The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  Jokes proliferated in Germany about the Luftwaffe’s capacity to retaliate:

  An ultimatum is going to be presented to the English and Americans. If they do not stop the air war immediately, retaliation will be made the subject of another speech.

  May 1950: Discussion in the Führer’s headquarters about retaliation. Adjourned, pending a decision as to whether the two aircraft are to fly side-by-side or one-after-the-other.34

  But between 21 January and 27 March 1944, there were German raids on Britain which, while ineffectual, did involve hundreds of bombers and caused enough damage to lead the British to talk of ‘the Little Blitz’. And after the allies’ D Day landings in France, the Germans assailed Britain with a novel ‘secret weapon’, the ‘pilotless plane’ or ‘flying bomb’, the V-I. From 13 June to 15 July, over 2,500 of these ‘doodlebugs’ reached south-east England, and half fell in the London area. During this period, they caused heavy casualties, produced large-scale official and private evacuation, and depressed the morale of a people wearied by war. Then defences against them were improved, and though they continued to come over until the spring of 1944, they were superseded as a serious threat by the V-2 rocket. The first of these exploded in London on 8 September 1944. Eventually 518 of these reached London, and they caused further severe damage, and approaching 10,000 casualties. But nothing compared to the losses finally suffered in and around Berlin in eighteen days in the spring of 1945, as German troops fought the final Russian advance on their capital, and ‘between half a million and a million human beings’ lost ‘their lives, their sanity or their freedom’.35

  To round this postscript to 1940 off with some more accountancy: during the Second World War, the United Kingdom lost 270,000 men in the armed forces, 35,000 merchant seamen, and approximately 60,000 civilians killed by bombing. This total of about 365,000 was only half the number killed in the Great War of 1914–18, though against this must be set the damage to 4 million houses, and the total destruction of nearly half a million – not to speak of factories, hospitals and schools.36 However, destruction of buildings and lives never reached levels experienced in large parts of continental Europe.

  In the firestorm at Dresden, caused by British incendiary attack on 13 February 1945, which was followed by USA Air Force daylight assault next day, more than 40,000 people probably died, and perhaps more than 50,000.37 Over the entire war, according to British official figures, 29,890 died through enemy action in London, two-thirds of them in 1940–41. Slightly more died elsewhere in Britain: 30,705. (Total admissions to hospital, most of them seriously injured, totalled 86,182 over the whole country, and a further 150,833 were recorded as ‘slightly injured’.38) These figures contrast not only with German casualties, but with the appalling rate in Bomber Command itself. Dedicated by High Command to winning the war by destroying German cities, Bomber Command employed over the entire war about 125,000 aircrew, of whom 55,500 were killed. A further 9,838 became prisoners of war, including many wounded; 8,403 were recorded as wounded other than prisoners.39 It is clear that at least half the Command’s men died or were maimed, twice as many in absolute terms as the civilians who died in London air raids.

  The courage of these men has never had its due. Public opinion in Britain, even Churchill’s own private opinion, recoiled from the effects of RAF ‘area bombing’ in Germany. Alone among High commanders, ‘Bomber’ Harris was not given a peerage after victory. Though he thought the casualty rate among his men acceptable, he justly remarked in his memoirs: ‘There is no parallel in warfare to such courage and determination in the face of danger over so prolonged a period, of danger which at times was so great that scarcely one man in three could expect to survive his tour of thirty operations …’40 The Few flying fighters in 1940 became and remained mythical heroes. Churchill did not forget Bomber Command in his orations in that year: on 20 August 1940 he told the Commons: ‘All hearts go out to the fighter pilots, whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day; but we must never forget that all the time, night after night, month after month, our bomber squadrons travel far into Germany … often with serious loss … and inflict shattering blows …’41 The ‘blows’, at that stage, were wishful thinking; but the courage was real. Bomber crews have never been mythologised, save in one notable post-war British film, The Dam Busters, which glorified an attack not on helpless civilians but on the water supplies of the Ruhr’s war industry. (Unfortunately, this ‘brilliant feat of arms’ produced no important results.42)

  Bomber Command had to be left out of the Myth of the Blitz, or mythology would have ceased to be efficacious. The heroism of the British under bombardment was quasi-Christian – its great symbol, after all, was St Paul’s dome flourishing above the flames. The Myth could not accommodate acts, even would-be acts, of killing of civilians and domestic destruction initiated by the British themselves, however they might be justified strategically. Its construction involved putting together facts known or believed to be true, overlaying these with inspirational values and convincing rhetoric – and leaving out everything known or believed to be factual which didn’t fit.

