What do you know about the Blitz (WW2)?

Question

Note that this is just a question... it is not for Homework... Any kind of information is appreciated... Thanks

Answer 1

the london blitz facts:

1. nazi germany (luftwaffe) fought the british (Royal Air Force)

2. the blitz was started by accident - the original german plan was to destroy all r.a.f. airfields and air installations(runways etc) based mainly on the english south coast away (but near) london. this was to be done to enable operation sealion, which was german code, and the landing of nazi troops on british soil to conquer the uk after france had fallen (may 1940).
the luftwaffe while bombing oil depots( suppilied fuel to aircrafts) in londons east end over flew and bombed central london. the raf retailiated by a surprise bombing of berlin. thus hitler said 'we will wipe english cities of the map'

3. the blitz occured between june 1940 to october 1940 in order to destroy the raf (before operation sealion,see above)
it was hoped that all british air cover would be destroyed thus allowing the nazi boats transport troop over the english channel safely and the luftwaffe would then move on to striking britains superior naval resources in the region and britain would have been conquered

4. the british first used the phrase 'the bomber will always get through'. this essentially meant that instead of attacking the bombers on the way to the mission/drop zone they would attack them on the way back to their bases in northern france. this doctrine was changed after two months of devastating bombing raid on churchills request . the raf then changed to dog fighting tactics and would engage the luftwaffe before the drop zone which resulted in a much more succesful outcome.

5. the british main plane was the spitfire the germans used the heinkel bomber. the british spitfire was highly manoeverable.

6. the germans concentrated there attacks on london - but also attacked other industrial cities and in fact totally flattened coventry in central england - the germans used terror attacks to frighten the population into submission by bombing residential areas

7. the london populous used the underground as shelter from the raids

8. the germans had a 3 to 1 advantage in airplanes at the beginning of the blitz. at one point famously churchill was at raf head quarter when all the british planes were in usage

9. the german tactics of attacking civilian areas meant attention was diverted from attacking strategic targets - airfield, radar and oil depots - meant the raf had time to repair

10 THE BRITISH HAD A SECRET WEAPON - radar and could see the germans coming over the channel (sea) and thus had time to orrganise esential in the defeat of the lufftwaffe

11. in october 1940 due to nazi losses, due to concentrating attacks outside of airfields and the brits use of radar and concentrating attacks on lufftwaffe bomber formations, hitler told the lufftwaffe to suspend the blitz and turned his attemntion to the east and yugoslavia


britain won due mainly to better planes -spitfire and radar - but it was close

Answer 2

Ww2 Blitz Facts

Answer 3

During WW2, Hitler directed the Luftwaffe to bomb London, and other British cities. Later, automated flying bombs, called the V1, but nicknamed 'BUZZBOMBS' by the British, were used. If you could hear them, all was fine, but when fuel cut out, they crashed and exploded. Eventually the Allies were able to follow them, and shoot them down with planes, but then the V2's started, which were alcohol and liquid oxygen fueled rockets, with a 1 ton high explosive warhead, travelling far too fast to be shot down, and, travelling on a ballistic trajectory, were so silent that people couldn't hear them, until they blew up: these were his terror weapons. Imagine the 11th of September happening every night!

Answer 4

I can't put it better than it is put in Wikipedia. I'll just paste the first two paragraphs here:
"The Blitz was the sustained bombing of the United Kingdom by Nazi Germany between 7 September 1940 and 10 May 1941, in World War II. While the "Blitz" hit many towns and cities across the UK, it began with the bombing of London for 57[1] nights in a row. By the end of May 1941, over 43,000 civilians had been killed and more than a million houses destroyed or damaged.

"Important munitions and shipbuilding areas were targeted. London was not the only city to suffer extensive bombing during the Blitz. Birmingham, Sheffield, Liverpool, Manchester, Portsmouth, Plymouth and Southampton were all among the cities to suffer similarly heavy air raids and high numbers of casualties."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blitz

The main things I'd add to that is that Hitler's aerial attack in 1940-41 had two successive goals: either to set the stage for a successful invasion from France, by knocking out British air defenses (the Battle of Britain), or to knock Britain out of the war, by damaging civilian morale and getting Britain, at that time alone against Hitler, to sue for peace (the Blitz.)

