An interactive map showing every German bomb dropped on London during WW2 Blitz
bombsight.org
bombsight.org
My father, who was a member of the crew of a Sunderland flying boat, didn't talk about it very much. He was a moody bastard with a quick temper, probably as a result of several years of flying sorties over the Atlantic that lasted many hours—a dreadful combination of boredom and intense anxiety and fear.
My mum was more forthcoming. She told me once of going into work in Fleet Street—she was a sub editor on a magazine—and seeing a bomb caught by its tail fins in a tangle of wires, just hanging there above the street. The authorities had cordoned off the immediate area but people were just detouring around it and going to work as usual.
Of course I checked out the area where I grew up in north London—ten years before I was born a stick of four bombs appears to have fallen across the street I lived in. It's possible to see additional information about any of the bombs by clicking on the symbol of the one you are interested in.
Anyone interested in how civilians experienced the second world war in London could have a look at 'Civilians at War' by George Beardmore, who kept a journal between 1938 and 1946 which he later published.
[0] http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/may/22/bomb-found-20...
[1] http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/pensioner-finds-unexpl...
[2] http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/police-called-in-after...
[3] http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/police-investigate-une...
(Try using Google Translate if you don’t understand french – the english article just is far too short)
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unexploded_ordnance + the german article)
"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will fall--soon--it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.
Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels, he sits in velveteen darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer and farther rub and connect, steam escaping in puffs, a vibration in the carriage's frame, a poising, an uneasiness, all the others pressed in around, feeble ones, second sheep, all out of luck and time: drunks, old veterans still in shock from ordnance 20 years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted women with more children than it seems could belong to anyone, stacked about among the rest of the things to be carried out to salvation. Only the nearer faces are visible at all, and at that only as half-silvered images in a view finder, green-stained VIP faces remembered behind bulletproof windows speeding through the city..."
Meanwhile the "blitz" and The Battle of Britain were an entirely different part of the war, taking place about four years earlier, and this map seems to cover that period of time, from late 1940 to mid-1941.
I now live in a part of London which is a conservation area, which has lots of nice old houses and streets. But every two streets or so there is a not-as-attractive 50s/60s/70s house. I used to joke that these were 2nd World War bomb sites, but after seeing the map of bombs for the first time a few years back I realised that might not be far off the truth.
It certainly puts modern day complaints, such as the cost of housing and long working hours, into perspective.
Aerial bombardment was very inaccurate in those days. In Berlin, the RAF failed to hit what was then the largest office building in the world: the ministry of aviation. However, they did destroy one of the oldest synagogues in Europe.
However this bomb wasn't used before June '44, when most of the death camps were closed or closing, and the short supply of Tallboys meant that they were exclusively used for targets of high military importance.
As for the targeting: you have to go really low. British bombers attacked the gestapo hq in Copenhagen by going so low that their bombs were dropped into the sides of the building (consequently, although that wasn't the plan, a number of prisoners who had been housed in cells in the top floor managed to escape).
Of course you can only do something like that if you are willing to paint a huge target on yourself because you will be very easy to shoot down.
Low and fast was safer in many scenarios, but it wasn't without drawbacks.
That's a bit of an exceptional case, but still, it isn't trivial.
Anyway, what I've usually heard is that they should have bombed the camps themselves, not the rail lines leading to them. That's not what I personally think, but that's what I've heard others talk about.
Now something like Treblinka was purely a "killing factory" with no prisoners held for more than a few hours before they were killed. In that case bombing everything would probably have saved lives in retrospect, since any prisoners at the site would have been killed anyway, and destroying the facilities would have slowed down the extermination project. But while the allied knew mass killings was taking place, they didn't know enough about the locations and logistics to make that call.
In reality, the day bombing was "precision bombing" only in the sense that most bombs fell somewhere near a specific designated target such as a railway yard. Conventionally, the air forces designated as "the target area" a circle having a radius of 1,000 feet around the aiming point of attack. While accuracy improved during the war, Survey studies show that, overall, only about 20% of the bombs aimed at precision targets fell within this target area.[159] In the fall of 1944, only seven percent of all bombs dropped by the Eighth Air Force hit within 1,000 feet of their aim point.
[0] http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2015/05/25/world_war_ii_why...
What percentage of people left the cities in anticipation of such events? The narratives I've seen on the Japanese bombings was that people strategically moved to the smallest villages they could find family in.
For those that stayed behind there was a post-war pride that they stuck it through and didn't give in, but it must have been unimaginable even with the bomb shelters and London Underground. Again, this is what I've been taught from my elders so not first-hand experience.
EDIT: I should add that I realise it was not just Britain for whom things were unimaginable.
EDIT 2: Another factor that must have had a big effect on Londoners was that the king and queen stayed at Buckingham Palace (which was hit a few times) during the war.
I can't remember whether ration cards were location-restricted as well, or whether there were bureaucratic obstacles to freedom of movement.
As others have pointed out children were evacuated, but realistically a lot of people have jobs to do that they can't just do elsewhere and most people just don't believe things like that will happen to them and certainly not here (there is a TED talk by a photographer of the Bosnian war about this that I cannot find right).
Finally, this is British people we are talking about: a stiff upper lip is basically their national idea (or was).
Regardless I hope I would have the foresight to do some vamoosing of my own, in case things went that much south.
"At Home in America you were in a country at war. Now, however, you are in a war zone."
It's very common to see modern buildings amongst beautiful period homes, in the gaps left by bombs [2].
[0] http://bombsight.org/#15/51.4548/-0.1443
[1] http://www.loveclapham.com/what-are-the-clapham-common-tarma...
[2] https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.455268,-0.142137,3a,75y,18...
What would be interesting is tying the bombs into stings and reconstructing the bomb raids over time.
The dots are very dense near london brigde region . London recovered well.
It should be completely random, but the representation on the map is too regular..
Looks like the apparent regularity is an artifact of the way the data is filtered for display on the map for some scales; if I zoom out/in the fully random distribution becomes more visible.
failrate is making a reference to the Thomas Pynchon novel "Gravity's Rainbow", in which the Poisson distribution of the bombing of London is a major plot point.
And I do believe the author is correct by claiming it is a Poisson distribution, since we are talking a number of events per km^2.
Pick bananas. He trudges through black compost in
to the hothouse. He feels he's about to shit. The
missile, sixty miles high, must be coming up on
the peak of its trajectory by now...
beginning its fall...
now..."On September 9, 1942 Japanese pilot Nobuo Fujita catapulted from the I-25 near the coast of southern Oregon aboard a seaplane and headed east toward Mt. Emily. His mission was to drop an incendiary (fire) bomb on the thick forest and cause a massive fire that would shock Americans and divert resources from fighting the war."
And I guess thousands, including live ones, were dropped in training exercises and during tests.
Are you assuming Pearl Harbor is pre-war?
So, each country that got hit during WWII is evaluating those pictures nowadays to find non-detonated bombs – leading to lots of maps of where bombs fell.