The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  Dear Mum and Dad, and dear loving sisters Rosie, Letty, and our Gladys -

  I am very pleased to write you another welcome letter as this leaves me.

  Dear Mum and Dad and loving sisters, I hope you keeps the home fires burning. Not arf. The boys are in the pink. Not arf. Dear Loving sisters Rosie, Letty and our Gladys, keep merry and bright. Not arf.28

  As Fussell observes, the language of the Great War – its neologisms, its jargon, its euphemisms and understatements – persisted afterwards, so that ‘one result … is that the contours of the Second War tend to merge with those of the First’. He quotes a young diarist of 1940 who wrote of going ‘up the line’ when he returned to London after the weekend: London during the Blitz was the Front Line.29 But in the mythologising of 1940, the legacy of trench humour – of understatement, joking about the indescribable – was more important than any merely lexical continuity. ‘British Phlegm’ had its ‘Finest Hour’ in the Blitz, not only because instances of it made useful propaganda for home and foreign consumption, but also because it had the same kind of use for civilians under bombing as for soldiers under fire: one had to ‘keep merry and bright’.

  If ‘literature’ had found no great individual heroes on the Western Front, it had found ways of making a whole class of persons heroic. The image of the phlegmatic, joking Tommy forms part of a spectrum, in which, at the other extreme, ‘each soldier becomes a type of the crucified Christ’, as when Wilfred Owen described his work as an officer training new troops as ‘teaching Christ to lift his cross by numbers’.30 The Great War thus established precedents useful for those in 1940 who wished to mythologise the entire British people as heroic, and even for individuals trying to reconcile the devastation of their home cities with the mythological needs of ongoing everyday life. In this war, from Dunkirk through to the end of Blitz, horror could not be concealed from the home public. But, except in some parts of London and briefly in a few other places, Blitz was an experience far less extreme than that of soldiers on the Somme, and to ‘make sense’ of it, to turn it into ‘story’, was superficially much less difficult. The language of pre-existing mythologies, including the Myth of the Tommy at the Front, adapted itself to events with remarkable ‘naturalness’ and fluency, and stories were generated with such success that we, born since, have ignored how frightening and confusing the period from April 1940 through to June 1941 was for the British people. Perhaps we simply cannot comprehend that fear and confusion imaginatively. Myth stands in our way, asserting itself, abiding no questions.

  In 1976 Miss Vere Hodgson published the diaries she had kept from 25 June 1940 to 16 May 1945. In her foreword, she remarks that ‘The events of those years seem like a forgotten nightmare …’ She was a welfare worker in a Christian ‘Sanctuary’ in Holland Park, London, and she wrote her diary at her office desk in the evenings when she was on fire watch. She found the nightly air raids intensely distressing. ‘Pretty bad’ (18 September); ‘Very bad night’ (19 September); ‘An awful night’ (24 September); ‘the foulest night so far’ (25 September); ‘Worst night on record!’ (26 September). She was not heroic, and didn’t profess to be but by 21 December 1940 she was a front-line fighter adept in ‘Tommy’ understatement: ‘Rather a blitzy night now. Something nasty seemed to come down. A new sort of noise.’ On 23 December she listened to one of Churchill’s broadcast speeches, addressed to the Italian people:

  in the dramatic style that suits him, alluding to Garibaldi, Mazzini and Cavour – and all we did for them. He alluded to Mussolini … It was a thrilling speech and made me think our Prime Minister is really the greatest man we have ever produced in all our long history – except perhaps for Alfred the Great. We have never been so near defeat as we were in June, nor so near invasion on our actual soil. It was just touch and go – and he saved us. A statue in gold would not be too much for what we owe him.31

  2

  ‘Finest Hours’

  This is the year which people will talk about

  This is the year which people will be silent about

  Bertolt Brecht, ‘Finland 1940’

  FOR MISS HODGSON, the story of 1940 had become simple. The British had been nearer defeat and invasion than ever before. But Churchill had saved them. Let us hear the story as she might have recognised it.

  Britain had declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939 because Hitler had invaded Poland and refused to stop. He had gone too far for Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, who had striven to ‘appease’ him. Chamberlain told the House of Commons, ‘This is a sad day for all of us, but to none is it sadder than to me. Everything that I have worked for, everything that I have hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life, has crashed into ruins.’ This gloom was not shared by Winston Churchill, excluded from office for years because his imperialism and warlike disposition were more than the Conservative Party leadership could stomach, but now brought into the government as First Lord of the Admiralty. When he followed Chamberlain to the dispatch box, he hammered out his sentences, according to the New York Times correspondent, so that they sounded ‘like the barks of a field-gun’. He agreed with Chamberlain that it was a sad day, but spoke of ‘the feeling of thankfulness that if these great trials were to come upon our island there is a generation of Britons here now ready to prove itself, not unworthy of the days of yore and not unworthy of those great men, the fathers of our land, who laid the foundations of our laws and shaped the greatness of our country.’1

  But Chamberlain proceeded as if reluctant to fight at all. Realistically, nothing could be done to help Poland. Britain had to defend its own shipping against German attack. The RAF soon went into action, bombing German ships at the entrance to the Kiel Canal, and suffering casualties. But further ‘raids’ over mainland Germany were described by the RAF as ‘for the purpose of distributing a note to the German people’. Leaflets were dropped, not bombs. Chamberlain declared that the British forswore attacks not only on German civilians, but even on military (as opposed to naval) targets.2

  British troops were soon in France. Most people expected – and feared – a repetition of the siege warfare of 1914–18. But after the German ‘Blitzkrieg’ had knocked out Polish resistance in a few weeks, ‘sitskrieg’ characterised the Western Front. Though Chamberlain rejected peace terms offered by Hitler in October as repugnant to British honour, Britain and France seemed uninterested in making a serious move to defeat Hitler. Only at sea were there real battles – and here Churchill was in charge. In mid-December three British . cruisers fought the German pocket-battleship Graf Spee in the South Atlantic and forced it to limp into neutral Montevideo. It emerged only to be scuttled. At last Britain had a victory to celebrate. Churchill modestly attributed ‘the present satisfactory position in the naval war’ to the First Sea Lord, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Dudley Pound:3 but the public associated it with Churchill. His speech in the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, on 27 January 1940, managed to invent inspiration from five months of ‘Bore War’ or ‘Phoney War’:

  I know of nothing more remarkable in our long history than the willingness to encounter the unknown, and to face and endure whatever might be coming to us, which was shown in September by the whole mass of the people of this island in the discharge of what they felt sure was their duty … The Prime Minister led us forward in one great body into a struggle against aggression and oppression, against wrong-doing, faithlessness and cruelty, from which there can be no turning back … So far the war in the West has fallen almost solely upon the Royal Navy, and upon those parts of the Royal Air Force who give the Navy invaluable help. But I think you will agree that up to date the Navy has not failed the nation.

  He went on to defend the policy of dropping leaflets, not bombs, on Germany, and to rejoice that the absence of massive war on land had given Britain a ‘time of preparation’ to strengthen its defences and train its armies. He pointed out that a huge expansion of the labour force was required to make munitions. ‘Her
e we must specially count for aid and guidance upon our Labour colleagues and Trade Union leaders.’ More than a million women would be needed in war industry, but Churchill promised male trade unionists that any ‘dilution’ of specialised crafts would be temporary – current practices would be fully restored after the war was won. Rousing his audience with references to the brutal treatment by the Nazi conquerors of Czechs and Poles, he concluded:

  Come then: let us to the task, to the battle, to the toil – each to our part, each to our station. Fill the armies, rule the air, pour out the munitions, strangle the U-boats, sweep the mines, plough the land, build the ships, guard the streets, succour the wounded, uplift the downcast, and honour the brave. Let us go forward together in all parts of the Empire, in all parts of the Island. There is not a week, nor a day, nor an hour to lose.

