Monthly Archives: February 2009

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Primary sources

Some more navel-gazingpost-thesis analysis. Above is a plot of the number of primary sources (1908-1941) I cite by date of publication. (Published sources only, excluding newspaper articles -- of which there are a lot -- and government documents. Also, it's not just airpower stuff, though it mostly is.) I actually have no idea if it's a lot or not, and I'm sure there are some selection effects in there. But, although I've certainly not attempted any sort of statistical analysis (nor will I!), I think some features of the plot reflect real features of the airpower literature of period, at least as it relates to the bombing of civilians.

Firstly, there's a substantial increase in the number of sources in the 1930s, particularly from 1934 when there is a big peak. I argue in the thesis that this was only partly and indirectly due to the obvious reason (the arrival of Hitler in 1933). The more important reason was the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva, which ran between 1932 and 1934 (actually it went longer, but was dead in the water when Germany walked out). This roused airpower writers -- whether pro- or anti-disarmament -- to action, and gave them a reason to explain to the public the effects of bombing on cities. The slight rise from the late 1920s is also due to the conference, I think, or rather the optimistic Locarno-era preparations for it. The big peak in 1927 is a bit odd, though. Let's call that an outlier.

The other two noticeable peaks are in 1909 and 1938. The first was very early in the public's awareness of flight. That really started in 1908, but the possible defence implications came to the fore in 1909 -- the founding of the Aerial League of the British Empire, the first phantom airship panic, the publication of the first serious books on the topic. And of course the dreadnought panic -- it was a peak year for Anglo-German rivalry. The 1938 peak was the culmination of the building concern over the previous decade. What the plot doesn't show is that, unlike previous years, it was largely sceptical, based on evidence from the Spanish Civil War. The Sudeten crisis that September showed that the fear of the knock-out blow still had a strong grip on the public and the press. But afterwards there's a sharp decline in interest, which I maintain is real.

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As my mind has been on other matters of late, I've been a bit remiss in attending to matters historioblogospheric. So here are some of the things I've not noted:

  • The Military History Carnival has a new home at Battlefield Biker. I think Gavin Robinson deserves many thanks and much praise for starting up the carnival and running it through its first nineteen incarnations!
  • Here's something for all the Vulcanophiles out there, written by Nabakov, a sometime commenter here.
  • Some newish (or newish to me) history blogs which I've been reading for a while and am adding to the blog list: Luke McKernan's The Bioscope, on early and silent cinema; Times Archive Blog, drawing on the awesome resources of the Thunderer; Tim Kendall's War Poetry, and not just from the First World War either.
  • See also: The Whirlwind, a blog set up by Dan Todman for his QMUL course on Bomber Command, and The Road from 1945, set up by Dan and Jack McGowan as a resource for another course on postwar British history. The latter, especially, is chock-full of video primary source goodness, and The Whirlwind also has some interesting reflections by Dan on how the course is going.

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Thesis wordle

Partly in lieu of the thing itself, but mainly just for fun, here are some word clouds of my thesis (generated with Wordle). So the above image shows the 75 most frequent words in the entire document, with the biggest word being the most common. (So it's something to do with air and war and London then ...) Below are clouds for each chapter. I just copied the text from the PDF file into Wordle; it works pretty well, except for some reason that process introduces weird breaks in some words. I don't really spend a significant chunk of chapter 4 talking about counter-os and ensives!

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Thanks to Jonathan for the tip: the Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe 1940-1945 project is holding a workshop at the University of Reading on 13 March 2009, on 'War, Bombing, and Trauma: World War 2 and Comparative Perspectives'. It's free but the registration deadline is 3 March 2009. They are also holding an international conference at the University of Exeter on 10-13 September 2009, which will explore the 'variety of political and cultural responses to bombing carried out against predominantly urban targets in Britain, France, Germany and Italy during the Second World War'. They both sound like entirely too much fun!

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Here's an explanation for phantom airships which I haven't come across before: whales!

