The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

The broadcast was deplored by the Swansea authorities and the population, and the Ministry reminded the BBC to clear broadcasts with their officials beforehand to avoid local protests. But a month later, in March, another broadcast insisted that an air raid on Cardiff had had only moderate effects. A local woman wrote to Churchill to complain that the city had been ‘a positive inferno’ and asked him to broadcast on the evening news to explain how he was going to stop the city from being bombed again.¹⁹³ When Churchill did broadcast to the nation in April that morale was firmest in the most heavily bombed cities, Edward Stebbing, a young conscript convalescing in a Scottish hospital, heard another patient call out ‘You ------ liar!’ A few weeks before, Stebbing had listened to the grumbles of his unit forced to do fire-watching duty. ‘If only people knew,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘of the discontent that seethes behind the façade of unity!’¹⁹⁴ The Ministry was also assailed by critics of a different sort who wanted the slogan to be ‘We can give it’, to show that Britain’s war effort was not simply about absorbing punishment. In early October 1940 local informers noted that reprisals against German cities were being widely discussed. By December reports suggested abandoning the slogan ‘Britain can take it!’ because the public ‘is more concerned about “giving it”’. Propaganda on being ‘front-line minded’ was abandoned and in April 1941 the Home Morale Policy Committee recommended dropping ‘We can take it!’ and substituting something more constructive.¹⁹⁵

What has been called ‘the myth of the Blitz’, shaped by the public discourse on civilian endurance and pluck, was not entirely myth, though historians have been sensibly critical of some of its central claims.¹⁹⁶ There is no dispute that hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens did behave with a remarkable degree of courage, good sense and self-sacrifice in situations they could never have imagined having to endure. James Doherty, a warden in Belfast during the Blitz, remarked in his memoir that ‘War has an impact on human character. It makes heroes out of quiet fellows.’¹⁹⁷ There was no gender division in the qualities required. Sir Aylmer Firebrace observed incidents of exceptional bravery across the fire service. ‘Neither sex,’ he wrote in 1946, ‘had a monopoly of courage and staying power.’¹⁹⁸ The experiences of the Blitz tested civil defence workers to extremes, whatever their social background or the nature of their personality. Barbara Nixon, a young woman volunteer warden in east London, kept a diary in which she confessed her uncertainty about whether she could cope when the bombing started. The first bomb she experienced blew her off her bicycle. She picked herself up and ran to help survivors. The first thing she saw was a baby in the road, burst open from the force of the blast. She wrapped it in a curtain and went on to cover up half a dozen more mutilated bodies in the street. The hope that she could ‘control her nerves’ had been a personal obstacle to overcome, as it was for a great many people. She reflected that civil defence workers were like soldiers waiting apprehensively for their first taste of enemy fire. After the first few times ‘one forgot oneself entirely in the job on hand’; people worked with a ‘dogged equanimity’.¹⁹⁹ The mundane context in which local disasters occurred, in familiar neighbourhoods, among friends or acquaintances, nevertheless differed from the serviceman’s experience. Nixon met RAF crew on leave in her area more frightened of bombing than she was.