A History of Britain, Volume 3 (70 page)

The ‘few’ weren’t, in fact, all that few at all. In mid-August, when the Battle of Britain began to be intense, the RAF actually had 1032 fighter planes to the Luftwaffe’s 1011. Even by the end of the first week of September, when the Germans thought they had disposed of all but a hundred or so fighters, the RAF had 736 available with another 256 waiting to be made operational. The Germans also suffered from other disadvantages. Plane for plane, there was nothing in the Luftwaffe that could beat
the
eight-gun British Spitfire for speed, manoeuvrability and concentrated firepower, at least at 20,000 feet and below. (Richard Overy argues that if the Battle of Britain had been fought at 30,000 feet the British would have lost it.) By having to protect bombers, German fighters lost the tactical flexibility they would have had if they had been allowed to roam freely, and their distance from base meant their operational time was severely limited. Although it was not always accurate, and not much use inland, radar – together with the 30,000 men and women who manned the Observer Corps – gave early warning of the raids. Wrecked or damaged aircraft that fell on British soil could be recovered and rebuilt. British pilots who bailed out could be back in the air the same day; German pilots and crew were quickly captured. The country responded in its own way to the exceptional sacrifices that the airmen were making: ground staff serviced planes round the clock, whilst civilians contributed to Spitfire Funds, voluntary donations that ran at about £1 million a month in 1940, to build more planes. By the autumn almost every town in Britain could claim its own sponsored Spitfire. When Lord Beaverbrook called for the donation of aluminium pots and pans to be melted down and reconstituted as aircraft parts, the kitchens of Britain emptied.

Between 12 August and 6 September there were 53 big raids on British airfields. On the 13th, 400 bombs fell on Lympne alone, chewing up the landing strips. On 15 August, the Luftwaffe committed its maximum strength to the battle but was bested by the RAF: 75 German planes were downed for the loss of 34 British aircraft. On the 18th there was a similar score. On the 20th, Churchill told the Commons that ‘never in the field of human conflict has so much been owed by so many to so few’, to which, according to Angus Calder, one airman is said to have commented, ‘That must refer to mess bills.’

The human price paid for this relentless engagement was severe. The casualty rate of pilots in August was a shocking 22 per cent and in early September no fewer than 133 pilots were killed, although this brought the British total of pilots down to around 600, rather than the 177 of which Goering boasted. When, on 8 September, Churchill asked Air Vice Marshal Park, ‘What other reserves have we?’, he got an answer of unwelcome candour: ‘There are none.’

On 7 September ‘Cromwell’, the code word to be used when a German invasion was under way, was signalled. A concentration of barges and flat-bottomed boats had been reported on the Channel and at the Dutch port of Rotterdam. Field Marshal Alan Brooke, the Ulster puritan at the head of Home Defence (Southern Command), was deeply pessimistic about the British army’s ability to defend the country when, as he believed,
rather
than if, invasion came. As many as 80 divisions had not been enough to hold the line in France. Britain had just 22, of which only half were capable of the mobile operations needed to defend a long coastline.

Fortunately, the German navy was just as pessimistic about its chances of landing invasion troops, outnumbered by the Royal Navy and with no guarantee of air supremacy. German admirals and generals were apparently put on a crash course of reading Caesar, Tacitus and accounts of the Norman Conquest.

German doubts about the viability of Operation Sealion did nothing, however, to soften the impact of the air war. If anything, they intensified what Hitler believed to be the necessary terrorizing of the population prior to the assault across the Channel, not by sea but from the air. Bombing attacks had already been made on civilian centres in the southwest of England well before the Battle of Britain, let alone before the RAF raids over Berlin at the end of August, the impertinence of which, admittedly, did not put Hitler in a terribly good mood. But Liverpool, Newcastle and Southampton had all been bombed in late June, and southwest England in late July. On 28–29 August the London suburbs – areas from St Pancras to Hendon (where there was an important airfield), Finchley and Wembley – were hit, and on 2 September it was the turn of Bristol, Liverpool and Birmingham. By the 7th the scale massively intensified, when the Luftwaffe sent 350 planes to destroy London’s dockland. Woolwich Arsenal, together with the Royal Victoria and Albert docks and the East India and Surrey Commercial docks, were hit. A huge, rolling fire started, which swept through the streets and houses of Southwark and Rotherhithe. Sailing up the river the writer A. P. Herbert, now a petty officer in the Thames auxiliary patrol, saw, as he rounded the bend at Limehouse, ‘a scene like a lake in Hell. Burning barges were drifting everywhere … we could hear the roar and hiss of the conflagration, a formidable noise, but we could not see it, so dense was the smoke.’

