London was the heaviest bombed city in the country. The series of bombing raids night after night were known as the Blitz. These raids were designed with the intent of getting rid of the leadership and killing civilians as well as destroying houses making people homeless. This was supposed to lower the morale of the citizens but if anything it made them more defiant. One of the places worst bombed was the East End. Thousands lost their homes in an area which was and still is, one of the poorest in the country.
Manchester was a city that was bombed because it was one of the main industrial towns in the country. By bombing Manchester the whole country suffered a huge lack of certain goods that were needed and wanted by citizens of this country like soap. Because of a shortage of soap there were fleas and other diseases being spread around.
These cities were bombed to bring the country to a standstill. And to starve us of resources. That did not happen, thanks to the resilience of the British people. In a way, those bombings of London, Liverpool and Coventry, pushed the country together to work against the enemy united.
- Describe the effects of the Blitz on everyday life in Britain.
The Blitz effected everyday life in Britain because there was lots of disruption to the things that kept Britain ticking on. Things like shops or office blocks could be flattened in one bombing raid. This would mean that there would be no jobs for people to go to and, in the case of a shop, people would not be able to buy the supplies they needed. This made many people poor and people going without supplies that they needed. As a result of there being not enough soap disease spread and rats infested cities like London with all the old food left from bombed out houses.
People learnt to deal with it and compromised by growing their own food and making their own clothes and going without things that they would never have gone without before.
The infrastructure of the country was in tatters. People tried to get on with life as normal as possible. People working in factories lost a lot of working hours due to air-raids. They lost working hours as that as soon as they heard the air-raid sirens they would run straight down to the shelters. But often there was a long time between the sirens going off any sign, if any, of a German plane. To combat this problem, men called “Jim Crows” were placed on top of factories as look outs. It was their job to look out for planes and call for the factories to be evacuated.
Targeted attacks at cites such as Coventry and Liverpool meant that war work went literally underground and equipment such as radar and ammunition were made. One of these stations was “Gants Hill Tube Station”. The tunnel was there but the track had not yet been laid yet so the stretch of tunnel from “Leytonstone Station” was an ideal place to make war resources such as guns, bombs and clothes.
When there was heavy bombing over London during the Blitz the Government, fearing a bombing of the Houses of Parliament the war rooms were set up in Whitehall. These were to protect the government from bombings or attacks.
In conclusion to the question, the Blitz effected the lives of civilians who were not fit to fight. Children, women, the old and disabled people were all on the front line. There was no choice in the matter. That is bound to have an affect on every aspect of life that we take for granted in peace time. Even going to the shop for a newspaper. The shop might not be there, the printing company that printed the paper might have been destroyed, or even the ink suppliers to the printing company might have vanished, in one nights bombing. If one of these stages does not work then there will be no newspaper. Imagine that now with a company making bread, or even the government of the country, all these things would affect the people of Britain’s everyday life.
