Author: John Penny
Bristol At War
This is the second edition of the popular 2002 original, updated with fascinating new photographs.
In this revealing and evocative book, John Penny recalls the extraordinary effect of World War Two on the lives of the inhabitants of Bristol. After the British defeat at Dunkirk and the fall of France, Hitler’s Luftwaffe turned its attention to bombing British cities, and Bristol was among the first to be targeted. During the difficult years that followed, the local people faced the continued threat of German air attach and coped with the inconvenience, danger and grief caused by the war.
In this, the first wide-ranging account of wartime Bristol, the author records the role the city played in the conflict. He draws on the eyewitness testimony of the local people, and he vividly brings back to life the everyday realities and intense atmosphere of those troubled times.
His opening chapters describe the anxious, sometimes disorderly, attempts made to arrange the defence of the Bristol area during the first months of phoney war. In his narrative he also recalls those aspects of wartime organisation that most affected the lives of the inhabitants – air-raid protection and civil defence, rationing, service in the armed forces, government propaganda, the Home Guard, the war economy.
He uses official British and German records, as well as newspaper reports and extracts from diaries kept at the time, to give a detailed account of the German raids on the city and their impact on the people. The German strategy is assessed, and there is an in-depth analysis of the successes and failures of the Luftwaffe’s bombing missions. The effectiveness of Bristol’s air and civil defences is examined, and the heroic deeds of ordinary Bristolians are remembered. The book is fully illustrated with maps, plans and documents dating from the war years, and with a selection of the outstanding photographs of the bombed city taken by award-winning photographer Jim Facey.
