[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

It’s time again for my six-monthly look at that portion of the blogosphere devoted to military history, as defined by the ‘Wars and Warriors’ section of Cliopatria’s blogroll. So, let’s begin.

Not a lot has changed since September, actually, and this plot shows why: the number of military history blogs has grown by only 13%, whereas between March and September 2007, it grew by more than 50%. Does this mean that fewer military history blogs are being started than before, or that instead Cliopatria is missing a significant portion of them? I’d be tempted to say the latter — the Cliopatricians are only human, after all, and can only add those blogs which come to their attention — but I can’t think of any they’ve missed. Also, the rate of growth of the blogosphere may be slowing — it’s hard to say, as Technorati seem to have stopped publishing their quarterly state of the blogosphere reports.

Here’s one change: the Australian share of the military historioblogosphere has doubled from, from 7% to 14%. This is almost entirely due to the Australian War Memorial’s new group blog, which draws on a wide range of its staff. (I’m not sure if this means the AWM will abandon the practice of separate blogs for each of its exhibitions — at the moment, the forthcoming Over the Front exhibition is the main focus.)

This growth has been at the expense of the Americans. Even taking into account the bloggers of unknown nationality — who are mostly going to be Americans too, given their predominant interest in the American Civil War — they’re now closer to three-fifths of the military historioblogosphere than three-quarters, as before.

The number of women blogging about military history continues to slowly edge upwards. Much of the growth, and most of the bloggers, are in group blogs, mostly attached to an institution or research project, rather than individually.

Nothing to see here …

… move along …

… move along.

Finally, we come to the only bit that anybody ever looks at, the top 5 military history blogs by Technorati rank. And here there has in fact been quite a bit of movement. Two of the top 5 are new to the list, and there is also a new number 1. That’s Civil War Memory, which has been threatening to become the most popular military history blog ever since I started doing these posts. Second is one of the new entrants, Kings of War. Though it’s an excellent blog, and has impeccable academic credentials, it’s only very rarely about military history: reflecting the interests of its maintainers, it’s mostly about contemporary wars. But as it is in fact in Cliopatria’s blogroll, and it has become very popular very quickly, Kings of War has earned its place at number 2. At number three is the former number one, and still the doyen of military history blogs, Blog Them Out of the Stone Age. Fourth is the other newcomer, Rantings of a Civil War Historian. And bringing up the rear is Airminded (phew).

None of this proves anything, other than the fact that I enjoy plotting numbers in a half-arsed fashion (and really, who doesn’t?) But what will happen next time? Will Australians take over the military historioblogosphere? Will Kevin Levin still have bragging rights over Mark Grimsley? Only time will tell …

This has been all over the news here today, though I suspect interest is somewhat less outside Australia: the wreck of HMAS Sydney has been found. On 19 November 1941, Sydney was returning to Fremantle, Western Australia, after escorting a troopship north to Sunda Strait. It encountered the German commerce raider Kormoran somewhere out in the Indian Ocean, and a battle ensued. When the engagement broke off, both ships were mortally wounded. (Kormoran’s wreck was itself found only a few days ago.) About 320 out of Kormoran’s crew of nearly 400 were eventually rescued, but there were no survivors at all from Sydney. Its 645 dead represent the Royal Australian Navy’s greatest wartime loss.

The press reports seem to follow the same line — a 66-year old mystery solved. The location of the Sydney’s wreck was unknown because no radio signal was ever received from her during or after the battle, and the Kormoran’s lifeboats had drifted a long way before rescue. But that’s actually only part of the mystery. The real mystery — or at least the one which is the real reason for the long-standing interest in finding the wreck, and for the accompanying conspiracy theories — is how did a modern warship like Sydney come to be sunk by Kormoran, a converted merchantman?

This does seem strange, on the face of it. Sydney was a modern Leander-class light cruiser, commissioned in 1935. It was much faster than Kormoran (32 knots to 19), more heavily armoured, and more powerfully armed. Kormoran was on its first (and only) cruise: in nearly a year’s sail from Germany it had encountered nothing more fearsome than defenceless merchantmen. Sydney, by contrast, had previously had a successful career in the Mediterranean. In particular, in the Battle of Cape Spada in July 1940 she led a British destroyer squadron (correction: flotilla) into action against a pair of Italian light cruisers, which fled before her. Sydney’s accurate gunnery disabled the Bartolomeo Colleoni, which was then despatched by torpedoes from the destroyers. It doesn’t seem credible that the proud victor of Cape Spada could be sunk by a lowly commerce raider.

