The sky over London's East End turned black with bombers—348 of them, flying in formations so vast they took thirty minutes to pass overhead.

The Blitz Begins: When German Bombs Rained on London's East End

September 7, 1940 — The Day Hitler Turned His Fury on Britain's Civilians

On September 7, 1940, nearly 1,000 German aircraft attacked London, launching the Blitz—and accidentally saving the RAF.

The afternoon sun hung low over the Thames when the drone began. At 4:43 PM on September 7, 1940, Londoners in the East End looked up to see something that would haunt their nightmares for years: 348 German bombers, escorted by 617 fighters, blackening the sky in formations that stretched for miles. The Luftwaffe had come not for airfields or factories, but for them.

In Silvertown, a neighborhood of dockworkers and their families, nine-year-old Len Jones was playing in the street when the first bombs fell. 'The whole world seemed to be on fire,' he later recalled. 'I saw a horse running down the street, its mane ablaze.' Within minutes, the Surrey Commercial Docks—stacked with timber from Canada—erupted into an inferno visible from seventy miles away. Firefighters arriving at the scene found the heat so intense that paint blistered off their engines before they could unroll their hoses.

This was the beginning of what Londoners would simply call 'The Blitz.' Hitler, furious over RAF raids on Berlin and frustrated by his failure to destroy British airpower, had shifted strategy. Göring had promised him that terrorizing civilians would break British morale within weeks. That night,…

💡 The fires in the Surrey Commercial Docks burned so hot that the Thames itself appeared to boil, and molten sugar from a destroyed warehouse flowed through the streets like lava.