  3

  No Other Link

  Is there no thread to bind us – I and he

  Who is dying now, this instant as I write

  And may be cold before this line’s complete?

  Is there no power to link us – I and she

  Across whose body the loud roof is falling

  Or the child, whose blackening skin

  Blossoms with hideous roses in the smoke?

  Is there no love to link us – I and they?

  Only this hectic moment? This fierce instant

  Striking now

  Its universal, its uneven blow?

  There is no other link. Only this sliding

  Second we share: this desperate edge of now.

  Mervyn Peake, ‘Is There No Love Can Link Us’

  THERE IS NOTHING new about the suppression of evidence, the invention of false evidence, or the distortion of history for propagandist purposes, as anyone knows who is aware, for instance, of how the Tudor dynasty and its apologists successfully turned Richard III, whom a Tudor had deposed, into a mythical monster. Shakespeare’s Crookback lives on indelibly, even if local pride within Yorkshire may stubbornly set the last Yorkist king in a better light.

  But deliberate distortion of history has thriven particularly in our own century. The best-known examples come from Nazi Germany and from behind the post-war Iron Curtain. Soviet historians dated the start of the Second World War as 22 June 1941. As Joseph Brodsky averred, just before ‘Glasnost’: ‘That the war had already been in full swing in the West for nearly two years has not been public knowledge in the Soviet Union, especially during the last two decades. The only mention the Allies are normally accorded has to do with their reluctance to open the Second Front – implying some sort of complicity with the Nazis, or a malicious desire to see Russia bleed to death.’ The Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 was not referred to in post-war Soviet fiction. The fact that about 100,000 Romanians fought alongside the Germans in the Battle of Stalingrad was missing from a 1985 issue of a Soviet military encyclopedia – Romania, of course, was then a Warsaw Pact ally. More oddly, Soviet citizens were not told how many Russians died in that battle, or that 20 million Soviet lives were lost in the war overall.1

  There is no need to belabour such a flagrant and well-known example as Eastern Bloc historiography. But a different process at work in West Germany has not dissimilar practical implications. In 1981 I saw in Frankfurt a public exhibition of photographs illustrating women’s life in Germany in the twentieth century. While it did not omit reference to the murder of Jews, it moved through evenly, decade by decade, signalling in its format no great disruptions, as if the thirties and forties were just phases like any other. In 1985, Taschenbuch Verlag published a new dictionary omitting the words Nazi, Gauleiter, Führer, Fascist and Gestapo.2 What goes on publicly in such cases is akin to the private
process whereby ‘normal’ healthy human beings successfully repress unhappy memories and reorder their own pasts accordingly. Where societies cannot achieve such suppression – where ‘history’ mythologises mayhem and trauma, as in Northern Ireland – the results can be extremely unpleasant.

  In Britain, one could certainly find recent cases where politicians and officials have destroyed documents, misrepresented or invented ‘facts’, and so forth. But no one has detected evidence of any large-scale ‘cover-up’ concerning events in 1940–41. On the contrary, one volume dealing with the Blitz in the official series of Civil Histories was written by a distinguished left-wing social scientist of unimpeachable integrity – Richard Titmuss – who had full access to documents during and after the war. Other books in the series were produced on similar terms by historians of high quality with professional reputations either at stake or to make. Since the late sixties, wartime official documents have been freely available under the ‘thirty years rule’, but even before then wartime civil servants and politicians had written and spoken with every sign of candour about crucial decisions and their contexts. The need for suppression, after all, was much less than in many countries. Britain had not been invaded. No one except a few rather pitiful spies had ‘collaborated’ with Nazism on British soil, outside the Channel Islands. Whatever the defeats suffered along the way, Britain had won the war.

