The Blitz: The British Under Attack. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ Churchill speaking in 1934 about the prospect of an aerial bombardment of London

      Darling Kat, You little know what you say when you tell me to write for the papers. I am not, as you know, made of the stuff Londoners are made of. My instinct is to flee. I cannot report on scenes in shelters. There are hundreds of keen, nerveless people out all night pursuing fires and demolition … Still it is endurable and my greatest fear is being forced by Duff [her husband, the Minister of Information] to leave the city. It is so utterly unlike what I imagined the raids on London would be. I thought of a bigger, suddener attack, with the whole population blocking roads, Ministries evacuating to their pre-arranged dispersal stations, frightful dislocation, worse perhaps than this cold-blooded waiting for destruction. Most people don’t see it so. They have confidence in a defence being found. ‘This is only a phase of war. We’ll stick it out all right.’ There is not a street that does not show some assault. The curtains flap dismally out of Londonderry House and most of the big Piccadilly houses. I try to avoid the places where the cruellest gashes have been inflicted, but one has to take the way that cut-off streets, encumbered with bombs ticking to explode, allow.

      Lady Diana Cooper writing from London to her friend ‘Kaetchen’ Kommer in New York on 23 September 1940

      Around the time the ‘big blitz’ on London started in September 1940, the War Damage Survey of the Architects’ Department of the London County Council (LCC) started to record bomb damage to the capital. Using sheets of Ordnance Survey maps from 1916 that had been updated in 1940 to show boundary changes, new buildings etc., on a scale of 1:2,500 (25.34 inches to the mile), the architects marked incidents of bomb damage across the city’s 117 square miles, using different-coloured pencils to indicate degrees of severity. Black denoted those buildings that had been totally destroyed, purple those damaged beyond repair. Those that had sustained ‘serious damage, doubtful if repairable’ were coloured dark red, while properties ‘seriously damaged but repairable at cost’ were light red. Orange indicated ‘non-structural general blast damage’ and those in yellow had escaped all but minor damage – broken windows, or roof tiles dislodged, for example. The architects kept up their meticulous work until the end of the German V-weapon offensive on 27 March 1945 (V-weapon damage was indicated differently), and today their maps make sombre viewing.

      The docks consist of little other than large slabs of black, with small infills of purple round the edges. Even more shocking are the narrow streets edging the quays, where dock and factory workers lived in small terraced houses in the shadow of the heavy industries, their lives dominated by their proximity to their work. They often paid the ultimate price for that proximity, as ‘collateral damage’ to the industrial targets of the Luftwaffe. Most of the Isle of Dogs is black and purple, with the occasional flash of orange. There is not a single house that was untouched, and most were totally destroyed. It is much the same in Stepney, Bermondsey, Wapping, Poplar and Woolwich. East Ham, West Ham, Canning Town, Barking and Beckton are all outside the LCC administrative area, but they suffered grievously too, with people killed, seriously injured, bereaved, made homeless. Although of course not all the damage was done in those nightmare early nights of September 1940, the toll then was chillingly high. In that month 5,730 Londoners were killed, 9,003 were seriously injured, and countless others received minor injuries: the worst totals of the blitz. By November 1940, 2,160 houses in Stepney had been demolished or were beyond repair, while 13,480 were damaged but repairable. A little further north, in Hackney, where the Home Secretary, Minister for Home Security and former leader of the LCC, Herbert Morrison, was an MP, 1,349 homes had been destroyed in the same period and 3,654 badly damaged; in Poplar, eight hundred homes were lost and 13,200 badly damaged. South of the river suffered too, with Lambeth losing 1,758 houses and Lewisham only slightly fewer, though a staggering 23,370 houses there were damaged but just about repairable. There is also a list of those houses ‘receiving first aid repairs’, with bits of wood, roofing felt and tarpaulin pro tem, a roof over the residents’ heads, but hardly a home any more. Fourteen thousand nine hundred Lewisham houses had had emergency repairs by November, Poplar, 8,500 and Wandsworth, 9,898.

      Len Jones had spent the night of 7 September in a brick and concrete street shelter in Poplar which had ‘lifted and moved, rolling almost as if it was a ship in a rough sea. And the suction and the blasts were coming in and out of the steel door, which was smashing backwards and forwards, bashing us against the walls … The worst part was the poor little kids; they were so scared, they were screaming and crying, clutching at their parents. The heat was colossal; the steel door was so hot that you couldn’t touch it. And everybody was being sick, and people were carrying out their normal bodily needs, and the smell was terrible.’

      The next morning, Jones ‘went to see how our house was, and when I got there the front door was lying back, and the glass of the windows had fallen in, and you could see the top of the house had virtually disappeared. Inside, everything was blown to pieces, you could see it all by the red glow reflecting from the fires that were raging outside. Then I looked out the back and I suddenly realised that where my father’s shed and workshop used to be, was just a pile of rubble, bricks. Then I saw two bodies, two heads sticking up, I recognised one head in particular; it was a Chinese man, Mr Say, he had one eye closed, and I began to realise that he was dead … I just convulsed and couldn’t get my breath. I was shaking completely. Then I thought, well I must be dead, because they were, so I struck a match, and tried to burn my finger, I kept doing this with a match to see if I was still alive. I could see, but I thought, I cannot be alive. This is the end of the world.’

      All that morning the East End was a scene of chaos and despair as people stumbled through the streets searching for family, friends and neighbours in rest centres and hospitals, wondered where to go for food and assistance, scrabbled through the rubble to locate their possessions in houses that had been bombed, attempted to patch up the damage if that was possible – or simply got out. A Thames pleasure steamer was pressed into service to evacuate women and children from the narrow, ruined streets of the Isle of Dogs, where most had lived all their lives and which few had seen any reason to leave – until now. What journalists called ‘the mean streets’ of the East End were full of what one of them, Hilde Marchant of the Daily Express, described as ‘a ragged sleepless army whose homes had been smashed’; a ‘civilian Dunkirk’ fleeing the enemy. ‘Little houses, four rooms and a bath tub, eight shillings a week [rent to a private landlord] had taken the attack … at daylight [the people] came up [out of the shelters] and many saw the roots of their homes turned to the sky.’ Families pushing perambulators or carts, clutching suitcases and bundles crammed with all they could carry – clothes, bedding, household goods, food – ‘climbed through streets that had once been two neat rows of houses and were [now] like a ploughed field’, either trekking east to the open spaces of Epping Forest or heading ‘up West’, where it was believed to be safer. Anywhere to get away from the East End before another night of hell.

At midday on Sunday, 8 September, the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, came to the East End with Duncan Sandys MP, who was married to Churchill’s daughter Diana, his brother Jack, and his Chief of Staff, Major-General Hastings Ismay,^* to inspect the damage for himself. They found the destruction much more devastating ‘than they had imagined … Fires were still raging all over the place. Some of the large buildings were mere skeletons, and many of the smaller houses had been reduced to rubble.’ Clambering over the debris, Churchill went first to visit an air-raid shelter in Columbia Road, Shoreditch, home of the flower market, where ‘about 40 of the inmates had been killed and a very large number wounded. The place was full of people searching for their lost belongings when you arrived,’ Ismay reminded his boss later when Churchill wanted to include the poignant occasion in his History of the Second World War.

      The Columbia Road bomb had been a particularly tragic introduction to the events of the next few months. In what the Daily Herald journalist Ritchie Calder called ‘a million to one chance’, a bomb had crashed directly through a ventilation shaft measuring only three feet by one foot, below which lay a shelter containing СКАЧАТЬ