The Storm of War - Andrew Roberts [63]
The Blitz cost 43,000 British civilians killed and a further 51,000 seriously injured, but after September 1940 the country was out of mortal danger, for the moment at least.50 Of course only the tiny number of those in receipt of German cipher decrypts in Britain could know this, and since the British Government wished to keep the people in a state of readiness, ordinary Britons remained on high alert until Hitler ended the bombing campaign a month prior to his invasion of Russia. Overall, since May 1940 the Germans had lost 1,733 planes to the RAF’s 915. These were very modest numbers of planes compared to some of the losses that would be incurred in Russia and the Far East a few years hence, but at the time they were enough to decide the battle in Britain’s favour, especially once added to the 147 Me-109s and 82 Me-110s lost in the battle of France. It was the first engagement that the Allies had won against the Germans. Hitler’s demand in Directive No. 16, ‘to eliminate the English mother country as a base from which the war against Germany can be continued’, had been successfully resisted, and Britain was indeed to become just such a base.
Colonel Schmid’s belief that the RAF was small compared to the Luftwaffe was taken on by the British too. Naturally, the Prime Minister idolized the brave young pilots, and rewarded them with his most precious gift: an immortal phrase. Returning from the Operations Room at RAF Uxbridge, west London, on 15 August where he had been watching No. 11 Group’s battle in progress, he had told his chief Staff officer Major-General Hastings ‘Pug’ Ismay, ‘Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.’ He repeated the phrase in the House of Commons five days later. On that occasion he added, ‘All hearts go out to the fighter pilots, whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day.’51 His words have helped to fix the battle and the heroism of ‘the Few’ in the collective consciousness of the British people ever since.
Churchill knew that, if Britain was to survive, what was called the Home Front needed to be made far more efficient, and so his ministry imposed radical changes on British society which were generally accepted in the mood of national emergency. The Chamberlain ministry had set in place the necessary legislative framework: compulsory military conscription had been introduced in April 1939 and the Emergency Powers (Defence) Act of August had given the Government sweeping powers. In May 1940 Churchill introduced a new subsection of the Act, numbered 18B(1A), which allowed him to intern Fascists without trial for the duration of the war, effectively an introduction of martial law in Britain. He disliked having to do this, describing the suspension of habeas corpus as ‘in the highest degree odious’, but he nonetheless took on powers that left him the closest Britain has come to a dictator since Oliver Cromwell.
Britain still imported 70 per cent of her food in 1939, so the invocation to ‘Dig for Victory’ meant the difference between life and death for the men of the Merchant Navy, 30,589 of whom lost their lives in the war. The amount of arable land was increased by 43 per cent, with 7 million acres of grassland going under the plough. The introduction of rationing and the virtual abolition of food wastage, as well as the swelling of the number of allotments to 1.7 million, meant that Britain could reduce food imports to the bare minimum. By the end of the war Britain grew about half her sugar consumption,