Except, that is, if you look a bit more closely:

1. Sydney’s armament was not hugely superior to Kormoran’s. The Australian ship had 8 x 6-inch guns for its primary armament, compared to the German’s 6 x 5.9-inch guns. It also had 8 torpedo tubes, to Kormoran’s 6.
2. Kormoran’s modus operandi was to pretend to be a regular, unarmed merchant vessel, which would allow it to get within striking distance of Allied merchants, or (hopefully) to pass by Allied warships. Normally, its weapons were concealed, only unveiled at the point of combat, so its disguise was very convincing.
3. Given 1. and 2., there’s a plausible narrative of Sydney’s last battle. Testimony from the Kormoran’s survivors indicates that the Sydney was suspicious enough to intercept the Kormoran when it was sighted on the horizon, but then was trusting enough to approach it without being ready for action — its guns were not even aimed at Kormoran, which opened fire first at a range of about 1000m. Sydney’s two forward turrets were soon out of action, and only one of its rear turrets seems to have fired accurately. Sydney was hit by about fifty 5.9-inch shells, as well as by at least one torpedo. It eventually managed to escape southwards, aflame. It probably met its end when its magazine exploded. (Update: or not. See below.) Kormoran’s engine room had been hit, and fire was approaching the several hundred mines stored on board. So it was abandoned and scuttled.

Obviously, given the lack of any testimony from the Sydney’s crew, we can’t know for sure what happened on board her that day. (Though, of course, investigation of the wrecks may help here.) But, still, I really don’t know what is so hard to believe about the above narrative. Yes, judging from the accounts of the German survivors it’s possible that Sydney’s captain, Captain Joseph Burnett, made a serious mistake in not approaching the Kormoran with much more caution. What is the point of investigating a suspicious ship if precautions are not taken in the event that the suspicions were well-founded? (But equally, he may have been following standard procedure: see this, 4.76-4.90) This is a very serious charge to level at a commanding officer, particularly since he didn’t live to defend his actions. It must have been, and may still be, awful for his family to have to bear this burden. But so what? Mistakes are committed in warfare all the time. Even by Australians.

This is where the conspiracy theories come in. As a culture, we don’t have a great talent for them, and they’re not particularly inventive. I can only think of a handful: that the CIA engineered the dismissal of Gough Whitlam in 1975; that a Chinese submarine abducted Harold Holt in 1967; that Phar Lap was poisoned by American gangsters in 1932. The Sydney conspiracy theory is that Kormoran didn’t sink Sydney, a Japanese submarine did. (See here, 5.39-5.51.) Problem 1: Sydney was sunk over two weeks before Japan attacked the US and the British and Dutch empires. Why would it risk alerting its prospective enemies for the sake of a lowly light cruiser? Problem 2: no evidence has ever been found of a Japanese submarine being anywhere within 6000 km of the battle site on the date in question. (See here, 5.52-5.61.) The same goes for a putative German or Italian submarine.)

Of course, any conspiracy theory worth its salt can explain away any and all objections. The Kormoran was taking on board Japanese officers to take back to Germany for liaison purposes. It’s precisely because Japan was not yet at war that Sydney had to be sunk. A painting was seen in a navy office during the occupation of Japan showed a submarine sinking an Australian cruiser (but had disappeared by the next day).

Yeah, yeah — whatever. There’s no actual verifiable evidence, no solid foundations for any of these beliefs. So why do people believe them? What’s wrong with going as far as the evidence will take you, but no further? That, I do not know.

Image source: Bruce Constable and Navy Photos.

Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, speech to the Lord Mayor’s banquet, 9 November 1897:

Remember this — that the federation of Europe is the only possible structure of Europe which can save civilisation from the desolating effects of a disastrous war. You notice that on all sides the instruments of destruction, the piling up of arms are becoming larger and larger, the powers of concentration are becoming greater, the instruments of death more active and more numerous and are improved with every year, and each nation is bound for its own safety’s sake to take part in this competition. These are the things which are done, so to speak, on the side of war. The one hope that we have to prevent this competition from ending in a terrible effort of mutual destruction which will be fatal to Christian civilisation, the one hope we have is that the Powers may be gradually brought together to act together in a friendly spirit on all questions of difference which may arise until at last they shall be welded in some international constitution which shall give to the world as a result of their great strength a long spell of unfettered and prosperous trade and continued peace.

