Dan Snow's History Hit - WWII's Battle for London

Episode Date: November 3, 2021

At the start of the Second World War London was one of the largest and most important cities in the world, a centre of industry, finance and the heart of Britain's empire. It was also an irresistible target for the Luftwaffe and between 1940 and 1945 London would be mercilessly attacked by German aircraft and V-weapons. Thousands were killed and wounded and many parts of the city were left devastated by the bombing but ultimately the Nazi attempt to cut the head off the imperial snake failed. Today's guest on the podcast is historian Jerry White, Author of the upcoming book: The Battle of London, 1939-1945 - Endurance, Heroism and Frailty Under Fire. He and Dan discuss why London was so important to both sides in the conflict, the fears of the British public and government, the effect the bombing had on the British war effort and how the city was defended.

Hello everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Just after the outbreak of war in 1939, on the 6th of September, the first British fighter pilot was killed in the Second World War. It was a friendly fire incident, the Battle of Barking Creek, ironically named as inexperienced fighter pilots and ground crew, anti-aircraft people on the ground, all made terrible mistakes. They ended up with one pilot being killed, a hurricane destroyed as it was pounced on by spitfires, and one of those spitfires as well destroyed by ground fire, by anti-aircraft fire. It was a reflection of the sensitivity the British state had towards

the protection of its capital, London. It was just a few miles east of London in the Thames Estuary where this so-called battle took place. In some ways, I suppose, it is the start of the battle for London in the Second World War, which continued right the way through the dying days of the war and the end of Hitler's V2 rocket campaign, which would see the first man-made objects to enter space, the V2 rockets, supersonic ballistic missiles fired from occupied Europe into Britain, doing terrible damage to London in particular. London was one of the most important cities in the world, the centre of the largest empire on earth, a massive industrial financial centre,

port as well, and as such it was essential to Britain's national salvation. It was also now, in the 20th century, as a result of development of aerial warfare on the front line. The Battle for London, which incorporated what we know as the Blitz, rumbled on right the way through the Second World War. And Gerry White, an award-winning historian, has got a new book out called The Battle of London, 39-45, which places all these moments of the Second World War, like the Battle of Britain, like the terror campaigns, the V1 and V2, in the overall context of a struggle for Britain's imperial capital. It was great talking to Gerry about this, and you can listen to other podcasts about the Second World War or watch TV shows. We've got a TV show about the air war in the Second World War, as well as many about the

Battle of Britain, on History Hit TV. If you just type into your little browser, historyhit.tv, you get to the world's best history channel. There's hundreds of documentaries on there, lots of podcasts on there, all about the ads, and many, many, trust me, about the air war in the Second World War. Go ahead, do that. You've got 30 days free. If you try it today, you're not going to regret it. Historyhit.tv. But in the meantime, everyone, here is Gerry White talking about the Battle for London. Enjoy. Gerry, thank you very much for coming on the pod. Is it helpful, is it important to think of a distinct battle for London that stretches through the length of the Second World War?

Well, I don't think so, really. I think that the battle really begins, I suppose, when London comes under fire, which is in July 1940. It continues under fire in periods of greater intensity and less until March 1945. It's a hugely sustained attack on this civilian population. And it's clear too that the preparation for the battle, this was no surprise, had been really running since September 1938 and the Munich crisis. And then it massively picked up with evacuation in 1939. So I think it is an extraordinarily prolonged attack and extensive fear of attack, which lasts six years. attack, which lasts six years.

Before I ask you what the purpose of that attack was, in terms of its ambition to knock Britain out of the war by sustained attack, cut the serpent off at its head, just to give me a sense of London's importance in the world and in the UK and the British Empire in the 1930s. Well, it was the great imperial city that had been since Victorian times. It was still the largest city in the world in terms of its civilian population, at least in the Western world. At that point, it was eight and three quarter million people in the greater London area. It had one of the largest ports in the world. It was the world economy's greatest banking centre. And as far as the empire was concerned, it was the centre of parliament,

government, the law. Everything really took place in London. It was by a very large margin, the greatest city in Britain, and one of the greatest cities the world had ever seen. Britain and one of the greatest cities the world had ever seen. So from that point of view, an ambition, as it were, to defeat Britain had to be an ambition to defeat London. And the interesting thing is this was a battle that was prepared for, as you mentioned, well, with the doubting system that we'll come to. London had been struck during the First World War. There was great concern in the government that London would be attacked again, and it might this time prove decisive. There might be some revolution as the bombed people of London rose up and

