The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  ‘To me’, Capra would write in his lively memoirs, ‘documentaries were ash-can films made by kooks with long hair.’ In an hour-long briefing, General George Marshall, US Chief of Staff, told him his job was to counter – in a US army of 8 million where civilians would outnumber professionals by fifty to one – the ‘superman incentive’ which kept the Germans and Japanese going: to ‘win the battle for men’s minds’. When Capra objected that he’d ‘never even been near anybody’ who had made a documentary, Marshall replied testily, ‘Capra, I have never been Chief of Staff before. Thousands of young Americans have never had their legs shot off before.’ So Capra responded, ‘I’m sorry, sir. I’ll make you the best damned documentary films ever made.’29

  His unit, set up on 2 May 1942, produced three series of ‘orientation’ films – Why We Fight, Know your Ally and Know Your Enemy – as well as the Army-Navy Screen Magazine and a film on The Negro Soldier in World War II. Though the first Why We Fight film won an Oscar as the best documentary of 1942, there was considerable (and well-founded) jealousy in Hollywood of the superior quality of British war documentaries, suggested by the popularity of Desert Victory in the USA.30 So Capra moved on from his ‘834th Photo Signal Detachment’ to become commander of a Signal Corps special coverage section intended to bring US combat filming up to and past British standards. Eventually, he received the Distinguished Service Medal, the highest award the army could bestow outside actual combat.

  For Capra, the American Dream had become reality. Brought to the USA, aged six, in 1903, he was the son of a Sicilian peasant. He had worked to pay his own way through high school and college while his brothers and sisters had remained illiterate. His famous films of the thirties had shown ‘little people’ overcoming evil. The Why We Fight series of seven films projects a contrast between the ‘free world’, characterised almost throughout in terms of ‘the people’, and the ‘slave world’, where wicked leaders scheme world conquest, rant and rave. Churchill walks through the streets of London shaking hands with workers – but Hitler’s conquest of Europe has given him, personally, more than a hundred million ‘slaves’.

  The Why We Fight series told soldiers the history of the war they were now engaged in. According to Capra, as a novice in the documentary form, he sat down to watch Leni Riefenstahl’s famous pre-war Nazi movie, The Triumph of the Will. It occurred to him that such enemy footage could be used to prove to US soldiers that the German cause was evil, theirs was just. At this point there breezed into his life Eric Knight, ‘a red-moustached American captain with a British accent’. Knight was a Yorkshireman by birth, now a US citizen, a ‘rollicking boon companion’, creator of ‘Lassie’, an accomplished novelist, and a man with links with the British documentary film movement. Before his premature death in an aeroplane, he made a famous documentary, World of Plenty, with the English director Paul Rotha. Knight agreed with Capra’s brainwave, and Capra commandeered all the German and Japanese propaganda footage he could find in Washington.31

  His film unit was established, with what seemed to Capra very primitive equipment, in a ‘falling apart borrowed studio’ in Hollywood. It could draw on the services, paid or unpaid, of much of Hollywood’s most distinguished talent. For Why We Fight, Walter Huston, for instance, did much of the narration, Walt Disney (under a commercial contract) provided maps and drawings, and Dimitri Tiomkin took charge of all the music. Capra himself, with Anthony Veiller, finalised most of the Why We Fight scripts, but besides Eric Knight – given primary credit for all the scripts by one scholar – there was help from such hands as James (‘Lost Horizon’) Hilton and William Shirer, the former foreign correspondent and CBS colleague of Ed Murrow. The whole team – some forty Signals Corps officers and enlisted men under Capra, plus Hollywood collaborators – worked ‘more or less concurrently’ on all the seven Why We Fight films, each of them fifty minutes long. Capra personally ‘directed’ the first three, merely ‘supervising’ the remaining four, but this seems to be a rather unimportant distinction, since the shape of all of them depended on the ‘editing principle’ which he had conceived.

