The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  Within twenty-four hours, over quarter of a million men had offered their services. Before the end of June, there were nearly one and a half million LDV, all unpaid volunteers. Villages, suburbs, coal-mines, railways, factories, threw up their own LDV troops. Eden had announced that volunteers would be given uniform and arms, but most did not get either for a long time. Men drilled and stood guard with all kinds of sporting guns, pickaxes, spears, truncheons and choppers. But the volunteers were full of enthusiasm and readiness to fight. They relieved the army of such routine tasks as keeping watch over coastlines and vital factories and manning roadblocks. Towards the end of July, they were renamed the Home Guard. As a popular biography of Churchill would put it:

  They were a symbol of Britain’s mood, these volunteers who streamed along to enrol while the Allied front in Flanders and Northern France was crashing to ruins beneath the sledgehammer strokes of Germany’s Blitzkrieg. The British were locking their jaws and gritting their teeth. The outlook was black; the hope of checking and defeating this Nazi machine was feeble. But there would be no surrender. Retreat or compromise was simply unthinkable.

  That was magnificently expressed by Churchill in the speech he made to the House on 4th June, reporting the course of the war and the miracle of Dunkirk. There are some speeches which are more than words. They are deeds. The stroke of them shapes history.10

  Dunkerque, or ‘Dunkirk’ was the port from which, between 26 May and 4 June, British vessels took off about 225,000 British, roughly 110,000 French and some 2,000 Belgian troops. Lord Gort, commanding the British Expeditionary Force, had been confronted with the danger that most of his forces in France would be surrounded and captured by the swift-moving Germans. Withdrawal to Dunkirk meant that British naval power could come to the rescue, and the Luftwaffe proved incapable of preventing the evacuation by bombing, and strafing. Besides Royal Navy ships, many small civilian vessels assisted, and ‘the little ships at Dunkirk’ at once became symbols of plucky resistance to Nazi might. As another biographer of Churchill, Philip Guedalla, wrote in 1941:

  Those were the burning summer days, when England listened to the distant thunder of the Dunkirk beaches and one officer, as his ship drew in by the dim light of dawn, saw ‘what seemed to be vast black shadows on the pale sands – he could not think what they were. As it grew lighter he saw that the blacknesses were enormous formations of men standing, waiting. He saw them thus whenever he entered the pass, coming or going. They did not seem to change; they did not seem to lie down; they stood, with the patience of their race, waiting their turn.’ That fortitude and discipline reaped a miraculous reward, as the worst disaster was averted by the selfless gallantry of rearguards and the young men in the sky overhead and the little ships, the unforgotten, unHomeric catalogue of Mary Jane and Peggy IV of Folkestone Belle, Boy Billy, and Ethel Maud, of Lady Haig and Skylark. Just as another challenge in the Narrow Seas had once been met by the Elizabethans, when ‘from Lyme, and Weymouth, and Poole, and the Isle of Wight, young lords and gentlemen came streaming out in every smack and sloop’ to face the Armada and to tear its threat to tatters, so the little ships of England brought the army-home.11

  An issue of The War Illustrated, edited by Sir John Hammerton, came out on 14 June telling ‘The Immortal Story of Dunkirk’. It praised the fight which the British Expeditionary Force had put up as it ‘Marched to Dunkirk to Glory’s Tune’. Under the headline ‘AT DUNKIRK TRAGEDY WAS TURNED INTO TRIUMPH’ it quoted the New York Times on the courage shown at Dunkirk itself ‘in such a hell as never blazed on earth before’. The ‘soul of democracy’ had faced the enemy ‘beaten but unconquered, in shining splendour … It is the great tradition of democracy. It is the future. It is victory.’12

