The only Luftwaffe pilot to bale out over Chelsea during WW2

His life was saved by a Chelsea artist who disarmed an outraged bombing victim who had grabbed the pilot’s pistol and was threatening to shoot him with it.

It is one of the most dramatic encounters between the enemy and the people of London in the midst of the terrifying and devastating Blitz.

It happened during one of the worst air raids in 1941 raining down tons of high explosive, bursting incendiaries, and the cruel deployment of sea mines dropped by parachute so they drifted down silently and detonated a much greater and murderous blast of destruction.

Just after 2 a.m. on the 17th of April Leutnant pilot Günther Sissimato was also descending on the end of a parachute over the Lots Road Power station and the World’s End area of Chelsea drifting from the King’s Road in the direction of Battersea.

He was silhouetted against the flashing light and roar of anti-aircraft fire, the fiery glow from burning buildings and the chiaroscuro of search-light beams.

Many of those who saw him in the sky thought he was another parachute mine and ducked or fell to the ground instinctively.

The 22 year old pilot landed feet first into the mudflats on the north bank of the River Thames parallel with the Chelsea Embankment. The tide was low. He was able to detach himself from his parachute which spread itself across the water as he paced anxiously back and forth between the water and steep embankment wall looking like some frantic costermonger who had lost his way.

He could hear loud and urgent voices speaking in English some twenty feet above him. He spotted a face or two peering down at him over the granite parapet. He would not have known that two parachute mines had laid waste and wrecked all the buildings on the Chelsea Embankment from Crosby Hall to the Cheyne Hospital for children.

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A view of Cheyne Walk and Chelsea Old Church on the Chelsea Embankment from the River Thames before destruction by two Luftwaffe parachute mines on 17th April 1941.

Chelsea Old Church Bomb Damage. People standing outside Chelsea Old Church which was reduced to rubble after a direct hit from a parachute mine during an air raid, London, 18th April 1941. (Photo by Topical Press/Hulton Archive/Getty Images) It looks as though a giant has grabbed the old church in its hand, crushed it and then dropped the wreckage to the ground.

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The new Lombard café at 77 Cheyne Walk was now a pile of bricks, plaster dust, twisted timber and earth, along with the tall Art Nouveau late Victorian houses in Cheyne Walk and the legendary Chelsea Old Church.

It had been Chelsea’s first parish church, Sir Thomas More’s church and one of the much-loved historical and ecclesiastical landmarks of this part of London.

One of the ironies of this awful bombing is that London County Council had been responsible for giving approval to the demolition of numbers 64 and 65 Cheyne Walk on the western side of the end of Old Church Street just before the war.

This meant the pulling down of the much-loved original and old Lombard Café which was the corner property and frequented by many of Chelsea’s artists and writers including the poet Dylan Thomas. This old terrace had been the last surviving remnant of Lombard Street before the building of the Chelsea Embankment towards the end of the 19th century.

The redevelopment plan had been bitterly opposed by the Chelsea Society and Chelsea Borough Council, and the 1941 bombing meant the replacement houses were never constructed.

In the early hours of Thursday 17th April, rescuers were picking up bodies and body parts of people they knew personally. The body of one man lay on the other side of the houses destroyed in Cheyne Walk as though he had collapsed to the ground waiting at the 39 bus stop there. In fact, he had most probably been blown across the road some twenty or thirty yards.

Heavy and light rescue squads, stretcher-bearer units, including the war artist Clifford Hall, fire service crews, Home Guard soldiers, St Stephen’s Hospital’s special paramedic car with doctor and nurse, police and local people were searching through the mountains of debris.

Those with bare hands found they were bleeding after catching the splintered glass mixed in all the rubble and shattered furniture, crockery and personal belongings which before 1 a.m. had been the contents of treasured homes.

Special War constable Francis Cremonesi had been jolted out of his sleep when all the windows and frames of his flat and grocer’s shop at 26 Old Church Street were blown in.

He quickly teamed up with Inspector Lewis who had arrived from Chelsea Police Station.

There are three dramatic accounts of Pilot Günther Sissimato’s surrender, capture and arrest as a prisoner-of-war.

This posting for Chelsea History and Studies is the first time Sissimato has been identified as the German airman who parachuted into Chelsea on 17th April 1941.

One of the first to see Leutnant Sissimato and his parachute was civil servant and part time ARP Warden Aymer Robert Maxwell-Hyslop. He recalled:

I can remember one old lady coming out of the top of that pile of rubble. I can remember thinking then – and I’ve never been able to understand it since – that she must have been thrown twenty or thirty yards in the middle of this enormous mass of timber and brick and broken glass and goodness knows what, and yet, somehow, she’d settled in there and more stuff had piled on top of her, and yet she didn’t seem, when we got her out, to be hurt at all. I’ve never been able to understand how that could happen.

Well, then the raid went on, and there was this horrible noise and the bright light of burning gas main, and sometime later on I heard somebody shouting what sounded like, “Look, there’s another!” And I looked up and there coming overhead, coming down from the King’s Road towards the river, was a parachute, and I was quite certain it was another mine. And all I could think of doing was to get down behind the pile of rubble and I lay down and I counted twenty waiting for it to explode and thinking that I was sure to be killed but not being so frightened of that as of the noise I was going to hear. And after I counted twenty, and nothing had happened, I began to feel rather silly. I heard people shouting on the embankment, and I got up and I saw that they were leaning over the embankment, and a little later, up came this frightened-looking German airman and he was taken away by a couple of policemen’ (FitzGibben 1956: 228-9).

Leutnant pilot Günther Sissimato had baled out of a fast light Junkers Ju. 88 bomber with three other members of his crew.

They had also landed safely though the Observer, Unteroffizier Walter Meissler, 21, Wireless/Radio officer, Gefreiter Paul Schumann, 19, and Gunner, Unteroffizier Georg Abell, 24, were picked up in other parts of London.

Where and when they each individually left the stricken aircraft meant they drifted down into scattered locations across London.

They were on their second mission of the night departing from their airfield in Jouvincourt-et-Damary, France at 0045. The remnants of the runway from which their JU 88 bomber took off for the last time with the lettering 3Z + BS on its side can still be seen just outside the village.

They had been loaded with one 1,000 kg bomb and six to eight chutes of incendiaries to bomb the West End of London.

When they reached their target area they dropped their high explosive bomb on a fire visible below from their height of 13,500 feet and then the sticks of incendiaries hoping to start another fire to act as a target for other German bombers.

Their JU 88 suddenly received a severe shock with flames shooting out from behind the Wireless Operator’s position. They had no idea whether they had been hit by anti-aircraft fire or the bullets of an RAF night fighter.

They had not been responsible for the parachute bombs in Chelsea. They may not have even been bombing Chelsea at all. Their aircraft crashed into the Observatory Gardens, Campden Hill Road, Kensington at exactly 0205 in the early hours of Thursday morning 17th April 1941.

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A contemporary satellite view from Google Maps showing Observatory Gardens in Camden Hill Road Kensington where Leutnant Sissimato’s JU 88 bomber crashed at five minutes past two in the morning of Thursday 17th April 1941.

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The second key eye witness to Leutnant Sissimato’s capture was the head warden of Post Don Leslie Matthews. The parachute bombs had wreaked their destruction in the middle of his Air Raid Precautions district:

‘There were little bits of salvage, tools for example, gathered up, belonging to one of the people who was later on to be brought out of the debris dead, handbags, trinkets and so forth – these were all collected up, it was part of our job to collect these things.

Then suddenly somebody called out: “There’s another one coming!” and I remember looking up and seeing what I thought was another parachute mine coming down. It was absolutely terrifying. You couldn’t look away from the thing and there you were, just trying to make yourself as small as possible in the debris, and I suddenly realised it wasn’t a mine, it was a man, it was an airman on the end of his parachute, and he dropped down quite fast over the roadway and down on to the foreshore of the river, on the embankment.

A number of us rushed across there and then we looked rather cautiously over the wall. We had ideas about paratroop invasions. I remember a couple of firemen training a hose and I was clutching my axe and I expect everybody else was wondering what we could do if the man turned a gun on us, but someone went down the steps which are just a little way along the embankment there, and got hold of him. My recollection is that it was one of our wardens, called David Thomas, but anyway, he brought him up, and he was a youngster I should think in his early twenties. I remember he was wearing a green flying suit and he was pretty well the same colour himself.

He was very correct in his behaviour- he didn’t say anything, he didn’t do anything, he just stood more or less at attention. I remember feeling his arm quite rigid when I got hold of him, and then something rather surprising happened- most of one’s ideas were upset I think that night. Somebody rushed up and kicked him in the seat, very hard. I suppose it was somebody who’d had someone killed or was just overcome by the strain of events, but anyway he, the man who kicked him, then rushed round to the front of him and succeeded in getting a pistol out of the pocket on his leg. [This would have been a Walther P38 semi-automatic pistol] He had a sort of pocket in front of his flying suit, and anyway, somebody else took the pistol from the little man.

