The necessity for the system was demonstrated on the day agreement was reached. At the Vickers aircraft plant in Weybridge, south of London, a surprise attack by a handful of dive-bombers on 3 September 1940 killed 89 workers and resulted in the disappearance of a further 3,000 and a cut in production by two-thirds.125 Roof-spotting had the advantage that it gave more precise warning of impending attack than reliance on official alerts, and it cut to a fraction the amount of time lost by needlessly sending the workforce to shelter. In early November 1940 the Minister of Labour, Ernest Bevin, forwarded to Churchill statistics from one firm which had instituted ‘Air Watching’ to show what it could achieve. Between 24 August and 19 October there had been 124 air-raid alerts, lasting a little over 233 hours; instead of losing the equivalent of ten working days, the roof-spotting had resulted in a loss of just one hour twenty minutes.126 Calculations made over the war in industrial localities suggest gains of 60–70 per cent in work-time by carrying on after the siren. In total, an estimated 11 million man-hours were saved.
Roof-spotting nevertheless placed a severe strain on those workers who were sent on rotas to sit for hours on the roof in all weathers when for most of the time there was no direct threat, and from 1941 onwards almost none. The first cohorts were trained by the RAF and then sent back to their localities to train a wider circle of recruits, approximately 4,000 each week. The scheme was not legally binding, and most industries began negotiating with the unions on how to cope with raiding in order to avoid industrial unrest. Schemes of compensation were worked out for the time when air raids really did compel workers to shelter: full pay for up to eight hours a week and half-pay thereafter.127 Workers who found themselves temporarily unemployed as a result of raids, or who suffered injury, could apply to local Assistance Boards and 100,000 payments were made over the course of the Blitz to the injured, in addition to temporary cash payments and clothing coupons for post-raid homeless. Many firms working on war contracts collaborated in Local Production Defence Committees to pool spotter information and provide adequate shelter for the labour force. One set up in Birmingham in March 1941 eventually covered 800,000 workers. To try to limit the time lost in reconstructing damaged premises the government insisted that Reconstruction Panels and Emergency Repair Committees be set up by local firms working with the civil defence authorities and local trade unions. By summer 1941, 120 Panels were in operation and had organized the repair of around 4,000 damaged plants.128
The easiest way to limit damage was to disperse production into a larger number of smaller premises or to duplicate vital production in two or more places. Much armaments production lent itself to dispersed production of components, particularly the aircraft industry, so that some degree of decentralization was already in place by the time war broke out. There were also thousands of small engineering and manufacturing firms which could be mobilized to meet the expected production crisis. The dispersal of the aircraft industry became policy at the Ministry of Aircraft Production several months before the bombing began and it continued on a wide scale throughout the Blitz.129 The object was to split up major production units so that there would be at least two and sometimes three production lines for individual components and for finished aircraft; small components or sub-assemblies were to have emergency sites on stand-by in case of air-raid damage; small hangers (‘Hangerettes’) were to be constructed some distance from aircraft plants so that finished planes would not be destroyed before they had been delivered.130 This pattern was followed successfully by most firms. The Castle Bromwich Spitfire plant in Birmingham was split into 23 premises spread over eight towns, each component manufactured in at least three places. The Vickers Weybridge plant bombed in September dispersed to 42 sites within a radius of 20 miles, employing 10,000 workers but no more than 500 on each site. In some cases the firm shared premises: a film studio was used to assemble Wellington bomber wings while films were still being made; a coffin-maker, keen no doubt to profit from the coming business boom, refused to evacuate his premises until compelled to do so and left his tools and equipment for Vickers to use. The Bristol Aeroplane Company dispersed its aero-engine production into the local Corporation Electricity Department, the bus garage and a cigarette factory.131 A more serious problem was dispersing labour to follow the machines. The government set up a scheme to build hostels for 200,000 workers engaged on war orders, but this did little for labour that dispersed itself after a raid. The search for nearby sites for dispersal had the advantage that a firm might miss the bombs but still hold its workforce together. The Bristol Company observed the sensible rule of finding ‘premises not near, and yet not too far’.132
