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60,000 civilians died on the mainland during the war.

    Looking at the wider context of the Second World War, what made it especially dreadful was the way that the lines between military and civilian targets at first blurred and then eventually collapsed completely. An estimated total of 60 million people died in the Second World War, triple the fatalities of the First World War, and more than half that figure were civilians. This imbalance was partly due to genocidal policies, none more notorious than Hitler’s ‘Final Solution’ to the ‘Jewish Question’, in which 6 million of Europe’s Jews were exterminated with an industrial ruthlessness that defies imagination. Yet also, air power had also reached a destructive ascendancy. Not only had the aircraft types diversified and increased in performance, but long-range strategic bombing could visit destruction on distant cities, raining high-explosives and incendiaries onto industrial targets and civilian housing areas alike. While Germany and Japan never quite developed the aircraft types or strategic focus for such bombing, the Allies unleashed hell upon Axis towns and cities, particularly between 1943 and 1945. The devastation of places such as Hamburg, Cologne and Dresden in Germany was little short of apocalyptic. In Hamburg, for example, an unrelenting pounding by British (at night) and American (by day) bombers between 24 and 28 July 1943 killed an estimated 30,000 people. During the raid a firestorm developed that generated 1,800°F (1,000°C) heat and 120mph (193km/h) windspeeds, immolating all those in its path. Japan also received the full force of strategic bombing in 1945, when US B-29 bombers began to make regular visitations. The Operation Meetinghouse air raid of 9–10 March 1945 on Tokyo has been classified as the single most destructive bombing raid in history – through using incendiaries against the city’s predominantly paper-and-wood houses, the US Air Force destroyed 16 square miles (41km 2 ) of city and killed more than 100,000 people. And of course, the ultimate expression of civilians as ‘legitimate’ targets came with the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 and 9 August 1945 respectively. Two cities were vaporised in two instants, and the new era of nuclear warfare was inaugurated.
    SECOND WORLD WAR CASUALTIES (DEAD, WOUNDED AND MISSING)

    FRONTLINE VOICES: THE BLITZ
    The following is an extract from the Manchester Guardian , recording just one of many incidents during the Blitz:

    Children sleeping in perambulators and mothers with babies in their arms were killed when a bomb exploded on a crowded shelter in an East London district during Saturday night’s raids. By what is described as ‘a million-to-one chance’ the bomb fell directly on to a ventilator shaft measuring only about three feet by one foot. It was the only vulnerable place in a powerfully protected underground shelter accommodating over 1,000 people. The rest of the roof is well protected by three feet of brickwork, earth, and other defences, but over the ventilator shaft there were only corrugated iron sheets. The bomb fell just as scores of families were settling down in the shelter to sleep there for the night. Three or four roof-support pillars were torn down and about fourteen people were killed and some forty injured. In one family three children were killed, but their parents escaped. Although explosions could be heard in all directions and the scene was illuminated by the glow of the East End fires, civil defence workers laboured fearlessly among the wreckage seeking the wounded, carrying them to safer places, and attending to their wounds before the ambulances arrived.

    Manchester Guardian ,
    9 September 1940
    BRITISH BOMBER CREWS
    Although British bomber crews delivered some of the most devastating raids of the war against German cities, they in turn faced the worst odds of survival of almost any branch of service. The threats they encountered