Monthly Archives: September 2011

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John Garth. Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle Earth. London: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2003. Never let it be said I'm not willing to go the extra mile for this blog! Actually, I read this last year and it's well worth having, not only for Tolkien fans but also as an examination of a different form of postwar literary disenchantment than the usual.

Philip Ziegler. London At War: 1939-1945. London: Pimlico, 2002. A spontaneous purchase because of a single page which will come in handy for an article. But also useful for describing wartime London before and after the Blitz, something I tend to neglect.

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Let's begin at the beginning:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

No, that's not the beginning. For understanding J. R. R. Tolkien and the aeroplane, the beginning is the Great War. He may have seen one flying overhead at Birmingham, where he grew up and went to school, or at Oxford, at which he enrolled in 1911. But they were quite rare birds at this time, and Tolkien doesn't seem like the sort of young man who would have been particularly interested in them. He probably would have encountered them when training as an Army officer in 1915, or, at the very latest, when he was posted to frontline service in France in July 1916.

Here Tolkien was thrown into the thick of things, as a signals officer in the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers fighting on the Somme, and aeroplanes were a common sight (there was a dogfight over the village where he was billeted when he arrived at the front). But the only trace of anything aeronautical in his writings at this time are blimps. These seem to have made quite an impression on him. In 1924, he recalled that 'German captive balloons ... hung swollen and menacing on many a horizon'.1 Perhaps he thought they were menacing because they made him think of some weird monster; but they were also menacing in a more direct way, because observers in the balloons recorded British positions and movements, for use in German counterattacks and barrages.

But Tolkien's interest was philological too. After the war he speculated that the world 'blimp' was a portmanteau word deriving from 'blister' and 'lump': 'the vowel i not u was chosen because of its diminutive significance -- typical of war humour'.2 But more significantly, in a lexicon he worked on during the war for his invented Elvish language, Quenya, he added an entry for pusulpë, 'gas-bag, balloon'.3 This was probably added sometime after the Somme and so would seem to be inspired by the 'swollen and menacing' German balloons he had seen: an obvious connection between Tolkien's war experience and his developing legendarium (all the more so because, as far as I'm aware, Elves are not known for their ballooning).
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  1. Quoted in John Garth, Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle Earth (London: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2004), 158. [↩]
  2. Quoted in ibid., 124. [↩]
  3. Quoted in ibid., 128. [↩]

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Death of Smaug by JRR Tolkien

Last year Alun Salt pointed out to me a proposal for a collection of essays on the theme of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and history, and asked if I'd thought about sending in something on ideas about airpower and the dragon Smaug. I hadn't, but immediately saw what he was on about! I did a little research, wrote up the proposal below (with a couple of small differences), and sent it in. Of course, it was rejected (or not accepted, same thing).
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Randall Hansen. Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany, 1942-1945. New York: NAL Caliber, 2009. Can't do better than to quote the blurb: 'most of the British bombing was carried out against the demands of the Allied military leadership, leading to the needless deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians and prolonging the war. By contrast, American precision bombing almost brought the Germans to their knees. This incisive story of the American and British air campaigns reminds us of the basic idealism and principle that underpin the history of U.S. military power.'

Raphael Samuel. The Lost World of British Communism. London and New York: Verso, 2006. A trilogy of essays Samuel wrote for New Left Review in the mid-80s, recreating the culture and politics of the CPGB in the 1930s and 1940s.

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Antler R3 (Taranaki) test

The last time Britain nuked Australia was at Maralinga on 9 October 1957, over half a century ago. The last of the Antler series of tests, code-named Taranaki (above), involved the detonation of a 25 kiloton fission bomb from a captive balloon at a height of 300 metres. The fallout 'moved east and then north-east towards the Queensland coast, missing the rain areas in New South Wales and Victoria as predicted'. Radiation levels in some areas 'slightly exceeded Level A [no health risk] for "people living in primitive conditions"', more than was predicted but not dangerously so, according to the safety criteria then in place.1 A 1985 Royal Commission however criticised the Antler tests on the grounds that '"inadequate attention was paid to Aboriginal safety", and that the patrols designed to ensure that the range was clear were "neither well planned nor well executed"'.2 Service personnel were also placed in greater than expected danger: a Canberra tasked with flying through the cloud half an hour later to collect air samples rapidly received unexpectedly high doses and had to abort the mission.3

