Raids on Liverpool and Southampton

In the early hours of Friday 29 November 1940, during the heaviest raid on Liverpool up to that day, a German parachute mine struck a three-storey school building on Durning Road in the Edge Hill district. The building collapsed into the basement, where some 300 people had taken shelter: residents of the surrounding streets, workers returning from the factories and passengers from trams halted by the alert. Scalding water poured from the shattered heating system, gas from fractured pipes, and fire raged above the rubble. According to the most commonly cited figure, 166 men, women and children were killed. The Durning Road disaster is regarded as the worst single incident of the Blitz on Merseyside, and Winston Churchill is credited with calling it “the single worst incident of the war”. The next evening, 30 November, more than a hundred German bombers pounded Southampton, a port on England’s south coast, for six hours, and on 1 December they returned to the burning city.

War chronologies record under 29 November the raid on Liverpool and the tragedy on Durning Road, and under 30 November the great raid on Southampton, repeated the following night, after which it was the turn of Bristol on 2 December and Birmingham on 3 December. Both events were part of a single phase of the German bombing campaign: after the destruction of Coventry, the Luftwaffe shifted the weight of its attacks from London to provincial ports and industrial centres. One precision concerns the date: the raid on Liverpool began on the evening of 28 November, and the bomb fell on Durning Road after midnight, which is why some studies, including certain British lists, give the date as 28 November.

After Coventry

From 7 September until the beginning of November 1940 the Luftwaffe’s main target was London, bombed almost every night. Other cities received bombs from single aircraft and subsidiary raids, but not great concentrated attacks. In mid-November the German command changed its plan. Since the invasion had been postponed until the spring of 1941, night bombing was to weaken Britain on its own: to destroy the armaments industry, especially aircraft production, and the ports through which the country received food, fuel and weapons from across the ocean. The first and most notorious example of the new plan was the raid on Coventry on the night of 14–15 November, after which the word coventrieren entered the language of German propaganda.

Over the next two weeks Hermann Göring’s bombers struck a different city almost every night. On the night of 19–20 November some 440 bombers attacked Birmingham, England’s second city and one of the largest centres of the armaments industry. About 450 people were killed that night, and at the Birmingham Small Arms works, which made rifles, collapsing halls buried several hundred workers, 53 of whom died. The bombers returned to Birmingham the next night and again on 21–22 November, in an eleven-hour raid that cut off the water supply to most of the city. According to British figures, some 800 people were killed in Birmingham between 19 and 28 November. On the evening of 23 November Southampton was bombed, and on 24 November Bristol, where about 200 people died and fire destroyed the medieval centre around the churches of St Peter and St Nicholas. By the end of November the Luftwaffe had some 1,100 bombers available for night raids, of which on average about 200 took off on any one night. According to figures cited in the literature, in November it flew about 6,000 sorties over Britain and carried out 23 major raids, that is, raids in which more than 100 tons of bombs were dropped.

British night defences could still do little. The anti-aircraft guns fired mainly barrage fire, and there were very few night fighters with airborne radar. The first destruction of a night bomber by a Beaufighter guided by airborne radar was achieved only on 19 November. In November and December the Luftwaffe flew some 9,000 night sorties over the British Isles, while RAF night fighters claimed only a handful of kills. Dissatisfaction with this state of affairs cost the victor of the Battle of Britain his post: on 25 November Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding handed over Fighter Command to Air Marshal Sholto Douglas.

Liverpool, gateway to the Atlantic

Liverpool, together with Birkenhead across the Mersey and neighbouring Bootle and Wallasey, formed the largest port on Britain’s west coast and its main window on North America. Convoys from Halifax and Sydney in Nova Scotia headed for Liverpool and the Clyde; here grain, meat, oil, steel and aircraft from Canada and the United States were unloaded, and quays a dozen or so miles long handled, according to post-war estimates, the greater part of the war materiel imported into the country. Liverpool’s importance grew in the autumn of 1940 when, after the fall of France and the German seizure of its Atlantic ports, ships avoided the English Channel and the ports of southern England and took the northern route around Ireland. Every day of delay in the Mersey docks meant ships waiting in the roads, exposed to attack, and goods missing from factories and shops. Small wonder that Merseyside was, after London, the most frequently and most heavily bombed area of the country. For the Germans, bombing the Liverpool docks was an extension of the Battle of the Atlantic, fought on the ocean by U-boats – and, from the autumn, by great “wolf packs” as well, as against convoys SC 7 and HX 79 in October.

The first large raid on Liverpool, by some 160 bombers, came on the night of 28–29 August 1940, and the following nights brought more. By the end of October some 50 raids on the city had been recorded, ranging from sorties by a few aircraft to attacks lasting many hours. On 18 September bombs destroyed a wing of Walton prison, killing 22 prisoners. The sirens sounded over Merseyside so often that by October local records were already noting the “two-hundredth” alert. The heaviest nights, however, were still to come.

The night of 28–29 November

On the evening of Thursday 28 November German bombers flying from airfields in France and the Low Countries arrived over Merseyside. The raid lasted nearly eight hours, into the early morning. According to figures cited in German and British studies, between about 300 and 350 aircraft took part, dropping some 350 tons of high explosive, several thousand incendiaries and about 30 parachute mines. This last weapon was particularly deadly for the inhabitants. Naval mines, originally intended to block shipping channels, came down on parachutes and exploded on the surface without burying themselves in the ground, so that the blast wave demolished houses within a radius of several hundred metres. One of them pierced the roof of a gasholder at the Garston gasworks in the south of the city and failed to explode; it was later defused by naval personnel. Bombs fell on the docks, railway lines and residential districts. According to some studies, nearly 300 people were killed in the whole raid, although the exact number, as with many other raids of the Blitz, was never established. Some of Liverpool’s civil defence records were in any case burned in later bombing.

Durning Road

The building on Durning Road in Edge Hill, east of the city centre, had been built at the end of the 19th century for the Edge Hill teacher training college. The college moved to Ormskirk in the 1930s, and in 1940 the building served as a vocational school for young people, known as the Ernest Brown Junior Instructional Centre. Its spacious basement, which housed the boiler room, had been designated a public air-raid shelter and was considered one of the safest in the area. Nearby lay Edge Hill railway station and extensive goods sidings serving the port – the bombers’ probable target. That night some 300 people crowded into the basement. They included residents of the surrounding terraced houses, whole families with children, night-shift workers and, according to some accounts, passengers from two trams whose drivers had directed them to the nearest shelter when the alert sounded.

In the early hours of 29 November a parachute mine struck the building. Its three storeys collapsed into the basement, crushing many of those sheltering there. Boiling water poured from the burst central heating pipes and gas from the damaged mains, and the rubble above the shelter caught fire. Rescue workers, firemen and civil defence volunteers worked amid the flames, while the raid was still going on, digging their way through to the people trapped beneath the concrete. Recovering the living and the dead took two days. The remains of some victims could not be recovered: for fear of disease they were covered with lime and the basement was sealed up.

According to the most commonly cited figures, 166 people died, although some lists give 164; some accounts even speak of several hundred victims, but the registers do not bear this out. Many of the survivors suffered serious injuries and burns. It was the worst single disaster of the entire Liverpool Blitz. Churchill is said later to have called it “the single worst incident of the war”. These words are widely quoted in the city’s history, although it is hard to pinpoint exactly where and when they were spoken; nor should they be taken literally, since a month earlier the disaster at the Coronation Avenue shelter in Stoke Newington, London, had claimed a similar number of lives. In line with the censorship rules, the press wrote of “a north-west town”, giving neither its name nor the number of dead, which many Liverpudlians later felt as a silence about their suffering compared with London or Coventry.

Southampton, 30 November and 1 December

Southampton, a great port on the estuary of Southampton Water, was a base for transatlantic liners, an important naval port and a centre of the aircraft industry. In the Woolston district, on the River Itchen, stood the Supermarine works where Spitfires were built. Lying on the south coast, the city was an easy target: bombers from airfields in Normandy and Brittany could reach it in less than an hour. In daylight raids on 24 and 26 September the Luftwaffe bombed the Supermarine works, killing about 110 people, mostly workers; Spitfire production then had to be dispersed among dozens of smaller workshops and garages across the county. On 6 November, in a daylight raid, a bomb hit the city’s new Civic Centre and penetrated to the basement of the art gallery, where a drawing lesson was in progress. Thirty-five people were killed, 15 of them children. On the evening of 23 November came the first great night raid: from a quarter past six until midnight the bombers killed 77 people and injured more than 300.

