Friday 10 July 2015

When the UK was bombed nightly for eight months in a row -

In early World War Two - from autumn 1940 to spring 1941 - German bombs killed 43,000 people across the UK. As the 75th anniversary of the start of the Blitz approaches, Imperial War Museum North has a new exhibition.
Horrible Histories: Blitzed Brits looks at how the bombing came about - and the devastation and death that was caused in the nightly raids.
In the quiet early months of the war people in the UK prepared for air attacks by Nazi Germany, says Ian Kikuchi from the Imperial War Museum. But domestically there were few signs that Hitler's bombers would soon be based just across the English Channel.
Then in spring 1940 the Germans invaded France and the Low Countries. Later in the summer the German air force, the Luftwaffe, tried to gain air superiority in the skies over the UK in the Battle of Britain.
Burning building in Manchester after a German air raid, December 1940
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But it was the resilience of the Royal Air Force during that "Spitfire summer" that caused the Germans to revise their plans, says Kikuchi - and on 7 September 1940 they embarked on a sustained eight-month bombing campaign, targeting all the UK's major cities.