The British War Economy (HMSO Official History of WWII Civil)

Cost was not an object. The delivery of new fighters rose from in April to in September —more than enough to cover the losses—and Fighter Command emerged triumphantly from the Battle of Britain in October with more aircraft than it had possessed at the beginning. They were helped by prisoners of war from Italy and Germany. The Women's Land Army brought in tens of thousands of young women from urban areas for paid labour on farms that needed them, at about 30 shillings a week.

One new specialty was harvesting timber, for which the government set up the Women's Timber Corps , a branch of the Women's Land Army that operated For townspeople and even city folk, the government promoted Victory Gardens that grew vegetables, fruits and herbs. Participants were not randomly digging; they were promoting self-sufficiency, imposing control over the domestic sphere, and exhibiting patriotism in working for the common good of winning the war.

There were sharply different gender roles, and class experiences-- gardening had been a favourite elite hobby and the upper class women helping out knew what they were doing. The much touted statistics of additional food production were designed to foster general confidence in the progress of the war, not just the progress of plants. Rationing was designed to provide minimum standards of essential consumption for all members of society, to reduce waste, reduce trans-Atlantic shipping usage, and make possible the production of more war supplies with less variety.

The theme of equality of sacrifice was paramount. The UK also imported more than half of its meat, and relied on imported feed to support its domestic meat production. The civilian population of the country was about 50 million. To deal with sometimes extreme shortages, the Ministry of Food instituted a system of rationing. To buy most rationed items, each person had to register at chosen shops, and was provided with a ration book containing coupons that were only good at that shop. The shopkeeper was provided with enough food for registered customers. Purchasers had to take ration books with them when shopping, so that the relevant coupon or coupons could be cancelled.

The outbreak of the world war in temporarily arrested the ongoing decline in heavy industry, with the city's shipyards and heavy industries working, To slow it down the Luftwaffe bombed of Clydeside. The worst was the Clydebank Blitz in March that left tens of thousands of Glaswegians homeless and destruction of housing caused by the war would leave a lasting legacy for the city decades later. Wales had been hard hit by deindustrialisation and high unemployment in the s and s. The war turned the economy around.

The historic basic industries of coal and steel saw a very heavy new demand. The best coal seams had long been depleted. It was more and more expensive to get to the remaining coal, but coal was urgently needed, and shipping it in from North America would overburden the limited supply system. Belfast is a representative British city that has been well studied by historians. The unemployment that had been so persistent in the s disappeared, and labour shortages appeared. There was a major munitions strike in When Germany conquered France in Spring it gained closer airfields.

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The city's fire brigade was inadequate; there were no public air raid shelters as the Northern Ireland government was reluctant to spend money on them; and there were no searchlights in the city, which made shooting down enemy bombers all the more difficult. After seeing the Blitz in London in the autumn of , the government began to build air raid shelters. In early , the Luftwaffe flew reconnaissance missions that identified the docks and industrial areas to be targeted. Especially hard hit were the working class areas in the north and east of the city, where over were killed and hundreds were seriously injured.

Many people left the city in fear of future attacks.

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The bombing revealed the terrible slum conditions. In May , the Luftwaffe hit the docks and the Harland and Wolff shipyard, closing it for six months. Apart from the numbers of dead, the Belfast blitz saw half of the city's houses destroyed. The bombing raids continued until the invasion of Russia in summer The American army arrived in —44, setting up bases around Northern Ireland, and spending freely. Figures produced by the Ministry of Home Security give a total of 60, civilians killed and 86, seriously wounded, directly due to enemy action.

Of these, 51, were killed by bombing, 8, by V-1 flying bombs or V-2 rockets , and by artillery bombardment. These figures do not include 1, killed while on duty with the Home Guard, or 32, civilian merchant seamen lost at sea. Public opinion in the s was horrified at this prospect of massive bombing of major cities.

The government planned to evacuate schoolchildren and others to towns and rural areas where they would be safe. Operation Pied Piper began on 1 September , and relocated more than 3. The average evacuee traveled about 40 miles, but some traveled longer distances.

