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JULIET GARDINER
The Blitz The British Under Attack
For Martha
Contents
1 Black Saturday, 7 September 1940
2 ‘The Most Grim Test in its History …’
8 Britain Can (Probably) Take It
12 Long Shall Men Mourn the Burning of the City
These are the facts, observe them how you will:
Forget for a moment the medals and the glory, The clean shape of the bomb, designed to kill, And the proud headlines of the papers’ story.
Remember the walls of brick that forty years
Had nursed to make a neat though shabby home; The impertinence of death, ignoring tears, That smashed the house and left untouched the Dome.
Bodies in death are not magnificent or stately,
Bones are not elegant that blast has shattered; This sorry, stained and crumpled rag was lately A man whose like was made of little things that mattered;
Now he is just a nuisance, liable to stink,
A breeding-ground for flies, a test-tube for disease: Bury him quickly and never pause to think What is the future like to men like these?
People are more than places, more than pride;
A million photographs record the works of Wren; A city remains a city on credit from the tide That flows among its rocks, a sea of men.
Ruthven Todd, ‘These are the Facts’
‘Blitz’ is an abbreviation of the German word ‘Blitzkrieg’, meaning ‘lightning war’. It all too accurately describes Hitler’s advance through western Europe in May and June 1940, as Norway, then Holland, Belgium and France fell to the German forces within weeks; but it hardly seems appropriate for the almost continual aerial bombardment of the British Isles that started on 7 September 1940 and continued with little relief until 10 May 1941. Yet ‘blitz’ is the name by which these eight months were known. It was a German word, and like lightning it came from the sky, and could and did kill. Indeed, an air raid was in many ways like a terrible storm – the sky livid, rent by jagged flashes, obscured by black clouds rolling across it or lit up by the reflected glow of fires, while the noise of bombs and guns echoed like the thunder of Mars, the god of war.
The blitz was the test of war for the British people: it touched everyone’s lives, it mobilised the population, and in phrases that have become time-worn but are nevertheless true, put civilians on the front line and made the home front the battlefront. Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain, which preceded it, had essentially been military operations. The blitz was total war. Its intensity and inescapability made it possible to call the Second World War ‘the people’s war’, in which, in the words of the poet Robert Graves, a soldier ‘cannot even feel that his rendezvous with death is more certain than that of his Aunt Fanny, the firewatcher’.
The blitz was the war that everyone in Britain had been expecting, and fearing, since that warm Sunday morning in September 1939 when Neville Chamberlain had announced that ‘Britain is now at war with Germany’. Although there had been sporadic raids throughout the ‘phoney war’ that followed, it was not until almost exactly a year after that declaration that the Luftwaffe bombers arrived in force over London. Although England’s capital was bombed more heavily and more continuously than anywhere else in the country, the blitz was an attack on the whole United Kingdom: few places escaped its direct effects, none its indirect ones.
In January 1941 George Orwell wrote to the editors of the American journal the Partisan Review, to which he would contribute a ‘London Letter’ throughout the rest of the war: ‘On that day in September when the Germans broke through and set the docks on fire, I think few people can