Did you know that 87% of the UK’s population, and 99% of its land area, lies outside Greater London? Well you’d barely know it from reading this blog. After finishing my research in that fair city (and after dispensing with the foolish notion of detouring to Cambridge or Aberystwyth to do yet more research), it was time to see a little of the rest of the country, aside from the brief glimpses I’d had already on my trip to Newark and Cranwell. In fact, I was a bit disappointed to discover that I was taking the exact same train line as I had done then, so wasn’t seeing anything new for the first hour plus (though it was nice to see Peterborough Cathedral again, over which PC Kettle saw a phantom airship pass on one fateful night in March 1909 …) After that, it was pretty much power stations all the way to York, my first destination. I arrived mid-morning, found my way to my hotel, dumped my luggage and then set out to explore.

One of the great things about York is that its city walls are still largely intact, the longest in England. This is the Micklegate Bar, the southern entrance into the old city (there are three others). It was built in the 14th century. The heads of traitors were displayed here, most recently in 1745 (well, I suppose you need to keep them somewhere). Today, it’s a traffic obstruction and a small museum (which I have to say was a bit ordinary, but as it was practically the only place I thought that about, I can’t complain!)

Though it varies a bit from place to place, most of the walls date to the 12th-14th centuries. The view from the top is great, but after all that’s part of the point: though they are mostly picturesque today (their other function being a fun way to walk into town), they once defended the city. The last time they did this was in 1644, when the Parliamentarians laid siege to York. They tried to storm the walls, but failed. But not long afterwards, York was voluntarily surrendered after the Royalists were defeated at Marston Moor, which took place a few miles to the west.

As I walked clockwise from Micklegate Bar along the walls, this magnificent building came into view. But it was not my immediate destination …

… that was the National Railway Museum. My father worked for the railways for many years, and until I was into my teens, wherever we lived there was always a railway shunting yard over the back fence, and sometimes the standard gauge line to Sydney. (It’s amazing how soothing the sound of shunting diesel locomotives can be when you’re going to sleep!) So I grew up around trains — not like this one though! It’s a South Eastern and Chatham Railway 4-4-0 locomotive built in 1901.

I was supposed to be on holiday, yet Britain’s air wars kept popping up all over the place. There’s another example below; and here’s the Battle of Britain class 4-6-2 “Winston Churchill”, built in 1945 and, appropriately, retired in 1965.

The NRM is very proud of this: Mallard, the fastest steam locomotive on the planet. And doesn’t it look it! It was designed for 160 km/h plus speeds, tested in a wind-tunnel, and reached 202.7 km/h on 3 July 1938, south of Grantham. It’s a beautiful machine, characteristically 1930s in its streamlining. It seems a shame that it hasn’t been run since the 1980s.

A British Rail Deltic — I think I had one of these in my train set! (A bit smaller though, as I recall.)

In the gap between the two steam locomotives, you can see a third, sitting on a turntable. The turntable is operational, and they give it a spin for the visitors, who oddly find this very entertaining. (Well, I did too …)

The front of London, Brighton and South Coast Railway 0-4-2 “Gladstone”, with the royal coat of arms. Presumably this means it was used to haul the royal family about. It’s also got E.R. on the side, which, as it was in service between 1882 and 1927 must refer to Edward VII (i.e. Edwardus Rex). Not that anyone cares, but I tried googling to find out why the coat of arms is on there, and drew a blank, so that’s the best I can come up with …

I found carriages like this one interesting — with three classes squeezed into the one tiny coach. First class can hardly be much roomier than second or third, and though it’s probably more nicely upholstered there’s just no room for any other amenities. This is very different to to-day’s travel experience, where everyone else envies those in first! It made me think that the main purpose of the separate seating classes was so you could be with your own social class. Oddly enough, I saw something similar a few days later on a little intercity train in Scotland, where most of the carriage was economy and then there was a little section partitioned off as first class. Again, it didn’t look any different to where I was sitting.

The Cornishman Richard Trevithick who (may have) invented the first steam-powered road locomotive, and was (possibly) assisted in this venture by Holman Bros. of Camborne, Cornwall, who I’m (probably not) related to …

An example of the original (1964) Japanese bullet train, or Shinkansen. It looks like a jet airliner with the wings shorn off.

That was enough looking at old trains, which after all are not inherently Yorkish. Back outside again and across the river Ouse …

… and straight on towards York Minster.

What a glorious building. Simply stunning. I think it was my favourite out of all the cathedrals and churches I saw (and given the competition, that is saying a lot).

The building dates to the 14th and 15th centuries, though it has been extensively damaged by fire over the centuries and rebuilt in places (not that it shows!)

The quire screen and the huge organ.

A close-up of the quire screen (quire = choir), showing Kings Richard I (left) and John. Mid-15th century.

Underneath the crossing tower (the big square tower in the 4th photo from the top).

Another astronomical clock and another memorial to an air war — this time dedicated to the Bomber Command airmen who died flying missions from bases in Yorkshire, Durham and Northumberland.

One of the chief glories of York Minster is its stained glass windows. The Great West Window (the one visible in the exterior shots), which dates to 1338; known as the Heart of Yorkshire for obvious reasons.

More glories.

I believe this to be a panel (I think either temporarily taken down, or else a reproduction) from the Great East Window (dimly visible behind the organ in one of the previous photos), which contains the largest area of medieval glass in the world. Much of the window depicts scenes from the book of Revelation:

And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand: and I heard the number of them. And thus I saw the horses in the vision, and them that sat on them, having breastplates of fire, and of jacinth, and brimstone: and the heads of the horses were as the heads of lions; and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone. By these three was the third part of men killed, by the fire, and by the smoke, and by the brimstone, which issued out of their mouths. For their power is in their mouth, and in their tails: for their tails were like unto serpents, and had heads, and with them they do hurt.

Revelation 9:16-19.

One of the grotesques from the wonderful chapter house, which dates to the late 14th century. There are all sorts of figures carved into the walls — fantastic, frightening, amusing — laughing monkeys, embracing lovers, and this demonic bird pecking the eyes out of some poor sinner’s face.

I think this is the tomb of Matthew Hutton (died 1606), Archbishop of York. (It looks like I’d forgotten the necessity of taking photos of explanatory plaques and suchlike by this stage in my trip.) Those are his children below, praying. I like the way he is lying on his side, propping his head up on his hand — like he’s on the couch watching the cricket or something …

Beneath the Minster is an undercroft and crypt, which contains much of interest — remnants of the Roman basilica, precious treasures from the middle ages. The air is cool and damp down there, but I was happy to linger. It’s one of those annoying no-photography-allowed areas, unfortunately, so you’ll have to go see for yourself.

After leaving York Minster I did a quick recce around the town centre — here’s the cross of St George flying above the 18th-century Mansion House — and went then back to my tiny hotel room, where the chief attraction was being able to watch British television for the first time since I’d arrived!

Basil Mathews. We Fight for the Future: The British Commonwealth and the World of To-morrow. London: Collins, 1940. Found this in a secondhand bookshop for $3. Even at that price I was a bit unsure about buying it — there seems to be some talk in it about setting up an international federal system after the war, but nothing quite in my line. But I had to get it when I saw on the first page that Mathews ascribes Hitler’s success (he’s writing in August 1940, or at least the preface was written then), in part, to his ’spreading wild confusion through mass air-bombing of terrorised refugees’ — yep — ‘and taxi-ing his planes over their writhing bodies’ — wait … what? That’s a use for the bomber I haven’t heard of before! I suppose it must have been some story or rumour which came out of one the German invasions, but that’s about all I can say.

In a previous post, I looked at some of Arthur C. Clarke’s predictions, made in 1946, about how rockets would change the types of weapons and vehicles used by military forces of the future.¹ He got some hits (space stations) but, on balance, more misses (rocket mines, more turret fighters). In the latter half of his paper, Clarke steps back to consider the broader implications of rockets for future warfare, and does rather better.

These are grim, given the advent of atomic weapons. It may be the case that for every weapon, Clarke says, a defence is eventually evolved. But

During the interval between the adoption of a new weapon and its countering, the damage done to the material structure of civilization grows steadily greater, and there must come a time at last when breakdown occurs. The present state of Germany shows how nearly that point had been reached even with the weapons of the pre-atomic age.²

One particularly interesting possibility Clarke considers is that of ‘radiation war’.³ He notes that the vast majority of the radiation emitted by an atomic bomb must fall outside the visible spectrum, concluding that ‘the bomb acts as an X-ray generator of unimaginable power’.⁴ So a bomb could be detonated at high altitudes to blind large numbers of people, or to ruin huge areas of crops. Atomic bombs carried by long-range rockets would be the ‘ultimate weapon’.⁵

Such attacks might in time assume even more vicious forms. The rockets might be detonated nearer to the ground to induce artificial radioactivity which would compel the evacuation of the areas affected. Neutron and gamma-ray warheads might be developed against which only great thicknesses of rock could provide protection. And most terrible of all would be the threat — even if it were no more than that — of X-ray mutation. This might well daunt a race which would fight to the death against ordinary weapons.⁶

Armies, navies and air forces would still have their uses — atomic-tipped rockets wouldn’t have been much use in Burma, for example; and at sea, the ‘mobile rocket launcher, almost certainly a submersible’ has great potential⁷ — but they will ultimately deploy only once the first rocket strike (quite possibly a surprise, Pearl Harbor-style attack) has secured victory. In the air, piloted aircraft will give way to unmanned vehicles operated by ‘controllers sitting in safety before television screens’.⁸ Fully-automatic aircraft may even be possible, since

All possible combat manœuvres can be analyzed and recorded by suitable coding in machines of the punched-card type. It is conceivable that “battle integrators” may be constructed along these lines, capable of making operational decisions in a matter of milliseconds according to changing combat conditions.⁹

In fact, such computers could be used to make strategic decisions as well as tactical ones, leading to a ‘new type of warfare which would be too swift and complex for detailed human control [...] the apotheosis of mechanized war’.¹⁰

