Hello I'm Tim Luckhurst, Professor of Journalism at the University of Kent, and
Head of the Centre for Journalism and the title of my lecture today is
Speaking truth to power in Britain's wartime press: George Orwell and the
obliteration bombing of German cities during the Second World War.
My research deals exclusively with British newspaper journalism during the Second World War.
It was a time when newspapers mattered and I think modern students both need
and deserve to understand precisely how much they mattered. Absorbed and misled
by the echo chamber of social media as so many of us are today, it's useful to
understand how an edited collection of stories, ideas and opinions rooted in
evidence and selected according to clear editorial values, helped people facing
terrifying uncertainty to make some sense of their world gone mad. By the
outbreak of war in 1939 consumption of national daily newspapers had reached
every section of British society.
80 per cent of British families read one of the popular London dailies, the Daily Mail,
Daily Mirror, Daily Express, News Chronicle and Daily Herald,
and two-thirds of middle-class families shared their habit,
although many of them also bought a serious title such as The Times,
Telegraph or Manchester Guardian. Mass Observation's report on the press, which
was published early in 1940, looked at the contents of newspapers, who read them
and what people thought of them. And one of its main conclusions was that 'Almost
everybody reads newspapers whether regularly or irregularly, thoroughly or cursorily.'
Plainly then, newspapers were selling in vast numbers.
Equally plainly, each of these titles had a political stance and a desire to guide
their readers' impressions of political events and issues. In the mass
circulation press much of this steering took readers in one direction:
support for the war, belief in a people's war and confidence in the central theme that
Britons were all in it together. This myth of equality under bombardment by
the Luftwaffe, rationing, conscription and wartime bureaucracy produced some
spectacular examples of newspaper propaganda. Examples not of enforced
censorship, but of the much more effective version whereby editors did
what the Ministry of Information wanted them to do - not because they were obliged
to, but because they sincerely believed that they were acting in the national interest .
Among my favourites is a page three lead from the Daily Mirror of
Wednesday September the 18th 1940. Headlined 'Women Say "Let Us Shop"', this
tremendous piece of keep-calm-and-carry-on propaganda from intense part of the
Blitz asserts that women's chief grouse about air raids is not about the bombs no.
They're complaining that it is impossible to get shopping done while
raids are in progress. It quotes one 'woman shopper's' objection that 'It seems all
wrong to me that trade should stop dead like that when a warning sounds.' Now that
sounds to me like the make it sing, make it up, make it dance type of journalism.
Another published a week earlier on September the 11th 1940 is even better.
It depicts an attractive nurse carrying a beautiful baby girl and the headline
reads: 'Goering's military objectives'. A sub-head below the first paragraph refers
to the baby in block capitals; 'Raids make her laugh'.
And the story goes on to explain: 'There was not a whimper from any one of the 46
little patients when a children's hospital in central London was struck by
blitzkrieg bomb on Monday night.' Now, I'm not entirely certain how the absence
of a whimper can be reconciled with the report of a laugh but the beautiful
baby's behaviour offers some help. The mirror explains that flames spurted from
the wreckage, clouds of smoke rolled down the staircase but not so much as a frown
came from Sandra. Clearly this was an absolutely heroic example of Blitz
spirit in a child too young to be conscious of its existence.
Now, my research confirms that I'm not alone in my skepticism about the accuracy and
authenticity of such reporting. George Orwell certainly thought newspapers
conformed to the wishes of the wartime coalition. In his 'As I Please' column
in Tribune on 7th of July 1944 he argued that the Ministry of Information
achieved the suppression of undesirable premature news and opinion by
participation in a conspiracy of the governing classes. He thought such a
conspiracy had always succeeded in preventing public discussion of anything
thought to be uncongenial and I think he was quite right. A quiet word dropped in
the appropriate ear at the appropriate place often secured silence on issues judged to be sensitive.
It had done so before the war on the subject of Edward VIII's relationship with Mrs Simpson.
But George Orwell overlooked the role played by publications to which the authorities
deliberately turned a blind eye. And this is truly remarkable because he wrote for one.
On several occasions during the Second World War, British newspapers did speak truth to power.
In doing so they demonstrated that questioning power in democracy at war
was a means by which they could prove the value of democracy, they could show
why it was worth fighting to defend. And such challenging writing and reporting
was most frequently tolerated when it appeared in niche publications aimed at
intelligent opinion. Close reading of wartime editions of Tribune, the New
Statesman, The Spectator and The Economist suggest that such titles, with
a combined weekly readership which approached half a million, were
deliberately permitted to question orthodoxy and challenge government policy.
