Civil defence

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Daily Mail, 23 September 1940, 1

There is tragic news today. Not that there has been any shortage of that lately, but this is on a different scale, at least qualitatively. A British passenger liner has been sunk by a U-boat in the Atlantic, with heavy loss of life. The ship -- its name has not yet been published -- was evacuating children to safety in Canada: eighty-three are reported lost, and only seven rescued. Two hundred and eleven others also perished, including seven other children not part of the official evacuation programme. The Daily Mail reports (1) that:

Some of the children were trapped in the ship or killed by the explosion.

Others suffered from exposure in life-boats and on rafts, which were swept by wind, waves, rain, and hail for hours before they could be picked up by a British warship.

A full list of the lost children is given on page 5, and stories from the survivors on page 6.
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Illustrated London News, 21 September 1940, 357

On the inside cover of this week's Illustrated London News -- the outside cover has advertisements on it -- is a photograph taken by Cecil Beaton at the Great Ormond Street Hospital. The subject is Eileen Dunne, an air-raid victim aged 3. The caption reads:

BOMBERS' PREY.
GOERING'S ATTACKS ON LONDON ACHIEVE LITTLE BUT THE MAIMING AND SLAUGHTERING OF CHILDREN.

This pretty much sets the tone for the whole issue -- but I'll try to quote around those parts.
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Lots of good stuff in the Spectator this week, so let's get into it. The 'News of the week' section starts out on page 281 with a paragraph on the speech Churchill gave last Tuesday. Noting that 'some 1,600 civilians have been killed [in London] and some 6,500 injured in the first half of September', the Spectator goes on to argue that

a civilian's life is not more intrinsically valuable than a soldier's, and in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 British casualties were over 400,000. And distressing though the devastation of some London streets is, it is in no way comparable with the destruction of scores of towns and cities in France -- for example Reims -- in the last war. When London is in the battle-line that it should suffer battle-line experience is inevitable.

There's also a paragraph on 'The War in the Air': 'The week that has passed has been one of air warfare such as the world has never before experienced'. On the one side, there is 'ruthless indiscriminate bombing' and on the other 'persistent attacks on military objectives' -- see if you can guess which refers to the RAF and which the Luftwaffe! The daylight air battles, especially the 'amazing result' of last Sunday, 'have given the measure of the real fighting quality of the two forces in legitimate warfare' -- in the week ending 15 September, Germany lost 471 aircraft and Britain only 96.
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Manchester Guardian, 18 September 1940, 5

The Prime Minister gave a speech on the war situation to the House of Commons yesterday, which I'll come back to. The Manchester Guardian has a lot on the air war, of course (5). A big wave of enemy raiders, consisting of 'more than 200 Messerschmitt and Heinkel fighters' was broken up over Kent yesterday afternoon, getting no farther than Maidstone. Losses were small on both sides, however (possibly due to the heavy clouds and the '100-mile-an-hour gale' they fought in): seven German aeroplanes were shot down, and three British. Unusually, the defenders' record was nearly as good at night: anti-aircraft guns accounted for four enemy aircraft before midnight, and fighters one. The Luftwaffe dropped bombs central London, including the West End ('There was considerable aerial activity near Green Park'), and also on 'a South-East England village':

One dropped in a roadway, making a crater and causing considerable damage to houses and a number of casualties, some of them fatal. A couple and their four children had a remarkable escape when their house collapsed and they were buried in the wreckage.

So it's not just the big cities which are having to 'take it'.
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Manchester Guardian, 11 September 1940, 5

I've noted that for the past two days two major London papers -- The Times and the Daily Mail -- have not led with the bombing of the city. I don't have today's Mail to hand, but it's the same for The Times today ('Fresh R.A.F. blow at Berlin', etc). But here is a provincial newspaper (albeit one with national influence), the Manchester Guardian, concentrating almost exclusively on the pounding the capital is receiving (5). I'm not sure what to make of this, or indeed whether to make anything of it all. Is it a liberal vs conservative difference (let's think about the wounded rather than focus on revenge) or a regional vs metropolitan one (Londoners don't need to be told what they are experiencing)? Or just small number statistics?
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Today's New Statesman and Nation has little to say about a German invasion or aerial strategy, unlike the Spectator yesterday, aside from a brief paragraph in the editorial comments (221) noting that German bombers now have an equal number of fighters as escorts:

The primary object of these attacks has been to engage and destroy as many British fighters as possible. An invasion is only possible if our defence fighters can be seriously weakened.