Clarke closes with a section on the problem of defence. Actually, the problem is bigger than that: he quotes the Smyth Report to the effect that

civilization may soon have the means to commit suicide at will. The problem that now confronts us is not one of defence but of survival.¹¹

He considers, but swiftly rejects, the idea that civilisation could move underground more or less permanently, to save itself from the bomb. Firstly, it would be practically impossible to arrange a food supply for a massive population of people for an indefinite period of time. Secondly, and more importantly, even deep underground there would be no guarantee of safety:

The penetrating power of a rocket falling from a hundred miles or more is enormous and would enable atomic warheads to be exploded at a considerable depth. Such “ground depth charges” could collapse or severely damage any cavity that could be built without an impossible amount of labour.¹²

The good news is that the British Empire, being so vast, is ‘probably the least vulnerable target in the world’.¹³ The bad news is that Britain itself is indefensible, and so Clarke concludes that

the removal to Canada of the Central Government and the Service Departments must be carried out as a permanent measure. It would be impossible to do this after a war had started, and there would certainly be insufficient prior warning to enable such a vast transfer of administration to be made.¹⁴

But ultimately he doubts whether even a political unit as big as the Commonwealth could work effectively during an atomic war.¹⁵ The only winning move in this game is not to play:

In other words, the problem is political and not military at all. A country’s armed forces can no longer defend it; the most they can promise is the destruction of the attacker.¹⁶

So, the United Nations is mankind’s last, best hope for peace. How can rockets help it with this task? By backing up an international air force:

even if there is no intention of using them except as a last resort, the World Security Council should for psychological reasons possess long-range rockets. However, the weapons which it would use if force proved necessary would be the air contingents of its members, employing ordinary explosives and machines of the type that exist to-day. Behind these would be the threat, never materializing save in dire emergency, of the mightier forces against which there could be no defence.¹⁷

The international rocket force would need, according to Clarke, no more than 20 launch sites for world coverage. The personnel would come from every nation, and ‘It would be the aim to inculcate in these men a supra-national outlook’,¹⁸ much like the Red Cross. That most of them would be ’scientific’ types would doubtless help this process along. And as support, they would need access to a research organisation that no nation could match:

This body might in time act as the nucleus around which the scientific service of the World State would form, perhaps many years in advance of its political realization.¹⁹

He sees this international force as only temporary, needed only until such time as ‘a world economic system is functioning smoothly, when all standards of living are approaching the same level, when no national armaments are left’.²⁰

I’m sure the RAF implied no endorsement of Clarke’s views by publishing them in RAF Quarterly!

So, there are a couple of points of interest here. Firstly, there’s the very early prediction of ‘radiation war’. I’ve suggested before that pre-1945, the radiation effects of atomic bombs were not well understood. Here’s some evidence, then, that not very long after the first atomic explosions, there was enough publicly available information to put together a fairly accurate picture of the longer-term and larger-scale effects of a nuclear war. (The fact that Clarke had immersed himself in 1930s pulp science fiction may have helped enlarge his imagination on this point too!) For that matter, in contrast to the first part of the paper, Clarke made quite a few accurate predictions: not just intercontinental ballistic missiles, which one might think was obvious,²¹ but also submarine-launched ballistic missiles, nuclear bunker busters, and unmanned aerial vehicles.²²

Secondly, it’s clear that Clarke was the very model of a liberal internationalist. His list of the causes of war — economics and armaments, more or less — speaks to the former, and his proposed solution to the latter. I don’t know if Clarke was aware of groups like the New Commonwealth, who took pretty much the same line in the early 1930s (minus the rockets!) but it seems to me that the international air (rocket) force and the world state were temptations that many others of a technocratic persuasion had succumbed to before and since. And it’s surely no coincidence that H. G. Wells was a huge influence upon Clarke, and Wells was practically obsessed with pretty much the same ideas in his later years (he died in 1945).

I’ll close by quoting Clarke’s two closing paragraphs in full, because they show just how strongly he felt about the need to reconstruct the world system, and also because the last paragraph, in particular, sounds very Clarke.

Only along these or similar lines of international collaboration can security be found: any attempt by great powers to seek safety in their own strength will ultimately end in a disaster which may be measureless.

Upon us, the heirs to all the past and the trustees of a future which our folly can slay before its birth, lies a responsibility no other age has ever known. If we fail in our in our generation those who come after us may be too few to rebuild the world when the dust of the cities has descended and the radiation of the rocks has died away.²³

We’ll never know whether Clarke was correct in his belief that an international air and rocket force could have ensured world peace. But we do know that he was wrong to say that disaster awaited us without such a force: we’ve managed to survive for more than sixty years. (So far, anyway!) I’m sure Clarke would be quite happy to admit that he was wrong about this, since that’s allowed him to reach his four score and ten.

Happy birthday, Sir Arthur!

