1940s

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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 diaries from people who didn't exist, no newspaper reports of events which never happened. The further you depart from our timeline, the more speculation you indulge in, the more pointless it seems: thinking about the Roman Empire undergoing a steam-powered industrial revolution is fun, but what does it tell us about, well, anything to do with reality? And if objectivity is impossible to achieve when doing history, alternative history is prone to wish fulfilment and outright fantasy.

And yet I think counterfactuals can be useful. There is so much we don't know about the past, so much that we cannot now recover, but in one important sense we know more than the people we study: we know what happened in their future. Our histories of the Soviet Union, for example, will forever have to take into account the fact that it dissolved in 1991, something which nobody knew in 1917, 1921, 1945 or 1968. That makes it hard for us to truly understand how people thought about the future and, crucially, how that affected their decisions and actions in the present. Considering counterfactual scenarios can help restore this sense of contingency, of uncertainty: what did happen was not necessarily what had to to happen. Or even likely to happen. Besides, historians implicitly indulge in counterfactual thinking all the time: whenever we single out some event or person or institution as important in whatever way, we are effectively saying that if it that event hadn't happened, or if that person hadn't existed, or if that institution hadn't been created, then history would have been significantly different (for whatever definition of 'significant' works for you).
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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:

  1. First thing is to explain what I'm talking about: the public debate about reprisal bombing of German cities during (and for) the Blitz, especially September and October 1940. A definition of reprisals would be useful here; here's a contemporary one from A. L. Goodhart, What Acts of War are Justifiable? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 25:

    The essence of reprisals is that if one belligerent deliberately violates the accepted rules of warfare then the other belligerent, for the sake of protecting himself, may resort by way of retaliation to measures which, in ordinary circumstances, would be illegal.

    That's a legal definition; it excludes the desire for mere revenge as illegitimate, but of course this was an important motivation for many.

  2. Next comes the problem: I will discuss the existing historiography on the reprisals debate, showing that the consensus is that the British people did not demand reprisals, and those who did weren't the ones who were bombed. (Only Mark Connelly differs on this point to any substantial degree.) I think this is wrong; in fact the desire for reprisals predominated at least among those who cared enough to voice their opinion, and possibly among the population as a whole, if only slightly.
  3. Now on to the first of the important bits: the shape of the reprisals debate. I'll discuss the two major axes of opinion: morality and effectiveness, and give some examples. I'll also point to an important subset of the reprisals demand, reprisals after notice. And I will show that the near-universal assumption was that Bomber Command was capable of carrying out precise and devastating air raids.
  4. The second of the important bits: assessing how popular the demand for reprisals actually was. Here I will discuss the BIPO opinion poll data, letters to the editor, and hearsay, setting these in the context of the editorial positions of the newspapers concerned. These lines of evidence all point towards public opinion being in favour of reprisals.
  5. Now to explain it all, largely in terms of pre-war ideas (which wartime reporting had done little to change by this point), with reference to the previous war, the knock-out blow theory, the bomber will always get through and air control. Essentially, the pre-war belief in the power of the bomber was the reason why there was a debate about reprisals at all; if it had been realised just how weak Bomber Command really was the question would not have arisen.
  6. Finally, to sum up: overall the British people, I believe, did want reprisal bombing during the Blitz. Any questions?

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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 on what other people think if you mix with them and talk to them (the 'everyone is complaining about how difficult it is to find servants this year' problem). So the insights may apply only to fairly narrow sections of the community. More dangerously, it's a common rhetorical trick to claim that what you think is what 'everyone' thinks, that what you're saying is what 'everyone' is saying. So as with letters to the editor, I find such claims more persuasive when they go against the grain, when someone admits that they are going against the majority. But if the overall picture points one way, that has evidentiary value too.
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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 have let their own biases on the subject of reprisals influence their selection and/or analysis of the letters they chose to publish (e.g. if the newspaper was pro-reprisals, perhaps pro-reprisal letters were more likely to be published), I'm now going to look at their editorial positions.
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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 there are other primary sources. One is the traditional one of the newspaper letters column. These are great because they apparently give you access to the thoughts of people who are otherwise lost to history, the men and women on the Clapham omnibus (substitute regionally-specific public transport systems as appropriate). Before opinion polls, letters to the editor were one of the most important ways of gauging public opinion available, and in 1940-1 they still would have been read as such.

But these letters come with huge problems too. They are filtered at every stage. Someone has to have an opinion on something (so the incurious and apathetic are selected against). They have to be able to read and write (so the illiterate are selected against). They have to actually decide to write and post a letter (so the busy are selected against). And then their letter has to be read and selected for publication by someone at the newspaper, and they could do this on any number of factors: whether it is well-written (or poorly-written, if the newspaper wants to mock its author), whether it is original or representative, whether it is controversial, who the author is (not always humble). High-minded newspapers published mostly serious letters; more populist newspapers might not have letters columns at all. Some newspapers tried to publish a representative sample of the opinions received (The Times was one); others were happy to present a more partisan selection. And maybe some letters were made up entirely; no doubt most were edited for style or length. So there were many, many potential biases, and we can't simply assume that the letters published represent the voice of the people. But taken collectively I think they represent voices of the people.
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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, Britain's first opinion polling organisation, the British Institute of Public Opinion (BIPO, later the Gallup Organization), was set up in 1937, and during the Blitz it did carry out polling on the reprisals issue.

In October 1940, BIPO polled on the question (among others):

In view of the indiscriminate German bombing of this country, would you approve or disapprove if the R.A.F. adopted a similar policy of bombing the civilian population of Germany?

The result was a dead heat: 46% of respondents approved and 46% disapproved. (The balance didn't know.) But I think there's a problem with BIPO's sample here. From a sample size of 2100 people, apparently selected through door-knocking and street interviews, only 46% were women. I'm not a demographer, but I would have expected slightly more women than men: that's the normal gender balance, and wartime conditions would skew that even further.
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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 monopoly of this weapon?'

Cazalet's letter ignited (or, rather, re-ignited) a debate about the efficacy and morality of reprisals. Less contoversial, however, was the way he thought reprisals should be carried out:

We should, I suggest, designate some 12 German towns, and openly declare that unless this indiscriminate bombing ceases we intend to wipe out each night one of these German cities. Let each one of the towns selected anticipate when their turn may be coming. If they evacuate them all -- we will choose 12 others.

Cazalet was convinced that this would have 'a most striking and speedy effect upon the German population [...] Widespread bombing will quickly disillusion them', given their reliance on propaganda for knowledge of how the war was progressing.
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  1. The Times, 12 September 1940, 5. [↩]

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Sunday Express, 6 October 1940, 1

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 nothing to indicate its authorship. No one knows who is paying for it.1

In just nine words the poster presents a very simple argument in favour of the reprisal bombing of Germany:

BULLIES ARE ALWAYS COWARDS

BOMB BERLIN AND SAVE LONDON

By bombing Berlin, London would be saved from the Blitz. The German (or perhaps just the Nazi) bullies, being cowards, will not be able to take it as well as the British and so will crack first.
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  1. Sunday Express, 6 October 1940, 1. Apparently a 'Mr. Beabie' admitted to the Sunday Dispatch that he was responsible, but I can't see the original text and I wonder if that should be 'Begbie'. Not that I know who he is either. [↩]

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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 on assumptions about airpower. For example, what, exactly were bombers capable of doing? How did people react to bombing? Was strategic airpower better used in attacking military objectives or should it be used to strike directly at the enemy population?

In turn, these assumptions would have been formed partly by experience (including the experience of being bombed, which may account for the observed difference in support for reprisals between the blitzed and the non-blitzed, rather than new moral scruples as seems to be the usual assumption) and partly from information picked up from sources like the press.

Here's one example of a newspaper article from the Blitz period which brings together a number of these themes, from the back page (6) of the Daily Express, 5 December 1940.

Daily Express, 6 December 1940, 6

ACCURATE BOMBING SHAKES GERMAN MORALE

WITH the picture in your mind of German-wrought devastation among the shops, homes, churches and hospitals of Bristol, Coventry, Birmingham, Southampton and London, take a look at what the the R.A.F. is doing in Germany.

There are two very clear claims in the headline here: firstly, that the British bombing of Germany is accurate, and that it is damaging German morale.

But accurate in what in what sense? And damaging morale how?
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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 this future shock: '"On our television set we saw CHURCHILL in BUSTED BERLIN!"'1 -- the television transmitters at Alexandra Palace had been switched off since September 1939. Invoking the early television experiments functions here as a promise of a better world to come, and not just because the 'bad old war days' will be over.

There isn't a lot about how the war actually went, but it would seem that it ended in 1943. There's no indication that the United States played any part in the war (though it is friendly to Britain; there are now no 'passports and visas and quotas' to bar travel between them). Or the Soviet Union for that matter (Barbarossa is still over a month away at this point). Britain seems to have won the war through bombing, or at least that's the only form of military activity mentioned:

My gosh, they've certainly got on with the work of rebuilding Berlin after those terrific winter blitzes by the R.A.F.! British authorities are directing the work. It hasn't so much been renovation as recreation, because just before the Germans sued for an armistice, there was precious little left of Berlin and it had been completely evacuated of everyone bar soldiers and A.R.P. people.

This (along with Wilhelmstrasse and Friedrichstrasse being 'just blotted out') suggests that British air raids became so heavy that Berlin had to be evacuated of all non-essential personnel. Hamburg too was hit hard: it 'was finished in the spring of 1942 and it isn't functioning as a port yet'. At some point Hitler died, though how isn't stated. It seems clear that the British air raids were the cause of the German armistice request (this was written long before unconditional surrender, of course), or perhaps that's just me.
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  1. Daily Mirror, 17 May 1941, 7. There's even an illustration showing Churchill's television appearance in front of the Brandenburg Gate, or at least that's what I think it is; sadly it isn't clear enough to reproduce here. [↩]