Customer Reviews

Blitz: The Story of December 29, 1940

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The German air attacks on England fall into about four main segments: Early, The Battle of Britain, The Blitz, and Later. Early was the almost casual air raids made by Germany. The Battle of Britain is usually considered to be from 9 July to 31 October 1940 and was the period when the Germans attempted to wipe out the RAF. The Blitz is the attack on British cities and is between 7 September 1940 and 16 May 1941. After that the later attacks were sporatic until the V-1 and V-2 weapons came into use.

This book is a detailed look at one day during the Blitz, December 29, 1940. This day saw the most devastating raid of the Blitz which caused what has been called The Second Great Fire of London. A famous photograph shows St Paul's Cathedral enshrouded in smoke, this photograph is used on the front cover of the book.

All in all, some 1,500 fires were started by the German incindary bombs, somewhere around 3,000 (no one knows for sure) civilians were killed. While these numbers are minor when compared to what came later in the war, the picture of St. Pauls, and the on the scene reporting by Edward R. Murrow was instrumental in convincing the Americans to enter the war.

This is not a historical report on the Blitz. It is a detailed report on what happened one night as told through the voices of people who were there.

Sadly the reviewer below seems to have been right; hardback copies of this book are currently residing in the "cut out bins" of bookshops across London. A shame, because I very much enjoyed reading it. At the same time I think I can see some problems with it. As a general reader I was quite interested in reading a book about the London Blitz as a whole; I was not sure that I wanted to read a minute by minute account of one night only, no matter how serious. The slightly (well, I thought so) gimmicky list of all the fatalities that night together with their addresses in the appendix seemed to threaten an unwanted degree of detail. In fact, I need not have worried because the book does give a good general account to the background of the whole ariel campaign against London. The author puts forward the night of the 29th December 1940 in London as one of the key nodal dates in history, like drawing a piece of rich fabric through a ring, everything seems to lead up to and then away from this moment. The description of the build up to the attack itself is very effective and when the conflagration starts people do show extraordinary courage and devotion to duty. I still can't quite get my head round the fact that in the middle of the bombardment there were taxis and buses running and that people came into work the next day. Amazing. If I had one criticism it would be that having given quite a lot of background context to what happened before the Blitz we don't learn very much about what happened afterwards. There were other incendiary attacks but why was something on the scale of 12/29 not tried again? What was the response in Germany to what had happened in London? How did the London Blitz relate to the subsequent Allied attacks on German targets? What about the V weapons? I think in a book which had already included a lot of general material about aerial warfare, Churchill and the position of America a chapter or so more on consequences would have been interesting. I would gladly have exchanged the appendix of fatalities for this. Finally, on a more positive note, I see that paperback copies of this book are appearing for sale in the London museums so perhaps it might even yet become a little classic.

Perhaps I expected a little too much from this book. As an Englishman born at the very end of the war I still seek answers to the devastation I saw as a child and didn't receive then. I was hoping that with the journalistic skills of the author that this was going to be the definitive work on the bombing of our capital city, London. I found the anecdotal nature of this work distracting from it's stated primary intention. As with all criticism however, it is just the critics opinion and in this case this critics disappointment, but there is a lot to be gained by reading this work for anyone who had no knowledge of the blitz and who would be more accepting of it's format.

I read a lot of books and this one did not all at all catch my interest. In the 1970's when an album did not sell it was consigned to the cut-out bin, to be sold for $1.99, etc. Such should be the book-equivalent fate for this book. My time reading it was not well-spent, and I regret that I did not use that time reading something worthwhile. Especially do not buy it if you are a WWII buff and have an interest in the December 29, 1940 air raid- you will be very disappointed.