Today the Federal Government introduced a bill into Parliament which will provide compensation and better health care for at least some of the latter group (the local Maralinga Tjarutja people received compensation in 1994). According to Warren Snowden, the Minister for Veteran Affairs:

The bill will benefit Australian personnel who participated in the British nuclear test program and their dependents by enabling compensation and health care to be provided with a minimum of delay [...] The personnel were involved in the maintenance, transporting or decontamination of aircraft used in the British nuclear test program outside the current legislated British nuclear test areas or time periods.

And there may be more to come:

The quality of the records from the test period and the secrecy surrounding the operation means that it is impossible to rule out the likelihood that new information may come to light which warrants further extension of coverage to additional groups of participants.

Not before time, either.

Image source: Nuclear Weapon Archive.

  1. Lorna Arnold and Mark Smith, Britain, Australia and the Bomb: The Nuclear Tests and Their Aftermath (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 202. [↩]
  2. Ibid., 204. [↩]
  3. Ibid., 202-3. [↩]

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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Folk physics (or naive physics -- there's also folk biology, folk psychology, and so on) is the term used in philosophy and psychology to describe the way we all intuitively understand the physical world to work. It's very often at odds with scientific physics (unsurprisingly or else there'd be no need for the latter). For example, we all know that in order for something to move, there has to be some force moving it. If you stop pushing a box across the floor, it will stop moving; if a car's engine stops working, the car will slow down and stop too. That's folk physics. Scientific physics disagrees: force causes acceleration, not velocity; in the absence of any other forces, once an object is set in motion it will keep moving forever. Of course it's that caveat which is responsible for the different conclusions of folk physics and scientific physics in this case: friction with the ground exerts a force on the box and the car and so robs them of their momentum. Folk physics works well enough for us in our everyday lives but would be disastrously misleading in, say, trying to dock a spacecraft to a space station.

I wonder if it's useful to apply this demarcation to military strategy? There have been attempts to formalise principles of strategy, of course, though trying to sciencise (yes, I just made that up) them by making them rigid formulae is not necessarily fruitful. Strategy has always been an art much more than a science, and as such is pretty intuitive itself. But certainly there can be (and probably usually is) a gap between what military leaders do and why they do it, and what everyone else, particularly civilians, understand them to be doing. This gap creates a space for folk strategy to exist.
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A police constable bearing a warning notice

In July, 1917, a new scheme for warning the people of London of impending air raids was adopted. When enemy aircraft were approaching, policemen with a notice warning passers-by to "take cover" went out on bicycles, blowing their whistles to attract attention. When all danger had passed, Boy Scouts went round blowing bugles.

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Alan Brooks. London at War: Relics of the Home Front from the World Wars. Barnsley: Wharncliffe Local History, 2011. What's left? More than you might think -- shelters, bomb damage, memorials (lots of those), even ghost signs. Profusely illustrated.

Zara Steiner. The Triumph of the Dark: European International History 1933-1939. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. With the first volume, The Lights that Failed (which I bought almost exactly six years ago), Steiner has produced the definitive history of the international politics of interwar Europe, at least for a generation or so. Although page 88 could have been improved with a reference to recent work on the British air panic of 1935 :)

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Belgrade, 1941

I've sometimes wondered if the air raids on Belgrade during the German invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941 can be considered as a knock-out blow from the air. From the accounts I've read it seems that the Luftwaffe launched a surprise attack before the declaration of war, intended as a punishment for the pro-British coup. Sometimes it is said to have been indiscriminate bombing (Hitler ordered the destruction of the city), sometimes a more targeted attack (Luftflotte 4's operational orders specified military and communication targets in the city centre). In any event there were heavy civilian casualties (the official number of dead is 2271, probably too low; 12,000 was the figure reported in the British press at the time -- either way, the toll was higher than any night of the contemporaneous Blitz, albeit spread out over a few days) and the Yugoslav government was forced to flee -- though with a Panzer army bearing down on Belgrade that was always going to happen anyway. In fact, despite their undoubted terror aspect, the Belgrade raids seem to me to be a true blitz: they were intended to disrupt a key command and logistics node ahead of a ground advance, just like Guernica in 1937 and Warsaw in 1939 (which latter had also been carried out by Luftflotte 4).
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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

