Bombs over London: Black Saturday, the East End and the V-weapons

Black Saturday: 7 September 1940

Late on the afternoon of Saturday 7 September 1940, around 350 German bombers escorted by some 600 fighters crossed the Kent coast and turned for London. By dusk the Royal Docks, Surrey Docks, Woolwich Arsenal and the riverside terraces of Silvertown, Canning Town and West Ham were burning. The fires drew a second wave through the night, guided in by the glow on the Thames. By dawn around 430 Londoners had been killed and 1,600 seriously injured in a single night. Black Saturday opened what became known as the Blitz — 57 consecutive nights of bombing on the capital, followed by sporadic raids until May 1941.

Key Fact

Black Saturday (7 September 1940) opened the Blitz with around 350 bombers attacking the East End docks; about 430 Londoners were killed and 1,600 seriously injured in a single night, and 57 consecutive nights of bombing followed.

Why the East End?

German planners did not pick the East End by accident. The Royal Albert, Royal Victoria and King George V docks handled food, oil, timber and munitions for the country and the army. Around them lay the food-processing factories of Silvertown (Tate & Lyle’s sugar refinery, the rum and molasses warehouses), engineering works, gasometers and chemical plants. The terraced housing of Stepney, Bethnal Green, Poplar and West Ham sat directly amongst these targets — dockers, lightermen and factory workers had to live within walking distance of their work. Hitting the docks meant hitting the people who kept the docks running. The result was that East End boroughs took disproportionate damage during the Blitz: Stepney lost more than 40 per cent of its housing stock, while wealthier West End and outer-suburban boroughs were comparatively less battered.

Incendiaries and High Explosives

German raids in 1940–41 used a deliberate two-stage cocktail. Incendiary bombs were dropped first — 1kg magnesium sticks scattered in their hundreds from canisters that opened in mid-air. Magnesium burns at roughly 2,200°C and water cannot be used to put it out; sand or smothering was the only response. The fires they started lit the city for the bombers behind. Then came high-explosive bombs — from 50kg up to the 1,000kg ‘Hermann’ and heavier bombs still — designed to demolish buildings, smash water mains and kill rescue and fire crews working on the incendiary fires. The 29 December 1940 raid on the City of London used this combination to start the ‘Second Great Fire of London’ that destroyed eight Wren churches and threatened St Paul’s Cathedral.

A single bomber could carry around 700 incendiaries; a 200-bomber raid could drop tens of thousands. Fire watchers, made compulsory after the December 1940 City raid, were posted on rooftops with stirrup pumps and sandbags to smother sticks before they took hold. The strategy was about overwhelming local capacity: if 1,000 sticks fell in a square mile in twenty minutes, fire crews could only reach a handful before fires merged. In late 1940 the heat from converging fires created localised firestorm conditions in parts of the City and East End, though London never experienced the full firestorms that destroyed Hamburg and Dresden later in the war.

The Scale of the Damage

Across the Blitz of 1940–41, around 20,000 Londoners were killed and roughly 1.4 million were made homeless at some point. About one in six Londoners was made homeless at some point. The docks were repeatedly targeted — the Surrey Docks lost roughly a million tons of timber to fire on Black Saturday alone — but kept working: cranes were repaired overnight, ships were unloaded by torchlight, and rubble was cleared by hand. The official propaganda film ‘London Can Take It!’ (1940) presented this as cheerful resilience; Mass Observation diaries from the same months also recorded panic, looting in bombed shops, and class resentment as East Enders watched West End hotels installing their own private deep shelters.

The V-Weapons: 1944–45

After the Blitz ended in May 1941, London faced only occasional raids, including the ‘Little Blitz’ of early 1944. Then came a new threat. The V1 doodlebug began arriving in June 1944, just after D-Day. It flew at around 400mph; when its engine cut out, Londoners had roughly fifteen seconds before it dived. RAF fighters, anti-aircraft guns and barrage balloons could shoot V1s down. Over the summer of 1944, around 6,000 Londoners were killed by V1s and a further wave of evacuation began.

Then on 8 September 1944 a new sound — or rather, no warning sound at all — arrived. The first V2 rocket hit Staveley Road in Chiswick, killing three people. More rockets followed through the autumn, fired from sites in the Netherlands. The most lethal single V2 strike on London came on 25 November 1944 at the Woolworth’s store in New Cross Road, Deptford, where 168 shoppers and staff were killed in seconds. Travelling faster than sound, the V2 could not be intercepted; the only defence was capturing the launch sites in the Netherlands, which the Allies achieved by April 1945. Around 2,700 Londoners died under V2 attack.

A common picture imagines the Blitz as one shared experience — St Paul’s rising above smoke, ‘London Can Take It’. The reality was much more uneven. East End boroughs along the river took disproportionate damage from 1940–41 because their housing sat directly amongst the targets. Wealthier inner-west boroughs were less battered, and outer suburbs barely touched. The V-weapons of 1944–45 changed the geography again: V1s tended to fall short of central London on south-east boroughs like Croydon, Lewisham and Bromley, and V2s scattered widely (Chiswick, Deptford, Hackney). Top-band answers note that ‘the Blitz on London’ was several different bombing experiences in different boroughs, not one.