The seventh of September, nineteen forty, was warm and clear in London. People were out in it. There were football matches, and washing on lines, and children in the streets, because it was a Saturday and the weather was good.
For a month the German air force had been attacking airfields and radar stations, out in the countryside, away from the cities. Londoners had heard about it. They had not really seen it.
At around four in the afternoon, the sound started. Not the sound of one aircraft, which everyone knew, but a sound people struggled to describe afterwards. Several of them used the same word. They said it was like a swarm.
Nearly a thousand aircraft were crossing the coast. Around three hundred and fifty bombers, with fighters above them, stacked up in layers to a height of six thousand metres, filling the sky from one side to the other.
People stood in the street and watched them come, because it did not occur to them yet to be frightened. It was, several of them said later, an unbelievably impressive sight.
The Thames is the reason London is where it is, and on that afternoon it was also the reason the bombers could not miss.
A river seen from the air at five in the evening in September is a bright silver line, and it points directly at the docks. There was no need for navigation. The crews simply followed the water.
The docks were the target. The Royal Docks, the Surrey Commercial Docks, the warehouses along both banks — the place where everything the country ate and burned and built with came ashore.
What was stored there turned out to matter enormously. The Surrey Docks held timber, acres of it, stacked and seasoned and bone dry. It caught, and once it caught it could not be put out. Elsewhere there were warehouses of sugar, which melted and ran burning along the ground and into the water. There was a rum store, and a paint store, and a pepper warehouse whose smoke made firemen choke a mile away.
By evening the fire officer in charge sent a message back that has been quoted ever since. He asked for every pump they had, and he said: the whole bloody world is on fire.
The first wave left around six. People came out to look at the fires, and there was a strange interval of a couple of hours when the raid seemed to be over.
It was not over. It had been the first half.
At about eight in the evening the bombers came back, and this time they did not need the river, because London was lit up for them from below. The fires from the afternoon were the marker. The second raid went on until half past four the following morning.
The men fighting it were mostly not professionals. The Auxiliary Fire Service had been recruited from volunteers: taxi drivers, clerks, shopkeepers, people who had done a few evenings of training in a drill hall. They were given a trailer pump towed behind a converted taxi, and they were regarded, up until that night, as rather a joke.
They fought that fire for the whole night with equipment that kept failing, in heat that blistered the paint on the pumps, and by dawn nobody was calling them a joke any more. Nine firefighters were killed before morning.
By the morning of the eighth of September, four hundred and thirty people in London were dead and about sixteen hundred were badly hurt. Whole streets in the East End were gone.
And then the following night, the aircraft came back again.
London was bombed on fifty-seven consecutive nights.
It is the consecutive part that people find hard to imagine. Not one terrible night, but every night, for two months, and then on and off for months after that. You went to work in the morning past buildings that had been standing the previous evening. You learned which sounds mattered and which did not. Children became connoisseurs of aircraft engines and could tell you what was overhead without looking up.
Where people slept became the great question. Some had an Anderson shelter, which was six sheets of curved corrugated iron bolted together and half buried in the back garden, freezing, and prone to filling with water.
And there were the Underground stations, which the government did not want people using at all. The official worry was that a population that went underground might refuse to come back up. Londoners settled this in the most British way imaginable: they bought the cheapest ticket available, walked down onto the platform, and declined to leave. Within a week the authorities gave in and started installing bunks and lavatories.
Others had a Morrison shelter, which was a steel cage the size of a dining table that you put in the living room and climbed inside, on the theory that if the house came down you would be in a strong box underneath it. A remarkable number of families simply used it as a table and ate their dinner off the roof of it.
At the peak, around a hundred and fifty thousand people were sleeping in the Underground each night. That is a large number and it is also a small one. It was never more than about five per cent of Londoners. The great majority stayed above ground, in their own beds, and simply got used to it, which is stranger than any of the rest of it.
Here is the part that nobody in London could have known at the time.
Through August, the German air force had been attacking Royal Air Force airfields, and it had been working. Runways were being cratered faster than they could be filled. Pilots were being killed faster than they could be trained. Fighter Command was close to the point where it could no longer defend the south of England.
On the seventh of September, that campaign stopped, and the bombers were sent to London instead.
The reasons were partly political and partly about pride, and they came from the very top. There is a long argument about how much a stray raid on London a fortnight earlier, and the retaliation raid on Berlin that followed it, pushed the decision along.
What is not argued about is the effect. The airfields were left alone. Squadrons that had been days from collapse were given time to repair runways, rest crews and bring replacement pilots forward.
So the worst two months in London's history were also the two months in which the Royal Air Force recovered. That is a very uncomfortable sentence, and both halves of it are true.
The word blitz is short for the German blitzkrieg, meaning lightning war. Londoners took the enemy's own word for the thing being done to them and made it their own, which tells you something about how they chose to deal with it.
Around forty three thousand civilians were killed by bombing in Britain during the eight months of the Blitz, and roughly half of them in London. Over the whole war, counting the V weapons that came later, the figure was around sixty thousand. Coventry, a much smaller city, was hit so hard in a single night in November that a new German verb was briefly coined to describe the destruction of a city that way.
The idea that Londoners were unfailingly cheerful is a tidy story and it is not quite true. There was looting. There were shelters that people avoided because of who else used them. Government surveys of public morale at the time make anxious reading. But the thing the bombing was supposed to achieve, which was to break the country's willingness to keep going, did not happen, and it did not happen in any of the cities on either side where it was tried.
Here is something to think about tonight. The nights that were worst for London were, at the very same time, the nights that let the air force survive. Nobody on the ground knew that, and it would have been no comfort at all if they had. How would you even begin to weigh those two things against each other?