Inspect the display cases now unveiled inside the Imperial War Museum in London and you wonder whether anything really changes.
In the ”phony war” period between the fall of Poland in September 1939 and Hitler`s blitzkrieg across Eastern Europe in May 1940, you discover, the British distributed gas masks at home and dispatched fighter aircraft squadrons for duty overseas. Armies were massing in a quiet but hair-triggered confrontation along a heavily fortified border.
An odious dictator was gobbling up weak countries and had to be halted. Sound familiar?
In the midst of the museum`s World War II exhibits is the entrance to
”The Blitz Experience.” You pay admission and file into a cramped brick air raid shelter with a dozen other curious folks. An elderly, hunch-shouldered woman accompanied by three girls, her granddaughters, are among the curious on my visit.
We sit on rough wooden benches, the door is shut, and the lamplighted space fills with fumes and noise: sirens screaming, enemy bombers rumbling overhead, antiaircraft guns blasting, recorded voices singing songs to keep their fear in check.
Suddenly, the benches shake as if from the impact nearby of a 1-ton
”Hermann” bomb (named for Hermann Goering, the rotund chief of the Luftwaffe). The door opens and we are ushered into an eerie night: barrage balloons seem to float above the deep red glow of a burning city.
We walk through a devastated East End London street. In the debris, an overturned baby carriage and toys smoulder. Next is the exit. It all took 10 minutes.
The elderly woman offers a critique. ”When the bench shook, I worried,” she tells the children. ”But it was only a memory, so I wasn`t afraid.” Yes, she says, ”it was very realistic” except that ”it (the bombing) would go on for hours and hours.”
The ”experience” is impressively reconstructed because it has to be. British critizens older than 55 are the toughest imaginable critics. They endured the real ordeals beneath cascading high explosives and incendiaries.
After the Dunkirk evacuation in June 1940, all that stood between Great Britain and a Nazi invasion were a 20-mile-wide English Channel, the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force Fighter Command.
As victorious German soldiers struck poses on the streets of Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam, the British government in London desperately scraped together what weaponry it could muster. The army had lost vast arsenals in France. The reserve Home Guard units were lucky to rustle up a few obsolete rifles.
But Prime Minister Winston Churchill wasn`t kidding when he vowed ”we will fight on the beaches” anyway. Defensive devices included Tiger Moth biplanes with spray tanks filled with poison (arsenic, copper acetate, Trioxide) to drench Germans splashing ashore. National survival was at stake, and the fabled British sense of ”fair play” has its limits.
Fireworks and planes
But Hitler needed air supremacy if the invasion, code-named Operation Sea Lion, was to succeed. The German air assault began in July 1940 and continued battering Britain until May 1941, when Hitler switched the bulk of the Luftwaffe east for the invasion of the Soviet Union instead.
In retrospect, the turning point was Sept. 15, 1940, when outnumbered RAF Spitfires and Hurricanes-jubilant newspapers claimed at the time-shot down 185 German planes. They actually downed 60 and damaged 25 more (at an RAF loss of 26), persuading Der Fuehrer the next day to postpone invading Britain, indefinitely.
So Sept. 15 is designated Battle of Britain Day-and the 50th anniversary this weekend is being celebrated with fireworks and RAF fly-pasts over the Thames River, which Heinkel twin-engined bombers once followed to raid the capital city.
The commemorations continue into October, ranging from a full-scale military parade with refurbished WW II fighters swarming overhead to a swanky Battle of Britain ball. A musty old musical celebrating blitz bravery has been resurrected. In cinema, Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine save the day again in ”Battle of Britain” (1969) and director John Boorman delivers a delightful child`s-eye view in ”Hope and Glory” (1988).
You can sample ”The Blitz Experience”; gaze at blitz-era art at the Museum of London; and shop at the RAF Museum for mementos, including aviator goggles (a stencil reads: ”In case of complaint refer serial (No.)KL 001649”), a Hurricane fighter joystick with firing button (no stencil), and teddy bears in pilot garb ($20 apiece). Browse in bookshops and it seems every RAF veteran has scribbled a jaunty memoir.
For the equivalent of $200, you get a three-volume set, ”The Blitz Then and Now,” edited by Winston Ramsey, packed with statistics and anecdotes few readers will have world enough and time to digest. And Penguin has even reissued, in the original orange-and-white-striped paperback cover design, R.A. Saville-Smith`s 1941 edition of ”Aircraft Recognition” (”over 2 million sold”-the first time around). How can you tell the Spitfires and Hurricanes from Messerschmitt 109s and Junkers JU-88s without one?
But air combat typically took place at high altitudes, so all the ground observers could see during daylight raids were vapor trails fingerpainting the sky, like white foamy skid marks, and the black streaks of stricken aircraft plunging earthward. (A golfer was startled one afternoon when a German airman, whose parachute had failed, thudded beside him on the fairway of an awfully unlucky 13th hole.)
The battle pitted a British front-line strength of 750 fighters against 1,100 bombers and 1,000 fighters-and the RAF tallied two Germans for every plane lost.
In early phases, the Luftwaffe attacked ports and shipping, vital radar stations, and then the RAF fields from mid-July to Sept. 6, almost bringing the RAF to its knees. The targeting of London, which relieved pressure on RAF bases, happened in a tit-for-tat accident.