held off authority. Yeah, I mean, I think that's entirely right. The experience of the First World War, which really sort of impacts on every Londoner aged 30 or over in 1939, the impact of the war was very much fresh in people's minds. And the impact included an air attack, zeppelins from 1915 to 1916, and then bombing planes, particularly in the autumn of 1917 and early 1918, when there were more people sheltering in the tubes. About 330,000 Londoners were sheltering in the tubes in September 1917, which was many more than sheltered in the tubes in 1940, 1941. And so that sort of fear of people living underground, a fear, too, of the expanded potential for air raids, the greater capacity of bomber planes, the greater power of high explosive, the unknown fear of poison gas. All these weighed on people's minds in the 1920s and the 30s. They'd seen poison gas used elsewhere,

the impact of high explosives in the Spanish Civil War. And they thought that, you know, London, the greatest target on earth, was peculiarly vulnerable to air attack. And they did fear people going underground. And they did fear, too, revolutions saying, well, we can't put up with this. We're going to have to have peace at any price, really, to prevent this terrible attack from the air. Famous quote, the bomb will always get through, which is sort of partly true and partly not true. What did the British government do to try and protect London, which is inconveniently close to the continent, what did they try and do to protect it before the war? Well, on the ground, a key element of strategy really from 1938 depended on evacuation.

In other words, that London, to a certain extent, could not be defended. The bomber would always get through as Stanley Baldwin said in the House of Commons and it was felt that what had to happen was that useless mouths as they were known in the jargon of civil servants at the time should be removed so children and elderly people and people with disabilities should, if possible, be got out of London. And so plans were set off to move about 700,000 Londoners. It was a voluntary arrangement,

but a large part of the strategy of London's defence was to reduce its population and to reduce the number of vulnerable people who would, as it were, be a liability when London came under attack, as everybody thought it would. There was then a very sort of controversial civil defence policy, which relied largely on local organisation and of warden services, first aid services, First aid services, the evacuation of hospitals so that hospital beds could be freed up for air aid victims, and a shelter policy which was never really properly got off the ground or thought through, largely because I think that what many people wanted was deep shelters buried a large distance underground, and which was really too expensive for the Treasury to contemplate on the one hand, and had all these fears of people living as troglodytes and going to ground and not coming up again. Yeah, there was a political dimension there as well, wasn't there?

There was, absolutely right. The major pressure for deep shelters came from the left. And the Treasury and the Conservative Party, of course, in power at the time, were much more interested in spending as little money as they could. And that always meant that shelter policy would be hit and miss, really, and didn't really get off the ground in many ways until early 1940.. So this is after Munich, it's after the declaration of war a year after Munich and it's months later that the shelter policy of surface shelters, which was seen as the main answer to high explosive bombing, really got underway in London. Surface shelters are not deep shelters, they are back of the garden, Anderson shelters.

Anderson shelters with a domestic shelter. If you had a back garden, which of course not everybody did in London because so many houses were tenement houses that were shared by more than one family. But if you had a back garden and if you lived in a single family house, then the simplest way to protect the family

was to bury this corrugated iron and concrete shelter in the back garden. It was designed very quickly and it came on screen manufacturing in 1939. It worked astonishingly well. It really had to be a direct hit to knock an Anderson shelter out. The street shelter program was something else. In effect, these were brick boxes. I've got a photograph of them in the book. And every street would have about one of these brick boxes for half a dozen or so families or half a dozen or so houses so that people could come out of their houses and shelter in these brick and concrete boxes which were built in the street. There was confusion over

government advice about the materials to be used for them which meant that some of these street shelters were extremely shaky and under attack. Some high explosives could suck the walls out and the concrete roof would then fall on whoever was unlucky enough to be below. But a strengthening program took place in the street shelter program and actually street shelters, despite their very sort of poor reputation at the start of bombing, stood up extremely well and they were london's main resource for many working class areas which say in south london you know not great access to the tubes many people had their lives saved by these street shelters which performed well at the end of the war right and then let's briefly because we've dealt with this on several podcasts of course

on this feed but let's just briefly talk about Fighter Command and what they were going to do to actually interdict attacks on London. Dowding built the world's first air defence system, effectively, didn't he? He did. I mean, there had been an air defence system in the First World War as well. So the sort of air defence system and relative sort of air defence from attack had at least a First World War model, which was then expanded, I think, by Dowding. Yes, I should have said involving radars, observers, integrated air defence, I guess you could say, yeah.

