A BBC friend alerted me to this fabulous clip from 1940. Here’s the background:
The London blitz started on 7 September 1940, and weeks later Broadcasting House took its first hit. A delayed action crashed through a window on the 7th floor, and came to rest two floors down in the music library. Moments later, as firemen rushed to the scene, it exploded, killing seven people. Bruce Belfrage was reading the news at the time, and his microphone picked up the sound of the blast. But Belfrage, covered in dust and soot, read on regardless.
And here’s the audio.
Not bad, hey? I’m doing a fair bit of thinking about panic and shock in conflict. How did Belfrage maintain that degree of composure?
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“How did Belfrage maintain that degree of composure?”
Stiff upper lip? Think of ‘Typical Englishman no.1′* at Anzio who’d wander around under fire by everything from machine guns to artillery, simply because that’s what one did.
*A British Officer named so by the Americans, can’t remember the reference, perhaps Ellis The Sharp End.
Yep – I suspect social expectations are part of the explanation. But not all – plenty of Brits gone into shock under fire.
I expect it’s a matter of basic nature of the person combined with their experiences and training. In other words, some people can just handle these things and some people can be trained for them. I suspect a good neurosurgeon could give you an explanation on what parts of the brain are stimulated and how we control them, but until they can remove fear it’s mostly academic.
Certainly but its one explanation. According to wiki Belfrage was a boarding school boy, Gresham’s to be precise. Obviously not conclusive but a possibility.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_School
I think Betz’s idea, of just doing what you know, also seems plausible. Again, plenty of evidence to suggest that in combat soldiers can just follow drills mechanically. In its own way a bomb is just an extreme of having someone mug in camera-shot whilst you’re filming or swear on the radio before the watershed. (Quite an extreme though!) Or again, of just doing the job so as not to let down others.
In Northern Ireland years ago there was a deluded American Marine over helping the IRA with their struggle (btw I’m ex Army Intelligence Corps)… he brought with him a .50 cal sniper rifle.
In Crossmaglen he would snipe at foot patrols wearing heavy armour – which obviously could not stop that round. The people out living their day to day lives would stop on hearing the shot, maybe even seeing a soldier go down. But once they realised it was a sniper, they would carry on – as obviously it was extremely targetted.
These were normal civilians who were used to bombings and shootings as part of the daily routine, so they knew when to run and when it was safe to just carry on. Hopefully those learnings will be forgotten in the future so they can have a normal, safe, peaceful life.
I wonder if the reason that an apparently normal guy reacted in this way is that this is actually the normal reaction. Things go bang, there is a short pause, and he goes back to what he was doing automatically. That’s the lifeline. Who knows, maybe ten minutes later he was shrieking and suckling a whisky bottle? But right after the event I wonder if just doing the job you are trained to do is not the most psychologically reassuring thing. I’m on my mobile at the moment so I can’t check the page but I recall a part in Dave Grossman’s book On Killing in which he described research done with Israeli soldiers immediately after combat who were asked what really scared them. Death? Savage injury? Capture? Not really. What most frightened them was the possibility of letting their mates down. I reckon what might have been on Belfrage’s mind, probably unconsciously, was something similar. Here I am doing my duty reading the war news to a nation in terrible peril I’d rather die than let the side down. There was a British soldier a year ago (or two?) who was decorated for throwing himself on a grenade. He’d tripped a booby trap, recognized that the rest of his patrol was going to get shredded for his mistake, so he lay on the thing. Miraculously survived.
David – yes, I like Grossman’s book too – fascinating stuff. Rosen on war and human nature is also gripping reading, and right now, I’m into Antonio Damasio on the relationship between emotion, social norms and cognition. For me, this is crucial stuff when thinking about power and force. You can’t have a decent theory of power without a decent understanding of the psychology that underpins it.
Why the H… is the sound “not available in (my) area”?? (France)
Laurent – sorry about that – doubtless it’s to do with the rights. It might be available elsewhere, I’ll have a look.
I can only second what Laurent wrote, that’s quite frustrating!
I think in part it might be due to the environment he was in: a city under aerial bombardment. It probaly wasn’t the first bomb he heard going off, and I doubt it was the last. I may have mentioned it before on this blog, but I encountered a similar situation in Rio De Janeiro: I lived just across the street from the entrance to a large favela that overlooks Ipanema and Copacabana (about the equivalent of Kensington and Chelsea). One day I walked out to find a number of military police across the road armed with assault rifles, bulletproof vests and helmets wth every intention of entering the favela. All around me, people were fleeing the crossroads in front of the entrance, and the moment a policeman stuck his head round the corner, some people began firing with small arms and a rather fierce gun battle ensued (the police were trying to suppress them so they could move the entire squad into firing positions). So far, as expected. However, I walked maybe 100 metres down the road away from the pitched battle, which was still completely audible and partially visible, and it may as well have not existed. People were going about their daily business, not even bothering to look up the street.
