by Angus Calder
Mollie Panter-Downes, an Englishwoman who sent a weekly or fortnightly letter from London to the New Yorker, recorded on 14 September:
For Londoners, there are no longer such things as good nights; there are only bad nights, worse nights and better nights. Hardly anyone has slept at all in the past week. The sirens go off at approximately the same time every evening, and in the poorer districts, queues of people carrying blankets, thermos flasks, and babies begin to form quite early outside the air-raid shelters. The Blitzkrieg continues to be directed against such military objectives as the tired shopgirl, the red-eyed clerk, and the thousands of dazed and weary families patiently trundling their few belongings in perambulators away from the wreckage of their homes. After a few of these nights, sleep of a kind comes from complete exhaustion. The amazing part of it is the cheerfulness and fortitude with which ordinary individuals are doing their jobs under nerve-wracking conditions. Girls who have taken twice the usual time to get to work look worn when they arrive, but their faces are nicely made up and they bring you a cup of tea or sell you a hat as chirpily as ever. Little shopkeepers whose windows have been blown out post up ‘Business as usual’ stickers and exchange cracks with their customers.
On all sides one hears the grim phrase ‘We shall get used to it …’
Panter-Downes observed that the East End had suffered most. But the bombers ‘made no discrimination between the lowest and highest homes in the City. The Queen was photographed against much the same sort of tangle of splintered wreckage that faced hundreds of humbler, anonymous housewives …’ Though Buckingham Palace had been bombed twice, damage elsewhere in the West End had so far been slight; however, a bomb which fell in Regent Street and didn’t explode for hours eventually shattered glass over a wide area, and ‘The scene next morning was quite extraordinarily eerie’, with the great thoroughfare deserted by all except police and salvage workers, and the pavements covered with ‘a fine, frosty glitter of powdered glass’. Panter-Downes concluded her report:
The behaviour of all classes is so magnificent that no observer here could ever imagine these people following the French into captivity. As for breaking civilian morale, the high explosives that rained death and destruction on the capital this week were futile.22
Charles Ritchie, a Canadian diplomat in London, had noted in his diary as early as 5 August that ‘English men and women of different classes, localities, sets and tastes are for the first time talking to each other… The weather was previously the one subject upon which everyone had fixed for conversations with strangers.’23 Now bombing mixed the classes together further. Well-off travellers in the London Underground could not miss the thousands of poor people who had turned the tube stations into what Panter-Downes in her report of 21 September described as ‘vast dormitories’, despite official appeals that they should not be used as shelters. Of the shelters, she wrote: ‘The bravery of these people has to be seen to be believed. They would be heart-rending to look at if they didn’t so conspicuously refuse to appear heart-rending.’ West End stores had now come in for heavy bombing. Whole areas had become unrecognisable and taxi drivers grumbled about the difficulty of finding their way and how hard broken glass was on their tyres – but their grumbles had ‘the usual cockney pithiness and gaiety’. On 29 September Panter-Downes noted, ‘The courage, humour and kindliness of ordinary people continue to be astonishing.’ The Blitz was becoming routine. Everyone ignored air-raid sirens during daylight, unless the noise of gunfire or bombs was uncomfortably near. ‘Gieves, the famous military tailor on Bond Street whose shop was completely gutted, ran a stately advertisement regretting that it was necessary to inconvenience clients for a few days, as though the fuss had been caused by a bit of spring redecorating.’24
