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.
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