Research Grants
Professor Richard Overy
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 their shared experiences, 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 common assumptions about political solidarity, strong morale and a popular determination to win the war, which the conventional image still sustains. As Professor Overy, principal investigator from the University of Exeter, notes “In France and Italy, for example, bombing was chiefly carried out by the same forces against the people that they were promising to liberate, resulting in ambivalent and confused responses.”
The emphasis of the project is on the political and cultural responses to bombing - 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. While the reactions to bombing were never uniform or consistent they were expressed in political and 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. It opens up new ways of looking at the relationship between state and population and the willingness of populations to endorse or understand the conflict in which they are involved.
This project is a collaboration between the Universities of Exeter, Reading and Newcastle, over the course of the project there have been 3 project workshops including participants from all the collaborating Universities and an international project conference where the keynote address was delivered by Jay Winter, the Charles J Stile Professor of History at Yale University. It has also established a website exhibition using a mix of archive film, photographs, documents and text to provide pathways through the history of these bombed communities. This ambitious and innovative project hopes its conclusions will help to produce a clearer understanding of the behaviour of bombed communities in recent contemporary conflicts such as those in the Middle East and Afghanistan.
More information can be found on the project website.
Image: © istockphoto.com/narvikk