Home front during World War II - Wikipedia

There was no bombing in , so they soon returned home. After a German invasion was possible and the Blitz began in September , there was a second major wave of evacuation in June from targeted cities. There were also small-scale evacuations of children to Canada. Many families relocated to safer areas on their own. The host families worked well with most children, however there was a minority from poor, undernourished, unhygienic and uncooperative environments who brought along a strong distrust of authority.

The confrontation was an eye-opener to both sides, and played a role in convincing the British middle-class to support expanded welfare programs. For the first time it became clear that middle class and rich people needed help too - they were bombed out of their homes and schools as well. Sociologist Richard Titmuss argues, "Reports in about the condition of evacuated mothers and children aroused the conscience of the nation in the opening phase of the war. Historian Amy Bell interprets private diaries, psychologists' notes, and fiction written by Londoners during the war "to reveal the hidden landscapes of fear in a city at war.

Many saw London as a "potential canker in the heart of Imperial Britain," with British civilization highly vulnerable to internal weaknesses stemming from an "enemy within," specifically, the cowardice among those who remained in London during the war.

Worried Londoners often identified as especially susceptible to this weakness the working classes, Jews, and children. His quest for a framework for generating firm empirical data on the state of the civilian mind was driven by a second, strategic imperative — the need to by-pass potentially powerful opposition from the Ministry of Pensions. It was vital to circumvent ministry suspicion, Zuckerman argued, not merely in the interest of home security, but to capitalize on a unique set of experimental conditions: It was to his already established Casualty Survey that Zuckerman turned to ensure the requisite investigative discipline: Several interesting themes were developed in subsequent documents.

The results have been of great value in the evaluation of shelter policy. It was these raids that Zuckerman selected for investigation.

UNITED KINGDOM CIVIL SERIES

On the advice of the influential Maudsley psychiatrist Aubrey Lewis, Zuckerman appointed Russell Fraser, a New Zealander working under Lewis at the Mill Hill Emergency Hospital, to serve alongside his existing casualty surveyors as psychiatric adviser. Dock workers were the principal investigative target, approximately of whom were selected — following the methods of the Casualty Survey — on a random sample basis for interview between November and January Fraser appears to have accepted his subordinate role, and in consultation with Zuckerman he devised a means of determining the existence of raid-induced neurosis that depended primarily on tangible behavioural indices.

Drawing on his experience at Mill Hill, Fraser proposed in a letter to Zuckerman a predominantly behaviouralist measure of neurosis. As raids took place in the night, those who manifested abnormal levels of anxiety during the day could be classed as neurotic. Excessive anxiety is graded according to various points: Fraser to Zuckerman, This enabled classification that by-passed subjective accounts of internal states:.

Individuals were not asked to describe the degree of their fear; but rather to describe symptoms which it was implied that everyone felt; and the impression was given that differences were expected to indicate features of their physical constitution. By this procedure it is felt that reliable answers were usually obtained. At face value, the gathering of stories from hundreds of vulnerable adolescents suggests a relaxation of his injunction against interiority, an invitation to engage in realms of fantasy. Nor were they to be read in search of emotional insight.

Instead, Zuckerman, along with Bradford Hill, prepared numerous drafts of a reading key that would facilitate the identification and recording of more prosaic information. In the final version of this document, readers were presented with a form see Figure 5 containing some 50 columns, in which they were to record, with reference to a prepared numerical key, instances in which the essays made reference to specific features of raid experience. The emphasis on objective, external behavioural indices as opposed to anecdote and interior sensibility was confirmed by the technology designed for processing the essays.

Fragmenting individuated stories as discrete numerical values tabulated on code cards would ensure their containment as a collective synthesis of common behaviour, rather than a record of singular affect Hull School Essay series, It is not as a study of neurosis that the Hull survey made its biggest impact. As Zuckerman acknowledged at the time of its design and implementation, and as the correspondence and draft reports confirm, it was something of a rush job, as the participants struggled to establish settled investigative parameters and to fix the human and material variables into a workable experimental model.

