The Valour and the Horror

Morale, national unity and wartime spirit: In 1940 and 1941 approximately 43,000 civilians in the UK were directly killed by bombs, and about 17,000 more over the remaining years of war. About half of these 60,000 deaths were in London. At least 86,000 people were seriously injured. This compares with deaths in the armed forces of 260,000. Both figures are small compared to losses from war causes suffered by European, Japanese, and Chinese forces and civilians. Nevertheless, the sustained nightly bombing of London in the autumn of 1940 was unprecedented in history and represented the fiercest exposure of any section of the UK population to armed conflict in centuries.

Morale was never tested as severely as it was in Germany, where war production soared in spite of raids which killed half as many people again in Hamburg one night as died from bombing in London throughout the war. Even in Japan, it took a new weapon of devastating power, the atomic bomb, to induce the surrender of a people whose cities had been devastated by the strategic air offensive mounted against it. That British morale survived the Blitz of 1940-1 is not, therefore, at all surprising. Nevertheless, the endurance shown by civilians in that period was a cause for local and national pride at the time, and has been since. Post raid emergency services were often sadly inadequate. In the absence of deep shelters, and justifiably suspicious of the brick communal shelters erected in city streets, hundreds and thousands of Londoners, in the autumn of 1940, slept in underground stations. Many others evacuated themselves to safer parts. But London was seen to be 'taking it' and inhabitants of other cities were generally determined to show that they, too, could 'take it'. 'Trekking' by inhabitants of heavily bombed cities to sleep under cover or without cover in suburban and rural areas was commonplace, but bombs caused surprisingly little voluntary absenteeism from work. In public shelters, communal entertainment's were often organised. The shared experience of the raids generated spontaneous fellow-feeling, strangers spoke to each other, neighbours were lavish with cups of tea, publicans gave out free drinks, class divisions (it seemed to many) broke down.

Other factors made for greater national cohesion. Among other effects, the greater mobility of the population brought Scots, Welsh, and Irish people in large numbers to dynamic centres of industry in England, as well as scrambling them together in the armed forces. The BBC before the war had already provided a common standard of information and entertainment for the nation: during the war it became less stiffly genteel, and began to use personalities with regional accents.

The war had the effect of cutting down (though not eradicating) conspicuous consumption by the well-to-do - it was hard to hold on to domestic servants, for instance- and of improving levels of feeding and income among the poorest, now guaranteed work if they could do it. Even the proliferation of 'red tape'- controls, regulations, and bureaucracy - at least had the effect of uniting the public against their tormentors, the civil servants.

Nevertheless, the war revealed, and confirmed, social problems and fissures between groups and classes. Crime rates rose sharply-there were just over 300,000 indictable offenses in England and Wales in 1939, 478,000 in 1945 - though increased theft, rather than violence, accounted for this increase. Juvenile delinquency was fostered by the disruption of schooling caused by evacuation and bombing, and by the preoccupation of adults with war work. Evacuation of poor slum dwellers, like the arrival later of refugees from blitzed areas, produced paroxysms of class hatred among well-to-do householders in safe areas, who often did all they could to avoid billeting such riffraff, and as figures for strikes showed, class feeling remained strong in industry. That Labour in 1951 secured a higher vote than any recorded before or since in a general election by any party, and nevertheless lost to Churchill's resurgent Conservatives, suggests, as analysis confirms, working-class self-assertion confronting middle class resistance.

But the UK won the war, after 'standing alone' in 1940, suggesting to the British public that British ways of doing things were better than those of other people. While the country's actual bankruptcy, a result of the all-out war effort, reduced the empire to the status of a satellite of the globally triumphant USA, British industry maintained its old-fashioned methods and attitudes prevalent during the war. While European nations earnestly created new constitutions, the Mother of Parliaments was now more than ever sacrosanct, and other salient British institutions basked in complacency. Talk, in the 1940's, of wartime social revolution, in hindsight seems ludicrously inappropriate.

Angus Calder - Courtesy of The Oxford Companion to World War II