Bombs on Britain: Where the Air Raids Killed, 1914 to 1945. Civilian Deaths Town by Town from the CWGC Roll and the First World War Raids

Popular memory places the air war against British civilians in London. I test that picture with the Commonwealth War Graves Commission's roll of civilian war dead of the Second World War, aggregated to counts by civic area, date and age, and set it beside a table of the First World War raids and bombardments built from Wikipedia and checked against its text. The roll holds 67,779 civilians, of whom 61,542 are filed under places in the United Kingdom. Greater London accounts for 29,983 (49%); the other 31,559 (51%) died elsewhere, in 51 civic areas outside London with 100 or more dead each. London's share changed sharply over the war: 48% of the 39,222 dead of the Blitz of 1940 to 1941, 12% in the Baedeker and tip-and-run years that followed, and 87% in the flying-bomb and rocket campaign of 1944 to 1945. The deadliest single days for any one place were outside London: Liverpool (669 on 3 May 1941), Belfast and Coventry. Approximate rates put Coventry (5.7 per 1,000) and Plymouth (5.1) above the County of London (4.8). Children under 16 were 13% of the dead with a stated age. In the First World War, airships and aeroplanes killed 1,414 people, 47% of them in the London police district, and the naval bombardment of 16 December 1914 killed 137; Hartlepool lost more people that morning and in a 1918 raid (94) than on its Second World War rolls (76). The roll agrees within ten per cent with published city totals in 13 of 18 cases. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/air-raids/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/air-raids. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/28/air-raids/.