This year, because I don’t have enough to do I’ve joined the editorial collective of the Melbourne Historical Journal. Here’s the call for papers for Volume 36:

Call for Papers

Submissions Due: 1st June 2008

Published since 1961, Melbourne Historical Journal (MHJ) is a refereed journal for the publication of Australian and Aotearoa New Zealand postgraduate work in history. It is open to new approaches and aims to present original postgraduate work to a wide and responsive readership.

Journal articles should be between 5000-7000 words and constitute an original piece of research. Manuscripts should not be under review or scheduled for publication by any other journal, and should be substantially different from other published work. The collective asks that all manuscripts conform to the MHJ style guide.

Articles submitted for publication pass through a two-stage process of review. First, all articles are read by the collective, which decides whether or not to send the article to be refereed. Then articles are sent to two referees who are experts in the relevant field of historical inquiry. If both referees agree that the article is of a standard worthy of publication then the article is accepted.

Articles and queries may be submitted to MHJ via email at mhj@unimelb.edu.au.

Admittedly, not very much!

I’m giving a talk at 4pm, next Friday, 16 May 2008, in the Fritz Loewe Theatre at the School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne. The title is “Facing Armageddon: Britain and the Bomber, 1908-1941″ and it will be a broad overview of my thesis topic. It should be fun, for me at least — it’s the department where I’ve worked for many years as the IT manager, so it will nice (and perhaps challenging) to try to explain to all the geologists and climatologists exactly what it is I’ve been doing these past few years. Thanks to Malek Ghantous of the Earth Sciences Postgraduate Group for the invite and for organising this — it’s the first, and quite possibly the last, time a poster has been made to advertise a talk I’ve given!

If anybody local has nothing better to do on a Friday afternoon, you’re more than welcome to attend the talk (and enjoy the refreshments afterwards). Perhaps just drop me a line first, though, so we can anticipate any massive surge of interest (ha!) There’s a map showing where Earth Sciences is after the jump. (The lecture theatre is on the 2nd floor, right near the main entrance, just past the disused theremin/mural …)
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A GIANT OF THE AIR. A HANDLEY-PAGE FOUR-ENGINED BIPLANE.

A Handley Page V/1500, the Kabul bomber. Below is (I think) a S.E.5a.

Image source: Harry Golding, ed., The Wonder Book of Aircraft for Boys and Girls (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1919), frontispiece. Painting by Geoffrey Watson.

I’m currently looking at the air menace as portrayed in the press during the Sudeten crisis in late September-early October 1938. The interesting thing is that there isn’t much, at least not directly. There was very little scaremongering material of the type so prevalent in 1934-5, or even earlier in 1938, for example, even in the Daily Mail. Rarely does anyone actually come out and say something along the lines of ‘The danger is that Germany will attempt an aerial knock-out blow against London’. I’d guess is this is at least partly due to self-restraint on the part of editors: it would be grossly irresponsible to run headlines playing up the possibility that bombs were about to start falling on British cities, particularly given that panic was itself one of the major concerns.

But, indirectly, the shadow of the bomber was definitely there. The most obvious indication is in the amount of space devoted to discussions of air raid precautions — distribution of gas masks, digging of trenches in parks, ads for gas-proofing material, plans for the evacuation of children, emergency council meetings to discuss what to do about the fact they’d done nothing in the way of ARP for the last two years … It would have been pretty clear to most readers what all this meant, especially after the horrors of bombing in Spain and China earlier in the year were recalled.

The other signifier is the end of the world. Or, rather, talk about the end of European civilisation, the abyss towards which we are all sliding, the imminence of a second dark ages. Just taking the New Statesman: on 10 September 1938, a leader states that a war would stop Germany but ‘would probably also end European civilisation’; a letter by Paul Goulding similarly refers to the ‘breakdown of what remains of European civilisation’ if war comes; another from V. Gordon Childe (the famous archaeologist) thought that war ‘must, in fact, destroy all that in Britain still deserves the name civilisation’, though he was more concerned that Britain was going to reject Soviet aid in order to help the Fascists dismember Czechoslovakia; and L. C. Knights urged that international and social reconstruction be undertaken on the basis of humane (and socialist) values, otherwise ‘the alternative is to wait in despairing fatalism for the end of our civilisation’.¹ These sorts of sentiments are more common from the left than the right, but not exclusively so.

