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Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.
http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/
The text below is a transcript from images supplied by the Public Records Office of a document, reference code AIR 20/4870. It is Crown Copyright but licenced as above.
This is from the last draft version as amended on 6 May 1945.
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CHAPTER IV
Though there had already been night raids over Britain, and of course very severe raids by day, the real night blitz on the country began to be concentrated in the middle of October 1940. London was raided in strength on the 16th, 19th, 27th and 28th of that month, and 6334 people were killed. Twelve raiders were destroyed, a small total of the entire forces, and these mostly by A.A. fire. By the end of the month the day war was virtually over, and on November 1st, when night raids were widespread all over across the country, it was clear that the German change of tactics was complete.
Four days later, on the perhaps not insignificant date of November 5, the Prime Minister addressed the House of Commons. It was his painful privilege to give to the House the details of a new kind of war: a war in which the casualties sustained by civilians, by children, women, sick, aged, rich and poor alike, were more than 40 times as great as those sustained by the armed forces. Few Prime Ministers in the history of Britain had ever given such astounding and dreadful facts to the people. Mr. Churchill said:
“Since I last addressed the House on general topics about a month ago, the course of events at home has not been unexpected, nor, on the whole, unsatisfactory. Herr Hitler declared on September 4 that as we would not bend to his will, he would wipe out our cities. I have no doubt that when he gave the order he sincerely believed that it was in his power to carry his will into effect. However, the cities of Britain are still standing. They are quite distinctive objects in the landscape, and our people are going about their tasks with the utmost activity. 14,000 civilians have been killed and 20,000 seriously wounded, nearly four-fifths of them in London. As against this, scarcely 300 soldiers have been killed and 500 wounded.”
These facts were tragic; but the meaning behind them was immense. The night raids, as the day raids had been, were part of a military plan. The destruction and disrupting of civilian life was only an incidental part of this plan. Where the day rates had aimed to destroy fighter aerodromes, fighter aircraft, railways, port facilities and those communications by which an invasion could be resisted, the night raids were concentrated on the destruction and disorganization of industry and supply. Factories, workshops, warehouses, port installations, heavy industries, armaments, food, manpower - all the essentials of war - were now to be destroyed. And since they were also the life of the country, it was reasonable to agree that if enough of them could be destroyed then the civilians who survived bombing still could not live. The cords of everyday life would be severed. The guiding maxim of the German High Command was still that the war was short.
All this was bad; but it was only the fine painful edge of the beginning. The real test was still to come. During August, September and October, however, certain interesting things had happened.
London, then the most blitzed of cities, had provided an excellent example of how the citizen behaves under fire. Although newspaper accounts did not necessarily form a completely objective view of the situation, it was clear that the Londoner had not panicked. He had indeed behaved well. He remained grim, sardonic, humorous, determined and perhaps above all resilient. He was hit very hard but he bounced. He drove his taxi under fire and he stuck to the wheel of his bus. He fought fires and he kept trains running. He sang songs in the shelters. And in the morning when the road was over, he swept up the broken glass in the streets, exchanged his bomb story with his neighbour and wrote rude, buoyant and comic slogans on the blackened walls of pubs, shops and houses. And when the blitz was renewed another night the Londoner was comforted by what he was sure was the greater intensity of the anti-aircraft barrage. From the country. forty or fifty miles away, people could look into the dark autumn sky and see the barrage streaming up, gold and red, over London, and would assure themselves that the defences were formidable. It was perhaps fortunate that they did not know just how many rounds were needed to destroy one raider or that only one in every six raiders destroyed was being destroyed by night fighters.
In this position, able to see with his own eyes the destruction of his city and the light of the nightly barrage and yet quite ignorant of the problems of night interception at which some of the finest scientists in the country were working, the Londoner came through his first great test. He was to be subject to still more fearful tests as the winter went on; was to see the greatest landmarks of his city - St Paul's, Guildhall, the Houses of Parliament, the Temple, with theatres, ancient churches and monuments - burnt, destroyed, threatened or damaged; was to witness the greatest fire in the city since 1666. The winter of 1940-41 was, in fact, to be hell. And it was to be hell, though the Londoner could only guess at it, on the edge of the precipice.
