Blitz: The diary of an air raid
Aftermath and consequences
The aftermath
Some of the 1,500 fires that night destroyed Paternoster Row and its immediate surroundings – the centre of Britain's book trade. Quite a few well-known publishers would later rise from these ashes, including William Collins (now HarperCollins), Hodder & Stoughton (now Hodder Headline), Hutchinson (now part of Random House) and Thomas Nelson, as well as the Publishers Association and Associated Booksellers (now the Booksellers Association). The remains of the wholesale bookseller Simpkin Marshall – which lost four million books on 29/30 December 1940 – would be utilised by Robert Maxwell to form the basis of his decidedly dodgy empire. Many other booksellers and publishers simply did not survive the destruction.
Of the five members of the Feldon family who went into the shelter, only two survived: Winnie and Frederick.
My brother was lucky – he got away without being hit. He was eight years old. He'd never speak about it, what he went through. As he grew up, he was a very quiet lad. He lived on his own, he never had no friends or nothing, you know what I mean? He never said nothing about the war.
Sid Feldon, conscripted soldier
The footage taken of the fire by the London Fire Brigade film unit was eventually shown in the United States in a bid to persuade the Americans to enter the war.
In the street outside, I met some firefighters. 'What does America think of all this,' they asked? I said something about America's sympathies being all with England. 'How soon do you think America will be in the war?' one of them asked. I had to say I didn't know.
William Lindsay White, war correspondent
It wasn't until a year later – after Pearl Harbor in Hawaii had endured aerial bombing – that the US came into the war.
For many, the images of that night proved unforgettable. For Leonard Rosoman, it was a moment that changed his life for ever.
It was an accident. It was a sort of force of nature that, in some terrifying way, overwhelmed us momentarily. I was haunted by every movement, crossing Shoe Lane, standing there, and then this unbelievable noise. And then eventually tons of red-hot brick, with the fellow who'd come to take my place crushed to death at the bottom of it.
I was so disturbed. I wanted to find a way of eliminating the horror of the whole incident. Then gradually, very gingerly, I started painting.
I called it The falling wall. It haunted me quite a lot and it still does a bit, and eventually returning and visiting the actual spot where this thing happened … A night like that night is, you know, so extraordinary, and the fact that it happened to me is, I now realise, incredible.
Leonard Rosoman, artist and wartime firefighter
Civil Defence
www.holnet.org.uk/learningzone/londonatwar/airraid/
p_civildefence.html
Short but interesting article about the arrangements made for managing air raids, dealing with fires and rescuing people during the Blitz. There is also a reproduction of Leonard Rosoman's painting A house collapsing on two firemen, Shoe Lane, EC4 (also known as The falling wall).
Consequences
The night of 29/30 December 1940 answered a fundamental question of war: Ordinary people could endure extraordinary things. It is not submission that bombing breeds.
But that was not the answer that any of the warring powers were looking for. The lesson that the British government took from the night was that incendiaries and high explosives can cause a firestorm of hurricane levels – as long as you return for one final attack.
The British replied to the Blitz by bombing many German cities to destruction. In Dresden, as many as a 100,000 people were killed in a single night. As in Hamburg and Berlin, the planes returned until the firestorm burned beyond control.
The people of Germany showed the same resilience as the people of Britain, but the concept of civilians as a legitimate target of war had taken hold, and with it came the technology to succeed.
In the face of the atomic bombs unleashed on two cities of Japan, civilian resilience was irrelevant. The United States – the very nation that had once appealed for civilians never to be targets of air attack – was the first to truly bomb a population to submission.
Blitz: Bombing and total war
www.channel4.com/science/microsites/S/science/war/bombing.html
An examination of the huge influence that aerial bombing campaigns have had on the conduct and aims of modern warfare – from World War II to 'shock and awe' in Iraq.
For the people of London, who had witnessed the start of this spiral of war, the memories proved hard to erase. The Blitz would continue for another five months. In all, more than 40,000 people would lose their lives.
