The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  Bredon Hill features in one of A. E. Housman’s most melancholy and effective poems, but Harrison, talking to Poston about his piece, did not mention that particular inspiration. He recalled writing the piece and playing it to Poston on the piano when she was staying with him:

  J.H.

  And we drove on a perfect summer afternoon high up in that lovely countryside of mine and had a picnic tea in sight of Bredon Hill.

  E.P.

  Yes – and I felt how really you had caught the essence of that English scene and put it into your music, and that you had written a real Rhapsody.

  J.H.

  Yes, I think so – because it grew out of itself in my mind from all those scenes I have known all my life. After all, we musn’t forget that this part of Worcestershire speaks of England at its oldest. It is the heart of Mercia, the country of Piers Plowman, and it is the spirit of Elgar’s music too. If I’ve been able to catch something of all this then I’m indeed glad …

  E.P.

  Yes … It’s all in your music.39

  10

  Telling It To America

  Here they were, the people who rule a fourth of the globe … They had been imperialistic and had exploited, they had subjugated, but down in the Tubes of London they were demonstrating that they could take the same sort of punishment they had handed out … They were a tough generation of Englishmen and I admired them in the shelters. They had Elizabethan fire in their guts.

  Ben Robertson

  NEGLEY FARSON WAS among the American journalists – well over a hundred of them were in London during the Blitz – who had no difficulty in accepting that there was a link between the Deep English landscape and ‘the strength of this marvellous country’. Farson was one of several important writers – John Gunther, Walter Duranty and Vincent Sheean were others – whose reports on the European crisis were distributed for syndication by the North American Newspaper Alliance. But his book, Bomber’s Moon, one of the first to cover the Blitz, published by Gollancz in January 1941, seems to have been aimed initially at British readers. Farson, from September 1940, had toured London with an artist, Tom Purvis, whose drawings provided the book with nearly fifty illustrations. It is particularly well written, with a restraint lacking in most Blitz writing at that time. Farson had known England for a quarter of a century and was able to put what was happening into long perspective. However, Bomber’s Moon is rich in what had already become clichés, especially in Cockney jokes. And his evocation of a small west-country town provides a version of Deep England mythology which is more interesting in its details than most, but includes the statement that, ‘In rural England you feel the deep, uncorrupted things which give this country its staying power. These people take a calmness from their affinity with peaceful things.’1

  Quentin Reynolds of Colliers Weekly Magazine, typically, was less mystical, more direct. He describes going to a village in Kent in the autumn of 1940. The local pub was ‘three hundred years old … Up the road was the village school; across from it the village church and here the pub. These three things are symbols of what England is fighting to maintain. The pub in many ways is more important than the other two; it is the place where men gather to speak their minds. The pub is the symbol of free speech in England.’2

  A basic problem for British propagandists addressing the USA was that Americans who had a Disneyland conception of England as a country of villages, green fields and Wodehouseian eccentrics could not swallow the class hierarchy implied in these images (and, of course, strong in reality).

  Alice Duer Miller’s poem The White Cliffs was a publishing sensation in both the USA and Britain in 1940–41. In America, more than 300,000 copies were sold. The actress Lynne Fontanne broadcast the poem over the NBC Blue Network and Jimmy Dorsey recorded a highly popular song relating to it. In Britain, eight printings were called for in a few months. The White Cliffs tells the story of Susan Dunne. This American girl visits England in 1914 and marries a young aristocrat who dies in the war. Now Lady Ashwood, she takes her son to the States, is shocked by prohibition, gangsters and political sleaze, and returns to England, which, alas, is a land of class distinctions and appeasement. Her son joins the services when war breaks out, and if she loses him it will be in a great cause.

  This synopsis makes clear that the poem, which is conventionally but not incompetently written, is not simple-minded propaganda. (When, after long wrangles with the Office of War Information, MGM turned it into a Hollywood feature, it was forbidden to export it, except, rather oddly, to liberated France and Italy.3) Susan is ambivalent about England – loving the cultivated English voice with its ‘pure round “o’s”’, but loathing the arrogance of its users. Even Miller’s view of English patriotism is hardly dripping with affection:

  … Englishmen

  Will serve day after day, obey the law,

  And do dull tasks that keep a nation strong.

  Pale shabby people standing in a long

  Line in the twilight and the misty rain

  To pay their tax, I then saw England plain.

  Her eventual resolution of doubt into support for England’s war effort is based on the idea that the founders of the USA were English – ‘Never more English than when they dared to be/Rebels against her’ – and that the seed of the tree of Liberty ‘was English’:

  I am American bred,

  I have seen much to hate here – much to forgive,

  But in a world where England is finished and dead,

  I do not wish to live.4

  There is no suggestion in the book that war is breaking down English snobbery: it implies that England has to be supported in spite of gross faults in its society, and might even have provided grist for the mill of shrewd isolationists.

  One strong card which isolationism had in hand was provided by the widespread belief that cunning British atrocity propaganda had lured the USA into the Great War. Aware of the strength of this feeling, the British government was now extremely cautious in its approach to propaganda in the States.