1. Arthur C. Clarke, “The rocket and the future of warfare”, RAF Quarterly, March 1946, 61-9; reprinted in Arthur C. Clarke, Ascent to Wonder: A Scientific Autobiography (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1984), 71-9.
2. Ibid., 76.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 77.
6. Ibid., 77.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 78.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 79.
15. It may seem odd to us now that anyone would even think that the Commonwealth would ever function like that, but of course it just had, in the war just past.
16. Ibid; emphasis in original.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. But wasn’t: see Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (London: Indigo, 2000), 16-7, where incidentally he discusses the May 1945 Lords debate I’ve talked about before.
22. OK, there were pre-atomic and pre-rocket precursors for most of these too.
23. Clarke, Ascent to Wonder, 79.

I spotted this ironic fusion of a peace symbol and a B-52 in the city¹ earlier in the year, and luckily it was still there when I went back with a camera this week.

It’s at the corner of Russell St and Bullens Lane. I assume it’s street art, and not anything to do with the bar advertised below it. No idea who is responsible for it, but well done, whoever it is!

1. That’s Melbourne, not London …

Is it possible to love a city? Surely. Is it premature to declare such a love after only having lived in that city for only two months? I don’t think so: after all, you can fall in love with a person practically on first sight. Love doesn’t depend upon your knowing its object deeply, only upon thinking that you do. I only experienced one season, summer (I’m sure it’s a lot less hospitable now); I never cooked a meal the entire time I was there (no kitchen, or at least none I ever found); I mostly stuck to the inner bits where public transport mostly works. It was really a working holiday, and different to how most Londoners experience their city. If I had to live there properly, and experienced the worst of London as well as its best, I might well feel more ambivalent. But until such disillusionment sets in, I love London!

So, to round off more than two dozen posts I’ve written about my time in London, here’s one more, with some photos that didn’t fit in anywhere else. Above is Eros in Piccadilly Circus.

The Victoria and Albert, taken from the grounds of the Natural History Museum. Sadly, I didn’t get a chance to go back and actually go inside.

Waterloo station. A few weeks later I saw The Bourne Ultimatum in York, in which a major set-piece takes place in the station — the first time I’ve had an ‘OMG! I’ve been there!’ moment while watching a movie set in London.

British Library Newspapers, Colindale — where I spent more hours while in London than any other place, with the exception of my room. The area isn’t quite as dodgy as the overturned shopping trolley would suggest … ok, well maybe it is.

Astor House on Aldwych, across from Australia House. Now it’s a post office. In 1927 it housed the offices of the Air League of the British Empire, during the secretary-generalship of P. R. C. Groves. (Telephone: Chancery 7258.)

And this is where the Air League (sans British Empire) lives today, on Tothill St in Westminster (across from London Underground HQ) — about midway between Parliament and the Palace. They don’t have the whole building of course, just an office suite in one corner of it.

And this, I think, was where the National League of Airmen had its offices in 1935, on Grosvenor Square (where the US Embassy is) in Mayfair. It’s part of a posh hotel now and they’ve taken the street numbers off, but this was about the right spot.

How many people have ever gone looking for these long-forgotten sites of airmindedness before? Quite possibly none …

Battersea Power Station, taken out the window of a train, on my way to chez Jakob in Peckham.

The Queen’s Tower at Imperial College, the last remnant of the old Imperial Institute.

All bar the last of the remaining photos were taken on the same day. It was during the Tube strike, I’d spent the day at the Royal Aeronautical Society in Mayfair and had to get to Peckham (again!) for The Dam Busters. Victoria station was not that far away, which worked well for Peckham Rye (not being Underground, the line was still open), and so I walked it. In the course of which I crossed Hyde Park Corner, and in my usual serendipitous way, stumbled on some very cool things I didn’t even know were there. Above is Wellington Arch, a former police station (!) Well, that and a memorial to the Duke of Wellington.

The Royal Artillery Monument. The statues are by Charles Sargeant Jagger, whose soldier figures have a very distinctive style, strong but sombre. I’ve long been fond of his statue Wipers, a casting of which used to stand outside the Museum of Victoria and is now by the Shrine of Remembrance. (The Driver, part of the Royal Artillery Monument, is also there.)

See what I mean about serendipity? The Australian War Memorial, London.

It bears the names of the major battles fought by Australians alongside the British, from Amiens to Ypres. Pozières has been mentioned on this blog several times before.

The battle names are rather artfully composed of smaller names, of Australian towns. I don’t think I’ve ever been to any of the ones in this photo — and I’m sure I’d remember if I’d ever happened across Upper Dingo!

The last photo I ever took in London: the 0830 GNER service from Kings Cross to York …

Nearly a year ago, I wrote about a childhood hero of mine, on the tenth anniversary of his death. Today, I’m writing about another one, and it’s a happier occasion: it’s Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s 90th birthday!

