Wikipedia Deep Dive

The Blitz

14 min read

For fifty-six consecutive nights, London burned.

Beginning on September 7, 1940, the German Luftwaffe—the Nazi air force—dropped bombs on Britain's capital with terrifying regularity. Night after night, Londoners descended into Underground stations, huddled in Anderson shelters dug into their back gardens, or simply prayed in their beds. The assault would continue for eight months, killing more than 40,000 civilians across Britain and destroying over a million homes in London alone.

The British called it "the Blitz," borrowing from the German word Blitzkrieg—lightning war. But there was nothing swift about it. This was a grinding campaign of terror from the sky, an attempt to break the British will to fight by reducing their cities to rubble.

It failed spectacularly.

The Logic of Bombing Civilians

To understand why Nazi Germany believed bombing cities could win a war, we need to step back to the 1920s and 1930s, when military theorists were grappling with a frightening new reality: aircraft had fundamentally changed warfare.

Theorists like the Italian general Giulio Douhet and the American colonel Billy Mitchell argued something radical. They claimed air forces could win wars entirely on their own, making traditional armies and navies almost irrelevant. Their reasoning went like this: bombers could fly over enemy lines, bypass all those soldiers and battleships, and strike directly at what really mattered—factories, government buildings, and communication networks. Destroy those, and your enemy couldn't make weapons or coordinate their forces.

But they went further. Bomb civilian neighborhoods, they argued, and you'd shatter public morale. Workers would be too terrified or homeless to show up at factories. Democracies were thought especially vulnerable because their governments actually had to listen to public opinion. A population that had endured enough bombing, the theory went, would demand peace at any price.

There was a grim phrase that captured the prevailing wisdom: "The bomber will always get through." Air defenses were primitive, and no one believed fighters could reliably intercept bombers, especially at night. This wasn't optimistic speculation—it was considered iron law.

Both the British Royal Air Force and the American military embraced this thinking. It would later guide their own devastating bombing campaigns against Germany and Japan.

Germany's Conflicted Air Strategy

The Germans, ironically, were more skeptical.

The Luftwaffe's high command—known by the German abbreviation OKL, for Oberkommando der Luftwaffe—never fully bought into the idea that bombing alone could decide a war. They saw air power primarily as a supporting act: soften up the enemy before your tanks rolled in, disrupt their supply lines, protect your own troops from air attack.

This wasn't an accident of history. It was largely the result of one man's death.

General Walther Wever served as Chief of the Luftwaffe General Staff from 1935 to 1936. He was a genuine strategic thinker who understood that air power could be decisive if used correctly. Wever championed the development of heavy bombers—the kind of aircraft that could carry large payloads over long distances—and argued that Luftwaffe officers needed education in grand strategy, economics, and industrial production, not just how to fly and fight.

In 1936, Wever died in an air crash. His successors promptly abandoned most of his ideas.

The generals who followed—Albert Kesselring and Hans-Jürgen Stumpff—came from army backgrounds and focused the Luftwaffe on supporting ground operations. The ambitious heavy bomber program was scaled back. The Air Academies trained pilots in tactics and operational planning, not in how to wage an independent air campaign against enemy industry.

By the time the Luftwaffe faced Britain in 1940, it had excellent tactical aircraft—nimble fighters and accurate dive bombers—but lacked the strategic bombers and coherent doctrine needed for a sustained campaign against a major industrial power.

Hitler and the Psychology of Terror

Adolf Hitler's relationship with air power was complicated by his own psychology.

In the 1930s, Hitler had used the threat of bombing to terrify smaller nations into submission. Austria, Czechoslovakia—the mere promise of German aircraft over their capitals had helped extract diplomatic concessions. Hitler came to see bombing primarily as a terror weapon, a psychological tool rather than a military one.

This created a strange blind spot. Hitler assumed his enemies thought the same way. When the British began bombing Germany, he interpreted it as an attempt to break German morale rather than what it actually was: an effort to destroy German industry. Any damage to morale, from the British perspective, was merely a bonus.

Hitler also grew increasingly skeptical that bombing could actually destroy industrial capacity. After seeing the results of early Blitz raids, he complained repeatedly that the Luftwaffe couldn't hit what it was aiming at. "The munitions industry cannot be impeded effectively by air raids," he griped. "Usually, the prescribed targets are not hit."

He wasn't entirely wrong about his own air force's limitations.

The Göring Problem

Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring commanded the Luftwaffe, and he was a disaster.

Göring was a World War One fighter ace who had parlayed his Nazi Party membership into one of the highest positions in the Reich. He was vain, lazy, increasingly addicted to morphine, and deeply invested in protecting his political position. The Luftwaffe was his personal fiefdom, and he guarded it jealously against any interference—including from the German Navy, which desperately wanted air support for its operations against British shipping.

