World War II Day by Day

London, England • December 29, 1940

On this date in 1940, when President Franklin D. Roose­velt appealed to the nation in a radio “fire­side chat” to support his pro­posal to strengthen the U.S. mili­tary in light of devel­op­ments in Europe, the German Luft­waffe delivered a mas­sive attack on London. Almost 3,000 civil­ians were killed in the overnight bombing.

­The December 29th airstrike on the British capi­tal com­pletely torched London’s City Dis­trict, or “Square Mile,” where much of the nation’s finan­cial trading and busi­ness trans­actions were carried out. The late-Decem­ber air­strike by 136 bombers, described as the second “Great Fire of London” by a U.S. reporter cabling an account back to his office (the orig­i­nal Great Fire dated to 1666), was part of the Luft­waffe’s sus­tained stra­tegic bombing cam­paign of Great Brit­ain and North­ern Ire­land, which the British public dubbed the Blitz (Septem­ber 7, 1940, to May 10, 1941). The Blitz (short­hand for the German Blitz­krieg, “lightning war”) was Adolf Hitler’s punish­ment for Britain’s refusal to sur­render their island to him during the Battle of Britain. For 57 nights straight (Septem­ber 7 to Novem­ber 2, 1941), 200 or more German bombers dropped high-explo­sive and incendiary bombs on London.

Across the nation many civilian and indus­trial tar­gets faced similar on­slaughts—Liver­pool, Cardiff, Bristol, Man­chester, Bel­fast, Coven­try, and Glas­gow to name a few. More than a mil­lion London resi­dences were destroyed or damaged and more than 40,000 civil­ians killed, almost half of them in London alone. (British urban dead would number over 60,000 when the war ended in May 1945.) During 8 bleak months of being pounded from the air Great Britain stood alone and defiant. Not until Decem­ber 11, 1941, would the United States enter the war on the side of Britain, and that was nearly a year away.

The Blitz never achieved its intended goals of either demor­alizing British poli­tical and mili­tary leaders into capitu­la­tion or sig­nif­i­cantly damaging the country’s eco­nomy to con­tinue the war. Roose­velt’s Decem­ber 29 appeal, mem­o­rable for its line that the U.S. must be­come the “arse­nal of demo­cracy” for the nations standing up to Nazi Ger­many, Fascist Italy, and Impe­rial Japan, was real­ized in the Lend-Lease Pro­gram, which kicked off in March 1941. The first deliv­ery of sup­plies reached to the belea­guered British Isles in mid-year. (Food was the largest single cate­gory in 1941.) By the time the last of the Luft­waffe’s bombs had fallen on London on May 10, 1941, in a par­tic­u­larly savage climax to the Blitz (507 air­craft dropped 711 tons of bombs, killing or wounding more than 3,000 peo­ple), the threat­ened cross-chan­nel amphib­ious inva­sion of England (Oper­a­tion Sea Lion) had passed. Hitler’s atten­tion now shifted to the east, to the Soviet Union. His stra­tegic gamble to anni­hi­late his oppo­nent in the east in one mas­sive battle, Oper­a­tion Bar­ba­rossa, which appeared so pro­mising when ini­tially launched, had the most grievous con­se­quences when his yearlong winning streak broke.

The Blitz, Germany’s Strategic Bombing of Great Britain, September 7, 1940, to May 10, 1941

Left: London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, mostly unscathed, ringed by clouds of smoke in this iconic photo­graph taken on Decem­ber 29, 1940, from the roof of the Daily Mail building by the paper’s chief photo­grapher, Herbert Mason. Almost every building north and north­east of St. Paul’s was destroyed (the city recorded 1,500 fires), leaving row upon row of free-standing walls and fire-blackened ruins creaking in the wind. The cathe­dral was struck 4 times during the Blitz: in Septem­ber, Octo­ber, and Decem­ber 1940 and in April 1941. In the Decem­ber raid, the cathe­dral was hit by 28 incen­di­aries, causing the gigan­tic dome’s outer lead covering to melt. One enemy incen­di­ary bomb succeeded in punching half­way through the dome’s lead covering, the bril­liant white light of the sput­tering bomb giving the impres­sion that that the cathe­dral had been set ablaze. Mirac­u­lously, the bomb fell out­ward, slid down the out­side of the dome, and landed in the walk­way that circles the bottom of the dome. There it was easily dis­posed of by volun­teer mem­bers of St. Paul’s Watch. The “divine inter­ven­tion” was referred to as the “Miracle of St. Paul’s.”

