The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  It would be impertinent to suggest that those many on the left in Britain who responded with unease or indignation to events in India were merely woolly liberals or willing tools of Moscow. Menon gave living flesh to the idea that Britain was indeed an ‘imperialist’ power, and one currently acting in India with every appearance of arbitrary injustice. The organisers’ claims that the Convention somehow directly represented a million and a quarter people can be dismissed as knowingly mendacious. But there is no doubt that it was a very remarkable event – a huge meeting amid the rubble and bomb sites of London, evoking a very positive response.

  Celia Fremlin, one of Mass-Observation’s best workers, attended. She had been a CP member, but had resigned over the Nazi–Soviet Pact, and there is no reason to doubt the integrity of her report, which was not written for publication. As she saw it, the great bulk of those present were middle class, with a scattering of upper-middle people (‘many of these student and intellectual type’) and about 25 per cent working class. Men outnumbered women about 3:1. The attendance was overwhelmingly young – the majority seemed to be between twenty-five and thirty-five. There were ‘perhaps about twenty soldiers and airmen in uniform’. While there was ‘a liberal sprinkling of CP and extreme left-wingers’, ‘ordinary trade unionists’ of ‘varying shades of leftish opinion’ seemed to Fremlin to make up the ‘vast majority’. The spirit of the conference was very friendly, as between platform and audience, and response to the speakers was swift and spontaneous. Menon got an especially good hand, and ‘general enthusiasm for internationalism’ stood out. ‘A marked feature of the proceedings was the fact that applause always followed remarks of ideological or sentimental appeal rather than materialistic.’ Talk about wages, food and ARP appealed, it seemed, far less than evocation of ‘new opportunities, the possibility of putting the whole of the present mess behind us and starting afresh’. Fremlin detected a ‘fair amount’ of regret that the extreme Left was so much in control of the Convention: ‘There was a large section with the feeling that it is tiresome that whenever any really vital and vigorous political activity arises, the Communist Party always seems to be in the middle of it.’ The mood, so far from being defeatist, seemed to Fremlin to be ‘one of hope’ – a vague hope that a way could be found ‘out of the present mess’.49

  Besides Pritt, and such leading Communists as Pollitt and Dutt, soldiers and clergymen spoke from the platform. Various resolutions were passed nem. con., barely amplifying the original six points. A national committtee of twenty-six was elected: from the CP, Dutt, Horner, Gallacher and Haldane could expect to co-operate harmoniously with the actress Beatrix Lehmann and the ‘Red Dean’ of Canterbury, Hewlett Johnson.

  Significantly, the left-wing press was much more hostile in its reports than the right. The Labour Daily Herald and Reynolds News attacked the Convention. Tribune published an effective onslaught, conceding that the Convention had been a ‘great success as a conference’, that most of those attending had been ‘good honest-to-God workers’ and that ‘much of what was said was the authentic voice of large and growing bodies of opinion representing genuine, deeply felt and widespread grievances’. Yet it had been ‘a fraud, a swindle, snare and delusion’. ‘Spontaneous’ speeches given from the floor had in some cases been circulated to the press before they were delivered. Those attending were dupes who had ‘no idea of the ends for which they were being used’. Kingsley Martin, in the New Statesman, was more thoughtful. Granted that the Convention was certainly under Communist control, what did the CP propose to use it for? The electoral truce and the absorption of Labour leaders into coalition had left a chance for an alternative leadership:

  The CP means to fill that gap. The puzzle is whether they are prepared in their hearts tacitly to aid a German victory with the illusory hope of making a revolution afterwards, or whether they are relying on the RAF to defeat Hitler while they increase their power.50

  The ‘CP line’ grew even more mysterious as a result of the government action which followed the Convention. Even before it, on 23 December, Herbert Morrison had proposed to the Cabinet that the Daily Worker should be suppressed, along with The Week, a more cerebral journal published by a Communist journalist, Claud Cockburn. On the day after the Convention, the Cabinet agreed to this, and on 21 January the papers were stopped. While right-wing and even liberal newspapers approved this manifest restriction on press freedom, the Daily Mirror protested and Aneurin Bevan initiated a debate in the House of Commons after which fifteen MPs voted against the ban.

