Mobs, Messiahs, and Markets

London Blitz: Beginning the Bombing

Eventually, however, Britain's air defenses were in danger of collapsing. Then, at the last moment, a retaliatory British air strike made the Führer lose his wits—and the war; he began bombing English cities instead of military targets, giving the RAF time to recover from the damage inflicted on it.

The raids came almost every night, leaving hundreds of casualties and billions in property damage. London's infrastructure—roads, railways, water, sewage, power—was blown up repeatedly and was under constant repair. But remarkably—and here we make our first point—the longer the raids went on, the more people took them for granted and went about their business. People stopped going into air raid shelters (only about 4 percent of the population ever went into them). Instead, they went to movie theaters and enjoyed the shows. The threat from outside demolished London's buildings and infrastructure, but it rebuilt her spirit. The more they came under attack, the more people felt their solidarity as Londoners.

Finally, in November 1940, the raids began to tail off, although they remained no less deadly. A huge raid in May of the following year, for instance, brought 550 German bombers over London, dropping 700 tons of bombs and thousands of incendiaries. This was probably the worst raid of the entire war, killing nearly 1,500 people in addition to destroying much of the House of Commons. The House of Lords, Westminster Abbey, Westminster Hall, St James's ...