The next night the target area widened into the West End. Without a tin hat, and dodging the splinters from anti-aircraft fire that were still burning as they came down, General Brooke saw 60 bombs fall on the same small area in a single hour. Madame Tussaud’s, the Natural History Museum, power stations and hospitals were all hit. On the first Sunday after this massive raid the prime minister went on a tour of the damage amidst the oil and glass and smashed timbers and haggard firemen. There he went into one of his astonishing routines, twirling his hat on the end of his cane and roaring, ‘Are we downhearted?’ Back came the equally amazing (although he would have said predictable) response: ‘NO!’ Londoners were adapting, sleeping under railway arches, crooned to sleep
by
the lullaby of the famous music-hall duo Flanagan and Allen. By 15 September, when 158 German fighters and bombers got through the Spitfire–Hurricane shield to attack London, 150,000 were spending the night underground in tube stations. On 15 October a bomb fell on the treasury, killing three and missing the Downing Street staff only because Churchill had ordered them into a Pall Mall shelter. As a result the prime minister was himself implored to leave Number 10, where the shelter was thought neither deep enough nor strong enough, and move underground into the heavily reinforced Cabinet War Rooms, completed only a week before the German invasion of Poland. But until a special residential annexe was built for himself and Clementine he spent only three nights there, often returning to Number 10 to sleep and even going up onto the roof to look at the blaze.

George Orwell, too, had been drawn to the inferno. His bloody coughing fits (still undiagnosed as TB) were bad enough to exempt him from military service, something that he said most men would give their balls for but that was a curse to him. As always, he needed to be close to the action. So he left his Bedfordshire cottage and moved to an equally freezing, equally austere small flat in northwest London. From there he wrote for
The Observer
, broadcast propaganda to India for the BBC (‘half whoreshop, half lunatic asylum’ was his verdict two years later), and served as a sergeant in the Home Guard among the leafy streets and boarded-up mansions of St John’s Wood.

Orwell’s patriotism, especially in the ‘Cromwell’ weeks from early September to mid-October, after which, with winter weather coming on, Hitler effectively cancelled any last hope of an invasion, was now militant. For the pacifists of the left, with whom he had already had serious rows over the Spanish Civil War and the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact – the exiled poets and the conscientious objectors, the no-war-at-any price brigade who argued that they were the only true anti-fascists – Orwell reserved his most withering contempt when he wrote in the July issue of
Pacifism and the War: A Controversy
(1942), referring to the attitudes of such people, ‘If [they] imagine that one can somehow overcome the German army by lying on one’s back, let them go on imagining it, but let them also wonder occasionally whether this is not an illusion due to security, too much money and a simple ignorance of the way in which things actually happen.’ England, he wrote, was the only great country he knew of where the intellectuals were ashamed of their own nationality.

Orwell certainly had not traded in his socialism for some sort of Colonel Blimpery. What stuck in his craw was the elitism of left-wingers who were simply too good, too fine, too precious for patriotism; who
refused
to understand that it was one of the most populist sentiments of all, wired into actual living human communities. What he rejected was any confusion between patriotism and conservatism. In his mind, the Home Guard was not a quaint bunch of superannuated geezers playing at soldiers while endlessly going on about Wipers and the Menin Road; it was, especially if Sergeant Blair had anything to do with it, the first line of defence of a People’s Army, perhaps even the vanguard of a social revolution. Orwell’s idea of how to drill Dad’s Army was to train them intensively in street fighting.