On Saturday 30 November, shortly after dark, some 120 bombers, according to the most frequently cited figures, arrived over Southampton. The raid lasted about six hours. Nearly 800 high-explosive bombs and thousands of incendiaries fell on the city. The town centre around the High Street, the port buildings and residential districts burned. Destroyed or badly damaged were the Pirelli cable works, the General Motors factory and the offices of the Southern Daily Echo, the churches of All Saints, Holyrood and St Mary’s, as well as the historic Audit House and the offices of the Ordnance Survey, Britain’s mapping agency. The medieval church of St Michael survived – according to local tradition because its tall spire served German airmen as a landmark. Bombs fractured the water mains; the firemen ran out of water and many fires had to be left to burn themselves out. Fire brigades came to help from all over Hampshire and beyond. According to accounts, the glow over the city could be seen from the French coast near Cherbourg, and German propaganda announced that Southampton had been turned into smoking ruins. According to local figures, 137 people were killed that night, 96 of them in shelters.

The next evening, Sunday 1 December, the bombers returned to the city, where fires were still smouldering. Bombs again fell on the centre and the quays. In one shelter that took a direct hit 16 people were killed, among them Edgar Perry – who in 1912, as a coal trimmer, had survived the sinking of the Titanic – and his wife. In a cellar beneath a restaurant on the High Street that had been turned into a shelter, a burst water main flooded those sheltering during these raids; at least one family drowned there. The death tolls for individual nights vary from source to source, because some of the dead were recovered only after several days and the records from those days were incomplete. There is no doubt, however, that the nights of 23 and 30 November and 1 December were the heaviest in the city’s entire wartime history, and it is these that Southampton calls “the Blitz”.

Three raids in nine days shook the inhabitants. Every evening thousands of people began leaving the city to spend the night in the surrounding villages, in woods and in cars, returning to work in the morning. Government observers and researchers from Mass-Observation, a volunteer social research organisation, recorded in Southampton exhaustion, a sense of abandonment and sharp criticism of the city authorities, who had failed to cope with relief for the bombed-out. It was one of the few cases during the Blitz in which officials openly spoke of a temporary collapse of morale. The port and factories, however, resumed work within a few days.

Bristol and Birmingham in early December

The next cities, Bristol and Birmingham, were not new targets for the Luftwaffe. On the night of 2–3 December the bombers returned to Bristol, an important port at the mouth of the Avon, with its dockside suburb of Avonmouth and the Bristol Aeroplane Company works at Filton, which had already been heavily bombed on 24 November. It was the second of six great raids Bristol endured between November 1940 and April 1941. Birmingham, after the November series, was attacked again in early December; according to some sources, on the night of 3–4 December some 60 bombers came over – far fewer than in November. The longest raid on the city, lasting thirteen hours, came only on the night of 11–12 December. By then the rhythm of the campaign was clear: the Luftwaffe struck a different city each night, choosing it according to the weather, the phase of the moon and the forces available, but rarely returned enough times in a row to paralyse any one centre completely.

Place in the war

The raids on Liverpool and Southampton showed what the Blitz had become after Coventry. It was no longer a battle for air superiority ahead of an invasion, but a long campaign of attrition aimed at ports, factories and the people who worked in them. The German command did not officially intend to attack the civilian population, but at night, in fog and blackout, the bombs and parachute mines dropped on a “target area” destroyed above all residential districts. The Durning Road shelter, probably hit instead of the goods station, became a symbol of this.

Liverpool went on to endure the pre-Christmas raids of 20–22 December 1940, in which some 365 people were killed, and above all the “May Blitz” of 1–7 May 1941, when Merseyside was bombed for seven nights in a row, the ammunition ship SS Malakand blew up in the docks and some 70,000 people were made homeless. According to post-war figures, bombs killed 2,716 people in Liverpool, 442 in Birkenhead, 409 in Bootle and 332 in Wallasey – some 4,000 in all, the highest toll in Britain outside London. Southampton endured 57 raids in all, in which 631 people were killed and some 45,000 buildings were destroyed or damaged; according to British figures, the city lost about one-eighth of its housing stock, more than any other in the country.

Strategically, these raids failed. Despite the damage, the port on the Mersey continued to receive convoys, and in February 1941 Western Approaches Command, which directed the escort of Atlantic convoys from a bunker beneath Derby House, moved to Liverpool. Spitfire production, dispersed after the destruction at Woolston, returned to normal after a brief dip. Britain did not sue for peace. In May 1941 most of the German bombers were transferred east, ahead of the attack on the USSR.

In Liverpool the memory of Durning Road survived above all in the families of the victims and on local memorial plaques. The burnt-out ruins of St Luke’s Church, destroyed in May 1941, were left standing in the city centre as a memorial to all those killed in the raids on Merseyside. In Southampton the traces of those nights can still be seen today in the preserved ruins of Holyrood Church, turned into a memorial to the sailors of the Merchant Navy.