The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  Roland Barthes, in his immensely influential Mythologies (1957), approached ‘myth’ semiologically, as a factor in everyday modern life obtrusive everywhere, a ‘type of speech’. Though I hope I have learnt something from Barthes and from those whom he has influenced, I don’t intend to work with his theory, so to speak, at my elbow. It is, however, useful to me that many of us now understand ‘myth’ as a relevant term in the discussion of apparent trivialities, like car design or magazine covers, obviously auratic phenomena like the charisma of film stars and politicians, and the projection of events such as the Falklands crisis.

  ‘Semiology’, Barthes says, ‘has taught us that myth has the task of giving an historical intention a natural justification, and making contingency appear eternal … The world enters language as a dialectical relation between activities, between human actions; it comes out of myth as a harmonious display of essences. A conjuring trick has taken place; it has turned reality inside out, it has emptied it of history and has filled it with nature.’ If newcomers find these formulations bewildering, I hope this book will help them to sense the value of Barthes’ further point:

  Myth does not deny things, on the contrary, its function is to talk about them; simply, it purifies them, it makes them innocent, it gives them a natural and eternal justification, it gives them a clarity which is not that of an explanation but that of a statement of fact … In passing from history to nature, myth acts economically: it abolishes the complexity of human acts, it gives them the simplicity of essences, it does away with all dialectics, with any going back beyond what is immediately visible, it organises a world which is … without depth, a world wide open and wallowing in the evident, it establishes a blissful clarity: things appear to mean something by themselves.3 (My italics)

  For a relevant example of a mythological pseudo-explanation posing as a fact I will turn, not for the last time, to cricket, the most ‘English’ of games and perhaps the most ‘mythological’. All followers of cricket are bound to remember the extraordinary series of Test Matches between England and Australia in 1981. Briefly: England began a home series of six encounters under the captaincy of Ian Botham, an all-rounder who had already accomplished feats with bat and ball which were apt for ‘legendary’ status, but who had latterly been in poor form. Australia won the First Test. The second was a dismal draw. Botham was sacked as captain, though not dropped from the side. The England selectors brought back Mike Brearley as captain. Though not a very successful Test batsman, Brearley had the record of never leading a losing England side at home: He was a brilliant graduate in philosophy with an acute tactical sense.

  Even so, halfway through the Third Test at Leeds (Headingley) England were heading for a very heavy defeat, by an innings. At this point the mighty Botham, with help from tail-end batsmen, began to thrash the Australian bowling. This counter-attack took England to the point where the Australians had to bat again, though they needed to score only 129 runs to win. Unbelievably, they were dismissed for 111. Brearley’s record remained intact. Botham’s was now a fully fledged myth. In the next Test, it was in his role as bowler that he snatched for England another impossible win. In the fifth, he hammered another rapid century with the bat, England went 3–1 up in the series and regained the coveted ‘Ashes’. That the Sixth Test was drawn rather tamely did not now matter.

  Brearley, most literate of major cricketers, called his book about all this Phoenix from the Ashes. In summing up, he turned his thoughts to Hughes, the Australian captain:

  For Kim Hughes, 1981 must have been a desperately frustrating season. With just ordinary luck at Headingley, his team would have won comfortably. Probably there would have been no revival by England after that (though as a country we have specialised in doing badly at the beginning of wars and ending up victorious!).4

  Cricket has been projected as a ‘gentleman’s’ sport, and it behoves gentlemen to be modest. Brearley does not wish to suggest that he believes his own skill as captain could have ‘saved’ England. Yet he cannot quite bring himself to put it all down to ‘luck’. He evokes a mythological ‘fact’ which provides an alternative ‘natural’ explanation. The push of this insinuation is not to assimilate sport with war (after all, the Australians are ‘kith and kin’ and allies), but war with sport. History is given what Barthes calls ‘the simplicity of essences’. It is ‘purified’.

  Against Brearley’s myth that the British begin wars badly, end well, could be set such ‘facts’ as England’s lack of success in the war against Spain after the Armada, the Russian recovery in the Crimean War and the guerrilla successes of the Boers after their conventional forces had been defeated.5 But as Barthes suggests, myth is invulnerable to mere facts. It ‘essentially aims at causing an immediate impression – it does not matter if one is later allowed to see through the myth, its action is assumed to be stronger than the rational explanations which may later belie it’.6 In this case the ‘immediate impression’ made by Brearley’s statement of a mythological ‘fact’ of the kind which ‘everyone knows’ is reinforced by one ‘memory’ in particular, that of Dunkirk.

