Blitz Bombing Significance

World War II began on September 1st, 1939, and shook the world to its core. The people of Britain were far from the action, but very soon things took a turn for the worse. The German army had conquered Europe by using a strategy called Blitzkrieg. Blitzkrieg is German for “lightning warfare” and the British shortened the word to just “Blitz”. The Germans, who recently conquered France, began bombing strategic British factories and airfields. German Luftwaffe fighters were bold enough to even go on daytime bombing runs of highly populated British Cities. No building was safe and the German bombers left the cities in ruble (see appendix A). The response to the bombings was something Hitler could never have predicted. The Blitz of London

The following day, Winston Churchill and his forces in Britain sought to get revenge in blood, and raided German forces in Berlin. Hitler was again furious, and declared that he would go to drastic measures by dropping one million kilograms of bombs to stop Britain if he had to. The first raid by Germany on London took place a couple of weeks later, on September 7th, and came as a huge surprise to the London people. Citizens were outside enjoying the sunny and warm weather when the bombings began. The attacked lasted twelve hours, and ceased at five in the morning on September 8th. This single raid resulted in four-hundred and thirty dead Londoners, and more than one-thousand and six-hundred wounded Londoners. Hospitals were crammed full of these wounded people, and had a good amount of work cut out for them (Trueman). Winston Churchill and George IV visited the more concentrated areas of damage right away, and were devastated by what they saw (See Appendix

Many historic buildings that could never be replaced were destroyed. Buckingham Palace and St. Paul’s Cathedral were hit by bombs, but were not completely destroyed (See Appendix C). The Germans dropped nearly 30,000 bombs on London and the city showed the devastating effect (“WW2 - the Blitz Hits London”). The destruction of these buildings gave London an opportunity to replace many older buildings with new ones that would better accommodate for the modern world. Winston Churchill summed up the debt Britain owed to its pilots quite well with his “finest hour” speech. "Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few"(Biesinger). Today London is a bustling city full of people under democratic rule. If Hitler had broken the people of Britain’s spirits, the world could be under Fascist