By 27 October, after a spell of especially heavy raiding, ‘so vicious that a lesser fighter’ than London ‘would have been knocked groggy’, Panter-Downes was clearly saddened by the ‘horrifying’ destruction in the capital, and wearied like others by the ‘transportation difficulties’ which resulted. Nor was she pleased by the ‘breezy’ tone with which the BBC announced news of raids: ‘To someone newly facing grief, the chirpy statement that “casualties were slight” has a way of sounding callous.’ She wrote sadly of the destruction of the historic Middle Temple Hall – beautiful carved stone bosses covered in rubble, elegant eighteenth-century doorways and windows smashed, broken stained glass on the choirstalls in the Temple Church. But she went on: ‘If history is being torn up by the roots in London, history is also being made. The new race of tube dwellers is slipping a fresh page into the record; nothing has ever been seen like the concourse of humanity that camps underground every night.’ People were seen staking their evening’s claim as early as eleven-thirty in the morning. ‘By five, when the homeward rush hour is on, one walks underground between double rows of men, women, and children – eating, drinking, sleeping, reading papers, and just sitting: all part of the most extraordinary mass picnic the world has ever known.’ The authorities were working out a system of permanent canteens.25
Meanwhile, the horror of death was mitigated by the spontaneous courage and warmth with which ordinary people strove to rescue and succour their neighbours. Charles Ritchie, on 26 October, was in the heavily bombed area near Lot’s Road Power Station, where some friends, Frank and Margery Ziegler, lived. A bomb fell in the next street. Ritchie and the Zieglers rushed to help people get out of the remains of three bombed houses. Afterwards, ‘We all went to a pub where a fat landlady, her hair in papers, was offering cups of strong sweet tea, while her husband with a conspiratorial air offered to break the law and give us beer or “take-away ports” although it was two a.m.’26
Meanwhile, the Luftwaffe had been devoting some attention to the provinces. On 25 October, 170 persons were killed in a raid on Birmingham, and other places had attacks which seemed significant to local people. It was 14 November, however, that marked the beginning of a new phase of Blitz. That night, the Germans attacked Coventry in force. It was a cardinal centre of British ‘war production’. Twenty-one important factories, twelve of them concerned with aircraft manufacture, were severely damaged. Hundreds of retail shops were put out of action. The centre of this medium-sized city (213,000 people in 1938, though swollen considerably since) was gutted. Approaching a third of its houses were wrecked; 554 people were killed.
After this London had a respite – only six major raids and two lighter ones from 18 November to 19 January. But Bristol was ‘Coventrated’ on 24 November, and Birmingham and Southampton soon received attention on a similar scale. In December, half a dozen more provincial cities suffered, though bad weather limited German attacks. It was by now clear, in any case, that in the provinces as in London, bombing was not going to stop people getting to work. Coventry remained a key centre of war production, and after eight months during which the capital was incessantly ‘blitzed’ the Ford factory there could claim that absenteeism barely existed.
On 30 December, Vere Hodgson reported ‘Terrible Fires’ in London the previous night:
We went up on the roof to look. At Shepherd’s Bush flames were leaping, and towards the City they were gigantic. As I walked up the road I could see the smoke. A great red glow filled the sky – I had no need of a torch – I could see every step I took and could have read a book if I had wished. The police said it was Waterloo Station, but the taxi man told Miss Moyes that the City was on fire, and they were trying to save St Paul’s …
The 29 December raid which produced ‘the Second Fire of London’ in the City proper had indeed been heavy. But St Paul’s, rebuilt to Wren’s design after the first Fire of 1666, had been saved this time, and photographs of the great dome riding unscathed over smoke and flame became symbols of British courage and endurance through a remarkable year. Miss Hodgson, like most people, listened to BBC news on New Year’s Eve, and in the popular Postscript slot afterwards, ‘they gave us some of the phrases of 1940. All the best are by Churchill. We shall n
ever forget them … Blood and sweat and toil and tears …’27
Another ‘postscript’ to 1940 is needed here. It was still believed that Hitler would try to invade in 1941. Bad weather limited air raiding in January and February, though London and other cities continued to suffer. The second and third weeks of March saw twelve major blows against ports and industrial cities. On the 13th and 14th the burgh of Clydebank, by Glasgow, was so heavily attacked that all but seven of its 12,000 houses were damaged, and 35,000 out of 47,000 people were made homeless. Bristol suffered again. Cardiff and Portsmouth had three and five big nights. On 19 March London suffered its highest casualties yet – 750 killed – and on the two following nights the city centre of Plymouth was levelled.
