The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  In 1940 only 941,000 man-days were lost through strikes, as compared with 1,354,000 in 1939. But in 1941 the figure rose again to over a million, and in 1942 the pre-war total was actually exceeded. Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain did not destroy the mutual antipathy of workers and management characteristic of large sectors of the industry. Jennie Lee recalls a moment in 1940 when ‘several workers said they wanted a private word with me. “That bugger”, they told me, “is a bloody Nazi.” They were referring to the factory owner. What in fact was happening was that work had come to a standstill because material that should have arrived from the United States was at the bottom of the sea.’ But the manager was wholly unable to communicate to them his own zeal for winning the war.21 And Mass-Observation, surveying the discontents of war industry in 1942, saw a kind of nostalgia for ‘Dunkirk days’ as part of its malaise:

  Instead of keeping up a steady optimum, people were allowed to descend from the peak of furious endeavour without being guided on to any plateau. Since then, the various organs for leading public opinion have demanded periodic peaks. The normal human mind is not adjusted to a peak-to-peak effort …

  It was, however, adjusted to the notion that when you were tired you needed time off. Absenteeism, notably higher than pre-war, was ‘the workers’ relief before the fatigue state’.22

  RAF fighter pilots were also human beings, and in most cases very young ones. I should now offer complete a quotation from one of them of which I gave in part (see here). Squadron Leader ‘Minnie’ Manton recalled:

  I don’t think any of us (and I was older than most) really appreciated the seriousness of the situation. When we could be scared to death five or six times a day and yet find ourselves drinking in the local pub before closing time on a summer evening, it all seemed unreal … 23

  Peter Townsend, a young squadron commander at the hard-hit Croydon airfield at the climax of the battle, likewise recalled:

  The greater issues were beyond us … Action and more action was the only antidote against the deadly, crushing fatigue creeping up on us … Our dispersal point, with ground crews’ and pilots’ rest rooms, was in a row of villas on the airfield’s western boundary. Invariably I slept there half-clothed to be on the spot if anything happened. In the small hours of 24 August it did. The shrill scream and the deafening crash of bombs shattered my sleep. In the doorway young Worrall, a new arrival, was yelling something and waving his arms. Normally as frightened as anyone, not even bombs could move me then. I placed my pillow reverently over my head and waited for the rest. Worrall still had the energy to be frightened. I was past caring. It was a bad sign; I was more exhausted than I realised.24

  Inevitably, morale under such stress was variable. ‘Chivalry’ was attributed to Fighter Command’s young men. It was not a virtue attuned to the rigours of mechanised warfare, though some RAF pilots did vow to disobey such instructions as were in force from 14 July, ordering them to shoot down German floatplanes painted with red crosses which were aiming to rescue aircrew from the Channel. Pilots with rank, reputation or influence made sure that they avoided flying in the dud planes which every squadron suffered from, and that they got the services of the best technical staff: ‘The green pilots got the slack and inferior ground crews, and the inferior aircraft, and they were shot down.’ But by the climax of the battle, experienced men were a dwindling minority, and, as in Townsend’s case, their own battle-worthiness was becoming suspect as fatigue took its toll.25

  By then Fighter Command was full of complaints and bad feeling. At top level there was the controversy over tactics between Park of 11 Group and Dowding on the one hand, and Leigh Mallory of the more northerly 12 Group on the other: the latter favoured the commitment of fighters to attack in ‘big wings’. Park saw that to protect the vital ‘sector airfields’ properly the Germans must be hit as early as possible, and there was no time to form up ‘big wings’. But flyers under him who might have agreed were perplexed and annoyed by his order that they should concentrate on shooting down bombers and avoid fighter-to-fighter contact: a wise but unchivalrous command. On the other hand, by 30 August, whole squadrons were disobeying orders which demanded they intercept Messerschmitts, flying deliberately away from the enemy. And on that crucial day, 15 September, when the morale of exhausted Fighter Command men was at its lowest, on the very brink of victory, Johnny Kent, sent in to take charge of 92 Squadron, was appalled when some of his Hurricanes turned for home at the sight of Messerschmitts.

