October 2007

While trawling through newspapers I keep an eye out for interesting aircraft-related advertisements. These are not uncommon, most obviously in relation to industries which could claim some relationship with aviation (after any record-breaking flight, there was usually at least one ad pointing out how much the triumphant pilot owed to some petroleum product or other). Other companies had to try a bit harder to make some aerial connection (Lyon’s swiss rolls, for example). But this magnificent example goes way beyond most! Actually, aviation is only one element of its vision of the future, designed to sell Field-day, a shaving lotion made from olive oil.

Here’s the text which appears below the image:

What of the future? What shall we wear? Eat? Drink? Shall we live in glass houses? Travel in Gyroplanes and wear Television on our wrists? Who knows? But we do know how we shall shave — for “Field-day” is one of the ‘Things to Come’ that’s here already! Revolutionary! Incomparably better! Different — not only from lather but from other ‘brushless’ creams. Fast — for the age of speed. Blades last longer. Simple and safe, too! Safe because you can see through “Field-day” as you shave instead of blindly guessing! Made with pure Olive Oil .. free from Caustic Alkali (an essential part of lather!) Made for the Future. On sale NOW. Are you going to wait — or be one of the ‘Moderns’? For the sake of your skin and your razor-blades do step out of that rut.¹

So how is the future invoked here in the pursuit of higher sales figures for Field-day? Most obviously, the city of the future has giant skyscrapers, with aeroplanes (and giant tubes of shaving lotion, ridden by a man who is clearly accustomed to boldly taking charge of his destiny in his dressing-gown) flying in between them. In fact, one of the skyscrapers is also an airport: there’s an aeroplane just taking off from it, and at the top of the tower is a windsock. Aside from the odd heliport or two, downtown airports have failed to materialise, but they remained a possibility in the 1930s.² The text mentions such wondrous technological possibilities as glass houses, autogiros, and wrist televisions.³

Then there is the rhetorical, almost ritual, use of the names of those two great novels about the future to come out of Britain in the 1930s, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come (1933) (or rather, the 1936 film-of-the-book, Things to Come). Neither of these can be said to look forwards to the future without any misgivings, however; the one is a dystopia (albeit one masquerading as a utopia), and the other might as well be, at least for the hundreds of millions of people killed along the road to a technologically-sophisticated, tunic-wearing paradise. So they might seem an odd choice for a straightforwardly optimistic (if not entirely straightfaced, perhaps) depiction of the future. But that’s par for the course: the titles of both books very quickly became a shorthand for the unknown future, often with little relation to anything in Huxley or Wells.⁴

Finally, there are all the key words defining the attributes which are to be associated with the future, and with Field-day: it will be revolutionary, incomparably better, different, faster, longer lasting, simple and safe. What man could resist a shaving lotion so laden with futurity? It is indeed the shave of the future, NOW. I do so want to be one of the Moderns, and I’d buy it myself, for sure — except that judging by Google, it looks like neither Field-day nor J. C. and J. Field, Ltd., its manufacturer, actually made it into this future. O brave new world, that doesn’t have such things in it!

1. Daily Mail, 8 May 1937, p. 14.
2. For example, in 1935 the Corporation of London was reported to be considering buying up land for a city airport along the south bank of the Thames, possibly near (or between?) London Bridge and Tower Bridge. Another possibility was to actually build a landing platform over the Thames itself. Daily Mail, 2 February 1935, p. 5. Even more extraordinary was the proposal made in 1931 by Charles Glover, an architect, for an elevated airport above the railway siding yards at King’s Cross and St Pancras stations. This would have taken the form of a wheel half a mile across, with the spokes acting as runways. There is a drawing and a bit more detail in Felix Barker and Ralph Hyde, London As It Might Have Been (London: John Murray, 1995 [1982]), 212.
3. So we’re still not in “the future” yet, although an increasing number of people effectively have a television in their pockets or hand bags, combined with telephone, still camera, movie camera, gramophone …
4. Yes, “brave new world” is itself lifted from Shakespeare, where it’s used differently; but The Times could only find occasion to quote the phrase twice in the almost-century-and-a-half before the publication of Huxley’s novel, and then used it at least 11 times in the rest of the 1930s (not including direct references to the book or to The Tempest).

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

One week I’m looking out over London’s skyline from the top of St Paul’s, the next I’m exploring underneath its streets, at the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms. But this post is only about the latter, as no photography is allowed in the Museum. That’s OK: while the museum was most interesting and very well done (and seemingly a magnet for American tourists), the Cabinet War Rooms — the underground bunker complex from where, in large part, the British war effort was directed during the Second World War — were why I was there. Everything was closed down and mothballed after V-J day, and at least some areas remained as they were during the war, until it was opened up again in the early 1980s; others have been restored more heavily (or turned into cafes!)

Above is the entrance, in King Charles Street, just off Horse Guards Road (and just a block away from Downing Street). It’s next to HM Treasury, though during the war the building seems to have been the Office of Works. On the one hand, the sandbagged entrance with machine gun slit is nicely evocative of a wartime sentry pillbox. On the other, it’s all fake: the real wartime entrance to the bunker was through adjacent government buildings. Plus several of the “sandbags” have been torn by some malcontent and it’s looking a bit tatty!

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Alan Kramer. Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. The barbarisation of warfare from the Balkan wars onward, including the targeting of civilians. This looks the goods (and a worthy successor to the book he co-authored with John Horne, German Atrocities, 1914), though oddly there’s only a little on bombing. Not that I’m complaining, mind …

Peter Stansky. The First Day of the Blitz: September 7, 1940. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. From the blurb, ‘Much of the future of Britain was determined in the first twelve hours of bombing’ — the Blitz spirit was just the start of a social revolution. Hmmm, that’s a big claim, but not necessarily an incorrect one: it’ll be interesting to see if he can pull it off.

Here’s something a bit different. It’s a paper model aeroplane which I made from a design published on 30 June 1934 in “Boys and Girls”, the weekly children’s supplement to the Daily Mail. The claim is made there that it glides, but sadly all mine does is stall and then enter a tailspin … but perhaps somebody taking greater care in making the model will have greater success! A PDF of the plan can be downloaded from here (size 1.4 Mb) and then printed out onto an A4-sized sheet of paper, if anyone wants to try it. The only other materials needed are a thin, stiff piece of card (for backing), glue, a match (for the wheel axle), a pin (for the propeller), tissue paper or something similar (to weight the nose, in the event that the model is actually airworthy). And scissors. The instructions are in the PDF; here are some tips based on my own experience:

• It does make it a lot easier if you fold where appropriate before you assemble the model!
• Take especial care to score along the lines on the rear fuselage section, as otherwise it will be out of shape and the tail assembly won’t sit straight.
• There’s no need to make the left and right tabs on the forward underside of the fuselage overlap precisely, as the “fuselage closing strip” is then going to be too wide for the fuselage at the front and will spoil the aeroplane’s clean lines.

I think the original was in colour, but the microfilm I printed it from was not, so unfortunately it’s a little drab. The colours could be worked out from the roundel and added with a paint program — or even just coloured in on the paper — but that would require more energy than I was prepared to expend :)

“Boys and Girls” would often include an aviation-related cartoon or story — in fact, one of the regular strips followed the adventures of Phil and Fifi, the “flying twins” — but this edition was chock-full of airminded goodness. The Whisker Pets see an aeroplane and decide to make their own (hilarity ensues); a stork-powered air show entertains the inhabitants of Treasure Island (’I like being an airwoman’, says Penelope the parrot); two panels list “Famous flyers’ great flights” (including some not so famous now, such as the non-stop flight of Codos and Rossi from New York to Syria in 1933); and on the Pet & Hobby Page, Teddy Tail provides some hints on how to make airworthy model aircraft — which I clearly should have read before making mine! This was obviously intended to coincide with the annual RAF Pageant held at Hendon on the very same day, a hugely popular air show: 200,000 attended that year, a record crowd — despite the best efforts of pacifist demonstrators outside the front gates.