Meanwhile the blitz spread to the rest of the country as well. Every city and town was within easy reach of the enemy, and the tactics were now quite clearly the tactics of annihilation. On November 15th the Germans were in fact proud to announce that they had added a new word to the English language. The word was “coventrate”. It was however very curious that the British, who had already accepted into the extraordinarily flexible language many enemy words such as blitz, flak, and ersatz, thus proving themselves once more a hopelessly illogical people, would have nothing to do with the word. It remains today the museum piece of the German propaganda mind.
The word indeed had terror. For on the night of November 15 the small city of Coventry had a raid of obliteration. It was like the heel of a gigantic boot smashed down in the centre of an ant-hill. Coventry, ancient city of the Midlands, with a fine spired cathedral and many churches, had been known as the City of Spires. The legend of Lady Godiva had made it known all over the world. Its narrow congested medieval streets had for years given the city one of the worst traffic problems in the country.
On November 15 all its traffic problems were solved. The heart of Coventry was gouged out by a raid which lasted from early evening until daylight. Two hundred and fifity tons of bombs fell in the night, and in the morning the surviving citizens of Coventry stood side by side, on the line of history, with the people of Warsaw, Rotterdam, Guernica and Belgrade. Their cathedral was a ruined shell, open to the sky. Most of their spires had gone. Their congested streets were wide open spaces of rubble. And their comfort was small. The number of raiders destroyed was five.
The story of Coventry was still sickening the world, as the story of Warsaw and Rotterdam had once done, when Birmingham was heavily raided twice in quick succession. There was a heavy raid on the city on November 19, only four days after Coventry, and a still heavier one on the 22nd. The German communique claimed that, in the second raid, a violent attack had been made and that 300 tons of bombs had been dropped on the city. “Owing to the favourable weather,” it stated, “all kinds of attacks could be carried out. Single raiders and mass formation attacks followed each other. The constantly changing attacks made it impossible for the strong A.A. defences to become effective.” The damage was heavy, so less concentrated than in Coventry, and the number of casualties was great. But once again the comfort of the people was small. In the first raid only five raiders were destroyed and in the second, the larger and more disastrous, only two. On the night of the 22nd the Germans claimed also to have raided London, Bristol, Southampton and Coventry again.
The position was undeniably very serious indeed. In the whole month 4588 people have been killed, vast damage had been done to the capital of England, to the second largest English city, to important ports and to an important centre of automobile and aircraft industry. Yet only 18 raiders had been destroyed: slightly less than the monthly average of 20 maintained over the whole country, chiefly by A.A. fire, between June and December. The truth of the statement that the Germans could raid us as they pleased was now in fact quite obvious. That winter had hardly begun; the months of real darkness were still to come; and it was clear that unless the enemy could be made to suffer far greater losses than those then nothing else, except weather, could prevent his extending the attempted obliteration of Coventry to the whole country.
On November 24, Bristol was raided again on the same scale as Birmingham, and on the same night, Sheffield, Manchester and Southampton. The total bomb tonnage in each case has been estimated as high as 500 tons, but if we accept the German figure for Birmingham on November 19 as 300 tons and the Coventry figure as 250 tons, and the German claim that the Bristol raid was “on the Coventry scale”, then we have a total tonnage for the 24th of about 1200 tons. Certainly there seems to have been another change of German tactics: i.e. the moving of the blitz from London, with its increased defence, to the provinces. Whether there was a change of tactics or not, one thing was certain. The rate of destroying the raiders had not increased. In the whole month 18 had been shot down.
