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The Blitz: The British Under Attack
Juliet Gardiner
In a series of powerful accounts drawn from diaries, letters, sound archives and interviews recorded during the period of devastation, discovery and transformation that make the blitz such an outstanding event in Britain's recent past, "The Blitz" brings to life the intense experiences, as they happened all over Britain.The blitz proved to be a highly effective laboratory constructed out of necessity, and intense forcing house for change.Yet, compared to other great events of the Second World War – Dunkirk, D – Day, and even VE Day, the Blitz remains curiously unexamined.A type of cleansing resulted from it. It soon became evident that many of the attitudes in society were outdated.The most obvious inequalities between British society also became clear, and yet with everyone sharing the same devastation, these differences slowly began to lose their importance.As well as a social laboratory, the Blitz was a medical one too. Overworked doctors and scientists were forced to experiment and improvise. It was during the Blitz that the embryonic blood transfusion service grew to become a nation-wide institution. Psychoanalysis took on a new meaning too: the enemy was now external, someone different from "us".It gave coherence to artists and writers at the time such as Cecil Beaton.The Blitz is arranged as a series of chronological chapters, each focusing on an aspect of key importance.The perspective will primarily be that of those who had actual experience of those tumultuous months, when no one knew when or if the bombings would stop.Above all, it will be recounted in the words of the many "ordinary people" across Britain who were caught up in the Blitz, their stories, entries that are taken from the journals that they kept during this difficult time and also interviews with those who are still alive today.
JULIET GARDINER
The Blitz The British Under Attack
Dedication (#ulink_39fc7c18-d473-5331-befb-7b10dea655f7)
For Martha
Contents
Title Page (#u170a5c83-f99f-5cbc-980e-a8774406c560)
Dedication (#u0d192188-e8f5-5999-ac3e-0d030952ef69)
Preface (#ubaf471f8-37c7-54d3-834d-d897a7623d8a)
Before (#u7188dbdb-4d55-5f1c-8e28-3a055d65d3a5)
1 Black Saturday, 7 September 1940 (#u84227c77-e10e-5007-873b-88ff9e1939c3)
2 ‘The Most Grim Test in its History …’ (#u0678045a-d564-5c57-a6be-8691c9d86ece)
3 Sheltering (#u21eedd9d-7ecb-54af-a3d5-60c6a582dfe3)
4 Underground (#u50524775-c6f2-5ec4-8e22-bdafebdf7b41)
5 Front Line (#ufa5cf98e-d5a7-595b-9768-1a947a87c587)
6 The Test of War (#litres_trial_promo)
7 Guernicaed (#litres_trial_promo)
8 Britain Can (Probably) Take It (#litres_trial_promo)
9 The Fear of Fear (#litres_trial_promo)
10 The 1940 Provincial Tour (#litres_trial_promo)
11 Peace on Earth? (#litres_trial_promo)
12 Long Shall Men Mourn the Burning of the City (#litres_trial_promo)
13 Standing Firm (#litres_trial_promo)
14 Spring Offensive (#litres_trial_promo)
15 The Far Reach (#litres_trial_promo)
16 Attrition (#litres_trial_promo)
After (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Preface (#ulink_8ce0a0e4-a1dd-5dc0-bbff-75c9a6dbc2b2)
These are the facts, observe them how you will:
Forget for a moment the medals and the glory,
The clean shape of the bomb, designed to kill,
And the proud headlines of the papers’ story.
Remember the walls of brick that forty years
Had nursed to make a neat though shabby home;
The impertinence of death, ignoring tears,
That smashed the house and left untouched the Dome.
Bodies in death are not magnificent or stately,
Bones are not elegant that blast has shattered;
This sorry, stained and crumpled rag was lately
A man whose like was made of little things that mattered;
Now he is just a nuisance, liable to stink,
A breeding-ground for flies, a test-tube for disease:
Bury him quickly and never pause to think
What is the future like to men like these?
People are more than places, more than pride;
A million photographs record the works of Wren;
A city remains a city on credit from the tide
That flows among its rocks, a sea of men.
Ruthven Todd, ‘These are the Facts’
‘Blitz’ is an abbreviation of the German word ‘Blitzkrieg’, meaning ‘lightning war’. It all too accurately describes Hitler’s advance through western Europe in May and June 1940, as Norway, then Holland, Belgium and France fell to the German forces within weeks; but it hardly seems appropriate for the almost continual aerial bombardment of the British Isles that started on 7 September 1940 and continued with little relief until 10 May 1941. Yet ‘blitz’ is the name by which these eight months were known. It was a German word, and like lightning it came from the sky, and could and did kill. Indeed, an air raid was in many ways like a terrible storm – the sky livid, rent by jagged flashes, obscured by black clouds rolling across it or lit up by the reflected glow of fires, while the noise of bombs and guns echoed like the thunder of Mars, the god of war.
The blitz was the test of war for the British people: it touched everyone’s lives, it mobilised the population, and in phrases that have become time-worn but are nevertheless true, put civilians on the front line and made the home front the battlefront. Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, which preceded it, had essentially been military operations. The blitz was total war. Its intensity and inescapability made it possible to call the Second World War ‘the people’s war’, in which, in the words of the poet Robert Graves, a soldier ‘cannot even feel that his rendezvous with death is more certain than that of his Aunt Fanny, the firewatcher’.
The blitz was the war that everyone in Britain had been expecting, and fearing, since that warm Sunday morning in September 1939 when Neville Chamberlain had announced that ‘Britain is now at war with Germany’. Although there had been sporadic raids throughout the ‘phoney war’ that followed, it was not until almost exactly a year after that declaration that the Luftwaffe bombers arrived in force over London. Although England’s capital was bombed more heavily and more continuously than anywhere else in the country, the blitz was an attack on the whole United Kingdom: few places escaped its direct effects, none its indirect ones.
In January 1941 George Orwell wrote to the editors of the American journal the Partisan Review, to which he would contribute a ‘London Letter’ throughout the rest of the war: ‘On that day in September when the Germans broke through and set the docks on fire, I think few people can have watched those enormous fires without feeling that this was the end of an epoch. One seemed to feel that the immense changes through which our society has got to pass were going to happen there and then.’ But he went on to say that these feelings had been erroneous: ‘to an astonishing extent things have slipped back to normal … When all is said and done one’s main impression is the immense solidarity of ordinary people, the widespread yet vague consciousness that things can never be the same again, and yet, together with that, the tendency of life to slip back into the familiar pattern.’
Just a month later, Orwell was demanding that ‘either we turn this war into a revolutionary war [against privilege and influence, and for equality and freedom] or we lose it’. Neither happened. The equivocation and ambivalence of wanting change and wanting things to be as they had always been would persist, and politicians consistently declined to define Britain’s war aims other than by the simple word ‘victory’.
Yet the blitz was a defining moment in Britain’s history. More than cityscapes were reconfigured in those eight months. The attrition that had been anticipated for over a decade revealed both the incompetence of the authorities, and their misunderstanding of the nature of such warfare and of the needs of the people. But at the same time it demonstrated their sometimes grudging, usually tardy, willingness to accommodate, compromise and innovate. And perhaps, above all, eventually and imperfectly, to listen. To keep the people ‘on side’ as much as possible, since it was recognised that civilian morale was vital in maintaining full-scale war production and thus Britain’s ability to prosecute the war at a time when victory was very far from assured. For this reason, and others, the blitz did prove to be a forcing house, a laboratory, the intense distillation of how an external threat could weld together a nation while at the same time failing to resolve many of its tensions.
The blitz has given the British – politicians in particular – a storehouse of images on which to draw at times of crisis: the symbol of an indomitable nation, united in resolution. The true story is, of course, more nuanced and complicated than that, cross-hatched as it must be by the freight of the prewar years, of differing experiences and expectations. There were thousands of examples of extreme bravery, fortitude and selflessness. There was also a pervasive sense of exhaustion, uncertainty and anxiety, and acts of selfishness, intransigence and contumely. The words that best sum up the blitz are probably ‘endurance’ and ‘defiance’. And arising out of that, a sense of entitlement: that a nation that had been exhorted to ‘take it’ could reasonably expect, when the war was finally over, to ‘get [some] of it’, in terms of greater equality, more employment, better housing, education and life chances in general.
In 1940 the use of the transitive verb ‘to blitz’ signified ‘to destroy by aerial bombardment’. Seventy years later it is sometimes used to mean ‘to deal with something energetically; to concentrate a lot of effort on something to get it done’. Both meanings resonate in our understanding of the blitz of 1940–41 and its aftermath.
Juliet GardinerJune 2010
Before (#ulink_63d1b207-dc00-53c7-9c68-0e4a632a455c)
I think it is well for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can prevent him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through … the only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.
Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin, speaking in the House of Commons in 1932
Robert Baltrop was sitting on the roof of a Sainsbury’s store in east London on Saturday, 7 September 1940. It was a warm late-summer afternoon, the rays of the sun stretching across the concrete rooftops. The air-raid alert had just sounded, so Baltrop, who worked as a porter in the store, ‘humping and cleaning and that sort of thing’, had clambered out to take up his post on lookout duty. ‘It wasn’t bad being a watcher during these daytime warnings, sitting up there in the sunshine and smoking and watching the sky, and looking down at the people going about their business as usual in the streets below. I wasn’t really sure what I was watching for, anything dangerous – fires or bombs falling or planes getting near, and I don’t really know what I could have done about it. I suppose I should have had to go down the steps and tell them in the shop that a bomb had fallen on them!’
The war was more than a year old by this time. It had been another lovely summer day when Hitler had failed to respond to Britain’s ultimatum to withdraw German troops from Poland, and the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had broadcast to the nation at 11.15 on 3 September 1939 to tell the British people that ‘despite all my long struggle to win peace … this country is at war with Germany’. Within minutes the air-raid sirens sounded, and Londoners scurried to take shelter. The war that everybody had been expecting had started. Only it hadn’t. That first alert was a false alarm, and a metaphor for a long autumn, winter and spring of expectation and fearful anticipation. But until the summer of 1940 there was little sign of the Armageddon that had been feared – except at sea, where the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’, which would take the lives of more than 30,000 merchant seamen by 1945, had been raging since the outbreak of war as Germany sought to stop supplies reaching Britain to enable her to keep fighting. By the late spring hardly anyone was carrying their gas mask any more, shelters were filling up with water through disuse, a ban had been put on recruiting any more Air Raid Patrol (ARP) wardens, and many volunteers, bored with the endless waiting around, drinking cups of tea and playing darts, had resigned, since there didn’t seem to be much for them to do other than act like martinets when any chink showed through the blackout curtains on their patch. Housewives were already beginning to feel fed up with rationing, and the endless queuing and ingenuity in the kitchen that wartime shortages would demand, and more than 60 per cent of the mothers and children who had joined the government’s evacuation scheme on the eve of war had drifted back home to the cities by January 1940, no longer convinced that their homes would be bombed, or their children killed, which had been the compelling reason for the exodus. It truly did seem to be a ‘bore war’ – all the regulations, restrictions and privations of wartime, with few of the dangers on the home front that would make them seem justified.
On 4 April 1940, in what Winston Churchill, recalled to the Cabinet on the outbreak of war as First Lord of the Admiralty, thought was ‘a speech of unusual optimism’, Chamberlain sanguinely told a Conservative gathering that Hitler had ‘missed the bus’ in seizing the offensive. Five days later German forces moved to occupy Norway and Denmark, and on 10 May, as Baltrop recalled, ‘quite suddenly the Germans invaded the Low Countries; there was the evacuation from Dunkirk [which the British press largely treated as a victory rather than a defeat]; and on 22 June France signed an armistice with Germany. I remember at the Sainsbury’s where I worked, somebody coming into the warehouse and almost with satisfaction rubbing his hands together and saying, “Well, we’re on our own now” … There was a feeling that we were in the war now, and a certain feeling of resolve about it. Dunkirk had its effect. There were Churchill’s speeches – “We will fight on the beaches and we will never surrender” – and very quickly daytime air raid warnings started. Again, there was this curious thing just like at the beginning of the war. We expected the worst and it didn’t happen like that. We started getting air raid warnings by day and night. [Sainsbury’s] agreed with the other shops round about, they would put up the shutters immediately. But nothing happened, and people didn’t go home. They stayed in the streets. So the “gentlemen’s agreement” between shopkeepers was dropped, and the shops started to open again even when the air raid warnings went, and … life went on through the summer. But they were getting nearer.’
