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