Civil defence

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Manchester Guardian, 3 January 1941, 5

A Bomber Command raid Wednesday night against Bremen, Germany's second-largest seaport, is described by the Manchester Guardian as 'R.A.F. Answers London Fire Raid' (5). The dropping of 20,000 incendiary bombs seems to be the basis for this. Whether the Bremen raid would technically count as a 'reprisal' (from the British point of view, anyway) is doubtful since the accompanying article from the Air Ministry News Service -- also reprinted in full by The Times (4) -- strongly emphasises the military nature of the targets:

The chief objectives of the night were the great shipbuilding yards in which warships of all kinds, and especially submarines, are under construction, the Deutsche Vacuum Oil refinery, railway communications, warehouses beside the harbours, the Gebrüder Nielson rice and starch mills, the Focke-Wulf air frame factory, and many other industrial targets.

All of these targets were reported to have been hit, in some cases very hard. The fires from the Gebrüder Nielson mills could be seen from the Dutch border, and the whole affair was said in one combat report to be 'Much greater than Mannheim', the previous benchmark of a successful raid. (The Air Ministry modestly describes this one as a 'brilliant offensive operation.)
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The Times, 2 January 1941, 4

The Mediterranean theatre of war has seen a lot of action in recent days, as these headlines from The Times (4) show. While the Italian outpost at Bardia is besieged from land, sea and air, British armoured units are approaching Tobruk, 70 miles to the west. On Monday night, Italian warships at Taranto were bombed by the RAF: '11 bombs were seen to burst around the target' (though without such striking success as attended the Royal Navy's raid last November). The Greek army is continuing its slow and stubborn advance, though 'the present line of Italian defence shows no clear sign of cracking'.
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The Manchester Guardian might have allowed itself a moment for self-congratulation here, as its previous call for compulsory fire-watchers appears to have been heeded (5). (Though it was not alone, as an article on page 10 quotes similar commentary from The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Express and the Daily Mail.) The decision was broadcast last night by Herbert Morrison, the Minister for Home Security; on the reading of The Times it was 'as a result of the fires in the City of London caused by incendiary bombs' (6). Morrison himself said (4):

I must say this plainly to each one of you: it is your duty to yourself, to your neighbours and friends, to your City and your country, to guard your own home, business, or factory, from fire bombs. You cannot stop a high-explosive bomb from bursting: but you can stop a fire bomb from starting a fire.

The fire services are too few to do this everywhere, and are anyway needed to fight big fires. But while Morrison invokes the volunteer spirit of the Home Guard, he also invokes the principle of compulsion:

Compulsion will apply to every one, of every grade -- managers and office workers, as well as manual workers -- as the needs of the situation may require. Factories and businesses of all kinds, large and small, will be subject to severe penalties for any neglect of their obligations.

Even households 'must, if possible, provide at least one member, man or woman, for its party'. The war is increasingly forcing the British people to subordinate their own will to that of the state.
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Manchester Guardian, 30 December 1940, 5

President Roosevelt had one of his famous 'fireside chats' (i.e. over the radio) with the American people last night. This one would seem to deserve its lead-story status in the Manchester Guardian, as he firmly committed the United States to Britain's side in the war, even if not as a non-combatant but as the 'arsenal of democracy' (5), producing the weapons needed to beat Hitler. 'There can be no reasoning with incendiary bombs', Roosevelt said. If Britain fell, America would have to face the Nazis alone, and 'to survive in such a world of "brute force" the United States would have to become permanently a militaristic Power'. Early signs are that this is a popular policy; the isolationists are becoming, well, isolated.
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Cmnd. 124, Defence: Outline of Future Policy, is one of the most famous (and infamous) documents in British military history. It's better known as the 1957 Defence White Paper, or the Sandys White Paper after the Minister of Defence responsible for it, Duncan Sandys. It ended National Service, committed Britain to nuclear deterrence, and foreshadowed drastic cuts in conventional force levels. Aviation bore the brunt of these last. Fighter Command was to be abolished (though in the end it won a reprieve, at least until 1967) and a large number of advanced fighter types under development for the RAF were cancelled, including the Avro 720, the Fairey Delta 2, the Hawker Siddeley P.1121, and the Saunders-Roe SR.177. Only the English Electric P.1 and TSR-2 were spared (the latter only temporarily). Unsurprisingly, all this was controversial then and remains so today for those who remember such things. Certainly, the White Paper was a cost-cutting exercise: Sandys had a brief from the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, to find savings of £100 million from the defence estimates. But my interest here is the intellectual context of the Sandys White Paper: it wasn't just about saving money.
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Daily Express, 20 November 1940, 1

According to the Daily Express, the 'ever-increasing power behind Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal's master-plan for crippling Hitler's war industries' is beginning to yield results (1). The giant Krupp factory (nearly always rendered as 'Krupps' in the British press) at Essen had three 'sections [...] put out of commission', which must be considered especially impressive as it is 'officially stated' that they 'has been built underground because of their importance'. A big ocean liner, SS Europa, was damaged in an air raid on the Bremen docks. Other targets attacked recently include the oil industry at Hanover ('completely destroyed') and the Fokker aircraft factory at Amsterdam.

None of this helped London and the Midlands last night, which were heavily bombed last night. According to German radio, Coventry and Birmingham were said by German radio to be the targets in the latter, though this is not yet confirmed by the government. In one of the towns,

Practically every suburb was involved. Civilian homes were the main target, and several were wrecked before the attack slackened off shortly after midnight.

