The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  The order to head for Dunkirk and home was a great relief to the British Expeditionary Force. And ‘Operation Dynamo’ was indeed a triumph, though hardly a miracle: the evacuation had been planned in advance, and the weather was favourable. The radiance of the triumph – which involved many acts that can fairly be called heroic – is stained in retrospect by the fact that it also involved ‘methodical deception’ of the French. While the latter were planning to make Dunkirk a redoubt, the British began days before the fight to ship non-fighting personnel out of the port. Though reserves were hastily sent from Britain to defend Boulogne as late as 22 May, they evacuated within two days on the basis of false reports that the town was untenable, without giving notice to their French allies, and after some had attempted to drink the place dry. The Royal Navy thoughtfully sank a blockship in the harbour mouth, which ensured that the French, fighting bravely on, could be neither supplied nor taken out by sea. ‘Politically, Britain encouraged her friends to fight on. Meanwhile her soldiers were disengaging from the fight.’ On 25 May Lord Gort, commanding the British Expeditionary Force, was formally ordered to deceive the French about his intentions. Churchill himself was involved in disguising from Reynaud what was going on. On 29 May, by which time ‘Dynamo’ had lifted 72,000 British soldiers across the Channel in three days, Admiral Abrial was astonished to receive a complaint from Gort that French soldiers were trying to embark too, on equal terms with their allies. This was the first that Abrial had heard of the evacuation. At this point – with a third of the British already gone – the allies reached agreement: French troops were to be taken off in equal numbers with British. But the French went on defending the port’s perimeter. The British in practice sailed first. In the end, most of the French troops did get away, outnumbering British embarkees from 1 June onwards. But the soldier who emerged as leader of the Free French, General de Gaulle, was convinced by this episode that the British would always choose the open sea rather than Europe – ‘Perfidious Albion’.9

  Another people with some cause to feel aggrieved was the Scots. The 51st (Highland) Division had been detached to serve under French command on the Maginot Line. They fought on through the Dunkirk ‘miracle’. Afterwards, French troops evacuated through the port went back to resume the battle in France, and Britain’s only two formed divisions went with them. Further miniature ‘Dunkirks’ eventually got most of the British troops out of French west-coast ports. Altogether, 558,032 were brought back to Britain during the battle of France – and 368,491 were British. But the Highlanders, cut off with a large contingent of French at St Valery En Caux, could mostly not be evacuated, because of fog, and 8,000 of them passed into captivity after surrender on 12 June. They would have no place in the Myth of 1940.

  But Dunkirk was indeed a great escape. Between 27 May and 4 June about 186,600 British soldiers and 125,000 French were taken across the Channel. And this was hailed as a triumph for the English volunteer spirit. Early in July, Victor Gollancz published Guilty Men, the most famous political tract of the war, by ‘Cato’, the pseudonym of three Beaverbrook journalists – Michael Foot, a socialist, the Liberal Frank Owen and Peter Howard, leader of Buchmanite moral rearmament – who were united in contempt for Chamberlain and his pre-war Cabinet colleagues and determined to brand them as responsible for British military unpreparedness. This opened with an evocation of the scene at Dunkirk:

  A miracle was born. This land of Britain is rich in heroes. She had brave daring men in her Navy and Air Force as well as in her army. She had heroes in jerseys and sweaters and old rubber boots in all the fishing ports of Britain. That night the word went round … In all the south-east ports of Britain there was not a man or a boy, who knew how to handle a boat, who was not prepared to give his own life to save some unknown, valorous son of his country who had faced without flinching the red hell of Flanders in the cause which he knew to be his own … For almost a week the epic went on. The little ships dodged their way up the waters and hauled over their sides the soldiers who waded waist deep, shoulder deep to safety.10

