As Richard Overy suggests in his book on the Battle, this division encourages the popular but misleading belief that the London Blitz was a response to the RAF’s attacks on Berlin. He argues that the framing of the Blitz as a retaliatory measure by the Germans was largely a rhetorical justification, and that the campaign had already been edging steadily in that direction throughout August.

Oh, I wasn’t offended! And it was good chance to expand upon a point I wanted to make.

Chris:

Nah, it’d be good for them — they might learn something!

Sorry!

I think that’s a good point. I’ve thought for a while that dividing the air war into “the Battle of Britain” and “the Blitz” is unhelpful in some ways and this is another example of that. The top graph in this post (rather, the data you compiled!) shows that August 1940 was the period of heaviest casualties outside of the Blitz proper and the V-1 attacks, and about equal to the Baby Blitz. But it’s all but forgotten next to to 7 September and after.

It comes through very clearly from Harrisson’s Living Through the Blitz that the Luftwaffe’s attacks on cities were most damaging and disruptive when the target hadn’t been attacked before. Local government, ARP, emergency services and utilities all learned how to cope better after being bombed a few times (and, it seems, didn’t learn much from the lessons of other cities — or maybe there’s just no substitute for experience). The same would likely be true of civilians in general. Much of the fear of air attack was in the not knowing what to expect. Once people did know, even if it was bad, it was a lot easier to bear.

And the suddenness of the knock-out blow is indeed key, as well as the fact that it comes at the start of war. I’m not entirely convinced that a knock-out blow couldn’t have worked in September 1939, or at least been approached. A sudden, massive air attack at the start of war — there wouldn’t have been time to learn lessons or overcome anxieties. I doubt it would have knocked Britain out of the war but it could have been a lot uglier than the Blitz!
Of course, Germany didn’t have the forces and it was more concerned to finish Poland off quickly. But that gave the British a year’s grace to prepare.

Gavin:

Cheers! The legacy of a youth misspent in physics. I do know what you mean; another abuse of mathematics that always annoys me is ‘infinitely’: infinity isn’t just a really, really big number …

roGER:

Thanks — though I wouldn’t say that graphs themselves are deceiving (the person presenting them may be, if they don’t label or explain them properly). Something I wanted to show with this post is that there’s not any one best way to plot data: any method that you do choose will emphasise some aspect of the data at the expense of other aspects. It all depends on what story you are trying to tell. A bit like history itself, really …