Damage to industrial buildings was reported to be small.

But 'Many casualties are feared in the two towns'.
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I have an embarrassment of Sunday papers now: the Observer, the Sunday Express, News of the World and The People. The last named (which has sales of more than 3 million per issue) has Coventry on the front page, but halfway down and underneath a photograph of a pig (I couldn't say why). US-British cooperation, the brave HMS Jervis Bay and the Italian evacuation of Koritza in the face of the Greek advance are the stories which are given top billing instead.

Sunday Express, 17 November 1940, 1

The other three have chosen Coventry as their lead story. The Sunday Express has this banner headline stretching the entire width of the front page. The story, written by Geoffrey Winn, continues on the back page where the headline is explained as a conversation overheard in the Cathedral (12):

Round me there are old folk, three generations together, grandfather, daughter, son. All of them week have not only looked on the cathedral as the centre point of their city. But have entered there to pray.

AT MY SIDE I HEAR SOME ONE SAY, IN A QUIET VOICE TO A BOY IN AIR FORCE UNIFORM: "PLEASE GOD, YOU WILL AVENGE WHAT WAS DONE TO US AND OUR BEAUTIFUL CATHEDRAL ON THURSDAY NIGHT."

He nods, too moved to speak. Then another voice said to some one else near-by: "Excuse me. But please remember this is still a church."

With a murmur of apology the man at once removes his hat.

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Daily Express, 16 November 1940, 1

News of Coventry's tragedy -- Hilde Marchant, writing on the front page of the Daily Express, above, says the city was 'Guernicaed' all Thursday night -- has reached the morning press (though it was announced by the government yesterday and would have been reported on the BBC and in the evening papers). Initial reports are that casualties amount to about a thousand people, killed or wounded. It is clearly a great shock to the nation: the Manchester Guardian's London correspondent says that the news 'has hit Londoners, I believe, harder than any of the attacks on themselves' (6). It's the first time an urban centre outside the capital has been blitzed in this way. Those who have already experienced London's intense bombardment can imagine how much harder to cope it would have been for the much smaller city of Coventry. For the rest of us, Marchant gives a sense of the devastation:

The shopping centre of Coventry is one choking mass of ruins, fire, and people who, by some miracle, have emerged alive.

They walk through this skeleton of the city centre with faces stained black, breathing the smoke of their homes, trying to find their families and friends, not sure of the way through their own streets.

The front page features a photograph of the suddenly ruined Coventry Cathedral.
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Daily Express, 15 November 1940, 1

It seems that Mussolini's attempt to annex Greece may have been somewhat ill-judged. The Daily Express leads with news of a Greek counteroffensive against the Italian forces invading their country from Albania. A spokesman for the Greek government said that their 'troops were advancing along the whole line'.

The offensive opened with a savage attack from the kilted Evzones, supported by cavalry, infantry, mountain guns, tanks and British and Greek planes.

This is the icing on yesterday's cake. The leading article on page 4 takes the Taranto raid as a turning point in the war:

FROM now on Britain must stay in top gear and go full speed ahead.

More smashing blows against Italy while she still reels from the effects of Taranto.

More bombs on German factories and fields.

And so on. The Daily Mirror takes much the same line (5):

WHAT does our success this week in the Mediterranean prove?

First, obviously, that the process of socking the Wop has begun.

Ah, that was not the bit I meant. Here it is:

But it proves more than that.

It proves that initiative, daring, the offensive spirit, brains directing risky operations can, after all, hasten the end of the war.

From different political positions (the Mirror broadly left, the Express definitely right, both populist and very popular) both papers are saying that Britain needs to take the offensive. But the Express seems a little less optimistic, saying only that this will 'bottle up the enemy's means of attacking us', not help 'hasten the end of the war' as the Mirror has it.
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The Times, 14 November 1940, 4

British and Allied forces have been having a good week, at Italy's expense. The Italians lost Gallabat (in the Sudan), a division in the offensive against Greece and much of a convoy taking supplies to Albania. The greatest Allied success was the carrier strike against the Italian naval base at Taranto, which took place on Monday night (The Times, 4). Three battleships were severely damaged. Last night the First Lord of the Admiralty, A. V. Alexander, told the nation via the BBC (and reported here on page 2) that whereas before the attack the Italian battle fleet had a numerical superiority in the Mediterranean, it is now inferior to the Royal Navy.

For reasons best known to themselves the Italians did not seek to exploit their superiority and they had remained immobile behind the defences of their harbour. Even that, however, had failed to protect them. Within their inglorious shelter the Italian battle fleet had suffered a defeat which could only have been redeemed in the public mind had that fleet shown itself willing to accept battle at sea.

The Italian News Agency has a somewhat different view of the air raid, calling the British account 'clap-trap' and a 'shameless fraud' (3):

If there had not been an urgent necessity to inject optimism into a depressed public opinion Churchill ought to have had the elementary prudence to study the Italian official communiqué of November 12, which said that only one unit was in any way extensively damaged, and added that there were no victims. It is evident that if the massacre of ships imagined by Churchill had really taken place there would have been a number of victims, unless we suppose that on board Italian warships there are no crews.

The truth is that 'the invincible British Navy has not yet scored a single success, however modest'. Who is telling the truth?
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