. . . and they did to us

The craters are all filled in, the ruins replaced, and the last memories retold only in the whispery voices of the old. Apart from celebrating the resilience of our parents and grandparents 70 years ago, why remember the Blitz?

It was triggered by the desire to retaliate, either Churchill’s to the random dropping of bombs on London in the summer of 1940 (heightened by the prior example of Nazi bombing of Guernica and Warsaw) or Hitler’s to the subsequent raid on Berlin. ‘This is a game at which two can play,’ he ranted on 4 September. ‘When they declare they will attack our cities in great measure, we will eradicate their cities.’

The shock and awe felt by Londoners in the first ten weeks of the campaign are well conveyed by Juliet Gardiner in her new book. From the first sighting of bombers ‘on the skyline coming up the Thames like swarms of flies’, her narrative describes the events of 7 September, the opening day of the Blitz, through the spell-binding quotation of first-hand testimonies. The astonishing thunder of the first bombs is followed by the night-time burning of the Surrey docks in a half-mile explosion of fire:

And as she makes unblinkingly clear, no amount of staring at the flames or at the patterns of searchlights in the night sky altered the reality of the carnage on the ground. Once the firemen quench the flames, and the all-clear sounds, and the stretcher parties clear body parts from the ruins, someone has to assemble them for burial: ‘The stench was the worst thing about it’ remembered one re-anatomist,

The Blitz has a sharp eye for details like that — for the heroism of volunteer workers, the viciousness of looters stealing valuables from ruined houses, and even rings from dead bodies, and the headlong rush into an unofficial air-raid shelter as ‘the swarming multitude careered down the slope, tripping, tumbling, fighting and scrambling for the choice of sleeping berths’.