John Hersey. Hiroshima. London: Penguin, 2001 [1946]. One of the most important pieces of journalism of the 20th century; with a new final chapter written by Hersey four decades later. I’m teaching Hiroshima mon amour again this semester and so this might be useful preparation.
Robert A. Pape. Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996. One of those books everyone cites but I haven’t read yet. More operational analysis-type stuff than pure history. Concentrates on the Second World War (offensives against Germany and Japan), Korea, Vietnam and the first Gulf War, but has an interesting appendix discussing other attempts at coercive strategic bombing, from the Gotha raids on.
Harry Houdini is still famous as a magician and escapologist, but he was also a pioneer aviator. One hundred years ago today, on 18 March 1910, he carried out the first powered, controlled flight in Australia, at Diggers Rest, near Melbourne. This testimonial from witnesses appeared in the Melbourne Argus, 19 March 1910, 18:
To Whom It May Concern.
Diggers’ Rest,
near Melbourne,
18/3/1910.
We, the undersigned, do hereby testify to the fact that on the above date, about 8 o’clock a.m., we witnessed Harry Houdini in a Voisin biplane (a French heavier than air machine) make three successful flights of from 1min. to 3½min., the last flight being of the lastmentioned duration. In his various flights he reached an altitude of 100ft., and in his longest flight traversed a distance of more than two miles.
(Signed)
HAROLD J. JAGELMAN, Kogarah, N.S.W.
ROBERT HOWIE, Diggers’ Rest.
A. BRASSAC, Paris.
WALTER P. SMITH, 4 Blackwood-street, North Melbourne.
F. ENFIELD SMITHELLS, care of Union Bank, Melbourne.
RALPH C. BANKS, Melbourne, motor garage. FRANZ KUKOL, Vienna.
V. L. VICKERY, Highgate, England.
JOHN H. JORDAN, 11 Francis-street, Ascot-vale.
Houdini was on a tour of Australia, and the flight was undertaken to generate publicity for him. But it wasn’t undertaken on a whim: he bought and flew the Voisin in Germany the previous year, and had it crated up and shipped out to Australia.
This film shows Houdini on a later flight over Sydney, probably from Rosehill Racecourse. (My first YouTube upload; I took it from Hargrave.) After leaving Australia, he never flew again.
As with any aviation first, there are other claimants for the title of first to fly in Australia. Colin Defries, for example, demonstrated powered flight, but not controlled flight, in Sydney on 9 December 1909: he got up into the air but crashed it. Defries was British; the first Australian to fly (and in an Australian-built aeroplane too) was John Robertson Duigan, later in 1910. David Crotty, a curator at Museum Victoria, discusses some of these issues here; Scienceworks has just opened a new exhibition featuring some artifacts from Defries’ aeroplane (its engine was dumped into Port Phillip Bay to avoid import duty!)
I tend to favour Houdini’s claims, but that may be because Diggers Rest was my first hometown :) Celebrations are being held there this week — the Festival of Flight — including flying displays and (appropriately) magic shows.
I’ve finally run out of photos from last year’s trip to the UK — well, almost! Here are some miscellaneous shots which didn’t make it into the previous posts. Read the rest of this entry »
The following letter appeared in the Evening News, 13 March 1935, 6:
On the brick wall at the side of our street door can still be seen faintly two large letters, “P. P.,” which stood for Poplar Patrol. Every Friday night it was my job to collect 3d. from each house-hold that belonged to the “P.P.” This paid for rent, fire and refreshments for our small front room, where three men, each in his turn, used to sit up every night.
In the event of a raid, as soon as they got the first warning they used to run and knock on every door where there was “P.P.”
– From Mrs. G. Stillwell, 9, Finnymore-road, Dagenham, Essex
Air-raid alerts in the First World War were highly variable in both form and usefulness: depending on the time and the place, they might include Boy Scout buglers, police cyclists wearing signs saying ‘TAKE COVER’, or maroons which sounded something like bombs going off. Government authorities dithered over whether it was even advisable to give warnings, since they could lead to unnecessary anxiety and (perhaps more importantly) lost sleep. So it was possible for civilians to not know there was an air-raid alert on at all, particularly if they were already asleep. I assume this was the reason for the Poplar Patrol: any family concerned about caught in their beds when the Zeppelins or Gothas came could subscribe their 3d. a week and be assured of a loud knock on the door, whatever the government was or wasn’t doing that week.
I think Samuel Smiles would have approved of this form of community self-help. On the other hand, it might be hard luck for those who didn’t (or couldn’t) pay up, if a bomb fell in their street. I wonder if voluntary civil defence schemes like this created local schisms between the ins and the outs, as the more inclusive (but still mostly voluntary) air-raid precautions of the 1930s and 1940s did to a degree.
A minor question: why ‘Poplar’? Poplar and Dagenham are both in east London, but aren’t particularly close to each other. In fact, Dagenham wasn’t considered part of London until 1926. My guess is that it is a reference to the shocking tragedy of the Upper North Street School in Poplar, which was hit by a Gotha’s bomb on 13 June 1917. Eighteen children were killed, including sixteen 5- and 6-year olds. For a long time, the Poplar infants school symbolised the horrors of the new warfare, just as Guernica did after 1937.
On the last night of January 1916, a large force of seven Zeppelins crossed over the Wash into Norfolk, heading for the industrial cities of the Midlands. Unsure of their location, most of them instead dropped their bombs on relatively unimportant targets. But at least they got home okay. The defending aircraft of the RFC and RNAS had an awful night: 22 sorties resulted in six aircraft being written off, two squadron commanders killed and no contacts with the enemy.
Or at least … no confirmed contacts with the enemy. Four pilots did report seeing something, but they were well to the south of the probable Zeppelin flightpaths, over London and Essex, and so their reports were dismissed by those higher-up as mistaken identities, phantom airships. At 7.40pm, Lieutenant R. S. Maxwell saw ‘an artificial light’ north of his B.E.2c while 10000 feet above London, and gave chase before losing it in clouds. 2nd Lieutenant C. A. Ridley, another B.E.2c pilot, also saw a ‘moving light’ over London at about the same time, and so they may have actually seen each other. Later in the night, at around 9pm, Flight Sub-Lieutenant H. McClelland (also flying a B.E.2c) also thought he saw ‘a Zeppelin’ by searchlight over London.
Strangest of all was the report of Flight Sub-Lieutenant J. E. Morgan, an RNAS pilot who sortied in his B.E.2c from Rochford in Essex at about a quarter to nine. At 5000 feet, slightly above and to starboard, he spotted
a row of what appeared to be lighted windows which looked something like a railway carriage with the blinds drawn.
(This is apparently a quote from Morgan’s after-action report.) Thinking that this was a Zeppelin only a hundred feet away — and presumably having no time to maneuver for a better shot — he fired his Webley at it! It then seemed that ‘the lights alongside rose rapidly’ and disappeared. Morgan then started looking for somewhere to land: he saw some lights below which he thought was Southend Pier but turned out to be a Dutch steamer off Thameshaven. He managed to put down safely and flew back to Rochford the following day. Read the rest of this entry »
This is Warrington Crescent, Maida Vale, on the morning of 8 March 1918, after it had been hit by a 1-ton bomb dropped by a Giant bomber the night before — one of the largest to fall on London during the First World War and the most materially destructive. Twelve people were killed (including Lena Ford, who wrote the words to the song “Keep the home fires burning”). It was the first air raid to come in the dark of the moon and, fortunately, the second-last of the war. Read the rest of this entry »
Nick Smart. Neville Chamberlain. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2010. I’m not a big reader of biographies, partly because they often aren’t ‘historical’ enough and partly because they usually aren’t about the people I’m interested in. This one satisfies on both counts.
