November 2007

Operation Chastise was the codename for the famous ‘dambusters’ raid carried out against three German dams by 617 Squadron on the night of 17 May 1943. The idea was to breach the dams and thereby deprive the factories of the Ruhr of their electricity. As far as the standard story goes — which everyone knows from the movie¹ — it was the brainchild of the engineer Barnes Wallis, chief designer of the R100 airship, the Wellesley and Wellington bombers, the bouncing bomb (as used in the raid) and the Tall Boy and Grandslam earthquake bombs.

Though he may well have had the idea independently, Wallis wasn’t the first to think of bombing dams. Having said that, I don’t actually know of many other candidates.² L. E. O. Charlton is one possibility. In a fictional coda to The Menace of the Clouds (the preface is dated September 1937), he imagined how an international air force might respond to an Italian attack upon (an independent) Egypt. Before dawn, the ISR (International Strategic Reserve) raids Italy’s major ports, and then:

At daylight a succession of strong flights flew inland from over the Tuscan Sea and proceeded to demolish the hydro-electric installations in the Appenine [sic] chain from Liguria to Abruzzi.³

However, Charlton doesn’t actually say that the dams themselves are the targets. And his choice of words is actually more suggestive of the generators at the base of the dams.

One other possibility is … the British government. There is a suggestion in Connelly’s Reaching for the Stars that the British were thinking about the possibility of attacking the Ruhr dams as early as 1937. He gives no details.⁴ But it looks like this interest actually made it into the papers, albeit in a roundabout way!
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1. Though they don’t in Germany, as I learned from a German historian when I was in London; he had never heard of the film or the raid. Which says something about the exaggerated importance attributed to Chastise in British (and Commonwealth) mythology as the representation of the bomber offensive, at least up until recently.
2. It was common enough to think that the enemy might attack other elements of the electricity generation system, such as power stations; or that reservoirs might be rendered unusable by biological weapons. But dams are another story.
3. L. E. O. Charlton, The Menace of the Clouds (London: William Hodge & Company, 1937), 291.
4. Mark Connelly, Reaching for the Stars: A New History of Bomber Command in World War II (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 95.

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

At the end of August, I spent a day and a half at the offices of the Air League, which very graciously had allowed me access to their archives. Their address on Tothill Street is not far from Buckingham Palace, which I hadn’t yet seen. And I hadn’t done Whitehall properly yet. So it was a good opportunity to do the tourist thing, camera in hand.
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If you haven’t already, it’s time to nominate for the 2007 Cliopatria Awards for the best history blogging in six categories: best group blog, best individual blog, best new blog, best post, best series of posts, and best writing. Nominations close at the end of November. I admit that I tend to wait until late in the month before thinking too hard about this, so that it’s mostly a case of working out what the most glaring omissions are — it’s less work that way :)

Good luck to all the nominees!

No, really.

You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!

Leo Amery (paraphrasing Oliver Cromwell’s dismissal of the Rump Parliament), in reference to Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, 7 May 1940.

Ron Austin. The Fighting Fourth: A History of Sydney’s 4th Battalion 1914-19. McCrae: Slouch Hat Publications, 2007. Private Mulqueeney’s unit, though the poor sod was with it in the field for only a couple of months before his death. It had earlier landed at Gallipoli, on the first day; and after the Somme fought at 3rd Ypres, Broodseinde, Polygon Wood and the Hindenburg Line, among other places. This is, surprisingly, the first history of the 4th Battalion AIF; it looks to have done it justice as far as writing and production quality goes (it’s fairly sparsely footnoted, but I suppose that’s not what unit histories are about).

