The Blitz: The British Under Attack

The siren had sounded at 4.43 p.m. that Saturday. Londoners had got used to its ululating note: the sound of ‘Wailing Winnie’ or ‘Moaning Minnie’ had been frequent during the last few weeks of constant ‘nuisance raids’. ‘We are growing accustomed to sudden warnings, and we have developed a quickening of our sense of danger … we are not panicky, but we are, at any rate subconsciously, more on the look-out than had hitherto been the case at any time during last year,’ the Harley Street psychologist and BBC producer Anthony Weymouth had written in his diary back in August. Harold Nicolson would have agreed. ‘People are becoming quite used to these interruptions,’ he wrote in his diary as he heard the siren wail on 26 August. ‘I do not think that that drone in the sky means death to many people at the moment. It seems so incredible as I sit here at my window, looking out on the fuchsias and zinnias with yellow butterflies playing around each other, that in a few seconds I may see other butterflies circling in the air intent on murdering each other.’

Yet despite the increasing frequency of the alerts, the mournful notes could still send a shiver of dread down people’s spines. ‘Whoohoo go the goblins, coming back at nightfall/Whoohoo go the witches reaching out their hands for us … Are we sure we will be the lucky ones/ … They have come back, we always knew they would after the story ended,’ wrote the author Naomi Mitchison in one of her ‘blitz poems’.

The planes droned on. As Robert Baltrop sat on the roof of Sainsbury’s, ‘all of a sudden on the skyline coming up the Thames were [black specks] like swarms of flies … weaving their way through puffs of smoke … and my reaction was one of astonishment and … well, what’s going to happen now? They were flying across my line of vision, and sitting up there on the roof, I had a perfect view of them, watching them fly across the Thames … coming in … past Dagenham and Rainham and Barking, and they were heading straight for London, and it was going to be the docks that were going to get it … I began to hear loud thumps, and those were bombs falling, and clouds of smoke were rising up – clouds of black smoke floating away until you couldn’t see anything but a huge bank of smoke, and still they were coming.’

The operational orders issued to 1 Fliegerkorps for that afternoon informed the pilots that ‘The purpose of the initial attack is to force English fighters into the air so that they will have reached the end of their endurance at the time of the main attack.’ To achieve ‘the maximum effect it is essential that units fly as a highly concentrated force … The main objective of the operation is to prove that the Luftwaffe can achieve this.’

‘We have had many air-raid warnings during the last week, and as soon as the sirens have sounded we have invariably done what we’ve been told to do – go to a place of safety,’ noted Anthony Weymouth, whose ‘place of safety’ was the hall of his ground-floor flat. ‘It is well inside the building, and between us and the blast of bombs are two sitting rooms and the hall of the building. The only windows in the hall have been shuttered and we have been told to leave all the windows open to avoid, so far as possible, broken glass.’ So on 7 September Weymouth and his family ‘waited for an hour or so, some of us sitting on the mattresses which are now a permanent part of our hall furniture, some squatting on the floor. Audrey [his wife] put on her [ARP warden’s] tin hat and went round her sector to see if she was needed. She returned to tell us that a big fire was raging in the City.’

But it wasn’t the City of London that three hundred German planes were converging on that late afternoon: it was ‘Target G’, the docks that lay in the bight of the Thames where it loops around in a U shape like a small child’s badly built wooden railway, a lazy-looking attempt to encircle not some pleasant riverside picnic place but Silvertown, a jumble of docks, warehouses and small houses built for workers in the docks and the nearby factories in days when industry and home were hugger-mugger in the poorer parts of towns and cities.

The German pilots had no difficulty in identifying their targets in the clear afternoon light. The first bombs fell on the Ford motor works at Dagenham, closely followed by a rain of high explosives and fire bombs on Beckton gasworks, the largest in Europe. Below them now lay the great Thames bight at Woolwich Reach, enclosing the three Royal Docks, their warehouses and sheds stacked with foodstuffs and materials vital to the war effort. Within minutes the huge warehouses and factories lining the river on both sides from North Woolwich to Tower Bridge were on fire. Two hundred acres of timber stacks, recently arrived from North America and the Baltic, burned out of control along the Surrey Commercial Docks, the main timber-importing centre in Britain: within twenty-four hours only about a fifth of the two and a half million tons was left. Burning spirits gushed out of the rum quay warehouses at West India Dock, a tar distillery flooded North Woolwich Road with molten pitch, and rats swarmed out of a nearby soapworks. A rubber factory was hit, and the acrid black smoke rolling through the narrow streets of Silvertown mingled with the escaping fumes from the damaged Beckton gasworks and started a rumour that the Germans were dropping canisters of poison gas as well as bombs. Fire burned through the ropes of barges tethered along the quayside and the burning boats drifted downstream, only to return several hours later on the incoming tide, still smouldering, while the intense heat blistered the paint on buildings in areas untouched by the bombs.

