>> Hello I'm Tim Luckhurst, Professor of Journalism at the University of Kent, and Head of the Centre for Journalism and the title of my lecture today is Speaking truth to power in Britain's wartime press: George Orwell and the obliteration bombing of German cities during the Second World War.

>> My research deals exclusively with British newspaper journalism during the Second World War. It was a time when newspapers mattered and I think modern students both need and deserve to understand precisely how much they mattered. Absorbed and misled by the echo chamber of social media as so many of us are today, it's useful to understand how an edited collection of stories, ideas and opinions rooted in evidence and selected according to clear editorial values, helped people facing terrifying uncertainty to make some sense of their world gone mad.

>> By the outbreak of war in 1939 consumption of national daily newspapers had reached every section of British society. 80 per cent of British families read one of the popular London dailies, the Daily Mail, Daily Mirror, Daily Express, News Chronicle and Daily Herald, and two-thirds of middle-class families shared their habit, although many of them also bought a serious title such as The Times, Telegraph or Manchester Guardian.

>> Mass Observation's report on the press, which was published early in 1940, looked at the contents of newspapers, who read them and what people thought of them. And one of its main conclusions was that 'Almost everybody reads newspapers whether regularly or irregularly, thoroughly or cursorily. 

>> Plainly then, newspapers were selling in vast numbers. Equally plainly, each of these titles had a political stance and a desire to guide their readers' impressions of political events and issues. In the mass circulation press much of this steering took readers in one direction: support for the war, belief in a people's war and confidence in the central theme that Britons were all in it together. This myth of equality under bombardment by the Luftwaffe, rationing, conscription and wartime bureaucracy produced some spectacular examples of newspaper propaganda.

>> Examples not of enforced censorship, but of the much more effective version whereby editors did what the Ministry of Information wanted them to do - not because they were obliged to, but because they sincerely believed that they were acting in the national interest.

>> Among my favourites is a page three lead from the Daily Mirror of Wednesday September the 18th 1940. Headlined 'Women Say "Let Us Shop"', this tremendous piece of keep-calm-and-carry-on propaganda from intense part of the Blitz asserts that women's chief grouse about air raids is not about the bombs no. They're complaining that it is impossible to get shopping done while raids are in progress. It quotes one 'woman shopper's' objection that 'It seems all wrong to me that trade should stop dead like that when a warning sounds.' Now that sounds to me like the make it sing, make it up, make it dance type of journalism. 

>> Another published a week earlier on September the 11th 1940 is even better. It depicts an attractive nurse carrying a beautiful baby girl and the headline reads: 'Goering's military objectives'. A sub-head below the first paragraph refers to the baby in block capitals; 'Raids make her laugh'. And the story goes on to explain: 'There was not a whimper from any one of the little patients when a children's hospital in central London was struck by blitzkrieg bomb on Monday night.' 

>> Now, I'm not entirely certain how the absence of a whimper can be reconciled with the report of a laugh but the beautiful baby's behaviour offers some help. The Mirror explains that flames spurted from the wreckage, clouds of smoke rolled down the staircase but not so much as a frown came from Sandra. Clearly this was an absolutely heroic example of Blitz spirit in a child too young to be conscious of its existence. 

>> Now, my research confirms that I'm not alone in my scepticism about the accuracy and authenticity of such reporting. George Orwell certainly thought newspapers conformed to the wishes of the wartime coalition. 

>> In his 'As I Please' column in Tribune on 7th of July 1944 he argued that the Ministry of Information achieved the suppression of undesirable premature news and opinion by participation in a conspiracy of the governing classes. He thought such a conspiracy had always succeeded in preventing public discussion of anything thought to be uncongenial and I think he was quite right. A quiet word dropped in the appropriate ear at the appropriate place often secured silence on issues judged to be sensitive.

>> It had done so before the war on the subject of Edward VIII's relationship with Mrs Simpson. But George Orwell overlooked the role played by publications to which the authorities deliberately turned a blind eye. And this is truly remarkable because he wrote for one. 

>> On several occasions during the Second World War, British newspapers did speak truth to power. In doing so they demonstrated that questioning power in democracy at war was a means by which they could prove the value of democracy, they could show why it was worth fighting to defend. And such challenging writing and reporting was most frequently tolerated when it appeared in niche publications aimed at intelligent opinion.

>> Close reading of wartime editions of Tribune, the New Statesman, The Spectator and The Economist suggest that such titles, with a combined weekly readership which approached half a million, were deliberately permitted to question orthodoxy and challenge government policy. And we shouldn't underestimate this concession, after all, as Professor Michael Schudson of Columbia University reminds us, we should never assess the power of newspapers by their circulation alone, how many readers may not matter as much as which readers they are and how intensely and instrumentally they read. 

>> The conspiracy that kept unpalatable news and opinions out of the mass circulation titles plainly also regarded occasional demonstrations of intelligent dissent as a valuable way of burnishing Britain's democratic credentials. And these credentials were particularly valuable when working to influence American opinion, a crucial aim throughout Churchill's wartime Premiership. 

