A comment from Melissa got me thinking about gender and the knock-out blow, which is admittedly not something I do very often. There are certainly a number of ways into this subject. The most obvious would be to look at the fact that airpower would bring war onto British soil for the first time since at least Culloden (ok, or since the Great War, if you want to be pedantic), thus threatening British women (and children) directly and on a large scale. Pointing this out was a powerful argument in favour of taking the threat of bombing seriously, and was widely deployed. So one could look at that construction. Or there’s the gendered language which was occasionally used to describe aerial warfare, such as Trenchard’s analogy of a football match, with victory going to the side which struck hardest and in their manly way made the defenders ’squeal’ first. Very playing-fields-of-Eton.

Another way would be the simple one of looking at what men and women wrote about the knock-out blow, and how it might have differed in style, content and reception. Certainly most of the writers on the subject were men, which is to be expected since only men had experience of air combat and so could plausibly present themselves as experts. But, particularly from the 1930s, a number of women writers did venture their opinions on the coming era of air war, generally from the pacifist viewpoint: H. M. Swanwick, Barbra Donington (with her husband, Robert), Sarah Campion, and of course Vera Brittain. (A notable non-pacifist, was the famous aviatrix Amy Johnson who wrote for the bellicose Daily Mail in the mid-1930s.) However, male writers could be dismissive of their arguments in highly gendered terms, when they bothered to note them at all. For example, W. Horsfall Carter wrote a pamphlet entitled Peace Through Police to rebut Swanwick’s works Frankenstein and his Monster: Aviation for World Service and New Wars for Old (both 1934). He thought that her attack on the idea of an international air force had ‘all the misdirected fervour of a militant suffragette’ and referred to her as a ’sentimentalist’.¹

All honour to the pacifists whose consuming idealism and “conscience” impels them to denounce war and all its works. But when the heart is stronger than the head the result is a peace babel totally ineffective for the realistic business of peacemaking.²

Read: don’t you worry your pretty little head about it, let us hard-headed menfolk sort things out!

But there was one woman who was not so easily dismissed, for she wrote the most influential attack upon the very idea of the overwhelming superiority of the bomber to be written in the interwar period. The Great Delusion: A Study of Aircraft in Peace and War was published in 1927, inspired at least one book-length rebuttal (Murray F. Sueter’s Airmen or Noahs: Fair Play for our Airmen; The Great “Neon” Air Myth Exposed, 1928), and was still being cited as a prime example of airpower scepticism over a decade later. Its author was pseudonymous. Who was Neon?³

Actually, that isn’t really a mystery at all. If you believe the British Library’s catalogue, Neon was the pseudonym of Marion W. Acworth. Aside from the fact that I have no idea how the British Library knows this, this isn’t immediately helpful, for this is not a name which otherwise appears in the annals of aviation, pacifism, strategy or anything else that I’m aware of. It doesn’t appear in the Times or the Oxford DNB. The only clue from this is that she shared her surname with a fairly well-known writer on strategy, the former submariner Captain Bernard Acworth. David Edgerton notes the similarity of their somewhat unusual surnames, and also that Bernard cited Neon’s book.⁴ Can we go further than this? Was there a connection between Bernard Acworth and Marion Acworth?

In fact, there is contemporary, though circumstantial, evidence that there was — indeed, that Bernard actually wrote The Great Delusion, or at least had a hand (or two) in its writing. J. M. Spaight, in Air Power and the Next War summarises Neon’s arguments in The Great Delusion and then immediately, and with uncharacteristic sarcasm, turns to Bernard Acworth where he writes that:

The mantle of “Neon” descended miraculously on Captain Bernard Acworth, whose book [The Navy and the Next War, 1934] was again a determined attack upon the air arm and all its works and a glorification of sea power […]⁵

This is a pretty broad hint that any similarity between Neon and Bernard is not coincidental!

Another piece of circumstantial evidence comes, oddly enough, from the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, which has put many documents of historical interest online. In a letter sent on 12 January 1928 to Stanley Bruce, the Prime Minister, his liaison in London R. G. Casey wrote:

If you happen by chance to have read a book called ‘The Great Delusion’ by Neon, which was published about a year ago, you may be interested to know that I hear confidentially that it was by a Mrs. Acworth, who has a brother-in-law in the Admiralty who is suspected (by the Air people) of having loaded her gun. It was, as you may remember, a violent attack on the Air Service and an implied boost for the Admiralty. It created considerable stir at the time.

So, maybe they were related by marriage?

Thanks to the magic of digitisation, I’ve now got a bit more information. It turns out that Marion was the wife of Joseph John Acworth, a chemist and developer of certain photographic processes. His obituary appeared in the Journal of the Chemical Society and provides a few details about her:

In his technical work, he was very capably assisted by his wife, who, as Miss Marion Whiteford Stevenson, had taken the Associateship course at the Royal College of Science and received her diploma (A.R.C.Sc.) in physics in 1893. She was the third woman to earn the Associateship, and the first in physics.⁶

So, it appears that here we have our Marion Whiteford Acworth. She was clearly an intelligent, educated and technically-minded person. And ‘neon’, one of the noble gases, makes some sense for a scientist’s pseudonym. Still, is she a likely candidate for the author of a diatribe against the aeroplane?

Let’s turn aside from Marion for a moment, and look at Bernard Acworth. If he was Marion’s brother-in-law, then Joseph would have been his brother. But this doesn’t work. Bernard’s 1937 Who’s Who entry says that he was born in 1885 and that his father was the Rev. Herbert Sumner Acworth. That must be this genealogist’s Herbert Sumner Acworth, born 1845, with a son Bernard born 1885. But if the Reverend was born in 1845, then he can’t be the father of Joseph, born in 1853, according to his obituary. They could be brothers, at best.⁷ So, perhaps Marion was Bernard’s aunt by marriage.

Now (and we’re nearly there, I promise), if Bernard did write The Great Delusion, he presumably chose not to publish it under his own name because he was still in the Navy. I’m not sure when exactly he retired, unfortunately, but he was in it for at least 24 years, so he can’t have left it any earlier than the mid-1920s. And he started producing the first of a steady stream of books (at least one a year up to 1940, bar 1931) in 1929. That suggests that it was shortly before then that he lay down his sword and picked up his pen. Which fits with Neon’s known publications in 1927 and 1928.

In his later writings, Bernard was apparently always a navy man, a sceptic of airpower and a controversialist by nature. This all fits with the style and content of The Great Delusion. In fact, his first book (under his own name, at least) sounds like it has some overlap with Neon’s: This Bondage: A Study of the “Migration” of Birds, Insects, and Aircraft, with Some Reflections on “Evolution” and Relativity (1929). According to Robin Higham, it contained an attack on the RAF (to the point of ‘hatred’) and on airships in particular.⁸ And according to my notes on The Great Delusion, the first nine chapters (out of fourteen!) are about ‘airships and how useless they are’. Even more intriguing, I notice that the first chapter is about air currents (as relating to flight), and Bernard published a letter on this subject in the Times on 15 August 1930, p. 8. All circumstantial, but all pointing only one way.

