Vera Lynn's wartime role in lifting morale helped to keep the Nazis at bay

Vera Lynn hands out cups of tea to servicemen - Keystone/Hulton Archive
Vera Lynn hands out cups of tea to servicemen - Keystone/Hulton Archive

“In war,” Napoleon wrote, “morale is three times more important than physical power.” The advantage of having high levels in wartime has long been acknowledged, just as much as the profound dangers that come from demoralisation, and it is for that reason that Dame Vera Lynn deserves to be considered as a serious and substantial figure in British history. Her contribution to maintaining high morale during the Second World War, but particularly during the Blitz, makes her as important a figure in our national story as some of the generals and admirals in that conflict.

Her immense popularity derived not just from her blonde good looks, her good nature, her beautiful singing voice, and her work for BBC’s Empire Entertainment Unit, which beamed her songs around the world, but primarily from those songs' cheery, optimistic message, their occasional unabashed sentimentality, and their capacity to sum up in a few phrases what Britons were fighting for. She didn’t know where or when she would see her man again, but she knew for certain that they would meet "some sunny day".

The Queen’s clear reference to perhaps Vera Lynn’s best known song, We’ll Meet Again, in her broadcast at the beginning of the lockdown, especially coming from someone who herself served in the Auxiliary Territorial Service during the war, was a conscious linking of the refusal to be demoralised in the Second World War with the travails of the present day. As such, it was a reminder of the sheer capacity of optimism to genuinely make things better, however little the daily news might engender it.

Good news was certainly in short supply in the dark days of 1940 and 1941 when Vera Lynn sang for the BBC’s musical request programme in London, which was then broadcast to British troops in the Mediterranean and Middle East via a transmitter in Gibraltar. The evacuation from Dunkirk was followed closely by the Battle of Britain and threat of invasion, and then the German aerial bombardment of British cities and towns, which was to kill over 58,000 civilians. With one country after another falling to the German onslaught, food shortages, and the genuine threat of defeat, the struggle against national demoralisation was one of life and death.

Vera Lynn was not an ethereal beauty of the Marlene Dietrich film-star kind, whom the ordinary squaddie could never dream of meeting or stepping out with. Instead, hers was the girl-next-door kind of prettiness that allowed soldiers, sailors and airmen to fall in love with her. “Carefully presented as a wholesome, kind ‘radio girlfriend’,” concludes Daniel Todman’s recent history Britain’s War, “her repeated assurances that everyone in Blighty was thinking of their menfolk and couldn’t wait for them to return, went down very well with the troops.” It was just what they wanted and needed to hear, often serving thousands of miles away from home.

Dame Vera Lynn in a studio portrait - Denis De Marney/Hulton Archive
Dame Vera Lynn in a studio portrait - Denis De Marney/Hulton Archive

In 1942, Lynn sang for a BBC programme Shipmates Ashore, which was a great popular success and ran for four years. It featured messages from seamen’s wives and families. That year, now that she had become the almost-official ‘forces’ sweetheart’, she was given many more opportunities to raise morale over the airwaves, yet the BBC worried that her flagship broadcast, Sincerely Yours – Vera Lynn, was too “sloppy”, and not upbeat and “virile” enough. “The sentimentality that made Lynn such a hit," records Todman, "was just the sort of thing that culturally conservative critics fretted was undermining morale.”

Yet they found that she was too popular to ban – and fortunately so, for in fact her lyrics were far more likely to induce patriotism than any number of the marching bands and choral airs with which the BBC panjandrums wanted to replace her. In The White Cliffs of Dover – itself a title redolent of patriotism – she sang, “I'll never forget the people I met braving those angry skies/ I remember well as the shadows fell, the light of hope in their eyes.” There’ll Always Be an England could hardly have been more patriotic, and A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square was redolent of central London. (She released her last single, I Love This Land, in 1982 to mark the British victory in the Falklands.)

Dame Vera Lynn performing at a concert in Hyde Park in 1995 - Kieran Doherty/Reuters
Dame Vera Lynn performing at a concert in Hyde Park in 1995 - Kieran Doherty/Reuters

In person, Dame Vera was charm personified, with none of the airs that stars can sometimes give themselves over many decades of worldly success. She told me at a party a few years ago, when she was 99, that she was continually astonished at the emotion that her wartime songs could still evoke in people of all ages, including those who were not born until decades after it ended. She also always paid full tribute to the genius of her songwriters and lyricists.

Concepts like morale are notoriously unquantifiable. Had Britain’s spirit been broken by the constant nights of heavy bombing, or later in the war by the terrifying V-1 and V-2 bombs, it was not impossible that the Nazis might have won the war. That the British people kept their spirits up was down to many factors, but one of them was undeniably the brave, patriotic and lovely Dame Vera Lynn.

Andrew Roberts is author of Churchill: Walking with Destiny (Penguin). £10.99 from Telegraph Books