The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  Meanwhile, Gollancz, as noted already, had torn the Left Book Club from the control of the CP by April 1940: this meant, incidentally, that the club, whose branches, as Gollancz complained, had tended to become ‘bastard CP locals’,33 lost its pre-war aspect of a burgeoning mass movement. His co-editor Strachey moved slowly rather than dramatically away from his former CP attachment. He was not repelled by the Nazi-Soviet Pact, nor by the Finnish war, nor even, initially, by the CP’s anti-war line. He claimed that it was the Nazi invasion of Norway which convinced him that the ‘inter-Imperialist aspect of the struggle was subsidiary to the necessity to prevent a Nazi world-conquest’. By July 1940 he was publicly berating the CP for its policies in ‘the nine months when the revolutionary defeatist line was pursued’, imagining wrongly that the ‘line’ was now changing.34

  However, Bevan, Gollancz and Strachey did not necessarily carry all the Labour Left with them. CP supporters had influence in many local Labour parties. Not all Party members could slip easily out of the pacifism which they had inherited from 1914–18 or acquired since. The Labour Peace Aims manifesto mentioned earlier, which was signed by twenty-two MPs, including Alex Sloan, was not a very left-wing document (it supported the idea of a Federal Union of Europe, recently quite widely fashionable), but the more than seventy constituency Labour parties and twenty to thirty trades councils which came out behind its call for a truce no doubt found relief in its expression of pacific hankerings.35

  After the Labour leaders had gone into coalition, most loyal Party members had less difficulty in giving broad support to the war effort. Labour Discussion Notes, the organ of a caucus of left-centre intellectuals within the Party (the ‘Socialist Clarity Group’), declared in June 1940, ‘This war, which originated in capitalist and imperialist conflicts and began under capitalist leadership, is now assuming the character which was implicit in it from the outset – that of a people’s war for liberty and social progress against the forces of reaction and monopoly power.’36

  However, it remained the case that, like Strachey, any leftish member of the Labour Party would find it hard to spot a single argument explicitly advanced by the CP which he or she had not deployed, or considered seriously, at some point since the war began. A witch hunt in 1940 based, for instance, on approval of the Soviet Pact with Hitler would logically have trawled in Cripps among others. In June 1940, Naomi Mitchison, wife of a prominent Labour member and friend of others, and ready to believe that the Nazis would put her in a concentration camp if they won, was confiding in her diary doubts about the morality of the war such as made many, especially women, uneasy: she was shocked to see the New Statesman ‘going all militarist’. On 7 June she heard the French Prime Minister Reynaud praising in a broadcast the military virtues, and wrote:

  One thinks of people in whom the military virtues are encouraged; after the last war they became Black and Tans. And now? If this is to be a world of military virtues, then my side has lost. Be we not swift with swiftness of the tigress. Let us break ranks when nations trek from progress. We have got to have other virtues.

  The German conquest of Paris a week later, however, made her feel ‘a bit of the real war hate … The feeling that one wants to do the same thing to Berlin and all that.’ Ruth, a medical student, told her she felt the same: ‘Says she thinks a lot of people have been trying to stop that feeling, but it’s difficult now.’37

  A third safeguard for the CP was that any intelligent observer could learn that Party members themselves, while in fact far less likely than the vast majority of Britons to favour any kind of capitulation to fascism, were themselves at least as confused and inwardly divided as Marxists and pacificists within the Labour Party, or as unregenerate supporters of Neville Chamberlain. Nor were their tactics making any distinctive impact, at least before heavy bombing started: they themselves must have realised this.

