Francis Beckett: Remembering the Blitz: Was It an Avoidable Tragedy?
[Francis Beckett's new book, Firefighters and the Blitz, is now in bookstores in the United Kingdom.]
...We think of [the blitz] as a time when cheerful cockneys defied the Nazi menace; and that's not wrong, but it is a small part of the story. People knew someone had blundered. Britain had had plenty of time to prepare: the Home Office had been thinking about mass bombing since 1933, and in 1937 German bombers supporting Franco in the Spanish civil war destroyed the town of Guernica and killed 2,000 citizens. Deep shelters had been built in Barcelona, which proved very successful, and there was a move to build them in London, but it was never done. Families were given Anderson shelters (named after the home secretary, Sir John Anderson) instead. This, as the author Stephen Spender wrote in 1945 in Citizens in War, "overlooked the fact that in the majority of homes there was no room for an Anderson shelter". So Londoners forced the authorities to permit the use of tube stations as shelters....
About the only thing the government had got right was the creation in March 1938 of the Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS), which saw 28,000 auxiliary full- and part-time firefighters recruited for the London Fire Brigade alone. But even the AFS might easily have failed. Professional firefighters resented it, while AFS people grumbled that they were paid less and their conditions of service were inferior. The situation was saved by an alliance between London Fire Brigade chief Major Frank Jackson and the leftwing leader of the Fire Brigades Union, John Horner, who collaborated in persuading regular firefighters to accept the AFS as equals. Horner later wrote of "the complete lack of preparedness which left men isolated for hours without food or drink, which condemned men who had been wet through for days to return to their stations and turn out again, still in wet clothes"....
Read entire article at Guardian (UK)
...We think of [the blitz] as a time when cheerful cockneys defied the Nazi menace; and that's not wrong, but it is a small part of the story. People knew someone had blundered. Britain had had plenty of time to prepare: the Home Office had been thinking about mass bombing since 1933, and in 1937 German bombers supporting Franco in the Spanish civil war destroyed the town of Guernica and killed 2,000 citizens. Deep shelters had been built in Barcelona, which proved very successful, and there was a move to build them in London, but it was never done. Families were given Anderson shelters (named after the home secretary, Sir John Anderson) instead. This, as the author Stephen Spender wrote in 1945 in Citizens in War, "overlooked the fact that in the majority of homes there was no room for an Anderson shelter". So Londoners forced the authorities to permit the use of tube stations as shelters....
About the only thing the government had got right was the creation in March 1938 of the Auxiliary Fire Service (AFS), which saw 28,000 auxiliary full- and part-time firefighters recruited for the London Fire Brigade alone. But even the AFS might easily have failed. Professional firefighters resented it, while AFS people grumbled that they were paid less and their conditions of service were inferior. The situation was saved by an alliance between London Fire Brigade chief Major Frank Jackson and the leftwing leader of the Fire Brigades Union, John Horner, who collaborated in persuading regular firefighters to accept the AFS as equals. Horner later wrote of "the complete lack of preparedness which left men isolated for hours without food or drink, which condemned men who had been wet through for days to return to their stations and turn out again, still in wet clothes"....