The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

During the spring of 1939 a network of Regional Commissioners was established to compensate for the difficulties local authorities might experience, and although their executive responsibilities were defined rather inexactly, they represented an important link once war had broken out between the main ministries involved in civil defence or emergency work and the local ARP organizations. There were eventually twelve Civil Defence Regions covering the entire country, each with a major headquarters in a designated city and a large staff responsible for coordinating the welfare and emergency services. Because of its size and importance, London was awarded five commissioners.¹¹ The whole structure was to be controlled by the British Home Secretary, who on the outbreak of war would also hold the newly created post of Minister of Home Security. The man eventually chosen for this dual role was Sir John Anderson, a much-respected career civil servant, austere, sharp-minded and principled, but remote from the teeming city populations now under his care. The Ministry was activated on 4 September 1939.¹² The strength of the British wartime system rested on these clear ligaments linking local and central government and the fortunate absence of duplication of effort, but its success rested a great deal on the capacity of local civilian officials to respond to the strenuous demands of war, and this could by no means be taken for granted.

Local authorities built up their civil defence organization with no standard pattern and no common schedule. In those urban areas where there was strong political resistance from a wide spectrum of pacifist and anti-war groups to civil defence as an expression of militarism and war preparation, it proved possible to block the development of effective organization until close to the start of the war. Other authorities began preparation several years before it became a legal obligation. When the City Engineer in Hull wrote a circular letter to other urban authorities in early 1938 to find out what progress they had made with civil defence measures, he found schemes already in existence in Walsall, Doncaster, Coventry, Ealing, Stoke Newington, Manchester, Leeds, Newcastle and Birmingham, but no schemes at all in Sunderland, Bradford, York, Rotherham, Sheffield, Middlesborough and half a dozen other industrial cities. The most comprehensive schemes had been developed as early as 1935 in Coventry and Newcastle, covering every potential aspect of emergency work, training and public education; major schemes in Leeds and Manchester were ready by the autumn of 1936. Most cities had a scheme in place by the time of the Munich Agreement, in late September 1938.¹³

To cope with the new demands, local authorities appointed a full-time ARP controller, but much of the work was carried out by men, and occasionally women, who combined civil defence functions with their other duties. The key institution was the Control Room, which was usually set up in the local town hall in a bomb-safe basement, linked by telephone to other emergency centres or served by a troop of young messengers recruited from uniformed youth groups. By the outbreak of war, progress in constructing a functioning civil defence organization differed widely between areas, though the local records show that it was seldom ideal. In the London borough of Hampstead the ARP services were reported to be ready to function fully in an emergency by July 1939 and all gas masks had been issued to the population. The Control Room and first-Aid posts were fully manned round the clock from 31 August, but out of the planned 1,100 air-raid wardens only 220 were in place and from 45 cycle messengers, only three.¹⁴ In York, less menaced than London, progress was even slower. By October the city’s Emergency Committee had still not put up signs showing where warden posts and air-raid shelters could be found, a major domestic shelter programme had only just begun, gas masks had not yet been fully distributed for babies and children, and a full-time ARP officer had not yet been appointed. Out of 1,700 warden volunteers only 964 were effective and 500 had disappeared since the outbreak of war.¹⁵