The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

The Ministry of Home Security, created for the emergency in 1939, was peremptorily closed down on 30 May 1945 and its powers transferred back to the Home Office. The five years in which it had taken the lead in preparing British society for total war on the home front and conducting its civilian offensive had represented an exceptional intervention by the state in the daily lives of Britain’s urban inhabitants. This had been achieved with evident areas of friction, social tension and occasional delinquency. The state provided a relatively sound organization but, in the beginning, poor facilities and limited material resources contributed to a high level of civilian casualties and community disruption. Fortunately for Britain’s war economy there was only a limited and temporary disruption of output. Over the course of the war the civil defence system became a large, expensively equipped and uniformed service with a higher operational capacity and potential effectiveness than it had enjoyed during the major bombing offensive.

Unlike the German home front, British society was not faced with an escalating and devastating offensive over five years of war, though the persistent threat of attack, including the final flourish with missiles instead of bombs, forced Britain to divert very substantial resources to keeping the home-front forces in being – resources that might well have been diverted to other more productive wartime purposes. Probably only in two months of the war, in September 1940 and May 1941, did the scale of attack and level of casualty suggest the possibility of a serious social or political crisis, but it would be wrong to argue that in either case the government was likely to compromise on the war effort. What is clear from the experience of bombing is the difficulty, later found in trying to evaluate ‘morale’ in defeated Germany and Japan, in separating out the effects of bombing from the many other sources of public concern. Bombing itself affects only very particular areas in clearly defined time. The scientist Patrick Blackett pointed out in his account of morale written in August 1941 the simple fact that no air force ‘will ever be large enough to bomb all the people all the time’.²⁷⁵

4 The Untold Chapter: The Bombing of Soviet Cities

In late September 1941 the British Under-Secretary of State for Air, Harold Balfour, found himself in Moscow attached to a mission headed by Lord Beaverbrook and the American diplomat Averell Harriman to discuss aid for the Soviet Union. Having experienced nine months of the Blitz on London, Balfour suddenly found himself again in the firing line from German bombers. He thought the blackout a model of its kind, ‘not a glimmer anywhere’, with cars dangerously invisible on the Moscow streets. The city was encircled by a thick apron of barrage balloons. On 2 October, as agreement was finally being signed on schedules of supplies for the Soviet war effort, the air-raid alarm went. Beaverbrook and Harriman were ushered down into the Moscow metro, where they dined and played cards to pass the time. Balfour instead disobeyed Soviet requests to shelter and went to the roof of the British Embassy, from which he was afforded a remarkable view of the heaviest anti-aircraft barrage he had ever witnessed. He reflected that for a country desperate for material aid from the West, their use of anti-aircraft ammunition was prodigal, but nonetheless apparently effective. Despite almost daily raids he saw comparatively little air-raid damage.¹