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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Reprisals
Vox pops — II
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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Vox pops — I
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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Reprisals after notice
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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- The Times, 12 September 1940, 5. [↩]
Bomb Berlin and…
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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- 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. [↩]
Precisely
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.
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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History never repeats
But sometimes, it rhymes.
The above map, accompanying an article entitled 'BOMB THESE TEN TOWNS!', was published on page 4 of the Daily Mirror on 29 August 1940. It rhymes with this map published in the Daily Mail twenty-three years before:
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Frightfulness for schrecklichkeit?
Previously, I identified a comparison between the reprisals debate in the First World War and the reprisals debate during the Blitz as something I could do that previous writers have not (except in passing, or implicitly). I won't have time in my AAEH paper for a full-blown comparative approach, or for that matter time before then to do the research; though perhaps I could for a version for publication. But it's something I can do briefly, and it helps that I already covered this in my thesis, where I looked at the British press reactions to the Gotha summer in 1917.1
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- The best published source for this is Barry D. Powers, Strategy Without Slide-rule: British Air Strategy 1914-1939 (London: Croom Helm, 1976), 81ff. [↩]
Who said that?
In my reprisals paper abstract, I said that
It is often argued that there was little enthusiasm in Britain for reprisals against German cities in retaliation for the Blitz, unlike the First World War.
This is a historiographical claim. If I don't want to be accused of using weasel words or attacking strawmen, it's one that I need to be able to substantiate. So what have previous historians said about the reprisals question?
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A myth of the Blitz?
I'm giving a talk at the XXII Biennial Conference of the Australasian Association for European History, being held in Perth this July. It's a big conference with some big names (e.g. Omer Bartov, Richard Bosworth, John MacKenzie), and there's an appropriately big theme: 'War and Peace, Barbarism and Civilisation in Modern Europe and its Empires'. My talk will be about the reprisals debate in Britain during the Blitz. Here's the original title and abstract:
'Bomb back and bomb hard': A myth of the Blitz
In Britain, popular memory of the Blitz celebrates civilian resistance to the German bombing of London and other cities, emphasising positive values such as stoicism, humour and mutual aid. This 'Blitz spirit' is still called to mind during times of national crisis, for example in response to the July 2005 terrorist bombings in London.
But the memory of such passive and defensive traits obscures the degree to which British civilian morale in 1940 and 1941 depended on the belief that if Britain had to 'take it', then Germany was taking it as hard or even harder. As the Blitz mounted in intensity, Home Intelligence reports and newspaper letter columns featured calls for heavier reprisals against German cities. Propaganda, official and unofficial, responded by skirting a fine distinction between reporting the supposedly heavy bombardment of strictly military targets in urban areas and gloating over the imagined suffering of German civilians. That the RAF's bombing efforts over Germany at this time were in fact wildly inaccurate and largely ineffective is beside the point: nobody in Britain was aware of this yet.
In this paper I will try to restore a sense of these forgotten aspects of the 'Blitz spirit', and attempt to locate their origins in pre-war attitudes to police bombing in British colonies and mandates, and in reactions the predicted knock-out blow from the air which dominated popular perceptions of the next war in the 1920s and 1930s.
A more recent and abbreviated version:
'Bomb back and bomb hard': the reprisals debate during the Blitz
It is often argued that there was little enthusiasm in Britain for reprisals against German cities in retaliation for the Blitz, unlike the First World War. There was in fact a serious contemporary debate about whether enemy civilians could or should be targets of bombing, which I will show derived from the prewar and wartime public understanding of the potential and proper use of airpower.
As these perhaps show, my thinking on the reprisals question is changing a bit, which is not surprising since I'm still researching it. What I plan to do over the next few weeks is to do some of my thinking out loud by way of blogging -- appropriately, since I became interested in this topic while post-blogging the Blitz. So watch this space!