The ‘blitz’, which the defenders dated from 7 September, was far harder for Fighter Command to repel than daylight attacks, because the RAF had few night fighters and only primitive Air Interception radar. Churchill incited the feeble anti-aircraft gun defences to fire at will to hearten the population, as indeed they did – but with little impact on the raiders. Between September and mid-November, an average of two hundred Luftwaffe aircraft attacked every night save one. In that period, over 13,000 tons of explosive and incendiary bombs were dropped on London, Bristol, Birmingham, Portsmouth and other major cities, at a cost to the Luftwaffe of just seventy-five aircraft, most of them victims of accidents.
The blitz imposed on city-dwellers mingled fascination, terror, horror and eventually acceptance of a new normality. A London woman wrote of one raid: ‘The bombs came down in a cluster, close together … Bomb explosions have a mesmeric attraction dating possibly from firework displays of one’s childhood, and I watched the first two explode. Unless it lifts an entire building in the air, the burst of an ordinary high-explosive bomb is not in itself a grand spectacle, as a major fire can be; its upward streaks of yellow or red look as crude and banal as a small boy’s painting of them.’ Muriel Green, a Norfolk village-dweller, wrote with notable sensitivity for a girl of nineteen about her thoughts as she heard German aircraft passing overhead, on their path to some British city, the night after the devastating 14 November attack on Coventry: ‘I wonder what the pilots feel. After all somebody loves them even if they are Nazis, and they are risking their lives and fighting for their country the same as our men that go bombing. Poor Coventry people. How bitter and hopeless they must feel today. How long can it go on? How many years must all live in fear of the unknown horrors that so many of us have not yet experienced?’
The bomber assault, which continued until Hitler began to withdraw aircraft for the invasion of Russia in May 1941, inflicted heavy damage on British city centres and ate deep into the spirits of millions of people who endured many nights huddled in shelters with their families and fears. It cost the attackers, flying from airfields in northern France, only 1.5 per cent aircraft losses per sortie. This was a much lower casualty rate than the RAF later suffered bombing Germany, because the British had further to go. Some 43,000 British civilians were killed and a further 139,000 injured. But throughout the winter of 1940–41 the Luftwaffe lacked a credible strategic plan, together with the aiming accuracy and bombloads necessary to inflict decisive damage on British industry. The young scientific intelligence officer R.V. Jones played a critical role, by identifying the Germans’ radio navigational beams and showing the way to jam them. Production was disrupted by alerts, and some important plants were damaged; tens of thousands of homes were destroyed, along with ancient buildings, churches and other landmarks. But, to a remarkable degree, the population of Britain learned to get on with its business amid air bombardment. ‘Human casualties were quieter than I had expected,’ wrote Barbara Nixon, an actress turned Finsbury air-raid warden.
Only twice did I hear really terrifying screaming, apart from hysteria; one night a [railway] signalman had his legs blown off and while he was still conscious his box burst into flames; it was utterly impossible for anyone to reach him and it seemed an age before his ghastly, paralysing screams subsided. Usually, however, casualties, even those who were badly hurt or trapped, were too stunned to make much noise. Animals, on the other hand, made a dreadful clamour. One of the most unnerving nights of the first three months was when a cattle market was hit, and the beasts bellowed and shrieked for three hours; a locomotive had been overturned at the same time and its steam whistle released. The high-pitched monotonous tone, coupled with the distant roaring of the bullocks, was maddening.
In an age when much local transport was still horse-drawn, some city stables borrowed from country custom and acquired a goat, which horses would follow in an emergency. One night when the premises of a big City of London firm of carters were set ablaze by bombs, two hundred of its horses were led to safety. Yet while Britain’s ‘blitz spirit’ was real enough, so too were the misery and squalor that bombardment imposed. Bernard Kops, a small boy who later became a playwright and novelist, wrote: ‘Some people … recall a poetic dream about the Blitz. They talk about those days as if they were a time of a true communal spirit. Not to me. It was the beginning of an era of utter terror, of fear and horror. I stopped being a child and came face to face with the new reality of the world … Here we were back on the trot, wandering again, involved in a new exodus – the Jews of the East End, who had left their homes, and gone into the exile of the underground.’