This being the Daily Mail, there was probably another agenda besides getting plane-crazy youngsters to remind their parents to buy their favourite right-wing newspaper that Saturday: to make even more plane-crazy youngsters. The need to create an airminded youth was a common theme in the Rothermere press in the 1930s. For example, just two days earlier, Amy (Johnson) Mollison’s regular aviation column had been entitled “Don’t discourage the young idea in flying”,¹ in reference to an Air Ministry ban on solo flying under the age of 17, after a 16-year old boy had been killed doing just that near Scarborough. And, near the end of the year, Lord Rothermere himself contributed an article called “Make the youth of England air-minded! Has Germany 10,000 aeroplanes?”² — the question explaining and justifying the demand.

The RAF roundels on the model aeroplane mark it out as a machine of war, not a pleasure craft or commercial aeroplane. So while I had fun making and trying to fly it, I was also replaying (in a very small way) the mobilisation of youth for the next air war. I wonder how many of the adolescent boys and girls who made it before me joined the RAF or the ATA when the prospect of war became reality, just five years later?

1. Daily Mail, 28 June 1934, p. 4.
2. Daily Mail, 4 December 1934, p. 15.

Or, at least, not very likely. In June 1922, the Daily Mail printed a two-column article under the headline “Our lost air power” (a title it used for just about all of its air-scare stuff that year).¹ The author’s name is not given, but is described as ‘An Armament Expert’, who until recently was on the ‘Allied Commission to Germany’. The bulk of the article concerns two types of aerial bombs he inspected while overseeing German compliance with the disarmament clauses of the Versailles treaty.

The first was the elektron bomb. Though this sounds like it might be an exotic weapon based on the latest advances in atomic physics, it’s actually just an incendiary, for setting cities ablaze. But this was something special. In contrast to the crude, and fairly ineffective, incendiaries used by the Germans against London during the war, the elektron burned so hotly that it could burn through armour plate, and what’s more, once ignited it could not be extinguished. As it weighed less than pound and was only nine inches long, thousands could be carried per bomber (or airliner). The German High Command thought it had a war-winning weapon, since

A fleet of aeroplanes would carry sufficient to set all London alight, past any hope of saving.

But — fortunately for London — the war ended before sufficient numbers of elektron bombs were available to the German forces.

The other weapon revealed by An Armament Expert was a small globe, made of glass and only four inches across. Inside the globe was a dark brown liquid: an unspecified form of poison gas (mustard, I’d guess). When the globe is dropped from an aeroplane and hits the ground, the glass shatters and generates ‘thousands of cubic feet of poisonous gas’. If used against London, the gas would permeate into cellars and tunnels, and lie in the streets for weeks.

One raid using such bombs would paralyse the very heart of our Empire, and bring a horrible death to most of London’s citizens.

How horrible? Imagine:

That girl with the baby sitting opposite to you on the Tube — can you see that girl rushing wildly and blindly away, pressing that same little mite’s face to her breast in a hopeless attempt to shield it from the fumes? Can you see her face drawn in the most horrible of death agonies and the baby’s lips covered with blood and mucus? A horrible description? A very horrible, yet very possible, fact.

Again, London was lucky to avoid being gassed during the war. This time, Germany had sufficient numbers of gas globes, but the ‘Secret Service’ knew this, and made it known to the Germans that Britain had them too, and would use them in large numbers against German cities if any fell on British soil.

Here we have an expert eyewitness describing two horrible new weapons, both of which were nearly used against civilians in the last war and which will certainly be used against civilians in the next war. So what’s the problem? Simply that one of these existed and the other is — I believe — made up!
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1. Daily Mail, 20 June 1922, pp. 9-10. All quotes taken from this article unless otherwise specified.

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

One of the archives I visited during the second half of my time in London was the Archive Collection at the RAF Museum. Sadly the material I turned up, though interesting, was not overall of much relevance for my thesis. So I couldn’t justify spending a second day there. But, on the bright side, the archives closed at 5pm and the museum itself at 6pm — so I was able to able to use that hour to whiz through and have a look at the Fighter Hall, which I’d missed on my first visit.

