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

Pelican Press · November 22, 2024

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

Elliot Heffernan (left) and Saoirse Ronan (right) portray a mother and son in Steve McQueen’s new film, Blitz.
Apple TV+

The Blitz

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on September 7, 1940. Virtually every night for the next eight months and five days, through May 11, 1941, ***** Germany razed British cities from above, waging an aerial ******** campaign whose name was derived from the ******* 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 ******* 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 *******’s ***** regime. Anticipating an imminent ******* on England, officials distributed

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so locals could evade poisonous vapors and built

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across the country.

But nothing happened for months, ushering in a ******* of limited fighting known as the

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. Then, in May 1940, Germany invaded France, and Winston Churchill became prime minister of Britain. In July, Germany began the Battle of Britain, ******** airfields and factories in an attempt to “******** Britain’s capacity to ******, defeat the Royal Air Force and soften up Britain for invasion,” says

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, an emeritus historian at Stanford University.

Civilians walk through a bombed-out street in London.

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In late August, a ******* pilot

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dropped ****** on central London. In response, Churchill ordered the

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, which Stansky describes as a “very ineffective” operation. This infuriated ******* and Hermann Göring, a high-ranking ***** military leader, so they ordered the ******** of London as retaliation. Thus began the Blitz.

“[The Germans] thought that ******** London would be so terrifying that people would demand peace,” says

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, 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 *******, people would be driven **** by the ********, 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 “

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” 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

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and television productions, from the 1942 movie

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to a two-part storyline on “

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.” Now, Steve McQueen, the director of the Academy Award-winning 12 Years a ******, is offering his take on the ******** campaign with

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, 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

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of around

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from the country’s biggest cities so they would be spared when the ****** 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 ****** 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,

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, author of

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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.”

Saoirse Ronan (left) and Elliot Heffernan (right) in Steve McQueen’s Blitz

Apple TV+

McQueen first came up with the idea for Blitz after working as a

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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

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, his 2020 anthology series about the lives of West Indian immigrants in postwar London, McQueen came across a

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of a ****** 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

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of London during World War II. Though most war films and military *********** depict the city as almost universally white, McQueen says that London was actually much more “

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,” boasting a

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,

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and immigrant communities from Britain’s many overseas colonies.

McQueen saw Blitz as a chance to celebrate the diverse group of

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who helped London endure the ******** campaign. “I knew I’d be asked about how historically accurate the film was, especially as I was putting a person of ****** 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.”

Soldiers arrive in London as children are evacuated from the wartorn city.

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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 *********-born

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, who volunteered as an Air Raid Precautions warden tasked with enforcing ********* 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

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that happened.”

Another overlooked figure featured in Blitz is

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(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 ********* politician once praised it as a symbol of democracy.

In his

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about the first day of the Blitz, Stansky argued that British morale came very close to cracking over that first weekend of the aerial ********. The constant threat of ****** by ******** 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 ******* 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 (…)

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But the British soon grew accustomed to the near-constant ********. 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 ***** cities,” says Allport. “The Germans were kind of just ******** at random. Plus, London is an enormous city that’s very hard to ********.”

Damage to roads proved to be a major

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, 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.

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, which were constructed in house’s gardens and backyards, were so

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that some opted to stay inside in their warm beds during air raids.

Ignoring precautionary measures was a risky strategy: During the Blitz, ****** damaged or destroyed around

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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

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arrived to make tea and provide food for those who had lost their homes. In 1942, the British government actually bought all of the

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in the world, Axis-controlled East Asia aside. “That’s how important … tea [was] to morale,” Allport says.

A bus ***** in a crater in Balham in the aftermath of a ********.

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One of the biggest battles between the government and British citizens during the early days of the Blitz was the

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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

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. In October 1940, a ***** created a huge ***** in the street above the station. A bus crashed into the ***** and burst a pipe, which flooded the station below, ********

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.

The end of the Blitz

The Blitz came to an end on May 11, 1941, when *******

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—and armies—to the ******* Union and the

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. The Nazis “realized that the Blitz wasn’t really achieving their goals,” says Allport. “The British had also gotten better at ********* down ******* 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

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,

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and Exeter in April 1942; a smaller-scale aerial campaign known as the

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barraged Britain between January and May 1944.

Londoners take refuge in the Aldwych tube station in 1940.

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Ultimately, the Blitz ******* 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 ******** 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 ******** state comes out of the Blitz,” says Levine. “If you look at the roots of the

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, 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 ***** [lookouts and] wardens and … in factories. The war was only able to continue because of them.”

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