Pushkin

At the outbreak of the Second World War, one of the many fears the world had to contemplate

was that civilians would be bombed. That was a new horror. Nobody knew what would happen

if the bombers swarmed thick in the skies over the world's great cities.

But the received wisdom was that the morale of the civilian population would shatter like the glass in their windows.

Civilisation itself might break down. Winston Churchill believed this, so did Adolf Hitler, so did their generals. They were wrong.

Every schoolchild in the UK knows the story of the blitz spirit of how as Hitler's Luftwaffe dropped bomb after bomb over London in late 1940,

Londoners refused to be cowed. The glass did indeed shatter, but the British upper lip remained as stiff as ever.

One pub put up a sign. Our windows are gone, but our spirits are excellent. Come in and try them.

80 years later, we still feel nostalgia for how people pulled together. We forget how surprising this stoic response was,

and the lesson was ignored. The Allies made the same mistake when contemplating their own bombing campaign of German cities.

There was little sign that morale had been dented in London, or other English bomb hit cities such as Birmingham or Hull.

Yet Churchill's friend and advisor, Frederick Linderman, told him that morale was cracking, and that when German cities were thoroughly bombed,

it would break the spirit of the German people.

Predictably, it didn't. Decades later, carpet bombing didn't break the spirit of the North Vietnamese either.

Our stubborn refusal to learn this lesson has had tragic consequences.

We keep believing that when disaster strikes, what's needed isn't food and medical supplies, its law and order.

When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, the response of the police, the media, and nearby areas, was all shaped by the sad fact

that they just couldn't believe that the citizens of New Orleans might pull together to look out for each other.

Community volunteers were told to stand guard against looters, rather than helping with evacuations or distributing food and water.

The Red Cross didn't enter the city for a month. They were afraid that it was just too dangerous.

I highlighted these true stories in an earlier episode of cautionary tales called The Village of Heroes.

...