Britain Learned the Wrong Lessons From the Blitz. That Makes Us Vulnerable Today
Modern civil defense requires preparation, not just perseverance.
In Britain, we’re raised on the myth of the Blitz Spirit. If we don’t have grandparents to tell us stories of digging Victory Gardens and singing songs in the Anderson shelter, our politicians, schools and even Saturday night television will do it instead.
While wartime Britons undoubtedly showed remarkable resilience, we have learned the wrong lessons from this period. It was not Britain’s dogged determination to “keep calm and carry on” that got us through, but the preparations the government and ordinary people made.
Our neighbours are facing up to Europe’s geopolitical uncertainty. Sweden recently sent every household a 32-page booklet bluntly titled “In Case of Crisis or War,” informing citizens that they need to prepare for hard times, how to stockpile at least a week’s worth of food, where to take shelter in an air raid, and that every citizen has to play their part in the country’s defense.
Norway and Finland also distributed new pamphlets around this time. Despite their reputation as peaceful countries and Sweden and Finland’s very recent accession to NATO, the Nordic countries have impressive cultures of national resilience. Speaking at the Berlin Security conference not long after Sweden’s booklet was issued, the chief of UK defense staff Admiral Sir Tony Radakin said that Britain was in a weaker position than the Nordic and Baltic countries. “We don’t have the culture of total defence. We don’t have some of the civil aspects or planning aspects that other countries within Nato have as part of their traditions. We are having those conversations to learn from our colleagues and see what might be appropriate for ourselves.”
Improving civil defense messaging is a less radical intervention than implementing mandatory national service, which all of those countries have to some extent. But we are partly in a weaker position because Westminster is reluctant to inform and prepare the British people for the harsh realities of a continent at war.
Britain has no such booklet. Instead, we have a website telling us how to respond to power cuts, broadband outages and other disasters. Experts1 have pointed out a glaring flaw with this. How are you supposed to access this website if you can’t recharge your device or mobile access has been disrupted?
This is why it matters that Sweden, Norway, Poland, Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania all have paper-based campaigns. Of course, people can throw away their booklet or put it in a drawer and forget about it. But a physical object is harder to ignore than a social media advert telling you to go to a website.
Printing and distributing them well in advance of a disaster is also crucial. Failure to do so is something in which London has form. In the 1970s, Britain had a policy of only informing the public how they should take action once a nuclear attack was expected within the next three weeks. Any earlier, and they felt the country would be driven to despair or conclude Britain was preparing its own nuclear launch2.
While the government thought that this would allow enough time to print and distribute a copy of “Protect and Survive” to every household around the country, Her Majesty’s Stationary Office told the BBC printing the booklets alone would take four weeks. In the meantime the public would be told what to do through radio and television broadcasts.
Regardless of whether “Protect and Survive” would have saved lives (it’s dubious) or the government assessment that they would have enough warning was correct (also dubious), informing civilians of their next steps at the last minute is a recipe for panic buying and disaster.
It’s not as if we haven’t done an effective paper-based awareness campaign recently. In 2004, in the wake of terror attacks in Europe and disease outbreaks at home, the government sent the “Preparing for Emergencies” booklet to every home across the country. If the objection to printing leaflets today is cost, a civil servant at the time said that the £8 million price tag (about £14 million today) was less expensive than it would have been to deliver each household a newspaper – “not a bad spend of money.”
Although now best remembered for a parody HMG failed to see the funny side of, the booklet is an extremely basic guide to first aid, fire safety and how to identify signs that someone is planning a terror attack. The present website – launched over two years into the full scale invasion of Ukraine – is more detailed and addresses an expanded range of crises. But it is remarkably coy about the reason for rising tension across the continent – war.
This reticence isn’t a new development. According to one history of British civil defense, “Attack Warning Red,” the Cold War government’s lack of open communication about how to survive such a nuclear catastrophe was because they decided it would be pointless. The cheery tone of early civil defense films, harking back to an already mythologised Blitz Spirit, faded as the power and number of nuclear weapons grew. Britain was simply too small and too densely packed with targets that nowhere in the country would escape the blast waves or fallout.
The risks Britain faces today go beyond nuclear war. Since 2021, the government has identified Russia as the “most acute threat” to UK security. As a leading supporter of Ukraine and “traditional enemy” of Moscow, Britain is a target for Russian missiles. But we’re also vulnerable to the Kremlin’s continent-wide sabotage and cyber operations that can disrupt our supply chains and technology-based society. Although the country has met its NATO spending goals since 2006, military planners warn that our army and ammunition stocks are far too low to fulfil our Article 5 requirements. We may be far from Russia’s borders, but that does not protect us and we need to prepare.
It doesn’t take a genius to work out why the Baltic and Nordic States and Poland are so concerned about war. Estonia’s emergency booklet explicitly gives guidance for “what to do as a civilian in a conflict zone.” Lots of these countries also advise their citizens on psychological resilience, how to spot propaganda and make sure any information they share is accurate.
Would the British government be so frank about the range of threats the public would face in wartime? When my dad picked up a copy of the Norwegian civil defense booklet in his hotel in Hell (a town near Trondheim) in late 2022, he dryly asked me if I could imagine how the UK media would react to Westminster telling them to stockpile iodine tablets.
We got a taste of such hysteria in April 2023, when Britain tested issuing alerts to mobile phones in case of an emergency. Such a system is already well-established in the United States and much of Europe. But it took Britain so long to develop its own because, according to a member of the Cabinet Office, “nobody was willing to pay for it.”
Ahead of the day of the test, there was a chorus of stories about all the negative consequences the text could wreak across our island. The front page of the Daily Mail – a newspaper prone to attacking perceived snowflakery – railed in the tone of an angry old man woken from his nap by children playing football in the street, “so which genius thought it was a good idea to terrify the whole country at 3pm on a Sunday?”
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak had to plead with the public not to switch off their phones like high-profile former cabinet member Jacob Rees-Mogg who denounced the test as “unnecessary and intrusive” nanny-statism on his GB News show. “If there’s something that has happened that’s serious, won’t we actually know anyway?” he asked bemusedly, ignoring the fact that by the time you’ve seen a crisis with your own eyes, it may be too late to do anything.
Technical failures meant that 7% of compatible phones did not receive the alert, which makes it all the more important that the country is not reliant on a single method of communicating emergencies. People who aren’t close to someone else's beeping phone need to be alerted . However, all but a handful of Britain’s 7,000 emergency sirens were dismantled by April 1993 after the Home Office complained that the £38 million (£80 million today) cost of their renovation was too expensive3. The few that remain are used in towns like Yorkshire’s Hebden Bridge for flood warnings.
Many European nations not only retained their emergency sirens but test them at least annually. In France and the Netherlands they are tested once a month with little fuss. In fact, following an announcement that the Dutch government would suspend monthly tests from 2025 as a cost-cutting measure, both left and right wing newspapers published letters and articles arguing for its retention in a time of increasing geopolitical uncertainty.
Of course, if the government was to be frank about the possibility of war – or the disruption further conflict in Europe, the Middle East or Pacific would cause – people would complain, headlines would be written, and the Stop the War Coalition would probably accuse Britain (again) of antagonising Russia.
But building resilience requires normalising the fact that something terrible could happen. A “comprehensive defense” culture like in Sweden or Finland can’t be built overnight. News of a national Resilience Academy based on the Nordic model is encouraging, but will only reach a small proportion of the population. Meanwhile, ensuring that every household in Britain has a booklet telling them how to prepare for the impacts of a war, as well as flooding and terror attacks, would be an achievable and relatively affordable step. The 2023 Resilience Framework says the government plans to offer new guidance to households and communities and make it more accessible by 2030, a weak aspiration considering that German intelligence believes Russia will be in a position to launch an attack on a NATO member state by the end of the decade.
If Britain remembers that true resilience requires preparation, not just stoicism, it will reap dividends beyond preparing for military threats. Unfortunately, it is a case of when and not if we will face another global pandemic, which could be far deadlier than COVID-19. Britain was unprepared for the last pandemic because it was weakened by a decade of austerity that stretched public services to breaking point and opened deep fractures in our national welfare and social fabric. We cannot allow ourselves to be caught off guard again.
Preparing for disaster unfortunately involves spending a lot of money on things which will hopefully never be used, and then spending even more money on making sure they don’t disintegrate beyond the point of use. That’s a tough sell when government purse strings are tight and the public is overwhelmingly more concerned about the cost of living and NHS funding than defense and security.
But it would be a mistake to view these sectors as unrelated: the NHS’ creaking cyber infrastructure has been targeted by Russian and North Korean hackers, and a recent analysis from the Royal United Services Institute suggested that the NHS would be unable to cope with a high casualty event on British soil or the evacuation of wounded troops stationed along the Estonian-Russian border. The same preparations for such an eventuality could be used to steel the health system for future crises; health security is national security.
Despite this bleak prognosis, there are some positive lessons from Britain’s experiences in the Blitz. The 1930s public were expected to panic in the event of an air-raid, resulting in psychiatric patients outnumbering the wounded in hospital by a factor of three-to-one.4 (Similarly, government advisors doubted whether the public would comply with COVID lockdowns.) Both crises showed that people are remarkably willing to accept significant changes to their lives in the case of a national emergency if they are informed about what they need to do and why.
To safeguard Britain’s security, the government needs to recognize that society-wide preparation matters as much as spirit in a crisis. Civil defense is more important than at any point since the Cold War, so we should fund it commensurately. If the government is going to prepare for a potential crisis and be prepared to justify it, it needs to trust that the public can handle the truth about the threats we face.
Giles, Keir. Who Will Defend Europe? Hurst Publishers, 24 Oct. 2024.
McDowall, Julie. Attack Warning Red! Random House, 6 Apr. 2023.
McDowall, Julie. Attack Warning Red! Random House, 6 Apr. 2023.
Titmuss, Richard Morris. Social Welfare, n.d.