Bombs on Britain

Everyone knows the Blitz was London. The photographs are of St Paul's in the smoke and families asleep on Underground platforms. But the roll of civilian war dead kept by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission tells a wider story. Of the 61,542 civilians it records for places in the United Kingdom, 31,559, a little over half, died outside Greater London: in Liverpool and Birmingham, Plymouth and Hull, Clydebank and Belfast, Bath and Exeter, and in hundreds of small towns along the coasts.

The story also starts earlier than most people think. On a December morning in 1914 German battlecruisers shelled Hartlepool, Scarborough and Whitby. Zeppelins first killed people in Great Yarmouth and King's Lynn a month later, and by 1918 airships and Gotha bombers had killed about 1,414 people across Britain. This page puts the two wars side by side, town by town.

These are counts of people who were killed in their homes, streets, shelters, schools and workplaces. I publish only totals by place, day and age group; no names or addresses leave my analysis.

01 · The mapWhere the dead were counted

Each orange dot is a civic area on the Second World War roll (a county borough, metropolitan borough, urban or rural district, or Scottish burgh), sized by its civilian dead so far. Slate dots are the First World War raids and bombardments. Drag the slider or press play to watch the dead accumulate month by month. Search for your town, or tap a dot for its story.

02 · 1914 to 1918The first Blitz

The first civilians killed at home by German guns were not killed from the air. At about eight in the morning of 16 December 1914, three battlecruisers opened fire on Hartlepool while two more shelled Scarborough and then Whitby. Hartlepool, a port with docks, steelworks and three coastal guns, was hit hardest: 86 civilians were killed and seven soldiers. In Scarborough 19 people died, and at Whitby, where the shells were aimed at the coastguard station on the headland, they also struck the abbey ruins. The day's toll across the three towns is usually given as 137. "Remember Scarborough" went on the recruiting posters.

A month later the airships came. On 19 January 1915 two Zeppelins aiming for the Humber were blown south and bombed Great Yarmouth, Sheringham and King's Lynn, killing four people. London was first bombed on 31 May 1915. Over the next three years German airships made 51 raids and killed 557 people; from 1917 the big Gotha and Giant bombers made 52 raids and killed 857. Together that is 1,414 dead and 3,416 injured.

London took the single worst blows. The first daylight raid on London, by Gothas on 13 June 1917, killed 162 people; a bomb that went through three floors of Upper North Street School in Poplar killed 18 children. But London was not the whole story then either. Within the Metropolitan Police District the raids killed 668 people, 47% of the total. The other 746 died in Hull and the Black Country, in Cleethorpes, Leith and the Kent coast. Three weeks before the Poplar school was hit, Gothas turned back from a cloudy London and bombed Folkestone instead, where Tontine Street was full of shoppers: 72 people died there, among them 25 children. The worst single loss of the war came at Chatham in September 1917, when two bombs on a drill hall killed 130 naval ratings.

03 · 1939 to 1945Day by day

The Second World War roll is far longer. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission lists 67,779 civilians who died from enemy action between 1939 and 1947 (most of the last are people who died later of their injuries). 61,542 are filed under places in the United Kingdom; the rest died at sea (1,496), in Malta (1,485) and elsewhere overseas, or in the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. That is 43.5 times the First World War toll from the air.

The Blitz proper, from 7 September 1940 to 16 May 1941, accounts for 39,222 deaths, 64% of the whole war. London's ordeal began on the first day: the roll has 548 deaths in Greater London on 7 September 1940. But the worst single day on the roll is 16 April 1941, with 1,580 deaths, and it was split almost exactly in two: 789 in London, where the night of 16 to 17 April was one of the heaviest of the war, and 791 elsewhere, most of them in Belfast after the Easter Tuesday raid. Of the twelve worst days, 6 fell mainly outside London.

04 · Beyond LondonPorts, factories and cathedral cities

Outside London the Luftwaffe went for ports and industry: the Mersey and the Clyde, Plymouth's dockyard, Hull, Southampton and Portsmouth, Birmingham and Coventry's factories, Belfast's shipyards. Liverpool has the longest roll of any single place in the country, 2,640, and with Bootle, Birkenhead, Wallasey and the other Merseyside towns the area's total reaches 4,090. Birmingham follows with 2,128, then Bristol, Hull, Plymouth and Coventry, each with more than a thousand dead.

The deadliest single days for any one place were all outside London, because the London dead were spread across dozens of boroughs. Liverpool lost 669 people on 3 May 1941, the peak of the May Blitz; Belfast 565 on 16 April 1941; Coventry 417 on 14 November 1940; Glasgow 402 and Clydebank 319 on 13 March 1941.

