Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang, eds. Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945. London: Pimlico, 2006. Scholars of the calibre of Richard Overy and Tami Davis Biddle examine the Dresden raid from a variety of angles. Hew Strachan contributes a chapter on "Strategic bombing and the question of civilian casualties up to 1945". Why isn't he off writing the second volume of The First World War instead, that's what I'd like to know. I mean, just how long does it take to write another 1000-page-plus magisterial magnum opus anyway? :)
Monthly Archives: April 2006
Me to BBC: you guys rock!
The BBC has put online a catalogue of recordings held of its radio and television broadcasts since about 1930! Not the recordings themselves, mind you, but details such as broadcast dates, participants, and programme summaries, in many cases. Nor is it a complete record of what was broadcast: if it wasn't recorded (as many early programmes were not), then it's not in there.
Some notes on getting around: searching could be easier, from an historian's point of view. You can search by description, or contributor, which are useful, but there is no way to search a range of dates, nor is it set up for browsing dates. If you have a specific day in mind, then you can go straight to it by using a URI of the form http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/on_this_day/yyyy/mm/dd. For example to see what the archive has for 30 January 1965, the URI is http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/on_this_day/1965/01/30. To see what the catalogue has for a particular year, the best way would seem to be to go to the advanced search page and enter the desired year in the description field; the vast majority of results will actually be from later programmes, but the older ones will be at the bottom of the page. I'm sure searching will improve in future, after all it is a prototype, in the BBC's very non-Web 2.0 language.
Here's a few random things I've found:
- A Mr Adolf Hitler has appeared in 602 productions since the 1930s, most often alongside Hermann Goering, Franklin Roosevelt, Neville Chamberlain, Benito Mussolini and Winston Churchill. I imagine they were some sort of British Rat Pack or perhaps a troupe of comedians.
- The earliest recording in the catalogue looks to be The End of Savoy Hill, broadcast on 14 May 1932, a retrospective of the BBC's first decade. Precisely because of the lack of recordings, it featured people like John Reith, Vita Sackville-West and Dick Sheppard re-reading things they'd said on the radio years before!
- Britain's greatest gift to the world?
More here and here. Via Boing Boing.
See the Bombers fly up, up …
Football, by which I mean Australian Rules, pretty much bores me to tears. Given that I live in the home of Aussie rules, it's something that I just have to put up with. Melbourne is obsessed with the sport for more than half the year, between the start of the pre-game season in February and that one day in September when the Grand Final is held and those of us who aren't fanatics can get some relief. (And look forward to the cricket and the tennis ...)
However, there is some small interest for the airminded historian. Today being Anzac Day, it is the occasion for the "traditional Anzac Day clash" (where apparently "traditional" means since 1995) between two of the original members of the Australian Football League (founded 1897, as the Victorian Football League), Collingwood and Essendon. Now, each team in the competition has a nickname, ranging from the biological (Kangaroos, Lions) to the religious (Saints, Demons) to the oddly abstract (Blues, Power). Collingwood are the Magpies, and Essendon are the Bombers -- and this is obviously where I come in.
So where did they get a name like that? According to the club's website, the name began to be used from 1922. Other sites add that it was because that year, the club moved to new grounds at Windy Hill, near Essendon Airport, which itself was only founded in 1921. That makes some sense, the 1920s were a boom time for aviation in Australia: Qantas, the Royal Australian Air Force and the Royal Flying Doctor Service all got off the ground in that decade, which also saw the rise to fame of such great Australian aviators as Charles Kingsford-Smith and Bert Hinkler. I can see the appeal of an aviation theme for a club wanting to move with the times. But still, I have questions. As far as I can tell Essendon Airport was never used by the RAAF (which in any event was tiny in this period), so there wouldn't have been many bombers around Essendon. So was it just the airport that inspired the name? Also, why bombers, and not the more glamorous fighters, which might seem to have many positive attributes for a sporting emblem -- speed, agility, power?
