cover image Blitz: The Story of December 29, 1940

Blitz: The Story of December 29, 1940

Margaret Gaskin. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), $27 (430pp) ISBN 978-0-15-101404-0

In her debut nonfiction account, British historian Gaskin spotlights the heart of London on the night of December 29, 1940, when Adolf Hitler tried to convince Britain the war was lost by burning London to the ground. Gaskin draws on published and unpublished interviews, letters, diaries and memoirs to reconstruct that night from the words of those who experienced it. Observers like American correspondent Edward R. Murrow, BBC announcers and Fleet Street journalists, played their parts, as did RAF fighter pilots and army antiaircraft crews. But the heart and soul of Gaskin's story comes from the ordinary Londoners who endured the raid in improvised shelters, defying prognostications of mass panic, and those who took to the streets, fighting fires, driving ambulances and rescuing survivors. Air raid defense was still in the stage of improvisation, and its men and women learned-and died-on the job. From the recollections of one terrifying night of the London Blitz, Gaskin fashions a refreshing, dramatic narrative that brings to life a city's wartime heroism and stoicism.