The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  His handling of Dunkirk, however, demonstrates how stoutly the Myth resists demystification by sensitively conceived fiction. As we have seen, that story always included generally admitted negatives. After the British Expeditionary Force men came back with their stories, no one writing about the retreat and evacuation could have got away with putting a radiant heroic gloss over all. Only the maritime operation could be represented as a typical triumph of British naval tradition. Organisation was good; but there was something preciously extra – ‘The lifting’, as John Masefield put it, ‘was a wonderful improvisation by the seamen of this people.’4

  Thomas presents Dunkirk through Harry, sent by the navy into the French port to organise embarkation, and Robert, who sails across in a friend’s small paddle steamer to help with the ‘lifting’. From the first viewpoint we confront ‘a mess’. In the bombed and burning town, a naval officer briefs Harry and others:

  I’m afraid the whole damned thing is terribly difficult and it’s not made easier by the fact that the brown jobs are thoroughly fed up with the entire story. There are soldiers all over this town lost, some drunk, some half crazy. It will be your task to round them up …

  Harry, pushing ‘deeper into the stricken streets’ begins ‘to realise what a widespread and undignified defeat had been inflicted upon the British Army’. He finds a party of Royal Engineers about casually to set fire to half a dozen military vehicles, drunk to the eyeballs, incensed by the desertion of their officers. He has barely rallied them when ‘a gang of staggering British soldiers, maddened, drunk, all pride lost, defeated in every way’, comes into view, one wearing women’s clothes, another a woman’s hat, two more wheeling a dead man in a barrow. The transvestite threatens Harry with a pistol … But these too accept naval authority, along with the hope of getting out and getting home.

  The paddle steamer Sirius, with Harry’s father in its crew, does useful work before it is crippled by the Luftwaffe at a point when it is carrying a mixed load of Senegalese Africans from the French army and German prisoners of war. While this odd combination produces farcical conflict, there is no doubt that we are to take Sirius, as its very name nudges us, seriously. So, while Thomas is very hard indeed on the British army, his narrative emphasises the heroic role of the navy, and pays tribute to the legend of the Little Ships. The Myth, on balance, is reinforced.5

  It is remarkable that even the gifted Derek Robinson, committed (as his scholarly postscript makes clear) to a wholly ‘revisionist’ view of the ‘Battle of Britain’, cannot, in his Piece of Cake (1983), escape from the paradigm. In fact, this powerful book demonstrates particularly well how ‘debunking’ the Myth component by component ensures that you end up with the same pattern. ‘There was a lot more to the Battle of Britain than the legend suggests’, Robinson writes at the end of the ‘Author’s note’ in which he justifies the way he has told his story. ‘By exaggerating the triumph of the RAF, and by deflating the performance of the Luftwaffe, the legend has given Fighter Command both too much and too little credit. The truth is fairer to everyone.’ Why ‘too little credit’? Because, presumably, as Robinson shows in the novel, the balance in the air was still more heavily against the RAF than the earliest heroic accounts suggested, its pilots more youthfully accident-prone than tradition allowed, its commanders more confused and divided than was apparent even to outsiders not very long after the event.

  Clean, simple yet convincing heroic accounts exist against which Robinson’s book can be set. Richard Hillary’s The Last Enemy, published in 1942, was a best-seller during the war itself. Hillary flew a Spitfire in 1940, was horribly burnt in the cockpit, was given plastic surgery by the remarkable Mclndoe, returned to the RAF and died in a training accident, aged only twenty-three. His autobiographical but fictionalised book is remarkably mature. What ‘dates’ in it is its moralising: the author presents himself as an egotist interested only in self-fulfilment, who is finally convinced that ‘no man is an island’ and that he must identify with Humanity in general by the experience of seeing a woman die after he has helped to extract her from the ruins of her blitzed home. Her last words, after drinking from his brandy flask, are, ‘Thank you, sir. I see they got you too’ – his face still shows the ravages of fire. This moment itself is well handled and very moving, but its effect is spoilt by the remaining pages of the book, in which he commits himself to write for his dead RAF comrades a book addressed to Humanity, ‘for Humanity must be the public of any book’:

  If I could do this thing, could tell a little of the lives of these men, I would have justified, at least in some measure, my right to fellowship with my dead, and to the friendship of those with courage and steadfastness who were still living and who would go on fighting until the ideals for which their comrades had died were stamped forever on the future of civilisation.6

  Had he been spared, this very gifted writer would surely have learnt to avoid such rhetorical excess. As it is, he told a compelling story very well, using understatement and silence as key devices. (Silence, for instance, when he mixes in London West End society and becomes close to the fiancée of a dead RAF friend while his face and hands are still subject to Mclndoe’s further ministrations: it is up to us to remember that this poised socialite and eloquent talker must create countless shocks on his public appearances.)

