edcayton Posted August 17, 2012 Share Posted August 17, 2012 Roughly one third of all homes in the UK were damaged by enemy bombing during WW11. Seen at Duxford yesterday. It staggered me. Ed Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
trisonic Posted August 17, 2012 Share Posted August 17, 2012 That's because there was so much damage in London and other major conurbations like Coventry. Best, Pete. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
edcayton Posted August 17, 2012 Author Share Posted August 17, 2012 Appreciate that Pete, but I'd have thought that a higher proportion of the population lived in the country then before farms got very mechanised. Ed Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kenton Posted August 17, 2012 Share Posted August 17, 2012 Like many statistics it is very difficult to believe. Especially as many villages and small towns never saw a single hit. Even more difficult to believe when you visit a city these days and see so many house built pre-WWII still standing intact. But then I guess there is damage and "damage" - a cracked pane of glass I guess counts. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kits from Somerset Posted August 17, 2012 Share Posted August 17, 2012 The house where I spent my child hood had a ceiling come down when a bomber dumped its load to do a runner and this was on the edge of a village a long away from the targets. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
34theletterbetweenB&D Posted August 17, 2012 Share Posted August 17, 2012 And crowded and poorly built tenement style construction is disproportionately vulnerable too. The effect of an off target bomb can still be seen 200 yards from where I live. Two houses sufficiently damaged to be later demolished enabling a road to be put through part of what were their plots; and although this was low density development, roughly three homes per acre, a good dozen sustaining 'nuisance damage', broken windows, displaced tiles and the like. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ceptic Posted August 17, 2012 Share Posted August 17, 2012 A friend of mine's house, in Bournemouth, is still suffering subsidence and wall cracking, caused by / blamed on a land-mine (parachute bomb), dropped on a school a quarter of a mile away, in 1943. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
coachmann Posted August 17, 2012 Share Posted August 17, 2012 As one who saw the damage inflicted on Manchester and surrounding towns, it was far more widespread than just the hot spots. Several reasons... Off target, and offloading weight to escape the RAF. The latter accounted for many homes being hit where there were no logical targets, in North Wales for example to clear the mountains while escaping from Liverpool. Unmanned doodlebogs and rockets played a part too. I expect those of us born in the war took it all for granted seeing as we had never known anything else, and playing in bombed out homes and shelters was a way of life for many into the 1950s. One thing that looked odd was streets with no houses in densely populated terraced areas, a sign that some places had had it bad. Towards the end of the war one of my Grans came to collect me from Hyde to stay with her in Oldham but when we got there the bedroom ceiling was on the bed where would have slept! I remember my gran crying probably becasue of the consequences if it had fallen an hour later or two later. Collateral damage after five years of bombardment. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Premium petethemole Posted August 17, 2012 RMweb Premium Share Posted August 17, 2012 During my work I've come across a lot of material relating to the Blitz, mostly on Southampton. Records of damage include all damage, however slight, so a single HE bomb of no great size in a residential area would cause damage over the surrounding area. Single bombs, widely spaced, would statistically cause more damaged properties than a group close together. Pete Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold TheSignalEngineer Posted August 17, 2012 RMweb Gold Share Posted August 17, 2012 A house I had in Birmingham for many years had a bulge in one wall which apparently appeared when a stray bomb landed about 100 yards away during a raid on the Tyseley area. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
S.A.C Martin Posted August 17, 2012 Share Posted August 17, 2012 Like many statistics it is very difficult to believe. Especially as many villages and small towns never saw a single hit. Even more difficult to believe when you visit a city these days and see so many house built pre-WWII still standing intact. But then I guess there is damage and "damage" - a cracked pane of glass I guess counts. Not sure where you're looking Kenton, but in my neck of the woods (Sidcup, South East London), the vast majority of housing is post-WW2 and very few pre-WW2 houses still exist (including my parents house, built 1895). A lot of houses built in the late forties and early 50s were built to a standard style (semi-detached, sloping roofs) and it's this type which is most prevalent in the south east London area, where the bombs fell. Waring Park, just round the corner from me, is a great example of what happens when a V2 lands in your area. A corner of the park was destroyed by a V2 and is a wide crater, now built on with houses and overgrown to a great extent now. Having visited Coventry, York and the like in recent years, the thing which is pointed out to me most is that other towns and cities outside of London did more to make the new housing blend in with the surviving archeitecture than could be found in the capital. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
bigd Posted August 17, 2012 Share Posted August 17, 2012 I took my children to see the museums and art gallerys in Liverpool about thwenty years age. My mother in law said 'Why would I want to go and look at them?" The last time she was in liverpool, presumably during or just after the war, they were bombed out shells of buildings! Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Pacific231G Posted August 17, 2012 Share Posted August 17, 2012 Britain became ubanised well before I think any other country so a majority of the population probably were living in built up areas. As mentioned, the level of damage may have been no more than a couple of tiles off the roof or some broken glass and the blast of a bomb some distance away would do that but a lot of urban areas were very heavily bombed. I have heard though that fairly trivial "war damage" was used to justify the demolition of a great deal of basically sound housing that could easily have been repaired some time after the war to help satisfy the fashion for comprehensive urban redevelopment and shiny new estates. I was born several years after the end of the war in Birmingham and remember there still being plenty of bomb sites and a lot of prefabs. When I was at college in Plymouth in the late 1960s the annexe we studied in had been a convent school and the classrooms were set around the ruins of the bombed out church which formed a sort of empty well- a slightly eerie place. In Plymouth they decided to competely redevelop the centre so around it there were streets of pre war housing that had escaped the blitz or been repaired that suddenly came to an abrupt end at some new road on a different level and it looked as though the new city centre had been dropped onto the existing city. In Southampton which was heavily bombed the rebuilding of the centre was equally comprehensive but they did follow the existing street lines Night bombing in particular was never very accurate during WW2 so even if the target was a specific factory or docks rather than area bombing the bombs would still fall in a scatter pattern of several miles around the target. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kenton Posted August 17, 2012 Share Posted August 17, 2012 Not sure where you're looking Kenton, but in my neck of the woods (Sidcup, South East London), the vast majority of housing is post-WW2 and very few pre-WW2 houses still exist. I'm thinking of my childhood (50's) living in a town (Dorchester) and in a city (Nottingham) and village (outside Nottingham) There was no bomb damage to speak of that I remember. Rows and rows of terraced housing build in the late 1800's one we lived in had 1881 embellished in bricks in one wall. I do remember a lot of bomb damage though in Southampton from "shopping" trips with my parents and also in Derby. It is the 1 in 3 that I find so unbelievable. That statistic should mean that at least some of the family would have been affected and although some of my great uncles were killed or injured whilst serving during the wars, none were bombed in the UK. I'm not suggesting that there were not areas that were affected just that in the overall picture of the UK as a whole the bombing was not that intense. I also guess that by the time I was old enough to appreciate the reality of such things - say the end of the 1950's - most of the damage had been repaired and swept away. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Edwin_m Posted August 17, 2012 Share Posted August 17, 2012 Like most statistics it is probably wise to check the source before putting too much weight on it. But in this case I guess it was written on a display panel with no further details. Presumably someone went round and counted the number of properties damaged after each raid (though you might wonder whether this was best use of labour at the time!) but the statistic may just be based on totals rather than degree of significance. As pointed out further back a single bomb would crack a lot of windows, and each house so damaged would be counted. But if asked a few years later by curious younger relatives, the residents would often have forgotten or decided it just wasn't worth mentioning compared with what some others had suffered. If this number is obtained by simply adding the totals for each raid then it will be a considerable over-estimate because many houses in heavily-raided areas would have been damaged multiple times. Establishing the total number damaged would be a much larger task, involving cross-checking of the actual properties involved each time. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bernard Lamb Posted August 17, 2012 Share Posted August 17, 2012 Living in a small Essex village in a typical stretch of 1930s ribbon development I can remember taking the bomb damage inspector round the bungalow to point out the damage. I must have been about three at the time. Some things stick in your mind. Every building in the area had some damage from the odd missing tiles and broken windows to being in the bottom of a crater deeper than the building. My grandmother told me a tale about that one. The man went to the toilet (out house down the garden in those days). The bungalow took a direct hit. He was still sitting there in shock with his trousers round his ankles with the bungalow and the out house totally vanished. Bernard Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
APOLLO Posted August 17, 2012 Share Posted August 17, 2012 Not only in WW2. The Hun bombed Wigan with a Zeppelin in 1918' Nice plan of the New Springs Branch here. http://www.wiganworld.co.uk/album/photo.php?opt=8&id=12573&gallery=ZEPPELIN+RAID+1918&offset=0 They were after the Kirkless iron & steel works. http://www.wiganworld.co.uk/album/photo.php?opt=8&id=14228&gallery=ZEPPELIN+RAID+1918&offset=0 http://www.wiganworld.co.uk/album/photo.php?opt=8&id=14218&gallery=ZEPPELIN+RAID+1918&offset=0 http://www.wiganworld.co.uk/album/photo.php?opt=8&id=18747&gallery=ZEPPELIN+RAID+1918&offset=0 Brit15 Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ozexpatriate Posted August 17, 2012 Share Posted August 17, 2012 Roughly one third of all homes in the UK were damaged by enemy bombing during WW11. Seen at Duxford yesterday. It staggered me. Like most statistics it is probably wise to check the source before putting too much weight on it. But in this case I guess it was written on a display panel with no further details. This does seem like a pretty big claim - particularly since the reference is "one third of all homes in the UK". Which to me also includes such large population centres as Belfast, Glasgow and Edinburgh. I know the midlands (Coventry, Birmingham etc) were hit hard, but were towns in the north of England like Leeds, Bradford and Newcastle heavily damaged too? All the descriptions of collateral damage make sense, but its still a very big claim. One third of all homes in greater London or perhaps southeast England sounds very plausible. Doubtless the effects of the Blitz were indeed horrible and I am glad I have never personally experienced times like those in 1940. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Gold The Stationmaster Posted August 17, 2012 RMweb Gold Share Posted August 17, 2012 It's not so difficult once you do a bit delving and thinking further in to the subject. For instance I was surprised some years ago to find that the most frequently bombed town or city in Britain was Falmouth - because it was a port and thus easy to get at for hit & run raiders. The other thing we tend to overlook was that many of the suburbs that we are used to didn't exist in that form in 1939 but were basically small villages while far more residential property and 'living units' were concentrated in town centres or industrial areas and thus were close to target areas let alone those that were hit by stray bombs or bombers dumping their load 'near the target'. I suspect the statistics were counted in the same way as the RAF and USBS produced theirs and were thus 'living units' (or words to that effect) rather than individual houses. I think - from past reading rather than checking back on detail - that most of the large industrial centres and ports were attacked at least once during the period of the 1940 - 41 bomber blitzes and that includes Belfast and Glasgow, Portsmouth was a regular target, Plymouth and Coventry of course suffered heavily but other places attacked included Exeter, Bristol, Cardiff, Swansea, Bristol, Birmingham/Wolverhampton, Liverpool/Birkenhead, Manchester, and Leeds and no doubt many others. While the V1 doodlebug and V2/A4 rocket attacks were mainly targetted on London many of the former fell south of the city while one of the latter hit Ipswich and quite a number hit Norwich and its surroundings. So an awful lot of places were damaged by bombing. As far as records are concerned the answer is relatively simple - building owners applied for compensation and in any case ARP wardens kept some records thus the basic data was available relatively easily although it would still have had to be collated, but there were more than enough Ministries of this or that to add up all sorts of numbers; wars thrive on statistics so it seems. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ozexpatriate Posted August 17, 2012 Share Posted August 17, 2012 I think - from past reading rather than checking back on detail - that most of the large industrial centres and ports were attacked at least once during the period of the 1940 - 41 bomber blitzes and that includes Belfast and Glasgow, Portsmouth was a regular target, Plymouth and Coventry of course suffered heavily but other places attacked included Exeter, Bristol, Cardiff, Swansea, Bristol, Birmingham/Wolverhampton, Liverpool/Birkenhead, Manchester, and Leeds and no doubt many others. Thanks Mike, I knew that the south west ports had been heavily bombed - particularly central Plymouth and Bristol. Belfast surprises me - not as a target (obviously shipbuilding) but that it was in the Lufwaffe's range - though (according to wikipedia) the He-111 had a range of 2,300km which is not too much shy of a Lancaster. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
peanuts Posted August 17, 2012 Share Posted August 17, 2012 As one who saw the damage inflicted on Manchester and surrounding towns, it was far more widespread than just the hot spots. Several reasons... Off target, and offloading weight to escape the RAF. The latter accounted for many homes being hit where there were no logical targets, in North Wales for example to clear the mountains while escaping from Liverpool. Unmanned doodlebogs and rockets played a part too. I expect those of us born in the war took it all for granted seeing as we had never known anything else, and playing in bombed out homes and shelters was a way of life for many into the 1950s. One thing that looked odd was streets with no houses in densely populated terraced areas, a sign that some places had had it bad. Towards the end of the war one of my Grans came to collect me from Hyde to stay with her in Oldham but when we got there the bedroom ceiling was on the bed where would have slept! I remember my gran crying probably becasue of the consequences if it had fallen an hour later or two later. Collateral damage after five years of bombardment. is this from the infamous oldham doodlebug? Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Neil C Posted August 17, 2012 Share Posted August 17, 2012 A Google Image search for 'bomb damage map London' produces some fascinating results. In my corner of SE London many houses suffered damage, but not all resulting in the houses being demolished. Lots of houses in my nearby streets had new fronts put on them, and you wouldn't guess they'd been affected. Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
chaz Posted August 17, 2012 Share Posted August 17, 2012 Not all the damage was down to the Luftwaffe. I live in an old terrace house in Eastleigh. An old chap (now dead) who lived a couple of doors away told me that there was an anti-aircraft gun on a meadow, about 100 yards away, on the other side of the river. He said that every time the gun was fired (which was quite often as a Spitfire factory was not that far away) you could feel the houses bounce up and down with the shock of the recoil. His house had a crack in an internal wall, running from above the ceiling upstairs down to just above the skirting downstairs, which he said had appeared during one particularly torrid night of enemy action. Chaz Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
RMweb Premium petethemole Posted August 17, 2012 RMweb Premium Share Posted August 17, 2012 This Ordnance Survey production http://blog.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/soton-blitz-map.jpg shows the distiubution of HE bombs only that fell on Southampton, just on the two successive nights of 30/11/40 and 1/12/40. Massive damage was caused by incendiaries in the same raids. At work I have access to the Council's map of all HE hits, which is even more intense, particularly around the docks and lower Itchen (Supermarine's factory), the main target area in summer 1940. Every one of those red dots in the residential areas around the centre would have been surrounded by a ring of houses with missing slates, broken windows etc. My old house had cracking that may have been down to a large bomb nearby, or subsidence; however all the houses in the street had the bottom of their wall cavities full of loose mortar fragments that had been shaken off the brickwork, causing rising damp. Pete Edited to add the map link! Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest stuartp Posted August 17, 2012 Share Posted August 17, 2012 The government carried out a detailed survey of bomb damage throughout the war, the results are here if anyone fancies a couple of days in Kew reading them. http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/records/research-guides/maps-bomb-census-survey.htm Link to post Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Archived
This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.