The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  Robinson, though, is up against the Big Fact. He can expose, with complete justice, the gross exaggeration by the RAF of numbers of Germans brought down; he can demonstrate his virtuosity by making somehow tolerable page after page of silly RAF backchat linked with pointless and sometimes cruel horseplay; he can emphasise stresses and fatigues which destroy men’s judgement and set us up to mock the crumbling organisation of Fighter Command. But he cannot end with the Luftwaffe winning: because it didn’t. Barton and CH3 may not be chivalric young Englishmen, but they are still in the air fighting at the end, as indeed their whole groggy Command was. Robinson’s book is very exciting and often, in gallows-humour mode, very funny. But its conclusion with an ‘Author’s note’ indicates that he could not quite drive his overview of the Battle of Britain successfully home in fictional shape. By concentrating entirely on a squadron exposed in east Kent, Robinson can accentuate horror and chaos. However, he cannot counteract his reader’s knowledge of the Big Fact, which at times makes his approach to the battle seem wilfully cynical. Nor, apparently, does he think that an overall ‘debunking’ would be valid. ‘Dowding has, quite rightly, received credit for his handling of the Battle’, his ‘Author’s note’ gratuitously concedes.12

  Battle is generally an all-male affair. That must be Robinson’s justification for giving women so little to do in his novel, which is sexist, one feels, by default. A much older book, Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Cruel Sea (1951), seems sexist virtually by intention. Alan Munson summarises the evidence thus:

  Sailors are undermined by bad marriages and bad sex, unfaithful women harm the war effort itself. Apart from Ericson’s wife and Lockhart’s girl-friend, every woman described in the novel is unfaithful or harmful. A promiscuous actress laughs at the news of her husband’s death, a seaman goes absent hunting for his wife, a young officer catches venereal disease. The men in this novel fight two battles: one at sea against U-Boats, another at home against women.13

  Monsarrat’s book – famously and very successfully filmed, with Jack Hawkins, as Captain Ericson, making his casting seem inevitable – retains considerable power. Like Robinson, he can make technical detail vividly interesting. As Captain Ericson and First Lieutenant Lockhart patrol the seas from 1939 to 1945 guarding convoys against U Boats, first in the Compass Rose, then in the Saltash, their travels yield many strong incidents, of which Monsarrat handles the most sickening and macabre particularly well. The novel cannot be dismissed as merely a matter of dated Union Jack heroics. However, the merits of its best passages are not the reason for discussing it here. I mention it because its negatives, silences and exclusions help to illuminate certain highly positive characteristics of the Myth of the Blitz – which is warmly inclusive.

  Monsarrat celebrates all-male life on shipboard – the dogged courage of men whose lives are at risk day after day, month after month, year after year. Homosexuality among sailors is hardly unknown. Monsarrat allows only a single hint of its existence. And yet such contentment as we are supposed to feel at the end of the novel is because two men have survived with honour, fully in tune with each other, After Lockhart has learned of the death of his Wren fiancée in a meaningless accident, Ericson watches him ‘with compassion’ that is ‘very nearly love’. Lockhart in turn feels ‘enormous affection’ for the captain with whom he reviews the war on the final pages.14 One feels that Monsarrat – whose ruthlessness in condemning men to death for weak dalliance with the other sex is, as Munson points out, shown in the passage where Compass Rose sailors, after the corvette is sunk, struggle in the cruel sea – has disposed of Lockhart’s sensuous Julie Hallam in order that the pure, platonic love of captain and Number One shall shine forth in the finale without competition. (Ericson clearly lost interest in sexual relations with his dull wife years ago.)

  Monsarrat’s mythologised Battle of the Atlantic stands in defiance of the Myth of the Blitz. Not only women (and Americans), but also British civilians in general, are treated with contempt and ridicule. British workers are idle and incompetent. The black market in petrol at home disgusts brave men sailing oil tankers in the Atlantic. Glasgow mid-war has for Lockhart ‘the same futureless air’ as he had found in 1939, with its ‘inward-looking, pallid faces’.15

  Such virtues in the English as the Myth of the Blitz extols are here concentrated amongst men on shipboard, together with one crowning virtue, expressed in Ericson’s view of his crew, mostly made up of volunteers and conscripts:

  ‘The sea in their blood’ meant that you could pour Englishmen – any Englishmen – into a ship, and they made that ship work and fight as if they had been doing it all their lives, catching up, overtaking, and leaving behind the professionals of any other nation. It was the basic virtue of living on an island.16

  On a particularly dangerous convoy run to Gibraltar, Ericson’s Compass Rose picks up great numbers of survivors from other vessels that have been sunk. Typically, none of the twenty Wrens embarked on one of them are permitted by Monsarrat to survive. So the rescued people cramming Compass Rose are all male: fourteen Merchant Navy officers and 121 others – ‘Seamen, firemen, cooks, Lascars, Chinese’. It is worth quoting the account of night in the fo’c’sle at some length:

  The place was crammed to the deckhead: men stood or sat or knelt or lay, in every available space: they crouched under the tables, they wedged themselves in corners, they stretched out on top of the broad ventilating shafts. There were men being sea-sick, men crying out in their sleep, men wolfing food, men hugging their bits of possessions and staring at nothing: wounded men groaning, apparently fit men laughing uneasily at nothing, brave men who could still summon a smile and a straight answer. It was impossible to pick one’s way from one end of the fo’c’sle to the other, as Lockhart did each night when he made the Rounds, without being shocked and appalled and saddened by this slum corner of the war: and yet somehow one could be heartened also, and cheered by an impression of patience and endurance, and made to feel proud … Individuals, here and there, might have been pushed close to defeat and panic, but the gross crowding, the rags, the oil, the bandages, the smell of men in adversity, were still not enough to defeat the whole company. They were all sailors there, not to be overwhelmed even by this sudden and sustained nightmare.17

  With a very few words changed – ‘deckhead … fo’c’sle … sailors’ replaced, say, by ‘ceiling … shelter … Londoners’ – this could almost be an account from one of the ‘worst’ shelters early in the London Blitz. But not quite. It is very hard to imagine a situation where the occupants of a shelter with over a hundred in it could have been exclusively male. A typical account of the crowded tube station, the sordid public shelter or the overflowing rest centre will in fact emphasise the presence of women and children.

  The Myth of the Blitz welcomes almost all comers. It has awkward dealings with race (the presence not only of many Jews but of ‘coloured’ and Asian residents in the East End produced remarks in passing by journalists and others which now seem embarrassing). But the Myth usually tells us that anyone – old, young, rich, poor, female, male – could be an heroic front-line fighter in 1940–41. The Daily Express correspondent in the Blitz, Hilde Marchant, quoted a soldier patrolling the Thames Embankment during a raid: ‘We feel a bit ashamed of ourselves when we see it’s the women and kids fighting the war for us.’18 Even if she improved in this case on a less striking remark, such thoughts were familiar at that time. This makes Monsarrat’s handling of the Merseyside Blitz all the more starkly indicative of the male chauvinism of the Myth of the Battle of the Atlantic which his book in many respects develops successfully.

  Compass Rose returns frequently to Liverpool. By 1941 it seems, we are told, to ‘belong to’ that city, where its sailors have married or established their wives. Chief Petty Officer Tallow has regularly taken his colleague Chief E. R. A. Watts to be fed, while on leave, by his widowed sister Gladys in Birkenhead, and it is understood that Watts, a widower, will marry her once the war is over.r />
  In May of 1941, the ship comes in to find devastation in and around the docks. Bob Tallow and Jim Watts, unable to get through to Gladys by phone, go to Birkenhead. There is little left of the street where Gladys lived. They find her house ‘a heap of dust and rubbish’. From ARP workers they learn that two dead women were brought out of it. They go to the Warden’s Post for confirmation of their fears …

  The remarkable thing about this passage of some four pages is that not one woman is reported to be seen in devastated Birkenhead. Male rescue-squad members, male wardens are given voices. ‘Children’ play in the rubble of Gladys’s house. But the tough seamen get the hard news, and laconic sympathy, from males in uniform, not female neighbours. There are to be no tears, no cups of tea, no gossip, so Monsarrat, consciously or not, has decreed.

