The existing fire services were, despite the expansion of their numbers, ill-prepared to cope with this degree of fire damage. The country remained divided into more than 1,600 firefighting authorities, all nominally independent. Some had modern equipment and a core of experienced firemen alongside the new volunteers, but some major urban areas had kept their ‘police brigades’, composed of local policemen with limited professional training. The poor performance of the firefighting in Plymouth, Liverpool, Southampton and Manchester resulted from this dependence on local police who doubled as firemen.155 Many brigades could not help neighbouring services fully because hose and hydrant equipment was incompatible. There was a shortage of modern fire tenders and automatic equipment. The AFS had been trained as thoroughly as possible during each year since 1939, but in some cases it was abandoned to operate on its own without the help of the professional force. Henry Green, anxious for action in wartime London, found the reality on 7 September 1940, when he and his AFS crews were sent in a taxi drawing a pump to stem the large timber fires in the docks, a scene of complete confusion: ‘When at last we drove through the Dock … there was not one officer to report to, no one to give orders, we simply drove on up a road towards what seemed to be our blaze.’ After finding the burning timber, Green found himself ‘pitchforked into chaos … doing practically no good at all … no orders whatever’. He was struck by the sorry sight of burning pigeons in flight.156 Even allowing for literary licence, Green’s experience reflected the existing inadequacies of the force. By the autumn of 1940, wrote the Home Office Chief of Fire Staff – the improbably named Sir Aylmer Firebrace – the service had reached ‘the limit of its possibilities’.157
Some effort was made to cope with the effects of bombing and there is no question that the fire services responded readily and bravely to the challenge. Some 700 firemen and 20 firewomen lost their lives and over 6,000 were seriously injured. The work was exhausting and in the case of London, continuous for almost two months, during which 13,000 fires were tackled by men who were allowed only 24 hours off between 48-hour shifts. The local services were grouped into mutual aid schemes like the civil defence services, with instructions to pool operational experience, and share equipment and men. At Coventry 150 pumps were supplied by other forces, a level of aid that brought all but 5 of 200 fires under control after two days.158 In major cities contingency plans were made against the prospect of fire. Large water tanks, holding from 5,000 to 1 million gallons of water, were placed in vulnerable areas. Householders were encouraged to keep their own supply of water ready in bathtubs and buckets to use against incendiary fires. The number of fireboats, to deal with dock and ship fires, increased from 5 to 250. The fire services laid 1,200 miles of black 6-inch water pipe along main urban city-centre streets to which hoses could be attached in an emergency.159 In September 1940 the first steps were taken to spread responsibility among the wider population by introducing the Fire Watchers Order to compel businesses to appoint fire guards to watch for incendiaries which they could either fight themselves or call others for help. In October the Access to Property Order at last gave civil defence staff the legal right to enter private property to extinguish fire-bombs.160
None of these reforms worked well enough to cope with the escalating impact of incendiary bombing from November 1940 onwards. Firms which had instituted fire-watching schemes sometimes left the premises untended in the evening or at weekends, when bombing was just as likely. In other cases fire-watchers turned up late or drunk for a duty they regarded as an imposition.161 The front line against incendiaries was supplied by ordinary householders, equipped if they were lucky with a stirrup pump and buckets of sand, supported by air-raid wardens and trained firefighters. Firemen often arrived only once a building was already well alight. A report to the Ministry of Home Security in December highlighted the disastrous experience of recent raids and recommended that a concerted firefighting organization be established which involved volunteers from the public, civil defences and the fire services.162 The turning point was probably the heavy raids on Manchester in late December. A few weeks before, the Ministry of Aircraft Production (MAP) area officer in Manchester had complained to Beaverbrook that Manchester lacked a fire-prevention scheme and encouraged him to set one up. The fires that destroyed much of Merseyside between 20 and 24 December were blamed on the inadequate fire-watching provision sponsored by local business. The managing director of The Manchester Guardian reported that when the firemen arrived they failed entirely to cope, refusing to enter dangerous buildings or to tackle early conflagrations.163
In late December Herbert Morrison introduced to Cabinet a scheme for compulsory fire-watching. This was part of a broader drive to recruit more civil defence personnel, since the first months of bombing had exposed the gaps in its organization. The decision to introduce compulsion was presented as a form of civil conscription, with appeals to duty: ‘some of you lately, in more cities than one,’ Morrison announced in a New Year’s Eve broadcast, ‘have failed your country. This must never happen again.’164 He wanted fire-watching parties to be set up in every street and business and empowered the local authorities to compel compliance if there were not enough volunteers. A further instrument for compulsion was introduced on 10 April 1941 with a new National Service Bill, which allowed compulsory recruitment of additional civil defence workers, classified key civil defence personnel as reserved occupation (free of the possibility of military conscription), and compelled local authorities to employ pacifists and conscientious objectors in civil defence and firefighting.165 The move brought additional volunteers and fire-watchers; street fire parties were trained, equipped where possible with helmets, pumps, ladders and shovels, and linked more closely with the local firefighting authorities. Eventually as many as 6 million people registered for fire duty. Nevertheless, the increased level of compulsory mobilization reached those parts of the population generally less committed to the civic militarization that had gone on during the Phoney War, before the fighting started in April 1940. Some pacifists, content to undertake voluntary fire-watching, refused to be conscripted to do the same job; by April there were 24 cases going through the courts, followed in all but two by a brief prison sentence.166 In Newcastle out of 57,444 registered for compulsory duty, 44,785 claimed exemption on grounds of ill-health, family commitments or vital war work. By 1943 the city had 57,000 people organized in fire-guard units but they were all volunteers.167
The new programme of fire prevention almost certainly came too late to make a great difference to the effects of the Blitz. Morrison faced hostility from the trade unions over issues of compensation and conditions for the new fire-watching groups. The relation between the fire services and the new organization was also not clearly defined and the fires that engulfed London, Plymouth, Hull and Merseyside in the spring of 1941 showed the limits of reform. On 8 May the War Cabinet approved the creation of a National Fire Service and Morrison railroaded the agreement into law two weeks later. The NFS became operational in August 1941, organized in 11 regional divisions and a separate service for Scotland. Across the country there were a total of 143 local fire forces. The fire-watchers became the Fire Guard, with white metal helmets and better equipment, under the direction of Ellen Wilkinson. The police brigades and all the smaller forces were scrapped. The reform made possible a standard chain of command so that a single officer would be in charge of the fire services after a raid; it also allowed standardization of equipment and operational technique. A National Fire College was set up in a former hotel outside Brighton, and six volumes of a Manual of Firemanship were published.168 By 1943 a comprehensive, well-equipped fire-prevention and firefighting system had been created, although difficulties were still experienced in coping with major conflagrations, as the later Baedeker raids demonstrated. How the new system would have stood up to bombing renewed on the scale of 1940–41 was never tested. The new service had to cope with only 10,000 fires, whereas the firemen in the Blitz had had
to tackle 50,000.169 The improvement in firefighting, like the efforts to cope with shelter, rescue and welfare, was one of the many stable doors locked long after the horses had bolted.
‘THE MENTAL STABILITY OF HULL’: MORALE IN THE BLITZ
In November 1941 the section of the Ministry of Home Security devoted to research on the effects of bombing began a survey under the direction of Solly Zuckerman on the psychological effects of air raids. A team of psychiatrists was sent to Hull to investigate the mental stability of its population in the aftermath of a series of shattering raids in the spring and summer of 1941. The object was to try to isolate factors that might explain how a city could be brought to the point of collapse. Hull was chosen because of the large numbers of trekkers who still left the city every night even though the major raids had stopped. The popular view in Whitehall was that the people of Hull exhibited less moral fibre than other city populations. Zuckerman’s team set out to test as scientifically as possible the extent to which bombing produced psychological collapse.170
There was more to the research than simple academic curiosity. Long before 1939 there had been a widespread popular assumption that bombing would be unendurable for an urban population and that the panic induced by air attack might provoke some form of social breakdown. ‘Morale’ was the term popularly used, a military concept more easily defined in the context of the battlefield than it was in the wider world of civilian society. It was not easy to measure or to identify, and Zuckerman’s team spent the first weeks trying to decide what questions to ask in order to determine the degree of abnormality or normality in the large sample of 900 men and women they initially selected. The selection was not entirely random, since many were trekkers, but they were chosen from a variety of occupations, from different areas of the city and from both sexes. The doctors prepared to look for hysteria, anxiety or depression as more or less extreme symptoms of neurosis; they also had a mixed category of anxiety and depression which they thought reflected a common psychological mix among those faced with death, dispossession and homelessness. They found almost no evidence of hysteria, the most serious medical condition, and therefore discounted it. Among the raid victims the psychiatrists found that 4.2 per cent of the men remained seriously neurotic six months after the attacks, while among women in heavily bombed areas the figure was 13.7 per cent. Moderate or slight neurosis persisted in 20 per cent of men and 53 per cent of women, but from the 706 subjects eventually assessed, 374 appeared on examination to have suffered no symptoms at all.171
The psychiatrists took this evidence to mean that the fears about the mental state of Hull’s population had been exaggerated and that psychiatric help for bomb victims was superfluous, capable of doing ‘more harm than good’. They recommended reliance on common sense and plenty of food: ‘the stability in mental health of the population depends much more on their nutritional state’.172 Zuckerman and his colleague, the physicist J. D. Bernal, completed their report for the government based on these findings. They concluded that there was no evidence of bad morale in Hull, neither panic nor excessive neurosis. ‘Hull to-day looks like a badly blitzed town,’ concluded their report, ‘but a visitor is not impressed by any peculiarities of the population.’173 Zuckerman was interested in statistical observation, which is why the figures on neurosis in Hull seemed so compelling. Elsewhere judgements about morale had been made impressionistically, although they generally confirmed the Hull findings, even in places such as Coventry where the initial fear had been of mass hysteria.174 The wider psychological press had also produced regular articles in 1940 and 1941 confirming that admissions for psychiatric treatment had in many cases gone down during the Blitz, while those with marked psychosis induced by bombing were already psychiatric cases before the war.175 In the London region hospitals an average of only two psychiatric cases a week were recorded in the first three months of raiding.176
The Hull figures nevertheless masked a much grimmer social and psychological reality for the victims of bombing. Each interviewee had the record of their Blitz experience, their previous mental and physical state and their current condition recorded on case sheets by the psychiatrists. A high proportion displayed symptoms that were anything but normal. Many women revealed that they had become prone to fainting, cried incessantly or vomited at the sound of the siren. Men admitted to depression, insomnia, extreme tension and severe dyspepsia. Case 17, a housewife judged to have ‘fair stability but marked timidity’, confessed that she shook uncontrollably ‘like an electric clock’ throughout the raids and for hours afterwards. Case 20, a housewife of ‘dull, solitary disposition’, wet herself in the shelter, refused to undress at night and dreamt of Germans dropping out of planes. Case 7, a docker, had changed from being cheerful and adaptable, after seeing his brother and sister-in-law killed in his house; he now drank eight pints a night and smoked 30–40 cigarettes a day to calm his nerves. Another docker lost his mother and three nieces in a shelter, dug out his brother and sister-in-law trapped for four days, and witnessed a shelter with 20 people in it blown apart. He told the interviewer that he thought life ‘not worth living’.177
In the worst cases, the psychological survival of the victim was in itself remarkable. Two examples out of many illustrate the dimensions of the crises to which survivors were exposed, often two or three times:
Case 1: Male Worker. Married, 4 children
‘He heard the mine come down and rushed to the floor of his cloakroom with his wife. He felt the explosion hit his stomach, and for 2 to 3 minutes he had considerable difficulty in getting his breath … On recovery he saw the whole house in ruins except for the walls of the room where he was. He heard moaning, and set about digging for his children – this was the worst experience of all; he felt “in a mental frenzy” … His wife sat about dazed. Then he called for the ambulances, and fainted – to wake up later in hospital. Two of the family were found dead …’
Case 37: Mrs C, housewife ‘with a good personality’. Married, 4 children
‘In the May blitz her house was demolished and after being imprisoned for ¾ of an hour she was released by the wardens. She had been in this house only a couple of hours, having moved from a house which was demolished the night before. She had already been bombed out of a third house in March. Her sister, with her 5 children, were killed in a raid … She dreamt of raids and used to lie awake imagining horrors. She could not forget the death of her sister’s children and used to cry all day. She had headaches and fits of dizziness and was terrified of the siren.’178
These experiences almost certainly produced profound trauma in many of the victims, though the language now used to describe it and the therapies to assist it have all been post-war developments. Few claimed to have gone to a doctor, and the men returned to work within days or weeks. The psychiatrists observed that all their interviewees were willing, even eager to talk. Their somatic experiences were evidently not unique to Hull and could be traced in every bombing raid across Europe. But they constituted a private crisis, veiled by the official bland assertions that Hull was, after all, ‘mentally stable’.
This kind of hidden damage was not what interested the authorities. The ministries and armed forces worried about defeatism, fifth-columns, political radicalism, pacifism and rumours. The population was monitored by numerous agencies to seek out evidence of collective disaffection or social breakdown – the Ministry of Information Home Intelligence department, the Ministry of Home Security, the intelligence services of the three armed forces, the Ministry of Food Research Department and MI5, the internal security police. In this process the reaction to the bombing formed only one element among many potential sources of discontent and disillusionment. Even at the height of the bombing in March 1941, opinion polls found that only 8 per cent of respondents thought air raids the most important war problem; an April poll found that 62 per cent claimed to feel no more anxious about air raids than they had before the bombing started.179 The Home Intelligence reports of the Mini
stry of Information also reveal a patchwork of reactions during the months of the Blitz in which the strength of concern over bombing fluctuated sharply. There was nevertheless an assumption that bombing must affect ‘morale’ more than other problems because of its violent interruption of daily life and the deliberate targeting of working-class areas, which the largely professional and educated classes who monitored them thought likely to display less robust willpower under attack.
The Ministry of Information began to think seriously about how to influence popular outlook on air raids as early as May 1940 after a Home Morale Emergency Committee gave its first report. The committee recommended using actors to keep people cheerful in the shelters and the distribution of song sheets, the start of a long catalogue of misplaced schemes. In June it identified ‘the lonely woman’ as the weakest link in the chain of public courage and suggested concerted efforts to encourage a sense of community and neighbourliness to help them. The committee also worried that class antagonism might be exacerbated by air raids, and suggested replacing the cultured voice of the BBC with more local dialects and giving radio air-time to left-wing speakers.180 In July the Treasury granted £100,000 for schemes to sustain morale. The Ministry used some of the money to sponsor public meetings and lectures all over the country to give the public a stronger sense of what they were fighting for and what role they could now play in total war. Lectures on ‘The Civilian’s Part in Defence’ or ‘The Home Front’ were interspersed with ‘What German Occupation Means’ and ‘The Nazi Record’. By the end of July 1940 well over 5,000 meetings had been held, attended by more than half a million people. The same month Kenneth Clark, the art historian seconded to the Ministry, launched an ‘anti-rumour’ and ‘anti-gossip’ campaign under the slogan ‘The Silent Column’, which proved an immediate disaster among a public hostile to what one of them called ‘the Gestapo over here’.181
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 24