84 years ago today, the Blitz began

In the late afternoon of Saturday, September 7th, 1940, 348 German bombers and their escort of 617 fighters attacked London, focusing their attack on the London Docks. The defending RAF fighters in the sky above lost 23 aircraft, with seven pilots wounded and six killed. Among the dead pilots was Flight Lieutenant Paterson Clarence Hughes, a 22 year-old Australian who had only been married for five weeks. In his final moments, he shot down one of the 14 bombers lost by the Luftwaffe, which also lost 22 fighters. That night, under cover of darkness, another 247 German bombers attacked the city a second time.

These raids wounded 1,600 civilians, and killed 430 men, women, and children. But this was only the beginning of the Blitz. On September 8th, another 747 civilians were severely injured, and 412 were killed. This campaign of bombing raids against London and other British cities would continue until the 11th of May, 1941. In total, German and Italian bombs injured 46,000 – 139,000 civilians, killed 40,000 – 43,000 men, women, and children, and destroyed 2,000,000 homes across the country. German bombing and missile attacks would continue throughout the war at a lower intensity.

The Luftwaffe had bombed London and killed civilians before, however, on the night of the 24th of August, which was followed by a retaliatory British raid on Berlin the next night. The attack on the 24th is widely considered to have been an accident caused by poor navigation on the part of the bomber crews, but some have cast doubt on this idea. Regardless of if the August 24th attack was accidental, however, such attacks were nothing new to the Luftwaffe. In the very first German act of war against Poland, German bombers had attacked the undefended and militarily worthless town of Wielun, strafing hospital patients as they fled. Two weeks later, the town of Frampol, also an illegitimate target, was bombed and its refugees strafed as well, in what was devised by the Luftwaffe as a training exercise.

Despite these attacks, the people of Britain, Poland, and other countries bombed by the Nazis such as the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, France, Belgium, Norway, Yugoslavia, and Greece would eventually defeat the warmongering and genocidal ideology of Nazism.

Never again.