  Though ‘sitskrieg’ continued, Churchill never ceased to be belligerent. In a broadcast on 30 March, he warned that more than 1 million German soldiers were drawn up ready to attack Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg, and that ‘at any moment’ these neutral countries might be ‘subjected to an avalanche of steel and fire’.4

  Chamberlain was more sanguine on 4 April, when he told the . Central Council of the National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations that the Germans had had their chance in December when they had been better prepared than the Allies. Now Hitler had ‘missed the bus’.

  But on 9 April the Germans overran Denmark without a struggle and landed sea and airborne forces in Norway. Very soon all the chief Norwegian towns were in German hands. The Norwegian army still held much of the country, and in the third week of April British troops joined them. There was hard fighting in difficult terrain – RAF Fighter Command Squadron 263 flew obsolescent Gladiator biplanes from an improvised base on a frozen lake. But by 3 May it had been necessary to evacuate all British troops south of Trondheim – southern and central Norway were lost. A recent historian of the RAF confirms the impression current in 1940 that ‘From the beginning to end the Allied operations in Norway … display an amateurishness and feebleness which to this day can make the reader alternately blush and shiver.’5

  While British forces continued to fight in northern Norway, aiming to control the remote port of Narvik (the final evacuation of nearly 25,000 allied officers and men did not take place till early June), public opinion in Britain was dismayed. An all-party group of MPs, convinced that Chamberlain must go, decided on a trial of strength in the Commons in the debate on the Whitsun adjournment. On the face of it, Chamberlain was invulnerable. His Conservatives and their allies when war broke out had had 418 seats in the House to the 167 held by the Labour opposition, and an overall majority of more than 200. Calls for Chamberlain’s resignation by Labour leaders in early May seemed mere gestures. Nevertheless, through the two-day ‘Norway Debate’, Chamberlain fell.

  Chamberlain, opening the debate on 7 May, was heckled by Labour members with cries of ‘Hitler missed the bus.’ He appeared to try to load the blame for the débâcle on Churchill, announcing that greater powers had been conferred on him to ‘give guidance and direction to the Chiefs of Staff Committees’, as if this had been true throughout the Norway campaign, then had to admit that it was a more recent development. Attlee, the Labour leader, declared that it was unfair to give Churchill so much responsibility and called on Conservatives to revolt. Devastating speeches followed from two distinguished figures on the government benches. Admiral Sir Roger Keyes, who had been a naval hero in the First World War, spoke for the officers and men of the fighting navy against the incompetence of the naval staff, specifically excluding Churchill from his criticisms. His speech caused a sensation, followed by another when Leopold Amery, a privy councillor and devoted proponent of the British Empire, quoted at the end of his oration Oliver Cromwell’s words on dismissing the Long Parliament: ‘You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.’

  Herbert Morrison, opening the second day’s debate for Labour, announced that his party would force a vote. A former prime minister, David Lloyd George, now denounced Chamberlain and, when Churchill rose and declared that he accepted his full share of the responsibility, put it to him that he ‘must not allow himself to be converted into an air-raid shelter to keep the splinters from hitting his colleagues’. But when Churchill wound up the debate for the government, he sturdily defended its record, describing Hitler’s invasion of Norway as a ‘cardinal political and strategic error’. The profit and loss account for the Royal Navy was satisfactory.

  The government won the vote by 281:200. But forty backbench MPs on his own side voted against Chamberlain, and perhaps forty more abstained. One-fifth of the Government’s total strength had defied a three-line whip, and, as Paul Addison observes, ‘Only the most intense outbreak of collective anger’ could have produced this unwonted display of disloyalty within the Conservative Party.6 It was now clear that Chamberlain must resign unless he could persuade either the Tory rebels, the Labour Party, or both, to join a reconstructed government. While negotiations proceeded, shocking news came from the Continent.