I don’t know what he’d have done if he hadn’t had it wrested away from him. Then a War Reserve policeman came along at that point, and shortly afterwards another one, and I remember seeing them marching this German airman off along the embankment, just as if he’d been drunk and disorderly on a Saturday night’ (FitzGibbon 1956: 238-9).

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A contemporary satellite view of Cheyne Walk, the rebuilt Chelsea Old Church and Chelsea Embankment and River Thames foreshore where Luftwaffe pilot Günther Sissimato landed. They never rebuilt the houses at the end of Danvers Street and along Cheyne Walk. It was turned into Roper’s Garden and the sunken area laid out with plants, grass and flowers had in fact been the basements of the tall art nouveau style late Victorian terraced buildings.

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Joan Eileen Rosling was an actress and model who met and fell in love with the photographer and surrealist painter Peter Rose Pulham in Paris in 1938 and began an affair lasting until 1943. He gave her the name Theodora. When she later met and married the American journalist Constantine FitzGibbon she took his surname and developed a career as a published writer specialising in cookery.

During the Blitz of 1940 and 1941, she lived in Chelsea with Peter Rose Pulham, taking a flat with artist’s studio space on the top floor of King’s Mansions next to the Cross Keys pub in Lawrence Street. It overlooked and backed on to the churchyard of Chelsea Old Church and it was wrecked in the Parachute mine explosions.

Theodora FitzGibbon is the third eye-witness from that extraordinary night:

‘The window blew in and a dense cloud of greenish dust moved slowly through the gaping hole, forming into the shape of a weird monster. Peter flung himself on top of me on the bed, his eyes wide and dark with fear.’

They went out and did all they could to help the trapped and injured. She recalled:

‘The Thames was at low tide, factories in flames opposite, as we smoked our cigarettes leaning over the wall near the steps leading down to the river. Bombs were dropped all round, but we were too exhausted to bother. So long as we could see them, we said. Down on the silty river-bank a man was walking about.

“There’s a man down there, Peter.”

“Probably a fireman looking for an unexploded bomb.”

“Well, he’s coming towards the steps. Let’s go down and see. It’s cold standing here.”

It was light enough to walk easily down the stone steps, and we were about halfway down as he was coming up. Over Peter’s shoulder, I said:

“Looks like air force uniform. Hope it’s one of ours!”

“Don’t be so imaginative, Pussy. [Peter’s nickname for Theodora]”

As they met face to face I heard:

“Leutnant [Günther Sissimato, fünf, fünf, fünf, eins, zwei.] and some German numerals followed. Peter stood aside, and the German airman stood on the steps between us.

“Ich sprache Deutsch,” I said.

He repeated only what he had said to Peter, and we walked in silence to the top.

The airman looked about twenty-three, the same age as myself; his face was pale with terror. He did and said nothing, just stood with his arms at his side, as is understandable when someone has just parachuted into an area which he has been bombing. Wardens and firemen came round, in fact one fireman had a hose ready in case he attacked us.

Nobody knew quite what to do with this man who had dropped from the sky. The airman suddenly lurched forward, as a man who none of us had seen kicked him hard in the backside. The man then rushed to the front and wrenched a pistol from a pocket on the pilot’s flying suit. Peter, usually slow-moving, quickly stretched out his long arms and wrested it away. It all happened so quickly, in the dim light, that only those close by realised what was going on.

Two war reserve policemen materialised from nowhere, and quite quickly marched off the German airman between them. Someone said: “Like a drunk and disorderly on a Saturday night”- except that the captive marched firmly and erectly, and there was no disorder.

Without speaking to each other, Peter and I followed at a distance. We had been shocked by the pistol episode, death on the ground was more real and immediate than from the skies; and despite all our horrors of the long night, we both knew that the young boy was frightened too. In a funny way, he was “our parachutist” and we wanted to see him in safe keeping.

What can he have been thinking as he walked through the ruined streets, fires blazing in all of them, bombs still raining down?’ (FitzGibbon 1982: 70, 72-3)

Theodora and Peter did see Leutnant Sissimato all the way to Chelsea Police station in Lucan Place and they were in there giving a statement when another parachute mine landed almost opposite on Cranmer Court causing more death and destruction.

The background and fate of Leutnant Günther Sissimato and his Ju. 88 crew

Sissimato’s Ju. 88, 3Z + BS of 8/K.G.77 made two sorties on the night 16/17th April 1941. A secret RAF Intelligence report released to the National Archives would provide much more detail about their operations, the careers of the crew and their morale.

Despite the Geneva Convention requiring each German airman to state only their name, rank, and military number, RAF Intelligence had a largely successful and sophisticated infrastructure of gathering information.

Sometimes German Luftwaffe prisoners of war were only too happy to be ‘out of the war’ and would be content to answer questions. Others would indiscreetly talk to each other unaware their conversations were being listened to, recorded via secret microphones, and then translated.

The RAF would also on occasion use stool pigeons- German speaking men dressed as Luftwaffe members with full legends in terms of fake identities and trick the POWs into revealing information to people they thought could be trusted confidantes.

The Ju. 88 took off on their first sortie from Jouvincourt with 1 x 1,000 kg. bomb and several chutes of incendiaries at about 9 p.m. on 16th April 1941.

They were the third aircraft in a Staffel (squadron) of three Ju. 88.s. The other two had the aircraft numbers 3Z + IS and 3Z + AS. The fourth plane which had been detailed to join them had broken down at the last moment.

A total of 22 aircraft from the Gruppe, including the Gruppenkommandeur were flying over to London for this operation.

It seems initial information from the pilot and radio/wireless operator suggested the intended target had been Victoria Dock, but later interrogation revealed they were somewhat reluctant to admit they had received orders to bomb ordinary civilian dwelling houses as a reprisal for recent RAF raids on Berlin.

Sissimato said he selected a definite target on his own initiative. This he believed to be the railway triangle either west of Bethnal Green Junction or surrounding Vallance Road and Artillery Street.

They flew into the target from the direction of the Isle of Dogs at about 12,000 feet, visibility was bad, nobody could recognise anything as the target area, so they dropped their bombs near two large red fires which were ablaze in East London on the South Bank of the river.

They returned to their base at Jouvincourt in France at about fifteen minutes past midnight. They were the first plane from their Staffel to land from the first sortie.

They remained with their aircraft as it was immediately refuelled and bombed up with the same load as previously- one 1,000 kg high explosive and a chute of incendiaries.

Half an hour later they took off for the second sortie. In another hour and twenty minutes they would be brought down by London’s air defences after dropping their bombs over the West End.

Sissimato’s crew had not all flown together. Their experienced radio and wireless operator had been ill. This means that 19 year old Wireless/Radio officer Gefreiter Paul Schumann was inexperienced. He had recently been misemployed as a batman and his earlier flights in other aircraft when he had been deployed as a last-minute replacement had been rather dicey with aircraft malfunctioning.

Various images of the Ju. 88 light bomber flown by Leutnant Sissimato and his crew including the wreck of one on the ground from the Bundesarchiv Bild CC BY-SA 3.0 de

He was the member of Sissimato’s crew who volunteered that he was so pleased to have been taken prisoner-of-war and lucky to have survived being shot down and parachuting into a city they had been bombing.

Sissimato had piloted the Ju. 88 bomber on 18 bombing raids over Britain since the 15th of February 1941.

In his first operation, the bomber was ordered to drop 1 x 1,000 kg and 1 x 250 kg high explosives in a solitary raid on Southampton between 11.25 p.m. and 4.20 a.m. the following morning, but visibility was very bad, the target not located, and they imagined they had dropped their bombs into a field.

On the 17th February 1941 they took off at 8.40 p.m. and bombed the London docks with 1 x 1,000 kg and 1 x 500 kg high explosives.

On the 1st of March 1941 after taking off at 5.30 p.m. they were in a group of three bombers raiding Cardiff. They attacked a railway junction near the docks with 4 x 250 kg, 3 x 50 kg high explosives and three containers of 36 incendiary bombs.

On the 10th of March 1941 they bombed Portsmouth between 10.30 p.m. and 1.25 a.m. the following morning with 4 x SC 250 kilos high explosive bombs, specially purposed against underground installations up to 8 meters deep, 3 x 50 kg high explosives and two containers of 36 incendiary bombs.

One day later they were over Birmingham with one other Ju. 88 dropping 2 x 250 kg high explosives between 9.10 p.m. and 1.35 a.m. following morning.

On the 18th March 1941 they attacked Hull between 10.50 p.m. and 1.25 a.m. following morning.

On the 21st of March 1941 they were one of three Ju. 88s from their base taking part in a raid over Plymouth. They took off at five minute intervals. Ju. 3Z + BS was the second and dropped 2 x SC 250 kg, 1 x 250 kg with two to six-hour fuse delays, and 1 x 250 kilo with fuse 25.

