The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  Gulls wheeled over Dover cliffs; kingfishers darted in alders; Britain awaited invasion with quiet confidence. Thus, it is clear, was the ‘finest hour’ prepared for. So why were thousands of innocent aliens interned? Why were people in high places obsessed with the danger of a British fifth column?

  It seemed important fairly to represent here the mass of evidence showing how tolerance and apparent equanimity persisted in Britain during the summer of 1940, as it helps to explain why the persecution of aliens and the scare about traitors were haltable before they did too much damage. But there is also ample evidence, familiar and unfamiliar, to indicate widespread fear and paranoia bordering on panic. Perhaps the weather seemed so ‘perfect’ because sunlight contrasted with inward ongoing nightmare. Certainly, the apparent persistence of everyday normalities which pleased commentators, worried them, or had both effects at once, must have involved an element of delusion brought about by the contrast between any peaceable, pleasant behaviour and the horrors heard of from the Continent, which might shortly be visited upon Britain.

  The evidence of widespread abnormality was easily available to Laurence Thompson in 1966, though he discounted it in his account of 1940: Year of Legend, Year of History with the remark that ‘Unity was not quite complete.’ He notes that spy mania prompted those Local Defence Volunteers who were used as armed sentries to kill or wound a number of motorists, not always after calling them to a halt. ‘Some of the British, excitable in the early summer of 1940 as nesting blackbirds, easily convinced themselves of the truth of the wildest rumour. Elderly ladies bravely followed trails of sky blue wool which, they believed, had been laid to guide parachutists across the country.’ General Ironside, Commander in Chief Home Forces, proposed ‘to turn a certain Captain Orde Wingate loose in Lincolnshire with a posse’ to hunt down traitors, complaining that ‘it is extraordinary how we get circumstantial reports of 5th Column and yet we have never been able to get anything worth having. One is persuaded that it hardly exists. And yet there is signalling going on all over the place and we cannot get any evidence.’ The New Statesman, that left-wing journal, believed equally devoutly that there must be a fifth column, and deplored the ‘liberalism of Home Office officials’ which held them back from suppressing fascism thoroughly. As Thompson puts it, proven Nazi sympathisers were ‘few, and uniformly petty’, and German intelligence about Britain was particularly bad.35 But these facts were not clear at the time, and many people credited absurd rumours that ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, broadcasting from Germany, was so well equipped with information that he knew when local public clocks stopped.

  In fact, an Mol investigation established in January 1941 that ‘no case’ had been discovered ‘in which Haw-Haw or any German wireless made predictions regarding a specific place or announced any detailed facts which … could not have been obtained through an explicable channel’. But rumour itself was a danger to morale. Churchill, on 5 July 1940, instructed the Mol to mount a campaign against it, and the distinguished art historian Sir Kenneth Clark was put in charge of an ill-fated campaign by poster, on radio and in the press which launched the ‘Silent Column’. With what Ian McLaine neatly dubs ‘lumbering jocularity’ the public were introduced to typical rumour-mongers and tittle-tattlers – ‘Miss Leaky Mouth’, ‘Mr Knowall’ and ‘Mr Glumpot’ – and instructed, ‘TELL THESE PEOPLE TO JOIN BRITAIN’S SILENT COLUMN’. It was further suggested that rumour-mongers should be reported to the police, though only ‘as a last resort’. Coinciding with a number of prosecutions against individuals for spreading ‘alarm and despondency’, this campaign went down badly with the public, who construed it as a campaign against free speech, and Churchill swiftly announced its abandonment (without admitting his own responsibility). At first sight the ‘Silent Column’ episode provides further evidence for the predominance at this time of British tolerance and phlegm: people wanted free speech as normal.36 But what it may represent most strongly is a reflex of revulsion against earlier, very widespread, fifth-column mania.

  At the outbreak of war a number of Germans living in Britain – some, but far from all, with Nazi sympathies – were interned in a holiday camp in Essex. Soon afterwards, early in October 1939, tribunals all over the country began to consider the cases of all ‘enemy aliens’ in Britain – that is, people of German and Austrian origin. They were to be sorted out into three categories: ‘A’ for those who were definitely dangerous and should be interned; ‘B’ for people who need not be interned but should be subject to restrictions; and ‘C’ for harmless persons who could remain at liberty. C class covered long-term residents in Britain of good character, and the scores of thousands of refugees who had fled to Britain to escape Nazism. The work of categorising these ‘enemy aliens’ was finished by the spring of 1940. Out of 73,800 cases considered, only 600-odd were recommended for internment; 64,200 were placed in Category C, and 55,460 of these were classified as ‘refugees’.37

  The phrase ‘fifth column’ had originated, it seems, in October 1936, when Franco’s associate General Mola had threatened the Republican defenders of Madrid with the boast that, besides four columns of soldiers ready to march on them, he had a fifth already in the city itself, prepared to rise and fight for Franco. It was a phrase already in the air early in 1940 when the Sunday Dispatch – owned by Lord Rothermere, himself an open supporter of fascism before the war – began a scare campaign against aliens in Britain linked with another against Communists. After the Nazis invaded Norway in April 1940, ‘the Dispatch invoked the Fifth Column to attack all its favourite targets simultaneously’. Hitler, it alleged on 14 April, had a ‘fifth column’ in Britain ‘made up of Fascists, Communists, peace fanatics and alien refugees in league with Berlin and Moscow’. The conscientious objectors in the Peace Pledge Union constituted ‘an underground political force’ endangering ‘the very life of the nation’. Other newspapers now took up the Dispatch’s theme – that Hitler, before attacking a country, created a fifth column to undermine it from within. A correspondent on the respected Daily Telegraph used it to explain Hitler’s success in Norway – a ‘Trojan Horse’ had been built, by bribery, infiltration and treason, to admit the Nazis. However, despite a growing chorus from press and MPs, Mass-Observation at this stage found among ordinary people little understanding of the term ‘fifth column’ and almost no spontaneous support for interning refugee ‘aliens’. Anderson, the Home Secretary, was determined to avoid it if possible.38

  But after 9 May, his position became untenable. The military authorities insisted on the internment of all adult male ‘enemy’ aliens living in the south-east and east of Britain – from Hampshire to Nairn – and the Cabinet backed this policy. Arrests were duly affected on 12 May. An unfinished housing estate at Huyton, near Liverpool, was hastily surrounded with barbed wire, and from 17 May it began to fill up with internees. There was no furniture, no towels and very little soap and toilet paper in the estate, which in that ‘ironically perfect’ summer was deluged with rain so that the field around became a sea of mud. Though nearly half the men interned there were over fifty, and many were ailing, there was a shortage of medical supplies.

  Worse was to follow. The British ambassador to the Netherlands, Sir Nevile Bland, had returned and reported on the ‘fifth-column menace’, which he now linked to the new fear of German parachute troops. ‘Every German or Austrian servant in Britain’ was, he alleged, ‘a real and grave menace.’ When Hitler gave the order, there would be ‘satellites of the monster all over the country’ who would at once embark on sabotage and attack ‘civilians and military indiscriminately … ALL Germans and Austrians, at least, ought to be interned at once.’ Anderson anticipated the inevitable and ordered the internment of all Class B aliens throughout Britain.39

  German generals were vastly amused to gather that Britain was possessed by baseless fantasies about fifth columns, and Lord Haw-Haw was soon exploiting the scare by sending spoof instructions over the air. Nevertheless, real grounds for concern emerge
d when an official of the US Embassy in London, Tyler Kent, and a young British woman named Anna Wolkoff were arrested and charged with passing military secrets to Germany, and a Conservative MP, Captain Maule Ramsay, was alleged to be implicated. The case was proven. The Cabinet’s attention was sharply drawn to the far Right of British politics.

  Ramsay had founded the anti-Jewish, anti-Bolshevik Right Club, with about 300 members. Similar views were propounded by the Link, founded in 1937 by Admiral Sir Barry Domville, a former director of Naval Intelligence. The Anglo-German Fellowship was less paranoid, and socially up-market; it had attracted literary and aristocratic admirers of Hitler. The largest concentration of anti-Semites was still found in the British Union of Fascists, founded by Sir Oswald Mosley in 1932, which entered the war with (MI5 estimated) 8,700 members. As recently as July 1939, 20,000 had flocked to a British Union of Fascists rally in London. Nevertheless, Anderson, with impeccable liberalism, had insisted that there was no positive evidence that the Union was unpatriotic and would help the enemy: the New Statesman was correct to suggest that the Home Office was reluctant to move against the Right. However, Regulation 18B, which permitted the government to detain anyone suspected of endangering public safety, was now amended to cover those ‘likely to’ imperil it, and Mosley, Captain Ramsay and fifty-seven others were arrested and imprisoned by 20 May. Further arrests, including Domville’s, followed; at a peak at the end of August, 1,428 people were detained under 18B – not all fascists or fascist sympathisers.40

