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!

On 29 March 1938, the Daily Mail noted that Leslie Burgin, the Minister for Transport, had sent an ‘urgent’ message to the Port of London Authority, a message which caused it to cancel its public inquiry into a proposal for a Thames barrage at Woolwich, scheduled to start that very day. (Here, barrage means ‘dam’, not artillery fire — though the meanings are related, of course …)

He [Burgin] told them that the Committee of Imperial Defence had reported that the construction of the barrage would have “very serious disadvantages” from the standpoint of defence, and that the Government would be compelled to veto the project if it were promoted.⁵

The article explained further:

Experts had warned the Government that an appalling disaster might ensue if such a barrage was successfully attacked by bombs from the air. At low tide shipping and life would be imperilled in the lower reaches of the river.⁶

I should explain here that the proposed Thames barrage wasn’t a hydroelectric dam, nor was it primarily a flood defence like the modern Thames Barrier (which is about a kilometre upriver from the proposed barrage site). Its main purpose was to make the Thames above Woolwich tideless. This, the Thames Barrage Association asserted, would be a good thing because it would ease the access of ships and boats into the various London docks (which were, as I understand it, enclosed by a lock and kept at constant water level).⁷ It would also make it much easier to deliver coal to the various power stations along the river (the colliers couldn’t pass under the various bridges at high tide, it seems). Also, the tides also washed sewage, dumped into the estuary below Gallions Reach, as far upriver as Chelsea: the barrage would reduce this by four-fifths. And it would help prevent flooding. Among the minor benefits would be a reduced need for barge roads, which could be used for an airport beside the Thames (Battersea Reach was proposed). Essentially, the Thames above Woolwich would become one giant enclosed lock. In engineering terms, this was a trifle; in 1932, the Dutch completed construction of the Afsluitdijk, which enclosed the Zuider Zee at a similar height to the proposed barrage, and with two locks — and that’s 32 km long.

The London Port Authority was never very keen on the barrage anyway, but the Thames Barrage Association, which had been pushing the idea for a few years, was definitely not happy with this turn of events. It kept fighting the good fight — one of its leading lights, the engineer J. H. O. Bunge, published a book in 1944 called The Tideless Thames in Future London — but the barrage was never built. I’m not sure why, though eventually the decline of the great docks upstream of Woolwich would have undermined its main purpose. But presumably there is some intellectual relationship between the barrage and the Barrier, which began construction in 1974.

So, getting back to bombs. It seems likely to me that the CID’s analysis of the vulnerability of the Thames barrage drew in some way upon their study of the Ruhr dams. Obviously there are important differences between bombing the barrage and bombing the dams. The latter were much higher; the height of the Thames tide at Woolwich is about 7 metres, on average, whereas the hole breached in the Möhne dam was more than 10 times that in height. So, all else being equal, the rate of flow of water out of the breached barrage would have been much less than in the German dams. Fewer people would be at risk downstream (only people close to the shore might be affected). Actually, the greater danger might be to shipping upstream as the river suddenly emptied; this could cause great chaos in the docks. On the other hand, there would be less disruption of electricity to London’s factories — though there would be some because, as noted above, coal was delivered to the Thames power stations by barge.

Breaching such a relatively small dam might not require fancy bouncing bombs; conventional bombs might do the trick, with luck. Not that there is any sign here that anyone considered that there it might actually be difficult to attack a dam successfully. Of course, it wouldn’t be desirable to give away too much operational information in a public statement … but the urgency of Burgin’s message does give the impression that blowing up dams would be an easy thing to do. And this fits in with the widespread impression in the 1930s (and, as far as the public was concerned, during the war) that pinpoint bombing was easily achievable. In reality, of course, it wasn’t (as the Butt Report showed). Still, determined low-level attacks would probably have been able to put the lock out of action, at least, with consequent disruption to food and fuel imports into London. So Burgin was probably wise to put a stop to the barrage plan, even if he did so in an unnecessarily alarming fashion.⁸

Another aspect to the decision to drop the barrage is that it’s an example — if a negative and, I think, a rare one — of the effect that the possibility of bombing had on urban planning. This was much talked about in Britain in the 1930s. For example, in September 1938, the Spectator reported that the British delegation to an international urban planning congress in Mexico City

revealed in all its nakedness a picture of the life to which civilised man will be condemned if air-warfare is to be perpetuated as one of the enduring achievements of civilisation. It is true that his life would not be spent underground, but all the essentials of life would have to be duplicated underground. Car-parks would go beneath the surface so that they could be used as shelters [...] hospitals would have to go underground, so would museums, for the security of their contents, so should all places of public entertainment, and communications must of course be constructed underground, at a cost of about £1,000 a foot.⁹