  Well before this time, relations between pilots and ground staff had in some cases been very strained. At Warmwell in Dorset civilian cooks refused to get up early to provide breakfast for aviators. The squadron’s commander cooked breakfast for his men himself; he was then rebuked by the station commander when the cooks complained about the dirty dishes, and was told never to use the kitchen again. Manston, an airfield perched on cliffs by the Channel in Kent, suffered a ‘twelve-day martyrdom’ under bombing during which it was, in Townsend’s words, ‘the scene of the finest and the most abject in human nature’. When the Luftwaffe attacked in force on 12 August, hundreds of airmen went down into the shelters and stayed there, despite threats and entreaties by their officers. Local civilians took the chance to loot damaged buildings of RAF tools and spares. The luckless 264 Squadron which flew Defiants was stationed there: they were helpless against the 109s when they valiantly rose up under attack from Stuka dive bombers which on 24 August finally put the airfield completely out of action. But Manston was not the only field where men spent weeks cowering in the shelters. Civilians employed to deal with bomb craters, who had been doing nothing until the action started, now refused to work during air-raid alerts. RAF personnel had to combine the job of filling craters with their other duties. As Len Deighton, noting this, goes on to observe, ‘Even the less glorious moments of the Battle retained their class-conscious character … This war in the air belonged to Varsity men, with technical school graduates as travelling reserves.’26 Ground staff taking shelter while officers Carried On foreshadowed the relationship in London between tube dwellers and ‘varsity’ men in Whitehall. Similar class cleavage marked British industry.

  Amongst about 3,000 men who flew for the RAF in battle, over 80 per cent were from the UK. But there were also many men from Europe and the Commonwealth – the former, exiles who hated the conquering Germans; the latter, often men who had paid their own fares to England to join the peacetime RAF. Commonwealth casualties were disproportionately high. In a period when average air-crew fatalities in Fighter Command were 17 per cent, nine out of twenty-two South Africans and fourteen out of twenty-two Australians were killed. Of the ‘top ten’ fighter pilots, those accredited with fourteen or more victories, one was Czech, one Polish, two were New Zealanders, one Australian – only five were British. (Taking the war as a whole, it seems that only two of the top eight RAF aces were British: the others were from Ireland, France and the Dominions.27) Nevertheless, the enduring image of the Battle of Britain would be of a young Briton fresh from public school or varsity soaring into combat with upper-class slang on his lips. The reputation of Oxford and Cambridge had been tainted before the war by resentment felt by unemployed workers against ‘toffs’ and by crusty Tories against ‘long-haired’ youths who were prone to pacifism and communism. The Battle of Britain helped to reglamorise England’s traditions of expensive private education.

  Babs Diplock was in the WAAF during the war, and a factory worker after. Forty years on she collected and published poems she had written in response to various life experiences. With her permission, I reprint one here. It seems to me to project very clearly a sense of class distance from the boys in blue mingling with sympathy and admiration and recollection of the horror of war. It is an honest tribute from a contemporary (she was nineteen in 1940) to the courage shown by part of her own generation. In another poem she asserts her own role, as one of ‘the lasses in blue’ who mended aero engines and did ‘a man’s job’, not ‘For the lads’
but ‘with them’; but the role of technicians in the WAAF is not part of the Myth of the Battle:

  Battle of Britain War Hero

  On a summer’s day

  you sat opposite me

  in a Tea Shoppe near the sea.

  You had no hands

  but you managed well

  as far as I could see.

  Plastic fingers on each metal hand

  coped well with food

  and I wondered how they would do

  with silver sand

  on our sunlit beach

  with buttons and shoes

  and the toilet

  and holding your baby

  and loving your wife

  in bed

  and did you mind me staring?

  Were you I wondered

  one of the Battle of Britain ‘FEW’?

