The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

The idea of a civilian front line raised innumerable questions about how to transform a predominantly urban population, organized by civilian authorities, into a community capable of withstanding and contesting the effects of heavy bombing. The local records make it clear that if the Blitz had begun on 3 September 1939, the consequences would have been much worse than they proved to be a year later. The long interval between the outbreak of war and the onset of the bombing gave both the government and the local administration the time to prepare their front line and to encourage the growing militarization of a large section of the population. The slow pace of recruitment of civil defence personnel before the start of the war ended with the onset of hostilities. Between 1939 and 1940 an army of regulars and volunteers was created capable of manning the front line; for the rest of the civil population habits of obedience to the blackout regulations, gas-mask drill, air-raid alerts and evacuation imposed on everyone an exceptional pattern of wartime behaviour that persisted until the very end of the war. Part of this regulation represented simple self-interest, but it survived even during the long periods after 1941 when the bombing was comparatively light and intermittent. The development of a civil defence mentality derived in part from the democratic nature of total war, which insisted that all citizens had a part to play and encouraged the view that wartime identity was linked to new ideals of the civil warrior.⁶ When the government considered the idea that workers should carry on working even after the air-raid alarm had sounded, the risk was justified by the argument that all those engaged in vital war work ‘are frontline troops’.⁷ In 1945 Herbert Morrison, British Home Secretary through most of the Blitz, summed up the civil defence forces he had organized as a ‘citizen army’ filled with ‘rank-and-file warriors’, men and women alike.⁸

In reality civilians were not soldiers. The civil defence network had to be built up from the late 1930s using civilians who were neither armed nor uniformed nor used to the demands of regular, quasi-military discipline. Following the Air Raid Precautions Act in late 1937, local authorities were obliged to establish a local civil defence scheme to be approved by the Home Office Air Raid Precautions Department, set up in 1935 under Sir John Hodsoll. Central government undertook to fund 65–75 per cent of the cost, subject to Home Office approval. The local councils were expected to appoint an ARP Controller to coordinate all civil defence activity, and it was generally expected that in the threatened urban areas this would be the local town clerk, head of the municipal administration. He would be subject to a local Emergency Committee or War Executive Committee formed by elected councillors and municipal officials of whom the most important were expected to be the city’s chief engineer, the local medical officer of health, the chief air-raid warden and the chief constable of police (who in some cases doubled as chief warden).⁹ The decision was taken by the government that civil defence should be grafted onto the existing structure of local administration, which meant placing a heavy burden on officials who had no necessary understanding of the problems involved in organizing passive defences or in disciplining their populations to collaborate and conform. Some relief was to be found by establishing Group Units, which linked smaller local authorities together and allowed them to pool resources and share experiences.¹⁰