The bombing teacher

I live just a few miles from Waltham and I had no idea about the bombing teacher building! I assume it must be on the other side away from the main road. I think the runway’s still there, and you can see a hangar from the road but I’m not sure whether it’s original. They used to fly crop dusters from there in the 80s, but now it’s just people walking dogs or practising driving.

There could be a whole other PhD thesis waiting to be written about the origins and development of simulation. It probably does have a lot to do with institutional culture as you said, but maybe it’s also because it wasn’t until the mid-20th century that there was any technology which needed to be simulated in order to learn how to use it effectively.

Gavin, Good point about the technology not needing simulation until recently.

I know there are “combat simulators” in the martial arts– a wood pole with paddles.

What about the models the Japanese drew up for bombing Pearl Harbor?
(http://www.history.navy.mil/photos/events/wwii-pac/pearlhbr/ph-ja5.htm at the bottom)
Generally, were the plates supposed to be theoretical targets (like Berlin) or just random practice?

The Link Trainer was a 1930s innovation., wasn’t it?

A simulator is just a control room with an artificial set of inputs. I really need to get cracking on the history of the control room before some bright young thing beats me to it.

Another data point: by the early 1940s, the RN was using a two-storey building to simulate submarine control rooms for officers doing the ‘perisher’. Periscope at the bottom, tracking table on the top, with sillhouettes, etc. Ref is Edward Young _One of Our Submarines_, I think.

Ashmore was using simulated inputs and practice interceptions to develop LADA in 1918. I think that he used simulated inputs on their own as well, but I’m not sure and I can’t find my notes right now.

I haven’t got any evidence of the railways simulating inputs or doing dry runs when they introduced central control. But what about gunners practising indirect fire? I think that yet again we’re being let down by the lack of a decent technical history of the Royal Artillery. Dan?

PS - sorry about the obsolete Monkey gag above. I left my facetiousness button down by mistake.

Central control in the UK - which I think was a significantly speeded-up version of the US dispatching system - came in in 1909, midwifed by Cecil Paget of the Midland Railway. In April 1915, Major Paget was appointed to head the BEF’s Railway Operating Division. But don’t forget, children, that British generals in WW1 were REALLY STUPID and never learned anything.

For artillery, what we need is a war and society expert who knows WW1 technical stuff and used to be a gunner. Hang on:
http://www.imperialservices.org.uk/

I’ve always thought the RAF’s sector control system was essentially a big computer, not to mention a significant example of decentral decision making - yeah, there was 11 Group HQ, and even Dowding’s own FCHQ, but the really important bit was the sector level.

I recall reading, when Network Rail was set up, an interview with Ian McAllister, the Ford executive who was hired to act as chairman, in which he mentioned that he wanted to automate the timetabling process which currently relied on “two PhDs in mathematics”. This was in 2002!

I think timetabling is one of those intractable “salesman’s problems” that has no perfect solution which can be arrived at by algorithms.

I was thinking about simulation yesterday as I sat in the British Library waiting for my manuscripts to appear, and railways did cross my mind, but I hadn’t thought about signalling or timetabling. I was just wondering how engine drivers were trained in the 19th or early 20th century. Steam trains might have been an early example of technology which needed to be simulated and could be simulated, but I don’t know whether they actually were simulated.

On reflection my earlier point was an oversimplification: simulation does depend on having systems complex enough to need simulating, but also depends on the systems being simple enough that they can be accurately simulated, and on the machinery being fragile and/or valuable enough to make training mistakes too costly, or mistakes being too dangerous to the trainee and instructor. Horses might meet some of those criteria, but there’s still no adequate way of simulating riding a horse. In practice the only way to minimise the costs and risks is to start on more docile and less valuable horses where mistakes don’t matter so much, and then gradually work up.

yr engine driver in late C19th UK practice began as a locomotive cleaner, then a fireman, then a shunter (driver), only then was he let out on the main line, and he had an inspector with him each time he drove a route for the first time. Inspectors were senior drivers. Lots of rail crew training was done via mutual improvement classes.

Source for most of the above is Adrian Vaughan’s _Grit, Grime, and Glory_

Sorry gang, I’ve joined this party a bit late. Seems to me that we’ve distinguished between training men and testing systems - so I’d be interested to learn at what stage in training the bomb trainer was used - but we perhaps need to go a bit further. A simulation used as training might usefully be simplified for all sorts of reasons to begin with - not least because making it as complex as reality might completely demoralise the poor trainee. But perhaps (and here I bow to Chris’ expertise and that of his monkeys) when you’re testing a system, you want to find out whether it works or not, as well as improve it.
As far as British artillery goes - I think that Jonathan Bailey has written that book, but perhaps you want something _really technical_, in which case I’m definitely not your man. But my impression is that whilst systems for controlling gunnery got a lot better in WWI, there wasn’t that much time to test those systems out of the line, for the reason that gunners were in action for longer: so developments were I suspect more organic. Probably worth looking at what happens over the winter of 1917-18 however: for all that our presumption is that modern armies didn’t move into barracks after the campaigning system, that seemed to be when GHQ underwent the biggest changes in structure.
To go back to some earlier comments - I’m rather wistful for that moment that didn’t happen in the 1930s when the RAF, realising its need to combine with the RN, and the RN, realising its need to cooperate with the RAF, practised bombing German battleships and sinking them with submarines, all in the same 3 storey building (I know, I know, scale etc. Whatever - that _would_ have been a landmark to British defence planning between the wars).

I’m just reading John Bushby’s _Air Defence of Great Britain_ . As well as knocking my thesis about Ashmore’s centrality into a cocked hat (bugger) it also mentions that in the early 1940s. Ground Control Approach fighter controllers were trained in Wemby Stadium, using two ice-cream tricycles, each with a radio, and the ‘controller’ sat in the press box. The pitch did duty as a PPI. Metronomes ‘governed’ the speeds of the trikes.

I’ve read elsewhere that CAMship fighter controllers and pilots were also trained in the same way, but the location was less auspicious: a croquest lawn in a country house somewhere.

Hard to say, cos none of it is sodding referenced. Bushby was a fighter controller in the 1950s, so there’s a lot of RAF backroom tacit knowledge in there, though, and he’s good on the technical side. The question is, which bits are reliable?

Chris, that Wembley thing is ridiculously cool.

p. 146.

Not only that, but according to the story, the trikes still had ‘Stop me and buy one’ painted on them, which might be a gag too far. A little bit of pink and yellow paint could have given them a far more apposite slogan for the duration: ‘Stop me or buy one’.

I like the retro-modernist tang of it - very J.B. Priestley.