London's Finest Hour

On September 7, 1940, Adolf Hitler and Field Marshal Hermann Goering, chief of the Luftwaffe, made a significant strategic blunder, perhaps one of the worst German blunders of the entire Second World War. Prior to that fateful Saturday, in an attempt to establish air superiority over English skies so that Operation Sea Lion, Hitler's intended invasion of the United Kingdom, could proceed, the Luftwaffe had so pummeled the airdromes, support facilities, and radar installations of the Royal Air Force that Fighter Command, the raf authority charged with defending the U.K. and fighting the Battle of Britain, was nearly on its knees. To make matters worse, although the raf never experienced a shortage of Hurricanes or the relatively fewer Spitfires with which it was fighting the battle, pilots—regardless of the fact that they were shooting down large numbers of Germans—were being lost faster than the raf could replace them. Had such losses continued, the raf could not have sustained the battle, and the German divisions assembled on the French coast might well have invaded the south of England and forced the British government to sue for peace.

Impatience, Hitler's impatience, may have saved England and saved what became the Allied cause. At the critical moment in the battle, the frustrated Hitler suddenly changed strategy. Rather than continue to accept high Luftwaffe losses and achieve his aim by reducing the raf on the ground and in the air, Hitler attempted to terrorize England into submission by unleashing the Blitz. Peter Stansky's well-documented and well-written The First Day of the Blitz shows why Hitler's strategy was doomed to failure and how the experience of the Blitz changed the United Kingdom forever.

As soon as the Luftwaffe shifted its focus and commenced the terror bombing of London and other English cities, the recovery Fighter Command was assured; thereafter the raf gained strength because civilians rather than military objectives became the primary targets. Goering appears to have assumed that, in the same way that he terrorized Guernica, Warsaw, and Rotterdam, he could so shock London and a few other British cities that he would drive the country into submission. The degree of his miscalculation cannot be measured. Guernica, when it was bombed, was a town of approximately seven thousand people; Warsaw and Rotterdam were much larger. But London was an immense city of nine million souls, and while damage on that first day was extensive, including more than 400 dead and 1600 injured, the percentage of the total population was so small as to be collectively (never individually) negligible. Londoners were far from submitting, and the expression London can take it quickly gained worldwide currency.

Professor Stansky is at his best when he explores the myths and realities associated with what it meant to take it. London on that first Saturday of the Blitz was struck by two successive waves of air attack. The first, consisting of 348 bombers, struck at 4:14 p.m., the all-clear sounding at 6:10 p.m.; the second wave, a stream of 318 bombers, commenced its attack at 8:10 p.m. and continued to drop bombs until 4:30 a.m. the next morning.

Hardest hit, the East End around the docks went up in flames. At one point, for example, in addition to oil tanks, warehouses, homes, ships, and barges, two hundred and fifty acres of stacked lumber exploded into a conflagration that dwarfed the Great Fire of London and defied effective firefighting. London—indeed the British government—should have been better prepared for the results, but it was not. Given the government's assumptions about what total war from the air would be like—not a few of them taken from such books as H. G. Wells's The Shape of Things to Come and The War in the Air—thousands upon thousands of dead were anticipated, and mortuarial services were far more plentiful than necessary. But unfortunately relief services for treating the...