But even if Bernard published a book under a pseudonym while still in the service, as many officers did, what, then, did Marion have to do with The Great Delusion? Here follows complete supposition. The drafts of Neon’s book were evidently substantially complete by the start of 1927, because the preface (by Arthur Pollen, the inventor of a sophisticated naval fire control system) is dated 8 and 18 January 1927. And Joseph Acworth died on 3 January 1927. So, here’s my best guess: that Bernard put The Great Delusion under his newly-widowed aunt’s (pseudonymous) name, in order to earn her a bit of much-needed cash? Or maybe he was just especially paranoid about having the book traced back to him and so used his aunt for an extra layer of plausible deniability?

Well, far from exploring the subversion of gender norms in airpower literature by way of Marion Acworth, it’s seems I’ve ended up reinforcing them by way of her possible nephew Bernard Acworth! That is, Neon was probably Bernard Acworth, not Marion Acworth. Let the word go forth.

1. W. Horsfall Carter, Peace Through Police (London: New Commonwealth, 1934), 6.
2. Ibid., 3.
3. She also wrote at least one article: Neon, “The future of aerial transport”, Atlantic Monthly, January 1928, also in a sceptical vein.
4. David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 319. He also gives Neon’s full name as ‘Marion Whitford Acworth’, but I think this is a typo — see below.
5. J. M. Spaight, Air Power and the Next War (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1938), 50.
6. “Joseph John Acworth”, Journal of the Chemical Society (1927), 960.
7. Herbert and his siblings are listed on a page about the village of Rothley in Leicestershire, but as that information is drawn from the 1851 census, it can’t tell us anything about a possible brother born in 1853.
8. Robin Higham, The Military Intellectuals in Britain: 1918-1939 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981 [1966]), 61.

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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.

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Not a phrase I ever expected to come across, but here it is, in David Omissi’s Air Power and Colonial Control, the context being the introduction of one the most successful aircraft of the interwar period, the Hawker Hart:

The Hart was soon found to be suitable for India; fifty-seven aircraft were accordingly fitted with desert equipment, large tyres and extra fuel; they flew with three Indian squadrons until 1939. Their high performance was particularly values on the Frontier as they were the only aircraft which could meet the Afghan air menace on equal terms, especially after 1937 when the Afghans began to employ the Hind, itself a high-speed derivative of the Hart. Others served in Egypt and Palestine.¹

Afghanistan established an independent air force as early as 1924, though it was easy enough for the British to dismiss as the only Afghan who could fly an aeroplane was made its Chief of Air Staff! But though small in European terms, with mainly Soviet assistance and aircraft the Afghan Air Force became quite efficient within a few years, and was used in several air control operations of its own, against rebellious tribes in outlying areas. Britain eventually felt it had to edge the Soviets out in order to gain some influence over it, hence the supply of Hinds (8 in 1937, another 20 ordered in 1939).

Although Omissi’s subject — air control, the use of airpower in Imperial policing, or in other words, the British air menace — is ostensibly quite some distance from strategic bombing, I found that reading his book illuminated aspects of my own work (and sadly, this means I’ve broken my New Year’s resolution already). Partly this is because he has chosen less jarring terms than I have (’mitigation’? what was I thinking?) but it’s more because he provides a typology of indigenous responses (in practice) to being bombed which transfers pretty well to ideas being worked out, at the same time, in Britain (in theory) about how it would or should respond to being bombing. Although Omissi doesn’t describe it as such, it’s almost a spectrum of responses, varying with the capacity of the society under attack to resist, which in turn is going to depend largely on the resources available, but also on other factors such geography and climate. (That doesn’t quite work, though, because the responses aren’t mutually exclusive.)

So, one of Omissi’s categories is resistance, which Omissi defines as:

all violent retaliation intended to inflict loss, damage or injury to [enemy] air force personnel and property²

The creation of the Afghan Air Force was, in part, intended to increase Afghanistan’s ability to resist British airpower, of which it had very recent experience. When Afghanistan invaded India in 1919, the RAF supported the Army on the ground to good effect. More importantly — if you believe later claims by airpower writers, which I suspect are exaggerated — the war ended with (probably) the first, (perhaps) the only and (almost certainly) the smallest knock-out blow in history. On 24 May, Kabul was bombed by a solitary Handley Page V/1500, a four-engined bomber which had been designed to bomb another capital city, Berlin. Several of its bombs hit the King’s palace, which seems to have caused some panic, and rather less material damage, but most of all showed that the terrain and the soldiers which had caused more than one bloody defeat for the British were no longer to be relied upon. A few days later, Afghanistan sued for peace.

Therefore Afghanistan strove to acquire an air force of its own. It was a relatively centralised society, close enough to what Europeans would recognise as a state. It didn’t have much in the way of industry or infrastructure, and depended on a foreign power for aircraft, spares, training and technicians, but this was enough to make it a menace to the RAF in India, with only 6 or so squadrons. However, not many societies threatened by British airpower could hope to compete with it on this level. The Imam of Yemen acquired several aircraft in the late 1920s but it seems they were not of much use. (Abyssinia, broadly comparable to Afghanistan many ways, developed a small air force also, which however was no match for the Regia Aeronautica in 1935-6.) But there were other forms of resistance: the acquisition of anti-aircraft guns (Yemen bought eight for its forts, though they lacked effective sights), ground attacks on advanced British aerodromes, rifle fire from soldiers (which could be surprisingly dangerous) or even, at the far end of capacity (or desperation) throwing rocks at low-flying aircraft.

Omissi’s second category is adaptation. He defines this as:

all non-violent means of reducing the impact of aerial action, including both psychological and religious adjustment to air raids and those tactics adopted to diminish their material effects.³

Examples of adaptation include concealment (especially using the cover of darkness to carry out essential work like harvesting crops, as bombers were far less effective at night), dispersal (Omissi means in a tactical context but it could equally apply to evacuating villages of people and livestock), protection (caves, dugouts and even, effectively, air raid shelters — towers and forts of stone in the Yemen turned out to be very resistant to the small bombs used by RAF policing aircraft), early warning (as developed on the North-West Frontier, this involved lookouts lighting bonfires when aircraft approached, allowing villages to be evacuated before they arrived), and deception (e.g., using the British system of ground signals to aircraft to give them false orders, as the Zeidi did in 1928). By psychological adjustment, Omissi basically means familiarity breeding contempt. Religious adjustment is more unusual: for example, he discusses at length the Nuer of Sudan, who built an earthen pyramid, 60 feet high, as a site for animal sacrifice intended (in part) to ward off British air attacks. As the raids would eventually cease, this process could be claimed a success; in any event, if religious beliefs helped sustain morale under air attack then this is a form of psychological adaptation.