  There was further outcry early in March (just after a CP candidate got 15 per cent of the poll standing against Labour in the Dumbarton by-election). The BBC decided not to use People’s Convention supporters. These included Lew Stone and a couple of other popular band leaders, Beatrix Lehmann and Michael Redgrave, the star actor. The result was outraged protest from distinguished people who were patently non-Communist. Ralph Vaughan Williams, best-loved of classical composers, withdrew a specially commissioned choral work from the BBC because it had banned the music of Alan Bush, a Communist. Rose Macaulay, the writer, likewise cancelled a broadcast; J. B. Priestley and David Low the cartoonist were amongst distinguished people who wrote letters; and E. M. Forster withdrew all his services from the BBC. Three days after Forster had attacked the Minister of Information at a meeting organised by the National Council for Civil Liberties, Churchill himself led the government’s retreat. ‘Anything in the nature of persecution, victimisation or man-hunting is odious to the British people’, he told the Commons on 20 March; the ban would be lifted. Meanwhile, the Cabinet’s recently formed Committee on Communist Activities had decided that ‘no action of a general character should be taken at present against the Communist Party’, though Ernest Bevin, who sat on it, had toyed with the idea of imprisoning CP intellectuals – reasoning that action taken against the likes of them wouldn’t lead to trouble in the factories, though the arrest of CP trade unionists would ‘cause discontent among workers who are not themselves in sympathy with Communism’.51

  Claud Cockburn, who lost his outlets in the Worker and The Week, recalled the aftermath of their suppression as a ‘period of inexplicable political dreariness’. He was consigned to work for the People’s Convention as a PRO man:

  Much of the activity of the organisation consisted in what, on a much later occasion, Mr Wilfred Roberts, MP, described to me – he was speaking of a Liberal Party Conference – as ‘an attempt to avert a split between the dupes and the fellow-travellers’. The only interest or amusement I ever extracted from the People’s Convention was in the reading of a secret report upon it, prepared for the Labour Party or the TUC (I forget which) by some ‘expert’, a copy of which had been stolen for us from Transport House. From this I gathered that our proceedings, which seemed to me almost totally futile, in reality constituted a serious menace and were a powerful source of political evil.52

  But Cockburn was one of those ‘intellectuals’ whom Bevin so despised. Convention supporters in the Amalgamated Engineering Union presumably saw their work as far from futile. In mid-June it was rewarded by a large majority vote at the Union’s annual conference for a lifting of the ban on the Worker: the same body called for a ‘people’s government’ and a ‘people’s peace’.

  Three days later, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. The CP’s many months of contortion and self-repression were over. The war was manifestly no longer ‘imperialist’, as it had been in the perturbing days of the Norway campaign, Dunkirk, Battle of Britain and Blitz.

  5

  Standing ‘Alone’

  ‘What are the British trying to do – turn this into a circus or something!’

  German artillery major at Dunkirk

  THROUGHOUT THAT HEROIC summer of 1940, and the grim autumn and winter of bombing, informed people were aware that the national ‘unity’ which Churchill and J. B. Priestley invoked, and which Morrison and Beaverbrook seemed to have found in war industry, was provisional, conditio
nal, and potentially fragile. Latent pacifist feeling was widespread. The Communist Party was invulnerable in its industrial strongholds. Scotland and Wales contained intellectuals and trade unionists whose indefinite attachment to a failing British cause could not be taken for granted. The omission of these factors from generalisations involving British morale is second in importance only to memory’s failure to recognise dependence on US goodwill. They are chief among the habits of forgetfulness which permitted, and permit, the Myth to subsist.

  By comparison, the Myth can stand any amount of ‘debunking’ based on the revival or bringing to light of unsavoury military facts. The Myth does not depend for its health on any faith in British military prowess. It can readily ride over proofs that in extremity Churchill and others made errors of judgement or sanctioned morally suspect actions. The more the fallibility of Churchill is emphasised, the more lovable his heroic bearing becomes, and the more superhumanly human he appears. The structure of the Myth depends on the leaving out of certain things. ‘Debunking’ attention to those which are included merely re-emphasises their central importance.

  However, certain ‘debunking’ points must be made here, if only because they help us to imagine how perilous Britain’s position was on ‘the desperate edge of now’ – how easily the ‘propaganda of events’ might have played into the hands of the CP and produced pacifistic revulsion.

  First, Norway. It was widely known at the time, and has been well established since, that Churchill was largely, even primarily, responsible for that débâcle. He had a taste for reckless adventure which had not been chastened by the Dardanelles disaster of 1915. It was he who had pressed in the war council for an ‘amphibious’ operation against Turkey, a naval expedition to bombard and capture the Gallipoli Peninsula and press on to Constantinople. Indeed, he had been generally blamed at the time, and had been shunted from the Admiralty to the Duchy of Lancaster, a major demotion from which he took years to recover. Yet after Russia’s invasion of Finland on 30 November 1939, Churchill came up with another dangerous scheme: British and French troops should be sent to Finland. On the way they would wreck the iron-mines in neutral Sweden on which Germany depended, and seize Narvik, the Norwegian port through which the ore was shipped.

  ‘The Finnish Campaign’, as A. J. P. Taylor puts it, ‘was Gallipoli again, and worse. The plans, too, were run up in the slapdash spirit which had characterised the expedition to the Dardanelles.’1 The Norwegian and Swedish governments naturally refused to authorise the expedition, yet early in March 1940 the British War Cabinet decided to go ahead. The folly of entering a campaign against the Soviet Union was prevented by Finland’s capitulation on 12 March. But a plan to mine the leads at Narvik remained on the agenda, and Churchill supported Prime Minister Reynaud of France, who pressed for its implementation. It was decided to mine Norwegian waters on the night of 8 April. But as it turned out, allied violation of Norwegian neutrality was covered over by large-scale Nazi aggression as simultaneously German forces moved into Denmark and Norway.

  It seems that, as Paul Addison argues, the decision to mine at Narvik was Chamberlain’s – he had pushed for it as the least ambitious scheme for action amongst several favoured by the warmongering Reynaud, not believing himself that it would provoke Germany into extending the conflict. However, Churchill himself later claimed credit for pushing the idea through, and he certainly did his best to make the chairmanship of the Military Coordination Committee, which Chamberlain had recently given him, a base for actually running the campaign. On this committee, three service chiefs sat with the corresponding ministers. All were dismayed by Churchill’s attempts to dominate. According to Colonel Hastings Ismay, the committee’s secretary, ‘His verbosity and restlessness made unnecessary work, prevented real planning, and caused friction.’ A serious political crisis loomed. For a time, Chamberlain himself took the chair. But Churchill’s popularity outside Westminster was such that he successfully demanded and got the power to guide and direct the Chiefs of Staff.2

  All this deepened the distrust of Churchill strongly felt in Whitehall and within the Conservative Party. After Chamberlain’s fall in May, ‘Churchill faced the remarkable predicament, for a Prime Minister, of having no party to command in the House of Commons’. Chamberlain remained the Conservative leader until fatal illness forced his retirement in October. Churchill’s assumption of the mantle at that point seems in retrospect, as Addison says, ‘a blood transfusion for an exhausted and demoralised party’.3 Many Conservatives, however, did not foresee this in May. Harold Nicolson, MP, noted in his diary, on 13 May, ‘When Chamberlain enters the House he gets a terrific reception, and when Churchill comes in the applause is less.’ The massed ranks of Tory MPs – the Party occupied two-thirds of the House – were still loyal to Chamberlain. Though Labour MPs were glad to cheer Churchill, and though Nicolson felt that ‘the House was deeply moved’ by Churchill’s speech about Dunkirk, the sullenness of the Tory benches towards him was such that a patriotic lobby correspondent felt compelled to warn Chamberlain about the ominous conclusions which foreign diplomats and journalists were drawing. Chamberlain took action. When Churchill made an important speech early in July, the usual Tory silence was broken as the Conservative Chief Whip, Margesson, rose to his feet and waved his followers on to theirs. They began to cheer fervently.4

  Such behaviour lent credibility to the thesis which became popular in the summer of 1940 that there were ‘guilty men’ in the Conservative Party, Chamberlain himself the most notable, who had appeased Hitler before the war, who had not really wanted to fight him since war began, and whose apathy (or anti-Communist, pro-Nazi leaning) was responsible for the débâcle at Dunkirk.

