The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

Coping mechanisms took many forms: increased interest in horoscopes and prediction; a return to religious belief (fostered by the exceptional practical assistance supplied by many priests in bombed areas); a show of fatalistic bravado. Accounts confirm that Londoners really did say that they were safe from everything except the bomb with their name on it. In areas with prolonged bombing, individuals could become insensitive to the sufferings of others as a way of protecting their own psychological stability. One London woman working for ARP wrote that ‘We have adjusted our minds to the fact that tragedies do happen… Thank God for the adaptability of the human mind.’²²⁹ This view of death was encouraged by the authorities, who wanted to limit the emotional space available to express grief by carefully controlling the mass burials made necessary by the number and condition of the corpses. Popular hostility to the idea of burial in a common grave, with its stigma of pauperism, was allayed to some extent by militarizing the burial ceremonies.²³⁰ Public expressions of grief or strain were common enough during a raid itself, but shelter marshals had instructions to try to isolate or remove hysterical or emotionally disturbed shelterers, not all of whom, as had been assumed, were women. The habits of British emotional reserve and sangfroid were adopted as cultural archetypes which ordinary people should, as far as they were able, try to approximate. Virginia Cowles found her caretaker and his wife eating supper calmly in their kitchen with the noise of bombs falling in the distance and the windows rattling. ‘I asked them if they weren’t afraid and Mrs K. said: “Oh, no. If we were, what good would it do us?”’ Cowles decided that if they could take it, she could too, and went to bed ‘hoping that if death came it would be instantaneous’.²³¹ Though reality might often be very different, the repetition of images of imperturbability helped to reinforce and validate imperturbable behaviour.

After the Blitz declined in intensity in June 1941, a number of surveys were conducted to try to understand why British society had not broken down under the bombs. This was a matter of judgement, and for the historian too any attempt to suggest what might have led to social breakdown even in one city is an exercise in speculation. In the end, despite a level of casualty higher than it might have been with better shelters and better shelter discipline, the Blitz resulted in the deaths of only 0.1 per cent of the population and serious injury to a further 0.15 per cent. Most of the damaged houses were fit enough for habitation after a few weeks or months. Food supplies were effectively maintained and food stocks increased. Air Intelligence calculated that if the German Air Force had more than doubled its effort it might have pushed the population ‘to breaking point’, but there was no supporting evidence to underpin the claim. The surveys carried out by government scientists concluded that a city like Birmingham might require four times the weight of bombs to overwhelm the civil defences; their final judgement in April 1942 suggested that to achieve real results the offensive should have been at least five times greater in scale. Even here no attempt was made to define properly what it meant to ‘knock out’ a city or to demoralize a population to the point of social collapse.²³²

TAKING IT AGAIN: BOMBING 1941–5

In December 1940 Sir George Gater, Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Home Security, chaired a committee meeting on ‘intensive air attacks’ which concluded unanimously that the type of attack experienced in the Blitz ‘was very much what had been originally anticipated’.²³³ This was far from the truth. The authorities had anticipated daytime raids and had made almost no provision for dormitory shelters; raids were expected to be of brief duration rather than lasting for six to eight hours; the high proportion of incendiaries had not been prepared for; a great deal of redundant effort had gone into anticipating gas attack with a variety of toxic elements. Over the course of the four wartime years following the Blitz most of these deficiencies were rectified. Civil defence was much better placed to cope with a heavy bombing offensive in 1944 than it had been in 1940.