The third and last category is the most simple and immediate: terror, generally leading to a sudden, panicked flight from the scene. This was often the first response of indigenous societies, but it did not last, because they quickly learned how to adapt and how to resist. It seems that this was a surprise to the RAF, which had to do some adapting of its own in response. In 1922, Air Vice-Marshal John Salmond had argued that after terror would come indifference, and after that would come weariness and a desire to end the fighting, at which point the tribal leaders would have to sue for peace. This is pretty much what was thought would happen when European societies were bombed too (Salmond said as much), and the same underestimation of powers of adaptation and resistance applied there also. Omissi points out that Salmond’s theory of responses was quite for the RAF, because it meant that if bombing a tribe failed to produce results, all it meant was that they hadn’t been bombed enough yet. As Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard suggested to the Air Conference in 1920, in reference to ’small wars’:

The capacity of the Air Service to deal a swift and unexpected blow may indeed succeed in stifling an outbreak in its early stages, but it is in the power to continue offensive action day by day, and, if necessary, week by week, that the assurance of ultimate success lies.⁴

Almost an article of faith in Trenchard’s RAF, but if this was true in air control operations (and it was, much of the time), it was misleading when it came to wars between European powers.

As I said earlier, Omissi’s typology can be applied to the ideas of British airpower writers between the Wars (and to actual behaviours in wartime) about how to respond to strategic bombing, though it needs to be extended. I won’t go into detail, but I’d propose something like the following, with my suggested additions in italics:

1. Terror
2. Adaptation
• psychological
• concealment
• dispersal
• protection
• early warning
• deception
3. Resistance
• ground fire
• ground attack
• anti-aircraft
• air defence
• counter-offensive
4. Internationalism
• pacifism and disarmament
• collective security
• international air force

The responses I’ve added weren’t, by and large, available to colonised peoples. For example, by counter-offensive I mean bombing the enemy (aerodromes, cities, or other targets), which by definition moves this out of the realm of Imperial policing and into war between rough equals. Afghanistan almost had this ability, I suppose, though the ‘Afghan air menace’ Omissi talks about is more the ability to interfere with RAF operations rather than attacks on Indian cities. (I could be wrong about that, he doesn’t spell out what the menace consisted of.) Under the heading of internationalism (or ‘co-operation’, perhaps?), collective security and an international air force similarly required the ability to project force, and, in addition, the ability to work closely with other societies in diplomatic and military operations. I suppose pacifism and disarmament were, in theory, available to all of Britain’s opponents, but I doubt they were ever considered except as part of surrender to British wishes. Still, it’s interesting to ponder what might have happened if Gandhian non-violent tactics had been adopted — villagers lying down in the streets when the RAF bombers came over, say, offering their own bodies as human shields. It might have been a second Amritsar, in terms of adverse publicity back in Britain.

So, very broadly speaking, terror and adaptation are responses available to practically all societies, though the latter involves considerable organisation for its more complex forms (e.g. early warning). Resistance requires more organisation and resources than adaptation, and eventually industrialisation (for counter-offensives). Internationalism requires all of that and more — more of what I’m not sure: it gets vague here. But then again, they were never actually successfully carried out by anybody.

A final thought that occurs to me is that while I’ve ordered these responses in a rough order of the resources and organisations needed to carry them out, thinking that these would generally increase over time, it also works in reverse. That is, as the more complex and sophisticated responses are negated (e.g. the RAF starts using wireless for communication with ground forces, ending the use of deception), only the more basic responses remain, until at last, terror returns. In other words, when all else fails, run like hell — exactly the desired result from the RAF’s point of view. I’m starting to think like an interwar air vice-marshal, which probably isn’t a good thing!

Update: a couple of books later, I’ve come across the exact same phrase! John Robert Ferris, Men, Money and Diplomacy: The Evolution of British Strategic Foreign Policy, 1919-26 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 169, says that in 1925 Trenchard cynically attempted to exploit fears in India about the ‘Afghan Air Menace’, presumably to win more funding for the RAF, in much the same fashion as he had done a few years earlier with regards to the French air menace. Only this time he got little out of it.

1. David E. Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force 1919-1939 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), 142; emphasis added.
2. Ibid., 122.
3. Ibid., 113.
4. H. M. Trenchard, “Aspects of service aviation”, Army Quarterly 2 (April 1921), 21.

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What was the first post-apocalyptic film? This is something I’ve wondered for a while. First, I should define what I mean by a “post-apocalyptic film”. It’s one which posits some great global catastrophe which shatters civilisation.¹ It can show that catastrophe but the focus has to be on what happens afterwards: how do people survive, what problems do they face, can they rebuild civilisation in some form, or is it a struggle to hold on to what they’ve got? Nearly everything everybody took for granted has been swept away or changed out of all recognition — social classes, political institutions, gender relations, fast food chains. People with guns have a big advantage — until they start running out of bullets. And so on. Mad Max 2 and 3 are classic post-apocalyptic films (Mad Max itself is borderline, as it is interestingly set in a world sliding into chaos, but society is still holding together — just). So is Threads, though it spends more time on the apocalypse itself. Children of Men arguably is; Dr Strangelove isn’t, because it ends with the End.

In short, post-apocalyptic films show life among the ruins, and so should be distinguished from their near relations, apocalypse and disaster films, which don’t attempt to show the long-term consequences of their particular catastrophes; though of course there is a grey area where the genres shade into each other.

I initially thought the first was H. G. Wells’s Things to Come (1936), the middle section of which is unmistakably post-apocalyptic. Three decades after the start of a world war, fighting still continues, only now it’s between the inhabitants of what’s left of Everytown, and the tribes living in the hills, squabbling over a coal mine. An epidemic has killed half the population of the planet, but now that it is over, the town is recovering. Petrol is scarce, so a double-decker bus now serves as a butcher shop, and cars are drawn by horses, though people still wistfully remember how far they used to travel in them …

But was there anything earlier? There’s no reason why there couldn’t be. Wells didn’t invent the post-apocalyptic novel; that honour belongs to Mary Shelley. Her triple-decker The Last Man was published, anonymously, in 1826, and traces the fortunes of one Englishman as the rest of humanity succumbs to a plague. He ends up alone, wandering among empty museums and palaces, and then setting off in a boat down the east coast of Africa. As it happens, a no-budget version was filmed this year, though it appears to have traded the melancholy for large volumes of automatic weapons fire.

