This week marks the 70th anniversary of the beginning of the bombing of London during WWII.
Congratulations to all you folks reading this who are in existence today because you were born of sturdy folk who survived those demoralizing days. It’s something I know little about other than long forgotten history classes and seeing the film “Hope and Glory.”
So I’m hoping some of you members across the pond will share stories told to you by your families and help educate me a bit.
This must be a record for the longest time I’ve checked a post! Perhaps my scope is too narrow, limiting it to direct word-of-mouth.
How about some of you history buffs? Any good anecdotes about the Blitz?
Once you read about the damage caused by German bombing of cities throughout Europe, it always comes across as a bloody nerve for them to complain about the bombing of Dresden.
Right now there is a memorial to thelost bomber crews being constructed after a reprehensible delay in recognising the sacrifice of tens of thousands of young men doing their duty. Needless to say, the politically correct are protesting against it.
Perhaps they should live in Taliban held territory during a US air strike to understand just a tiny smidgeon of what the Axis inflicted upon others for years.
The arguments against bombong Dresden seem all based on a logic free from the suffering and pressure of pain and deprivation of years of brutalisation imposed by the Nazis.
You can still go to various parts of UK towns and see very readily the effect of German bombs, where newer buildings stand in the vacnt spaces of bombed out homes - Portsmouth is a good example, but you could also go to Hull, CoventryLiverpool as well as London.
Churchill made it pretty plain - ‘Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind’
My mother grew up in London during the war. They used to sleep in the underground stations to protect themselves from the bombs. As the war progressed, her family was split up and different children went to different relatives who lived out in the countryside. My mother ended up with an aunt and uncle in Bedford. My grandmother stayed in London for the duration of the war.
My mother has often talked about how they only had two sets of clothes, literally one to wear and one to wash. Food was also very scarce. To this day, my mother is very particular about food. She gets upset when people waste food, and sampling something from another person’s plate really bothers her because her brothers would sometimes steal food off of her plate while they were eating.
After the war, my mother’s oldest sister married an American serviceman who was stationed in London. They eventually moved to Ohio, where he was from. My mother came over to visit in 1956 and never went back. She eventually became and American citizen and married my father.
Everyone from our family survived the war, except for my grandfather, who took his own life (for reasons that have never been explained to me). My mother and one of her brothers are still alive. The rest have passed on.
I have been to London and Bedford to visit the relatives that are (or were) still over there, and I have seen the areas where my mother grew up. She lived in a relatively poor section of London.
Here’s the BBC Blitz Archive:
Thanks for your responses. I will check out the Blitz archives.
I just happened to be in the car and caught a little of a public radio program and I started to think about the reality of all those months in the underground and the effect it must have had on families. Imagine having to send one’s children away just to hope they’d be safer!
It has only occurred to me lately that all the adults I knew growing up had only recently been through the horror of WWII and have been pondering how that may have affected the whole community in which I was raised. Funny how as a child it all seemed like ancient history but the effects of war must carry scars on families through several generations. And there was so much silence about it that it must have festered like a wound that hadn’t been cleaned.
As far as political correctness trying to silence the history, or change it, it seems like a poor idea given the possibility that it may affect furture generations in ways they may not understand without adequate knowledge.
What we are sacrificing in the sake of saving people’s feelings! It would be better to speak the facts (without a political bent) and let the chips fall where they may.
Many cities in the U.K. were blitzed not just London.
My mums family lived in a Victorian house and used to hug each other in the cupboard under the stairs during a raid because they didn’t have a bomb shelter.
She said that when a stick of bombs was dropped it sounded like a giants footsteps "walking "towards them.
They only knew that they were safe (for the moment) when the next bomb went off on the other side of their house, they always wondered which of their neighbours had “got it”.
My mother always used to hate the sound of a civil defence siren being sounded for practice even years after the war.
Growing up in the fifties and the sixties overgrown, derelict bomb sites were very much a normal part of life.
Even today in English slang is the term “bombed out”.
Used when someone appears to be acting strangely/dazed/drugged, as in “He’s bombed out isn’t he?”
Where I come from post raid photos show just a sea of rubble where once the city center was.
As another poster has already stated you can still see today rows of houses with one or two missing, estates where whole terraces are missing, houses with bricks forced into the wall face and burn marks on the wall.
Construction sites quite frequently find UXBs nowadays when excavating and not too long ago a 40scar was dug up where it had been blown into a crater and the crater filled in with rubble.
