After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  In the trials of the vanquished German leadership at Nuremberg in 1945, it was brazenly taken for granted by the Allies that the bombardment of civilian targets was a war crime. ‘Was not your purpose in this attack to secure a strategic advantage by terrorization of the people of Rotterdam?’ asked Sir David Maxwell Fyfe of General Albert Kesselring, indicted for his part in the defeat of Holland in 1940. Goring, mastermind of the aerial bombardment of Britain in the same year and onwards, admitted: ‘I decided on Coventry because there the most targets could be hit within the smallest area.’5 While the men who directed the bombing of Rotterdam (civilian losses about 840) or Coventry (568 killed during the worst raid, in November 1940, when the cathedral was destroyed; 1,253 killed by air raids during the entire war)6 could be put on trial for their lives, it was perhaps as well that Harris was conveniently in South Africa lest against the British and Dutch losses be placed the 600,000 German civilians who lost their lives, the 3.5 million German homes which were destroyed, the 7.5 million Germans left homeless. By then a variety of justifications had been adduced by the Allied leadership, American as well as British, for the policy of civilian bombing. These justifications included strategic necessity, the shortening of the war, the need to sap enemy morale. None of these reasons could quite stand exposure to the light of common day, once the Army of Occupation moved across Europe and began to see for themselves what Arthur Harris’s Lancasters, Mosquito Mk IVs, Halifax Mk Ills and other ingenious planes, together with American B17 Fortress Mk IIIs, had wrought on people and places. Those who had flown in Bomber Command on dangerous raids through the night in the latter years of the war, and survived, saw themselves as the lucky ones, but also as the heroes of the war. Half the boys who had flown with them in Bomber Command had died. But their senior officers, and above all Harris himself, had assured them that their courageous flights over enemy territory were a vital, perhaps the vital contribution to Allied victory. The men of Bomber Command were kept isolated from others in the air force and by the very nature of their service – cooped up either in planes or back on the ground with their squadron – they had never mingled with the army or navy.

  When the fighting was over one small group of bomber pilots in their RAF uniform were sitting in the rubble of some building they had destroyed, smoking a quiet cigarette. The small town or village they had wrecked seemed miles from anywhere and everything was still. It had never occurred to any of these very young men that what they had been asked to do, at such personal risk, was anything but brave, virtuous and necessary. In the distance, they saw, and heard, the arrival of a small army jeep coming up a dusty road. When it reached them, an officer, an English public schoolboy, leaned over his rolled-down window and addressed the little group. His arm took in the devastation, the ruined buildings, the teetering masonry.

  ‘Did you do this?’ he asked.

  The class thing kicked in. These working-class Lincolnshire boys, brought up to habits of deference but resentful of the drawling superiority of the voice which questioned them, said:

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  They expected congratulations – some school slang from a Biggles book or a Magnet magazine which they could snigger about but which would confirm their sense of self-worth.

  ‘You bastards!’ exclaimed the officer and drove off at speed.7

  It was their first indication that the world did not necessarily regard their war work in the same light that they did.

  Before war broke out, it was assumed that the German air force would set out to bomb London flat. In fact, severe as the German bombardment of British cities was to become, it was months after the outbreak of war before Germany bombed any civilian targets in Britain. By contrast bombing German cities was part of British policy from the moment Neville Chamberlain lost control of the government. ‘Whatever be the lengths to which others may go, His Majesty’s Government will never resort to the deliberate attack on women and children, and other civilians for purposes of mere terrorism,’ he promised the Commons at the beginning of the war.8 While Churchill approved constant bombing of German civilian targets, German attacks on Britain were always more sporadic, less concentrated.9

  By the time the war was at its height and Churchill with his scientific advisers was weighing up the rival merits of different varieties of poison gas to be dropped on German cities, he was able to express in a memo the wish ‘that this matter in the meanwhile will be thought through cold-bloodedly by rational people, and not by these psalm-singing uniformed spoilsports who always encroach on the territory of others’.10 The uniformed psalm-singers were those chiefs of general staff who doubted not merely the morality but the efficacy of civilian bombing.

