Britain in the shadow of the Blitz
University researcher’s map details scale of aerial bombardment on country during Second World War
IT WAS two years into the war that Adolf Hitler, in the words of an air raid warden at the time, dropped his eggs on Guiseley.
The semi-industrial suburb in the West Riding, 10 miles north-west of Leeds and famous for turning out Silver Cross prams, was a world away from the heavily-bombed Yorkshire concentrations around Sheffield and Hull, strategic for steel and shipping.
But it was nevertheless one of the 30,000 pins on the Luftwaffe map which defined life – and often death – on the home front.
The 6,500 pages of daily reports from wartime intelligence officers chronicled every one, but only now are the details being made readily available, in an online map that makes finding an air raid site as easy as searching for a supermarket.
The project, the work of a University of York researcher, is being launched to mark the 80th anniversary today of the first air raid of the war, in the Firth of Forth outside Edinburgh.
Like the attack on Guiseley, there were no casualties that time. But over the next fiveand-a-half years, some 60,000 civilians were killed and another 139,000 wounded.
The map reveals that the Luftwaffe dropped some 580 bombs on the area around Hull, and a further 688 along the coast, from Scarborough down to Skegness.
The biggest concentration by far was in the South and East, with Liverpool also sustaining heavy bombardment.
But less densely populated areas were not immune to attack, with an injury reported at Leyburn in the Yorkshire Dales, on the night before New Year’s Eve of 1941.
Dr Laura Blomvall said the statistics should not overshadow the human tragedy the raids represented.
“There is a story behind each and every bomb. People lost their partners, their children or their homes,” she said.
“Bombs were dropped from the Orkney Islands to Coventry, from Liverpool to the Scilly Isles and from Dover to Swansea. “The normalisation of aerial warfare turned mainland Britain into a violent battlefield, and the term ‘home front’ was no longer figurative.” The map offered an “astonishing insight” into the scale of total war and its effect on the population, she added.
The attack on Guiseley – possibly targeted for the presence of the Crompton Parkinson light bulb factory, which was turned over to munitions work – was recorded in a note from an ARP warden in Bradford.
“If they were intended for Yeadon, it was a bad miss, but it made people sit up,” he wrote.
Dr George Hay, at the National Archives, said the map would be “a fantastic resource, not only for military and social historians, but for anyone interested in the impact of wartime air raids across the UK”.
There is a story behind each and every bomb. Dr Laura Blomvall, University of York researcher.
WE CAN never be reminded often enough about the sacrifices of the men and women who stood firm during this country’s darkest days.
As the Second World War fades from the memory of even the eldest among us, it is more important than ever to ensure that their collective experience remains part of our national consciousness. The work that has been done in York to document the day-to-day reality of the air assault on Britain is an important step towards that end.
More than 30,000 locations were bombed over the course of the conflict, the first just a few weeks after the hostilities had begun. But it is only when viewed at street level, as is now possible, that the enormity of the onslaught becomes clear. The effect on lives and property is hard for successive generations to comprehend, yet it was taken in the stride of those who were there.
History now considers them to be our greatest generation, and their finest hour is also ours.