I found this fascinating. I grew up in London during the 50s so the war and the blitz were still fresh in people's minds when I was a child.
My father, who was a member of the crew of a Sunderland flying boat, didn't talk about it very much. He was a moody bastard with a quick temper, probably as a result of several years of flying sorties over the Atlantic that lasted many hours—a dreadful combination of boredom and intense anxiety and fear.
My mum was more forthcoming. She told me once of going into work in Fleet Street—she was a sub editor on a magazine—and seeing a bomb caught by its tail fins in a tangle of wires, just hanging there above the street. The authorities had cordoned off the immediate area but people were just detouring around it and going to work as usual.
Of course I checked out the area where I grew up in north London—ten years before I was born a stick of four bombs appears to have fallen across the street I lived in. It's possible to see additional information about any of the bombs by clicking on the symbol of the one you are interested in.
Anyone interested in how civilians experienced the second world war in London could have a look at 'Civilians at War' by George Beardmore, who kept a journal between 1938 and 1946 which he later published.
Also worth noting that unexploded bombs from the Second World War still turn up in London every now and again, e.g. 21 May in Wembley [0], 14 May in Bromley [1], 23 March in Bermondsey [2], 20 February in New Malden [3].
Also interesting is the ship wreck at the mouth of the Thames containing 1,400 tons of explosives. They estimate if it blew it would be felt in London and create a tidal wave 1-5 meters high.
Lest we forget the true nature of war, it should be noted that British and American bombs are discovered all over the place in Germany too, every year. And still cause casualties, alas.
Yes - from today's news at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-32897388 "Some 20,000 people in the German city of Cologne have been forced to leave their homes as authorities defuse a one-tonne bomb from World War Two".
Wikipedia has numbers: Every year, about 5,500 duds are removed (sometimes, evacuation of several 10,000 people included), the daily average is given as 15. In 2013 an estimated 100,000 were remaining. Wars suck, for everyone and for a long time.
Reminded me of the opening passage of Gravity's Rainbow. Tyrone Slothrop gets around...
"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is nothing to compare it to now.
It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will fall--soon--it will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.
Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels, he sits in velveteen darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer and farther rub and connect, steam escaping in puffs, a vibration in the carriage's frame, a poising, an uneasiness, all the others pressed in around, feeble ones, second sheep, all out of luck and time: drunks, old veterans still in shock from ordnance 20 years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted women with more children than it seems could belong to anyone, stacked about among the rest of the things to be carried out to salvation. Only the nearer faces are visible at all, and at that only as half-silvered images in a view finder, green-stained VIP faces remembered behind bulletproof windows speeding through the city..."
Gravity's Rainbow is a cool book, but it's actually about the V2 rockets (roughly 1,300 of which hit London), that started being used in 1944.
Meanwhile the "blitz" and The Battle of Britain were an entirely different part of the war, taking place about four years earlier, and this map seems to cover that period of time, from late 1940 to mid-1941.
As the other comment says, Gravity's Rainbow is about the V-2s; but I also recall that there is an element regarding the map of Slothrop's sexual adventures matching nicely to the map of V-2 strikes. (Well, I think I recall--it has been a long time since I read the book.)
Strangely enough I was just showing the visiting inlaws this site last night, after their trip to the Imperial War Museum yesterday.
I now live in a part of London which is a conservation area, which has lots of nice old houses and streets. But every two streets or so there is a not-as-attractive 50s/60s/70s house. I used to joke that these were 2nd World War bomb sites, but after seeing the map of bombs for the first time a few years back I realised that might not be far off the truth.
It certainly puts modern day complaints, such as the cost of housing and long working hours, into perspective.
It looks like they didn't spared places like Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, London bridges and so on. How did these things survived then? I can't tell at all if these were re-build after WWII.
The tragedy of the aerial bombardment of WWII is that bombing was not precise enough to hit specific buildings or landmarks. The targets was on the level of a whole city. This is part of the reason the number of civilian casualties in WWII were so huge compared to previous wars. All parties in the war did this, but the allied were simply more effective due to air superiority, especially towards the end of the war. This is why cities in Germany where totally destroyed while London was not.
Aerial bombardment was very inaccurate in those days. In Berlin, the RAF failed to hit what was then the largest office building in the world: the ministry of aviation. However, they did destroy one of the oldest synagogues in Europe.
In reality, the day bombing was "precision bombing" only in the sense that most bombs fell somewhere near a specific designated target such as a railway yard. Conventionally, the air forces designated as "the target area" a circle having a radius of 1,000 feet around the aiming point of attack. While accuracy improved during the war, Survey studies show that, overall, only about 20% of the bombs aimed at precision targets fell within this target area.[159] In the fall of 1944, only seven percent of all bombs dropped by the Eighth Air Force hit within 1,000 feet of their aim point.
