The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

It was the ports and cities on the German Air Force priority lists which suffered repeated and heavy bombing. Even small coastal towns were not immune if they were on the German routes. Ramsgate on the Kent coast, ‘that defenceless watering place’ Churchill called it, had 62 raids between 1940 and 1944; many of the attacks were made by only one or two aircraft and on some occasions the handful of bombs fell into the sea or on the local golf course. The one major and deliberate raid was on 24 August 1940. Over the course of the war 76 townspeople were killed.⁶⁸ The port of Hull by contrast was deliberately targeted 84 times, 20 modest raids in 1940, 10 heavy raids in 1941, and then hit-and-run raids until March 1945, all at the cost of 1,104 dead.⁶⁹ Plymouth, hit 59 times between July 1940 and April 1944 and subject to 602 air-raid alerts, claimed to be proportionately the ‘worst blitzed city’, with 1,172 dead. The total number of damaged housing units exceeded the city’s entire pre-war total because repaired houses were hit again, sometimes two or three times.⁷⁰ The impact on major conurbations also differed widely. In the northern region there were 118 raids in 1940, 131 in 1941, but thereafter only 49 small raids. In Newcastle these resulted in 141 deaths and in Sunderland 273, yet in Gateshead, across the river from Newcastle, there were only five fatalities and in Durham and in Darlington, both at the heart of the nearby coalfield region, there was not one.⁷¹ The overall pattern of bombing in Britain presented a patchy and uneven picture both geographically and chronologically.

The priority throughout the period popularly known as the Blitz (a term mistakenly derived from the German Blitzkrieg, or lightning war) was to limit casualties either by temporary or permanent evacuation of the bombed area or through shelter and rescue. The effort to ensure that vulnerable women and children were evacuated was renewed as bombing began, but there remained extensive resistance to the transfer. A study of ten London boroughs found that among the most heavily bombed quarters of central London the percentage of households affected by evacuation ranged from 20 per cent in West Ham to 11 per cent in Islington. The proportion in suburban Barnes was only 8 per cent.⁷² From the whole London area, now the object of sustained daily bombing, only 20,500 children were moved in September, and in December only 760. By September 1941 there were just 60,000 unaccompanied evacuee children from a population of over 7 million. In December 1940 the Minister of Health, Malcolm MacDonald, concluded in a report for the government civil defence executive committee that there was no need to compel children to leave the capital: ‘the general picture is that London children are healthy and are even less affected by bombing than adults’.⁷³ By the spring of 1941, from the whole country, there were 1.368 million evacuated children, babies and mothers, teachers, disabled and blind, a lower figure than in 1939; some had remained in the reception areas since 1939, others joined in what was called a ‘trickle evacuation’ over the winter months, many from cities outside London. The number of unofficial or unassisted evacuees has been difficult to estimate but may well have been greater than the number who left under official aegis. By 1941 the population of Greater London had fallen by one-fifth. Many private evacuees could be found among better-off households which could bear the cost of moving to the country or a long sojourn in a hotel. In September Home Intelligence reported that it was impossible to get a hotel room anywhere within 70 miles of London.⁷⁴