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Faces of The Blitz and England in World War 2 (40 Photos): 1940-1944



The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put that rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now, they are going to reap the whirlwind.

- Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris

Harris was wrong too. Bombing civilians does nothing but kill a lot of civilians.

We were caught up in that conflagration; and living in London, in 1940, at the age of six at the time, I remember it well.
An experience never forgotten.

Paul....A Cockney evacuee to the County of Herefordshire.

Ta for the Photo's, Jim....Memories....
..saved them!

Webb wrote:
Harris was wrong too. Bombing civilians does nothing but kill a lot of civilians.

Except that the area bombing of German cities was not a policy of Harris' own design - it came from government. He just did his job in ensuring it was done effectively. At night there is very little you could do with a bomber in the 1940 except hit "area" targets - the US Army's 8th AF being "fortunate" in having the technology to bomb in daylight and hit precision targets en-masse (the RAF had the technology, but the Lancaster - as several daylight raids such as the one on the Gremberg Rail Yard proved - was no day bomber. Neither was the Halifax, Stirling etc). Area bombing had a massive effect on German capacity to do "other stuff" (just think of where the '88s would have gone had they not been tied to the cities); it destroyed morale and major industrial and logistical hubs. It sapped the energy and will to continue - and a policy the Germans themselves maybe would have adopted had they steered their technology that way - but their preference was for random, indiscriminate weapons such as the V1 & V2 (which we targeted with our own "superweapons" - weapons that were the 1940s equivalent of the "smart bomb" (but weighing in at up to 22,000lbs)); by the time they had any viable heavy bombers it was too late to have any reasonable numbers.

Harris was just a rather convenient person, thankfully who had broad shoulders, to have the burden apportioned to him post war for what others, particularly the increasingly fashionable and powerful postwar left, considered a distasteful policy. But hey, the alternative in 1940-1944 was a Nazi ruled Europe...

A price worth paying I think.