The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

The reaction to raiding varied widely from area to area, but in the opening weeks it was clear that the civil defence system could not deliver everything the bombed population needed. The problem was in some respects worse in the smaller cities outside London where a heavy raid could destroy much of the civil defence structure and dislocate a higher proportion of the population. The major raids on Southampton on 30 November and 1 December 1940 exposed the problems of dealing with a sudden disaster even when it had been anticipated. The attacks destroyed the telephone system and made communication difficult; the Control Room in the city’s civic centre building was knocked out but, contrary to instructions, no auxiliary control centre had been prepared; the water mains were severely disrupted, producing an acute water shortage; food was available but not distributed effectively; the thousands of evacuees who fled into the countryside could not be properly provisioned or disciplined; a number of full-time first-aid staff abandoned their posts at the risk of prosecution; the almost 3,000 soldiers and workers who were sent to help could not be properly fed or housed. In his report for the government, the Regional Commissioner admitted that ‘The Civic Authorities were overwhelmed by the magnitude of the disaster.’¹⁰³ An official of the Ministry of Food, sent to Southampton after the raids, found the remaining population ‘dazed, bewildered, unemployed and uninstructed’. In the bombed areas people stayed in their houses without food or safe water; information on the location of Rest Centres and canteens could not be passed on because of a complete breakdown of communication. The five mobile canteens visited had no more than a handful of customers, and only tea and sandwiches to dispense; one arrived from London driven by two women with only supplies of tea, sugar and soap. The official could find no communal feeding facilities. ‘Over and above everything,’ he wrote in his report, ‘local authorities must once and for all be condemned. They have everywhere, I think, proved inefficient… they are parochial, slow and indecisive.’ Among ‘islands of good work’ he found half-measures and ad hoc arrangements which threatened ‘the progressive deterioration of morale in every English city’.¹⁰⁴

The relative failure of the efforts to shelter and rescue the bombed communities provoked a crisis at the centre of the war effort by the end of September 1940 not unlike the crisis facing the RAF with the switch to night-bombing. Churchill pressured Anderson to do something urgently about the shelter crisis and to restore confidence in the ARP structure, but for all his widely acknowledged competence, Anderson was not an inspiring home-front commander. Beaverbrook suggested to Churchill in early October that a change was needed at the top. Anderson became Lord President of the Council, responsible for home-front mobilization of resources, and on 3 October his place was taken by the former Labour Party chair of the London County Council, Herbert Morrison. Morrison was a popular political figure, a barrow boy from Lambeth and a conscientious objector in the First World War, who dedicated himself in the interwar years to promoting the welfare of poorer Londoners. He was a blunt, intelligent and politically astute politician, capable much more readily than Anderson of engaging with public concerns and demonstrating the government’s desire to act. He recruited the radical Labour MP for Jarrow, Ellen Wilkinson, as his under-secretary responsible for shelter. Nicknamed ‘Miss Perky’ by her parliamentary colleagues, her energy and forthrightness were deemed to be the right qualities for one of the hardest jobs to be faced in the winter of 1940.¹⁰⁵