  Did you in another age say

  WIZARD PRANG and BOMBS AWAY?

  I search your face for a clue.

  Did everything used to be

  PUKKA GEN in 1939?

  Did you see the HUN

  at TWELVE O’CLOCK

  as you flew in the English sun?

  Your face is so guarded,

  a tight sad mask.

  I don’t want to intrude

  but I’ve got to ask,

  was it ALL dear friend

  A JOLLY GOOD SHOW

  so very long ago?

  (I did have tea in a tea shoppe … in Eastbourne, and I did see a badly disfigured man at a nearby table. I knew his burns were ‘war’ burns … they always look the same … lips thin and stretched and the eyes in shrunken sockets. The skin a pattern of burn marks purple and white on grey skin. I tried to see him as he once was. One of the young gladiators we all adored in the war years. As a wartime WAAF I saw and knew many of these. Their odd jaunty language was a cover for their deep fears and sorrows when comrades had a ‘wizard prang’ and didn’t survive. How easily they are forgotten. We have already forgotten the young men of the Falklands … But through this small poem I will not forget the glorious young men of my war.28)

  If Babs Diplock and her WAAF colleagues have been discarded from the 1940 story as unmythworthy, so, in effect, has Sergeant Pilot Josef Frantisek, the ace who probably made the highest score of anyone. A Czech Regular airman, he had flown from his own country after German occupation, fought for the Polish air force, escaped via Romania (despite being interned there) and won the Croix de Guerre flying with the French. The RAF placed him in a Polish squadron. He died as the battle was ending. He is hardly a household name in the country over which he fought his last dogfights. But at least he was not among the thousands of anti-Nazi European exiles who, at this time, were interned in Britain, and whose treatment tells us something about the state of British morale between 9 May 1940, when Hitler invaded the Low Countries, and 7 September, when heavy bombing of London began.

  There is abundant testimony to demonstrate that the British in the summer of 1940 demonstrated remarkable sang froid and phlegm.

  Mollie Panter-Downes assured New Yorker readers after the surrender of Belgium and the first news of Dunkirk that, in London, ‘the calmness of the average non-military citizen’ was ‘magnificent … The public remains amazingly cheerful … The success of the new Defiant fighting planes … has raised everyone’s spirits considerably.’ While she noted a couple of weeks later that there were ‘urgent and frightening problems to think of at the moment (such as how to induce stubborn East End mothers to evacuate their children so that the defence of England will not be delayed by tragic fleeing hordes like those which blocked the roads out of Brussels and Paris)’, after the fall of France she felt able to write:

  It would be difficult for an impartial observer to decide today whether the British are the bravest or merely the most stupid people in the world … The individual Englishman seems to be singularly unimpressed by the fact that there is now nothing between him and the undivided attention of a war machine such as the world has never seen before. Possibly it’s lack of imagination, possibly again it’s the same species of dogged resolution which occasionally produces an epic like Dunkirk. Millions of British families, sitting at their well stocked breakfast tables eating excellent British eggs and bacon can still talk calmly of the horrors across the Channel, perhaps without fully comprehending even now that anything like that could ever happen in England’s green and pleasant land.29

  Herbert Agar, a distinguished journalist and one of a caucus of American ‘warmongers’ which met at the Century Club in New York to discuss how to get their nation into the fight, was impressed by a Gallup Poll taken when France fell: ‘only three percent of these astonishing people thought they might lose the war’.30 But as Panter-Downes implied, such confidence at such a juncture might be tantamount to stupidity. Another American journalist, writing in 1960, described the conversation in a pub in ‘front-line’ Kent that month: ‘This was a period when the English habit of considering war as a series of small personal affronts tried the nerves of foreigners in their midst.’ There were grumbles about tea rationing and disrespectful remarks about the appointment of the Duke of Windsor to govern the Bahamas. ‘Of the prospects for survival and victory, nothing.’31