A strand of traditional British silliness helped the afflicted: a London vicar once asked a fellow occupant of his basement shelter whether she prayed when she heard a bomb falling. ‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘I pray, Oh God! Don’t let it fall here.’ The vicar said, ‘But it’s a bit rough on other people, if your prayer is granted and the thing drops, not on you, but on them.’ The woman replied, ‘I can’t help that. They must say their prayers and push it off further.’ Air-raid shelters in old buildings swarmed with lice and bugs. In the big subterranean shelters of the inner cities, there was ugliness generated by drunken men and women, bitter quarrels and fights, filth inescapable where there were no lavatories.
Most people agreed that the struggle bore hardest upon the elderly and the very young, alike uncomprehending. Barbara Nixon again: ‘Neither had any idea what it was all about; they had never heard of Poland … and Fascism was, at most, a matter of that wicked beast Hitler who was trying to blow us up, or murder us all in our beds.’ Ernie Pyle, the great American correspondent, wrote from London in January 1941: ‘It was the old people who seemed so tragic. Think of yourself at seventy or eighty, full of pain and of the dim memories of a lifetime that has probably all been bleak. And then think of yourself now, travelling at dusk every night to a subway station, wrapping your ragged overcoat about your old shoulders and sitting on a wooden bench with your back against a curved street wall. Sitting there all night, in nodding and fitful sleep. Think of that as your destiny – every night, every night from now on.’
Seventy-one-year-old Londoner Herbert Brush described how a woman friend had been to her doctor ‘as evidently her nerves have gone wrong with the strain of driving a car under war conditions. On her way to Cambridge she came under machine-gun fire from the air and had to hide in a hedge. Then at Norwich there were several bombs dropped in the vicinity during the night. The doctor says she has shell-shock and has made her up a strong tonic and recommended complete rest for a fortnight.’ In a narrow sense, this woman’s response to relatively slight peril was unimpressive; but human beings measure risk and privation within the compass of their personal knowledge. It was meaningless to assert to an English suburban housewife that Poles, Jews, French refugees, and later soldiers on the Eastern Front suffered much worse things than herself. She knew only that what was happening to her was dreadful in comparison with all her previous experience of life. Only a few exulted in it, like thirty-year-old gardener, pacifist and conscientious objector George Springett. In the first weeks of war, he had regularly dosed himself with Sanatogen nerve tonic, but now he no longer felt the need for it: ‘I’ve had really first-class health since the blitz started!’
Among the heroes of the campaign were the men who learned by trial and error to deal with unexploded bombs, of which there were soon a plethora in Britain’s cities. One of the more remarkable was ‘Jack’ Howard, Earl of Suffolk. Early in the war, this maverick boffin, thirty-four in 1940, secured himself a roving commission in the Scientific Directorate of the Ministry of Supply. In that role, one of his more notable feats was to evacuate from Bordeaux after the French surrender £3 million-worth of industrial diamonds retrieved from Amsterdam, a group of France’s most brilliant scientists, and the country’s entire stock of Norwegian heavy water, indispensable for making an atomic bomb. In the autumn of 1940, this self-consciously eccentric figu
re chose to appoint himself to bomb disposal.
Suffolk formed his own squad, which included his pretty secretary Beryl Morden, and outfitted a van from his own resources. Thereafter, dressed in a stetson hat and flying boots or occasionally a pilot’s helmet, and invariably affecting a nine-inch cigarette holder, he addressed himself to defusing bombs, and especially to exploring German delayed-action devices, which were fitted with increasingly sophisticated anti-tampering devices. His courage and imagination were undisputed, but some BD men deplored his casual indiscipline. On 12 May 1941, at London’s ‘bomb graveyard’ in Erith Marshes, the earl was addressing a ticking Type 17 delay fuse when the bomb exploded, taking with it ‘Wild Jack’ Howard and thirteen other personnel rashly clustered around, including the beautiful Beryl Morden. His death was lamented, but it was widely held that his insouciance had caused the gratuitous loss of his companions. UXB work penalised amateurs.
A different sort of embarrassment was caused by another UXB man, Bob Davies, a pre-war drifter from Cornwall. He had acquired some technical experience during travels around the world, which he parleyed into an emergency commission in the Royal Engineers. Early one morning in September 1940, Davies commanded a squad sent to address a thousand-kilogram bomb which had buried itself deep in the road in front of St Paul’s Cathedral during a raid in the night. The engineers quickly found themselves in difficulties when overcome by gas from a fractured main, which caused them to be briefly hospitalised. Resuming work, they dug all night, until a spark ignited gas from another main, burning three men.