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

After Newark and Cranwell, I returned to London, for the last couple of weeks of my stay there. No longer did the summer stretch out before me. This meant that I had to start making hard choices about how to spend my time, both in terms of my research and my sight-seeing. In my gawking tourist mode, I still had three major sites on my must-see list — Hampton Court Palace, the Tower of London, and Greenwich — but only two sight-seeing days left! The first of these was the summer bank holiday, which turned out to be a nice day, so I chose to head out to Hampton Court Palace, much of which dates to the 15th century. The present building was originally Cardinal Wolsey’s palace; Henry VIII acquired it through not-entirely-honourable circumstances, and it was a popular royal palace up until the Georgian period.
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I can’t say I’m terribly familiar with Lord Allenby, either the man or his career (and when I visualise him, he always looks like Jack Hawkins). But in my experience, retired field marshals are more likely to call for national service than a world state,¹ so I was surprised when I came across Allenby’s Last Message: World Police for World Peace, a pamphlet containing an address given by Allenby in his role as Rector of the University of Edinburgh on 28 April 1936. Sadly, he died only a few weeks later; in fact, the pamphlet contains a preface from Allenby dated 14 May 1936, the very day he died. It was published by the New Commonwealth, a society founded by Lord Davies to proselytise for an international police force (meaning an international air force, more or less, rather than something like Interpol), which would step in and stop wars, and hopefully deter them from starting in the first place. The speech is thin on practical details, being more of a call to (collective) arms directed at the rising generation.

First, Allenby outlined the the danger:

There is danger in delay, for it seems likely that, unless an effort in the right direction — a successful effort — is made soon, the present social system will crumble in ruin; and many now alive may witness the hideous wreck. Then will loom the dreadful menace of the dark ages; returning, darker, black, universal in scope, long-lasting.²

‘Recent progress in Science has now given to the machine the mastery over man its maker’,³ Allenby claimed. Scientists everywhere were ‘busily experimenting with new inventions for facilitating slaughter; […] designing more monstrous methods of murdering their fellow men and women’.⁴ There would be no hesitation in attacking civilians with these new weapons in the next war. But science (by which he really means, technology) also gave him hope, for it enlarged people’s horizons:

Man is now able to navigate the atmosphere, plumb the deep seas, travel in three dimensions of space, move anywhere at a speed unimaginable to our fathers. Willingly or unwillingly, he has become a world-citizen; and the duties of that citizenship cannot be evaded; duties calling for the whole-hearted co-operation of every man and woman alive, joined in mind and purpose to promote the good and the advancement of all.⁵

And his solution? A world state and an international police force.

Is it too much to believe that the human intellect is equal to the problem of designing a world state wherein neighbours can live without molestation; in collective security? It does not matter what the state is called; give it any name you please: — League of Nations; Federated Nations; United States of the World. Why should there not be a world police; just as each nation has a national police force?⁶

It’s somehow reassuring that Allenby could retain some measure of faith in the future after fighting the Battle of Armageddon!

1. Though for that matter, in 1930 Allenby did set up the British National Cadet Association in order to help preserve the public school cadet system after the Geddes axe. I’m sure Bobs would have approved.
2. Allenby, Allenby’s Last Message: World Police for World Peace (London: New Commonwealth, 1936), 8.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 9.
6. Ibid.

Philip Williamson. Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Stan, me old mucker!

What was the first post-apocalyptic film? This is something I’ve wondered for a while. First, I should define what I mean by a “post-apocalyptic film”. It’s one which posits some great global catastrophe which shatters civilisation.¹ It can show that catastrophe but the focus has to be on what happens afterwards: how do people survive, what problems do they face, can they rebuild civilisation in some form, or is it a struggle to hold on to what they’ve got? Nearly everything everybody took for granted has been swept away or changed out of all recognition — social classes, political institutions, gender relations, fast food chains. People with guns have a big advantage — until they start running out of bullets. And so on. Mad Max 2 and 3 are classic post-apocalyptic films (Mad Max itself is borderline, as it is interestingly set in a world sliding into chaos, but society is still holding together — just). So is Threads, though it spends more time on the apocalypse itself. Children of Men arguably is; Dr Strangelove isn’t, because it ends with the End.

In short, post-apocalyptic films show life among the ruins, and so should be distinguished from their near relations, apocalypse and disaster films, which don’t attempt to show the long-term consequences of their particular catastrophes; though of course there is a grey area where the genres shade into each other.