  Blitzkrieg, lightning war, was, in the German language, that deployment of quick strike which had secured such easy victory over all the European countries invaded by their armies. For the British, however, ‘the Blitz’ meant bombing. Since the German air force had no plane which could last longer than 30 minutes over England without running out of fuel, and most German planes had about ten minutes, either to fight or to bomb, before turning for home with even a faint hope of survival, the policy of aerial bombardment was haphazard.

  An early, and emblematic, victim of German bombing was the Warwickshire city of Coventry. The place was a palimpsest through which appeared the history of England. On the borders of this West Midland manufacturing town was the large Triumph Motor-cycle Works and the smaller Lee Francis Cycle Works. But Coventry was not one of those nondescript villages such as Manchester or Birmingham which were purely the creation of the Industrial Revolution. There had been a human settlement at ‘Coffa’s Tree’ in the seventh century. The Benedictine abbey had been founded in 1043 by Earl Leofric, and his wife, the Countess Godiva, entered legend by her celebrated naked ride through the city to ‘free the town of Coventry from heavy bondage and servitude’. (The first chronicle to mention the event, more than a century later, speaks of the horse, not the rider, being ‘naked’, that is, saddle-less; but why spoil a good story?)11 The thriving market town swelled to eminence as a meeting-place for trade guilds in the fifteenth century. Shakespeare probably came here from nearby Stratford to see the miracle plays and to hear the Coventry Carol, a Christmas song from those plays. (The great medieval abbey church became a cathedral – the new diocese was carved out of that of Worcester – in 1918.) Between the 1860s and 1914 Coventry became ‘the bicycle capital of the world’. In the post-First World War era, Courtaulds established a vast modern factory manufacturing synthetic fibres. In addition the Gauge and Tool Company was established here by the mid-1930s. The factories were on the outskirts of what remained a charming old town with a Georgian coaching inn, medieval houses, and modern housing developments for its 280,000 inhabitants.

  It could be seen as a miniature version of modern England, an individual complex built around a settlement which stretched back through Tudor merchants and medieval monks to Saxon times. The factories were being put to war use even before September 1939. Courtaulds nylon works was producing parachutes. Alfred Herbert Ltd, since Munich, had been working shifts night and day to produce tools for weapons. Aircraft components were being manufactured in Coventry from March 1940. The first German bombs in the area fell on the nearby Ansty aerodrome in June 1940.

  The first German bombs on London were dropped by accident on 25 August 1940, when a German pilot released explosives on a civilian target, which had been meant for oil tanks at Thameshaven.12 On 8 November 1940 the RAF bombed Munich. The raid achieved nothing, but it so influenced Hitler that he insisted there should be retaliation.

  The German squadron leader gave the following instructions to his men, for the so-called Operation Moonlight Sonata:

  Comrades, you are acquainted with the nature and essentials of tonight’s operation. Our task is, with other squadrons, to repay the attack on Munich by the English during the night of 8 November. We shall not repay it in the same manner by smashing up harmless dwelling houses, but we s
hall do it in such a way that those over there will be completely stunned.

  The aim, their squadron leader assured them, was to smash the factories making engine parts, including the Rolls-Royce aero-engine works.13

  The 14th of November 1940, a Thursday, was early-closing day in Coventry. The boys of King Henry VIII school played their usual game of rugger. The clergy of St Thomas, and of the cathedral of St Michael, said Evensong. Over high tea the citizens read the Midland Daily Telegraph or listened to Children’s Hour, episode five of Forgotten Island by J. D. Strange. It was shortly after 7 pm that the bombers arrived and dropped about 100 incendiary bombs over the city. Mingled with the incendiaries were a few high explosives.

  ‘Strangely persistent this raid tonight, Kenneth,’ remarked the vicar of Holy Trinity Church to his curate.14 By nine o’clock many of the factories on the outskirts of town were ablaze – Alfred Herbert Ltd, and the Daimler works in Sandy Lane. The Coventry and Warwickshire Hospital glowed with incendiary bombs. It was at about eight that the first of the incendiaries struck the cathedral. Clergy and people rescued a few treasures – cross, candlesticks, the colours of the 7th Battalion, the Royal Warwickshire Regiment – but by 11 o’clock that night it was clear that the fire-fighters could not rescue the cathedral itself.

  Those who saw the raid from afar – Birmingham is eighteen miles away – felt they were witnessing ‘a gigantic sunset’. The next day there was drizzle in the air. It looked, and felt, as if the whole city had been destroyed, even though by the standards of other bombarded cities later in the war, remarkably few people were killed or injured.

  There survives an extraordinary recording of the provost and choir of Coventry Cathedral singing the medieval Coventry Carol in the ruins, on Christmas Day 1940. The world heard Provost Hurrand say: ‘I am speaking from the ruins of Coventry Cathedral … Last Christmas we had our wonderful carol services in the glorious building of pink sandstone … with its wide arches and spacious windows, every stone of it loved and treasured by twenty generations of Coventry people. Six weeks ago the enemy came and hurled down fire and destruction upon our city all through the long night … Early this morning, here under these ruins in the lovely little stone chapel built six hundred years ago we began the day as usual with our Christmas communion, worshipping the Christ, believe me, as joyfully as ever before …’

  But for all the brave and pious words, more than the sum of 568 lives, a cathedral, a lot of houses and factories and streets and gardens, had been destroyed. The past had gone. In some European cities which suffered similar fates, it was decided, when peace came, to reconstruct an ersatz version of the old building. In Coventry in the 1950s there was a brave attempt to build a new cathedral (Sir Basil Spence, architect) surrounded by the honest but predictable hideousness of a postwar town. In both cases, the past, that accumulation of masonry and memories which accrues its patina through generations, could not be recovered. The Luftwaffe had destroyed old Coventry – Cuffa’s, Godiva’s, Shakespeare’s – as surely as the RAF would remove the life, the guts of German history. Lübeck, Rostock, Cologne, Hamburg, Dresden, Frankfurt am Main and many other towns were punitively and thoroughly incinerated. Berlin, the Prussian capital and symbol since Bismarck of German unity, was wrecked.

  Bombing with intelligent tactical purpose was not really of interest to Harris. In February 1943, for example, he enlisted the help of his old colleague, now Chief of Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal to resist the conversion of thirty Lancaster bombers to carry a new spinning bomb devised by the scientist Barnes Wallis.15 The bouncing bomb, if it worked, would burst the Ruhr dams and flood the industrial heartland of Germany. The ingenuity, the sheer brilliance, of Wallis must have been one of the things which repelled Harris’s very crude personality. He dismissed Wallis’s invention as ‘just about the maddest proposition as a weapon that we have yet come across’.16 ‘My boys’ lives are too precious to be wasted on your crazy notions.’17 He was eventually converted. The damage inflicted upon two of the Ruhr dams on the night of 16/17 May 1943 was substantial but the third dam was not breached. The Dam Busters had not quite succeeded in wiping out the bulk of the German mining and manufacturing strength in one audacious raid. But this sort of precision bombing, focusing on single achievable objectives, never appealed to Harris. When asked to consider targeting the rubber factories of Hanover, for example, he said: ‘I distrust experts and specialists on “panacea” commodities … for example a fortnight after we were told Germany was nearly on the rocks for oil she staged the biggest campaign in history [Russia] using billions of gallons.’ He preferred to ignore the ‘panacea merchants’18 and concentrate on huge destructive plans of what came to be known as ‘area bombing’.

