57 Fun Facts About The Blitz

Hitler ended the Blitz in May 1941 to invade which country?

Soviet Union: after eight months Hitler called off the raids to mass his bombers for the June 1941 invasion, leaving Britain battered but still in the war.

The word 'Blitz' is a shortened form of Blitzkrieg; what does 'Blitz' mean in German?

Lightning: 'Blitzkrieg', lightning war, named Germany's fast surprise attacks, yet the shortened word stuck to a bombing campaign that dragged on for eight months.

Which now-famous poster was printed in 1939 for use after heavy air raids, yet never officially issued?

Keep Calm and Carry On was held back for the bombing, then most of its 2.45 million copies were pulped in a 1940 paper shortage; it stayed almost unknown until one surfaced in a bookshop in 2000.

Which Luftwaffe commander-in-chief joined Hitler in ordering the switch to bombing London in September 1940?

Hermann Göring and Hitler changed tactics in fury after RAF bombers raided Berlin in late August 1940, turning the Luftwaffe from fighter airfields to London itself.

Which medal did the King create in September 1940, weeks into the Blitz, chiefly to honour civilian bravery?

The George Cross came in the Blitz's third week, when no existing award suited civilian heroes; the King later gave one to the entire island of Malta for its people's wartime gallantry.

The firestorm raid on the City of 29 December 1940 became known as what?

The Second Great Fire of London got its name that night, when an American reporter cabled his office that it had begun; the flames swept the same streets that had burned in 1666.

On 29 December 1940, what hampered London firefighters trying to draw water from the Thames to fight the firestorm?

Low tide left the river at an unusually low ebb on the very night bombs fractured the City's water mains, so firefighters ran short of water as the Square Mile burned.

Herbert Mason's 1940 photograph, hailed as 'War's Greatest Picture', shows which London landmark rising above the smoke?

St Paul's Cathedral, shot from the Daily Mail's roof during the raid of 29-30 December, became a symbol of defiance, though the Mail cropped out many of the wrecked buildings in the foreground before printing it.

Which children's classic opens with four siblings sent out of London to escape the air raids?

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe sends Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy to a professor's country house to avoid the bombing, and Lucy finds Narnia while exploring its spare rooms.

What was the German codename for the devastating raid on Coventry of 14 November 1940?

Operation Moonlight Sonata was timed for a full moon: some 500 bombers found the city bathed in brilliant moonlight, and the raid went on for more than ten hours.

After Kiel, with which other German city devastated by Allied bombing did Coventry twin as a gesture of reconciliation?

Dresden, firebombed in 1945, became the twin of a city whose own ruin had given German propaganda a new verb: to 'coventrate', meaning to flatten a place from the air.

Which architect designed the new Coventry Cathedral, leaving the bombed ruin of the old one standing beside it?

Basil Spence beat more than 200 rival designs in a 1950 competition by keeping the roofless shell instead of rebuilding it, and the cathedral that made him a household name also brought him a knighthood.

Group Captain F. W. Winterbotham's 1974 book claimed Churchill let Coventry burn to protect which secret?

Ultra intelligence warned days ahead that a big raid was coming but never revealed the target, so the choice Winterbotham described was never Churchill's to make.

In September 1940, Stepney residents demanding better shelters occupied the air-raid shelter of which luxury London hotel?

The Savoy kept an underground shelter for its own guests, so a party of Stepney residents marched in to demand the same protection that their flimsy street shelters could not give.

What did a household need to put up an Anderson shelter?

A garden was essential: the shelters came free to poorer households but had to be dug into the ground and heaped with earth, which ruled them out for the many families in crowded industrial districts.

What were Anderson shelters made from?

Corrugated steel panels bolted into an arch and heaped with earth shrugged off bomb fragments and debris, but the shelters were so cold and damp that few people could bear long nights in them.

The Morrison shelter, distributed from 1941, was designed for use where?

Inside the home: the Morrison shelter was a heavy cage that could stand in the living room, where families ate off it as a table by day and crawled inside to sleep at night.

At its September 1940 peak, roughly how many people slept in London's Underground stations on a single night?

About 180,000 slept on the platforms at the peak, yet a census that November found only 4% of Londoners using Underground stations; most stayed in their own homes or were out on duty.

What did Underground officials do with station entrances during early Blitz raids, before the government relented?

Locked them, on government orders, for fear that shelterers would refuse to come back up; Londoners poured down regardless, and the government gave way and fitted the platforms with bunks.

What were the huge barrage balloons tethered over British cities during the Blitz designed to do?