It does however have quite a bit to say about air-raid precautions, reflecting its left-wing stance. The near-constant raid warnings are interrupting war work (222). Should factories be permitted to keep working through daytime alerts? Do workers need more comfortable shelters in which to sleep through nighttime alerts?

Are the present areas over which the warning is given too large? Is it possible to arrange for a system of subsidiary warnings which will send people to shelters when enemy planes are approaching their own districts? Can the problem in factories be solved by the system of watchers which is now in many factories developing by agreement between men and employers?

Most importantly, 'we' -- meaning 'the whole public' -- must learn to 'discipline ourselves to carry on with necessary work as soldiers, sailors and airmen do during raids'. This is the true meaning of the slogan 'we are "all now in the front line"'.
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Manchester Guardian, 4 September 1940, 5

The big news in the Manchester Guardian today (5) has nothing to do with the air war but a deal with the United States, which will transfer fifty elderly destroyers to Britain in exchange for 99-year leases on bases in the Western Hemisphere. (It seems that Roosevelt meant what he said at Newfound Gap.) The destroyers 'will be used for convoy, anti-submarine work, and policing the ocean lines of communication so vital to maintaining British exports and imports'. The agreement should be regarded as 'a proof of a solidarity which will remain unaffected by the attacks of isolationists or the slow poison of Nazi propagandists'.
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Times, 3 September 1940, 4

Yesterday was another big day for aerial warfare (these headlines are from The Times, 4). Six hundred and fifty German aircraft attacked RAF aerodromes in south-east England; forty-six were shot down and the raids repulsed. Only thirteen British aircraft were lost. London had more air-raid warnings during the day but suffered nothing worse than that.
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Saturday is the day that the new New Statesman and Nation comes out. (The Spectator comes out on Friday, but I missed that yesterday. Not to worry; there's always next week.) It's a 'week-end review', not a newspaper, but inevitably has much commentary on the war, generally from a left-wing perspective. Indeed, this week it opens (197) with an editorial comment (probably by Kingsley Martin) entitled 'The war in the air'. This war is evolving, from mass daylight raids to small night raids:

GERMAN tactics have changed once more. Blitzkrieg methods were no proving too costly in relation to the results achieved, and the Nazi High Command has decided to follow the example of our own raids on Germany, operating chiefly at night and using only small formations.

Martin admits that this change has been effective, mainly due to the 'wearisome length of the air-raid warnings'.

By our own experience we are beginning to have some experience of what the people of Germany have been enduring for many weeks. Even if we discount official optimism, there is no doubt the damage done by the Germans is small in comparison with that caused by our own airmen, with their far greater experience of night-flying. In this type of warfare it is we who took the initiative, and the Nazis are as yet but clumsy imitators.

(No comment.) He goes on to suggest that the present German tactics are more suited to 'a long war of attrition than to a campaign designed to finish off the enemy by a single decisive blow', though the danger of invasion won't pass until 'the equinoctial tides in the middle of September are over'.
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Times, 30 August 1940, 4

Interestingly, after yesterday's coordinated pro-bombing campaign, today's headlines in The Times (4) emphasise the efforts of Bomber Command over those of Fighter Command. In particular, a raid on Berlin on Wednesday night (or Thursday morning) is described in some detail. A 'large number of bombs, high explosive and incendiary' were dropped 'on a series of carefully selected military objectives and on works vital to war production', including a power station and railway yards. A pair of squadrons made a 'special attack' on an (unspecified) objective just four miles from Berlin's centre. A number of the aircrew (all of whom returned safely) gave accounts of the mission, including this 'young pilot officer':

We bombed at 24.00 hours -- dead on midnight (he said). Somebody had been there before us. When we arrived we found the target well on fire. We could see it when we were 25 minutes' flying time away from the target. We came in more or less North to South and put our stick of bombs down just to the left of this big fire. Then four more fires started. They were burning with very bright white lights. Altogether we were cruising round over Berlin for about half an hour.

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