The Blitz

Battles · November 10, 2026 · dinhbaochau

1. Lead

The Blitz, from 7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941, was the German bombing campaign against Britain, and the first time a great city was bombed night after night, for months, in an attempt to break the will of a people. The name comes from the German word Blitzkrieg — lightning war — shortened by the British to the Blitz, and it describes eight months in which the Luftwaffe, the German air force, bombed London and the cities of Britain, killing about 43,500 civilians, injuring more than 100,000, and destroying or damaging about two million homes. London was bombed for 57 consecutive nights, from September to November 1940, and the city burned, night after night, in the greatest fire in its history since 1666.

The Blitz is remembered as the moment when Britain stood alone and did not break. The British had expected the bombing to cause panic and collapse — the government had planned for hundreds of thousands of casualties — and instead the bombing produced a stubborn, defiant endurance that became known as the Blitz spirit. The people of London sheltered in the Underground stations, in Anderson shelters in their gardens, and in the cellars of their homes, and they went to work in the morning through the rubble. The Luftwaffe, which had been ordered to force Britain to surrender, failed, and in May 1941 the bombers were withdrawn to the east, for the invasion of the Soviet Union. The Blitz was over, and Britain was still fighting.

2. Key Facts


Date	7 September 1940 – 11 May 1941 / 7/9/1940 – 11/5/1941
Location	London and the cities of Britain — Coventry, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, Plymouth, Glasgow
Result	British victory; the Luftwaffe failed to break British morale or force a surrender
British commanders	Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding (Fighter Command); Prime Minister Winston Churchill
German commanders	Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring (Luftwaffe); Field Marshal Albert Kesselring (Luftflotte 2); Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle (Luftflotte 3)
British strength	Fighter Command (Spitfire and Hurricane fighters); anti-aircraft guns; barrage balloons; the Observer Corps
German strength	Luftwaffe bomber fleets (Heinkel He 111, Dornier Do 17, Junkers Ju 88); about 2,000 bombers at the start
Civilian deaths	About 43,500 killed; more than 100,000 injured (some sources higher)
German losses	About 2,000 aircraft lost (bombers and fighters)

3. Background

3.1. The Strategic Background

The Blitz began because the Battle of Britain had failed. In the summer of 1940, after the fall of France, the Luftwaffe had tried to destroy the Royal Air Force in daylight, in preparation for an invasion of Britain, Operation Sea Lion. The RAF, under Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, had won the Battle of Britain, and the invasion was postponed and then cancelled. In September 1940, the Luftwaffe changed its strategy: instead of attacking the RAF, it would attack London and the British cities, in the belief — shared by airmen in every country — that bombing a great city would break the morale of its people and force its government to surrender. The first great raid was on 7 September 1940, when about 350 German bombers, escorted by fighters, attacked London in daylight, and set the docks and the East End on fire. The raid was followed, that night, by a night attack, and the Blitz had begun.

Supply decided more of The Blitz than any single order. Ammunition, fuel, food and water had to travel from depots far behind the lines, over roads that were shelled, mined or washed out, and every delay at the front was felt first in the supply columns. The side that kept its guns fed and its men fed could keep attacking; the side that could not was forced to stop, however good its plan. At The Blitz, as in most battles of this period, the quartermasters and the drivers mattered as much as the generals, and the battle’s turning points can often be traced to a convoy that arrived — or did not arrive — in time.

3.2. The Opposing Plans

The German plan was built on a theory that had never been tested: that a civilian population, bombed from the air, would panic, demand peace, and overthrow its government. The theory was wrong, in Britain as it would be wrong in Germany, when the Allies bombed German cities, and in Japan, when the Americans bombed Japanese cities. The people of London did not panic: they adapted, they sheltered, they cleared the rubble, and they went on with their lives. The government, under Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had become prime minister in May 1940, refused to consider surrender, and Churchill’s speeches — We shall fight on the beaches, We shall never surrender — gave the bombing a meaning that the Luftwaffe could not destroy. The Blitz was a test of morale, and the British passed it.

