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For eight months from 1940 to 1941 London was besieged by the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) in the Blitz. France had already surrendered while the Soviets were cooperating with Nazi Germany and the United States was adamantly neutral. The United Kingdom and its empire were alone and most every observer believed Germany was about to strike the knockout blow. Unusually the Blitz’s objective was not to destroy the British military’s industrial capacity to continue fighting, but to destroy the British people’s will. The Luftwaffe ignored military targets and focused their bombing on civilian ones, homes, hospitals and anything else they thought would damage civilian morale. Many families who could afford to chose to send their children to live in the country or even overseas British dominions, but the vast majority who could not either slept in their homes knowing they might not wake up the next morning, or slept in communal bomb shelters, most of which were converted areas of the London Underground where they were somewhat safer. Shelters were by no means prepared for the numbers of people they took in, lacking enough mattresses and bathrooms, and often contained haphazard military hospitals or other facilities that were simply set up wherever there was room. In spite of poor conditions morale remained high and the British public took the Blitz in  stride. 

- Ward Archer