The problem is, though, that these statements are usually ambiguous. Obviously, my first impulse is to interpret these as references to the devastation caused by massive aerial bombardments. But they could also refer to the effects of a major land war too, and all its consequences — think of a greater Great War, plus fascism and bolshevism, and with all of the advances in military technology since 1918 thrown in. Come to think of it, that’s just the Second World War, really, which did in fact cause far more devastation than did the first (more than three times the total deaths worldwide, for example). Such a war could conceivably stretch the fabric of European society to the breaking point. And so it could be that this is what was meant by the end of civilisation.² Or, that the mobilisation of society for total war, and the loss of freedoms that went with that, would destroy it from within.

I tend to doubt this is so in most cases, because when such comments are occasionally elaborated upon, they tend to reveal air-mindedness. For example, Gordon Childe went on to speculate whether pro-appeasement intellectuals might come to wonder if ‘the bombed ruins of London and Berlin would not have been better than the skeleton of a civilisation condemned to stagnation condemned to stagnation by the denial of free enquiry’.³ And after the crisis had passed, it seems that people felt a little freer to say exactly what it was that they feared. Speaking in the House of Commons after the Munich Agreement, Chamberlain said that the government had ’saved Czecho-Slovakia from destruction and Europe from Armageddon’. Earlier, he had explained what modern war meant:

When war starts to-day, from the very first hour, before any professional soldier, sailor, or airman had been touched, it would strike the workman, the clerk, the man in the street or in the bus, and their wives and children in their homes — people burrowing underground to escape from poison gas, filled with dread of what might happen to them or those dear to them, or leaving them with maimed fathers and mothers.⁴

So, I suppose what I’m arguing is that, during the Sudeten crisis, there was a reluctance to talk about that which was most feared, at least in print, just when it seemed imminent. Which is probably very human.

1. New Statesman, 10 September 1938, 366; 17 September 1938, 412; 24 September 1938, 451; 8 October 1938, 525.
2. After all, Salisbury made similar forecasts four decades earlier, without even mentioning aircraft.
3. New Statesman, 24 September 1938, 452.
4. Manchester Guardian, 7 October 1938, p. 4.

Air Raid Precautions. Stroud: Tempus, 2007. Another one of those books where the publishers have obviously asked themselves, Who’d buy this book? and answered, Well, there’s that Airminded bloke — that’s one copy at least. A collection of facsimile reprints of various Home Office/Lord Privy Seal’s Office ARP booklets and leaflets: The Protection of Your Home Against Air Raids (1938); ARP Handbook No. 1, Personal Protection Against Gas (1938); Public Information Leaflets 1 through 4, Some Things You Should Know If War Should Come, Masking Your Windows, Evacuation Why and How? and Your Food in War-time (all 1939); Organization of the Air Raid Wardens’ Service (1939?); and Inspection and Repair of Respirators and Oilskin Clothing (1940?).

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

I stumbled across this by accident: a pilot digitisation of Hansard, funded and operated by Parliament. What an excellent thing! It’s functional, but based only on a subset of 20th-century Hansard material:

What’s on this site? This site is generated from a sample of information from Hansard, the Official Report of Parliament. It is not a complete nor an official record. Material from this site should not be used as a reference to or cited as Hansard. The material on this site cannot be held to be authoritative.

This warning should be heeded — it’s only a prototype and should not be relied upon for any purpose. It’s easy to find omissions, such as Baldwin’s ‘the bomber will always get through’ speech, even though there’s quite a number of entries for the day in question. The text itself appears remarkably uncorrupt, given the volume of data that’s been OCRed: I’ve only found a few errors (most amusing one: the Marquees of Londonderry — I guess it must rain there a lot). There are certainly a few minor problems — for example, once I managed to get the search engine to tell me that a debate in 1958 happened earlier than one in 1944. At present there’s no disambiguation between different people with the same name — so the earliest utterance recorded for Mr. Winston Churchill is on 19 March 1941, and the latest on 11 March 1997 — nor combinations between (possibly) the same person with different names — such as Churchill, Mr. Churchill, Mr. Churchill (by private notice), Mr. Churchill (Stretford) and so on. It’s all experimental at this stage, so these issues will presumably be addressed in future. (LibraryThing lets its users do a lot of the work for similar problems, but I doubt a HansardThing would ever reach the critical mass needed for that to work.)
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A comment from Melissa got me thinking about gender and the knock-out blow, which is admittedly not something I do very often. There are certainly a number of ways into this subject. The most obvious would be to look at the fact that airpower would bring war onto British soil for the first time since at least Culloden (ok, or since the Great War, if you want to be pedantic), thus threatening British women (and children) directly and on a large scale. Pointing this out was a powerful argument in favour of taking the threat of bombing seriously, and was widely deployed. So one could look at that construction. Or there’s the gendered language which was occasionally used to describe aerial warfare, such as Trenchard’s analogy of a football match, with victory going to the side which struck hardest and in their manly way made the defenders ’squeal’ first. Very playing-fields-of-Eton.

