Juliet Gardiner - The Blitz - The British Under Attack

JULIET GARDINER

The Blitz The British Under Attack

For Martha

Title Page

Dedication

Preface

Before

1 Black Saturday, 7 September 1940

2 ‘The Most Grim Test in its History …’

3 Sheltering

4 Underground

5 Front Line

6 The Test of War

7 Guernicaed

8 Britain Can (Probably) Take It

9 The Fear of Fear

10 The 1940 Provincial Tour

11 Peace on Earth?

12 Long Shall Men Mourn the Burning of the City

13 Standing Firm

14 Spring Offensive

15 The Far Reach

16 Attrition

After

Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

By the same author

Copyright

About the Publisher

These are the facts, observe them how you will:

Forget for a moment the medals and the glory,

The clean shape of the bomb, designed to kill,

And the proud headlines of the papers’ story.

Remember the walls of brick that forty years

Had nursed to make a neat though shabby home;

The impertinence of death, ignoring tears,

That smashed the house and left untouched the Dome.

Bodies in death are not magnificent or stately,

Bones are not elegant that blast has shattered;

This sorry, stained and crumpled rag was lately

A man whose like was made of little things that mattered;

Now he is just a nuisance, liable to stink,

A breeding-ground for flies, a test-tube for disease:

Bury him quickly and never pause to think

What is the future like to men like these?

People are more than places, more than pride;

A million photographs record the works of Wren;

A city remains a city on credit from the tide

That flows among its rocks, a sea of men.

Ruthven Todd, ‘These are the Facts’

‘Blitz’ is an abbreviation of the German word ‘Blitzkrieg’ , meaning ‘lightning war’. It all too accurately describes Hitler’s advance through western Europe in May and June 1940, as Norway, then Holland, Belgium and France fell to the German forces within weeks; but it hardly seems appropriate for the almost continual aerial bombardment of the British Isles that started on 7 September 1940 and continued with little relief until 10 May 1941. Yet ‘blitz’ is the name by which these eight months were known. It was a German word, and like lightning it came from the sky, and could and did kill. Indeed, an air raid was in many ways like a terrible storm – the sky livid, rent by jagged flashes, obscured by black clouds rolling across it or lit up by the reflected glow of fires, while the noise of bombs and guns echoed like the thunder of Mars, the god of war.

The blitz was the test of war for the British people: it touched everyone’s lives, it mobilised the population, and in phrases that have become time-worn but are nevertheless true, put civilians on the front line and made the home front the battlefront. Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, which preceded it, had essentially been military operations. The blitz was total war. Its intensity and inescapability made it possible to call the Second World War ‘the people’s war’, in which, in the words of the poet Robert Graves, a soldier ‘cannot even feel that his rendezvous with death is more certain than that of his Aunt Fanny, the firewatcher’.

The blitz was the war that everyone in Britain had been expecting, and fearing, since that warm Sunday morning in September 1939 when Neville Chamberlain had announced that ‘Britain is now at war with Germany’. Although there had been sporadic raids throughout the ‘phoney war’ that followed, it was not until almost exactly a year after that declaration that the Luftwaffe bombers arrived in force over London. Although England’s capital was bombed more heavily and more continuously than anywhere else in the country, the blitz was an attack on the whole United Kingdom: few places escaped its direct effects, none its indirect ones.

In January 1941 George Orwell wrote to the editors of the American journal the Partisan Review , to which he would contribute a ‘London Letter’ throughout the rest of the war: ‘On that day in September when the Germans broke through and set the docks on fire, I think few people can have watched those enormous fires without feeling that this was the end of an epoch. One seemed to feel that the immense changes through which our society has got to pass were going to happen there and then.’ But he went on to say that these feelings had been erroneous: ‘to an astonishing extent things have slipped back to normal … When all is said and done one’s main impression is the immense solidarity of ordinary people, the widespread yet vague consciousness that things can never be the same again, and yet, together with that, the tendency of life to slip back into the familiar pattern.’

Just a month later, Orwell was demanding that ‘either we turn this war into a revolutionary war [against privilege and influence, and for equality and freedom] or we lose it’. Neither happened. The equivocation and ambivalence of wanting change and wanting things to be as they had always been would persist, and politicians consistently declined to define Britain’s war aims other than by the simple word ‘victory’.

Yet the blitz was a defining moment in Britain’s history. More than cityscapes were reconfigured in those eight months. The attrition that had been anticipated for over a decade revealed both the incompetence of the authorities, and their misunderstanding of the nature of such warfare and of the needs of the people. But at the same time it demonstrated their sometimes grudging, usually tardy, willingness to accommodate, compromise and innovate. And perhaps, above all, eventually and imperfectly, to listen. To keep the people ‘on side’ as much as possible, since it was recognised that civilian morale was vital in maintaining full-scale war production and thus Britain’s ability to prosecute the war at a time when victory was very far from assured. For this reason, and others, the blitz did prove to be a forcing house, a laboratory, the intense distillation of how an external threat could weld together a nation while at the same time failing to resolve many of its tensions.

The blitz has given the British – politicians in particular – a storehouse of images on which to draw at times of crisis: the symbol of an indomitable nation, united in resolution. The true story is, of course, more nuanced and complicated than that, cross-hatched as it must be by the freight of the prewar years, of differing experiences and expectations. There were thousands of examples of extreme bravery, fortitude and selflessness. There was also a pervasive sense of exhaustion, uncertainty and anxiety, and acts of selfishness, intransigence and contumely. The words that best sum up the blitz are probably ‘endurance’ and ‘defiance’. And arising out of that, a sense of entitlement: that a nation that had been exhorted to ‘take it’ could reasonably expect, when the war was finally over, to ‘get [some] of it’, in terms of greater equality, more employment, better housing, education and life chances in general.

In 1940 the use of the transitive verb ‘to blitz’ signified ‘to destroy by aerial bombardment’. Seventy years later it is sometimes used to mean ‘to deal with something energetically; to concentrate a lot of effort on something to get it done’. Both meanings resonate in our understanding of the blitz of 1940–41 and its aftermath.