Imagine, as a firefighter might, defending a city over 57 consecutive nights from firebombing with incendiaries and high-explosives, battling block fires, great fires and conflagrations — not one a night, but many, every night, from September to November 1940.
It stands as a major accomplishment in firefighting history that the firefighters of London, men and women, who worked the Blitz displayed courage, fortitude and grace.
There are two important points to acknowledge about the response to the Blitz. First is the level of planning and coordination executed to put into place the resources for the fire defense of Britain’s vital urban and industrial centers.
Second is the extraordinary human effort required to stand up to direct and sustained bombing. The attack on London and its sister cities, as well as the attacks on German and Japanese cities, unleashed the full effect of fire as a weapon.
What words cannot describe
No suitable metaphor or image exists that portrays the dynamic and physical nature of raw fire unleashed. Words and images fail to capture the sights and sounds of burning of buildings and industrial facilities. The better accounts of urban fires comes from those who experience it firsthand and the firefighters of the Blitz offer an additional viewpoint of urban firefighting under conditions of war.
In Fire and Water: The London Firefighters Blitz 1940-42 Remembered, we find the personal stories and images of men, some writers and artists, who served with the Auxiliary Fire Service as part of the London Fire Brigade during the worst firebombing.
In a chapter from that book titled, “The Naked Flame” LFB Fireman William Sansom expresses his own difficulty of trying to convey, in words and images, the power of fire. Sansom offers us a passage he borrowed from another writer who relived in words one moment of a conflagration by its silence.
“There are the noises. But there is something here that is more terrible: the silence. I believe that in the course of great conflagrations there sometimes occurs a moment of extreme tension: the jets of water fall back; the firemen no longer mount their ladders: no one stirs. Noiselessly a black cornice thrusts itself forward overhead, and a high wall, behind which flames shoot up, leans forward, noiselessly. All stand motionless and await, with shoulders raised and brows contracted, the awful crash. The silence here is like that.”
Organizing splintered groups
In September 1939, the people of Britain saw the mobilization of 23,000 auxiliary firemen to augment the 2,700 regular members of the LFB. This occurred just prior to the official declaration of war with Germany. In the following months, the AFS received basic firefighting training and was equipped for functional integration with the LFB.
Fire defense planners understood that the country’s urban-industrial centers would soon face an air attack, as it had in the First World War. Imagine the planning and preparation needed to manage, control, and coordinate a sustained fire defense, over a wide geographic area involving great fires and conflagrations, on a daily basis, using a response system based on local mutual aid all the while under attack from the air.
At the outset of the Second World War, England had 1,440 independent fire authorities. During the height of the Blitz, problems in command and control of so many independent and frequently poorly prepared fire forces proved costly. That cost translated directly into deaths and injuries to the civil population and fire forces, as well as unimaginable property losses both personal and commercial.
Resource management
At the fundamental level, the challenge for the executive fire command staff was one of resources and administration, especially in the areas of training, leadership, management and resource deployment.
Managing firefighting resources under wartime conditions requires striking a balance between efficiency and effectiveness in the allocating scarce resources, protecting the civil population and minimizing destruction to property essential to the war effort. Government leaders recognized quickly the need for a coordinated national system of fire defense.
The Home Office, a department of Great Britain’s government, drew up a national fire defense plan to strengthen the response effort. The plan involved formalizing the control structure (to achieve unity of command), increasing operational flexibility (to better allocate scarce resources), and standardizing administrative functions (to better manage human resources).
Out of this grew the National Fire Service thus bringing the various independent local fire authorities under centralized leadership and management. The new service came into being in September 1941.
The British National Fire Service at mid-war (March 1943) was at its highest strength with a total roster of 343,000 men and women. The service employed 87,000 men and 29,000 women on a permanent basis.
To bolster the force it employed 186,000 men and 41,000 women on a part-time basis. The duty tour was 48 hours on and 24 hours off.
Fortunately, or unfortunately depending upon perspective, the national service never had the opportunity to perform its intended functions under conditions of sustained air attack, such as was seen in late 1940 and early 1941. When London was bombed on 57 consecutive nights between September and November 1940, the fire defense forces operated under the fragmented peacetime model.
Tenuous infrastructure
Firefighting during the Blitz raids took place under air attack with incendiaries and high-explosive bombs falling on firefighters operating among a fragile and mostly broken public infrastructure. The bombing destroyed not only buildings, but also roads, streets, water mains, gas mains, the electric grid and the telephone system.
After each raid, a strong effort went into cleaning up debris and restoring vital services to help bolster the morale of the civilian population.
The most important need for fire suppression was water and the means to supply it efficiently and apply it effectively on fires under extremely hazardous and difficult conditions. The concept of an auxiliary water system to support, if not replace entirely, the public water system required construction and strategic placement of tanks ranging in capacity from 5,000 to 1 million gallons in streets and open spaces.
Before the start of the war, a network of 12-inch mains was installed to carry untreated water (what they referred to as dirty water) for firefighting purposes to high-risk sections of London. This supplemental system proved itself just as vulnerable to rupture from bombing as regular water mains.
Ironically, piping laid above ground often survived bombing because of its flexibility to movement. In essence, it could bounce and give a little without bursting.
Mobile water tenders (tank trucks) found wide application for delivering water to fire forces. Within London itself, trailer-mounted 250 gallons per minute portable Jowett fire pumps, each powered by a small 8-horsepower engine, proved very effective.
Fire command deployed approximately 20,000 of these devices towed into action by London taxicabs, in addition hauling a crew of five firefighters plus gear and hoses. London’s taxicab drivers knew the city well and their small vehicles were excellent for towing the pumps and crew through narrow streets and alleys.
Dangerous job
The wartime casualties to the fire service during raid firefighting in England and Wales amounted to roughly 700 fireman and 20 firewomen killed in action and 6,000 seriously injured. In one raid alone, 91 firemen died and several hundred were injured protecting London.
The men and women who fought the Blitz fires were certainly heroic as a whole, and it seems as if they looked upon their service as simply part of the war effort. What they did was practical and essential and they knew and understood it as such. What is most striking is that they did not hold themselves up as singular or special among so many of their brothers and sisters, both civilians and military.
All firefighters share a sense of comradeship that develops out of the common danger of fire and the ensuing appreciation of life that derives from living through the experience. Frank Eyre, a London fireman during the Blitz, wrote of this element of firefighter culture:
“And many learned the nastier ways of dying.
Or limped back, maimed and shattered, from the strife,
While all endured unpleasantness and danger
Continually—and learned to like life.”
