ABSTRACT
The myths that I have been tracing have organized the preparation for, the experience and the aftermath of the most dangerous year in modern British history. These myths were not ‘lies’. They are not to be judged for their truth-value, as such, but for what they tell us about the period in which they circulated, and how they were reworked in subsequent, and different, times. In the years between 1918 and 1939, Britain had been deeply worried by the prospect of another war, and understandably so. Air warfare threatened to impact on British society in a way that the Great War, by a small margin, had not quite done. Though Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia had collapsed under the strain of total war, Britain had managed to adapt and survive and, although it soon hardly seemed worth the cost, to win. The impact of the depression of the interwar years, the central political issue for so long, served to confirm for the political elite that the future of advanced industrial, urbanized Britain was poised on something of a knife’s edge. If the bombers ever came, and if they were always to get through, then the tensions that were only just being held in check by peacetime politics might well be unbearable, and Britain could go down the totalitarian path that was affecting so much of the contemporary European mainland. The threat of air power to the home country was compounded by the international threat to the Empire, on three widely separated fronts. The appeasers were faced with an unprecedentedly dangerous world, with the homeland apparently vulnerable as never before and the over-extended Empire also perilously exposed.
