Nevertheless a rumour department continued to operate during the Blitz, trying to counteract the more bizarre stories and exaggerated death tolls circulated by word of mouth. The official position on air-raid damage was to give away as little as possible and to release no figures on deaths or material losses. Among all the issues bombing raised with the wider public, this was one that provoked strong feelings. The Ministry of Information finally agreed to release limited raid details to their Regional Information Officers for wider publication, but Morrison stopped it. After the Coventry raid in November 1940 – which fuelled exaggerated reports of thousands dead, and shelters sealed up with the bodies still inside – the Ministry pressed again for a more flexible policy. A compromise was finally reached by the end of December which allowed discretionary release of casualty figures in a bombed locality if it was felt this would reduce damage to morale. Monthly figures of the dead were to be posted in town halls when required, but it was agreed that the figures for Coventry could be released as a special case.182 But when Duff Cooper pressed for real post-raid information to counter the popular view that the government was ‘hiding the truth from them’, Churchill sent a firm rebuttal: ‘I am not aware of any “depressing effect” produced upon the public morale, and as a matter of fact I thought they were settling down very well to the job.’183
Churchill epitomized the slogan chosen to buoy up popular sentiment during the Blitz that ‘We [sometimes London, sometimes Britain] can take it.’ This seemed a clever choice of slogan because it combined defiance with a sense of collective effort and left little space for those who thought differently (though it also provoked resentment from those who did). Much of the popular writing by journalists and essayists viewing British urban society under bombing reinforced the propaganda. ‘There was no break in the dam here as there was in France,’ wrote Virginia Cowles in a book published in June 1941. ‘Even the weakest link in the chain was reliable. From the highest to the humblest, each person played his part.’184 Vera Brittain, while deploring the war that made such sacrifices necessary, nevertheless portrayed in England’s Hour, written in London in 1940 in between air raids, a heroic British morale: ‘Never, I suppose, has the sum total of civilian courage in this country proved so great as it is to-day … Day after day, men and women working in offices, in factories, or in their homes, fight their human fears with a brave show of cheerful indifference.’185
The Ministry of Information found that, contrary to its early predictions, ‘gloomy apprehension’ was more marked among the middle classes and least evident among workers. Police fears that the ‘poorer classes’ would stand up less well to raids was quickly exposed as an illusion. Early reports from local Metropolitan Police stations in London confirmed that the poorer areas displayed no signs of panic or alarm. ‘Public morale in these areas, which are poor class,’ ran a report from Tooting, in south London, ‘was splendid.’ Middle-class shelterers, on the other hand, were easily distinguished by their sombre aloofness from the shelter community.186 It was also found once bombing had started that communities which had not been bombed were much more prone to ‘self-pity and exaggeration’ than those on the receiving end. At the height of the London bombing, morale was judged to be generally good; an opinion poll conducted in November 1940 found 80 per cent confident that Britain would win.187 Local reports after raids also suggested that after the initial shock and disorientation, panic subsided. ‘The spirit of the people,’ according to guidance notes issued to local army commands in November 1940, ‘though temporarily shocked, is never lost, perhaps it slacks a little.’ A Ministry of Home Security report in January on lessons learned from ‘intensive air attacks’ concluded that civil defence had ‘stood up well to a severe test’.188
The construction of the image of stoical endurance was designed to augment the public pressure to participate in civil defence work, good neighbour associations, women’s voluntary organizations, and fire-watching. The government commissioned a documentary on the Blitz with the title London Can Take It! Produced by Humphrey Jennings and Harry Watt, with an American journalist as scriptwriter and voice-over, the film was aimed at the American market, where it was distributed by Warner Brothers to 15,000 American cinemas.189 The 10-minute documentary was built around the contrast between the smoke and noise of a night-time raid on the capital and the population’s calm return to work the following morning; the script described the bombed communities as ‘the greatest civilian army in the world’. When it was released in Britain in October 1940, the film was prudently retitled Britain Can Take It! and the commentary altered to show that in each British city resistance was ‘every bit as heroic’ as in London. It proved popular with cinema audiences (though by the height of the Blitz in 1940, cinema audiences in London had fallen to 46 per cent of the pre-raid level).190 In late 1942 the image of a courageous civilian army defying the German Air Force was solidified in the publication of Front Line, the official account of the population under fire in 1940–41. Like the film, Front Line emphasized the contribution of ordinary people, ‘the achievement of the many’ in the face of brute force. By January 1943, 1.3 million copies had been sold.191 The image of British defiance and endurance was easily borrowed by the public trying to find a cognitive shape and a shared language for expressing their ordeal. The American journalist Virginia Cowles asked two young girls carrying bedding for the night to an East End shelter whether they were still in danger: ‘Every bloody night! Cor, don’t you know we’re the front line?’192
The Ministry of Information nevertheless understood that there were limits to the campaign. ‘Taking it’ was a rallying-cry as much as a description of reality and it invited hostility from those who experienced bombing first hand. In February 1941, following heavy raids on the Welsh port of Swansea, a BBC reporter broadcast a cheerful eyewitness account of what he saw:
But there are the usual smiles; even those who have lost friends or relatives are not really depressed … I saw some elderly men and women running through the streets clutching small cases and parcels in their hands … Many of them raised their hand and gave us a cheery greeting … The attitude of everyone here is just grand.
The broadcast was deplored by the Swansea authorities and the population, and the Ministry reminded the BBC to clear broadcasts with their officials beforehand to avoid local protests. But a month later, in March, another broadcast insisted that an air raid on Cardiff had had only moderate effects. A local woman wrote to Churchill to complain that the city had been ‘a positive inferno’ and asked him to broadcast on the evening news to explain how he was going to stop the city from being bombed again.193 When Churchill did broadcast to the nation in April that morale was firmest in the most heavily bombed cities, Edward Stebbing, a young conscript convalescing in a Scottish hospital, heard another patient call out ‘You ------ liar!’ A few weeks before, Stebbing had listened to the grumbles of his unit forced to do fire-watching duty. ‘If only people knew,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘of the discontent that seethes behind the façade of unity!’194 The Ministry was also assailed by critics of a different sort who wanted the slogan to be ‘We can give it’, to show that Britain’s war effort was not simply about absorbing punishment. In early October 1940 local informers noted that reprisals against German cities were being widely discussed. By December reports suggested abandoning the slogan ‘Britain can take it!’ because the public ‘is more concerned about “giving it” ’. Propaganda on being ‘front-line minded’ was abandoned and in April 1941 the Home Morale Policy Committee recommended dropping ‘We can take it!’ and substituting something more constructive.195
What has been called ‘the myth of the Blitz’, shaped by the public discourse on civilian endurance and pluck, was not entirely myth, though historians have been sensibly critical of some of its central claims.196 There is no dispute that hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens did behave with a remarkable degree of courage, good sense and self-sacrifice in situations they could never have
imagined having to endure. James Doherty, a warden in Belfast during the Blitz, remarked in his memoir that ‘War has an impact on human character. It makes heroes out of quiet fellows.’197 There was no gender division in the qualities required. Sir Aylmer Firebrace observed incidents of exceptional bravery across the fire service. ‘Neither sex,’ he wrote in 1946, ‘had a monopoly of courage and staying power.’198 The experiences of the Blitz tested civil defence workers to extremes, whatever their social background or the nature of their personality. Barbara Nixon, a young woman volunteer warden in east London, kept a diary in which she confessed her uncertainty about whether she could cope when the bombing started. The first bomb she experienced blew her off her bicycle. She picked herself up and ran to help survivors. The first thing she saw was a baby in the road, burst open from the force of the blast. She wrapped it in a curtain and went on to cover up half a dozen more mutilated bodies in the street. The hope that she could ‘control her nerves’ had been a personal obstacle to overcome, as it was for a great many people. She reflected that civil defence workers were like soldiers waiting apprehensively for their first taste of enemy fire. After the first few times ‘one forgot oneself entirely in the job on hand’; people worked with a ‘dogged equanimity’.199 The mundane context in which local disasters occurred, in familiar neighbourhoods, among friends or acquaintances, nevertheless differed from the serviceman’s experience. Nixon met RAF crew on leave in her area more frightened of bombing than she was.
The myth nevertheless tells only part of the story of how people reacted to the bombing campaign and how they coped with its consequences. There was no simple linear pattern of social and psychological response – remarkable quiet courage, class solidarity, stolid resilience – but instead a vast patchwork of responses determined by a rich array of situational and dispositional factors. Unsurprisingly, there were profound distinctions in the capacity of individuals to cope with the mental pressures of disaster, as the research in Hull later demonstrated. There were also clear differences of geography, not only between small towns bombed only once or major cities bombed more than fifty times, but between a small self-contained urban area with one city centre, where the shock of destruction was often very great, and a large conurbation more able to absorb the disaster, shelter the homeless and provide alternative amenities. There were evident social differences dictated by contrasts in wealth and opportunity. Better-off or more educated households were able to buy more assistance, drive out of bombed cities, stay with friends in houses large enough to absorb the influx, replace lost or damaged possessions and navigate the complex system of post-raid administration. Workers in most cases lacked those choices, social skills, material advantages and time, and as a result suffered disproportionately from the consequences of bombing. Finally there were differences over time. The reaction of populations bombed repeatedly was observably different from a community hit for the first time. Home Intelligence reports by October 1940 noted a more cheerful outlook in London because raids were less frightening ‘once you have got used to them’. A post-Blitz analysis of morale produced by the Air Ministry put ‘conditioning’ high on the list of factors that helped people cope. A survey showed that between the first London raids on 7 September and the end of the month the number of Londoners claiming to get no sleep fell from 31 to 3 per cent, while two-thirds said they could sleep at least four hours despite the bombing outside.200
These many contrasts make it difficult to construct an aggregate account of popular behaviour and moral outlook during the Blitz that does not distort this diversity. Nevertheless, a number of broader conclusions suggest themselves. Almost all contemporary accounts of bombing show that the immediate reaction among the bombed population (including a number of civil defence and medical personnel) was one of shock, disorientation, fear and anxiety. The experience of being bombed was a physical and psychological challenge of an extreme kind. One woman who lived through the first raids on London (and refused to take shelter) tried to describe the experience in a letter a week later:
we were very frightened … Sunday night was the limit. No sleep was possible, crashes came from all sides and then suddenly the most brutal shattering roar … I cannot describe to you what a curious note of brutality a bomb has … The screaming bomb I can cope with … its noise doesn’t sound to me as appalling as the noise of high explosive.201
There were evidently extremes of fear and panic at the moment of the raid itself, and it would be remarkable if the reaction had been very different among an untrained and poorly protected population, though it was also far from universal. The letter-writer’s three maids were said to turn up each morning from the shelter ‘amazingly courageous and unruffled’. In the Hull survey 349 bombed housewives were asked what they considered the worst aspects of a raid, and despite the long-term traumatic effects from which they suffered, 286 identified the actual moment of bombing as the worst – the whistling noise of the bombs, the roar of aircraft engines overhead and the explosion of landmines. Only 20 picked out fear for the family, and 17 the burning ruins and scenes of devastation.202 Almost all official accounts acknowledged that the initial reaction to a raid was one of ‘despondency’ or ‘depression’ or ‘confusion’, but experience showed that the demoralization and loss of nerve was always temporary, even if the psychological scarring lasted longer. The initial shock was also local, even if the shock-waves rippled out to the surrounding area. The government scientist Patrick Blackett concluded in his analysis of morale in August 1941 that ‘people who are not being bombed do not worry too much about those who are’.203
There were many other reactions, some of which could coexist with fear and despondency, some of which transcended them. There are accounts of bravado, exhilaration, curiosity, anger, detachment that defy any attempt to impose generic categories on the victims of bombing. Harold Nicolson, Duff Cooper’s deputy at the Ministry of Information, wrote the following in his diary after the bombing of his offices in the University of London Senate House building in November 1940: ‘It was all great fun and I enjoyed it. This is not a pose. I was exhilarated. I am odd about that. I have no nerves for this sort of thing.’204 One London warden, whose letters were published while the Blitz was still happening, recalled a mixture of emotions but no fear: ‘For my part, I am beginning to bear all perils with a certain philosophical detachment, a kind of intellectual courage … I climbed to the top of one of the city’s highest buildings and there excitedly awaited the battle.’205 The aftermath of bombing, particularly in smaller cities where bombing was uncommon, brought trails of sightseers, curious to view the damage. Police had to set up roadblocks outside Coventry following the raid on 14–15 November to keep visitors out of the city; at the tiny port of Whitley Bay in Northumberland, bombed sporadically in 1941 and 1942, the incidents attracted visitors in such numbers that rescue work was hampered and police and civil defence workers had to be employed to keep the crowds under control.206
Bombing also generated an instant cultural response. Artists, photographers, writers, poets, and critics embraced bombing and its aftermath despite the horrors. This could be done with official approval. The paintings of John Piper (who arrived in Coventry almost immediately after the bombing to record the damage) or Edward Ardizzone were part of the War Artists programme. Henry Moore’s drawings of the shelterers in the Underground are the best-remembered images of the Blitz (though at the time Londoners were reported to be ‘baffled and insulted’ by his modernist idiom).207 Writers and poets found in the bombed cities a rich source of inspiration, ‘half masonry, half pain’ in the words of the poet Mervyn Peake. A number became civil defence workers – Henry Green, Stephen Spender, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay – and gave literary expression to their experience of what one literary warden called ‘a splendid violence’.208 The poet Louis MacNeice, looking at the aftermath of a raid, could not help himself ‘regarding it as a spectacle’, the colours and textures of smoke, fire and water like ‘the subtlest of Impre
ssionist paintings’.209 The cultural voyeurism was a tribute to the democratic character of the new home-front war because the images were of ordinary people and the descriptions were of the mundane and everyday, even if most of those who experienced the bombing were unlikely to see the pictures or read the novels that so vividly captured their suffering.
Among the many ambivalent reactions to bombing was the popular attitude towards the Germans. Where it might seem self-evident that a bombed population would want to be revenged on a hateful enemy, the effect of the raiding produced a complex response. There was certainly no shortage of anger.210 The general secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen, writing in the Railway Review in November 1940, urged a bombing policy that spared the German people ‘none of the terrors that we have endured … bomb for bomb, blow for blow, by night and day’.211 Lady Hilda Wittenham gave a forthright response to a letter in the press from Lord Queensborough, which had deplored the deaths of German women and babies:
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