The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

The Ministry of Information began to think seriously about how to influence popular outlook on air raids as early as May 1940 after a Home Morale Emergency Committee gave its first report. The committee recommended using actors to keep people cheerful in the shelters and the distribution of song sheets, the start of a long catalogue of misplaced schemes. In June it identified ‘the lonely woman’ as the weakest link in the chain of public courage and suggested concerted efforts to encourage a sense of community and neighbourliness to help them. The committee also worried that class antagonism might be exacerbated by air raids, and suggested replacing the cultured voice of the BBC with more local dialects and giving radio air-time to left-wing speakers.¹⁸⁰ In July the Treasury granted £100,000 for schemes to sustain morale. The Ministry used some of the money to sponsor public meetings and lectures all over the country to give the public a stronger sense of what they were fighting for and what role they could now play in total war. Lectures on ‘The Civilian’s Part in Defence’ or ‘The Home Front’ were interspersed with ‘What German Occupation Means’ and ‘The Nazi Record’. By the end of July 1940 well over 5,000 meetings had been held, attended by more than half a million people. The same month Kenneth Clark, the art historian seconded to the Ministry, launched an ‘anti-rumour’ and ‘anti-gossip’ campaign under the slogan ‘The Silent Column’, which proved an immediate disaster among a public hostile to what one of them called ‘the Gestapo over here’.¹⁸¹

Nevertheless a rumour department continued to operate during the Blitz, trying to counteract the more bizarre stories and exaggerated death tolls circulated by word of mouth. The official position on air-raid damage was to give away as little as possible and to release no figures on deaths or material losses. Among all the issues bombing raised with the wider public, this was one that provoked strong feelings. The Ministry of Information finally agreed to release limited raid details to their Regional Information Officers for wider publication, but Morrison stopped it. After the Coventry raid in November 1940 – which fuelled exaggerated reports of thousands dead, and shelters sealed up with the bodies still inside – the Ministry pressed again for a more flexible policy. A compromise was finally reached by the end of December which allowed discretionary release of casualty figures in a bombed locality if it was felt this would reduce damage to morale. Monthly figures of the dead were to be posted in town halls when required, but it was agreed that the figures for Coventry could be released as a special case.¹⁸² But when Duff Cooper pressed for real post-raid information to counter the popular view that the government was ‘hiding the truth from them’, Churchill sent a firm rebuttal: ‘I am not aware of any “depressing effect” produced upon the public morale, and as a matter of fact I thought they were settling down very well to the job.’¹⁸³

Churchill epitomized the slogan chosen to buoy up popular sentiment during the Blitz that ‘We [sometimes London, sometimes Britain] can take it.’ This seemed a clever choice of slogan because it combined defiance with a sense of collective effort and left little space for those who thought differently (though it also provoked resentment from those who did). Much of the popular writing by journalists and essayists viewing British urban society under bombing reinforced the propaganda. ‘There was no break in the dam here as there was in France,’ wrote Virginia Cowles in a book published in June 1941. ‘Even the weakest link in the chain was reliable. From the highest to the humblest, each person played his part.’¹⁸⁴ Vera Brittain, while deploring the war that made such sacrifices necessary, nevertheless portrayed in England’s Hour, written in London in 1940 in between air raids, a heroic British morale: ‘Never, I suppose, has the sum total of civilian courage in this country proved so great as it is to-day… Day after day, men and women working in offices, in factories, or in their homes, fight their human fears with a brave show of cheerful indifference.’¹⁸⁵