Monthly Archives: July 2005

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I haven't yet been to the UK National Archives (well, I haven't been to the UK at all yet ...) but I probably will at some point for the PhD, and I have ordered documents from them before. So it's more than a little disturbing to learn via Schneier on Security via Patahistory that forged documents have been found in the archives, which were used to support a claim that British intelligence murdered Heinrich Himmler in 1945. It's true that historians are routinely suspicious of their primary sources, but that doesn't usually extend to being suspicious of their being primary sources at all! At least the forgery was detected, and it's unlikely anyone would care enough about my areas of interest for this to be a big problem for me.

There's a terse note confirming this at the National Archives.

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I've (mostly) finished a big update to my other site, scareships, which is about the British phantom airship scares of 1909 and 1912-3 - essentially, Edwardian UFO waves. To my mind, the fact that people (including, for a time, newspaper editors) believed that German zeppelins were buzzing their country - when in fact they weren't - shows that fear of airpower (in this case, espionage rather than bombing) came early to Britain. But I've created the site so that anyone interested can learn about the sightings, read the primary sources and form their own opinions about what was going on.

Anyway, I have completed entering summaries of all the phantom airship sightings I found while researching my 4th year thesis, 135 in all, using WordPress as a simple content management system. There's a bit of tidying up to do first, and then the next step will be to finish scanning in and uploading all the primary sources (newspaper articles), which may take some time ...

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This happened a week ago, but it's rather cool - a re-enactment of the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic by the British airmen Alcock and Brown in June 1919. They used a modified Vickers Vimy, a two-engined aircraft designed for bombing German cities. The Vimy was never used in this role, but a flight of just over 3000 km surely proved its potential - even if Brown had to keep climbing out onto the wings to remove ice from the engines! Also of note is that in completing the flight, they won the last of the Daily Mail's aviation prizes designed to promote innovation and airmindedness, a handsome £10000 - Lord Northcliffe's final legacy to aviation. (Earlier prizes included £1000 for the first aerial crossing of the English Channel, which was won by Louis Bleriot in 1909; the modern Ansari X-Prize is an astronautical version of the same idea.) The re-enactment used a beautiful replica Vimy.

1919 was a busy year for trans-Atlantic flights (compared to all the previous years, anyway). Alcock and Brown's flight overshadows the crossing made by the US Navy's NX-4 flying boat the previous month (which wasn't non-stop, and took 19 days), as well as the Royal Navy airship R34's double crossing the following month (ie there and back again). But then Alcock and Brown are themselves overshadowed by Lindbergh's non-stop flight from New York to Paris in 1927, admittedly a much longer distance of 5800 km.

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But of course it shouldn't have to. It was a pointless and tragic waste of human life.

References to London's stoicism during the Blitz are all over the place: former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani and Australian Labor Party foreign affairs spokesman Kevin Rudd ("British bulldog spirit" was how he phrased it on the radio this morning), who both happened to be in London at the time of the attacks; newspaper articles such as one from the Mirror (entitled "We can take it" and full of allusions to the Blitz); Cliopatria's Alan Allport, who simply and movingly posted the words to Noel Coward's 1941 song "London Pride".

While comparing the terrorist attacks to the Blitz is obvious and perhaps, in some places, trite, it's not misplaced. Over four hundred Londoners were killed on the first Luftwaffe attacks on the city alone, and yet morale did not break (although it was not always as strong as the later myth made out) - and that's despite the attacks being repeated night after night and with the threat of invasion looming, and bereft of great power allies. Why do the terrorists think they will be able to achieve what the Luftwaffe (or, for that matter, the 9-11 hijackers) could not? Cities are a lot more resilient than airpower strategists then or terrorists now seem to think.

On the other hand, in 1940 Britons were mostly united against a common enemy; I don't think that's the case today. Solidarity in the face of terror is surely easier to maintain when it was present in the first place. Also, it must be stressed that unpredictability dramatically enhances terror bombing: the V2 rockets shook Londoners more than the earlier Blitz did, partly because death could and did rain from the sky with little or no warning, an effect terrorists exploit. Another difference between then and now is that during the Blitz, the Tube was a symbol of security, so much so that authorities had to relent in the public's use of them as air-raid shelters. Today, they are scenes of terror. Where will the Londoners of 2005 find refuge?

Although I probably won't be researching the Blitz period per se, I can recommend a couple of related books, particularly dealing with the way the 'myth' of the Blitz was formed and how it has been used since the war (more in the sense of a powerful national story than something that didn't happen the way everyone thinks it did - though there's certainly some of that too): Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991) and more broadly, Mark Connelly, We Can Take It! Britain and the Memory of the Second World War (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2004). I may write a bit about these books in future.

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Leo Amery was a long-serving Conservative MP, minister, imperialist and close contemporary (though not, I think, a close friend) of Winston Churchill's - they were at Harrow together, where at their first meeting the future staunch foe of Nazi oppression pushed the smaller boy into the school pool. For some reason, he seems to pop up in many of my readings on diverse topics and here he is again, in 1904:

Sea power alone, if it is not based on great industry, and has not a great population behind it, is too weak for offence to really maintain itself in the world struggle ... both the sea and the railway are going in the future ... to be supplemented by the air as a means of locomotion, and when we come to that ... the successful powers will be those who have the greatest industrial base. It will not matter whether they are in the centre of a continent or on an island; those people who have the industrial power and the power of invention and of science will be able to defeat all others.

Comments on H. J. Mackinder, "The geographical pivot of history", Geographical Journal xxiii, no. 4 (April 1904); quoted in Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001 [1976]), 184 (emphasis in Kennedy).

This was quite farsighted of Amery. Not only was he quite right about the necessity for industrial power, and about the weakness of naval power (not likely to be a popular point of view during the twilight of the Pax Britannica), but he also pointed to the future importance of aviation as a form of transport a mere four months after Kitty Hawk (which in any case was barely reported in the British press). Some day I must read up on Amery.

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I've just put in a massive order at Abebooks (which links the catalogues of many secondhand booksellers from around the world). This is not something I will be able to afford to do often, but at the moment I am still working full-time so it is sort of affordable. One thing I've found out that is that even if you choose the slower, cheaper postage option, it usually doesn't take anything like the estimated 21-36 (or more) working days to get to Australia, but more like a week or two - so it's not really worth going for the faster, more expensive postage unless you really, really needed it yesterday.

Most of the books are primary sources, particularly British novels from the interwar period featuring predictions of massed air raids on cities, ranging from the relatively well known (eg Nevil Shute's What Happened to the Corbetts (1939), Harold Nicolson's Public Faces (1932)) to the delightfully obscure (eg Bernard Newman's Armoured Doves: A Peace Novel (1931), or Leslie Pollard's Menace: A Novel of the Near Future (1935). There are also some non-fictional works, such as L. E. O. Charlton's The Next War (1937), that I missed in an earlier Abebooks order a few months ago. I already have a decent pre-WWI collection, but I splashed out on R. P. Hearne's Aerial Warfare (1909), an early and important work (a bit of a luxury as the State Library has it -- but I found a surprisingly cheap copy so I couldn't resist!)

Also I've ordered some of the more important secondary sources for my area - not least so I don't have to keep constantly renewing or re-borrowing them from the library over the next three years! These include Malcolm Smith's British Air Strategy between the Wars, and David Edgerton's England and the Aeroplane. Finally, to add a comparative dimension, I picked up Peter Fritzsche's A Nation of Flyers and Joseph Corn's The Winged Gospel, classics on airmindedness in Germany and the USA respectively.