  As news from the Continent worsened, the pressure from the War Office and press to intern more aliens intensified. Churchill gave his weight to it, and seems to have initiated, in Cabinet on 24 May, the idea of deporting all internees from Britain. Control of the ‘alien’ question was passed by the Cabinet on 27 May to a new Home Defence (Security) Executive chaired by Lord Swinton. Anderson had lost. On 31 May chief constables were informed that they could now intern any German or Austrian in Category C whose reliability seemed doubtful.

  The entry of Mussolini into the war on 10 June at once made ‘enemy aliens’ of 19,000 Italians in Britain. The chief role of this community had been to tickle the British palate, with everything from high-class West End restaurants to fish-and-chip and ice-cream shops in Scotland. Now they were easy targets for xenophobia. Of the 4,000 suspected ‘Fascists’ arrested in two weeks, some were probably glad enough to escape from possible mob fury.

  On 11 June, Naomi Mitchison heard that in Campbeltown, near her home in Kintyre, ‘the three Italian shops had been broken up. The old man had been rather rash, saying that England needed a totalitarian government and so on, but the younger ones were all decent, good citizens who gave money to charity and paid their taxes … one of the youngest generation was in a mine sweeper.’41

  The tragedy of the interned Italians, however, did much to generate revulsion against the new, unbridled, internment policies. Many were respected and popular local figures; some had been explicitly anti-fascist. Several hundred of them were sent to what was probably the worst of the improvised camps – a derelict cotton factory, ‘Warth Mills’, at Bury in Lancashire. It was filthy; its roof let in the rain. Food was bad, sanitation appalling. Some blankets were verminous. Rats scuttled among the remains of the mill machinery.

  Now the Cabinet learned that Canada had agreed to accept 7,000 male internees. On 1 July, a conscripted ocean liner, the Arandora Star, sailed from Liverpool with well over 1,000 German, Austrian and Italian refugees aboard. North-west of Ireland it was torpedoed by a U Boat. A Canadian destroyer picked up survivors, but roughly a third of the 478 Germans on board had died, and two-thirds of 712 Italians.

  The German dead included well-known socialist opponents of Hitler. The secretary of the Italian League of the Rights of Man perished. The press – Labour Herald as well as Tory Express -compounded Britain’s disgrace by printing reports which suggested that many lives had been lost because aliens on the ship had panicked, cowardly Germans punching and kicking feeble Italians in their haste to get to the boats. These stories were simply untrue. The truth was that the Arandora Star, with a load of 1,564 internees and crew, had lifeboats sufficient for only 1,000. Despite this, there had been no fighting and little panic.42

  Nor would those Britons who had known the Italians easily credit the tales of their moral turpitude. Colin Perry, an eighteen-year-old who lived in the Surrey suburb of Tooting, wrote in his diary:

  Azario, the man who owned the pet stores at the bottom of our road, has lost his life on the Arrandora [sic] Star. It was only a few short weeks ago that my brother, Alan, took our canary to him to have its nails cut … We used to be slightly amused at his long, straggling hair, his stooped shoulders and his characteristic Scrooge appearance. Then Italy entered the war. The pet man – as we called him – an Italian subject who had lived peacefully in Tooting for forty-two years, was immediately taken off in a police car for internment. His last words to his wife and daughter were: ‘I shall never come back’… It just seems incredible that an old man who kept a pet stores in Upper Tooting Road has suddenly been snatched away, to forfeit his life in the Atlantic.43

  Tom Johnston, though regional commissioner for Scotland, was powerless to prevent the ‘tragedy’ of an Italian merchant in Edinburgh who had spent all his adult life in Scotland, whose family were serving in the British Forces and who loathed Mussolini. Together with the Scottish Lord Advocate, Johnston ‘bombarded the army authorities. But by the time we had convinced Security of the sheer injustice of its action the Italian had been “lost”.’ He too went down with the Arandora Star.44

  Other drowned internees were known in governing-class circles: Zangiacomi and Maggi of the Ritz, Zavattoni of the Savoy, and several more who were prominent in London cuisine; also P. M. Salerni, an Italian engineer who had been doing important work in the British aircraft industry, had lived most of his life in England and had a British-born wife. The Ministry of Aircraft Production had lobbied unavailingly on his behalf. Yet Beaverbrook’s own paper, the Express, continued the anti-alien campaign.

