evacuated to the countryside as the
bombing started. But people who needed
to stay in the city by and large stayed. As
the Blitz continued, as the German
assaults grew heavier and heavier, the
British authorities began to observe—to
their astonishment—not just courage in
the face of the bombing but something
closer to indifference. “In October 1940
I had occasion to drive through South-
East London just after a series of attacks
on that district,” one English psychiatrist
wrote just after the war ended:
Every hundred yards or so, it seemed,
there was a bomb crater or wreckage
of what had once been a house or