What It’s Like When the Bombs Begin to Fall

The transatlantic phone line hisses and pops and then I get a clear, lightly accented “Hello?” from London.

I am looking for someone who lived through the Blitz, I say. Someone who can tell me what it is like to be bombarded night after night. What it is like to run for the shelters, the sirens howling, the fear clawing at you.

I want to know what it is like for the people of Baghdad every night. What it is like for the people of Tel Aviv and Haifa and Jerusalem and Dhahran and Riyadh on some nights.

“Oh, well, yes,” the voice says. “I was here for the Blitz. Oh, yes.”

Marga Vogel was 17 when the bombs began to fall. She had escaped from Nazi Germany, from Mainz am Rhein, with her younger twin sisters in the spring of 1939, and they had come to London.

Now it was Sept. 7, 1940. The German bombers appeared over London that afternoon and came again that night. The damage was heavy and 1,000 people were killed. Three nights of silence followed and then the bombing began in earnest. The Blitz was on and it continued for 76 nights.

“Well, we were rather frightened,” Marga says, “though I am sure it does not compare with today. I am sure today is much worse.”

Perhaps. But in the book “Total War,” which, despite its title, is a rather matter-of-fact chronicle of World War II, there is this about the London Blitz:

” . . . in addition to the death and destruction, human beings had to contend with a lack of sleep, more dirt and more broken glass than most people had thought about, the blackout, sirens (reduced on Churchill’s command from a two-minute to a one-minute wail), an increase in the accident rate especially among young children, queues, and a continuous strain which was not totally lifted until the war ended.”

What shelters did you go to? I ask. The Underground?

“At one time we had a shelter in the back yard, in the garden,” she says, “but it was so awful. So many people crammed in, you couldn’t sleep. And, of course, all of us had to get up early the next morning and do war work. Everyone did war work.

“So you would come out of the shelter after the raid and sweep up the windows and then go home to bed. If your house was still standing, of course. Sometimes it wasn’t.”

Prewar planners had not counted on night bombing, on the difficulty of finding survivors, extracting them from the rubble and taking them to hospitals in complete darkness.

In the Persian Gulf, most of the attacks on cities have come at night.

“Everything was blacked out and London was often foggy,” Marga says. “And it was very hard to find your way home. One time I ended up in the wrong house!” There is laughter on the phone like the tinkling of crystal.

She is remembering herself at 17. Picking her way through the broken streets in the inky blackness, the only light coming from the blazes off in the distance. The clanging of the ambulances. The fog and smoke. And finally finding her door, her relief that she still had a door, making her way to her room . . . to find a stranger there!

She laughs now. She laughed then. Yes, there was laughter during the Blitz. Is there laughter today in Baghdad? In Tel Aviv? In Riyadh? I think so. Human beings may not be the best creatures on the planet, but they are the most astonishing. “The worst bit was toward the end,” Marga says. “The flying bombs. They were the worst.”

The flying bombs were Germany’s V-1 and V-2 rockets. The V stood for Vergeltungswaffe or “vengeance weapon.” The Scud missiles that Iraq fires today are direct descendants of these rockets.

The British got very good at knocking down the V-1s with anti-aircraft fire, but the V-2s flew much faster, faster than the speed of sound, which meant they struck in silence.

When the first V-2s hit London on Sept. 8, 1944, some of the worst injuries came from flying glass as the rockets exploded, shattering windows. Numerous men, women and children were blinded for life that day.

But you never got demoralized? I ask Marga.

“Never,” she says instantly, firmly. “Just the opposite. People were immensely kind to each other. Talkative. In the shelters, they would ask: ‘How did you do last night? Is your house still standing? Do you have walls? Can we help?’ There was a wonderful spirit. It is noticeable even now.”

Now? You mean today?

“Yes, today, with the Persian Gulf War,” she says. “I think I notice a difference on the streets, in the shops, from people of my generation. People who lived through the bombing in London, people who went through it, I think, are much more supportive of each other during these days, much more sympathetic and concerned about what is now going on. You actually notice it. Londoners can be rather distant. But not now, not today.”

It should be pointed out that the British and other allied forces did their own bombing in World War II and it was often terrible to behold.

In Hamburg, in July and August, 1942, allied bombers created firestorms by using incendiary bombs. These created temperatures of more than 1,800 degrees and a literal hurricane of fire in which wind speeds reached 100-150 m.p.h., incinerating even those people who had escaped to underground shelters.

At least 50,000 people were killed in the Hamburg raids, a million more fled the city, half the houses were destroyed and more than half of those houses left standing were damaged.

Yet morale did not break. It didn’t break in London and it didn’t break in Hamburg. That is one of the more interesting lessons of World War II (and later Vietnam). Conventional bombing, though at least partly designed to break the spirit of civilians, instead seems to strengthen it.

Astonishing creatures, these human beings.

But most astonishing, perhaps, is how people got used to the bombing, how life struggled for normalcy amid the madness. How people kept a stiff upper lip. How they muddled through. And how they just began to ignore the war.

“Really, sometimes we would just not go down to the shelters when the bombing began,” Marga says. “After a while, we sometimes took our chances. Life went on. Life always goes on.”

Marga Vogel is Marga Alexander now (actually she is Lady Alexander, but that’s another story) and she turned 69 a few weeks ago. Her twin sisters also came through the war just fine and later moved from London.

Today, one lives in Haifa and the other lives in Jerusalem. They will muddle through.

In cities throughout the Mideast, while the warriors make their war, the people will muddle through.