Force bombers to fly higher: the higher a crew flew, the worse it aimed, and the steel cable anchoring each balloon was strong enough to wreck any aircraft that struck it.

In March 1943, 173 people were crushed to death entering the shelter at which East London Tube station?

Bethnal Green's disaster involved no bomb at all: as a crowd hurried down the dark, wet stairway, a woman carrying a baby fell, and within seconds some 300 people were piled up behind her.

Swing bandleader Ken 'Snakehips' Johnson was killed mid-show in March 1941 when a bomb hit which London nightclub?

The Café de Paris lay in a basement beneath a cinema, yet the bomb still reached its ballroom; Johnson is said to have walked there through the raid when he could not find a taxi, arriving minutes before.

The first day of the Blitz, 7 September 1940, is remembered by which grim name?

Black Saturday began at about four in the afternoon, when some 350 bombers set the docks ablaze; the fires then guided a second wave that bombed through the night, and more than 400 people died.

After Buckingham Palace was bombed in September 1940, Queen Elizabeth said she could now look which part of London in the face?

The East End and its docks were the main target of the first raids, so the bombs that fell while she and the King were inside the palace let the Queen claim a share of the danger.

What was later built on the site of the Buckingham Palace chapel destroyed by a bomb?

An art gallery: the Queen's Gallery opened on the ruined chapel's site in 1962, so a bomb that wrecked a private royal chapel ended up opening a corner of the palace to the public to show the royal art collection.

Which UK shipbuilding city lost hundreds of people in the Easter Tuesday raid of April 1941?

Belfast had few shelters and too few firemen for fires burning out of control, so its government turned to the neutral south, and crews from Dublin and other towns drove across the border to help.

Which storybook codename did Britain give the mass evacuation of city children that began in September 1939?

Operation Pied Piper moved about a million and a half people, most of them children, within days, under a codename taken from the German legend of a piper who lures a town's children away.

Which Scottish shipbuilding town had only a handful of its 12,000 homes undamaged after the March 1941 raids?

Clydebank's crowded tenements stood right beside the shipyard and factories the bombers came for, so about 35,000 of its 50,000 or so residents were left homeless.

Which was the most heavily bombed area of Britain outside London?

Liverpool's docks, Britain's main Atlantic port, were the target: in the first eight days of May 1941 Merseyside was bombed almost every night and 1,900 people were killed.

What was the SS Malakand carrying when fire spread to it in Huskisson Dock on Merseyside on 3 May 1941?

Munitions: about a thousand tons of bombs and shells. Crews fought the fire for hours, but after the all-clear the ship blew up, destroying the whole dock, and the wreck burned for three days.

Which port, with more than 90% of its houses damaged, was usually called just a north-east town in wartime news reports?

Hull usually went unnamed for security reasons, so many people elsewhere never learned how badly it had suffered; some 1,200 of its citizens died in the raids.

Rubble from blitzed Bristol crossed the Atlantic as ships' ballast and now lies beneath a riverside highway in which American city?

New York: ships that had reached Bristol full of war supplies sailed home ballasted with its rubble, which became the East River landfill still called Bristol Basin, marked by a plaque since 1942.

The 1942 Baedeker raids on Exeter, Bath, Norwich, York and Canterbury took their name from what?

A series of tourist guidebooks: a German spokesman boasted that the Luftwaffe would bomb every building in Britain that Baedeker's guide had marked with three stars.

The Baedeker raids were launched in response to the RAF's March 1942 bombing of which German city?

Lübeck's Old Town was largely built of wood and burned fiercely; an incensed Hitler ordered reprisals against English cities chosen for their history, not their factories.

What did BBC newsreader Bruce Belfrage do when a bomb exploded in Broadcasting House during the nine o'clock news?

Went on reading: the delayed-action bomb of October 1940 killed seven people upstairs, but Belfrage, in the basement studio, paused only briefly, and listeners heard little more than a distant thud.

The British codenamed Germany's Knickebein beams 'Headache'; what did they call the jammers built to counter them?

Aspirin was the cure for Headache: the jammers were transmitters that mimicked the beam's own signal to muddle it.

Night-fighter ace John 'Cat's Eyes' Cunningham's kills were put down to eating carrots; what secret device really found his targets?

Airborne radar, carried inside the night fighters, was the real secret; the press credited carrots instead and nicknamed him 'Cat's Eyes', a name Cunningham disliked.

Roughly how many British civilians were killed in the eight months of the Blitz?

