by Simon Schama
Between 12 August and 6 September there were 53 big raids on British airfields. On the 13th, 400 bombs fell on Lympne alone, chewing up the landing strips. On 15 August, the Luftwaffe committed its maximum strength to the battle but was bested by the RAF: 75 German planes were downed for the loss of 34 British aircraft. On the 18th there was a similar score. On the 20th, Churchill told the Commons that ‘never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few’, to which, according to Angus Calder, one airman is said to have commented, ‘That must refer to mess bills.’
The human price paid for this relentless engagement was severe. The casualty rate of pilots in August was a shocking 22 per cent and in early September no fewer than 133 pilots were killed, although this brought the British total of pilots down to around 600, rather than the 177 of which Goering boasted. When, on 8 September, Churchill asked Air Vice Marshal Park, ‘What other reserves have we?’, he got an answer of unwelcome candour: ‘There are none.’
On 7 September ‘Cromwell’, the code word to be used when a German invasion was under way, was signalled. A concentration of barges and flat-bottomed boats had been reported on the Channel and at the Dutch port of Rotterdam. Field Marshal Alan Brooke, the Ulster puritan at the head of Home Defence (Southern Command), was deeply pessimistic about the British army’s ability to defend the country when, as he believed, rather than if, invasion came. As many as 80 divisions had not been enough to hold the line in France. Britain had just 22, of which only half were capable of the mobile operations needed to defend a long coastline.
Fortunately, the German navy was just as pessimistic about its chances of landing invasion troops, outnumbered by the Royal Navy and with no guarantee of air supremacy. German admirals and generals were apparently put on a crash course of reading Caesar, Tacitus and accounts of the Norman Conquest.
German doubts about the viability of Operation Sealion did nothing, however, to soften the impact of the air war. If anything, they intensified what Hitler believed to be the necessary terrorizing of the population prior to the assault across the Channel, not by sea but from the air. Bombing attacks had already been made on civilian centres in the southwest of England well before the Battle of Britain, let alone before the RAF raids over Berlin at the end of August, the impertinence of which, admittedly, did not put Hitler in a terribly good mood. But Liverpool, Newcastle and Southampton had all been bombed in late June, and southwest England in late July. On 28–29 August the London suburbs – areas from St Pancras to Hendon (where there was an important airfield), Finchley and Wembley – were hit, and on 2 September it was the turn of Bristol, Liverpool and Birmingham. By the 7th the scale massively intensified, when the Luftwaffe sent 350 planes to destroy London’s dockland. Woolwich Arsenal, together with the Royal Victoria and Albert docks and the East India and Surrey Commercial docks, were hit. A huge, rolling fire started, which swept through the streets and houses of Southwark and Rotherhithe. Sailing up the river the writer A. P. Herbert, now a petty officer in the Thames auxiliary patrol, saw, as he rounded the bend at Limehouse, ‘a scene like a lake in Hell. Burning barges were drifting everywhere … we could hear the roar and hiss of the conflagration, a formidable noise, but we could not see it, so dense was the smoke.’
The next night the target area widened into the West End. Without a tin hat, and dodging the splinters from anti-aircraft fire that were still burning as they came down, General Brooke saw 60 bombs fall on the same small area in a single hour. Madame Tussaud’s, the Natural History Museum, power stations and hospitals were all hit. On the first Sunday after this massive raid the prime minister went on a tour of the damage amidst the oil and glass and smashed timbers and haggard firemen. There he went into one of his astonishing routines, twirling his hat on the end of his cane and roaring, ‘Are we downhearted?’ Back came the equally amazing (although he would have said predictable) response: ‘NO!’ Londoners were adapting, sleeping under railway arches, crooned to sleep by the lullaby of the famous music-hall duo Flanagan and Allen. By 15 September, when 158 German fighters and bombers got through the Spitfire–Hurricane shield to attack London, 150,000 were spending the night underground in tube stations. On 15 October a bomb fell on the treasury, killing three and missing the Downing Street staff only because Churchill had ordered them into a Pall Mall shelter. As a result the prime minister was himself implored to leave Number 10, where the shelter was thought neither deep enough nor strong enough, and move underground into the heavily reinforced Cabinet War Rooms, completed only a week before the German invasion of Poland. But until a special residential annexe was built for himself and Clementine he spent only three nights there, often returning to Number 10 to sleep and even going up onto the roof to look at the blaze.
George Orwell, too, had been drawn to the inferno. His bloody coughing fits (still undiagnosed as TB) were bad enough to exempt him from military service, something that he said most men would give their balls for but that was a curse to him. As always, he needed to be close to the action. So he left his Bedfordshire cottage and moved to an equally freezing, equally austere small flat in northwest London. From there he wrote for The Observer, broadcast propaganda to India for the BBC (‘half whoreshop, half lunatic asylum’ was his verdict two years later), and served as a sergeant in the Home Guard among the leafy streets and boarded-up mansions of St John’s Wood.