So, I turned to the venerable IMDb.² This only has incomplete information for early films, particularly silent-era ones, but it’s better than nothing; and it has a system of plot keywords, such as Post Apocalyptic and Last Man on Earth, which can be used to pick out likely candidates from before Things to Come. There are four in total, three American and one French. Actually, two of them, It’s Great to Be Alive (1933) and El Último varon sobre la Tierra (’The last man on Earth’; 1933 — though it’s in Spanish it appears to be a US production) are remakes of The Last Man on Earth (1924). The catastrophe in these three films is a plague which kills only men; all men are wiped out, except one, who then has every woman in the picture competing over his affections. These three don’t take the apocalypse very seriously, however: they are all comedies, and the later versions are musicals to boot. I doubt their makers were very interested in exploring what might happen to society should one sex die out (beyond suggesting that a female US president would allow the White House to be overrun by cats); they sound more like nudge-nudge wink-wink male fantasies of getting rid of all of the competition. (One link I found referred to the title of one of the films as It’s Great to Be Alive When You’re the Last Man on Earth, which says it all, really.)

The fourth candidate is Sur un air de Charleston (1927), a short film made by Jean Renoir. Here, the premise seems to be that a future war has wiped out Europe. An African airman lands in the ruins of Paris, sees a white woman, who proceeds to … show him the Charleston. He learns to dance it as well. Then they fly away again. Oh, there’s a chimp too. Well, I suppose it could be argued that it’s some sort of commentary on the pervasiveness of American popular culture (not just the Charleston, but the African is played by an African-American dancer wearing blackface!) or an inversion of white anthropologists watching and recording indigenous dances, or something. But the indications are that it was just a bit of fluff which Renoir didn’t even bother to edit into a proper film (that was done later). If there was a point, it was to show off his wife’s dancing, and to play around with some film effects.

These all do appear to be post-apocalyptic films of a sort, but, at best — and without having seen any of them, I must add — they are amusing opportunities for seeing the world turned upside down, not serious excursions into the land of What If …? In drawing such a distinction, am I just being a snob? Maybe it’s just my own peculiar bias; for example in my own research I look for novels which treat the idea of city bombing seriously enough to have thought through the consequences of their suppositions. The authors think what they describe might really happen; so their readers might too. So I look for something similar in post-apocalyptic works too. But still, I’m happy to give the title of first post-apocalyptic film to The Last Man on Earth, for now; Things to Come can be the first serious post-apocalyptic film :)

PS To keep tabs on what’s happening after the apocalypse, check out Quiet Earth.

1. I think it has to be global, or least nearly global in its effects. If for some reason Australia’s cities were wiped out by swarms of meteorites, say, but the rest of the world was unaffected, the survivors wouldn’t be left to fend for themselves, there’d be rescue efforts, rehabilitation etc. At the very least, I guess the people affected by the catastrophe have to believe that it’s pretty much global, that there’s no help coming from elsewhere, and so they have to fend for themselves.
2. Incidentally, probably the website I’ve been using the longest — I can remember when it was called the ‘Cardiff Movie Database Browser’ …

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Or, at least, not very likely. In June 1922, the Daily Mail printed a two-column article under the headline “Our lost air power” (a title it used for just about all of its air-scare stuff that year).¹ The author’s name is not given, but is described as ‘An Armament Expert’, who until recently was on the ‘Allied Commission to Germany’. The bulk of the article concerns two types of aerial bombs he inspected while overseeing German compliance with the disarmament clauses of the Versailles treaty.

The first was the elektron bomb. Though this sounds like it might be an exotic weapon based on the latest advances in atomic physics, it’s actually just an incendiary, for setting cities ablaze. But this was something special. In contrast to the crude, and fairly ineffective, incendiaries used by the Germans against London during the war, the elektron burned so hotly that it could burn through armour plate, and what’s more, once ignited it could not be extinguished. As it weighed less than pound and was only nine inches long, thousands could be carried per bomber (or airliner). The German High Command thought it had a war-winning weapon, since

A fleet of aeroplanes would carry sufficient to set all London alight, past any hope of saving.

But — fortunately for London — the war ended before sufficient numbers of elektron bombs were available to the German forces.

The other weapon revealed by An Armament Expert was a small globe, made of glass and only four inches across. Inside the globe was a dark brown liquid: an unspecified form of poison gas (mustard, I’d guess). When the globe is dropped from an aeroplane and hits the ground, the glass shatters and generates ‘thousands of cubic feet of poisonous gas’. If used against London, the gas would permeate into cellars and tunnels, and lie in the streets for weeks.

One raid using such bombs would paralyse the very heart of our Empire, and bring a horrible death to most of London’s citizens.

How horrible? Imagine:

That girl with the baby sitting opposite to you on the Tube — can you see that girl rushing wildly and blindly away, pressing that same little mite’s face to her breast in a hopeless attempt to shield it from the fumes? Can you see her face drawn in the most horrible of death agonies and the baby’s lips covered with blood and mucus? A horrible description? A very horrible, yet very possible, fact.

Again, London was lucky to avoid being gassed during the war. This time, Germany had sufficient numbers of gas globes, but the ‘Secret Service’ knew this, and made it known to the Germans that Britain had them too, and would use them in large numbers against German cities if any fell on British soil.

Here we have an expert eyewitness describing two horrible new weapons, both of which were nearly used against civilians in the last war and which will certainly be used against civilians in the next war. So what’s the problem? Simply that one of these existed and the other is — I believe — made up!

The elektron bomb was very real, and was in fact very similar to the incendiaries used by both sides in the Second World War. (And before: the Condor Legion’s elektrons set Guernica ablaze.) “Elektron” was the name given by the Germans to magnesium alloy; the bomb casing was made of this, surrounding a thermite core. When the bomb ignited, the thermite would burn hotly (up to 2500 °C) and violently, but quickly (lasting less than a minute). This would be long enough, however, to set the elektron casing on fire, which could burn for around 15 minutes at 1500 °C. Between the thermite and the magnesium alloy, the risk of fire spreading from an elektron bomb was obviously great. A householder or ARP warden who encountered one of these could control it with the use of water, sand and/or Redhill container, but as An Armament Expert quite rightly pointed out, even a single bomber could carry thousands of elektron incendiaries, and so the prospect opened up of a city being overwhelmed by fire.