Nevertheless, in his final report on the combined results of the Hull and Birmingham survey, co-authored by Bernal, Zuckerman was clear in his overall assessment of the lesson to be drawn from the survey. Among the summary of conclusions listed at the front of the document is the following emphatic statement: In neither town was there any evidence of panic resulting either from a series of raids or from a single raid.

The situation in Hull has been somewhat obscured, from this point of view, by the occurrence of trekking, which was much publicized as a sign of breaking morale, but which in fact can be fairly regarded as a considered response to the situation. In both towns, actual raids were, of course, associated with a degree of alarm and anxiety, which cannot in the circumstances be regarded as abnormal, and which in no instance was sufficient to provoke mass anti-social behaviour.

War on fear

There was no measurable effect on the health of either town. The reference to trekking, sandwiched between clear statements about the absence of panic, anti-social behaviour and ill-health, is a telling one.

His conclusion represented another victory in his war on fear: The Hull survey, then, fitted easily within the growing contemporary consensus that pre-war predictions about an epidemic of raid-induced panic had proven groundless. For Zuckerman, moreover, it complemented his prior analytical containment of the consequences of bombing: Yet it was not as an exercise in rational reassurance that the Hull survey is best known. Indeed, quite the opposite — historical interest in the report has focused on its subsequent use by Lord Cherwell in his highly controversial and contested efforts to use area bombing to break German morale.

For Cherwell, the main interest of the report lay not in the niceties of classifying degrees of neurosis but in a simple arithmetical ratio of tonnage and intensity to human and material strain. If the civilian population had suffered significant mental breakdown, he wanted to know, what were the characteristics of the attacks that had achieved this effect? If not, how much more, and what kind of attacks, would produce this outcome?

In stark contrast to the preliminary drafts produced between January and April , which foregrounded the sociological and psychological work of the survey, the final version issued on 8 April emphasized the data generated on the physical scale of the German attacks — tonnage dropped, area intensity, and the corresponding human and material casualties that had resulted.

Though this information was implicitly correlated with an assessment of the impact on civilian morale, no more detail was provided than the emphatic statements cited above about the absence of breakdown and panic. Yet of course it was this ratio that was of most interest — and use — to those engaged in the strategic bombing debate. Webster and Frankland, Yet this was not a defeat that Zuckerman would easily accept, as is amply demonstrated by his later war work and, arguably, beyond.

By early Zuckerman had been appointed scientific adviser to the commander-in-chief of the North African and Mediterranean Air Command, Arthur Tedder, for whom he conducted further detailed empirical research on the comparative effectiveness of different uses of air power. In January Zuckerman returned to the UK to provide advice on the preparatory bombing strategy for the D-Day offensive, where again he laid out the scientific case for strategic over area bombing.

The lessons of Hull can also be detected well beyond the war years, most directly in his criticism of subsequent bombing campaigns that pursued the chimerical objective of subduing civilian morale, such as the US campaign in South-East Asia Zuckerman, For Zuckerman, the policy of successive governments to pursue ever more powerful nuclear weaponry was grounded in the emotive power of conventional thinking transmitted through successive generations, untested by empirically based rational calculation. In this war, moreover, his faith in the power of quantitatively expressed empirical investigation at times failed to meet his objectives.

Numbers, indeed, could themselves serve the purposes of myth-makers. I owe a special thanks to Rob Kirk for his help in framing the questions pursued in this article, and to Brigit Gillies for her assistance with the Zuckerman Archive. Thanks also to Ray Macauley, Neil Pemberton, Matthew Thomson and Mick Worboys for reading and commenting on drafts, to Rhodri Haywood for advice, encouragement and forbearance, and to an anonymous reviewer for constructive, and challenging, critical engagement.

His latest book, Poison, Detection and the Victorian Imagination , has recently been reissued in paperback by Manchester University Press. He is currently working on a Wellcome Trust-funded project on the homicide investigation in 20th-century England. Waves of ether may cause visual injury or burns.

In an internal memo, Zuckerman underscored the need to present the survey in these limited terms: It also had the advantage of privileging the bodily exterior, of eliding interior states by tying them to objectively measurable physical forms. Write a customer review. Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers.

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