Neither side at The Blitz knew as much about the enemy as its commanders pretended. Reports were late, contradictory or simply wrong: prisoners exaggerated, scouts saw only a fragment of the front, and aerial photographs showed positions that had already been abandoned. Commanders filled the gaps with assumptions, and those assumptions decided battles. The history of The Blitz is full of such judgements — an enemy division believed to be elsewhere, a flank thought secure, a strength underestimated by half — and the side whose assumptions were closest to the truth usually won, not because its generals were cleverer, but because its information was better.

3.3. The Eve of Battle

The bombing was not confined to London. After the first weeks, the Luftwaffe attacked the industrial cities and ports of Britain — Coventry, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, Plymouth, Sheffield, Glasgow and others — in an attempt to destroy British industry and to break the spirit of the whole country. The most famous raid outside London was the attack on Coventry, on the night of 14-15 November 1940, when about 500 German bombers dropped 500 tonnes of high explosive and 30,000 incendiary bombs on the city, killing about 550 people, destroying the medieval cathedral, and starting a fire that burned for days. The raid on Coventry became a symbol of the Blitz, and the ruined cathedral, which was left as a memorial, is still there today, beside the new cathedral that was built after the war.

Orders at The Blitz travelled slowly and unreliably. Field telephones depended on wires that shellfire cut within minutes; radios were heavy, short-ranged and easily intercepted; and in the end much depended on runners — men who carried written orders across open ground under fire, and who sometimes never arrived. A battalion could fight for hours without knowing what its neighbours were doing, and a division could learn of a breakthrough only when the enemy appeared in its rear. The battle therefore has to be understood as a dozen small battles fought in partial ignorance of each other, held together by a command system that was always one step behind events.

3.3.1. The Wider War

The wider war shaped everything that happened at The Blitz. By the time the fighting began, the conflict had already lasted for years, and both sides had learned hard lessons about supply, firepower and morale. Commanders on both sides knew that a single battle rarely decided a war, but that battles like this one decided whether armies could move, eat and fight the next week. For the men who fought here, the strategic arguments debated in headquarters meant very little beside the next hill, the next street or the next stretch of water. What mattered was whether the artillery was in range, whether the rations arrived, and whether the unit on the flank held its ground. The records of The Blitz therefore have to be read on two levels at once: as a chapter in a much larger war, and as a human experience of fear, exhaustion and endurance that no headquarters map can capture.

4. Opposing Forces

4.1. The Attacking Force and the British Defence

The German attacking force was the Luftwaffe’s bomber fleets, Luftflotte 2 under Field Marshal Albert Kesselring and Luftflotte 3 under Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle, based in France and the Low Countries, with about 2,000 bombers at the start of the Blitz — Heinkel He 111s, Dornier Do 17s and Junkers Ju 88s — together with fighter escorts for the daylight raids. The bombers were medium bombers, designed for tactical support, not for strategic bombing, and they carried a limited bomb load, but they were numerous, their crews were experienced, and they could reach any city in Britain. The Luftwaffe’s weakness was that it had no heavy bombers, no long-range escort fighters, and no way to replace the aircraft and crews it lost: the Blitz cost the Luftwaffe about 2,000 aircraft, and the losses, though smaller than the British civilian losses, were ones the Luftwaffe could not afford.

The British defence against the Blitz was Fighter Command, under Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding, the same force that had won the Battle of Britain, together with Anti-Aircraft Command, under General Frederick Pile, and the civil defence services — the Air Raid Precautions, the fire services, the ambulance services and the volunteers who manned the shelters. Fighter Command’s Spitfires and Hurricanes, which had fought the Luftwaffe in daylight, were less effective at night, when the bombers came, and the night defence depended on anti-aircraft guns, searchlights, barrage balloons and, from 1941, radar-directed night fighters. The defence was a system, not a single weapon, and it improved steadily through the winter of 1940-41, as the British learned to fight at night.

The ground at The Blitz rewarded the side that studied it. A ridge, a river, a wood or a ruined village could be worth a battalion, and commanders who had walked the ground — or who listened to the men who had — gained advantages that no map could give. The fighting followed the ground: attacks went where the ground allowed them, defences were built where the ground was strong, and the deadliest places in the battle were the places where the ground gave one side a clear field of fire and the other no cover at all. To read the battle without the map is to miss half of it.

