George Orwell Versus Vera Brittain: Obliteration Bombing and the Tolerance in Wartime of Dissent in Weekly Political Publications

In the summer of 1944, George Orwell used his column in Tribune to launch a ferocious assault on arguments advanced by the peace campaigner Vera Brittain in her pamphlet Seed of Chaos, published that year by the Bombing Restriction Committee. By doing so, Orwell raised publicly a topic the wartime coalition sought anxiously to conceal from the public – the deliberate killing of German civilians in RAF bombardment of German cities – and he took advantage of the government's preparedness to tolerate controversy in weekly political publications which it worked carefully to exclude from mass market newspapers and BBC broadcasts. The controversy serves as an excellent example of the way in which weekly political publications were used to burnish Britain's democratic credentials in wartime. It also annoyed Vera Brittain so greatly that she would lie about it after Orwell died.