70th anniversary of the last Blitz attack

Nearly exactly 70 years ago Londoners woke up to the devastation caused by the largest single Blitz raid of the Second World War. It came closer than any other attack to breaking the British spirit but unknown to Londoners at the time the date was also destined to go down in history as marking the end of the Blitz.

The previous night the capital had been subjected to the most destructive raid since the beginning of the Blitz back in September 1940. After it 1400 people lay dead, 1800 seriously injured and over 12,000 people were homeless. The list of buildings damaged or destroyed read like a tourists guide book to London and included the Royal Naval College, Queens Hall, the Law Courts, the Tower of London, Fleet Street, the British Museum, London Underground and the Houses of Parliament.

“It took us a long time to realise that raid on 10 May was the last one”  East End fireman Cyril Demarne said at the time. “We’d been so used to having a raid every night, or them stopping and starting again…..and of then of course we got the answer. We found out what it was all about. Hitler had attacked Russia. What Churchill called the biggest blunder in history. He attacked Russia. And we realised that the Luftwaffe couldn’t possibly come to us, so it was safe to go to bed at night and have a good night’s rest, dry our clothes and get our breath back”.

The day before the attack Londoners had been enjoying a fine summer day and the war had been temporarily forgotten. A crowd of over 93,000 had packed Wembley stadium for the FA Cup final between Preston North End and Arsenal. That evening across the other side of London in Queens Hall, home since 1895 of the Proms, over 2000 people had listened to the London Philharmonic Orchestra performing  Elgar’s ‘The Dream of Gerontius’. As people had made their way home before the back out at 10.21 pm. little did they realise that in the next few hours London was to be nearly bought to its knees.

The Lufwaffes main target, as in so many previous raids, was again to be the docks but on this occasion the bombing was so heavy that both sides of the Thames were set ablaze. Over 2,000 fires raged across the capital, stretching the fire services to near breaking point. As a result many of London’s most famous landmarks were to be destroyed or damaged by incendiary bombs before the engines could arrive.

The list of buildings succumbing to the flames included Westminster Abbey where the deanery was burnt to the ground and the House of Commons. The next day the walls of debating chamber had collapsed, the speaker’s chair was burnt to a cinder and many of the famous green leather benches used by Members were charred beyond recognition.

Across the river Lambeth Palace was also badly damaged while the area all around around St Pauls Cathedral had been burnet to the ground. Remarkably Wrens masterpiece survived with just the dome’s glass blown out. Queens Hall, which the previous evening had been packed with concert goers, was reduced to a smouldering pile of rubble and the British museum closed because a high explosive bomb had destroyed many of the galleries.

London’s underground transport system was put also out of action with bombs damaging many stations including Kings Cross Station, St James Park, Victoria and Paddington. “London was in flames” wrote the American journalist Quentin Reynolds, war correspondent on Collier’s Weekly, “Across the river a solid sheet of maddened fire banked the river for nearly half a mile.”

Churchill on the weekend of the raid was outside the capital, staying at Ditchley Park near Oxford, the home of his fellow Conservative MP and friend Ronald Tree. There he was considering the fate of Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, who had parachuted into Scotland on the day of the raid. Hearing of the attack Churchill decided to send him to the Tower of London where he could witness at first hand the destruction meted out to Londoners by the Luftwaffe.

Yet out of the rubble on that fateful day was to be forged one of the most enduring features of the British personality, the ‘Blitz Spirit’ according to Juliet Gardiner, the historian. “This Blitz spirit, so valued at the time and later evoked by politicians in need of a storehouse of British fortitude and resolution on which to draw should not be sentimentalised; pre-war social tensions did not disappear. It can best be described perhaps in two words – “endurance” and “defiance”.

More than 43,000 civilians were killed in the Blitz and over 71,000 injured in raids lasting 243 days. Yet on the morning of the 11 May 1941, although the people didn’t know it at the time, the Blitz was effectively over. Britain had endured the worst that the German Luftwaffe could throw at her and had defied Hitler to live and fight again another day.