There were raids over Avonmouth at the end of March and Bristol in early April with varied bomb loads including 10 x SD 50 kg bombs. These might have been the smallest conventional bomb in the German armoury during the Second World War, but they were also rather nasty black painted thick-walled fragmentation/anti-personnel bombs sending thousands of metal shrapnel fragments in all directions when detonating.

April 1941 was an even busier month of raids all over the United Kingdom.

Leutnant Sissimato flew Ju. 3Z + BS in a twenty bomber raid over Liverpool. His plane dropped 4 x 250 kg high explosives and four containers of 36 incendiaries.

Sissimato would not provide the details of their war flight on 5th April.

The following day he was flying over Bristol and then on 7th April, his aircraft Gruppe was transferred to Schipol in the Netherlands where they remained until the 13th. That night they flew two sorties to Glasgow from 10.35 p.m. and 3.35 a.m. the following morning.

The target was shipyards and repair shops between Greenock and Port Glasgow but visibility was very bad and they thought the 4 x SC 250 kg and 5 x SD 50 kg bombs they dropped never reached their mark.

In the early hours of the morning on 9th of April they tried to attack an aircraft factory just outside Coventry with 4 x SC 250 kg and 5 x SD 50 kg bombs.

On the same day, they took off at five past nine at night and attacked the Railway Waggon factory east of Birmingham.

Visibility was extremely good and Sissimato recalled ‘Identification of the target was made particularly easy because of a line of three reservoirs to the north of Birmingham which practically pointed to the objective.’ The Staffel had also attacked the same factory twice previously.

On the 11th of April they attacked the London Docks between 7.47 p.m. and thirteen minutes past midnight with 4 x 250 kilo bombs and they were flying with four other Ju. 88 light bombers from their Gruppe.

After their return to their base at Jouvincourt they took part in an ambitious raid on Belfast in Northern Ireland on 15th April 1941. The flight lasted from 9.47 p.m. in the evening and 3.20 a.m. the following morning.

Sissimato’s aircraft was in a large group with five planes from their Staffel and the rest of the Luftwaffe Gruppe. They aimed to attack Harland and Wolff shipyards south of Musgrave Canal, but they were not sure that any of their 4 x 250 kg bombs reached their target in the bad visibility. They were also hit by flak near Bristol, but managed to return and land safely.

This means that through the day on Wednesday 16th April they were sleeping while the Ju. 88 was repaired.

RAF Intelligence gathered that Sissimato and other pilots were having difficulty distinguishing between genuine fires and decoy fires when flying over Britain, but they were aware of decoy RAF airfields.

On their final flight 16th/17th April 1941 they approached the West End from the Isle of Dogs, but were surprised they could not locate the River Thames which they had always regarded as the most prominent and reliable landmark in London.

They were also using the new tactic of flying as low as 5,000 feet when on return flights because they believed this was the best way of avoiding night-fighters.

Leutnant Sissimato had had three years of training and joined his aircraft group from Krakow in Poland. He was born and educated in Berlin. Early schooling in Ju. 88 aircraft had been through short flights and he was first introduced to operational flying on 15th February 1941. He was promoted to Leutnant on the 1st of April 1941.

21 year old Observer, Unteroffizier Walter Meissler had originally joined the German Airforce’s artillery in January 1939 before transferring for training as an operational Observer.

19 year old Wireless/Radio officer, Gefreiter Paul Schumann had started his war service in the Luftwaffe’s infantry in 1939 before transferring to be trained as a radio/wireless operator.

After training to operate on Ju. 88 aircraft he was found to be a spare man after all of the pairing with pilots, observer/bombardiers and flight engineer/gunners. Consequently, he was misallocated and rather wasted as a batman (kind of military manservant) to a senior officer.

In April he was hastily posted to air crews when wireless operators dropped out with illness and his operational experience was not a happy one. In a first flight over Liverpool on the 3rd of April 1941 one engine started overheating badly, they hurriedly dropped all their bombs without any specific aiming and the crew considered themselves fortunate to get back home alive.

In the raid over Belfast on 15th April 1941 the Ju. 88 he was flying in experienced serious engine trouble, so they turned for home, dropped their bombs over Brighton, and counted themselves lucky to have got back alive.

His third night of flying was in his third and different Ju. 88- this time 3Z + BS piloted by Günther Sissimato, and as we know, he was shot down on the second sortie.