Despite its supposed necessity, in practice very little of this type of thing was ever carried out. I suppose it’s easier, and a lot cheaper, to not build something you wanted to, for fear of air attack, than to build something that you otherwise wouldn’t have done, for the same reason. If that makes sense. And admittedly, the underground hospitals and museums turned out not to be necessary, and the money was put to better use elsewhere. But the same sorts of choices — yes if it’s easy, no if it’s hard, despite the apparently dire threat faced — were made in the Cold War,¹⁰ and we’ll probably end up making the same non-choices with regards to modern-day threats like climate change. This time, however, we may regret it.¹¹

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.
5. Daily Mail, 29 March 1938, p. 4.
6. Ibid.
7. E. F. Spanner thought that these locks were themselves a point of vulnerability to air attack.
8. Though I guess it probably wouldn’t have been finished before the war, anyway.
9. Spectator, 9 September 1938, 391.
10. E.g. with regards to meaningful shelter programs to protect civilian populations from nuclear warfare. See David Miller, The Cold War: A Military History (London: John Murray, 1998), 149.
11. Though for a more hopeful lesson from history, see this suggestion by Mark Roodhouse, which draws on the British experience of rationing during the world wars for advice to policymakers looking at implementing carbon rationing.

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.

The Cenotaph.

Possibly the most famous street in a city which has more than its fair share of famous streets.

Don’t know who these guys were, but since they were standing in the middle of Downing Street having an earnest discussion about something or other, they are probably Very Important Persons.

The Women of World War II Memorial. I like it; makes a nice change from the usual men-with-guns-type monument!

Field Marshal Douglas Haig, or H**g as he sometimes referred to on one mailing list I subscribe to, where the mere mention of his name has been known to start flame wars!

The Old War Office, which was just called the War Office during both of the world wars …

The obligatory Horse Guards photo — a Life Guard, I think. With all the tourists crowding around and taking photos (like me), it must be a test of discipline for both man (or woman — the first time I walked, the trooper on guard was female) and beast. They always passed while I watched, though the horses did sometimes get a bit skittish.

Moving away from Whitehall now, and towards the palace. This is the Guards Memorial, in St James’s Park just off Horse Guards Road.

St James’s Park, with Buckingham Palace just visible in the distance.

This was very moving, all the more so because I didn’t know it existed and happened on it by chance (on Horse Guards Road, near the entrance to the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms). It’s a memorial to the victims of the Bali terrorist bombings on 12 October 2002, which have a special significance in Australia. Bali is a popular holiday destinations for Australians (and I’ve been to Bali too, as it happens) and 88 of us were killed in the bombings, out of 202 deaths total. This memorial quite rightly focuses on the 24 British victims, but also lists the names of those from other nations. So I was touched by this memorial.

A Ferret armoured car, in the grounds of the Guards Museum.

The European Commission’s UK office. Somehow I was expecting something more grand!

Maybe something like this, in fact. 55 Broadway, on top of St James’s Park tube (and opposite the Air League). Currently it houses the headquarters for London Underground, but surely the nascent European superstate is more deserving of such a brutal edifice. (Though Senate House, by the same architect, would be even better.) It’s hard to believe now, but when this opened in 1929 it was the tallest building in London.

One of the statues adorning 55 Broadway, Night by Jacob Epstein.

Finally, Buckingham Palace itself. (This photo, like the one of the Ferret, was taken a few days later.)

Also there were a goodly number of TV crews — it just so happened that I was there on the 10th anniversary of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. But why they were all lined up with the palace in the background is somewhat mystifying. Did they think Her Maj was going to throw herself off the balcony or something?

The Victoria Memorial (as in the queen, not my home state).

Another shot of the palace and the memorial.

And going through Green Park on my way back to my digs, I chanced upon yet another memorial — the Canada Memorial, dedicated to Canadian servicemen and -women of the world wars.

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).

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.

This is the palace from across the Thames. It’s not the best angle, perhaps, but it does show off the the authentic Tudor car and motor boat in the foreground.