Clarke has always been my favourite of the ‘big three’ post-war science fiction writers: he evokes a sense of wonder at the universe that was mostly missing in Asimov and Heinlein, as much as I loved their stories.¹ From the decaying billion-year-old city of Diaspar in Against the Fall of Night (1953), to the giant interstellar interloper in Rendezvous with Rama (1973), to the last visitors from home in Songs of Distant Earth (1986), Clarke’s universe is indifferent to humanity’s presence, but it’s precisely our human qualities which make its immensities explicable and bearable. It’s terrific stuff, at its best Wellsian and Stapledonian, and just talking about it makes me want to go re-read it all again …

I was casting around for some way to connect Clarke to the themes of this blog. I could have speculated on the parallels between the British Interplanetary Society, in which he was heavily involved from the 1930s to the 1950s, and aviation advocacy groups like the Royal Aeronautical Society or the Air League of the British Empire. Or there’s his wartime work for the RAF on ground control approach radar. Or the way his experience of being billeted in the bombed-out East End in 1941 apparently inspired him to write a chapter on space warfare which he later used in Earthlight.² Or the fact that the first publication of his famous idea for communication satellites in geosynchronous (or ‘Clarke’) orbits was in a letter on potential scientific applications of V2 rockets, which appeared in the February 1945 issue of Wireless World — at a time when V2s were still falling on London!³

But then I found that in March 1946, RAF Quarterly published a prize-winning essay by Clarke on “The rocket and the future of warfare”, which was outside Clarke’s usual range of topics, but well within mine — just too perfect a fit to ignore! But it’s not available online like his satellite stuff, and nobody around here has the RAF Quarterly. Luckily it was reprinted in Ascent to Wonder, a compilation of his more technical papers, so I made an impromptu trip to the State Library this afternoon to check its copy.⁴

Clarke begins with some technical background on rocket propulsion, and draws up four classes of rocket, both manned and un-manned: short-range (e.g. Katyushas, bazookas), medium-range (e.g. Me 163, Wasserfall), long-range (e.g. V2 or A4, A9/A10), and infinite range (i.e. spacecraft). He suggests that the advent of anti-tank rockets may spell the end of tank warfare, since now a few soldiers can destroy the largest tanks. Buried rockets could even be used as anti-tank mines. He is greatly impressed by the amount of firepower carried by rocket-equipped aircraft, noting that a fully-loaded Mosquito is equivalent to a cruiser with 6-inch guns. And foreseeing a great future for air-to-air rockets, Clarke suggests that

a possible line of development is the heavily armed “destroyer” fitted with rocket-launching turrets. The rockets would be aimed by radar and detonated by proximity fuses when they approached their targets. The larger projectiles might even be guided, either from the launching plane or from the ground.⁵

But, moving into the medium range category, these would soon be replaced by aircraft which are themselves rocket-propelled. Clarke sees these as an almost insuperable threat to bomber streams, since they are so fast; massive barrages from defending destroyers might be one defence, but a better one would be speeds too high for interception.

The speed of attack is steadily increasing and the 3,400 miles an hour of A4 is merely the beginning. Against such speeds men can never hope to fight. Skill and courage and resolution — in the end all are of no avail, for there comes at last a time when only machines can fight machines.⁶

And conventional bombers would not have a chance against unmanned, ground-controlled rockets, homing in on the infrared emissions from their engines. At sea, rockets will probably replace fighters as air cover for fleets, meaning the end of the carrier. At long ranges, rockets have tremendous potential as offensive weapons — probably more cost-effective at short ranges than conventional bombers — the more so since there is currently no defence against them once they have been launched:

The only defence of any kind would be the guided rocket, and one can visualize the development of small machines capable of accelerations of 100 g. or more and homing on radiation, radar or even local gravity fields.⁷

But even so, there’d be only seconds in which to intercept the incoming rocket. Clarke even ponders ‘atomically propelled rockets [...] flying under continuous thrust at very high accelerations along constantly “randomed” paths’.⁸ These would be even harder to intercept, since their ultimate destination would not be clear until it was too late. He sees little point in the development of rocket bombers (i.e. capable of returning to base to rearm for another mission); single-use rockets can carry a greater proportion of explosive load. Finally, in the ‘infinite range’ category — spacecraft — Clarke pretty much dismisses chemical rockets as useless for anything other than scientific exploration. But if atomic power were to be used for propulsion …

The least of the achievements we may expect to see is the establishment of stations in closed orbits at heights of a thousand miles or more, circling the world in periods of a few hours like artificial moons. The Germans were indeed planning such stations, and they present an attractive solution to the problem of world surveillance and control.⁹

This is getting pretty long, so I’ll stop there for the moment, and save Clarke’s analysis of the bigger picture for another post. Just a few closing observations.

Many of the details of Clarke’s predictions didn’t pan out (such as the super-Defiant rocket turret fighters), but that’s an occupational hazard of technological prophecy. It’s interesting (to me at least) that he dismisses the bomber, until now the premier weapon of mass destruction, but replaces it with the rocket, which will always get through, will tempt its possessor into making sneak attacks, and so on. From the language he uses, I don’t get the feeling he has read much of the airpower prophets of previous decades, though he does mention Seversky by name; and surely he would have been well up on his Wells.

It’s a bit odd that Clarke barely mentions the jet engine, another recent invention which as it turned out, has been far more widely used than rockets. Aside from the fact that the essay competition was specifically about rockets in warfare, I suppose Clarke might have assumed that anything jets can do, rockets can do better — or at least faster, which seems to have meant much the same thing to him.

I was surprised by all the references, accurate for the most part, to experimental German weapons. I would have thought that details of these would still have been secret so soon after the war’s end. Obviously that’s not the case! The reference to German plans for space stations seems a bit of a stretch, though this page suggests there was some basis for it, and certainly von Braun continued to be obsessed with the idea of orbital battle stations.

Next up: radiation war, battle integrators, and — surprise, surprise — yet another incarnation of the international police force idea.

1. Asimov’s non-fiction more than made up for this lack, of course.
2. Neil McAleer, Odyssey: The Authorised Biography of Arthur C. Clarke (London: Victor Gollancz, 1992), 47.
3. Arthur C. Clarke, “V2 for ionosphere research?”, Wireless World, February 1945, 58. His better known paper devoted to geosynchronous communication satellites was published in the same journal the following October. See here for more on both articles.
4. Arthur C. Clarke, “The rocket and the future of warfare”, RAF Quarterly, March 1946, 61-9; reprinted in Arthur C. Clarke, Ascent to Wonder: A Scientific Autobiography (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1984), 71-9.
5. Ibid., 73.
6. Ibid., 74.
7. Ibid., 75.
8. Ibid; emphasis in original.
9. Ibid., 76.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Recently, I read Alan Kramer’s Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War. It’s an excellent book, both illuminating and informative (being airminded, I found the section on the Austrian and German bombing of Italy to be especially fascinating), and I highly recommend it.¹

But there was one section which brought me up short. In a section on Britain’s entry into the war, Kramer says that the breach of Belgian neutrality by Germany was a gift to Asquith and Grey, because it meant that the war could be framed as a just war. Absolutely. Then he goes on to say:

At the time, British decision-makers could only sense intuitively what we know today — this was far more than a conservative defence of the status quo: had Germany succeeded at the Marne in September 1914, which it almost did, the defeat of France and a separate peace would have been followed by a defeat of Russia and, after a pause to build up the German navy, the invasion of Britain from a position of towering strength on the Continent.²

Which is where I went ‘Huh?’ Do we really know that? Because I didn’t know we knew that.

It’s not that the scenario outlined is implausible — I’m just not sure how it can be elevated to the status of fact. OK, let’s walk through it. (This is all my speculation, as Kramer doesn’t explain his reasoning.) So Germany wins the Battle of the Marne, takes Paris, forces France to surrender late in 1914. By this time it’s winter, too late to take on Russia in any serious way. But around May 1915, the bulk of the Germany army could have transferred to the east and, let’s assume, crushes Russia by the end of the year, about 2 years before it was historically out of the war. It’s really only at this point that Germany could afford to start building up for an invasion of Britain. That means dreadnoughts, above all, to secure sea superiority in order to get its troops across and supply them.³ And Britain had a massive advantage here: 22 dreadnoughts to Germany’s 13 in August 1914, and was building them at a faster rate.⁴ But let’s make a wild assumption and grant Germany the ability to build to a superiority in dreadnoughts in one cycle of construction, about 2.5 years or so. So we’re now looking at the middle of 1918: just about the earliest that Germany could possibly be ready to invade Britain in overwhelming strength, about 4 years since the invasion of Belgium and France.

But what’s Britain been doing in all that time? I rather doubt it’s been sitting on its hands, whether it’s a belligerent or a neutral. It would absolutely have been building up the navy; that would have been uncontroversial while so long as Germany was overrunning Europe. But anyway, I’ve magically waved away Britain’s naval superiority, so the main question is what would have happened with the army? Presumably it would have been expanded, but on a volunteer or a conscription basis? Let’s say it’s a volunteer force (though if the Unionists had come in in the election due by 1916, conscription probably would have too) — relatively small, but far larger than the home forces in 1914. There might also have been contingents from the Empire too. In the real war, about one million men volunteered by January 1915, so when all is said and done, I’d say Britain could have sustained an army of something approaching a million volunteers for home defence. That is not an inconsiderable force, especially considering that it’s had 3 or 4 years to dig in. It’s true that Germany would have had a much bigger, veteran army, and I’m assuming that it would have had the power to transport and supply a big army due to its naval buildup. But given the superiority of the defence at this time, perhaps especially for contested landings (how did Gallipoli go again?), it’s hard to see how it can be assumed that the Germans would want to chance it.⁵

What else might they have done? Well, tried to strangle Britain economically, by U-boat. Already in 1915, U-boats accounted for over a million tons of Allied shipping, so in this alternate timeline, the Germans would have known that their submarines had a good chance of success.⁶ If they’d poured resources into U-boats instead of dreadnoughts, and used bases in France to extend their reach into the Atlantic, then surely there’s every chance that Britain would have been on its knees at some point in 1917. After all, it practically was in our 1917, with France and Russia both still in the war.

Well, maybe not. I’m sure my alternate alternate history can be picked to pieces as well,⁷ but I think I’ve made my point: we don’t know that a German invasion of Britain would have followed from a French defeat in 1914. There are too many imponderables, there’s reasonable doubt. Maybe it would have happened that way; and almost certainly, whatever happened would have been bad for Britain. So I agree with Kramer that Britain didn’t have much choice about whether to enter the war, strategically speaking, but I don’t agree that we know much beyond that.

