The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

Since not everything necessary to provide protection could be paid for, states opted for particular strategies to try to minimize the potential social damage. Evacuation was one way of ensuring the possible survival of large fractions of the urban community. In France, where there was profound concern throughout the interwar years about the problems for security posed by a sharply declining rate of population growth, the social body was to be preserved by moving women and children out of the city in an organized way as soon as war began, since they were the biological investment for the future. Extensive provision was made for evacuation in the late 1930s, and the delay in sending an ultimatum to Berlin following the German attack on Poland was excused by the need to transport the vulnerable population out of Paris in anticipation of a sudden, annihilating air attack.⁶⁴ In Germany, where pro-natalist priorities were equally evident, the Hitler government opted to avoid mass evacuations, first by encouraging local communities to establish ‘self-protection’ through rigorous civil defence training and the creation of private cellar and basement shelters, and second by reliance on an extensive military anti-air defence of guns, searchlights and radar. By making the population stay put, it was hoped that Germany’s war economy would suffer less disruption; but it also met the ideological requirement to demonstrate family and community solidarity in the face of the aerial threat.⁶⁵ In Britain, limited evacuation was organized in the late 1930s, but greater emphasis was put on preparations for gas warfare, since fear of gas bombing remained at the forefront of British interwar anxieties about the bombing war. Gas masks were produced for the entire population, and decontamination squads organized earlier and trained more thoroughly than other civil defenders. In Germany masks were issued only to the population most likely to be under threat, in France they were issued late and in insufficient numbers, while in Italy masks had to be bought at considerable expense, and were poorly distributed. In the Soviet Union, where the gas mask was a symbol of a nationwide anti-air organization, Osoviakhim, supplies never exceeded more than 10 per cent of the population.⁶⁶

Civil defence regimes everywhere in the 1930s depended on some level of popular participation. One of the implications of total war waged by bomber aircraft was the need for home populations to recognize that they would become, willy-nilly, a home army combating the effects of air raids. Levels of participation, not all of it voluntary, varied from state to state. In Germany and the Soviet Union, mass organizations were created – 13 million in the German Air Defence League (Luftschutzbund), founded in 1932, 15 million in the Soviet Osoviakhim, established in 1927. Neither organization was a formal civil defence service, but they provided propaganda and training for householders, students and workers. In both cases there was a strong ideological imperative to join, in the Soviet case to help preserve the new revolutionary state, in the German case to defend the National Socialist ‘People’s Community’. In other states there was greater reliance on volunteers for regular civil defence services, medical aid and welfare, but these numbered millions by the end of the 1930s. A conservative estimate of the number of Europeans involved in some form of civil defence activity by 1939 is somewhere between 30 and 32 million, the great majority German and Soviet. The motives for joining evidently varied widely. If some were motivated by apprehension at what the air war would be like, it seems more plausible that those who became full-time or part-time civil defence workers did so because they believed it was possible to ameliorate the physical and social effects of bombing, despite rather than because of the lurid images of its unbearable nature. A proportion was almost certainly animated by the ideology of community protection, though some, like the British novelist Henry Green, joined in order to avoid having to serve in the army.⁶⁷ A great many became civil defenders simply because of where they worked and lived.