Orwell’s patriotism, especially in the ‘Cromwell’ weeks from early September to mid-October, after which, with winter weather coming on, Hitler effectively cancelled any last hope of an invasion, was now militant. For the pacifists of the left, with whom he had already had serious rows over the Spanish Civil War and the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact – the exiled poets and the conscientious objectors, the no-war-at-any price brigade who argued that they were the only true anti-fascists – Orwell reserved his most withering contempt when he wrote in the July issue of Pacifism and the War: A Controversy (1942), referring to the attitudes of such people, ‘If [they] imagine that one can somehow overcome the German army by lying on one’s back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen.’ England, he wrote, was the only great country he knew of where the intellectuals were ashamed of their own nationality.
Orwell certainly had not traded in his socialism for some sort of Colonel Blimpery. What stuck in his craw was the elitism of left-wingers who were simply too good, too fine, too precious for patriotism; who refused to understand that it was one of the most populist sentiments of all, wired into actual living human communities. What he rejected was any confusion between patriotism and conservatism. In his mind, the Home Guard was not a quaint bunch of superannuated geezers playing at soldiers while endlessly going on about Wipers and the Menin Road; it was, especially if Sergeant Blair had anything to do with it, the first line of defence of a People’s Army, perhaps even the vanguard of a social revolution. Orwell’s idea of how to drill Dad’s Army was to train them intensively in street fighting.
He and Churchill drew on very different, though not entirely mutually exclusive, visions of British history and national community to explain to themselves and to the country why it was important that Britain fight on to the end. Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking Peoples, which would be swiftly resumed after the war, was the unfolding pageant of liberty, by which he meant parliamentary government, consummated ultimately in a democratic Commonwealth. Orwell, too, was interested in the idea of a Commonwealth, but his version owed a lot more to Oliver Cromwell and the Levellers, to the great tradition of popular insurrections from the Peasants’ Revolt to the Chartists. Churchill thought it was no accident that in 1942 the Luftwaffe deliberately set out on a ‘Baedeker tour’ to destroy the greatest buildings of medieval and Georgian England: Canterbury, Norwich, York, Exeter and Bath. They were out to bomb their worst enemy – British history. He set himself in th
e tradition of popular princes and heroes, always ready to defend the ‘island race’ against invading tyrants: the same drama Alexander Korda had produced in 1937, with Raymond Massey playing the satanic Philip II of Spain and Flora Robson the armoured Virgin Queen in Fire over England. When Churchill went stamping round the rubble, not just of Stepney but also of blitzed Plymouth and Manchester, he was, as Laurence Olivier would demonstrate in the 1944 film of Shakespeare’s Henry V, ‘a little touch of Harry in the night’, stalking through the camp, listening to the grumblings of the ordinary soldiers and trying to explain why they were fighting and why, even in misery and terror, they should fight.
Orwell recognized – generously, in fact – that this was Churchill’s special genius; that he could somehow connect with people with whom socially he had nothing whatsoever in common. But Orwell looked round him and he saw multitudes of unrecognized, undecorated heroes – the quarter of a million Londoners who had been made homeless after just six weeks of the Blitz. (It would move on to other industrial centres like Coventry and Birmingham, returning to London in December to strike the City, and then again in the first two weeks of May when more high explosives were dropped than at any other time in the war, hitting the House of Commons, Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London and the Royal Mint. Some 76,000 people were made homeless.) Orwell looked at the air-raid wardens and the Women’s Volunteer Service – not to mention the 6 million ordinary serving men and women in uniform – and thought that if this ‘total’ war was being fought by them, it should also be fought for them. ‘Probably the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing-fields of Eton,’ he wrote in 1941 in his essay ‘England Your England’, ‘but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.’ The working people of Bristol and Clydebank, where 80 per cent of the population had been bombed out, were not taking it on the chin from the Luftwaffe in order to make Britain safe for the likes of the boys of St Cyprian’s, for the country-house set. All this heartbreak, destruction and misery was only worthwhile if a country could be created that would finally give the miners of Wigan, and the millions like them, the common decencies of life – houses that were not verminous slums; basic food that would nourish rather than sicken; schools for their children; proper medical care; help for the aged and infirm.
The Britain that had gone into the war, Orwell said in the same essay, resembled a stuffy Victorian family with ‘rich relations who have to be kow-towed and poor relations who are horribly sat upon … in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bed-ridden aunts … A family with the wrong members in control.’ But as J. B. Priestley – another broadcaster with a radio audience almost as massive as Churchill’s – had commented, the country had been bombed and burned into democracy. And there were now Labour ministers with their hands on the economy, including, by 1942, Stafford Cripps. Orwell thought it unlikely – and certainly undesirable – that they should relinquish it. As laid out in his 1941 essay, ‘The English Revolution’, this blueprint of the new socialist Britain needed to include the nationalization of major industries – coal, railways, banks, utilities; the creation of a democratic, classless education system (away with St Cyprian’s!), limitations on incomes, and the immediate grant of dominion status to India, with the right to full independence once the war was over. The House of Lords should be abolished as an absurd anachronism, but the monarchy should probably stay. For Orwell had no intention of wiping away British history in the name of his new Jerusalem. On the contrary, he thought it would ‘show a power of assimilating the past which will shock foreign observers and sometimes make them doubt whether any revolution has happened’.
