by Andrew Marr
Above all, when it came to fighting an air war Britain was, for once, better organized than Germany. Churchill often gets the credit for this, thanks to his campaigning before the war, and, as we have seen, he was generally spot-on. But it was actually Chamberlain who in the late 1930s listened to Dowding when he insisted that, by creating an excellent fighter force, annihilation by bombing could be averted. As described earlier, radar was an essential component of the new system. Its full effectiveness had been stumbled upon during a fruitless search for a ‘death-ray’ and the famous chain of radar stations along the coast had been built in great secrecy. The Germans knew about them but never understood how important they were – partly because of the command-and-control system created by Dowding at the same time. Below Dowding in the RAF was the great genius of the front line of the battle, the New Zealander Keith Park, whose command of 11 Group, covering the south-east of England, was inspirational. Dowding, who was personally rather dull, and Park were both constantly being conspired against by another Air Vice Marshal, Leigh-Mallory, who believed in grouping far more fighters together for a knock-out blow, the so-called ‘big wing’. His manoeuvring sidelined the later careers of both Dowding and Park, neither of whom is even mentioned in the Air Ministry’s official history of the battle. Luckily, it did not seriously impede the efficient command of the fight at the time.145
Getting the new Spitfires and Hurricanes to front-line squadrons had been a slow business. The appallingly outdated state of Britain’s engineering industry meant that most of the machine tools used to build them, and many of the components, had to be imported. But one of Churchill’s earliest appointments was to make the wicked press baron Lord Beaverbrook his minister for aircraft production. In a devilish whirlpool of activity, bullying, cajoling, stealing and sabotaging Whitehall systems, Beaverbrook raised the monthly output of fighters from 256 in April 1940 to a peak of just under 500 in July. He persuaded half the country, from towns to works canteens to coal mines, to raise money to ‘buy a Spitfire’. The Germans, producing only two new fighters for every three British ones, had no idea how far away they were from destroying the RAF physically.
Even when it came to the famous fear of running out of pilots – and there were certainly anxious days – accelerated British training and the use of naval and other pilots more than filled the gap. Despite the deaths of 500 RAF pilots among the 3,000 or so who fought in the summer of 1940, the operational strength of fighter command actually rose between the beginning and end of the battle by around 40 per cent.146 Outnumbered in individual fights, they also outfought the Luftwaffe, with a higher kill-rate across the battle. Far from this being a battle of ‘the few’, it was a military achievement of the many. Behind the 3,000 fighter pilots there were another 400,000 people in the RAF, including the mechanics, fitters, riggers and pilots (some of them women) ferrying new and damaged fighters. There were the Observer Corps, the searchlight crews, the gunners and the radar operators. Behind them were the frantically overworking factories, often in vulnerable parts of the south-east, and the repair crews who kept the few flying. This was a fight that involved industrial energy and organization, a sophisticated communications system, a high degree of professional training and the very latest technology. The RAF, whatever its own spin, was a disciplined and meritocratic outfit. In short, the Battle of Britain was not won because of amateur, public-schoolboy pluck but because for once, we fought with the same kind of focus and organization as the Germans.
None of which detracts an inch from the extraordinary courage of the young men who fought. And they were young – the oldest RAF squadron leader was twenty-four. Sitting behind eighty-five gallons of fuel, for a fighter pilot death by bullet was merciful compared with the horror of being burned alive, or at best burned out of recognition – the skin-graft technology of Archibald McIndoe’s East Grinstead unit was much needed. Luck, excellent eyesight and reflexes and a killer instinct were essential, but often not sufficient. Though only one key airfield, Biggin Hill, was put out of action for a short time by German bombing, pilots regularly had to make emergency landings, bail out over the sea – where their chances of survival were low – and face being shot in the air as they tried to parachute to safety. What they achieved was deathless. Had the RAF lost control of the skies to Hitler’s hitherto all-conquering war machine, invasion would have been far likelier. The army had left their tanks, artillery, machine guns, transport vehicles and most of their rifles behind in France. Had the Wehrmacht made it ashore at Dover or Brighton, there would have been little to stop them in Kent or Sussex. Hitler did not want to invade if he did not have to, and had indeed again offered what he regarded as reasonable peace terms to his defeated foe. (These were rejected not by Churchill or one of his ministers but, off his own bat, by a BBC announcer.) And the question of whether the German invasion of Britain, Operation Sealion, would ever have been successful cannot be answered. The German army was poorly equipped for a seaborne invasion, was still reliant on horse-drawn transport and was at that time not supported by warships which could have taken on the Royal Navy. It would have been another huge gamble. But Hitler at the time was a gambler on a winning streak.
