Just saw these colour pictures from the 2nd World War, some amazing sights of places we are familiar with. Really makes me appreciate how lucky we have been to live in such relatively peaceful times. There's a couple showing a bus inside a bomb crater that underlines how random your luck was in those days... https://www.handpicked.org/blitz_colour
There were still plenty of vacant bomb site plots around in the sixties when I was growing up. Shame we ****ed up so much of the rebuild. I think they have re done it now, but Paternoster Square next to St Pauls was hideous. Mind you, we did better in London than Birmingham or Coventry, which I was amazed to learn was one of the best preserved medieval cities in England before the bombing and rebuilt as a global example of how not to rebuild. I live less than 20 minutes away and go there at most once a year (usually a forced IKEA trip) the experience is so horrible, including a ring road with shared on/off slip roads designed to be way too much for the average local IQ to navigate in safety.
I loved the war photos and the thought of the day photos Sooper. Thanks a lot for posting. One of the war photos got me thinking, it is the fourth photo titled, girl guides and sea rangers selling savings stamps. Surely in the middle of such a traumatic war, people would only be interested in surviving day to day rather than saving for a future which may not exist?
The Blitz must have been a terrifying experience, but we were very well prepared for it. In fact the bombing intensity was less than expected, mainly because the Nazis could not afford to lose the planes. Obviously there was a lot of damage to property, but though there were a lot of civilian deaths, proportionate to the population it was still quite small, especially when compared to deaths and destruction through bombing later in the war. Above all morale never collapsed - a network of mental health clinics had been set up in anticipation of widespread shell shock, but they were closed through lack of use. There was a lot of crime and looting as well, because of course the blackout and distractions for the police made it easy, much less widely reported. I suspect that you have to put people through an enormous amount of stress before they meekly accept death and no future Fingy. Particularly if the herd instinct is largely positive and they respect and trust their leaders. But when morale does collapse it must be a total nightmare. We are very fortunate never to have been tested in this way. My Dad was eight when the war started, was evacuated early but came back to Walthamstow because he didn't like the countryside and they made him work on the farm. He reckoned he could spot the type of plane from either side from miles away, loads of boys preferred to watch the dogfights over the East End to going into the shelters.
From what my mother and father told me of living through it you just got on with life as normal, sounds unbelievable but you hear so many stories that bear that out. For me the photo of the little girl holding her doll amid the wreckage just makes you wonder, did she survive the war? Is she still around today?...
Funnily enough my mum said she could tell which planes were coming from their engine sounds, she was in Liverpool during the war and she said the biggest strike came when they bombed the Bryant & May match factory which blazed for almost a week and lit the city up for the next wave of bombers...
My father remembers being 7-8 years old in Chingford and seeing a V1 sail overhead and take out some flats down the road.
Just struck me that we are the last generation to have had these first hand accounts from family members. And I bet we all regret not asking more about it when we had the chance. It's just history from now on..... My mum was born in Kingsbury, Wembley on the day the war broke out. It was normal life for her first six years. The only thing she vividly recalls is that they had custard in cones instead of ice cream, which she never tasted until she was seven or eight, and for many years she preferred the custard.......her mum once told me she saw a Zeppelin over London in the Great War (she was born and raised in Marylebone). Of course I never asked the follow up questions, being a callow youth at the time, or just the basic stuff about even non war time life, though I do remember her saying that her family and the neighbours all took their Sunday joints to the local bakers for cooking, because no one had ovens.
My mum was 15 when war was declared, she had just won a scholarship to the Liverpool College of Art and her first day would have been Monday 4th September 1939, dreams that were shattered the day before...
This is interesting.... http://bombsight.org/#15/51.5050/-0.0900 One remarkable statistic is that the number of French civilians killed by allied bombing in WW2 was almost the same as the number of UK civilians killed in the Blitz. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-27703724
So true. There was an old soldier walking through our town this morning with some (presumably) campaign pins on his beret. Uber Minor asked why these old boys always do that in a way that suggested a 13 year old found it in some way odd. I thought at the time how detached the younger generations are from war even with our armed forces still deployed in the Middle East. Perhaps this is a good thing that they're relatively untouched by war, but I wonder whether we're losing something undefinable yet invaluable as these old boys and their memories fade away. As I was growing up WWII veterans were everywhere: teachers, sidesmen at church, lollypop men, parish councillors, neighbours, relatives, family friends, politicians and celebrities. Now all pretty much gone.
you still see the evidence of the war today. Walking in Chiswick for instance, you'll see a house that looks out of place and then you realise, that was where the original house was demolished by a direct hit from the Luftwaffe
Good post, Sooper, my pet subject. Germany indeed caused much damage in the early part of ww2 but in saying that, the RAF continued to develop their bomb loads and the destruction on the German cities was immense. Included below are images from the 'three heavies' of Bomber Command - The Short Stirling, the Handley Page Halifax and the Avro Lancaster. A typical bomb load would include 14 one thousand pound bombs and a 4000 pound 'Cookie'. The Cookie was thinly cased and was a major blast bomb. The last image is of a RAF Tallboy, from Barnes Wallis ( creator of the Dambuster bomb ). The Tallboy would sink deep underground and really shake the earth. As Hilter ordered more flying bombs to be made deep below the mountains in underground hideouts, the RAF could still wreck havoc on them. please log in to view this image please log in to view this image please log in to view this image please log in to view this image please log in to view this image please log in to view this image please log in to view this image