Many of those in government shared some, at least, of Orwell’s reformist fervour and were already looking towards a post-war Britain that would not, like the Britain of 1918, slide back to the raw inequalities of Victorian individualism. In December 1942 the Beveridge Report was published, ostensibly concerned with comprehensive social insurance and full employment but promising that post-war government would be committed to giving ‘freedom from want by securing to each a minimum income sufficient for subsistence’. In other words, the British state would care for the citizen from cradle to grave. These things were not minority interests. The Beveridge Report sold 635,000 copies, surely a record for a government white paper. A number of Tories, the ‘reform group’ that included Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and R. A. Butler, sensing a big change in public opinion in the country and anxious not to lose post-war elections, promised ‘a great programme of social reform’.
But before any of this could be realized, a war had still to be won. And it was exactly the circumstances of how it was eventually won that caused trouble for the vision of the new 20th-century Britain: one that attempted to reconcile the romance of back-to-the-wall island history with the obligations of a welfare state. Not everyone was enamoured by Beveridge. The Employers’ Confederation felt it had to say that the war was being fought not to set up social insurance but to secure the country’s freedom from German tyranny. And even Churchill wondered out loud just what the bill for the Beveridge reforms might be, especially since British foreign reserves had all but disappeared: ‘The question steals across the mind whether we are not committing our forty-five million people to tasks beyond their compass and laying on them burdens beyond their capacity to bear.’ As long as the issue was just endurance, all the contradictions could just be set aside. Once endurance was no longer in question, the difficulties in the way of reaching Albion–Jerusalem, especially the matter of who should shoulder the fiscal burden, were already apparent.
In this odd sense 1940 had been both the hardest and the easiest year of the war, because the reborn community of the nation was so incontrovertible. When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, for all the sorrow and genuine sympathy Churchill showed Roosevelt he was secretly exultant, for he knew in his bones that victory was in sight. ‘So we had won after all,’ he wrote in his memoirs. ‘We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end.’ But if he were right that ‘England would live’ – even right, as far as he could see, that ‘Britain would live’ – Churchill’s equally confident assumption that ‘the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire [for him interchangeable] would live’ was misplaced. For whilst Churchill thought Britain’s future depended on imperial revival, Roosevelt believed it depended on something like the opposite.
In the lead up to the Atlantic Alliance, of course, he was innocent of all this. When he and Franklin D. Roosevelt met in Placentia Bay on board HMS Prince of Wales in August 1941, as American and British sailors standing together sang hymns chosen by Churchill, the dream of a true Atlantic democratic partnership, the partnership Churchill carried in his own blood, seemed gloriously at hand. But it was indeed just a dream. There was a telling moment during his visit to Washington in June 1942 when Roosevelt asked Churchill to think of the relationship with India in the light of what had happened to the British 18th-century empire, meaning that Britain should grant India independence before that country was forced to fight for it. Churchill flared up into full imperialist fury. It was still on his mind at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet that year, when he stated bulldoggedly that he had not been made His Majesty’s prime minister only to preside over the demise of the British Empire. What Roosevelt had in mind was the granting of immediate dominion status to India to pre-empt the possibility of Subhas Chandra Bose’s pro-Axis volunteer Bengal Tigers from triggering something like the great rebellion of 1857 but on an even larger scale. Needless to say, Churchill wouldn’t hear of it.
But the demise of empire was happening anyway with the fall of first Hong Kong and then, more catastrophically in February 1942, of Singapore, where the commander-in-chief in southeast Asia, Archibald Wavell, had been ordered, rather bizarrely, by Churchill to instruct his troops to fight to the end over the ruins of the port city. Instead, the Japanese took into captivity 85,000 men, of whom 57
,000 would die. HMS Prince of Wales, on which the two leaders had met, had been sent halfway round the world to cow the Japanese, only to end up ignominiously sunk in the China Sea. Whether Churchill imagined it or not, the Commonwealth that emerged from the Pacific war would emphatically not be the one that had existed in 1940.
Hitler’s Operation Barbarossa, launched against the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, was another double-edged sword for Churchill and Britain. The most famous anti-Bolshevik in the land found himself in alliance with a Soviet leader who really did embody all of Churchill’s ferocious stereotypes about satanic communist monsters. But, as he said of Stalin, he would make friends with the devil himself if it helped win the war. Whilst Barbarossa would be the nemesis of the Third Reich, the chumminess between Stalin and Roosevelt at the conferences, in Teheran in November 1943 and Yalta in 1944, made Churchill depressingly aware of Britain’s suddenly shrivelled place in the scheme of things. Tying down German manpower on the Russian front had allowed the British Eighth Army to take north Africa, first from the Italians and then (after the initial disaster at Rommel’s hands at Tobruk, where 30,000 Allied prisoners were taken) from the Germans as well. For a brief moment when Churchill ordered bells to be rung to celebrate the victory at El Alamein in November 1942, or when he sat beneath the palms with Brooke at Siwa Oasis in January 1943, en route from Cairo to Turkey, eating dates and sipping mint tea, listening to the local sheikhs complaining about the Italians eating their donkeys, it must have seemed that all was well with the empire of palm and pine.
