The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

The greatest amount of damage was done by fire, when it destroyed existing stocks of food. Much of the food and animal feedstuff was stored close to the quayside in wooden warehouses. In Liverpool 100 sheds were destroyed in the bombing, with the loss of 31,500 tons of food. Records of food losses were compiled every week and presented to the Cabinet in close detail. By the end of December 1940 141,000 tons of foodstuffs had been lost, including 27,000 tons of wheat and 25,000 tons of sugar.¹³⁸ The following week a granary with 30,000 tons of cereals was destroyed next to the Manchester Ship Canal, but in this case most of the grain that spilled out was salvaged. Between January and May 1941 a further 271,000 tons of food was affected by raiding, but only 70,500 tons was reckoned a complete loss. The Ministry of Food set up a salvage branch in January 1941 and managed to rescue 162,900 tons for consumption and 39,000 tons for agricultural uses. The Ministry gradually moved food stocks away from vulnerable areas, so that by the end of 1941 only 45 per cent was still close to the docks.¹³⁹ This proved to be a slow process: in Hull the food crisis that hit in May 1941 finally prompted the authorities to abandon storage near the port area; in Newcastle a bomb on a quayside warehouse in September 1941 resulted in a congealed syrup of flour, fat and sugar that nourished swarms of fat flies so dense that local people had to drink their tea through a straw from covered cups to prevent it being contaminated.¹⁴⁰ Nonetheless by the autumn of 1941 the food situation had improved from the worst days of the Blitz. Most stocks had been decentralized into 104 food-storage zones across the country, providing enough stock to feed the entire population for two weeks, three times the level before the war.¹⁴¹

Alongside food the most important factor for the millions of ordinary people caught up in the campaign was to have somewhere secure to live. As German bombing shifted to night operations and became less accurate, damage to residential housing in the inner-city areas escalated. The most poignant images of the Blitz are the rows of demolished terraces and the huddle of the homeless and dispossessed in the brick-strewn streets. ‘Never before have I seen houses completely reduced to this thick and gritty powder,’ wrote Tennyson Jesse to an American friend in October 1940. John Strachey, reflecting on the ordinariness of the small houses blown open to view by the bombs, described ‘a domestic sort of war’ in which its catastrophes were ‘made terrible not by strangeness but by familiarity’.¹⁴²

It is nonetheless possible to exaggerate the degree of damage to housing and the extent of homelessness as a result of the Blitz. Homelessness was for most bomb victims a temporary state. Every effort was made by local authorities to return people to hastily repaired housing, or to allocate those whose homes had been obliterated to temporary billets or new accommodation. In Birmingham, where 67,000 were registered as homeless after the bombing, people returned to damaged housing even in bombed areas, or moved into housing standing vacant in the neighbourhood. Out of every 300 families rendered homeless, 280 in fact returned to their homes. Observers found that among the remainder whose houses had been destroyed, a ‘strong tendency exists towards moving into a house in the immediate neighbourhood’. To ease the congestion, the Ministry of Health waived the slum-clearance orders on condemned housing to allow the homeless a temporary new home, so long as it was cleaned and repaired in advance.¹⁴³ Nor was the percentage of uninhabitable housing as high as the initial scenes of devastation suggested. Once the smoke had cleared and the debris had been shunted aside, most houses were quickly reparable and the remainder capable of returning to use within a matter of weeks. By January 1941, 80 per cent of the half million houses damaged in London had been repaired, and 70 per cent of the 70,000 in Birmingham. By the end of the Blitz 1.6 million houses had been returned to use, leaving just 271,000 still undergoing repairs.¹⁴⁴