But glass globes as gas delivery systems — that’s a different story. As I’ve written before, it can be difficult to find reliable information on early chemical weapons (outside of the First World War, of course), and I’ve not yet found a good description of what an aerial gas bomb actually would have looked like. Surely, though, using fragile glass globes would be utterly daft: accidents happen, and the chances of breaking one or more during transport or arming would have to be rather high. Imagine some poor erk dropping dropping one of these on his foot! And I can’t see any reason why a modification of a normal explosive bomb couldn’t be used (just as artillery shells were used to deliver gas), or perhaps something like a Livens canister (basically a big metal drum, with a small explosive charge to disperse the gas). I’ve only ever seen one other reference to the use of glass globes as bombs, by the Swiss biochemist and pacifist Gertrud Woker. But she was actually speaking of biological weapons. Anyway, judging from my notes, she gave no indication that she knew anything specific, merely claiming that it was probably how biological weapons would be delivered.²

So on the one hand, An Armament Expert has given an accurate description of the latest thing in incendiary bombs; on the other, an apparently completely made up one of the gas bomb of the next war. And he claimed to have seen both of these with his own eyes. Was he lying? Was he mistaken? Was he hoaxed? (Or am I wrong about the globes?) It’s impossible to know, now, especially as his identity is unknown. But that very cloak of anonymity would have provided cover for a knowing fabrication. Taking liberties with the truth might have seem justified (to quote the rationale for the article given by the Daily Mail’s leading article writer)

in order that our people may understand calmly the dangers which threaten, and insist on the country being put in a position to repel them, and if necessary to forestall them by seeking out the enemy and destroying him in his own country before he destroys ours.³

If you firmly believe that there’s a threat to your nation which requires urgent action — ‘The position is quite clear. We have lost our air-power. We must get it back quickly’⁴ — isn’t a little sexing-up excusable? Well, no … but if that is indeed what happened here (and I haven’t shown that) it probably didn’t hurt the Daily Mail and it definitely didn’t stop it from a future career in serial exaggeration, as its increasingly ludicrous estimates of German air strength in the 1930s (I think peaking at 40,000 front-line aircraft) were to show.

1. Daily Mail, 20 June 1922, pp. 9-10. All quotes taken from this article unless otherwise specified.
2. G. Woker, “Chemical and bacteriological warfare”, in Inter-Parliamentary Union, What Would Be the Character of a New War? (London: P. S. King & Son, 1931).
3. Daily Mail, 20 June 1922, p. 8.
4. Ibid.

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I recently had the somewhat guilty pleasure of watching Flood, a film (from a novel) about the sudden devastation of London by a massive storm surge — predicted by a scientist who had long been dismissed as a crank — which swamps the Thames Barrier, submerges most of the city’s landmarks, kills a couple of hundred thousand people and forces most of the rest to evacuate. An even bigger disaster is averted (just in the nick of time, as it happens) and Londoners are left to clean up the mess. All very timely, given the unusually high proportion of England which was under water earlier this year.

Disaster movies are a pretty venerable genre by now (there were at least three films about the Titanic made in the year after it sank). The subset which deals with destruction on the scale of a big city (or larger) — as opposed to aeroplanes or skyscrapers — is relatively small, and that concerned, like Flood, with the fate of London specifically is quite small indeed.¹ No doubt this is because disaster movies are generally loaded with special effects and therefore are expensive, and as the US market for film is so huge, it makes more financial sense to destroy some American city rather than a British one. So there aren’t all that many cinematic depictions of the end of London. But books are much cheaper to make, and in those London has been destroyed many times over.

I’ve been trying to think of the first time this happened. It’s easy enough to find early references to the eventual ruin of London, such as H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885) (in which a neo-medieval adventurer seeks his fortunes amid the city’s swampy remains), or Macaulay’s New Zealander (1840).² But those only show London long after its fall, and so, properly speaking, are post-apocalyptic. The actual destruction happens off stage; it is inevitable, something to accept rather than prevent. Other candidates might include science fiction stories like Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt (1913), wherein the Earth passes through a region of toxic ether, and Professor Challenger and companions take an eerie trip through dead London afterwards.³ Or H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), with its Martian tripods laying waste to the metropolis with their heat rays. Where else might we look?

Well, obviously, novels about aerial warfare regularly predicted the death of London, or at least its inhabitants. In fact, probably in no other genre was London blown up so regularly than it was in the knock-out blow literature, since this event was pretty much a genre convention and often the climax of the story. Thus, the city is totally depopulated by a Russo-German gas attack in the Earl of Halsbury’s 1944 (1926), and a goodly proportion of it is blown up by a terrorist aërostat in Hartmann the Anarchist (1893) by E. Douglas Fawcett. The onslaught on the city by aerial Russian hordes in Martin Hussingtree’s Konyetz (1924) heralds Judgement Day (with trumpets sounding and all); while in Shaw Desmond’s Chaos (1938), German biological and chemical attacks finally force mass evacuations from London after seven years of resistance, ending in the complete breakdown in law and order.

Most of those books are relatively late, though. The invasion genre, which preceded and overlapped with the air scare stuff, also often portrayed London under attack. Some even involved battles being fought in London itself, which surely would count as a disaster. The best-selling example of the invasion novels, William le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910 (1906), featured an intense artillery bombardment of the city north of the Thames, to break its resistance before the German regulars moved in to occupy it. Le Queux gleefully describes the damage done to major landmarks and helpfully even provides maps of Westminster and the City, showing which buildings were damaged (one is shown at the head of this post). He is perhaps less thorough in documenting the human cost but does make it clear that such a battle would kill thousands of innocent people. But here, as in most invasion novels, the goal of the enemy was to capture London, not to destroy it. Any damage to it was generally incidental and not intentional. (The model here was the siege of Paris in 1870-1, which was not exactly a fun time, but it bounced back soon enough.)

So none of this is really getting me closer to answering my question of when was London first destroyed. My trouble is that I’m much less familiar with Victorian literature of this type than that from the early 20th century, so I turned to my trusty Bleiler, an annotated bibliography of science fiction published before 1930.⁴ It’s not complete and naturally has a bias against the more mundane forms of disasters, but at least I now have a candidate: William Delisle Hay’s The Doom of the Great City, Being the Narrative of a Survivor, Written A.D. 1942, which was published in 1880. Hay seems to have been a British mycologist who lived in New Zealand at some point, who also authored a future history entitled Three Hundred Years Hence (1881). Here’s Bleiler’s summary of The Doom of the Great City:

A short recriminatory narrative, looking back from New Zealand in 1942, a la Macaulay, to the events of 1882 or so. * The narrator, who is eighty-four years old, tells of the horrible death of London, when divine retribution overtook its wickedness. Fogs had become worse and worse, what with increased industrialization, until one day about half the population of London suffocated from fumes. There was a hysterical mass exodus, which the narrator witnessed, and later a search through the dead area, seeking remains. * A rather interesting piece of fantastic reportage, if one can overlook the unpleasant religious and moral aspects. How God and the industrialization share responsibility for the deaths is not clear.⁵

It does sound very interesting, an anticipation of the killer fog of December 1952 which killed around 4000 people (though to hazard a guess, probably inspired by the killer fog of January 1880 — see here, the paragraph after the graph). And killing off half the population is certainly a disaster. But 1880 is fairly late. Did nobody think it would be interesting to write about the fall of London before then? This would seem surprising, since a genuine (albeit historical) disaster novel like Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) was hugely successful in its day, well before 1880; and since London had been through disasters before, it shouldn’t have been too hard to imagine that it might have to do so again.⁶ But maybe the date of Hay’s book is significant, at the height of Empire but with other powers beginning to rise in the world. This was also (roughly speaking) the period in which invasion literature began to flourish. Perhaps imperial hubris was a prerequisite for the emergence of disaster novels as a genre, just as it was for the invasion genre. Pride going before a fall does provide a satisfying narrative arc, after all.