Source: Lord Lytton, BBC Empire Service broadcast, 18 August 1938; quoted in Listener, 1 September 1938, 430. Emphasis added.

Rome, beautiful Rome! Is there anything I can say about the Eternal City that hasn’t been said before? No, but I won’t let that stop me trying. It was fantastic both in the sense of great and in the sense of unbelievable — it’s almost hard to believe I really was there. But I have the photos to prove to myself that I didn’t just imagine it all.

One of the first things I noticed was the way that SPQR (Senatus Populusque Romanus, ‘the Senate and people of Rome) is plastered across every lamppost, rubbish bin, etc. The Empire ended some time ago so it seems a bit anachronistic to me …

My first ‘big’ sight on my first day in Rome: the Trevi Fountain. It looks far more impressive in real life than it does on posters on the walls of cheap Italian restaurants, that’s for sure. It’s huge, and the way it dominates a small piazza makes it seem even bigger.

I loved the rocks over which the water tumbles, they seemed both artful and natural at once. They and the rest of the fountain were made in the mid-18th century, to mark the terminus of one of the main aqueducts into Rome. Apparently the water is very pure — I assumed it must have been liberally dosed with chlorine!

The Spanish Steps. Luckily, you don’t have to be Spanish to use them.

From half-way up the Steps, looking down the Via Condotti (i.e. in the opposite direction to the above photo), a very fashionable shopping district. Lucky I didn’t try to walk down it then, or I’d probably have been arrested by the fashion polizia.

This was taken from somewhere on the Pincian Hill, looking past a fountain towards some church or other.

An Egyptian obelisk, in Rome? Yes, and it’s not the only one, either. They’re all over the place, in fact. This one is the obelisco Flaminio in the Piazza del Popolo. It’s from the reign of Rameses II, from Heliopolis, and during the reign of Augustus was brought to Rome to stand in the Circus Maximus. It rather puts Cleopatra’s Needle to shame!

Some church (not the same some church as above, although I think that church is nearby) in the Piazza Augusto Imperatore (where the Mausoleum of Augustus is, though that’s not particularly interesting to look at, as it’s currently closed). There are a lot of churches in Rome. (Not so many chapels, synagogues, mosques or temples.) I honestly don’t know what they do with them all! The following day was a Sunday, but I didn’t see much evidence of them filling up with parishioners.

Update: By chance, I came across an account of the opening of the Ara Pacis in the Times of 1938, and it has a little map … so I now know that the church is San Rocco.

Also in the Piazza is a Fascist-era building, with a frieze celebrating the technology of war: early modern-era weapons on the left, modern ones (e.g. machine guns) on the right.

My first ‘wow … just, wow’ moment of the day. According to the Res Gestae Divi Augusti, a record of the achievements of the emperor Augustus written late in his life,

When I returned to Rome from Gaul and from Spain, in the consulship of Tiberius Nero and Publius Quintilio, having brought to a satisfactory finish my works in these provinces, the Senate decreed that there should be consecrated in the Field of Mars an altar to the Augustan Peace and ordered that the officials, priests and vestal virgins should celebrate a sacrifice at it every year.

And this is that altar: the Ara Pacis, or Altar of Peace (also now in the Piazza Augusto Imperatore), dedicated in 9 BC. Or at least some of it is — much of it is a modern reconstruction, as only fragments have been found. But what fragments!

(Oh, the mannequins in the dresses? There was some sort of retrospective fashion exhibition in the Museo dell’Ara Pacis, that is to say, modern fashion. I can’t blame Italians for wanting to point out that they didn’t just die out at the end of the 18th century … but still: not interested.)

Start with the steps. Well, they’re only steps … but steps that Augustus himself probably climbed. Or am I assuming too much? Maybe he wasn’t allowed inside the altar, just the priests? (The Romans did have some odd superstitions. Then again, he was Pontifex Maximus …) Or maybe he didn’t turn up at all because he had an empire to run? Or maybe they were replaced a couple of centuries later due to wear and tear. Oh well.