Hitler, for his part, called the Luftwaffe "the most effective strategic weapon" and refused to divide it. This might have made sense with competent leadership. Under Göring, it meant the air force operated in isolation from the rest of Germany's military strategy.

Göring also had a habit of telling Hitler what he wanted to hear. In July 1939, he arranged an elaborate demonstration of the Luftwaffe's latest equipment at a place called Rechlin, giving the impression that Germany's air force was far more prepared for strategic warfare than it actually was. When reports came in that didn't match his optimistic assessments, Göring simply falsified them or interpreted them in the most favorable light possible.

The result was a "communications gap" between Hitler and reality. The Führer made decisions based on information that ranged from incomplete to fictional.

The Battle Begins

The Blitz emerged from the failure of an earlier campaign.

From July through early September 1940, the Luftwaffe had been fighting the Battle of Britain—an attempt to destroy the Royal Air Force (RAF) and achieve air superiority over the English Channel. This was the essential precursor to Operation Sea Lion, the planned German invasion of Britain.

The strategy was straightforward: attack RAF airfields, destroy British fighters on the ground and in the air, bomb the factories producing replacement aircraft. Once the RAF was eliminated, German bombers could operate freely, and the invasion fleet could cross the Channel without being attacked from above.

It wasn't working.

British fighter production actually outpaced German production by roughly two to one. The British built 10,000 aircraft in 1940; Germany built 8,000. Worse, the geography favored the defenders. British pilots who were shot down but survived could be back in the air within hours. German pilots who parachuted over England became prisoners of war. German bombers carried crews of four or five men, meaning every lost bomber cost more trained personnel.

The Luftwaffe's intelligence was also poor. German aircraft frequently couldn't find their targets. Attacks on factories and airfields often missed entirely or did far less damage than reported.

The Switch to London

On September 6, 1940, Hitler and Göring ordered a change in strategy. Instead of continuing to attack RAF infrastructure, the Luftwaffe would bomb London.

German intelligence believed Fighter Command was weakening. A massive attack on the capital, they reasoned, would force the RAF to commit its remaining fighters to defend the city, allowing the Luftwaffe to destroy them in a final, decisive battle. Simultaneously, the terror of bombing might force the British government to surrender.

The first major raid came on September 7. Nearly a thousand aircraft attacked London's East End, targeting the docks along the Thames. The fires were visible for miles. Three hundred civilians died that first night.

And then it continued. Night after night. For fifty-six of the next fifty-seven nights, London was bombed.

A Strategic Mistake?

Many historians consider the switch to bombing London a catastrophic German error.

The argument goes like this: Fighter Command was genuinely strained by late August 1940. Airfields were damaged, pilots were exhausted, losses were mounting. A few more weeks of concentrated attacks on RAF infrastructure might have achieved the air superiority Germany needed.

By shifting to London, the Germans gave Fighter Command breathing room. Airfields were repaired. Pilots rested. The RAF recovered.

Others dispute this interpretation. They point out that the Luftwaffe wasn't actually making much progress against Fighter Command in those final August days. Weather would have forced a pause in operations by October regardless. And even if Germany had achieved air superiority, the Royal Navy remained so overwhelmingly powerful that any invasion fleet would likely have been massacred in the Channel.

The debate continues, but the practical result was clear: Operation Sea Lion was postponed indefinitely. Britain would not be invaded.

The Night Campaign

After the initial daylight raids proved costly—German bombers were vulnerable to British fighters during the day—the Luftwaffe shifted to night bombing.

This made the bombers safer but the bombing less accurate. Without sophisticated navigation equipment (which didn't yet exist), German crews struggled to find specific targets in the darkness. They relied on following rivers, identifying landmarks by moonlight, and using radio beams to guide them—all methods the British learned to disrupt.

The result was area bombing. Rather than hitting specific factories or military installations, the Luftwaffe increasingly just bombed cities. If you couldn't hit the aircraft factory, hit the workers' neighborhoods. If you couldn't destroy the port, destroy the city around it.

Beyond London

London bore the brunt of the Blitz, but it wasn't alone.

Liverpool, Britain's main Atlantic port, suffered heavily in what became known as the Liverpool Blitz. The city was crucial for receiving American supplies, and the Germans knew it. Hull, a North Sea port, became a frequent target partly because it was easy to find—bombers that couldn't locate their primary targets often dropped their bombs on Hull instead.

The list of targeted cities reads like a geography of British industry: Birmingham, Coventry, Manchester, Sheffield (industrial centers), Bristol, Cardiff, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Southampton, Swansea (ports), Belfast and Glasgow (shipbuilding), Sunderland (more shipbuilding).

Coventry endured one of the war's most notorious raids on November 14, 1940. German bombers destroyed much of the medieval city center, including its fourteenth-century cathedral. The attack was so devastating that Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi propaganda minister, coined a new verb: coventrieren—"to Coventrate"—meaning to completely devastate a city from the air.

The British Response

The British didn't break.

This confounded the theorists who had predicted that sustained bombing would shatter civilian morale and force democracies to sue for peace. What actually happened was more complicated.

People were terrified, certainly. They were traumatized. They lost homes, family members, entire neighborhoods. But they also adapted. Londoners developed routines around the nightly raids. They learned which Underground stations offered the best shelter. They went to work in the morning, even when their offices had been bombed the night before.

British war production didn't collapse—it actually increased throughout the Blitz. Wartime studies later concluded that most cities took ten to fifteen days to recover from a severe raid. Some, like Birmingham, needed three months. But recovery happened.

The greatest industrial effect was forcing the British to disperse their aircraft production. Factories were broken up into smaller facilities spread across the country, making them harder to target. This was disruptive and inefficient, but it worked.

Why the Blitz Failed

The German air offensive failed for reasons that seem obvious in hindsight but weren't to the men making decisions in 1940.

First, the Luftwaffe lacked a coherent strategy. OKL attacked too many different types of targets—airfields, then cities, then ports, then factories—without concentrating enough force on any single set of objectives. If they'd focused relentlessly on, say, aircraft factories, they might have achieved more. Instead, the bombing effort was diluted across multiple campaigns.

Second, German intelligence about British industry was remarkably poor. They didn't know which factories were most critical, which supply chains were most vulnerable, or even where many targets were located. This wasn't for lack of trying—British counter-intelligence was effective at concealing and misdirecting.

Third, the Luftwaffe simply didn't have the aircraft for sustained strategic bombing. Their bombers were designed for supporting ground operations, not for flying long distances with heavy payloads. They lacked the navigational equipment for accurate night bombing and the fighter escorts for safe daylight operations over Britain.

Fourth, and perhaps most fundamentally, the theory was wrong. Bombing civilians didn't break morale in the way the prewar theorists had predicted. People didn't demand surrender. They got angry. They endured. They kept going to work.

The End of the Blitz

The Blitz ended not because Germany decided it had failed, but because Germany needed its air force elsewhere.

In early July 1940—before the Blitz even began—German military planners had started work on Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. As that operation approached in the spring of 1941, the Luftwaffe was progressively redeployed eastward.

The last major raid on London came on the night of May 10-11, 1941. It was one of the heaviest of the entire campaign, killing over 1,400 people and destroying the chamber of the House of Commons. A month later, German forces invaded the Soviet Union, and the strategic priority of knocking Britain out of the war was shelved indefinitely.

Britain had survived. More than 40,000 of its civilians had not. Over a million homes in London were damaged or destroyed. Entire city centers lay in ruins.

But the factories still ran. The ports still operated. The RAF still flew. The British people, to quote a phrase that became famous during those months, had "kept calm and carried on."

The Lessons and the Legacy

The Blitz taught lessons that its participants interpreted in very different ways.

The British concluded that civilian morale could withstand bombing—but they also concluded that bombing could devastate enemy industry if done with enough force and precision. This led, somewhat paradoxically, to the RAF's own massive bombing campaign against Germany, which killed hundreds of thousands of German civilians and remains controversial to this day.

The Germans concluded that strategic bombing was largely a waste of resources, reinforcing their preference for using air power in support of ground operations. This contributed to their failure to develop the heavy bombers that might have made their campaigns more effective.

The Americans, watching from across the Atlantic, concluded that daylight precision bombing against specific industrial targets—rather than area bombing of cities—was the correct approach. They would test this theory over Germany starting in 1942, with mixed results and terrible losses.

What none of them fully grasped was how much the effectiveness of strategic bombing depended on factors they couldn't control: the accuracy of intelligence, the resilience of targeted populations, the adaptability of industrial systems, and the sheer quantity of aircraft required to achieve meaningful results.

The Blitz failed to knock Britain out of the war. But the era of strategic bombing was only beginning. The true horror of what aircraft could do to cities would not be fully revealed until Hiroshima and Nagasaki, five years later.

A City Remembers

Walk through London today and you can still see the Blitz if you know where to look.

There are the obvious memorials: the preserved ruins of Christ Church Greyfriars, its walls standing open to the sky. The plaques marking where bombs fell. The rebuilt Coventry Cathedral, designed to stand beside the ruins of its medieval predecessor as a permanent reminder.

But there are subtler traces too. The street patterns that jog unexpectedly where buildings once stood. The postwar housing blocks, grimly functional, that replaced Victorian terraces. The gaps in neighborhoods where something is clearly missing.

And buried in London's flowerbeds, apparently, are stolen mobile phones—a modern echo of a city where people have always hidden things in the ground during times of trouble, waiting for the danger to pass.

The Blitz lasted eight months. Its shadow stretches much longer.