  A few months later Gollancz published an account of 1940 by another Beaverbrook journalist, Hilde Marchant, who had been at Dover to see the troops come home. Like other press persons and publicists, she confirmed that during the ‘miracle’ the navy had been assisted by ‘an armada of fishing boats, steamships, barges and pleasure steamers’ manned by ‘our rough-rugged coastal seamen – ordinary fishermen in jerseys with yachting club initials across their chests’ and ‘the men who in a peace-time summer would be standing on a Southern pier shouting “Bob trip in the Saucy Jane to see the sights”’. Volunteers had come from Norfolk, Suffolk and the Yorkshire ports:

  They went in, a line of cheeky arrogant little boats to sit like wrens on the edge of the battlefield, to be picked off by the German guns, as they grabbed men on to their fishing decks … Always we knew we had men like that, men who said little, but went backwards and forwards for sixty, eighty, a hundred hours, throwing sea water over themselves to keep awake …11

  And so on. Account after account appeared in similar terms. No heroic story of 1940 was better confirmed by eye witnesses.

  And yet, as Nicholas Harman shows, the received story was grossly misleading. Few members of the British Expeditionary Force owed their passage to ‘little ships’ manned by civilian volunteers. The crews of the pleasure steamers and fishing vessels which operated from the beginning were members of the Royal Naval Reserve, ‘as much part of His Majesty’s armed forces as any peacetime civilian recruited for the duration of hostilities’. It is true that ‘the ships which carried the largest number of soldiers out of Dunkirk were entirely civilian, with civilian crews …’ These were passenger ferries, which in peacetime had plied between Britain and the Continent or other islands in the British archipelago. But they were hardly little ships: the Scotia, for instance, was built to take 800 passengers from Holyhead to Ireland, and on 29 May packed about 3,000 troops aboard from Dunkirk pier. On the following day, believing wrongly that the Luftwaffe had succeeded in closing Dunkirk port, the navy diverted ships to the beaches, where small vessels were needed to take men off to bigger ships at sea. But these were not crewed by enthusiastic volunteers, nor could they have been. The evacuation was still a secret. Owners and crew of ships registered in the Small Vessels Pool at Sheerness for service as necessary had no information about the operation they were summoned to join. The beach operation was in fact a sanguinary muddle, as motorboats and rowing boats laden with soldiers in sodden battle dress dug into the sand, so that the men had to get out, push off and start all over again: ‘It was infuriating for the soldiers, who cursed what they saw as the incompetence of the seamen. It was agonising for the masters of the bigger ships offshore, as they waited for the arrival of the next load – or for the arrival of the bombers.’12

  Next day, the 31st, was in fact the last on which large-scale evacuation from the beaches was attempted. Tiny wooden ‘bawley-boats’ from Essex – normally used to fish for shrimps and cockles – were conscripted, but even the skill and courage of their sailors did not stop these ancient vessels grounding on the sand, and they were taken off beach work and sent to act as ferries in the harbour. Meanwhile, the Small Vessels Pool had assembled a large number of tiny craft for ‘special tows’ – they were tied in strings behind larger ships. Their owners stayed at home. The idea was that soldiers would man them. But very few actually made it across – the tug of the ropes tore them up – and the few motorboats which did get to the beaches broke down.

  Some other ‘little ships’ had more success – flotillas of pleasure-fishers from Ramsgate, launches from Southampton. But the fishing fleet of Rye in Sussex collectively refused to go, and the navy had to commandeer small craft in Devon whose owners would not volunteer. Even southern crews of the Royal National Lifeboat Institution mostly failed to come forward when asked, and the navy had to man their vessels. But as Harman points out, this does not prove that the vaunted heirs of Drake
and Grenville were cowards. When civilian sailors were told of the importance of the operation, they normally offered to serve at once. But ‘nobody can volunteer until he has been told there is something to volunteer for’ – and the British people were not fully informed about the evacuation until the six p.m. radio news on 31 May:

