The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [60]
Although Britain had 1,200 heavy anti-aircraft guns and 3,932 searchlights in July 1940, and 1,691 and 4,532 eleven months later, they were of limited use except for forcing German planes to higher altitudes than were ideal for accurate bombing. Overall during the night-time Blitz, more German bombers were lost to flying accidents than to anti-aircraft fire or night-fighters.38 Ack-Ack, as it was known, nonetheless gave the civilians, sheltering below in converted cellars, London Underground stations, public shelters and private Anderson shelters in gardens, the morale-boosting sense that Britain was fighting back. (Surprisingly enough, although two million people left London during the Blitz, 60 per cent of those who remained slept in their beds rather than going to shelters.) 39
Hitler’s intentions were clear from a monologue he gave to his architect-in-chief (and later armaments minister) Albert Speer at a supper in the Reich Chancellery in the summer of 1940, in which he said:
Have you ever looked at a map of London? It is so closely built up that one source of fire alone would suffice to destroy the whole city, as happened once before, two hundred [sic] years ago. Göring wants to use innumerable incendiary bombs of an altogether new type to create sources of fire in all parts of London. Fires everywhere. Thousands of them. Then they’ll unite in one gigantic area conflagration. Göring has the right idea. Explosive bombs don’t work but it can be done with incendiary bombs – total destruction of London. What use will their fire department be once that really starts!40
Although it sounds like the ranting of a pathological pyromaniac, the concentration on incendiary rather than high-explosive bombs did have logic behind it, as Hitler was to discover at the time of the bombing of Hamburg in July 1943.
The state of morale was obviously going to be vital if Britain was not going to buckle under the stress, pain and horror of the nightly bombing. Lieutenant-Commander John McBeath, who commanded the destroyer HMS Venomous that brought BEF troops back from Dunkirk, recalled that the attitude of their officers was ‘that although they were naturally defeated and had been kicked out of Europe, there was no sort of idea that they’d been beaten. It was just, “Well, we’ll get them next time.” ’41 Yet how could there possibly be a next time, considering that Hitler was now the unquestioned master of Continental Europe from Saint-Jean-de-Luz on the Franco-Spanish border in the south to Narvik in the north, and from Cherbourg in the west to Lublin in the east? For all its lack of logic, the feeling did nonetheless exist in Britain that fighting on without Continental allies was almost a relief. The playwright J. B. Priestley remembered a mood of ‘We’re by ourselves now and really we can get on with this war.’42 The King felt the same, telling his mother on 27 June 1940, ‘Personally I feel happier now that we have no allies to be polite to and to pamper.’43
British agencies attempted to boost national morale through the subtle use of public information, certainly far less blatant than the vainglorious untruths told nightly by Dr Goebbels’ vast propaganda machine in Germany. These British themes accepted vulnerability, something that was foreign to the Nazi self-perception. Thus the songs weren’t uniformly jingoistic: Anne Shelton’s haunting ballad ‘I’ll Be Seeing You’ could refer as much to a dead lover as to an absent one; Flanagan and Allen’s gentle ‘Run, Rabbit, Run’ expresses the hope that the rabbit will escape the British farmer’s pot; Vera Lynn didn’t know where or when she would see her man again, except ‘some sunny day’. The movie Waterloo Bridge (1940), starring