  Harry Pollitt, general secretary of the CP, had reacted fervently to Britain’s declaration of war on Germany. Harry McShane, then a CP member, recalled how, after Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Pollitt swept into a London bar full of Party members, and cried: ’I have been sitting in the Gallery of the House of Commons, and that old bastard Chamberlain refuses to declare war.’ McShane later gathered that at a secret Party meeting which followed, Pollitt proposed ‘that a National Government should be formed and that a “man of the people” should be in the Government’. McShane’s informant ‘added that he had the impression that the “man of the people” should be someone like Harry Pollitt’.38

  The central committee of the CP at this stage declared that the war could have been avoided if Britain had had a People’s Government, that it supported ‘all necessary measures to secure the victory of democracy over fascism’, but that fascism would not be defeated by the Chamberlain government. By 12 September 1939, the Party had produced 50,000 copies of a penny pamphlet by Harry Pollitt called How to Win the War. He proclaimed that ‘The Communist Party supports the war, believing it to be a “just war”’, though he called on anti-fascists to struggle for a new government in Britain. But the Nazi–Soviet Pact had been signed. On 14 September a Soviet broadcast said the war was ‘imperialist’ and ‘predatory’ on both sides, and R. Palme Dutt, the Party’s leading theoretician, saw how the wind blew from Moscow. When the CP’s central committee met on 24 September, Pollitt continued to argue for full support of the war, and the majority supported him – until Dave Springhall, the British representative at Comintern headquarters in Moscow, arrived with firsthand news of the Soviet line, which was that the war was ‘an imperialist and unjust war … carried on between two groups of imperialist countries for world domination’. Pollitt still stuck to his guns. When the central committee at last voted on the issue on 3 October, he, Gallacher and J. R. Campbell, editor of the Daily Worker, defied the Comintern line, but were outvoted 21:3. Four days later a new CP manifesto declared that the British and French ruling class were ‘seeking to use the anti-fascist sentiments of the people for their own imperialist aims’. Pollitt was removed from his post as general secretary and Palme Dutt took over. Campbell was replaced at the Daily Worker. Both he and Pollitt were banished to Party work in the provinces. The Party rank and file expressed overwhelming support for the ‘new line’.39

  Noreen Branson, herself a CP member at that time, has argued convincingly that this volte face represented not cringing servility towards Moscow, but deep-seated feelings of solidarity with the Soviet Union, suspicion of the British Empire, and disgust over the imperialist war of 1914–18, and over the suppression of the French CP in September 1939. These were reinforced by the exceptional habit of cohesion within the British Party: ‘Once a decision was taken, it was your duty to go along with it, even if privately you disagreed; otherwise, it could split the Party.’ Hence Pollitt and Campbell, while continuing to believe that the war was worth fighting, publicly recanted their views in the Worker.40 But these men and their comrades were stiff-necked and dedicated anti-fascists. It is impossible to believe that they could have brought themselves to give material or moral assistance to Nazi invaders.

  While the war was still ‘phoney’, the question as to whether it was ‘imperialist’ remained abstract. Events in the spring and summer of 1940 impelled what Branson calls a ‘new approach’. It was ‘necessary to make clear that Communists were not in favour of surrender to Hitler – something of which they were frequently accused’. As France fell, the central committee called in a new manifesto (22 June 1940) for a People’s Government which would make a ‘complete break with the interests of the ruling class. The policy of the ruling class has led to disaster after disaster.’ It claimed that, ‘The same kind of leaders who brought France to defeat are in high places in Britain.’ The CP now called for the removal of ‘supporters of fascism, the men of Munich’ from all commanding positions, and for the arming of the workers in the factories. Nevertheless, John Strachey was wrong in imagining that the ‘CP line’ had changed. Dutt’s theses about the �
�imperialist war’ remained sacred – as the Party’s political bureau stressed in a circular to branches on 15 July which deplored ‘tendencies to national defencism’ in the Party’s current campaign. The Party line was that if the British workers ousted their own ruling class, this would encourage German workers to bring down Hitler.41

  The CP now set up a front organisation which would gather together ‘all those outside the Party who were prepared to support the call for a “People’s Government”’. These included local Labour parties which had still opposed the war at the May annual conference, some of which had been disaffiliated, and the MP for North Hammersmith, D. N. Pritt, whose views on virtually all issues corresponded exactly with the CP’s, and who had been expelled by Labour. On 7 July 1940 a ‘People’s Vigilance Committee’, which soon became known as ‘The People’s Convention’, was launched at a meeting in London. Pritt – a charming and brilliant lawyer – was its figurehead. Prominent trade unionists who backed the Convention were duly bounced out of the Labour Party, which outlawed it as a CP organisation.

  But when, on 12 July, the Home Office formally warned the Daily Worker that the Home Secretary was considering whether or not to ban it under the new Defence Regulation 2D ‘on the grounds that there is in that newspaper a systematic publication of matter calculated to foment opposition to the prosecution of the war to a successful issue’, Professor J. B. S. Haldane, the very distinguished scientist who was chairman of the Worker’s board, asked sarcastically, ‘What is the Daily Worker’s real crime? A very serious one indeed. It is the only daily newspaper which opposes the Government.’ When the Cabinet decided to seize and suppress a CP leaflet, ‘The People Must Act’, the Scottish Office refused to implement the policy on the grounds that it would be illegal. As numerous people were arrested for distributing the leaflet, selling the Worker or speaking at open-air meetings, as CP members’ homes were raided and documents and books were seized, people who weren’t Communists but were concerned about civil liberties were disturbed into sympathy with the Party. The government itself, as we have already seen, recognised the danger implicit in this when Anderson, on 27 July, told the regional commissioners to be careful in proceeding against Communists. And the ‘propaganda of events’ still further strengthened the Party.42

  Haldane had led the Party’s campaign, from 1937, over inadequate Air Raid Precautions. The onset of full-scale Blitz in September 1940 proved that he and his comrades had not been far off the mark. The CP cry for bomb-proof shelters was reinforced as many Londoners took to sleeping in the Underground railway system. The authorities were so worried by the campaign of leaflets and posters now launched by the Party’s London district that police again were sent in to seize them. But Party members played a prominent part in the informal committees which sprang up to represent and organise shelterers, and their clamour proved irresistible. It was not because of controversies over ARP that Sir John Anderson ceased to be Home Secretary in October: the dying Chamberlain’s resignation from the Cabinet made a reshuffle necessary. But Anderson’s shifting to another post looked to many like the result of agitation against his policies. His successor, Morrison, warned the War Cabinet that he could not counter the CP’s campaign if he himself ‘adopted a wholly negative attitude towards the provision of deep shelters’ – and de facto recognition of the public’s right to seize the tube stations was now given as the authorities acted to improve conditions in them, and even to expand them by tunnelling.43

  The bombing of Coventry on 14 November made the CP a propaganda gift. It was ‘the turning point for the Coventry Communists’. Their agitation over ARP had achieved some impact while the town had had relatively light raids. Ernie Bevin had come down to address shop stewards. Provoked by hecklers, he is said to have shouted: ‘I know you Communists. I know Harry Pollitt. The trouble with you people is – you can’t take it.’ This, in a ‘front-line’ city, recently bombed, caused uproar. The Party exploited its position very well when the big raid came: ‘Within two days Daily Worker sales were resumed. It was the only paper available in the city.’ A Communist shop steward has recalled how a dedicated Party man brought a carload of copies up overnight, and arrived at about 4 a.m. By just after daybreak they were on sale in the streets: ‘We had a line of people of many hundreds all patiently waiting for their penny copy of the Daily Worker.’ The Midlands District Committee of the CP rushed out a pamphlet which blamed the city’s destruction on ‘the big factory owners, the big business and landowning interests’, and called for a negotiated peace. The Worker’s headline, ‘1000 CASUALTIES IN “REPRISAL” RAID ON COVENTRY’, was clearly intended likewise to push blame towards Britain’s ‘imperialist’ rulers who had ordered raids on Germany. But this ‘line’ did not prevent the Party from doubling its membership in Coventry, from 70 to 150, by the following June – while the Labour Party’s local organisation, shattered by the raid, remained ‘inert’ and lost many members.44