About 43,000 civilians died, a terrible toll yet far below what planners had feared before the war: only a fraction of the hospital beds and ambulances set aside for raid victims were ever used.

Which item was issued to every civilian in Britain before the Second World War began?

Gas mask: one went to every man, woman and child in Britain, tens of millions in all, yet the gas attack they were meant for never came.

Britain stopped sending evacuee children overseas in 1940 after the liner City of Benares was sunk by what?

A U-boat's torpedo sank the Canada-bound liner in the Atlantic in September 1940; most of the 90 evacuee children aboard died, and the outcry ended the scheme.

Which of these everyday staples did Britain's wartime government never ration?

Beer was never rationed: the government saw it as vital to morale and brushed aside temperance campaigners who wanted the grain kept for food.

Before sheltering 15,000 people a night in the Blitz, Chislehurst Caves in Kent were used between the wars to grow what?

Mushrooms thrived in the dark man-made tunnels, old chalk and flint mines, which then became an underground town with electric light, a chapel and a hospital.

Pianist Myra Hess organised daily lunchtime concerts throughout the war at which London building?

The National Gallery stood empty, its paintings sent to hiding places in Wales and Gloucestershire, so Hess filled it with music from 1939 to 1946, even at the height of the bombing.

Which American broadcaster opened his live CBS reports from the Blitz with the words 'This is London'?

Edward R. Murrow's eyewitness reports of the raids made him a national figure back home and marked radio journalism's coming of age; a 2005 film about him took its title from his sign-off, 'Good night, and good luck'.

American reporter Quentin Reynolds narrated which 1940 film, made to show audiences in the neutral United States a city under nightly attack?

London Can Take It! followed one night's raid and the morning after; Warner Bros. distributed it across America, and a shorter version for home audiences was retitled Britain Can Take It.

Which Welsh poet worked in wartime London scripting documentaries for Strand Films?

Dylan Thomas was excused military service because of a lung condition, so he spent much of the war writing film scripts for Strand instead.

Which director made the 2024 film 'Blitz'?

Steve McQueen wrote and directed it, following nine-year-old George, who jumps from his evacuation train and makes his way back across London to his mother, played by Saoirse Ronan.

Which Communist newspaper did Home Secretary Herbert Morrison ban in January 1941?

The Daily Worker began the war backing resistance to Hitler, then changed its tune and attacked the war effort instead; the ban lasted until 1942.

Which women's organisation, founded in 1938 by the Marchioness of Reading, ran canteens and rest centres in the Blitz?

The WVS was formed to recruit women into air-raid precautions, but its work spread so fast, from evacuating children to clothing bombed-out families, that it was soon renamed 'for Civil Defence'.

Which 14-year-old made her first radio broadcast in October 1940, speaking to children evacuated from Britain's bombed cities?

Princess Elizabeth told them on the BBC's Children's Hour that 'in the end all will be well', then brought her younger sister Margaret to the microphone to say goodnight.

Which part of Parliament did bombs destroy on 10 May 1941?

The Chamber of the House of Commons burned out, so MPs took over the Lords' chamber until 1950 while the peers squeezed into the Robing Room, an arrangement kept secret for the rest of the war.

Which Battle of Britain victor was replaced as head of Fighter Command in November 1940?

Hugh Dowding was replaced by Sholto Douglas, one of his sharpest critics, only weeks after his fighters had won the daylight battle, at a time when the RAF could do little against raids by night.

Which general commanded Britain's Anti-Aircraft Command during the Blitz?

Frederick Pile ran Anti-Aircraft Command from 1939 to 1945. Short of gunners, he brought women into his batteries: they tracked the bombers and aimed the guns but were never allowed to fire them.

What were 'Starfish sites'?

Decoys simulating targets to lure bombers: once a raid began, crews lit controlled fires in open country a few miles from a city, so that later waves would unload on empty fields.

Which young physicist discovered the radio beams that led German bombers to British cities in the Blitz?

R. V. Jones persuaded Churchill to send up a search aircraft, which found the beams where he had predicted; jammers then bent them, so raiders scattered their loads over open countryside.

Which Blitz-era nickname for anti-aircraft guns came from army signallers' spoken alphabet?

Ack-ack: 'ack' was how army signallers said the letter A over the telephone, so AA, short for anti-aircraft, came out as ack-ack.

Why had almost half of Britain's evacuated children gone home before the Blitz began?

No air raids had come: months of quiet after the September 1939 exodus drew families back, despite government posters urging mothers to leave their children in the country.