I've been using the Internet for nearly two decades: in 1992 -- after nervously checking with the physics computer lab manager first -- I sent an email to my future Honours supervisor while she was visiting Toronto. I was quickly hooked by the promise of overcoming the tyranny of distance and transparently communicating with people all across the planet. Of course, it never worked quite like that. Of the many of the different forms of communication enabled by the Internet I've tried since then, many have fallen by the wayside (who now uses Unix talk? When was the last WAIS server shut down?), others still limp along (Gopher, IRC, Usenet) while others are in surprisingly rude health (you've probably used FTP at some point, though you may not have known it). Sometimes I was an early adopter: I set up my first webserver early in 1994, at a time when there must have been only a few thousand websites in the world. At other times I was very late to the party. But after much enthusiastic (and occasionally obsessive) participation in these and other protocols, I eventually became jaded and turned to passive consumption of content rather than creation in any form. It was only when I took up blogging at the start of my PhD that I rediscovered that early joy in talking to the world.

But the thing about blogging is that it's pretty much all about me, me, me. While I absolutely value and enjoy interacting with commenters, and hope that those who read without commenting find what I post here interesting or valuable, it's my place and I set the agenda. And I'd probably still blog even if nobody read it. So while Airminded is part of the World Wide Web, spending so much time on it could lead me to think that bombing and phantom airships and the knock-out blow are more important than they really are (which is to say, not very). As well, because my authorial voice dominates here it can lead me to think that my opinion is more important than it really is (which is to say, even less).

Which brings me to Twitter. I've blogged about tweeting a couple of times before, first when I began using Twitter in earnest, then when I reached one thousand tweets. I've now added more than 10,000 to that figure, so it's probably safe to say that I'm a Twitter addict -- er, become accustomed to using it. For link sharing, making contacts, historical musings, friendly banter and just general silliness, for sure; but there's more to it than that.

Tweeting is sometimes called microblogging, but that's a bit of a misnomer. It's true that it's possible to use Twitter just to broadcast your own thoughts or promote your own things, but unless you're already a celebrity nobody is going to listen. The real value comes from listening and (optionally) responding to what others say -- in interacting with others. With other historians, sure, but also with other people who share some interests and with others who don't.

The biggest and best example of this, for me, has been following the Arab Spring, particularly the revolutions in Egypt and Libya. Not just the news (and the rumours), but the commentary coming from those living through them: their experiences, hopes, fears. I confess this was a bit of an eye-opener for me. Intellectually, of course, I knew that people living in autocracies are like people everywhere else, but hearing the diversity of their responses (even within the limitations of 140 characters) I recognised them as individuals at a more basic level. It became impossible for me to discount the revolutions as quarrels in far away countries between people of whom I knew nothing. Twitter help me humanise an important period in contemporary history. That's something that I don't think any of those older protocols, from email on, could have helped me to do, not in practice. It's not transparent at all, of course, and it is as subject to biases and deceptions as any other form of human communication; but using Twitter is really the closest I've come to entering the global village I glimpsed nearly two decades ago.

Because it's #twitterstorians Day, I really should have said something about the specifically historical uses (and limitations) of Twitter. Luckily there are plenty of others who have done that:

@katrinagulliver (who is responsible) · @jliedl · @jondresner · @kathryntomasek · @kellyhignett · @kelly_j_baker · @lottelydia · @markcheathem · @publichistorian · @raherrmann · @sharon_howard (with a special shout-out for The Broadside) · @wilkohardenberg

PS If you don't already follow me on Twitter, I'm @Airminded!