In the war`s first year, the opposing air forces avoided population centers, except for Rotterdam. Then an off-course Nazi plane jettisoned bombs on the outskirts of London one night. (Nazi bombers once mistook Dublin for Liverpool.)
The RAF retaliated by bombing Berlin. No need to imagine Hitler`s response. On Sept. 7, some 300 bombers and 600 fighters turned the docks and East End into infernos.
From August through October, German bombs killed 13,000 people and injured 20,000 more. Meanwhile, the RAF shot down 1,426 Luftwaffe planes, losing 787 aircraft itself.
John Ellis notes in ”Brute Force” (Andre Deutsch publishers, 1990) that Britain readily replaced losses while Hitler, incredibly, had approved a cut in German plane production. The British churned out half again as many warplanes as Germany did in 1940, twice as many in 1941. Despite a terrible toll, the British suffered no genuine pilot shortage. The ”few,” the figher pilots, to whom, in Churchill`s phrase, so many owed so much, included Commonwealth citizens (Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, etc.), the Free French, and the especially effective Poles and Czechs.
The Poles toted up the highest scores. The fifth-ranked World War II RAF ace (32 kills) was an Irishman, Brendan Finucane. Seven Americans flew in the battle; one was killed. (Of some 3,000 RAF pilots, 541 died during the blitz). In October, the bloodied Luftwaffe switched to night attacks. From November 1940 to March 1941, 500 more bombers fell, as often to mishaps as to fighters and antiaircraft fire.
The RAF, recent authors now argue, was bound to win the aerial war of attrition. But no one, including the RAF high command, knew it at the time. And certainly not the folks below, whose accounts are being published as part of the commemoration.
`Mum didn`t trust shelters`
For example, a doctor, then a medical student, tells how awed he felt atop Parliament Hill, London`s highest point, after the first mass air raid, watching the docklands blaze in the inky night. Victory was hard to see in the cinders and flames.
Pat Jolley, then a child, remembers the shrill sirens. ”Mum didn`t trust shelters,” she says. ”We`d hide under a bed in the bottom flat of the building.” Ghisha Koenig, an art student who joined the Women`s Army branch, rarely went to shelters: ”It was more important, you see, to get sleep.”
This need is better appreciated in light of the fact that, in one lethal stretch, the Luftwaffe bombed London (and other cities, especially Coventry)
for 57 consecutive nights. In the heavily bombed East End, however, the mostly poor or working class population had little choice but to find shelter, even sleeping in subway stations, where artist Henry Moore made a memorable series of wartime sketches. The blitz did breach class barriers. Affluent British families in rural England took in evacuated inner-city children, rudely awakening the former as to how ”the other half” lived.
The impact, Clive Ponting notes in ”Myth and Reality” (Hamish Hamilton publishers, 1990), was striking. In 1940, he reports, records show that three- quarters of these children received no regular education, one in eight
”did not have proper shoes, one in five was deficient in clothing and half of the children were infested with (lice).” Fewer than 1 in 100 of these children who were 14 to 18 years old completed the equivalent of high school. All of this helped elect a reform government in 1945 that swept Churchill out of office practically on the eve of his greatest triumph, and instituted welfare and full employment policies to upgrade citizens` lives. (That government, in Margaret Thatcher`s view, overreacted.)
But when did the British know the military tide had turned? Blitz survivors report they toasted Hitler`s attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941. Some were pleased that the dictatorships were bleeding each other dry. But most British people simply were thrilled that they no longer were alone, and, indeed, it was the Soviet Union that bore the brunt of the war thereafter, inflicting 85 percent of Wehrmacht casualties.
In December, the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and Hitler casually declared war on America. ”To have the United States at our side was to me the greatest joy,” Churchill wrote. ”Hitler`s fate was sealed. Mussolini`s fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground into powder. All the rest was merely the application of overwhelming force.”
All this illustrates that the blitz, despite its well-earned hoopla, needs to be seen in a wider and bloodier context. During 11 months, the Nazis dropped 30,000 tons of bombs on Britain, killing 41,000 people, injuring 137,000 and demolishing 800,000 homes.
Adding casualties from the V-1 and V-2 rocket bomb flights in 1944-45, nearly 60,000 British civilians were killed. Stiff upper lips did tremble, but the country never cracked. Quite the contrary.
But the same can be said for German civilians beneath vastly enhanced Allied bombing. Twice as many people died in the fire-bombing of Dresden and as many in Hamburg as died in Britain throughout the war (not to mention Tokyo, Nagasaki and Hiroshima). In Germany, 600,000 civilians died and 800,000 were injuredas 7 million homes became rubble.
The reprisals for the blitz were ferocious, and possibly futile. In fact, more Britons were killed (59,000) dropping bombs on Germans than were killed during the blitz. And no post-war study credits all these World War II-era air assaults on civilian population centers with anything more positive than inspiring Picasso`s Spanish Civil War painting ”Guernica.”
In the Imperial War Museum recently, a father was overheard chatting with two sons attired in bright Ninja Turtle T-shirts.
They were speaking German.
Then Papa guided his lads briskly toward the blitz exhibits.
