Primary History - World War 2 - The war effort. School Radio - Tudors Audio Clips. The bombers looked so majestic... then death rained from the sky: 70 years after the Blitz, the heart-stopping accounts of courageous survivors. By Juliet Gardiner Updated: 23:16 GMT, 27 August 2010 The familiar wail of the air raid siren had sent porter Robert Baltrop clambering on to the roof of a Sainsbury's store in East London on that never-to-be-forgotten warm and cloudless late summer afternoon of September 7, 1940. 'It wasn't bad doing lookout duty during these daytime warnings,' he recalled, looking back on events that happened 70 years ago, 'sitting up there in the sunshine, smoking and looking down at the people going about their business as usual in the streets below.
I wasn't even really sure what I was watching for.' World War II was by this time officially more than a year old. The conflict everybody had been expecting had finally begun on September 3, 1939 - except that for civilians, it hadn't. Carnage: A bus lies inside a huge bomb crater after heavy German air raid attacks during the Blitz And then, on August 24, 1940, the Luftwaffe, in contravention of Hitler's orders, offloaded seven or eight bombs over London.
The London Blitz, 1940. The London Blitz, 1940 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 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. St. World War II: The Battle of Britain - In Focus. In the summer and autumn of 1940, Germany's Luftwaffe conducted thousands of bombing runs, attacking military and civilian targets across the United Kingdom.
Hitler's forces, in an attempt to achieve air superiority, were preparing for an invasion of Britain code-named "Operation Sea Lion. " At first, they bombed only military and industrial targets. But after the Royal Air Force hit Berlin with retaliatory strikes in September, the Germans began bombing British civilian centers. Some 23,000 British civilians were killed between July and December 1940. Thousands of pilots and air crews engaged in battle in the skies above Britain, Germany, and the English Channel, each side losing more than 1,500 aircraft by the end of the year.
Use j/k keys or ←/→ to navigate Choose: World War II: The Holocaust - In Focus. One of the most horrific terms in history was used by Nazi Germany to designate human beings whose lives were unimportant, or those who should be killed outright: Lebensunwertes Leben, or "life unworthy of life".
The phrase was applied to the mentally impaired and later to the "racially inferior," or "sexually deviant," as well as to "enemies of the state" both internal and external. From very early in the war, part of Nazi policy was to murder civilians en masse, especially targeting Jews. Later in the war, this policy grew into Hitler's "final solution", the complete extermination of the Jews. It began with Einsatzgruppen death squads in the East, which killed some 1,000,000 people in numerous massacres, and continued in concentration camps where prisoners were actively denied proper food and health care. It culminated in the construction of extermination camps -- government facilities whose entire purpose was the systematic murder and disposal of massive numbers of people. Lt.