I initially thought the first was H. G. Wells’s Things to Come (1936), the middle section of which is unmistakably post-apocalyptic. Three decades after the start of a world war, fighting still continues, only now it’s between the inhabitants of what’s left of Everytown, and the tribes living in the hills, squabbling over a coal mine. An epidemic has killed half the population of the planet, but now that it is over, the town is recovering. Petrol is scarce, so a double-decker bus now serves as a butcher shop, and cars are drawn by horses, though people still wistfully remember how far they used to travel in them …

But was there anything earlier? There’s no reason why there couldn’t be. Wells didn’t invent the post-apocalyptic novel; that honour belongs to Mary Shelley. Her triple-decker The Last Man was published, anonymously, in 1826, and traces the fortunes of one Englishman as the rest of humanity succumbs to a plague. He ends up alone, wandering among empty museums and palaces, and then setting off in a boat down the east coast of Africa. As it happens, a no-budget version was filmed this year, though it appears to have traded the melancholy for large volumes of automatic weapons fire.

So, I turned to the venerable IMDb.² This only has incomplete information for early films, particularly silent-era ones, but it’s better than nothing; and it has a system of plot keywords, such as Post Apocalyptic and Last Man on Earth, which can be used to pick out likely candidates from before Things to Come. There are four in total, three American and one French. Actually, two of them, It’s Great to Be Alive (1933) and El Último varon sobre la Tierra (’The last man on Earth’; 1933 — though it’s in Spanish it appears to be a US production) are remakes of The Last Man on Earth (1924). The catastrophe in these three films is a plague which kills only men; all men are wiped out, except one, who then has every woman in the picture competing over his affections. These three don’t take the apocalypse very seriously, however: they are all comedies, and the later versions are musicals to boot. I doubt their makers were very interested in exploring what might happen to society should one sex die out (beyond suggesting that a female US president would allow the White House to be overrun by cats); they sound more like nudge-nudge wink-wink male fantasies of getting rid of all of the competition. (One link I found referred to the title of one of the films as It’s Great to Be Alive When You’re the Last Man on Earth, which says it all, really.)

The fourth candidate is Sur un air de Charleston (1927), a short film made by Jean Renoir. Here, the premise seems to be that a future war has wiped out Europe. An African airman lands in the ruins of Paris, sees a white woman, who proceeds to … show him the Charleston. He learns to dance it as well. Then they fly away again. Oh, there’s a chimp too. Well, I suppose it could be argued that it’s some sort of commentary on the pervasiveness of American popular culture (not just the Charleston, but the African is played by an African-American dancer wearing blackface!) or an inversion of white anthropologists watching and recording indigenous dances, or something. But the indications are that it was just a bit of fluff which Renoir didn’t even bother to edit into a proper film (that was done later). If there was a point, it was to show off his wife’s dancing, and to play around with some film effects.

These all do appear to be post-apocalyptic films of a sort, but, at best — and without having seen any of them, I must add — they are amusing opportunities for seeing the world turned upside down, not serious excursions into the land of What If …? In drawing such a distinction, am I just being a snob? Maybe it’s just my own peculiar bias; for example in my own research I look for novels which treat the idea of city bombing seriously enough to have thought through the consequences of their suppositions. The authors think what they describe might really happen; so their readers might too. So I look for something similar in post-apocalyptic works too. But still, I’m happy to give the title of first post-apocalyptic film to The Last Man on Earth, for now; Things to Come can be the first serious post-apocalyptic film :)

PS To keep tabs on what’s happening after the apocalypse, check out Quiet Earth.

1. I think it has to be global, or least nearly global in its effects. If for some reason Australia’s cities were wiped out by swarms of meteorites, say, but the rest of the world was unaffected, the survivors wouldn’t be left to fend for themselves, there’d be rescue efforts, rehabilitation etc. At the very least, I guess the people affected by the catastrophe have to believe that it’s pretty much global, that there’s no help coming from elsewhere, and so they have to fend for themselves.
2. Incidentally, probably the website I’ve been using the longest — I can remember when it was called the ‘Cardiff Movie Database Browser’ …

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

Cranwell is a RAF base in Lincolnshire (not far from Newark or Grantham, or Lincoln for that matter). It was first established as a RNAS training station in 1915, and sortied the odd anti-zepp patrol in the next few years. In the 1930s, Frank Whittle did much of his work on jet engines here; indeed, the first flight of the Gloster E.28/39, on 15 May 1941, was from Cranwell. But it is best known as the home of the RAF’s officer training college, RAF College Cranwell (but usually called Cranwell, just to confuse things). The College was founded in 1919, and the rather splendid College Hall, seen above, opened for business in 1934.
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The grave of Pte John Joseph Mulqueeney, in Courcelette British Cemetery, Somme, France. He was killed on 17 August 1916 near Mouquet Farm.