Image source: William le Queux, The Invasion of 1910 (London: Macmillan and Co., 1906), 384.

1. The Day the Earth Caught Fire springs to mind (rather oddly, since I haven’t seen it); Day of the Triffids and 28 Days Later too. There must be others though.
2. Not actually a novel, a story, a paragraph or even a sentence: merely a few clauses in a book review, referring to some future time ‘when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.’ But the image caught the imagination of many who read and spread it, to the point where it practically became a cliché. See David Skilton, “Tourists at the ruins of London: the metropolis and the struggle for empire”, Cercles 17, 93-119.
3. Even if the ending is a huge cop-out.
4. Everett F. Bleiler, Science-fiction: The Early Years (Kent and London: Kent State University Press, 1990). How many different kinds of awesome is a book which has entries like the following in the index?
   

   Human types, exotic. See Albinism, Amoeboid people, Balloon people, Blue-skinned people, Congenitally mute people, Dwarves, Four-armed men, Furred people, Giants, Horned people, Human heads that live independently of bodies, Human physical specialization for occupation, Humans with mixed skin colors, Humans with organic radios, Leonine people, Long-necked people, Oviparous people, Pygmies, Radiant-faced people, Sea and water people, Spherical people, Squareheaded people, Tailed people, Tiny people, Tusked people.

   My estimate is approximately 13 to 14 kinds.

5. Ibid, 355.
6. A very early near miss might be Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year, a fictionalised account of 1665 which was published in 1722. It’s a near miss because after all, London survived that year (and the one after it) …

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Yet another British war game to add to the pile, this one from 1922: The Raider.

A copy of a new game called “The Raider” has been received from Enstone and Lilienfeld, of 47, Berners Street, W.1. The game consists of a large sheet divided into squares, the whole showing a view of a battle-front seen from the air. The game is played with miniature attacking and defending aircraft, and is further complicated by machine gun and shrapnel barrage, contrary winds and failing engines. Moves are made by throwing dice, the object being for the attacking force — 3 in number — to reach and bomb a village and return intact.

The defending force is 9 in number, and these take off from two different aerodromes. The game, which was invented by an officer of the R.A.F., is so designed that experience in the gentle art of scrapping in the air is of considerable value to the players. The price is 5s. net.

Incidentally, Messrs Enstone and Lilienfeld, by whom the game is made and marketed, are ex-officers of the R.A.F., and they have besides a most amazing selection of “Brainwave” games and implements with which to pass the time amusingly.¹

This is rather interesting, especially given the timing: about 5 weeks after P. R. C. Groves popularised the knock-out blow in a series of articles The Times. I think you could just about knock together a boardgame in that time; on the other hand, Messrs Enstone and Lilienfeld might have working on it for some time and it may just be a coincidence. The object is to bomb (or defend) a village, which could be considered a civilian target, though given that the map is described as a ‘battle-front’ I’d say it’s more likely that it’s being attacked to support ground operations. The defenders out-number the attackers by three to one, which seems unusual in these sorts of games: normally the forces are quite symmetrical. It suggests a “bomber will always get through” mentality, but it could also just as easily be the result of the way the game is set up (for example, perhaps the defending player gets to choose where their aerodromes are, but does so before the attacker: they would then be at a severe disadvantage unless they had more units to play with). And the suggestion that the game is ’so designed that experience in the gentle art of scrapping in the air is of considerable value to the players’ implies that the rules allow the possibility for aerial manoeuvring and are in some sense intended to be “realistic” rather than abstract (as do the rules about AA, wind and engine failure), though I wonder how that works given that movement is said to be based on die rolls.

Google seems not to know about The Raider so presumably it wasn’t a big seller, despite the Aeroplane’s best efforts.

1. Aeroplane, 3 May 1922, p. 312.

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In my recent post on the Imperial War Museum I remarked upon the commemorative function of the museum, or rather the apparent lack of it. So I was interested to come across this comment made in 1922 by Major-General Sir Frederick Maurice (he of the Maurice Affair), explaining what he thought the true value of the IWM was:

We of the generation who fought have in this matter grave responsibilities; we have to think not of ourselves but of our children and our children’s children. The memorials to our dead now to be found in nearly every town, village and parish, with their simple record of sacrifice, will do much, but the effect of these memorials will become every year less poignant. The War Museum impresses the mind in another but not less direct way. I have talked with numbers of people who have told me that on seeing it they, for the first time, began to understand the nature of trench warfare on the Western Front. The devastated areas in France and Belgium are rapidly ceasing to be devastated. Within a generation the area of the trenches will have much the same appearance as have the Roman and British camps on Salisbury Plain. The cemeteries will remain, but they are not in our midst. To refuse to have a permanent and national memorial of the nature of the Great War because to many of us it evokes memories which are terrible and terrifying is to give way to unmanly sentiment and to do a grave wrong to the generations to come after us.¹

(The context here was that the IWM was then housed temporarily at the Crystal Palace, and it had been proposed to move it to the Imperial Institute, where Imperial College is now. The Institute protested about this, and in turn somebody, somewhere seems to have taken this as a pretext to argue against the idea of having a war museum at all, because (a) the weapons were nearly all out of date; (b) the British Museum and the Committee of Imperial Defence already had books and records about the war; and (c) local war memorials were a better ‘record of the sufferings, sacrifice and achievements of the war’.² Maurice was, obviously, trying to knock this idea on the head.)

In an age when everyone, more or less, has seen Gallipoli or Blackadder goes Forth or both, it’s easy to forget that there was a time when the general public did not have much of an idea as to what trench warfare was actually like. So in educating the public about the war’s realities, it was in fact serving a memorial function: this is how your father lived, this is how your sweetheart died.³ I think my observation, or rather lack of observation, about the IWM’s non-commemorative nature was based upon the assumption that its museum functions were something fundamentally apart from its memorial aspects, which of course doesn’t make much sense if you think about it. The whole purpose of the museum, founded in a time of war, was to make sure that future generations would remember what had happened. And of course the choice of what is exhibited in the IWM, what wars are featured and whose stories are told, is an exercise in (necessarily) selective memory.