  Churchill himself had been rather more cautious when he addressed the Commons on 4 June. He had feared, he said, that it would be his ‘hard lot to announce the greatest military disaster in our long history’. He had thought that no more than 20,000 or 30,000 men of the BEF might be re-embarked. But thanks to the devotion and courage of British seamen manning 220 light warships and 650 other vessels, ‘A miracle of deliverance, achieved by valour, by perseverance, by perfect discipline, by faultless service, by resource, by skill, by unconquerable fidelity’ was manifest to all. And the role of the RAF had been vital: ‘We must be very careful not to assign to this deliverance the attributes of a victory. Wars are not won by evacuations. But there was a victory inside this deliverance, which should be noted. It was gained by the air force.’ Young men flying Hurricane and Spitfire fighters had proved their superiority even when outnumbered by German planes four to one:

  There never had been, I suppose, in all the world, in all the history of war, such an opportunity for youth. The Knights of the Round Table, the Crusaders, all fall back into the past; not only distant but prosaic; these young men, going forth every morn to guard their native land and all that we stand for, holding in their hands these instruments of colossal and shattering power, of whom it may be said that

  Every morn brought forth a noble chance

  And every chance brought forth a noble knight

  deserve our gratitude …

  Though what had happened in France and Belgium was, as Churchill admitted, ‘a colossal military disaster’, the upshot was that for the moment Britain had on its own soil ‘incomparably more powerful military forces’ than ever before ‘in this war or the last’. This was reassuring to think of when Hitler seemed likely to invade, a possibility confronted in Churchill’s famous peroration:

  I have, myself, full confidence that if all do their duty, if nothing is neglected, and if the best arrangements are made, as they are being made, we shall prove ourselves once again able to defend our island home, to. ride out the storm of war, and to outlive the menace of tyranny, if necessary for years, if necessary alone. At any rate, that is what we are going to try to do. That is the resolve of His Majesty’s Government – every man of them. That is the will of Parliament and Nation … Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous states have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule, we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender … 13 (My italics)

  In May 1940, 3 per cent of the British people, according to a Gallup Poll, had believed that they might lose the war. ‘By the end of the year the proportion was so small that it could not be measured. Confidence in the Prime Minister stood at 88 per cent in July, rose to 89 in October, fell to 85 by the end of the year.’ Yet Laurence Thompson, recording this, recalls the realities of 1940, when he was a young soldier:

  A pink cheeked subaltern, fresh back from a course, instructs us that in the event of invasion we are to lay soup plates upside down in the road, which German tank crews will mistake for mines. When they get out to remove them, we will machine gun them … There are in the country fewer than a thousand tanks, most of them obsolete or unserviceable. No division has anything like its establishment of field anti-tank guns. At the current rate of production it will take two months to bring a single division up to strength in twenty-five pounders; and there are twenty-nine divisions. Instead of guns, containers of petrol are mounted beside strategic roads, which as the Germans approach will spray the road with petrol, into which a heroic Home Guard will lob a hand grenade.

  While the full truth of British unpreparedness could not be revealed by Churchill or any one, people knew that no smoothly organised, well-equipped defensive forces existed to resist Nazi invasion. Improvisation was the order of the day. Thompson concludes: ‘There is no doubt that the British were united, nor is there the least doubt that they found in Churchill an exact expression
of their own obstinacy, courage, and refusal to recognise the apparent logic of facts.’14

  But it seemed to be logic which made the point that everyone had to work harder. Churchill’s new Cabinet had received from the House of Commons, on 22 May, an Emergency Powers Act which gave it extraordinary scope for coercion – complete control over persons and property, so that Bevin, for instance, could direct any person to perform any service he thought fit, with wages, hours and conditions set by himself. In July, Order 1305 made strikes and lockouts illegal wherever collective bargaining between trade unions and employers existed. But large-scale direction of labour didn’t occur at this stage. Most people were still working in jobs they had voluntarily sought.

