The colossal panorama of a defiant city
MONDAY marks 80 years since the beginning of the Blitz when London was systematically bombed by the Luftwaffe for 56 of the following 57 days and nights.
Amid the devastation, people found hope in the broadcasts of JB Priestley.
A new book says Priestley was the second most inspiring wartime broadcaster after Churchill and that, in the terrifying depths of 1940, he built up morale as Britain faced the Nazi onslaught alone.
Here we relive his BBC overseas broadcast from September 10.
These recent big raids, indiscriminate, vindictive and fundamentally stupid, like the plunging and lashings about of an enormous tormented beast robbed of its prey, have caught the world’s imagination, and the fact that they have done this is itself a tribute to the might and majesty of London itself.
I am not myself a Londoner, though I have lived here on and off for 20 years, but during these last few days I’ve been proud to feel myself a Londoner.
I should think even these young Nazi airmen, who are notoriously not very sensitive types, must have been troubled by a feeling of awe as they caught glimpses far below them of the ancient, mighty capital city whose contributions, by way of government and law, arts and sciences, to the world civilisation have been incalculably vast.
GLIMMER
Time after time during these last few days, I have gone up to high places, my own roof and other roofs, at dusk, during the night and at dawn, to stare at the colossal panorama of the defiant city. This morning, for example, at daybreak, I climbed to my own roof, which is very high up on top of London’s steepest hill, and stared about me, in the chill sweet dawn, feeling most deeply moved.
There, lead-coloured in that sunless early glimmer, was every familiar monument – as if standing to attention at reveille as we used to do in the trenches at this hour – but far away, dramatic in their sharp vermilion and orange, were curling tongues of fire.
On Sunday night it was much more spectacular, when I went up very high in central London and watched the fires that for hours had cast a rosy glow over half the sky and turned the upper storeys of those whitish London terraces a bright pink.
From where I watched, the greatest of the fires was just behind St Paul’s, which was carefully silhouetted in
dead black against the red glare of the flames and the orange pink of the smoke. It stood there like a symbol, with its unbroken dome and towering cross, of an enduring civilisation of reason and Christian earth as against a red menacing glare of unreason, destruction and savagery.
You get the same significant contrast when you compare the voices and speeches of Winston Churchill and Adolf Hitler; one a gallant, reasonable man, seriously weighing evidence and considering chances, and the other a screaming, raving neurotic, hardly knowing what he’s saying but mad with violence and hate.
In the other half of the sky, where the blue night still held sway, the searchlights made rapidly changing patterns, trying to locate the tiny objects that were droning round and round before dropping, quite indiscriminately, their cargoes of destruction and death.
It was much later, it was daylight in fact, when I started on my way home.
After various bouts of walking and waiting, I managed to get a bus or two to help me on my way.
We passed near – and had to slow up – by a scene of most fantastic destruction, where an exceptionally heavy bomb must have fallen during the night, for not only were several houses completely wrecked but immediately next door to this wreckage a large London bus had been half flattened out and hurled against the side of a building, clean up in the air. Just as if it had been a little piece of tin that you picked up and hurled against a wall with such force that it stuck there.
TERRORISE
Fortunately, this bus had been completely empty at the time. Well, we all had a good look, in my bus, at this spectacle, but in spite of the long hours of danger and waiting and weariness, nobody was at all overcome; there were merely murmurs of indignation.
If the intention of the Nazis in this use of indiscriminate bombing, in which bombs of the heaviest calibre have been dropped anywhere and everywhere, is to terrorise the people of London then they are wasting men, machines and high explosives.
So long as our people think they can hit back – and we’re going to hit back harder and harder – Goering will never bomb them into suing for terms even if he sends over, night after night, every machine he’s got.
The latest high Nazi view – which is that this blitz will result in the resignation of the present government here – is just about the silliest put forward yet, and that the expression of such wildly nonsensical notions coupled with this wildly indiscriminate bombing suggests that the Nazi leaders are much worried men.