The lesson we wish to teach is this. Let the German women get out of their homes and rush into their shelters and let their homes be razed to the ground … Let this lesson be taught to German women all over Germany so that not a single home stands. Then they will understand what their brutal work has done here.212
Diaries and memoirs also illustrate moments of intense hatred. ‘The wickedness of this enemy is beyond words,’ wrote Clara Milburn after the bombing of neighbouring Coventry; Edward Stebbing was told by an old soldier who had spent his leave in London in October 1940 that even after the war if he met a German, ‘he would want to murder him’. The Ministry of Information received a letter after the bombing of Southampton from an eyewitness claiming that morale would be raised only by the knowledge that Britain was going to hit back ‘to give the Boche some of his own medicine and to hell with the Boche women and children’. The Ministry declined to reply on the ground that the author seemed too panic-stricken for reasonable argument.213
More surprising is the widespread evidence that simple vengeance against the Germans was disapproved of by much of the British public. Policy at the Ministry of Information, on Churchill’s instructions, was to play down the idea of reprisals. Home Intelligence reports showed that popular interest in reprisal was declining by the late autumn. Two RAF training stations organized debates on the motion ‘Should we bomb Berlin?’, but both registered strong majorities against.214 Opinion polls taken over the course of the Blitz showed that in the bombed areas in particular there was no overwhelming desire for retaliation. In October 1940 the British Institute of Public Opinion (Gallup Polls) asked whether respondents would approve or disapprove of the RAF bombing of civilians and found the population exactly divided, 46 per cent for and 46 per cent against. The same question was asked again in April 1941, after six further months of bombing, and this time found 55 per cent in favour and 38 per cent against. But when the responses were divided by geographical area they revealed that in London more people were opposed to bombing enemy civilians than favoured it (47 per cent to 45 per cent), while the areas where there had been no bombing registered the highest proportion in favour and the lowest against (55 per cent to 36 per cent).215 During the last months of 1940 a campaign began to take shape in London against the RAF night-bombing of Germany which finally resulted in the formation, in August 1941, of the Committee for the Abolition of Night-Bombing whose most prominent members were the economist Stanley Jevons, the writer Vera Brittain and the Quaker Corder Catchpool. It was supported not only by pacifist organizations, some of which ran a public campaign of propaganda against reprisal raids, but by non-pacifist public figures who risked popular hostility to maintain their objection to the idea that British interests could be served by bombing Germans indiscriminately.216 In April 1941 the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, followed shortly afterwards by the playwright George Bernard Shaw and the classical scholar Gilbert Murray, published letters in The Times deploring night-bombing. The protests made no difference to RAF policy, but they did provoke debate about the legitimacy and purpose of bombing Germany back and showed that bombing did not necessarily encourage a thirst for vengeance.
None of these reactions brought British society remotely to the edge of crisis during the year of heavy bombing. Although much has been written about the dark side of the Blitz, the narrative suggests that moments of social breakdown or acute protest were rare, confined to particular areas and brief in extent. The authorities could not be certain of this in advance, so that there evolved a continuous process of monitoring, adjustment, negotiation and reform to cope with bombing disasters and their immediate consequences. ‘Morale’ in this sense was not something static, ‘susceptible of quantitative measurement’, as the Air Ministry put it, but reflected a variety of public opinions and emotional states, some of them positive, some negative.217 How much of this reflected the impact of the air war is open to question. It is evident that many other issues on the home front and the fighting front preoccupied the wider public as well. A Mass Observation survey in August 1940 found that three-quarters of respondents could not name a British air marshal; included on the list of responses was Hermann Göring. A second MO report on the attitude of demolition labourers showed that they discussed the bombing hardly at all, but spent most of the time bantering about sex, race and loot, with an occasional comment on the war overseas.218 Diaries and letters from the Blitz contain very full entries on the bombing at the start of the offensive, but both the regularity and the level of detail decline markedly after the first month. The war in Africa against Italy features widely; the debacle at Dakar, when a combined British/Free French force was repulsed by the Vichy garrison, was a humiliation that lingered on in the public mind; the Battle of the Atlantic and food supplies took top place in polls about war problems taken in November 1940 and March 1941, 20 per cent in the first case, 44 per cent in the second. Night-bombing was chosen by 12 per cent in November, but only 8 per cent four months later.219
The maintenance of social and psychological stability in the bombed areas was not, of course, automatic. Two factors were of critical importance in explaining how British society coped with the Blitz. The role of the state and local authorities in managing the consequences of bomb attack was a major test of Britain’s capacity to survive its effects. The civil defence and emergency services played as full a part as the resources and planning would allow, and the performance of all services improved steadily over the period of the Blitz. The formal structures for coping with bombing came to be reinforced by a substantial fraction of the population that endorsed the public discourse on ‘front-line civilians’ and wanted to play a part, however limited, in a democratic war effort. In doing so they acted both as agents of authority but also as informal community monitors, reinforcing consensus and broadening the field of participation. One example may illustrate this process. In the Northumberland town of North Shields the residents of just two streets established a formal committee to run their fire-fighting party, with regular meetings and a minute book. The committee was elected by 85 per cent of the householders, who had to pay 5 shillings (25 pence) each to defray the expenses of ladders, stirrup pumps and water drums. Four fire parties, composed of a designated leader and five men, were allocated in shifts to watch for six hours every night. Women were allocated to day duty in parties led by two men. The few households that refused to participate received house visits to encourage them to join in. The rotas were observed until 1944 without a single incendiary threat.220 This represented an exceptional level of commitment on the part of this and hundreds of other small communities, which can perhaps best be explained in terms of a strong impulse towards democratic identification with the war effort. The bombing threat was uniquely able to mobilize these forms of popular engagement and to limit the space for non-compliance.
The authorities had to combine popular mobilization with a capacity to deliver what the population needed after bomb attack. The bombed populations became dependent on public authorities as the only potential source of aid in ways quite different from peacetime. Official analyses of the Blitz conducted later in 1941 suggested that the critical thing was to provide concrete, material assistance and to be able to do so rapidly after a raid. This meant the ability to provide solid information at once about where to go to find assistance, food and shelter. The initial problems in Southampton and Coventry were caused by a failure of communication. In Coventry loudspeaker vans were eventually brought in inviting the public to come and ask questions, which officials noted down: ‘where they could get a meal’; ‘where they could get coal’; ‘how they could be evacuated’; ‘how soon would the “pictures” be resumed?’; and many more questions on housing repair and food.221 Instructions to Regional Commissioners after the crisis in Southampton emphasized how important it was that the situation ‘should be taken in hand at once. Speed in re-establishing effective machinery of town management is the essence.’222 In all cases it was observed that the morale
of the population depended more ‘upon material factors acutely involving their lives, than upon the ebb and flow of the events of the war’.223 The Regional Commissioners instructed local authorities to focus everything on ‘energetic action’ immediately after a raid to cope with welfare, food supply, communications, repair and salvage. Of all these factors food (particularly hot meals) and a secure place to sleep were the most important. The Air Ministry report on the Blitz concluded that civilians could stand up to continuous night raids if they could be sure ‘that there is a safe refuge somewhere for themselves and their families’.224 The record in the bombed areas was uneven, and took time to develop, but the capacity to feed, shelter and rehouse the bombed communities was sufficient to prevent social breakdown and to encourage reliance on the state even in the worst-affected inner-city areas.
The second factor was the capacity of ordinary people to find ways of ‘normalizing’ daily life under bombing by restoring some sense of order or devising psychological mechanisms for coping. The authorities also placed a premium on restoring ‘the wheels of Civic Government and normal life’ as quickly as possible.225 Life after bombing was for a fraction of the population far from normal, but there are numerous eyewitness accounts which suggest that establishing new routines or restoring some or all of pre-bombing habits was an essential aid to coping with disaster. ‘The better we wrest order out of potential chaos,’ wrote Vera Brittain in 1940, ‘the more effectively we counter not merely the attacking Nazis but war itself.’226 Observers were sometimes surprised to find life continuing much as usual despite the bombs. Even Clara Milburn, so shocked by the major raid on Coventry, drove into the city a few weeks later to buy a new car battery and found the car dealer open and working with broken doors and cracked walls.227 In the shelters and Rest Centres displaced families, where they could, turned a temporary billet into a space they could regard as home. A survey in south-east London in 1941 found that shelterers would pass four or five available shelters in a raid in order to get to the one they had first started to shelter in. Poorly constructed shelters were sometimes boarded up for repair, but users would tear the boarding down and re-enter a familiar space rather than change to a more comfortable shelter. Shelters could be decorated with paint provided by the council, while curtains, lampshades and pictures were common. ‘These small points,’ ran the report, ‘add up to definite aid against fear and help to keep the atmosphere normal.’228 This also explains the strong desire expressed by the temporarily homeless to return to a damaged house rather than have to live somewhere unfamiliar.
Coping mechanisms took many forms: increased interest in horoscopes and prediction; a return to religious belief (fostered by the exceptional practical assistance supplied by many priests in bombed areas); a show of fatalistic bravado. Accounts confirm that Londoners really did say that they were safe from everything except the bomb with their name on it. In areas with prolonged bombing, individuals could become insensitive to the sufferings of others as a way of protecting their own psychological stability. One London woman working for ARP wrote that ‘We have adjusted our minds to the fact that tragedies do happen … Thank God for the adaptability of the human mind.’229 This view of death was encouraged by the authorities, who wanted to limit the emotional space available to express grief by carefully controlling the mass burials made necessary by the number and condition of the corpses. Popular hostility to the idea of burial in a common grave, with its stigma of pauperism, was allayed to some extent by militarizing the burial ceremonies.230 Public expressions of grief or strain were common enough during a raid itself, but shelter marshals had instructions to try to isolate or remove hysterical or emotionally disturbed shelterers, not all of whom, as had been assumed, were women. The habits of British emotional reserve and sangfroid were adopted as cultural archetypes which ordinary people should, as far as they were able, try to approximate. Virginia Cowles found her caretaker and his wife eating supper calmly in their kitchen with the noise of bombs falling in the distance and the windows rattling. ‘I asked them if they weren’t afraid and Mrs K. said: “Oh, no. If we were, what good would it do us?” ’ Cowles decided that if they could take it, she could too, and went to bed ‘hoping that if death came it would be instantaneous’.231 Though reality might often be very different, the repetition of images of imperturbability helped to reinforce and validate imperturbable behaviour.
After the Blitz declined in intensity in June 1941, a number of surveys were conducted to try to understand why British society had not broken down under the bombs. This was a matter of judgement, and for the historian too any attempt to suggest what might have led to social breakdown even in one city is an exercise in speculation. In the end, despite a level of casualty higher than it might have been with better shelters and better shelter discipline, the Blitz resulted in the deaths of only 0.1 per cent of the population and serious injury to a further 0.15 per cent. Most of the damaged houses were fit enough for habitation after a few weeks or months. Food supplies were effectively maintained and food stocks increased. Air Intelligence calculated that if the German Air Force had more than doubled its effort it might have pushed the population ‘to breaking point’, but there was no supporting evidence to underpin the claim. The surveys carried out by government scientists concluded that a city like Birmingham might require four times the weight of bombs to overwhelm the civil defences; their final judgement in April 1942 suggested that to achieve real results the offensive should have been at least five times greater in scale. Even here no attempt was made to define properly what it meant to ‘knock out’ a city or to demoralize a population to the point of social collapse.232
TAKING IT AGAIN: BOMBING 1941–5
In December 1940 Sir George Gater, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Home Security, chaired a committee meeting on ‘intensive air attacks’ which concluded unanimously that the type of attack experienced in the Blitz ‘was very much what had been originally anticipated’.233 This was far from the truth. The authorities had anticipated daytime raids and had made almost no provision for dormitory shelters; raids were expected to be of brief duration rather than lasting for six to eight hours; the high proportion of incendiaries had not been prepared for; a great deal of redundant effort had gone into anticipating gas attack with a variety of toxic elements. Over the course of the four wartime years following the Blitz most of these deficiencies were rectified. Civil defence was much better placed to cope with a heavy bombing offensive in 1944 than it had been in 1940.
There was no certainty in the summer of 1941 that the temporary pause brought about by the German invasion of the Soviet Union would not end in a matter of months, after which the German Air Force could renew the offensive on Britain with even greater intensity. ‘We must prepare for worse attacks than we have yet known,’ announced a report from the Ministry of Home Security in August 1941, and the same month a poll found that three-quarters of respondents expected renewed heavy raiding, though the sudden period of relief was welcome enough. Mass Observation found that within weeks Londoners seemed to forget the daily routine of siren and shelter and luxuriate in ‘momentary peace’.234 The sudden cessation of heavy raiding was reflected in a dramatic fall in monthly casualty rates, which was sustained into 1942 and 1943 (Table 3.1). The main weight of the limited German attacks was borne by the coastal towns of the south and east. Sunderland on the east coast had been little bombed during the Blitz, but suffered 8 small raids in 1942 and 1943 which killed 191 people and demolished over 500 houses.235
Yet in the absence of any firm evidence that the bombing offensive would not be renewed at some point in the future, civil defence and emergency services were continually upgraded and professionalized and shelter and welfare amenities expanded. By the autumn of 1941 there were approximately a quarter of a million hospital beds immediately available for bomb casualties and 1,000 decontamination centres for gas cleansing either built or under construction.236 Civil defence personnel and the emergency service
s were all finally issued with helmets, uniforms and standard equipment to make them into an identifiable service. The peak strength of the civil defence forces was reached in December 1943 at 1.86 million. Shortages of male personnel as a result of military conscription forced civil defence to rationalize its use of manpower and to recruit more women, whose service was made compulsory in April 1942. By 1943 there were fewer full-time civil defence workers, but 33,000 more part-timers, most of them female.237 In London there was an impressive expansion of facilities: in 1941 there had been 540 ambulances, in late 1942 there were 1,344; instead of 180 medical centres, there were 451; the number of rescue squads almost trebled, from 350 to 1,367.238 Only in 1944 did numbers begin to decline. Despite the low level of enemy activity, Britain retained almost 2 million active civil defence workers for most of the war.
Table 3.1: Monthly Casualtics from Bombing, August 1940–December 1941
M = men; F = women; C = children; U = unidentified
Source:TNA, HO 191/11, MHS, ‘Statement of Civilian Casualties in the United Kingdom from the Outbreak of War to 31 May 1945’, 31 July 1945.
A great effort was made to improve shelter and welfare provision to avoid the mistakes of 1940–41, but the demands of the war economy meant that shelter repair and improvement remained a low priority. Fortunately the decline in raiding turned out to make the programme less urgent. In London, shelter was available for 5.5 million people by the end of 1941. Public shelters accounted for 1 million places, but in December 1941 they housed just 47,000 people, 0.8 per cent of London’s population.239 Surface and trench shelters were overhauled but became no more popular than before; bunks were slowly distributed to local authorities as steel supplies became available. Reconstruction and rehabilitation work was carried out alongside shelter improvement. In the spring of 1942 in Hull there were over 2,000 building workers engaged in completing the repair of houses damaged in the major raids of 1941; at the same time 2,000 shelters were given either steel reinforcement or an extra ‘skin’ of bricks and reinforced concrete.240
The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 Page 26