Monthly Archives: June 2008

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Sometimes I wonder how I'd react if I was perusing an early-twentieth century newspaper and came across a URL in an advertisement. Maybe http://www.aerialgymnkhana.co.uk or http://www.hobadl.org.uk. I mean, there's no physical reason why this couldn't happen -- all those characters existed back then. It's just that arranging them in such a way would have made no sense whatsoever to anyone living at the time. So I'll never see one, which is probably good for my sanity.

But I do occasionally see something reminiscent of some of our idiosyncratic online protocols: telegraphic addresses. They were the functional equivalent of postal addresses, of course: they allowed the rapid routing of a message to a physical location on the surface of the Earth. But what I find interesting about them is that they were evidently arbitrary: a person or organisation could choose its own address (apart from the geographical bit). This means that telegraphic addresses reflected something of their character -- much like personal email addresses today often do, or even more so, like an organisation's domain name does. They also often had something of the cramped style, the abrvs and runtogetherwords, of modern txtspk, which must come from a similar desire to save characters (since the longer the addresses were, the more keypresses and time it took the Morse operator, and ultimately pence it cost the sender). And this is true even of government bureaucracies like the RAF. Here are some telegraphic addresses culled from the Air Force List for January 1922.

Some are self-explanatory, such Airministry, London. Aircivil, Airministry, London is also pretty obvious, if you are aware of the existence of the Civil Aviation Department, Air Ministry. (The way the addresses are nested here is reminiscent of a subdomain, or perhaps of the old percent hack for forwarding mail from ARPANET to another network.) Airships, Bedford is the Airship Constructional Station (which must be Cardington), and Scientist, London is the Air Ministry Laboratory. Cranwell, including RAF HQ and the nascent RAF College, could be reached at Aircoll, Sleaford, though for some reason the Boys' Wing had a separate address, Avion, Sleaford.

Others require a bit more work to puzzle out. Ok, so Imwarmus, Crystal, London is the Imperial War Museum (RAF Section) at its temporary home at the Crystal Palace and Judvocate, London is the Judge Advocate General. And Cenrafhos Finch, London is the Central RAF Hospital -- but what's the Finch bit refer to? Paynavator, Westrand, London is the General Services Pay Officer, which explains 'pay', but what's a 'navator'? (Westrand = west Strand?) I think I've worked out Airgenarch, Kincross, London, the address of the Coastal Area HQ (Kincross being King's Cross): 'genarch' is an archaic word for the head of a family (as in patriarch or matriarch). Inland Area HQ could also be reached by Airgenarch, Uxbridge. Then there's Prinpustor, Watloo, London, which was the Air Ministry Publications Department. Hmm ... PRINcipal PUblications STORe, maybe? (And Watloo would be Waterloo.)

A group of meteorological addresses stand out, including Weather, London, the Air Ministry Meteorological Department (Forecasts); Meteorology, Southkens, London, a, or the, Meteorological Office (at South Kensington); Barometer, Edinburgh, another Meteorological Office; Meteorite, Liverpool for the Port Meteorological Officer there; and Meteor Experiments, Shoeburyness, a Meteorological Station. I suspect these are addresses inherited when the Air Ministry took over what is today known as the Met Office, in 1920 -- they're just a bit too inconsistent and whimsical to be part of a RAF naming scheme. Another legacy address is Ballooning, South Farnborough, for the Royal Aircraft Establishment -- which had its earliest incarnation at that location in 1905 as His Majesty's Balloon Factory.

The default address for a RAF station in Britain was Aeronautics -- so, Aeronautics, Biggin Hill or Aeronautics, London (not an aerodrome but the Central Medical Board, among other things). Aeronautics was also used for government-owned civil aerodromes such as Croydon. Ocredep was another very common one. All seventeen RAF recruiting offices used it. Officer Commanding, REcruiting DEPot?

The RAF overseas did its own thing. In fact, the address for HQ Mediterranean Group is Rafos, Malta, which could be derived from RAF OverSeas. Maybe. Some wag thought up the addresses for HQ Middle East Area, Perardua, Cairo, and its subordinate group HQs for Egypt and Palestine, Adastra, Cairo and Ismailia. Per ardua ad astra, get it? (But, for some reason, HQ Mesopotamian Group is Aviation, Baghdad.) Otherwise it's mostly a descriptive name with the prefix air-, for example Airengine, Abbassia for HQ Engine Repair Depot. Airsquad 70, Heliopolis is the address for 70 Squadron. The Base Pay Office in Egypt is Airpay, Cairo, but the one in Iraq is Paycash, Baghdad. In India, there's more uniformity. Aeronautics, Ambala for HQ RAF India, and Astral, Ambala or Peshawar, for Wing HQs. Then Aviation and a number for squadrons, e.g. Aviation 5, Quetta for 5 Squadron. And finally, Airskool, Ambala, for the RAF School (India), is so 21st-century in its use of an incorrect spelling just to save a single character that it is, in fact, quite oldskool.

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Part of the methodology of the Mass-Observation project was the tracking of paranormal beliefs, perhaps a reflection of its anthropological inspiration. In War Begins at Home, published early in 1940 by Mass-Obs, the following article is reprinted from the December 1939 issue of Prediction (a magazine devoted to astrology, psychic powers and the like):

ON THE WAR FRONT
Join our 'Thought Barrage'

Last month Prediction published an article which showed how every reader could help win, and end, the war. Our contributor re-affirmed the Occult principle that thoughts are things, and reminded readers that the reverse of this truism is also proved. Things are thoughts; and the power of thinking can, in the present emergency, make a substantial contribution towards our effort to restrain and overthrow the forces of evil.

This month we publish another article illustrating how this vital thought-power can be directed to a given end -- the extinction of the U-boat peril.

We believe that every reader who has even a smattering of Occult teaching will realise how valuable is the weapon which is here fashioned for his hands.

No one, better than the Occultist, understands the power of thought. No one, more than he, realises that all material life and action depend on prior vision and effort on the mental plane.

OUR NIGHTLY BROADCAST

Prediction, then, has suggested a way in which this power may be harnessed on the side of the angels. We invite every reader to join in a greatly broadcast, which we firmly believe will soon produce tangible results.

Every night, as the clock strikes ten, let your mind play upon these vivid realities. Tune in, and pass on, the message of victory which will be vibrating in the ether, and which must cheer and encourage our soldiers at the front, our pilots in the air and our sailors who hunt the enemy on the seas.

GOVERNMENT RECOGNITION

Even the Government has in part recognised the importance of thought in the national will for victory. It has issued a poster which acclaims:

Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution, will bring us Victory?" [sic]

The man in the street reads this slogan, passes by and forgets ... But you and I, through the power of visualisation, can make it a living thing.1

...continue reading

  1. Quoted in Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge, War Begins at Home (London: Chatto & Windus, 1940), 132-3. []

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From Peter Stansky, The First Day of the Blitz: September 7, 1940 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 10:

Bertrand Russell wrote in 1936 that when London was bombed it would be "one vast raving bedlam, the hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for help, the city will be a pandemonium."

It's a great quote, and one I use myself in the current draft of my thesis. Except that there I attribute it to J. F. C. Fuller in 1923! You wouldn't think it was easy to confuse Russell (interests: philosophy, pacifism, free love) with Fuller (interests: armoured warfare, fascism, yoga) but this isn't the first time I've seen this misattribution made. Obviously there's a bit of copying of other people's (erroneous) footnotes going on, though I think Stansky is the first I've come across to do the right thing and note where he got the quotation from: Ken Young and Patricia L. Garside, Metropolitan London: Politics and Urban Change, 1837-1981 (London: Edward Arnold, 1982), 222. Which does indeed attribute the quote to Russell and not Fuller. Whether Young and Garside are the original source of the mistake, I don't know. The Russell book in question, Which Way to Peace? (London: Michael Joseph, 1936), 37, does have the passage, but says fairly clearly that it's a quote from Fuller (although without giving the title of the source!)

So here's the original quote from the original source:

I believe that, in future warfare, great cities, such as London, will be attacked from the air, and that a fleet of 500 aeroplanes each carrying 500 ten-pound bombs of, let us suppose, mustard gas, might cause 200,000 minor casualties and throw the whole city into a panic within half an hour of their arrival. Picture, if you will, what the result will be: London for several days will be one vast raving Bedlam, the hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for help, the city will be in pandemonium. What of the government at Westminster? It will be swept away by an avalanche of terror. Then will the enemy dictate his terms, which will be grasped at like a straw by a drowning man. Thus may a war be won in forty-eight hours and the losses of the winning side may be actually nil!

J. F. C. Fuller, The Reformation of War (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1923), 150.

I should add that The First Day of the Blitz is very good, and this mistake shouldn't be held against it ... although I do wonder who Paul Overy (193) and Daniel Tolman (198) are? :)

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

The 15th Military History Carnival has been posted at Cardinal Wolsey's This Day In History. This time around, I'd like to contrast two styles of blog conversation. The first is at Crooked Timber, on the differing memories of the Great War in America and Europe, and the bearing this may have on attitudes to war and peace: not only the post itself but the 170-comment long discussion thread, which features regular Airminded commenter Chris Williams. (See also the cross-post at John Quiggin's own blog, and some comments at Trench Fever.) It's a good example of somebody posting some interesting ideas which resulted in a thorough discussion (though not without its frustrations, and it's a shame that Crooked Timber threads seem to close after such a short time). But while intense, it's pretty localised in time and blog-space.

Compare this with the reaction to a post (which had nothing to do with military history and so wasn't in the Carnival) at Mercurius Rusticus attacking the role and influence of women in the history profession, and gender history in general. The post has now been taken down (Ralph Luker quotes some of it), apparently permanently, though it was up and down a couple of times before that, and for a while the whole blog was closed to all but invited readers. (Another post, quite innocuous as far as I could see, was taken down after being mentioned in a comment at Cliopatria.) Mercurius Rusticus himself (and presumably he's a he) seems uninterested in discussing or defending what he's said in any sensible way: his comments on the matter to date have all been written in the style of a 17th-century scholar, or so I take it. Which is amusing enough but, unless this is an accepted style of discourse amongst early modern historians, seems pretty disrespectful to his interlocutors. As is his most recent post.

But the thing is that this hostility to debate doesn't matter too much, because there are plenty of other places for people to respond, comment, point and laugh. The ones that have come across my feed reader include: Cliopatria (here, here and here), Tenured Radical (here and here), Historiann, Early Modern Notes, Investigations of a Dog, Europe Endless, and Progressive Historians. Mercurius Rusticus isn't doing himself any favours with his evasiveness, but in any event the historioblogosphere is doing a good job of analysing the issue without his further input.

My own attitude is pretty much the same as it was in a somewhat-different context two years ago:

I would have thought that anything that happened in the past is a ‘worthwhile’ subject for study by historians. Anything!

If gender history isn't your thing (and I've already confessed that it's not an approach that I often adopt myself) then just don't do it. I simply don't get why any historian would be offended by the fact that other historians choose to do things differently to themselves -- let alone feel the need to attack them for it. History is such a vast subject that we need to illuminate it from as many angles as possible in order to approach a true understanding of it.

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Venus

Nick at Mercurius Politicus has an excellent post up on the The Mowing-devil, an English pamphlet from 1678 which is famous among forteans because it contains an illustration of something that looks a lot like a crop circle, three centuries before the term was coined. If it is an account of the mysterious appearance of a circle in a farmer's field, then it is evidence that crop circles long preceded the activities of circlemakers Doug and Dave, and so are presumably a real, and as yet unexplained, phenomenon.

But Nick's analysis suggests that the anonymous writer of the The Mowing-devil was not presenting an account of a strange but true event, but rather a cautionary tale about class relations in rural England. He concludes that

In short, The Mowing-Devil is probably not the representation of an early crop-circle that enthusiasts want it to be. In focusing on the woodcut, they’ve missed a much more interesting side to the text that tells us something about late seventeenth-century popular politics and religion.

Deleriad, a folklorist, made an interesting comment:

Although your analysis of the narrative is pretty reasonable I think it’s also worthwhile applying Hufford’s notion of the experiential source hypothesis. Put simply, it works on the basis that people explain anomalous experiences within the pre-existing worldview of a particular culture. So for example, encounters which might once have been explained in terms of fairies are nowadays explained in terms of aliens, lights in the sky which were explained as zepplins at the dawn of the 20th century are now explained as UFOs and so on.

Now, I'm aware of David Hufford's work, though mainly by reputation: The Terror That Comes in the Night (1982), a study of old hag folklore in Newfoundland, is a book I've heard much about. Hufford's experiential source hypothesis (ESH) was put forward as an alternative to the prevailing cultural source hypothesis (CSH), which would explain supernatural claims almost entirely in terms of pre-existing beliefs, or else misperceptions, hoaxes or hallucinations.1 According to the CSH line of thinking, as I understand it, The Mowing-devil is probably best explained by something like Nick's suggestion, or maybe there was an early modern Doug and Dave having a laugh, or something like that. The ESH, by contrast, would posit that that something odd happened in Hertfordshire -- for example, a circle appearing overnight in a field of crops -- and that the writer of The Mowing-devil described it in terms that he and his audience could understand -- for example, a devil with a flaming scythe who appears after a farmer's ill-tempered rejection of a workman's offer to mow the field. To simplify grossly, a CSHer would say there's no reason to believe that anything freaky is going on here, so let's look for a mundane explanation; an ESHer would respond that this attitude risks throwing the extraordinary baby out with the ordinary bathwater.

So what should historians make of all this? I don't think we can make much at all.
...continue reading

  1. In other words, a sceptical viewpoint. David J. Hufford, The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centred Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 13-4. []

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Vote National

A poster from the 1935 general election, showing, quite literally, the shadow of the bomber. The National Government was a coalition comprising the Conservatives and two splinter parties, National Labour and the Liberal Nationals. With Stanley Baldwin at its head, the National Government went to the people on a platform of peace and prosperity. The poster doesn't spell out how peace was to be secured (no doubt one of its virtues), namely through a commitment to the League of Nations and collective security, and moderate rearmament, particularly in the air. It's interesting that at this stage, aeroplanes were still evidently equated with biplanes. Monoplanes were certainly becoming prominent by this time, but they weren't necessarily seen as more 'modern' than the familiar biplane. (As indeed they weren't: Blériot used a monoplane to fly the Channel back in 1909.)

This election poster and others are available from the Conservative Party Archive at the Bodleian. There's only one other which has an aviation theme:
...continue reading

I was invited this week to take part in a 'round table' discussion between Major Paul Moga (USAF), Professor James Arthur Mowbray (Air War College), and selected bloggers with an interest in aviation (including Scott Palmer of the Avia-Corner). I'm not sure the producers realised that I'm down under, but although the scheduled time for the chat actually was at a reasonable hour, my time, I had to decline because of a prior engagement. At least it spared everyone concerned the trouble of translating my native Strine on the fly ...

The purpose was to advertise a documentary series called Showdown: Air Combat, which starts this Sunday on the Military Channel. Which I'm happy to do in this case, because the aforementioned discussion has been made freely available online. Of course I won't be able to watch it, but it looks interesting: the basic idea being to replay, using warbirds or RC models, ten notable dogfights from the First World War on. Sadly, only one episode features a British aeroplane, that on the Red Baron's last flight.

The discussion can be played below, or listened to here. It lasts for about 45 minutes.