So the Imperial War Museum itself, just by existing, can be said to serve the memory of those who served. On the other hand, it is still true that the Australian War Memorial (and note it is called a memorial, not a museum) was clearly designed in a different way, with a part of it expressly set aside for commemoration. The creators of the IWM and of the AWM chose different paths but that doesn’t mean they were starting from different assumptions.

1. Observer, 11 June 1922, p. 7.
2. Ibid.
3. Maurice probably would have approved of the Trench Experience, then.

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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

One interesting minor theme of my recent museum visits here in London has been, I suppose, the popular origins of wargames (as opposed to the intellectual origins): I’ve been coming across a number of games, produced in the first half of the twentieth century and aimed presumably at children, which represent war in some way. War games, but not yet wargames. So for example, one exhibit in the Science Museum’s aviation gallery was a First World War-era board game called Aviation: The Aerial Tactics Game of Attack and Defence. The board represents the sky, and the pieces are aircraft and squadrons. Here’s the box:

According to the caption, it was published around 1920, and the cover shows ’stylised First World War tanks and Handley Page H.P. 0/400 [sic] bombers’. It doesn’t look particularly like an O/400 to me; the corresponding game-piece is just called a Battle Plane (and the “tanks” are actually anti-aircraft guns on tank chassis, very advanced!)

The caption also says that the game itself was similar to Battleship. But as you can see above, each player can see their opponent’s pieces, which is kind of exactly unlike Battleship (where the point is to guess where the enemy ships are). I’d suggest that since the pieces are blank on one side, it’s more like Stratego, where you can see where the opposing pieces are, but not what they are. The pieces in Stratego have number values, and so do those in Aviation:

• Scout: 1
• Bomber: 2
• Bristol Fighter: 3
• Battle Plane: 4
• Troop Carrier: 4.5
• Airship: 5
• Three Battleplanes: 7
• Commodore’s Squadron: 8
• Vice-Marshall’s [sic] Squadron: 9
• Air Marshall’s [sic] Squadron: 10

There are also some pieces which don’t have any assigned values: Observation Balloon, Searchlight, and Anti-Aircraft Gun (3, 4 or 5 Miles). Presumably these correspond to some combination of the bombs, spies and flags in Stratego — guns for bombs, searchlight for spies and balloon for flag might make sense, although there is also a double-square labelled “Aerodrome” on each player’s side which doesn’t seem to have any obvious correlate in Stratego (they are too far back to be choke points, maybe they are actually the flags?)

It turns out I could have saved myself the trouble with a bit of Googling: the third message on this Stratego website confirms that Aviation is a Stratego variant; or rather that both are derived from a common French ancestor patented in 1909, L’Attaque! Aviation came well before the American game, and its maker, H. P. Gibson, also published L’Attaque in Britain, along with a naval version (Dover Patrol) and an air-land-sea version (Tri-Tactics). In fact, Gibson’s games were very popular and went through several editions into the 1960s. BoardGameGeeks has pages on all four of them, including photos of the components and even scans of some of the rules (for the later editions, though). So now it becomes clear that the enemy Aerodrome in Aviation is indeed the objective; you have to land one of your Troop Carriers on it to capture it. Interesting, but not exactly orthodox air strategy in 1920!

The Imperial War Museum had even more war-themed games on display. This one is called From the Ranks to Field Marshal, and is clearly basically Snakes and Ladders: you start out as a private, trooper, gunner or sapper, roll a die, move your piece along, and follow any instructions on the square.

Sometimes this is good (’Rescues a comrade under heavy fire. Promoted 1 rank, and receives Distinguished Service Order’), sometimes bad (’Court Martial. Tried for incompetence’ — 1 in 6 chance of being reduced 4 ranks). The first to land on 100 exactly becomes a Field Marshal and wins; though the game can end in other ways and then it’s the highest ranked player who wins. The IWM’s captions don’t say much other than repeat the game’s name, so I don’t know when exactly it was published. It was in a case on “The military and naval origins of the [First World] War” but it was clearly actually made during the war itself, between 1914 and the end of 1915, as French is one of the field marshals shown in the centre, alongside Kitchener; presumably Haig would have been shown after 1915. Not that either French or Kitchener rose through the ranks to field marshal (who had by then? Wully Robertson didn’t until after the war) of course, but it’s interesting that the game does make you start at the bottom, instead of giving you a plum commission in the Hussars. So it seems like it’s designed to appeal across the classes, and perhaps encourage young working-class lads to think they could make it to the top through hard work and straight shooting. (Though presumably the war would be over before the Snakes and Ladders-playing cohort reached military age!)

Moving on a world war, it seems that card games had become popular. It’s harder to work out what the rules for these might be, but presumably they again were adapted from already existing games. The above is an advertisement aimed at retailers for a game called Who’s Who or Food for Thought, ‘for delivery during October, 1939’, so quite likely was rushed into production just after the declaration of war.

OK, I think I’ve partly worked this one out: it looks like you have to try and collect triplets, where one card has an important figure’s name, another has an incomplete sentence describing that person, and the last one has an illustration and word which completes the sentence, which cleverly rhymes with the word in bold on the second card. So for example: ‘Winston Churchill’/'Shows he is the true fighting type, ignoring all Nazis [sic] scandalous’/'Tripe’ (and there’s a picture of some tripe — I assume). Sounds pretty trivial — I think I’d rather be playing From The Ranks To Field Marshal, to be honest!

This one is called Evacuation, I would guess from the first evacuation at the start of the war rather than the one during the Blitz, but can’t really be sure. There are at least three types of cards: Householder, Evacuee and (I think) Teacher — though the Evacuee cards seem to be subdivided with the red letter in the corner: B, G, M and perhaps A). Each has a comic figure — Mona Mudd is one of the evacuee children, for example, who has fallen into a puddle. Possibly, then, the game is depicting in light-hearted fashion the difficulties everyone involved had in adjusting to the new living arrangements.

