But what actually happened? Not that much! The panic never came.
As a British government film from 1940 described it, “London raises her head, shakes the debris of the night from her hair, and takes stock of the damage done. London has been hurt during the night. The sign of a great fighter in the ring is, Can he get up from the floor after being knocked down? London does this every morning.”
The psychiatric hospitals were switched over to military use because no one showed up. Some women and children were evacuated to the countryside as the bombing started, but by and large people stayed in the city. And as the Blitz continued, as the German assaults grew heavier, the British authorities began to observe—to their astonishment—not just courage in the face of the bombing but also something closer to indifference.
The Imperial War Museums later interviewed many survivors of the Blitz, including a woman named Elsie Elizabeth Foreman. As she described it,
We used to go in the shelter all the time, and then as they petered off a little bit, we got a bit blasé, I suppose you might say. And we stayed in bed some of the time, but we still used to go dancing. [If] there was an air raid on, if anybody wanted to leave, they could, and all that. And the same at the pictures, if we went to the pictures…we used to just sit there. We never used to move and go out or anything until the actual time when we were bombed out twice, I think. We weren’t actually bombed out the first time, just the glass…
One of my sisters—she came home and she was sweeping the glass from the front, because all the windows came in. But she swept it into the curb. And my eldest sister came out and—this was during an air raid that the all-clear hadn’t gone. And they had this terrific row because my sister had put my oldest sister’s best high-heel shoes on, which were very hard to get in those days, same as silk stockings were…Bombs were dropping all over the place, and there were these two having a row over a pair of shoes and sweeping the glass at the same time.
It turns out that people were a lot tougher and more resilient than anyone expected. And it also turns out that maybe if you bomb another country day in and day out, it doesn’t make the people you’re bombing give up and lose faith. Maybe it just makes them hate you, their enemy, even more. The area-bombing advocates had this cleverly deceptive word they used to describe the effect of their bombing: dehousing. As if you could destroy a house without disturbing its occupants. But if my house is gone, doesn’t that make me more dependent on my government, not more inclined to turn on my government?
Historian Tami Biddle takes the long view on area bombing: “I think we’ve seen this over and over again in the history of bombing. We’ve seen [that] the state, the target state—if we’re talking about coercive bombing, long-range coercive bombing—finds ways of absorbing the punishment if it’s really determined to do so.”
When Blitz survivor Sylvia Joan Clark was asked whether she ever thought the Germans might win the war, she replied,
No. I never thought that. I am very proud to be English, and I thought they’ll never beat us. Never. I had that in my heart that if I worked, and I helped everybody, we’d get there in the end…I used to say this to people. It’s no use being down. I had a home. I’ve had a mother. I’ve had a father and I’ve lost [them], but I’ve made up my mind nobody’s going to get me down. I’m going to survive, and I’m to work hard and be proud that England will be England again.
Once they tallied up the damage, the British determined that more than forty-three thousand people had been killed and tens of thousands injured. More than a million buildings were damaged or destroyed. And it didn’t work! Not on London or Londoners. It did not crack their morale. And despite that lesson, just two years later, the Royal Air Force was proposing to do the exact same thing to the Germans.
Ira Eaker said that he and RAF Marshal Harris, when they were living together, had discussions—though I’m guessing arguments would be a better term. They’d talk long into the night, and once, Eaker turned to Harris and made this exact point: “I asked Harris if the bombing of London had affected the morale of the British. He said it made them work harder. But in the case of the Germans, however, he thought the reaction was different because they were a different breed from the British.”
To Eaker and the rest of the Bomber Mafia, the British attitude made no sense. And it was only later that they came to understand why. The British had their own version of a Bomber Mafia—with an equally dogmatic set of views about how airpower ought to be used. Actually, the word mafia is not quite right—more like a single bombing mafioso. A godfather. And his name was Frederick Lindemann.