The press got hold of the story – and the threat to the cathedral. The Daily Mail used the opportunity to applaud the courage of the UXB squads: ‘These most gallant – and most matter of fact – men of the RE are many a time running a race with death.’ Deeper and deeper Davies’s men dug, until almost eighty hours after it fell, they reached the bomb, twenty-eight feet into the London clay. A heavy cable was attached, with which a lorry sought to extract the huge menace. This snapped. Only when two lorries took the strain on a second cable did the bomb slowly rise to the surface. It was lashed to a cradle and driven through the streets of London to Hackney Marshes, where it was detonated. The explosion blew a crater a hundred feet wide.
A flood of publicity followed about Davies and his team, who became famous. A headline asserted: ‘A Story that Must Win a Man a VC’. Davies and the sapper who found the bomb and saved St Paul’s were indeed awarded the newly created George Cross, for civil acts of heroism. Only in May 1942 did an unhappy sequel take place: Davies was court-martialled on almost thirty charges involving large-scale and systematic theft throughout his time in charge of his BD squad; he had also exploited his role to extract cash payments from some of those whose premises he saved from bombs, as well as passing dud cheques. More embarrassments followed: it emerged that the St Paul’s bomb did not, as claimed by the media, contain a delay fuse, so it was much less dangerous than had been alleged; and Davies did not himself drive it out to Hackney. The officer served two years’ imprisonment, being released in 1944. The perils of UXB work were indisputable, and the Cornishman undoubtedly did brave and useful work. But a lesson of his story was that scoundrels as well as heroes played their parts in the blitz, and some people were a tangle of both.
Hitler’s air assault on Britain ranks second only to the invasion of Russia among his great blunders of the war. After June 1940 many of Churchill’s people, especially in high places, recognised their country’s inability to challenge Nazi mastery of the Continent. If they had merely been left to contemplate British impotence, political agitation for a negotiation with Germany might well have been renewed, and gained support from the old appeasers still holding high government office. The unfulfilled threat of air attack, on an annihilatory scale widely anticipated and feared in 1939, could have influenced British policy more strongly than the reality of an inconclusive one.
The prime principle of employing force in pursuit of national objectives is to ensure that it is effective. The Germans failed to achieve this against Britain in 1940–41, a first earnest of one of the great truths of the conflict: while the Wehrmacht often fought its battles brilliantly, the Nazis made war with startling ineptitude. The Luftwaffe, instead of terrorising Churchill’s people into bowing to Hitler’s will, merely roused them to acquiesce in defiance.
Posterity sees the period between July 1940 and the spring of 1941 overwhelmingly in terms of Britain’s air battle against the Luftwaffe, yet that engaged only a small proportion of Germany’s military resources. For the remainder of Hitler’s warriors, and almost the entire army, this became a curious time of idleness comparable with the earlier Phoney War. To be sure, there were conquered nations to be secured, fruits of victory to enjoy – above all those from France. In Berlin, ‘The first effects of the war were not the traditional ones of decay and scarcity,’ wrote American correspondent Howard Smith, ‘but a sudden leap upwards in visible prosperity. Berlin charwomen and housemaids, whose legs had never been caressed by silk, began wearing stockings from the boulevard Haussmann as an everyday thing – “from my Hans at the front”. Little street-corner taverns began displaying rows of Armagnac, Martell and Courvoisier.’
German war industry, still performing relatively sluggishly, needed time to produce tanks, planes and ammunition to replace those expended in the Continental campaigns. The army spent the winter conducting a vast expansion programme – between May 1940 and June 1941 it grew from 5.7 million to 7.3 million men, from 143 divisions to 180. Beyond brandy and stockings, there was important industrial booty to be garnered from the conquered territories, especially railway wagons. Nazi occupation precipitated a drastic decline in economic activity which persisted across most of Europe until the liberation, though French armaments factories made a useful contribution to the German war effort.
Hitler spent much less time than the British supposed contemplating the Luftwaffe’s operations against them. He never visited the airfields on the Channel coast. Instead, for most of the autumn and winter he was wrestling with his fundamental strategic dilemma: whether to consolidate Germany’s western victories and invade Britain in 1941, or instead to follow his strongest inclinations and turn east. On 31 July 1940, long before the Luftwaffe attack on Britain reached its climax, at the Berghof he told his generals of his determination to attack Russia the following May. Thereafter, however, he indulged in more months of vacillation. The German navy pressed for major operations to expel Britain from the Mediterranean, by seizing Gibraltar through Spain and the Suez Canal through Libya. In advocating this course, naval C-in-C Admiral Erich Raeder was supported by General Walter Warlimont, head of the Wehrmacht’s strategic planning section. Following an important commanders’ conference in the Reich Chancellery on 4 November, Hitler’s army adjutant Gerhard Engel wrote that the Führer seemed ‘visibly depressed … at the moment he does not know what to do next’.
The western option had still not been finally and formally rejected in November when Molotov, Stalin’s foreign minister, visited Berlin. The Russian displayed an appetite for further Soviet expansionism which roused German ire, expressing Moscow’s interest in the future of Romania, Bulgaria, Poland and even Greece. He enquired whether Sweden’s continuing neutrality suited the common purposes of Germany and the Soviet Union, and was sharply told that it did. His remarks emphasised that if Hitler still had unfulfilled territorial ambitions, so too did Stalin. By the time Molotov boarded a plane home, Hitler was confirmed in his earlier conviction: Germany should attack Russia the following year.
From his own perspective, he had no choice. The German economy was much less strong than its enemies supposed – only slightly larger than that of Britain, which enjoyed a higher per capita income. It could not indefinitely be sustained on a war footing, and was stretched to the limits to feed the population and arm the Wehrmacht. Hitler was determined to secure his strategic position in Europe before the United States entered the war, which he anticipate
d in 1942. The only option unavailable to him was that of making peace, since Churchill refused to negotiate. Hitler persuaded himself that British obstinacy was fortified by a belief that Churchill might forge an alliance with Stalin, which could make victory over Germany seem plausible. Thus, the Soviet Union’s defeat would make Britain’s capitulation inevitable. If Germany was destined to engage in a death struggle with Russia, it would be foolish to delay this while Stalin re-armed. On 18 December, Hitler issued a formal directive for an invasion, to be launched at the end of May 1941.
Hitler saw three reasons for striking: first, he wished to do so, in fulfilment of his ambition to eradicate bolshevism and create a German empire in the east; second, it seemed prudent to eliminate the Soviet threat before again turning west for a final settlement with Britain and the United States; third, he identified economic arguments. Ironically, Russia’s vast deliveries of raw materials and commodities following the Nazi–Soviet Pact – which in 1940 included most of Germany’s animal-feed imports, 74 per cent of its phosphorus, 67 per cent of its asbestos, 65 per cent of chrome ore, 55 per cent of manganese, 40 per cent of nickel and 34 per cent of oil – convinced Hitler that such a level of dependence was intolerable. That summer, a poor German harvest made necessary the import of huge quantities of Ukrainian wheat. He became impatient to appropriate the Soviet Union’s cornbelt, and thirsty for the oil of the Caucasus. Only late in the war did the Allies grasp the severity of their enemies’ fuel problems: petrol was so short that novice Wehrmacht drivers could be given only meagre tuition, resulting in a heavy military vehicle accident rate. Even in 1942, the worst year of the Battle of the Atlantic, Britain imported 10.2 million tons of oil; meanwhile, German imports and synthetic production never exceeded 8.9 million tons. Thus it was that Hitler made seizure of the Caucasian oil wells a key objective of Operation Barbarossa, heedless of the handicap this imposed on operations to destroy the Red Army, by dividing Germany’s forces. He envisaged the invasion of Russia as both an ideological crusade and a campaign of economic conquest. Significantly, he confided nothing of his Russian intentions to the Italians, whose discretion he mistrusted. Throughout the winter of 1940–41, Mussolini continued to nurse happy hopes of a victorious peace following his own conquest of Egypt. It was a striking characteristic of Axis behaviour until 1945 that while there was some limited consultation between Germany, Italy and Japan, there was no attempt to join in creating a coherent common strategy for defeating the Allies.
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