That’s only one paragraph, though — do read the rest of the book :)

1. Reading really good books is depressing when you’re in the middle of writing a thesis — Nicoletta F. Gullace’s “The Blood of Our Sons”: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship During the Great War (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) was another. Which suggests a New Year’s resolution: to read only rubbish …
2. Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 95.
3. Air superiority would have been nowhere near as important as it was in 1940, since the use of aircraft against ships was in its infancy at the time.
4. 13 under construction by Britain, 5 by Germany. Paul G. Halpern, A Naval History of World War I (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1994), 7.
5. The ultimate success of such an invasion is another question, but Kramer doesn’t actually say that it would necessarily have been successful — though I think it’s implied.
6. Though if Britain had remained neutral, then the U-boat would have had far fewer targets and so fewer chances to prove themselves …
7. What’s Italy doing? If it joins in with the Central Powers in 1915, Britain’s naval superiority vanishes, unless it abandons the Mediterranean entirely. Or, maybe Germany would pursue both tracks (invasion and strangulation) at once, as in 1940, with U-boats taking the place of bombers. And so on.

The 9th Military History Carnival is up, over at the Official Osprey Publishing Blog. This month, the post I found the most interesting is at Citizen Historian, about the part played by the Malayan Regiment in the Battle of Pasir Panjang, 13 February 1942. I certainly didn’t know that Malayans had been involved; it changes the story, somewhat, from the usual ‘imperial battleground’ narrative to one where the locals were not just bystanders in the great events happening all around them. I would like to know something about motivations though — why did Malayan men join up, what (or who) did they believe they were fighting for?

I’ve nearly finished with my long series of London posts, but I’ve got a couple more before I recount my travels in the provinces. This one is about Bloomsbury, my home for two months in the (northern) summer of 2007; I really took to it. I’ve written about some of Bloomsbury’s sights before (Charles Fort’s house, Mecklenburgh Square, St Pancras Parish Church, and of course the British Museum). Here are a few more.

Above is Euterpe, the Muse of music. Between 1898 and 1961 she graced the facade of the Apollo Inn on Tottenham Court Road.

Bloomsbury is famous for its garden squares. But my favourite Bloomsbury garden isn’t a square at all, but a former graveyard: St George’s Gardens (where Euterpe can now be seen). It’s much more secluded and peaceful than the squares, because it is surrounded on all sides by houses instead of roads, and there are usually far less people than Russell Square or somewhere like that. The remaining tombs and headstones give it a wonderfully melancholic air. It’s a nice place to sit and read, or just to walk through; luckily it’s on the way from Mecklenburgh Square to St Pancras so I got to do this quite a lot.

The tomb in the foreground is that of Anna Gibson (1659-1727), sixth and favourite daughter of Richard Cromwell, the second and last Lord Protector of England, Scotland and Ireland.

I think the human remains have been removed. It was in use as a cemetery (one of the first not adjacent to a church) from some time after 1713 until 1855 when it was too crowded with the dead to take any more. A few decades later it was reopened as a green space for the urban poor.

An obelisk by (or for?) Thomas Falconer, dated 1729.

Presumably the family coat of arms of whoever was buried here. Obviously really fond of their halberds.

I’m glad to see that St George’s Gardens has Friends. Here’s how Betty Szarowicz, who was born in 1915 and grew up nearby, remembered it:

We were 5 children, house shared, no facilities, a yard for hanging the washing (but we did eventually grow a small cherry tree there), and so gardens were very important to me.

We knew all the Parks (the Squares were closed when we were children)…but St George’s Gardens was very special, magical, and we spent a lot of time there because we could go alone, being nearby.

We acknowledged the tombs, whispering when passing out of reverence, but I never thought of it as being a burial place, it was simply called “the gardens”.

‘[V]ery special, magical’ — sounds about right!

Moving on from the gardens now … though this next one is actually very close to the south-east gate:

Seems a bit harsh.

Ah, the British Library, or ‘BL’ as we old hands like to call it. I think it’s spoiled me, as far as libraries are concerned; I went to the State Library last week, for the first time since I got back, and it just wasn’t the same. I almost missed having to check with a librarian whether I’m allowed to photocopy something, or having to open my laptop so a security guard can make sure I wasn’t smuggling anything out. Almost.

My prized 3-year BL reader’s pass expires in July 2010; I wonder if I’ll get to use it again?

Russell Square tube was the closest station to me, though if I didn’t want the Piccadilly Line, Kings Cross St Pancras was often the better bet, since it was only a few minutes further away on foot.

The northbound (I think) platform at Russell Square. This was an air raid shelter during the Blitz (of course, so were most of the other tube stations). As Constance Holt later recalled, it was still being used as a station as well.

