This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

This is Dispatches with Patrick Cockburn, a subscriber-only newsletter from The i Paper. If you’d like to get this direct to your inbox, every single week, you can sign up here.

In the early hours of 1 June, 1942, between 30 and 40 German bombers dropped high explosive bombs and incendiaries on Canterbury in a raid that destroyed much of the east and part of the south of the small city. Local people stood on the roof of the great medieval cathedral with metal rods to push off incendiaries before they could set fire to the building.

Catherine Williamson, the former mayor of Canterbury who had overseen the building of bomb shelters and other preparations for an attack by the Luftwaffe, recorded in a memoir how she watched the raid develop: circling German aircraft dropped “chandelier” flares to mark the target which “hung in the sky over the whole area of the city and I knew we must be prepared for the worst”. She moved to an underground bomb shelter, but “became aware that a great part of the city was already on fire”. She heard a great clanging sound and feared that the central bell tower of the cathedral had collapsed.

As the raid ended, she made her way through the blazing streets of wooden houses dating from the Middle Ages to a central control room which was efficiently dispatching fire engines, heavy rescue vehicles and ambulances. The staff were distressed because they had just heard that George Marks, the town clerk and civil defence controller for Canterbury, was trapped in the wreckage of his house after it was hit by a bomb. As the sirens sounded the all clear, he said to his wife: “I wonder how soon they will come and dig us out?” But when they did so, he was already dead.

Photographs of Canterbury after the raid shows fire-blackened timbers and shattered walls. An official report details how “very heavy damage has been done to the main shopping areas and also to residential property by explosive bombs and incendiaries”. Canterbury was only a small city with a population of 25,000 people, but destruction was massive, with 3,110 buildings destroyed or damaged, including two churches and the cathedral library. The cathedral itself had only survived thanks to the heroic efforts of people pitching the incendiaries off its roof and because the German “chandelier” flares had been carried by the wind a little way to the east of the building.

Much of Canterbury’s infrastructure was gone, with telephone communications disrupted and the sewers, water mains, gas and electricity damaged. Yet casualties among Canterbury townspeople were surprisingly low: some 48 dead, 55 seriously injured and 62 lightly wounded. Moreover, the city went on functioning, with 697 people who were homeless after their houses were destroyed and other bomb survivors able to go to a centre which told them where they could get extra clothes, find somewhere to stay, obtain travel vouchers, and apply for compensation for bomb damage. Everybody who asked was given between £10 and £15 for immediate needs.

But the comparatively low loss of life – despite the severity of the raid – and the capacity of government to operate in its aftermath,........

© iNews