| Summary/Abstract |
They came just after dark,” American war correspondent Ernie Pyle wrote from London in December 1940, about a German bombing raid. “Somehow I could sense from the quick, bitter firing of the guns that there was to be no monkey business this night.” From a balcony, he watched “a night when London was ringed and stabbed with fire.” With dark buildings illuminated by the glow of hundreds of fires, balloons visible against pink clouds, a star peeking between them, it was “the most hateful, most beautiful single scene I have ever known.” Pyle thought of the day when he would be able “to tell somebody who has never seen it how London looked on a certain night in the holiday season of the year 1940.”
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