On September 1, 1939 the lights were extinguished across the cities, towns, and villages of Britain and Germany, a darkness fell that neither country would emerge from until the end of the war six years later. Since 1933, Germany was seeing an unprecedented mobilization of civilians into a permanent readiness for war and, most notably, the potential devastation of an air war. Across the country bombs on plinths advertised air defense exhibitions and branches of the local air raid precaution (ARP) organization. 1 Those strange pillars of the air age, which stood as though they were an instant from striking the ground, were evidence of a profound shift in the German public’s knowledge of space and of its militarization. British preparations for ARPs during the interwar years were far less evident, and with a domestic political climate that was unfavorable for the militarization that ARP implied it had a low profile before the Munich crisis. 2 Yet despite those differences, both countries would maintain the most complete blackouts in Europe. It would continue every day of the war in every house and office block, every factory and shipyard, and on every vehicle on land and water. The impact of the blackout on both countries was profound, and this book is an attempt to describe how it was planned and organized, as well as its effect on civilian life.
Purposes and Argument
The blackout has a low profile in the historiography of the war, where it has tended to be marginalized in operational histories or the story of life on the home front. This book contends that the blackout was something more than a system of passive civil defense, and that it was an integral part of mobilizing and legitimizing the British and German wartime discourses of community, fairness, and morality. It derived from the universal logic of the blackout, best articulated by scientist and commentator J. B. S. Haldane in 1938: “If I lose my respirator or go onto the roof during an air raid I only endanger my own life. But if I leave a light shining through an uncovered skylight I endanger the King in Buckingham Palace and the Prime Minister in Downing Street.” 3 That blackout ethic was one of the principle ways in which the rights of the individual were restrained for the protection of the wider community and the nation in both countries. Bunkers, flak batteries, and decoy sites were defenses that could be constructed from raw materials, however, the blackout needed to be created through the public’s agreement, and where that was not forthcoming, through the workings of the state and the law. It was a form of social control, mobilizing the public into an awareness of existential danger, and in its language and ethic it featured a community of citizens cooperating in their own defense. Rose contends that nationhood, as an ‘abstraction that produces the pull of unity,’ was a consequence not of automatic processes, but of ‘ideological work,’ framed by the cultural and social context that generated them. 4 This book maintains that the blackout played an important but little remarked upon role in maintaining the ideological discourses that constructed the idea of a unified home front. It operated as a type of structural propaganda, performing the ‘ideological work’ of framing the relationship of individuals to the nation and each other, and a manifestation of wartime priorities which everyone was affected by and which everyone had to adhere to. This is particularly important when considering that although the blackout restrictions were mostly universal, the experience of bombing was not. Some cities were bombed heavily for days, then left in ruins—and peace—for the remainder of the war. Others were the sustained focus of bombing attacks for longer periods of the war. There were also areas of both countries where bombing was a distant reality, and which the blackout helped tie to those where the threat was greatest. In every case, the blackout was a fundamental part of the wartime ‘national community’ in both countries.
This monograph is a short and focused discussion about the blackout, and while it refers to both the operational and social history of the bombing war, and the development of bombing and ARP between the wars, it does not dwell on them. 5 Expertise on the bombing war in Britain and Germany, and in Europe more generally, has grown markedly during the last few decades, but as yet there has been no single study of the blackout since the conclusion of the war. Whenever it has been mentioned, it has generally been in the context of home front life, or in reference to wider defense preparations. The most detailed treatment of the blackout remains the now aging studies of civil defense preparations in Britain and Germany—Terence O’Brien’s Civil Defence (1955) and Erich Hampe’s Der Zivile Luftschutz im Zweiten Weltkrieg (1963). 6 That low profile has led to some misconceptions about its development and purpose. In his contribution on the European blackout in the Oxford Companion to World War II, Michael Foot stated that “no one seems to have consulted the air authorities about whether the blackout was really necessary.” 7 However, this monograph demonstrates that that was entirely false.
Most comparative research on wartime nations has focused on the fascist and communist regimes which, as totalitarian systems, are seen to have more in common with each other than with liberal democracies. 8 Consequently, the home fronts of Britain and Germany are generally written about in isolation from each other. While histories of both foreground the importance of the ideas of local or national community, the absence of any comparator in those studies has left doubt regarding the effect of transnational processes such as technological change, and whether common ground exists in public and state responses to wartime phenomena. 9 Responding to a review of Half the Battle: Civilian Morale in Britain During the Second World War, Robert Mackay pondered whether a comparative approach to examining the British and German home fronts “might produce an explanation owing more to reflections on the nature of homo sapiens than on homo Britannicus or homo Germanicus.” 10 Jürgen Kocka asserts that comparison “sharpens the historian’s sense for possibilities,” helping to “relativize one’s own record in the light of others,” a corrective for national histories that sometimes become too bound up in their own uniqueness. 11 Bernd Lemke and Dietmar Süß have both engaged this issue, Lemke studying the development of interwar civil defense as an expression of a state’s political constitution, and Süß in a panoramic study of the effect of the aerial war on the British and German home fronts. 12 Süß’s book places particular emphasis on using comparison to relativize the stability of states, crisis management, and the social practices that resulted from bombing. Comparing does not mean obscuring the fact that the flow of the bombing war differed between both countries. Bombing peaked in the early years of the war in Britain (1940–1941) and in the final years in Germany (1943–1945), where it also caused far greater destruction, loss of life, and became increasingly problematic for the state’s claim to protect German civilians. This study demonstrates how the German state increasingly relied on the blackout restrictions for the social discipline it engendered, as much as its defensive purpose. Additionally, it contributes to Lemke and Süß’s work by examining the blackout as a type of totalizing wartime structure that worked almost identically in Britain and Germany, and gives a sense of the way social and political structures in each country were changed under it, and to what degree a common problem developed common solutions.
A Note on Sources
This monograph applied primary sources drawn from several national and regional archives in Britain and Germany, as well as many contemporary published sources. Public opinion is represented by the wartime diaries and letters of civilians, the reports of the British Ministry of Information, the British social research organization Mass Observation, and the German secret police. Most of the archival material provides narratives of the administrative and political development of the blackout, generally comprising the minutes of meetings, statements issued to local authorities from central governments, statements made by government or other authorities to the wider community, as well as legal cases. There is a degree of filtering and selection at work across all sources that affects the narrative that can be told. Most references to the blackout occur in the initial years of the war, as the systems in both countries settle and the population becomes accustomed to coping with life during the blackout, particularly during the winter. Perhaps more importantly, owing to the relative freedom to complain about government restrictions, criticism of the blackout is more often raised in Britain. Because the blackout generally caused the same problems for both populations, there is a gap in the German sources that may tentatively be filled by the responses of Britons. In Germany, the reports of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) remain one the key sources for tracking public opinion, although the lack of any systematic analysis from the British Ministry of Information and Mass Observation means that they can be perceived as incomplete in comparison. Kershaw contends that what was recorded by the SD was done for “particular administrative and political purposes and contain their own heavy internal biases and colouring.” 13 That is no less true for the British data. What both sets of public opinion share is their use in finding issues with the blackout before they became major problems. The analysis in this monograph takes into account both the differences and the similarities in the recording practices in both countries, and suggests that meaningful comparison between wartime Britain and Germany is possible despite the different political cultures.
Structure
This monograph is structured thematically. Chapter 2 discusses how plans for blackouts in both countries were developed at different paces. Early trials in Germany were spurred by its vulnerability to aerial bombardment from its neighbors, and after 1933, provided a dem...