7 January – TheBBC Forces Programme begins broadcasting; it becomes the most popular channel among civilians at home as well as its primary target audience.
8 January –Food rationing is introduced;[2] it will remain in force until 1954.
9 January – World War II: linerDunbar Castle of the Union Castle Line hits a mine in the English Channel and sinks with the loss of 9 men (2 dead and 7 missing).
17 January – A wave of freezing weather afflicting most of Europe leads to theRiver Thames freezing for the first time since 1888.
February – The last mounted charge by a British cavalry regiment is made when theRoyal Scots Greys are called to quell Arab rioters inMandatory Palestine.[4]
26 January – British battleshipHMS Barham (04) is torpedoed by aU-boat but suffers only minor damage.
16 March – First civilian casualty of bombing in the UK, onOrkney.[6]
18 March – Last terrorist bomb in theIrish Republican Army'sS-Plan campaign on the British mainland (and until 1973) explodes harmlessly on a London rubbish dump.[7]
21 March – Old Age and Widows' Pensions Act reduces the pensionable age for insured women and the wives of pensioned men from 65 to 60.[8]
Neville Chamberlain resigns as Prime Minister, and is replaced this evening by Winston Churchill with acoalition war ministry.[2]
German invasion of France and the Low Countries, ending the "phoney war". BritishInvasion of Iceland, following the German invasion of Denmark and Norway, to avert a possible German occupation of the island, in violation of Iceland'sneutrality.
5 June – NovelistJ. B. Priestley broadcasts his first Sunday evening radioPostscript, "An Excursion to Hell", on theBBC Home Service, marking the role of the pleasure steamers in the Dunkirk evacuation.
17 June –RMS Lancastria, serving as atroopship, is bombed and sunk by theLuftwaffe while evacuating British troops and nationals fromSaint-Nazaire with the loss of at least 4,000 lives, the largest single UK loss in any World War II event, immediate news of which is suppressed in the British press.[16] DestroyerHMS Beagle (H30) rescues around 600.
18 June
Churchill makes his Battle of Britain speech to the House of Commons: "...theBattle of France is over. TheBattle of Britain is about to begin... if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say,This was their finest hour." He repeats the speech on BBC radio this evening.
TheMinistry of Information issues more than 14 million copies of an advisory leafletIf the Invader Comes.[17]
Operation Catapult aims to take French navy ships into British control or destroy them to prevent them falling into German hands. Those in port atPlymouth andPortsmouth are boarded and in anattack on Mers-el-Kébir British naval units sink or seize ships of the French fleet anchored in theAlgerian ports ofMers El Kébir andOran. The following day,Vichy France breaks off diplomatic relations with Britain.
Adolf Hitler makes a peace appeal ("appeal to reason") to Britain in an address to theReichstag. BBC German-language broadcasterSefton Delmer unofficially rejects it at once[24] andLord Halifax, British foreign minister, flatly rejects peace terms in a broadcast reply on 22 July.
13 August –Adlertag ("Eagle Day") strike on southern England occurs, starting the rapid escalation of theBattle of Britain.
18 August
"The Hardest Day" in the Battle of Britain: both sides lose more aircraft combined on this day than at any other point during the campaign without theLuftwaffe achieving dominance over the RAF.
31 August –Texel Disaster: Two Royal Navydestroyers are sunk by running into aminefield off the coast of the occupied Netherlands with the loss of around 400 men, 300 of them dead.[28]
2 September –Destroyers for Bases Agreement between the United Kingdom and United States is announced, to the effect that 50 U.S. destroyers needed for escort work will be transferred to Britain. In return, the United States gains 99-year leases on British bases in the North Atlantic,West Indies andBermuda.[29]
The Blitz begins with "Black Saturday". This will be the first of 57 consecutive nights ofstrategic bombing on London.[2]
British high command issues the code "Cromwell" to troops, alerting them to possible German invasion.[19]
10 September – A bomb at South Hallsville School,Canning Town in the East End of London, which is in use as an evacuation centre, kills at least 77 and perhaps four times as many.[30]
11 September – Churchill, speaking from theCabinet War Rooms, warns of a possible German invasion.[29]
23 September – KingGeorge VI announces the creation of theGeorge Cross decoration during a radio broadcast.[2]
27 September –Battle of Graveney Marsh inKent, the last exchange of shots with a foreign force on mainland British soil, takes place when soldiers of theLondon Irish Rifles capture the crew of a downed new GermanJunkers Ju 88 bomber who initially resist arrest with gunfire; one of the enemy is shot in the foot.[35]
14–15 November –Coventry Blitz: the centre ofCoventry is destroyed by 500 GermanLuftwaffe bombers: 150,000incendiary devices, 503 tons of high explosives and 130 parachute mines level 60,000 of the city's 75,000 buildings. At least 568 people are killed, while 863 more are injured.[2] Exceptionally, the location and nature of the damage here is immediately publicised in the media.
19 November – Less than a week after the blitz of Coventry, further heavy air raids take place in central England.Birmingham,[38]West Bromwich,[39]Dudley andTipton[40] are all bombed. Some 900 people are killed and 2,000 more injured – there are 53 deaths at theBirmingham Small Arms Company factory inSmall Heath alone. Most of the region's casualties are in Birmingham.
12–15 December –Sheffield Blitz ("Operation Crucible"): the city ofSheffield is heavily bombed by theLuftwaffe. 660 people are killed, while another 1,500 are injured and 30,000 more left homeless.
Following the outbreak of World War II, housebuilding is halted, but some 1.1 millioncouncil houses have been built in the last 20 years to replace slum property, although the need for further demolition and rehousing remains, including the issue of rehousing families left homeless by air raids.[44]
^abSimons, Paul (2008).Since Records Began. London: Collins. pp. 205–7.ISBN978-0-00-728463-4.
^Grant, Charles (1972).Royal Scots Greys. Reading: Osprey. p. 33.ISBN0850450594.
^Gowing, Margaret (1964).Britain and Atomic Energy, 1935–1945. London: Macmillan Publishing. pp. 40–43.OCLC3195209.
^Doyle, Peter (2010).ARP and Civil Defence in the Second World War. Oxford: Shire Publications. p. 9.ISBN978-0-7478-0765-0.
^McKenna, Joseph (2016).The IRA Bombing Campaign Against Britain, 1939-40. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. p. 142.
^Smith, Harold L. (October 1995). "Gender and the Welfare State: The 1940 Old Age and Widows' Pensions Act".History.80 (260):382–399.doi:10.1111/j.1468-229X.1995.tb01676.x.
^Palmer, Alan; Palmer, Veronica (1992).The Chronology of British History. London: Century Ltd. pp. 386–387.ISBN0-7126-5616-2.
^Draper, Alfred (1979).Operation Fish: The Fight to Save the Gold of Britain, France and Norway from the Nazis. Don Mills: General Publishing.ISBN9780773600683.
^Ceadel, Martin (2000).Semi-detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854–1945. Oxford University Press.ISBN9780191696893.
^"Red Cross Gift Shop".Worthing Gazette. 17 July 1940. p. 4.The Worthing Division of the British Red Cross Society is opening a Red Cross Gift Shop in Chapel-road, Worthing for a month from to-morrow...
