How Britain survived the Blitz

HISTORY: PATRICK SKENE CATLINGreviews The Blitz: The British Under AttackBy Juliet Gardiner, Harper Collins, 431pp. £25

WHEN MY FATHER, a journalist, returned to London after the Munich conference at which, in effect, Czechoslovakia was swapped for one more year of peace, he had a huge air-raid shelter built in our garden. Neighbours sniffed at the disfigurement of the lawn, as Noah’s neighbours must have pooh-poohed his ark – until the Flood.

My father returned again to London in the retreat from Dunkirk and commuted to the Reuters office on Fleet Street while I, at the age of 15, commuted to a school in Hampstead. My parents, my two young brothers and I had privileged access to a comfortable, electrically heated shelter of reinforced concrete believed to be secure against anything but a direct hit, compared with the government-issued flimsy corrugated-iron Anderson shelters, which proved not to be immune even to cold, wind and rain. Anyway, for the first year of the second World War there seemed to be no need for shelters of any sort: there were no air raids, and Londoners felt safe sleeping in their usual beds.

Then Hitler, having failed to destroy RAF fighter command in the Battle of Britain, and so having had to postpone indefinitely Operation Sea Lion, the planned invasion of Britain, decided he could win the war by destroying the nation's industries and terrorising the population. September 7th, 1940, was the beginning of the intensive Luftwaffe bombardment called the Blitz (from the German Blitzkrieg, or lightning war), which continued unabated for eight months, spreading beyond the metropolis to many other great cities, as far as Belfast. There, from the Germans' point of view, the Harland and Wolff shipyard and aircraft-fuselage factory justified 1,000 deaths, and eventually 20,000 houses were made uninhabitable.

The first night of the Blitz, 250 Dornier and Heinkel bombers dropped countless incendiary bombs, followed by 625 tons of high explosives, on the London docks and the closely surrounding workers’ houses in the East End. At that time the targets were virtually defenceless, with only 264 anti-aircraft guns to protect an urban area of 300sq km, and as yet there were no night fighters. As the Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin had predicted in 1932, “the bomber will always get through”. During that Black Saturday 436 men, women and children were killed and 1,600 were seriously injured. In London on September 5th, 730 were killed and 9,003 injured. Throughout Britain by May 10th, 1941, there were 43,485 fatal casualties, almost all civilians. Afterwards, fortunately, Hitler was increasingly distracted by his incredibly stupid Soviet campaign.

The basic facts and figures that Juliet Gardiner has industriously gathered are terrible enough. But what makes this respected historian’s book unforgettably impressive, by far the best I have read on the subject, are the descriptions of day-to-day life and death under fire, the agonising details of physical and psychological suffering and stringent rationing and the frustratingly slow bureaucratic red tape to provide financial support and accommodation for the dispossessed. The dangers and inconvenience made the survivors’ stoicism, resilient morale and democratic comradeship admirable, and so disappointing to the enemy.

Gardiner has gathered quotations from a variety of published sources and her own interviews with men and women of all social levels, showing what it was like to be there. Thousands of people with daytime jobs volunteered for arduous service at night as wardens, firefighters and ambulance crews. Self-sacrifice was commonplace. There are horror stories of attempts to assemble identifiable corpses with miscellaneous body parts collected from the rubble. And there are horror stories of a different kind about the merciless exploiters who looted the ruins of bombed shops and homes and stole everything movable from the buildings temporarily abandoned by people who fled to the country. Germans in those days immediately shot looters; British magistrates handed down prison sentences, on occasions condemning rescue workers to as much as six months for illegally salvaging food that would otherwise have rotted. During the Blitz there were notable increases in crime, heavy drinking and casual sex.

When there were air-raid alerts during the day we at University College School were ordered to take shelter in the school’s substantial crypts. We enjoyed the disruption of classes. In the blissful ignorance of youth we never doubted that we would win the war, and we looked forward to future rugby and cricket. In the long evenings in the family shelter, boredom was the main problem. I read a lot but didn’t like card games, and my father monotonously kept winning at chess. He and I sometimes emerged from the shelter before the all-clear siren, to listen to distant guns and bombs and to look at the searchlight beams sweeping to and fro across the sky and the red glow of distant conflagrations. In the northwest suburb of Golders Green in early September we were outside observers on the fringe of other people’s catastrophes.

But as the Blitz progressed all of London seemed to be a target. About 177,000 people became what Churchill called troglodytes, sheltering in deep Tube stations. In the City, the financial district, eight Wren churches were destroyed, but the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral was, miraculously, left intact. Everyone now had a bomb story. One night, outside the shelter, we heard the distinctive throbbing drone of German planes, much closer than before. They sounded different from ours, some people explained, because their engines, because of esoteric Nazi cunning, were not exactly synchronised. Suddenly, an incendiary bomb bounced off the roof of our house – actually bounced – and landed close to our feet in a white glare. As Gardiner points out in her meticulous way, the incendiaries each measured only 18in in length and two pounds in weight, but if their thermite magnesium contents penetrated a building they could burn it to the ground. Our bomb fizzled out without causing any damage except to the grass, and we retreated to the shelter, with our conscientious misgivings about past non-involvement eased by having been attacked.

When Air Chief Marshall Sir Arthur Harris, the commander of RAF bomber command, said the Germans “have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind” (Hos 8: 7), all Christian restraints were put aside, and I must admit I was very glad.

Patrick Skene Catling is a writer who has lived in Ireland for the past 37 years