In 1940 the popular Korda film The Lion Has Wings offered the stirring vision of a German raid panicked and scattered by the sight of a balloon barrage, and despondently turning for home. The reality was that during Luftwaffe ‘turkey shoots’ of blimps above Dover that summer, spectators on the ground actually applauded each time a balloon was shot down in flames. Several balloon rumours were highly imaginative. One held that the mooring cables were electrified, so that enemy aircrew would be fried on contact. Another claimed that the cables acted as a magnet: ‘bombs are attracted to the cord and slither down harmlessly.’
The legend of the ‘Blitz spirit’, by which citizens of every creed and class, galvanised by crisis, were united as never before, to share a strong bond of equality of sacrifice, has a far more limited basis in fact. Since the end of the war, popular myth has greatly inflated the extent to which the British Public smiled on through adversity. Over 5,000 people fled Britain during the last two days in August 1939, and by July 1940 no fewer than three sitting MPs had absconded abroad. Among those who stayed behind instances of minor discord were not uncommon. Writing in Crime in Wartime, Edward Smithies records that common flashpoints among civilians during the war years were the ubiquitous queues, whether at shops, or for trains and buses, or outside air raid shelters, and even inside them. If court records are a reliable barometer, altercations between customers and shopkeepers were also not unknown.
The Stygian black-out facilitated crime generally, although at the outset a few optimists had predicted burglars would be ‘forced out of business’ by the ‘perpetual fear of opening a blackened window to find a family party in progress’. The facts failed to match the dream, as Hermann Mannheim noted in War and Crime, published in 1941:
It is not only the burglar who profits from the black-out. According to newspaper reports, larcenies from telephone boxes, thieving from the docks, bag-snatching, assaults on police or on women, and other forms of hooliganism seem to be of fairly frequent occurrence … The criminal courts have, from the beginning, paid particular attention to crimes of this kind by imposing severer sentences, though they avoid entirely such savageries as are reported from certain countries abroad.
More serious was the extent to which civil defence personnel seized opportunities to steal and loot from bombed houses. Indeed almost half (42 per cent) the arrests made by police for this type of offence were civil defence workers. A Mass Observation reporter recorded in 1941 that some Heavy Rescue and demolition men took up their posts with this very object in mind.
Some men come on the jobs in the hope of picking up loot. Even most of those who are not primarily concerned with what they can find are not averse to taking something when it turns up. The press campaign and the heavy sentences for looters don’t seem to worry them. In fact, they are stupidly and foolishly open about it, and will often scramble for bluey in full view of passers-by …
Condan found a suitcase and opened it. The foreman pounced on him immediately. He warned us not to open a case if we found it. He picked up a handbag and took out a purse which was empty. Then he turned to us and said, ‘It’s the funniest bloody bomb I ever came across. I been all through the last war and I done several jobs in this, but I never come across a bomb like it. It’s blown every bag open and knocked the money out, it’s even knocked the money out of the gas meters, yet it didn’t break the electric light bulb in the basement!’
Looting was often from the rubble of bombed houses, although empty properties were also vulnerable. Some seem to have considered that the goods taken were a form of reward for dangerous rescue work, or that loot from commercial premises was fair game. In London a squad of special plain clothes anti-looting detectives was formed by Scotland Yard, who mingled with civil defence workers to catch offenders red-handed, while in 1941 police in Birmingham went so far as to warn the public that firewatchers were responsible for a substantial proportion of the increase in cases of larceny. In some towns, such as Portsmouth and Liverpool, troops even stood guard after raids to deter looters. Probably the most infamous case was the aftermath of the bombing of the exclusive Café de Paris in London on the night of 8/9 March 1941, when a single bomb plunged through the roof to the dancefloor, killing 34 revellers (including the band leader Ken ‘Snake Hips’ Johnson) and injuring 80 more. The immediate aftermath was witnessed by the novelist Nicholas Monsarrat:
The first thing which the rescue squads and the firemen saw, as their torches poked through the gloom and the smoke … was a frieze of other shadowy men, night-creatures who had scuttled within as soon as the echoes ceased, crouching over any dead or wounded woman, and soigné corpse they could find, and ripping off its necklace, or earrings, or brooch; rifling its handbag, scooping up its loose change.
As the historian Philip Ziegler noted, like the sinking of the Titanic several decades earlier, at the Café de Paris it was the instant transition from opulence and glitter to appalling destruction which captured public imagination, and further sensationalised the gruesome stories of quick-witted looters tearing open handbags, and stripping rings from the fingers of the dead and wounded. In truth, the devastation and theft at the scene was little different to any number of other incidents in cities across Britain. In the opinion of Barbara Nixon, an ARP worker in Finsbury:
It was a gory incident, but the same week another dance hall a mile to the east of us was hit and there were nearly 200 casualties. This time there were only 10/6d frocks, and a few lines in the paper followed by, ‘It is feared there were several casualties.’ Local feeling was rather bitter.
The defiant sentiment that ‘Britain can take it’ was often found to be wanting in heavily bombed areas. Official reactions in many cities visited frequently by the Luftwaffe give a consistent picture far removed from the myth of modern memory. Unity of purpose and high morale often gave way to boredom, apathy and pessimism, as we see from this appraisal from the Ministry of Information:
Coventry: There was great depression, a widespread feeling of impotence and many open signs of hysteria … Terror, neurosis … Women were seen to cry in the street, to attack a fireman and so on. (November 1940)
Bristol: Much talk of having been let down by the Government, and of the possibility of a negotiated peace. (December 1940)
Portsmouth: On all sides we hear that looting and wanton destruction had reached alarming proportions. The police seem unable to exercise control … The effect on morale is bad and there is a general feeling of desperation … Their nerve had gone. (May 1941)
Outside London, where there was no Tube in which to seek refuge, many towns were depopulated after dark, after residents decamped to the countryside to sleep rough. In Portsmouth some 90,000 people left the city each night during the heavy bombing of the ‘May Blitz’ of 1941, while in Belfast 100,000 fled to the countryside after the first major raid in April. In Liverpool the figure for ‘trekking’ was 50,000, and in Clydebank the overnight population fell from 50,000 to 2,000 after the first attack in March. Previously many in Clydebank had imagined themselves immune from bombing, on the false premise that Germans were not antagonistic to the Scots, and because magnetic fields in the surrounding mountains would dislocate aircraft engines. In the aftermath of the heavy raid on Liverpool on 7 May, there arose the enduring legend of mass peace demonstrations and martial law, described as ‘one of the great rumours of the war’ by Tom Harrisson, the director of Mass Observation. The myth took in food riots, summary shooting of defeatists, Irish troublemakers stirring panic, homeless marchers with white flags and the removal of trainloads of unidentified corpses for mass burial. According to Harrisson:
The Liverpool rumour of martial law was encouraged by the police and army temporarily closing the city centre to cars and persons without special business, in order to ease congestion and enable surface debris and unexploded bombs to be cleared. There was no public explanation for this necessary measure. Some of the victims jumped to conclusions.
The Liverpool myth was slow to fade
, outlasting an earlier rumour popular in the north-west that bowed and bloodied East Enders in London had petitioned Churchill to end the war. A year earlier, in May 1940, a rumour swept the country that the royal family were set to leave for Canada, that a shadow government had already been formed on the far side of the Atlantic, and that the War Cabinet was also preparing to pack its bags as soon as the invasion began. In recent years some historians have sought to challenge the myth of the Blitz by citing the fact that various dignitaries, usually Royals, were on occasion jeered and hissed during visits to blitzed areas. But in Southampton, according to a Mass Observer, the underlying cause was trekking by local civic leaders:
After the big raid, when Southampton’s High Street was left in ruins, and most of the centre of the town, the King and Queen came on a flying visit. As they went down the High Street, people booed. But we were not booing the king and queen. It was all the town’s top brass who were with them. Everybody knew that they got out of Southampton every night, and only came back to meet the King and Queen.
Among the most enduring memories of 1940 are the stirring speeches made by Winston Churchill, although even here not all was as it seemed. On 13 May Churchill made his first speech as Prime Minister, in which he famously stated that he had promised nothing but ‘blood, toil, tears and sweat’. However, this speech was made to the House of Commons alone, and for the BBC broadcast his words were simply read aloud by a newsreader. In fact Churchill himself did not record it for posterity until November 1942. His first broadcast speech, on 19 May, is little quoted today, and instead the next memorable phrase came on 4 June, when Britons were exhorted to fight the enemy on the beaches. That evening Churchill refused to repeat the speech for the BBC, and with no recording from the Commons available, an actor named Norman Shelley was substituted. Shelley, who played Larry the Lamb for Children’s Hour, repeated the deception on 18 June, for the speech which ended with the immortal phrase: ‘This was their Finest Hour.’ On 20 August Churchill famously informed the Commons that ‘never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’ However, the BBC did not broadcast this speech, and the prime minister addressed the nation just once more in 1940, on 11 September. There followed an elongated gap of five months, unbroken until Churchill broadcast again on 9 February 1941.
Another radio myth concerns BBC newsreaders, who in June 1940 broke with tradition and began each bulletin by giving their names. According to the BBC Handbook of 1941:
The reason for this is not a hankering after self-advertisement – although at first some listeners unfairly took this to be so; in wartime listeners must be able to recognise instantly the voice of British broadcasting and then, in any possible emergency, they will be on their guard against some lying imitation by the voice of the enemy.
In fact, self-promotion was precisely the motive, as the celebrated newsreader John Snagge revealed in 1972:
I said to Lotbiniere one day [in 1940], ‘It seems to me ridiculous that if Outside Broadcast people can get their names mentioned, why shouldn’t the announcers chosen to read the news also give their names?’ To my surprise the powers that be accepted it … When it came out afterwards, and a reason was asked for it, Lotbiniere and I said it was for security reasons. After the invasion of Poland there had been a number of false announcers put up by the Germans … But it was in fact I, not normally the inventive type, who first suggested it, for a different reason.
Two of the most enduring myths of the Blitz arose long after the war had ended. In 1977 the author Len Deighton published Fighter, a highly readable account of the Battle of Britain, in which he claimed that sustained heavy bombing of Manston airfield in August 1940 resulted in a mutiny among ground crew. By this account, airmen refused to leave the shelters for days on end, pilots had to rearm and refuel their own aircraft, and local civilians took the opportunity to loot the damaged buildings for tools and spares. The situation deteriorated so far, so it was said, that the station chaplain was obliged to disarm one officer who threatened to kill everyone else in the mess. On the basis of Deighton’s account, the same allegations were repeated by Angus Calder in The Myth of the Blitz, yet this alleged mutiny is neither confirmed nor denied by official documents. The station record book briefly states that:
Later it was decided to evacuate permanently all administrative personnel and those not required in connection with station defence and servicing of aircraft. Accommodation for evacuated personnel was found in Westgate.
Although between 28 August and 5 September the Operations Record Book is blank, there is no evidence that pages have been removed from the original now lodged with the Public Record Office. Rocky Stockman, the author of the History of RAF Manston, has failed to locate any reliable evidence which backs up Deighton’s claim, and despite interviewing many of those present at Manston in 1940 unearthed nothing beyond ‘vague mentions of shadowy stories at fourth or fifth hand’. Deighton has not revealed his original source, and as Stockman rightly points out:
There were a number of administrative and other non-combatant personnel at Manston at the time and they were at the station mainly because it provided service office and living accommodation. There were also some newly-arrived recruits. They were most likely to have been the ones in the shelters. That is where they should have been during the raids. They would not have known what to do in ‘turning round’ the fighters, and would have impeded the others had they tried. They were later evacuated to Westgate and other places.
It is clear from the example of certain ships during the Dunkirk evacuation that morale can rapidly fail under sustained attack, and that fear can be contagious. However the notion that the entire station at Manston refused to obey orders is difficult to credit, and it is more likely instead that the actions of a few dazed, fatigued and shell-shocked personnel have been magnified to become the so-called mutiny. The same form of numerical exaggeration is a hallmark of the military myth, and can be seen in the case of the massacre that never was at Arras, where the killing of perhaps half a dozen German prisoners became the calculated murder of 400.
Another Blitz myth surfaced in 1974, in the wake of the publication of The Ultra Secret by Frederick Winterbotham. A wartime Group Captain with SIS, Winterbotham was in charge of security and communication of decrypted Enigma signals at Bletchley Park, and did history no less a service by breaking the 30-year silence surrounding Ultra with his unauthorised book. Because he had no official sanction, however, Winterbotham was not allowed access to classified material, and instead had to rely on memory alone. This led to a number of errors in The Ultra Secret, the most significant of which concerned the devastating German air raid on Coventry on 14 November 1940. Of this Winterbotham wrote:
At about 3 pm on November 14th someone must have made a slip up and instead of a city with a code-name, Coventry was spelt out … There were, perhaps, four or five hours before the attack would arrive … I asked [Churchill’s] personal secretary if he would be good enough to ring me back when the decision had been taken, because if Churchill decided to evacuate Coventry, the press, and indeed everybody, would know we had pre-knowledge of the raid and some counter-measure might be necessary to protect the source.
In the event, it was decided only to alert all the services, the fire, the ambulance, the police, the wardens, and to get everything ready to light the decoy fires. This is the sort of terrible decision that has to be made on the highest levels in war. It was unquestionably the right one, but I am glad it was not I who had to take it.
The ten-hour raid code-named Moonlight Sonata duly took place, and resulted in unprecedented civilian losses: 550 killed and 1,000 seriously injured. A total of 50,749 houses were destroyed or damaged, and the attack even gave rise to a new verb for urban devastation: to Coventrate. Rumours in circulation during the immediate aftermath included news that a man had been shot while signalling with a night light, and that prior to the raid a swastika of smoke appeared in the sky as a warning to fifth col
umnists to evacuate the city. The inference from Winterbotham was that the scale of the tragedy might have been greatly reduced if the city had been evacuated, but that Churchill decided against this in order to preserve the security of Ultra. Subsequently several other authors repeated the claim that the city had been martyred, including Anthony Cave Brown in Bodyguard of Lies (1976):
Should not the population of the inner city, together with the aged, the young, and those in hospitals who could be moved, be evacuated? To all these propositions, Churchill said no; there must be no evacuations and no warnings.
Cave Brown stated that Ultra had provided Churchill and his advisors ‘at least 48, possibly 60 hours’ warning’ of the raid, a claim repeated by William Stevenson in A Man Called Intrepid (also 1976): ‘The name of the target was in Churchill’s hands within minutes of Hitler’s decision … If the citizens were not warned, thousands would die or suffer.’
Myths & Legends of the Second World War Page 12
