Although war was declared on Germany on 3rd September 1939 for the first year there was absolutely no fighting between the two countries, this was known as the phoney war. During the phoney war the government believed that Germany would attack them at any minute and so prepared the country for war, they handed out regulations, built public shelters and even introduced rationing, which limited the number of food items that were rare or imported, this reduced the countries dependence for supplies from other countries as at the beginning of the war Britain imported more than half of its food supply, and in a war Germany could exploit this as a weakness and cripple the countries food supply, just as they had done in the first world war with their U-boat campaigns were the German submarines attacked British supply boats, in the last war this was a major blow but in the second world war this would have been devastating. So the government introduced rationing, however rationing was introduced alongside other campaigns such as ‘Make do and Mend’ and ‘dig for victory’, these sorts of campaigns encouraged people to become more self sufficient in their food products; to save on clothes material by mending their own clothes and to grow their own produce in allotments. We can tell that these campaigns worked because by 1943 there were more than 1.4 million allotments, meaning that more than half of the working class owned their own allotment.
The phoney war ended in April 1940 when Germany invaded Denmark and Norway, Hitler then in May 1940 invaded Holland, Belgium and France, in the midst of all these attacks Neville Chamberlain resigned as Prime Minister and was replaced by Winston Churchill who for the war formed a coalition government of all the political parties, so that Britain could pull together in an attempt to win the war.
During Hitler’s attack on France in 1940 a very famous and memorable event occurred in Dunkirk, which will be forever known as the miracle of Dunkirk. As between the 27th May and 4th June, during the battle of Dunkirk the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) found itself forced onto the beaches of Calais and Dunkirk, they were outflanked and had no options other than to perform a daring and risky feat, as the soldiers had to be saved by operation Dynamo in which the Soldiers were transported off the beach by the Royal Navy and privately owned boats. Although brave and daring this operation was nonetheless successful as other 340,000 men were saved in this way. Despite the fact that in this case the BEF were fleeing from the Germans for their lives and they lost lots of equipment the British government somehow seemed to twist this desperate rescue attempt into a bizarre victory saying that the courageous British soldiers had been heroically rescued from the cruel Germans, and would live to fight another day. This gave rise to the Dunkirk spirit, the idea that Britain would stand the test of the war and would prevail. However in actual fact the reality was extremely harsh, the BEF had lost a large amount of equipment 475 tanks, 1000 heavy guns, 400 anti-tank guns and casualties totalling 68,000.
After Hitler had taken over France on 22nd June 1940, he turned his attention to Britain, for which he had a strategic plan for its invasion. What Hitler planned to do was to destroy the Royal Air Force (RAF) eliminating Britain’s best line of defence, then he would send his army in boats across the channel, this was known as Operation Sea Lion and was quite an ingenious plan since Britain would no longer be able to put up a resistance when the RAF was destroyed, and so Hitler would be free to take over Britain thus controlling the whole of Europe. To put his plan into action Hitler must first try and destroy Britain’s RAF, so for the first month Hitler’s bombings he attacked mostly Britain’s airfields, ports and radar stations, and anything else which supported the RAF. This occurred between July and August 1940, however suddenly in the middle of August Hitler began a full on battle with Britain’s RAF, this was known as the Battle of Britain where the RAF fought the Luftwaffe. This battle was crucial for Hitler’s take over of Britain, as he absolutely needed control of the skies, as without this when Hitler sent his soldiers across the English Channel Britain’s RAF would quite easily target Hitler’s boats and destroy a large proportion of his army. S o this battle was essential to Operation Sea Lions success.
The battle of Britain was a very tense time for the British people as they knew that if the Luftwaffe succeeded in destroying the RAF then Britain would be left practically defenceless to the German invasion and Hitler would be able to take over the country. So this was a very frightening time, particularly after the first few weeks of the battle when the RAF began to lose more aircraft than the Germans, this worried people as they could clearly see that Britain was slowly losing the battle. People become even more anxious because although industry could replace the planes it took much longer to train the pilots, so often people’s friends and relatives were going into battle with only 10 hours flying experience and this made the government appear extremely desperate which in fact it was.
However there was mass relief when Hitler suddenly changed his tactics and stopped with the assault on the RAF. With the end of the battle of Britain Hitler decide to change his tactics, he ceased the daylight attacks on the RAF, and instead sent the Luftwaffe on night time attacks on London and many of Britain’s other major cities, this was known as the blitz and it had three main purposes; to destroy transport, ruin the countries industry and to lower the British people’s morale by destroying their homes and killing their family members, this terrified the British public and caused wide spread panic. On Hitler’s first attack on London, Britain was caught completely off-guard, this allowed Hitler to carefully choose his targets, so he could destroy major points of industry or even to destroy transport, so he got a free chance to attack the London Docks, the Woolwich Arsenal and armament factories in Silver town. The result of this first attack was 430 Londoners dead and 1600 people were injured. This was devastating and brought great fear and upheaval n the country.
So the main cities of Britain were bombed originally to destroy the RAF and weaken the British air force substantially, however after Operation Sea Lion was scrapped the bombings became an attempt to achieve three main goals, to destroy British transport, destroy British industry and to break the morale of the British people by performing night time terror bombings.