A view of the main gate from the Base Court (i.e., inside the palace), which dates to the second decade of the 16th century, Wolsey’s day.

Dotted around the courtyards are terracotta medallions of various Roman emperors. Wolsey commissioned them from Giovanni da Maiano, and, it has been suggested, were basically taken from an Italian guide on palace design for the up-and-coming cardinal. But the selection of emperors seems a bit strange. The one above is Tiberius, whose reputation probably still hasn’t recovered from Tacitus’s hatchet-job; but I see from Ronald Mellor’s Tacitus (1993) that the Annals wasn’t widely influential in Europe (outside Germany) until a few decades into the 16th century, so perhaps Tiberius isn’t so odd. But, looking through my other photos, there’s a Titus, an Otho and a Nero. Titus I can understand, but Otho ruled for barely three months in AD 69, and Nero was, well, Nero. Now I know that all things classical and pagan were in vogue during the Renaissance, but I wouldn’t have thought that the first persecutor of the Christians would be the obvious emperor for a cardinal to choose!

Next court, the Clock Court.

The colonnade on the south side of the Clock Court. As both these photos show, there’s an odd mishmash of architectural styles throughout the palace (the last major changes are ‘restorations’ and additions from Victoria’s reign, including — I think — the lion and the dragon holding up the flagpoles at the start of the post). That’s something I didn’t fully appreciate, knowing only of castles and palaces at a distance — over the centuries, they were often extensively rebuilt by their current owners to suit current needs or fashions. So I don’t think I actually saw an architecturally ‘pure’ castle or palace the whole time I was overseas, unless it was in Rome, perhaps. I suppose the trick is to find somewhere owned by a family which had fallen on hard times for several hundred years, and so didn’t have the money to do it up very often.

Now this is a real treasure. It’s a 16th century astronomical clock which normally resides over the gateway between the outer Base Court and the inner Clock Court. But the gateway is being restored, so for the time being the clock components are propped up against a wall (as can be seen in the previous photo), so I got to have a good look at them.

This is the clock’s hand, which moves the Sun around the clock’s rim (in the previous photo), which is divided into months and days and the corresponding zodiacal constellations (each 30° wide). So it’s actually a calendar, more than a clock. The big disc would go underneath the black-rimmed central disc in the previous photo — it’s marked to the length of a lunar month (a bit over 29.5 days). The black heart-shape is there to show the phase of the moon as it passes under the hole in the black-rimmed disc.

Well, that’s all perfectly clear in my head, but I’m not so sure that it’s still clear after I’ve written it down …

The clock was constructed in 1540, according to the adjacent sign. However, this site thinks that’s a myth, and that it goes back to at least 1528. (The mechanism above does bear the mark “N.O. 1540″, referring to the Tudors’ clock keeper Nicholas Oursian, but that only dates to the late 19th century.)

The magnificent, if somewhat over-the-top, paintings in the King’s Staircase, the entrance to the state apartments of William III — that is, a series of increasingly grand rooms by which his subjects approached His Majesty, culminating in the bedroom where he received his closest intimates. Mary II had a similar set of apartments, just as grand (and Henry VIII’s are also still here, somewhat less linearly). No photos allowed inside the palace proper, so you can’t see the Hampton Court Beauties or the grace and favour or King Harry’s Great Hall, unless you visit yourself.

The, erm, staircase in the King’s Staircase. The murals are by Antonio Verrio and depict figures from Roman mythology and history — everybody from Apollo and Aeneas to Julian the Apostate.

Much later, one critic wrote:

The grandiose wall and ceiling paintings of Verrio and Laguerre, however admired in their own day, have lost their vogue, and it is impossible to look at such decorations as those of the King’s Staircase without a certain impatience at the riot of feeble allegory which they present.

That’s the Edwardians for you — I rather liked it.

The Fountain Court, designed by the astronomer Christopher Wren.

In the Tudor Kitchens with the experimental food historians. This was a highlight of the day (somewhat surprisingly, as I’m not exactly a foodie) — these chaps prepare, cook and ear a meal following the recipes and etiquette of the Tudor period, while one of them gives a running commentary to the crowd. It was most entertaining and educational — the sheer industrial-scale organisation required for feeding a court full of nobles, soldiers, bureaucrats and servants was staggering.

It looked and smelled good … sadly, we were only allowed to look!

