blackout

blackout was imposed in every belligerent country in 1939–40, as a necessary precaution to protect homes and factories from air attack. From a civilian's point of view, it was an infernal nuisance. It meant that several minutes had to be taken up, twice a day, with putting up and taking down screens or blinds on every window in a room where a light would be used after dark; and that anyone who went out at night in a town had to remember to carry a torch to find the way about the darkened streets. Motoring, with headlights blacked out to a single narrow slit a few centimetres long, became nightmarish, except for those with exceptional night vision. Restrictions applied as sharply to the armed forces as they did to civilians. In factories, particularly factories with large glass roofs, blackout made a perceptible hole in the accounts; black paint could be used to cover the roof (as it did, for example, in main-line railway stations), but buying it and applying it cost money and time, and more money had to be spent again on lighting the workfloor by day.

No one seems to have consulted the air authorities about whether blackout was really necessary. Bomber pilots found that they could navigate best at night by looking out for water, which shows up clearly from the air by starlight as well as by moonlight; so that, on clear nights, they should have been able to orient themselves without too much trouble, whether anything on the ground was lit up or not. Next to lakes and rivers, railways also showed up clearly; so did large roads.

Blackout was one of the ways in which the totality of this total war declared itself for it was universally imposed in Germany, France, Italy, the UK, and elsewhere. Switzerland was not blacked out at the start of the war, but provided such excellent navigation beacons for Allied aircraft that German and Italian diplomatic pressure persuaded the Swiss, too, to agree to what was becoming almost a European norm.

Sweden, Spain, and Portugal remained un-blacked-out. The Balkan countries had to do their best to black out, hurriedly, when they were invaded; there was hardly time to assemble the quantities of black cloth or shuttering material that were needed. In the USSR, also, there were difficulties of supply, with which the regime and the citizenry coped as best they could.

A side-effect of blackout, noticed by common people, was the increase it brought in police power: in the UK, for example, the local air raid warden, a neighbour known by sight to all those he (or she) looked after, became a somewhat feared and disliked figure, because wardens had to insist so firmly that no chink of light was shown; while in Germany and France, the already considerable power of the Blockwart and the concierge was increased. Blackout also provided a mass of opportunities for the cartoonist and the humorist, as well as a number of tragedies, from individuals killed in the sharply increased number of road accidents.

When the USA entered the war, most of its citizens had heard of blackout because the BBC news service from Europe was so good; but, knowing themselves to be out of range of the Luftwaffe, they left it to the Europeans. The happiest of the U-boats' ‘happy times’, in the Caribbean in early 1942, was much assisted by the un-blacked-out towns on the coasts of Florida, Texas, and Louisiana; thereafter federal effort ensured a degree of ‘grey-out’, at least, in coastal areas (see also convoys).

The Japanese blacked out carefully: they needed to. But it was no protection against the daylight raids that devastated Tokyo, or those that dropped the atomic bombs which ushered in the ending of the war.

M. R. D. Foot