Juliet Gardiner - The Blitz - The British Under Attack

Juliet Gardiner June 2010

I think it is well for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can prevent him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through … the only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.

Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin, speaking in the House of Commons in 1932

Robert Baltrop was sitting on the roof of a Sainsbury’s store in east London on Saturday, 7 September 1940. It was a warm late-summer afternoon, the rays of the sun stretching across the concrete rooftops. The air-raid alert had just sounded, so Baltrop, who worked as a porter in the store, ‘humping and cleaning and that sort of thing’, had clambered out to take up his post on lookout duty. ‘It wasn’t bad being a watcher during these daytime warnings, sitting up there in the sunshine and smoking and watching the sky, and looking down at the people going about their business as usual in the streets below. I wasn’t really sure what I was watching for, anything dangerous – fires or bombs falling or planes getting near, and I don’t really know what I could have done about it. I suppose I should have had to go down the steps and tell them in the shop that a bomb had fallen on them!’

The war was more than a year old by this time. It had been another lovely summer day when Hitler had failed to respond to Britain’s ultimatum to withdraw German troops from Poland, and the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had broadcast to the nation at 11.15 on 3 September 1939 to tell the British people that ‘despite all my long struggle to win peace … this country is at war with Germany’. Within minutes the air-raid sirens sounded, and Londoners scurried to take shelter. The war that everybody had been expecting had started. Only it hadn’t. That first alert was a false alarm, and a metaphor for a long autumn, winter and spring of expectation and fearful anticipation. But until the summer of 1940 there was little sign of the Armageddon that had been feared – except at sea, where the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’, which would take the lives of more than 30,000 merchant seamen by 1945, had been raging since the outbreak of war as Germany sought to stop supplies reaching Britain to enable her to keep fighting. By the late spring hardly anyone was carrying their gas mask any more, shelters were filling up with water through disuse, a ban had been put on recruiting any more Air Raid Patrol (ARP) wardens, and many volunteers, bored with the endless waiting around, drinking cups of tea and playing darts, had resigned, since there didn’t seem to be much for them to do other than act like martinets when any chink showed through the blackout curtains on their patch. Housewives were already beginning to feel fed up with rationing, and the endless queuing and ingenuity in the kitchen that wartime shortages would demand, and more than 60 per cent of the mothers and children who had joined the government’s evacuation scheme on the eve of war had drifted back home to the cities by January 1940, no longer convinced that their homes would be bombed, or their children killed, which had been the compelling reason for the exodus. It truly did seem to be a ‘bore war’ – all the regulations, restrictions and privations of wartime, with few of the dangers on the home front that would make them seem justified.

On 4 April 1940, in what Winston Churchill, recalled to the Cabinet on the outbreak of war as First Lord of the Admiralty, thought was ‘a speech of unusual optimism’, Chamberlain sanguinely told a Conservative gathering that Hitler had ‘missed the bus’ in seizing the offensive. Five days later German forces moved to occupy Norway and Denmark, and on 10 May, as Baltrop recalled, ‘quite suddenly the Germans invaded the Low Countries; there was the evacuation from Dunkirk [which the British press largely treated as a victory rather than a defeat]; and on 22 June France signed an armistice with Germany. I remember at the Sainsbury’s where I worked, somebody coming into the warehouse and almost with satisfaction rubbing his hands together and saying, “Well, we’re on our own now” … There was a feeling that we were in the war now, and a certain feeling of resolve about it. Dunkirk had its effect. There were Churchill’s speeches – “We will fight on the beaches and we will never surrender” – and very quickly daytime air raid warnings started. Again, there was this curious thing just like at the beginning of the war. We expected the worst and it didn’t happen like that. We started getting air raid warnings by day and night. [Sainsbury’s] agreed with the other shops round about, they would put up the shutters immediately. But nothing happened, and people didn’t go home. They stayed in the streets. So the “gentlemen’s agreement” between shopkeepers was dropped, and the shops started to open again even when the air raid warnings went, and … life went on through the summer. But they were getting nearer.’

Italy had entered the war in support of Germany on 10 June, and six days later the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, resigned and Marshal Philippe Pétain, a military hero of the First World War, took over, and shortly afterwards signed an armistice surrendering northern and western France to the advancing German forces. From across the Channel, Winston Churchill, Prime Minister since Chamberlain had resigned on 10 May, surveyed the defeated British Expeditionary Force evacuated from Dunkirk, and on 18 June, the 125th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, he addressed the House of Commons. Whatever had happened in France, he assured MPs, would make ‘no difference to the resolve of Britain and the British Empire to fight on if necessary for years, if necessary alone’. He predicted that:

the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States [he added pointedly, since America was still pursuing an official policy of neutrality] will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age … Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth lasts for a thousand years, men will still say ‘This was their finest hour.’

The swift fall of France had not been foreseen by the German high command, and for several weeks they were at something of a loss to know what to do next. In mid-June, as German forces made their final assault on Paris, 120 German bombers attacked eastern England, killing nine in Cambridge, * and the first bomb in the London area fell on Addington near Croydon, though at that time Hitler had expressly placed London off-limits for attack. Throughout June and July there were intermittent random, small-scale daylight raids around the capital and on coastal towns in the south and east, and as far north as the Tyne. South Wales was bombed and shipping in the English Channel attacked, and on 12 July twenty-nine Aberdonians were killed and 103 seriously injured in a raid for which no warning had been given. On 16 July Hitler issued Directive no. 16, Preparations for the Invasion of Britain , and such an invasion seemed a real possibility to the British. There were rumours from all over the country of sightings of German parachutists (maybe dressed as nuns) floating down, of barges massing in the Channel, of flotillas of gliders conveying troops from occupied France to East Anglia and Kent. On 18 August the Sunday Express suggested that 18 September would be a good day for a German invasion: ‘The tide would be high, the nights longer than at present, and sea mists and fogs are prevalent at the equinox. Therefore, unless the Nazis come between the eighteenth and twenty-third of next month, they will be wise to postpone their visit until next spring.’