Standing tall against Hitler
THE FIRST DAY OF THE BLITZ:
September 7, 1940
By Peter Stansky
212 pp. Yale University Press $24.00
Reviewed by Bob Sanchez
A remarkable facet of Peter Stansky’s history of the Blitz is the abundance of eyewitness accounts. Ordinary people wrote diary entries and letters while waves of Nazi bombers pounded British cities for months. These were people determined to survive even in their darkest hours. Everyone expected that the bombing was the precursor to an invasion that could occur at any moment.
Beginning on September 7, 1940, Hitler’s forces carried out a policy of bombing civilian targets: Manchester, Liverpool, Coventry, and many other cities. Above all, he targeted London, turning buildings to rubble, setting over a thousand fires, and blowing ordinary people limb from limb. The blasts were so loud, one man recounted, “my eardrums [went] west.” To maintain morale, newspapers were forbidden to show the human carnage; to deny intelligence to the enemy, they could not print the exact locations of destroyed buildings.
Could the British hold on? The United States would not join the war for over another year, and the British might well have succumbed in the meantime. To forestall the invasion, British bombers pummeled major seaports such as Antwerp and Dunkirk, inflicting major damage on the Nazi war machine. Indeed, they held on until May 1941, when the Blitz ended. A month later, Hitler’s troops went west to the Soviet Union.
Throughout the attack on Britain, Stansky writes, “There was terror—but not panic,” and the British took comfort in “the cure for all troubles, a good cup of tea.” This is a theme that comes up repeatedly in the book: However dark the outlook, it could be darker or more dire. Meanwhile, let’s have a cuppa.
Stansky draws a parallel between two September days 61 years apart: September 7, 1940, and September 11, 2001. Both events, he writes, “provided evidence of our ability to survive as human beings.” He even cites the attack on the Twin Towers as part of his motivation for writing about the Blitz, as both Mayor Giuliani and Prime Minister Churchill cultivated the “myth” that their respective countries were “bound to win.” The Blitz was a a long-awaited and ongoing assault meant as a prelude to invasion, so the comparison is most apt in regard to the resilience of the human spirit.
In other ways, the effect was different. Stansky notes that British society changed fundamentally as a result of the Blitz. Government had once been an entity apart and distant from the people. Leaders had assumed that their own citizens, in particular East London’s working class, would panic under attack. They were wrong. Although many British fled to the countryside when they could, many of every social class stayed where they were. They went to work whenever possible. They treated their wounded, buried their dead, cursed Hitler, and generally carried on. One anecdote tells of a young woman who arranged a tryst, determined to lose her virginity before she died. A schoolboy looked up at the skies filled with enemy planes and thought: “I felt angry. How dare they fly over my country as though they owned it.”
“London can take it” became a popular slogan, part of what Stansky calls “the myth of the Blitz. ... Myths are not necessarily falsehoods, but might be transformations of experiences, making them emblematic and memorable—and possibly misrepresenting them.” One false myth is that everyone behaved well—they didn’t. Some panicked, some looted and pillaged, but most did their nation proud. “The myth of the Blitz,” he writes, “became a construct that the British people, through their united heroism on the home front, had proved themselves worthy of being much better treated by their government.” Thus Churchill’s defeat, and the election of a Labor government immediately after the war.
The First Day of the Blitz is a highly readable history of what the author describes as one of the best-documented major events in British history. Excellent first-person accounts and well-chosen news reports give the reader the sense of being right on the scene. Stansky notes that some of the accounts may have been spruced up after the fact, but he believes that many were not.
Anyone interested in World War II—or in human resilience—will enjoy this short, dramatic, and well-documented book.
Bob Sanchez is an associate editor of The Internet Review of Books. His novel, When Pigs Fly, has received rave reviews.
Bob invites you to check out his blog and his website.
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