Rain of Terror The First Day of the Blitz: September 7, 1940 by Peter Stansky Yale. 224 pp. $24.00 How well do democracies bear up under the strain of terror? The question has been posed time and again. England, Spain, Germany, Italy, Greece, and of course Israel are but some of the countries that have been plagued by bouts of terrorist violence, some of them prolonged. The United States was tested severely on September 11, 2001. A very different kind of extreme case is a starting point for some suggestive comparisons. Beginning on September 7, 1940, Great Britain’s capital was pounded by Germany’s Luftwaffe for 57 consecutive nights. After that initial phase, with somewhat decreasing intensity punctuated by a few enormously destructive raids, London and other British industrial and port cities were bombed without interruption until May 11, 1941. On that final night, after nine months of trying to bring the country to its knees, the Germans unleashed their most lethal raid, killing nearly 1,500 Londoners. Altogether, the death toll in London from the Blitz was 40,000.

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