>> Newspapers spoke truth to power on topics including conscientious objection, the policy of unconditional surrender for Germany and perhaps most controversially the area of bombing of German cities. The War Cabinet did more than just turn a blind eye to such criticism. When it was distributed to local intellectual leaders and professional men it functioned as a useful safety valve and Orwell took advantage. But not perhaps in the way one might expect.

>> His topic was the RAF's area bombing of German cities. Tribune took an interesting line on these raids. It wasn't persuaded that such bombing could end the war. It was not certain that defeat of the Nazis could come about unless their land armies were beaten. And Tribune said the RAF couldn't do that and it should be diverted from area raids against cities to attacks intended to support Allied troops and could defeat the German land armies. 

>> But Tribune's most prominent columnist took a very different approach. George Orwell thought area bombing of cities was entirely sensible and his support for RAF policy provoked him into a truly splenetic argument with the peace campaigner Vera Brittain. For those who are not acquainted with Miss Brittain's wartime opposition to the British American bombing campaign against Germany, a very brief explanation. 

>> Early in 1944 she published 'Seed of Chaos', a pungent denunciation of the allied policy of destroying German industrial cities in massive round-the-clock raids. Reprinted in the United States as 'Massacre by Bombing', Britain's eloquent polemic offered eyewitness accounts of the consequences of RAF raids extracted from neutral Swiss and Swedish newspaper reports who actually had correspondence in the German cities under bombardment.

>> One such extract from the St Gallen Tagblatt noted: 'It was nerve shattering to see women demented after the raids, crying continuously for their lost children, or wandering speechless through the streets with dead babies in their arms.' Vera Brittain argued that saturation bombing of cities such as Cologne, Hamburg and Berlin, and the firestorms that often assumed as the RAF became expert in combining high explosives with incendiary bombs, plunged Britain into a moral and spiritual abyss. She described tens of thousands of German civilians in bomb shelters being suffocated, charred and reduced to ashes.

>> She recalled frantic children pinned beneath the burning wreckage screaming to their trapped mothers for help as the uncontrollable fires came nearer. And she was appalled by a Swiss correspondent's account of an RAF raid on Wuppertal during which, 'numerous victims ran around aimlessly like burning torches until they died'.

>> For Brittain then, area bombing invited vicious reprisal attacks and caused morale deterioration, and she said, would display itself as loss of sensitivity and callous indifference to suffering. Britain's stance attracted support and respect in the New Statesman, The Guardian and Spectator. Tribune's editorial stance though remained less moral than practical. The policy of aerial bombardment promoted a 'dangerous fallacy'.

>> Air Marshal Arthur Harris's colossal four-engined heavy bombers were 'ill suited to tactical work with land forces' which might hasten the end of the war - hence sadly they had to be used for bobbing cities. This, Tribune insisted, would not hasten the war's end. Indeed it appeared to be provoking the same stubborn resistance that German bombing of British cities had caused.

>> Orwell's review of Seed of Chaos in issue 386 or May 19 1944 was damning: 'No one in his senses regards bombing, or any other operation of war, with anything but disgust. 

>> On the other hand,' he wrote, 'no decent person cares tuppence for the opinion of posterity. And there is something very distasteful in accepting war as an instrument and at the same time wanting to dodge responsibility for its more obviously barbarous features. Pacifism is a tenable position, provided you are willing to take the consequences, but all talk of limiting or humanising war is sheer humbug. ... Why is it worse to kill civilians than soldiers?' And when readers wrote to contest his relativism and his aggression, the literary editor came out fighting: 'It was the fascist states' he said 'who started this practice and as long as the air war went in their favour they avowed their aims quite clearly.' And then warming to his theme he insisted on 'dealing with' the 'parrot cry' against 'killing women and children'.

>> For Orwell: 'It's probably somewhat better to kill a cross-section of the population than to kill only the young men. If the figures published by the Germans are true and we've really killed 1.2 million civilians in our raids, that loss of life has probably harmed the German race somewhat less than the corresponding loss on the Russian front or in Africa and Italy. Those who opposed the killing of German women were guilty of 'sheer sentimentality' and Orwell thought child casualties were probably exaggerated. 'Contrary to what some of my correspondents seem to think, I have no enthusiasm for air raids, either ours or the enemy's, but I believe absolutely the objections to the use of force and total war are utterly hypocritical'. 

>> Readers' objections continued to arrive, so on August the 4th 1944 Orwell returned to the topic of saturation bombing, noting that: 'A correspondent who disagreed with me very strongly added that he was by no means a pacifist. He recognised, he said, that 'the Hun had got to be beaten'. He merely objected to the barbarous methods that we are now using. Now, it seems to me that you do less harm by dropping bombs than you do by calling people 'Huns'. So, not atypical Orwell.

