London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead. Story time. History time.
And in the beginning of London Calling, is the word.
Our word of the day.
One word.
Five letters.
Blitz.
You know that word.
Of course you do.
It’s one of those words that comes trailing an entire world behind it.
Say “Blitz” and you see London.
Blackout.
Searchlights.
Barrage balloons.
Air-raid sirens.
Anderson shelters.
People sleeping on Underground platforms.
ARP wardens.
Incendiaries.
Buildings opened up like dolls’ houses.
Firefighters silhouetted against burning streets.
St Paul’s floating miraculously above the smoke.
It permeates our sensibility about those years.
But here’s the thing.
Go back exactly 86 years, to August 24th, 1940, and that little word hasn’t acquired any of that baggage yet.
For most Londoners it’s either a foreign word, a very new word, or no word at all.
It’s German.
Blitz.
Lightning.
The word had come into English principally riding on the back of another German word.
Blitzkrieg.
Literally, lightning war.
The terrifyingly fast German way of war that had smashed through Poland, the Low Countries and France.
But our English “Blitz”?
The Blitz with a capital B?
The word that summons up London night after night under German bombs?
That meaning is still being made.
Londoners on August 24th, 1940, don’t know they’re about to live inside that word.
Edward R. Murrow doesn’t know.
Churchill doesn’t know.
The newspaper editors don’t know.
The bloke standing in Trafalgar Square lighting his cigarette certainly doesn’t know.
We know.
And that gives us one of history’s great privileges.
We can stand beside them…
and see round the corner.
And what’s round the corner is extraordinary.
Because this great, terrible chapter in London’s history is about to turn on something almost ridiculously small.
A navigational error.
Some German airmen, flying at night over blacked-out southern England, are going to get it wrong.
Wrong course.
Wrong place.
Wrong target.
Their bombs are supposed to fall elsewhere.
They fall on London.
And those misplaced bombs are going to help set off a chain reaction.
London bombed.
Churchill retaliates.
Berlin bombed.
Hitler enraged.
The rules change.
And less than two weeks later, hundreds upon hundreds of German bombers will come deliberately for London.
Not by mistake this time.
The docks will burn.
The East End will burn.
Londoners will die in their hundreds.
And that new little word will acquire the meaning it still carries today.
Blitz.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Because none of that has happened yet.
It’s still Saturday night.
August 24th, 1940.
So let’s go to Trafalgar Square.
London is blacked out.
Nelson is up there on his column, invisible against the dark sky.
There’s a big red London bus coming round the corner.
Hardly any lights showing.
Just those little illuminated windows on the upper deck.
And standing on the steps of St Martin-in-the-Fields is a 32-year-old American.
Edward R. Murrow.
He’s got a microphone.
He’s broadcasting to America.
The programme is called London After Dark.
And then it happens.
The air-raid sirens begin to wail.
Murrow says:
“This is Trafalgar Square. The noise that you hear at the moment is the sound of the air-raid sirens.”
A searchlight suddenly comes on.
One great white finger feeling its way across the London sky.
Murrow looks around him.
“People are walking along quite quietly.”
That’s the detail.
That’s London.
The entrance to an air-raid shelter is right beside him.
People are filing past and Murrow realises his microphone cable is getting in their way.
So, live on air, he says:
“I must move this cable over just a bit so people can walk in.”
Another searchlight comes on behind Nelson.
And Murrow stops talking for a moment.
Lets America listen.
The siren.
The traffic.
The footsteps.
Some people are walking rather hurriedly towards the shelters.
Others are taking their time.
And one man does something so magnificently ordinary I wish we knew his name.
The air-raid sirens are wailing.
Searchlights are probing the sky.
German aircraft are approaching England.
And this Londoner stops in front of Edward R. Murrow…
to light a cigarette.
Elsewhere in London that same evening, another American broadcaster, Eric Sevareid, is at the Hammersmith Palais.
More than a thousand people are dancing.
The air-raid warning sounds.
The orchestra leader makes an announcement.
They’ll carry on playing if everybody wants to stay.
Sevareid reckons perhaps half a dozen people leave.
Everybody else carries on dancing.
And remember the date.
August 24th, 1940.
Because somewhere out there in the darkness are German bombers.
Their intended targets are not Trafalgar Square.
Not Oxford Street.
Not the heart of London.
The intended targets appear to have included Rochester and the Thameshaven oil installations.
But this is night navigation in 1940.
No satellite.
No GPS.
No little blue dot telling you exactly where you are.
Below is blackout Britain.
Darkness.
Cloud.
Coastline.
Rivers.
Searchlights.
Anti-aircraft fire.
And somebody gets it wrong.
The German bombers overshoot.
They mistake where they are.
Bomb-bay doors open.
The bombs fall.
On London.
That’s the hinge.
Because Hitler has not ordered this attack on the capital.
But Churchill doesn’t know that.
And in any case, it scarcely matters to the Londoner underneath a falling bomb whether the man who released it was supposed to be somewhere else.
Britain answers.
The following night, August 25th into the 26th, 81 RAF bombers are sent towards Berlin.
Berlin.
That matters.
Because Hermann Göring has boasted about the security of the German capital.
British bombers over Berlin?
The very idea.
And now the sirens sound there too.
The physical damage is comparatively small.
The psychological damage is enormous.
The war has crossed another line.
Hitler is furious.
On September 4th he stands before a roaring crowd at the Berlin Sportpalast and threatens Britain.
If they drop thousands of kilograms of bombs on Germany, he says, Germany will drop hundreds of thousands, then millions.
Three days later comes September 7th.
Black Saturday.
This time there is no navigational error.
No wrong target.
No mistake.
The Luftwaffe comes for London deliberately and in overwhelming strength.
Nearly a thousand German aircraft are committed.
The docks and the East End are hammered.
More than 400 Londoners are killed.
Around 1,600 are seriously injured.
London burns.
And the Blitz begins.
Night after night after night.
Fifty-seven consecutive nights of bombing.
So be careful with history.
One navigational error did not, all by itself, cause the Blitz.
There were strategies being debated.
Military calculations being made.
Hitler.
Göring.
Fighter Command.
The invasion problem.
The whole enormous machinery of war.
But those bombs falling in the wrong place on the night of August 24th helped push open a door.
London.
Then Berlin.
Then London again.
Except the next time…
they knew exactly where they were going.
And suddenly that little German word has changed.
Blitz.
Lightning.
It’s no longer just a foreign word.
It’s a London word.
A shelter word.
A fireman’s word.
A widow’s word.
A child’s word.
A word for nights spent underground.
A word for streets that aren’t there in the morning.
A word for death.
And survival.
And endurance.
And that’s the extraordinary thing about August 24th.
The people in Trafalgar Square aren’t living through “the Blitz”.
Not yet.
They’re living through Saturday night.
Murrow is doing his broadcast.
People are walking home.
A bus is coming round the corner.
A thousand people are dancing in Hammersmith.
And one Londoner is lighting a cigarette.
They can’t see round the corner.
We can.
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.