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The Blitz Eye Witness Accounts of The Blitz September 1940 to May 1941
If you were out and a bombing raid took place you would make for the nearest shelter. The tube stations were considered to be very safe. I did not like using them myself. The stench was unbearable. The smell was so bad I don't know how people did not die from suffocation. So many bodies and no fresh air coming in. People would go to the tube stations long before it got dark because they wanted to make sure that they reserved their space. There were a lot of arguments amongst people over that. We did not have an Anderson shelter so we used to hide under the stairs. You felt the next bang would be your lot and it was very frightening. My grandmother was a very religious person and when she was with us during the bombing raids she would gabble away saying her prayers. Strangely enough, when I was with her, I always felt safe. Evelyn Rose was a teenager living in London during the Blitz. She was interviewed about her experiences in 1987
In the West End, we could 'take' the raids we got; whether we could have survived many more like the last two raids in the spring of 1941, when many of London's gas and water mains were destroyed, I don't know. We might not have been able to carry on, but bombs do not induce surrender. The Government had miscalculated the effect of raids; the 300,000 papiermache coffins which were ready when the bombing began were never used and the hospitals, which were cleared for patients who were expected to be driven mad by raids, remained empty. On the contrary, bombs tended to cure psychological maladies. Many people who were neurotic about the prospect of war were cured by its reality. They had too much to do to have time to be frightened. In the late summer of 1940 German bombers for the first time began their raids on Dockland. I was one of a small company who went down to the East End in early mornings with Bob Boothby, then Under-Secretary to the Ministry of Food. We took with us a mobile canteen which provided hot drinks for people who had been bombed out. I got to know Father Groser, the happiest example of a priestly saint, who was then and afterwards beloved by co-workers of all denominations as well as by the poor he helped. I recall one morning my pleasure in being able to ring him up to say that I had just received a cheque for £1,000 to help his work in the Blitz. Kingsley Martin was the editor of the New Statesman during the Second World War. He wrote about his experiences in his autobiography, Editor, in 1968
Then came the Blitz. After Coventry, the East End of London had to bear the brunt. Every night, from dusk to dawn the German bombs fell upon them. Woolton suggested that I might go down there every morning about six o'clock when the 'All-clear' sounded, and see what I could do to help. I found that, as they came out of the shelters, what comforted them most was a kiss and a cup of tea. These were easily provided. Almost overnight I got the Ministry of Food to set up canteens all over the East End, manned by voluntary workers, where the tea was free. When we took them back to their homes, often reduced to rubble, their chief concern was what had happened to the cat. I am afraid that the cat searches which I tried to organize were less successful than the canteens. Robert Boothby, Boothby: Recollections of a Rebel (1978)
The streets were lit up like day. Houses were burning, shops were burning, it was a proper inferno. Heat was something terrible. The soles of your shoes were being burnt because of the heat of the pavement. In one period I never took my clothes off for six weeks. There was one outside shelter with I suppose fifty or sixty were in the shelter. When I got to the shelter we could do nothing for them. They were literally blown to pieces. The next morning you could see pieces of them in the trees. Another time I came across nine bodies dead at a factory bench with no visual signs of injury. Blast had caused it. It had blown all their clothes off, including their socks. On another occasion people were walking over heads that had been blown off bodies. We brought out forty people on pieces of corrugated sheets. We used anything we could find. I remember bringing out one fellow who had lost his face down one side. His arm was gone. His leg was gone. He looked up at me and said: "Have you got a cigarette, mate? I lit it up for him and put it in his lips. He took a couple of puffs and said: "Will you tell me landlady I shall not be home to tea." And with that he closed his eyes and was gone. Harry Meacham worked as an air-raid warden during the Second World War. He was interviewed for the television documentary in The People's War (1987).
We had to wait until the second alarm before we were allowed to go to the shelter. The first bell was a warning they were coming. The second was when they were overhead. They did not want any time wasted. The planes might have gone straight past and the factory would have stopped for nothing. Sometimes the Germans would drop their bombs before the second bell went. On one occasion a bomb hit the factory before we were given permission to go to the shelter. The paint department went up. I saw several people flying through the air and I just ran home. I was suffering from shock. I was suspended for six weeks without pay. They would have been saved if they had been allowed to go after the first alarm. It was a terrible job but we had no option. We all had to do war work. We were risking our lives in the same way as the soldiers were. Muriel Simkin worked in a munitions factory in Dagenham during the Second World War. She was interviewed about her experiences for the book, Voices from the Past: The Blitz (1987).
London still stood this morning, which was the greatest surprise to me as I cycled home in the light of early dawn after the most frightening night I have ever spent. But not all of London was still there, and some of the things I saw this morning would scare the wits out of anyone. When the sirens first shrieked on Saturday, it was evident we were in for something, but dinner proceeded calmly enough. It was when the first screaming bomb started on its downward track that we decided the basement would be healthier. The whole night was one of moving from the basement to the first floor, with occasional sallies to make sure that no incendiaries had landed on the rooftop. That was perhaps more frightening than the sound of constant bombs punctuated by guns near and far. For the London air was heavy with the burning smell. The smoke sometimes brought tears to the eyes, and the glow around the horizon certainly looked as though the entire city might be up in flames any minute. On one occasion I dropped off to sleep on a basement floor and slept probably forty-five minutes, when two screamers sounding as though they had landed right next door brought me, startled, to my feet. A few minutes later a couple of incendiaries arrived just around the comer, but the fire equipment came within seconds. Most of the time we felt that the entire center of the city had probably been blasted out of existence and we ticked off each hit with "That must be Buckingham Palace - that's Whitehall." It was staggering, to say the least, to cycle for a mile through the heart of London and fail to see even one pane of glass shattered and eventually to find ones own house standing calm and in one piece. A later tour, however, showed that while none of the bombs hit any objectives we had picked out, they had landed squarely on plenty of places. I walked through areas of rubble and debris in southeastern London this morning that made it seem incredible that anyone could be alive, but they were, and very much so. Fires for the most part were put out or were well under control by early morning. It was a contrast to find one section of "smart London" that had as bad a dose as the tenement areas. Near one of many of Sir Christopher Wren's masterpieces, houses were gutted structures with windowpanes hanging out, while panes in a church were broken in a million pieces.