The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

Case 1: Male Worker. Married, 4 children

‘He heard the mine come down and rushed to the floor of his cloakroom with his wife. He felt the explosion hit his stomach, and for 2 to 3 minutes he had considerable difficulty in getting his breath… On recovery he saw the whole house in ruins except for the walls of the room where he was. He heard moaning, and set about digging for his children – this was the worst experience of all; he felt “in a mental frenzy”… His wife sat about dazed. Then he called for the ambulances, and fainted – to wake up later in hospital. Two of the family were found dead…’

Case 37: Mrs C, housewife ‘with a good personality’. Married, 4 children

‘In the May blitz her house was demolished and after being imprisoned for ¾ of an hour she was released by the wardens. She had been in this house only a couple of hours, having moved from a house which was demolished the night before. She had already been bombed out of a third house in March. Her sister, with her 5 children, were killed in a raid… She dreamt of raids and used to lie awake imagining horrors. She could not forget the death of her sister’s children and used to cry all day. She had headaches and fits of dizziness and was terrified of the siren.’¹⁷⁸

These experiences almost certainly produced profound trauma in many of the victims, though the language now used to describe it and the therapies to assist it have all been post-war developments. Few claimed to have gone to a doctor, and the men returned to work within days or weeks. The psychiatrists observed that all their interviewees were willing, even eager to talk. Their somatic experiences were evidently not unique to Hull and could be traced in every bombing raid across Europe. But they constituted a private crisis, veiled by the official bland assertions that Hull was, after all, ‘mentally stable’.

This kind of hidden damage was not what interested the authorities. The ministries and armed forces worried about defeatism, fifth-columns, political radicalism, pacifism and rumours. The population was monitored by numerous agencies to seek out evidence of collective disaffection or social breakdown – the Ministry of Information Home Intelligence department, the Ministry of Home Security, the intelligence services of the three armed forces, the Ministry of Food Research Department and MI5, the internal security police. In this process the reaction to the bombing formed only one element among many potential sources of discontent and disillusionment. Even at the height of the bombing in March 1941, opinion polls found that only 8 per cent of respondents thought air raids the most important war problem; an April poll found that 62 per cent claimed to feel no more anxious about air raids than they had before the bombing started.¹⁷⁹ The Home Intelligence reports of the Ministry of Information also reveal a patchwork of reactions during the months of the Blitz in which the strength of concern over bombing fluctuated sharply. There was nevertheless an assumption that bombing must affect ‘morale’ more than other problems because of its violent interruption of daily life and the deliberate targeting of working-class areas, which the largely professional and educated classes who monitored them thought likely to display less robust willpower under attack.