I think an understanding of post-war airpower might help here. To take the second question first, fighters were faster (though not always by much) and more agile, but on the other hand they lacked the endurance of the bomber. More importantly, perhaps, the twin machine-guns of most fighters in this period hardly compared with the awesome destructive power of the high-explosive, incendiary and gas bombs that bombers could carry. Yes, that's right -- it all comes back to the theory of the knock-out blow, which was debated extensively in public throughout this period. At least, it was in the UK, but the State Library's extensive holdings on the subject leads me to suspect the debate was followed closely over here too (or at least that librarians thought that it was ...)
And that, I suggest, may help answer the first question. So 1922 was the year that Essendon started being called the Bombers; 1922 was also the year that, back in Mother England, P. R. C. Groves published an extremely influential series of articles in The Times which I think mark the real start of the knock-out blow, at least as far as public awareness is concerned.
Well, that's all speculation! There are some possible problems. One is that a few sites say that the nickname wasn't used until the 1940s. Another is the possibility that it originally had nothing directly to do with aeroplanes at all, but referred to a style of kick that Essendon players excelled at circa 1922. If either of those is true then my theory has been shot down in flames. I've looked at some academic histories of Aussie rules, but none of them talk about the origins of Essendon's nickname.
PS It seems that the Magpies' air defences were too strong this year: the Bombers were downed by 15.16 (106) to 12.17 (89).
Image source: Wikipedia.
Score Zero
Regarding the Japanese Air Force, which many people, he said, were inclined to discount as a second-rate body equipped with obsolete aircraft and lacking skillful and daring pilots, Air Vice-Marshal Pulford said that he certainly does not underrate its capacity. When it was suggested to him that it might be compared with the Italian Air Force, he pointed out how completely the R.A.F. gained the mastery of the skies of the Middle East even when the Italians possessed great numerical superiority. He thinks that what the R.A.F. has done in the Middle East it could certainly do in the Far East against the Japanese. One of the best Japanese fighters is the 'O' naval fighter, but the Brewster Buffaloes at present with the R.A.F. in Malaya and Burma would have no difficulty in dealing with them. The Japanese, he said, have two bombers of the Mitsuibishi type, one of which is used by the Navy and one by the Army -- they are about equal in performance to the Whitley bomber in the R.A.F. He believes that Messerschmitt 109s are being produced in limited numbers in Japanese factories.
Source: The Times, 20 October 1941, p. 4 (via the WWII mailing list).
The Air Vice-Marshal was somewhat mistaken in his opinions of the relative merits of Zeroes and Buffaloes (but then public pessimism from high-ranking officers doesn't go down too well in wartime). Pulford was the Air Officer Commanding, RAF Far East, at the time of the Japanese attack in December 1941. According to Air of Authority he was in home air defence and seaplanes during the First World War; afterwards he won recognition for his experimental work with torpedo bombing and, in 1926, for leading a flight of Fairey IIIDs in a record-breaking flight from Cairo to Cape Town and back, and then on to Lee-on-Solent. Unfortunately, his story had an unhappy ending. He evacuated from Singapore two days before its surrender, along with many other small boats, but the one his party was on was hit and forced to beach on an inhospitable island, where they remained for two months before being picked up by Japanese forces. Pulford was in poor health and died before the rescue.
Acquisitions
J. M. Kenworthy. Peace or War? New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927. I ordered this back in January, before I realised that it's just Will Civilisation Crash? (London: Ernest Benn, 1927), under a different title. And a different pagination. Oh well.
David Zimmerman. Britain's Shield: Radar and the Defeat of the Luftwaffe. Stroud: Sutton, 2001. A (the?) standard reference on the invention of radar. Has some details on a couple of unjustly neglected high technologies of the interwar period -- sound location and death rays.
Why you should blog
Badge of something
While looking at Airminded's stats the other day, I noticed that my brief biography of L. E. O. Charlton has been linked to by the Wikipedia entry about him. I guess this is some sort of mark of distinction in this Internet age of ours,
The SLV
I spent most of the last week at the State Library of Victoria. It's a grand old pile, built in the 1850s when Melbourne was awash with gold money (apparently, it was one of the richest cities in the British Empire). For the last decade or so, it has been undergoing works of some kind -- first of all to refurbish and expand the whole building, for the last few months they have been doing something at the offsite storage area which means that all the old journals like Fortnightly Review and Nineteenth Century and After are unavailable until after Easter (ie this weekend, finally!)
