London: Day 5 and our last day in London. Todd sold us on this museum so we wanted to make sure we saw it before we left. The kids and I walking up to the Imperial was Museum, a short walk from our apartment, in the rain of course.

Right inside the museum, war planes from all eras are suspended from the ceiling.

Below the airplanes are tanks from all the wars sprinkled with missiles and bombs, 100% testosterone fest.

Todd was drooling, you can't see it because the picture is too far away, but I will verify he was.

A picture of the gas masks that were government issued and all school children were required to pack in the backpacks along with their lunches and homework. Can you imagine to remind your children to pack their gas masks with their lunches?

A replica of an Anderson shelter which were also government issued. By 1940, 2.3 million of these shelters had been distributed.

The kids with Graham Zeitlin, now 79 years old, a survivor of WWII. At the time of the war, he was a nine year old boy. He spent awhile telling the kids of his experiences as a boy during the way. He showed them a program from a puppet show that he had put on. He and his friends would rotate between their homes and put on finger puppet shows. You didn't have to pay to come in, but you had to pay to leave. All money collected was donated to the war effort. He showed them receipts from the a war department made out to Tinker. Tinker was his cat who he said was rather busy during the war years. She would have a litter of kittens every six months, he would sell them, and donate the proceeds in the name of Tinker to the war efforts. He was an only child so when the air raid sirens would go off and all the lights would go out, he would have to play by himself. There were no toys because all metal was given to the war effort and all manufacturing facilities were creating bombs, guns, and tanks, not toys. He made a monopoly game out of cardboard and paper. He said it was better than the real game because it had his streets on it.

To this day he remembers ice cream from a particular shop as being the best ice cream he ever had in his life. During the ration times, most stores didn't keep the same quality they had prewar times. But one store somehow did. They were only open for a couple of months in the summer. He rode his bike 10 miles there, sat down and ate his ice cream, and would ride the ten miles back home. The last ice cream of the year he would savor since it would be nine months before he would have another. The store would only be open for a couple of hours a day, only until they ran out of ice cream. He said, "it may not have been the best ice cream I have had, but it seemed like it because I had to wait for it and travel so long to get it." Some of the rations were an egg a week per person, a couple of cups of flour, one chocolate bar. Even the king had the same ration amounts as everyone else.

The Anderson Shelters were made of corrugated metal, sunk in the ground, and covered with a garden of vegetables or flowers. Used to protect the families during the raids, the shelter was made to house six people. During the Blitz, 60,595 British civilians were killed by enemy action. 2.25 million people were homeless and 46% of London's children were evacuated. Graham said, although these numbers seem staggering, the loss of life was greatly reduced compared to the number of people who lost their homes. He credited this to the Anderson Shelters. The German people were not so lucky. Hitler didn't provide anything for their protection. 

The whole reason we came to this museum was to experience The Trench.

This smelly, dark, and chaotic WWI trench gave you a good feeling of what the soldiers experienced sometimes for a year at a time.

The reason or trench warfare is below, the invention of the machine gun. The old way of lining up and shooting your opponent became obsolete with the machine gun. Too many men were lost with this invention. So the war went underground.

Ironically, the Brits were first offered the machine gun design, but saw no need for it so the Germans adopted it. By the start of the war, the Germans had 12,000 machine guns compared to the French and the Brits couple of hundred.