It’s the 70th anniversary of the Blitz. I’ve been following the Battle of Britain Day By Day blog since last month, today it stepped up a gear with a long post about the first day of concentrated bombing on London.

By coincidence, I’m also reading First Blitz, an account of the German bombing campaign against London and the south of England during the First World War. After Zeppelins were no longer effective, the England Squadron flew Gotha and Giant bombers at first in daylight and then, as England’s air defence improved, on night raids. The numbers of aircraft and tonnage of bombs were significantly lower than in the next war, but this was one of- if not the- first time large raids were mounted against an enemy city.

I’m halfway through the book right now. It’s a simple chronological recounting of raids, developments and countermeasures, but told in such a way as to remain interesting and based upon accounts from the attackers and defenders for balance. My only quibble is in its use of the word Blitz. It was my understanding that Blitz came from blitzkrieg and was first used to describe the bombing campaign of 70 years ago. It feels to me like the WW1 campaign has been retroactively renamed as a Blitz, either by the book’s writer or earlier historians, and contemporary writers would have called it something else. That aside, the book is proving an interesting read on early air warfare.