
An interactive map showing every German bomb dropped on London during WW2 Blitz - mtviewdave
http://bombsight.org
======
GeorgeRichard
I found this fascinating. I grew up in London during the 50s so the war and
the blitz were still fresh in people's minds when I was a child.

My father, who was a member of the crew of a Sunderland flying boat, didn't
talk about it very much. He was a moody bastard with a quick temper, probably
as a result of several years of flying sorties over the Atlantic that lasted
many hours—a dreadful combination of boredom and intense anxiety and fear.

My mum was more forthcoming. She told me once of going into work in Fleet
Street—she was a sub editor on a magazine—and seeing a bomb caught by its tail
fins in a tangle of wires, just hanging there above the street. The
authorities had cordoned off the immediate area but people were just detouring
around it and going to work as usual.

Of course I checked out the area where I grew up in north London—ten years
before I was born a stick of four bombs appears to have fallen across the
street I lived in. It's possible to see additional information about any of
the bombs by clicking on the symbol of the one you are interested in.

Anyone interested in how civilians experienced the second world war in London
could have a look at 'Civilians at War' by George Beardmore, who kept a
journal between 1938 and 1946 which he later published.

------
m-i-l
Also worth noting that unexploded bombs from the Second World War still turn
up in London every now and again, e.g. 21 May in Wembley [0], 14 May in
Bromley [1], 23 March in Bermondsey [2], 20 February in New Malden [3].

[0] [http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/may/22/bomb-
found-20...](http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/may/22/bomb-
found-200m-from-wembley-stadium-safely-detonated-by-army)

[1] [http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/pensioner-finds-
unexpl...](http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/pensioner-finds-unexploded-
second-world-war-bomb-in-her-potting-shed-10247434.html)

[2] [http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/police-called-in-
after...](http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/police-called-in-after-
unexploded-bomb-found-near-tower-bridge-bermondsey-10127342.html)

[3] [http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/police-investigate-
une...](http://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/police-investigate-unexploded-
world-war-ii-bomb-found-at-bq-in-south-london-10059810.html)

~~~
fit2rule
Lest we forget the true nature of war, it should be noted that British and
American bombs are discovered all over the place in Germany too, every year.
And still cause casualties, alas.

~~~
jstalin
I've also heard that WWI munitions are routinely found in France still, with
farmers still getting killed occasionally.

~~~
kaybe
The topic even has its own wikipedia article:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_harvest)

~~~
kuschku
And there are more interesting articles related to it, like
[https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_rouge_%28s%C3%A9quelles_d...](https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_rouge_%28s%C3%A9quelles_de_guerre%29)

(Try using Google Translate if you don’t understand french – the english
article just is far too short)

------
scarmig
Reminded me of the opening passage of _Gravity 's Rainbow_. Tyrone Slothrop
gets around...

"A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before, but there is
nothing to compare it to now.

It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre. There are
no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an
iron queen, and glass somewhere far above that would let the light of day
through. But it's night. He's afraid of the way the glass will fall--soon--it
will be a spectacle: the fall of a crystal palace. But coming down in total
blackout, without one glint of light, only great invisible crashing.

Inside the carriage, which is built on several levels, he sits in velveteen
darkness, with nothing to smoke, feeling metal nearer and farther rub and
connect, steam escaping in puffs, a vibration in the carriage's frame, a
poising, an uneasiness, all the others pressed in around, feeble ones, second
sheep, all out of luck and time: drunks, old veterans still in shock from
ordnance 20 years obsolete, hustlers in city clothes, derelicts, exhausted
women with more children than it seems could belong to anyone, stacked about
among the rest of the things to be carried out to salvation. Only the nearer
faces are visible at all, and at that only as half-silvered images in a view
finder, green-stained VIP faces remembered behind bulletproof windows speeding
through the city..."

~~~
tritium
Gravity's Rainbow is a cool book, but it's actually about the V2 rockets
(roughly 1,300 of which hit London), that started being used in 1944.

Meanwhile the "blitz" and The Battle of Britain were an entirely different
part of the war, taking place about four years earlier, and this map seems to
cover that period of time, from late 1940 to mid-1941.

------
m-i-l
Strangely enough I was just showing the visiting inlaws this site last night,
after their trip to the Imperial War Museum yesterday.

I now live in a part of London which is a conservation area, which has lots of
nice old houses and streets. But every two streets or so there is a not-as-
attractive 50s/60s/70s house. I used to joke that these were 2nd World War
bomb sites, but after seeing the map of bombs for the first time a few years
back I realised that might not be far off the truth.

It certainly puts modern day complaints, such as the cost of housing and long
working hours, into perspective.

------
sytelus
It looks like they didn't spared places like Big Ben, Buckingham Palace,
London bridges and so on. How did these things survived then? I can't tell at
all if these were re-build after WWII.

~~~
afarrell
Luck

Aerial bombardment was very inaccurate in those days. In Berlin, the RAF
failed to hit what was then the largest office building in the world: the
ministry of aviation. However, they did destroy one of the oldest synagogues
in Europe.

[http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detlev-Rohwedder-
Haus](http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detlev-Rohwedder-Haus)

~~~
afarrell
For a separate discussion about the argument that the allies should have
bombed the lines to the death camps: I've been bewildered for a decade how
anyone proposes that they could have done any damage to a 1.4 meter wide
target made of two steel beams lying on the earth. At least, any damage that
could not have been repaired in half a week.

~~~
tomjen3
You don't blow up just any track: you blow up bridges because they take so
much more time to build or repair.

