The Day the Bombs Came
T HE D AY THE B OMBS C AME
B LACK S ATURDAY , C HARLIE HAD often heard it called afterward. Before that, sirens had sounded for many months with few German planes accompanying the warnings. Because of that folks had started calling it the “Bore,” or “Phony War.” But that had not been the case on that first Saturday in September 1940.
It was a lovely warm, sunny day, fairly rare in England.
At 4 p.m. British radar stations picked up a fleet rendezvous between German bombers and fighters above the French coast. About fifteen minutes later the frontal edge of the twenty-mile-wide Luftwaffe armada, which rode over ten thousand feet in the sky, crossed the English coast and was spotted by an Observer Corps post. The RAF was then scrambled.
By then, it was far too late.
It was around five when the city’s bomb warnings went off, building in volume. The sirens sounded to Charlie like high-pitched screams from the sky. Charlie and his gran, and his mother and his grandfather, for they had been alive back then, had hurried to their agreed-upon shelter, a cupboard in the windowless back room of their old flat. Folks with rear yards often fled to their hardy Andy bomb shelters, half dug into the ground with their thin hides of corrugated arched aluminum set next to flower beds that had been turned into Digging for Victory gardens. However, many poor folks without yards went to public shelters; others headed to the Underground. Most, like Charlie and his family, ventured straightaway to the cupboard.
Gripped in his mother’s hand was her gas mask, a device they all had been issued. She helped Charlie to put on his, then aided her parents, and, finally, donned her mask.
At first, there had been no sounds other than people rushing here and there outside, and the warbly sirens. Then Charlie looked up at his mother.
“They’re coming,” he heard her say, and in a tone that captured her son’s full attention. She helped Charlie tighten his mask. In her skirt pocket was a tube of No. 2 Anti-gas Ointment. It was supposed to help burns on the face and relieve the eyes of the gas’s sting, and perhaps return one’s mustard gas–stolen sight, though even young Charlie was highly doubtful that any cream could actually accomplish that.
Plymouth and Cardiff had already been struck by the Luftwaffe, but not London. The city had seemed protected by some divine power that kept great metropolises from the inconvenience of wholesale destruction.
That delicate fantasy was about to come to an end.
First came the unnerving drone of plane engines as they neared Dagenham, Rainham, and Barking. Charlie would learn later there were three hundred and fifty Junkers, Heinkels, and Dorniers massed in this particular Luftwaffe fleet, escorted by six hundred fighter planes. Next came the scream of bombs, high-pitched walls of wails that brought a terror to Charlie far greater than any nightmare he’d ever endured. The target was the East End around the U-shaped bend in the Thames. Known as Silvertown, it was a collection of massive warehouses, and workers’ homes, all muddled topsy-turvy together next to the labyrinth of docks that were critical to the war effort.
The Ford Motor Works was hit first, then the enormous Beckton Gasworks. The Woolwich Arsenal, the country’s largest, was also struck. After that the three Royal Docks, loaded with foodstuffs, were leveled; the stench of incinerated fruits and cheeses would linger for months. Barge tethers burned away, sending the freed boats gliding down the Thames, only to return later with the tide. Barrage balloons designed to entangle German planes instead simply burst from the ensuing heat of detonations and soaring fires. As the bombs went off, the very foundations of the city seemed to vibrate as explosion after explosion produced a tsunami of terrifying sound.
Disrupted dust settled over Charlie and his family. Windows cracked, roof trusses groaned, floorboards quivered. And each subsequent blast of concussive force seemed more powerful than its predecessors. They never heard the big ack-ack guns fire back, and had no idea it was because British gunners on the ground feared they would strike their own planes in the air.
The Germans returned that night and dropped still more bombs, using the fires caused by the first attack as handy illumination for the second. Wholesale evacuations by thousands of people from the stricken East End had some dub it “Dunkirk in London.”
After the all clear siren sounded around 4:30 on Sunday morning—one elongated note to distinguish it from its counterpart of short separate blasts—nearly four hundred and fifty Londoners had perished. Sixteen hundred more were seriously injured, and many would eventually die. And countless structures had been leveled, leaving the poor in the East End, who had little to begin with, with even less now.
Infernos raged along the obliterated docks as the Auxiliary Fire Services courageously battled them. The Thames became a pumping station of last resort when the hydrants ran dry. A conflagration fire meant that a hundred-plus pumps were needed to extinguish it. There were nine such fires that night.
The Isle of Dogs was mostly gone. Both sides of the river in the East End had been reduced to rubble. Bow Road Station no longer existed. Stepney Green looked like a blackened carpet, denuded of trees. People as far off as Reading thought they saw the sun set in the east that day, because the Blitz fires burned the sky just as brightly as did the descending sun.
By the end of the month more than six thousand Londoners were in premature graves. They had had ashes to ashes and dust to dust sprinkled over them by legions of religious men, who all looked stunned that their god would allow such devastation despite sincere prayers, thundering sermons, and the frenetic fingering of rosaries.
In his box in the cupboard, Charlie opened his eyes, and the sounds of death coming for them all vanished.