To do the former, Hitler had to have complete command of the sky over the Channel ports and the Channel itself (obviously, it wouldn't do to have his troop-filled landing barges sunk at sea, or his soldiers strafed as they were wading ashore). Remember, until Hitler attacked Russia in June of 1941, and until Japan attacked the US at Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Britain was the only major power still at war with Germany.

If he had kept up the attack-the-air-defenses for just one or two weeks longer, he would likely have won that battle. The RAF was desperately stretched. Also, if the British hadn't developed radar far beyond the capability of any other nation, and been the first to build radar stations, Britain would have been knocked out very quickly, but with her network of radar stations, she was able to scramble fighters just in time, time after time. Further, if Hitler had told the Luftwaffe before the war to design a heavy bomber, the results might have been very different; but he didn't, and so all the Germans had were light and medium bombers, which were good for army support missions but couldn't carry a heavy bomb load at all.

The Blitz proper was the second phase of Hitler's aerial assault, after he gave up on an invasion and tried to damage civilian morale by bombing civilian targets, especially London. He didn't understand the British very well! The more they were bombed, the more they grew committed to the war.

The Blitz ended when it became clear that Britain, led by a heroically pugnacious Churchill, wasn't about to sue for peace, and Hitler pulled the Luftwaffe away from France to support his invasion of Russia in June 1941.

Answer 5

It lasted for 76 days and nights.

Answer 6

The BLITZ was Hitler proving he was a sh^t. Angered by setbacks due to his ineptness and the ineptness of his armed forces, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to bomb London not for strategic purposes but for the sheer sake of breaking the morale of the people. The people in question were British and people whose diet includes kidney pie and such delicasies as eel pie and haggis (ask a Scot) are not likely to be cowed by bombs dropping from the sky. The term Blitz is used to describe the terror campaign of 1940 into '41 when it slowed but did not completelt stop to a renewed terror campaign in 1944 when the first 'blind' missile the dreaded V 1 and then the V 2 were flung against London.

Far from breaking British morale the Blitz solidified Britain's resolve to defeat Hitler. By bombing civillians Hitler revealed his venality and ended any talk about his harmless nature. Sadly enough the Blitz obliterated many ancient buildings and destroyed many an architectural treasure. But the Blitz did paint a picture of heroism that is still admirable.

Here is a link and snippets....

http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/blitz.htm
"""The appearance of German bombers in the skies over London during the afternoon of September 7, 1940 heralded a tactical shift in Hitler's attempt to subdue Great Britain. During the previous two months, the Luftwaffe had targeted RAF airfields and radar stations for destruction in preparation for the German invasion of the island. With invasion plans put on hold and eventually scrapped, Hitler turned his attention to destroying London in an attempt to demoralize the population and force the British to come to terms. At around 4:00 PM on that September day, 348 German bombers escorted by 617 fighters
Sept. 7, 1940 - the beginning of the
London Blitz
blasted London until 6:00 PM. Two hours later, guided by the fires set by the first assault, a second group of raiders commenced another attack that lasted until 4:30 the following morning.

This was the beginning of the Blitz - a period of intense bombing of London and other cities that continued until the following May. For the next consecutive 57 days, London was bombed either during the day or night. Fires consumed many portions of the city. Residents sought shelter wherever they could find it - many fleeing to the Underground stations that sheltered as many as 177,000 people during the night. In the worst single incident, 450 were killed when a bomb destroyed a school being used as an air raid shelter. Londoners and the world were introduced to a new weapon of terror and destruction in the arsenal of twentieth century warfare. The Blitz ended on May 11, 1941 when Hitler called off the raids in order to move his bombers east in preparation for Germany's invasion of Russia.

