The Real Story Behind Apple TV+’s ‘Blitz,’ a New Steve McQueen Movie About Britain’s Everyday World War II Heroes

The Blitz began on September 7, 1940. Virtually every night for the next eight months and five days, through May 11, 1941, Nazi Germany razed British cities from above, waging an aerial bombing campaign whose name was derived from the German word blitzkrieg, which translates to “lighting war.” These deadly raids were intended to weaken British resolve during World War II. While the Germans also targeted smaller cities like Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield, Bristol, Glasgow and Coventry, it was the United Kingdom’s capital, London, that sustained the most damage and destruction.

Britain’s leaders had initially expected the bombings to take place a year earlier. Two days after Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, the U.K. declared war on Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. Anticipating an imminent attack on England, officials distributed gas masks so locals could evade poisonous vapors and built air raid shelters across the country.

But nothing happened for months, ushering in a period of limited fighting known as the Phony War. Then, in May 1940, Germany invaded France, and Winston Churchill became prime minister of Britain. In July, Germany began the Battle of Britain, bombing airfields and factories in an attempt to “destroy Britain’s capacity to fight, defeat the Royal Air Force and soften up Britain for invasion,” says Peter Stansky, an emeritus historian at Stanford University.

In late August, a German pilot accidentally dropped bombs on central London. In response, Churchill ordered the bombing of Berlin, which Stansky describes as a “very ineffective” operation. This infuriated Hitler and Hermann Göring, a high-ranking Nazi military leader, so they ordered the bombing of London as retaliation. Thus began the Blitz.

“[The Germans] thought that bombing London would be so terrifying that people would demand peace,” says Alan Allport, a historian at Syracuse University. “It was assumed that within a few days, London would be a huge pile of ruins, hundreds of thousands of people would be killed, people would be driven mad by the bombing, and there would be mass panic.”

But that didn’t happen. Instead, over the next eight months, Britons rallied together. They showed such a level of stoicism and resistance that the phrase “Blitz Spirit” was coined in recognition of their bravery. Decades later, the term is still used whenever British people need to overcome the odds.

Steve McQueen’s Blitz

The Blitz has featured in numerous film and television productions, from the 1942 movie Mrs. Miniver to a two-part storyline on “Doctor Who.” Now, Steve McQueen, the director of the Academy Award-winning 12 Years a Slave, is offering his take on the bombing campaign with Blitz, a new film streaming on Apple TV+.

Blitz – Official Trailer | Apple TV+

Set in the early days of the Blitz, the war drama follows defiant young boy George (Elliott Heffernan), who escapes from the train evacuating him out of London and returns to the beleaguered city. As he tries to make his way back to his distraught mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan), George comes face to face with many of the horrors of the London bombings.

When Britain declared war on Germany, the government organized the evacuation of around 800,000 children from the country’s biggest cities so they would be spared when the bombs started falling. As the prolonged nature of the Phony War became more apparent, “a lot of the kids started drifting back home after a couple of weeks,” says Allport. When the Blitz actually began, a second wave of evacuations took place, as it quickly became apparent just how dangerous cities were going to be. “Evacuation is [framed] as being a one-time thing, but it’s actually a constant process,” Allport adds.

In Blitz, George—the son of a white mother and a Black father—makes the decision to return to London and Rita after he’s racially abused on the train heading out of the city. While that scene isn’t based on a specific incident, Joshua Levine, author of The Secret History of the Blitz and a historical adviser on the new film, has heard plenty of stories of evacuated children’s varied experiences.

One man Levine recently spoke to was sent from his working-class home in Bristol to live with a rich family in New Zealand. While there, he became “a different person,” says Levine. “He played cricket, learned to sail and even got a scholarship to a top art school.” But just as he was about to enroll, the war ended, and he had to return home. When the child got back, his mother threw his art supplies away within two days. Feeling like his parents “were strangers,” Levine says, “as soon as he was able to, he ran away, joined the Royal Marines and has spent most of his retirement returning to New Zealand every year.”

McQueen first came up with the idea for Blitz after working as a war artist in Basra, Iraq, in November 2003. “After really experiencing actual war, which most of us are fortunate not to, I wanted to bring war home in some way, because I thought there was a numbness to people’s understanding of what war is,” the director-writer says.

For years, however, McQueen struggled to find a way into the story. Then, when he was researching Small Axe, his 2020 anthology series about the lives of West Indian immigrants in postwar London, McQueen came across a photo of a Black child who was about to be evacuated during the Blitz. “As soon as I saw that image, I knew that I should show the narrative through a child’s eyes,” says McQueen. He asked himself, “Who is this child? Where could he have come from? What was the background of his parents? Where did he live? What was the makeup of the area?”

Through the character of George, McQueen was able to explore the racial dynamics of London during World War II. Though most war films and military propaganda depict the city as almost universally white, McQueen says that London was actually much more “cosmopolitan,” boasting a Chinatown, Black nightclubs and immigrant communities from Britain’s many overseas colonies.