December began in the same way. The main weight of attack continued to be on provincial cities. Southampton was raided on the 1st; Bristol on the 6th; London on the 8th; Birmingham on the 11th; Sheffield on the 12th; and Liverpool, in a particularly severe sequence, on the 19th, 20th, and 21st. Then on the 29th came a change of methods by the Germans once again.
The Germans had already confessed themselves puzzled by the failure of the obstinate British to surrender and add themselves to the impressive list of Nazi conquest, and on the 29th they sought to impress the British with a display of the oldest terror in the world. The London attack of December 8 had already shown the possibilities of fire. In that raid 80-90,000 incendiaries had fallen in addition to a great weight of high explosive. But the raid of the 29th, four days after the peaceful passing of Christmas, was the most concentrated and deliberate ordeal by fire ever inflicted on a city up to that time. Its ferocity, directed entirely at the congested area of the city of London about St Paul's, caused the largest conflagration in the city since the calamity in the reign of Charles II. For five and a half hours a regular procession of bombers dropped incendiaries without stopping. The famous city Guildhall, seven of Wren's churches, and many other historic buildings were destroyed; St Paul's, menaced constantly by a ring of flames, was hit but finally saved. Among the material destruction also were millions of books: destruction that also seemed immensely symbolic of the whole Nazi regime and mentality. With the destruction of its churches, its Guildhall, its books, London suffered spiritually more than materially in this great raid. Its effect on Britain's war potential was negligible; but its effect on tradition, culture and decency, things for which England held a name, was very great.
The fires of London was still burning when the year came to an end. Every Londoner must have wondered if, in the two remaining days of the year, the great raid would be repeated; and every Briton must have wondered with him what would happen if it were. But it was still clear that we had nothing to stop that train-line procession of bombers coming in over the dark fields of Kent and Sussex from the aerodromes of France and Holland. There had been rumours that the new defence measures would become effective about Christmas time; but December 29th, as good a testing time as any, had shown no sign of them. Nor had the Prime Minister, in a speech on December 19, given any indication that they were ready. He seemed on the other hand anxious to dispel illusions. He mentioned the efforts of a group of brilliant scientists, and referred to a considerable improvement in various directions, but he did not hold out any great or tangible hopes that we were about to defeat the night bomber, and he ended his speech with the words “We must expect a continuance of these attacks and we must bear them.”
There were other things he did not say and which naturally he could not say. He could not reveal, for example, that at the end of 1940 we had in Britain, quite apart from the lack of any scientific solution to the problem of the night-bomber, only ten specialist night-fighter squadrons to protect - in so far as they could protect - the whole of the country. If we allocate half of these to the defence of the world's largest city, it leaves only five to protect the enormous port and industrial area from Plymouth to Edinburgh, from Glasgow to Hull, from Hull to Liverpool, from Birmingham to Newcastle. Nor was there the slightest hope of increasing this number by converting day-squadrons, which were already severely weakened by the Battle of Britain. Unfortunately this was not all. Of these ten squadrons, two were equipped with aircraft of a type found to be unsatisfactory, and two with Blenheims, which were good aircraft but too slow for the bombers they were sent to attack and were in fact already becoming obsolete. The remaining squadrons were in process of re-equipping. Moreover we needed not only more and better aircraft; but more and better aerodromes; more training for pilots and ground-staff; more and better control facilities.
The Prime Minister said nothing of the constant struggle to obtain all this. Nor perhaps did he know of the existence of an operational record of a night-fighter squadron, in which, on the very last day of the year, the intelligence officer sadly wrote:
“There still does not seem to be a satisfactory method of dealing with the night fighters as yet and it is disheartening for a night flying squadron to go up night after night and never get a Jerry. One can only hope the coming year will produce some new method, or improved equipment, to enable our pilots to contact more enemy planes and shoot them down.”
