In the fall of 1940, half of Europe was under the rule of the Third Reich. Britain stood alone against the Nazi war machine; the Battle of Britain was raging over the summer of that year. In September 1940, the German air force, the Luftwaffe launched the Blitz, a bombing campaign aimed not only against factories and airstrips of the Royal Air Force but British cities and their citizens also. The Blitz lasted until May 1941, by which time two-thirds of the Luftwaffe had been redeployed to other fronts. 40,000 British civilians lost their lives, and a million buildings were destroyed during the bombing campaign. An average of 150,000 people took shelter in London's Tube stations every night. (Read our earlier article).
After one such raid in September 1940, the cover of Life magazine showcased the horrors of the war and the pain the locals had to endure amidst the German bombings. American readers were confronted with a photo of a three-year-old little girl, Eileen Dunne, who got injured during a raid. She was hospitalized and the photo was taken when she was sitting in bed with a bandaged head, holding her doll. The photo was described by LIFE magazine as follows: “The wide-eyed young lady on the cover is Eileen Dunne, aged 3 3/4. A German bomber whose crew had never met her dropped a bomb on a North England village. A splinter from it hit Eileen. She is sitting in the hospital. A plucky chorus of wounded children had just finished singing in the North English dialect, “Roon, Rabbit, Roon.”
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