Juliet Gardiner

It's quite a challenge to pick up this book with the intention to read it cover to cover - all 700 or so pages of it. I'm so glad I have. This is a book that fleshes out in considerable detail the knowledge that most of us have - or think we have - of life on the Home Front in WWII. Though scholarly, it's intensely readable, and each chapter is crammed with nuggets of fascinating information, whether it's about evacuees, the unremitting horrors of the Blitz, coping with rationing, wartime show more crime....anything and everything about daily life in the bleakly difficult years of the war. I'm left with a renewed respect for the citizens who coped with privation, hunger, homelessness, loss and just general dinginess, as well as surprise at the level of lawlessness among certain sections of the population. This book is a really absorbing read. show less

Historian Juliet Gardiner's The Blitz: The British Under Attack offers a highly focused view of World War II as seen from the shattered streets of Great Britain, particularly London, from the first wave of German bombers on the night of 7 September 1940 through the last major bombing runs in May 1941. The view is--and one struggles for an appropriate adjective--sobering, instructive, horrendous, unimaginable (at least for those readers who have never encountered wholesale destruction at show more first hand), terrifying, and even almost desensitizing in its repetitive duration.

How can one who has not experienced it imagine the degree of terror, horror and fear engendered by a nightly rain of high explosive bombs and tens of thousands of incendiary devices screaming down from a darkened sky, not for a brief moment but for nine interminable months? Shelter in trenches, basements, subway stations? Not a single shelter proved impermeable and hundreds of civilians were blasted to bloodied shreds of burnt flesh within those very shelters. No place proved a safe haven.

Nor was the incredible destruction limited to London. Bristol, Coventry, Hull, Glasgow and other cities were massively damaged and their citizens killed by deadly devices from the night skies. Ancient buildings that had endured for centuries vanished into piles of smoldering rubble. Horses, men, women and children died instantly or, perhaps worse, were entombed under collapsed buildings.

Fire fighters watched helplessly as water pressure vanished from exploded water mains while their hoses lay useless and as more bombs hurled their engines and colleagues against walls of yet-standing structures. We learn, of course, in any general history textbook that Great Britain was heavily bombed in a long spate of attacks collectively called "the Blitz" before the U.S. entered the war in December 1941, but that knowledge tends to be clean, sanitized fact. Gardiner's book forcefully shows what the Blitz really was and sanitizes nothing. The reality was much more than fact--it was also blood and pain and fear and cowardice and bravery and looting and selfless sacrifice.

As the reader makes his way through the carnage in this history, he realizes how close Great Britain came to falling before the Nazi advance. Hitler's ill-advised (for him) decision to turn his attention to an invasion of Russia eventually brought the British some relief while, a short while later, Emperor Hirohito's war-mongering cabinet ensured America's entry into the war by bombing its naval fleet at Pearl Harbor. Even though the tide of the war eventually turned against the Nazis, the nine months of the Blitz cost Britain over 43,000 civilian dead and another 71,000 seriously injured, and Gardiner's book pictures those months as they appeared to those casualties.

The reader begins to feel a sense of helpless frustration as he progresses through the book. Where are the RAF fighter planes? Why aren't the antiaircraft Ack-Ack guns more effective? What of the barrage balloons? In fact, German bombers were shot down. By no means did all return to Germany or to occupied France. In addition, German civilians in Berlin and other cities were also dying from the explosion of British bombs. However, these facts are not the focus of Gardiner any more than they would have been the focus of the British civilians under the onslaught of the Nazi bombers overhead. Her book is one-sided but intentionally so; we see the war through the eyes of the civilians on the ground in the cities falling into ruin under the roar of high explosives and falling walls.

As an American reader who is not at all familiar with the physical layout of London or of even the relative locations of many large cities in England, Ireland and Scotland, I often wished for maps showing the whereabouts of the sites of which Gardiner writes. Such maps would have made many of the place names more meaningful to a non-Britisher. Other than that lack, I can find no nit to pick with The Blitz, and I recommend it to all who seek a better understanding and fuller comprehension of World War II from the British perspective in the year before America herself became a combatant. The Blitz may not particularly easy to find in the United States. In fact, my copy shipped from London. However, for any reader interested in this sort of focused history, the book is well worth seeking out. show less

A splendidly readable narrative account of Britain during the second world war, focusing on the fabric of civilian life, rather than on major political and military events, though there is sufficient detail of these to provide the necessary understanding of the context. The book's great achievement is to enable the reader really to feel what it meant to be a citizen of a country at war, the day to day impact of restrictions on activities as well as the horrors of the Blitz and the V1/V2 show more raids. It also covers in a balanced way less well known aspects such as conscientious objectors of various kinds and the frankly outrageous treatment meted out to German and Italian people living in Britain, the great majority of whom were loyal to Britain and in many cases were refugees from Nazism, including Jews, or long settled Italian families running restaurants. A fascinating eye-opener of a book. show less

For the British, there is perhaps no more iconic event of the 20th century than the Blitz. The German bombing campaign that stretched from September 1940 until June 1941 was an event that people experienced throughout the British isles, from London and the southeast to Belfast in Northern Ireland. As such it was a shared experience, albeit one filtered through the personal circumstances of the individual and their particular experience of the war. Yet for all of the specific moments in which show more the Blitz touched their lives, it was an inescapable experience for everyone,

Encapsulating this within the covers of a single book is just one of the challenges undertaken by Juliet Gardiner in writing a history of the event. Another is to penetrate the shared mythology of the event that has grown up around it over the decades in order to convey the realities of the experience and the response of its survivors. In both respects her book is an unqualified success, as she moves beyond the "keep calm and carry on" legend to convey a more nuanced portrait of how Britons coped. For while many rose to the challenge, others faltered in response to a crisis unprecedented in its nature. Its impact proved far-reaching, forcing adjustments to a situation that unfolded in ways few anticipated. Gardiner's coverage here is impressively comprehensive, addressing everything from the shifts in official policy to the problems of looting and other criminal activities it spawned.

All of this makes Gardiner's book an excellent read for anyone seeking to learn about the Blitz. Yet its greatest strength is its focus. For while Gardiner addresses the evolution of official policy in response to the attacks, her narrative is centered primarily upon the experiences of the people themselves. By drawing upon contemporary reporting, published accounts, and the oral histories collected years afterward, she provides her readers with a superb study that conveys well the broad impact of the Blitz and its legacy for British history. For as she argues, it was from this event more than any other of the war that the commitment to the postwar "New Jerusalem" was forged. In this respect, the Blitz left an imprint upon Britain in ways that are still visible today, decades after the last craters were filled and bombed sites rebuilt. show less