I'm sure it's not a patch on, say, the old British Library Reading Room, but the La Trobe Reading Room (above and below) is a rather nice place to sit, read and write. (There's another big reading room, but La Trobe is nicer and quieter.) It was opened in 1913 and is covered by what was apparently the biggest reinforced concrete dome in the world. Well, it is big, certainly. It also has a big collection, 1.5 million books, and I'm always surprised at (and grateful for) the amount of primary source material I can find there. Any time I look up some musty old 1920s book on airpower by J. M. Spaight, say, or "Neon", there must be at least an 80% chance that the SLV has it. (If it's non-fiction, anyway -- 'works of fiction and of the imagination' were specifically excluded back then.) They are not so great on British newspapers, but you can't have everything ...
To me though, this building will always "really" be the Museum of Victoria, which shared the building up until the mid-1990s -- in fact, I'm not sure I even knew there was a library in there as well, until the museum moved out! I loved the rabbit warren that was the old museum, and visited it many times. I even worked there for a few months as an "Explainer". It's great to have a swish space for the all the library's collections, but I do miss turning around a corner and bumping into a mummy or a racing horse, or even a musty old set of dioramas illustrating the history of warfare, which must have themselves dated to the interwar period. The new Melbourne Museum is great, but lacks the charm (and the dioramas!) of the old museum.
PS The photos on the Wikipedia page are much nicer than mine, so go look at them too :)
Acquisitions
A. C. Grayling. Among the Dead Cities: Was the Allied Bombing of Civilians in WWII a Necessity or a Crime? London: Bloomsbury, 2006. I haven't really come to grips with the moral questions surrounding my subject yet (yes, bombing civilians is bad, but then war is generally not very nice, so ...), so I'll be interested to read this. I'll have to bear in mind that he's a philosopher, not an historian, though. (There's a review of the US edition in a recent Washington Post.)
Christian Wolmar. The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground was Built and How it Changed the City Forever. London: Atlantic Books, 2005. Or, how Londoners had the foresight to build a system of public air raid shelters, and subsidised it by running trains between them -- decades before Kitty Hawk! Brilliant.
‘Quick, Hans — what’s German for “Tally Ho”?’
The Royal Navy is about to pay a high price for its neglect of airpower ...
Front cover of E. F. Spanner, The Broken Trident (London: E. F. Spanner, 1929).
I just like this picture for some reason. Spanner was a retired naval architect who evidently had at least one bee in his bonnet, for he wrote about half a dozen books on various aviation matters (including the inadvisability of the government's Imperial airship scheme -- well, he was right about that), and what's more, he published them all himself! The Broken Trident was originally published in 1926, and the cover above is from the 1929 "cheap edition" (price: 2/6), so either the first edition sold enough to warrant going down market, or probably more likely, he wanted to get his message out to a wider audience. There was also a German edition (1927), which I'm sure would have sold relatively well, given the effortless ease with which, in the novel, a supposedly downtrodden Germany bests a smug and complacent Britain.
Update: I was looking at another book of Spanner's today, Armaments and the Non-combatant: To the 'Front-line' Troops of the Future (London: Williams and Norgate, 1927), which is a non-fictional rendition of many of the ideas in The Broken Trident. So obviously not all of his books were self-published (as I stated above), at least the first editions, contrary to what the cover of The Broken Trident suggests. In Armaments and the Non-combatant, Spanner notes (p. 295) that he wrote The Broken Trident (among other books) as a novel because 'in that form I thought it easy to present facts and probabilities so that they might gain the attention of technical men of all shades of thought and also the attention of ''the man in the street''', and appends excerpts from its favourable reviews. The title page also notes that he's the 'Inventor of the Duct Keel system of Ship Construction, the "Soft-ended Ship" system of Bow Construction, the "Spanner" Strain Indicator, etc'.