Above is a Bristol Beaufighter TF.X torpedo bomber (well, the TF stands for torpedo fighter but that’s a bit of an oxymoron, isn’t it). A very versatile and heavily-armed machine, which according to the museum’s sign was called the “whispering death” by the Japanese — but Wikipedia says this is probably a propaganda legend. In front is a cannon (I assume from a Beaufighter), with a few shells in the magazine. Those things are big.
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Welcome to Military History Carnival 7!

Wars and battles

Let’s start at the sharp end of military history: actual combat. To Flanders Fields, 1917 reflects upon the huge scale of the Passchendaele campaign on the Western Front, and how its misery was shared between Germany, Britain and its Empire. The Battlefield Biker leads us through a failed assault against American Indian tribes — though a successful retreat — by the US Army in the Washington Territory, in 1858. Naval hiring policies should probably discriminate against drunkards and rebels, or so I infer from Cardinal Wolsey’s Today in History post on the Battle of the Kentish Knock in 1652. The previous year, on the other side of England, the Isles of Scilly were also under assault, as Mercurius Politicus narrates in a beautifully illustrated post. And, getting back to the Great War period, Great War Fiction examines a slightly different form of fighting — a riot by Canadian troops waiting in Wales to be sent home.

Representations

The largest number of posts this month concern representations of war, in various forms. Errol Morris, the documentary maker (no, I didn’t know he blogged either) delved deeply into the question of which of two photographs of a road, taken during the Crimean War, came first: the one with cannonballs on the road, or the one without. It seems like a trivial question, but in trying to answer it Morris illuminates the larger question of how historians know anything about the motives of people in the past. (See also Barista’s thoughts on Morris’s posts.) We don’t have to speculate about the motives underlying Ian R. Richardson’s fabulous photos taken at an archaeological dig near the site of the First World War, Messines: as Plugstreet tells us, he was trying to recreate the feel of the haunting scenes captured by the great Australian war photographer, Frank Hurley.

Frog in a Well: China examines some pro-Japanese cartoons produced in China in the 1930s — some well after incidents like the Rape of Nanking, which one would naively expect to have cooled Chinese feelings towards Japan. A Soviet Poster A Day (yes, really!) tells us the story behind a World War Two poster about a famous Soviet sniper, entitled “That’s the way to shoot — every shell is a foe”. Or, as one of the commenters suggests, “One shot, one kill.”

History Survey recommends four movies about the Second World War, in four different languages; while a Polish blog, Historia i Media (fortunately for me, the post is in English) wonders what the historical value might be of a brand new castle, complete with electricity and modern plumbing.

Memory

UKNIWM blogged about the opening of a major new British war memorial, at Alrewas in Staffordshire. It’s unique in that it is devoted to all those military personnel who been killed in the service of their country since the end of the Second World War. As Andrew Keating points out, another novel feature is the space for 16,000 or so extra names, reserved for future deaths.

The purpose of war memorials is to ensure that future generations “never forget”. But in some places, people have never been allowed to remember: Clioaudio points us to a documentary aired by al-Jazeera on the problems Spain still has in confronting the brutal legacy of the Civil War. And there are those who remember, because they were there, but have never had their memories recorded: War in the Mediterranean stresses the urgency of getting veterans to recount their stories before it is too late.

Historiography

For want of a better word. Quite possibly the only review of Michael Howard’s new book, Liberation or Catastrophe?, to mention Lyotard is that by Investigation of a Dog — but I’m sold! Civil Warriors has an example of a gendered reading of the letters of a minor Confederate general, but make sure you read the whole of the introductory paragraph first. Actually, reading the first paragraph last (like I did) might be even more fun. More serious is Civil War Memory’s report on a lecture by Peter Carmichael on the intellectual roots of two major interpretations of Robert E. Lee (pro-Lee, moralising and “Victorian” vs anti-Lee, revisionist and “modernist”), and why they will never see eye to eye. And Blog Them Out of the Stone Age discusses an article by Richard Betts which questions (but ultimately affirms) the very idea of strategy, and how this might be useful in teaching military history.