  Charles Ritchie, the Canadian diplomat, had visited Dover on 2 June, in the latter stages of the Dunkirk evacuation. The war was close enough here: as he walked on the pier, a destroyer limped into harbour with its stern blown clean off by a bomb. Other warships, British and French, carried French soldiers. A tug debouched German prisoners:

  While the procession of prisoners and wounded moved by, the Tommies who were guarding the pier remained silent … About the cliffs the eternal gulls circled. Two little girls were shrilly calling to each other from their bicycles as they rode in and out of the small gardens in front of a row of houses at the foot of the great bluff of cliff behind the docks. These docks, and in fact the whole of Dover, are now within range of German shell-fire from Boulogne. But the life of the town is going on just the same. We could see the groups of old ladies coming out of church after eleven o’clock service and standing for a minute to chat in the sun.32

  Vera Brittain, a pacifist, wrote at the time an account of a visit to Hyde Park on 4 August 1940. Whatever meteorological records show, for her it was ‘one of the hottest and sultriest’ days of an ‘ironically perfect summer’. She also remembered it as the twenty-sixth anniversary of the outbreak of the First World War, but found that for Londoners it was, more pertinently, ‘the Sunday before the Monday which in normal times would be August Bank Holiday. Although work, tomorrow, is to continue as usual, the British determination to celebrate a holiday somehow is obvious to the most casual spectator.’ The crowds were out to hear the speakers at Hyde Park Corner proclaiming their political and religious opinions with as much freedom as in peacetime: the Salvation Army and the National Secular Society; the Catholic Evidence Guild – and the Ministry of Information. Passing behind the MoI’s stand, ‘a group of Welsh miners singing hymns in unison temporarily drown the efforts of the speaker to assure his audience that all empires but the British Empire have been built upon domination’. Next to the Peace Pledge Union, an Anti-Fifth Column League speaker held forth, denouncing Lord Haw-Haw as a cowardly rat and Hitler as a dirty murderer. The crowd listened with ‘mild amusement’, as if ‘children slain in Hull and Hamburg’ were unreal to them. ‘The sound and fury of the orator’s hatred do not in the least represent the feelings of the majority, who regard Hitler as a dangerous but pitiable lunatic …’ Brittain could ‘not help wishing’ that Hitler and Goebbels could see in that crowded park ‘the vast London population’ which they had ‘so often described as panic stricken’. She too worried about whether ‘our national equanimity’ might be too closely related to ‘apathy, inertia, lack of foresight and failure of imagination’.33

  Yet none of these could be charged against the Mayhew family, scions of the joint vice-chairman of Colman’s, the famous mustard manufacturer. Six
young Mayhews and two Howarth cousins served in the war and kept in touch via a family ‘Budget’ – each writing letters for family consumption, which Beryl, Lady Mayhew, circulated to all from the family house in Norfolk. Of her step-sons, Christopher was prospective Labour candidate for South Norfolk, serving in the army; Pat, a Christian Pacifist, had joined the army as an ambulanceman and had received the Military Medal for his bravery at Dunkirk, from which he had escaped in an open rowing boat, upon which Christopher wrote: ‘It is the most delightful incident of the war so far. One’s faith is simultaneously strengthened in democracy for allowing Pat to object; in the Army for decorating an objector to itself; in Pat himself; in religion for helping him not to run until the time came.’ But Pat now went through a crisis of conscience, and applied for a commission as a combatant soldier. Meanwhile, young Paul’s turn was coming up: he was in the RAF, about to be trained for service in fighters. As they all awaited invasion, Beryl, who kept busy with voluntary work, wrote that she found the crisis ‘quietly but deeply exhilarating … I wouldn’t change places with anyone in history.’ Yet she hardly had time to think about the war: ‘I’m either much too busy making sure pyjamas will be finished as promised or 1001 odd jobs attended to, or else as on Sunday evening Dad and I are paddling in the lake taking off weed and scum, turtle doves crooning in the woods behind us, a family of baby ducks catching flies by the island, and a kingfisher over in the alders – peace incarnate.’34