Monthly Archives: November 2005

6 Comments

Trench Fever reports on a seminar by Stefan Goebel on the post-war memorialisation of Coventry's bombing in 1940. Hence today's word for the day: ''coventrate''. It's a good example of a word or phrase coined in a mean-spirited way (in this case, by the Germans), but which ends up being adopted by those whom it was meant to spite - like ''big bang'' or ''queer''. By the end of the war, it was the Germans who were themselves being coventrated.

coventrate, v. (temporary.) To bomb intensively; to devastate sections of (a city) by concentrated bombing, such as that inflicted on Coventry, Warwickshire, in November 1940. So coventrating vbl. n.; coventration.
1940 Hutchinson's Pict. Hist. War 2 Oct.-26 Nov. 221 German bombers made prolonged mass attacks..on Coventry... And..they invented the verb 'to coventrate' to describe the indiscriminate mass murder of civilians. 1940 New Statesman 21 Dec. 647 The fact was that 'Coventrating' meant that the nerves and sinews and muscles of local government were wrenched and lacerated. 1942 L. E. O. CHARLTON Britain at War 22 Possibility of another 'coventration' of a manufacturing centre. 1944 H. HAWTON Night Bombing viii. 126 It was the Germans themselves who had coined so gloatingly the verb 'to coventrate'.

Source: OED. (Nice to see Charlton getting a guernsey!)

I doubt that the word was used much after 1945, though I would be interested to hear otherwise! Here is one example from that year, from a newspaper article about rugby union teams trying to get back on their feet after the war, which suggests that it was still then regarded as unfamiliar (as it is in quotes - so are all the OED cites, for that matter).

In the Midlands, too, Coventry not only refused to be ''Coventrated'' by the enemy; they retained most of their veterans and, both at home and abroad - meaning London - did much to maintain the old standards of Midland forward play.

Source: The Times, 18 September 1945, p. 8.

Ann Curthoys and John Docker. Is History Fiction? Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006.Sic. On truth in history; seems to be attempting a third way between, or at least taking the good bits from both postmodernism and empiricism. My glib answer to the question in the title would be, not if you're doing it right! (Which probably tells you where my sympathies lie.)

Philip Eklund. Airships at War 1914-1941. Sierra Madre Games, 2003. Not a book but a wargame, simulating a Zeppelin mission in the First World War or in a hypothetical war between the US and Japan (including the American flying aircraft carriers Macon and Akron). There seems to be a lot of info packed into this game: it even simulates things like onboard sailmakers (for repairing tears in the hydrogen cells), and tossing the wireless overboard in order to gain lift! I'll write a bit more about this game when I have had a chance to play it; for now here's the company's product page for a bit more information. (I'm really annoyed to see that the game listed there now has updated rules and components compared to the one I ordered a whole week ago. They could have at least mentioned the fact that an update was due soon!)

Philip Eklund. Riesenflugzeugabteilungen. Sierra Madre Games, 1997. An expansion for Airships at War which features the giant German, Italian and Russian bombers of WWI. Product page. (Again, a newer edition than the one I've just received ...)

Jay Winter and Antoine Prost. The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Writing (and to a lesser degree, filming) the Great War across time and space (mainly Britain, France and Germany). The structure looks fruitful: it slices the narrative by 'experience' (eg soldiers, workers, civilians).

As promised, here are a couple of captures from the 1939 propaganda film The Lion Has Wings, which dramatised the RAF attack on Wilhelmshaven of 4 September 1939. The actual results of the raid were meagre; one Blenheim crashed into the fo'c'sle of the cruiser Emden, while the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer was hit by bombs which failed to explode. Below are the corresponding scenes from the film (obviously model shots), which are nothing like what actually happened - it's pretty clear that the film makers were using their dramatic license to the full!

