BEATING THE BLITZ

Steven Taylor delves into the archives and unearths some of Winston Churchill’s bizarre schemes to defeat the Luftwaffe’s night-time bombing offensive of Britain

- Steven Taylor

Eighty-two years ago, the blitz reached its deadly climax. For eight months, from September 1940 until May 1941, Hitler’s Luftwaffe, having been defeated in the Battle of Britain, pummelled the country’s towns and cities in nightly terror raids in a bid to break the will of the people to continue the war.

The German night bomber offensive began on 7 September, with a raid by 350 aircraft on London, which killed more than 400 people. For the next 57 days the capital would be attacked night after night without respite. At the time, prime minister Winston Churchill famously declared: “London can take it.” Privately, however, the PM was deeply concerned about the damaging effect the Luftwaffe’s unrelenting onslaught was having on civilian morale.

The public, he realised, was particularly disconcerted by the apparent lack of any effective defence being mounted against the nocturnal raiders, who seemed able to bomb London and other cities with near impunity. Britain’s anti-aircraft batteries could only fire blindly into the night sky and hope for a lucky hit, which they very seldom achieved.

As for the RAF’s Fighter Command, which had performed so magnificently in daylight during the summer of 1940, winning the Battle of Britain and thereby ending the threat of Nazi invasion, it appeared powerless to counter the enemy at night. Indeed, the risk of being shot down while bombing British cities during the blitz was so low, and German casualties so few, that Luftwaffe crews habitually referred to operations over the British Isles as “a milk run”.