After another relatively slack period, mid-April brought fresh hammering to Clydeside, Coventry and Bristol. Belfast was ‘Coventrated’. Over 1,000 people were killed in London on the 16th, and again on the 19th; 148,000 houses were damaged or destroyed in these two raids, whereas in September the rate had been only about 40,000 per week. But now Plymouth suffered far more intensively even than London, with five heavy raids before the end of the month, until the housing ‘casualty’ figures came to exceed the total number of houses, as many were hit more than once. Merseyside’s turn followed, on eight successive nights in early May. Belfast again, Hull and Nottingham were blitzed. And on 10 May London had its worst ever raid, with 1,436 people killed and 1,792 seriously injured. Westminster Abbey, the Law Courts, the Tower and the British Museum were hit, and the Chamber of the House of Commons was destroyed. A third of the streets of Greater London were left impassable. All but one of the main railway stations were blocked for weeks. Brown smoke blotted out the sun.
Surely invasion must come? But raids over the next few weeks were light. On 22 June the Germans attacked Russia. The Nazis had diverted their main effort eastwards.
And meanwhile, Roosevelt’s victory in the US presidential election of November 1940 had confirmed that the world’s greatest industrial power would continue to show goodwill to Britain. His ‘Lend-Lease’ bill passed into law in March 1941, empowering him to give Britain anything it needed on whatever terms he liked. ‘Lend-Lease’ food arrived in Britain from 31 May – a crucial reinforcement to the nation’s diet, and encouraging tangible proof of American support. By the end of 1941, America was fully at war with Germany, and, as Churchill himself saw when news came of Pearl Harbor, Hitler’s defeat was virtually inevitable:
No American will think it wrong of me if I proclaim that to have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy. I do not pretend to have measured accurately the martial might of Japan, but now at this very moment I knew the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! Yes, after Dunkirk; after the fall of France; after the horrible episode of Oran; after the threat of invasion, when, apart from the Air and the Navy, we were an almost unarmed people; after the deadly struggle of the U-boat war – the first Battle of the Atlantic, gained by a hand’s breadth; after seventeen months of lonely fighting and nineteen months of my responsibility in dire stress. We had won the war. England would live, Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live … Once again in our long island history we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious. We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end … All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force. The British Empire, the Soviet Union, and now the United States, bound together with every scrap of their life and strength, were, according to my lights, twice or even thrice the force of their antagonists.28
Churchill, in his war memoirs, patriotically listed the British Empire first among the members of the Grand Alliance in the extract just quoted. Yet until more than halfway through the war, the Empire could boast of no great triumph of aggressive arms. To defeat the Italians in Africa in 1940–41 was better than losing to them, but the British set little store by it. German forces drove British out of Greece and Crete in the spring of 1941. British tanks proved ineffectual against German in the North African desert. Then the Japanese early in 1942 knocked over Britain’s Far Eastern colonies – Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, Borneo, Burma – like ninepins. In 1942 Churchill was fighting for his political life as discontent swelled at home over Britain’s lack of military success, and it took Montgomery’s victory at El Alamein in November to secure the Prime Minister’s position for the rest of the war.
Throughout the long phase of retreats and defeats until then, the idea that British bombers were hitting the Germans at home was important to Churchill and to many of the British people. The Prime Minister endorsed the policy of attacking the morale of German industrial workers by bombing their homes, which ‘Bomber’ Harris, Commander in Chief Bomber Command, applied from early 1942. Harris’s experimental attack on Lübeck, an ancient German town, late in March, created a firestorm which destroyed half the town. This provoked Hitler to order the so-called ‘Baedeker’ raids against English towns of historic and cultural significance. Since the summer of 1941, when Hull had suffered several sizeable raids after the main Blitz had ended elsewhere, air attacks on Britain had been only occasional. Now Exeter, Bath, Norwich, York and Canterbury, in April and May 1942, suffered ‘Baedeker’ raids which, relative to the size of these cities, amounted to full-scale Blitz.
