For three interminable months in 1940, London fell hostage to an incessant and savage bombing campaign by the German Luftwaffe. From mid-August through mid-November, about one hundred tons of explosives were dropped on London nearly every night. The scene described in the following anonymous letter was all too typical:
"You will be sorry to hear that D. and I are homeless, and have only what we stand in owning to having a direct hit . . . . I was downstairs talking to the landlady when the bomb fell . . . . I saw the furniture in her sitting room rise, and the back half of her house collapse. We were buried in the debris. How ever I got her out of it I do not know. We were both pretty badly shaken, and it's not too pleasant to get a good whiff of coal gas. My nerves are not too good either after that lot and I just dread the air raids now, and I wish that I was miles from London." (1)
Night after night the air raid sirens wailed, but Londoners stood their ground. Though their lives were disrupted by having to retreat to bomb shelters as often as seven times a night, these tenacious people refused to surrender. Another anonymous letter writer puts it best:
"What a week we have had with air raid warnings every day, but you would be surprised to see how calmly we go on with our doings, and Herr Hitler will find out his mistake if he thinks he can break down our morale in this way. Our Air Force is just wonderful and over 1,000 planes for the month of August must be giving him something to think about!" (2)
The air raids finally slowed to a trickle by the time of the Normandy invasion, and Londoners breathed a sigh of relief and even reunited with their children who had been sent to the country or abroad for their safety.
In retaliation for the Allied attack at Normandy, Germany launched its latest weapon, the V-1 missile, on London 13 June 1944 at 4:25 A.M. These pilotless "flying bombs," or "doodlebugs" as they came to be called, were twenty-five feet long with a sixteen-foot wingspan. The V-1 carried one-ton warheads at speeds of about 360 miles per hour. While the missiles did not always hit their intended targets, their bombardment did succeed in straining morale.
The V-1 caused damage and injury in a quarter-mile radius from the point of impact by shattering windows, and lacerating and killing innocent passersby. Almost 6,000 civilians were killed and 22,000 injured during this phase of German retaliation.
Many Brits found the flying bombs to be even more frightening than the earlier air raids--mostly because they landed during the day and night, allowing no rest.
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1. Beatrice Curtis Brown and Jan Struther, "Women of Britain: Letters from England," (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1941), p. 291.
