The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

Diaries and memoirs also illustrate moments of intense hatred. ‘The wickedness of this enemy is beyond words,’ wrote Clara Milburn after the bombing of neighbouring Coventry; Edward Stebbing was told by an old soldier who had spent his leave in London in October 1940 that even after the war if he met a German, ‘he would want to murder him’. The Ministry of Information received a letter after the bombing of Southampton from an eyewitness claiming that morale would be raised only by the knowledge that Britain was going to hit back ‘to give the Boche some of his own medicine and to hell with the Boche women and children’. The Ministry declined to reply on the ground that the author seemed too panic-stricken for reasonable argument.²¹³

More surprising is the widespread evidence that simple vengeance against the Germans was disapproved of by much of the British public. Policy at the Ministry of Information, on Churchill’s instructions, was to play down the idea of reprisals. Home Intelligence reports showed that popular interest in reprisal was declining by the late autumn. Two RAF training stations organized debates on the motion ‘Should we bomb Berlin?’, but both registered strong majorities against.²¹⁴ Opinion polls taken over the course of the Blitz showed that in the bombed areas in particular there was no overwhelming desire for retaliation. In October 1940 the British Institute of Public Opinion (Gallup Polls) asked whether respondents would approve or disapprove of the RAF bombing of civilians and found the population exactly divided, 46 per cent for and 46 per cent against. The same question was asked again in April 1941, after six further months of bombing, and this time found 55 per cent in favour and 38 per cent against. But when the responses were divided by geographical area they revealed that in London more people were opposed to bombing enemy civilians than favoured it (47 per cent to 45 per cent), while the areas where there had been no bombing registered the highest proportion in favour and the lowest against (55 per cent to 36 per cent).²¹⁵ During the last months of 1940 a campaign began to take shape in London against the RAF night-bombing of Germany which finally resulted in the formation, in August 1941, of the Committee for the Abolition of Night-Bombing whose most prominent members were the economist Stanley Jevons, the writer Vera Brittain and the Quaker Corder Catchpool. It was supported not only by pacifist organizations, some of which ran a public campaign of propaganda against reprisal raids, but by non-pacifist public figures who risked popular hostility to maintain their objection to the idea that British interests could be served by bombing Germans indiscriminately.²¹⁶ In April 1941 the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, followed shortly afterwards by the playwright George Bernard Shaw and the classical scholar Gilbert Murray, published letters in The Times deploring night-bombing. The protests made no difference to RAF policy, but they did provoke debate about the legitimacy and purpose of bombing Germany back and showed that bombing did not necessarily encourage a thirst for vengeance.