helen goethals
terror and grandeur of history endured. These attitudes meet in the idea of the sacred, that
Englanditself was sacred.^20
The idea that ‘England itself was sacred’ strikes a new patriotic note, one which was
to have malignant consequences during the third and last stage of the War. It drew
on definitions of nationalism that saw its roots as pre-political, pre-rational, on ideas
developed by German Romanticism, which were much closer to the Fascist mystique
of nationalism. It was a more malignant form of nationalism, which included ethnic
and racial distinctions, which could deny to some people, such as the Japanese, the
benefit of universal human rights. In addition, and for the first time, patriotism
placed ‘England’ above criticism, for to criticize the sacred was to commit sacrilege.
God was on the Allied side. The ideological shift was all the more dangerous for
occurring at the very moment when Allied strategy was most open to criticism, as it
quietly moved from a modestly defensive to a massively offensive stage of the War.
One aspect of the Dunkirk spirit had been the focus on the spectacular courage
of the RAF pilots who, under Brooke’s English heaven, had defended Britain from
invasion in the summer of 1940. Forgetting the warnings of W. H. Auden and
drawing instead on the Nietzschean joy of Yeats’s poem ‘An Irish Airman Foresees
his Death’, poets joined the general chorus of praise for the element that was
indeed to distinguish this war from all previous wars, the war in the air. The Battle
of Britain was history made straight into myth, from Churchill’s well-publicized
speeches to the HMSO pamphlet that sold 300,000 copies on the first day that it
was published in March 1941. For the victims of the Blitz, it was not a war poet, but
Richard Hillary, the brave fighter pilot and iconoclastic author ofThe Last Enemy
(1942), who became the hero of the hour.
But the warinthe air was also the warfromthe air. From the spring of 1942,
the decision was taken to use the strategy of area bombing to paralyse German
industry and demoralize her civilian population. The start of the campaign was the
1,000-bomber attack on Cologne in May 1942. From the first, the strategic bombing
campaign was questionable, both in military and in human terms. Research soon
aftertheeventsshowedthatindustryrecoveredquickly,andcivilian morale,farfrom
being shaken by the bombing, was all the more determined to resist. The campaign
was extremely costly to the Allies themselves in terms of the loss of expensive aircraft
and aircrew. Moreover, the sheer scale of the civilian casualties raised moral ques-
tions. To give just a few figures: the area bombing of Germany cost the lives of some
100,000 British and American aircrew, and resulted in the death of between 750,000
and a million Germans. More French and Italian citizens than Britons were killed
by bombing. The strategic bombingbeforeHiroshima caused 800,000 casualties,
including300,000dead,andrenderedmorethan8.5millionhomeless.InHiroshima
(^20) Stephen Spender,The Thirties and After: Poetry, Politics, People 1933–1975(London: Macmillan,
1978), 96.