December 2009

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The war with Eurasia/Eastasia

31 December 2009 in 1940s, Books, Cold War, Nuclear, biological, chemical by Brett Holman | 21 comments

Just as when reading Brave New World I applied my airminded filters and extracted Aldous Huxley’s vision of future warfare, I’m going to do the same for that other great British dystopia, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. (Which is what passes for summer reading for me. Quotes taken from this version.)

War is much more important in Orwell’s novel than in Huxley’s: it’s constantly referred to throughout the novel, and it turns out to be a crucial part of the Party’s method for maintaining its control of Oceania. Assuming that there actually is a war, that is, and the whole thing isn’t just fabricated for that very purpose. War is peace, after all.

But let’s assume that Winston Smith’s memories and experiences of war reflect some objective reality. Then there are two phases, the war of his youth, and the current, never-ending war, with the Revolution in between. Smith was probably born in 1945, presumably named after Churchill in that year of victory. There were some years of peace, and then a war in the mid-1950s, probably with the Soviet Union and its satellites. Britain seems to have been the only the country in Western Europe not conquered at this time, and absorbed into what was to become Eurasia. But it — renamed Airstrip One — became part of Oceania, along with the Americas, southern Africa, and Australasia. A third power, Eastasia, emerged after the end of the civil wars in China.
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Odd plane out

29 December 2009 in 1940s, Aircraft, Art, Books, Ephemera, Pictures by Brett Holman | 8 comments

Which People's War
I recently read Sonya O. Rose’s Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), which is interesting on such subjects as anti-Semitism during the Blitz. But I kept being drawn back to the front cover, for a completely trivial reason. The illustration is from a 1941 poster designed by Philip Zec (the Daily Mirror’s political cartoonist), ‘Women of Britain, come into the factories’. The bombers in flying in the stream over the woman’s head are clearly highly stylised, and nearly all identical. But one of them is different, the one above her right arm. In the following close-up, it’s the one on the far left:
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Swansea

27 December 2009 in Pictures, Travel 2009 by Brett Holman | 3 comments

This post relates to my trip to England and Wales in September 2009.

National Waterfront Museum, Swansea

After my day of fortifications I felt it was time for a change of pace, so I headed east for Swansea. The main attraction here (other than the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency, of course) is the National Waterfront Museum, which explores the industrial history and technological of Wales. Of which there is quite a lot!
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After; and before?

23 December 2009 in Blogging, Tools by Brett Holman | 6 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Since graduating I’ve become what they call an ‘independent scholar’, meaning I currently have no academic job but still have the irrational desire to do research. I’d certainly like to be a dependent scholar, but it turns out they don’t hand out jobs with your testamur.1 Who knew?

So there are things I need to do. One is to keep an eye out for jobs. In Australia, we don’t have anything like the AHA interview-fests, which sounds like a slightly terrifying (if hopefully worthwhile) experience for recent/almost graduates. Nor does Britain, as far as I know. So job-hunting is presumably less seasonal. We do have the usual job search sites, such as UniJobs.com.au and jobs.ac.uk.

Once into the job application and interview process, one useful site to keep an eye on is the Academic Jobs Wiki, especially the history section. There are also places to share good and bad interview experiences, or simply to vent. The entries are mostly about North American universities, but it being a wiki there’s no reason why that can’t change.

The other thing to keep doing is writing and publishing. Part of that is knowing which journal to submit to, and part of that is knowing how long it takes for them to get your article through the review process. It’s not something journals advertise on their websites (and understandably so), so the only data seems to be anecdotal. Which is why I was glad to stumble across the History Journal Response Times wiki. It might have saved me some grief had I known of it earlier!

Finally, an inspiring blog I recently discovered is Nicholas Evan Sarantakes’ In the Service of Clio, which is aimed at providing advice to history graduate students on the subject of career management. It’s all there, from choosing a university, to conference strategies, to having a life. For me, the best posts are the numerous guest blogs from people who got their PhDs and then got jobs, mostly outside traditional academia. So it can happen.

I’d be glad to know of any similar resources I might have missed.

  1. Australian for ‘diploma’.

The field marshal and the ghost rockets

20 December 2009 in 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Cold War, Collective security, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Phantom airships and other panics, Radio by Brett Holman | 8 comments

Field Marshal Jan Smuts, prime minister of South Africa, broadcast a speech on the BBC on 29 September 1946. He talked about the prospects for peace in the post-war world, a subject on which he could claim some authority, since he had helped unify Anglophones and Afrikaners after the Boer War, and was involved in the Paris peace conferences after both world wars. The speech was mainly about the United Nations (or as he quaintly called it, ‘Uno’) and the growing signs of friction between the former Allies on the Security Council. And we all know how that turned out. (Churchill had given his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in March.) But one section is somewhat confusing for modern readers:

The United States may not long continue to enjoy the sole secret of the atom bomb, and this and other no less deadly weapons will at no distant date be in the possession of other nations also. The flying bombs, now seen nightly in the west, are indications of what is going on behind the curtain. It is highly doubtful whether any new weapons, or indeed any mechanical inventions, could ever be relied on to remove the danger of war. A peaceful world order could only be safely based on a new spirit and outlook widely spread and actively practised among the nations.1

Flying bombs seen nightly in the west? What flying bombs?