"They came just after dark... "

Ernie Pyle was one of World War Two's most popular correspondents. His journalism was characterized by a focus on the common soldier interspersed with sympathy, sensitivity and humor. He witnessed the war in Europe from the Battle of Britain through the invasion of France. In 1945 he accepted assignment to the Pacific Theater and was killed during the battle for Okinawa. Here, he describes a night raid on London in 1940:

ADVERTISMENT

"It was a night when London was ringed and stabbed with fire.

They came just after dark, and somehow you could sense from the quick, bitter firing of the guns that there was to be no monkey business this night.

Shortly after the sirens wailed you could hear the Germans grinding overhead. In my room, with its black curtains drawn across the windows, you could feel the shake from the guns. You could hear the boom, crump, crump, crump, of heavy bombs at their work of tearing buildings apart. They were not too far away.

Half an hour after the firing started I gathered a couple of friends and went to a high, darkened balcony that gave us a view of a third of the entire circle of London. As we stepped out onto the balcony a vast inner excitement came over all of us-an excitement that had neither fear nor horror in it, because it was too full of awe.

You have all seen big fires, but I doubt if you have ever seen the whole horizon of a city lined with great fires - scores of them, perhaps hundreds.

There was something inspiring just in the awful savagery of it.

The closest fires were near enough for us to hear the crackling flames and the yells of firemen. Little fires grew into big ones even as we watched. Big ones died down under the firemen's valor, only to break out again later.

About every two minutes a new wave of planes would be over. The motors seemed to grind rather than roar, and to have an angry pulsation, like a bee buzzing in blind fury.


Children sit among the rubble
of their home September 1940
The guns did not make a constant overwhelming din as in those terrible days of September. They were intermittent - sometimes a few seconds apart, sometimes a minute or more. Their sound was sharp, near by; and soft and muffled, far away. They were everywhere over London.

Into the dark shadowed spaces below us, while we watched, whole batches of incendiary bombs fell. We saw two dozen go off in two seconds. They flashed terrifically, then quickly simmered down to pin points of dazzling white, burning ferociously. These white pin points would go out one by one, as the unseen heroes of the moment smothered them with sand. But also, while we watched, other pin points would burn on, and soon a yellow flame would leap up from the white center. They had done their work - another building was on fire.

The greatest of all the fires was directly in front of us. Flames seemed to whip hundreds of feet into the air. Pinkish-white smoke ballooned upward in a great cloud, and out of this cloud there gradually took shape - so faintly at first that we weren't sure we saw correctly - the gigantic dome of St. Paul's Cathedral.

St. Paul's was surrounded by fire, but it came through. It stood there in its enormous proportions - growing slowly clearer and clearer, the way objects take shape at dawn. It was like a picture of some miraculous figure that appears before peace-hungry soldiers on a battlefield.

The streets below us were semi-illuminated from the glow. Immediately above the fires the sky was red and angry, and overhead, making a ceiling in the vast heavens, there was a cloud of smoke all in pink. Up in that pink shrouding there were tiny, brilliant specks of flashing light-antiaircraft shells bursting. After the flash you could hear the sound.

Up there, too, the barrage balloons were standing out as clearly as if it were daytime, but now
Dec. 29, 1940 - St. Paul's Cathedral
emerges from the flames during
one of the most devastating raids.
they were pink instead of silver. And now and then through a hole in that pink shroud there twinkled incongruously a permanent, genuine star - the old - fashioned kind that has always been there.

Below us the Thames grew lighter, and all around below were the shadows - the dark shadows of buildings and bridges that formed the base of this dreadful masterpiece.

Later on I borrowed a tin hat and went out among the fires. That was exciting too; but the thing I shall always remember above all the other things in my life is the monstrous loveliness of that one single view of London on a holiday night - London stabbed with great fires, shaken by explosions, its dark regions along the Thames sparkling with the pin points of white-hot bombs, all of it roofed over with a ceiling of pink that held bursting shells, balloons, flares and the grind of vicious engines. And in yourself the excitement and anticipation and wonder in your soul that this could be happening at all.