Fun and games

War, or at least military history, is not always grim. As evidence, I offer two posts on Xerxes’ invasion of Greece in 480 BC. Popcorn & chain mail rightfully mocks the recent movie 300 (which allegedly has something to do with Thermopylae), while the skwib uncovers the lost PowerPoint slides of the battle of Salamis. Coming Anarchy points out that, contrary to many computer games and movies, most pre-modern armies did not use uniforms, making it difficult to tell friend from foe. American Presidents Blog examines the not-so-illustrious sporting career of a future Supreme Allied Commander Europe and US President. And Osprey Publishing Blog reveals what is possibly the least inspiring eve-of-battle speech ever uttered. Well, it probably wasn’t funny then, but it is now!

Included in this classification

I couldn’t cram these into the above categories, which anyway are completely arbitrary. So, in no particular order: behind AotW looks at a Stetson who fell at Antietam, and traces his family connection to a more famous bearer of that name (think hats). Early Modern Whale looks at a book by Joseph Swetnam, author of The schoole of the noble and worthy science of defence and The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Inconstant Women (sadly, it’s the former which is under discussion here). Quid plura? relates an incident in 1945 when a young American chaplain took the initiative to help save some of Germany’s past. Thoughts on Military History uncovers a fantastic resource for anyone interested in the history of modern artillery. And bringing up the rear, The DC Traveler recommends an amphibious tour of the US capital’s streets and waterways by DUKW — though they have these in London too, and I have to say I wasn’t tempted when I was there recently!

That’s all for this edition of the Military History Carnival. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it, as I’ve enjoyed writing it! (Even though it’s a singularly non-airminded carnival this time around …) Thanks to everyone who contributed suggestions.

The next Military History Carnival will be hosted by Gary Smailes on 7 November. Please send him suggestions at garysmailes at gmail dot com or use the form.

Today is the 95th anniversary of the Sheerness Incident. Sheerness is a town at the mouth of the Medway, on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. For several centuries, it was a dockyard for the Royal Navy (the Nore Mutiny took place nearby in 1797). In 1912, Sheerness was an important part of Britain’s naval defences, helping to guard the Thames Estuary — and hence London — against a possible German invasion.

On Monday, 14 October 1912, between about 6.30pm and 7pm, many people in Sheerness and in Queenborough, two miles to the south, heard a sound like an aeroplane engine coming from the skies overhead. Sunset was shortly after 6pm, and so it was rapidly getting dark. Some witnesses — including a Royal Navy lieutenant — believed they could also make out a red light, and possibly a searchlight, passing to and fro over the town. It was assumed by some townsfolk that the pilot was from the Royal Naval Aerial Service station at nearby Eastchurch, where there was a flight training school;¹ perhaps the pilot was in trouble. The aerodrome was alerted by telephone, and flares were lit in an effort to guide the aircraft in. But although the engine sounds were also heard at Eastchurch, nothing was seen. By about 7pm the sound, and the light, was no longer detectable.

Where did the sounds come from? Eastchurch had no aircraft up that night, so it wasn’t from there. In fact, night flying was relatively rare at the time: Claude Grahame-White was the first to do it successfully in an aeroplane, in 1910. The world of British aviation in 1912 was a small one, and if a pilot had successfully undertaken a hazardous cross-country night flight it seems unlikely that it would have remained a secret. (An unsuccessful flight, of course, would have been even harder to miss!) Newspapers no longer reported on each and every flight, but weekly aviation magazines seem to have had notices of many of them. For example, Flight reported on flights at Eastchurch by nine different pilots during the week in question, though for 14 October itself only noted that ‘Lieut. Briggs was out with passenger on Monday’.² So it seems unlikely that any British pilot was flying that night over the Isle of Sheppey.
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1. Short Brothers was also based at Eastchurch at the time, though I’ve not seen this mentioned in reference to the Sheerness Incident.
2. Flight, 19 October 1912, p. 932.

The above photograph, and all of the following, are from Poison Gas (London: Union of Democratic Control, 1935).
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.

One week after Westminster Abbey, I visited the other great London church, St Paul’s Cathedral. They are very different in form and function. (They are alike in not allowing photography inside, so again I’ve only got exterior shots. I took some more on an earlier excursion.) Westminster Abbey is medieval and gothic. St Paul’s is Renaissance and baroque, one of Christopher Wren’s great churches, rebuilt after the Great Fire of London.
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I recently had the somewhat guilty pleasure of watching Flood, a film (from a novel) about the sudden devastation of London by a massive storm surge — predicted by a scientist who had long been dismissed as a crank — which swamps the Thames Barrier, submerges most of the city’s landmarks, kills a couple of hundred thousand people and forces most of the rest to evacuate. An even bigger disaster is averted (just in the nick of time, as it happens) and Londoners are left to clean up the mess. All very timely, given the unusually high proportion of England which was under water earlier this year.

Disaster movies are a pretty venerable genre by now (there were at least three films about the Titanic made in the year after it sank). The subset which deals with destruction on the scale of a big city (or larger) — as opposed to aeroplanes or skyscrapers — is relatively small, and that concerned, like Flood, with the fate of London specifically is quite small indeed.¹ No doubt this is because disaster movies are generally loaded with special effects and therefore are expensive, and as the US market for film is so huge, it makes more financial sense to destroy some American city rather than a British one. So there aren’t all that many cinematic depictions of the end of London. But books are much cheaper to make, and in those London has been destroyed many times over.

I’ve been trying to think of the first time this happened. It’s easy enough to find early references to the eventual ruin of London, such as H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885) (in which a neo-medieval adventurer seeks his fortunes amid the city’s swampy remains), or Macaulay’s New Zealander (1840).² But those only show London long after its fall, and so, properly speaking, are post-apocalyptic. The actual destruction happens off stage; it is inevitable, something to accept rather than prevent. Other candidates might include science fiction stories like Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt (1913), wherein the Earth passes through a region of toxic ether, and Professor Challenger and companions take an eerie trip through dead London afterwards.³ Or H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), with its Martian tripods laying waste to the metropolis with their heat rays. Where else might we look?
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1. The Day the Earth Caught Fire springs to mind (rather oddly, since I haven’t seen it); Day of the Triffids and 28 Days Later too. There must be others though.
2. Not actually a novel, a story, a paragraph or even a sentence: merely a few clauses in a book review, referring to some future time ‘when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.’ But the image caught the imagination of many who read and spread it, to the point where it practically became a cliché. See David Skilton, “Tourists at the ruins of London: the metropolis and the struggle for empire”, Cercles 17, 93-119.
3. Even if the ending is a huge cop-out.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

… to send me submissions for the next Military History Carnival! This will be posted at Airminded on 14 October, one week from today. I have a few suggestions already, but need more. Any posts published in the previous month and which involve military history in some way will be considered. From the Carnival’s home page:

Military is defined very broadly. It includes all levels of armed conflict — there will be no rigid definition of what is and isn’t a war — and all military experiences during peacetime. At the risk of offending latin purists, it includes navies and air forces as well as armies. Weapons, tactics, strategy, uniforms, insignia, equipment etc are all interesting and important, and so are relationships between war and society, culture, race, gender, sexuality, disability, and the non-human. Preparations for and aftermaths of wars are as significant as the wars themselves. Opposition to war needs to be considered alongside the conduct of war. Representations of war in literature, films, TV, games etc are just as valid objects of study as empirical evidence of reality (although fictional representations should be related to the real world — no fictional universes please).

About the only restriction is that here, history means “before 1 January 2001″.

So please nominate posts for inclusion, either by emailing me directly at bholman at airminded dot org, or by using the form.

Image source: London Opinion, 5 September 1914 (I think — the original magazine cover from which all imitations ultimately derive. The image itself is from World War Pictures).

But then computers so often don’t …

OK, so earlier today I upgraded my WordPress theme, Tarski, in preparation for an update to WordPress itself. After 3 hours, much cursing and many broken plugins, I mostly got things working and looking the way they were before. Then, about 6 hours later, I noticed that the Similar Posts plugin also wasn’t working, so (hoping for a quick fix) I upgraded that to the latest version. This turned out to be a bad idea, because then all pages started showing up completely blank — including admin ones. Presumably Similar Posts did something bad to the php then: that happens sometimes. So I went in with ftp and deleted Similar Posts. No change. I deleted the old Similar Posts too. Still no change! Now I’m worried that the mysql database has been hosed somehow (which would serve me right, as I decided I couldn’t be bothered backing it up earlier in the day). I reverted to the previous version of Tarski, the one I’d been using before I touched anything today. No change. Finally I reverted to a really old version of Tarski, some six months old, and that finally undid the damage. (The WordPress Default theme works as well.)

So the database actually is ok (and is now backed it up, of course …) But this all makes no sense. It was clearly Similar Posts which caused the whole problem, so why did I have revert Tarski to an ancient version to fix it? Bleh. I was quite happy with Tarski, but the way it’s being developed means that I have to rewrite more and more of it in order to make it do what I want. So maybe I’ll have to look around for another nice, clean theme.

It might just be some sort of caching thing, or I might have another look tomorrow and figure out what the problem really was, but for the moment things Airminded will not quite be itself until I can do something about it. Apologies for any inconvenience!

Update: fixed now. The problem was some extra code relating to Similar Posts which was residing in Tarski’s constants.php file, which explains why I had to go back to an old version of Tarski (when I wasn’t using Similar Posts), but not why going back to the previous version of Similar Posts didn’t work, when it had been a few minutes earlier … But as a bonus, in the process of getting Similar Posts to work again, I now understand Tarski’s new way of doing things better, so it has a reprieve :)

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

It’s 50 years since Sputnik I lifted off. Although I was airminded as a kid, I was much more spaceminded. So 1957 was always a crucial year in my understanding of history back then: it was where the modern age began. (In fact the very first historical work I ever I started — but never finished! — was a history of the space race from Sputnik on. I can’t have been older than 12 so it’s not exactly sophisticated …)

More than that, to me 1957 was where the future began. A future where humans would spread out into the solar system and then explore the universe beyond. And who knows? Maybe I’d even get to take part in that somehow! That future hasn’t quite worked out the way I’d envisaged it — yet — but of course, I’m in good company where failing to predict the future is concerned. There’s a good article by Michael J. Neufeld in the July/August 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, on Wernher von Braun’s proposals for manned orbital battle stations. In the early 1950s, von Braun predicted that these would be used to deploy nuclear weapons in orbit. For example, in a conference paper published in 1951, he wrote that

Our space station could be utilized as a very effective bomb carrier, and for all present-day means of defense, a non-interceptible one.¹

and that

The political situation being what it is, with the Earth divided into a Western and an Eastern camp, I am convinced that such a station will be the inevitable result of the present race of armaments.²

Neufeld makes the point that for all his expertise in rocketry — including leading the V2’s development team — von Braun’s obsession with space stations meant that he failed to realise that ballistic missiles actually made a lot more sense as a delivery platform for nuclear weapons, rather than space-launched hypersonic gliders — a space station being a relatively big and very predictable target, for one thing.³

Von Braun wasn’t the only one arguing along those lines. There were others. The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein co-authored a popular article in 1947 for Collier’s Magazine which suggested putting nukes in orbit. In a novel published the following year, Space Cadet, he expanded upon this idea. Now, I read Space Cadet probably a couple of dozen times when I was a kid, but haven’t for a long time so I’ll have to rely upon the Wikipedia page to explain:

The Space Patrol is entrusted by the worldwide Earth government with a monopoly on nuclear weapons, and is expected to maintain a credible threat to drop them on Earth from orbit as a deterrent against breaking the peace. […] The cadets are taught that they should renounce their allegiance to their country of origin and replace it by a wider allegiance to humanity as a whole and to all of the sentient species of the Solar System.

It never occurred to me before now, but this is nothing more than the international air force concept, so beloved of liberal internationalists in the 1930s (it was included in the Labour Party’s manifesto for the 1935 general election, for example), but now updated for the coming space age! Only now instead of pilots of all nations standing by, ready to drop high explosives on any aggressor nation, it would be astronauts with atom bombs. Plus ça change … sometimes, anyway.

When I was 12, I understood that Sputnik I was part of a ‘Race for Space’ between two superpowers, as I put it, but I mainly saw it it as a straightforward — if impressive — technical achievement, which the Soviet Union managed to do first. I certainly didn’t have much clue about the bigger picture of the Cold War or the historical background to the decision to launch a small sphere into orbit, though. Now it’s hard for me to see things in any other way, as all of the above probably demonstrates. But sometimes it’s good just to forget about all that context and just appreciate the thing-in-itself.

So I’ll end by reverting to age 12 and saying wow, that is just so ace!

1. Quoted in Michael J. Neufeld, “Wernher von Braun’s ultimate weapon”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2007, 53.
2. Quoted in ibid.
3. But the fact that von Braun was still trying to sell the public on manned space stations in 1965 with no military role beyond reconnaissance suggests that it’s more that he just really, really liked space stations, rather than that he wasn’t aware of the potential of ballistic missiles.

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

Probably my favourite place to research in London was the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College London, where I spent the better part of two weeks digging through several personal archives. It’s a very pleasant environment to work in, and the staff were very helpful in accommodating this rude colonial’s requests, even at short notice! (Plus they actually sent me the roughly 200 pages of photocopies I ordered; I still haven’t got the batch I ordered from the British Library, and quite possibly won’t now, since it shouldn’t take a month to arrive by airmail …) KCL lies between Strand and the Victoria Embankment, near Waterloo Bridge; I’d usually take the Tube to Embankment and walk up from there, keeping my eye out for anything interesting along the way …

This is the Imperial Camel Corps memorial in Victoria Embankment Gardens. I’ve previously written about a relative who was in the ICC and knew there was a memorial to it in London (in itself a bit odd, as most of them were Australians), which I vaguely thought I should seek out while I was there. Turns out I didn’t have to as I stumbled across it completely by chance! It’s quite a striking — though incongruous, amid all the green — statue, though the photo probably exaggerates the size of it.
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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.

One of the benefits of living in London for two months is the way it helped me to understand its geography. So when I read, for example, that 500 men, women and children walked from Greenwich to Trafalgar Square on 22 July 1917 to demand ‘improved air defences for London and the adoption of a systematic offensive air offensive against German towns’,¹ I know now that it was actually a fairly long walk (even if they took the omnibus home!) and so shows that their protest march was not a casual affair. And my experience also comes in handy when reading about what was predicted to happen to London when it was bombed, and what actually happened when it was bombed.

In some places, the effects are still easy to see. But sometimes my imagination needed a little help. This is the enclosed garden in the middle of Mecklenburgh Square, where I was staying, in Bloomsbury:

And this is how the poet John Lehmann described Mecklenburgh Square after being blitzed (possibly in September 1940):

Mecklenburgh Square was a pretty sight when I left it. Broken glass everywhere, half the garden scorched with incendiary bombs, and two houses of Byron Court on the east side nothing but a pile of rubble. Clouds of steam were pouring out of one side, firemen still clambering over it and ambulances and blood transfusion units standing by with ARP workers and police. The road was filled with a mass of rubble muddied by the firemen’s hoses, but the light grey powder that had covered the bushes at dawn had been washed off by the drizzle. The time bomb in the Square garden sat in its earth crater coyly waiting. The tabby Persian cat from No. 40 picked her way daintily and dishevelledly among the splinters of glass on her favourite porch.²

The garden where the UXB fell looks so peaceful and quiet today, but once it was right in the front line.

1. Daily Mail, 23 July 1917, p. 3.
2. Quoted in Peter Hennessey, Never Again: Britain 1945-1951 (London: Penguin, 2006), 35-6.