How about this fragment then, on the east exterior. The identity of the figures is disputed. The one in the middle could be Tellus, Italia, Venus (ancestor of the Julii), or the Pax Augusta herself (which seems most likely to me, but then I’m just a tourist). She is dandling two putti (NOT cherubs, as I discovered about 1 minute ago), which along with the plants, fruit and animals refer to fecundity and plenty, and then on either side are figures representing the winds. Why the winds? For their importance for maritime trade, perhaps?

On the south side is a long panel showing a procession of people, priests, lictors and Augustus himself. In the photo above can be seen Agrippa, Augustus’ close friend and advisor; either Livia, Augustus’ wife, or Julia, Agrippa’s; and between them, Agrippa and Julia’s son (and Augustus’ grandson), Gaius. He, along with his older half-brother Lucius, was adopted by Augustus so that they would be his heirs. But first Lucius and then Gaius died in their twenties, while Augustus was still alive, and so Tiberius (Augustus’ stepson) eventually became emperor. It’s impossible to know if the Julio-Agrippans would have been any better than the Julio-Claudians, but they could hardly have been worse.

Another family group: here we see Germanicus holding the hand of Antonia, his mother, and behind him is his father, Drusus. Germanicus was another might-have-been-emperor: he was an excellent general, like his father, but died in suspicious circumstances, perhaps due to the jealousy of his uncle Tiberius, who was then emperor. However, his son Gaius — Caligula — succeeded Tiberius, and his brother Claudius succeeded Caligula, so his part of the family got to have their turn.

After leaving the Ara Pacis, I headed south along the Tiber, where I saw this building. It looks like somebody has ripped out the twin fasces symbols from either side of the facade (the keystone over the arch is also damaged). But they didn’t bother to plaster over the holes left behind. This strikes me as quite apt. All over Rome, there are ancient sites and monuments with signs saying that this area was first excavated in 1928-35 (say), or underwent major renovations in 1934-7. But they never say who or what was responsible for all this interest in the Roman past during the 1920s and 1930s. So Fascism is often only detectable by the holes it left behind.

Speaking of the Tiber, here it is. I hate to say it, but it’s not one of the world’s great rivers. It’s sluggish, dirty and smelly. At least it was when I was there, at the start of autumn. But still: what a view! The bridge is the Ponte Sant’Angelo, and behind that is the dome of St Peter’s.

The Pont Sant’Angelo leads, naturally enough, to the Castel Sant’Angelo.

This bridge was built in the 130s! So it’s only a quarter-century short of 1900 years old, and still bearing traffic across the Tiber. The castle was built at the same time — although it wasn’t originally a castle, but Hadrian’s mausoleum. Every emperor from Hadrian to Caracalla was buried there. Under the emperor Honorius, the mausoleum was made part of Rome’s defences, though it was itself looted in 410 by the Visigoths and again in 537 by the Ostrogoths. The popes used it into a fortress (Clement VII sheltered here during the sack of Rome in 1527) and a prison (Giordano Bruno stayed here). Now it’s a museum, although sadly I didn’t visit it as I could see one of my major objectives of the day, St Peter’s Basilica (as shown in the photo at the top of the post).

Even 75 years ago, I wouldn’t have been able to see it from near the Castel Sant’Angelo, however, as the view was blocked by a jumble of old palaces and churches. To celebrate the signing of the Lateran Treaties, Mussolini knocked them down and built the Via della Conciliazione. It’s still controversial, and understandably so — but the view down it is magnificent.

After trekking all that way, I finally made it to St Peter’s Square. Here I am at the back of the queue to go through the security screening (about where the white square is, I think) — there’s another queue beyond that to get into the basilica etc. Actually, I can’t remember if there was security screening, but there was definitely modesty screening: no shoulders, no knees, no belly buttons, no cleavage. These things are evidently not part of God’s plan.

Still, despite the length of the line, it relatively quickly … less than 20 minutes total, which was good because it was now about noon and getting warm. Here I’m a lot closer to getting somewhere. In fact, I’m so close to the basilica that the dome, which is set quite far back, isn’t visible at all. It’s actually a lot more striking from a distance than up close.