The first successful attack, by implication upon a pocket battleship:

The Lion Has Wings

The second attack, on what looks like a submarine:


The Lion Has Wings

Image source: Adrian Brunel, Brian Desmond Hurst, and Michael Powell, dirs. [The] Lion has Wings. Magna Pacific, 2002 [1939].

7 Comments

While looking at the American journalist William Shirer's Berlin Diary for my earlier post on the wooden bomb tale, I was intrigued to see that immediately after the start of war in September 1939 he simultaneously expected, hoped and feared that there would be an immediate, large-scale air attack on Berlin, by either Poland or Britain and France. This is interesting for two reasons. Firstly, it shows that the idea that war would begin with an aerial knock-out blow was widely-shared and not confined to Britain. (Clearly, Shirer initially believed that the psychological strain of air-raid alerts alone would be tremendous - though soon enough he was sleeping through them!) Secondly, that Shirer could believe that Britain's air force (not to mention Poland's!) was capable of attacking Berlin in force at this stage suggests that it was extremely difficult for even well-informed civilians to form accurate perceptions of the relative strengths and abilities of air forces (indeed, this was a hard enough task for professionals). The bombers should always get through - so where were they? His exasperation at their absence (as well as the inaction on the Western Front) shows through in the later entries. Shirer was apparently unaware that there was virtually nothing that Allied air forces could do in practical terms, save for brave but ineffectual gestures like the Wilhemshaven raid or leaflet drops over the Ruhr region. He does show more awareness that Britain and France may also have been constrained by their own dread of what German bombers would do to them (as Goering indeed threatened).

I've excerpted the relevant parts of Shirer's early diary below; the source is William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent, 1934-1941 (Melbourne: George Jaboor, 1942), 160-8.

1 September 1939:

Almost through our first black-out ... We had our first air-raid alarm at seven p.m. ... The lights went out, and all the German employees grabbed their gas-masks and, not a little frightened, rushed for the shelter ... No planes came over. With the English and French in, it may be different to-morrow. I shall then be in the pleasant predicament of hoping they bomb the hell out of this town without getting me. The ugly shrill of the sirens, the rushing to a cellar with your gas-mask (if you have one), the utter darkness of the night - how will human nerves stand that for long? ... Curious that not a single Polish bomber got through to-night. But will it be the same with the British and French?

2 September:

Hitler has cabled Roosevelt he will not bomb open towns if the others don't. No air-raid to-night. Where are the Poles?

3 September:

But the war has seemed a bit far away to them [the Berliners] - two moonlight nights and not a single Polish plane over Berlin to bring destruction - and the papers saying ... that the Polish air force has been destroyed ... Third night of the black-out. No bombs, though we rather expected the British and French.

4 September:

After midnight and no air-raid, even with the British and French in the war. Can it be that in this new World War they're not going to bomb the big cities, the capitals, the civilians, the women and children at home, after all? The people here breathing easier already. They didn't sleep much the first couple of nights ... The faces of the Germans when word came in late to-night that the British had bombed Cuxhaven and Wilhelmshaven for the first time! This was bringing the war home, and nobody seemed to like it.

9 September:

The second air-raid alarm of the war at four a.m. to-day, but I did not hear it, being engulfed in my first good night's sleep in ages ... Göring broadcast to-day ... he threatened terrible revenge if the British and French bombed Germany.

10 September:

One week after the Anglo-French declaration of a state of war the average German is beginning to wonder if it's a world war after all ... The British, it is true, sent over twenty-five planes to bomb Wilhelmshaven. But if it is war, why only twenty-five? And if it is war, why only a few leaflets over the Rhineland? The industrial heart of Germany lies along the Rhine close to France ... Yet not a bomb has fallen on a Rhineland factory. Is that war? they ask. The long faces I saw a week ago to-day are not so long this Sunday.

14 September:

All of us here still baffled by the inaction of Britain and France.

'Is that war?' It clearly wasn't the war they were expecting.

