The Blitz

Everyone knows the Blitz. Almost everyone has the length of it wrong.

It was nine months, not six years: the night bombing campaign that ran from 7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941. Whitehall had spent a decade planning for 600,000 dead in the first sixty days and had quietly stockpiled about 300,000 papier mache coffins to match. Across the entire war, bombing killed something like 60,000 British civilians. The planners were wrong by close to an order of magnitude, and being wrong was no comfort: the country had spent ten years preparing for the wrong catastrophe and got a different one.

This Turbo History short tells the nine months straight, and takes the legend apart without sneering at it:

• Black Saturday on the London docks, where the afternoon raid lit the fire that guided the bombers back after dark
• The government that refused to let Londoners shelter in the Underground, and the Londoners who bought a ticket, went down the escalator and simply did not leave
• The number that puts the famous photographs in their place: about 4 per cent of Londoners used the Tube and the other big public shelters, and roughly 60 per cent stayed in their own houses
• Coventry, the verb the Germans coined for it, and why the story that Churchill let the city burn to protect the Enigma secret is not true
• Clydebank, Belfast, Plymouth and Hull, the city so badly hit that the censor would only call it a north east town
• Trekking: the thirty thousand people a night who walked out of Plymouth and slept in barns, tents and ditches, which the myth has no room for
• What the rest of the world was doing that same winter, from a convoy that lost twenty ships out of thirty five to Lend-Lease to a directive about a completely different country

People did not break. They were not serene either. They were frightened, badly housed, badly informed, and they got up in the morning and went to work. Take the smile off the myth and what is left is better.

Read it in under an hour. Free on Kindle Unlimited.