  Herbert Morrison, the new Minister of Supply, called on Britain’s workers to ‘Go to it’. Lord Beaverbrook dramatised the crisis in aircraft supply by insisting that Ministry of Aircraft Production contractors worked on Sundays. Bank Holidays and Works Weeks were cancelled. Factories worked twenty-four hours a day several days a week. And the workforce responded in many places. Some people worked continuously for thirty-six or even forty-eight hours without a break, and ten- to twelve-hour shifts seven days a week were normal in sections of ‘war industry’.

  On 10 June Italy entered the war on Germany’s side. On 14 June the Germans occupied Paris. On 17 June, Marshal Pétain, the new French Prime Minister, asked for an armistice. Next day Churchill addressed the Commons with a speech which he then broadcast to the British people. Again he was reassuring about the quantity and quality of the forces now mustered at sea, on land and in the air to defend Britain. He conceded that the Germans had a larger force of bomber aircraft:

  I do not at all underrate the severity of the ordeal which lies before us, but I believe our countrymen will show themselves capable of standing up to it, like the brave men of Barcelona, and will be able to stand up to it, and carry on in spite of it, at least as well as any other people in the world. Much will depend upon this; every man and every woman will have the chance to show the finest qualities of their race, and render the highest service to their cause. For all of us, at this time, whatever our sphere or our duties, it will be a help to remember the famous lines:

  He nothing common did or mean,

  Upon that memorable scene.

  (The lines are from Andrew Marvell’s ‘Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell’s Return from Ireland’ and refer to King Charles I’s behaviour on the scaffold.)

  Churchill’s peroration began:

  What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilisation. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire …

  It concluded with his call, already quoted, to make this the British Empire’s ‘finest hour’.15

  By 25 June, hostilities in France were over. Britain (with its Empire and Commonwealth) stood alone. This actually came as a relief to many people in Britain. King George VI wrote to his mother that he felt happier ‘now that we have no allies to be polite to and to pamper’. The commissionaire of one of the Service Clubs in London cheered a depressed member with the remark, ‘Anyhow, sir, we’re in the Final, and it’s to be played on the Home Ground.’ A tug skipper shouted across the Thames to a well-known MP, ‘Now we know where we are! No more bloody allies!’ And when the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, visited Air Chief Marshal Dowding at the headquarters of Fighter Command, the latter said to him, ‘Thank God we’re alone now.’ On 16 July George Orwell, an enthusiastic Home Guard member, wrote to an American publisher, ‘I actually rather hope that the invasion will happen. The local morale is extremely good …’ David Low the cartoonist seemed to have summed up the prevailing spirit in Beaverbrook’s Evening Standard just after the French capitulation: he depicted ‘a solitary soldier in a steel helmet, standing on Dover’s cliffs and shaking his fist at the blazing vanquished continent. The caption beneath the picture contains only three words: “Very well, alone”.’16

  On 25 June, Vere Hodgson began to keep a diary – inspired, it seems, by the fact that London had had its first air raid the previous night. A German attempt to invade was daily expected, and as Churchill had prophesied, Fighter Command had the key role in preventing it. Churchill’s phrase ‘Battle of Britain’ was applied to the war in the air which began in earnest on 10 July. Charles Gardner, a BBC reporter, was at Dover when German aircraft arrived, and commentated on the resulting air battle as if it were a sporting event. Vere Hodgson thought such broadcasts ‘Jolly good!’17 For some weeks German planes attacked convoys in the English Channel and British aircraft opposed them. On 19 July Hitler offered peace. The BBC, on its own initiative, bluntly rejected it, and Halifax confirmed this rejection three days later. German leaflets giving the text of Hitler’s speech were dropped in parts of southern England on 1 August, to the joy of souvenir collectors.

