The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

There were many other reactions, some of which could coexist with fear and despondency, some of which transcended them. There are accounts of bravado, exhilaration, curiosity, anger, detachment that defy any attempt to impose generic categories on the victims of bombing. Harold Nicolson, Duff Cooper’s deputy at the Ministry of Information, wrote the following in his diary after the bombing of his offices in the University of London Senate House building in November 1940: ‘It was all great fun and I enjoyed it. This is not a pose. I was exhilarated. I am odd about that. I have no nerves for this sort of thing.’²⁰⁴ One London warden, whose letters were published while the Blitz was still happening, recalled a mixture of emotions but no fear: ‘For my part, I am beginning to bear all perils with a certain philosophical detachment, a kind of intellectual courage… I climbed to the top of one of the city’s highest buildings and there excitedly awaited the battle.’²⁰⁵ The aftermath of bombing, particularly in smaller cities where bombing was uncommon, brought trails of sightseers, curious to view the damage. Police had to set up roadblocks outside Coventry following the raid on 14–15 November to keep visitors out of the city; at the tiny port of Whitley Bay in Northumberland, bombed sporadically in 1941 and 1942, the incidents attracted visitors in such numbers that rescue work was hampered and police and civil defence workers had to be employed to keep the crowds under control.²⁰⁶

Bombing also generated an instant cultural response. Artists, photographers, writers, poets, and critics embraced bombing and its aftermath despite the horrors. This could be done with official approval. The paintings of John Piper (who arrived in Coventry almost immediately after the bombing to record the damage) or Edward Ardizzone were part of the War Artists programme. Henry Moore’s drawings of the shelterers in the Underground are the best-remembered images of the Blitz (though at the time Londoners were reported to be ‘baffled and insulted’ by his modernist idiom).²⁰⁷ Writers and poets found in the bombed cities a rich source of inspiration, ‘half masonry, half pain’ in the words of the poet Mervyn Peake. A number became civil defence workers – Henry Green, Stephen Spender, Graham Greene, Rose Macaulay – and gave literary expression to their experience of what one literary warden called ‘a splendid violence’.²⁰⁸ The poet Louis MacNeice, looking at the aftermath of a raid, could not help himself ‘regarding it as a spectacle’, the colours and textures of smoke, fire and water like ‘the subtlest of Impressionist paintings’.²⁰⁹ The cultural voyeurism was a tribute to the democratic character of the new home-front war because the images were of ordinary people and the descriptions were of the mundane and everyday, even if most of those who experienced the bombing were unlikely to see the pictures or read the novels that so vividly captured their suffering.

Among the many ambivalent reactions to bombing was the popular attitude towards the Germans. Where it might seem self-evident that a bombed population would want to be revenged on a hateful enemy, the effect of the raiding produced a complex response. There was certainly no shortage of anger.²¹⁰ The general secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen, writing in the Railway Review in November 1940, urged a bombing policy that spared the German people ‘none of the terrors that we have endured… bomb for bomb, blow for blow, by night and day’.²¹¹ Lady Hilda Wittenham gave a forthright response to a letter in the press from Lord Queensborough, which had deplored the deaths of German women and babies:

The lesson we wish to teach is this. Let the German women get out of their homes and rush into their shelters and let their homes be razed to the ground… Let this lesson be taught to German women all over Germany so that not a single home stands. Then they will understand what their brutal work has done here.²¹²