Abstract
Considering the amount of attention that has been given to bombing over the past half-century, one could be forgiven for supposing that there is not much left to say about it. However, there are always holes to be filled in and, more importantly, new ways of looking at familiar things. Michele Haapamaki addresses both tasks. Her heuristic toolbox contains two instruments, both borrowed with due acknowledgement from others: ‘the landscape of fear’, a term used to describe the regulation of emotions, and ‘the culture of anticipation’. The latter takes the author straight into somewhat choppy water, since it apparently presupposes ‘pre-mourning’ for a culture that is imagined to be rapidly dissipating. This produces the assertion that ‘there was a palpable sense in 1930s Britain of an impending loss of culture, sovereignty, Imperial greatness, and even Britishness itself’ (p. 4). To which one is tempted to add: ‘Discuss.’
The book is about ideas of civil defence in the years leading up to the Second World War. Its opening chapters – covering attitudes towards aviation in interwar Britain, contrary views about the utility and humaneness of using poison gas, and (as representative figures of ‘rightist’ and ‘leftist’ science) the ideas of C.G. Grey of The Aeroplane and J.B.S. Haldane – provide useful summaries of the debates about the pros and cons of war in the air that characterized the public sphere before war broke out. An analysis of the impact of the Spanish Civil War brings into view the thrust of the author’s argument: that British views of Spain ‘were, at their core, directed towards internal British politics and aspirations for social change’, that the conflict ‘served as a model for how British citizens should approach their roles on the Home Front during wartime’, and that it produced ‘a highly active conception of citizenship, in which civilians took the lead in providing for themselves’ (p. 89). One conclusion drawn by British observers was that deep shelters were an absolute necessity when it came to self-defence. The Left, led for this purpose by Haldane, demanded them – the Communist Party wanted tunnels for the entire population of Greater London (8,000,000 people) at a cost of £11 per head, a sum so enormous as to make one wonder whether the motive was not something other than straightforward protection. The non-appearance of the necessary cash was then taken to demonstrate the capitalist state’s determination first and foremost to preserve the existing class structure.
The demand for gas-proof shelters for the population at large was one aspect of the ‘landscape of fear’ that air war created. Another was that civil liberties would be under threat as normal government was suspended and emergency powers were introduced. The New Statesman reflected a belief that the Air-Raid Precaution scheme was nothing more than a device for public control, the Union of Democratic Control thought its mere existence would encourage war, and Bertrand Russell went around the country claiming that it was nothing more than ‘sham and lies’. There was, though, another side to the coin, and government promotion of civil defence drew on two deeply rooted notions of British identity: individualism and liberal values. This, of course, was particularly a middle-class way of looking at things, and, as Haapamaki shows, class as well as British identity was implicit in all discussions about who and what was to be safeguarded from the attentions of enemy bombers, and how.
All these themes come together in a case study: the London borough of Finsbury’s plans to build 15 deep shelters, each holding between 7,000 and 15,000 people. Support came from likely directions (the Daily Worker) and unlikely ones (the Institute of Structural Engineers). The proposal, and the government’s reaction to it, brought out all the tropes that were in play in the public sphere: political activism, ‘Britishness’, and the role of the state. The Hailey Commission examined the Finsbury proposals and came down against mass air-raid shelters on a variety of grounds that included prioritizing resources for work of national importance, fears of mass deaths if a big shelter was hit, and the likelihood of panic and stampedes as people tried to take shelter in them. Its conclusion – ‘that most British citizens would prefer to count upon a less effective protection at their homes . . . if they can be safeguarded against the one danger which must loom largest in their minds, namely that of being themselves, or seeing their families, buried under fallen roofs or masonry’ (p. 175) – was shot through with in-built notions about British national character. As such it provides a ringing endorsement of Michele Haapamaki’s underlying thesis: that in studying war we risk losing sight of important truths if we neglect its cultural dimensions.