The Blitz

For eight months, from 7 September 1940 to 16 May 1941, German bombers attacked the cities of the United Kingdom in a sustained campaign that the British press called the Blitz, after the German word for lightning. London was hit hardest, but ports and industrial towns from Plymouth to Belfast and Glasgow were also struck. Around 40,000 to 43,000 civilians were killed, yet the bombing failed either to break British morale or to cripple war production.

Through the summer of 1940 the Luftwaffe of Nazi Germany fought the RAF for control of the skies over southern England, a precondition for any invasion. In early September, believing that Fighter Command was close to exhaustion, Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring switched the main effort to London, hoping to force the RAF into a final, decisive battle and to pressure the British government into giving up. Historians still argue over whether abandoning the attacks on airfields was a German mistake.

The first great raid came in the late afternoon of 7 September 1940, aimed chiefly at the docks along the Thames; some 400 people were killed that day and over 400 more the next. London was then bombed on all but one of the next 57 days and nights. A huge daylight assault on 15 September, now remembered as Battle of Britain Day, cost the Germans heavily without gaining control of the air, and two days later Hitler postponed the invasion of Britain indefinitely. From October the Luftwaffe turned mainly to night bombing, which fighters and anti-aircraft guns of the time found very hard to stop.

Londoners sheltered in back-garden Anderson shelters, public shelters and the deep stations of the Underground, which the authorities at first refused to open but soon allowed. At the peak, in late September 1940, about 177,000 people slept in the Tube, though a census that November suggested most Londoners simply stayed at home. Shelters were not always safe, and direct hits killed many.

From November 1940 the bombers ranged more widely over industrial Britain. On the night of 14 to 15 November several hundred aircraft devastated Coventry, destroying its historic cathedral and much of the city centre and disrupting factories for months. Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Bristol and other cities followed. On 29 December an incendiary raid on the City of London started a firestorm remembered as the Second Great Fire of London.

In February 1941 Hitler ordered greater priority for attacks on Britain's sea trade, and the spring raids fell heavily on ports. At Clydebank, near Glasgow, almost every house was damaged in March; Plymouth, Portsmouth, Swansea, Belfast, Hull and Liverpool suffered repeated attacks. The heaviest raid on London came on the night of 10 to 11 May 1941, when 1,436 people were killed. By then Germany was moving its bombers east for Operation Barbarossa, its coming attack on the Soviet Union, and the campaign wound down.

Over the whole war more than 40,000 British civilians died in German air raids, almost half of them in London, where over a million homes were damaged or destroyed. Yet British arms output kept rising through the Blitz; British studies found that most badly bombed cities recovered within 10 to 15 days, though Birmingham took about three months. Civilian society did not break down, the feared wave of mental breakdowns never came, and the image of Londoners carrying on under the bombs became an enduring part of British memory. Between June 1940 and March 1941 the Luftwaffe lost more than 2,200 aircraft over the British Isles.

Our 1938 map shows Britain and continental Europe on the eve of the war, and our 1945 map shows them at its end, with the borders of the United Kingdom unchanged.