The Battle of Britain was the first proper success the country had had since war broke out. It turned the RAF from being the least regarded of the British services to national heroes. It brought home to everyone living in the southern parts of England that this was a national war unlike any other, which was actually being fought on home territory. Rather like the ‘halt order’ which allowed the BEF to escape at Dunkirk, it is often said that Britain was saved by another German mistake, Goering’s decision to shift the air attacks away from the RAF airfields to London. Yet the shift was not nearly as clear-cut as history remembers, and some of the hardest fights came after the Blitz was underway. Given the relative success of Britain’s radar, aircraft production and kill ratios, it seems unlikely that the RAF would have been broken by a few more weeks of Luftwaffe assault. None of this was clear at the time. Exhaustion was taking its toll. Ahead lay an experience that showed just how democratically the carnage of war would be distributed: Britain might not be invaded on land but she remained open to bombing. Just as an evacuation is still a defeat, so a defensive success is not victory. The British have never been wildly enthusiastic about current affairs: nevertheless, it is remarkable that in the summer of 1940 a grand total of 3 per cent thought the country would lose the war.
All Our Blitzes
If ‘the Blitz’ refers to the bombing of London, first in 1940–41 by aircraft and then in 1944 by flying bombs and rockets, then we need a plural. Almost every major industrial city, and many smaller ones, were bombed. From Belfast to Exeter, Clydebank to Hull, high streets and city layouts today still bear witness to what happened. But the first Blitz was on London. There had been dramatic air attacks already, not only on Guernica during the Spanish Civil War but during the Polish campaign and against Rotterdam. Yet the first really serious attempt in the world to make a country surrender by bombing its civilians until the nation’s morale broke began in September 1940. Up to a point, Britain was ready for this. A quarter of a million volunteers were organized as wardens, firemen, nurses and even amateur bomb-disposal teams. There was a national civil defence and air-raid protection structure in place. Public shelters had been prepared, though they would prove grossly inadequate. Anderson shelters and Morrison shelters – steel hide-unders for use inside the house – had been widely distributed. Many people had quietly left London – about a quarter of the city’s population had gone by November 1940, and in some East End streets a majority had left their homes before the bombing started. Evacuation took place at the grander end too. King Charles I, having lost his head once, nearly lost it again: the vast painting of him on horseback by Van Dyck was part of the huge National Gallery collection moved out for the duration, eventually to the cave of a slate quarry in Wales. He got stuck under a railway bridge; rather than destroy the painting, th
e bridge was partially dismantled. All manner of valuables, public and private, were spirited out of the capital. A second evacuation of children and some women began, and by the end of 1941 1.25 million had been taken to the countryside or small towns. The air-raid warning system was working in every major population centre.
The bombing, when it came, was nothing like as lethal as the pre-war Cassandras had foretold. The Germans were using relatively light bombers originally designed to support their army, not to annihilate cities. Britain, not Germany, was the first country to invest seriously in heavy bombers. Yet the effect was indescribable. Literally: one can list horror stories for tens of thousands of sober words and still not scratch the surface of the full experience. Hundreds buried or crushed to death in Underground stations, either by direct hits or trampled in panic; people cut in half by falling plate glass; children’s bodies lying in pieces in the streets; old people left wandering about, driven insane by the loss of their families; baskets of human flesh carried to morgues for jigsaw-puzzle identification; children buried alive for days beside their dead parents. Of the 60,000 people killed by German bombing and (later) rocket attacks, half were in London, and 43,000 were killed during 1940–41. About 230,000 people were injured. In the first six weeks alone a quarter of a million Londoners lost their homes. Below the statistics for death and destruction lay fear, squalor, humiliation and boredom. Ignoring official advice, people poured into the Underground, where at first they lived without sanitation, water, proper ventilation or privacy – a lice-ridden, stinking, undignified underworld which choked newcomers with its smell. Occasionally in the post-war years some idiot politician has promised to bomb this or that people ‘back into the Stone Age’. Thousands of Londoners literally became cave-dwellers, bedding down in the ancient Chislehurst caves in Kent: special trains were laid on each night. Others lived under railway arches. The Tilbury arches at Stepney, crammed with people of all races living in appalling squalor, were so bad that sightseers came to gawp. At the other end of the social scale the most privileged could find shelter in the Turkish baths at the Dorchester Hotel. But class was not a waiver: even Buckingham Palace was hit three times and when the ritzy Café de Paris took a direct hit while crammed with revellers dancing to a swing band the carnage was frightful.