  On 8 August a new phase began, as the Luftwaffe attacked targets in south and south-east England. On the 15th it made an assault designed to knock out Fighter Command itself. It claimed to have shot down ninety-nine British aircraft, but the real losses were only thirty-five, and the Air Ministry News Service reported that 180 German planes had been destroyed. There were further huge battles on the 16th and 18th. The RAF was running short of planes, despite inflicting heavy losses on the Germans, but the aircraft industry, under Lord Beaverbrook’s control, was pouring out Hurricanes and Spitfires. Beaverbrook had come into office determined to cut red tape and had ruthlessly commandeered supplies for aircraft production. On 10 July he had called on the British people to hand over anything made of aluminium. Even the Royal Family and the War Office turned in pots and pans. And .Beaverbrook’s ‘Spitfire Funds’ brought in over £1 million a month from the public, who learnt that any individual, city or group contributing £5,000 would ‘buy’ a new aeroplane. In August a price list of components was issued – the blast tube of a machine gun, for instance, could be purchased for 15 shillings.

  On 20 August Churchill told the Commons:

  The whole of the warring nations are engaged, not only soldiers, but the entire population, men, women and children. The fronts are everywhere. The trenches are dug in the towns and streets. Every village is fortified. Every road is barred. The front line runs through the factories. The workmen are soldiers with different weapons but the same courage.

  He praised Beaverbrook’s ‘Genius of organisation and drive’ for producing ‘overflowing reserves’ of aircraft and an ‘evermounting stream of production’. And he expressed the British people’s gratitude to its airmen: ‘Undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger’, they were ‘turning the tide of the world war by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’18

  The ‘Few’, the young pilots of Fighter Command, achieved results broadcast nightly which the British could grasp as they understood Test cricket scores. In mid-August, in Piccadilly, Vera Brittain saw a placard chalked by a newspaper seller:

  BIGGEST RAID EVER

  SCORE 78 TO 26

  ENGLAND STILL BATTING19

  The risk of death for the young warriors was high – and known to be so by the people of the south-east who saw Fighter Command aircraft crashing in their neighbourhoods: 201 fighter air crew were killed between 15 August and 15 September. Yet these very young men themselves seemed to treat their task as sport. They were cheerful, rakish, disrespectful of service discipline and stuffy conventions. One squadron leader recalled, ‘we could be scared to death five or six times a day and yet find ourselves drinking in the local pub before closing time on a summer evening …’20 Herbert Asquith expressed public delight in their spirit in a poem published by The Times in August:

  These who were children yesterday

  Now move in lovely flight,

  Swift glancing as the shooting stars

  Tha
t cleave the summer night …

  Old men may wage a war of words,

  Another race are these,

  Who flash to glory dawn and night

  Above the starry seas.21

  From 24 August, the Luftwaffe began to attack the ring of seven RAF sector stations which were the key to the defence of London. People in and near the capital saw ‘dog fights’ in the air. On the night of 24 August central London was quite severely bombed. Then, on the late afternoon of 7 September, with the Battle of Britain in the air still undecided, London received a raid on a new scale, which is taken as marking the start of the ‘Blitz’.

  The docks were set alight. Huge fires blazing in London’s East End were seen many miles away. While the Chiefs of Staff issued the code word ‘Cromwell’, alerting army and (unofficially) Home Guard to the possibility of invasion, and troops kept vigil, the capital’s air-raid precaution and fire services were confronted with an immediate task of nightmarish proportions. There were 430 civilians killed and 1,600 seriously injured. Thousands were made homeless. And next night the bombers came back and killed 400 more. The next night, the toll was 370. For seventy-six consecutive nights, excepting 2 November when weather precluded it, London was raided, and usually heavily.

  On 15 September (thereafter ‘Battle of Britain Day’) Fighter Command, which had not recorded any great ‘scores’ since the German offensive had switched to London itself, broke up a horde of bombers heading for the capital in the morning, then another such in the afternoon. The Air Ministry claimed 185 German aircraft destroyed, for a British loss of twenty-five. As Churchill himself knew within a couple of days, this was followed by the Germans’ decision not to attempt invasion in 1940. To the British public it seemed that the battle was still in full swing – on 27 September the Air Ministry claimed 133 German scalps – but though daylight fighting continued throughout October, the Germans had obviously switched their main effort to night bombing.