The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

There was more to the research than simple academic curiosity. Long before 1939 there had been a widespread popular assumption that bombing would be unendurable for an urban population and that the panic induced by air attack might provoke some form of social breakdown. ‘Morale’ was the term popularly used, a military concept more easily defined in the context of the battlefield than it was in the wider world of civilian society. It was not easy to measure or to identify, and Zuckerman’s team spent the first weeks trying to decide what questions to ask in order to determine the degree of abnormality or normality in the large sample of 900 men and women they initially selected. The selection was not entirely random, since many were trekkers, but they were chosen from a variety of occupations, from different areas of the city and from both sexes. The doctors prepared to look for hysteria, anxiety or depression as more or less extreme symptoms of neurosis; they also had a mixed category of anxiety and depression which they thought reflected a common psychological mix among those faced with death, dispossession and homelessness. They found almost no evidence of hysteria, the most serious medical condition, and therefore discounted it. Among the raid victims the psychiatrists found that 4.2 per cent of the men remained seriously neurotic six months after the attacks, while among women in heavily bombed areas the figure was 13.7 per cent. Moderate or slight neurosis persisted in 20 per cent of men and 53 per cent of women, but from the 706 subjects eventually assessed, 374 appeared on examination to have suffered no symptoms at all.¹⁷¹

The psychiatrists took this evidence to mean that the fears about the mental state of Hull’s population had been exaggerated and that psychiatric help for bomb victims was superfluous, capable of doing ‘more harm than good’. They recommended reliance on common sense and plenty of food: ‘the stability in mental health of the population depends much more on their nutritional state’.¹⁷² Zuckerman and his colleague, the physicist J. D. Bernal, completed their report for the government based on these findings. They concluded that there was no evidence of bad morale in Hull, neither panic nor excessive neurosis. ‘Hull to-day looks like a badly blitzed town,’ concluded their report, ‘but a visitor is not impressed by any peculiarities of the population.’¹⁷³ Zuckerman was interested in statistical observation, which is why the figures on neurosis in Hull seemed so compelling. Elsewhere judgements about morale had been made impressionistically, although they generally confirmed the Hull findings, even in places such as Coventry where the initial fear had been of mass hysteria.¹⁷⁴ The wider psychological press had also produced regular articles in 1940 and 1941 confirming that admissions for psychiatric treatment had in many cases gone down during the Blitz, while those with marked psychosis induced by bombing were already psychiatric cases before the war.¹⁷⁵ In the London region hospitals an average of only two psychiatric cases a week were recorded in the first three months of raiding.¹⁷⁶

The Hull figures nevertheless masked a much grimmer social and psychological reality for the victims of bombing. Each interviewee had the record of their Blitz experience, their previous mental and physical state and their current condition recorded on case sheets by the psychiatrists. A high proportion displayed symptoms that were anything but normal. Many women revealed that they had become prone to fainting, cried incessantly or vomited at the sound of the siren. Men admitted to depression, insomnia, extreme tension and severe dyspepsia. Case 17, a housewife judged to have ‘fair stability but marked timidity’, confessed that she shook uncontrollably ‘like an electric clock’ throughout the raids and for hours afterwards. Case 20, a housewife of ‘dull, solitary disposition’, wet herself in the shelter, refused to undress at night and dreamt of Germans dropping out of planes. Case 7, a docker, had changed from being cheerful and adaptable, after seeing his brother and sister-in-law killed in his house; he now drank eight pints a night and smoked 30–40 cigarettes a day to calm his nerves. Another docker lost his mother and three nieces in a shelter, dug out his brother and sister-in-law trapped for four days, and witnessed a shelter with 20 people in it blown apart. He told the interviewer that he thought life ‘not worth living’.¹⁷⁷

In the worst cases, the psychological survival of the victim was in itself remarkable. Two examples out of many illustrate the dimensions of the crises to which survivors were exposed, often two or three times: