The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

Churchill was among those whose view of the ruined cities focused on the visible destruction as a loss difficult to recover. In December 1940 he pressed the Minister of Works to set up repair squads for the rows of windowless housing he saw ‘deserted and neglected’. The Ministry had already begun a programme of urgent repairs to factories and severely damaged housing. Because there was little for the army to do, thousands of building workers were temporarily released from their units to cope with more extensive house reconstruction. Housing in the intermediate category of badly damaged was always a much smaller proportion of the whole. Following the heavy raid on Hull on 8 May 1941, 561 houses were destroyed or beyond repair, 1,345 were damaged but needed extensive work, but 8,352 were still usable subject to minor repair.¹⁵² The First Aid programme was designed for this larger category. The statistics show that the programme of repairs kept reasonable pace with the renewed bombing in the spring of 1941. By March 1941 there were only 5,100 damaged houses in London awaiting repair out of 719,000; in the provincial cities 50,800 out of 335,000. By November, with the bombing almost at an end, over 2 million houses had been dealt with. Of the severely damaged houses, over one-third had been restored to use by 1942.¹⁵³ The bare statistics render dumb the acres of burnt out and ruptured urban landscape and the improvised nature of life in damaged houses and apartments, but they do show that nationwide programmes of repair and rehabilitation worked to limit the damage that bombing might have inflicted on a less prepared and economically poorer community.

The one factor responsible for a large part of the damage was fire, and the extent of incendiary bombing was one of the aspects of the bombing campaign that had not been anticipated or adequately prepared for. Fire chiefs were asked to estimate after the Blitz how much of the damage in their regions could be attributed to fire and their replies ranged between 80 and 98 per cent; 90 per cent of the damage in London, Plymouth, Southampton and Portsmouth was the result of conflagrations caused by large clusters of incendiaries.¹⁵⁴ Firefighting in wartime differed from peacetime not only because of the danger of high-explosive bombs or delayed-action incendiaries, each with a high-explosive capsule inside designed to maim, but because buildings became fully ventilated at once as windows were blown out, creating a rapid blaze and spreading quickly to become what fire chiefs called a ‘fire zone’. Water supplies were fractured, forcing brigades to pump water from rivers and canals, often at considerable distance from the blaze. British cities were fortunate that the scale of attack never made possible a firestorm like Hamburg or Dresden.

The existing fire services were, despite the expansion of their numbers, ill-prepared to cope with this degree of fire damage. The country remained divided into more than 1,600 firefighting authorities, all nominally independent. Some had modern equipment and a core of experienced firemen alongside the new volunteers, but some major urban areas had kept their ‘police brigades’, composed of local policemen with limited professional training. The poor performance of the firefighting in Plymouth, Liverpool, Southampton and Manchester resulted from this dependence on local police who doubled as firemen.¹⁵⁵ Many brigades could not help neighbouring services fully because hose and hydrant equipment was incompatible. There was a shortage of modern fire tenders and automatic equipment. The AFS had been trained as thoroughly as possible during each year since 1939, but in some cases it was abandoned to operate on its own without the help of the professional force. Henry Green, anxious for action in wartime London, found the reality on 7 September 1940, when he and his AFS crews were sent in a taxi drawing a pump to stem the large timber fires in the docks, a scene of complete confusion: ‘When at last we drove through the Dock… there was not one officer to report to, no one to give orders, we simply drove on up a road towards what seemed to be our blaze.’ After finding the burning timber, Green found himself ‘pitchforked into chaos… doing practically no good at all… no orders whatever’. He was struck by the sorry sight of burning pigeons in flight.¹⁵⁶ Even allowing for literary licence, Green’s experience reflected the existing inadequacies of the force. By the autumn of 1940, wrote the Home Office Chief of Fire Staff – the improbably named Sir Aylmer Firebrace – the service had reached ‘the limit of its possibilities’.¹⁵⁷