In the worst days of the London Blitz more than 175,000 people were sleeping in the Underground. Overhead, firefighters – of whom more than 700 died – and air-raid wardens, nurses, WVS women and ambulance crews, police and bomb-disposal teams acted with relentless courage, dousing, digging, bandaging, feeding, consoling and burying. Broken power lines and water pipes, sewers and cables were mended while the fires burned all round. Live bombs were dug out, despite booby-trap devices: St Paul’s only survived because of two men who disobeyed instructions and dug deep to recover a huge bomb, which should have killed them. The first London Blitz ended after a particularly heavy and destructive raid on the centre of the city on 10 May 1941, when the Commons chamber was destroyed, along with hits on Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London and the British Museum, where there was an inferno of books. Irreplaceable artworks, records, sculptures and buildings went. Even a world-class collection of fossils was blown to pieces when the Royal College of Surgeons suffered three direct hits, leaving lumps of dinosaur and extinct mammal scattered through local gardens. More than 2,000 fires were started and 3,200 people were killed or injured. Many roads and most railway lines were blocked and the firefighters were struggling to put out fires for eleven days. After it was over, London was changed for ever; yet the city would go through a second wave of attacks in 1944 when first the ‘Doodlebug’ flying bombs and then the V2 rockets, harbingers of the post-war age, rained down, killing between them another 8,000 people. Croydon, once a beautiful market town, now a concrete metropolis, was particularly badly hit.
Though London took the worst, it is not clear whether it suffered more proportionally than other blitzed cities. The case of Coventry, which lost most of its ancient centre, a third of its houses, its cathedral and its railway connections on the night of 14 November 1940, after German bombers used intersecting radio beams and then incendiaries to guide them, is particularly poignant. A small town, comparatively, people there felt it had lost its soul and there was panic, hysteria and chaos. But what of Clydebank? It had 12,000 houses. After its attack, seven of them were left undamaged and the population able to sleep there dropped from 47,000 to 2,000. Plymouth suffered a two-night Blitz which gutted the place. So many houses were hit twice that the figures exceeded the total number of homes. It is thought that around 50,000 people trekked into the countryside to sleep in barns, fields or even on Dartmoor. But Merseyside, Birmingham and Bristol could claim to have suffered as badly and some believe that Hull was the worst-hit city of all. The point is that the Blitzes ranged right across Britain. The terror and uncertainty was spread from the north of Scotland to the English West Country. It arrived in small and non-industrial centres, too, particularly after the bombing by Britain of the ancient port of Lu¨beck produced in response the ‘Baedeker raids’, when the Germans used the famous tourist guide to choose particularly historic or beautiful towns. This was when the ‘People’s War’ was felt by the people.
A Warrior People?
Morale did not collapse. It may be that the myth of the cheery Londoner, ‘taking it’ and carrying on, was overblown propaganda. But the stories of shops staying in business with only three walls (‘more open than usual’ said the sign) and of workers struggling back to factories from demolished houses are true. The Blitz can be likened to a severe malady, affecting much of the population. It caused sleeplessness and exhaustion, fear for the future, anger and disorientation. It mingled people, as in hospital wards, who had nothing much in common but their misfortune. It provided a single topic of conversation and, as with some chronically sick, it actually gave many people a theme. Suicides fell in the war years; so far as it can be measured, there was less depression too. It certainly did not break Britain’s will to fight, nor did it much impede the war economy. Even in the most shattered cities, such as Coventry, Bristol and Southampton, production was soon back to normal and the bombing spurred workers on. Yet by 1943 Britain was dropping on German cities fifteen or more times the explosive power used in the 1940–41 Luftwaffe raids, apparently under the illusion that, having not worked here, it would work there.
