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The Blitz: The British Under Attack. Juliet Gardiner
Читать онлайн.Название The Blitz: The British Under Attack
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isbn 9780007352418
Автор произведения Juliet Gardiner
Издательство HarperCollins
Just a month later, Orwell was demanding that ‘either we turn this war into a revolutionary war [against privilege and influence, and for equality and freedom] or we lose it’. Neither happened. The equivocation and ambivalence of wanting change and wanting things to be as they had always been would persist, and politicians consistently declined to define Britain’s war aims other than by the simple word ‘victory’.
Yet the blitz was a defining moment in Britain’s history. More than cityscapes were reconfigured in those eight months. The attrition that had been anticipated for over a decade revealed both the incompetence of the authorities, and their misunderstanding of the nature of such warfare and of the needs of the people. But at the same time it demonstrated their sometimes grudging, usually tardy, willingness to accommodate, compromise and innovate. And perhaps, above all, eventually and imperfectly, to listen. To keep the people ‘on side’ as much as possible, since it was recognised that civilian morale was vital in maintaining full-scale war production and thus Britain’s ability to prosecute the war at a time when victory was very far from assured. For this reason, and others, the blitz did prove to be a forcing house, a laboratory, the intense distillation of how an external threat could weld together a nation while at the same time failing to resolve many of its tensions.
The blitz has given the British – politicians in particular – a storehouse of images on which to draw at times of crisis: the symbol of an indomitable nation, united in resolution. The true story is, of course, more nuanced and complicated than that, cross-hatched as it must be by the freight of the prewar years, of differing experiences and expectations. There were thousands of examples of extreme bravery, fortitude and selflessness. There was also a pervasive sense of exhaustion, uncertainty and anxiety, and acts of selfishness, intransigence and contumely. The words that best sum up the blitz are probably ‘endurance’ and ‘defiance’. And arising out of that, a sense of entitlement: that a nation that had been exhorted to ‘take it’ could reasonably expect, when the war was finally over, to ‘get [some] of it’, in terms of greater equality, more employment, better housing, education and life chances in general.
In 1940 the use of the transitive verb ‘to blitz’ signified ‘to destroy by aerial bombardment’. Seventy years later it is sometimes used to mean ‘to deal with something energetically; to concentrate a lot of effort on something to get it done’. Both meanings resonate in our understanding of the blitz of 1940–41 and its aftermath.
Juliet Gardiner June 2010
I think it is well for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can prevent him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through … the only defence is in offence, which means that you have to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.
Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin, speaking in the House of Commons in 1932
Robert Baltrop was sitting on the roof of a Sainsbury’s store in east London on Saturday, 7 September 1940. It was a warm late-summer afternoon, the rays of the sun stretching across the concrete rooftops. The air-raid alert had just sounded, so Baltrop, who worked as a porter in the store, ‘humping and cleaning and that sort of thing’, had clambered out to take up his post on lookout duty. ‘It wasn’t bad being a watcher during these daytime warnings, sitting up there in the sunshine and smoking and watching the sky, and looking down at the people going about their business as usual in the streets below. I wasn’t really sure what I was watching for, anything dangerous – fires or bombs falling or planes getting near, and I don’t really know what I could have done about it. I suppose I should have had to go down the steps and tell them in the shop that a bomb had fallen on them!’
The war was more than a year old by this time. It had been another lovely summer day when Hitler had failed to respond to Britain’s ultimatum to withdraw German troops from Poland, and the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had broadcast to the nation at 11.15 on 3 September 1939 to tell the British people that ‘despite all my long struggle to win peace … this country is at war with Germany’. Within minutes the air-raid sirens sounded, and Londoners scurried to take shelter. The war that everybody had been expecting had started. Only it hadn’t. That first alert was a false alarm, and a metaphor for a long autumn, winter and spring of expectation and fearful anticipation. But until the summer of 1940 there was little sign of the Armageddon that had been feared – except at sea, where the ‘Battle of the Atlantic’, which would take the lives of more than 30,000 merchant seamen by 1945, had been raging since the outbreak of war as Germany sought to stop supplies reaching Britain to enable her to keep fighting. By the late spring hardly anyone was carrying their gas mask any more, shelters were filling up with water through disuse, a ban had been put on recruiting any more Air Raid Patrol (ARP) wardens, and many volunteers, bored with the endless waiting around, drinking cups of tea and playing darts, had resigned, since there didn’t seem to be much for them to do other than act like martinets when any chink showed through the blackout curtains on their patch. Housewives were already beginning to feel fed up with rationing, and the endless queuing and ingenuity in the kitchen that wartime shortages would demand, and more than 60 per cent of the mothers and children who had joined the government’s evacuation scheme on the eve of war had drifted back home to the cities by January 1940, no longer convinced that their homes would be bombed, or their children killed, which had been the compelling reason for the exodus. It truly did seem to be a ‘bore war’ – all the regulations, restrictions and privations of wartime, with few of the dangers on the home front that would make them seem justified.
On 4 April 1940, in what Winston Churchill, recalled to the Cabinet on the outbreak of war as First Lord of the Admiralty, thought was ‘a speech of unusual optimism’, Chamberlain sanguinely told a Conservative gathering that Hitler had ‘missed the bus’ in seizing the offensive. Five days later German forces moved to occupy Norway and Denmark, and on 10 May, as Baltrop recalled, ‘quite suddenly the Germans invaded the Low Countries; there was the evacuation from Dunkirk [which the British press largely treated as a victory rather than a defeat]; and on 22 June France signed an armistice with Germany. I remember at the Sainsbury’s where I worked, somebody coming into the warehouse and almost with satisfaction rubbing his hands together and saying, “Well, we’re on our own now” … There was a feeling that we were in the war now, and a certain feeling of resolve about it. Dunkirk had its effect. There were Churchill’s speeches – “We will fight on the beaches and we will never surrender” – and very quickly daytime air raid warnings started. Again, there was this curious thing just like at the beginning of the war. We expected the worst and it didn’t happen like that. We started getting air raid warnings by day and night. [Sainsbury’s] agreed with the other shops round about, they would put up the shutters immediately. But nothing happened, and people didn’t go home. They stayed in the streets. So the “gentlemen’s agreement” between shopkeepers was dropped, and the shops started to open again even when the air raid warnings went, and … life went on through the summer. But they were getting nearer.’
Italy had entered the war in support of Germany on 10 June, and six days later the French Prime Minister, Paul Reynaud, resigned and Marshal Philippe Pétain, a military hero of the First World War, took over, and shortly afterwards signed an armistice surrendering northern and western France to the advancing German forces. From across the Channel, Winston Churchill, Prime Minister since Chamberlain had resigned on 10 May, surveyed the defeated British Expeditionary Force evacuated from Dunkirk, and on 18 June, the 125th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo, he addressed the House of Commons. Whatever had happened in France, he assured MPs, would make ‘no difference to the resolve