  A small British Library of Information already existed in New York. In 1939 a secret government inquiry was set up to devise a more ambitious policy. This was done on the basis of ‘direct and detailed consultation’ with Edward R. Murrow, the London-based European director of the Columbian Broadcasting Service. It was resolved that ‘the British should merely feed information into American channels, cultivating … the makers of American opinion and particularly the growing number of American broadcasters in the United Kingdom’. By August 1939 a structure was ready. The News Department of the Foreign Office, which would continue to brief US correspondents, would be backed up by an American liaison unit in the BBC and a small American Division of the Ministry of Information.5

  The very ineptitude of the MoI in the early months of war, when its amateurish staff was faced with the problem that there was little war news of interest, may have done Britain a favour. Referring to the first minister, Time magazine said: ‘If Lord Macmillan’s first task was to undo Britain’s reputation for cleverness, he could not have done it more brilliantly.’ In any case, Chamberlain was not sure what he wanted from the USA – he wrote to his sister in January 1940: ‘Heaven knows I don’t want the Americans to fight for us; we should have to pay too dearly for that if they had any right to be in on the peace terms.’ Events thereafter, which made USA help completely essential, transformed British ‘informational’ operations both at home and in America. It was helpful that Churchill himself, even before May 1940, had been a popular broadcaster in the USA. As Nicholas Cull summarises the developments which followed his accession to the Premiership:

  During the critical period of 1940 and 1941, practically all America’s news about the war passed through London and was accordingly shaped by the publicity and censorship structure of the British Government, or indirectly by the partiality of the press corps. The flow of information from London established the picture of a new, dynamic Britain, and a struggle increasin
gly based on moral issues; these same ideas were reflected and rearticulated in the indigenous American mass media, creating a new paradigm for the American public and ultimately redefining conceptions of America’s role in the world. The old culture of isolationism and the policy responses associated with that culture had given way to a new culture of war and globalism many months before Pearl Harbor.6

  In so far as the Myth of the Blitz did not evolve spontaneously (and I have argued that in great part it did), it was a propaganda construct directed as much at American opinion as at British, developed by American news journalists in association with British propagandists and newsmen – and was all the more strongly accepted by Britons because American voices proclaimed it. It could therefore be said that the most important single figure in its dissemination was Edward R. Murrow, who, as we have just seen, had helped the British government pre-war to set up the procedures whereby his colleagues would receive official war news.

  Murrow was a man of unquestionable integrity, completely committed to the ideals of broadcasting as a public service and of journalism as truth-telling. In a broadcast from London to the USA at the outbreak of war, he said:

  I have an old-fashioned belief that Americans like to make up their own minds on the basis of all available information. The conclusions you draw are your own affair. I have no desire to influence them and shall leave such efforts to those who have more confidence in their own judgements than I have in mine.7

  In spite of this, there is not the least doubt that Murrow, during and after the summer of 1940, used his broadcasts consistently to influence US public opinion away from isolationism.

  Murrow’s wife, Janet, actually took a job in the MoI. His relationship with the BBC, which was committed to truth-telling but was of course highly selective with ‘the truth’, was so close that he was virtually on their strength: night after night, he would sit into the small hours talking to the scholarly Scot, who was the BBC’s news editor, R. T. Clark. (But, as he told BBC listeners on one of the occasions when he broadcast to them – he was sitting beside his friendly rival Fred Bate of NBC – he was his own editor: ‘There’s one big advantage we have, and that is that no one can rewrite or change our material.’8) We can picture him in his flat in Hallam Street near the BBC singing ‘Joe Hill’ to his wife’s piano accompaniment for the pleasure of Clark, Alan Wells (the foreign editor of the BBC Home Service, a close friend of the Murrows killed in the Blitz) and maybe Jan Masaryk, the exiled Czechoslovakian leader. He and Janet were frequent guests at 10 Downing Street, and John G. Winant, who, during the Blitz, replaced the anglophobic Joseph Kennedy as US ambassador, was an old friend. After ‘Lend-Lease’ went through, important Americans visiting London all resorted to Murrow as the most reliable source of information.9

  He was regarded with some awe by many of the American press corps in London, whose numbers swelled after the fall of France. Eric Sevareid, a CBS colleague, would recall the impression which Murrow had made on him before the war:

  A young American, a tall thin man with a boyish grin, extraordinary dark eyes that were alight and intense one moment and sombre and lost the next. He seemed to possess that rare thing, an instinctive, intuitive recognition of truth.

  This initial admiration never dimmed. In his memoirs (published in 1946, when both men were still under forty), Sevareid hailed Murrow as ‘the first great literary artist of a new medium of communication’.10 Murrow’s older friend Vincent Sheean (whose articles from London were taken by the North American News Agency) likewise wrote about him, in a book published in 1943, as if he was already confirmed to be one of the great men of history – ‘dark and taciturn and often beset by gloom’, he ‘was at the same time capable of sustained hilarity and high spirits: the range of his moral orchestra was great’.11 Murrow’s British co-workers also fell under his spell: reserved by American standards, he seemed refreshingly free and easy to them.

  Murrow’s dedication and energy are almost frightening to read about. Several times knocked down in London streets by bomb blast, he refused to enter an air-raid shelter unless it was in search of a story. Chain-smoking as always, he drove through the Blitz in his small British car, checking casualty reports, since he never worked from official handouts; he paced the streets of the city not only as a reporter but as a fire warden; yet he maintained close contact with European governments in exile, consorted with Cabinet ministers and important Labour politicians – and broadcast up to four or five times a night. To colleagues he seemed, as one of his biographers puts it, ‘the iron man of the blitz, living on adrenalin, black coffee, and cigarettes … his six-foot-two frame down to 150 pounds’.12

  Murrow’s father was a farmer – not poor, as he liked to imply – who owned 320 acres in the North Carolina Piedmont, but had been tempted to the North-west to work as a locomotive engineer in the lumber industry. ‘Ed’ himself had worked in the frontier lumber camps as a youth and was heard on occasion to wish that he’d never left them: his egalitarianism was fed by memories of men in the epic Wobbly movement, whose activities brought a taste of revolution to Seattle in 1919. At Washington State University, however, his chief interest was in ‘speech’. His platform skills brought him election as president of the National Student Federation in 1929, and in that capacity he travelled to a congress in Bucharest in 1931 and had a foretaste of sinister changes in Europe.13 In 1937 he went to London as CBS’s European director. The role of the foreign correspondent speaking on radio was about to enter a literally heroic phase. By 1940, CBS, NBC and to a lesser extent their rival, the Mutual network, had ‘established the broadcast correspondent as a staple of the American news scene. The small group of men and women’, (David H. Hosley goes on), ‘were as good as any radio or television correspondents since, and they were a key element in the Golden Age of Radio.’ A Fortune poll in 1938 had shown that listening to radio was America’s favourite leisure activity – preferred by 18.8 per cent as compared with 17.3 per cent favouring movies.14 No wonder Hollywood itself paid tribute to the charisma of the Foreign Correspondent in a film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and released in 1940. Vincent Sheean’s Personal History had attracted the attention of an independent Hollywood producer, Walter Wanger, who wanted to make a film about the civil war in Spain. His ideas ran into opposition from the Hays Office, which administered the industry’s production code and was averse to political topics, let alone foreign ones.15 By the time Joel McCrea starred in Hitchcock’s film as a reporter sent to Europe to find out ‘what was going on over there’, almost the only element left from the book was its opening location, Holland; all references to Spain and to German anti-Semitism had been removed. However, the conclusion had McCrea broadcasting from a bomb-torn London: ‘The lights have gone out in Europe! Hang on to your lights, America – they’re the only lights still on in the world. Ring yourself round with steel, America!’16

  H. V. Kalterborn had made the first live battlefield broadcast from Spain in 1936. At this time, NBC established a lead over CBS. Fred Bate, NBC’s London chief, was a personal friend of Edward VIII and trumped CBS with very full coverage of the abdication crisis. But in the Munich crisis CBS, now led by Murrow, acquired an edge in depth of coverage and analysis and sheer number of broadcasts from Europe. At this point, a Gallup Poll showed that radio had suddenly taken over from newspapers as the preferred source of news for seven out of ten Americans – and the medium’s potency was confirmed in October when Orson Welles produced his famous version of his near-namesake H. G.’s War of the Worlds and convinced many listeners that Martians had landed in their homeland.17

  Murrow, initially an organiser of broadcasts by others, began to go out on shortwave direct to the US after war broke out. Before long, he was rated the ‘number one’ American newsman. However, interest excited by radio news helped to sell newspapers. Murrow’s own Blitz reports were printed in PM, a New York afternoon tabloid which first appeared in June 1940, the brainchild of its editor Ralph Ingersoll, who sent Be
n Robertson to cover the war in Britain and visited London himself later to convince himself at first hand that the city really was ‘Taking It’.

  To ‘Take It’ was an American expression, and its general adoption in Britain may indicate how strong the desire for American approval of its spirit was in that country. Like the ‘morale’ of the British themselves, the attitude of the core of the American press corps was stabilised after the fall of France and before 7 September. First, there was the colonisation of Dover Cliff. As the Battle of Britain began with the RAF trying to defend convoys in the Channel, American journalists flocked to Dover, where they stayed in the Grand Hotel by night and spent day after day watching air battles from the white cliff associated with Shakespeare’s King Lear. Others drove down to join them – Murrow travelling with his friend Sheean, with Ed Beattie of United Press and Drew Middleton of Associated Press, who said ‘You could be on your back, with glasses, and look up and there was the whole goddam air battle!’18

  Ben Robertson, PM’s fresh-faced and idealistic young reporter, with the charming South Carolina accent and an attachment not only to rather left-wing views but to what he took to be the anti-materialistic, anti-mechanistic ethos of Deep South tradition, once saw four dogfights from the cliff in one day. His high-spirited account, published in I Saw England (1941), makes the atmosphere in town and on cliff seem romantically heady:

  Those were wonderful days in every way – they changed me as an individual. I lost my sense of personal fear because I saw that what happened to me did not matter … It was not we who counted, it was what we stood for. And I knew now for what I was standing – I was for freedom. It was as simple as that … I understood Valley Forge and Gettysburg at Dover.19