  In contrast, Helen Forrester’s very well researched Three Women of Liverpool (1984) is a most effective novel presenting the Merseyside May Blitz from female perspectives. It does not exaggerate the active role of women in Civil Defence, but the heroine, a plain thirty-nine-year-old ‘spinster’, Emmie, released from a long sentence of caring for aged parents, works in a canteen for sailors alongside other women, some of them upper-class volunteers. She is there when it is bombed, and her long ordeal trapped in a vault before she is rescued, carefully and most vividly realised, gives the book a very strong climax.

  Written four decades after the events which it fictionalises, Forrester’s novel is unselfconsciously honest about working-class Merseyside. An admirably devoted Irish Catholic air-raid warden is also a black marketeer: his children, presented with sympathy, are as ill-trained and verminous as evacuees from Merseyside were so often alleged to be. Post-raid looting is several times referred to; also, ghoulish sightseers clustering round an ‘incident’.

  Forrester does not have enough subtlety to make the most of the grudging accommodation with Catholic neighbours which the raids force on Emmie’s intensely Protestant and houseproud sister-in-law, Gwen, but the issue of sectarianism is squarely faced. In no way is the Blitz glamorised or its horror treated lightly. It is seen throughout in terms of work – at the climax the skilled work of technicians (it is a telephone engineer who by fluke locates the buried Emmie), of former builders and coalminers in the rescue squad shifting intricate rubble to get to her. And also the housework which obsesses Gwen, and the labour of women feeding sailors.

  Overall, this warm and intelligent novel provides as plausible a reconstruction of the Blitz – using the new freedom to write about sexuality enjoyed in the later twentieth century, not available during the war – as any reader could wish. It doesn’t disturb the Myth one iota. It ends like a wartime film, with Emmie, out of hospital, enjoying a Sunday outing with her merchant-sailor fiancé, who is about to return to the cruel sea, or, as she thinks, to ‘the god-damned Atlantic’. She is resolved, when fully healed, ‘to try for a job in munitions’, so she can ‘send a bit back to the Jerries with her best compliments’.19 In 1942 or 1943, of course, no film-maker or novelist could step outside the war and create closure there. Why doesn’t Forrester do so?

  One speculates, as with Derek Robinson, that the effort of detailed, horrific reconstruction raised too many issues for glib long-term resolution. There is also this feature of the events gathered in the Myth: that they have such heroic intensity that exploration of characters’ fates beyond them can only generate anti-climax. 1940–41, the Finest Hour, invests all active, courageous, and half-decent participants with glory. Forrester would have undermined the status of her people by showing them watching the Coronation of 1953 on television, or reminiscing together after J. B. Priestley’s TV documentary 1940 made for the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Battle of Britain. And the disturbing point would emerge that 1940 was not the end of history, that memories of it would become tangled in post-war ‘austerity’, in fifties ‘affluence’, in sixties ‘permissiveness’, in the widening realisation during the seventies that Britain had for some time been a distinctly second rate power.

  The problem of closure can be further illuminated by considering two very different novels by distinguished writers.

  The Belfast Blitz of April 1941 was particularly gruesome and, from the German point of view, effective – the hardest of all ‘provincial’ blitzes to mythologise adequately. Little needs to be said here about the pervasiveness of sectarian division in Ulster. More men from neutral Eire’s twenty-six counties volunteered to serve in the British forces than stood forth in Northern Ireland, where the British government dared not demand conscription for fear of inflaming Catholic Irish feeling. The Home Guard in Ulster was effectively barred to Catholics by the Protestant majority who controlled the parliament which ran this mini-state within the UK. Craigavon, the Prime Minister, had successfully pleaded for contracts for Belfast’s shipbuilding and aircraft industries. These made the city a natural target for Luftwaffe raids, yet the Northern Ireland government did little to provide protection. When Coventry’s ordeal made the danger clear, it was too late. Belfast was still badly short of shelters in the spring of 1941.

  Air defences were so feeble that two of the six German planes which made an exploratory raid on 7 April and killed thirteen people actually switched on their navigation lights over the city. On 15 April, 180 more followed. The fire service was ill-equipped. Faced by conflagration and chaos, the Minister of Public Security rang Dublin for help. Daring German displeasure, De Valera obliged, and thirteen fire appliances set off north. The driver of one of them would always remember Belfast as a place of devastation, with ‘human bodies and dead animals lying all over the place’.

