1930s

The Sudeten crisis (or Czech crisis, or Czech-German crisis as it is called here) wasn’t front-page news in the Manchester Guardian on 29 August — it was on page 9. But that was actually where most newspapers put the most important news. Compared with those of today, British newspapers of the 1930s and before seem to be inside out. The first few pages would have classified ads, then there might be sport, then domestic news. Then, in the middle spread, easy to find when you open the paper, would be the index, leading articles (editorials) and other commentary on the left-hand side, and the major news of the day on the right. (This particular issue had 16 pages, so the leaders were on page 8 and the news on page 9.) Then, on following pages, there might be foreign news, business news, and letters to the editor on the last page. So the Sudeten crisis wasn’t front-page news, it was middle-page news!

So, here we see that there is already fairly intense diplomatic activity going on. Neville Chamberlain, the Conservative prime minister (though leading a coalition National Government) is to meet with his ministers (those who were ‘available’: it was the end of summer and Parliament was in recess, so not everyone was around. Chamberlain himself had just returned from Hampshire). The ambassador to Germany, Sir Neville Henderson (a pro-German — always what you want in an ambassador to Germany), has been recalled for discussions. And Konrad Henlein met with Lord Runciman on the weekend. Runciman was a former Liberal MP and minister who had been sent by Chamberlain (albeit in an unofficial capacity) to mediate between the Sudeten minority and the Czechoslovakian government after an earlier crisis. He was known to favour the Sudetens. Henlein was always described as the leader of the Sudeten Germans, but he was actually leader of the Sudeten German Party, which was not the same thing since the Sudetens did not have autonomy. Indeed, autonomy is ostensibly what Henlein was seeking on behalf of the Sudetens.
Read the rest of this entry »

Tomorrow I’m starting a bit of an experiment, an idea I had after doing a post on Human Smoke a few months back. We’re coming up on the 70th anniversary of the Sudeten crisis, which, as I noted recently, was a crisis long before Munich had anything to do with it. Long before. The Munich Conference was on 29 September 1938, but the Sudeten issue was already prominent in British newspapers a full month earlier, and didn’t start to fade until early October.

So, what I thought I’d do is put up a post every day showing how the crisis was unfolding in the press on the same date 70 years ago. Hopefully this will convey something of the steady rise — and sharp decline — of tension: from concern, to anxiety, to fear, to intense relief. I’ll start with 29 August 1938 and go through to 8 October (six days out of every seven, at least — I haven’t looked at any Sunday papers), and will draw on The Times, the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Mail, as well as a couple of weeklies, the Spectator and the New Statesman. (George Orwell started keeping his diary in early August 1938, so I’ll be keeping an eye out for his thoughts on the crisis too.) I’m not exactly sure how I’ll write the posts, but they won’t be very dense, at least at first: maybe just the headlines, to show what a not-particularly interested reader might pick up just by flicking the pages. We’ll see how it evolves.

This means that my more usual fare will be thin on the ground for the next 5 or 6 weeks, so apologies to those wanting more aeroplanes and bombs!

Last year I gave a lecture where I said that Things to Come, the 1936 Alexander Korda production of H. G. Wells’ novel The Shape of Things to Come, was not a very popular film, that not many people would have seen it. I had to retract that, but I then said that

I stand by my other point, however, which was that Things to Come is actually very singular, at least in British feature films: there are very few depictions of a city being turned to rubble by air attack

Now I have to retract that too, as since then I’ve compiled an — admittedly short — list of interwar British films which do depict cities being destroyed by bombing, or at least coming under the threat of air attack.

Some of these I did know about, such as The Airship Destroyer (1909). It’s now available on YouTube, under an alternate title, Battle in the Clouds. In it, an airship bombs a city, which is last seen in flames. I’m not sure if either of the sequels, The Aerial Anarchists and Pirates of 1920 (both 1911) had anything comparable.

There’s a long gap after that. The Flight Commander (1927) climaxes with Sir Alan Cobham bombing a Chinese village, which was filmed at the RAF Pageant, but that’s more air control than strategic bombing. In High Treason (1928), written by Noel Pemberton Billing, an aerial war is threatened, but averted. There were a few American films set during the First World War which showed Zeppelin raids on London, including The Sky Hawk (1929) and Hell’s Angels (1930), but they’re, well, American.¹

Things to Come (1936) was actually, I think, the first proper (i.e. scary) depiction in a British film of the effects of a truly devastating air raid. But there were others over the next few years. A pair of short instructional films, The Gap (1937) and The Warning (1939), have long piqued my interest, but unfortunately I didn’t get to see them while in London. The Gap was a recruiting film for the Territorial Army, which manned Britain’s anti-aircraft guns. London is hit by a surprise air raid, and because there are not enough AA gunners it is devastated. The Warning was aimed at drawing in volunteers for air raid precautions, and portrays the terrible aftermath of an air attack on Nottingham. Air defences swing into action, but do little to prevent the carnage.
Read the rest of this entry »

1. I think one or the other of these was the source of a similar scene in a British film from the 1930s or 1940s, or perhaps it was from the Korda documentary Conquest of the Air (1936, but not released until 1938). I can’t for the life of me remember what film I saw it in, but the scene was too short and too lavish to have been made specially.