I can’t remember what this room is. It’s obviously been restored to reflect some function from the Tudor period — the kitchen accountant, perhaps?

I had no problems navigating the famous maze, being a dedicated follower of walls. But I took a wrong turn when trying to find the entrance to the gardens, so didn’t get to see them before closing time. There’s always next time, I suppose!

Finally, I paused on the bank of the Thames, took a few pictures of the sky, then joined the throngs heading back into town on the train.

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 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’ …

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.

On 22 and 23 August 2007, I was fortunate to be able to attend a conference at Cranwell on the subject of “Air Power, Insurgency, and the ‘War on Terror’”. This was jointly hosted by the Air Power Studies Division of King’s College London, and by the RAF Centre for Air Power Studies (RAF CAPS), newly formed out of the Air Power Studies Division, Air Historical Branch, and Directorate of Defence Studies. The purpose of RAF CAPS is described as follows:

The Centre aspires to strengthen the relationship between academia and the RAF and to utilise the enhanced collaboration to develop and stimulate thinking about air power in both areas, as well as more broadly throughout the United Kingdom. The RAF CAPS is ideally placed to enhance the RAF’s current and future operational effectiveness by improving the ability of the Service to apply lessons from the past to both the present and the future.

This is a very worthwhile endeavour, and I wish RAF CAPS every success. They’ve made a good start with their website: there’s a page for job listings, a link to Air Power Review (which they are now responsible for), and even a space for a blog, though it’s currently empty.

Staying on a RAF base for a night was a novel experience. In fact even before I got onto the base, I sat behind an Air Chief Marshal (retired) on the bus, which was stopped at the gates by a young woman with a very big gun. But I’m too much of a civilian to have enjoyed even the minimal restrictions I had to observe as a guest (I’ve already mentioned the tie thing) — I never would have made it in the military!

That’s the lawn in front of College Hall; you could land a 504K on that … quite possibly the intention!

The conference itself was of a high standard. Its purpose was to examine the role played by airpower in past counter-insurgency operations and to try to draw lessons for current and future wars. So, the papers were a mix of historical case studies, reports on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and broader overviews — more war studies than history. Of course, the historical papers were of most direct interest to me, particularly those dealing with RAF air control policies: Group Captain Neville Parton’s “Air power and insurgency: early RAF doctrine” (which showed the evolution of air control doctrine, and made the very good point that unlike strategic bombing, air control operations constituted the RAF’s concrete experience of bombing in the interwar period) and Air Vice-Marshal Peter Dye’s “Royal Air Force operations in southwest Arabia 1917-1967″ (fascinating to see the continuities over such a long period, but also how political changes, both international and local, made air control policies more difficult to sustain). Probably the most enjoyable papers were some of those on operations I knew little about: for example, Richard Grossman’s “‘Looks suspicious’: the U.S. Marines’ air campaign against the Sandino insurgents of Nicaragua, 1927-1933′ (a real eye-opener: poor intelligence and little understanding of the cultural context often led to bombing of civilians with no connection to the insurgents, which oddly enough was counterproductive), or David Jordan’s “Air power in urban insurgencies: the battles of Surabaya and Fallujah” (in both cases good intelligence was gathered beforehand and drastically improved effectiveness). Of course, there was much on present-day operations too, and there were attempts by distinguished historians like James Corum and Philip Meilinger to draw more general principles about the application of airpower in the 21st century.

The participants were probably 70% military (mostly RAF, of course). I was impressed by the attentiveness of the senior officers (the Chief of Air Staff was in attendance) to the conclusions drawn by the various speakers: this conference was not for show, or a mere academic exercise, but a real attempt to learn from the successes and failures of the past. Nor were they only interested in learning how to destroy things more efficiently, or in a more discriminating fashion: there was much discussion of non-lethal uses of airpower, such as for reconnaissance or even just keeping the enemies’ heads down, restricting their mobility. (Which strikes me as a return to 1914 conceptions of airpower, in some ways.) Having said that, my favourite new phrase from the conference was undoubtedly “the kinetic effects of airpower”, meaning precisely the ability to destroy things from the air, using the awesome power of kinetic energy. As an ex-physicist, that’s a phrase I can get on board with!

Speaking of King’s and war studies, I’ve recently come across an excellent group blog called Kings of War, run by three KCL War Studies academics: David Betz, Theo Farrell and Patrick Porter. Only occasionally historical, but it’s still good clean fun.