Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe 1940-1945

Within the UK, the prevailing image of bombing in the Second World War is still that of the 'Blitz' in which British people all pulled together, their morale stiffened by the experience of bombing, until the storm was over. The purpose of this project is to put the Blitz into a broader comparative framework by examining the political and cultural effects of bombing during the Second World War in Germany, France, and Italy, as well as in Britain. The research is designed to test the common assumptions about political solidarity, stronger morale and popular determination to win the war which the conventional image still sustains, by looking at the way other populations responded. In France and Italy, for example, bombing was chiefly carried out by the same forces that were promising to liberate the people they bombed, and this produced a response that was ambivalent and confused as a result.
The emphasis is on the political and cultural response - on ideas, attitudes and language / rather than the social and economic effects or strategic consequences. This is an area of the bombing experience that has been much less closely studied, and almost never directly compared and opens up new ways of looking at the relationship between state and population and the willingness of populations to endorse or understand the conflict they are involved in. The originality of the project lies in the choice of perspective and the comparative framework. This is part of the shared history of Western Europe during the war.
The research will explore the variety of political and cultural responses to the experience of bombing in four different ways. First by examining the political reactions to see if and why the bombing changed political attitudes or identities, or altered attitudes towards war by provoking hostility to war or overt pacifism. Second, by defining the ways in which bombing affected the relationship between states and peoples by looking at the links between propaganda and popular belief, the popular perception of friend and foe (particularly complex, for example, for an anti-Nazi who suffered bombing but wanted Hitler defeated) and the extent to which bombing alienated populations from the state or encouraged renewed endorsement. Third, by analysing the whole question of popular 'morale' to measure ways in which bombing encouraged popular war-willingness and social collaboration or encouraged increased levels of dissent, social disaffection, crime and delinquency. Here there are important gender and generational differences to confront. Finally, the project will examine the cultural impact of bombing in terms of the survival of popular or elite culture, the mobilization of popular belief and the development of a bombing 'sub-culture' expressed through language, literature, visual images, rumour, songs and phobia.
The reactions to bombing were never uniform or consistent but they were expressed in political/cultural terms which are often neglected in the standard social history of the experience. This project aims to define and compare the political culture of the populations of Western Europe under bombing and to explain what was different and what was similar. The project's outcome will be disseminated as widely as possible through the publication of two books and four articles, and the establishment of a website exhibition using a mix of archive film, photographs, documents and text to provide pathways through the history of these bombed communities for a specialised user community and for the wider public at home and abroad. This is an ambitious and innovative project whose conclusions will help to produce a clearer understanding of the behaviour of bombed communities in recent contemporary conflicts in the Middle East and Afghanistan.