Michele Haapamäki - The Coming of the Aerial War: Culture and the Fear of Airborne Attack in Inter-War Britain

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Copyright 2014 Michele Haapamaki

The right of Michele Haapamaki to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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International Library of Twentieth Century History 65

ISBN 978 1 78076 418 4

eISBN 978 0 85773 584 3

A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

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CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The process of researching and writing this book has been an absorbing multi-year journey, and along the way I have incurred many debts. I would like to express my appreciation to the staff of all the libraries and archives where research for this book was undertaken: McMaster University, the British Library, the British Architectural Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, Cambridge University Library, the Centre for Military Archives at Kings College, the Islington Local History Centre, the London School of Economics, University College London, and the National Archives at Kew.

I am also grateful for the rich intellectual life I experienced at the McMaster University History Department where this study first began, and the encouragement of colleagues and many friends now scattered around the world. I have benefited from scholarly exchange at the Center for British Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, the Northeast Conference on British Studies, and the Institute of Historical Research, London. My research has been supported by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. I would like to thank Stephen Heathorn, Pamela Swett, Martin Horn, Stephanie Olsen, and Brett Holman for reading this work at different stages of its development. Tomasz Hoskins at I.B.Tauris provided helpful editorial guidance and I am grateful for his enthusiasm for this project. I thank Tricia Edgar for her careful editing of the text. Any errors that remain are my own. My parents, my mother Idinha Haapamaki and my late father Taisto Haapamaki, inspired and encouraged me in all that I have undertaken, and this book is dedicated to them.

LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

Air power may either end war or end civilization.

Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 14 March 1933

It is the tendency of every generation to imagine that their circumstances are particularly novel, or that their terrors are newer or more immediate. The fear of sudden destruction, either natural or man-made, has found particular resonance in the industrialized age. It is the thin layer of murky film that lightly covers our collective subconscious, manifesting itself in particular fears at different junctures. In our current young and troubled century the fear of weapons of mass destruction, enabled through science and the devious capacities of the human mind, floats perpetually as a nightmare scenario. Yet our present preoccupation with terror and the possibility of a devastating attack being visited upon Western civilization has long antecedents.

As shattered Europeans were coming to terms with the effects of trench warfare and institutionalized slaughter in the First World War and preparing for the next international conflict, the locus of the threat moved upwards. The capability of aerial bombers to deliver deadly payloads of high explosive, gas, or chemical weapons gripped the consciousness of military men, international commentators, and the public at large. In the words of one historian, visionaries, enthusiasts, disarmers, civil defence, and pulp fiction all contributed to the fear of aerial attack and debate over how the civilian population could be protected from these dangers. Such dire predictions were little questioned by writers, commentators, and politicians of all stripes.

This book serves as a composite portrait of fear of the next war in interwar Britain. Each of its chapters speaks to a different aspect of the landscape of fear, to use the phrase recently posited by Amy Bell to describe how emotions were regulated during World War II. The primitive, biological survival instinct inherent in expressions of fear manifests itself in contradictory ways and is contingent on social conventions. As one psychologist wrote about expressions of fear in 1940:

The whole atmosphere of modern war is likely to revive those unreasonable fears that the human race has inherited [] gas masks that make us look like strange animals; underground shelters []. Small wonder, then, that we are afraid lest in the face of real danger our first impulse should be to behave like little children []. We are afraid of being afraid.

These fears collectively impacted how preparations for civilian protection were envisioned. The anxieties of the 1930s, which intensified as the political events of the decade progressed, were intertwined with theories about war and annihilation. As Richard Overy has described it, these omnipresent fears held an almost independent existence, external to human affairs. This study seeks to demonstrate how fear of future war translated into lived historical experience and how it impacted planning for a war in which there would be little distinction in the vulnerability of combatants and civilians.

The complex amalgam of attitudes towards war and the anticipation of aerial attack sheds light on politics and social change throughout the interwar years and into World War II. Fear worked in two directions; first it was created and mobilized for specific purposes by a variety of agents. Interwar accounts of the aerial threat were rarely crafted without some sort of agenda at the forefront the fear of catastrophic destruction was emphasized for reasons ranging from political expediency to the commercial imperative to sell books or newspapers. Second, commonly accepted fears took on a life of their own, in turn influencing culture, military policy, and domestic politics. The interwar period was characterized by doomsday scenarios of the next war, and the fact that the most drastic predictions failed to materialize in Britain, even during the worst of the Blitz, does nothing to lessen the central importance of these notions to war preparations. The Home Office, simply unable to truly plan for a scale of devastation that might obliterate the capital or cause mass panic throughout the nation, instituted measures that, at their root, were designed primarily to maintain order and prevent a fatal breakdown of morale. This book is about fear, war, preparation for air raids, and citizenship in interwar Britain as demonstrated through the planning for national air raid precautions (ARP). It is particularly concerned with the critics of government plans and how their arguments interacted with expressed fears of aerial destruction; this singular issue offers insight into much of the interwar political sphere.