Another way would be the simple one of looking at what men and women wrote about the knock-out blow, and how it might have differed in style, content and reception. Certainly most of the writers on the subject were men, which is to be expected since only men had experience of air combat and so could plausibly present themselves as experts. But, particularly from the 1930s, a number of women writers did venture their opinions on the coming era of air war, generally from the pacifist viewpoint: H. M. Swanwick, Barbra Donington (with her husband, Robert), Sarah Campion, and of course Vera Brittain. (A notable non-pacifist, was the famous aviatrix Amy Johnson who wrote for the bellicose Daily Mail in the mid-1930s.) However, male writers could be dismissive of their arguments in highly gendered terms, when they bothered to note them at all. For example, W. Horsfall Carter wrote a pamphlet entitled Peace Through Police to rebut Swanwick’s works Frankenstein and his Monster: Aviation for World Service and New Wars for Old (both 1934). He thought that her attack on the idea of an international air force had ‘all the misdirected fervour of a militant suffragette’ and referred to her as a ’sentimentalist’.¹

All honour to the pacifists whose consuming idealism and “conscience” impels them to denounce war and all its works. But when the heart is stronger than the head the result is a peace babel totally ineffective for the realistic business of peacemaking.²

Read: don’t you worry your pretty little head about it, let us hard-headed menfolk sort things out!

But there was one woman who was not so easily dismissed, for she wrote the most influential attack upon the very idea of the overwhelming superiority of the bomber to be written in the interwar period. The Great Delusion: A Study of Aircraft in Peace and War was published in 1927, inspired at least one book-length rebuttal (Murray F. Sueter’s Airmen or Noahs: Fair Play for our Airmen; The Great “Neon” Air Myth Exposed, 1928), and was still being cited as a prime example of airpower scepticism over a decade later. Its author was pseudonymous. Who was Neon?³
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1. W. Horsfall Carter, Peace Through Police (London: New Commonwealth, 1934), 6.
2. Ibid., 3.
3. She also wrote at least one article: Neon, “The future of aerial transport”, Atlantic Monthly, January 1928, also in a sceptical vein.

Source: Department of Veterans’ Affairs, Australia.

I’ll be giving a talk entitled “From Darfur to London: P. R. C. Groves and the construction of aerial apocalypse, 1916-1922”, at the Australian Historical Association’s Biennial Conference, Locating History, 7-10 July 2008, which is conveniently being held at the University of Melbourne. Here’s the abstract:

The idea that cities could be shattered and wars won by aerial bombardment in a so-called ‘knock-out blow’ was embryonic before the Great War. After the war, such exaggerated theories became an orthodoxy among airpower theorists and, by the 1930s, among the wider British public — an important factor underlying support for pacifism, appeasement and collective security up to the Munich crisis. But the war itself was crucial to both the formulation and the propagation of the theory of the knock-out blow.

Most responsible for promoting this idea of the knock-out blow to a wider audience was General P. R. C. Groves, a veteran of both aerial and bureaucratic warfare: the British equivalent of Douhet and Mitchell. Convinced that Britain’s air defences were being dangerously neglected, he retired from the RAF in 1922 and waged a highly-visible press campaign on the issue. In so doing, Groves relied upon and popularised the theory of the knock-out blow, drawing on his experiences in using airpower against rebellion in Darfur, in trying to win the war in France, and in trying to suppress a German resurgence after 1918 — and thereby, ironically, complicated the task of dealing with Germany after 1933.

I wrote that a few months ago, and some of it strikes me as a bit strange now, but I doubt that anyone is going to be tracking how rigorously I adhere to my abstract!

I’m currently slated to talk just after lunch on the first day. I’ve never been before, but it must be Australia’s biggest history conference, with twelve parallel streams. One of these is a war and society-type stream, so I should be right — although the title that’s intriguing me the most is from one of the others: Erin Ihde’s “Do Not Panic: Hawkwind, the Cold War and ‘the Imagination of Disaster’”! I see that fellow bloggers Megan Sheehy and Melissa Bellanta will be giving papers too.

Should be fun.

This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.

The last few hours of daylight of my last day in Rome were upon me. So, sadly, I couldn’t linger in the forum — there was still so much to see!
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