  The implications of the Dunkirk Myth can be clarified by contrasting it with a superficially similar one. Australians, like the British (whom they tend to dismiss as ‘whingeing Poms’), have mythologised a notable defeat: Gallipoli, 1915. In April of that year ANZAC (Australian and New Zealand) forces were landed in the Dardanelles as part of an attempt to open up the Bosphorus and the Black Sea. Australians established a bridgehead at an unsuitable landing place under withering Turkish fire. For months they tussled unavailingly with brave Turks, gaining insignificant ground, until the directors of the war in London decided that the Gallipoli venture had failed, and allied troops were evacuated (December 1915) ‘in such an exemplary fashion’, one historian tells us, ‘that Sir Ian Hamilton’s last order of the day reads as though it were in celebration of a victory’.7

  Australians provided a quarter of the casualties at Gallipoli – 8,587 killed and 19,367 wounded. Their courage won applause from British observers – the novelist Compton Mackenzie, mindful of the classical associations of the area where they fought, wrote that there was ‘not one of these glorious young men’ who ‘might not himself have been Ajax … Hector or Achilles’. He admired ‘their tallness and majestic simplicity of line’.8 The world began to realise at this time that Australians had a distinctive ethos, seen not only in Turkey but on the Western Front. Their soldiers were all volunteers, and fought ‘without threat of firing squads if they chanced to disobey’:

  Anzac troops were contemptuous of the narrow discipline to which British troops subscribed and were led by officers who had first shown their qualities as privates in the ranks. Social distinctions between officers and men, so characteristic of the British army, were therefore less pronounced; Australian-born soldiers could not, for instance, be induced to serve as officers’ servants …9

  Their combination of fierce courage with disrespect for authority made a strong impression in England. An Anglican parson in Essex, Andrew Clark, noted in his diary in 1917 the remarks of a chaplain back from the Front: ‘The Australian troops are splendid fellows, but very independent. They will not take any order which they think unreasonable, from any officer, whatever his rank.’ There follows an anecdote, told ‘good-humouredly’ by a British general who had come upon a party of Australians sleeping and smoking after a march, had ordered them to fall in so that he could inspect them, received no response, repeated his order, was answered by one man ‘Fall in yourself, and be damned’, saw he’d made a fool of himself, and rode off.10

  This third-hand tale, whether based on ‘fact’ or not, is clearly ‘mythological’. A myth of Australian identity was being formed out of Australians’ perception of themselves in a new, foreign context, British reactions to these ‘colonials’, and Australian reactions to British reactions. The same parson–diarist, about the same time, reported friction in a local military hospital between an elderly British vol
unteer nurse and an Australian Sister: ‘The other day Miss L.V. pointed her out to a lady visitor and said, loud enough to be heard, “That is the Australian Sister.” The lady stared at her somewhat rudely; walked off a few steps; and turned round and stared again. “Gracious me!” said the Sister to a bystander. “Does the woman expect me to hop like a kangaroo?”’11

  However, the Gallipoli myth of Australian identity projected that quasi-fact, that piece of ‘nature’, in male terms. It built on the foundations of an earlier mythology of ‘mateship’. Russel Ward, the historian, in his influential account of The Australian Legend (1958), suggested that it was from images of the outback life of the frontiersman that the presentday stereotype of the Australian derived. He was practical, rough and ready, hated affectation, was always swearing, loved gambling and drinking, was sceptical about the value of religion and of intellectual and cultural pursuits generally; was a ‘great “knocker” of eminent people’, was fiercely independent, hated policemen and military officers, but was very hospitable and would stick to his mates through thick and thin.12 Despite the subsequent advance of ‘women’s liberation’, not least in Australia, there is evidence that this macho male myth of national identity is still strong. The burgeoning Australian feature-film industry favours outback locations over the city suburbs in which the vast majority of Australians actually live, and has arguably flaunted macho values in images of the ‘Battling White Aussie’.13 In this case, Peter Weir’s film Gallipoli (1981) is not a throwback, with its elegiac evocation of two strong, handsome young ‘mates’ who fight and die in the Dardanelles, but a symptomatic instance of a still-dominant mythology.

