At midday on Jan 20 1943, a little girl skipping on the playground of Sandhurst Road School in southeast London waved at what she thought was an RAF bomber. It was a German plane, whose pilot “sliced her down” in a round of machine-gun fire. He then turned and released a 500 kilogram bomb onto the school building, instantly killing 32 children and six staff. Sixty others were injured, some grotesquely. Parents searched the rubble frantically for their missing children.
