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Bombsight.org - Londoners, did your street get bombed?
jessmum
Posts: 596
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Interesting website now up and running showing locations of all the bombs dropped over London during the blitz.
Have a looky!
www.bombsight.org
Have a looky!
www.bombsight.org
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They must have had some power!
Always speculated that a WW2 bomb had landed on our block and nice to have it confirmed. Fascinating and a little creepy. One tends to think it was just central London and the Docklands that got it bad - the whole of London is absolutely covered in red dots.
They're bombs!:rolleyes:;)
On my old road a bomb fell destroying four houses (now six houses). No one was killed, but several years after the war ended a child was killed playing in the ruins when a wall collapsed on him. Together with other fatalities in similar circumstances it served as a catalyst for clearing up all bomb sites in the late 1950s
In the outer areas you can see lines of bombs being dropped as the bombers flew over.
Would be nice to find out why some apparently innocuous areas were bombed several times (clustering). Wonder what was there.
Just looking at the map - there seems to have been three bombs dropped in the vicinity of Redlibbets Golf Club, which is east of London. Anyone know the story behind that?
You'd have though they'd have gone all out targeting my area because even then it was a centre of the UK Jewish community!
And even the US bombers were inaccurate compared to modern cruise missiles. Which can also go awry.
Just realised that this is a "blitz" list. It doesnt cover the damage to my house as it was damaged in 43 according to the lady who used to live there.
The blast wrecked part of the back wall, and it was rebuilt using the shattered brick rubble. We only knew the lady was telling the truth when we had the bathroom replastered, and wondered why the wall didnt seem quite right and didnt have a whole lot of full bricks.
The council wasnt much help, as many of the work orders for repairing the damage during the period were destroyed in the 50's.
V2 just up the road in '45 damaged 2000 houses including mine. Not got a straight door-frame in the house
I think there was a 'children's home' on this site before they built the apartments in the 90s but I don't know what use the building had during the war.
There's quite a few stories here ...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/categories/
London's far "easier", for the material is culled from a relatively small number of crosscheckable sources - Fire Service records, Police records etc.
A "stick" of bombs....most Blitz era German bombers couldn't control the numbers of bombs dropped when the bombardier pressed the "tit"...but they would be travelling at 150mph plus when it happened...so the bombs fell in a line...
Honestly? Usually NO real reason at all Crews would be briefed on certain strategic objectives for London - the Imperial Docks, power stations, railway stations etc....but after a couple of weeks, once they switched to night bombing, all bets were off. Usually a bomb aimer would simply aim at the heart of the nearest biggest fire :eek: Then get the hell outta Dodge. But they were supposed to try and obtain various targets by reference to bends in the Thames, bridges etc....land/water boundaries being the one thing that shows up very well from altitude.