53 Comments

As befits a self-respecting Unix geek, I've pretty much finally decided that I will write my thesis in LaTeX, and not in Word (which is what I have been using for the last few years). I am a bit nervous about this. Most historians, I'm sure, have never heard of it, and indeed the typical LaTeX user would be working in the sciences (which is where I first learned to use it, many moons ago; among other things, it's great for equations). There's not a lot of support for using LaTeX in the humanities.Though there are in fact some users in the humanities, as the comments to this Crooked Timber post show. The Astrophysical Journal may prefer papers to be submitted in LaTeX format, but the Journal of British Studies probably wouldn't have any idea as to what to do with such a beast.Though actually, it seems that most history journals only accept paper manuscripts. How quaint! Since none of my colleagues will know how to use LaTeX, it's next to useless for any collaborative work. But all that is get-around-able, because I can switch back to Word if need be. The big problem, though, is bibliographical management. EndNote can't work with LaTeX in the same way as it does with Word. That means I either enter and format all citations by hand (urk), or use BibTeX-oriented software. Which is fine ... except if I ever decide I want to go back to Word/EndNote, either temporarily or permanently, then my bibliography will be in BibTeX, which of course Word can't handle. It is possible to convert from EndNote to BibTeX and vice versa, in theory, but in my experience this isn't very unreliable. EndNote can export directly to BibTeX, but the resulting file isn't readable; I had better luck exporting to RefMan (RIS) format instead. Unfortunately, for some reason this abbreviates authors' first names to just their initial, so I will have to key those in by hand.

So much for the pain. What's the pleasure? Well, for one thing, the result looks so much better than Word. It is very easy to produce a beautiful document in LaTeX. It's the kerning ... the justification ... it's just the vibe. More importantly, LaTeX separates form from content. When writing in Word, I find that I get hung up on how the thing looks, and distracted by trying to massage its appearance. In LaTeX, you just write, and worry about that stuff later. And when producing large and complex documents (like a PhD thesis!), LaTeX comes into its own: when you do need it, you have the power to specify exactly where to place that table on the page - whereas Word will put it wherever it thinks best and you have little say in the matter. In fact, LaTeX can be (and is) used to typeset entire books. The other main advantage as I see it is that LaTeX files are just plain text files, where Word uses a binary format. Which is stupidly easy to corrupt.To be fair, this seems to happen much less often than it used to. This is the safest and most portable format around, and it helps that LaTeX is available for Windows, OS X and your various Unices and Unix-work-alikes. (For more comparisons, see here (with pictures!) and here.)

OK, but just what is LaTeX? It's actually not strictly comparable to Word, because it's not a word processor: it's essentially a markup language, like HTML. So for example, in HTML the first sentence in this paragraph would be written like this:

OK, but just what <b>is</b> LaTeX?

In LaTeX, the equivalent is:

OK, but just what \textbf{is} LaTeX?

And so on. Then you run 'latex' on the document in order to produce the output (these days, generally a PDF file) - just as a web brower parses a HTML page. There's a handy cheat sheet here, and a useful collection of installation and usage links here.

Frankly, LaTeX is hard to get the hang of, especially coming from the WYSIWYG world, and typing out the various commands is a bit tedious. But there are tools which make the process a lot easier (and this is the biggest improvement from my days as an astrophysics postgrad, when I used vi exclusively). I'm on OS X, and my favourite LaTeX editor is TeXShop, but there are others. To manage my bibliography, I'm using BibDesk (and for the humanities, the jurabib bibliographic package is a must - specifically the Oxford style, jox.bst, as Chicago support is poor).MAKEBST might be another way to go. I'm currently going through my ex-EndNote bibliography, fixing up the first names and adding keywords (PRImary/SECondary, OWNed/LIBrary/UNSeen) as I go. This will be a good thing to finish, because I had been deferring adding new entries until I made a decision to go to LaTeX/BibTeX or stick with Word/EndNote, and instead writing them down in little text files here and there, and it was all starting to get away from me!

So is this a good idea? Come back in three years and I'll tell you ...

Update: for some reason, I've re-edited this entry about 10 times since posting it. The most important thing I forgot to mention is that all of the LaTeX/BibTeX tools mentioned above are free - an important consideration for postgrads! LaTeX is open source software, and pretty much all the related tools are too, though I think there are some commercial LaTeX editors.

1 Comment

To continue the Australian theme, here's an excellent article by Leigh Edmonds on the development of airmindedness in Australia, from Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture. (It's quite long; there's a shorter version at the Airways Museum & Civil Aviation Historical Society.) My impression from that is that airminded organisations had more influence with the government in Australia than in Britain, and also that the Australian government was more successful in encouraging the growth of airlines than was the British (geography no doubt helped - there's far less need for aircraft to get around in a tiny place like the UK). And it might just be because of the focus of the article, but military aviation seems to have taken a distinct second place to civil aviation, though it's interesting to see that in the 1930s, the shadow of the bomber fell across even so remote a country as Australia.

3 Comments

4th Battalion colour patch

Today is Remembrance Day. Today I remember Private John Joseph Mulqueeney, of Tumut, New South Wales - my great-grand uncle. A labourer in civilian life, he enlisted in the 4th Battalion of the 1st AIF (Australian Imperial Force) on 9 October 1915, embarking for Egypt on 3 February 1916. His unit was soon redeployed to France, where it fought in the Somme offensive; in the middle of August it was involved in the attempts to capture Mouquet Farm, near Pozières. On 17 August 1916, Pte. Mulqueeney was looking out over the parapet when a shell landed in front of his trench, and he was hit in the head by a piece of shrapnel. He died instantly. He was 25 27 and, according to his sergeant, a 'good chap'. His fellow soldiers buried him in a nearby shell-hole, marking it with a rough cross, though his remains are now in Courcelette British Cemetery.

Lest we forget.

Image source: Australian War Memorial.

2 Comments

Agatha Christie. Death in the Clouds. London: HarperCollins, 2001 [1935]. I am ashamed to admit it, but I have read very little British fiction from the early twentieth century, aside from thesis-related stuff and some science fiction. So I'm trying to remedy that, by reading characteristic and/or significant novels from my period. Christie's Hercule Poirot novels are certainly characteristic, and since this one starts off on an airliner bound from Le Bourget for Croydon, the choice seemed clear!

Tom Harrisson. Living Through the Blitz. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. A classic book from the co-founder of Mass-Observation, on how the British people coped with the Blitz. Not only does it have a chapter on expectations of the air war-to-come, but there's even one on reactions to the false air raid alarm of 3 September 1939, just moments after Chamberlain's speech announcing the declaration of war. I like it.

Frederic Manning. The Middle Parts of Fortune. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2000 [1929]. Possibly my most serious shortcoming with respect to pre-1939 literature is that I haven't read any of the "war books" that started coming out about a decade after the end of the First World War. This is a start. (I didn't even know that Manning was an Australian!)

Winston G. Ramsey, ed. The Blitz Then and Now. Volume 1. London: Battle of Britain Prints International, 1987. Lots of interesting material for social history - eg, all the false air raid alarms in the first few months of the war, reactions to the propaganda quickie The Lion Has Wings - along with geeky fun like the Starfish decoy airfield system, and diagrams of the detection lobes of the Chain Home/Chain Home Low radar systems. No references, which drives me batty, but much of it is from Home Office daily intelligence logs. This volume covers the period from the start of the war until 6 September, 1940.

P.G. Wodehouse. The Code of the Woosters. London: Penguin, 1999 [1937]. I have at least read a little Wodehouse before (The Swoop! is a great parody of the Edwardian invasion genre), but now I wonder why I haven't read more! (Airminded language: 'And now the All Clear had been blown, and I had received absolute inside information straight from the horse's mouth that all was hotsy-totsy between this blister and himself', p. 42.)