Right: Surrey docks in flames east of Tower Bridge on the Thames in South­east London on the start date of the Blitz, Septem­ber 7, 1940. During the course of the Blitz, over 100,000 tons of shipping was damaged in the Thames Estuary, 800 civil­ians were injured, and 400 civil­ians were killed. Between January and May 1944 the Luft­waffe assaulted Southern England in an oper­a­tion code­named Oper­a­tion Stein­bock (Unter­nehmen Stein­bock), known collo­quially as the “Baby Blitz.” The oper­a­tion achieved very little other than wearing down the offen­sive power of the Luft­waffe. Stein­bock turned out to be the last stra­tegic air offensive by the German bomber arm during World War II.

Left: Firefighters of the London Fire Brigade bravely battle a con­fla­gra­tion on Queen Victoria Street with water hoses during the dev­as­tating over­night air raid on the capi­tal city on May 10/11, 1941. Less than half­way into the 37 weeks of the Blitz, Luft­waffe hordes had dropped more than 13,000 tons of high explo­sives and nearly 1,000,000 in­cen­diaries on London. The number of bombers varied from night to night; for exam­ple: Octo­ber 6, 7 bombers; Octo­ber 15, 380. Using a scatter-gun approach, they dropped their deadly pay­load every­where: on West­minster Abbey, St. Paul’s Cathe­dral whose dome domi­nated the sky­line, Bucking­ham Palace (9 times during the war), No. 10 Downing Street (the offi­cial home of the British prime minis­ter), the Tower of London, the British Museum, on hos­pi­tals, thea­ters, churches, the London Zoo, on rich and poor neighbor­hoods, and on arguably mili­tary and war-industrial instal­la­tions. After Bucking­ham Palace had suffered a hit on Septem­ber 13, 1940, Queen Eliza­beth, wife of King George VI, remarked that damage to the royal resi­dence meant she could better empathize with ordinary citizens.

Right: A street of ruined houses in London. More than a million London houses were destroyed or damaged and close to 20,000 Londoners killed during the 267 days of the Blitz. The city was scarred but not deva­stated because its great sprawl meant that the vio­lence lacked con­cen­tra­tion. By con­trast the Allied bombing raid on the large North German port and indus­trial cen­ter of Ham­burg (popu­la­tion 1.8 million) during the last week of July and the first week of August 1943 (Oper­a­tion Gomor­rah) killed 42,600 civil­ians, of which 7,000 were chil­dren or ado­les­cents, wounded 37,000, and prac­ti­cally leveled the city in a series of one-two punches, first by high explo­sives and then by incen­di­aries: 9,000 tons of bombs in all. Local rescue efforts stalled after British bombers cut elec­tri­city to a major portion of the city for 2 weeks. One million Hamburgers fled the city, where in just 8 days over 250,000 resi­dences were destroyed. In the case of Ham­burg, London, and every other Euro­pean city that was at war and became the target of enemy bombings, the number of non-civilians (that is, combatants) killed was low.

Left: Children of an eastern suburb of London made homeless by the Blitz. Though mili­tarily inef­fec­tive, the Blitz caused enor­mous damage to Britain’s infra­struc­ture and housing stock. An esti­mated 1 in 6 Londoners suffered homelessness during the bombing campaign.

Right: Coventry city center after 449 German bombers had dropped 530 tons of bombs on the night of Novem­ber 14/15, 1940. With poor anti­aircraft defenses for a city of nearly 240,000 people with many war­time indus­tries, Coven­try was smashed: 75 per­cent of all buildings, 33 per­cent of all fac­tories, and 50 per­cent of all homes (4,300) were destroyed by a com­bi­na­tion of German high-explosive bombs and incen­di­aries. To show for it, the Germans lost 1 bomber to antiaircraft fire.

Amateur Color Film of Destruction Caused by London Blitz, 1941 (Suggest silencing the projector’s sound)