What was the political effect? It certainly bound the country together. Not all the country was alike, or affected in the same way. We should beware of thinking that the British were wholly united or unique in courage or perseverance. When the Channel Islands, far closer to France than to England, were abandoned in 1940 to the Germans, the islanders seem to have behaved very much as people did in occupied France, Belgium or Holland. Without an army, they did not try to resist and when a tiny occupation force arrived, they found most houses flying white flags. The authorities – councillors, postmen, teachers and police – collaborated with the Germans. The King’s portrait remained hanging on walls and British currency continued to circulate for most of the war. A few of the tiny number of Jews on Jersey and Guernsey were sent to camps on the mainland. Both islands produced ‘Jerrybags’ – girls who slept with Germans and sometimes bore their children. There were examples of disobedience and a few heroes and a few outright traitors. Some islanders took great risks to help slave labourers drafted in to build Atlantic wall defences against invasion, but others worked the black market and enjoyed themselves. After the war there was much forgetting. All of this is exactly what would be expected, reading over from the behaviour of other Europeans: it showed how little different the British were.
It is worth remembering too that this was already a smaller United Kingdom. Southern Ireland had gone and would remain neutral. In 1938, against Churchill’s strong protests, Britain surrendered her right to use the so-called Irish ‘treaty ports’ of Cobh, Berehaven and Lough Swilly, and when war came the newly named Eire refused to reopen the matt
er. The Irish partly depended on Atlantic convoys, whose journeys were made far more dangerous by this decision: Churchill even considered a retaliatory blockade. In the opening year of the war Coventry had been bombed – to start with not by the Luftwaffe but by the IRA, who killed five people in a shopping centre. That year there were other terrorist attacks by the IRA in London, Blackpool and Liverpool. As in the First World War, German agents were active in Ireland and in 1941 four divisions of British troops were sent to Northern Ireland in case of an invasion via the south.147 In 1945, when Hitler finally killed himself in his bunker, the Dublin government presented its condolences via the German embassy. On the other side of the account, at least 160,000 Irish citizens went to do war work in Britain. Neither part of Ireland was affected by conscription into the British forces (because of the political impact of trying to conscript nationalists in the North). As it happens, rather more volunteers came from Eire, some 50,000, than from admittedly smaller Northern Ireland, which provided 42,000.
In Scotland and Wales, pre-war nationalism was much subdued. One leading Scottish Nationalist, Douglas Young, who believed that the Nazis would win the war, refused to serve and fought a lengthy legal battle. In Kirkcaldy in 1944 he came close to winning a by-election, and indeed the SNP did so in the following year. Once ‘surplus women’ were conscripted and sent around Britain for war work there was resentment and a small campaign in Scotland about the despatching of innocent Scottish lassies south. Germans thought it worth creating a Scotland-only propaganda station, Radio Caledonia, and dreamed of recruiting Welsh Nationalists to their cause too. Before the war Plaid Cymru activists had indeed attacked an RAF bombing site. Yet the binding-together impact of the siege of Britain, with constant patriotic propaganda, had a far stronger effect. The BBC was at the height of its authority. War films assiduously included Scots and Welsh characters; so, of course, did the war stories produced by the Dundee-based firm of D. C. Thomson. Scotland’s greatest wartime politician, Tom Johnston, began to create the corporate, public-works country and used the threat of nationalism to get what he wanted from Churchill. A belief that ‘we’re all in it together’ was only enhanced when servicemen returned home with common stories of France, Italy, North Africa and the Far East. Bombs fell alike on south Wales and southern England, the Clyde and the Thames. It was not coincidental that the years after the war saw the Unionist parties at their all-time peak: the Conservatives dominated Scottish politics during the fifties.