Italy had entered the war in support of Germany on 10 June, and six days later the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, resigned and Marshal Philippe Pétain, a military hero of the First World War, took over, and shortly afterwards signed an armistice surrendering northern and western France to the advancing German forces. From across the Channel, Winston Churchill, Prime Minister since Chamberlain had resigned on 10 May, surveyed the defeated British Expeditionary Force evacuated from Dunkirk, and on 18 June, the 125th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, he addressed the House of Commons. Whatever had happened in France, he assured MPs, would make ‘no difference to the resolve of Britain and the British Empire to fight on if necessary for years, if necessary alone’. He predicted that:
the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States [he added pointedly, since America was still pursuing an official policy of neutrality] will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age … Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say ‘This was their finest hour.’
The swift fall of France had not been foreseen by the German high command, and for several weeks they were at something of a loss to know what to do next. In mid-June, as German forces made their final assault on Paris, 120 German bombers attacked eastern England, killing nine in Cambridge,
(#ulink_db2a3a6b-fb4f-5cd9-8805-a67965cdc09c) and the first bomb in the London area fell on Addington near Croydon, though at that time Hitler had expressly placed London off-limits for attack. Throughout June and July there were intermittent random, small-scale daylight raids around the capital and on coastal towns in the south and east, and as far north as the Tyne. South Wales was bombed and shipping in the English Channel attacked, and on 12 July twenty-nine Aberdonians were killed and 103 seriously injured in a raid for which no warning had been given. On 16 July Hitler issued Directive no. 16, Preparations for the Invasion of Britain, and such an invasion seemed a real possibility to the British. There were rumours from all over the country of sightings of German parachutists (maybe dressed as nuns) floating down, of barges massing in the Channel, of flotillas of gliders conveying troops from occupied France to East Anglia and Kent. On 18 August the Sunday Express suggested that 18 September would be a good day for a German invasion: ‘The tide would be high, the nights longer than at present, and sea mists and fogs are prevalent at the equinox. Therefore, unless the Nazis come between the eighteenth and twenty-third of next month, they will be wise to postpone their visit until next spring.’
Towns along the Kent and Sussex coasts were evacuated, beaches were mined, piers dismantled and barbed wire uncoiled. An appeal by Anthony Eden, Secretary of State for War, broadcast just after the BBC nine o’clock news on 14 May, for volunteers ‘to serve in the defence of their country in its hour of peril’ had resulted in a stampede that had reached one and a half million by the end of June. For many months these Local Defence Volunteers (soon to be renamed the Home Guard at Churchill’s insistence) had no uniform other than a brassard, and since all military equipment had first to be channelled to re-equip the denuded army, nothing to fight with other than a pitchfork or broomstick, or if they were fortunate, a First World War Lee Enfield rifle. Nevertheless, the band of under-resourced men was evidence of a willingness to ‘defend our island whatever the cost may be’, as Churchill had demanded.
Hitler hoped that Britain could be persuaded to abandon the fight and sue for peace when faced with the success of the blitzkrieg that had swept through the Low Countries and France and now threatened its shores. However, a final peace offer was rejected by the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, on 22 July, and since it was clear that, despite the odds, Britain intended to fight on alone (though of course supported by Empire and dominion forces), various means were considered of bringing the country to its knees, including invasion. But it was obvious that there could be no successful invasion until German planes enjoyed air supremacy, and the aim of what has become known as the ‘Battle of Britain’ that summer was to wipe out the country’s defences. By early July the Luftwaffe was dive-bombing British shipping and ports along the south coast and engaging RAF fighter planes in aerial combat; on 8 August it switched to trying to knock out Britain’s fighter defences, with attacks on airfields, radar stations and other targets such as repair sheds and anti-aircraft guns and equipment.
It soon became apparent to Hitler that this strategy on its own was not working. ‘The collapse of England in the year 1940 is under present circumstances no longer to be reckoned on,’ he told his HQ staff on 20 August. The dogfights over southern England and the bombing raids on RAF targets had not succeeded in putting Britain’s air force out of commission. The battle continued, although 15 September 1940 has since been celebrated as Battle of Britain Day, the day on which in retrospect it became clear that against the odds Britain had retained mastery of its skies.
However, Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Air Minister and Commander-in-Chief of the German air force since 1935, assumed on the basis of inaccurate intelligence that Fighter Command was all but annihilated, and was anxious to attack London in the hope that this would draw RAF fighter planes to the capital, where they could be picked off. On 24 August, in contravention of Hitler’s orders, the Luftwaffe dropped several bombs on London. Although this was most likely an error, it gave Churchill the opportunity to order raids on Berlin, in the expectation that Hitler would retaliate and send his bombers to London, where they would be expected – and supposedly dealt with – thus relieving the pressure on the Western Front in France. On 2 September Göring ordered the Luftwaffe to switch to bombing Britain’s industrial and administrative centres and transport and communication links, while the strategy the Kriegsmarine (the German navy) advocated, the blockading of British ports and attacks on her shipping, continued unabated.
So the war entered a new phase. The ‘Battle of Britain’ was to be carried on by other means. Germany’s targets were now industrial installations and transport and communication links around major cities. It was hoped that this would ‘cripple’ Britain and compel her to seek peace. The home front would become a front-line battlefield for the next five years. And on 7 September 1940, ‘Black Saturday’, the first day of the war of persistent aerial attack that became known as the blitz, it was the London docks that were in the Luftwaffe’s sights.
(#ulink_bc15c555-cb87-51c2-bc80-a60694e46014) The first civilian British bombing death had in fact come on 16 March 1940, when an Orcadian labourer was killed as he stood by his croft door in the hamlet of Bridge of Waithe. It was presumed that the German plane had lost its way, or had mistaken the hamlet for a nearby airfield.
1 Black Saturday, 7 September 1940 (#ulink_69e0ca86-c8e3-5158-aef4-706e72bff105)
[The British] will understand now, as night after night, we give them the answer [to RAF bombing raids on Germany] – when they declare they will attack our towns on a large scale, then we will erase theirs.
Adolf Hitler speaking in the Berlin Sportspalast, 4 September 1940
‘The Reichsmarschall is leaving his train and is coming past us. He sees us. Is this what he was intending? Is he really coming? Yes. He is coming! The Reichsmarschall is coming from his train and is coming to the radio,’ the German announcer reported excitedly on 7 September. Hermann Göring, a large, heavy man, clad in a greatcoat, wearing the Grand Cross of the Iron Cross, which he had been awarded as a result of the French campaign, at his throat, strode to the microphone to address his fellow countrymen and women. ‘I now want to take this opportunity of speaking to you, to say this moment is a historic one. As a result of the provocative British attacks on Berlin on recent nights the Führer has decided to order a mighty blow to be struck in revenge against the capital of the British Empire. I personally have assumed the leadership of this attack, and today I hear above me the roaring of victorious German squadrons which now, for the first time, are driving towards the heart of the enemy in full daylight, accompanied by countless fighter squadrons.’ So saying, the Commander of the German air force clambered back into the carriage of his personal train, ‘Robinson’, and resumed his journey back from the Channel coast where he had stood on the cliffs of Cap Gris Nez, binoculars trained on Britain, watching the German aircraft set out on their mission and maybe hoping to catch a glimpse of the effects of the havoc their bombs would wreak in their ‘major strike on Target Loge’ (the German code name for London).
Sitting in deckchairs, mowing the lawn or visiting friends that sun-filled afternoon, people in Kent looked up as the drone of planes grew louder and louder – ‘like the far away thunder of a giant waterfall’, thought the American journalist Virginia Cowles. She was having tea in the garden of the Palladian Mereworth Castle, the home of the press baron Esmond Harmsworth, eldest son of Viscount Rothermere, in Kent, forty miles from London. ‘We lay on the grass, our eyes strained towards the sky; we made out a batch of tiny white specks, like clouds of insects moving north west in the direction of the capital. Some of them – the bombers – were flying in even formation, while the others – the fighters – swarmed protectively around … during the next hour [we] counted over a hundred and fifty planes. They were not meeting any resistance.’ To the urbane diplomat turned journalist and author Harold Nicolson, now a Junior Minister at the Ministry of Information, sitting with his wife Vita Sackville-West in their garden at Sissinghurst, also in Kent, the ‘wave after wave of enemy aircraft planes looked like silver gnats above us in the air’.
