The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

The British people were the first to experience a heavy and prolonged campaign of independent bombing. British society was the first to be tested to see whether the fantastic images of social disintegration suggested in the air culture of the pre-war years would really be the outcome. Moreover, British civilians had for centuries been spared the horrors of invasion, occupation and civil war that had regularly punctuated the history of Continental Europe. The violent death of over 43,000 people during the almost year-long German campaign was an unprecedented violation of British domestic life. The narrative of this violation differs remarkably from the narrative of the bombing itself, as it does for all bombing campaigns. Bombing raids took a matter of a few hours at most, but the act of ejecting the bombs took no more than a few seconds over the target. Bomber crews were not like soldiers, confined to the front lines, the battlefield strewn with corpses, the wreckage wrought by bombs and shells all too visible. Aircrews returned to base and an environment of relative calm. Yet for the bombed community the strike of the bombs was just the beginning. The material, social and psychological impact of bomb destruction persisted for weeks or months, sometimes for years. Bombing was a brief, if dangerous, operation for the bomber crew, but it was a profound social fact for the victims who lived more permanently with its consequences.

The British government was all too aware in the late 1930s of the extraordinary demands likely to be made on the fabric of the state and the resolution of the population if a major bombing campaign ever happened. Though preparations to cope with the air menace were launched nationwide from the mid-1930s, there remained intrinsic limitations as to what could be done. A report on evacuation plans in January 1939 put the problem bluntly: ‘in a country of the size of England there is under the conditions of modern war no place of absolute safety’.² It was understood that safety was only relative and that high levels of casualty and destruction were almost certainly unavoidable. The one sure protection for the population was to provide bombproof shelter, but central government and local authorities alike appreciated that this was a counsel of perfection. An official leaflet on shelters produced in 1939 urged the public to realize that the idea of a ‘bombproof’ shelter was misleading. ‘Literally it means a shelter conferring complete immunity from the direct hit of the heaviest piercing bomb,’ ran the explanation. ‘It is not considered practicable to design a structure… giving such immunity.’³ The official British response to the coming bombing campaign was always to limit the damage, not to avoid it.

BUILDING THE NEW FRONT LINE: 1939–40

The view that civilian society was willy-nilly in the firing line in modern war turned the home front into a fighting front. This was a universal response in all societies threatened by bombing, reflected in the language used to describe civilian defence. When the editor of the New Statesman, Kingsley Martin, visited the East End in September 1940 after the start of the heavy raids, he found ‘in the most exact and non-metaphorical sense, the front line of an enormous battle’.⁴ Local civil defence authorities divided their operational activities into two parts: the first they called ‘the Battle’, carried on when the bombs dropped; the second was ‘the Aftermath’, coping with the victims and the restoration of services.⁵ As the war went on, those engaged in all the many branches of civilian defence came to view themselves as a fourth service, alongside the army, navy and air force.