As people strove to save themselves and their community, some lost conviction in the reality or the rightness of many hierarchies. Olivia Cockett, a government clerk in her late twenties, wrote at the time, “On the first night of the Blitz I put out an incendiary bomb, alone for some minutes, though help came after I had dealt with it. This incident has come back to my mind on unexpected occasions. I was being ‘put on’ by my boss, and had resented it for some time. After the bomb, I stood up to him, thinking, ‘If a blasted incendiary didn’t frighten me and I dealt with it, why should I be afraid of him?” This has resulted in a general boldness of thought and action.” A mother of two Cockett’s age wrote that after surviving the raids, “I feel much more certainty and self-confidence . . . as a result of the discovery that I am not the coward I thought, and have more good in me . . . than I would have believed.” Drawn away from personal problems and old concerns, people entered the intensified present of disaster. Virginia Woolf ’s nephew Quentin Bell reported that “from the time when she literally came under fire, the talk of suicide ceased” and commented, “Fate provided a sort of cure, or so it seems, in the form of actual rather than imagined dangers.” Woolf herself wrote on September 22, 1940, “This wet day—we think of weather now as it affects invasions, not as weather that we like or dislike personally.”
Tom Harrisson, who was there at the time directing the Mass-Observation surveys of wartime behavior, writes in his history Living Through the Blitz, that there had “in particular, been a massive, largely unconscious cover-up of the more disagreeable facts of 1940-1. . . . It amounts to a form of intellectual pollution: but pollution by perfume.” Still, he concluded that though the “blitz was a terrible experience for millions” it was not “terrible enough to disrupt the basic decency, loyalty (e.g., family ties), morality, and optimism of the vast majority.” The Blitz is unusual as a disaster in which public behavior is remembered in a positive glow, though that memory singles out the Britons in wartime as anomalies rather than akin to those in most other disasters. Three weeks into the London Blitz, Panter-Downs wrote, “The courage, humor, and kindliness of ordinary people continue to be astonishing under conditions that possess many of the features of a nightmare.” People adjusted to the horrific circumstances; wonderful or horrible, the extraordinary becomes the ordinary. One survivor said of the beginning, “Once you’ve been through three nights of bombing, you can’t help feeling safe the fourth time. So the only real panic I saw was then.”
Many felt private fear and enormous strain but braced themselves by putting on a good front, and one famous effect of the Blitz was the relaxing of boundaries between strangers and between types of people. Privilege mattered: the wealthy were often able to get out of harm’s way, while the poor and often the middle class were not, but some divides softened. Cockett describes herself whistling on her way to work after a particularly bad night of bombing and going up to a porter who was also whistling to say, “The tune for today is Serenade in the Night, please,” at which they both laughed. An American witness, Mary Lee Settle, noted that “the English were discovering each other with the freedom of strangers, lurched by war out of their silences, often friendly, sometimes with the direct belligerence of the stripped down.” A British writer added, “New tolerances are born between people; offsetting the paleness of worn nerves and the lining of sorrow there occurs a marvellous incidence of smiles where smiles have never been before; an unsettling vista of smiles, for one wondered how unsympathetic life could have been before, one was ashamed to reflect that it had needed a war to disinter the state of everyday comradeship.” Disinter—as if it were that something vital had been buried during peacetime and was resurrected amid carnage and ruin. The Blitz was like most disasters: one in which some were killed, many bereaved and injured, many escaped death by a hairbreadth, and the great majority were witnesses and survivors in a drama that left them relatively unscathed. By some accounts, the greatest trauma of the London Blitz was the mass evacuation of London-area children that tore apart families and placed children in unfamiliar, sometimes unfriendly, homes. Many, however, stuck it out in the epicenter of danger, some by choice, some for lack of choice.
One young woman sheltered with her boyfriend’s parents in northern London on the third night of the Blitz. In the long account she wrote the next day, she complained that her hostess made them all tea “ just for something to do” and added that “that’s one trouble about the raids, people do nothing but make tea and expect you to drink it.” The hostess, identified only as Mrs. R., would cry “Is that a bomb?” with every thud, and her husband would grunt back “No, s’a gun.” (An antiaircraft gun.) The anonymous writer commented, “I felt all swollen up with irritation, a bloated sort of feeling, but actually it was fear, I knew very well. A horrid, sick sort of fear, it’s quite different from worry.” She and her boyfriend went out into the garden, sat on the long grass, and found that the warm, beautiful summer night was “made more beautiful than ever by the red glow from the East, where the docks were burning.” She fixed the scene in her mind, knowing it was historic, and “I wasn’t frightened any more, it was amazing. . . . The searchlights were beautiful, it’s like watching the end of the world as they swoop from one end of the sky to the other.”