The siren had sounded at 4.43 p.m. that Saturday. Londoners had got used to its ululating note: the sound of ‘Wailing Winnie’ or ‘Moaning Minnie’ had been frequent during the last few weeks of constant ‘nuisance raids’. ‘We are growing accustomed to sudden warnings, and we have developed a quickening of our sense of danger … we are not panicky, but we are, at any rate subconsciously, more on the look-out than had hitherto been the case at any time during last year,’ the Harley Street psychologist and BBC producer Anthony Weymouth had written in his diary back in August. Harold Nicolson would have agreed. ‘People are becoming quite used to these interruptions,’ he wrote in his diary as he heard the siren wail on 26 August. ‘I do not think that that drone in the sky means death to many people at the moment. It seems so incredible as I sit here at my window, looking out on the fuchsias and zinnias with yellow butterflies playing around each other, that in a few seconds I may see other butterflies circling in the air intent on murdering each other.’
Yet despite the increasing frequency of the alerts, the mournful notes could still send a shiver of dread down people’s spines. ‘Whoohoo go the goblins, coming back at nightfall/Whoohoo go the witches reaching out their hands for us … Are we sure we will be the lucky ones/ … They have come back, we always knew they would after the story ended,’ wrote the author Naomi Mitchison in one of her ‘blitz poems’.
The planes droned on. As Robert Baltrop sat on the roof of Sainsbury’s, ‘all of a sudden on the skyline coming up the Thames were [black specks] like swarms of flies … weaving their way through puffs of smoke … and my reaction was one of astonishment and … well, what’s going to happen now? They were flying across my line of vision, and sitting up there on the roof, I had a perfect view of them, watching them fly across the Thames … coming in … past Dagenham and Rainham and Barking, and they were heading straight for London, and it was going to be the docks that were going to get it … I began to hear loud thumps, and those were bombs falling, and clouds of smoke were rising up – clouds of black smoke floating away until you couldn’t see anything but a huge bank of smoke, and still they were coming.’
The operational orders issued to 1 Fliegerkorps for that afternoon informed the pilots that ‘The purpose of the initial attack is to force English fighters into the air so that they will have reached the end of their endurance at the time of the main attack.’ To achieve ‘the maximum effect it is essential that units fly as a highly concentrated force … The main objective of the operation is to prove that the Luftwaffe can achieve this.’
‘We have had many air-raid warnings during the last week, and as soon as the sirens have sounded we have invariably done what we’ve been told to do – go to a place of safety,’ noted Anthony Weymouth, whose ‘place of safety’ was the hall of his ground-floor flat. ‘It is well inside the building, and between us and the blast of bombs are two sitting rooms and the hall of the building. The only windows in the hall have been shuttered and we have been told to leave all the windows open to avoid, so far as possible, broken glass.’ So on 7 September Weymouth and his family ‘waited for an hour or so, some of us sitting on the mattresses which are now a permanent part of our hall furniture, some squatting on the floor. Audrey [his wife] put on her [ARP warden’s] tin hat and went round her sector to see if she was needed. She returned to tell us that a big fire was raging in the City.’
But it wasn’t the City of London that three hundred German planes were converging on that late afternoon: it was ‘Target G’, the docks that lay in the bight of the Thames where it loops around in a U shape like a small child’s badly built wooden railway, a lazy-looking attempt to encircle not some pleasant riverside picnic place but Silvertown, a jumble of docks, warehouses and small houses built for workers in the docks and the nearby factories in days when industry and home were hugger-mugger in the poorer parts of towns and cities.
The German pilots had no difficulty in identifying their targets in the clear afternoon light. The first bombs fell on the Ford motor works at Dagenham, closely followed by a rain of high explosives and fire bombs on Beckton gasworks, the largest in Europe. Below them now lay the great Thames bight at Woolwich Reach, enclosing the three Royal Docks, their warehouses and sheds stacked with foodstuffs and materials vital to the war effort. Within minutes the huge warehouses and factories lining the river on both sides from North Woolwich to Tower Bridge were on fire. Two hundred acres of timber stacks, recently arrived from North America and the Baltic, burned out of control along the Surrey Commercial Docks, the main timber-importing centre in Britain: within twenty-four hours only about a fifth of the two and a half million tons was left. Burning spirits gushed out of the rum quay warehouses at West India Dock, a tar distillery flooded North Woolwich Road with molten pitch, and rats swarmed out of a nearby soapworks. A rubber factory was hit, and the acrid black smoke rolling through the narrow streets of Silvertown mingled with the escaping fumes from the damaged Beckton gasworks and started a rumour that the Germans were dropping canisters of poison gas as well as bombs. Fire burned through the ropes of barges tethered along the quayside and the burning boats drifted downstream, only to return several hours later on the incoming tide, still smouldering, while the intense heat blistered the paint on buildings in areas untouched by the bombs.
A fireman stationed at Pageant’s Wharf Fire Station stared in horror as magnesium incendiaries lodged in the wood stacks and oil bombs ignited the timber like kindling on a bone-dry bonfire. It seemed as if ‘the whole bloody world’s on fire’ to Station Officer Gerry Knight as he yelled to the fire station telephonists to call for urgent reinforcements. The regular London firemen were joined by men from the four wartime Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS) substations on the docks, their trailer pumps drawn by vans, taxi cabs – 2,000 had been hired by the start of the war, often with their drivers coming along as part of the deal – or anything that could be pressed into service to get to the blaze.
The AFS, an adjunct of the fire brigade, had started recruiting in March 1938, and had expanded after the Munich crisis, when large posters had appeared on walls and on the sides of fire engines urging: ‘Keep the home fires from burning’. By the time war broke out, for every regular fireman there were fifteen auxiliaries, and ‘it was quite a big job getting them all trained’. AFS members had received sixty hours of basic training, but most had never been called to a major fire before. Now it seemed that all the drill they had carefully learned was for another world: as soon as they trained their hoses on one outbreak, another flared up feet away. Damped down by the water jets, a pile of wood would sizzle in the heat, then burst into flame again. The firemen worked fast to screw together the sections of hose and run them into the river so there was no shortage of water, but soon telegraph poles all around the dock were combusting in the heat, and even the wooden blocks that surfaced the roads were igniting. Grain spilling out of the warehouses made a sticky mess that stuck to the firemen’s boots, bogging them down as if they were walking through treacle in some sort of nightmare. Gerry Knight realised that the inferno was burning out of control, impossible to put out, and that if he didn’t withdraw his men were in real danger of being trapped by the sheets of flame.
Peter Blackmore was a successful playwright who had become a volunteer fireman after seeing a ‘Join the AFS’ poster in the London Underground, showing ‘a firelit fireman holding the branch of a hose, an exciting picture which stirred the imagination and at the same time in small print set out the glorious benefits of such service, the exceptional wages, the food allowance, the uniform and the leave days’. He had grown used to the sound of the siren, ‘more popularly known as the “sighreen”. In those days this was the signal for us to rig fully in helmets, boots, leggings, belts, axes and spanners, tear to the appliance-room and man the pumps, there to sit and grumble until the “All Clear” sounded and we could return to an overcooked or cold meal. This seemed to occur many times day and night. We were certainly always ready. Still no blitz came.’ But on the night of 7 September 1940 Blackmore was wondering what to make of the ‘ominous red glow in the sky, which, had it not been in the east, could have passed for an indifferent sunset’ when a colleague came to tell him, ‘They’re bombing the docks.’ ‘Down went the bells,’ and Blackmore and his colleagues set off eastwards.
As they approached the docks they joined ‘an endless queue of appliances, all steadily moving and being detailed to their exact positions. Bombs were falling fast and heavy. We did a great deal of ducking … and my heart was in my mouth. The journey towards a blitz, like most apprehension, can be the worst part of it … Eventually we came to a standstill at the wharf where we were to spend the endless night. Everything seemed to be on fire in every direction, even some barrage balloons in the sky [winched up in the hope that low-flying enemy aircraft would become entangled in their metal ropes] were exploding. The cinder-laden smoke which drifted all around made us think of the destruction of Pompeii.’
Cyril Demarne, a regular fireman stationed at Abbey Road School in West Ham in London’s East End, was in the school yard when soon after the alert had sounded he heard ‘the drone of approaching aircraft rapidly swelling to a roar. Suddenly squadrons of bombers appeared all over the eastern sky, flying very high and escorted by hundreds of fighter planes glinting in the sunlight as they weaved and turned over the bomber formation … I dived for the safety of the Control Room, where calls for assistance were already flowing in from Dagenham, Barking, East and West Ham. The electricity mains were damaged in the first minutes of the raid and [as it grew dark] the fire control had to operate by the light of candles set in jam jars.’