This was taken near the door to the basilica, looking back towards Castel Sant’Angelo. It shows just how vast St Peter’s Square is. The canopy is presumably where the Pope stands when addressing the multitudes sitting in all those chairs. And yes, that’s another Egyptian obelisk, 13th century BC this time. During Caligula’s reign it was in a nearby circus, which may have been where St Peter was martyred. It was moved here in the 16th century.

Hmmm, this isn’t St Peter’s. What’s going on here? Well … one of the things I wanted to see was the Sistine Chapel. And the Vatican Museum too. As do most visitors to the Vatican, I’m sure. The problem was that I was in Rome on a weekend, and both the chapel and the museum were open only on the Saturday morning. I was well aware of this, but when I stood at the back of that long queue, I thought that was the line to get into the chapel, because on my map it was marked very close to the basilica. Well, it probably is, but the entrance to the chapel (by way of the museum) is actually a quarter of the way around the Vatican. It may be the world’s smallest country, but by the time I’d realised my mistake I think I had about 10 minutes to get there and I missed it by less than 5. So I took this photo while I was trudging along the walls back to St Peter’s, feeling drained because of my sudden adrenalin burst and dejected because I’d missed out on seeing the Sistine Chapel. I mean, that’s like going to London and not seeing the Tower …

Then I figuratively slapped myself upside the head. I was in Rome! It’s not like there’s nothing else to see and do. So I went and stood in the queue again, and went inside the basilica — actually, down into the crypt below. I took this photo of the tomb of John Paul II, but obviously I wasn’t meant to … never fear, there’s a webcam !

Also in the crypt is the tomb of a king of Great Britain: James III. I was surprised, because there wasn’t a James III. OK, so obviously he’s the Old Pretender. But I was still surprised — what’s he doing under St Peter’s? It turns out that his younger son, Henry Benedict Stuart, became a cardinal in the Catholic Church — though he still styled himself Duke of York and Henry IX. So presumably he pulled strings to get himself, his father and his brother (Bonnie Prince Charlie — they’re all in there) a prime burial place.

Inside the basilica itself. A statue of St Peter, the first Bishop of Rome. The statue is probably about seven hundred years old …

… which is about how long it takes for the kisses and caresses of thousands of pilgrims every year to wear the toes off.

A list of all the Popes buried in St Peter’s. I wonder how accurate it is, and why there’s a gap from the 3rd to 5th centuries.

The so-called Chair of Peter — it’s not old enough to be really be his, as the chair itself is probably Byzantine in origin. As it was falling to pieces, Alexander VII commissioned a monument from Bernini to protect it, with a glory above it. It’s pretty impressive. It’s also pretty blurry — most of my photos inside St Peter’s were unfortunately the same or worse, which I attribute to the aftereffects of the adrenalin rather than an act of God.

As I said, from the ridiculous to the sublime: Michaelangelo’s Pièta. There’s nothing I can add to this.

I’m only half-way through day 1 in Rome — I couldn’t bring myself to leave out enough photos to cram the whole day into one post. The next post will feature a hole, an elephant, and an hermaphrodite, among other things.

A curious snippet from Margaret MacMillan’s account of the Paris Peace Conference, Peacemakers (2002):

Why not give it to Hughes of Australia, suggested Clemenceau.¹

The ‘it’ was Heligoland, a small island in the North Sea, off the north-western coast of Germany. For most of the 19th century it had belonged to Britain, which swapped it for Zanzibar to Germany in 1890 — when relations between the two countries were still friendly. But then the naval arms race started up, and Heligoland became a handy place from any attempt by the Royal Navy to approach the German coast could be interfered with. Which is why, in Paris in 1919, the question arose of what to do about it.

The Admiralty naturally wanted the island back, but presumed that the Americans would object. In the end, the compromise solution adopted was to destroy all of its fortifications. Presumably Clemenceau’s suggestion was that Australia, as a nation almost as far away from Heligoland as possible, be given a Mandate over Heligoland (to add to New Guinea and Nauru), so that neither Britain nor Germany would have control over the disputed territory. I don’t know how seriously he meant it, or whether it ever had a chance of getting up. But in my mind’s eye I could see Australia dominating the North Sea from its Heligoland base with our single battlecruiser … well, no. But what would have happened if Australia had been given a Mandate over Heligoland?

Well, for a start, I don’t think Australia would have been exactly regarded as a disinterested party by Germany: British Empire and all that. In practice, there probably wouldn’t have been much difference between Australia governing Heligoland and Britain governing it: precisely because we were so far away from Europe, we had nothing to gain from it and nothing to lose, except perhaps in terms of our international reputation. I don’t see any reason why we wouldn’t use it to benefit our friend (and protecting power), Britain, in whatever way they wished.

What use would it have been to Britain? MacMillan notes that the coming of the aeroplane was another reason why Heligoland seemed newly valuable. She doesn’t explain, but seems to imply that this is because of their potential use as airbases for offensive action. I doubt that it would have been of much use for Britain in this way — it was too small to have a really big airbase (only 1 sq. km!) to be very powerful, and too close to Germany (only 70 km away) to survive for long.

But what Heligoland might have been very useful for was as a RDF (radar) station, to give Britain early warning of an incoming knock-out blow. It was actually ideally placed for this purpose.

This map, taken from The Chosen Instrument (1938) by Norman Macmillan (no relation, as far as I’m aware), shows the ranges from the various ‘heavily-armed air powers’ (France, Germany, Italy) to Britain. I’ve marked the rough range of a hypothetical Chain Home RDF station on Heligoland in red: it covers the entire German north-west coastline very handily.² So, assuming the Luftwaffe respected Dutch neutrality, any bombers they sent to Britain would have to pass through Heligoland’s detection radius. Heligoland could then give warning to London that a knock-out blow was imminent. At the cruising speed of a He 111, and depending on the flight path, that could be 1.5-2 hours additional warning (or even more if the bombers formed up in range of Heligoland). Very handy, even though the actual targets wouldn’t be known until the English coast was crossed.

Obviously, there are a whole bunch of caveats. I’m obviously assuming that, not only is Dutch neutrality respected (and the Low Countries not invaded, for that matter), but also that France has not been conquered. This is not our 1940, in other words, but a scenario often envisaged in the 1930s, where Germany suddenly attacks Britain without any warning. I’m also assuming that Germany doesn’t assault Heligoland first, or cut its communications with Britain (whether radio or cable).³ But even these acts would at least give warning that an attack was imminent, which is more than the British got in the usual nightmare imaginings. Finally, and perhaps least reasonably, I’m assuming that Britain (well, Australia) would not have handed it back to Germany. Heligoland in foreign hands would have been a major irritant to German nationalists, and unlike the case with the ex-German colonies, Hitler wouldn’t have been merely posturing when he said he wanted it back. So, very likely, giving it back to Germany would probably have been one of the first acts of appeasement.

The only reason to keep it, frankly, would be as an early warning post. Even then, would the Air Ministry risk placing such a valuable piece of technology as radar right under the German’s noses, where they could study its emissions at their leisure and quickly capture it in wartime?⁴ Probably not. Though even without RDF (which in any case was secret until 1941), the British public might gain some measure of confidence, whether false or not, just from being told that there were ‘observers’ on Heligoland who would give advance warning of a massive aerial armada heading their way.

Still, it would seem that, even in this alternate history, the Heligoland Mandate would have come to exactly nothing in the end, just as it did in ours. An interesting and diverting nothing, though.

Image source: Norman Macmillan, The Chosen Instrument (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1938), 21.

1. Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2002), 187.
2. Chain Home Low, for detecting low-level aircraft, had a much shorter range. But it would still cover a useful area of sea.
3. Another thought: a German army which had prepared for an opposed landing on Heligoland might also be a bit better prepared for an opposed landing in Kent …
4. Germany had radar too, of course, but they did not well understand the capabilities of the British system or how it would be used — even after the Graf Zeppelin II made several trips parallel to the English coast, loaded with radio detection gear, in what must have been among the first ELINT air missions ever.

“Slough” by John Betjeman (1937):

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.

And get that man with double chin
Who’ll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women’s tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It’s not their fault that they are mad,
They’ve tasted Hell.

It’s not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It’s not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren’t look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

David Brent’s analysis of “Slough”:

‘Right, I don’t think you solve town planning problems by dropping bombs all over the place, so he’s embarrassed himself there’ — brilliant.