A bomb fell two streets away. Another landed nearer as they raced inside, came near enough to buffet her with waves “like bathing in a rough sea.” She found herself clutching the floor as if to keep from falling while dust was everywhere, her mouth was full of plaster, and Mr. R yelled out contradictory orders to stay still and do something. The house was wrecked, the front door jammed, and so they climbed out a broken window. When people around them responded with anxiety to their blood-streaked, dusty appearances, she realized, “I might have been hurt! Somehow, right up to that minute I had taken everything for granted, in a queer, brainless way, as if it was all perfectly ordinary.” She was taken in by a neighbor who plied her with blankets and a hot-water bottle “for the shock,” and when she said she wasn’t in shock her hostess “referred darkly to ‘delayed shock.’ ” And then she was left alone: “I lay there feeling indescribably happy and triumphant. ‘I’ve been bombed!’ I kept saying to myself, over and over again—trying the phrase on, like a new dress, to see how it fitted.” She concluded, “It seems a terrible thing to say, when many people must have been killed and injured last night; but never in my whole life have I ever experienced such pure and flawless happiness.”
She was young, she’d survived with her love by her side, and she had fifty-five more nights of bombing to endure before London became only an intermittent target, but time and war did not change her memory. Thirty-five years later Harrisson, the Mass-Observation researcher who had surveyed response to the Blitz as it unfolded, followed up on her story. She had recently become a grandmother, and she looked back on her night of being bombed as a “peak experience—a sense of triumph and happiness” that she compared to the “experience of having a baby.” Near-death experiences and encounters with one’s own mortality are often clarifying, tools with which to cut away inessentials and cleave to the essence of life and purpose. Illnesses and accidents can produce the same reinvigorated gratitude and appetite.
After that night of heavy bombing, residents of West Ham, a slum neighborhood near the brightly burning London docks, were evacuated to a local school and told to wait for buses. The buses went to the wrong location one day, arrived during an air raid the next, so the evacuation was postponed, and the night after that the school was bombed and an unknown number—perhaps as many as four hundred—of men, women, and children were blown up. There were many Blitzes, some terrible, some fatal, at least one ecstatic. It seems to be because the virtues of the Blitz were so exaggerated that the counterversions have been so fierce in denouncing the positive aspects as myth. But they did exist, in the firsthand accounts of the moment and not only in propaganda, though they existed alongside privation, injustice, fear, loss, and death. The ways that wa
r differs from disaster matter, but the similarities can be illuminating. And the Blitz stands alone as almost the only time when the way that most people behave in disaster has been highlighted rather than missed, though it was highlighted as something specific to wartime or to Britain rather than the way things usually go.
The Rebirth of Disaster Studies
A young Missouri-born soldier with a degree in sociology, Charles E. Fritz, was in Britain during the war. “As a captain in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II, I was stationed at several different air bases and command centers throughout England from 1943 to 1946,” he wrote toward the end of his life. His words appear as the preface to his major statement on disaster, a riveting challenge to all conventional wisdom that was written in 1961 and never published (though it was released in 1996 as a university paper, a landmark the world passed by without noticing). By the time he arrived, Britain was five years into a war; there were chronic shortages of food, clothing, and housing; and tens of thousands of Americans had just arrived to further overstretch its resources. “Under those conditions, one might expect to find a nation of panicky, war weary people, embittered by the death and injuries to their family members and friends, resentful over their prolonged life style deprivations, anxious and disillusioned about the future, and, more generally, exhibiting personal and social behaviors indicating a state of low morale and esprit de corps. Instead, what one found was a nation of gloriously happy people, enjoying life to the fullest, exhibiting a sense of gaiety and love of life that was truly remarkable.” Fritz had a splendid time, in part because “my access to British family life was greatly enhanced during those years by my courtship and subsequent marriage to Patricia Ware, a resident of Bath, England, who worked throughout the war as a nursery school teacher.” Bath was heavily bombed too.
At the end of the war, Fritz was assigned to the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, which prepared a monumental study on the effectiveness of the aerial bombing of Germany’s civilians. The Germans had not been “demoralized” to any profound degree either, despite atrocities far worse than any England had endured, such as the firebombing that one night turned Dresden into an inferno in which more than twenty-five thousand people died. The study Fritz worked on concluded, “Under ruthless Nazi control they showed surprising resistance to the terror and hardships of repeated air attack, to the destruction of their homes and belongings, and to the conditions under which they were reduced to live. Their morale, their belief in ultimate victory or satisfactory compromise, and their confidence in their leaders declined, but they continued to work efficiently as long as the physical means of production remained. The power of a police state over its people cannot be underestimated.” The aplomb of the British under bombardment was attributed to special national characteristics that became a matter of pride; the resoluteness of the Germans was attributed to grim subjugation. Fritz noted that their surveys revealed that “people living in heavily bombed cities had significantly higher morale than people in the lightly bombed cities” and that “neither organic neurologic disease nor psychiatric disorders can be attributed to nor are they conditioned by the air attacks.” From there the survey went to Japan without him and reached similar conclusions about bombing’s psychological effects there.
After his discharge, Fritz entered the University of Chicago to pursue graduate work in sociology and in 1950 became associate director of the Disaster Research Project of the university’s National Opinion Research Center, the first organization to systematically study human behavior in disaster. The cold war had come quick on the heels of the world war, and the U.S. government was assembling a vast nuclear arsenal and worrying about how its own population would react in a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. These cold-war fears were the impetus for the earliest systematic studies of behavior in disasters, and such nuclear-related studies were commissioned into the 1960s. Since other than Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 there were no urban nuclear calamities to study, the method was to look at natural and domestic disasters and extrapolate. Thus began the little-known and remarkable field of disaster studies. At first, graduate students in psychology and anthropology were employed along with young sociologists like Fritz, but the sociologists soon took the lead and have ever since largely owned the field—and largely been ignored, despite their extraordinary conclusions. That is, they have had an influence on disaster preparedness and planning in some places and at some levels, but their conclusions have had little effect on the media, public opinion, and the bureaucrats and politicians responsible for developing disaster-response plans.
The initial expectations were grim; as with the British authorities twenty years earlier, the military commissioners wanted to know more about “Herd Reaction, Panic, Emergence of Leaders, and Recommendations for Guidance and Control of Masses.” Writes one of the pioneering sociologists, “From oral histories obtained later from key officials involved, it is obvious that there was a strong belief [on the part of the Office of Civilian Defense] that the reaction would not be a good one, that there would be widespread ‘panic’ and a breakdown of the social order.” The premise was that people were sheep, except when they were wolves, and the solution was to find out how best to herd them. But the sociologists would stand all this on its head. None was more glowing about the results than Fritz.
His conclusions began to appear in 1954, and a few more essays followed in 1957, but he hit his stride in 1961. That year, in an essay in a textbook on “the sociology of deviant behavior and social disorganization,” he summed up his conclusions from the research he had conducted and directed throughout the 1950s. Like the long, unpublished report from the same year, it strikes a wholly new note, or rather picks up where William James had left off (and quotes James and Prince), but does so from the basis of methodical investigation of dozens of disasters. He described the conventional beliefs that in disaster “there are mass panics and wild stampedes. People trample one another and lose all sense of concern for their fellows. After panic has subsided—so the popular image suggests—many people are hysterical, or so stunned that they are helpless. Others turn to looting, pillaging, or other forms of selfish, exploitative behavior. The aftermath is widespread immorality, social conflict, and mental derangement.” Later, he described another stereotype: “that disasters render people a dazed and helpless mass completely dependent on outside aid for guidance and organization.”
Those beliefs have yet to die. Naomi Klein’s 2007 book The Shock Doctrine is a trenchant investigation of how economic policies benefiting elites are thrust upon people in times of crisis. But it describes those people in all the old, unexamined terms and sees the aftermath of disaster as an opportunity for conquest from above rather than a contest of power whose outcome is sometimes populist or even revolutionary. She speaks of disasters as creating “these malleable moments, when we are psychologically unmoored and physically uprooted” and describes one recent disaster as being akin to torture in producing “profound disorientation, extreme fear and anxiety, and collective regression.” It’s a surprisingly disempowering portrait from the Left and one that echoes the fears of the prewar British authorities, the apparent product of assumptions rather than research. In a public talk when the book appeared she said that in extreme crises “we no longer know who or where we are. We become like children, we look for daddies.” If only she had read Fritz. But his treasure was buried 650 pages deep in a dreary textbook on deviancy and in a manuscript first released thirty-five years after it was written. His essays are essentially two versions of the same manifesto, though the unpublished one goes further in its conclusions. These conclusions have become standard thinking among disaster sociologists, though few put it as boldly as Fritz. Half a century later, his work conveys the thrill of a redemptive discovery, and though later sociologists have tamped down a little his exuberant optimism, they have largely confirmed his insights.
Fritz’s first radical premise is that everyday life is already a disaster of sorts,
one from which actual disaster liberates us. He points out that people suffer and die daily, though in ordinary times, they do so privately, separately. And he writes, “The traditional contrast between ‘normal’ and ‘disaster’ almost always ignores or minimizes these recurrent stresses of everyday life and their personal and social effects. It also ignores a historically consistent and continually growing body of political and social analyses that points to the failure of modern societies to fulfill an individual’s basic human needs for community identity.”
A Paradise Built in Hell Page 13
