The Blitz and its Legacy

Wartime Destruction to Post-War Reconstruction

Peter J. Larkham, Mark Clapson, Mark Clapson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351893893
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique publique en matière d'aménagement du territoire

Triggered in part by contemporary experiences in the Balkans, the Middle East and elsewhere, there has been a rise in interest in the blitz and the subsequent reconstruction of cities, especially as many of the buildings and areas rebuilt after the Second World War are now facing demolition and reconstruction in their turn. Drawing together leading scholars and new researchers from across the fields of planning, history, architecture and geography, this volume presents an historical and cultural commentary on the immediate and longer-term impacts of wartime destruction. The book's contents in 14 chapters cover the spread of themes from experiencing the war to reconstruction and its experiences; and although many chapters draw upon the UK experience, there is deliberate inclusion of some material from mainland Europe and Japan to emphasise that the experiences, processes and products are not London-specific. A comparative book tracing destruction to reconstruction is a relative rarity, and yet of the utmost importance in possessing wider relevance to post-disaster reconstructions. The Blitz and Its Legacy is a fascinating volume which includes war experiences of destruction, architecture, urban design, the political process of planning and reconstruction, and also popular perceptions of rebuilding. Its findings provide very timely lessons which highlight the value of learning from historical precedent.

1 The Blitz, its Experiences, its Consequences

Mark Clapson and Peter J. Larkham

PEOPLE, PLACES AND PREDICTIONS OF DISASTER

Dire prognostications of the impact of aerial warfare on towns and cities have a history as long as that of flight itself. Most well-known, perhaps, is the novelist H.G. Wells’s story of the bombing of New York, written in 1908.¹ In the aftermath of the aerial attacks during World War I, many pessimistic predictions were made about the impact of mass bombardment upon urban populations. The potential effect on life and limb was obvious, while the consequences upon the mental health of individuals, and the collective morale of entire cities, were explored with considerable foreboding.² Morale was, of course, intrinsically connected to the potential impact of aerial bombardment on the streets and houses where people lived and the familiar buildings and open spaces that they used for work and leisure. In no previous century had the built environment been so open to devastation from above, a hugely important point that was not lost on military experts. Writing in 1921, and drawing from the lessons to be learned from the bombing of Tripoli in Libya during the Italo-Turkish War of 1911 and World War I, General Giulio Douhet saw air power as the most potent and pervasive component in a new era of total warfare:

Nothing man can do on the surface of the earth can interfere with a plane in flight moving freely in the third dimension. [All] citizens will become combatants since all of them will be exposed to the aerial offences of the enemy.³

Writing just four years later, the Assistant Chief of the American Air Force, Brigadier-General William (Billy) Mitchell, argued that ‘the aeronautical age’ rendered the urban world vulnerable to war from above. Mitchell, like Douhet, was making predictions about the vulnerability of urban areas to air attacks before the invention of radar and anti-aircraft defences:

Wherever an object can be seen from the air, aircraft are able to hit it with their guns, bombs, and other weapons. Cities and towns, railway lines and canals, cannot be hidden.⁴

The widely-publicised German air raid on the tiny town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, with its first-hand reportage by writers such as the Daily Express correspondent Noel Monks,⁵ further frightened many people. Following the bombing of Guernica, the phrase ‘total war’ was increasingly used. This raid and its bloody aftermath was, perhaps strangely, also quickly represented in various artistic forms, none better-known than Picasso’s painting.⁶ Was this the future for towns and cities in wartime? The idea of reducing risks by decentralising people and industrial production gained momentum, especially in the UK, where:

bigger cities made easier bombing targets and the failure to encourage new and militarily important industries like motor and aircraft manufacturing to grow outside the vulnerable south and midlands began to look very foolish.⁷

Yet although some of the predictions of Douhet and Mitchell would come to be realised, on a massive and terrible scale, they were not completely correct about future developments. By the time massed phalanxes of German bombers engaged in a sustained attack on London from September 1940, a system of radar had been developed as the first line of defence against the enemy from the air. Anti-aircraft measures, alongside a civilian Air Raid Precautions (ARP) apparatus, were mobilised to minimise death and destruction.⁸ The voluntarism involved in the ARP activities provides a powerful clue to why the much-feared collapse of civilian morale did not happen. The war was historically high in ‘social capital’ or, to put it another way, people wanted to ‘do their bit’.

Cities began to have nightly blackouts. No streetlights, store or theater signs, or other outside lights were allowed on after sunset. Cars drove with their lights off. Windows of homes and apartments were covered with thick curtains. It was hoped that by keeping the city dark, bombers would be unable to locate their targets.⁹

But the bombers found their mark – more or less. Damage in Birmingham, for example, was extensive, but in the sense of widely scattered across the city than consisting of large areas of completely-demolished property,¹⁰ and there were complaints over the randomness of the bombing and the non-military targets hit.¹¹ London suffered both concentrated destruction and a more fragmented pattern of damage.¹² By contrast, the Bulgarian capital of Sofia fell ‘from glory to rubble’.¹³ Yet, as the social anthropologist and co-founder of Mass Observation Tom Harrisson observed in Living through the Blitz, continuous mass nightly bombings did not send people gibbering into the hospitals, or cause mass riots in the streets. Nonetheless, there was a nuanced collective response to air raids. Some people suffered mental illnesses, others experienced stress levels otherwise previously unknown.¹⁴ However, while morale mostly held, longer-term psychological effects became more difficult to measure. But the built-environment absorbed extensive, tangible and quantifiable damage and destruction. The short- and longer-term scars of the Blitz on the surface of the cities were more visually readable than emotional consequences. But in Britain both places and people survived, despite the impacts upon them. People and places suffered terribly from aerial bombardment in other countries too, notably Germany and Japan; yet for far too long there has been a widespread reticence, certainly in Britain, to acknowledge and fasten upon shared experiences in wartime.

‘DON’T MENTION THE WAR’¹⁵

This phrase, from a now-classic English television comedy, highlights the cultural stress generated by war and its aftermath. A strange mixture of political correctness and politeness meant that the Second World War was, in some international contexts, a taboo topic. Early British histories of the war, including the one written by Winston Churchill, mostly refused to engage in an understanding of Japanese wartime history, choosing to concentrate too much on Japanese military cruelty, and the terrible impact of the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the summer of 1945.¹⁶ Such narrowness of focus was transferred to Germany. Many perspectives on the wartime experience were not to be raised by the British with German nationals. There was both a widespread cultural reluctance to share discourses about war and its aftermath. The humour in Fawlty Towers derived from the spectacular ways in which this misguided intention went wrong. On British television, the Sunday afternoon feature film during the 1960s and the 1970s was one of the most culturally popular media for remembering the war or, for the young, for imbibing a rather one-sided view of it.¹⁷ But much was left unsaid, or ignored, in American and British war movies. In Germany, the novelist Günter Grass wrote that the German preoccupation with the war, its effects including guilt and victimisation, ‘doesn’t end. Never will end’.¹⁸

World War II and its aftermath, however, are all around us. It is indeed impossible to ignore it. Many of our towns and cities, as well as less-tangible features such as national boundaries, have been shaped by war and the politics of war. This is most evident, of course, in areas of ground-based fighting. But the legacy of war is more diverse in places that suffered bombing, which was so variable in its impact; but even places not directly touched by combat, such as in North America, can see indirect impacts in features such as memorials to war dead. Non-combatant locations might be affected by physical preparations for the potential calamity of war: air raid precautions and so on.

Seventy years after World War II, we are still living with that impact. In England, for example, many bomb sites were reused as surface car parks, some of which still exist even in city centres. A few undeveloped bomb-sites still remain. The replanning and rebuilding dominate some places, particularly those most devastated by air attack (often termed ‘blitz’ even though that term is most heavily used in relation to the German bombing of London) although many other places jumped on the bandwagon of reconstruction, apparently seeking to maintain or improve their place in the urban hierarchy in the fast-changing post-war economy and society.¹⁹ The foremost planning and architectural fashions of the immediate post-war years still dominate, although we are now entering a phase of redevelopment of the post-war redevelopment as these areas and building age and become structurally, functionally or economically obsolete. Strangely to some, these buildings and areas themselves may now have historic merit.²⁰

THE DIFFICULT HERITAGE

We also live with the human consequences of war and the impact of bombing on the civilian context. As Jones has argued: ‘Air raids not only altered the physical cityscape, but also the personal mental landscape of those who experiences raids’.²¹ Or, as a contributor to the BBC People’s War website argued: ‘Today most of the scars of destruction have gone, but the scars of memory live on for some’.²² The misguided Fawlty Towers mentality derives from recognition of the painful human impact, which now creates a difficult, often even contested, dissonant heritage.²³ Many people were killed or injured, families split, individuals traumatised. Some of those individuals are still alive; their immediate descendants, who are likely to have heard stories of these impacts from direct experience, are more numerous. Even those born well after the war, with no direct personal or family contact with it, cannot avoid its coverage in the mass media. The World at War, a ground-breaking 26-part documentary series of the 1970s, is still frequently screened.²⁴ There has been a recent boom in publications derived from oral histories and diaries, including of those on the ‘home front’: non-combatants experiencing the catastrophes large and small of the ‘total war’.²⁵ A balance to these histories are official reports and surveys, including the work of Mass Observation, some of which have also been recently republished.²⁶

The difficulty of this heritage is in its very pain.²⁷ Some, whether directly involved or born more recently, simply do not wish to be reminded of such a terrible topic. They can manage to ignore the new areas and buildings – perhaps increasingly successfully as these places age and are themselves redeveloped. They may have no direct family calamities to be reminded of. They may not notice the often rather subtle urban reminders, of plaques and similar small features. It might be more difficult in smaller and rural communities to ignore the sheer number of war memorials, many in churchyards and public spaces; many originally erected in a flurry of zeal in the 1920s being adapted to serve for both major twentieth-century conflicts.²⁸ Occasionally, though, a feature is too prominent to ignore: an entire building or area serving as a memorial, for example the Hiroshima Peace Park commemorating the unprecedented and long-term human cost of atomic warfare; but the retention of bombed churches as war memorials is also common.²⁹ The symbolism and politics of war memorials are complex and problematic.³⁰ But people may skirt around this type of difficult topic simply in often-misguided attempts to avoid causing pain to others, particularly if those others could have been affected (in the Fawlty Towers example, just by being citizens of the defeated country).

The dissonant, and contested, heritage of war is evident when the values of different groups, and their aspirations for remembering the impacts of conflict, are themselves in conflict. The heritage of the treatment of Jews in Nazi-controlled Europe remains contentious despite the criminalising in some states of ‘Holocaust denial’; although it makes even more poignant the plaque to the bombed synagogue in Norwich and the name markers embedded in pavements to each murdered individual in some German cities (Hamburg, for example). The scale and nature of damage can be contested, and was during and immediately after the War, for example in Britain when war damage payments and new legal (planning) mechanisms were being negotiated, and it was perhaps advantageous to emphasise the amount and severity of damage.³¹ Of course in many circumstances it was physically difficult to accurately measure this. Some cities seem unwilling to mark the history of this conflict, moreover, perhaps because their politicians and managers are more interested in looking ...