On 30 May, Harris unleashed the RAF’s first ‘Thousand Bomber’ attack, against Cologne. Over 6,500 British airmen were in the sky simultaneously, homing in on one German city; 898 crews claimed to have reached Cologne and dropped nearly 1,500 tons of bombs, some two-thirds of these incendiaries. Huge fires were started. As John Terraine puts it: ‘Harris had done what he had set out to do: he had captured the imagination of the British and American public, he had exhilarated his Command, and he had won the unreserved admiration of the Prime Minister, thus saving the bomber offensive for a yet more vigorous future.’29
Goebbels, after the Lübeck raid, had feared that weeks of attacks ‘on these lines’ might ‘conceivably’ demoralise the German people. In fact, life in Cologne was functioning almost normally (despite 474 killed and over 5,000 injured) within two weeks of the Thousand Bomber raid. Exaggerated British ideas of Bomber Command’s success led to still more ambitious plans for rendering three-quarters of Germany’s urban population homeless by raids in 1943 and 1944, to kill 900,000 Germans and seriously to injure a million more. This plan was modified because British resources did not permit it. Nevertheless, within the period March 1943 to March 1944, in the operations of Bomber Command, ‘“independent” strategic air power reached its peak in the Second World War’.30
From March to mid-summer 1943 the Ruhr was the chief target. Then Hamburg was assailed in July and August. In Hamburg a huge firestorm was created by incendiary attack on July 27–8. A lake of fire spread over twenty-two square kilometres. Air temperatures may have reached 1,000 degrees centigrade. Vast suction was created; trees were uprooted, people were thrown to the ground or pitched alive into the fires by winds of over 150 miles an hour. In shelters, people were suffocated by carbon monoxide poisoning and their bodies were reduced to ashes. Perhaps 50,000 people were killed, some 40,000 injured. Nearly a million fled. Three-fifths of the city’s homes were destroyed. Industry was badly affected. In the words of Generalleutnant Adolf Galland:
A wave of terror radiated from the suffering city and spread through Germany … A stream of haggard, terrified refugees flowed into the neighbouring provinces. In every large town people said: ‘What happened to Hamburg yesterday can happen to us tomorrow’… After Hamburg in the wide circle of the political and military command could be heard the words: ‘The war is lost.’
Albert Speer, in charge of Germany’s war production, told Hitler that the armaments industry would collapse if six more major cities suffered such attack.31
Yet Hamburg recovered. And the ‘Battle of Berlin’, four and a half months of raiding from November 1943 to March 1944,
was sensed as a British defeat by Bomber Command men taking part, though 9,111 sorties were sent against Berlin itself. This was not a nightly battle of concentrated attrition like the ‘Battle of London’. Over the period, nineteen out of the full total of thirty-five operations were against other cities. Bomber Command suffered very severe losses. Awe-inspiring damage was afflicted, on Berlin and other places. But German weapon production rose two and a half times between January 1943 and December 1944. To quote Terraine again:
As for morale, the story is the usual one; it did not collapse. Berliners could still make jokes; an example which seems to belie all contemporary British estimates of the German situation and character being the café story of an encounter between Goebbels and Goering. Hitler, Goebbels told the Reichsmarschall, had hanged himself. ‘There you are,’ replied Goering, ‘I always said we should win this war in the air.’ It was not a particularly brilliant joke – wartime jokes seldom are; but the point is that according to British orthodoxy, Germans were supposed not to be able to joke at all, still less to do so under devastating air bombardment, and least of all to joke at the sacred person of the Führer. It was not just the Battle of Berlin that had failed, it was the whole three-year assault on German morale.32
Christabel Bielenberg was a British-born German citizen, married to a lawyer who was involved in the secret German resistance to Hitler. She spent three nights in Berlin that winter under heavy raiding: ‘The bombs fell indiscriminately on Nazis and anti-Nazis, on women and children and works of art, on dogs and pet canaries.’ She learnt that ‘those wanton, quite impersonal killings … did not so much breed fear and a desire to bow before the storm, but rather a certain fatalistic cussedness, a dogged determination to survive and, if possible, help others to survive, whatever their politics, whatever their creed.’33