>> His case is blunt, uncompromising, sometimes dismissive. He recognised the sheer nastiness of bombing. He harbours no delusions that it is aimed at exclusively military targets. He knows civilians are dying in colossal numbers and that is entirely deliberate. But this stance put him directly at odds with government policy, which was to pretend that civilian deaths were collateral damage in raids planned to hit industrial and military infrastructure. Indeed, the argument with which Orwell defended area bombing challenged British government policy just as directly as Vera Brittain's moral fury, because it recognised that the policy caused mass civilian casualties and crucially that it intended to do so. The government had worked very hard to disguise.

>> This story by Martin Middlebrook describes the British government's official utterings about area bombing between 1942 and 1945 as 'a three year period of deceit on the British public and world opinion.'

>> Air Marshal Arthur Harris, Head of Bomber Command saw RAF Bomber Command strategy launch a thousand bomber raids against cities including Cologne, Essen, Bremen and Hamburg. Harris pleaded, pleaded, with the Prime Minister and his air minister, Sir Archibald Sinclair to acknowledge that these attacks involved the deliberate murder of civilians. He asked in particular that the Air Minister is to tell the British public that the killing of German civilians was not a 'by product of attempts to hit factories'. Rather, such slaughter was among the 'accepted and intended aims of our bombing policy'. Plainly, Harris took a view close to the one Orwell articulated. The Air Marshal knew that true precision bombing was beyond the competence of RAF heavy bombers and their brave crews.

>> He developed his policy of area bombardment specifically in order to kill German workers. Choosing to identify any enemy civilian engaged in economic activity as a contributor for Nazi war effort, he ensured the RAF always attacked either city centres or densely populated residential areas. Harris knew it meant the deliberate and systematic killing of women, children and old men. And ministers knew it too but they were determined to disguise the truth. They used a series of euphemisms to describe area bombing raids. These included 'blanketing an industrial district', 'neutralising the target' and 'softening up an area'. 

>> But as my colleague at Kent Mark Connelly has demonstrated, government policy was rooted in determination to occupy the moral high ground. It was also intended, absolutely intended, to avoid tension with Britain's American allies. 

>> Bomber Command knew that the United States Army Air Forces policy of bombing in daylight was introducing casualty rates even more catastrophic than those endured by our air crews who flew night time missions. But the Americans maintained the fiction that their daylight raids allowed them to conduct real precision bombing. The American public was led to believe that USAAF raids only targeted military targets, they were told that no American boys were engaged in murdering German civilians, so, to admit that the RAF was doing so deliberately and very effectively would have undermined the message - and British ministers had no desire to do that. Therefore by defending area bombing on the grounds that killing civilians the total war was entirely sensible George Orwell was playing with fire. And this for me was Orwell at his absolute best. 

>> Determined to confront complacent consensus with ruthless logic and utterly contemptuous of moral relativism. I disagree with him, I think the murder of German women and children probably encouraged German soldiers to fight on when victory was no longer possible, an unconditional surrender their only option. But I love Orwell's instinct. A good journalist should always be the grit in the oyster. Consensus is the enemy of justice, it narrows the frame of debate and it conceals plausible alternatives to current orthodoxy. 

>> Orwell's wartime work revealed that he often played this crucial role. I use his argument with Vera Brittain, and his support of area bombing as a case study. It helps my students to understand how and why a reporter should question everything. I don't promote cynicism, just acute scepticism, and George Orwell was a master sceptic.

>> German bombing of Britain spawned popular demand for harsh revenge and this was vividly expressed in popular titles of both left and right. British newspapers didn't celebrate the agonies of German civilians but they certainly took pride in the RAF raids and mass market journalism did not address, still less concede, the central truth that the RAF Bomber Command set out to kill civilians as a conscious act of policy. 

>> Now Orwell may have been right to argue that this is was a perfectly sensible policy. But crucially, Tribune let him do so with crystal clarity, so enabling its famous wartime printer to make maximum use the freedom afforded weekly political publications with thoughtful subscribers. 

>> It was also an example of his editor, the Labour MP Aneurin Bevan's, own commitment and his determination to nurture and sustain honest dissent in wartime and that was a strategy Bevin pursued both in his work in the House of Commons and in the pages of Tribune but for this Bevan too deserves recognition.

>> Orwell regarded freedom of speech as a distinctive and precious British asset and he recognised Tribune's contribution to promoting it.

>> In late July 1944, he explained this explicitly in the column defending the titles publication of an anti-war poem. He said that he believed 'there is much more freedom of expression in Britain than any totalitarian country. I want that to remain true, and by sometimes giving a hearing to unpopular opinions I think we help it do so'. He was right, the candour with which Tribune published and debated dissenting ideas did not simply give sanctuary to a writer of Orwell's stature, it helped freedom of speech to endure the test of total war and showed that Britain's defence of democracy was more than a slogan.

>> Thank you very much for listening.