Smuts was referring to reports which had been coming out of Sweden since May, and more recently from Denmark and Greece. Fast moving objects, sometimes with wings, sometimes without, were seen flashing across the sky. Some had flames shooting out the rear; others appeared to manoeuvre. Some of them crashed; residents of Malmö reported that windows were broken when a rocket ‘exploded’ over their town.2 They were sometimes even tracked on radar. A photo was even taken of one. They were seen by military personnel as well as by ordinary people. An example:

One of the mysterious bombs which in recent weeks have been passing across Sweden was seen last night by an officer of the Air Defence Department of the Defence Staff. He reports that the bomb looked like a fireball with a clear yellow flame passing at an estimated height of between 1,500 and 3,000 feet and at a considerable but quite measurable speed.3

The term now given to these objects is ghost rockets.
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  1. The Times, 30 September 1946, 5. Emphasis added.
  2. Manchester Guardian, 17 August 1946, 6.
  3. Ibid., 8 August 1946, 6.

Air men of The Times

16 December 2009 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Periodicals by Brett Holman | No comments

I’ve just had a go at working out who held the influential position of aeronautical correspondent (or air correspondent, in later years) for The Times for its first third of a century or so. No names were used in the articles themselves, so the easiest way to find them seems to be through the obituary columns of The Times. Here’s what I’ve managed to come up with, along with their years of service and the date of their obituary:

  • Harry Delacombe, 1907-1910. Obituary: 21 January 1959.
  • Hubert Walter, at least 1915-1916, perhaps 1914-1917. Obituary: 22 December 1933.
  • Colin Cooper, 1919? Obituary: 30 March 1938.
  • Ronald Carton, c.1919-1923. Obituary: 11 July 1960.
  • C.G. Colebrook, 1923-1930. Obituary: 30 August 1930.
  • E. Colston Shepherd, 1929-1939. Obituary: 2 August 1976.
  • [Edit: Oliver Stewart, 1939-1940. Obituary: 23 December 1976. See below.]
  • Arthur Narracott, 1940-1967. Obituary: 17 May 1967.

There are some gaps and contradictions here. There could be a gap between Shepherd and Narracott of a year or two, enough for somebody else to do the job. Colebrook was air correspondent until 1930, but Shepherd started in 1929. That may be because Colebrook was ill towards the end and died in harness, so perhaps Shepherd started to take over some of the workload before then. Cooper seems to have been air correspondent for only a short time, as he resigned from the RAF in 1919, when Northcliffe gave him the job, but Ronald Carton (better known as the crossword compiler!) did the job for four years from 1919 (he covered Alcock and Brown). The job was said to be vacant when Colebrook started, so there may be another short gap there. All I know of Walter (a scion of the family which founded The Times) is that he there in 1915-6. He was in Berlin until (perhaps) 1914 and went overseas again in 1917, so presumably those years represent the endpoints of his occupancy. And I don’t know who held the job in the crucial years between 1910 and 1914. Oddly, according to their obituaries, three men had the honour of being the first aeronautical correspondent of The Times: Walter, Cooper and Carton. Which is odd, since Delacombe predated all of them!

My main reason for doing this to work out whether P. R. C. Groves was ever The Times’s aeronautical correspondent, as both Barry Powers and Uri Bialer have written (without giving any more information). As far as I can tell, he was not. There’s no mention of this in his personal archive or publications, and as the above shows, no gap for him to fit into. He didn’t retire from the RAF until 1922, and there was no vacancy until 1923. Groves did write some articles for The Times in 1922 and 1923, but they appeared under his own name – except for one article early in 1922, which used a phrase which was highly characteristic of Groves and appeared only days before the first of his official articles. But it wasn’t bylined ‘Our aeronautical correspondent’ as would be usual, but ‘An aeronautical correspondent’. It was an anonymous, freelance contribution, not from somebody on staff. So I can’t see how Groves could have been the aeronautical correspondent for The Times.

Edit: thanks to Rose Wild of the Times Archive Blog, who picked up my post on Twitter, I can now fill in one of the gaps: Oliver Stewart, previously a long-serving air correspondent for the Morning Post, helped out at The Times in 1939-1940.

Caerleon and Caerphilly Castle

12 December 2009 in Pictures, Travel 2009 by Brett Holman | No comments

This post relates to my trip to England and Wales in September 2009.

Caerphilly
Cardiff Castle was just the first of many Welsh fortresses I visited. In fact, the next day I was at two more: Caerleon, a Roman legionary headquarters, and Caerphilly Castle, the second-largest castle in Britain.
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The superweapon and the Anglo-American imagination — IV

6 December 2009 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Books by Brett Holman | 98 comments

So we’ve seen American claims of a British secret air defence weapon in the Battle of Britain; American claims of British secret air defence weapons in the mid-1930s; and American ideas for superweapons to break the deadlock of the First World War. What do I mean suggest by these examples? Why have I called these posts ‘The superweapon and the Anglo-American imagination’?

Actually, the phrase ‘Anglo-American imagination’ is misleading, because I think the British and the American imaginations were significantly different, at least when it comes to technology and war. And the difference is this: at least in the period of the two world wars, Americans found it much easier to imagine that technology could help them win wars than the British, who were more pessimistic and tended to see new technologies as a threat. It’s easy to get into trouble with big generalisations like this, and I definitely can’t quantify it in any useful way. But I don’t think it’s accidental that it American journalists imagined British superweapons more readily than British journalists, or that American science magazines had superweapons on their covers, and British ones didn’t.
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