Merlin engines by the end of the war, and Metropolitan-Vickers and Avro at Chadderton built the Manchester’s successor, the four-engined Avro Lancaster, which became the main weapon of the British bombing offensive against Germany. The experience of the December raids, above all that of 29 December on London, where fire spread through locked, unattended buildings, led the government in early 1941 to introduce compulsory fire-watching duties for civilians, while the Minister of Home Security, Herbert Morrison, appealed for volunteers to join the fire services in large numbers. In August 1941 hundreds of local fire brigades were merged into a single National Fire Service.

Rebuilding took a long time. The Free Trade Hall reopened in 1951 behind its surviving façade, and the Hallé played once again at the opening. At the cathedral the Lady Chapel was rebuilt after the war, and one of the new windows, the “Fire Window” of 1966, commemorates the night when the old glass was blown out. Many of the ruined warehouses around Piccadilly were never rebuilt; new office blocks and squares took their place after the war. In the memory of the people of Manchester and Salford, the Christmas Blitz remained what the night of 14/15 November was for Coventry: the moment when the war reached the very heart of the city.