The Blitz spirit: what was true and what was a myth

For the British people, the Blitz was entirely distinct from the Battle of Britain. One had been a dramatic fight in the skies over southern England, the other was a restless series of bombing raids on towns and cities across the UK.

But for Adolf Hitler there was no such distinction. They were both attempts to use air power to bring Britain to heel - whether by invasion, negotiation or popular uprising. The intensive bombing would, he believed, disable trade, shatter industry and hinder governance.

Perhaps most crucially, it would leave ordinary people so terrorised and distressed they would force their leaders to make peace.

Hermann Goering, head of the Luftwaffe, promised Hitler he could force Britain to sue for peace by bombing its airfields and key cities - especially London.

So it was that from September 7, 1940, the aerial assault was focused on the capital - the most populous city, containing the centre of government and a port bringing in almost half of the nation's supplies. For 57 consecutive nights it was attacked before the aerial assault was extended to all parts of the nation in November.

At the start of the Blitz, the German aircraft dropping the bombs were the Dornier 17, the Heinkel 111 and the Junkers 88. The outdated Dornier was phased out at the end of 1940, after which Stuka dive bombers and Messerschmitt 110s flew sorties.

The Italians also joined the party, reflecting the desire of their dictator Benito Mussolini to be seen contributing to an Axis victory. Fiat BR.20 medium bombers were flown over Britain from airfields in Belgium but proved unsuccessful and were quickly sent home.

In the early days, Hurricane, Spitfire and Boulton Paul Defiant aircraft were sent up to attack the bombers but, without on-board radar, rarely found their targets.

Nor were anti-aircraft gunners achieving much success but, under pressure to be seen to be doing something to combat the raids, they were ordered to fire continuously even if aiming at thin air. This apparently pointless exercise had two positive effects: it boosted civilian morale while forcing enemy bombers to fly higher.

As the Blitz drew on, developments in radar improved both the anti-aircraft gunners' accuracy, and the ability of night fighters - specifically the fast, well-armed Bristol Beaufighter - to locate and close in on bombers.

Many kinds of bombs were dropped on Britain and they were feared for a variety of reasons. Small, thin incendiary bombs, intended to start fires, were dropped in large numbers, making a sound like dried peas hitting a tin plate as they fell on roads and pavements. Made from a magnesium alloy, they were ignited by a small fuse before burning for ten minutes at a high temperature.

The most common high-explosive bomb, weighing 250kg, would typically destroy two houses in a terrace and take the roofs off the homes over 100 yards in any direction. Land mines, meanwhile, were obsolete anti-shipping explosives recycled as parachute mines, floating gently down and exploding devastatingly above ground.

The first British bomb-disposal teams of the war were made up of Royal Engineers working by trial and error. "I went out as a Royal Engineers subaltern with some cotton to deal with a bomb in a field, knowing nothing at all about German bombs," saidJH Emlyn Jones.

Some high-explosive bombs were meant to explode on impact while others had delayed fuses of up to four days. So, when a team was attempting to defuse a bomb, it was either meant to have exploded or be primed to explode at any moment. It's hard to imagine a more terrifying wartime job or one that required greater courage.

George Ingram said: "Bomb-disposal work made you drink a lot more than you should.

"I used to say: 'Join the Army and see the world. Join Bomb Disposal and see the next.'"

Yet the Blitz was not simply a time of terror and misery. For many, it heralded new possibilities. Shocked out of their rhythms by fear and necessity, ordinary people pulled together and helped strangers.

Viola Bawtree, a 57-year-old woman living in Sutton, shared her cellar air-raid shelter with various neighbours and family members. Her remarkably honest diary entries paint a picture of her near-paralysing fear.

One night, lying in bed and suffering "abject terror", she ran down to the cellar and took her place in a deckchair among the others. "Oh how welcome! For I feel I must be with someone!" she wrote. The shared danger clearly led to instinctive companionship.

Blitz Spirit - the idea that people were brought together in awful circumstances - was not, in its organic form, simply a myth. There was a great deal more common ground than ever before. Rationing meant that people were eating the same food, wearing the same clothes, buying the same furniture. They were joining up together, evacuating together, taking shelter together, working in factories together and volunteering together for the ARP (Air Raid Precautions), the WVS (Women's Voluntary Services for Civil Defence), the Home Guard and many other organisations.

Many people were seeing life from others' perspectives as they never had before. It was in the interest of the Government to treat all of these people well, too. The people were gaining a stake in their own society for the first time. A surreptitious democratic revolution was taking place.

In 1940, a short British propaganda film called London Can Take It!, narrated by US journalist and war correspondent Quentin Reynolds, was produced by the GPO Film Unit and distributed throughout the United States. It showed the effects of 18 hours of the Blitz on Londoners - demonstrating morale was higher than ever. None of which is to say that the period was entirely defined by good behaviour. Exactly the same intensity that drove people to pull together drove others to break rules and exploit each other. Many were cruel and selfish.

Opportunity led to looting, black-market crimes, sexual violence and gun crime. There was a large overall increase in criminal activity. Looters arrived at bomb "incidents" before the emergency services. There were even a few instances of emergency services personnel being accused of looting.

The intensity of the time affected people in shocking ways. Take the case of George Hobbs, a 43-year-old mortuary assistant found guilty of stealing items from the bodies of air-raid victims. The sentencing judge described these actions as "horrible and disgusting" yet Hobbs's plea in mitigation is revealing. Nobody, he protested, could possibly imagine the sight of bodies recovered from bombed premises. Combined with the ever-present dread the same would happen to him, Hobbs claimed his mind and his behaviour had been turned.

Blitz Spirit is often - rightly - celebrated. Actions such as Hobbs's are rarely admitted. Yet they stand as twin symptoms with a common cause. In November, when Hitler realised that Britain was unlikely to concede defeat, his strategy changed. He began to plan for an invasion of the Soviet Union, which he believed would result in victory by the spring of 1941.

In the meantime he ordered the Blitz to be widened to target the major industrial and port cities. His intention was to shatter Britain's economy so that when he turned his full attention back to the country it would offer little resistance. This phase of the Blitz began with the horrifying attack on Coventry on the night of November 14, 1940, when 568 people were killed and the entire city centre was eradicated. Attacks followed on Southampton, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester and Sheffield, among others.

On the night of December 29, London suffered the worst raid yet. From February onwards, the attacks on the ports intensified, with raids on Swansea, Plymouth, Ports-mouth, Bristol, Belfast, Clydebank and Hull.

May 10, 1941, was the most devastating night of the London Blitz. In a final great raid, intended to divert attention from Hitler's preparations for the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Luftwaffe started almost 2,500 fires in the capital.

But although no one in Britain realised it that night, it marked the end of the Blitz. Six weeks later Hitler launched Operation Barbarossa. He would not achieve victory over Russia - and he would never again be able to focus entirely on Britain.

Joshua Levine is author of The Secret History of the Blitz (Simon and Schuester, £10.99)