Class war in the blitz

September 7, 2010 at 12:08 am (fascism, hell, history, Jim D, trotskyism, war)

Late in the afternoon of Saturday, 7  September 1940, people enjoying the warm summer sunshine in south-eastern England heard the drone of wave after wave of  aircraft passing high overhead. Hundreds of German fighter and bomber planes were converging on London, and soon the capital’s docks and the surrounding residential areas were ablaze. That night, 436 people were killed and 1,600 seriously injured. So began the eight-month period known as ‘the blitz’, a new and terrible form of warfare directed not at enemy troops, but at a civilian population. After that first raid, London would be bombed for fifty-seven consecutive nights, and death and destruction also rained down on Coventry, Liverpool, Glasgow, Bristol, Southampton, Hull, Belfast and many other cities. Over 40,00 people would be killed, while the damage to property and the shattering effects on million of lives would be incalculable (see the best recent history of the blitz, Juliet Gardiner’s ‘The Blitz – The British Under Attack’, Harper Press 2010).

Above: a London tube station in use as an air raid shelter as a result of militant action led by the Trotskyist Workers International League and some dissident Communist Party members, including Alfie Bass.

In the destruction of the blitz, three significant attitudes developed among working people.

First, there was the growing sense of community, the feeling of mutual dependence, a new realisation that one another’s problems and aspirations were exceedingly similar. In air raid shelters, people’s barriers broke down; strangers became friendly with persons they had never dreamt of even speaking to under normal circumstances. In an emergency, a person you did not know may risk his (or her) life to save yours. No wonder a sense of solidarity, of common purpose, emerged from this baptism of fire.

.
If a feeling of the great ‘us’ grew up among people of varying skills and status, there was, secondly, the contrary feeling of ‘them’, a hatred for those not making sacrifices — indeed, waxing rich — from the misfortunes of others, the black marketeers, the fat cats, those who had positions and influence. The ruling class, who were responsible for the present mess and whose bumbling ineptitude had led to the war, seemed to be largely immune to any of war’s ill effects. This widely-held feeling may have been ill-defined. Nevertheless it was strongly held.

Third, through painful experience, people began to understand that they had to do things themselves. No Labour leader would back any agitation. If you occupied an underground station, then it was no use appealing to Labour leaders. A prominent Labour right winger, Herbert Morrison, as Home Secretary, remained responsible for the civil defence fiasco. He was assisted by the darling of the Labour left: Ellen Wilkinson was not merely Morrison’s understudy, she also became his lover. No Labour leader ever backed the illegal occupation of underground stations. No Labour leader ever backed illegal squats. Yet they occurred. People were resorting to do-it-yourself politics.

.
These were the rebellious seeds — nay, revolutionary seeds — that henceforth plagued British capitalism. The impact is revealed in later industrial and political unrest. It also created an attitude of critical hostility which pervaded society, resulting, among other things, in the defeat of Churchill-backed candidates in by-elections held in what had been rock-solid Tory constituencies.

-Ray Challinor, ‘Class War in the Blitz’  (Workers Liberty 1995);  read the rest here.

We must not forget that the Allies also engaged in bombing raids on civilian targets; 635,000 German civilians ( far more than the Blitz death toll) died in raids, starting with the May 12 1940 raid on Cologne, and culminating in the firebombing of Dresden.

Also worth reading: Orwell’s diaries, updated daily.

Also the Graun‘s detailed historical data:

London’s Blitz is recorded in meticulous detail by London Fire Brigade records. See – for the first time online – how they showed September 7, 1940, the first 24 hours of attacks
• Get the data

• 
• Two Dornier 217’s flying over the Silvertown area of London’s Docklands.