But to return to the First World War period, and to board games, the most intriguing game out of all of these is War Tactics or Can Great Britain be Invaded? This time I’ve manage to find it in the IWM Collections database, as EPH 2701 and EPH 2702, and there it is dated to c. 1911. My initial thought was that it was from during the war, but on balance, I’d probably agree with the comment there that it reflects ‘the production and widespread popularity of anti-German ‘war scare’ literature of the period’.¹

The pieces here are Dread Nought (3 dots), Cruiser (2 dots), Torpedo Boat (1 dot), Sub, an unnamed piece which is obviously a monoplane, and one which has 16 dots on it and no picture — I’m guessing this is meant to be a ground unit. But what is most intriguing is the map:

The thing about Aviation and the other Stratego-style games, along with other stylised representations of warfare like chess, is that they are almost completely symmetrical. No matter which side you’re playing, the board is the same, the forces are the same and the objective is the same. About the only asymmetry is that somebody has to go first. This does make such games very evenly-balanced, and so the result will on balance come down to skill. But as a representation of warfare, it’s not in the least realistic (except in certain circumstances, particularly the more tactical you go, I guess). Each side in a battle or war has very different forces at its disposal, in terms of numbers, equipment, training and morale. And each side will be constrained by the geography it has to fight from or in, and each side will likely have different objectives in the war. Abstract games like chess or Stratego don’t have asymmetry, which is why they might be war games, but aren’t really wargames as currently understood.

But the map for War Tactics is clearly very asymmetric, as it’s based on the actual geography of the North Sea. Naval bases are placed not to make a “good” or “fair” game, but because that’s where they really were. The eastern coast of England does look inviting for the Germans because of the lack of bases, but then the British cities are spread out both north and south: which way to go? It also looks like the British can try to invade Germany, but good luck getting in close to the German coast. I’m not saying this is a particularly accurate depiction of the North Sea strategic situation ca. 1911 — for one thing it does look like the German and British forces might be symmetric in number and capability, which is rather unhistorical; and anyway I don’t know what the rules are — but it is at least a partial recognition that not all is fair in war, just as in love. So some props are due Lowe and Carr of Belvoir Street, Leicester, for creating an early ancestor of the strategic wargame.

I was going to leave it there, but I came across a couple of things on the net that I have to mention. One is from a Time article published on 14 December 1942, about the current vogue for military games. It talks about Gibson and the French origins of L’Attaque, but says he independently came up with Dover Patrol. It also mentions that the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes — who also rather liked very big aeroplanes — invented his own Little Wars-style wargame played on a huge table with 14 (!) players a side. Games could last for years — if you had the right stuff, that is:

The game occasionally took a tragic turn. Rear Admiral William B. Fletcher, long a regular player, lost eight capital ships one night and was so humiliated that he never returned. Another friend, after being court-martialed one evening for losing an entire army, lay on a sofa and cried.

Such are the burdens of command.

The other interesting thing I came across was that Dennis Wheatley, the best-selling author of thrillers in the 1930s who went on to write strategic appreciations for the Joint Planning Staff during the war (his Times obit claims it was his idea to remove all the signposts in Britain!), invented several strategy games which appear to be at least geographically asymmetric. One, called Invasion, was published in 1938, and was popular enough to go through a few editions. The publisher’s description is as follows:

ATTACK & DEFENCE
by Land, Sea and Air
A thrilling battle of wits in which 2, 3 or 4 players have as their playing pieces the armed forces of the Navy, Army and Air Force.
The Battlefield is a Map in the size of approximately 24 inches square, PRINTED IN SIX COLOURS with Capitals, Principal Towns and Forts named and a full Fighting Force of 160 Pieces with dice, shaker, etc.
You have to be ready to resist an invasion and at the same time send Expeditionary Forces to Allies.
A Game in which Young and Old can use their strategy to overcome the luck of the dice.

There’s a picture of the map here; it appears to be a Ruritanian representation of north-west Europe (the country off the coast is called Angleland, I think). It’s interesting that this came out in 1938; I can’t say I’m aware of much discussion of the possibility of an invasion of Britain at the time. But since Wheatley was helping plan anti-invasion strategies a couple of years later, Invasion perhaps should be considered as serious speculation, and not just a game.

Finally, just for completeness’ sake, I’ll mention two other war games I came across. From 1916 or so, there’s Trencho, ‘The Famous Australian War Game As Played in the Camps and Trenches’, which is apparently just Nine Men’s Morris. Can’t say I’ve ever heard of it, but “Trencho” does sound very Australian! As does Spotto!, for that matter (second from the bottom), and indeed judging from the web it was originally a Bingo-like Australian car journey game (make lists of things to watch out for, cross them off when you see them, then shout “spotto!” when you’ve got them all). But again, I’ve never heard of it. This one is an aircraft recognition version, ‘OF INSTRUCTIVE VALUE TO: SPOTTERS, A.T.C.[,] R.O.C.[,] HOME GUARDS, SCOUTS, A.R.P., POLICE, SAILORS, SOLDIERS, AIRMEN, Etc.’ so obviously it’s British, ca. 1940, and not Australian — anyway, we didn’t get many Heinkels down our way!

My brain is fried after all that, but one last thought. Some of these games are evidently intended to be simulations of war, not just representations in some abstract way: War Tactics asks in its title, “can Great Britain be invaded?” and presumably players are invited to think that the game does provide an answer to that question. Did they in fact think so? And if so, did their game-playing affect their fears about the future one way or the other? If the German player in War Tactics won 7 times out of 10, did the players (presumably children) take that as a warning of what may come? Or did they just treat it as a harmless bit of fun? No doubt some did see it as just a game, but possibly not all. As a teenaged wargamer, one of my favourite games was GDW’s The Third World War, about the potential land and air war in Germany between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, ca. 1985. It was considerably more sophisticated than the proto-wargames discussed here, but not necessarily more accurate. I certainly thought it was, to some degree, accurate, however. Playing such games was one way in which I tried to understand the Cold War and what might happen in the future, and I do remember getting anxious when the Warsaw Pact won. I wanted NATO to win, because I would want NATO to win in a real war if it ever happened. In fact, I must admit I would sometimes cheat a bit in solitaire games, re-rolling die rolls in important battles to get a “fair” result. Pretty silly, any way you look at it; but I could understand some overly-sensitive boy in 1911, probably already immersed in le Queux and An Englishman’s Home, playing War Tactics and thinking that perhaps “Der Tag” was nearly upon him …

1. For example, looking at the map, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Holland are marked as neutrals, whereas France and Belgium seem to be British allies; this suggests a WWI setting. Except that Luxembourg is also neutral, and most of Belgium’s territory should be marked as a German conquest. Perhaps more tellingly, there’s no naval base at Scapa Flow — the closest is Cromarty (ie Invergordon). Given the great importance of Scapa Flow as the harbour for the Grand Fleet throughout the war, it’s hard to imagine that it would have been left out.

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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.

Actually, that should be “The lodgings of the compiler of the damned”, but it’s more dramatic this way.

39 Marchmont St, Bloomsbury, WC1, just a few blocks from my own lodgings. The word “unprepossessing” could have been coined in honour of this building,¹ and there are certainly many far more pleasing buildings too look at around here, so why does it warrant a post of its own? The not-actually-blue plaque attached to it explains further: