The Blitz: The British Under Attack. Juliet Gardiner

crashed, others sounded as if 50 people in the upstairs flat were playing tig around a billiard table, others as if 50 equally noisy children had collected tin trays and were banging them with hammers’.

      Eight out of every ten heavy bombs dropped by German planes on Britain during the Second World War were high-explosive (HE) bombs – Sprengbombe-Cylindrisch (SC) general-purpose bombs – though tens of thousands of incendiary bombs fell during the blitz. The bombs were of various weights, ranging from 112 pounds (the bomb most generally dropped during the blitz, though by the beginning of 1941 heavier bombs were being used) to the 2,400-pound ‘Hermanns’ (named after the portly Göring, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe), the 4,000-pound ‘Satan’ (which could produce a crater large enough to accommodate two double-decker buses), and the largest bomb ever dropped on Britain, the 5,500-pound ‘Max’ (both names self-explanatory). The bomb’s thin metal casing was filled with amatol (TNT, ammonium nitrate and sometimes aluminium powder), and there was an electrical fuse in its side to detonate and ignite the explosive material, forming a ball of expanding, blazing gas while sharp shards of metal casing flew out with deadly penetrative power.