As for the targeting: you have to go really low. British bombers attacked the
gestapo hq in Copenhagen by going so low that their bombs were dropped into
the sides of the building (consequently, although that wasn't the plan, a
number of prisoners who had been housed in cells in the top floor managed to
escape).

Of course you can only do something like that if you are willing to paint a
huge target on yourself because you will be very easy to shoot down.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
But cruise missiles fly low for the express purpose of being harder to shoot
down! I know, radar and anti-aircraft measures are different now. But flying
low means antiaircraft measures have only hundreds milliseconds to spot you,
aim and fire, before you pass over.

~~~
Crito
Flying low and fast means that the heavy AA can't hit you, but it leaves you
vulnerable to light AA. If you're low and fast enough, then they won't have
much warning and your angular velocity will be pretty high, making you harder
to hit. At the same time, light AA rounds get to the target faster. That means
they are shooting at you, rather than where they think you are going to be.
That light AA also has a better rate of fire.

Low and fast was safer in many scenarios, but it wasn't without drawbacks.

------
kristopolous
I'm curious about how the civilian population went about this. I'd like to say
that if I saw even a remote possibility of something like this happening, I'd
hastily vamoose to the hinterlands without a second thought and remain there
indefinitely.

What percentage of people left the cities in anticipation of such events? The
narratives I've seen on the Japanese bombings was that people strategically
moved to the smallest villages they could find family in.

~~~
tagawa
Children were evacuated to live with volunteer homestay families in the
countryside. From what I was taught at school, it was a case of suitcase, gas
mask and name tag, then get on the train with all the other kids. This is how
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (and many other books/films) starts.

For those that stayed behind there was a post-war pride that they stuck it
through and didn't give in, but it must have been unimaginable even with the
bomb shelters and London Underground. Again, this is what I've been taught
from my elders so not first-hand experience.

EDIT: I should add that I realise it was not just Britain for whom things were
unimaginable.

EDIT 2: Another factor that must have had a big effect on Londoners was that
the king and queen stayed at Buckingham Palace (which was hit a few times)
during the war.

~~~
kristopolous
I've seen this depicted in movies also (I think the imitation game (2014) had
a scene with it). wikipedia has this:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evacuations_of_civilians_in_Br...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evacuations_of_civilians_in_Britain_during_World_War_II)

------
marcosscriven
I live next to Clapham Common [0], where there are still mounds anti-aircraft
guns were mounted on [1].

It's very common to see modern buildings amongst beautiful period homes, in
the gaps left by bombs [2].

[0]
[http://bombsight.org/#15/51.4548/-0.1443](http://bombsight.org/#15/51.4548/-0.1443)

[1] [http://www.loveclapham.com/what-are-the-clapham-common-
tarma...](http://www.loveclapham.com/what-are-the-clapham-common-tarmac-
bumps/)

[2]
[https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.455268,-0.142137,3a,75y,18...](https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.455268,-0.142137,3a,75y,181.55h,80.31t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1st1MRbMEawn1tNs2S0AkLXQ!2e0!6m1!1e1)

------
wahsd
Wait. Every bomb? Seriously, how is that even possible? I guess, once you zoom
in you realize the bombing wasn't really all that dense and I guess each bomb
could have been cataloged.

What would be interesting is tying the bombs into stings and reconstructing
the bomb raids over time.

------
boona
Isn't it bad taste to say Germans rather than Nazis?

~~~
Crito
Not every German in the Luftwaffe was a member of the NSDAP (aka, "a Nazi").

------
kanche
It looks so terrifying. How powerful were these bombs?

The dots are very dense near london brigde region . London recovered well.

~~~
kristopolous
did some research ... this would be a dot: [http://waralbum.ru/wp-
content/comment-image/91368.jpg](http://waralbum.ru/wp-content/comment-
image/91368.jpg)

~~~
caublestone
This should be a setting for the dots on an aerial/satellite view of London.
Another skin could be the images of all of the explosions at once.

------
failrate
Is it a Poisson Distribution?

~~~
empiricus
I can't see any possible reason for the distribution to be Poisson.

It should be completely random, but the representation on the map is too
regular..

Looks like the apparent regularity is an artifact of the way the data is
filtered for display on the map for some scales; if I zoom out/in the fully
random distribution becomes more visible.

~~~
bweitzman
Poisson distributions are completely random, so I'm guessing you mean either a
uniform or normal distribution.

failrate is making a reference to the Thomas Pynchon novel "Gravity's
Rainbow", in which the Poisson distribution of the bombing of London is a
major plot point.

And I do believe the author is correct by claiming it is a Poisson
distribution, since we are talking a number of events per km^2.

~~~
empiricus
Thanks, I see now. I was thinking that Poisson distributions look like
distributions generated by Poisson disk sampling (with which I was more
familiar).

------
zatkin
How many bombs were dropped in the United States during World War 2?

~~~
dba7dba
A few hundred. By balloons launched from Japanese subs off coast of Northwest
US. No accurate record available because the discoveries were strictly kept as
secrets.

~~~
kristopolous
[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/news/photos/0...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/content/dam/news/photos/000/677/67790.jpg)
secrets in 1943 perhaps ... not now though.

~~~
dba7dba
Not a secret now of course. I'm saying because it was kept secret at that
time, not good records were kept.

------
scottmcdot
How do they know where the bombs were dropped?

~~~
kuschku
All sides in the war took pictures while dropping bombs.

So, each country that got hit during WWII is evaluating those pictures
nowadays to find non-detonated bombs – leading to lots of maps of where bombs
fell.

