The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

The sense that here were urban communities about to become embattled reinforced the argument that in the next war whole societies would be on the front line. This did little to allay the anxieties about air warfare. Civil defence preparations could be seen as a rational response to threat, but they could also be seen as a sure indication that bombing and gassing were going to happen. In Germany by the late 1930s the civil defence authorities found evidence that side by side with community civil defence commitment there existed persistent anxiety and scepticism about the dangers to which the population was now exposed and the deficiencies of existing provision.⁶⁸ In Britain, popular reaction to increased civil defence activity provoked hostility from anti-war and pacifist lobbies which saw air-raid precautions as an invitation to militarize the nation and evidence that the government was preparing for war. The No More War Movement encouraged its members to acts of civil disobedience against civil defence requirements because they represented ‘the psychological preparation for rearmament’. In December 1937 the National Peace Council, the umbrella organization for all pacifist and anti-war groups, agreed to investigate the establishment of ARP Vigilance Committees in every city to challenge the implicit militarism of civil defence measures and to argue that peace was a surer path to security. Some local boroughs with left-wing councils refused to introduce civil defence measures until compelled to do so during the early months of war.⁶⁹

Much criticism was also levelled at what was seen as a deliberate failure on the part of government to provide even the minimum level of shelter and security.⁷⁰ Scientists and architects regularly recommended radical, if idealistic, responses to the air threat. In 1938 Frederick Towndrow, the editor of Architectural Design and Construction, argued in an article on ‘The Great Fear – And After’ for a systematic programme of urban decentralization, bomb-proof plans for building, and a network of bunkers and arterial roads underneath every city.⁷¹ Another proposal published in 1937 for building 100 new small towns designed to limit the air threat recommended broad boulevards, wide recreational spaces (useful for segregating parts of the town ‘which might happen to be on fire because of incendiary bombs’), and residential housing built around quadrangles to prevent the spread of gas and allow easy escape onto the street.⁷² In Germany in the late 1930s all new residential housing was supposed to have an air-raid shelter built into its design, while plans were also elaborated for decentralizing the population into small towns of 20,000 people, or even in isolated homesteads, one for every four acres of territory.⁷³ In France, fantastic schemes were sketched out against the air threat, including an air defence skyscraper more than five times the height of the Eiffel Tower, with platforms for anti-aircraft guns, observer posts and fighter aircraft, and an underground city of the future, its subterranean structure covered over with earth to allow farming to carry on above the sunken streets.⁷⁴ The integration of civil defence into thinking about town planning and construction provides a further illustration of the extent to which the expectation of future air war had become embedded in popular European culture by the late 1930s.