But some people did think like that, or at least wanted to use the need for urban reconstruction after intensive bombing as an opportunity to build a better city. Even more common were plans for reconstruction before war came, to build a city which would better protect its inhabitants from bombing as well as provide a more pleasant way of life. Indeed, the latter might well be a byproduct of the former, as Alistair Cooke¹ suggested in a review of Lewis Mumford’s The Culture of Cities (1938). He first apologised for criticising Mumford’s penchant for ‘philosophic blueprint[s]‘, and then added that:

But it is inevitable at a time when A.R.P. underlines the fact that idealism is possibly the last drive a community acts on when it decides to rebuild itself. Profit, plague, satiation, and especially fear are paramount; a regrettable conclusion that Mr. Mumford himself amply proves in his section on “War as City-Builder.”

He tells in masterly detail of the mediaeval [sic] city’s ache for security after five centuries of looting and civic bankruptcy. But it is likely that radical reform in street-planning, and (in this country) in greenbelt planning, will take effect not from somebody’s idealism but from Mr. Langdon-Davies’s insistence that air raids make such foresight inevitable. Planning for war may, in this instance, bring about peace-time playgrounds that philanthropy would never have created.²

Not all visions of the bombproofed cities of the future were so positive. Only two weeks later, the same publication reported on the British delegation’s report to the 1938 International Housing and Townplanning [sic] Congress, held in Mexico City:

Here we get 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 (but according to Professor Haldane they would have to go at least 50 feet down), 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. It is just as well that we should realise what faces us even if actual war in the immediate future is avoided and only the prospect of war overhangs us.³

In a society where, apparently, it would either take the threat of war to build truly livable cities, or alternatively, that threat would force life partly underground, one can perhaps understand why ‘the hatred of modern life, the desire to see our money-civilization blown to hell by bombs’ was ‘a thing [...] genuinely felt’ by the protagonist of George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). Of course, none of these things happened, but that’s another story.

1. Yes, that Alistair Cooke, though being neither American nor British I’m more familiar with Alistair Cookie.
2. Alistair Cooke, “A diary of civilisation”, Spectator, 26 August 1938, 241.
3. ”The subterranean life”, Spectator, 9 September 1938, 391.

In 1923, the Salisbury Committee enquired into the proper relationship between the RAF, on the one hand, and the Army and Navy, on the other. According to Andrew Boyle’s biography of Hugh Trenchard, the then Chief of the Air Staff quoted a recent statement by Sir Ian Hamilton (the commander at Gallipoli) at some point during this inquiry:

Surely we who have witnessed the Germans doing star turns over London and the second exodus of the Jews, surely we will be worse than Thomas Didymus if we do not put the conquest of the air above the conquest of the sea?¹

This needs a little explaining. The bit about the Germans must be a reference to the Gotha raids on London in 1917-8, when the German bombers seemed to come and go with impunity. Thomas Didymus, Google informs me, was the apostle Thomas, so I suppose this is a reference to doubting Thomas, meaning that with all this evidence, there’s no longer any reason to doubt that the air is more important than the sea. And the second exodus of the Jews? Admittedly, I haven’t read all of Hamilton’s article (or whatever it was), but still, I’m pretty sure that this is an anti-Semitic libel.

Anti-Semitism was not uncommon in interwar Britain. This is well-known, but it’s sometimes represented as merely unpleasant and relatively benign — which it certainly was when compared with some other countries. However, it could go beyond mere unpleasantness into real ugliness. One idea which was floating around in airpower writing in the early 1920s is that Jews were especially likely to crack under the pressure of bombing. And that supposedly, during the Gotha and other air raids on London, rich Jews had fled the city for the safety of the seaside resorts — Hamilton’s ’second exodus’ — while poor ones stayed in the East End but ran around in a blind panic.

Sometimes Jews were referred to in code. For example, the authors of Air Raid Damage in London (1923), published by the British Fire Prevention Committee, referred to ‘aliens’, which I think would have been commonly understood to mean, primarily, Jews (the Aliens Act of 1905 was largely aimed against Jewish immigration). They asserted that during air raids, ‘the average Londoner, both male and female, showed his usual equanimity and sang-froid, often under most trying circumstances’, but then added that:

Any individual who was panic-stricken or lost his morale was the exception, but where he did, it was largely due to the bad influence of the alien or semi-alien population, who, with but few exceptions, behaved in a manner that was both despicable and dangerous.²