And then a massive increase in terms of ground-based ACAC, you know, anti-aircraft guns and so on, which were rapidly enlarged when bombing began in September 1940. And in general, the air defences of London worked well against day bombing, but not so well against night bombing. And of course, night bombing was what confronted London on a massive scale from 7 September 1940. Yeah, and I'm very struck by, we'll come to night bombing in a second, I'm very struck by, I've visited most of those RAF airfields. I mean, RAF Hornchurch is in East London. You can see the skyscrapers of London from it, and you're inside the M25. I mean, these were airfields, really, they were London airfields, some of these ones, weren't they?

as well as the East. I mean, when you think too of Croydon, you know, which was the first sort of victim of the Luftwaffe in terms of Croydon airfield. I mean, a lot of these airfields were actually within what was then considered to be Greater London. And now, as you say, within the M25. Let's come on to, you mentioned the bombing of Croydon there.

So is that July or August 1940? And then Churchill bombs Berlin and Hitler says, right, we're going to go for London. Is this the critical point? Why does Hitler decide to switch to focus on pounding London in September 1940? I think the argument and the way it was seen by the Luftwaffe is that because of London's unique significance to Britain, it is Britain's nerve centre. It's not just the nerve centre of the British Isles, it's the nerve centre of the British Empire. And this is where the war effort continues to be led from. And if some sort of

key weakening of London, in terms of getting people to rise against the government, of destabilising London's defences generally, if that can be achieved, then Britain's war effort is massively impeded. That's the rationale for it. And how devastating was that starting on the 7th of September, that daylight bombing? Just give me a sense of how much damage, how bad was it? Well, the bombing on 7th September and 8th September began at about five o'clock in the evening, and then there was a subsequent raid. The critical thing was that there had been bombing of London for about a month before. So Londoners knew about daylight raids. They knew something about nighttime raids.

They got used to sheltering. But the attack of the 7th of September was a massive, had massive impact on the port of London and the East End, both sides of the river. There was massive destruction along the riverside, and the East End boroughs of Stepney, West Ham, Bermondsey took a tremendous pounding. About a thousand people were killed. It was massive destruction along the riverside and the port, which of course was still London's main source of importing food

and getting resources and so on. So the port was hugely important to London. The chain of the river was a bomb aimer's paradise, really, so that planes from Germany could see from the coast the fires set alight by the five o'clock raid and could then just follow along the river to continue bombing the east end of London in particular that first night. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit, talking about the battle for London in the Second World War. More coming up. Hello, if you're enjoying this podcast, then I know you're going to be fascinated by the new episodes of the History Hit Warfare podcast Second World War. More coming up. Rogers and each week, twice a week, I team up with fellow historians, military veterans, journalists and experts from around the world to bring you inspiring leaders. If the crossroads had fallen, then what Napoleon would have achieved is he would have severed the

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when something is compared to the stoicism showed by the people of London and Britain during the Blitz. Where do you come down? How did Londoners cope? And they coped differently probably during the different waves of attack, but there was public disorder, wasn't there? There was frustration against the posh people of the West End who had little nightclubs with bomb shelters in the basement.

As you say, it's difficult to generalise really, and things change over time. But the massive attack of the 7th and 8th of September caused a great deal of local panic and of local distress. People fled if they could. They fled to Epping Forest. They got onto their neighbours' lorries and just got out as fast as possible. The disruption in Stepney and West Ham in particular was absolutely massive and the civil authorities really could not cope with what the Luftwaffe had thrown at them that night. Gas was cut off, electricity supplies were cut off. Electricity supplies were cut off. Roads were blocked. Food couldn't get around. People were in a desperate state. That sort of sense of panic-stricken chaos did not last, I think, more than about 48 to 72 hours. There was a very quick recovery in terms of the response of the London Fire Brigade,

and other brigades, of course, had come in to help. But also some sort of order was restored, particularly in these East End boroughs. A different sort of response quickly came apparent after about two or three days, which was a sense of anger, the sort of sense of we have been left to fight this battle alone. These are parts of London where the shelter system was in very great chaos, where rest centre facilities for homeless people have been absolutely underregarded and underplanned for by government. No one expected bombing raids to last all night. No one expected huge swathes of working class housing to be so badly hit that they couldn't be lived in anymore, so that large numbers of people

were not casualties ending up in hospital, but were presenting at rest centres because they had nowhere to live. And that sense of anger, a sense of the East End being picked out, the West End not suffering so much, there was indeed bombing in the West End pretty quickly after. But that sort of sense of anger of the East End being left on its own was, I think, very apparent. It was also manipulated by the Communist Party and so on, who had long campaigned for deep shelters. The Communist Party, after all, was supporting Stalin, who at this point was an ally of Hitler. And the Communist Party and others were advocating peace Others were advocating peace rather than fighting Hitler at this point in time. And the Communist Party generated anger with the West End, struck a real nerve, I think,

among EastEnders at the time. They could see that there was an inequality of sacrifice in those first nights of bombing after the 7th of September. Did the government get better? What happened to that strain of anger? Did it just rumble on or did things change? Things changed, I think, from the Communist Party's point of view. The great change was the invasion of Russia by Nazi Germany in June 1941, when immediately the Communist Party line became very different from what it had been before, and they were absolutely supportive of the war effort and indeed were actively suppressing any attempt to criticise the authorities. But in terms of the first couple of months or between, say, September and Christmas of 1940, the amount of chaos in the East End gradually weakened. The shelters were improved, benches were put in, facilities were put in to help people stay through the night,

some sort of ordering of shelters with shelter marshals and organization of things like reasonable sanitary conveniences, water supplies, canteen facilities, those sorts of things were largely in place by Christmas 1940. It undoubtedly took some time to recover. But when you think about the crisis that London had gone through, particularly in those areas where the bombing was most severe, really, I think the public authorities did a pretty good job in getting things as stable and as safe as they did between September and Christmas 1940. So talk me through the Blitz, what we call the Blitz, would you call that September to just Christmas? How many nights on the trot was London hit? It was hit 57 nights on the trot. And there was pretty consistent bombing

between roughly September the 7th and Christmas 1940. There was then a bit of a lull. And people, you know, remembering Christmas 1914 thought that maybe there was a bit of almost a Christmas truce in terms of the bombing war. But then on the 29th of December 1940 came the tremendous fire raid on the City of London, the second great fire destroying more of the city than the fire of 1666 had done, wiping out large parts of the city around the Barbican, St Paul's Churchyard, and so on, and causing not great loss of life, but massive destruction of property and a huge amount of the city put out of action for the rest of the war, not just for the rest of the war, but well into the 1950s and 60s. And you can see my walk around that particular

battlefield on History Hit TV, a documentary I made last year. Anyway, let's keep going, Gerry. Yeah. 1941, there were some extremely severe raids. There was not the sort of consistent night after night bombing from New Year 1941 to May 1941. But the worst bombing raids in the war took place in April and May 1941, the worst of all the 10th and the 11th of May 1941. Massive destruction. Again, huge numbers of fires, well over a thousand fires. This time, much more destructive of human life. About 1,800 people killed in one night. These large numbers of people killed in South London, the East End of London again, and also the West End very badly hit. And between January 1941 and May 1941, there were some of the most deplorable, I suppose,

losses of life and destructive raids of the whole war. There's the sort of sustained nightly bombing, which is a tremendous toll on the Londoners' nerves. No one is sleeping through this. Night after night, sleep is broken. And then you've got these hammer blows in early 1941, these massive raids, massive loss of life and huge destruction for London and getting around and so on. And then with the invasion of Russia, almost everything stops in terms of bombing raids on London. The battle goes into a completely different period, really, in terms of the London experience. different period, really, in terms of the London experience. Through 1941, through much of 1942 and 1943, there is a great fear of bombing, but the raids are much fewer and further in between. Shall we just quickly say, it's pretty extraordinary, isn't it, that you

burned down the city of London. It actually had no impact on the course of the war, did it? I mean, that's a disaster for air power strategists before the war. David of Sumer, you torched the whole of the ancient city of London. That's got to move the dial. Do you get government ministers going, I don't know how much more we can take of this? No, you don't. You don't really get that sense of government being at the end of its tether

in terms of defending London and what was being thrown at it, really until 1944 with the V-weapons. That's interesting. Which is, I think, a different kettle of fish. And in many ways, 1944, for a whole variety of reasons, London's worst year. But I think, no, I mean, it's a very interesting thought that there's all this destruction in the city

and there are almost no consequences. I mean, there are obviously consequences for Londoners who now have to readjust their defences so that from New Year's Day 1941, there's a sort of compulsory fire guard. It's first of all voluntary. People are having to have a rotor of people living in your street. You would have to be on fire guard for It's first of all voluntary. People are having to have a rotor of people living in your street. You would have to be on fire guard for that street or for other people's streets

every night. And that's a compulsory extension of civil defence in the war. But no, nothing alters. Everything goes on as normal. And partly, I think it's this extraordinary thing about the size of London, that before the war, the very size of London was seen as its worst weakness. This was an unmissable target for the Luftwaffe. But actually, the size of London meant that it had such enormous resources of transportation, of people, of money and engineering power, that even though parts of London are wiped out, there could never be the sort of knockout blow that air power might represent against a city like Plymouth or Coventry. London could never really be more than dented. Talk to me about the V weapons and how that was a very strange, different story and very difficult for Londoners to swallow.

1944 was a difficult year because it opened with yet more bombing. At this point, really, Londoners, they were four years into the war, nearly five. into the war, nearly five. The baby blitz, as it's called, or the little blitz, had a major impact, I think, on people's mental resources. It's not that Londoners gave in or Londoners wanted peace or anything, obviously they wanted peace, but not at any price. It did not ever dent Londoners' view that the war had to be won. But I think the baby blitz of the first months of 1944, when bombing resumed, when the Luftwaffe, everybody thought, well, it might be beaten by now, but it wasn't. It came back.

There was bombing night after night, dark raids. That shook, I think, people's confidence. But the very worst was the V weapons. The V1 was the key killer weapon, if you like. It didn't actually kill that many people in London, but it terrorized the whole population. If we can have one measure of London sort of self-confidence, I suppose it's the number of people who are living there at any one point in time. confidence, I suppose it's the number of people who are living there at any one point in time. Well, about a million and a half people left London at the very outset of the war.

Roughly, you've got to think of London's population as being a million and a half less throughout the war than it was at the beginning of the war in peacetime. That's some measure, I think, of people who are sent out of London for a whole variety of reasons or who choose to leave it because really they think, well, I can't go on with this. I don't want to face any more bombing. I've had enough. Or I'm frightened of facing what London is going up to. What happens in the summer of 1944, the V weapon starts in June 1944.

By August, the population of London is under 6 million. More than 2 million, two and three quarter million people have left London. And that's some measure, I think, of the destructive power of the V weapons just in terms of a terror weapon. This thought of a robot plane aimed as a sort of deliberate act of malevolence, of spite, with a war that could not really be won, with massive American and British forces now fighting in Normandy and fighting through France and towards Germany, and Russia doing so well on the Eastern Front. Everybody in London knew that this was a war which the Germans could not win.

But there were these robot planes coming over. You heard them from miles away. You didn't know if it was aimed at you, where this thing was going to fall. And until the silence of the engine cutting out and then the massive explosion that followed this was an absolute terror weapon it was much more terrible i think than the v2 which followed it the rocket which no one had any warning for it emitted no sound all you heard was a huge bang and you knew that it either got you or it hadn't. With the V1, you could hear this thing from miles away and sometimes a hundred and more were coming every

day over London. And the sense of this unnerving robotic plane aimed at you from a level and so, you know, I think that shook a very great number of people's nerves in London. When did the Battle of London come to an end? March 1945, the last V1s and the last V2s. And about the 25th of March, I think it was, when the last numbers of V2s exploded on London. And when you think about it, Dan, I mean, this had been a battle that had been running various degrees of ferocity, but certainly from July 1940 to the end of March 1945, one of the last V2s destroyed huge mansions in Stepney, occupied mainly by Jewish people in the Jewish East End, 150, 160 people killed in this single event. It had nothing to do with winning the war. It was just to kill as many Londoners as possible. This city, which had held its nerve through this enormous battle, no other civilian population has had to put up

with this in history. But still, there was this sense of wanting to kill Londoners, the very last throw of the dice, really, from Nazi Germany. What's it all mean, Gerry? What is the legacy of the Battle of London? Ironically, it's the place that suffered so much during the war, but it's the most cosmopolitan place today. You'd probably say it's the most welcoming to people from other parts of the world. It didn't retreat into a kind of insularity? What is the legacy of that suffering of that battle? Well, I think it's an interesting legacy. And I try to point out some of this. But in many ways, for a whole variety of reasons, government policy during the war and after was to reduce London's population, was to

take a million people out of London, take roughly a million jobs. And the impact of government policy was, in effect, the star of London of investment for at least two decades, right until the 1970s. That didn't alter with all sorts of consequences for London that those of us who lived through at least part of that might remember the city being run down, the city in the 60s and 70s, despite swinging London and all the rest of it, was in many ways a very depressed place indeed. And lots of Londoners leaving the city and voting with their feet. And it's really, I think, that the legacy of the war led to two decades of decline in London. And it's really that legacy which London has somehow, from the 1990s onwards, I think, government has begun to see again the value of London to the nation. And London has begun to reinvent itself, really, from the 1990s onwards over the last 30 years or so. So I think the legacy of the Blitz, you know, there was a great deal of hardship, if you like, or suffering to London that went on beyond 1945 and really, I think, scarred the history of London for the next 20 years.

And that had to be made good in some way in the subsequent decades. Thank you very much indeed for coming on, Gerry, and talking about the Battle of London. What's the book called? It's called The Battle of London, 1939-45, Endurance, Heroism and Frailty Undefined. Well, thank you very much indeed for coming and talking all about it. Thank you.

I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks. You've made it to the end of another episode. Congratulations.

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