London 1945: Life In The Debris Of War, Maureen Waller. c. 2004. 940.53WAL.
Prelude:
Snowdrops: white-helmeted US military police
- Piccadilly: pretty much gone
- Shaftesbury Avenuue, Rainbow Corner: American Red Cross Clubs
- British visitors by invitation only
- Café Royal: for those in the know; whiskey from Ireland; plentiful supply
- Windmill Theatre: said it never closed
- Stars and Stripes, printed on the presses of The [London] Times
- taxis, scarce
- Wren's St James's Church had lost its spire
- St James's Square: had lost its railings in the salvage drive of 1940
- London Library intact
- whole area out to St James's Street down to Pall Mall, badly scarred
- Christie's action house was a burnt skeleton
- Buckingham Palace: soot-grimed; blackoout still firmly in place
- it had been damaged 14 times; King and Queen still in residence
- and so on
- Westminster Abbey, knocked about a bit
- none of the bridges spanning the Thames was hit!
- Fleet Street, home of the newspaper industry, relatively unscathed;
- everything around St Paul's destroyed; that St Paul's survived at all was a miracle
- and then a history of the worst "hits."
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