  A merit of the pages describing Hillary’s days at Oxford, his RAF training and his active service in the Battle of Britain up to his incineration is that they dress powerful simplifications with superficial sophistication and complexity. Understatement is cleverly used to characterise the narrator, Hillary, as a man who is deeper than he cares to let on. This ‘idle’ Oxford undergraduate, besides coming close to a rowing blue, and flying in the University Air Squadron, is also an effective student journalist, widely travelled, with a grasp of French and German. At his college, Trinity – ‘a typical incubator of the English ruling classes before the war’ – kindred souls are held together by ‘a common taste in friends, sport, literature, and idle amusement, by a deep-rooted distrust of all organised emotion and standardised patriotism …’7 The dead friends he will evoke at the end being mostly Varsity men, his book will serve subtly to vindicate the English ruling class and its Oxbridge ‘incubators’, of which he initially appears dismissive. Meanwhile, the left-wing intellectuals among the student body, accused of ‘adolescent petulance’ in Hillary’s early pages, will finally be discredited by the agonising dilemma of one of them, David Rutter, a pacifist who, when Hillary sees him after his burning, is irreconcilably torn between his principles and his impulse to join in the struggle.

  The point of the struggle is neatly made clear by Hillary’s account of an experience in Germany in 1938. He joins an ad hoc crew of Oxford oarsmen which extracts from the German government permission to row in a regatta at Bad Ems for ‘General Goering’s Prize Fours’. They arrive with no boat – a friendly German, the only friendly German, finds them one in the nick of time. They face five ‘elegantly turned-out German crews’ with ‘set, determined faces’:

  Looking back this race was really a surprisingly accurate pointer to the course of the war. We were quite untrained, lacked any form of organisation and were really quite hopelessly casual. We even arrived late at the start …

  They are trailing by five lengths up to the halfway mark:

  But it was at that moment that somebody spat on us. It was a tactical error. Sammy Stockton, who was stroking the boat, took us up the next half of the course as though pursued by all the fiends in hell and we won the race by two-fifths of a second. General Goering had to surrender his cup …8

  Hillary’s appealing account of RAF training in Scotland does not gloss over the matter of silly accidents in training, but presents a friendly picture of the young would-be pilots, as a very mixed body of people. They became, as Hillary presents it, a case apart, inarticulate in the mundane world. ‘It is only in the air that the pilot can grasp that feeling, that flash of knowledge, of insight, that ma
tures him beyond his years …’ On the ground, ‘He wants only to get back to the Mess, to be among his own kind … He wants to get back to that closed language that is Air Force slang.’ Indifferent to war news, pilots read ‘not literature but thrillers, not The Times but the Daily Mirror… They like to drink a little beer, play the radio and a little bridge.’ But they do not stand aloof from the technicians who service their planes, working with them in ‘easy comradeship’; and some of them, including Hillary, devote their time off to playing games with Scottish child evacuees …9

  Granted the almost monastic virtuousness of Hillary’s dedicated pilots, it is not surprising that they fight the Battle of Britain, those who get there, in a clean, inspired way. The Germans, of course, make things easy because of their ‘mass psychology’. They are very good at prearranged manoeuvres, confused and ineffectual once these are disturbed. Even their planes are so constructed that the crews are ‘always bunched together, thus gaining confidence and a false sense of security’. On his very first sortie in a Spitfire out of Hornchurch, Hillary destroys a Messerschmitt 109 – other kills by him follow, as he casually intimates. During August and September the RAF is hard-pressed, but Hillary’s squadron swiftly learns how to counter German tactics, and when the Germans attack Hornchurch, apart from four men killed in a lorry and a network of holes on the landing surface there is ‘nothing to show for ten minutes really accurate bombing’, and this is ‘striking proof of the inefficacy of their attempts to wipe out our advance fighter aerodromes’. (Hillary has forgotten the destruction by bombs of three Spitfires which he vividly described two pages before.10)

