On the evening of Sunday 29th December 1940, seventy-five years ago, there was low cloud over the English Channel and low tide on the Thames. Being a Sunday evening the buildings in the City were mostly locked up and empty. The Luftwaffe had waited for these conditions to launch a devastating firestorm on the City of London.
It was a clever plan. Low cloud allowed their aircraft to cross the Channel unseen, low tide made it harder for firemen to pump water from the river and locked buildings made it more difficult to put out fires. Pathfinder ‘planes led bombers carrying incendiary bombs to London. A wave of bombers carrying explosive bombs followed. A third wave was thwarted because of bad weather and the All Clear was sounded shortly after midnight. However, nineteen churches, almost all the ancient livery companies’ halls and countless houses, workshops and offices had been destroyed.
The Blitz lasted from September 1940 until May 1941 and was by no means restricted to London. However, it is heavily populated London that I think of. At night when the sirens sounded people went to air raid shelters, if they were available, or else slept on the platforms of deep, underground stations. More than 40,000 civilians were killed in the Blitz, about half of them in London.
My mother worked on the children’s ward of a hospital and told me that she soon got weary of sleepless nights in a shelter and risked staying in her own bed. “Tommy” Lascelles describes his experience in his diaries, King’s Counsellor; Lady Diana Cooper in her letters to her son, Darling Monster; “Chips” Channon and Harold Nicolson in their diaries. These are all on my bookshelves but there are many other first-hand accounts.
Everything I have read records the fortitude of Londoners as night after night bombs rained down on them, once for fifty-seven consecutive nights. This year it is possible that there will be another terrorist attack in the UK. Thinking back to the Blitz may help Londoners put any such terrible event in perspective. Let Harold Nicolson have the last word:
Dear London! So vast and unexpectant, so ugly and so strong! You have been bruised and battered and all your clothes are tattered and in disarray. Yet we, who never knew that we loved you (who regarded you, in fact, like some old family servant, ministering to our comforts and amenities, and yet slightly incongruous and absurd), have suddenly felt the twinge of some fibre of identity, respect and love. We know what is coming to you. And our eyes slip along your old untidy limbs, knowing that the leg may be gone tomorrow, and that tomorrow the arm may be severed. Yet through all this regret and dread pierces a slim clean note of pride. “London can take it.” I believe that what will win us this war is the immense central-dynamo of British pride. The Germans have only assertiveness to put against it. That is transitory. Our pride is permanent, obscure and dark. It has the nature of infinity.