For a separate discussion about the argument that the allies should have bombed the lines to the death camps:
I've been bewildered for a decade how anyone proposes that they could have done any damage to a 1.4 meter wide target made of two steel beams lying on the earth. At least, any damage that could not have been repaired in half a week.
Barnes Wallis' Tallboy[1] was a 5 ton bomb designed to be dropped from a high altitude and penetrate deep underground. Upon detonation at the correct depth it could create a large crater, up to 100ft deep and 80ft across, which was identified as being useful for attacking railway targets and airstrips, as repair of these craters was time consuming. Combined with the specialised bomb sights used by the squadron who dropped the Tallboys, successfully bombing a small target such as a viaduct or railway line was doable.
However this bomb wasn't used before June '44, when most of the death camps were closed or closing, and the short supply of Tallboys meant that they were exclusively used for targets of high military importance.
You don't blow up just any track: you blow up bridges because they take so much more time to build or repair.
As for the targeting: you have to go really low. British bombers attacked the gestapo hq in Copenhagen by going so low that their bombs were dropped into the sides of the building (consequently, although that wasn't the plan, a number of prisoners who had been housed in cells in the top floor managed to escape).
Of course you can only do something like that if you are willing to paint a huge target on yourself because you will be very easy to shoot down.
Part of the Copenhagen story is that the first planes hit the Gestapo HQ with the bombs, but one of the planes hit a tower, dropped the bombs over a random street and then crashed into a girls school. The following planes then bombed the crash-site (the school) since they saw the smoke and thought it was the target. Precision bombing was incredible risky.
But cruise missiles fly low for the express purpose of being harder to shoot down! I know, radar and anti-aircraft measures are different now. But flying low means antiaircraft measures have only hundreds milliseconds to spot you, aim and fire, before you pass over.
Flying low and fast means that the heavy AA can't hit you, but it leaves you vulnerable to light AA. If you're low and fast enough, then they won't have much warning and your angular velocity will be pretty high, making you harder to hit. At the same time, light AA rounds get to the target faster. That means they are shooting at you, rather than where they think you are going to be. That light AA also has a better rate of fire.
Low and fast was safer in many scenarios, but it wasn't without drawbacks.
You have your bombing run at an angle to the rails, not parallel or perpendicular. Like the RAF did with Operation Black Buck in the Falklands.
Anyway, what I've usually heard is that they should have bombed the camps themselves, not the rail lines leading to them. That's not what I personally think, but that's what I've heard others talk about.
Bombing the camps would have killed the prisoners. Extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau was built in connection with the concentration camp Auschwitz, so it would have been impossible to bomb without killing camp prisoners.
Now something like Treblinka was purely a "killing factory" with no prisoners held for more than a few hours before they were killed. In that case bombing everything would probably have saved lives in retrospect, since any prisoners at the site would have been killed anyway, and destroying the facilities would have slowed down the extermination project. But while the allied knew mass killings was taking place, they didn't know enough about the locations and logistics to make that call.
The argument is (and again, it is not mine) that it would have been better to kill everyone currently in the camp, if it meant that the camp was taken out of commission for the future. The holocaust survivor I first heard this from was talking specifically of Auschwitz.
I understand the sentiment, but deliberate bombing a prisoners camp (which btw. also have a number of your own captured soldiers) in order to destroy the facility? In any case a camp could quickly be rebuilt somewhere else, much more complex installations like airplane factories were moved around and continued to operate despite heavy bombing.
From "Why Wasn't Big Ben Bombed During World War II?" [0]: "Luck. Sheer luck. At the time of the Blitz, the Germans, like every air power, did not have the ability to specifically target key buildings through high-altitude bombing raids..."
Partly because Hitler ordered that specific cultural sites shouldn't be targeted. Partly because a lot of buildings in London actually were destroyed then rebuilt close enough to what they were that most people can't tell the difference. For example the whole south side of Fleet Street was reduced to rubble near Temple Bar but you wouldn't know it now.
Hitler might have made that order, but that doesn't mean that WWII bombers were actually able to bomb with such precision that they could deliberately avoid hitting specific buildings. Especially since the bombings happened at night! The blitz was "strategic bombing" which basically means a large area is bombed in order to destroy and and kill as much as possible - not target specific buildings.
I'm curious about how the civilian population went about this. I'd like to say that if I saw even a remote possibility of something like this happening, I'd hastily vamoose to the hinterlands without a second thought and remain there indefinitely.
What percentage of people left the cities in anticipation of such events? The narratives I've seen on the Japanese bombings was that people strategically moved to the smallest villages they could find family in.
Children were evacuated to live with volunteer homestay families in the countryside. From what I was taught at school, it was a case of suitcase, gas mask and name tag, then get on the train with all the other kids. This is how The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (and many other books/films) starts.
For those that stayed behind there was a post-war pride that they stuck it through and didn't give in, but it must have been unimaginable even with the bomb shelters and London Underground. Again, this is what I've been taught from my elders so not first-hand experience.
EDIT: I should add that I realise it was not just Britain for whom things were unimaginable.
EDIT 2: Another factor that must have had a big effect on Londoners was that the king and queen stayed at Buckingham Palace (which was hit a few times) during the war.
Some people did, if they had the money. Children were evacuated and dispersed. However, as always, people have to live within commuting distance of their work. And pretty much everyone was either conscripted, recruited into the manufacturing or logistic side of the war effort, or in one of the "exempt" professions keeping the country operating. My grandfather was one of those as a railway signalman.
I can't remember whether ration cards were location-restricted as well, or whether there were bureaucratic obstacles to freedom of movement.
As others have pointed out children were evacuated, but realistically a lot of people have jobs to do that they can't just do elsewhere and most people just don't believe things like that will happen to them and certainly not here (there is a TED talk by a photographer of the Bosnian war about this that I cannot find right).
Finally, this is British people we are talking about: a stiff upper lip is basically their national idea (or was).
Regardless I hope I would have the foresight to do some vamoosing of my own, in case things went that much south.
My Grandma moved with their sons (my father & uncle) from the city to the countryside to her uncle during WWII.
It was probably a bad decision, because there was a lot of heavy industry, therefore of lot of bombs and heavy ground fighting.
Wait. Every bomb? Seriously, how is that even possible? I guess, once you zoom in you realize the bombing wasn't really all that dense and I guess each bomb could have been cataloged.
What would be interesting is tying the bombs into stings and reconstructing the bomb raids over time.
I'm not mathematician, but yes there have been studies to show that bombs sometimes fell in clusters, and those clusters were symptomatic of a perfectly random distribution, and that the nazi didn't have the skills/time to target some places more than others. In fact, if a function returned a homogeneous grid of spots, then it would be optimized for homogeneity, not randomness.
I can't see any possible reason for the distribution to be Poisson.
It should be completely random, but the representation on the map is too regular..
Looks like the apparent regularity is an artifact of the way the data is filtered for display on the map for some scales; if I zoom out/in the fully random distribution becomes more visible.
Poisson distributions are completely random, so I'm guessing you mean either a uniform or normal distribution.
failrate is making a reference to the Thomas Pynchon novel "Gravity's Rainbow", in which the Poisson distribution of the bombing of London is a major plot point.
And I do believe the author is correct by claiming it is a Poisson distribution, since we are talking a number of events per km^2.
Thanks, I see now.
I was thinking that Poisson distributions look like distributions generated by Poisson disk sampling (with which I was more familiar).
Pick bananas. He trudges through black compost in
to the hothouse. He feels he's about to shit. The
missile, sixty miles high, must be coming up on
the peak of its trajectory by now...
beginning its fall...
now...
A few hundred. By balloons launched from Japanese subs off coast of Northwest US. No accurate record available because the discoveries were strictly kept as secrets.
"On September 9, 1942 Japanese pilot Nobuo Fujita catapulted from the I-25 near the coast of southern Oregon aboard a seaplane and headed east toward Mt. Emily. His mission was to drop an incendiary (fire) bomb on the thick forest and cause a massive fire that would shock Americans and divert resources from fighting the war."
And I guess thousands, including live ones, were dropped in training exercises and during tests.
All sides in the war took pictures while dropping bombs.
So, each country that got hit during WWII is evaluating those pictures nowadays to find non-detonated bombs – leading to lots of maps of where bombs fell.
My father, who was a member of the crew of a Sunderland flying boat, didn't talk about it very much. He was a moody bastard with a quick temper, probably as a result of several years of flying sorties over the Atlantic that lasted many hours—a dreadful combination of boredom and intense anxiety and fear.
My mum was more forthcoming. She told me once of going into work in Fleet Street—she was a sub editor on a magazine—and seeing a bomb caught by its tail fins in a tangle of wires, just hanging there above the street. The authorities had cordoned off the immediate area but people were just detouring around it and going to work as usual.
Of course I checked out the area where I grew up in north London—ten years before I was born a stick of four bombs appears to have fallen across the street I lived in. It's possible to see additional information about any of the bombs by clicking on the symbol of the one you are interested in.
Anyone interested in how civilians experienced the second world war in London could have a look at 'Civilians at War' by George Beardmore, who kept a journal between 1938 and 1946 which he later published.