  When Nicholas Harman in 1980 published a ‘debunking’ account of Dunkirk, he subtitled his book The Necessary Myth. Of course, the best possible face had to be put on the evacuation of the British Expeditionary Force: ‘If the British told, and enjoyed, and embroidered, some versions of the truth, they did so because that helped them to stay in the war.’ As Harman goes on to point out, the truth cannot hurt the British now.5

  The capture or destruction of the British Expeditionary Force was not part of the German plan. The German target was Paris: ‘For the French and the Germans alike the evacuation from Dunkirk was a sideshow.’ For the British public, however, it was the crux of the war. They blamed other nations for putting their boys into terrible danger. King Leopold of Belgium was widely denounced for capitulating to the Germans on 27 May – though in fact he had been appealing without concrete effect for support from Britain and France, lacking which the tenacious fight of his troops was hopeless. Harman points out that for the previous ten days three armies had been fighting in Flanders:

  side by side, but with different objectives. The Belgians were fighting to defend Belgium and thought they should surrender if that proved impossible. The French wanted to counter-attack away from Belgium into France, and regarded surrender as a regrettable necessity that might come if that counter-attack failed. The British refused to think about surrender, but planned to get away to England.

  Dunkirk had a different significance for each of the allies. It was on the English Channel, next to Belgium, just in France. The Belgians hoped to use it as the base for an operation to drive the Germans out of their own country. The French regarded it as one of their own major towns – a port and a centre of shipbuilding and steel manufacture – and also as a fortified base, easy to supply by sea, from which they could attack the Germans in defence of Paris: ‘To ask a French soldier to abandon it was like asking an Englishman to surrender Newcastle.’ Yet as far as the British were concerned, Dunkirk was just a convenient place to get out: ‘The British alone were to carry through their hope into a plan and then an achievement. But this they were at pains to conceal from their partners.’6

  From 22 May, the British began to pull troops away from the firing line. It looked as if the Germans could trap them, and they wanted to get out of the trap and e
scape home. They defied what were tantamount to orders from General Blanchard, the local French commander, and left adjacent French troops exposed on their flanks. They scuppered the plans of the supreme commander, General Weygand, for a counter-attack against German supply lines, which Churchill himself had ordered the British Expeditionary Force to join, and which gave the only chance of aggressive action. The French now had to trek after the British towards Dunkirk. But the French still saw it as a strongpoint on the German rear. Neither they nor the Belgians were informed when, on 26 May, the order went out to start wholesale British evacuation – ‘Operation Dynamo’.

  When the Belgian army gave in, the British, without consulting the French, moved into the gap which it left south-east of Dunkirk. The Germans in turn moved in where the British Expeditionary Force had been. And seven French divisions, ‘half of the French First Army’, were left cut off near Lille.7

  The British public liked to imagine that the gutless collapse of the French had left no alternative to evacuation. In fact, the French troops around Lille held out so bravely, until all their ammunition was gone, that the Germans in tribute to them allowed the survivors to keep their weapons for the ceremonial parade of surrender. It was the morale of the British Expeditionary Force which was at rock bottom.

  As they engaged the Germans in Flanders after 10 May, ‘Neither at headquarters nor at the fighting front did the British know what had hit them.’ British Expeditionary Force military intelligence was understaffed. Radio communication was inadequate. It was in a context of confusion and dismay that the British Expeditionary Force developed the habit, which spread back to Britain, of blaming defeat on the poor morale of their allies and on grossly exaggerated conceptions of the role of fifth columnists. Bewildered and bad-tempered, British troops behaved on occasion very poorly. It was an accident that the Grenadier Guards, on 15 May, shot up elements of the Belgian army retreating towards them, and inflicted quite heavy casualties. But belief that the British had been ‘betrayed’ thereafter provided an excuse for looting food and drink from the local population, and for summary execution of supposed fifth columnists. As Harman comments, ‘It is small wonder if local civilians were eager to see the back of them – even if the replacement was to be the German army, whose propaganda had plenty of material to work with.’ While some soldiers figured bravely in rearguard actions, ‘too often’ the British collapsed. One frank account published during the war described a ‘disorderly mob’ of British soldiers running away because of a false report that German tanks were at hand and ‘looking (if the truth be told) very much like the popular conception of the Italian army’. One thing which frightened the British soldiers was the fear of capture. They assumed that, like themselves, the Germans had been ordered to take no prisoners. While SS troops did cold-bloodedly murder 170 British prisoners in two separate incidents, this was after men of the Durham Light Infantry had killed a great many (perhaps 400) SS men who were legitimate prisoners of war.8