  At this very time, in November, the Worker successfully launched a Scottish edition, printing 12,000–14,000 copies nightly in Glasgow, according to Branson. Harry McShane recalls a circulation of only 5,000–6,000, but ‘rising steadily … it appeared that our anti-war line was spreading’. The Party’s membership included a high proportion of men in their twenties, and it did not discourage them from accepting conscription into the armed forces, though it did instruct them to destroy their Party cards for their own protection. By November 1940, the Worker had a regular page for ‘Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen’, consisting largely of letters, signed with initials, reporting and complaining about conditions in the services. Its editor, William Rust, claimed at the turn of the year that it had ‘become the paper of the forces, passed from hand to hand in barracks, ship and aerodrome’.45

  On balance, the war seems to have extended, rather than impaired, the CP’s scope. To its influence in factories and mines, it now added a prominent role in shelter committees and other ad hoc organisations responding to wartime problems which affected ordinary people, and a significant presence in the armed forces. It clearly saw Scotland as an especially promising field for further recruitment. ‘The People’s Convention’ was able to speak to and canalise Britain-wide currents of thought and feeling.

  Its manifesto in September 1940 had been signed by 500 people, covering a comprehensive roll-call of the many sections of the Labour movement and adding to them notable figures from the spheres of the arts, intellect and the churches; 265,000 copies were distributed. It called for the appointment of delegates to a national convention, in support of six aims: defence of living standards; defence of democratic and trade-union rights; adequate ARP; friendship with the Soviet Union; a People’s Government; and ‘a people’s peace that gets rid of the causes of war’. The first aim was of wide appeal within the Labour movement; the second could not be contested by liberals; the third played the Convention’s strongest single card; and ‘friendship with the Soviet Union’ was not a bad card either. Public sympathy for Russia had survived Stalin’s invasions of Poland and Finland. As Tom Harrisson of Mass-Observation reported, in 1940–41, ‘the feeling that Russia was basically sensible, kindly and ordinary, persisted, along with the feeling that there was something mysterious, enigmatical, deeply wise, about Stalin’.46

  The aims of a ‘People’s Government’ and a ‘People’s Peace’ were shared by the entire Left. Socialists could find them debatable only in terms of tactics and priorities. How could one establish a government representing working people without disrupting the war effort against Hitler? And should a ‘People’s Peace’ be sought before the Nazis were defeated? To such arguments the Convention’s organisers replied that popular agitation giving leadership to popular discontent could bring new men to power, and this People’s Government would then, by granting immediate freedom to India, introducing socialism at home and setting out reasonable peace terms, so entrance the German working class that it would overthrow the Nazis. Other proletariats would follow suit, and peace-
loving socialist régimes would produce stable peace in the world.47

  The ‘capitalist’ press kept silent as D. N. Pritt and his colleagues organised towards a grand ‘Convention’ on 12 January 1941. But when the Convention took place, even The Times had to pay attention. It had been scheduled for the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. When this was destroyed in an air raid, the Royal Hotel in London was booked instead. The meeting overflowed into Holborn Hall.

  The credentials committee claimed ‘2234 Delegates directly representing 1,200,000, of which 1,136 delegates represented 1,004,950 in Trade Unions and Factories and in Jobs’. Beside many trade-union branches, eighty Co-operative organisations were represented; 199 ‘political organisations’ (including Labour parties, socialist medical associations, Labour teachers); ninety-one ‘Youth organisations’; fifty ‘Tenants Associations and Shelter Committees’ and so on. There were messages of support from Paul Robeson and from the US novelist Theodore Dreiser. Mao Tse Tung sent ‘fraternal militant party greetings’ to this convention which represented ‘the British working class and toiling masses and all progressive elements’, and a future foreign minister of India, Krishna Menon, then resident in London, told the Convention in person that Nehru would have sent his support had the British not recently jailed him: ‘We are not impressed by such things as “democratic imperialism”, there is no such thing, as there is no such thing as a vegetarian tiger … There is no use in asking whether you would choose British imperialism or Nazism, it is like asking a fish if he wants to be fried in margarine or butter. He doesn’t want to be fried at all.’48 Indira. Gandhi was also present, in the audience.