  The stages seem to have been as follows. A script was produced, outlining the story, making the propaganda-instructional points. Then newsreels, allied and enemy propaganda films, and, if needed, Hollywood feature films were ransacked for footage which would tell the story and support the points. About 80 per cent of each film came from such sources – the rest was composed of animated maps and drawings provided by Disney, and ‘production shots’ made in Hollywood. After the script was finalised and the footage obtained, everything went to Capra and his crew of cutters, headed by William Hornbeck, an Academy Award Winner.32

  The result would be a precision-built artefact, nothing like Griersonian ‘documentary’. But it would anticipate the characteristics of post-war ‘documentaries’ which narrated over and over again the war’s stories on television, British as well as American. This is one reason for concluding this chapter with a look at Why We Fight no. 4, The Battle of Britain. Another is that no film about the events of 1940–41 in Britain reached such a vast audience. It was shown to all US army personnel in 1943 – attendance was compulsory. Navy and air-force men were not forced to watch it, but some did. With commentary translated into French, Spanish, Portuguese and Chinese, it was screened to allied armed forces. In enemy countries occupied after the war the Why We Fight films raised (Capra could boast) at 10 cents a viewing, six times more than their original cost.33

  Most significantly, The Battle of Britain was screened, more or less on Churchill’s personal orders, in British cinemas, going on general release in the autumn of 1942 after opening at two London venues. It was prefaced by film of Churchill himself saying, apropos of the Why We Fight series in general:

  I have never seen or read any more powerful statement of our cause or of our rightful case against the Nazi tyranny …

  The story is told in vivid scenes, but facts and figures are carefully and accurately recorded, and it will surprise many people who have lived through these tremendous years to see, for the first time, laid out in order, what happened and why … As an Englishman, and as a subject of the King and a citizen of the British Commonwealth, I naturally feel deeply grateful to the generous manner in which the part we have played in this world drama has been treated. Things are said about what we have done and how we behaved, which we could never have said about ourselves …34

  This was not a wholly ingenuous statement. The shot list of Battle of Britain held in the Imperial War Museum shows that the British Information Services in New York provided no fewer than thirty-five propaganda documentaries from which Capra and his team drew much of their material. Not surprisingly, shots from London Can Take It, Christmas Under Fire, Words for Battle and Listen to Britain were used at salient moments. German material in the possession of the US government was also heavily used. Clips from Hollywood features were cut in. And – uniquely in the Why We Fight series – a lot of ‘production shots’ were used, British in origin, which involved fictional dialogue between British citizens played by actors: scenes in an air-raid shelter, men caught in an air raid (humorous Cockneys, of course), two air-raid wardens and an old couple entering their bomb-shattered home. Some purists objected at the time to the use of ‘faked’ material. But the Why We Fight project was predicated on the idea that there was a true story about the war: in getting this truth over, it was perfectly in order to select any shots which made it vivid.35

  The Battle of Britain does not bother much with stock anglophile conceptions of England as a green and pleasant land, but it is suffused with a conception of English character, according to which the islanders are quiet, modest folk who don’t like raising their voices. (A Spitfire pilot, reporting several kills, is almost inaudible: the shot, of course, came from a British propaganda film.) The story of Battle and Blitz is brilliantly simplified so as to create a visual narrative with an easily extracted moral. Thus, on 7 September the frustrated Nazis resor
t to bombing London, apparently chiefly by day. It is on 5 October, according to Capra, that they switch to night bombing, and only after this are RAF bombers seen at work, accurately bombing a submarine yard in Bremen. So, Hitler retaliates indiscriminately against Coventry, but, after shots of devastation and mass mourning (thirty-two feet from Words for Battle are cut in amongst many more from Pathé News), the people of Coventry get back to work making planes. Then the British impudently celebrate Christmas (Quentin Reynolds’s second film is drawn on here), so Hitler sets the City of London on fire, but it’s too late, he has lost, freedom has won, because, under the flames, shelterers in the tubes Carry On calmly: ‘They knew this was a people’s war, and they were the people – and a people who didn’t panic couldn’t be beaten.’ Churchill is cheered in the street. ‘For the first time it was the Germans who had tasted the bitter dirt of defeat … A regimented people met an equally determined free people … The British did more than save their country – they won for the world a year of precious time.’ The film ends with the song ‘There’ll Always Be An England’, and with ‘God Save the King’ (George VI has appeared several times, but has never been identified by name, because this is the People’s War).

  From the early shots in which Hitler stares through a telescope, purportedly at the English coast – ‘The chalk cliffs of Britain rose sheer and white out of the choppy water’ – The Battle of Britain is brilliantly fast-moving. Filmed images are reinforced by Disney’s animated diagrams, displaying the supposed German strategy of World Conquest (which ultimately involves getting control of the seas and dominating the USA). Statistics are snappily and authoritatively presented. The RAF is outnumbered ‘ten to one’ both in men and machines. As Fighter Command (largely represented by shots from the Twentieth Century Fox feature film A Yank in the RAF, released in 1941 and starring Tyrone Power) go up to meet the Luftwaffe, they face odds of six, eight, ten to one. In ‘twenty-eight days’ (precisely) of ‘terror’ from the beginning of heavy raids on London, 7,000 civilians are killed but the Nazis lose 900 planes …

  There is no reason to suppose that Capra, hardly an expert on current affairs, himself knew that this film contained statements which, though convenient, were false. He came to believe that Why We Fight had revolutionised ‘not only documentary film making throughout the world, but also the horse-and-buggy method of indoctrinating and informing films with the truth’.36 But to what extent could Churchill have persuaded himself, as he sought to persuade the British public, that Battle of Britain was a film in which ‘facts and figures’ were ‘carefully and accurately recorded’? Leaving aside (for instance) the deft positioning of the ‘raid on Bremen’, so that it appears that the British bombed only in retaliation, what did the Great Man privately make of the statement, ‘In a democracy it is not a government that makes war, it is the people … To lead them the people had chosen Winston Churchill as Prime Minister’? Battle of Britain, with its straightforward opposition of ‘people’ and ‘freedom’ to one-man tyranny, its readily intelligible, because radically simplified, fusion of chronology and causation, and its unqualified assertions about British will to fight and British morale, created a version of the Myth of the Blitz which Americans could believe, presented with Hollywood finesse. Britons were happy to accept it also. It gave due praise from a powerful ally – an ally which had brought to the war industrial and military might far exceeding that of their own country, but which could never match the moral authority represented (of course Capra’s team used it!) by the image of St Paul’s dome above the ruins.

  What did St Paul’s represent? English creative genius, of course, since the great architect Wren had designed it. Christianity, still more obviously, triumphant over neo-paganism. Also, London’s metropolitan role – within Britain, within the British Empire (though perhaps relatively few people realised that its crypt contains a British pantheon of the tombs of imperial military and naval commanders, surpassing even the copious imperial hagiography which one finds in other British cathedrals). The Palace of Westminster had not been unscathed, but Big Ben had survived, proudly erect, a more fitting symbol for the Father than for the ‘Mother of Parliaments’. The monarchy, with its essential, mystified role in the unwritten and literally incomprehensible British Constitution, had been given new stature by the comportment of George VI and his smiling Queen as they toured the ruins. (After a few months, the MoI decided that ‘London Can Take It’ propaganda to home audiences was becoming counterproductive. Horrific footage of Coventry alone came to represent the ‘provincial Blitz’: film of visits by royalty was the reward of other cities for their sufferings.37) British institutions representing Nation and Empire, Democracy and Tradition, had come through the Blitz with enhanced credit. Whatever the Treasury’s national balance sheet said, Britain was still great.

  Epilogue

  ALMA:

  Do you think it would be better for us if we had won the Battle of Britain?

  FRED:

  Of course I do.

  ALMA:

  I don’t.

  FRED:

  Mrs Boughton!

  ALMA:

  It might have been better for America and the rest of the world, but it wouldn’t have been better for us.

  FRED:

  Why not?

  ALMA:

  Because we should have got lazy again, and blown out with our own glory. We should have been bombed and blitzed and we should have stood up under it – an example to the whole civilised world – and that would have finished us.

  Noël Coward Peace In Our Time

  NOËL COWARD’S SURPRISING play, seen in London in the summer of 1947, when glorious weather and the amazing cricketing feats of the ‘Middlesex Twins’, Compton and Edrich, at Lord’s must have provided unfair competition, has now been completely forgotten. Peace In Our Time is a tale of the British resistance, set in a pub in Kensington between November 1940, just after the Nazi conquest, and May 1945, when allied forces are liberating the island. As one would expect from Coward, it is very cleverly constructed, avoiding overstatement at every point, with only two important German characters and a wide range of English types among the regulars to provide humour and small-scale drama. Only one English person is shown as a collaborator (if one excepts a certain prostitute). That is Chorley Bannister, a homosexual, like Coward himself, but the target for Coward’s ire against petty London littérateurs with no backbone, a vein of invective which Priestley and Orwell had mined already. So the play affirms, as the Myth does, the quiet heroism of the People across the classes (though in this case mostly middle).

  But the passage quoted above shows that Coward, one of the war’s most efficient filmic mythologisers, had done some thinking in the drab aftermath. Perhaps he had spotted that French culture had re-emerged after liberation in 1944 with enhanced intellectual and moral prestige – his projection of occupied Britain certainly seems to replicate the idealised and essentially very false notion that in occupied France only tarts and a few twisted intellectuals had had any time for the Germans. Fashion in dress, films and painting and even in drama and ideas, was increasingly dictated by Paris. In any case, it is pertinent that the astute assessment which Coward gives to Alma of the harm which the Myth of the Blitz might do to Britain is subtly mixed with resentment of the USA. It is implied that Britain is liable to suffer for having saved America.

  American journalists who had collaborated in the creation of the Myth would not all look back with unmixed gratification to 1940. The distinguished Drew Middleton would affirm, in an account of the Battle of Britain published in 1960, that 1940 taught a ‘lesson … Despite its fumbling and uncertainties, democracy by its representation of the mind and spirit of all the people can in hours of trial exhibit a resiliency and morale that can be extirpated but that cannot be broken.’ But after that thinking man’s version of Why We Fight, Middleton admits that, ‘To the survivors of the blitz that second autumn of the war is a dark memory to be locked away at the back of
the mind.’1

  Eric Sevareid, as we have seen, was prepared to admit freely, in memoirs published just after the war, that unlike his fearless CBS colleague Ed Murrow, he had found the Blitz intolerable. On his way out of London that autumn, he gave a last broadcast from the city, praising its spirit – London, which was not ‘England’ but which was ‘Britain’, had become ‘a city state in the old Greek sense’. He couldn’t hold his voice steady and feared the broadcast was mawkish. But in the USA a businessman told him that he ‘had listened while driving and had had to stop his car for a moment’, and a professor of history that he ‘had heard it in his bedroom and had had to bathe his eyes before he went down to dinner’.2

  Back in Britain in 1944, Sevareid didn’t like the arrogant and ignorant behaviour of US GIs. He thought that the intellectuals of the Labour Left – Foot, Strachey, Bevan – were ‘bringing political journalism to its greatest flourishing in the English-speaking world’. He was certainly not an anglophobe. Even so, much in the British mood disgusted him. People seemed to have abandoned any rational approach to history. He told an intelligent British friend that the US navy after the war would not only be the world’s biggest, but also the only one with really large-scale battle experience. His friend’s face darkened, his hands shook, his voice choked; he was as indignant ‘as if I had insulted his honour’. To British critics a bad American film was a ‘typical Hollywood product’, a bad British one was ‘merely an unfortunate effort’. The ‘Beaverbrooks of London’ used ‘glaring headlines to demonstrate to the people that the B-29 was not up to the capacity of one of their own heavy bombers’: