Michael Kerrigan. World War II Plans That Never Happened, 1939-1945. London: Amber Books, 2011. As a historian, I’m probably not supposed to like counterfactuals. There are very good reasons for this. It’s hard enough to reconstruct what did happen without worrying about what didn’t. There are no minutes from meetings which never took place, no […]
Since my AAEH talk is in four days, I’d better start actually putting the pieces I’ve scattered over this blog together into something (ideally) coherent which can be presented in 20 minutes (with 10 for questions). So here’s a stab at a plan: First thing is to explain what I’m talking about: the public debate
Another source of information about public opinion on reprisals during the Blitz is hearsay — what people reported that other people thought. This can give us an insight into contemporary judgements of the public mood. But, as with letters to the editor, hearsay is highly problematic too. It’s only possible to get a good grasp
In my previous post I identified three newspapers which published extended correspondence from their readers about reprisals during the Blitz — The Times, the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Mail — one of which provided its own analyses of all the letters it received — the Mail. To try and assess whether these newspapers might
After opinion polls, the rest of the evidence for public opinion on reprisals is more impressionistic. I’ve already noted the conclusions of those who have plumbed the Mass-Observation archives (and Tom Harrisson didn’t just plumb the archives, he ran Mass-Observation during the war), and as I haven’t done that myself I’ll let them stand. But
Let’s tackle the question of public opinion head on. Did the British people want reprisal bombing to be carried out against the German people? How can we tell? Can we even tell? If we wanted to gauge public opinion on a particular question today, we’d carry out an opinion poll. As luck would have it,
Shortly after the Blitz began in earnest, Conservative MP Victor Cazalet wrote to the editor of The Times to urge that the RAF carry out reprisals against German cities for the ‘indiscriminate bombing’ of London.1 ‘The attack on the civil population is a military weapon’, he argued. ‘Can we possibly afford to give Germany a
This photo appeared on the front page of the Sunday Express on 6 October 1940, a month into the Blitz. A caption explained, or rather asked: WHO PUT UP THIS POSTER? This mystery poster has appeared in the streets of London. It is about six feet high and ten or twelve feet across, and bears
I noted in a previous post that the debate about reprisal air raids during the First World War largely revolved around two questions: are reprisals moral? and are reprisals effective? The same was true in the Second World War. Taking the question of effectiveness, how this was answered by participants in the debate depended partly
In May 1941, after nine months of German bombing and the evacuation of yet another British army from Europe, the Daily Mirror printed a fascinating little piece of futurism, in the form of a letter written as though it was May 1944, with Britain victorious and Germany prostrate. The headline itself gives some idea of
