The Start of The Blitz

A City on the Edge: September, 1940

London, late afternoon. The Thames winds past the brick terraces and crowded docks of the East End—the city’s beating, stubborn heart. It’s Saturday, September 7, 1940, and for a moment, the war feels distant. Shoppers shuttle home with rationed groceries; dockworkers pause for a pint, their faces smeared with the city’s dust and hope. In the Underground, children’s voices echo—their parents anxious, but holding tight to a desperate normalcy.

Nobody knows, as the clock nears a quarter to five, that this is the last regular afternoon London will see for a very long time.

In the far blue above, an ominous whisper grows—a gathering cloud, thunder without rain. For weeks, the Luftwaffe had battered the RAF and its airfields beyond London. But today, what is coming is not about the air force, or the military at all.

Today, the city itself is the target.

The Gathering Storm

The story of the Blitz didn’t begin with the boom of bombs over London. It started in the slow, grinding aftermath of France’s fall in June, and the tense summer that followed. The Battle of Britain raged overhead from July into early September, with fighter planes drawing white scars across the sky. Bombs had already fallen across the countryside—on airfields, radar masts, and factory towns. But London? London had largely been spared.

That changed on the night of August 24, when a German bomber group veered off course and dropped its deadly load over the city center. For Londoners, it was a sign: the war could, after all, find them at home. For Winston Churchill and his government, it was cause for a deadly reply—they ordered RAF bombs to rain on Berlin. Enraged, Hitler commanded his air chiefs to shift their fury. The Luftwaffe was no longer to hunt for airfields and hangars. London itself would become the battlefield.

So when morning broke on September 7, the sense of unease hummed like electricity. Air raid wardens and fire brigades watched the sky. The city braced itself for what, deep down, everyone knew might come.

September 7: London Burns

At exactly 4:43 p.m., air raid sirens wailed. Londoners heard it—at home, on the buses, at the docks—and many hurried for the safety of their Anderson shelters or the deep, echoing darkness of the Underground platforms. Some, out of exhaustion, or simple stubbornness, stayed above ground, hoping it would be another false alarm.

But then the sky filled with planes—hundreds of them, engines roaring, wings stark against the clouds. The Luftwaffe arrived in two great waves, nearly a thousand bombers strong, shielded by fighter escorts. They came low over the docks and warehouses, over crowded neighborhoods, and the packed railways vital to Britain’s surviving war economy.

Eyewitnesses remembered it as a wall of noise. The first bombs struck the East End and the industrial heart around the Thames. Shrapnel tore through Old Silvertown, through Poplar and Canning Town, through streets crowded with families and dockworkers. Warehouses ignited, spewing flames that leaped from building to building, and smoke billowed thick over the river. One survivor, Arthur Cross, then a local youth, later described the ground "jumping under your boots, the sky all on fire."

For nearly two hours, the assault continued. Yet when the sun fell, people crept out—some dazed, some defiant. They saw their streets slumped in ruins: homes splintered, shops shattered, churches now broken crosses silhouetted by fire. In the flickering dark, rescue workers pulled survivors from cellars and debris. And as night drew in, the bombers came back.

All night, the bombing continued. Fire brigades worked themselves to collapse, passing buckets from hand to hand as they tried to stop the city from burning to the ground. Children, huddled with mothers in Underground stations, tried to sleep as the explosions rolled overhead, each one another reminder that daylight would reveal a changed world.

By morning, the docklands burned. London had lost nearly 430 souls in one day; 1,600 more were torn by shrapnel and blast. Thousands stood in the streets, eyes stung by smoke, counting what—and whom—was left.

The Longest Nights

If anyone thought it would end there, they were swiftly (and bitterly) disappointed. For 57 nights straight, the bombing returned, always before sunset, sometimes lasting until dawn. The city’s surface—its bricks, stone, metal, glinting glass—would never look the same again.

