Over the last few years we’ve occasionally discussed people and sometimes fictional characters who through their actions, words and lazily extended middle fingers to the establishment proved that they neither care or are capable of giving a fuck. Today we’re giving the same treatment to the people of WW2 era Britain, specifically those caught in the Blitz.
For anyone unfamiliar with the Blitz, it was essentially a targeted bombing campaign by the German’s during WW2 specifically singling out major British cities and population centres. Despite living with the near-constant threat of being hit by a fucking bomb, the people of Britain remained stoically defiant, going about their day as if absolutely nothing of note had happened.
This is perhaps best summed up by the image at the top of this very page of a milkman calmly strolling through a destroyed cityscape like Bruce Banner with a hangover. While often presented as genuine, the image was staged by the photographer, however, it does capture the general attitude of people at the time. For example, here’s a real picture of British people making their way to work the morning after a particularly heavy raid.
Because oh yeah, British people didn’t let a little thing like their offices being disintegrated by bombs stop them from working. Reports from the time note that you could often find men in freshly pressed suits sat at desks outside of ruined office blocks casually doing paper work that their secretary would then file in half destroyed filing cabinet. On top of this, shops and pubs stayed open and despite the fact beer was one of the only things that wasn’t rationed, incidents of public drunkenness actually decreased.
The people of Britain gave such a profound lack of a fuck about a literal army of Nazis trying to kill them every single day that some housewives reportedly enjoyed bombing raids because it gave them a break from housework and a chance to catch up with their neighbours. People would literally discuss bombing raids like they would the weather, saying the previous night was a “a bit blitzy” if it happened to coincide with a bombing raid and children could be found playing football within feet of unexploded bombs. Hell, one woman even got married during because the Nazis could fuck a pool cue sideways if they thought she was going to postpone her big day over a few measly bombing raids.
Prior to the Blitz, the British government, anticipating widespread panic opened dozens of psychiatric clinics across the country, virtually all of which were closed because nobody visited them. In fact, it’s noted that reported cases of mental health and suicides dropped during the heaviest times of bombing recorded.
While there was some panic, the sheer resilience displayed by the British people stunned Hitler who couldn’t fathom how British people were able to climb out of the recently bombed out rubble of what was once their home, shrug and go to work. That’s something people actually did by the way, elderly people in Britain are made of cast iron. To be perfectly honest, they could have probably ended the war like 3 years earlier if everyone in Britain faced Germany at the same time and collectively emptied their pockets of fucks at the same time, crushing the Nazi war machine under 80 million metric tons of weapons-grade apathy.