And we shouldn't underestimate this concession, after all, as Professor
Michael Schudson of Columbia University reminds us, we should never assess the
power of newspapers by their circulation alone,
how many readers may not matter as much as which readers they are and how
intensely and instrumentally they read. The conspiracy that kept unpalatable
news and opinions out of the mass circulation titles plainly also regarded
occasional demonstrations of intelligent dissent as a valuable way of burnishing
Britain's democratic credentials. And these credentials were particularly
valuable when working to influence American opinion,
a crucial aim throughout Churchill's wartime Premiership. Newspapers spoke
truth to power on topics including conscientious objection, the policy of
unconditional surrender for Germany and perhaps most controversially the area of
bombing of German cities. The War Cabinet did more than just turn a blind eye to
such criticism. When it was distributed to local intellectual leaders and
professional men it functioned as a useful safety valve and Orwell took
advantage. But not perhaps in the way one might expect. His topic was the RAF's area
bombing of German cities. Tribune took an interesting line on these raids.
It wasn't persuaded that such bombing could end the war. It was not certain that
defeat of the Nazis could come about unless their land armies were beaten. And
Tribune said the RAF couldn't do that and it should be diverted from area
raids against cities to attacks intended to support Allied troops and could
defeat the German land armies. But Tribune's most prominent columnist took a
very different approach. George Orwell thought area bombing of cities was
entirely sensible and his support for RAF policy provoked him into a truly
splenetic argument with the peace campaigner Vera Brittain. For those who
are not acquainted with Miss Brittain's wartime opposition to the British
American bombing campaign against Germany, a very brief explanation. Early
in 1944 she published 'Seed of Chaos', a pungent denunciation of the allied
policy of destroying German industrial cities in massive round-the-clock raids.
Reprinted in the United States as 'Massacre by Bombing', Britain's eloquent
polemic offered eyewitness accounts of the consequences of RAF raids extracted
from neutral Swiss and Swedish newspaper reports who actually had correspondence
in the German cities under bombardment. One such extract from the St Gallen Tagblatt noted:
'It was nerve shattering to see women demented after the raids,
crying continuously for their lost children, or wandering speechless through
the streets with dead babies in their arms.'
Vera Brittain argued that saturation bombing of cities such as Cologne, Hamburg
and Berlin, and the firestorms that often assumed as the RAF became expert in
combining high explosives with incendiary bombs, plunged Britain into a
moral and spiritual abyss. She described tens of thousands of
German civilians in bomb shelters being suffocated, charred and reduced to ashes.
She recalled frantic children pinned beneath the burning wreckage screaming to
their trapped mothers for help as the uncontrollable fires came nearer. And she
was appalled by a Swiss correspondent's account of an RAF raid on Wuppertal
during which, 'numerous victims ran around aimlessly like burning torches
until they died'. For Brittain then, area bombing invited vicious reprisal attacks and
caused morale deterioration, and she said, would display itself as loss of
sensitivity and callous indifference to suffering.
Britain's stance attracted support and respect in the New Statesman, The
Guardian and Spectator. Tribune's editorial stance though remained less
moral than practical. The policy of aerial bombardment promoted a 'dangerous
fallacy'. Air Marshal Arthur Harris's colossal four-engined heavy bombers were
'ill suited to tactical work with land forces' which might hasten the end of the
war - hence sadly they had to be used for bobbing cities. This, Tribune insisted,
would not hasten the war's end. Indeed it appeared to be provoking the
same stubborn resistance that German bombing of British cities had caused.
Orwell's review of Seed of Chaos in issue 386 or May 19 1944 was damning: 'No one in his
senses regards bombing, or any other operation of war, with anything but
disgust. On the other hand,' he wrote, 'no decent person cares tuppence for the
opinion of posterity. And there is something very distasteful in accepting
war as an instrument and at the same time wanting to dodge responsibility for
its more obviously barbarous features. Pacifism is a tenable position, provided
you are willing to take the consequences, but all talk of limiting or humanising war
is sheer humbug. ... Why is it worse to kill civilians than soldiers?' And when readers
wrote to contest his relativism and his aggression, the literary editor
came out fighting: 'It was the fascist states' he said 'who started this practice
and as long as the air war went in their favour they avowed
their aims quite clearly.' And then warming to his theme he insisted on
'dealing with' the 'parrot cry' against 'killing women and children'.For Orwell:
'It's probably somewhat better to kill a cross-section of the population than to
kill only the young men. If the figures published by the Germans are
true and we've really killed 1.2 million civilians in our raids, that loss of life
has probably harmed the German race somewhat less than the corresponding
loss on the Russian front or in Africa and Italy. Those who opposed the killing
of German women were guilty of 'sheer sentimentality' and Orwell thought
child casualties were probably exaggerated. 'Contrary to what some of my
correspondents seem to think, I have no enthusiasm for air raids, either
ours or the enemy's, but I believe absolutely the objections to the use of
force and total war are utterly hypocritical'. Readers' objections
continued to arrive, so on August the 4th 1944 Orwell returned to the topic of
saturation bombing, noting that: 'A correspondent who disagreed with me very
strongly added that he was by no means a pacifist. He recognised, he said, that 'the Hun
had got to be beaten'. He merely objected to the barbarous methods that we are now
using. Now, it seems to me that you do less harm by dropping bombs that you do
by calling people 'Huns'. So, not atypical Orwell.