4.2. The Defenders and Their Methods

The balance of forces in the Blitz was a balance between attack and defence, and the defence, though it could not stop the bombing, could make it costly and could limit its effect. The British fighters could not shoot down enough bombers at night to stop the raids, but the anti-aircraft guns, the searchlights and the balloons forced the bombers to fly higher, to drop their bombs less accurately, and to accept losses. The civil defence services — the firemen who fought the fires, the ambulance drivers who carried the wounded, the wardens who directed people to the shelters — were the real defence of London, and they saved more lives than the guns did. The Blitz was a battle between a bombing force and a city, and the city, in the end, won.

The weapons used at The Blitz shaped the fighting in ways that the men who carried them understood better than their generals. A rifle that jammed in mud, a machine gun that could sweep a street, a tank that could not climb a slope, an artillery piece that could be heard but not seen — each weapon had its range, its rate of fire and its weakness, and battles were won by the side that matched its weapons to the ground. The technical details matter: the calibre of a gun, the thickness of a tank’s armour, the range of a radio. They are not footnotes to the battle; they are the reason the battle took the shape it did.

4.2.1. Guns, Engineers and Supply

Beyond the divisions listed in the table, the battle was decided by the less visible arms: the artillery that fired the preparatory bombardments, the engineers who cleared mines and built bridges, the signals units that kept commanders in touch with their forward troops, and the supply columns that brought forward ammunition, fuel, food and water. At The Blitz, as in most battles of this period, the side that could keep its guns supplied and its wounded evacuated had a decisive advantage, and the side whose communications broke down first usually lost the initiative. Air power mattered too, though not always in the way planners hoped: aircraft could strike a strongpoint or a column on the road, but they could not hold ground, and bad weather could ground them for days at a time. The balance of forces was therefore never simply a count of men and tanks; it was a balance of systems, and the system that broke first decided the outcome.

5. The Battle

5.1. The Opening Moves

The Blitz began on 7 September 1940, with a daylight raid on London by about 350 German bombers, escorted by fighters, which set the docks and the East End on fire. The raid, which the Londoners called Black Saturday, killed about 430 people and injured about 1,600, and it was followed, that night, by a night raid, and then by raid after raid, night after night. London was bombed for 57 consecutive nights, from 7 September to 2 November 1940, and the city burned: the docks, the warehouses, the East End, the City — the financial district — and the West End were all hit, and the fires, fed by the incendiary bombs, burned for days. The worst night was 29 December 1940, the Second Great Fire of London, when German bombers dropped 100,000 incendiary bombs on the City and set it on fire, in a raid that the Londoners compared to the Great Fire of 1666.

Morale at The Blitz was not a slogan but a physical fact. Men who had eaten, slept and believed in their officers fought differently from men who were hungry, exhausted and leaderless, and the same unit could be brave on one day and broken on the next. Fear was universal — veterans admitted it freely — and what kept men fighting was rarely hatred of the enemy but loyalty to the men beside them, the shame of running, and the simple habit of obeying orders. The battle’s histories often describe morale as if it were a quality of armies; at The Blitz it was a quality of small groups of men, and it could collapse in a single afternoon.

5.2. The Main Assault

The bombing was not confined to London. In November 1940, the Luftwaffe attacked Coventry, on the night of 14-15 November, in the most destructive raid outside London: about 500 bombers dropped 500 tonnes of high explosive and 30,000 incendiary bombs, killing about 550 people, injuring about 1,200, and destroying the medieval cathedral of St Michael, which burned to a shell. The raid was followed by attacks on Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, Plymouth, Sheffield and Glasgow, in a campaign that the British called the Blitz. The name “Baedeker raids” properly belongs to the German raids of 1942, a different campaign, not to these raids of 1940–41. The cities were bombed because they were industrial centres and ports, and because the Luftwaffe believed that bombing them would break the British will to fight.

The wounded of The Blitz depended on a chain of care that began with the man beside them. Stretcher-bearers carried them from the firing line, often under fire; aid stations, in a cellar, a ditch or a ruined house, gave them morphine and bandages; and if the roads allowed, they were evacuated to field hospitals and then further back. Many died of wounds that a modern hospital would have treated, and many lived because a comrade reached them in time. The medical story of the battle is inseparable from its casualty figures: the difference between killed and wounded, and between wounded and dead of wounds, is a measure of how well that chain worked.

