Thanks for your comment Jul — that’s an interesting idea. I can certainly buy the idea that Churchill mentioned Barcelona to appeal to the left, but I’m not sure that it’s a reference to Barcelona’s deep shelters — because Churchill would then be implying that he was favouring deep shelters, wouldn’t he? And I don’t think he ever did, and wouldn’t want to make implicit promises to that end. In my opinion it’s more likely that it’s just because the left identified with the plight of Barcelona in general (because of their links with the city during the civil war, as you say), and because Barcelona could plausibly be presented as a city which had resisted fascist attacks for over two years, as London might soon have to do …

I think you hit the nail on the head with JBS Haldane. If you search the Times online edition for references to “Barcelona” and “The Lessons of Barcelona” in December 1938, you´ll see that the city was the focus of the “deep shelter” lobby´s campaign — led by Haldane — to make the govt adopt similar deep shelter ARP measures as they had in Spain. As Barcelona was a more accesible city than Madrid, Labour party deleagations repeatedly visited the city´s shelter projects, gathering information to pressure the anti-Anderson shelter campaign at home.

This is my theory: Churchill knew the Barcelona “model” appealed to the left, and in this crucial speech was making every possible gesture towards national unity.

[…] a highly presentist reading of Japan, Iraq and the films themselves. Speaking of WWII, Brett Holman discusses early air attacks on urban populations as reported in the British press, including […]

Yes, but my point is that there were alternative representations of the Chinese for Churchill to draw upon, if he so chose, which would have been positive role models for civilians under bombardment (doesn’t mean they would have to emulate the Chinese in every respect!). That he didn’t may well have been because he didn’t view them so positively, or because he thought his audience didn’t, or it might just have been that Barcelona had been bombed by Italy, which had just entered the war whereas Japan was still neutral.

Well, it’s the representation of the Sino-Japanese War that’s the issue here, not the reality. Obviously the Chinese were incredibly resilient in the face of unimaginable horrors. But one does get the sense that they were seen in the West as childlike innocents. Capra has a piece about the Chinese as peculiarly unwarlike, only interested in gunpowder for its pyrotechnic qualities - cue a scene of wonderstruck peasants watching a firework display. Historical nonsense, of course. But influential nonsense.

That’s a fair point, but wasn’t there also a stereotype of the Chinese peasant as capable of patiently enduring crushing burdens? And by the summer of 1940 China had been fighting Japan for just under three years, longer than the entire Spanish Civil War lasted. Seems like a good model for the Blitz spirit!

Another reason why a Chinese city might not have been a useful allusion for WSC was the way in which the Sino-Japanese War was framed in the West. In Capra’s Why We Fight, for instance, the Chinese are depicted as helpless, passive victims - objects of pity, but not emulation. The Spanish Republicans might not have been Churchill’s ideological cup of tea, but there was less question about their willingness to resist.