  And had done so while maintaining liberal freedoms of expression substantially intact. Conscientious objectors to armed service had in some cases been imprisoned. At one stage, pro-Communist intellectuals had been banned from the air by the BBC and a Communist newspaper had been suppressed. Newspapers had submitted to censorship and journalists had been rebuked for straying out of line. But it had always remained possible to protest publicly against these departures from normal freedoms. The coalition government accepted without any sign of hysteria the loss of quite a large number of by-elections. Bishop Bell of Chichester was as free to protest publicly against the ‘area bombing’ of Germany as Aneurin Bevan, MP, was to criticise Churchill’s handling of the war in the Commons. No one was in a position to make a film or a radio programme scathingly critical of the government – but these media were largely in the hands of people who had been disaffected from right-wing government policies during the thirties and were consciously radical in their interpretation of the war and of its implications for peace-time society.

  Nor did the Myth of 1940, in some of its most potent expressions, exclude politically contentious matters. In my retelling of the ‘story’ in my last chapter, I was careful to omit these wherever possible, though I could not have left out the fall of Chamberlain. I was careful to set down no statement which was historically ‘untrue’, as phrased by me. Historians establish ‘truth’, or seek to do so, according to a scholarly code which exacts reference to authentic contemporary documents supplemented by credible memoirs and interpreted with the help of sound secondary sources, and I did not knowingly transgress against this code. Nevertheless, I was consciously aiming to express, so to speak, the ‘highest common factor’ in British mythologising, to provide a version which such an ‘innocent’ and ‘non-political’ member of the public as Miss Hodgson might not have quarrelled with, and which would have been rejected neither by a self-conscious Tory, nor by a left-wing member of the Labour Party, nor even by such a pacifist as Vera Brittain. A consensual memory of 1940 was in fact an important basis for the political consensus which was achieved after the war. But over certain details and emphasis it was possible to argue, during the war and later, without disturbing the rock-like ‘natural’ presence of the Myth.

  Confronted in the sixties, as consensus ebbed away, by the question, ‘Were people really so heroic and self-sacrificing and united in 1940?’ any honest veteran would have had to say, ‘Well, of course, you got exceptions.’ A right-winger might have gone on to inveigh briefly against ‘conchies’ and confide that he’d never been able to forgive Herbert Morrison, Churchill’s Labour Minister of Supply and later Home Secretary, for being a conscientious objector in 1914–18. He could have referred to the ‘revolutionary defeatist’ line taken by the Communist Party of Great Britain. And a Labour left-winger might quite heartily have concurred with him in deploring the behaviour of CP members: ‘Don’t think Morrison was right to suppress the Worker, but at the time it would have been hard to argue against it – those people could have done a lot of damage.’

  But such a left-winger would have augmented the story thus: ‘Well, you have to understand that there were people in high places, and lots of them on the Tory benches, who’d never wanted to fight Germany at all. You know, the Cliveden Set, and their pals – people who’d fawned on Ribbentrop the German Ambassador and supported appeasement to the hilt. And that Old Gang, as we called them, were still in the Cabinet after war broke out. It took that disaster in Norway to get rid of Chamberlain and get Labour ministers into the Cabinet, but by then the damage had been done. Look at Dunkirk – good heroic stuff, but behind it a great disaster due to pre-war British governments refusing to realise that fascism had to be fought. Well, under Churchill of course, things improved. The CP had one very strong card, and boy, they played it – provision of air-raid shelters was dreadfully inadequate. Anderson, who was in charge of shelters, was a po-faced right-wing bureaucrat who was completely out of touch with public opinion – but, thank God, we got rid of him and Morrison came in, did a good job. Even then, though, there were still people in high places who thought we should really be fighting Russian Bolshevism – and weren’t they sick when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and Churchill forgot all his own long anti-Communist record and embraced our new and noble ally …!’