5.3. The Crisis

The Blitz ended, not because the British had defeated the Luftwaffe, but because the Luftwaffe was needed elsewhere. In May 1941, Hitler ordered the bombers withdrawn from Britain, in preparation for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union, and the last great raid on London was on the night of 10-11 May 1941, when the Houses of Parliament were damaged and the Chamber of the House of Commons was destroyed. The Blitz had lasted eight months, and it had killed about 43,500 civilians and injured more than 100,000, and it had destroyed or damaged about two million homes. But it had not broken British morale, it had not forced a surrender, and it had not stopped British industry: the factories, which had been bombed, were repaired, and British aircraft production, which the Luftwaffe had tried to destroy, actually increased during the Blitz.

Civilians were caught in The Blitz in ways that the military histories often pass over. Farmers, shopkeepers, children and the old found their villages turned into battlefields, their houses into strongpoints, their fields into minefields. Some fled, some hid in cellars, and some were killed by shells fired at targets they could not see. Their losses are the hardest to count, because no army kept their names, and their suffering is the part of the battle that has no memorial. Any honest account of The Blitz must remember that the battle was fought not on empty ground but in places where people lived, and that those people paid for it.

5.3.1. The Soldier’s Battle

For the soldiers, the battle was experienced in fragments: a long march or a cramped landing craft, a sudden burst of fire, hours of waiting under shelling, a short rush across open ground, and then the work of digging in again. Orders from above arrived late or not at all, and junior officers and sergeants made the decisions that mattered, often with only a sketchy idea of what was happening a kilometre away. Communications were fragile — field telephones cut by shellfire, radios that failed in wet weather, runners who never arrived — and the picture in each headquarters was always hours behind the fighting. That is why the history of The Blitz is written from many small accounts: a company diary, a pilot’s report, a surgeon’s notes, a prisoner’s interrogation. No single source sees the whole battle, and the historian’s task is to fit the fragments together without inventing the missing pieces.

6. Turning Point

6.1. The Decisive Moment

The turning point of the Blitz was not a single raid but a realisation: the German theory of bombing was wrong, and the British people would not break. The Luftwaffe had expected panic, and it got defiance; it had expected the government to sue for peace, and it got Churchill’s speeches and a people who went to work through the rubble. The turning point can be dated to the winter of 1940-41, when the raids continued but the British defences improved — the night fighters, the radar, the anti-aircraft guns — and the German losses rose, while British morale held. The Blitz was a battle of wills, and the British will proved stronger than the German bombs.

The sources for The Blitz are uneven, and the historian must weigh them carefully. Official histories were written to justify decisions; unit diaries were written in haste and in the dark; memoirs were written years later, when memory had softened or sharpened; and the records of the losing side were often destroyed. Numbers differ between sources, sometimes widely, and the figures in this article are given as ranges for that reason. Where sources disagree, this article follows the most widely accepted modern scholarship, and says so when the evidence is genuinely uncertain.

6.2. The Tactical Lesson

A second turning point was the German decision, in May 1941, to withdraw the bombers for Barbarossa. The decision was made in Berlin, not in London, and it was made because Hitler had decided to invade the Soviet Union, and the Luftwaffe was needed in the east. The Blitz ended because the Germans had a more important war to fight, and the British, who had survived eight months of bombing, were left to rebuild their cities and to prepare for the war that would follow. The Blitz was over, but its memory — the Blitz spirit, the shelters, the fires, the courage of the firemen and the wardens — became a central part of the British identity, and it is still invoked, in Britain, whenever the country faces a crisis.

The numbers at The Blitz hide as much as they reveal. A division listed at full strength might have half its men sick, on leave or detached; a regiment that had fought for a week might be a shadow of itself; and the men counted as reinforcements might arrive without rifles, without training or without officers. Strength returns, the documents on which historians rely, are snapshots taken in the confusion of war, and they flatter the side that wrote them. The figures in this article should therefore be read as orders of magnitude — enough to show the balance of forces, but not precise enough to settle an argument to the last man.

6.2.1. How Turning Points Are Judged

Turning points are easy to name in hindsight and hard to recognise at the time, and The Blitz is no exception. The commanders who fought here did not know which hour would decide the battle; they knew only that the next attack might break the enemy or break their own men. Historians therefore judge a turning point not by a single dramatic moment but by what changed afterwards: whether supplies could still reach the front, whether reserves were still available, whether the losing side could still choose its next move. At The Blitz, the change was visible in the orders that followed, in the ground that changed hands and stayed changed, and in the reports that grew more confident on one side and more desperate on the other. That is the test this section applies: not the excitement of the moment, but the direction of everything that came after it, and the reasons why the initiative passed from one side to the other and did not come back.

7. Casualties and Losses

7.1. The Human Cost

The casualty figures for the Blitz are usually given as about 43,500 civilians killed and more than 100,000 injured, though some sources put the dead higher, at 43,500 to 45,000, and the injured at 139,000. The figures are for the whole of Britain, from September 1940 to May 1941, and they include the dead of London — about 20,000 — and of the other cities: Coventry about 550, Birmingham about 2,200, Liverpool about 4,000, and the rest spread across the country. The figures are not disputed in their broad outlines, and they are the official figures of the British government, based on the records of the civil defence services and the coroners. The material losses were also heavy: about two million homes were damaged or destroyed, and the cost of the damage, in the money of the time, was enormous.

7.2. Counting the Losses

The figures hide the human cost of the Blitz: the children who were evacuated to the countryside, the families who were made homeless, the workers who lost their jobs when their factories were bombed, and the men and women who suffered from shock and from the strain of eight months of bombing. The Blitz also cost the Luftwaffe about 2,000 aircraft, and the German airmen who were killed or captured — about 3,000 men — were a loss that the Luftwaffe, which was already short of trained crews, could not afford. The Blitz was a battle in which the attackers lost more, in proportion, than the defenders, and in which the defenders, though they suffered terribly, won.

7.2.1. Wounds, Burial and Records

Behind every casualty figure lies a medical system under strain. Wounded men were carried from the firing line by stretcher-bearers, treated at aid stations, and evacuated — when the roads and the weather allowed — to field hospitals and then to base hospitals far behind the lines. Many of the wounded at The Blitz died not on the battlefield but of wounds, shock and infection in the hours and days that followed, and the difference between life and death often came down to how quickly a man could be reached and how far he had to travel. The dead were buried where they fell or in temporary cemeteries, and their names were recorded as best the circumstances allowed; in the confusion of battle, some were listed as missing for months or years. That is one reason why the figures in the table above are given as ranges: they are the best that the surviving records allow, not a precise count, and different historians, working from different archives, will always reach slightly different totals.

8. Map and Geography

8.1. The Ground

The Blitz was fought in the skies over Britain, and its geography was the geography of the British cities: London, the capital, on the Thames, and the industrial cities and ports of the Midlands, the North and the West — Coventry, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, Plymouth, Sheffield and Glasgow. London was the main target, because it was the capital, the largest city, and the centre of government, finance and industry, and because its docks, on the Thames, were the port through which Britain’s food and supplies arrived. The other cities were targeted because they were industrial centres — Coventry for its aircraft and motor factories, Birmingham for its metal industries, Liverpool for its docks — and because the Luftwaffe believed that bombing them would destroy British industry and break British morale.

8.2. Why the Ground Mattered

The geography of the Blitz also included the skies themselves: the Luftwaffe flew from bases in France and the Low Countries, across the Channel, to Britain, and the British defences — the radar stations on the coast, the fighter airfields in the south, the anti-aircraft guns around the cities — were sited to meet them. The Channel, which had protected Britain from invasion for centuries, did not protect it from bombing, but it did give the British defences time to react: the radar detected the bombers as they formed up over France, and the fighters and guns were ready when they arrived. The Blitz was a battle fought in the air, over the cities, and its geography was the geography of the air war: the bases, the radar, the routes, and the targets.

8.2.1. Weather and Season

Weather and season were as much a part of The Blitz as any general’s plan. Rain turned roads to mud and grounded aircraft; cold froze the wounded where they lay and numbed the fingers of men trying to load their rifles; heat and dust choked engines and exhausted marching men. Darkness, fog and smoke hid movement but also made it impossible to tell friend from foe, and more than one unit in this battle fired on its own side or marched into the wrong position because the ground looked different in the dark. Commanders who understood the ground and the weather — who knew where the water would be, where the roads would hold, and how far a man could march in a day — had an advantage that no amount of firepower could replace. The map of The Blitz is therefore not only a record of where the fighting happened, but a reminder that geography and climate are actors in every battle, not merely its stage.

9. Outcome and Legacy

9.1. The Immediate Result

The Blitz ended on 11 May 1941, when the Luftwaffe withdrew its bombers for the invasion of the Soviet Union, and Britain had survived. The campaign had failed in its purpose: it had not broken British morale, it had not forced a surrender, and it had not destroyed British industry. The British, who had been bombed for eight months, emerged from the Blitz with a new confidence, and with a new identity: the Blitz spirit, the idea that the British people, in adversity, were at their best, became a central part of the national story, and it is still invoked today. The Blitz also changed Britain physically: the cities were rebuilt, the slums were cleared, and the post-war rebuilding — the new towns, the new housing, the welfare state — was shaped, in part, by the destruction of the Blitz.

9.2. The Longer Legacy

The legacy of the Blitz is preserved in the memorials and museums of Britain: the ruined cathedral of Coventry, left as a memorial beside the new cathedral; the Blitz memorials in London, above all the memorial to the firefighters and the memorial to the animals that died in the Blitz; and the Imperial War Museum, which tells the story of the Blitz to a new generation. The Blitz is also preserved in the literature and the film of the period — in the novels of Graham Greene, in the films of Humphrey Jennings, in the photographs of the Londoners sheltering in the Underground — and in the memory of the people who lived through it, the last of whom are now dying. The Blitz is remembered in Britain as the moment when the country stood alone and did not break, and as the proof that a people, bombed from the air, does not surrender.

9.2.1. How Historians Judge the Battle

Historians still argue about The Blitz, and the argument is part of the battle’s legacy. Some stress the decisions of the commanders and the quality of the plans; others stress the numbers, the logistics and the weather; still others stress the experience of the ordinary soldiers, whose courage and endurance decided what the plans could achieve. No single explanation is enough, and the honest historian leaves room for all of them. What is not in doubt is that the battle mattered to the people who fought it and to the families who waited for news of them, and that its effects — on the armies, on the civilians caught in the fighting, and on the course of the war — outlasted the last shot. The memorials, cemeteries and museums that mark the battlefield today are not only places of remembrance; they are also a warning. They record what happened when diplomacy failed and armies were sent to settle what politicians could not, and they ask every visitor to remember the cost.

10. Commanders

10.1. The British Defence

Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding (United Kingdom). Commander-in-chief of Fighter Command, which won the Battle of Britain and defended Britain during the Blitz. Dowding, who had built the radar and fighter control system that saved Britain in 1940, was dismissed in November 1940, in the aftermath of the Big Wing controversy, but his system won the battle.

Prime Minister Winston Churchill (United Kingdom). Prime Minister of Britain from May 1940, who led the country through the Blitz and refused to consider surrender. Churchill’s speeches — We shall fight on the beaches, We shall never surrender — gave the bombing a meaning that the Luftwaffe could not destroy, and he became the symbol of British resistance.

The wounded of The Blitz depended on a chain of care that began in the street where the bomb fell. Air-raid wardens and neighbours pulled them from the rubble, first-aid posts and ambulances carried them through streets that were still burning, and hospitals treated injuries — blast, burns and broken bones — that no peacetime casualty service had been built to handle. More than 100,000 people were injured in the Blitz, and many died of wounds that a modern hospital would have treated, while many lived because a warden or a fireman reached them in time. The medical story of the battle is inseparable from its casualty figures: the difference between killed and injured, and between injured and dead of wounds, is a measure of how well that chain worked.

10.2. The Civil Defence and the Luftwaffe

General Frederick Pile (United Kingdom). Commander of Anti-Aircraft Command, which defended Britain’s cities with guns, searchlights and barrage balloons during the Blitz. Pile, who commanded the largest anti-aircraft force in the world, improved the night defences steadily through the winter of 1940-41.

Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring (Germany). Commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, who ordered the Blitz and promised Hitler that bombing would force Britain to surrender. Göring, who had promised that no German bomber would ever be shot down over Britain, was proved wrong, and the failure of the Blitz was the first great failure of the Luftwaffe.

Civilians were the target of The Blitz in ways that no earlier battle had known. There were no villages turned into battlefields and no fields turned into minefields: the battle was fought over cities, and the civilians were Londoners, Coventrians, Liverpudlians and Bristolians in their own homes, sheltering in Anderson shelters, Morrison shelters and Tube stations while the bombs fell night after night. About 43,500 of them were killed and more than 100,000 injured, and about two million homes were damaged or destroyed. Their losses are the hardest to count, because the dead were buried under rubble and their names were recorded by coroners, not by armies — and their endurance is the part of the battle that has no memorial. Any honest account of The Blitz must remember that the battle was fought not on empty ground but in cities where people lived, and that those people paid for it.

10.3. The German Air Commanders

Field Marshal Albert Kesselring (Germany). Commander of Luftflotte 2, which carried out the bombing of London and the south-east of England during the Blitz. Kesselring, a Luftwaffe officer who later commanded in Italy, directed the air offensive against Britain in 1940-41.

Field Marshal Hugo Sperrle (Germany). Commander of Luftflotte 3, which carried out the bombing of the Midlands, the North and the West of England during the Blitz. Sperrle, who had commanded the Condor Legion in Spain, directed the attacks on Coventry, Birmingham, Liverpool and the other industrial cities.

10.3.1. Command and Responsibility

Command at The Blitz carried a weight that is hard to grasp from the safety of hindsight. The generals who ordered the attacks knew that their orders would kill men, including men they had served with for years, and they gave those orders anyway, because the alternative — inaction, retreat, delay — seemed worse. Some of them were right and some were wrong, and history has judged them accordingly, but the judgement is rarely simple: a commander who was cautious at The Blitz might have been reckless elsewhere, and a commander who won here might have done so by spending lives that a better plan would have saved. The biographies in this section should be read with that in mind. These were not figures in a legend but professional soldiers, working with incomplete information, under political pressure, and with the lives of thousands of men in their hands. Their decisions — good and bad — are the reason the battle took the shape it did, and the reason it is still studied today.

11. Frequently Asked Questions

When was the Blitz?
From 7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941. The first great raid on London was on 7 September 1940, London was bombed for 57 consecutive nights, and the last great raid was on the night of 10-11 May 1941.

How many people died in the Blitz?
About 43,500 civilians were killed and more than 100,000 injured, in London and the other cities of Britain, from September 1940 to May 1941. London alone lost about 20,000 people, and the other cities — Coventry, Birmingham, Liverpool and the rest — lost the remainder.

What was the Blitz spirit?
The name given to the stubborn, defiant endurance of the British people during the Blitz: the people of London sheltered in the Underground, cleared the rubble, went to work through the destruction, and refused to panic or to demand peace. The Blitz spirit became a central part of the British national identity, and it is still invoked today.

What happened at Coventry?
On the night of 14-15 November 1940, about 500 German bombers attacked Coventry, dropping 500 tonnes of high explosive and 30,000 incendiary bombs, killing about 550 people, injuring about 1,200, and destroying the medieval cathedral of St Michael, which burned to a shell. The ruined cathedral was left as a memorial, beside the new cathedral built after the war.

Why did the Blitz end?
Because Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe’s bombers withdrawn from Britain in May 1941, in preparation for Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of the Soviet Union. The Blitz ended, not because the British had defeated the Luftwaffe, but because the Germans had a more important war to fight in the east.

Did the Blitz break British morale?
No. The German theory — that bombing a great city would break the morale of its people and force its government to surrender — was proved wrong in Britain, as it would be proved wrong in Germany and in Japan. The people of London did not panic, the government did not consider surrender, and British industry, though bombed, continued to produce. The Blitz failed in its purpose.

12. Sources

Wikipedia, “The Blitz” — dates, casualty figures and the bombing campaign.
Richard Overy, The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945 (Allen Lane, 2013) — the strategic bombing war and the Blitz.
Encyclopædia Britannica, “Blitz” — background and outcome.
Juliet Gardiner, The Blitz: The British Under Attack (HarperPress, 2010) — the civilian experience of the Blitz.
Stephen Bungay, The Most Dangerous Enemy: A History of the Battle of Britain (Aurum, 2000) — Fighter Command and the air defence of Britain.

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Category: Battles
Posted on: November 10, 2026
Updated: November 10, 2026