The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

None of these reactions brought British society remotely to the edge of crisis during the year of heavy bombing. Although much has been written about the dark side of the Blitz, the narrative suggests that moments of social breakdown or acute protest were rare, confined to particular areas and brief in extent. The authorities could not be certain of this in advance, so that there evolved a continuous process of monitoring, adjustment, negotiation and reform to cope with bombing disasters and their immediate consequences. ‘Morale’ in this sense was not something static, ‘susceptible of quantitative measurement’, as the Air Ministry put it, but reflected a variety of public opinions and emotional states, some of them positive, some negative.²¹⁷ How much of this reflected the impact of the air war is open to question. It is evident that many other issues on the home front and the fighting front preoccupied the wider public as well. A Mass Observation survey in August 1940 found that three-quarters of respondents could not name a British air marshal; included on the list of responses was Hermann Göring. A second MO report on the attitude of demolition labourers showed that they discussed the bombing hardly at all, but spent most of the time bantering about sex, race and loot, with an occasional comment on the war overseas.²¹⁸ Diaries and letters from the Blitz contain very full entries on the bombing at the start of the offensive, but both the regularity and the level of detail decline markedly after the first month. The war in Africa against Italy features widely; the debacle at Dakar, when a combined British/Free French force was repulsed by the Vichy garrison, was a humiliation that lingered on in the public mind; the Battle of the Atlantic and food supplies took top place in polls about war problems taken in November 1940 and March 1941, 20 per cent in the first case, 44 per cent in the second. Night-bombing was chosen by 12 per cent in November, but only 8 per cent four months later.²¹⁹

The maintenance of social and psychological stability in the bombed areas was not, of course, automatic. Two factors were of critical importance in explaining how British society coped with the Blitz. The role of the state and local authorities in managing the consequences of bomb attack was a major test of Britain’s capacity to survive its effects. The civil defence and emergency services played as full a part as the resources and planning would allow, and the performance of all services improved steadily over the period of the Blitz. The formal structures for coping with bombing came to be reinforced by a substantial fraction of the population that endorsed the public discourse on ‘front-line civilians’ and wanted to play a part, however limited, in a democratic war effort. In doing so they acted both as agents of authority but also as informal community monitors, reinforcing consensus and broadening the field of participation. One example may illustrate this process. In the Northumberland town of North Shields the residents of just two streets established a formal committee to run their fire-fighting party, with regular meetings and a minute book. The committee was elected by 85 per cent of the householders, who had to pay 5 shillings (25 pence) each to defray the expenses of ladders, stirrup pumps and water drums. Four fire parties, composed of a designated leader and five men, were allocated in shifts to watch for six hours every night. Women were allocated to day duty in parties led by two men. The few households that refused to participate received house visits to encourage them to join in. The rotas were observed until 1944 without a single incendiary threat.²²⁰ This represented an exceptional level of commitment on the part of this and hundreds of other small communities, which can perhaps best be explained in terms of a strong impulse towards democratic identification with the war effort. The bombing threat was uniquely able to mobilize these forms of popular engagement and to limit the space for non-compliance.