Coincidence or what? With the new updated edition of Steaming to Victory out in a few days, my local paper, the CNJ, rang me last night to ask advice about the origin of an unexploded bomb found not far from my home in Camden yesterday, closing busy Hatton Garden to traffic. I’ve written lots about bombs in Camden and was able to tell them that the area was a high-ranking target for the Luftwaffe because it was close to the railway goods yards at Euston, King’s Cross and St Pancras as well as on the borders of the City of London. Even though these bombs are 70 years old, anything still can happen with these dangerous old things! Here’s a picture of what one did to St Pancras in 1941. And below an extract from what I wrote about the London blitz
IT WAS not until 7 September 1940 that Londoners felt the full force of the Luftwaffe intentions when the Reichsmarschall, with the pomp characteristic of the Nazi high command, announced the arrival of the ‘historic hour when our air force delivers its first strike into the enemy’s heart’. The railwaymen and -women of London, along with the civilian population, did not have to wait long to see what he meant, as they were about to experience the full impact of the Blitz, with heavier and more sustained destruction than anywhere else in the land.
On that delightfully warm Saturday afternoon one off-duty senior fire officer was having his leisurely off-duty tea in the shade on a lawn in the south London suburb of Dulwich. There were planes about, and some gun noise – which was hardly unusual – but soon after five o’clock he saw a great rash of black dots break out to the north against the summer sky – hostile planes, in numbers never yet seen over any great city of Britain, moving upriver from the east. There were the heavy whoomphs of distant bomb explosions as the Dornier 17s flooded in. Spirals of black smoke twisted into the sky from where the bombs had hit. Eventually there were so many they combined into a pall that hung over the London skyscape as far as the eye could see. The Dulwich fire officer knew this was serious. He was out of his flannels, into his uniform and in five minutes on his way to headquarters and to a greater firefight than any he or his colleagues had ever seen or imagined.
Some 348 German bombers accompanied by 617 fighters were swooping across the capital in waves. They dropped their first load of bombs as they came in over east London on Woolwich Arsenal and on the gasworks at Beckton – London’s first civilian target. Later waves moved on to pound the docks at Millwall, Limehouse and Rotherhithe, as well as the Surrey Docks and the tiny St Katharine Docks in the lee of Tower Bridge. The Germans then veered west over the City … Michael Williams, author