‘In the Next War’ was a short series of books published in Britain in 1938 and 1939, edited by Basil Liddell Hart. Unlike the earlier To-day and To-morrow books which attempted to predict things to come, these were much less eclectic and much more narrowly focused on future warfare: airpower; seapower; tanks, infantry and the Territorials; gas, civilians and propaganda. The actual arrival of the next war in 1939 seems to have cut the series short, as two of these were never published (those on infantry and, to my regret, civilians).
The authors were also drawn from a more select group, as they mostly seem to have had prior credentials in their subjects (not always the case with ‘To-day and To-morrow’, where the ability to come up with an interesting take seems to have been at least as important as expertise). J. M. Spaight was a prolific writer on airpower, and late of the Air Ministry; Jonathan Griffin had written a couple of widely read books on similar topics (and also editor of Essential News and, oddly enough, translator of Babar the Elephant) which suggests to me that his book on civilians would have focused on ARP. (Both Spaight and Griffin were now more-or-less sceptical of the knock-out blow paradigm.) Most of the other authors were or had been in the services, mostly in the Army. Henry Thuiller had been head of the wartime Trench Warfare Supply Department (which had a responsibility for manufacture of chemical weapons), while Eric Dorman-Smith was to have a controversial career in the next war, but in the last one had served with distinction and in the meantime had experience with the Army’s experiments with mechanised warfare. Sidney Rogerson was the author of Twelve Days, a popular memoir of the Somme, but I’m not sure what his qualifications for writing on propaganda were. Eric Sheppard had written a couple of books on the American Civil War, as well as what looks like a military history study guide for Sandhurst. Russell Grenfell had served in the Royal Navy and was a veteran of Jutland; he already had a number of books on naval matters to his credit (and in 1940 wrote under the pseudonym T 124, arguing that with adequate sea- and airpower, the capture of the Low Countries by a hostile nation was nothing to fear). I don’t know much about Green; as he had a DFC he must have been in the RFC/RAF but here he is writing about the Territorials, with which he must have had some connection. His volume was actually advertised in advance as being by the Deputy Director General of the Territorial Army, Sir John Brown, but perhaps he had to turn this down due to his official position.
From the little I’ve read of it, I think ‘In the Next War’ is an interesting series, so I’ve put up a short bibliography. It certainly presents a very different take on the future than that of ‘To-day and To-morrow’: rather than bright and exciting, it was going to be bloody. But that the future was still thought worth writing about still reflects a faith that there probably would, after all, be some sort of world worth to live and die for.
During the dark days of the Second World War, British children passed the time with marbles, hopscotch, tiddlywinks and, for a lucky few, a Monopoly set.
But over in Germany, the amusements were far less innocent.
In one version of bagatelle named Bombers over England, children as young as four were encouraged to blow up settlements by firing a spring-driven ball on to a board featuring a map of Britain and the tip of Northern Europe.
Players were awarded a maximum 100 points for landing on London, while Liverpool was worth 40.
British children of the time were playing marbles and hidding [sic] in air raid shelters.
But for youngsters under the Third Reich, this board game was invented to teach them the tactics of warfare – against a British foe.
The war time amusement, Adlers Luftverteidigungs spiel, which translates as the Eagle Air Defence Game, involves two or more players attacking enemy positions on a geographically illustrated board while defending friendly territory.
The supposed contrast between pacifist British kids and militarist German kids is as silly now as it was then. Apparently the Daily Mail hasn’t learned anything in the interim. (I checked to see if the same person was responsible for both, but the new article is credited to the improbably-named “DAILY MAIL REPORTER”.) The only difference is in the quality of the comments: last time they took the writer to task for his foolishness, now they’re almost spEak You’re bRanes-worthy.
No doubt there were differences between British and German games of the period — it’s hard to imagine any British equivalent of the 1936 game Juden Raus, where the aim is to force the Jews in your town to emigrate to Palestine — but simplistic dichotomies (as the Daily Mail seems to be fond of) are not going to help us understand what they were.
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