How did people cope with the blitz spirit?

Answer 1

Londoners shelter in a tube station during the second world war. Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

When the second world war broke out on 3 September 1939, the populations of the fighting powers expected immediate air raids as the enemy tried to achieve the feared "knock-out blow" from the air. It was widely believed that modern armaments would usher in a quite different war using new weapons of mass destruction - bombs, gas, biological weapons. The reality was very different. War was not over in 72 hours of apocalyptic destruction but instead there set in what came to be called the "phoney war", almost eight months in which Germany, Britain and France did very little. What fighting did take place was largely confined to naval warfare, little different from the war at sea between 1914 and 1918.

The real war was fought instead in eastern Europe. German armies quickly destroyed Polish resistance and by 28 September Warsaw surrendered. Polish leaders had expected help from their powerful western allies, Britain and France, but the west had already decided that Poland could not be saved in the short term. Western strategy was based on the idea of a long war of attrition, with Germany bottled up by economic blockade and the impenetrable Maginot Line of defences along France's eastern border, and subject to heavy bombing raids to reduce German willingness to continue the war. Western strategy was modelled on the first world war in which economic strength and a static front had finally produced victory. The "phoney war" reflected those expectations.

Poland was defeated not only by German armies but by a Soviet invasion from the east that began on 17 September. This attack was the fruit of the unexpected agreement signed between the two dictatorships in the early hours of 24 August 1939. The non-aggression pact had been the result of Hitler's belief that without the prospect of possible Soviet assistance, Britain and France would back down from confrontation over the Polish question. Stalin accepted the agreement in order to avoid the prospect of war in 1939, but he had few illusions about the threat posed by Germany in the future. Although it was a shock to the thousands of communist sympathisers in the west, who thought agreement between the two ideological enemies impossible, the western powers stuck by their commitment to Poland regardless, hopeful that the Polish army would prove more effective than it turned out to be in September.

Under the terms of the pact Germany and the Soviet Union agreed spheres of influence in eastern Europe. Eastern Poland was in the Soviet sphere, as well as the Baltic states and Finland. Stalin saw this as an opportunity to improve the Soviet defensive position and to absorb former areas of the old Tsarist empire back under Russian rule.

In November demands were presented to Finland to make territorial concessions in the Baltic area, designed to increase Soviet security in the region. When the Finnish government refused, the Red Army invaded on 30 November 1939 and there followed more than three months of fierce fighting in a war that proved to be longer and more costly than the brief German-Polish war. The western powers thought about intervening but did nothing before it ended in March with limited Finnish concessions to the Soviet Union. But it seemed to the west that the totalitarian states were now bent on tearing up the political geography of eastern Europe between them. Relations between the Soviet Union and the west reached their lowest point before the onset of the cold war