  Official statistics eventually showed 745 lives lost – many more than in Coventry’s big raid. Next day, a thick fog of smoke, ash and dust covered the city. The Germans came back on 4 May, killed only 150 more people, but did so much damage in the port area that Harland and Wolff’s shipyard was not back in full production for six months.

  ‘Trekking’ to sleep outside Belfast assumed colossal proportions – up to 100,000 people. ‘Every industry or factory listed on the Luftwaffe’s target indicator chart in the previous November’ was destroyed or seriously damaged. The Northern Ireland Cabinet now considered improved ARP. It gave priority to working out how to safeguard the large statue outside the Parliament building of Carson, the defiant Protestant politician who had prevented Home Rule for a united Ireland.20

  Brian Moore, future prize-winning novelist, served in Belfast ARP during the big April raid, and his novel centring on it, The Emperor of Ice Cream, is semi-autobiographical. Moore’s own Catholic and Republican father was a distinguished surgeon, young ‘Gavin Burke’s’ is a Republican solicitor. This fine novel, full of witty and incisive detail, is unsparing in its account of the Blitz, in which Gavin, against his British-hating father’s wishes, works as an ARP regular. Wearing Wellington boots and yellow oilskins, Gavin is set to work coffining corpses in the morgue; ‘In the stink of human excrement, in the acrid smell of disinfectant, these dead were heaped, body on body, flung arm, twisted feet, open mouth, staring eyes, old men on top of young women, a child lying on a policeman’s back, a soldier’s hand resting on a woman’s thigh …’ At least Gavin doesn’t have to work on, or even look at, ‘the pieces’, attended to in a back room. ‘He thought of old films he had seen … But this was no film. There were no ugly corpses in films.’

  His own family has fled to Dublin. Gavin returns to an empty house, windows broken, ‘condemned’ as ‘unsafe’. To his extreme surprise, his father appears. He has come back from Eire, worried about his son:

  In the candlelight, he saw that his father was crying. He had never seen his father cry before. Did his father know that the house was condemned, did his father know that everything had changed, that things would never be the same again? A new voice, a cold grown-up voice within him said: ‘No.’ His father was the child now; his father’s world was dead. He looked over at the wireless set, remembering his father, ear cocked for Englan
d’s troubles, pleased at news of other, faraway disasters.

  Gavin realises that he himself has risen to adulthood:

  His father seemed aware of this change. He leaned his untidy gray head on Gavin’s shoulder, nodding, weeping, confirming. ‘Oh Gavin,’ his father said, ‘I’ve been a fool. Such a fool.’

  Though this literally deals only with an individual’s development and one father-son relationship, the novel pushes us to see this ending as prophetic of the future of Ulster. Protestants and Catholics have been bombed indiscriminately.

  The young IRA supporter who flashed a light deliberately to guide the bombers has been seen repenting bitterly. Moore has seized hope from the Irish Blitz experience and brought Belfast under the umbrella of the Myth. Just as in London, class differences were reportedly subdued, so in Belfast sectarian feeling is chastened.21

  Moore published his novel in 1965, when prospects for harmony in Ulster seemed good. By the end of the decade they would be in ruins. For all the quality of the writing, The Emperor of Ice Cream seems betrayed and diminished by Moore’s attempt at a closure which would relate the Blitz to the sixties and beyond.

  Robin Jenkins, who provides in Fergus Lamont perhaps the most powerful evocation of Blitz in Scottish fiction, is lured into positioning the raids on Clydeside in 1941 as if at the end of Scotland’s history.22 The book’s first-person narrator dies in 1963, as we learn from a concluding ‘footnote’ by his son, ‘within hours’ of completing this ‘autobiography’. The last twenty pages of the novel describe the return of Lamont, in 1941, to his home town, ‘Gantock’. His persona has been intriguingly complex and inconsistent: he is proletarian radical, pseudo-aristocratic snob, soldier and poet. He confronts his old teacher, Calderwood, an erstwhile socialist rebel now ‘screwed up and shrunken’ with disillusionment: