It was a sunny Saturday, 7 September. The people of London were mostly tending to their normal weekend tasks, accelerated somewhat by the pressures of wartime. The more fortunate were relaxing in the warm sunshine of Hyde Park and St James Park. Some were enthralled with an afternoon cricket match, showing their occasional approval with gentle, mannerly applause. Over Canterbury in Kent, Heinkel He 111s of Bomber Group 2 under the command of Oberst Johannes Fink roared over the cattle market. It was 4:30 p.m.
Few, if any, in London that afternoon had reason for particular concern about what the enemy might be up to that fine summer day. Most were comforted and uplifted by the inspiring efforts of the pilots of RAF Fighter Command who had been doing their best all summer to sweep the skies of southern England clean of those nasty German intruders.
As many Londoners watched, their reverie was suddenly ended. Twenty-one squadrons of Fighter Command Hurricanes and Spitfires had been scrambled and were climbing from their stations at Kenley, Northolt, Biggin Hill and elsewhere, most of them in full expectation that the approaching German bomber formations would be striking again at the fighter fields of the RAF or British aircraft factories like Vickers at Weybridge. What they soon saw was a sight they would never forget, a dark mass of nearly 1,000 enemy aircraft, Heinkel and Dornier bombers and their Messerschmitt Me 109 fighter escorts growling across the green and tan of the English countryside at 8,000 feet and occupying 800 square miles of sky. Clearly, their target was London.
What had led up to this unprecedented raid? In the German hierarchy, General Bruno Lörzer, commander of the 2nd Flying Corps, and Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring, commander of Air Fleet 2, had long been pressing for all-out air attacks on the British capitol. Adolf Hitler refused to allow such an assault, however, in the persistent hope that a “peace” could still be reached with Churchill. But in the evening of 24 August, a small number of Luftwaffe bomber crews committed a slight navigational error and the bombs they had brought for the oil storage tanks at Thameshaven were instead delivered over central London, the first bombs to fall on London since the notorious Zeppelin raid of 1918.
Churchill reacted with fury, ordering an instant reprisal by Bomber Command, which sent eighty-one Whitley, Hampden, and Wellington bombers to Berlin. With the rather crude navigation methods available to them at the time, only about ten percent of the British bombers found their target that night. They returned to Berlin four times in the next ten days. One thing led to another and on 2 September, Oberst Theo Osterkamp told Major Adolf Galland and the other Luftwaffe fighter leaders at Wissant near Calais that a massed bombing attack might be launched on the 7th. On the 3rd, a no-holds-barred conference was held at The Hague, at which Goering said that the time had come to change tactics and re-direct Luftwaffe resources into a massive assault on London. The only question was—had the resources of RAF Fighter Command been sufficiently depleted to this point, or would the cost to the German bomber fleet be too high? Kesselring championed the view that Fighter Command was finished, as evidenced by the Luftwaffe combat reports. He took satisfaction in reminding the gathering that he had all along advocated a mass attack on a single key objective, rather than Goering’s campaign of divergent targets—ports and shipping, radar stations, airfields, and factories, struck in turn and then capriciously abandoned. Hugo Sperrle disagreed with Kesselring, sighting the continuing accomplishments of Fighter Command’s pilots and claiming that the RAF still retained more than 1,000 operational fighters left. In fact, the total of serviceable Spitfires and Hurricanes then numbered exactly 746. General Kurt Student, the designated commander of airborne troops for the proposed invasion of England, Operation Sea Lion, said later that Goering had told him “The Fuehrer doesn’t want to invade Britain.” When Student asked him for an explanation, the Reichsmarschall shrugged and said “I don’t know. At any rate, there will be nothing this year.” On 4 September, Hitler raged to a worshipful crowd at the Berlin Sportpalast “If they attack our cities, we will raze theirs to the ground. We will stop the handiwork of these air pirates, so help us God.”
above: German raiders taking off to strike at a British target in summer 1940; below: A Heinkel medium bomber is photographed over the river Thames in London during the Battle of Britain.
The terrors and deprivations of the German Blitz on London and the other cities of Britain are expressed in the civilian population who lived in constant fear of poison gas attack as well as the devastation wrought by the bombing raids that persisted for fifty-seven consecutive nights from 7 September 1940. Many Londoners sought shelter and some respite from the bombing by descending nightly for protection and rest in the tunnels and stations of the city’s Underground system.
top: One of the defenders of Britain, a Polish pilot flying Spitfires with Fighter Command; above: The common sight of vapour trails high over London and the southeast of England during the Battle of Britain period.
The planning for a mass raid on the 7th began. 1,273 bombers and fighters were earmarked for the day’s activities. Goering intended to personally take charge of the assault from a vantage point on the Channel coast. While many would see the attack as a colossal blunder on Goering’s part, others, including 11 Group commander Keith Park, would be grateful. “Thank God for that. I knew that the Nazis had switched their attack from the fighter stations, thinking they were knocked out. They weren’t, but they were pretty groggy.”
In the Thames Estuary, at Gravesend twenty-four miles out of central London, were three veteran American war correspondents who huddled next to a big haystack to watch a hellish scene like nothing anyone had ever witnessed. Ben Robertson, Edward R. Murrow, and Vincent Sheean had, until this day, been covering the Battle of Britain for their news organizations, from the white cliffs of Dover where they had front-row seats for the Luftwaffe attacks on British coastal shipping in the Channel. They had also seen and heard something of the German strikes on Britain’s harbours and the airfields of Fighter Command. Londoners were conditioned to the wail of air raid sirens and the thump of antiaircraft guns issuing from hundreds of batteries in the parks. After a while they paid little heed when the wondrous fighter planes of the RAF rose to tangle with the black-crossed, villainous flying Huns. But now, when the nasty Nazi gnats were starting to show up in wave after wave after wave; in the dark, billowing clouds over the Big Smoke … everything was changing and this time they were bringing the war to the people of Britain, in the start of a fifty-seven night campaign of merciless, terrifying, relentless destruction. The seemingly endless formations of enemy planes, their strangely out-of-sync engines droning on, made their way to the docks of the city’s port and soon immense columns of thick smoke were rising there.
top: A severely damaged Anderson shelter in the gardenof this bombed home; centre and above: The preparation of school children for possible evacuation from urban target areas to the relative safety of the English countryside in the days before the beginning of the Blitz.
It was something less than their finest hour for Keith Park’s heroic Few. Massively outnumbered, sent up much too late and much too low, very few of his squadron’s were actually given the opportunity to operate at full strength and capability that day. The situation rapidly deteriorated for them, forcing the majority to abandon the tactics they knew so well, and fly as lone wolves. The effective team-work they trusted was out the window. The day would prove an eye-opener for most of them. One, Flying Officer Dennis Parnell of 249 Squadron, found himself playing tag with a burning Heinkel bomber heading back for France. Each time the German plane reappeared to one side or the other of its heavy smoke trail, Parnell got off a quick burst. He kept that up until the German finally ran out of air and flopped onto the mudflats of Sheerness.
Robert Shaw in a still from the the 1968 film Battle of Britain; below: actual scenes from the period.
“The sky over London was glorious, ochre and madder, as though a dozen tropic suns were simultaneously setting round the horizon … everywhere the shells sparkled like Christmas baubles.”
—Evelyn Waugh
The London sky was so thick with twisting, rolling, jinking aircraft of both sides that distinguishing friend from foe was proving a problem for many airmen. When Sgt Cyril Babbage of 602 Squadron caught sight of his friend Andy McDowall being chased by six very determined 109 pilots, he yelled “Hang on, Andy. I’m coming.” Babbage had unwittingly alerted a further dozen 109s who also went to work on McDowall, compounding his troubles. Flying Officer Keith Ogilvie of 609 Squadron described his experience: “… zooming and dancing around us like masses of ping-pong balls.” Ogilvie got in close, took careful aim at one of a pair of the German fighters, and was mortified to discover he had hit the second plane.
One of 222 Squadron’s performers that afternoon was Sgt John Burgess, a twenty-year-old Spitfire pilot with a total operational exposure of just ten days at his Hornchurch base in Essex. In the late afternoon that Saturday, Burgess was chasing a trio of Heinkel bombers as they ran hard for their French airfield, having delivered their loads on the London docks. He trailed them by about three miles but, with the considerable speed of his Spitfire he had no concern about overtaking them. At that point Burgess spotted what he believed to be a pair of Hurricanes about two miles behind the Heinkels and apparently also tracking the bombers. He decided to join with the Hurricanes in a concerted effort to down the Germans, but as he drew nearer he saw their yellow noses that marked them out as enemy fighters. Shifting mental gears instantaneously, Burgess pulled into line behind the rearmost fighter and sprayed it with machine-gun fire. The German fighter flipped over and began trailing a thin wisp of white smoke. Burgess and the German fell into a vertical dive at red-line speed. “At that point I suppose I was down to 2,000 feet, but he kept on, straight into the ground. I was very shaken … I was shaking because I had obviously killed a man, and I had never killed anyone before.”
“I burn for England with a living flame / In the uncandled darkness of the night. / I share with her the fault, who share her name, / And to her light I add my lesser light. She has my arm—who had my father’s arm, / Who shall not have my unborn children’s arms. / I burn for England, even as she burns / In living flame, that when her peace is come / Flame shall destroy whoever seeks to turn / her sacrifice to profit—and the homes / Of those who fought—to wreckage. / In a war for freedom—who were never free. —from Poem by Gervase Stewart
Possibly the greatest danger facing the escorting fighter pilots of Goering’s Luftwaffe on the mass raid of the 7th was the Channel itself. Major Max Ibel of Fighter Group 27: “Although the fighters had stuck close to the bombers, it had been a close-run thing. Every warning bulb was glowing red—signalling ten litres of petrol, twenty minutes flying time at most”. As they reached the Channel coast of England on the way back to their French bases, the very real prospect of coming down in that water haunted many of them as they stretched their luck and hoped to make it flying on fumes. And now the defending fighters of the RAF were alerted.
“I was pushing the glass across the counter for a refill when we heard it coming. The girl in the corner was still laughing and for the first time I heard her soldier speak. ‘Shut up!’ he said, and the laugh was cut off like the sound track in a movie. Then everyone was diving for the floor.
“The barmaid (she was of considerable bulk) sank from view with a desperate slowness behind the counter and I flung myself tight up against the other side, my taxi driver beside me. He still had his glass in his hand and the beer shot across the floor, making a dark stain and setting the sawdust afloat. The soldier too had made for the bar counter and wedged the girl on his inside. One of her shoes had nearly come off. It was an inch from my nose; she had a ladder in her stocking.
“My hands were tight-pressed over my ears but the detonation deafened me. The floor rose up and smashed against my face, the swing door tore off its hinges and crashed over a table, glass splinters flew across the room, and behind the bar every bottle in the place seemed to be breaking. The lights went out, but there was no darkness. An orange glow from across the street shone through the wall and threw everything into a strong relief.
“I scrambled unsteadily to my feet and was leaning over the bar to see what happened to the unfortunate barmaid when a voice said, ‘Anyone hurt?’ and there was an AFS man shining a torch. At that everyone began to move, but slowly and reluctantly as though coming out of a dream. The girl stood white and shaken in a corner, her arm about her companion, but she was unhurt and had stopped talking. Only the barmaid failed to get up.”—from The Last Enemy by Richard Hillary.
As Hermann Goering met with some of his fighter pilots in his private railway car at Cap Blanc Nez near Wissant after the raid of the 7th, he was plainly angry. The teleprinter spat out the first reports of the day’s action and his rage grew. Of the first wave of his bombers dispatched, nearly forty of 247 had been lost. What he was unable or unwilling to accept was that, having put up 600 fighters in escort of his bombers, that huge mass of aircraft had created chaos in the London sky, making the protection work of his fighter pilots all but impossible. “Your job is to protect the bombers” he railed. “Don’t tell me the sky is full of enemies—I know they haven’t more than seventy fighters left.”
In the aftermath of the great raid on London, Assistant Divisional Geoffrey Blackstone of the London Fire Brigade felt the weight of his own responsibilities. Of the 30,000 Brigade members, 28,000 were wartime auxiliaries, many of them conscripts, but even more were volunteers. What ninety percent of them had in common was never having fought a fire of any kind. In peacetime a major fire required some thirty pumps, as fire engines were known. By midnight on 7 September, there were nine separate 100-pump fires burning across Dockland, the Woolwich Arsenal, and the Bishopsgate Goods Yard. At Rotherhithe, on the river Thames, Geoffrey Blackstone arrived at the Surrey Commercial Docks. Blackstone was tall and fit, an ex-public school boy, who had raced over from the tennis party he had been attending at a friend’s in Dulwich, South London, to take charge of a huge fire of resinous timber stacked twenty feet high over some 250 acres. Even the dockland roadway was ablaze. At Paget’s Wharf fire station, the senior officer was on the phone with Fire Brigade headquarters in Lambeth: “Send every pump you’ve got. The whole bloody world’s on fire.”
So intense was the heat from this blaze that the paint was blistering on the fire boats moving past the scene some 300 yards away near the opposite shore of the river. Enormous solid embers were being tossed like cabers over into distant roads to start fresh fires. Telegraph poles were bursting into flame, as were fences. Burning barrels of rum were exploding like liquid oxygen cylinders. Choking, noxious fumes were rising from the many rubber fires, fires started by the hundreds of high-explosive bombs and cannisters of incendiaries from the enemy bombers. And now armies of terrified rats ran through the streets of this burning neighbourhood. Brigade fireman William Ward: “I don’t think any fireman has ever seen anything like it before.”
above: Mothers and children awaiting trains from London in the Blitz period, 1940-41.
The next day, Sunday 8 September, the war correspondent Ed Murrow told his thirty million American listeners, from Studio B4, Broadcasting House: “This… is London.” He recalled the previous night: “The fire up the river had turned the moon blood-red. Huge pear-shaped bursts of flame would rise up into the smoke and disappear. The world was upside down.”
“When people’s ill, they come to I / I physics, bleeds, and sweats ’em; / Sometimes they live, sometimes they die. / What’s that to I? / I lets ’em.” —On Himself by Dr J.C. Lettsom
“What is moral is what you feel good after and what is immoral is what you feel bad after.” —from Death in the Afternoon by Ernest Hemingway.