  These left-wing embellishments do not weaken the Myth – they enhance some aspects of it. The British working class and its political leaders are seen as forcing into retreat, through 1940, forces which had betrayed what Churchill would always call Britain’s long history, of opposition to tyranny. Churchill’s own arrival in office expressed the will of the people to ‘Go to it’ in the correct spirit. The occupation of the London Underground by shelterers becomes a heroic assertion of popular rights against a legacy of inept bureaucracy and Tory rule. And even the CP can be incorporated into the image of ‘progressive’ or ‘anti-fascist’ unity. They weren’t far wrong about shelters, and after Russia ‘came in’, they showed by their enthusiasm that they’d always really wanted to fight Hitler. The Old Gang are excluded from ‘Unity’, but they are seen as anachronistic, increasingly irrelevant, however obnoxious.

  So persuasive was this view that the loyalist Conservative retort, ‘Well, those Labour chaps opposed rearmament in the thirties, and don’t forget how strong pacifism seemed to be – Baldwin and Chamberlain had to take public opinion into account …’ cut little or no ice in the 1945 general election when, as if on the crest of the wave which had been mounting in 1940, Labour swept into power with a colossal majority.

  The left-wing version of the Myth, therefore, can account, or appear to account, for many conflicts and errors and strains and failures abundantly obvious to people in 1940, and of course to any historian. It had for a long time the inherent power of a ‘Whig’ myth – it explained and legitimated success, as represented by Labour’s victory in 1945, the creation of a welfare state, and its maintenance by consensus thereafter. But on what Mervyn Peake’s poem of 1941 calls the ‘desperate edge of now’, how was the ‘nightmarish’ (Vere Hodgson’s word) course of events, day by day perceived? And what aspects of British life did the Myth, as it grew in strength down to 1945, when allied victory finally gave it the last requisite stamp of validation, come to suppress? Because, I repeat, what happened was not a crude propagandist distortion à la post-war Bonn Republic, à la post-resistance France, à la post-Vietnam USA. Desperation on the edge of now was acknowledged in retrospect only as a resolution to fight on the beaches and in the hills: as might indeed have been necessary.

  Ironically, Churchill’s det
ermination to fight Hitler, ‘if necessary, alone’, in 1940 hastened the conclusion of the ‘long history’ of that British Empire overseas to which he was so totally devoted, and made Britain dependent on the United States.

  Britain could not afford a long war. In February 1940 the Treasury warned that, ‘even if carefully husbanded, British resources could last at the current rate of dollar expenditure no longer than two years’. Yet in August, Churchill and his Cabinet decided to create an army of fifty-five divisions and to expand aircraft production to 2,782 a month by December 1941. To do these things would entail massive purchases from the USA of steel and machine tools, aircraft and aero engines, motor transport and so forth, to the tune of $3,200 million over the next twelve months. The Chancellor of the Exchequer calculated that Britain would exhaust its gold and dollar reserves by December 1940, then go bankrupt. ‘This moment of final wreck did not in the event occur until March 1941, when Britain’s own reserves were utterly at an end, and payments currently due to America for war supplies could only be met thanks to a loan of gold from the Belgian government in exile.’3

  During the Battle of Britain, the USA had been granted ninety-nine-year leases of bases in the Caribbean and Newfoundland in return for fifty old destroyers. This was an important gesture of US sympathy. Five months later, in December 1940, Roosevelt went further. His idea of ‘Lend-Lease’ was a fine Christmas present for Britain. He asked for powers to provide defence articles to the government of any country whose defence he deemed vital to the defence of the USA, on whatever terms he saw fit. These Congress granted him in the ‘Act to promote the defense of the United States’, better known as the ‘Lend-Lease Act’, which it passed on 11 March 1941.

  In the short run this made little difference – throughout 1941 Britain still paid cash for most arms obtained from the USA. In the long run, the Act guaranteed that Britain could go on fighting. It also ensured that Britain, as A. J. P. Taylor has put it, would be ‘a poor relation, not an equal partner. There was no pooling of resources. Instead Great Britain was ruthlessly stripped of her remaining dollars. The Americans insisted that they were aiding Great Britain so that she should fight Germany and not to maintain her as an industrial power.’ Britain ‘sacrificed her post-war future for the sake of the war. As Keynes put it, “We threw good housekeeping to the winds. But we saved ourselves, and helped to save the world.”’4