That too was the Prime Minister's hope. Two months earlier he had told the story of how, going home one night, he had asked a group of steel helmetted men standing about the door what was going on, and how a deep voice in the background had said: “It's a grand life, if we don't weaken.” That, Mr. Churchill said, would be the British watch-word for the winter of 1940. We would, he said, find something else for the winter of 1941.
The words were more than symbolic. By the end of December the need for that something else was very desperate.
CHAPTER V
All through the day Battle of Britain and on into the night battle we had working for us a system of defence whose work has been all too little publicised. it was a system that worked, never stopping, twenty-four hours of the day; that worked, by its very nature, in the most exposed places - on hill-tops, on wild sea-coasts, in bleak fields, - and in the most vulnerable places - on aerodromes, in congested urban centres, and on harbour jetties - and that was, above all and all the time, a voluntary system. It is in fact not too much to say - and it is no reflection on the scientist, the fine gunners of A. A. Command, the night-fighters and the Air Staff to say it - that the Observer Corps was sometimes, during these two grim battles, the only adequate system of defence we had.
The Observer Corps was organised - fortunately - long before the war began. It started as one of the expressions of amateur enthusiasm which are rather an English characteristic. In the hands of an organised political system, such as that under National Socialism, the Observer Corps would no doubt have been officially drilled, uniformed, brow-beaten and giving a handsome portmanteau name. In Britain, very typically, it was an orphan child. Nobody pretended to own the Observer Corps; nobody wanted the bother of organizing, let alone drilling, these enthusiasts from all classes whose passion was spotting and plotting aircraft, and nobody thought of putting them into uniform. They were left alone as a voluntary organization, with their observation posts, their report centres, and their clubs where they gathered to discuss the new types of aircraft coming into service with peace-time air-lines and the R.A.F. Where other men amused themselves at the golf club, others in the garden, others at the local dramatic society, these men of the Observer Corps - farmers, architects, surveyors, grocers, parsons, butchers, accountants, small business men of all sorts, - were quite happy and quite harmless enjoying themselves in their own way. In the restless and confused pre-Munich days when Mr. Churchill was giving startling facts of German re-armament to the House of Commons and newspapers complained that we had not enough fighter aircraft or anti-aircraft guns to keep a flock of seagulls at bay, few of the public ever thought of the Observer Corps, amateur, un-uniformed and unpublicised, as a front-line form of defence of these islands.
But this, in fact, is what it was. The Observer Corps has been called, in a rather hackneyed phrase - the eyes and ears of the R.A.F. This is as precise a description as any, and when war began and the possibility of air-raids over this country became a probability and then a certainty, we were more than fortunate to have ready, all over the country, a network of observer posts and centres manned by men who had trained themselves to detect and identify, by sight and sound, the approach of aircraft of all kinds. It was a god-send that such a warning system was instantly ready, at the very moment war broke out, to co-operate with the R.A.F. and its system of radio-detection. The two systems were then, and have remained, essentially complementary.
The peacetime work of the Observer Corps had, of course, been fairly simple: few aircraft, few types, no danger, none of the complications of blitz and bomb. Men of the Observer Corps could find time to watch, in peace, the sun on the sea, the cricket match on the green, the flocks of plovers on the deserted downs. The cataclysmic events of 1939, and still more of 1940, changed all this. The Observer Corps post on the wall of Dover Harbour became, for instance, rather like a seat on the edge of a volcano; the Observer centre in the peaceful country town of Maidstone found itself in the position of a man sitting on a railway track over which would a continuous stream of expresses; the centre in the Cathedral town of Coventry - but we shall have more to say of Coventry in a moment or two. It is enough to say that everywhere the Observer Corps was flown into the front line - armed only with its trained eyes and ears and an enthusiasm which was absolutely boundless. By the Summer of 1940 the importance of the Observer Corps was equally limitless, and even by that time it was using as much as 70,000 miles of telephone cable, or enough to go three times around the equator.
In the late summer of 1940, in the Battle of Britain by day, its first real test began. We shall not go into that in detail here, since it is the night-battle that concerns us, except to say all through it the volunteers of the Observer Corps continued to man every post in the country without a second’s break and with an enthusiasm that increased, if anything, as the danger and tension of the battle heightened. The day battle put on them, as it did on all our defences, a severe test. They came through it admirably - plotting the hundreds of enemy aircraft that filled the blue English Sky in August and September, passing these plots through to report centres, filtering them through to the operations rooms of Fighter Command. They did this so well that it is not too much to say that every aircraft shot down in the Battle of Britain had somewhere behind it the eye of an Observer Corps volunteer - a parson on the look-out in his church-tower, a butcher perched on a hillside in Kent, an accountant on the top of a factory, a grocer on a peninsular of Essex sand curving out to sea.
Then the night war began. It brought a new test of severity and complications. The men of the R.O.C. - and now already there were some women too - were still volunteers, and there was never any compulsion on them to work at their own jobs or business by day, man their observer posts by night, and go back to work after breakfast the next morning without having slept. This in fact is what thousands of them were doing, and continued to do all through the grim Winter of 1941. They proved that the conscience of the volunteer can give as fine a quality of duty and service as the compulsion of the conscript.
The Observer Corps might well have been discouraged by the conditions imposed on it that Winter. Terrific blizzards, storms of frozen rain, temperatures in which birds were frozen in the branches of trees - the months of December 1940 and January and February 1941 would have been grim enough for night watches on field and shore and hillside without the terrors and difficulties of the blitz. And the blitz itself brought not only the bomb, blasting Observer Corps centres with the same impunity as it crushed churches and cathedrals and cottages, and not only fire, with particular terrors at Coventry, but an unholy strain on telephone systems and operations boards. Night after night they were saturated with plots of enemy bombers. The route from the South coast to London via Maidstone became known as Heinkel Alley, and The Observer Corps plotted its shuttle service with philosophical efficiency under conditions which might well have been heart-breaking. Often telephone lines were down, telephone exchanges blitzed; often it was quite impossible to maintain essential contact with the R.A.F. even by the most roundabout and complicated routes. But all the time the Observer Corps kept on, plotting and reporting, helped beyond reckoning by the skill and courage of Post Office engineers, who worked tirelessly to keep 100,000 miles of telephone cable out of chaos.
All this was bad enough. But what might have discouraged the Observer Corps more than anything was the knowledge that a high percentage of their plots had only a theoretical value. In the Day Battle the Observer Corps had known, with pride, that their plots were being used, that the bombers and fighters they reported were being met by fighters wherever it was practically desirable or possible. They knew that they were behind the combats. Unhappily they knew that this was not quite the case at night. They knew, in December and January and February, when the cities of Great Britain were being bombed to pieces, that the essential strength of our defences was not yet ready. They had the heart-breaking job of plotting death to half England, well knowing that their work had often no end, again and again, but a record in a log-book.
Of this situation Coventry was a distressing example. On that night, which became world-notorious as the prime example of war against the citizen, the Observer centre at Coventry was isolated by great fires. It became impossible to reach the persons at the centre, who had no choice, even if they had wished it, but to stay at their post until morning. They therefore remained there ringed by fire, with the Luftwaffe for company overhead, until morning brought relief: their operations board saturated with plots of enemy bombers and their headphones ringing with a cry which no-one could answer - “If you don't send us fighters this city will be gone forever in the morning.” To go on plotting and reporting in these conditions, under fire and bombers, well knowing that there were no fighters to send, was an experience demanding the sort of morale and stamina that even the soldier of the front-line does not always find it easy to give.