Most of the tube stations were taken over as shelters, as there weren’t enough big public shelters that people could get to. Russell Square Station was one of these. I remember on several occasions coming back from the theatre by tube, and when I got out at Russell Square they had put bunks all along the platform, and you’d see women putting on their face-cream, doing up their curlers and getting right for the night. Of course you’d politely not stare at them because they were in their bedrooms. I remember there was a little bit of snobbery about stations. I heard one woman say, ‘Oh, us and our family go to Regent’s Park now, it’s nicer people.’ And the children used to go for rides on the tube. At least their mothers knew where they were, and it was much safer than the street.

The fact that bunks were put up indicates that this was later on in the Blitz, because the government initially tried to discourage people from using tube stations as shelters, fearing that once people went down, they’d stay there.

Finally, the memorial at Tavistock Square to the 13 people (including Sam Ly, a fellow Melburnian) killed by a bomb on a bus near here on 7 July 2005. I arrived in Bloomsbury on the day after the second anniversary of the terrorist attacks, and the crowds of people gathered around the various floral memorials were hard to miss. The three bombers on the Underground all diverged from Kings Cross St Pancras; one detonated his bomb between there and Russell Square. And Tavistock Square is just north of Russell Square.

So my personal geography overlapped that of the terror attacks, and as my research is all about fear, panic, terror, Bloomsbury was an oddly appropriate place to stay.

On Friday, I went along to a talk on “Great War aerial photography: a source for battlefield survey and archaeology?”, given by Birger Stichelbaut of Ghent University in Belgium. This brings the total number of in-any-way-related-to-early-20th-century-aviation talks given at the University of Melbourne during my PhD candidacy (as far as I know and excluding a couple I’ve given) to one (1). And even this was archaeological and not historical; but it kept me awake even at the quite indecent hour of 10am, so you know it must have been good!

The basic idea is to use aerial photographs of the Western Front trench system, taken over Flanders during the war itself, to help plan battlefield excavations. The main value of this is that they are more useful than contemporary trench maps, which didn’t always show every feature and also aren’t as accurate when it comes to pinpointing the location of features (to within ~30m, compared with ~10m for aerial photographs). And all sorts of things show up: the different kinds of trenches, gun emplacements, pillboxes, and so on (as well as many remnants from much longer ago). Of course, it’s not quite as simple as poring over a bunch of old photos: the full panoply of GIS techniques (photo stitching, orthorectification, georeferencing, DEM overlays, stereo pairs) are used to make sense of them and match them up to present-day photographs and other data. Most of the trenches are no longer extant, apparently, at least in Belgium, so this sort of thing would be of great benefit to projects like Plugstreet. The same techniques could also be used in other theatres and wars where trenches and aerial photographs coexist, though its utility also depends on the soil type and other factors (Gallipoli was deemed unlikely to be suitable, though I didn’t catch the reason). One interesting point: magnetic aerial surveys don’t help with determining where trenches are, because of the sheer mass of metal lying all over the battlefield.

Of course, I was mostly there to gawk at the stunning photos (the one above, from Rosebud’s WWI and Early Aviation Image Archive, really doesn’t do them justice. That’s an FE.8, incidentally). At the start of the war, they were taken on an amateur basis, with a camera stuck over the side of the aeroplane; by the end, specialised cameras with long focal lengths had been developed, so that photographs could be taken from altitudes safe from anti-aircraft and ground fire. Stichelbaut has many thousands of these images, gathered from various archives around the world. Interestingly (and unfortunately) most of his German photos were found in the archives of the former Bavarian army, since those taken by virtually all the other German armies were destroyed in the Second World War. He showed a map of the European distribution of where the German photos were taken; all fronts were covered to some degree, but the vast majority were in the northern part of the Western Front (i.e., where the Bavarian army was). There were some which rather oddly appeared to be of somewhere in the south of France, hundreds of miles from the front, but these hadn’t been checked yet and were probably due to the French habit of reusing the names of their villages!

I would have liked more details about how all this work has actually been used. One interesting snippet was the difference between German cemeteries and Allied ones. From 1915 the Germans constructed elaborate cemeteries for their war dead, not far from the front lines (close enough to turn up in photoreconaissance, at least). These show up very clearly in the photos, and there are no equivalents on the Allied side of the lines. But after the war, the German cemeteries were torn down, while the victorious Allies created their own funereal landscapes, which are so characteristic of that part of the world. Another snippet was the location of a Zeppelin shed near Ghent, I think Gontrode. Stichelbaut’s departmental host is actually from that village, and so now he knows why his grandparents’ windmill was knocked down by the Germans so the foundations could be used for an anti-aircraft emplacement! Although this was fortuitous, as one of the audience remarked it shows that there’s an opportunity to integrate the archaeology with social and local histories. But these were the only hints of applications of the project beyond its uses for trench (re)digging.

Something I should have asked was, is the data going to made available to the public in any way? There are obvious possibilities for Google Earth layers and the like. Of course, I don’t know who funded the work and there may well be copyright issues involved too. I assumed that such a technologically sophisticated project would have an equally sophisticated website, but I can’t find one at all, beyond a brief mention — at least not in English. But if you’ve got access to Antiquity, you can read Stichelbaut’s paper describing the project.