A potted personal history and views on the London Blitz

A summary, written in 2004/2005 of personal memories and views of the original German Air Force "Blitz" of London and Britain -
September 1940 - May 1941 and the subsequent air war. A "story" on this site is limited to 3000 words - and my "potted history" runs to almost 12,000 - it appears in 4 "Parts" This is Part 1!
For some years I have sporadically researched a large number of official archives for the general outline and the
figures and statistics of the German Air Force "Blitzes" of London (and Britain generally) that follow. I found there
are sometimes discrepancies in the "official" versions and - when I had edited them into a reasonably cohesive whole
- I felt that most of them had been written by someone who "wasn't there." They are in "officialese" and do not have
the feel, the smell, the fear, the atmosphere, the frequent feeling of exhaustion - what it was really like to personally
be in London during the blitz - especially during the 56 consecutive night raids in 1940 - the real blitz. The printed works, the
photographs, the films and recorded radio do not truly set the scene or the atmosphere, from the vague uneasiness that the melancholy
sound of the air raid sirens gave, to the unreasoning, heart stopping realization that "although that one was close - it hasn't
harmed you" one felt after a nearby big bang. I was eighteen when "the real blitz" started and yet now - better than sixty-five years
later I can still vividly remember the smells, the sounds, the atmosphere of those days - and - mainly - nights.

Let me try to set a little of that "atmosphere" for you - London was even then one of the world's largest cities with a
population of around 5 million. As soon as war was declared as precaution against air raids. all street and any other
form of outdoor lighting was completely banned and no house, factory, no building was allowed to show a light
even from a tiny window at night - every window had to be completely blacked out by some form of impenetrable-by-light
material, boarding up or paint etc. Not the tinniest hole in such material was allowed. All street lighting, neon and advertising signs
were extinguished for the whole duration of the war. From a city of light it became completely "a city of darkness."
You were not allowed to constantly use torches/flashlights to find your way - (even if you could find the batteries for them!)
there was only what starlight and moonlight afforded - and London was most often (still is!) clouded over so there
was little of that. Cars. buses, trucks - all vehicles - had to drive with their lights hooded (see photo) and were not
allowed to use interior lighting (which most of them didn't have anyway). Outdoor fires were not allowed -
but the German bombers made their own.

Every one of London's many Parks had its anti-aircraft gun batteries, searchlights and also unmanned barrage balloons which were
tethered to the ground by cables - the idea being that they would "down" aircraft that flew into their cables - but they
could only be raised to an altitude of a couple of thousand feet maximum so they did not help very much because - while they
might have prevented low level machine gun bombing and strafing with machine guns, the Luftwaffe did not attempt this and
came in at as high an altitude as they could reach. Anti-aircraft fire was ineffective - the guns had to be "laid" and
fired mainly by their human crew's guesswork - there was no automation, no instrument that could help them.
Searchlights roving the night sky rarely "found" the bombers - again they were directed only by human guesswork and
their beams could not be as swiftly moved as was needed to "hold" the aircraft to give the anti aircraft guns a visible
target. Barrage balloons and searchlights have vanished from military equipment since. And so have those old basic
anti-aircraft guns. All were not effective given the manpower to crew them, their range, cost and their relatively few
successes. Technologically air warfare developed too fast for what ( in 1940) had seemed to be those three "good" ideas.

The blackout restrictions were very strictly enforced by the police - still mainly the on-foot "Bobby" and by the Air
Raid Precautions people - whose responsibility also extended to rescue from bombed buildings - the Fire Brigades - the
Home Guard - every street, every neighborhood road had its "squad" or members of these groups.

If you ventured outdoors in London by night and there wasn't an air raid (which generally "lit up" the sky with
searchlights, anti aircraft fire and ground fires) you had to virtually grope your way around and unfamiliar areas were
very difficult - you could not see the street signs - you had to know where you were - there was no light by which to
see them! Most London roads and streets are narrow and afford narrow views of the sky above, so moonlight/starlight was minimal.

The object of "the blackout" was, of course, to NOT light the way for enemy bombers - but they navigated to London
anyway - via the River Thames, easily found from the air, which led directly there, by compass, starlight and moonlight and then the
anti-aircraft fire - heavy and persistent - and even searchlights looking to locate bombers for the anti-aircraft guns lit the sky and acted
as beacons. In turn the bombers lit up London for those following with their exploding bombs and especially their
incendiary bombs - and the often huge fires they caused. That autumn and winter were - as most London winters - damp - and
the high humidity made the air feel even colder than it actually was.

Food was severely rationed, - a few ounces of meat and butter and one egg per person per week. Clothing was
rationed too - indeed there were very few consumer goods available. The BBC closed down its (then infant and tiny)
television service and there was only the BBC radio and the newspapers - and rationing of paper caused the newspapers
to produce only four pages - and forbidden to print information which might be of use to the enemy. The result being that
most of us knew little of what was going on outside our own immediate area, what damage there had been, how many had dies that
previous night.

Schools were closed and children under 14 evacuated to the safety of the countryside and beyond and outside
London there was a weird mishmash of less sensible precautions (mostly against invasion by the German forces - everyone
was convinced that invasion was inevitable) had been experimented with or taken - I append a few photos which show
them.

Take all these things into effect, close your eyes and imagine and I hope you get something of the ugly atmosphere. Even
for a native Londoner it was difficult to be out at night. And - in winter - night falls early and daylight comes late in
the morning.

I have taken my original "reasonably cohesive whole" of official and semi-official reports and amended and added
from my personal memories (and am still gathering more information and continuing amending) plus what few
photographs I can beg, borrow or steal - because I was "there" - for every night and day of the "real" blitz - September 1940 through
May 1941 - not in some remote part of London that heard and saw but suffered very little from the bombing but
"there" right in the center of the most heavily bombed area of London. The "East End." And now I am approaching my
84th. birthday and everyone I knew then and there (except a few who were children then) is dead so I guess I should
set this down while I am able for the sake of my children and their children who were all born far away from London
and W.W.II.

Recent official history has tended to treat the various phases of the bombings of Britain and London in particular as a
single entity, stretching from September 1940 through to late 1944, but really there were four phases:-

1. The "real blitz" as the survivors came to call it - carried out solely by manned Luftwaffe bombers dropping
conventional high explosive and incendiary bombs - mainly by night. That ran from September 1940 through to May
1941

2. The intermittent bombing of London - and other British cities from May 1941 also by the above conventional
method. This continued (on a diminishing basis) through until May 1944. There are records of a few - but rare -
conventional raids after May 1944 but these were of very small scale - there were no more protracted blitzes such as
London suffered in 1940/41.

3. The day and night V1 "flying bombs" - they looked somewhat like a small aircraft (they were only 25 feet in
length with a 17 feet wingspan) but were in fact the first jet-propelled aircraft - automated, unmanned, pilotless
except by instruments, self propelled bombs, with an explosive load equivalent to a 1 ton bomb. They were usually
"power launched" rather like naval aircraft carrier aircraft but from a ramp and they flew at relatively low altitudes
with a reputed maximum speed of up to 400 m.p.h. - personally, I doubt that because the ones I saw were all definitely
flying slower than that and quite a few were shot down by RAF fighter aircraft (whose maximum speed was less than
400 mph).

They had a limited range of a maximum of about 150 miles. This type of raid and this weapon was relatively short
lived - from June 1944 for a little less than 3 months. They - and the V2s - were not a strategic weapon - lacking
human piloting the guidance systems were very crude - their aiming points could not be closely controlled - they might
fall anywhere within a 50 mile radius of the target point - so they were - simply "terror weapons" but
fairly unsuccessful from that aspect - they were no more terrifying than conventional bombings - and they were not as
long drawn out nor as persistent - they rarely "kept it up" for as long as ten hours continuously as the original blitzes did.
A few were shot down by RAF fighter planes and anti-aircraft fire and exploded in mid-air - and a few more
were even brought down by the barrage balloon cables.

Contrast the damage tht just one V1 could do (above) with the following picture taken in London in 1915 showing the damage caused by a
Zeppelin (airship) raid then

4. The V2 "rockets" were the first true ballistic missiles - probably the most terrifying weapon used to that time,
because there was no warning nor even sound of their coming. Launched by day and night and rocket propelled, they
flew faster than sound - over 700 m.p.h. Flying from France or Holland to the London area in a few minutes and
reaching the stratosphere at the height of their climb there was no sound of their approach (although post war
experts say they created a "sonic boom" I - and no-one else I knew then remembered hearing such booms - they were
still flying faster than the speed of sound when they hit!). There was no air raid warning system that could detect, let
alone home in on them in time to sound a warning.