His case is blunt, uncompromising, sometimes dismissive. He recognised the sheer
nastiness of bombing. He harbours no delusions that it is aimed at
exclusively military targets. He knows civilians are dying in colossal
numbers and that is entirely deliberate. But this stance put him directly at odds
with government policy, which was to pretend that civilian deaths were
collateral damage in raids planned to hit industrial and military infrastructure.
Indeed, the argument with which Orwell defended area bombing
challenged British government policy just as directly as Vera Brittain's moral
fury, because it recognised that the policy caused
mass civilian casualties and crucially that it intended to do so.
The government had worked very hard to disguise. This story by Martin Middlebrook
describes the British government's official utterings about area bombing
between 1942 and 1945 as 'a three year period of deceit on the British public
and world opinion.' Air Marshal Arthur Harris, Head of Bomber Command saw RAF
Bomber Command strategy launch a thousand bomber raids against cities
including Cologne, Essen, Bremen and Hamburg. Harris pleaded, pleaded, with the
Prime Minister and his air minister, Sir Archibald Sinclair to acknowledge that
these attacks involved the deliberate murder of civilians. He asked in
particular that the Air Minister is to tell the British public that the killing of
German civilians was not a 'by product of attempts to hit factories'. Rather, such
slaughter was among the 'accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy'.
Plainly, Harris took a view close to the one Orwell articulated. The Air Marshal
knew that true precision bombing was beyond the competence of RAF heavy
bombers and their brave crews. He developed his policy of area
bombardment specifically in order to kill German workers. Choosing to identify
any enemy civilian engaged in economic activity as a contributor for Nazi war
effort, he ensured the RAF always attacked either city centres or densely
populated residential areas. Harris knew it meant the deliberate and
systematic killing of women, children and old men. And ministers knew it too but
they were determined to disguise the truth. They used a series of euphemisms
to describe area bombing raids. These included 'blanketing an industrial
district', 'neutralising the target' and 'softening up an area'. But as my colleague
at Kent Mark Connelly has demonstrated, government policy was rooted in
determination to occupy the moral high ground. It was also intended, absolutely
intended, to avoid tension with Britain's American allies. Bomber Command knew that
the United States Army Air Forces policy of bombing in daylight was
introducing casualty rates even more catastrophic than those endured by our
air crews who flew nighttime missions. But the Americans maintained the fiction
that their daylight raids allowed them to conduct real precision bombing. The
American public was led to believe that USAAF raids only targeted military
targets, they were told that no American boys were engaged in murdering German
civilians, so, to admit that the RAF was doing so deliberately and very
effectively would have undermined the message - and British ministers had no
desire to do that. Therefore by defending area bombing
on the grounds that killing civilians the total war was entirely sensible George
Orwell was playing with fire. And this for me was Orwell at his absolute best.
Determined to confront complacent consensus with ruthless logic and
utterly contemptuous of moral relativism. I disagree with him,
I think the murder of German women and children probably encouraged German
soldiers to fight on when victory was no longer possible, an unconditional
surrender their only option. But I love Orwell's instinct. A good journalist
should always be the grit in the oyster. Consensus is the enemy of justice, it
narrows the frame of debate and it conceals plausible alternatives to
current orthodoxy. Orwell's wartime work revealed that he often played this
crucial role. I use his argument with Vera Brittain,
and his support of area bombing as a case study. It helps my students to understand
how and why a reporter should question everything. I don't promote cynicism, just
acute scepticism, and George Orwell was a master sceptic. German bombing of Britain
spawned popular demand for harsh revenge and this was vividly expressed in
popular titles of both left and right. British newspapers didn't celebrate the
agonies of German civilians but they certainly took pride in the RAF raids
and mass market journalism did not address, still less concede, the central
truth that the RAF Bomber Command set out to kill civilians as a conscious act of
policy. Now Orwell may have been right to argue that this is was a perfectly
sensible policy. But crucially, Tribune let him do so with crystal clarity, so
enabling its famous wartime printer to make maximum use the freedom afforded
weekly political publications with thoughtful subscribers. It was also an
example of his editor, the Labour MP Aneurin Bevan's, own commitment and his
determination to nurture and sustain honest dissent in wartime and that was a
strategy Bevin pursued both in his work in the House of Commons and in the pages
of Tribune but for this Bevan too deserves recognition. Orwell regarded
freedom of speech as a distinctive and precious British asset and he recognised
Tribune's contribution to promoting it. In late July 1944, he explained this
explicitly in the column defending the titles publication of an anti-war poem.
He said that he believed 'there is much more freedom of expression in Britain
than any totalitarian country. I want that to remain true, and by sometimes
giving a hearing to unpopular opinions I think we help it do so'. He was
right, the candour with which Tribune published and debated dissenting ideas
did not simply give sanctuary to a writer of Orwell's stature,
it helped freedom of speech to endure the test of total war and showed that
Britain's defence of democracy was more than a slogan.
Thank you very much for listening.