The way in which rumours start and grow is shown by the following incident recorded by the Daily Telegraph correspondent at Harwich:—

"It was rumoured in Harwich this evening that a Zeppelin had been seen flying on the North Sea to-day, surrounded by British destroyers. The story was brought into this port by members of the crew of the Great Eastern Railway Company's steamer Colchester, which arrived late in the afternoon from Rotterdam. On enquiry I have ascertained that when within twenty-five miles of Harwich the crew of the Colchester saw a large object of a yellowish tint afloat on the water, with two destroyers near by. The weather was hazy, and it was difficult at a distance to determine precisely what the object was. One of the destroyers fired at it; the other steamed away. The true explanation of the incident is now stated in naval circles to be that the supposed Zeppelin was merely a dead whale, and that the carcase was fired at with the object of sinking it.
"'Did it look like a whale?' I asked a member of the steamer's crew.
"'Oh, yes, it might have been,' he answered."

Source: Flight, 23 October 1914, 1065 (link).

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Black Thursday, February 6th 1851 by William Strutt (detail)

I don't have anything deep or moving to say about the bushfires which destroyed several towns on the north-east edge of Melbourne on Saturday (try here instead). Everyone I know is (I think) safe, which is the first thing to say, but beyond that ... the official death toll is currently 181, but is sure to go higher. Many have suffered burns. Many more have lost their homes. A temporary morgue has been set up, and tent villages are springing up in nearby towns. I don't know what I can say about all that. What I guess I can and perhaps should do is put the disaster in some sort of historical context. It's what I did for New Orleans and London, so let's see if I can do it for my home town.

Bushfires are an annual event in southern Australia. We've had bad ones before: Ash Wednesday (1983), Black Friday (1939), Black Thursday (1851). (The above image is a detail from William Strutt's massive 1864 painting Black Thursday, February 6th 1851.) Most are started by natural causes (such as lightning), some by arsonists, if you can believe it. Every summer we hear the warnings, and with global warming we can likely expect more frequent and more dangerous fires. Sydney had a close shave in 2001; Canberra had it worse in 2003. The current one is the worst of them all.

We've had more than a decade of drought already, so the countryside is very, very dry. A heatwave last week (three consecutive days over 40 degrees) primed the situation; then Melbourne's highest temperature ever was recorded on Saturday (46.4 degrees) and with it came very strong winds. A firestorm swept through and over towns like Marysville and Kinglake with very little warning; but even those who were prepared often did not survive. The standard advice is stay or go: that is, decide to stay put and defend your house, or decide to go, and go early. Don't dither, decide on one or the other and stick to it. But the firefront moved so fast and was so intense that people didn't have time to leave in good order, nor were they able to effectively protect their properties. Some panicked and tried to flee when the fire bore down on them; apparently a number of bodies have been found in burned out cars.

This inevitably reminds me of 1945, or 1941 or 1937, of responses to the danger of bombing. Evacuation was one such response then, as it is now to the threat of bushfires. Householders were given advice on how best to defend against fire. The CFA is somewhat analogous to the AFS, both volunteer, part-time firefighting organisations. Even air-raid shelters are making a comeback. Half a century ago and more, it seems that the use of dugouts as fire refuges was fairly widespread (though with mixed success). There's some talk of reviving the practice, with updated technology, and I think there's a lot to be said for the idea. It also seems that stay-or-go is to be reviewed. Maybe it will be changed into just go, or stay-in-a-shelter.

And the firestorm makes me think of Tokyo or Hamburg. The casualties are far lower, of course, but then so are the population densities. (Is there a danger that one of these bushfires could penetrate deep into a big city like Melbourne? Perhaps, but there is far less combustible fuel -- meaning dead eucalyptus leaves and the like -- lying around in urban areas, so my guess is they'd progress much more slowly.) I saw a photo somewhere of a man standing beside his burnt-out car; there were silvery rivulets on the ground which was where molten metal had flowed from it. Some people spoke of getting into baths and spas when the fire came by. That made me shudder when I recalled those who had been boiled alive when sheltering in water tanks in Dresden. It's not the same but I guess these images and ideas are part of my intellectual toolkit now and they're some of the things I use to make sense of the world.

Please consider making a donation for the relief of the bushfire victims through the Australian Red Cross.

Image source: State Library of Victoria.

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Japanese flying bomb / Modern Mechanix, April 1933

Via Modern Mechanix comes this supposed Japanese suicide bomb. It's from the April 1933 issue of Modern Mechanix, an American magazine. It's not an aeroplane but a precision guided munition, with the guidance supplied by the pilot inside the bomb itself. The accompanying article claims that Japan was using such bombs in China.

