the muse that failed the atomic bomb killed 118,661 people outright, and injured some 80,000 others; in
Nagasakimore than 73,000 were killed outright, and nearly 75,000 were injured.^21
These appalling figures are to be set against the 60,595 killed, 86,182 injured, by
bombs in Britain. The mythology of the Blitz and the stoicism of ‘Britain Can Take
It’ masked the far greater extent to which Britain and her allies were inflicting it.
Of course, the figures were not known at the time; of all the propaganda campaigns
during the War, the one concealing the aims and results of the strategic bombing
war waged by the Allies was by far the most successful.^22 Butevenatthetime,the
morality of the bombing of Hamburg in July 1943 (in which more than 45,000
civilians were killed by a firestorm) was questioned, both in the press and at greater
length in pamphlets such asSeed of Chaos, written by Vera Brittain and issued by the
Bombing Restriction Committee in 1944. Strategic bombing turned the War into
one of grim aggression, and moreover one which in its later stages pitted the strong
against the weak, the armed against the unarmed. To such criticism, ‘Bomber’
Harris replied that he did not consider ‘all the remaining cities of Germany as worth
the bones of one British Grenadier’.^23
What were the poets’ responses to this new phase of the War? All too few still,
small voices were raised in protest, though one pacifist poet, Alex Comfort, did
insist on the moral symmetry involved in the very notion of universal human rights:
‘Acquiescence in the murder of the population of Lidice is as evil as acquiescence
in the murder of the population of Hamburg.’^24 Most poets were guilty of ‘white
propaganda’: not actually telling any lies, but not telling the whole truth either. They
continued to focus on their own side, continued to spin what Charles Hamblett
later called ‘the thin-skinned texture that precariously holds together the bubble of
our collective imagination’.^25 It was not so much that they were fiddling while Rome
was burning, as that they were writing about ruined churches while in Germany
and Japan the jaws of hell gaped wide.
The short-sighted honesty of the first stage of the War now prevented them from
even searching for the truth, from questioning too closely the motives and methods
of their own side. The poets who had answered the call of ‘My Country Right
or Left’ now relapsed into the blindly patriotic obedience of ‘my country right or
wrong’, as George Orwell bitterly pointed out:
Actions are held to be good or bad not on their own merits but according to who does
them, and there is almost no kind of outrage—torture, the use of hostages, forced labour,
(^21) Figures taken from I. C. B. Dear and M. R. D. Foot (eds.),The Oxford Companion to World War
II(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 22
See Philip M. Taylor,British Propaganda in the Twentieth Century(Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1999), 187.
(^23) Arthur Harris, quoted in Dear and Foot (eds.),Oxford Companion to World War II, 312.
(^24) Alex Comfort,Art and Social Responsibility(London: Falcon, 1946), 30. Edith Sitwell, inThe
Shadow of Cain(London: John Lehmann, 1974), addressed the question of the atomic bombings in
religious terms. 25
Hamblett, ‘Introduction’, 14.