The flight engineer and gunner, 24 year old Unteroffizier Georg Abell, did not respond to interrogation and did not disclose any information in any surreptitiously recorded conversations. RAF Intelligence was only able to establish he had been trained and had been in the Ju. 88 3Z + BS aircraft.

Leutnant Sissimato was transferred with many other Luftwaffe pilots and the other members of his crew to POW camps in Canada. Sissimato was actually promoted again to Oberleutnant in 1943 while in captivity in Canada where he remained for six years.

It seems the German POWs were moved around the country. Sissimato said he gained much knowledge of the Rockies and other places. He returned to Nuremberg, Germany in 1947 for a few months before joining his family in Berlin.

He renewed a friendship with 27 year old Danzig born Ilse-Dorothee Thomas who was working in a school in Brandenburg, but she could not travel to the western zones because she had no home or employment contract there.

Günther agreed to marry her so she could escape the Eastern Bloc. The marriage of convenience with a plan to divorce after a year turned into a marriage of love. Günther Sissimato developed a successful career in West Germany as a self-employed graphic artist and designer. Ilse-Dorothee helped manage the office side of his business.

There is no doubt that the Chelsea artist and photographer, Peter Rose Pulham, would have been delighted to learn that the Luftwaffe bomber pilot whose life he had saved on 17th April 1941, would go on to participate in the post-war world of West Germany in art and design.

Günther and Ilse-Dorothee retired in 1995 and moved to live near their daughter in Lohr in 2009 and pursued an active hobby of travelling.

Günther’s life was in stark contrast to that of Oberleutnant Franz von Werra, a Luftwaffe fighter pilot shot down over Britain in 1940.

He had initially tried to escape while captive in England, but was later successful in getting into the then neutral USA after being transferred to a POW camp in Canada.

Von Werra was the only Axis prisoner-of-war to succeed in escaping and make it home during the war. However, he would be killed in a practice flight crash into the sea off Holland in October 1941.

His narrative was immortalised in the book The One Who Got Way in 1956 by Kendal Burt and James Leasor, and the film with the same name released in 1957 with a sympathetic portrayal of von Werra by Hardy Krüger.

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The dramatic accounts of the parachuting of a Luftwaffe airman into Chelsea on the night of the bombing of Chelsea Old Church have been published in the books The Winter Of The Bombs: The Story of the Blitz of London by Constantine FitzGibbon in 1956, and With Love: An Autobiography 1938-1946 by Theodora FitzGibbon in 1982. Cover and back covers below. The declassified RAF intelligence files including the reports on Leutnant Sissimato’s Ju. 88, 3Z + BS of 8/K.G.77 and the interrogation of Sissimato and his crew are contained in UK National Archives file AIR 40/2405.

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The Chelsea Blitz: Chelsea at war between 1939 and 1945 by Tim Crook is coming soon with publication by Kultura Press in 2025.

The book will contain in narrative form all of the postings on Chelsea Blitz history posted and in continuing development in Chelsea History and Studies. Publication is by popular demand from people and online readers wanting to have a book form of this remarkable story of the people’s history of Chelsea during these dramatic years.

It is expected to be the most comprehensive history of Chelsea during the Second World War years to date.

The online postings will remain on open access though with all rights reserved.

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Special thanks to Karen White and Chris Pain whose families lived in Chelsea during World War Two, and Malachy John McCauley, also brought up in Chelsea, who have very kindly encouraged and assisted my research. Special thanks to Marja Giejgo for editorial assistance. Research and archive facilities from Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council library services, The Imperial War Museum and National Archives at Kew.

If you would like to protect the history and heritage of Chelsea do consider applying to be a member of The Chelsea Society which ‘was founded in 1927 to protect the interests of all who live and work here, and to preserve and enhance the unique character of Chelsea for the public benefit.‘

I am also a great believer in the importance of local libraries for preserving the memory of community and local history. Royal Kensington and Chelsea Borough Council library services were my refuge and temples of learning when I was brought up in Chelsea. They continue to provide outstanding lending and archive services, have been invaluable in my continuing research and writing about the people of Chelsea. I give tribute to all who work in them, use them and support them.

Congratulations to The Chelsea Citizen, a dynamic new hyper-local newspaper launching in the spring 2025. Founder & Editor Rob McGibbon, Chelsea resident for 30 years and 40 years a respected and campaigning journalist. This is a significant and important development in the history of newspapers and journalism in Chelsea. Whole-hearted support from Chelsea History and Studies. Sign up for the Chelsea Citizen Newsletter.

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