These things all went together to make the most hateful, most beautiful single scene I have ever known."
References:
Johnson, David, The London Blitz : The City Ablaze, December 29, 1940 (1981); Pyle Ernie, Ernie Pyle in England (1941), Reprinted in Commager, Henry Steele, The Story of the Second World War (1945). """

http://www.worldwar2exraf.co.uk/Online%20Museum/Museum%20Docs/Theblitz4.html

http://www.worldwar2exraf.co.uk/Online%20Museum/Museum%20Docs/Theblitz6.htm
"""After the Blitz of 1940 and 1941, Londoners experienced a kind of lull from the nightly drone of the bombers.
Bombing raids by the Luftwaffe still happened but not as heavy as in the 9 months previous.

Then, in January 1944, there was a return to the heavy bombing raids Londoners had once feared.
Known as The Little Blitz, it lasted from 21st January to 8th April 1944. Perhaps It was not as bad as the Blitz of 1940, but never the less there were still thousands of casualties


Child victim of the blitz


In the seven raids in February, 1000 people were killed and over 3000 homes in Battersea destroyed.

But something worse was yet to come - The V1 flying bomb and the V2 rocket. The V-1 was an unmanned, un-guided flying bomb. Designed by the Fiesler company.



The V1 Rocket

The Germans called it "Vergeltungswaffe" or "retaliation weapon."

The V-1, or Doodle bug as it was nicknamed, was a liquid fuelled, pulse-jet drone aircraft which carried a deadly 2,000 lb warhead.



There was no navigation system. It was simply pointed in the direction of it's target and launched from makeshift ramps.
Simple gyrocompasses kept it level and the range was controlled by the fuel supply.

Once launched it would fly until its engine ran out of fuel. It would then come crashing down to earth, destroying all that lay beneath it.


Throughout the 1930s German scientists had been working on flying bombs and rockets and by October 1942 they had successfully tested a rocket, 46 feet long and able to carry a one ton warhead.
It could travel more than 200 miles at a speed of 3600 miles per hour.
This was developed into the V2 rocket.
At the same time, the V1 flying bomb had also been developed.



The V1 Launch Pad


Although not as good as the V2, the V1 was cheaper to produce.
The British Government knew about the development of these two weapons and tended to take a pessimistic view of the damage and carnage they could cause.
To slow down production, raids were launched on German factories.
The British and Americans commenced Operation Overlord, the invasion of France, on 6th June 1944.
Just six days later the first V1 flying bombs descended on London, yet only one of the ten launched arrived in London killing six people in the East End.


On the night of 12th June 1944, London experienced its first night of the flying bombs.
Then On the 16th a procession of flying bombs came over by day and by night, and for two weeks the attack continued at the rate of about 100 V1 flying bombs a day.

On average of the 100 or so V1s that were launched towards London at any one time, British fighter planes would bring down about 30 a day. Anti-Aircraft guns would bring down around 10, but the other 60 would still get though.
How a VI Rocket worked







Some fell far from London, but around half reached Greater London itself.
As these rockets were launched in daytime, and many people were on the streets, they caused large numbers of casualties.

When people heard a V1 come over what they dreaded most was the terrible noise cutting out.




This meant only one thing - The flying bomb was about to come crashing down to earth. All they could do was dive for cover and hope that the engines did not cut out directly above your head.

Londoners nicknamed them 'buzz bombs' or 'doodlebugs' after a New Zealand insect.
In total, 6,725 flying bombs had been seen over Britain during this period, almost all of them over London, Surrey
Human misery of the V1 and the Kent area.
Almost 3,500 had been destroyed by fighter planes, A.A. guns or barrage balloons. Yet 2,340 hit London itself causing 5,475 deaths and injuring 16,000 more.
""

Peace........................... pppffftttzzzzzzzzzz