A fireman stationed at Pageant’s Wharf Fire Station stared in horror as magnesium incendiaries lodged in the wood stacks and oil bombs ignited the timber like kindling on a bone-dry bonfire. It seemed as if ‘the whole bloody world’s on fire’ to Station Officer Gerry Knight as he yelled to the fire station telephonists to call for urgent reinforcements. The regular London firemen were joined by men from the four wartime Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS) substations on the docks, their trailer pumps drawn by vans, taxi cabs – 2,000 had been hired by the start of the war, often with their drivers coming along as part of the deal – or anything that could be pressed into service to get to the blaze.

The AFS, an adjunct of the fire brigade, had started recruiting in March 1938, and had expanded after the Munich crisis, when large posters had appeared on walls and on the sides of fire engines urging: ‘Keep the home fires from burning’. By the time war broke out, for every regular fireman there were fifteen auxiliaries, and ‘it was quite a big job getting them all trained’. AFS members had received sixty hours of basic training, but most had never been called to a major fire before. Now it seemed that all the drill they had carefully learned was for another world: as soon as they trained their hoses on one outbreak, another flared up feet away. Damped down by the water jets, a pile of wood would sizzle in the heat, then burst into flame again. The firemen worked fast to screw together the sections of hose and run them into the river so there was no shortage of water, but soon telegraph poles all around the dock were combusting in the heat, and even the wooden blocks that surfaced the roads were igniting. Grain spilling out of the warehouses made a sticky mess that stuck to the firemen’s boots, bogging them down as if they were walking through treacle in some sort of nightmare. Gerry Knight realised that the inferno was burning out of control, impossible to put out, and that if he didn’t withdraw his men were in real danger of being trapped by the sheets of flame.

Peter Blackmore was a successful playwright who had become a volunteer fireman after seeing a ‘Join the AFS’ poster in the London Underground, showing ‘a firelit fireman holding the branch of a hose, an exciting picture which stirred the imagination and at the same time in small print set out the glorious benefits of such service, the exceptional wages, the food allowance, the uniform and the leave days’. He had grown used to the sound of the siren, ‘more popularly known as the “sighreen”. In those days this was the signal for us to rig fully in helmets, boots, leggings, belts, axes and spanners, tear to the appliance-room and man the pumps, there to sit and grumble until the “All Clear” sounded and we could return to an overcooked or cold meal. This seemed to occur many times day and night. We were certainly always ready. Still no blitz came.’ But on the night of 7 September 1940 Blackmore was wondering what to make of the ‘ominous red glow in the sky, which, had it not been in the east, could have passed for an indifferent sunset’ when a colleague came to tell him, ‘They’re bombing the docks.’ ‘Down went the bells,’ and Blackmore and his colleagues set off eastwards.

As they approached the docks they joined ‘an endless queue of appliances, all steadily moving and being detailed to their exact positions. Bombs were falling fast and heavy. We did a great deal of ducking … and my heart was in my mouth. The journey towards a blitz, like most apprehension, can be the worst part of it … Eventually we came to a standstill at the wharf where we were to spend the endless night. Everything seemed to be on fire in every direction, even some barrage balloons in the sky [winched up in the hope that low-flying enemy aircraft would become entangled in their metal ropes] were exploding. The cinder-laden smoke which drifted all around made us think of the destruction of Pompeii.’

Cyril Demarne, a regular fireman stationed at Abbey Road School in West Ham in London’s East End, was in the school yard when soon after the alert had sounded he heard ‘the drone of approaching aircraft rapidly swelling to a roar. Suddenly squadrons of bombers appeared all over the eastern sky, flying very high and escorted by hundreds of fighter planes glinting in the sunlight as they weaved and turned over the bomber formation … I dived for the safety of the Control Room, where calls for assistance were already flowing in from Dagenham, Barking, East and West Ham. The electricity mains were damaged in the first minutes of the raid and [as it grew dark] the fire control had to operate by the light of candles set in jam jars.’

‘I was frightened out of my life. Bombs coming down, screaming – the row they make, it’s a sort of warning saying, “Look out, here comes death.” And when they landed they went off with a terrific roar – not one but dozens of them – bang, bang, bang, bang, all the time, everywhere. And then there was the drone of aircraft … the noise was the sort of thing that got to me. It … dulled the senses … you couldn’t think clearly.’

‘That day stands out like a flaming wound in my memory,’ wrote Bernard Kops, a London schoolboy who would grow up to be a playwright.

Imagine a ground floor flat [in Stepney Green Buildings], crowded with hysterical women, crying babies and great crashes in the sky and the whole earth shaking. Someone rushed in, ‘The docks are alight. All the docks are alight.’ I could smell burning … The men started to play cards and the women tried a little sing song, singing ‘I saw the old homestead and faces I loved’ or ‘Don’t go down the mine, Daddy, dreams very often come true’ or ‘Yiddle mit his fiddle’. But every so often twenty women’s fists shook at the ceiling cursing the explosions, Germany, Hitler … Yet cursing got my mother and my aunts through those early days. I sat under the table where above the men were playing cards, screwing my eyes up and covering my ears, counting explosions.

‘We’re all gonna get killed, we’re finished,’ one of my aunts became hysterical.

‘Churchill will get us through, he’s a friend of the Yiddisher people.’ With these words she was soothed.

Len Jones, an eighteen-year-old Poplar resident, went outside when he heard the first German planes overhead. ‘It was very exciting because the first formations were coming over without any bombs dropping, but very, very majestic, terrific. And I had no thought that they were actual bombers. Then … the bombs began to fall, and shrapnel was going along King Street, dancing off the cobbles. Then the real impetus came … the suction and the compression from the high-explosive bombs just pushed you and pulled you, and the whole of the atmosphere was turbulating so hard that, after an explosion of a nearby bomb, you could actually feel your eyeballs being [almost] sucked out … and the suction was so vast, it ripped my shirt away, and ripped my trousers. Then I couldn’t get my breath, the smoke was like acid and everything round me was black and yellow. And these bombers kept on and on, the whole road was moving, rising and falling.’

By 6.30 the planes – Dornier and Heinkel bombers escorted by Messerschmitt fighters – had turned back and wheeled across the Kent countryside, flying over Romney Marsh and back across the Channel to their bases in France. The All Clear sounded, and East Enders emerged from their homes and public shelters and peered about them at the raging fires, the broken glass, the destroyed and damaged houses, debris everywhere, a pall of greasy black smoke enveloping the scene as firemen desperately tackled massive fires with tangles of hoses snaking across the roads and water sloshing into the gutters.

But this was just a lull. ‘Black Saturday’ would set the pattern for the next eight harrowing months. First the Luftwaffe would drop showers of incendiary bombs that would start fires. The blazes would both act as a beacon to guide the subsequent formations of bombers with their loads of highexplosive (HE) bombs to their target, and also occupy the Civil Defence services – fire, rescue, medical – so they would not be standing by ready to engage immediately with the crisis when the heavy bombs began to fall.

Just over two hours later, at 8.30 p.m., the siren wailed again. This time the raid would continue relentlessly until dawn, adding further chaos and devastation to the already stricken East End, and widening out to other parts of London. Chelsea and Victoria were hit that night too, but it was the area of the tidal basin around the docks – the Isle of Dogs, Silvertown and Rotherhithe – that took the brunt of the devastation. Bermondsey, Canning Town, Woolwich, Deptford – fanning out to West Ham, Plaistow, Bow, Whitechapel, Stepney and Poplar – also suffered heavy loads of bombs.

Squadrons of Heinkels and Dorniers – 250 in all – came in waves to drop high-explosive bombs onto the still-blazing wharves, the ruined houses, the cratered streets, the terrified east Londoners. AFS despatch riders on motorcycles made their way through the chaos and rubble to report the immensity of the situation to local fire controls. Columns of fire engines raced east, their bells clanging, men called on duty fastening their helmets and doing up their jackets as the engines sped to answer the urgent calls from the East End. When they arrived there was often nobody in charge to be found, and men were simply deployed to fight the nearest fire to hand. Five hundred engines converged on West Ham alone after a request to the London Regional Fire Control Headquarters at Lambeth, where the map of London pinned on the wall, usually dense with markers indicating the availability of fire engines, was ominously clear. There were already nine fires designated as ‘conflagrations’ (when fires coalesce, burn out of control and spread rapidly), nineteen requiring thirty pumps, forty needing ten, and over a thousand smaller incidents.

