The Blitz begins

September 7, 1940

Unable to defeat the RAF in daylight combat, Hitler switched to bombing British cities by night. For fifty-seven consecutive nights London burned beneath waves of Luftwaffe bombers. Families slept in Underground stations while their neighborhoods turned to rubble. Twenty thousand Londoners died under the high explosive. The city did not break. Other cities, Coventry foremost, fared worse. A new kind of civilian war had arrived.