  The myth of Gallipoli turns defeat into discovery. C. E. W. Bean, later the official Australian historian of the Great War, wrote in 1915, in the soldiers’ Anzac Book:

  We only know from good and great

  Nothing save good can flow.

  That where the cedar crashed so straight

  No crooked tree shall grow.

  In 1919, Bean proposed that ‘the big thing in the war for Australia was the discovery of the character of Australian man. It was character which rushed the hills at Gallipoli and held on there during the long afternoon and night, when everything seemed to have gone wrong and there was only the barest hope of success.’ And in 1945, after Australians had again fought bravely. Bean exclaimed that ‘The “Anzac spirit” of brotherhood and initiative as shown by our fighting forces and Legacy Clubs is the kind of force to move the world.’ As Alastair Thomson (to whom I owe these quotations) comments, in the Anzac-Gallipoli mythology, ‘Images of the past are fused with a vision of the future; the individual becomes one with the nation.’14

  ‘Gallipoli’ as myth represents the discovery of a new national identity. It arrives without precedent (Australian forces had never been so committed in large-scale warfare before) and at once attracts to itself the ‘mateship’ mythology evolved over a bare century and a quarter since the arrival of the first convict settlers in New South Wales. It renders war ‘innocent’, and ‘naturalises’ as quintessentially Australian qualities seen at their sharpest (supposedly) in wartime adversity. The Dardanelles defeat was not Australia’s – it was suffered by the British Empire, as a result of a strategy decided by the British government. Britons, not Australians, bungled. Hence the Gallipoli myth also crystallises Australian resentment against British condescension towards colonials, and Australians’ sense of difference from Britons. It is also intrinsically expansionist: the Gallipoli heroes far from home show the world what Australians are made of, and represent, as Bean put it, ‘the kind of force to move the world’.

  ‘Dunkirk’, by contrast, involves not discovery but rediscovery, or confirmation. It is not, as ‘Armada’ and ‘Glorious Revolution’ once were, a myth for a rising nation. It is a myth for people ‘living in an old country’, to adapt the title of Patrick Wright’s recent book (1985). It does not shrug off defeat, like ‘Gallipoli’; it accepts it and sublimates it, adapting old mythology. ‘As a country we have specialised in doing badly at the beginning of wars and ending up victorious’ is Mike Brearley’s revival of a myth already to hand in 1940.

  In Arthur Bryant’s Years of Victory, a narrative, published in 1944, of the war against France from 1802 to 1812, that Tory historian mused over ‘England [sic] Alone’ in the year 1806: ‘It was always the way of England to measure adversity with resolution, and there was no weakening of her purpose.’ Without drawing parallels with 1940 – without need to – Bryant noted how ‘the Kentish ports’, in 1809, ‘were filled with militiamen bearing pale-faced ghosts from the transports to hastily improvised reception centres’, after the failure of a British expeditionary force in the Low Countries. ‘Twice in eight months had a British army come home in such a plight. It was enough, as a sea captain said, to make John Bull shake his head …’ And in Iberia, Wellesley retreated after Talavera: ‘For even the battle which, in their exultation at their soldiers’ courage, the people of England [sic] had hailed as the successor of Agincourt and Cressy had proved Pyrrhic and fruitless.’ But Wellesley, the ‘Fabian General’, remained ‘in his calculating, undemonstrative way … at heart an optimist. He saw the inherent flimsiness of Napoleon’s dominion: its foundations were not sound in time.’ Wellesley, now Wellington, wrote in March 1810 that the position in Iberia had ‘always appeared to be lost … The contest however still continues.’15

  Other traditions of an ‘old country’ could be melded with ‘Dunkirk’. From the revolutionary Left, Tom Wintringham wrote, just after the evacuation, in July 1940, New Ways of War, designed to instruct British civilians on techniques for fighting Nazi invaders. Wintringham had commanded the British Battalion in the International Brigades in Spain during the civil war. He saw Dunkirk as exemplary, when, in his tract, a ‘Penguin Special’, he suggested a form of ‘agreement’ to be affirmed by all:

  As soldiers, or as civilians who from now on count themselves soldiers, we shall give in the common disciplined effort all our initiative and abilities, including our ability to hang on as our soldiers hung on at Calais and Dunkirk. We will stick by whatever we find to do or are told to do in spite of invasion, bombardment, wounds, hunger or whatever may be the price of victory.

