The Blitz

Tom_Hovi said:

ShootersHillGuru said:

I don’t pretend to be a student of this period but I thought I was reasonably clued up. I watched a tv programme last night fronted by Robert Rinder and Historian Ruth Goodman. The period in focus was the London blitz, starting in September 1940. Decent enough programme but it mentioned something that I was totally unaware of. Before the German Luftwaffe bombed London for the first time on 7th September 1940, The RAF bomber command had carried out a bombing raid on Berlin on 25th August. Infuriating Hitler that he raged that London would be flattened. Perhaps I should have known about our raid before the German retaliation but I didn’t. I’m sure a good number of you will have far more knowledge than I obviously have. Any comments

Like many aspects of the war, many myths have grown around the Blitz, including the one that London was bombed "in error" by the Luftwaffe on the 24 August 1940, a myth perpetuated in many publications and in the Battle of Britain movie of 1969. When one looks at the incident logs for that night, there were simply too many bombs dropped over too wide an area for this to have been the work of one lone aircraft dumping his bombs mistakenly over London. 

It was the beginning of a change of strategy by the Luftwaffe to switch from bombing RAF airfields and industrial targets by day, to a policy of bombing Britain's industrial cities. 

Bomber Command did indeed bomb Berlin the next night and caused minimal damage and casualties but such was the shock that the RAF had actually bombed targets in Germany, when Goering had basically promised immunity from such attacks, Hitler was moved to publicly change strategy to a policy of what became the night time area bombing of London and other British towns and cities.

What we now call the First Blitz or Night Blitz began on "Black Saturday" 7 September 1940 with a combination of daylight and night time raids on London and continued initially for 57 consecutive nights and then right through to the night of 10/11 May 1941, which was ironically the heaviest raid on London of the entire war, when 540 bombers dropped something in the region of 700 tonnes of High Explosive and a further 86 tonnes of Incendiaries, which killed 1,436 Londoners.

To give a little context to this raid, if one compares it to the second "Gomorrah" raid on Hamburg on 27/28 July 1943, 787 aircraft of Bomber Command dropped 2,326 tons of bombs on the city, including about 350,000 incendiaries. The firestorm caused by this raid killed something in the region of 34,000 people - more than were killed in London during the entire war.

During the entire war, the RAF dropped some 80,000,000 (eighty million) individual incendiary bombs on German targets.

The Luftwaffe was essentially a tactical air force, used to support the army in swift attacks when they had overwhelming air superiority. The twin engined medium bombers that they used could never hope to deliver the bomb loads required to truly devastate a city the size of London. The Battle of Britain severely blunted the Luftwaffe and there were many senior figures amongst the Luftwaffe who felt it never truly recovered from this defeat in 1940.

Bomber Command in contrast was a strategic air force, from late 1942 equipped largely with four engined "heavies", initially the Stirling and Halifax but in increasing numbers the Lancaster. It was a force specifically created to destroy German cities and industry, as well as to eliminate and demoralise the civilian population.