The Blitz Essay

At 9:00 pm on June 18, 1940, sixty percent of the population gathered around their radios to hear their prime minister, Winston Churchill, read the speech he had earlier presented to the House of Commons. The state of the Second World War was bleak, with Germany having won over Holland, Belgium, and France; the Battle of Britain was on the verge of beginning. Despite Churchill’s insistence on smoking a cigar during the broadcast, the speech was a success, filling citizens with national pride and courage, and elevating Churchill’s approval ratings to a soaring 88%. Indeed, the concluding line, “Let us, therefore, brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour’” was soon to shape the civilian response to the Blitz.

Up until the late 1960’s, the widely accepted view of the Second World War was that it marked an unprecedented level of British national unity and identity. As Churchill proclaimed in his speech, standing resilient against the evil of Nazi Germany would save not only Britain, but all of mankind. Obtaining victory would not be easy, but if each British citizen accepted their duty and supported each other, success was inevitable.

However historians such as Philip Ziegler and Angus Calder have challenged the idealism of the traditional perception of the period, building up the myth of the Blitz. Ziegler highlights the role of American journalists in supporting the canonical view of the period, including Edward Murrow, who “held his microphone to the pavement so that Americans could hear Londoners on their way to the shelter. They were impressed by noticing that nobody ran” (Ziegler 163-164). Anec...

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...mergency Services. Women joined voluntary services and military groups such as the Women's Royal Naval Service and the Auxiliary Territorial Service, filling men's roles in factories and hospitals. A more passive, quiet courage was also to be observed in London in that people did become accustomed to the new way of life. Instead of a sense of duty to Britain, they pursued a sense of duty to friends, family, and themselves.

It may be that the original myth and the revisionist history are mutually defining: the excesses of nostalgic wartime idealization have led to the detached analyses of the revisions. The revisionist history has been an equal and opposite reaction to adjust for the action of the early myth-creators. As such, the revisionists utilize the less appealing facts of life during the Blitz in the same way as the myth-creators employed subjective license.