Per head of population

A big city has a long roll partly because it is big. To compare, I divided each roll by a population for the place. Wartime figures are hard to get, so this is rough: for most English towns I use the average of the 1921 and 1951 censuses as published on Wikipedia, for Plymouth and Hull the figures their Wikipedia articles give for the start of the war, and for the County of London the four million or so it held on the eve of the war. Evacuation, and the people who left the cities to sleep in the fields, mean the real wartime populations were lower and the true rates higher.

On this measure Coventry is first, at 5.7 dead per 1,000 people, then Plymouth (5.1) and the County of London (4.8). Southampton, Hull, Portsmouth, Liverpool, Birkenhead and Bristol all lost around three people in every thousand. Clydebank is not in the list because I have no population for it, but with 443 of its 448 dead recorded on 13 to 15 March 1941 in a small shipbuilding burgh, it may well have suffered more heavily than any of them. At the other end, Leeds lost 95 people, Bradford 15, and Blackburn and Preston 5 and 8.

05 · 1942 and 1943Cathedral cities and seaside towns

After May 1941 the big raids stopped, but the dying did not. Between 17 May 1941 and 20 January 1944 the roll records 8,852 deaths, and 7,797 of them (88%) were outside London. In April and May 1942, after the RAF burned Lübeck, the Luftwaffe attacked historic cities said to have been picked from the Baedeker tourist guide.

Bath lost 390 people in those three months, almost its whole wartime roll of 414. Meanwhile fast fighter-bombers made low "tip and run" attacks on the south and east coasts, dropping a bomb and turning for home before the defences could react. Between March 1942 and June 1943 seaside towns appear high on the roll: Eastbourne (138 dead in that period), Hastings (101), Torquay (89), Bournemouth (84) and Weston-super-Mare (74). The roll cannot say which deaths came from which kind of raid, so I give these as totals for the period. In Dover, under bombing and shelling from the German guns across the Channel, the roll has deaths in every year from 1940 to 1944, 206 in all.

One of those daylight raids, on 20 January 1943, hit Sandhurst Road School in Catford and killed 38 children and six staff. Lewisham's roll records 59 deaths on 20 and 21 January.

06 · 1944 and 1945Flying bombs and rockets

The last phase was London's again. The "Baby Blitz" of early 1944 killed 1,749, 73% of them in London. Then from 13 June 1944 came the V-1 flying bombs and, from September, the V-2 rockets. Between them they account for 9,479 deaths on the roll, and 87% were in Greater London: the boroughs of south London, Wandsworth, Deptford, Lambeth, Lewisham and Camberwell, and West Ham and Croydon just outside the old county.

One V-2 hit Woolworth's in New Cross at lunchtime on 25 November 1944; Wikipedia gives 160 killed, and Deptford's roll records 144 deaths on that day and the next. The last two rockets fell on 27 March 1945. One killed a woman at home in Orpington, the last civilian killed by enemy action on British soil; Orpington's roll has 1 death that day. Across the country the roll records 124 deaths on 27 March 1945.

07 · StoriesShelters, schools and dance halls

Behind the totals are particular nights. The cards below set a few of the best-known incidents against the roll. Because the roll is filed by civic area and date, not by incident, each card gives the area's deaths on that day or those days, which usually includes other bombs as well. Tap a card to find the place on the map.

Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, Hull, Plymouth and Coventry each lost more than a thousand civilians.

08 · Who diedChildren and the old

The roll gives an age for 60,027 of the 61,542 United Kingdom dead. Of those, 7,764 (13%) were children under 16, including 1,751 under five, and 13,142 (22%) were 60 or older. The roll records an age of nought for 1,515 people; that can mean a baby under a year old or an age not known, so I keep them apart.

09 · Then and nowTwo wars, the same towns

Some places were hit in both wars. Hartlepool, shelled in 1914 and bombed by a Zeppelin in 1918, lost 94 people in those two attacks. In the whole of the Second World War its two rolls, Hartlepool and West Hartlepool, record 76: fewer than on one winter morning in 1914. Folkestone lost 72 people in a single raid in May 1917 and 98 in the six years of the second war. In most places the second war was far deadlier, but on the North Sea coast the first was not a footnote.

10 · Counting the deadHow good is the roll?

The Commission's civilian roll is the fullest single list there is, but local histories often give different totals. I compared the roll with the figures quoted in Wikipedia's articles for 18 towns and cities. In 13 of them the two agree within ten per cent. The big gaps have reasons: Swansea's article counts only the three-night Blitz of February 1941; Belfast's figure is for the Easter raid alone yet is higher than the city's whole roll, so some of those dead are probably filed under other areas; and Clydebank's article gives 1,200 dead, more than twice the 448 on the burgh's roll, although the town's own memorial names 528. Some of the Clydebank dead are probably filed under Glasgow or Dunbartonshire, where they died in hospital or lived.