I am extremely grateful to Steve John for providing me with this photograph.

It’s the 75th anniversary of Stanley Baldwin’s famous ‘the bomber will always get through’ speech. It’s an important text which is widely quoted, both in my primary and my secondary sources, as a testament to the fear of bombing in the 1930s. But I’ve never actually read it very closely, and I think I’m in good company because it’s usually the same couple of lines which are quoted, and the rest of it is ignored. And as it doesn’t seem to be online anywhere I thought it would be a useful exercise to transcribe it and put it up on the web.

Baldwin was not Prime Minister when he gave the speech, as is sometimes said. He had been PM twice before, in 1923-4 and 1925-9 (and would be again in 1935-7), but at this time he was Lord President of the Council, a Cabinet-level post with no major duties attached to it. Baldwin’s real importance was as leader of the Conservative Party, which had by far the most seats in Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government. He had power without responsibility, one is tempted to say.

The occasion for the speech was a debate in the House of Commons about disarmament, held on 10 November 1932 — the eve of Armistice Day. The original motion was proposed by Clement Attlee, deputy leader of the Labour Party, and read:

That, in the opinion of this House, it is an essential preliminary to the success of the forthcoming World Economic Conference that the British Government should give clear and unequivocal support to an immediate, universal, and substantial reduction of armaments on the basis of equality of status for all nations, and should maintain the principles of the Covenant of the League of Nations by supporting the findings of the Lytton Commission on the Sino-Japanese dispute.¹

This was obviously an attempt to embarrass the Prime Minister, a well-known pacifist — and a hated former leader of the Labour Party. But MacDonald didn’t speak in the following debate; instead, his Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, defended the Government’s record and went into some hopeful diplomatic initiatives in some detail. George Lansbury, Labour’s leader, lashed out and accused all nations of failing to fulfill any of the international peace pacts signed since the war. Baldwin spoke last of all. According to the Times’s parliamentary correspondent, when he finished ‘There was a deep and almost emotional round of applause’ from the House.² Of course, he was the party leader for most of the MPs, but it does seem that he had touched a chord. Baldwin had a longstanding record of concern about the air threat and his sincerity would have been evident. And — not that there was ever any doubt given the huge majority enjoyed by the National Government — Attlee’s motion was defeated by 402 votes to 44.

The following transcript of his speech is taken not from Hansard but from The Times.³ I’ve edited it lightly, mainly to move the murmurs of approval from the listening MPs into footnotes. The phrases in bold are those which are most commonly quoted.
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1. The Times, 11 November 1932, p. 7.
2. Ibid., p. 14.
3. Ibid., p. 8.

Gary Smailes has put together Military History Carnival 8, and it’s a good one. The item which, inevitably, appealed to me most was Damned Interesting’s account of incidents where the world nearly stumbled into an accidental nuclear holocaust. (But wait, there were more!) Obviously, a scenario where the survival of a significant proportion of humanity, and of civilisation itself, depends upon accidents not happening is not a particularly good thing. But we got WarGames out of it, so on balance I think we’re ahead.

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

After six weeks in the UK, I finally got to see somewhere other than London when I attended a conference at RAF Cranwell in Lincolnshire. To get to Cranwell, I took a GNER train from King’s Cross to Newark in Nottinghamshire, where a RAF courtesy bus took me the rest of the 20km or so to the air force base. Between when the train arrived and when the bus left, I had about 90 minutes to kill, and so I used that time for a quick whirl around the town to see what there was to see. Mainly that was two things: the magnificent ruins of a castle, and quite a large church.
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Every day during the Blitz, the Daily Mail published a selection of letters from readers on various topics, out of the hundreds received every day. Clearly it can’t be assumed that these are representative of British public opinion generally, or of Mail readers, or even of those readers motivated to write letters to the editor (though on that last point, at least there is the newspaper’s own daily summary of its mailbag to compare with). Still, they’re fascinating to read. Consider this letter from Molly Roche, of Welwyn, Hertfordshire:

For God’s sake put women in charge of the R.A.F. policy before it is too late.¹

This is somewhat cryptic as it stands: what did she think women would do differently, if they were in charge of the RAF? It’s clear enough from the context that the policy she had in mind was the bombing of German cities in reprisal for the Blitz. At this point, 80% of the letters received by the Mail advocated ‘unlimited reprisals on German cities’ — though another 12.5% were opposed.² Was she right in implying that women generally favoured reprisals? It’s impossible to say, because of the caveats mentioned above, but there were certainly other women who were thinking along the same lines. For example, Ida Turnbull, Bury St. Edmunds:

English men and women are getting as tired of hearing “bombed at random” as we were of “appeasement.” And what good did that do? The only thing that Hitler and Co. can understand is the iron fist: so why not bomb their principal streets and shops of Berlin? We have the finest airmen and craft, so why not let them “Go to It?”³

Mrs. A. Penington, Blackpool:

“Bomb Berlin. Raze it to the ground.” is on everybody’s lips.⁴

Mrs. Rosa Keoghoe, Wood Green, N.22:

Why all this tender feeling for German children? When bombing military objectives it is their own families’ fault if they are within bombing distance. They have the same chance to break up their homes and go to safer places as many English families have had to take. This is war, and we are all in it.⁵

Mrs. E. M. McMillan, Ormskirk, Lancashire (it’s not clear what she is proposing specifically, but it’s the first letter in a section headed ‘Reprisals’):

As a cancer or a poisonous weed should be ruthlessly cut out, so must the German race be utterly and definitely purged of all its evil powers.⁶

Not all published letters from women on the matter of reprisals were in favour, of course. And there were plenty in favour from men — or so I assume, since in most cases first names or honorifics are not given, only initials; where either or both appear, it’s nearly always for a woman. The letter I found most chilling in fact gives no clue as to the gender of the author, and is from E. James, Colchester:

I understood we were going to be meeting force with force. What is murdering women and children but force?⁷

At least it’s not hypocritical.

1. Daily Mail, 26 September 1940, p. 3.
2. Ibid. The other 7.5% were presumably on unrelated topics.
3. Ibid., 23 September 1940, p. 3.
4. Ibid., 24 September 1940, p. 3.
5. Ibid., 2 October 1940, p. 3.
6. Ibid., 4 October 1940, p. 3.
7. Ibid., 30 September 1940, p. 3.

This week I attended the bi-annual departmental Work in Progress Day, where postgrads give talks on their research. I wasn’t presenting this time around (I did earlier this year) but it turns out that two of my fellow students are also fellow bloggers! (Which, as far as I know, makes a total of three for the department, including myself.)

One I knew about already, actually: David Llewellyn’s Australia Felix. He’s doing his PhD on the influence of utilitarianism in Australian political life — for example in the genesis of the Australian constitution. His paper, which is online, takes in Aeneas, Madame de Stael, Gallipoli, Chartism and of course Jeremy Bentham. By taking as a touchstone a novel by Henry Handel Richardson, it also gave me flashbacks to English lit in high school, where I was forced to read The Getting of Wisdom. Which in retrospect wasn’t a bad book, but at the time I had a very low tolerance for any novel without spaceships or elves in it, so a coming-of-age novel set in a private girls’ school didn’t exactly cut it! Do check out David’s website and blog though.

The other blog is Megan Sheehy’s History and Web 2.0. Her MA topic is on the use of Web 2.0 tools by Australian historians, and her paper was specifically about the use of YouTube. Megan also has a post about her talk, but even better (and rather recursively!) she has put a two-part video of it on YouTube (part one, part two).

Above is the first part: you can see me arriving late at -8:37, but it’s worth watching the rest of it too :)