At one point (about 25 minutes in), Prof. Mowbray says that the aeroplane was always viewed as one of the most expensive weapon systems, and that so when Douhet started talking about fleets of thousands of bombers, everybody laughed at him because nobody could afford that many. Of course, in a discussion like this there's not the time to fully qualify one's remarks, and I'd hate for anyone to take me to task for a mistake made when speaking off the cuff, but I can't agree. Before 1914, people like Claude Grahame-White often made the argument that you could buy a thousand aeroplanes, say, for the cost of one dreadnought -- and it might only take one bomb from one aeroplane to sink that dreadnought. A bargain at twice the price, if true. And at the end of the war, the great powers did have massive fleets of aircraft -- the RAF had over 22000 aircraft on its books (though this number includes every category of aeroplane: reserves, trainers, obsolete models and probably scraps of broken wing sitting in the corner of the hangar). It probably would have had many more had the war continued into 1919. But don't let my pedantry put you off having a listen!

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Short Empire

Director Baz Luhrmann (Strictly Ballroom, Moulin Rouge) has been working on a new film, called Australia. As the name perhaps suggests, it's a sweeping saga of this wide, brown land of ours: the men who conquered it, the women who loved them, the cattle, the dust, the flies ... well, it sounds pretty dull to me, to be honest. But I saw an extended trailer before Indy IV the other day, and it seems that Australia does have a couple of points of interest for the airminded film-goer.

The first is hinted at in this set photo. It shows Nicole Kidman ('our Nic') and, if I'm not mistaken, Bill Hunter (who is contractually obliged to appear in every major Australian motion picture) in a boat with 'QANTAS EMPIRE AIRWAYS LTD' written on the side. Well, since Qantas have not, historically, been known for their watercraft, presumably there'll be a Short Empire flying boat around somewhere! Such as the QEA Empire boat pictured above, VH-ABB Coolangatta. That's excellent -- we don't see enough of these strangely beautiful aircraft these days. But a few scenes with a CGI flying boat are probably not enough to get me into the cinema.

The second is much more central to the story, it seems: the Japanese air raids on Darwin on 19 February 1942, carried out by the four fleet carriers of Nagumo's task force and land-based bombers from the East Indies. About 240 aircraft attacked the harbour and airfield; 10 ships were sunk and about 250 people killed. To date, it's the heaviest and costliest attack by an enemy on an Australian target.

Which would seem to make it a fitting subject for an epic Australian film. Except that there was no Blitz-style, Darwin-can-take-it stoicism here. In fact, what happened was not unlike the pre-war predictions of the effects of an aerial knock-out blow. Half the town's population of 2500 (most women and children had been evacuated in December) fled south after the raid, along with a fair number of RAAF service personnel -- the so-called 'Adelaide River Stakes' (Adelaide River being a small town about 60 km south of Darwin).1 It's true enough that the two air raids were taken as a sign of imminent invasion, not unreasonably since Fortress Singapore had surrendered just four days earlier, along with most of the 8th Division AIF; and Darwin was a long way from any help. And it has been suggested that the deserting servicemen had been given confusing orders. That doesn't explain the fact that one of them got as far as Melbourne (about 4000 km away!) before stopping. Or, more seriously, the looting which took place in Darwin the night after the raid, perpetrated by servicemen (including some military police). There was certainly bravery -- not least from the USAAF pilots who took to the air to defend Darwin in their P-40s, though greatly outnumbered -- but overall, it's a pretty inglorious episode in Australia's military history. (And an example of something which Australians might do well to remember on ANZAC Day.)

So, it will be interesting to see how the raid's aftermath is depicted in Australia. Telling anything like the full story would seem to cut against the intended epic nature of the film. But it sounds like Luhrmann does does intend to tell this part of Australia's history:

Darwin was attacked 64 times in six months ... The government (disguised) the truth: 2000 whites were killed and non-whites were not counted, so the toll was far greater," he said. "But everything in the film will be in service to a great romance ... Facts will be moved around but not in a way that fundamentally disturbs the truth.

I may have to see it after all ...

(The title of this post, as Australians of a certain age may have guessed, is an homage to that great maker of epic films, Warren Perso, the 'last Aussie auteur'.)

Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

  1. See here; the relevant volumes of the official history, Douglas Gillison, Royal Australian Air Force, 1939-1942 (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1962), 426-32, and Paul Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1942-1945 (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1970), 141-4; and the relevant volume of the centenary history of defence, Alan Stephens, The Royal Australian Air Force (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001), 136-9. []