The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz

by Erik Larson

In practice, however, it waged war more openly against the city’s civilian population than ever before. For one thing, the Luftwaffe was deploying increasing numbers of bombs known as “parachute mines,” which drifted wherever the wind carried them. Loaded with fifteen hundred pounds of high explosives, they could destroy everything and everyone within a five-hundred-yard radius. Originally designed to destroy ships, they were first used over land on September 16, when twenty-five were dropped on London, descending on the city in eerie silence. The terror they raised was amplified when seventeen of them failed to explode, forcing evacuations of whole neighborhoods until the weapons could be disarmed by specially trained technicians from the Royal Navy.