Date: 7th September 1940 to May 1941
Location: The South East, London and the Midlands, England
On 30th August 1940, the German news bureau announced to London, "The attacks of our Luftwaffe are only a prelude. The decisive blow is about to fall."
At 4.56pm on the late summer afternoon of Saturday 7th September, London's air-raid sirens announced the arrival of 375 German bombers and supporting fighters. They came up the Thames to London from the sea and set the London docks ablaze. As darkness fell, the fires burnt fiercely all over East London, and illuminated the efforts of a London Fire Brigade, which was to have almost no rest for almost two months. This was the dawn of the Blitz, and the only mass daylight raid of a campaign of terror that was characterized by the undaunted spirit of the civilian population. Although the daylight raiders were gone by 6pm that evening, the fires were still burning when the night raiders arrived to inflict more damage at 8.10pm.
(London Underground, used by tens of thousands as their nightly bomb shelters)
The raid lasted until 4.30am, and by dawn London had nine major conflagrations. Huge spreading areas of flame included nineteen fires, which would normally have called for thirty pumps or more, forty ten-pump fires and nearly a thousand lesser fires, any one of which would have made the front pages in peace time. Thousands of homes in the inner suburbs along the Thames were destroyed or damaged in one night. 430 men, women, and children were killed and another 1,600 seriously injured.
For every single night of the rest of September the bombers came, the fires burned and the death toll mounted. By the end of September 5, 730 people had been killed and nearly 10,000 badly injured. Roads were cratered, telephone systems crippled, gas mains fractured, and electricity supplies destroyed. Hospitals all over Greater London were damaged, some severely.
October seemed to produce a lessening of the scale of the attack, although the bombers still came every night and more people died. On the night of the 15th, however, a full moon, over 400 bombers dropped over a thousand bombs. 430 were killed, 900 badly hurt. No break came until the night of November 2nd, the 57th consecutive night of the Blitz, as London prepared for the devastating rain of high explosive and incendiary bombs, but the raiders miraculously did not come.
During November, there were only three nights the Germans did not come, and again they concentrated their biggest effort around the full moon, on the 15th. The previous night had seen German bombers attack Coventry. Although Churchill knew of this raid in advance, Coventry was not warned due to the need to keep the British decryption of the German Enigma a secret from the Germans. The raid on Coventry destroyed the famous Cathedral and devastated the city.
By the end of November 1940, 12,696 civilians in London had died, about 20,000 had been severely injured and approximately 36,000 bombs had fallen on England's capital. After November, the Germans realised this strategy, an attempt to crush the British will, would not work. The pattern of bombing became more widespread but just as destructive, with great fire raids on the City of London in December and more raids in January 1941. The raids continued until May 1941, when 40,000 civilians had been killed and 46,000 more seriously injured. Over 1 million homes had been destroyed or damaged. RAF involvement was mainly the contribution of light bombers and fighters equipped with airborne interception radar to intercept the German bomber formation at night.
The citizens of London, however, had more to face in
the later years of the war with Hitler's 'Vengeance'
weapons raining destruction on London once more,
which included the V-1 'Doodlebug' with its ominous
drone and silent fall, and the deadly, unstoppable V-2
with its enormous warhead.
-- Anonymous, October 31, 2001