  As early as his appointment in 1942 Harris was telling readers of the Daily Express: ‘If I could send 1,000 bombers to Germany every night, it would end the war by the autumn. We are going to bomb Germany incessantly … the day is coming when the USA and ourselves will put over such a force that the Germans will scream for mercy.’19 He had learnt in Iraq that Arab villages could be bombed into submission. The examples of the courage and fortitude of people in Glasgow, Coventry, Plymouth, Liverpool and hosts of other British towns, including London, with its defiant photographic self-image of St Paul’s surviving the smoke and flames, gave him no pause. He began with medieval towns, not because they had the smallest strategic importance but because, being built of wood, they burnt well. Lübeck and Rostock went up like matchsticks. Over Cologne in May 1942 Harris had his dream fulfilled – 1,000 bombers in one raid.

  Workers in the Ruhr had chanted the song:

  Tommy, please don’t drop that bomb;

  All we are is miners, Tom.

  Berlin’s where you want to drop it,

  They said ‘Yes’ so let them cop it.

  Harris in August 1943 was telling Portal: ‘we are on the verge of a final showdown in the bombing war’, but after nearly two years more of his bombing raids, Germany had still not caved in. By the end of the war, Harris had ordered 14,562 sorties over Berlin. He dropped more bombs on the German capital alone, 33,390 tons, than were dropped on the whole of Britain throughout the war. The suffering of the people of Hamburg, Dresden and ultimately Berlin was on a scale unseen in any British city, since the devastation was so much more widespread, the havoc and destruction more absolute, the casualties so hugely greater. One reason for this in Berlin was that the city was filling up with foreign workers – as many as 800,000 had arrived by 1943 – to replace factory workers who were now dying, in uniform, at the Russian Front. Many of these workers were slaves, and the Gestapo made sure that none of them came near an air-raid shelter. Tens of thousands died in RAF raids.20

  Although Berlin was on fire for much of the time in the closing months of the war it never reached the stage of the total inferno which engulfed, for example, Hamburg. One witness recollected, nevertheless: ‘the air-raids kept on getting worse. Sometimes the whole city was on fire. At times, you could not differentiate between night and day. When you went outside you had to have a wet cloth over your face because there was so much dust and dirt in the air that it was impossible to breathe … incendiary bombs fell by the thousands every day.’21

  The bombing of London in the closing weeks of 1940 and the beginning of 1941 had an extraordinary effect upon its population. Naturally, there was some panic, and much distress, but the universal mayhem predicted by the Anderson Committee simply did not happen. People huddled in the Underground stations. The authorities forbade them to do so, but the authorities were defied. ‘We was always singin’,’ one woman told the Thames Television World at War programme, ‘always happy, just like there was no war at all, I remember one night when the big guns started …’

  The tension of the atmosphere, and the fires themselves, created an extraordinary collective response. In one of the most remarkable novels to come out of the Second World War, Elizabeth Bowen’s The Heat of the Day, the author evokes the atmosphere
of the blacked-out streets, the smell of burning and death … ‘From the moment of waking you tasted the sweet autumn not less because of the acridity on the tongue and nostrils; and as the singed dust settled and smoke diluted you felt more and more called upon to observe the daytime as a pure and curious holiday from fear.’ Shops had BUSINESS AS USUAL defiantly posted outside them when they had been bombed. Bombed-out civil servants dictated to their secretaries, typewriters perched on their knees, on benches in St James’s Park. ‘The very soil of the city’, wrote Bowen, ‘seemed to generate more strength: in parks and the outsize dahlias, velvet and wine, and the trees on which each vein in each yellow leaf stretched out perfect against the sun emblazoned the idea of the finest hour.’22

  London was bombed on seventy-six nights in succession during that autumn and over 40,000 people were killed. There were more than 1,500 fires burning in and around the Square Mile in December 1940. The heart of the City was destroyed, but St Paul’s survived.

  Churchill visited the East End to inspect the damage, for, as always happened in bombed cities, it was the poorer areas, with the most densely and cheaply built housing, closer to factories and docks, which were most easily destroyed. ‘I can remember,’ one woman recalled, ‘just off of Green Street and there were crowds of women there trying to get their bits and pieces out of houses … Churchill called out, “We can take it!” and the women told him what he could take in no uncertain terms.’23