Juliet Gardiner - The Blitz - The British Under Attack

* Usually known as ‘Pug’, since, according to Churchill’s private secretary John (‘Jock’) Colville, he ‘looked like one, and when he was pleased one could almost imagine he was wagging his tail’.

* Most Ack-Ack guns had been deployed to defend factories and airfields during the Battle of Britain, so when the Germans suddenly switched their attention to London, the capital was highly vulnerable, its defence resting on an entirely inadequate total of 264 anti-aircraft guns.

* On 28 August 1939 the Ministry of Health had ordered that since at least 25,000 casualties a day were expected when the blitz started, hospital admissions should be restricted to emergency cases only, and those should be monitored carefully, since the patients might well have to be evacuated. On the day war broke out the Emergency Medical Services came into operation. Under this scheme the capital and its outlying districts were divided into ten sectors, with one or more of the London teaching hospitals at the head of each. St Thomas’s, for example, was the key hospital for Sector VIII, which included fifty-one voluntary hospitals and homes and miscellaneous other institutions scattered around south-west London and adjoining parts of Surrey and Hampshire, with the matron of St Thomas’s responsible for all the nursing staff in the sector.

What a domestic sort of war this is … it happens in the kitchen, on landings, beside washing-baskets; it comes to us without stirring a yard from our own doorsteps to meet it. Even its catastrophes are made terrible not by strangeness but by familiarity.

John Strachey, Post D (1941)

On the night of 12 September Whitehall was hit during a raid, and the Ministry of Transport was damaged by high-explosive bombs. Plans had already been made to move the Cabinet and the chiefs of staff to a citadel in the basement of the GPO’s research centre in Dollis Hill in north-west London (code-named ‘Paddock’) if Whitehall were to be bombed out, though other options had been considered, including various reinforced-concrete buildings close to Whitehall, such as a rotunda in Horseferry Road. On 20 September Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine, accompanied by Jock Colville, went to look over what might be their new London home. They inspected the flats and the ‘deep underground rooms safe from the biggest bomb, where the Cabinet and its satellites (e.g. me) would work and if necessary sleep’, wrote Colville. ‘They are impressive but rather forbidding; I suppose if the present intensive bombing continues we must get used to being troglodytes (“trogs” as the PM puts it). I begin to understand what the early Christians must have felt about living in the Catacombs.’

In fact the PM would prove to be only an occasional and somewhat peripatetic ‘trog’, as in the early days of the blitz he experimented to find what suited him best, somewhat to the alarm of his staff. One member of his private office, John Peck, wrote a spoof memo under the Churchillesque heading ‘ACTION THIS DAY’:

Pray let six new offices be fitted for my use, in Selfridge’s, Lambeth Palace, Stanmore, Tooting Bec, the Palladium and Mile End Road. I will inform you at 6 each evening at which offices I shall dine, work and sleep. Accommodation will be required for Mrs Churchill, two shorthand typists, three secretaries and Nelson [the resident black cat at No. 10, of which Churchill had grown fond]. There should be a shelter for all and a place for me to watch air-raids from the roof. This should be completed by Monday. There is to be no hammering during office hours, that is between 7am and 3am. WSC. 31.10.40.

In the event Churchill spent most of his working day at 10 Downing Street, occasionally repairing for the night to the underground Cabinet War Rooms, just off Whitehall, the nerve centre from which, in his words, he ‘directed the war’, or to London Underground’s offices housed in Down Street underground station in Mayfair, on the Piccadilly Line between Dover Street (now Green Park) and Hyde Park Corner stations, which had been closed in 1932 and adapted as offices for the Railway Executive Committee. This was considered to be safe, and boasted a large dining room where the food was reputed to be excellent, though it could be noisy as underground trains rattled past.

In December 1940 the Churchills moved into a ground-floor flat in the No. 10 annexe above the Cabinet War Rooms. It was hardly bomb-proof, but it was more robust than No. 10 itself, and was at least fitted with heavy steel shutters that could be closed during an air raid. Apart from Winston’s occasional excursions underground, it was in this ex-typing pool that the couple largely saw out the war.

The question of how best to protect the public during air raids was one that had exercised government and civil servants for some time. It had long been estimated that each ton of high-explosives dropped on a congested area would cause as many as fifty casualties, and the RAF had reckoned that on average seven hundred tons of bombs would be dropped daily, although in the first few days in an effort to achieve a ‘knock-out blow’ the figure was more likely to be nearer 950 tons; or perhaps the Germans would decide on a week-long attrition that would deliver as much as 3,500 tons on London in the first twenty-four hours. An indication of the effects of intense air raids was brought sickeningly home to many British people as they sat in their cinema seats watching newsreels of the bombing of Barcelona and Bilbao during the Spanish Civil War.

A vital matter was to give the public warning of an impending air raid. The country had been divided into 111 warning districts (based on telephone areas rather than local authority boundaries), and messages about approaching enemy aircraft were originated by RAF Fighter Command, which, using direct telephone lines, cascaded the warning to control centres. These would then transmit the message in strict order of priority to those on the warning list: government offices, military establishments, the police, Civil Defence HQs, fire brigades and large industrial concerns in particular areas.

Each stage of alert was distinguished by a different colour code-name. A yellow message was the ‘Preliminary Caution’, meaning that enemy planes were estimated to be about twenty-two minutes’ flying time away. This message was confidential, and the public would not have been aware of its receipt since those receiving it were instructed ‘to take the necessary precautions in as unobtrusive way as possible’. A red message, the ‘Action Warning’, was relayed when the planes were twelve minutes’ flying time away. This was the signal for the police to activate the air-raid sirens in their district, which emitted a low, moaning sound that rose to a querulous wail (a ‘wailing banshee’, in Churchill’s phrase), alerting the public to the fact that a raid was imminent and that they should seek shelter. Fighter Command finally sent the green message, ‘All Clear’, indicating ‘Raiders Passed’; for this the sirens sounded a steady two-minute note.

In July 1940 the government shifted the balance from safety first to production first, as the war effort was being disrupted by workers unnecessarily spending unproductive hours in shelters, particularly during daytime raids, when an alert might last for three or four hours. The Home Secretary and Minister for Home Security Sir John Anderson announced that ‘Workers engaged in war production should be encouraged … to continue at work after a public air-raid warning until it is clear that an enemy attack is actually imminent in their neighbourhood.’ This was to be made practicable by the recruitment of roof spotters, who would alert the workers when enemy planes were sufficiently close for them to need to take shelter.