  In the early hours of 10 May, the German army, as Churchill had foreboded, crossed the frontiers of Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg. The British and French were caught by surprise, and bewilderment persisted as the Germans revealed their new style of ‘lightning war’. Airborne landings gave them control of crucial points. Mobile formations of tanks and armoured cars moved rapidly down roads and lanes. Crafty subterfuge was employed, as when some sixty Germans, dressed as mechanics and Dutch soldiers infiltrated Holland in the dark to try to seize the crossings of the Lower Meuse. Rotterdam, declared an open city by the Dutch authorities, was bombed with heavy civilian casualties. The dreaded Junkers 87 Stuka dive bomber tortured the morale of allied civilians and soldiers as German columns poured into France. ‘Ironically, it was not a particularly sophisticated aircraft, and was notoriously ungainly in air-to-air combat. But its sinister full-winged silhouette and the banshee scream of its siren helped to make it one of the war’s most feared weapons.’

  On 13 May, when their forces confronted the French on the Meuse at Sedan, instead of waiting while artillery was brought up to prepare the way for an assault crossing, the Germans committed nearly 1,500 planes, almost equivalent to the total allied air strength in France and Belgium, to attack their opponents’ lines ‘in the greatest single demonstration of tactical air power that the world had ever seen. By nightfall the Germans were across the river, and the moral disintegration of the French army had begun.’7

  Chamberlain’s fall was equally sudden. Attlee had agreed to ask the executive of his party, meeting at Bournemouth for its annual conference, whether they were prepared to serve under Chamberlain and whether they would serve under someone else. The answer by five in the afternoon of 10 May was no to the first question, yes to the second. Chamberlain gave way to Churchill. It was clear that this change would command enthusiastic popular support.

  As early as May 1939, an opinion poll had showed 56 per cent in favour of Chamberlain’s asking Churchill to join the Cabinet. As the nation had moved towards war, he had acquired immense moral authority as the one leading politician who had constantly warned against Hitler, demanded rearmament and denounced appeasement. While an equal proportion (57 per cent) approved Chamberlain’s prime ministership in a poll taken in April 1940, he inspired at best respect, not enthusiasm. Churchill had profited during the Phoney War from the fact that only the navy was undertaking glamorous and, in Churchill’s word, ‘vehement’ warlike action. The left-wing popular press had begun to boost Churchill’s claim to replace Chamberlain during the first autumn of war. In December a poll had shown that 30 per cent would prefer him to Chamberlain as Prime Minister – and while the latter was preferred by women, elderly people and the better off, Churchill’s stock was high with men, with young voters and with the poor: most Labour supporters favoured him. People cheered
in the cinema when they saw him in newsreels.8

  So he came to power as the one man who could inspire and unite the people. Labour and Liberal leaders joined his new War Cabinet. Churchill had referred in his speech in the Norway Debate to Ernest Bevin as a friend of his who was working hard for the public cause, and Bevin, the most powerful man in the British trade-union movement, though he was not at first an MP, joined the government as Minister of Labour. An equally unorthodox appointment made Lord Beaverbrook, owner of the Daily Express, Churchill’s Minister of Aircraft Production.

  On 14 May, the day when the Dutch army surrendered, Anthony Eden, the new Secretary of State for War, gave an important broadcast. He spoke of the new form of warfare which the Germans had employed against the Low Countries – ‘namely, the dropping of troops by parachute behind the main defence lines’, to cause disorganisation and confusion prior to the landing of troops by aircraft. Eden went on:

  In order to leave nothing to chance … we are going to ask you to help us in a manner which I hope will be welcome to thousands of you. Since the war began, the Government has received countless enquiries from all over the kingdom, from men of all ages who are for one reason or another not at present engaged in military service and who wish to do something for the defence of the country. Now is your opportunity. We want large numbers of such men in Great Britain who are British subjects, between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five, to come forward now and offer their services in order to make assurance doubly sure. The name of the new force which is now to be raised will be the Local Defence Volunteers.9