  Before the secret was lifted 72,000 soldiers left from the beaches, mostly in craft manned by the Royal Navy, or by the soldiers themselves. After the secret was lifted, when civilian volunteers began to come forward, 26,500 were rescued from the beaches. The contribution of civilian volunteers to the success of the Dunkirk evacuation was gallant and distinguished; but it was not significant in terms of numbers rescued.13

  Even Churchill, in his epic speech of 4 June, did not refer to the ‘little ships’. But he did, strangely, give credence as well as credibility to exorbitant reports of Fighter Command’s exploits against the Luftwaffe over Dunkirk, including the impossible claim that a squadron of Boulton Paul Defiants – a misdesigned fighter which had no forward-firing guns and placed its crews in fearful danger – had shot down thirty-seven enemy planes without loss. This was on a day when in fact the Germans lost only eighteen planes on all fronts. While deliberate misrepresentation was probably not involved in this story – pilots in the heat of battle often misread what they see – there is no doubt that deliberate propagandist distortion disfigured the authorities’ ‘news management’ of the evacuation. It was found to be counterproductive, and thereafter government and BBC stopped telling lies. Soldiers, after all, had eyes in their heads, and bitter tales to tell when the ‘undefeated army’ got home – including complaints of inadequate air support, which were not badly founded since Dowding, the head of Fighter Command, had fought and won a battle against Churchill himself in mid-May to prevent too many of his planes and men being committed in France when he foresaw that they would be needed to defend London.14

  The desperate ‘Battle of Britain’ in which Dowding commanded will always retain the aura of a unique episode – the first and still the only decisive battle fought in the air (though some German authorities doubt that it should be termed a battle at all). It is no legend that Fighter Command, by staying in the air, preserved England from German invasion. The ‘cricket scores’ attributed to the Few were inaccurate, but not deliberately rigged. The Luftwaffe’s largest loss on any single day was seventy-six on 15 August; the Air Ministry News Service claimed 180. The most authoritative recent figures indicate that the Luftwaffe during the battle lost 1,882 planes, and Fighter Command 1,017. The German figures of course include bombers as well as fighters (and it was much easier to shoot down a Stuka or Dornier than a Messerschmitt 109). If we throw in the losses of British Bomber and Coastal Commands involved in the fight for national survival, which John Terraine estimates at 248 aircraft, then the ratio of ‘scalps’ is still roughly three to two in the RAF’s favour, and the same applies to air crew killed. Terraine feels able to conclude that the battle was an ‘entirely glorious occasion for the Royal Air Force’, clouded only by the dismissal of Dowding and the transfer of Air Chief Marshal Park, who had commanded the crucial No. 11 Group under him, before the end of 1940.15

  It does not ‘debunk’ the Battle of Britain to point out that the best German fighter, the Messerschmitt Bf 109, which was at least equal to the Spitfire and considerably superior to the Hurricane, could never spend more than thirty minutes over British soil: the Germans were not equipped with long-range killer planes, but if they had had the sense to fit external ‘drop tanks’ to their fighters the result of the battle might well have been very different. British aircraft design, flying skill and tactics were adequate to ensure a decisive victory over a more experienced and previously triumphant air force, and to deprecate that achievement would be absurd.

  Nevertheless, ‘real life’ does not provide tidy examples of unadulterated heroism. Certain adjustments to the received story may now be made. They concern the weather, the supply of fighters, and the morale of Fighter Command.

  When the prowess of the Few is recounted, brilliant summer weather is evoked – vapour trails crossing clear blue skies as delighted civilians watched the dog fights from below. In fact, although May and June 1940 were warm, dry and sunny – temperatures reached 90 degrees Fahrenheit in the latter month – July (before the battle reached Britain’s inland parts) was cool and wet. August brought average sunshine and temperature. September began well, but turned cool after the first week. This was not irrelevant to the RAF’s success. ‘Normal’ weather over England is uncertain weather. The average English August increased the Luftwaffe’s problems. If German planes flew under cloud, anyone looking up could see them. If they flew above cloud, fighters still higher up could spot them easily. But to fly in the cloud was dangerous and made accurate navigation and bomb-aiming impossible.16