Train lines buckled. Water mains burst. The London Fire Brigade—swollen with volunteers, including women and local boys—fought hundreds of fires each night. The new National Fire Service struggled heroically, moving between volleys of falling bombs, sometimes digging survivors barehanded from collapsed homes.

As weeks ran into months, Londoners adapted—if adaptation is the word for what they endured. Families slept in the Tube. Newspapers offered advice on “getting a good night’s sleep” underground. Children learned to carry gas masks slung across their backs like school satchels. Whole communities ran impromptu classes beside the platforms, trying to maintain some rhythm of ordinary life.

But the fear was real. Each evening, families made choices no parent should face: who would risk the journey home, who would stay and sleep in the Underground, what treasured possession or pet could be carried to safety. Museum records would later show not only the destruction of homes, but also the loss of beloved animals, museums’ collections, and the quiet toll these everyday losses took.

Survival and Resilience

The numbers churned out by government ministers only begin to tell the story. By year’s end—after ceaseless nights of fire and dust—over 43,000 British civilians were dead, with more than 28,000 from London alone. Hundreds of thousands of homes were reduced to rubble, shrapnel holes spiking the rows of still-standing houses. The cost, counted in war budgets and insurance, was over £1.3 billion. In today’s terms: unimaginable.

Factories and ports—the lifelines for food, fuel, the tools of survival—were nearly crippled. The Port of London, usually humming day and night, sat half-ruined. Trains ran when they could. Buses wound past burned-out blocks, often detouring into neighborhoods that still smoldered.

Yet the city—and the country—held. Civil defense ramped up with ruthless efficiency. Millions spent nights under the city, listening to the BBC and to each other. Wardens, nurses, and volunteers pulled survivors from rubble, patrolled the streets, and kept nerves steady with tea wherever it could be brewed.

Weeks into the bombing, the government rallied public morale with broadcasts, loudspeakers, and posters—urging Londoners to see resilience as a form of resistance. “Keep Calm and Carry On” wasn’t just a slogan; it was the only way forward.

Perhaps most hauntingly, the insistence on normalcy remained. Schoolboys cleaned up their battered classrooms. Shopkeepers hung hand-lettered signs on shattered windows: “Open as usual.” There was laughter, sometimes forced, sometimes real. There were tears. And there was always the smoke drifting, slowly, down the streets.

Beyond London: The Blitz Widens

The capital took the brunt, but it did not suffer alone. Liverpool, Birmingham, Coventry, Glasgow—city after city endured the same nightly torment, flames and falling glass marking the map of Britain.

Nowhere felt truly safe. Children were shuttled with urgency to country villages, relatives, strangers, even overseas. Many would not see their homes for years, if ever.

What the Blitz Left Behind

The Blitz did not break the city, though at times it nearly did. Instead, it changed London and its people forever.

In the months that followed, emergency planning advanced—shelters improved, fire services were unified, and the rhythm of blackout nights faded only as the war itself turned. The scars on brick and bone would last much longer.

In the decades since, historians have scoured bomb maps and diaries, piecing together not just statistics but stories: a mother’s missing wedding ring, a favorite neighborhood pub reduced to ash, a boy’s recollection of “the night London disappeared.” Survivor accounts tell of both trauma and courage, and the city’s postwar skyline still holds traces—the craters, the new blocks built quick atop ruins, the stoic memorials silently marking sites of loss.

Almost 85 years later, the memory of the first night—the thunder, the flames, the endless, sleepless dark—still lingers. Sometimes, during repairs, unexploded bombs are found beneath the modern city streets, a silent echo of that September when the world changed overnight.

The Resilient City

There are facts and there are legends, and in London during the Blitz, the line blurred every night. Yet for all the destruction, it is not just a story of loss; it is one of endurance. When the sun rose after that first night of bombing, through the gray smoke and the bitterness of what was gone, Londoners found each other in the wreckage—and decided to stand, one more day.

And the city endures, scarred but unbroken.