After the first two waves of Operation Steinbock, the Nazi’s final bomber offensive of WWII, “nearly 100 Londoners were wounded or dead. It was just the beginning of a deadly four-month air onslaught against Great Britain the likes of which the country hadn’t seen since the war’s grim early days.”
The novelist George Beardmore, who had been declared medically unfit for military service, was spending the war documenting its effects on his fellow Londoners. In a journal entry dated June 12, 1944—two weeks after Operation Steinbock ended and seventy-four years ago today—Beardmore reminds us of the totality of the devastation:
Other side-effects of bombs are the stripping of leaves from wayside trees, the deaths by blast of sparrows, chaffinches, etc., and the awful things that happen to cats and dogs. We had a man complain that thirty of his forty-odd small birds in a backyard aviary had been killed by blast, half a mile or so away from where the bomb had landed.