By now Surrey Docks was a square mile of fire. The paint on the fireboats attempting to douse the flames blistered in the intense heat, as cranes buckled and crashed into the river. At the Royal Arsenal in Woolwich many of the buildings on fire contained live ammunition and highly flammable nitroglycerine. Water mains had been damaged, and when the hydrants ran dry water had to be pumped from the Thames, reservoirs, even ponds and ditches. At Woolwich a fireman aboard one of six fireboats which had been ordered to return to London from a fire at the Shell-Mex Thameshaven oil refinery on Canvey Island at the mouth of the Thames, its 2,000-ton-capacity tanks ablaze after a bomb attack on 5 September, saw ‘an extraordinary spectacle. There was nothing but fire ahead, apparently stretching right across the river and burning on both of its banks. We seemed to be entering a tunnel of fire – no break in it anywhere. All the usual landmarks were obliterated by walls of flame. Burning barges drifted past. For many hours no contact with the shore was possible. We did what we could where we could. At one time we were just getting into position to fight a fire in a large warehouse when the whole of the riverside front collapsed into the water with a mighty splash. The contents of the building, bags of beans, pouring into the river made a sound like a tropical rain storm. Soon after, we were surprised to see two firemen and three firewomen picking their way along the shore in the direction of Southwark Bridge; they told us they had been cut off in a control room for several hours’ by the fires.

During the raid, that lasted for over eight hours, 250 German planes had dropped 625 tons of high-explosive bombs and at least eight hundred incendiary bomb canisters, each containing 795 pounds of explosive. A thousand fire pumps were fighting the blaze at the Surrey Docks, with three hundred pumps and over a thousand men trying to contain just one of the largest fires. The firemen wrestled to control their heavy hoses, sending arcs of water through flames that seemed scornful of their efforts, their faces blackened by smoke and soot, their eyes pricking from the heat, their throats and lungs irritated by the smoke and the dust of falling masonry, their uniforms scorched and singed by flying sparks and heavy with the water from the hoses, hungry, thirsty, exhausted.

F.W. Hurd, a member of the AFS stationed at East Ham fire station, was ordered to a fire at Beckton gasworks at nine o’clock that night.

Chaos met our eyes. Gasometers were punctured and were blazing away, a power house had been struck rendering useless the hydraulic hydrant supply (the only source of water there). An overhead gantry bearing lines of trucks communicating with the railway siding was also … alight. And then overhead we heard [the German planes], the searchlights searching the sky in a vain effort to locate them. Guns started firing, and then I had my first experience of a bomb explosion. A weird whistling sound and I ducked behind the pump with two other members of the crew. The others, scattered as we were, had thrown themselves down wherever they happened to be. Then a vivid flash of flame, a column of earth and debris flying into the air and the ground heaved. I was thrown violently against the side of the appliance.

… After a time things quietened down and we went out again. It was now about 10 o’clock and the fire had been burning unattacked by us for lack of water [when] a local Fire Officer arrived and informed us that he knew where we could obtain a supply! Our ‘heavy’ was sent about half a mile from the fire to ‘pick up’ water from three other pumps which were being supplied from hydrants. We relayed the water thro’ a chain of pumps to the fire. And then there was nothing to do except watch the hose and guard it where it crossed an arterial road (from being burst by cars proceeding at speed across it), so we had time to look round. What a sight. About a mile to our right was the riverfront. The whole horizon on that side was a sheet of flame. The entire docks were on fire! On all other sides it was much the same. Fire everywhere. The sky was a vivid orange glow … And all the time the whole area was being mercilessly bombed. The road shuddered with the explosions. AA [anti-aircraft] shells were bursting overhead. A Royal Navy Destroyer berthed in one of the docks was firing her AA equipment, as were other ships. The shrapnel literally rained down. It was now about midnight and still the racket kept on. It surprised me how quickly one got used to sensing whether a bomb was coming our way or not. At first we all lay flat every time we heard anything, but after an hour or so we only dived for it if one came particularly close … At 3am a canteen van arrived and served us tea and sandwiches. It was the first ‘bite’ any of us had had since mid day the day before, 14½ hours ago.

