In 2006, the philosopher AC Grayling published a book entitled Among the Dead Cities, which he described as an attempt “to come to judgement” on the role of Bomber Command during the Second World War. The “Gomorrah” raids against Hamburg in July 1943 were subjected to particular examination. Grayling’s pronouncements were received with indifference and scepticism by reviewers who know anything about the Bomber offensive. However, in putting his case, Grayling disinterred a spat between two people who were, in their different ways, icons of the left in this country: Vera Brittain and George Orwell.
In April 1944, in his “As I Please” column in Tribune, Orwell reviewed Brittain’s anti-bombing pamphlet Seed of Chaos. While agreeing that the war against Hitler had to be won Brittain argued for restrictions on the extent and intended targets of allied bombing. In Orwell’s opinion, any proposal to limit the means of waging war while supposedly supporting the need to defeat Nazi Germany was “sheer humbug”. Brittain responded in a letter to Tribune in which she stated it was perfectly possible to want to win the war without agreeing with every excess proposed by “war makers”. What she meant by “war makers” is clear from the text of Seed of Chaos: the British and American governments and their respective air forces.
In the spring of 1945, Orwell was sent by The Observer as a correspondent following closely behind the allied forces as they fought their way into western Germany. This was not an easy time for him. His London flat had recently been wrecked by a V-1 and, tragically, his wife Eileen had died on March 29 while undergoing a hysterectomy. Nevertheless, Orwell chose to return to Germany rather than remain in England. He filed a number of reports, one of which was published in The Observer on Sunday April 8. It was entitled Future of a ruined Germany and vividly described the devastation wrought by the allied air forces. However, in the course of a relatively brief article, Orwell sought to justify the use of bombing as a means of waging war, comparing it favourably with what he termed “normal” or “legitimate” warfare. He deployed a line of argument which might seem somewhat cold-blooded to a 21st century sensibility: “A bomb kills a casual cross-section of the population. Whereas the men killed in battle are exactly the ones that the community can least afford to lose.”
Orwell also speculated that there would probably be an outpouring of sympathy for the blitzed Germans from the British public – once the Germans were safely defeated.
He was restating views he had first expressed just under a year previously, during the exchange with Brittain on the subject of the bombing of German cities. Now, seeing the effect and consequences of such bombing with his own eyes, Orwell did not change his opinion as to whether the allies should have used such a means of prosecuting the war.
Towards the end of Future of a ruined Germany, Orwell shifted his focus to “the frightful destructiveness of modern war” and the long period of reconstruction that lay ahead. His final paragraph began with the arresting sentence: “To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilisation as a whole.”
Clearly, he was referring not just to damage done by allied air forces, but to the whole gamut of destruction inherent in modern warfare, as subsequent sentences show: “The desolation extends all the way from Brussels to Stalingrad. Where there has been ground fighting, the destruction is even more thorough than where there has merely been bombing.”
In the earlier exchange with Brittain on the ethics of bombing, Orwell dismissed the idea of fighting the war with regard to “the opinion of posterity” and went on to state that there was “something very distasteful in accepting war as an instrument [of policy] and at the same time wanting to dodge responsibility for its more obviously barbarous features”.
Whatever one’s view of the efficacy or morality of bombing, it is evident that, writing as he was from the midst of war, Orwell’s viewpoint was sincere, not lightly arrived at and one which almost certainly reflected the majority opinion of his fellow citizens at the time.
An interesting, if trivial, footnote to the history of the Second World War, then – one which could be summed up as: “George Orwell did not change his mind on the subject of the bombing of cities, even though he was in a position where he might well have done so”?
What is especially intriguing about this piece of forgotten journalism is that in 1957, some six years after Orwell’s death, Vera Brittain published a volume of autobiography, Testament of Experience, in which she referred to the exchanges with Orwell on the subject of “obliteration” bombing. Presumably Brittain had access to the full text of Orwell’s piece, so it seems reasonable to conclude she was quoting selectively in order to “win” her argument with him, in retrospect and when he could not respond. Did it work?
It did, in that a number of people have repeated and elaborated on Brittain’s mendacity. For example, her biographers, Paul Berry and Mark Bostridge, and AC Grayling, suggest that Brittain’s view of the bombing of Germany was vindicated by the apparent change of opinion, having seen the evidence first hand, of Orwell.
As with all the best fabrications, it is plausible. Orwell could well have changed his mind. Also, more subtly, the reader might expect Orwell to have altered his view, especially in light of the post-war revulsion that was felt about the bombing of civilians.
It is worth looking in detail at the lengths to which Brittain went in order to suborn Orwell to her side. First, she set the scene. It is the spring of 1945, she is at her desk with news clippings in front of her from various correspondents who had followed the advancing allies into Germany, all of them expressing horror at the fearful havoc the allied air forces had wrought. Then she turns to Orwell: “Even George Orwell, who had dismissed Seed of Chaos with contempt the previous year, now expressed deep misgivings in The Observer for April 8. ‘The people of Britain have never felt easy about the bombing of civilians… but what they have still not grasped – thanks to their own comparative immunity – is the frightful destructiveness of modern war and the long period of impoverishment that now lies ahead of the world as a whole. To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilisation.’” And there she left it. The reader is left to conclude that Orwell, on witnessing the grim reality for himself, had altered his viewpoint and, although Brittain does not actually say so, had come to agree with her. But that is not what happened.
To show the care Brittain took to misrepresent Orwell, here is her quotation of him in bold, embedded within the original wording of the article.
“Bombing is not especially inhumane. War itself is inhumane and the bombing plane, which is used to paralyse industry and transport rather than to kill human beings, is a relatively civilised weapon. ‘Normal’ or ‘ warfare is just as destructive of inanimate objects and enormously more so of human lives. Moreover, a bomb kills a casual cross-section of the population. Whereas the men killed in battle are exactly the ones that the community can least afford to lose. The people of Britain have never felt easy about the bombing of civilians and no doubt they will be ready enough to pity the Germans as soon as they have definitely defeated them. But what they still have not grasped – thanks to their own comparative immunity – is the frightful destructiveness of modern war and the long period of impoverishment that now lies ahead of the world as a whole. To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilisation as a whole. It is not only Germany that has been blitzed. The desolation extends all the way from Brussels to Stalingrad.”
Before asking why Brittain carried out this apparently childish subterfuge, it is worth examining the excisions in detail. Although the motivation behind them may be unworthy, she has taken great care in order to produce an exact result. First, she frames Orwell’s comments by stating that he had dismissed her pamphlet Seed of Chaos with contempt the previous year (although earlier in Testament of Experience she said it had received no reviews in anything other than “specialist publications in this country”).
What Orwell had actually done was to put his finger on the central weakness of Brittain’s case – namely, that faced with the unique evil of Nazism, there was no real possibility of fighting a limited war. It is this which seems to have enraged Brittain. She did not regard the Nazis as morally any worse than the allies and apparently retained this view even after the evidence of Nazi atrocities became incontrovertible with the liberation of the concentration camps.
Second, Brittain excises Orwell’s robust defence of bombing cities (there would be little point in quoting him if she did not) and cuts any reference to the need to defeat Germany. Then she lops three words off one sentence: “To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilisation as a whole.” The effect is subtle but definite. Instead of doubting the continuity of civilisation on all sides, it becomes specifically the civilisation of those who ruined the cities of Germany from the air that is called into question. Further, by omitting Orwell’s reflections on the extent of the devastation “from Brussels to Stalingrad”, Brittain implies that Orwell was referring only to damage to German cities caused by aerial bombardment.
Why did she misrepresent Orwell in this fashion? The answer is probably the prosaic “because she could”. In the pre-internet age and with Orwell dead, there was little prospect of anyone noticing her deception. On the “moral touchstone” question of the bombing of civilians, she was able to demonstrate that she had been right and the great George Orwell wrong. Moreover, Orwell was shown to have moved to her position.
Vera Brittain, who regarded herself as no one’s intellectual inferior, probably took great satisfaction from slyly altering the historical record as far as the author of 1984 was concerned. By the simple expedient of leaving out a few words here and there, her version would triumph, with no need for the vast fact-altering apparatus of The Ministry of Truth.
And there the matter might well have rested, except that Brittain’s biographers, Berry and Bostridge, in their Vera Brittain, A life, nearly 40 years on from the publication of Testament of Experience, picked up on her reference to Orwell, repeated, simplified and strengthened it. They wrote: “Orwell would undergo something of a change of heart after visiting Germany as a war correspondent”. Berry and Bostridge assumed precisely what Brittain wanted her readers to assume: that Orwell came to agree with her on area bombing. Had they checked the original source of Brittain’s quotation from The Observer on April 8 1945, they would have seen that there had been no “change of heart” on Orwell’s part regarding the bombing of cities.
In Among the Dead Cities, AC Graying makes much the same claim about Orwell’s supposed revised opinion. He reiterates the Berry and Bostridge version of events, which was taken from Brittain’s mendacious account.
Since Professor Grayling is described by his publisher as “one of this country’s leading intellectuals”, he should surely have checked the original source of Orwell’s short despatch, particularly as the entire article was reprinted by The Observer and available online from May 2005. According to his footnotes he did not do so, preferring instead to rely on Berry and Bostridge book’s account, not even Brittain’s version (still less Orwell’s).
This is strange, given that Graying rehearses the wartime dispute between Brittain and Orwell extensively in his book and in particular highlights Orwell’s “change of mind” as a major plank in his argument against the morality of area bombing.
It is worth noting that his repetition of Brittain’s misrepresentation of Orwell seems to have achieved the effect that she intended. Alex Butterworth, reviewing Among the Dead Cities in The Observer, commented approvingly that Orwell, having seen the bombed cities for himself, changed his mind.
How would Orwell have reacted to being misrepresented in this fashion? Given the importance he placed on maintaining the veracity of an objective historical record as a minimum pre-requisite for a civilised society, he is likely to have been furious. Doubtless Brittain’s defenders would argue that, once the “truth” of the full horror of the Bomber Command offensive had sunk in, Orwell would surely have altered his opinion. Against this, we have the fact that up until his death in London in 1950, Orwell did not publish anything to indicate he had altered his viewpoint. Moreover, his pre-war and wartime writings indicate that his views were considered and deep-rooted. As early as 1938, following his experiences fighting in the Spanish Civil War he wrote: “You cannot be objective about an aerial torpedo. And the horror we feel of these things has led to this conclusion: if someone drops a bomb on your mother, go and drop two bombs on his mother. The only apparent alternatives are to smash dwelling houses to powder, blow out human entrails and burn holes in children with lumps of thermite, or to be enslaved by people who are more ready to do these things than you are yourself; as yet no one has suggested a practicable way out.”
It is clear that Orwell was well aware of the likely consequences of dropping bombs on urban areas and would not have countenanced this course of action – except that, in his opinion, the alternative was worse. This makes even more risible Brittain’s implication of Orwell’s failure to empathise until he had seen for himself.
At the time of his clash with Brittain, in a letter to the then pacifist John Middleton Murry in August 1944, Orwell stated: “You must not think that because I ‘support’ the war and don’t disapprove of bombing I am in favour of reprisals, making Germany pay. You may not understand this, but I don’t think it matters killing people so long as you do not hate them. I also think that there are times when you can only show your feelings of brotherhood for somebody else by killing him, or trying to… There has been very little popular resistance to this war, and also very little hatred. It is a job that has to be done.”
Orwell was certainly aware that his views could easily be seen as jingoistic and open to misinterpretation – and not just in left-wing circles. In an As I Please column in July 1944, he wrote, “Contrary to what some of my correspondents seem to think, I have no enthusiasm for air raids, either ours or the enemy’s. Like a lot of other people in this country, I am growing definitely tired of bombs. But I do object to the hypocrisy of accepting force as an instrument [of policy] while squealing against this or that individual weapon.”
Having established that Orwell had a robust and consistent view of the bombing of Germany and that Brittain, while not approving of waging total war even against the Nazis, had no scruples about ensuring that her version of events “won the peace”, the question of who was more morally correct at the time, Brittain or Orwell, becomes an interesting subject for further investigation.
Richard Westwood is an English teacher and Labour Party member