  He evoked the spirit of seventeenth-century English revolutionaries:

  In this country freedom, made real in new forms, is still as powerful and as heartening as it was in the days when Milton wrote that liberty ‘hath enfranchis’d, enlarg’d and lifted up our apprehensions degrees above themselves’ … Men of the past made our nation by conquering tyranny; like them we shall conquer.16

  ‘Gallipoli’ signifies novelty, expansion, history-to-be-made. ‘Dunkirk’, even with left-wing inflexions, signifies reiteration, retrenchment, history-as-made. Barthes argues as if ‘mythology’ were essentially right-wing, identical in its processes with ‘bourgeois ideology’. This is very debatable. But this book will suggest that left-wing interventions in the myth-making process from 1940 through 1941 and onwards contributed to a right wing, or at least ‘conservative’, effect. While talking like Wintringham about ‘new ways of war’ and new freedoms, left-wingers ineluctably drew on the existing mythologies of ‘an old country’.

  Patrick Wright’s On Living in an Old Country considers ‘everyday life, nostalgia and the national past’ in contemporary Britain, and discussion of his views may help to clarify my point that ‘myth’ entails more than ‘untrue stories, legends’.

  While historiography, quasi-scientific, is a valuable pursuit, and its quest for true or truer ‘facts’ is amply justified, it arises from ‘everyday historical consciousness’. Historians, after all, live in ‘everyday life’. (I first heard about the Blitz from my father, who ‘was there’. This book is one consequence of his stories.) Everyday life is full of stories. These are concerned with ‘being-in-the world’ rather than with abstractly defined truth. Such stories have to be plausible, but their ‘authenticity’, which is a vital ingredient
, does not depend on true knowledge. When authenticity collides with ‘factual’ truth, people in everyday life, even historians trying to work outside it, will often stubbornly resist the latter. (I return to my cricketing example. The mythological power of Mike Brearley’s evocation of history would survive any amount of detailed citation of examples standing against his generalisation.)

  Historical consciousness has more pressing motivations than scientific accuracy. A Scot can live as a Scot without thinking about, let alone knowing in detail, the calculations which led Robert Bruce to seize the throne, and their legal, social, economic, diplomatic and other contexts; but every Scot chanting at a football match knows that ‘Bruce beat the English at Bannockburn’. Historical consciousness, involved with ‘stories’, helps us to bring our world into order, to ‘make sense’. In a homogeneous and static society – say, that of hunter-gatherers in a favourable environment well away from competing groups – people would accept reality ready-made; it would make sense quasi-naturally. But such equilibrium must have been rare over the roughly 10,000 years since agriculture and warfare were invented, and industrialisation and modernisation over the last 200 have made stasis seem abnormal and even ‘unnatural’, (‘I don’t see the tide of economic history reversing itself,’ one of Mrs Thatcher’s ministers announced in February 1986. Since the eighteenth century, Western man has commonly assimilated change not only with ‘progress’ – which shouldn’t be ‘reversed’ – but with nature: the tide of the sea; although, of course, the tide does ‘reverse’, change, in either direction, is inevitable.) As Wright puts it: ‘The everyday “sense of historical existence” becomes progressively anxious, searching more intently for answers which – in the dislocated experience of modernity – seem to be less and less readily forthcoming.’17 What Wright calls ‘particularisms’ – ‘us’ as opposed to ‘them’ – confront the ‘destabilising demands of social transformation’. The ‘sense of national identity and belonging’ projected in Britain during the Second World War may or may not be defined in Wright’s phrase as ‘bourgeois-imperial’ (there are objections against so defining it, of a ‘commonsense’ kind), but clearly Churchill spoke for a ‘dominant particularism’ lording over the particularisms of marginal groups like Welsh-speakers and subordinated ones like coal-miners. And he spoke through the myths of a particular historical consciousness.