He and Churchill drew on very different, though not entirely mutually exclusive, visions of British history and national community to explain to themselves and to the country why it was important that Britain fight on to the end. Churchill’s
History of the English-Speaking Peoples
, which would be swiftly resumed after the war, was the unfolding pageant of liberty, by which he meant parliamentary government, consummated ultimately in a democratic Commonwealth. Orwell, too, was interested in the idea of a Commonwealth, but his version owed a lot more to Oliver Cromwell and the Levellers, to the great tradition of popular insurrections from the Peasants’ Revolt to the Chartists. Churchill thought it was no accident that in 1942 the Luftwaffe deliberately set out on a ‘Baedeker tour’ to destroy the greatest buildings of medieval and Georgian England: Canterbury, Norwich, York, Exeter and Bath. They were out to bomb their worst enemy – British history. He set himself in the tradition of popular princes and heroes, always ready to defend the ‘island race’ against invading tyrants: the same drama Alexander Korda had produced in 1937, with Raymond Massey playing the satanic Philip II of Spain and Flora Robson the armoured Virgin Queen in
Fire over England
. When Churchill went stamping round the rubble, not just of Stepney but also of blitzed Plymouth and Manchester, he was, as Laurence Olivier would demonstrate in the 1944 film of Shakespeare’s
Henry V
, ‘a little touch of Harry in the night’, stalking through the camp, listening to the grumblings of the ordinary soldiers and trying to explain why they were fighting and why, even in misery and terror, they should fight.

Orwell recognized – generously, in fact – that this was Churchill’s special genius; that he could somehow connect with people with whom socially he had nothing whatsoever in common. But Orwell looked round him and he saw multitudes of unrecognized, undecorated heroes – the quarter of a million Londoners who had been made homeless after just six weeks of the Blitz. (It would move on to other industrial centres like Coventry and Birmingham, returning to London in December to strike the City, and then again in the first two weeks of May when more
high
explosives were dropped than at any other time in the war, hitting the House of Commons, Westminster Abbey, the Tower of London and the Royal Mint. Some 76,000 people were made homeless.) Orwell looked at the air-raid wardens and the Women’s Volunteer Service – not to mention the 6 million ordinary serving men and women in uniform – and thought that if this ‘total’ war was being fought by them, it should also be fought for them. ‘Probably the battle of Waterloo
was
won on the playing-fields of Eton,’ he wrote in 1941 in his essay ‘England Your England’, ‘but the opening battles of all subsequent wars have been lost there.’ The working people of Bristol and Clydebank, where 80 per cent of the population had been bombed out, were not taking it on the chin from the Luftwaffe in order to make Britain safe for the likes of the boys of St Cyprian’s, for the country-house set. All this heartbreak, destruction and misery was only worthwhile if a country could be created that would finally give the miners of Wigan, and the millions like them, the common decencies of life – houses that were not verminous slums; basic food that would nourish rather than sicken; schools for their children; proper medical care; help for the aged and infirm.

The Britain that had gone into the war, Orwell said in the same essay, resembled a stuffy Victorian family with ‘rich relations who have to be kow-towed and poor relations who are horribly sat upon … in which the young are generally thwarted and most of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bed-ridden aunts … A family with the wrong members in control.’ But as J. B. Priestley – another broadcaster with a radio audience almost as massive as Churchill’s – had commented, the country had been bombed and burned into democracy. And there were now Labour ministers with their hands on the economy, including, by 1942, Stafford Cripps. Orwell thought it unlikely – and certainly undesirable – that they should relinquish it. As laid out in his 1941 essay, ‘The English Revolution’, this blueprint of the new socialist Britain needed to include the nationalization of major industries – coal, railways, banks, utilities; the creation of a democratic, classless education system (away with St Cyprian’s!), limitations on incomes, and the immediate grant of dominion status to India, with the right to full independence once the war was over. The House of Lords should be abolished as an absurd anachronism, but the monarchy should probably stay. For Orwell had no intention of wiping away British history in the name of his new Jerusalem. On the contrary, he thought it would ‘show a power of assimilating the past which will shock foreign observers and sometimes make them doubt whether any revolution has happened’.

Many of those in government shared some, at least, of Orwell’s
reformist
fervour and were already looking towards a post-war Britain that would not, like the Britain of 1918, slide back to the raw inequalities of Victorian individualism. In December 1942 the Beveridge Report was published, ostensibly concerned with comprehensive social insurance and full employment but promising that post-war government would be committed to giving ‘freedom from want by securing to each a minimum income sufficient for subsistence’. In other words, the British state would care for the citizen from cradle to grave. These things were not minority interests. The Beveridge Report sold 635,000 copies, surely a record for a government white paper. A number of Tories, the ‘reform group’ that included Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and R. A. Butler, sensing a big change in public opinion in the country and anxious not to lose post-war elections, promised ‘a great programme of social reform’.