Oxford historian Juliet Gardiner, a former lecturer at Brookes University, has completed another mammoth study to add to her Wartime: Britain 1939-1945 and last year's The Thirties. Her latest book, simply called The Blitz (Harper Press, £25), documents Britain's years of terror under aerial bombardment from Nazi Germany. The brunt of the attacks came in the East End of London, but large ports like Southampton and Bristol also suffered as well as Coventry, which was almost flattened.

Oxford features in the book only as a quiet respite for eyewitnesses from the big cities, but it did play a role in medical research into the victims' injuries. The physicist J. D. Bernal enlisted his colleague, the zoologist Solly Zuckerma, to set up a casualty survey, with a central analytical group in Oxford. An "audaciously precise" bombing attack on Banbury on October 3, 1940, was a turning point. One lone bomber circled low along the railway tracks before dropping its bombs. The first few, aimed at gasometers near the station goods yard, caused considerable damage, but those aimed at the rail track and signal box destroyed a single-storey brick building on the end of the platform with eight men in it.

One man outside and two inside were killed instantly and three more later. All had been injured by pieces of bomb casing or falling debris. The blast pressure had affected everyone's lungs and ruptured eardrums.

The researchers concluded that people were most likely to be killed by flying debris and glass, rather than directly by bombs — a conclusion which was used not to protect people in decent bomb shelters but to design better bombing raids on German civilians.

The author concludes that the Blitz spirit was not a myth, but helped to win the war. She also reminds us of the conflicting lessons of the bombing. On the one hand, there was the 'never again' feeling, that the rebuilding of 'homes for heroes' would create a new, more equal society. But there was also an urge to escape the imperatives of war, to return to a more individualistic society of home, work and family, as it had been before the war.

As she says: "The debate was not resolved then, nor has it been now."