Facing Armageddon: British society and civil defense, 1939–45

By the late 1930s it was widely expected, drawing on the experience of German air raids on Britain in the First World War, that if and when the next war came it would mean that London and other areas would come under heavy aerial bombardment. Exactly what this would mean in practice, however, was difficult to say – except that it would be much worse than in the last war, since aeronautical technology had improved tremendously since the relatively primitive Zeppelins and Gothas of the 1914–18 period.