The results of the efforts to restrict damage to military production were mixed. Intense raids on the arsenal at Woolwich in the attack on 7 September resulted in heavy temporary losses of munitions output (except for bombs, ironically enough, which lost only 2 per cent); raids on Southampton damaged 30 per cent of Spitfire production based there.133 But these figures were often only temporary disruptions. Work was either further dispersed or the plant repaired, covered with tarpaulins and running at almost full capacity within days. For all the anxiety about Britain’s war industries, it was found that among the smoke and debris much less damage was done than at first appeared. Reporting to Churchill on the bombing of the Midlands aero-industry in November and December 1940, Beaverbrook found that only 700 machine tools had been destroyed and 5,000 damaged out of a total regional stock of 120,000. A study of 200 Birmingham city-centre factories after five heavy raids found that only 15 per cent had called in repair services and only 22 per cent had suffered serious damage but with most tools intact. The heavy raids on Merseyside in December left ‘negligible’ damage to factories in Bootle and all machines intact in the aircraft plants in Manchester. The Regional Commissioner in his report concluded that ‘permanent damage is very small indeed’.134 The pattern in 1941 was similar. The Ministry of Home Security calculated that out of 6,699 economic ‘key points’ – industry, utilities, food stocks, oil – only 884 had been hit; a mere eight out of 558 factories attacked had been destroyed beyond repair. Figures for weekly output of iron and steel show a higher output figure for every month of the Blitz compared with September 1940. By the end of the bombing, the monthly output of aircraft was almost a quarter higher than it had been before it started. The report concluded that the War Material Production Index was affected more in April 1941 by the Easter holidays than by bombing. More effective damage, as the Manchester report suggested, required far greater numbers of aircraft, more effective bombs, repeated raiding and the occasional lucky hit.135
The protection of food stocks and food supplies was a greater challenge, since food could only be imported through a handful of major ports and perishable food was stored in large quantities on or near the quayside. So anxious was the government to protect food stocks that air-raid precautions were introduced in 1940 at embarkation points for food supplies from West Africa and southern Asia.136 The supply of food from overseas depended on keeping open Britain’s major ports, which is why the German Air Force attacked them with such regularity. Ports could not be dispersed like factories, though the shipping could be diverted to smaller and less vulnerable coastal towns. But the attacks seldom succeeded in closing an entire port, damaging though they were. In Liverpool, subject to a detailed study after the Blitz, only the raids in May 1941 seriously affected the operation of the dock area, resulting in the loss of the equivalent of three working days. In the five weeks before the raid an average of 91,000 tons had been unloaded each week; in the week of the raids the figure fell to 35,000 tons, but a week later was back up to 86,000. During the same period the average weekly number of stevedores was 510,000; during the week of bombing this number fell to 299,000, but by the third week of May had risen to 518,000. The damage had been extensive, including 69 out of 144 berths, but arriving ships were instead unloaded in midstream while the docks were repaired.137 In most cases there seems to have been
only a temporary decline in dock work following the raids, though workers depended on the local authorities providing them with food, temporary accommodation and transport.
The greatest amount of damage was done by fire, when it destroyed existing stocks of food. Much of the food and animal feedstuff was stored close to the quayside in wooden warehouses. In Liverpool 100 sheds were destroyed in the bombing, with the loss of 31,500 tons of food. Records of food losses were compiled every week and presented to the Cabinet in close detail. By the end of December 1940 141,000 tons of foodstuffs had been lost, including 27,000 tons of wheat and 25,000 tons of sugar.138 The following week a granary with 30,000 tons of cereals was destroyed next to the Manchester Ship Canal, but in this case most of the grain that spilled out was salvaged. Between January and May 1941 a further 271,000 tons of food was affected by raiding, but only 70,500 tons was reckoned a complete loss. The Ministry of Food set up a salvage branch in January 1941 and managed to rescue 162,900 tons for consumption and 39,000 tons for agricultural uses. The Ministry gradually moved food stocks away from vulnerable areas, so that by the end of 1941 only 45 per cent was still close to the docks.139 This proved to be a slow process: in Hull the food crisis that hit in May 1941 finally prompted the authorities to abandon storage near the port area; in Newcastle a bomb on a quayside warehouse in September 1941 resulted in a congealed syrup of flour, fat and sugar that nourished swarms of fat flies so dense that local people had to drink their tea through a straw from covered cups to prevent it being contaminated.140 Nonetheless by the autumn of 1941 the food situation had improved from the worst days of the Blitz. Most stocks had been decentralized into 104 food-storage zones across the country, providing enough stock to feed the entire population for two weeks, three times the level before the war.141
Alongside food the most important factor for the millions of ordinary people caught up in the campaign was to have somewhere secure to live. As German bombing shifted to night operations and became less accurate, damage to residential housing in the inner-city areas escalated. The most poignant images of the Blitz are the rows of demolished terraces and the huddle of the homeless and dispossessed in the brick-strewn streets. ‘Never before have I seen houses completely reduced to this thick and gritty powder,’ wrote Tennyson Jesse to an American friend in October 1940. John Strachey, reflecting on the ordinariness of the small houses blown open to view by the bombs, described ‘a domestic sort of war’ in which its catastrophes were ‘made terrible not by strangeness but by familiarity’.142
It is nonetheless possible to exaggerate the degree of damage to housing and the extent of homelessness as a result of the Blitz. Homelessness was for most bomb victims a temporary state. Every effort was made by local authorities to return people to hastily repaired housing, or to allocate those whose homes had been obliterated to temporary billets or new accommodation. In Birmingham, where 67,000 were registered as homeless after the bombing, people returned to damaged housing even in bombed areas, or moved into housing standing vacant in the neighbourhood. Out of every 300 families rendered homeless, 280 in fact returned to their homes. Observers found that among the remainder whose houses had been destroyed, a ‘strong tendency exists towards moving into a house in the immediate neighbourhood’. To ease the congestion, the Ministry of Health waived the slum-clearance orders on condemned housing to allow the homeless a temporary new home, so long as it was cleaned and repaired in advance.143 Nor was the percentage of uninhabitable housing as high as the initial scenes of devastation suggested. Once the smoke had cleared and the debris had been shunted aside, most houses were quickly reparable and the remainder capable of returning to use within a matter of weeks. By January 1941, 80 per cent of the half million houses damaged in London had been repaired, and 70 per cent of the 70,000 in Birmingham. By the end of the Blitz 1.6 million houses had been returned to use, leaving just 271,000 still undergoing repairs.144
The task of rehabilitation and rescue began as soon as a raid was over. Local authorities set up schemes for Mutual Aid so that immediately after an incident there would be lorry-loads of labourers, craftsmen and equipment arriving from neighbouring towns. In the Northern Civil Defence Region seven cities could supply at once a total of 44 vehicles and 1,150 men for mutual aid. Each man arrived with a pick, shovel and a meal, while every five men had a crowbar and a wheelbarrow between them. The first help would be followed by heavy equipment – hydraulic jacks, steamrollers, bulldozers, excavators, concrete mixers and cranes.145 The work could be interrupted by unexploded or delayed-action bombs or the fall of badly damaged masonry, but temporary repairs could be undertaken very quickly. In Liverpool there were 7,000 workers employed on clearing and repairing the damage the day after the heavy raids in May 1941. Sometimes cities that sent mutual aid found themselves the victim of bombing before their crews had returned. Manchester in late December had 24 rescue squads away in Liverpool and had to call for assistance from Bury, Oldham, Bolton, Huddersfield and Nottingham to compensate. A month before, Manchester had sent 12 squads to help in Coventry alongside 52 from neighbouring Midlands towns.146 The rescue services worked in difficult conditions, sometimes short of food and comfortable accommodation, but they were able to restore housing, road traffic and utility services in a remarkably short period of time. In Coventry electricity was restored two days after the raid, two-thirds of the water supply a week later, half the private telephone lines after a week, all but one train line and all bus routes after just four days. After six weeks 22,000 houses had been made habitable. Clara Milburn and her village neighbours took in a number of temporary refugees from Coventry but found after four or five days that many preferred to go back to bomb-damaged homes, including a woman with just one intact room for her, her daughter and the piano accordion she refused to abandon.147
