The Blitz begins

Late in the afternoon of Saturday 7 September 1940, the largest air formation the British had yet seen appeared over the mouth of the Thames: some 350 bombers escorted by more than 600 fighters. This time its target was not the fighter airfields the Luftwaffe had been attacking for the previous two weeks, but the Port of London and the working-class districts around it. The docks of East London burned all night, and the glow guided wave after wave of bombers over the city, dropping bombs almost until dawn. According to British figures, between about 430 and 448 Londoners were killed that day and night, and some 1,600 were seriously injured. The British called it “Black Saturday”. It was the first day of the Blitz, the German bombing offensive against British cities that lasted until May 1941, and at the same time the turning point of the Battle of Britain.

7 September is often described as one of the greatest blunders of the war: the Luftwaffe turns its attention away from the RAF’s airfields, and its “success” is measured only by an estimate of some 2,000 civilian dead. The judgement that the turn towards London was a mistake is widespread, although historians qualify it, as discussed below. The casualty figure, on the other hand, needs correcting. More than 400 people died on the first day and night, not 2,000. London suffered roughly that number of deaths over the first week of raids, because the nights that followed proved just as bloody: according to the British official history, 412 people were killed and 747 seriously injured on the night of 8–9 September.

Why London

Until the end of August, London was a target reserved for Adolf Hitler himself. Directive No. 17 of 1 August ordered the Luftwaffe to destroy the British air force, while Hitler kept for himself the decision on any “terror” raids by way of reprisal. Plans for an attack on the capital’s port and industry, code-named Loge, had nevertheless been sent out to the air corps as early as July. In the original concept, a great raid on London was to be the climax of the campaign, delivered just before the landing in order to create chaos and a flood of refugees on the roads at the moment Operation Sea Lion, laid down in Directive No. 16, began.

Events brought that decision forward. On the night of 24–25 August German bombs, probably contrary to orders, fell on the City of London, and Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered Berlin to be bombed in response. The British raids on the Reich capital, small and inaccurate as they were, humiliated Hitler and Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, who had assured the Germans that their cities were safe. On 30 August Hitler lifted the ban on bombing London. On 3 September Göring conferred in The Hague with his air fleet commanders. The commander of Luftflotte 2, Albert Kesselring, argued that the British fighter force was nearly exhausted and that its last reserves could be destroyed only over a target the British would have to defend at any cost – the capital. The commander of Luftflotte 3, Hugo Sperrle, believed that the RAF still had many aircraft and preferred to go on hitting the airfields. Kesselring’s view, which was what Göring wanted to hear, prevailed.

On 4 September Hitler spoke at the Berlin Sportpalast to open the Winter Relief collection. He declared that since the British were threatening great attacks on German cities, Germany would “erase” theirs, and promised to answer every raid with hundreds of times as many bombs. Over the following days, 5 and 6 September, orders were issued for raids on London. From then on German propaganda presented them as “reprisal attacks”. Behind that word, however, lay two aims that were intertwined in the German orders: to destroy the port, industry and communications of the capital, on which the country’s war economy depended, and to draw the last British fighters into a battle in which the Luftwaffe meant to wipe them out once and for all.

Göring on the cliff

Göring arrived on the Channel coast in his special train and announced that he was taking personal command of the battle. On the afternoon of 7 September, accompanied by Kesselring and the commander of II Air Corps, Bruno Loerzer, he watched the formations crossing the Channel from the cliff of Cap Blanc-Nez, between Calais and Wissant. Surviving photographs show him with binoculars above the straits. That evening he spoke on German radio. He said that he had taken charge of the attack himself and that the historic hour had come when the Luftwaffe had for the first time struck the enemy in his very heart.

The forces assembled that day were indeed immense. According to the most commonly cited figures, 348 bombers, mainly Heinkel He 111s and Dornier Do 17s, and 617 Messerschmitt Bf 109 and Bf 110 fighters took part in the daylight attack. Other tallies, which include every aircraft sent over England that day, speak of more than a thousand machines.