McQueen saw Blitz as a chance to celebrate the diverse group of unsung heroes who helped London endure the bombing campaign. “I knew I’d be asked about how historically accurate the film was, especially as I was putting a person of color within this context,” he says. “But the real question is, ‘Why are these people not in these [historical] images when they were there and helping?’ That was a choice that was made.”

The real stories behind Blitz

McQueen wrote the character of Ife (played by Benjamin Clementine) to help correct the whitewashing of the Blitz. He is based on the Nigerian-born Ita Ekpenyon, who volunteered as an Air Raid Precautions warden tasked with enforcing blackout regulations, guiding civilians into shelters and overseeing other safety measures. “He had come over to Britain to study law,” says Levine. “There’s a scene in the film where he stops people segregating themselves and says, ‘That’s not going to happen in my shelter.’ That’s [based on] a real event that happened.”

Another overlooked figure featured in Blitz is Mickey Davies (Leigh Gill), who McQueen insists should be a “household name,” as he was “one of the architects” of the National Health Service. Davies was the leader of a communal air raid shelter in London’s Spitalfields neighborhood, where he demanded that authorities improve medical and sanitation facilities. “He took this shambles of a shelter and singlehandedly turned it into a showpiece shelter,” Levine says. “Dignitaries were taken down to it,” and an American politician once praised it as a symbol of democracy.

In his 2007 book about the first day of the Blitz, Stansky argued that British morale came very close to cracking over that first weekend of the aerial assault. The constant threat of death by bombing was cause for concern alone, but the destruction of houses and the breakdown of public services like hospitals and transport also contributed to Londoners’ low spirits. As Allport says, “People are in shock. Social services have broken down. There’s a brief period where people are panicking.”

The Thoughts Of Private Ekpenyon – 2 October 1943 -Ita Ekpenyon who volunteered as a St Marylebone Air Raid Warden in 1939, publishes a 14 page pamphlet on his experiences.Originally from Nigeria, Warden (…) #BlackHistoryMonth pic.twitter.com/8ua3EyFxsz

— OurHeritageTV (@ChairmanOhtv) October 2, 2022

But the British soon grew accustomed to the near-constant bombing. While the government expected mass casualties from the outset, the overall number of civilian deaths was lower than anticipated. “It turns out that it’s quite hard to bomb cities,” says Allport. “The Germans were kind of just bombing at random. Plus, London is an enormous city that’s very hard to destroy.”

Damage to roads proved to be a major inconvenience, especially as broken sewage, water and gas mains prevented people from getting to work in the morning. The sound of air raid sirens, especially at night, kept people awake for days on end. Anderson shelters, which were constructed in house’s gardens and backyards, were so cold and damp that some opted to stay inside in their warm beds during air raids.

Ignoring precautionary measures was a risky strategy: During the Blitz, bombs damaged or destroyed around 1.1 million houses, leaving one out of every six Londoners homeless. That’s why one of the government’s most important projects was getting homes fixed as quickly as possible. “Thousands of construction workers would do emergency repair jobs, board up windows and fix roofs,” says Allport. “They’d put people in dormitories or find families temporary homes while they waited.” In the aftermath of bombings, members of the Women’s Voluntary Service arrived to make tea and provide food for those who had lost their homes. In 1942, the British government actually bought all of the available tea in the world, Axis-controlled East Asia aside. “That’s how important … tea [was] to morale,” Allport says.

One of the biggest battles between the government and British citizens during the early days of the Blitz was the public’s demand to use London Underground stations as air raid shelters. Initially, the government believed that allowing people to gather together would be bad for morale. Officials even feared that if civilians went belowground, they’d be too scared to ever come out. These concerns all proved to be unfounded. But while people clambered to take refuge in the stations, disasters still unfolded there. A scene in Blitz takes its cue from the real-life Balham station disaster. In October 1940, a bomb created a huge hole in the street above the station. A bus crashed into the hole and burst a pipe, which flooded the station below, killing 68 people.

The end of the Blitz

The Blitz came to an end on May 11, 1941, when Hitler shifted his focus—and armies—to the Soviet Union and the Eastern Front. The Nazis “realized that the Blitz wasn’t really achieving their goals,” says Allport. “The British had also gotten better at shooting down German aircraft.” Over the next four years, bombings continued to occur sporadically in Britain as Germany sought to keep the country on tenterhooks. The Germans launched attacks on Bath, York and Exeter in April 1942; a smaller-scale aerial campaign known as the Baby Blitz barraged Britain between January and May 1944.

Ultimately, the Blitz killed more than 43,500 civilians. Despite these catastrophic numbers, Stansky believes that the Nazis’ decision to focus their aerial attacks on London might have helped Britain win the war. “If Germany had continued bombing factories and airfields [instead],” he says, the Axis powers “might have been successful in sufficiently softening up Britain and invading it.”

The Blitz helped pave the way for postwar Britain, too, demonstrating citizens’ value to the government. “The welfare state comes out of the Blitz,” says Levine. “If you look at the roots of the National Health Service, the rise in wages, employment protection and free education, they all come from the Blitz. It was the people who were bombed and were in danger, but they still volunteered on a huge scale as fire [lookouts and] wardens and … in factories. The war was only able to continue because of them.”