  However, weather conditions which on balance favoured the defence could not have helped Fighter Command much had the supply of fighters faltered. German intelligence in Britain was mercifully inept. Not only did it fail to grasp the way the British fighter defence was organised, with radar in a key role, it mistook the Supermarine aircraft factory at Southampton (not at all a difficult target to reach), which was, until the height of the battle, the only works manufacturing Spitfires, for a factory making bombers, and ignored the crucial significance of the world-famous Rolls-Royce works at Derby, one of only two places producing the Merlin engines which powered both Spitfires and Hurricanes. Even so, by mid-August losses of these two key fighters were exceeding the number available in storage, and this trend increased ominously until early September, when it was reversed, largely thanks to the operations of the Ministry of Aircraft Production’s Civilian Repair Organisation, which put 4,196 damaged planes back into the line between July and December. A third of the aircraft issued to fighter squadrons during the battle were in fact salvaged, not new.17

  Beaverbrook has commonly been praised for what Churchill described as his ‘personal force and genius’ in busting bottlenecks which had impeded supply of fighters, turning a production shortfall of 282 aircraft in February into an excess over target of 291 in August. Jennie Lee, a former Labour MP, was surprised and pleased when Beaverbrook, the ‘arch-appeaser’ of 1938, called her in to help with his production drive, and in her memoirs, published in 1980, she paints again a familiar picture of her boss: the man who ‘was not a gentleman’, who ‘had not been to the right schools’, who abhorred red tape and long memos, and won the Battle for Britain because he was ‘ready to starve the Army and drown the Navy … provided he got all the planes and spare parts through to the fighter pilots on time’. Her own job was as a kind of trouble-shooter. For instance, she would ‘go to any factory where the workers stopped work once the sirens warned of approaching enemy planes’ and tell people to ignore the government instructions to seek cover. She was also asked to detect causes of delay if essential deliveries were not made on time. She cheerfully connived in acts of piracy – as when Beaverbrook heard from her that men were rushing back to their homes from a certain factory when the sirens sounded because their families did not have adequate shelters, and promptly commandeered cement destined for elsewhere so that proper protection could be provided.18

  However, statistics show that it was in April, before Beaverbrook came to office, that actual production of fighters first exceeded plans, a surge accelerating when Churchill created the Ministry of Aircraft Production for him in May.19 While Beaverbrook’s flair for publicity (which was in no way impeded by his ownership of three popular newspapers) undoubtedly dramatised most successfully the need for the highest possible aircraft production, there is little doubt that his buccaneering methods were in the long run dangerous. Aircraft production doubled in mid-1940, but fell back in the last quarter of the year. By the time Beaverbrook left the ministry in mid-1941, his crude technique of ‘carrot planning’, whereby unrealistic production targets were set in the hope that bottlenecks would be burst in the effort to
meet them, was contributing mightily to public loss of faith in ‘war industry’ both inside and outside the factories.

  Nor was the ‘Dunkirk Spirit’ which he fostered an unequivocally desirable phenomenon. Some factories worked twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Bank holidays were cancelled. An experienced industrial correspondent claimed that it was commonplace to meet people who had worked continuously for thirty-six hours on special rush jobs. The results of the manic spurt came as no surprise to experts on industrial health, who knew from First World War experience that a twelve-hour day produced no greater output in the long run than a ten-hour one. Production rose by a quarter in the first week after Dunkirk – but by the fifth week was practically the same as before. Ernest Bevin, the Minister of Labour, saw the danger. At the end of June he insisted on ordering the restriction of hours worked by women and young people to a sixty-hour week of six days, and he strongly recommended the same limits for men. Yet excessive hours continued to be demanded in the munitions industries, ‘despite the conclusive evidence that such demands lowered efficiency and raised the rate of absenteeism’.20