From blackout to dim-out

On 6 September 1944 the British government announced two decisions that meant more to millions of people in Britain than many a bulletin from the front. It declared that the blackout, in force for five years, would be relaxed and give way to a “dim-out”, and it suspended compulsory drills and training in the Home Guard – the volunteer home defence force raised in 1940 against the threat of a German invasion. Both decisions sprang from the same conviction: after the German defeat in France and the rapid Allied advance through Belgium, the danger of an invasion of Britain had vanished, and the great raids by Luftwaffe bombers seemed to belong to the past. The new lighting rules came into force on 17 September 1944. The change itself therefore dates from 17 September; 6 September was the day on which the government announced it.

Five years of darkness

The blackout was imposed on the evening of 1 September 1939, even before war was declared, as part of the package of measures with which Britain prepared for war. The regulations required every window and door to be covered at night with heavy curtains, cardboard or paint, so that not even a chink of light could escape to help enemy airmen find their way. Street lamps were switched off or dimmed and shaded, and the lights of cars and traffic signals were fitted with slotted masks that directed a narrow beam downwards. Compliance was enforced by wardens of the civil defence service, and offenders faced heavy penalties.

The blackout was one of the most irksome aspects of the war in Britain, especially in the first months, when not a single bomb had yet fallen. Road deaths rose sharply – according to the statistics of the time, in some months of autumn 1939 they were almost twice as high as a year earlier – and the government had to relax some of the rules and lower the speed limit in built-up areas. In the ports, sailors drowned at night after falling into the docks in the dark. Crime also flourished under cover of darkness: thefts, burglaries and looting of bombed houses. Factories with large glazed roofs could not black them out completely, and shops built double doors so that no light escaped as customers came and went. During the Blitz of 1940–1941, however, the blackout ceased to be an abstraction and became a daily duty in cities over which German bombers circled almost every night.

What changed on 17 September

The “dim-out” was in essence a milder form of the blackout rather than its end. From 17 September 1944 ordinary curtains were sufficient in homes instead of special black material – except in a coastal belt where the old rules remained in force, since light there could still guide German aircraft and ships. Street lighting was permitted at a level that contemporary descriptions compared to moonlight, and the headlamps of the few cars and motorcycles on the roads could shine somewhat more brightly. The authorities stipulated, however, that a full blackout applied immediately whenever an air-raid warning was sounded.

The relief was psychological rather than practical. In the autumn of 1944 the streets of British towns remained dark compared with peacetime, but after five years the blackout had lost its most oppressive character: the stiff black curtains could come down from the windows, and people no longer had to check every evening that no light was escaping through a gap.

The end of compulsory Home Guard service

The second decision announced on 6 September concerned the Home Guard. The force, which at its peak numbered more than one and a half million volunteers – men too young or too old for the army, or employed in reserved occupations – had originally been meant to watch for and delay an enemy landing, guard communications hubs and factories, and fight paratroopers. From 1942 men could be directed into it, and its members underwent regular drill and training. After the turning point on the Eastern Front in 1943 the threat of invasion receded, but even before the Normandy landings there were fears of German commando raids on bases in southern England. The Home Guard also manned anti-aircraft batteries and relieved the regular army of guard duties.

In September 1944 these fears were judged to have passed. The suspension of compulsory drills and training was announced. The force’s formal disbandment was to follow a few months later.

“The Battle of London is over”?

The easing of the blackout came at a moment when the last attempt to bomb Britain also seemed to be coming to an end. Since June 1944 German V-1 flying bombs had been falling on London and south-east England; over the summer they drove more than a million people from their homes and killed thousands of civilians, as the capital endured the first weeks of the flying-bomb offensive. At the turn of August and September Allied troops overran the Pas-de-Calais coast, from which the flying bombs had been launched, and the bombardment from France ceased. To the British it seemed that the defences – fighters, anti-aircraft guns moved to the coast and the balloon barrage – had won.

The mood of those days was well captured by a press conference on 7 September, the day after the blackout decision was announced. Duncan Sandys, chairman of the War Cabinet committee on defence against flying bombs and rockets and son-in-law of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, declared, according to press reports, that “except possibly for a few last shots, the Battle of London is over”. On the same day the summer evacuation of the capital was formally ended. Sandys’s words proved premature. The next day, 8 September 1944, the first V-2 rocket, against which there was no defence at all, fell on the west London district of Chiswick; by March 1945, according to British figures, these rockets had killed some 2,700 people in Britain. Flying bombs, meanwhile, kept coming for many months more – launched from bombers over the North Sea and later from sites in the Netherlands. There was good reason, then, for the full blackout to remain in force during air raids.

Place in the war

The decisions of 6 September 1944 were among the first signs that Britain was beginning to think about the end of the war. After five years in which the whole of society had been mobilised, the state for the first time was lifting some obligations from its citizens instead of imposing new ones. This was not, however, the end of the war on the home front: food rationing and conscription for work and military service remained in force, and civil defence still faced months of rocket bombardment.

The Home Guard was ceremonially stood down on 3 December 1944, when King George VI gave a radio broadcast; the force was formally disbanded on 31 December 1945. Full street lighting, unseen since 1939, was restored in April 1945, in the last weeks of the war in Europe. For Londoners the symbolic end of the blackout came on the evening of 30 April 1945, when the clock face of Big Ben was lit for the first time in five years – on the day Adolf Hitler committed suicide in Berlin.