  Three other ships carrying deported aliens did reach Canada, where the puzzled authorities found themselves guarding such ‘dangerous’ characters as Jewish schoolboys and left-wing German merchant seamen. One ship, the Dunera, sailed for Australia on 10 July. The 2,550 internees aboard included over 400 survivors from the Arandora Star. These included some Category A pro-Nazis, but all the rest were B or C. The commander of the military guard, Lieutenant Colonel Scott, put on record his view that the Nazi Germans on board were ‘of a fine type, honest and straightforward, and extremely well disciplined’, whereas his Jewish charges were subversive liars, demanding and arrogant. His soldiers plundered the internees they guarded of anything they could find of the least value. One of their charges recalls how they seized suitcases as they shepherded internees aboard: ‘Those who were carrying their watches had them taken off them by the soldiers. There wasn’t much you could do about it.’ A senior seaman offered to look after internees’ valuables in a case under his bunk, but they never got them back. Eventually the British government had to pay out over £30,000 in compensation. The Dunera narrowly missed a torpedo on the way, while conditions on shipboard were hardly, if at all, better than those endured by convicts on the same route 100 years before.45

  The Cabinet did not yet know of this scandal. But by 18 July they had had enough of alien-baiting, which had caused so much obvious injustice – chronically ill persons seized and interned in rough conditions, relatives ignorant of whereabouts, genuine anti-fascists and Jewish refugees imprisoned with equally genuine Nazis. It transferred responsibility for the detention camps from the War Office to the Home Office, ordered an inquiry into the selection methods used for the Arandora Star, and halted internment at 27,200.

  Of these people, 7,350 had been deported and 650 drowned. The remainder were scattered in camps throughout Britain, with the biggest concentration by far on the Isle of Man, which was now virt
ually a prison island, with a camp for British 18B internees, two camps for ‘enemy alien’ women, two for Italians, and one for German and Austrian men. The Government had requisitioned seaside boarding-houses and surrounded them with barbed wire. An astonishing galaxy of talent was gathered at Hutchinson’s Camp in conditions which they were able to make tolerable. Most of the inmates were ‘assimilated’ middle-class German and Austrian Jews (though there were oddities such as a circus entertainer originally from Bremen who had been heavily decorated fighting for Britain in 1914–18, had risen to Company Sergeant Major, but had never been naturalised, and twin brothers from Scotland, coal-miners, born during a brief stint their father had done in a Ruhr pit, whose nationality had never been regularised). A rich artistic and intellectual life flourished.

  Sixteen painters and sculptors of repute in Hutchinson’s Camp protested in a letter to the New Statesman (24 August) that art could not live behind barbed wire. But Kurt Schwitters, the co-founder of Dadaism, made collages out of everything to hand – cigarette packets, ripped-up lino, seaweed and so on. ‘His pièces de résistance’, a fellow internee recalls, ‘beyond doubt, were sculptures fashioned out of stale remnants of porridge, which he assiduously collected from breakfast tables. They had the colour of Danish blue cheese and exuded a faintly sickly smell. Alas, they did not survive long; the mice soon got at them.’

  In Hutchinson’s, distinguished scholars helped set up a camp university. There was also a technical school. Fine musicians provided camp concerts. Onchan Camp nearby also seeded art exhibitions, lectures, chamber music, and had its own weekly newspaper. In these two camps, ‘the general mood of the internees was on the whole reasonably buoyant’. Conditions in Central Promenade Camp in the centre of Douglas were much poorer. Dr Bell, Bishop of Chichester, visited it and denounced it in the House of Lords on 6 August: the ‘unforgettable depressing picture, seeing men of high quality wandering aimlessly about behind high palisades of barbed wire’. Another observer, Mary Hills, thought conditions worse than at Wandsworth jail.46