The bombing of East Grinstead

Seventy-five years ago, on July 9, 1943, a Dornier Do 217E became separated from the rest of its 10-plane Luftwaffe flight as it entered a cloudbank on its way to bomb London.

 Likely based near the town of Toulouse, France, close to the Spanish border, the German bombers had crossed the English coast at Hastings on one of hundreds of raids that dropped tens of thousands of tonnes of bombs over the course of the Second World War, killing some 60,000 British civilians and injuring 80,000 more—most of them Londoners.