Reduced activity, attacks mainly over Thames Estuary and East London.
Night: Raids on London and Merseyside.
Weather: Showery.
Main Activity:
Piccadilly, Regent Street, Bond Street, North Audley Street, Park Lane and many less famous thoroughfares in the centre of London were blocked after the night’s raids. Big cranes surrounded Marble Arch and men of the Civil Defence Corps, Pioneers and Police worked to clear the rubble and rescue the victims trapped in the wreckage.
A lull was expected after the intensity of the previous day’s operations. Only seventy hostile planes, flying singly, crossed the coast via Dungeness. A few reached Liverpool and London where a lone rooftop raider machine-gunned Hackney.
Near Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, a Ju 88 fell to the guns of No. 302 Squadron. Engine failure compelled another to land intact at Oakington airfield near Cambridge. Losses for the day were eight German and no British.
In Germany, Hitler formally ordered the assembly of the invasion fleet to be stopped, and shipping in the Channel ports to be dispersed ‘so that the loss of shipping space caused by enemy air attacks may be reduced to a minimum’.
Excerpt from The Narrow Margin by Derek Wood & Derek Dempster
German Losses
Airmen: 22 | Aircraft: 10
British Losses
Airmen: 0 | Aircraft: 0
Photo Descriptions:
- A wide view of the damage sustained by the Peter Robinson department store at Oxford Circus, following an air raid on London. Half of the front of the building has been destroyed and large mounds of rubble are piled outside, September 1940. © IWM (D 1096)
- Squadron Leader B J E ‘Sandy’ Lane, the Commanding Officer of No. 19 Squadron RAF (facing camera), relaxes with some of his pilots in the Squadron crew room at Manor Farm, Fowlmere, Cambridgeshire, September 1940. © IWM (CH 1461)
- British aerial reconnaissance of German invasion barges in Boulogne harbour, 1940.
- Surviving pilots of No. 601 Squadron RAF pose on a tractor used to negotiate the muddy conditions on the airfield at Exeter, Devon. 601 Squadron suffered crippling losses during the Battle of Britain and moved to Exeter on 7 September 1940 after being classified as overdue for rest and training of new pilots, (Class ‘C’). Among the pilots identified are two flight commanders, Flight Lieutenant W P Clyde (first left) and Flying Officer T Grier (second left), who shot down nine and one shared, and eight and four shared, enemy aircraft respectively during the air battles over France and Britain. © IWM (CH 17324)