Still are. There was an old bomb shelter at my prep school in Birmingham in 1994. I assume it’s still there.
One of the big reasons the US and allies won the war was our country’s main area was never bombed, we had our factories going full tilt through the whole war. We were able to make so many guns, bombs, planes, ships, tanks, etc. and the axis could not keep up.
“Vienna” by Ultravox. I had the 12" version of this and my dad (born 1921) actually tore it from the record player. There are sounds like anti-aircraft guns on it apparently. My friends dad slept under his bed and kept all the windows blacked out - this was in the countryside in the sixties. Looking back it was a whole generation or two of shell shocked men really, staring at the sky and not talking much. My dad kept a piece of twisted metal which was shrapnel from an off course bomb which took part of the roof of our house off, again far enough in the country for our village to have taken evacuees.
Some old bloke in a chipshop in London once said to me: “I hope you’ll never have to eat a pigeon pie.”
Pigeon pie. Sounds better if you call it squab!
I imagine that more than just the men were shellshocked. When I was a toddler we had an English war bride and family living next door. Though she couldn’t have been more than mid-twenty her hair was white and she claimed that it had turned so overnight during the bombing!
You just put me in mind of the war influence in “The Wall.”
So I’m wondering, if all that effort was put into shutting the country down, how could they have missed bombing the factories?
It was darned hard for night bombers to hit anything much smaller than a city, or for day bombers to get through against effective fighter opposition. It also turned out that, both in the UK and Germany, bombing damage could be worked around more easily than either side expected. Strategic bombing had its place in a campaign of grinding the enemy down, but it proved less decisive than the doom-mongers were predicting in the 1930s. There were exceptions - the bombing of Warsaw and of Rotterdam seemed to produce effective “shock and awe”, but that was possibly because the Poles and the Dutch were unable to mount a defence or to retaliate, whereas the British and the Germans in their turn could and did.
My grandparents lived in Harrow during the war (my granddad was a draughtsman working on Hurricane fighter air intakes). My grandmother said she, pregnant with my dad, went with her friends with picnics to the top of Harrow Hill during the Battle of Britain and parts of the Blitz, and watched dogfights over the capital, cheering them on like sporting events.
During the Blitz, a bomb landed in the front garden of their next-door neighbour, tunneled all the way under my grandparents’ garden, and came up, unexploded, in the garden of the next-door neighbour on the other side.
She also drove ambulances, which were converted Pickfords removal vans, in the blackout with blackout headlights (downward-facing grilles) which rendered the headlights pretty much useless. She said it was amazing she never hit anything or anyone, haring through the streets of north-east London pretty much blind.
She went to one house that had been knocked in half, everyone in it killed, and said she was freaked out because in the half of the kitchen that had survived the teacups were still hanging from their hooks on the dresser, right next to the dismembered limbs of the children and adults that had been in the kitchen at the time.
They built an Anderson air raid shelter in the back garden and pimped it out with floorboards and store cupboards, but never used it. During construction they thought they’d walled in their cat, because they could hear mewing coming from the shelter, so took out all the floorboards, only to find that she was actually stuck inside a small cupboard. I used to play in it when I was a kid.
My other granddad was chief gunner on a destroyer, working the Indian Ocean. My grandmother, living in the south of England, got by while he was away, bringing up my mother. She was in a butcher’s shop buying sausages one day when the butcher suddenly said “I think I just heard a doodlebug stop”. She was holding my mother, who was a baby, and the butcher grabbed her and pulled both of them down behind the counter. The V1 flying bomb landed nearby and the windows of the shop shattered inwards violently, lacerating the meat to shreds. He saved her life, and that of my mother, and by extension, me.
Erratum: north west London.
Recent BBC article about the impact of the Blitz on British consciousness.
Let’s not forget the first blitz in the Great War as well. Although it pales in comparison to the second world war, that it was so new made it very frightening.
I have a number of UK newspapers from the Blitz period, and the advertisements about what to eat is really strange.
Wow! I’d heard the spirit of the English was sturdy. Guess your grandmother was a good role model for that. Lucky you.
Such a story.
Thanks for this.
Through a little research, our own Martini Henry discovered that my SMLE Mk III* was manufactured at the Small Heath plant at the height of the Blitz. So I own a little piece of history.
Here’s an article about the wartime maps of Londons bomb damage. I was surprised to learn that Russel Square, about 50 yards away from where I’d stayed for vacation, was hit right in the middle by a V-2.