The ‘blitz’, which the defenders dated from 7 September, was far harder for Fighter Command to repel than daylight attacks, because the RAF had few night fighters and only primitive Air Interception radar. Churchill incited the feeble anti-aircraft gun defences to fire at will to hearten the population, as indeed they did – but with little impact on the raiders. Between September and mid-November, an average of two hundred Luftwaffe aircraft attacked every night save one. In that period, over 13,000 tons of explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on London, Bristol, Birmingham, Portsmouth and other major cities, at a cost to the Luftwaffe of just seventy-five aircraft, most of them victims of accidents.
The blitz imposed on city-dwellers mingled fascination, terror, horror and eventually acceptance of a new normality. A London woman wrote of one raid: ‘The bombs came down in a cluster, close together…Bomb explosions have a mesmeric attraction dating possibly from firework displays of one’s childhood, and I watched the first two explode. Unless it lifts an entire building in the air, the burst of an ordinary high-explosive bomb is not in itself a grand spectacle, as a major fire can be; its upward streaks of yellow or red look as crude and banal as a small boy’s painting of them.’ Muriel Green, a Norfolk village-dweller, wrote with notable sensitivity for a girl of nineteen about her thoughts as she heard German aircraft passing overhead, on their path to some British city, the night after the devastating 14 November attack on Coventry: ‘I wonder what the pilots feel. After all somebody loves them even if they are Nazis, and they are risking their lives and fighting for their country the same as our men that go bombing. Poor Coventry people. How bitter and hopeless they must feel today. How long can it go on? How many years must all live in fear of the unknown horrors that so many of us have not yet experienced?’
The bomber assault, which continued until Hitler began to withdraw aircraft for the invasion of Russia in May 1941, inflicted heavy damage on British city centres and ate deep into the spirits of millions of people who endured many nights huddled in shelters with their families and fears. It cost the attackers, flying from airfields in northern France, only 1.5 per cent aircraft losses per sortie. This was a much lower casualty rate than the RAF later suffered bombing Germany, because the British had further to go. Some 43,000 British civilians were killed and a further 139,000 injured. But throughout the winter of 1940–41 the Luftwaffe lacked a credible strategic plan, together with the aiming accuracy and bombloads necessary to inflict decisive damage on British industry. The young scientific intelligence officer R.V. Jones played a critical role, by identifying the Germans’ radio navigational beams and showing the way to jam them. Production was disrupted by alerts, and some important plants were damaged; tens of thousands of homes were destroyed, along with ancient buildings, churches and other landmarks. But, to a remarkable degree, the population of Britain learned to get on with its business amid air bombardment. ‘Human casualties were quieter than I had expected,’ wrote Barbara Nixon, an actress turned Finsbury air-raid warden.
Only twice did I hear really terrifying screaming, apart from hysteria; one night a [railway] signalman had his legs blown off and while he was still conscious his box burst into flames; it was utterly impossible for anyone to reach him and it seemed an age before his ghastly, paralysing screams subsided. Usually, however, casualties, even those who were badly hurt or trapped, were too stunned to make much noise. Animals, on the other hand, made a dreadful clamour. One of the most unnerving nights of the first three months was when a cattle market was hit, and the beasts bellowed and shrieked for three hours; a locomotive had been overturned at the same time and its steam whistle released. The high-pitched monotonous tone, coupled with the distant roaring of the bullocks, was maddening.
In an age when much local transport was still horse-drawn, some city stables borrowed from country custom and acquired a goat, which horses would follow in an emergency. One night when the premises of a big City of London firm of carters were set ablaze by bombs, two hundred of its horses were led to safety. Yet while Britain’s ‘blitz spirit’ was real enough, so too were the misery and squalor that bombardment imposed. Bernard Kops, a small boy who later became a playwright and novelist, wrote: ‘Some people…recall a poetic dream about the Blitz. They talk about those days as if they were a time of a true communal spirit. Not to me. It was the beginning of an era of utter terror, of fear and horror. I stopped being a child and came face to face with the new reality of the world…Here we were back on the trot, wandering again, involved in a new exodus – the Jews of the East End, who had left their homes, and gone into the exile of the underground.’
A strand of traditional British silliness helped the afflicted: a London vicar once asked a fellow occupant of his basement shelter whether she prayed when she heard a bomb falling. ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘I pray, Oh God! Don’t let it fall here.’ The vicar said, ‘But it’s a bit rough on other people, if your prayer is granted and the thing drops, not on you, but on them.’ The woman replied, ‘I can’t help that. They must say their prayers and push it off further.’ Air-raid shelters in old buildings swarmed with lice and bugs. In the big subterranean shelters of the inner cities, there was ugliness generated by drunken men and women, bitter quarrels and fights, filth inescapable where there were no lavatories.
Most people agreed that the struggle bore hardest upon the elderly and the very young, alike uncomprehending. Barbara Nixon again: ‘Neither had any idea what it was all about; they had never heard of Poland…and Fascism was, at most, a matter of that wicked beast Hitler who was trying to blow us up, or murder us all in our beds.’ Ernie Pyle, the great American correspondent, wrote from London in January 1941: ‘It was the old people who seemed so tragic. Think of yourself at seventy or eighty, full of pain and of the dim memories of a lifetime that has probably all been bleak. And then think of yourself now, travelling at dusk every night to a subway station, wrapping your ragged overcoat about your old shoulders and sitting on a wooden bench with your back against a curved street wall. Sitting there all night, in nodding and fitful sleep. Think of that as your destiny – every night, every night from now on.’
Seventy-one-year-old Londoner Herbert Brush described how a woman friend had been to her doctor ‘as evidently her nerves have gone wrong with the strain of driving a car under war conditions. On her way to Cambridge she came under machine-gun fire from the air and had to hide in a hedge. Then at Norwich there were several bombs dropped in the vicinity during the night. The doctor says she has shell-shock and has made her up a strong tonic and recommended complete rest for a fortnight.’ In a narrow sense, this woman’s response to relatively slight peril was unimpressive; but human beings measure risk and privation within the compass of their personal knowledge. It was meaningless to assert to an English suburban housewife that Poles, Jews, French refugees, and later soldiers on the Eastern Front suffered much worse things than herself. She knew only that what was happening to her was dreadful in comparison with all her previous experience of life. Only a few exulted in it, like thirty-year-old gardener, pacifist and conscientious objector George Springett. In the first weeks of war, he had regularly dosed himself with Sanatogen nerve tonic, but now he no longer felt the need for it: ‘I’ve had really first-class health since the blitz started!’
Among the heroes of the campaign were the men who learned by trial and error to deal with unexploded bombs, of which there were soon a plethora in Britain’s cities. One of the more remarkable was ‘Jack’ Howard, Earl of Suffolk. Early in the war, this maverick boffin, thirty-four in 1940, secured himself a roving commission in the Scientific Directorate of the Ministry of Supply. In that role, one of his more notable feats was to evacuate from Bordeaux after the French surrender £3 million-worth of industrial diamonds retrieved from Amsterdam, a group of France’s most brilliant scientists, and the country’s entire stock of Norwegian heavy water, indispensable for making an atomic bomb. In the autumn of 1940, this self-consciously eccentric figure chose to appoint himself to bomb disposal.
Suffolk formed his own squad, which included his pretty secretary Beryl Morden, and outfitted a van from his own resources. Thereafter, dressed in a stetson hat and flying boots or occasionally a pilot’s helmet, and invariably affecting a nine-inch cigarette holder, he addressed himself to defusing bombs, and especially to exploring German delayed-action devices, which were fitted with increasingly sophisticated anti-tampering devices. His courage