SUSAN R. GRAYZEL. At Home and under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz.

Abstract

Susan R. Grayzel has written an original book looking back at the long path leading to the Blitz: aerial bombardment from 1914 to 1918, followed by the evolution of thinking about the vulnerability of civilians to bombs in the interwar years, to the emergence of air-raid precautions in the 1930s, and finally to World War II itself. Its most striking contribution is showing the extent to which the two wars did form a unified whole, defined by the obliteration of the distinction between civilian and military targets evident when zeppelins and then airplanes attacked British cities in World War I. By the end of World War II everything about the Blitz was present in the popular imagination, and in the minds of planners who had lived through both wars. This is an important conclusion, and yet I want to raise one important doubt about it. The Blitz in World War II was a prelude to invasion, and nothing in World War I foretold either that or even the remote possibility of a British defeat. Grayzel presents an extended and powerful interpretation of the World War II film Mrs. Miniver (1942), and rightly so. When the eponymous heroine captured a German airman shot down, she slapped him for his audacity and cruelty in saying that his comrades would be back to kill more women and children. Her outrage, as noble as it was, could not obliterate the fear that the Nazis might very well win the war, and just as they had forced Belgian, Dutch, French, and Polish civilians to submit to their rule, might do the same in Britain. Of course very few said this publicly, but everyone who watched the newsreels or read the papers from 1936 on knew the fear to be real. Winston Churchill's swagger, as moving as it was, was the braggadocio of the besieged and the cornered, and you really did need to be clairvoyant to know that Britain would win the war as late as December 1942, when the Beveridge report came out long after the end of the Blitz. For this reason, I cannot accept Grayzel's view that the history of bombing in the two wars was essentially the same.