Again they were completely automatic, unmanned and unpiloted except by instruments and had about the same size
warhead as the V1s although they were twice the V1s length. Range unknown but most probably no more than 200 miles.
They were operative from September of 1944 through until the end of March 1945 when the allied armies recapturing
Europe finally overran the areas from which they were launched. It is interesting to note that one of the principal V2
inventors/designers - Werner Von Braun - when captured was not tried as a war criminal, but hastily taken to the
U.S.A. where he was instrumental in guiding the early generations of American rockets into existence - leading to
man's landing on the moon. It was not discussed in the media at the time - it was "hush-hush" but was nevertheless
widely known publicly and Londoners especially were angry and bitter at this special and preferential treatment of a
man they considered a real war criminal. Expedience makes strange bedfellows. The Russians also "kidnapped" other
prominent German rocket scientists - which led to their originally being about level with the USA in developing
intercontinental ballistic missiles and almost as advanced in space travel.

Most of the following account is therefore of the "real blitz" but I have included a few personal items regarding the
V1s and V2s because although I was finally called for my R.A.F. training in September 1941, I was "there in London"
for many of the later raids and the V1s and the V2s - my mother used to joke that "no matter how few the raids had
been for weeks or months, as soon as Ron came home on leave from the RAF, we would get another real dose." In
fact it became a family joke - "let us know when you are coming on leave Ron so we can get out of London for a
while." I was stationed at an airfield quite close to London toward the end of the war so, in addition to the rare
seven day leaves, I sometimes got 48 or 24 hour "passes" and went home when I did.

I have included some "public domain" photographs of the real blitz - plus a few taken by one of my brothers who had
a Kodak "Brownie" camera and somehow managed to get film - it took me months to get copies of these for they
had long been buried away with various friends and relatives "archives." Cameras were scarce then - we only had
that one old Kodak "box" camera in our family and film for it was generally impossible to find during the war.
Plus which you could be mistaken for a spy and literally arrested if you were seen taking photos of any military
equipment, bomb damage etc. - although he did! And, in the Army, Navy or Air Force, it was "verboten" to have
a personal camera. A lot of what I did not know then, I now know. A lot of the trust in government and the law
as it then was - I do not have now. I am grown more than a little cynical of "officialdom" and disdain "politics."

But as I was - and we mostly all were - then - given Adolf Hitler's seemingly insatiable appetite for more "living space" for the
German people, from the summer of 1938 on war expecting war - it seemed inevitable to us in Britain and, together with three of my
four ex-grammar school friends, I volunteered for the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve as aircrew - because we had all been "air force
mad" or flying enthusiasts since school days. But you could not actually serve in the British armed forces until you
were 18 years old and, in 1938 I (and my friends) were only 16 going on seventeen, so we were waiting to be "called
up." In fact none of us were called up until we were nineteen - due to lack of training facilities I guess - they were
few then and confined to British bases but later this training was speeded up with facilities in Canada and - after 1941
- the USA.

In the interim, just before the war started, I joined the London Auxiliary Fire Service as a "messenger" (they would
take you when you were sixteen) for it was thought (and later became fact) that - during air raids - telephone lines
would be put out of commission and therefore each fire brigade substation would have several messengers who
would relay orders and other communications between stations and equipment located at fires so as to be able to
move the equipment to where it was most needed. And what better messengers than young and foolhardy teenagers?
We were first equipped with bicycles and later motor cycles to carry our messages. So I was "called up - full time" -
for that service on Friday Sept.1.1939 - on the day the Germans invaded Poland and actually two days before war was
declared by Britain. I was seventeen. With their parent's consent (although it was not mandatory and quite a few
parents refused) children under 14 had been evacuated to homes in the country and every civilian (including children)
had been issued with a (very basic) gas mask, for gas bomb attacks were feared (but never happened).

The London Auxiliary Fire Service wartime system was that each of the some 40 London Main Fire Stations would
have five, six or seven "sub" stations to give blanket coverage to their area and these were usually located in schools
(quite a few of which initially temporarily closed at the beginning of war - the kids being evacuated to the countryside) and I was
posted to one of these substations - a "infants" school - a mile or two from home. We had as "skipper" a "real"
(regular) London Fireman, together with about 20 grown men (past the then military service call-up maximum age of 40 - or younger
men whose "trade" exempted them from military service) who had volunteered for the AFS, two or three primitive
fire engines (see photo) plus the team of five or six messengers and I was the "leading messenger" at our substation in charge of
the other few boys - simply because I had had a Grammar School education. "Democracy" caused me a few fist fights
to establish "real" authority over them! Initially we slept on the floors - the school was equipped with furniture and
desks sized for 4 to 8 year olds! Later we got Army type furniture and a field kitchen.

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