But the picture is not always black. The Observer Corps had its victories, no less renowned in a way than those of frontpage fighters. Perhaps their sweetest moment of triumph was on a night in 1941, when an observer from a post on the East Coast of Scotland reported the approach of an M.E.110. Now it was known that if such an aircraft had reached the coast of Scotland it could not, purely for lack of petrol, get back to Germany. Therefore when its presence was reported to the R.A.F. it was simply not believed. “You must be mistaken” the Observer was told, but he staunchly replied by repeating the plot with that firm certainty that comes to Observers of long experience. Still the R.A.F. refused to believe that the pilot of an M.E.110 could be so foolish, and still the Observer insisted. The next morning that proud Observer was proved right by the dramatic announcement that Herr Rudolf Hess, late deputy Fuehrer to the Greater Reich, had landed in Scotland.
This aircraft was recognised by sight, in the dusk: itself a considerable feat; but an uncanny faculty for recognising aircraft by sound, at night, had by now become one of the Corps’ most highly developed activities. Silhouettes of aircraft, which had been practically all an Observer needed by day, were now quite out of the question in the battle at night. The Observer had to train himself to plot purely by sound. How superbly this was done is very well seen by an incident that happened long after the night blitz was over and when the debt of that grim Winter was being even more grimly paid. On a night when an enormous force of Lancasters was outward bound for Germany their plots were being duly recorded and filtered through an Observer Corps centre just North of London. There were several hundred Lancasters. “But also” the Observer post reported, “somewhere among them there is an Anson”. In reply to the extreme scepticism of the Centre personnel the Observer said simply, again and again, “I can hear it. Somewhere among the Lancasters there is an Anson too”. Half an hour later this stubborn insistence was triumphantly justified. The plot of an Anson that had been lost half an hour before had now returned to the operations board. It was the same Anson that had been heard, separate from the roar of hundreds of four-engined Lancasters, flying the opposite way.
The Observer Corps is, very justly, proud of such feats. They have more than an academic value. An Observer can distinguish easily, for instance, between a twin-engined aircraft and a four-engined aircraft, and the accuracy of observers’ reports on this difference has sometimes made it possible for us to send intruder fighters to the correct home aerodrome of each type, there to await their return. Observers have also quite often performed the difficult feet of distinguishing the noises of one or two enemy aircraft sneaking into England with a large force of our own returning bombers. The Observer in fact now relies entirely on the human ear in order to differentiate between the noises of aircraft, of which he now hears scores of types, and all the confused conglomerate noises of trains, trams, wind, the movement of trees and even ships at sea. So confident are they at this last sort of distinction that two sea-coast Observers recently reported the approach, at low-level, of two enemy fighter bombers. They were rather frigidly informed that sea-level was not a possible height at which aircraft could fly and were handed the suggestion that they were E-boats instead. After a few moments silence the Observer Post reported back: “Your E-boats are now at 400 feet and are about to drop their bombs on you”.
The personnel of the R.O.C. has now risen to about 35,000, both men and women, both young and old, and though many changes have been made in work and personnel, so that there are now many thousands of full-time members, the spirit of loyalty - and enthusiasm remains as fine as ever. If there were times, early in the war, when its importance and achievement were not fully recognised as they should have been, they have been recognised now. The Observer Corps, given its Royal Charter on May 8th, 1941, is now proudly the Royal Observer Corps; it wears a uniform very like that of the R.A.F.; there are medal ribbons across the chests of many of its members. And the fact is better known now that its ordeal of fire in the Winter of 1940-41 was as tough as many an ordeal by battle, and its response, in honour and duty, just as high. Like the rest of the country’s defences at that time, the R.O.C. rocked a little on its feet, but was never out. Its posts and centres, bombed and fired and isolated, continued to function practically throughout the whole time. Its men and women, working by day, refused to rest at night. Praise for their tireless and skilful performance under conditions which we must remember were entirely new in the experience of the citizen, has come most often from the R.A.F. itself, for without them the ultimate work of the night-fighter could not have been possible. And we shall see presently, how it was possible - how the time was coming when the Observer Corps no longer filtered plots for which there was no defensive answer but in the knowledge that fighters were ready and able at last to use, with deadly results, the information it gave.