Afternoon over the docks

British radar detected the formations assembling over France at about 3.40 p.m. At the headquarters of No. 11 Group under Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park another strike on the sector airfields was expected, so the squadrons were positioned to cover them. The German formations, however, passed the airfields by and flew along the Thames straight for London. The sirens sounded in the capital at 4.43 p.m. The first bombs fell on Thameshaven with its fuel tanks, and then on the docks and the riverside districts. Between five and six in the evening successive waves bombed the Royal Docks and the works around them, the West India Docks on the Isle of Dogs, the Beckton gasworks, the power station at West Ham and the Royal Arsenal at Woolwich, where powder magazines exploded. On the south bank the Surrey Commercial Docks at Rotherhithe, with their vast stocks of timber imported from Scandinavia and Canada, were ablaze.

The RAF fighters caught the bombers only over the target or on their way home. Park threw more than twenty squadrons into the fight, and from the north, for the first time as a single formation, came the “Big Wing” of No. 12 Group under Air Vice-Marshal Trafford Leigh-Mallory, led by Douglas Bader. Forming up the wing, however, took so long that it reached London after the bombers had already released their loads. In the day’s fighting the Luftwaffe lost, by various tallies, between about 40 and 50 aircraft, and the RAF between 23 and about 28 fighters. Pilots of the Polish No. 303 Squadron, with only a week of combat behind them, also fought over the Thames estuary.

A night of fires

The all-clear sounded after six, but there was no relief. Several hundred fires were burning in the East End, and some of them had engulfed whole blocks of warehouses. The men of the London Fire Brigade and the volunteer Auxiliary Fire Service, many of them without experience, fought burning timber, sugar, rubber, paint and rum pouring out of the warehouses. The fire in the Surrey Docks, where tens of thousands of tons of timber were burning, is sometimes described as one of the greatest in London’s history. According to a frequently quoted account, a fire officer at the docks signalled: “Send all the bloody pumps you’ve got; the whole bloody world’s on fire!” Fire engines were brought into London from the surrounding counties and even from Birmingham and Bristol. Some firemen worked without a break for two days and nights.

The glow could be seen from far away, and there was no need to search for the target. At about eight in the evening a second wave crossed the Kent coast: some 250 bombers of Sperrle’s Luftflotte 3, this time without escort, since in the darkness they had no fighters to fear. The British night defences were almost helpless: there were few radar-equipped night fighters, and the anti-aircraft guns had nothing to aim at. The bombers circled over the city until about 4.30 a.m. According to British figures they dropped more than 300 tons of high explosive and thousands of incendiaries. The densely built working-class districts along the river and deeper in the East End suffered worst: Silvertown, Canning Town and other parts of West Ham, Poplar, Stepney, Wapping, Whitechapel and Bermondsey. The workers’ houses stood right against the dock walls, and a raid on the port inevitably became a raid on the people who lived there.

The casualties

The death toll of “Black Saturday” is given slightly differently in different studies. Most often cited are 430 to 448 killed and some 1,600 seriously injured; some tallies give 1,337 seriously injured and apply the figure of about 1,600 to all casualties. The discrepancies arise mainly from whether only the London area is counted or the surrounding districts as well, and from the fact that many of the injured died in the following days. Thousands of people lost their homes. The rest centres for those bombed out, designed for short stays by individual families rather than for crowds of homeless, were overwhelmed. On the following nights the Luftwaffe returned to London, and on 10 September a bomb hit a school in Canning Town where East End families were waiting to be evacuated; officially 73 people died there, according to local people many more.

Even so, the losses were far smaller than the authorities had feared. Pre-war British government estimates had predicted that the very first week of heavy raids on the capital would kill tens of thousands, and preparations had been made for mass burials and an outbreak of panic. There was no panic. According to the British official history, more than 13,000 civilians were killed and almost 20,000 seriously injured in September and October 1940, most of them in London.

The codeword “Cromwell”

On the evening of 7 September, London feared more than bombs. For several days British intelligence had been recording a sharp increase in barges and ships in the ports from the Netherlands to Boulogne and more German aircraft in the Pas-de-Calais, while the tides and the moon over the following days favoured a landing. At the beginning of September several German agents had also landed in Kent and been quickly caught. At about eight in the evening General Headquarters Home Forces (GHQ Home Forces) sent the codeword “Cromwell” to units in eastern and southern England, meaning that invasion was imminent and troops were to take up their battle positions. The codeword did not mean that the landing had begun, but in many places that is how it was understood. Home Guard units were put on alert, in some places church bells – reserved since June as the signal of an enemy landing – were rung, and people spent the night waiting for paratroopers. No invasion came. That same night British bombers attacked the barges in the ports of the occupied coast.

A reprieve for the airfields

For Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding’s Fighter Command the turn towards London brought relief. For the two weeks since 24 August the attacks on the airfields of No. 11 Group had been wearing down the pilots and wrecking the operations rooms. Now the bombs were falling on the city, and the sector airfields could be repaired, the squadrons brought up to strength and the pilots given some rest. London, moreover, lay further from France than the Kent airfields, so the radar stations and controllers had more time to scramble the fighters and assemble them before the bombers arrived, while the German Bf 109s could spend only a few minutes over the target before having to turn back for lack of fuel.

Hence the view, repeated in war chronologies and many popular histories, that on 7 September the Luftwaffe made one of the decisive mistakes of the war. On this reading the Germans were one step from breaking Fighter Command and abandoned a winning strategy in a fit of anger, in revenge for Berlin. Some historians, among them Stephen Bungay and Richard Overy, regard this picture as oversimplified. They point out that in the critical fortnight only one sector airfield was briefly put out of action, and that the number of fighters with the squadrons did not fall, because the factories and repair shops kept pace with demand. The real problem was the loss of pilots, but the Luftwaffe was exhausted too. Nor was the turn towards London a mere reflex of rage: it followed from plans that had envisaged an attack on the capital from the outset, from German intelligence’s conviction that the RAF had only a handful of fighters left, and from the calculation that they could be finished off over London. The mistake, then, lay not so much in the choice of target as in a false assessment of the enemy. Whichever view prevails, the result is beyond dispute: Fighter Command survived, and over London it would fight in better conditions than over its own airfields.

Other cities

Other British cities also suffered on 7 September. That day the main weight fell on London and its surroundings, but night raids on industrial cities and ports had already been going on for several weeks. At the end of August the Luftwaffe had bombed Liverpool and Birkenhead several nights running, and earlier Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. In parallel with the attacks on London (Operation Loge), the German command conducted Operation Seeschlange against ports and shipping: bombers and minelaying aircraft attacked Liverpool, Bristol, Southampton and other ports. For the next two months, however, London remained the main target.

Its place in the war

On the morning of 8 September Churchill went to the bombed districts of the East End. According to the memoirs of General Hastings Ismay, who accompanied him, the people called out, “Good old Winnie, we thought you’d come. We can take it”, and the Prime Minister had tears in his eyes. That night the bombers came back, and from then on London was bombed for 57 nights in a row. Londoners began to go down into the Underground stations for the night, despite an initial ban by the authorities. On 13 September bombs hit Buckingham Palace, which allowed the royal family of George VI to share the lot of the people of the East End. On 15 September the Luftwaffe suffered such heavy losses over London in daylight that it could no longer win command of the air, and on 17 September Hitler postponed the invasion indefinitely. From October the Germans bombed mainly at night. On 14 November a raid on Coventry destroyed the city’s medieval centre, and the attacks extended to Birmingham, Bristol, Southampton, Liverpool, Plymouth, Glasgow, Belfast, Hull and other cities. The last and heaviest raid on London, on the night of 10–11 May 1941, killed about 1,400 people. After that most of the German bombers flew east, ahead of the attack on the Soviet Union.

The Blitz killed more than 40,000 British civilians, nearly half of them in London, but it broke neither Britain’s industry nor its will to resist. The raid of 7 September was not the first bombing of a city in this war: the Luftwaffe had already razed Wieluń and bombed Warsaw and Rotterdam. It was the first time, however, that the German air force had waged a campaign lasting months against a great city, aimed not only at military targets but also at breaking the spirit of its population. The experience of the Blitz strengthened Britain’s conviction that the war had to be fought to the end, and became its moral justification for its own bombing offensive against Germany, whose victims in 1942–1945 included Hamburg, Cologne, Berlin, Dresden and dozens of other cities.