  As August draws to a close, the squadron shows ‘no sign of strain’ (despite casualties), and Hillary is personally content:

  If I felt anything, it was a sensation of relief. We had little time to think, and each day brought new action. No one thought of the future … At night one switched off one’s mind like an electric light.11

  Hillary and his kind might enjoy a good meal in a West End restaurant, we infer, but had no time for hard drinking, heavy wenching and other immoralities.

  Another heroic yet plausible version of pilot behaviour can be seen in Angels One Five, released in 1952, one of the greatest box office successes among many popular British war films of its decade. While it stands up better to reviewing than the coarsely epic Battle of Britain of 1969 (with Laurence Olivier as Air Chief Marshal Dowding), its modesty now seems excessive. Seven years after victory, the film doesn’t have to explain the context of its action: quotations from Churchill screened at beginning and end are enough to evoke the whole well-known story. Centred on just one Fighter Command aerodrome, it establishes the Battle of Britain as a family event. The station is a family, with Group Captain Small (Jack Hawkins) as its father and Nadine (Dulcie Gray), the wife of Squadron Leader Clinton, as its mother. The technical staff are Cheery Cockneys (‘Cor, chase me round the ’angar’) but the women in the Ops Room almost all have high-carat upper-class accents as do most of the flyers. Humphrey Lestocq as Batchie copes impressively with the concentration in his lone person of all the famous irreverence and high spirits of the Knights of the Air, with his cricketing and public school metaphors and air of rakishness. Otherwise, the pilots behave on the whole like prefects in a well-ordered educational establishment, with just two moments of ritualised horseplay. (They are seen rolling around in a heap on the floor of the Mess, with the group captain well submerged; later they chair Pilot Officer Baird home from his first kill, chanting carefully bowdlerised RAF songs.)

  Tension in this almost idyllic community is provided less by the never-seen Germans than by the actions and personality of a newcomer, from the Volunteer Reserve, Pilot Officer Baird. He is a stereotyped Scot, acted by John Gregson with such conviction that he runs the risk of being as boring and embarrassing as the equivalent would be in real life. A medical student before the war, he is pompous and formal, extremely shy, diffident and self-punishing; he is a good theoretical flyer who makes mistakes in practice. Nicknamed ‘Septic’, he plays chess between sorties and drinks Drambuie in preference to bitter. But Mother Gray and Father Hawkins like and encourage him, and are seen (with the whole female Ops Room complement) to be deeply grieved when, hit from behind by a cowardly Messerschmitt, he dies in the cockpit of his Hurricane, his last poignant radio messages received at the very time when he should have been meeting upper-class English Rose Betty (somewhat round-shouldered, but jolly sweet) for their First Date.

  The aerodrome has been bombed. The girls in the Ops Room have shown they can Take It. There is no suggestion that this battle belongs solely, or even chiefly, to the young Knights of the Air. What is foregrounded is the brilliance of British Method, based on ‘radiolocation’ (radar). Baird dies, not in the air, but over Ops Room radio. There are only brief (though efficiently devised) episodes in the air: we see much more of the Ops Room, and stress is laid on the strain felt by Squadron Leader Clinton (Cyril Raymond) in charge of that, rather than any weariness among the pilots. The Ops Room girls plot accurately the course of battle. The Ops Room guides pilots intelligently to their targets. Outnumbered six to one or so by the Hun, the RAF family are seen to be defeating ‘him’ by superior discipline and method. When, in the final frames, Mother Gray hangs up a light in the ruins of her bungalow at the end of the runway to guide any benighted stray pilot safely home, we are perhaps to think of a gesture towards the faint hope that Baird might yet somehow return; but the image has much wider force – any pilot’s goal is the domestic family happiness from which he is a temporary absentee.

  What is one to make of the film’s conception of Baird? His extreme Caledonian stiffness makes the stiff-upper-lip English public-school types seem relatively wild. As poignant representative of the Fallen Few he incorporates probity and chastity; as Scot he shows that the Battle of Britain wasn’t just a south of England affair. But perhaps his main effect is to demonstrate the wisdom and cherishing power of the RAF family: he is an awkward child, but, carefully directed, rewards his parents, who grieve over his loss especially.

  Derek Robinson’s Piece of Cake is a kind of sequel to the same writer’s Goshawk Squadron, which made his reputation in 1971. That book presents the activities of the Royal Flying Corps in France in 1918 in terms of sordor, black comedy, and futility. Major Woolley’s brutal training methods are designed to disabuse his flyers of any notions about chivalry and fair play, and to instil in them the idea that their job is to kill Germans. Not out of the top drawer – a football follower with a Midlands accent – Woolley is clearly more or less mad. Robinson’s ruthless realism presents him with an acute problem of closure. A colossal casualty rate picks off good, bad and ugly RFC men alike, so a conventional ‘happy ending’ is wholly impossible, and any kind of ‘point’ would be hard to educe. Robinson makes Woolley go soft. In the air, he starts thinking about his mistress, not the Germans. His resulting death, which concludes the book, ironically vindicates his own callous ideology.

  Piece of Cake is far longer, taking a squadron of Hurricanes all the way from the outbreak of war to 7 September 1940, when the Germans break through in force and bomb London. The Hornet Squadron’s experiences of ‘phoney’, then disastrously real, war in France occupy more of the novel than the 204 pages out of 667 (in the paperback) given to the Battle of Britain. Though having ‘popsies’ is much alluded to, there are only three significant female characters in this épopée. Two are teachers in France (one herself English) who marry Hornet Squadron members. The lively French girl is killed in a road accident trying, against the tide of refugees, to meet her husband after the squadron has flown from its old base. The other becomes the focus of misogyny, haunting the base in Kent after her husband fails to return, being accused of bringing bad luck, and shoved away. Only the rather thinly conceived Jackie Bellamy, a US presswoman, long attached to the squadron, with a nasty habit of querying the RAF’s claims, is there at the end to vindicate at least the intelligence of the non
-flying sex. So much for Angels One Five and its strong emphasis on (supposedly) feminine values …

  And so much for Richard Hillary. The ex-public-school types in Hornet Squadron are variously oafish, stupid, callow, neurotically disturbed or (in one case) positively evil: ‘Moggy’ Cattermole is a relentless practical joker, liar, bully and thief with homicidal propensities which make him (Robinson’s text insinuates) just the right type to be a fighter pilot. Willy-nilly, after destroying most of his pilots in horrible ways, minutely described, with uncannily precise technical know-how, Robinson, resisting closure, is bound to suggest a kind of ‘point’ by his selection of those who are still alive in the last pages. We do not know for certain that ‘Mother’ Cox, stranded out in the Channel but drifting towards land, will survive. He is half Jewish, notably quieter, more sensible and more decent than most of his mess-mates. ‘Pip’ Patterson, the rather dour and detached but over-imaginative Scot has, we know, landed safely away from the raid at a base in Essex used long before by the squadron. CH3 (Chris Hart III), the Squadron’s ever-critical American, is diving into battle on the last page, following his leader Fanny Barton, a New Zealander who has achieved authority despite awkward personality problems.

  The last Englishman, evil Cattermole, has been killed by a Messerschmitt on the penultimate page. As we review the book in our minds, we remember that the best marksmen and pilots the squadron ever had in the battle were a Czech Communist and an anti-Semitic Pole, both now dead. The young Englishmen, apart from the horrible Moggy, seem flimsily unsuccessful compared to colonials, Yanks and Europeans. CH3, the rich young American who has already flown against the Luftwaffe in Spain, has, in the course of the book, been vindicated in his contempt for chivalric motivations and for pretty flying formations. Readers are perfectly clear that even up-to-date Hurricanes are vastly inferior to ME 109s and that Fighter Command by early September has been reduced to a shambles. As Jackie Bellamy has pointed out, what’s saving Britain is its navy. The Germans, so inferior in ships, can’t risk cross-Channel invasion. But Fighter Command can’t stop the Luftwaffe getting through to London.