So their implication is that while the British behaved splendidly, the aliens did not — but then, they’re not really British anyway, are they? The trashier more popular end of the spectrum of knock-out blow novels was more blatantly anti-Semitic, and often owed as much to fears of ‘the enemy in our midst’ as to the fear of the bomber. William le Queux, the grand master of really, really bad invasion and spy novels, tried his hand at an air-scare story in 1920, The Terror of the Air. In le Queux’s world, even being bombarded with pamphlets is enough to send Jews over the edge:

The atmosphere before was electrical; the fall of the leaflets let loose the storm. Babel broke forth. Miles away people heard the noise of the shouting and screaming. The scene was bad enough in the purely English districts, but in the East End, in Soho, and similar quarters where Jews and foreigners of all types were still herded together, swamping the native population, the panic was indescribable.³

Even the Earl of Halsbury’s relatively classy 1944 features a pretty clear, negative Jewish stereotype: a ‘more than usually fat and prosperous-looking diner’ named Griesheim, ‘with large pudgy hands and an oleaginous smile’ and worth over £2 million. When the air raid begins he tramples over the woman in front of him in his rush to get out of the restaurant, and a young Englishman is forced to punch his ‘bloated jaw’ to show him that this sort of thing just isn’t done.⁴

By the 1930s, this sort of thing was becoming rarer — possibly because events in Germany were making expressions of anti-Semitism less acceptable.⁵ One writer who did repeat it was the retired RAF officer L. E. O. Charlton. In War over England (1936), in a section on the First World War air raids, he wrote that

The foreign folk in the crowded East End district were singularly liable to an unreasoning panic, particularly the preponderating Jewish element [...] it is an undoubted fact that in the air-raid periods they were far more subject to alarm than the body of the people with whom they dwelt [...] the distress of Jewish mothers and children was very difficult to soothe. They would scream loudly, tearing their clothes and beating their breasts [...] bands of young aliens belonging to neutral or allied countries, shedding every vestige of manhood, would behave like animals of the wild, sometimes brutally trampling people to death in a mad, insensate rush for safety.

Charlton at least suggested that this behaviour was ‘probably the result of harsh treatment and persecution through the ages from every nation under the sun’.⁶ But unsurprisingly, the fascist J. F. C. Fuller left out that part when quoting the socialist Charlton’s book the following year.⁷ Again, the message is that the ‘real’ British are made of sterner stuff than the inferior foreign types living among them, who will be a liability in wartime.

To be sure, this repellent anti-Semitic streak was only present in a fairly small fraction of books about the next war from the air in the 1920s and 1930s. (Perhaps because it wouldn’t help their arguments to suggest that only a minority of a city’s inhabitants would break under the pressure of bombing.) But then again, neither did many writers take trouble to refute this libel. The only one I’ve come across is J. M. Spaight, in Air Power and War Rights (1924):

No doubt, on the whole, London took the air raids with dignity and composure, but no one who is acquainted with the facts can admit that the people who left London to crowd into Maidenhead, Manchester, Brighton and other safer towns, were exclusively “Jews and aliens.”⁸

So, thank you, Spaight, for not being an anti-Semite!

1. Andrew Boyle, Trenchard (London: Collins, 1962), 469.
2. E. C. P. Monson and Ellis Marsland, Air Raid Damage in London (London: British Fire Prevention Committee, 1923), 8.
3. William le Queux, The Terror of the Air (London: Herbert Jenkins, n.d [1920]), 71.
4. Earl of Halsbury, 1944 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1926), 89, 97.
5. Not for Hamilton though: by this time he was a Nazi sympathiser, possessed of an anti-Semitism which ‘had a distinct racial edge to it, beyond the conventional anti-Jewish sentiment which was commonplace at the time in much of the British upper class, in that he was prepared to stipulate negative physical features and behavioural characteristics of Jews’. Ian Kershaw, Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and Britain’s Road to War (London: Allen Lane, 2004), 55.
6. L. E. O. Charlton, War over England (London, New York and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1936), 13.
7. J. F. C. Fuller, Towards Armageddon: The Defence Problem and its Solution (London: Lovat Dickson, 1937), 168.
8. J. M. Spaight, Air Power and War Rights (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1924), 9. Spaight also quoted a historian of the war to the same effect, A. F. Pollard’s Short History of the Great War, 308, which I haven’t seen.