The urge to return home in cases other than complete destruction is not difficult to explain. Householders were anxious to salvage what they could from badly damaged housing or to find where salvaged furnishings had been sent in their absence. The Ministry of Home Security issued detailed regulations on salvage in August 1940 but made it clear that primary responsibility lay with the owner for recovery and protection of ‘removable goods’. As the bombing intensified, this responsibility had to be shared increasingly with the civil defence authority, particularly in cases where the owners could not be traced.148 Goods were transported and stored free of charge; storage facilities could be requisitioned and piles of fire-damaged, damp and dusty possessions made their way to a motley number of church halls, warehouses, theatres and equipment stores where they ran the risk of pilfering. Demolition workers stole anything they regarded as both useful and portable, though a Mass Observation report pointed out that many refused to steal from poorer houses if there was a street of middle-class villas available.149 During the Blitz there were almost 8,000 reported cases of looting, of which only a quarter resulted in arrests. The opportunity to steal was widespread, but over the course of the war, crime and punishment remained little different from pre-war levels, though looting was punished with increasing severity because it challenged the community values of a country at war.150
As many people as could returned to live in familiar surroundings and with familiar things, however damaged. The immediate repair of housing was undertaken by the Ministry of Health, which may well explain why it was called ‘first aid’. A great many houses had windows blown in and slates removed from the roof. Stocks of likely materials had been established in advance and could be utilized at once; lists of contractors willing to be part of the programme were drawn up beforehand and mobilized when repairs were needed. Instructions were issued to replace windows with linoleum, cardboard or plasterboard, leaving some ventilation and, in habitable rooms, between one-third and one-half covered with translucent fabric to let in a pale daylight. Ceilings were repaired with stiff cardboard screwed to the joists above. Roofs were covered with tarpaulins and retiled as soon as labour was available.151 The results wer
e neither attractive nor comfortable but, in the absence of a further explosion, habitable.
Churchill was among those whose view of the ruined cities focused on the visible destruction as a loss difficult to recover. In December 1940 he pressed the Minister of Works to set up repair squads for the rows of windowless housing he saw ‘deserted and neglected’. The Ministry had already begun a programme of urgent repairs to factories and severely damaged housing. Because there was little for the army to do, thousands of building workers were temporarily released from their units to cope with more extensive house reconstruction. Housing in the intermediate category of badly damaged was always a much smaller proportion of the whole. Following the heavy raid on Hull on 8 May 1941, 561 houses were destroyed or beyond repair, 1,345 were damaged but needed extensive work, but 8,352 were still usable subject to minor repair.152 The First Aid programme was designed for this larger category. The statistics show that the programme of repairs kept reasonable pace with the renewed bombing in the spring of 1941. By March 1941 there were only 5,100 damaged houses in London awaiting repair out of 719,000; in the provincial cities 50,800 out of 335,000. By November, with the bombing almost at an end, over 2 million houses had been dealt with. Of the severely damaged houses, over one-third had been restored to use by 1942.153 The bare statistics render dumb the acres of burnt out and ruptured urban landscape and the improvised nature of life in damaged houses and apartments, but they do show that nationwide programmes of repair and rehabilitation worked to limit the damage that bombing might have inflicted on a less prepared and economically poorer community.
The one factor responsible for a large part of the damage was fire, and the extent of incendiary bombing was one of the aspects of the bombing campaign that had not been anticipated or adequately prepared for. Fire chiefs were asked to estimate after the Blitz how much of the damage in their regions could be attributed to fire and their replies ranged between 80 and 98 per cent; 90 per cent of the damage in London, Plymouth, Southampton and Portsmouth was the result of conflagrations caused by large clusters of incendiaries.154 Firefighting in wartime differed from peacetime not only because of the danger of high-explosive bombs or delayed-action incendiaries, each with a high-explosive capsule inside designed to maim, but because buildings became fully ventilated at once as windows were blown out, creating a rapid blaze and spreading quickly to become what fire chiefs called a ‘fire zone’. Water supplies were fractured, forcing brigades to pump water from rivers and canals, often at considerable distance from the blaze. British cities were fortunate that the scale of attack never made possible a firestorm like Hamburg or Dresden.
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