The History Behind Steve McQueen’s World War II Drama Blitz

More than eight decades after the Blitz, when Nazi Germany bombed Britain for nine months straight between 1940 and 1941, Oscar winner Steve McQueen’s film Blitz, in theaters Nov. 1 and on Apple TV+ on Nov. 22, aims to show viewers what it was like to live in the country during that tumultuous period.

The film starts with a London factory worker and single mom Rita (Saoirse Ronan) making the difficult decision to send her son George (Elliott Heffernan) to the countryside so he can be safe from the bombing. Furious, George jumps off the train and spends the rest of the film trying to find his way back to his mother. The tearjerker of a movie also features flashbacks to Rita’s romance with George’s father and how it tragically ended.

Here, Josh Levine, author of The Secret History of the Blitz and a consultant on the film, talks to TIME about the hardships brought on by the Blitz and the scenes that are based on real people and incidents.

The Blitz, explained

The German air force’s bombing of London from Sept. 7, 1940, to May 11, 1941, left about 43,500 people dead and many more homeless. The attack campaign became known as "the Blitz."

While the Germans bombed other parts of England, London bore the brunt of the attacks. The Germans targeted large industrial areas where suppliers were coming in, and areas with munitions factories and ports. Among London’s famous landmarks hit during the Blitz were Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, the Tower of London. Some neighborhoods had to be completely rebuilt.

The Germans hoped to “bring the people to a point where they'll be so utterly demoralized, so damaged mentally and physically, that they will demand that their government makes peace," Levine says. "So that was the thinking behind it, and it didn't work.”

The Blitz ended when the Germans turned their focus toward the Soviet Union. World War II ended in Europe with Nazi Germany’s surrender on May 7, 1945.

How children were evacuated during the Blitz

George, the little boy in the film who is sent to the countryside to avoid the Blitz, is not based on anyone in particular. McQueen was inspired to create the character after being struck by an image of a young biracial person taken from the time period of the Blitz. That photo is in the Imperial War Museum’s collection.

But George’s story in the movie is inspired by the very real sagas of some one million children who were evacuated to the countryside at different points during World War II, including the Blitz. Various couples got paid to take in these children from the big cities. Levine’s own father was one of these boys, and he remembers boarding a train to the countryside and then waiting for someone to let him and his brother stay with them. Many of the surrogate parents picked girls first, figuring they’d be less trouble.

“It was done very quickly, and there was no vetting of the families. So you find lots of examples of [children] who are incredibly happy, who wanted to stay with their families and families [who] wanted to adopt the children," Levine says. "But you also find terrible stories of families who just either didn't care, or, even worse, were abusive. So it was a very mixed bag.”

Just as George jumps off a train in the movie, child evacuees really did flee from their surrogate parents. “I have found accounts of children who were so miserable that they ran away,” Levine says. He came across one story of a boy who ran away to his grandmother’s house because he was afraid if he ran back to his parents, they would send him back to the countryside. The grandmother ended up letting the little boy stay with her.

Robberies during the Blitz

Cities instituted blackouts, extinguishing all lights so that the German air force would have trouble identifying targets. 

At one point in the movie, George stumbles upon a group of shadowy figures in a pool hall who are counting up all the belongings they have stolen during the blackouts.

Theft was rampant during the Blitz. Levine describes London during the Blitz as “a criminal paradise” given “there’s absolutely no light. Then you've got all these bombed out houses with everyone’s possessions suddenly strewn across the streets. And people took advantage of this.”

A notable example is the looting after the bombing of Café de Paris nightclub in March 1941. At least 34 people died, including the bandleader Ken “Snakehips” Johnson, who is depicted in the film by Devon McKenzie-Smith. Thieves swarmed the scene to cut off victims’ fingers so they could quickly steal their rings. 

Some of the looters were the emergency medical professionals. For example, members of the Auxiliary Fire Service who were putting out a fire across from St. Paul’s Cathedral in Sep. 1940 helped themselves to clothing, bottles of whisky and gin, and carried them out in their water buckets. 

Sheltering in the Tube during the Blitz

Londoners indeed sought refuge in the city’s underground subway stations during the Blitz. Since the bombings usually occurred at night, people would head into the Tube at the end of the day, where they’d have their own designated area to camp out. 

The person with dwarfism who runs a shelter in the Stepney tube station in the movie is inspired by a real person: Mickey Davies. He turned it into a showpiece shelter in London with medical facilities, toilet facilities, and a system for distributing food.

However, the shelters were not fool-proof. The scene of George escaping a flooded tube station is inspired by a real incident in which the Balham tube station flooded on Oct. 14, 1940, while about 600 people were sheltering in the station. According to the Imperial War Museum, at 8:02pm, a bomb dropped on the station. Water, gas, and sewage lines were ruptured, and many people drowned. At least 68 people were killed. 

In the film, an air warden named Ife (Benjamin Clementine) asks a man in a shelter to take down a curtain he put up so he wouldn’t have to look at the Sikh family next to him. The character is based on a real law student-turned air warden named E.I. Ekpenyon, and he talked about how he dealt with people who tried to institute segregation in the shelters, arguing, “I would like to see a spirit of friendliness and comradeship prevail at this very trying time in the history of the Empire. I further warned my audience that if what I said was not going to be practiced, I would advise those who did not agree to shelter somewhere else.”

Indeed, Levine says that there was a so-called “Blitz spirit,” examples of Brits from all walks of life banding together to survive, whether it was holding hands to support one another as the bombs dropped, or a mix of rich and poor civilians being on the lookout for small fires and extinguishing them. While World War II may have ended eight decades ago, the filmmakers hope viewers will muster some of that “Blitz spirit” and camaraderie whenever times are tough.

November 18

The original version of this story misstated when World War II ended. It was eight decades ago, not two decades ago.