Just then the bombing became more severe and localised. A brighter glow in the sky immediately over us, then we saw the flames. Another fire had started in the gas works, which by now after 6 hours concentrated work by us, had been got well under control. Then a huge mushroom of flame shot into the air from the docks followed by a dull rolling roar. An oil container had exploded. The whole atmosphere became terrible again with the noise of gunfire. Afterwards when London established its famous [AA] barrage we got used to it, but on that first night it was just Hell.

Water mains had been fractured all over the East End, as had gas pipes and electrical and telephone cables. With no radio communication between the crews and control, messages had to be relayed by AFS and London Fire Brigade messengers, most of them teenaged boys with tin hats, riding motorbikes or yellow-painted bicycles. Sixteen was the statutory minimum age for such work, but checks were cursory, and many of those undertaking this hazardous and courageous work were younger. They set out to apprise District Control of the situation on the ground, to report the progress of the firefighting and request reinforcements, skidding through wet and cratered streets as the bombs fell, narrowly missing being hit, falling from their machines as girders fell in their path, negotiating piles of rubble, accelerating away to escape walls of fire, disorientated by the noise, the smoke, the confusion.

One of ‘Gillman’s Devils’, teenaged boys organised by Bill Gillman, Assistant Controller of Operations at West Ham, found himself riding through ‘a patch of burning paint on the roadway in Silvertown from the burning paint works on the corner. Paint stuck to my tyres and set them alight but I rode on the pavement until the flames were out.’ ‘You’d go round a corner and there’d be a great big hole in the road where a bomb had fallen, or half a house had fallen and the debris was blocking the road, or there might be an unexploded bomb,’ remembers Stan Durling, an AFS despatch rider. ‘But that night when I reported for duty at Millwall, you just didn’t know where to look. The chemical works had been hit. Everywhere you looked was fire. Across the water, north, south, east and west, everywhere. It seemed as if the whole East End docks were on fire. It was unbelievable.’ Sixteen-year-old Stan Hook was in the bath when the bombs started to fall. ‘They scream through the air, and then crump, crump, and the bath shook and I thought Christ, bombs. I don’t remember drying myself. I don’t remember getting dressed. But I was on my bike and back to the [fire] station [on the Isle of Dogs] and that’s when I came to. That was the beginning at five o’clock and from then until five o’clock the next day I just lived in a daze. A smoke-filled haze covered everything and orders were flying around in all directions, and you were charging around, and bombs were falling and fires were starting, and it wasn’t until the next morning that I really thought, well this is war.’

Uncontrollable by any blackout regulations, the river Thames served to guide enemy aircraft to their targets night after night during the blitz. A.P. Herbert, the lawyer, humorist and Independent MP for Oxford University, who had seen active service with the Royal Naval Reserve in France and at Gallipoli in the First World War, joined the River Emergency Service in the Second. This in effect mobilised the Thames as part of London’s defences. On the night of 7 September, Herbert was detailed to take his converted canal boat Water Gipsy from its mooring at Tower Bridge to pick up some wire from a Port of London Authority wreck lighter and take it to North Woolwich. Rounding Limehouse corner, he and his crew

saw an astonishing picture. Half a mile of Surrey shore … was ablaze – warehouses, wharves, piers, dolphins, barges.

The wind was westerly and there was a wall of smoke and sparks across the river. Burning barges were drifting everywhere but there was not a soul in sight – the small police boat ahead of us had turned back to report – and we had been ordered to Woolwich. [As ours was] a wooden ship and petrol driven, we didn’t like the look of it much; but we put wet towels round our faces and steamed at half speed into the torrid cloud. Inside, the scene was like a lake in Hell. We could hear the hiss and roar of the conflagration ashore, but could not see it, only the burning barges and the crimson water that reflected them. It was not as alarming as it had looked outside, the main whirl of sparks and smoke went over us. We took off our towels and felt quite happy. It was something to be the only boat in Hell. We steamed on slowly, using the compass and dodging the barges, and at last the Water Gipsy came out safe, but sooty, the White Ensign [of the Royal Navy] nearly black, the other side. After that, all the other fires we passed seemed no more than nightlights, though there were some brave ones.