When I read literature on “insecurity”, “human security” and related concepts, I often consider this event, since such work is often written by people who have never had to live with or deal with such situations on a regular basis. I must admit that I became completely blase about hearing shots fired a block or two from my house to a degree that I never thought possible, and I only lived there five months.
Speaking of British stiff upper lip, this is what the Captain of a British Airways jumbo jet, flying over the Indian Ocean in 1982, told passengers when all four engines shut down due to volcanic ash:
“Good evening ladies and gentlemen. This is your captain speaking. We have a small problem. All four engines have stopped. We are all doing our damnedest to get them going again. I trust you are not in too much distress.”
Fortunately, they got all four engines re-started. 15 minutes later!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8622099.stm
Theo – that’s fab! There’s a bit in Tom Wolfe’s excellent The Right Stuff where he argues that airline pilots are all wannabe Chuck Yeagers, and have borrowed the laconic, reassuring southern drawl from him. Surely though British airline pilots model their delivery on the Dambusters?
Here’s an official perspective: http://www.livescience.com/health/Navy-SEALs-recognize-anger-100414.html
It’s a little different scenario but I think reflects the same fight or flight autonomic response system in action.
PB
I’m no expert but my take on this is as follows… Reading the news on national media is a stressful activity. It requires a specific personality type – the same type that will seek out careers as police officers, soldiers, criminals, actors and people that pursue extreme sports – skydivers, BASE jumpers, etc.
This personality type is sometimes described as an “Adrenaline Junkie”, but the truth is that “Endorphin Junkie” is a more accurate description (though not quite as snappy). Endorphin is an opiate that is released by the Pituitary Gland as a reward to the brain and body after an individual had successfully negotiated a dangerous situation. It is the brain’s way of telling the rest of the body: “Ok, well done. Now calm down, and feel good.”
Danger is not the only condition that will trigger an Endorphin release. But let us focus on this condition for the purpose of this response.
Endorphins are released as an activity by the OMC gene (cannot recall the full name and too lazy to Google it). In a study of BASE jumpers and skydivers, it was found that people that pursue these activities do not experience the “normal” Endorphin release process – and therefore seek to induce it artificially, either by adopting a particular career path, or lifestyle.
So, skydivers know that there is happiness at the end of a 60 second freefall. In a typical formation skydive, teams have a period of time to walk the dive through, practice it (called dirt dive), kit up, get checked out and then make their way to the jump-ship. The jump-ship will take off and climb to altitude (taking about 15 minutes to do so). In total, the team members will have to cope with ever increasing adrenaline levels for up to 90 minutes. In order to do this, they adopt techniques:
a) One such technique is to fool the brain into releasing Endorphins prematurely – the release is a primitive mechanism and cannot differentiate between reality and the imagined. One effective method is to daydream of the canopy deploying.
b) Another technique is to re-direct the source of fear – rather than dwelling on the possibility of a horrible accident, they concentrate on the complexity of the activity ahead, fooling the adrenaline release process into associating the cause of release with the things that can go wrong during the dive execution. The nett result is something called “performance anxiety” (as David Betz pointed out, “you don’t let your mates down”).
As a result, the brain and body will enter an unnatural state. The continuous fluctuation between “tense/relax” is the equivalent of taking stimulants and suppressants at the same time (skydivers call this “zoning”), leaving the skydiver in a heightened state of awareness, yet completely relaxed. When the team finally set up in the door, all of the members will focus solely on the next 60 seconds. Nothing else matters (I sometimes jump in temperatures of -15 degs Celsius or less, and in spite of wearing only a thin jumpsuit, I never experience any discomfort).
So… what happened to Bruce Belfrage on that night? My guess is that Bruce, as a veteran news reader, had developed techniques of dealing with the stresses of news reading. Prior to going on air, Bruce would have experienced the same re-directed performance anxiety and periodic premature Endorphin release that our skydivers experience in the lead-up to an exit at 13,000 feet. By the time that he was given the light, Bruce would have thought of nothing but the broadcast ahead… total focus – and a heightened state of awareness, while being completely relaxed.
And then there was a BANG! Bruce surfaced from his focus (the pause), his hyper-alert brain raced to make sense of the intrusion… And when it did, it rewarded Bruce with enough Endorphins to float a battleship (or to knock a morphine addict senseless). If it wasn’t for the blood-brain barrier, Bruce would have continued reading the news about flying purple hippos. As it was, he floated on a perfect cloud for the next 12 hours. He would’ve felt euphoric, life was perfect. He would’ve noticed colours, sounds and smells more accutely. His food and water would’ve tasted sweet (as if saccharine had been added). And he would’ve lost some of his feeling for the passage of time. Some guys have all the luck…
This is a great recording.. Can I check – is this the actual recording or a reconstruction with Bruce Belfrage?
Dee – it’s the real deal, I believe.