Now, this is a bit outside my area but I'm fairly sure that Japan was doing no such thing. It had pretty complete air superiority in China and it was winning on the ground, so why would it need to resort to suicide tactics? Modern Mechanix has an explanation: it's because 'the Nipponese are conscious of their inferiority in developing new and fearful weapons of war, and are forced to rely on man-power'.

The simple truth of the matter is that -- a man is practically required to steer Japanese bombs to their mark because they haven’t been able to develop the bomb-sighting machinery which makes Uncle Sam’s flyers, for instance, so deadly in their accuracy.

Contrast this with the American way:

A country like the United States would approach the problem of directing bomb flight in an entirely different way. Some method of mechanical control of the bomb would be sought -- in fact, the idea of controlling a bomb or gun shell by radio is already being worked on, as described in Modern Mechanix and Inventions some months ago. It will be seen that, entirely aside from making the sacrifice of a man’s life unnecessary, radio control of a bomb is much more accurate and less liable to error through the failure of the human machine in a moment of critical nervous tension.

So deficiency in Japanese technology + Japanese tradition of suicide = Japanese suicide bomb. Which would be risibly racist -- except that it's not too far from what really happened, only 11 years too early. (The first kamikaze attack was against HMAS Australia at Leyte, in October 1944.) So perhaps I'm being a bit harsh?
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Some perfectly ordinary banter, c. 1917:

First "Hun": "Did you see old Cole's zoom on a quirk this morning?"
Second "Hun": "No, what happened?"
First "Hun": "Oh, nothing to write home about ... stalled his 'bus and pancaked thirty feet ... crashed completely ... put a vertical gust up me ... just as I was starting my solo flip in a rumpty!"

This is the start of an article by W. A. B. entitled 'Airmen in the making', from the Daily Mail, 19 July 1917, p. 4. It's about some of the new words and phrases used by trainee RFC pilots: 'no one can claim so many strikingly original terms as the air services'. Most of the examples given weren't actually new; some of them don't seem to have survived the war; others are still familiar enough in an aviation context; and yet others are now so widely used that their aeronautical context comes as a surprise.

Hun does not here refer to one of Biggles' foes but to the trainee pilots themselves. The OED's earliest cite for this sense is 1916; a later cite from 1925 suggests that the derivation was that flight cadets tended to be highly destructive of training aircraft. Zoom (a 'soul-satisfying word') is what an aeroplane does when it is 'hauled up apruptly and made to climb for a few moments at a dangerously sharp angle'. But it seems that zooming was already something that moving objects did, especially if they made some sort of humming or other sound as they did so: an OED cite from 1904 has bees zooming against a window plane. All sorts of vehicles can zoom these days, though aircraft may have been first. But we probably use it more often to refer to cameras or image editing software. A quirk is a training aeroplane (though according to the OED it can also mean a trainee pilot), or just any which is slow and ungainly. But it's a very old word, in the sense of something odd or unusual, which seems directly related to this usage. A rumpty is a specific type of training aeroplane, namely a Maurice Farman Shorthorn. According to the RAAF Museum, it (or rather Rumpety) is an onomatopoeic word, from the sound it makes while travelling over the ground.

To stall in the aeronautical sense is of course quite familiar, but stalling in the sense of coming to a standstill is quite old (OED's first cite is c. 1460). 'Bus is short for omnibus, presumably -- a later generation of pilots might have said kite or ship. To pancake I had previously understood just to mean to land, but it can evidently also mean a sudden vertical drop (i.e. from a stall) or a crash. A solo flip is a solo flight -- does anyone take a flip anymore? And finally, a vertical gust sounds like a straightforward meteorological term, but in this context it's a 'breezy way' for the Hun to confess that seeing the crash before his own solo had, well, put the wind up him.

The other words in the article are still standard aviation terms, though to gamers of a certain age a joystick doesn't necessarily have anything to do with even simulated flight. W. A. B. ends by claiming gadget for the airmen:

But the most priceless word of all is "gadget." If the name of anything escapes you call it a "gadget" and you will be understood!

And it is indeed an excellent word. But sadly for the RFC's legacy, the OED shows that sailors were using it three decades earlier: 'if the exact name of anything they want happens to slip from their memory, they call it a chicken~fixing, or a gadjet, or a gill-guy, or a timmey-noggy, or a wim-wom'. Though perhaps we can thank the airmen for choosing to bring gadget into common use instead of chicken~fixing! (And just how do you pronounce ~ anyway?)