Here’s a question of terminology which has been bugging me for some time. The Munich crisis in September and October 1938 is a well-known historical event. But the name ‘Munich crisis’ is misleading, because the crisis was building long before the word Munich was ever associated with it. Munich had nothing to do with the Munich crisis at all, except that it just happened to be the place where Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini and Daladier met to resolve it. (So ‘Munich conference’ is fine, as is ‘Munich’ as a shorthand for the betrayal of Czechoslovakia.) ‘Czech crisis’ would be better, but that’s usually reserved for an earlier flap around March 1938. I tend to prefer ‘Sudeten crisis’, which has the virtue of indicating what the crisis was actually about. On the other hand, nobody at the time seems to have spoken of the Sudeten crisis; usually they referred to the Czech crisis, and very occasionally, after the crisis had passed, the Munich crisis. And Munich crisis is certainly the preferred term today.

So what say you? Feel free to make arguments in comments.

Next up: ‘Crisis’ vs ‘crisis’. You be the judge!

A bomb plunges through the floors of an office building: its denizens look on in astonishment, cower in terror or fall through the holes left in its wake. This is an illustration from a book published in March 1939 by the Tecton group of architects, Planned A.R.P., which described their plan for bomb-proofing the London borough of Finsbury. Tecton helped bring European influences to British architecture, from constructivism to Le Corbusier. In the 1930s, they designed several iconic buildings — literally so, in the case of Finsbury Health Centre, which was used on a 1942 propaganda poster to symbolise the benefits of modern medicine.

I’ll talk a bit more about the plan itself below, but it’s the drawings, and especially the people, which really caught my eye. They are cartoonish, childish even, but still convey horror. They were drawn by Gordon Cullen, later a well-known architect in his own right.
Read the rest of this entry »

Here are a couple of photos I used in my AHA talk last week:

This is a Lufthansa Ju 52/3m, one of the great airliners of the 1930s, at Croydon aerodrome, ca. 1936. Other operators included Swissair, Aeroflot, and British Airways (an ancestor of the current airline of the same name).
Read the rest of this entry »

This is the talk I gave at Earth Sciences back in May. It’s long and picture heavy and much of it will be be familiar to regular readers, but some people expressed some interest in it so here it is. I’ve lightly edited it, mainly to correct typos in my written copy. I’ve put in links to the Boswell drawings because they’re under copyright, and I’ve replaced one photo because I realised it was of British Army Aeroplane No. 1b, not British Army Aeroplane No. 1a! How embarrassing.

Facing Armageddon: Britain and the Bomber, 1908-1941

Today I’m going to give you an overview of my PhD thesis topic. My broad area is the history of military aviation in the early twentieth century, so first I’ll give you a little background on that.

The first heavier-than-air manned flight was made by the Wright brothers in 1903, as you can see here. Within a few years, countries around the world started thinking about how they could use this new technology for warfare.
Read the rest of this entry »

Everybody loves flying aircraft carriers — well, I do, anyway! Above is the closest the British got to the concept. In October 1926, the R33 (above) was used to carry and launch two Gloster Grebe fighters (below). These were relatively heavy aircraft, weighing over a ton each; earlier experiments had used only a single, lighter aeroplane. Although the trials seem to have been successful, I don’t think any of the R100, the R101 or the planned R102 had any capacity for trapeze-launched aeroplanes.

What use might a flying aircraft carrier have been? An article in The Times explained that, should the experiment prove successful:

the first result is that the airship can carry an effective means of defence against other aircraft. Thus its value as a long-distance reconnaissance vessel, able to operate for long periods away from any protection, is increased; while and obvious corollary is that the future airships of 5,000,000 cubic feet capacity, with loads of 20 tons or more, can become aircraft carriers of the air. Six of more machines could probably be slung under the vessel and taken speedily to any threatened point in the Empire; or, alternatively, the interior space of the vessel might be designed to take aircraft with their wings folded for compact stowage.¹

Read the rest of this entry »

1. The Times, 20 October 1926, p. 13.

Since coming home from London, I keep coming across interesting things which I could have seen while I was there, but didn’t. Which is not at all surprising, given the city’s size and history, but it’s true even in the relatively restricted confines of Bloomsbury, where I was staying and got to know fairly well (or so I thought). My first inkling of this came when I was watching Black Books for the nth time, and idly wondered where the exterior location filming was done. Practically around the corner from where I was staying, as it happens; I must have walked past the street it’s in on an almost daily basis, if not down the very street itself. If I’d known I would have gone in and bought a book, even at the risk of being verbally abused for my troubles!

But there were also things I didn’t know about which were more relevant to my research. Chronologically, I stumbled across the earliest when flipping through a new Osprey book, London, 1914-1917: The Zeppelin Menace by Ian Castle. It’s got these nice maps showing the tracks of individual Zeppelins across the city, and where their bombs fell. And from one of the raids, there were two nearby, one in the south-east corner of Russell Square Gardens and the other in Queen Square. Unfortunately I was too poor (or at least too responsible) to buy the book, and I can’t remember what the date of the raid was. Judging from this, it would appear to be 8 September 1915. And the Bedford Hotel on Southampton Row was hit on 24 September 1917 by one of the first Gotha night raiders.

Anyway, I’ve been to former bomb sites before. A more truly unique event which took place in Bloomsbury was the discovery of the nuclear chain reaction which underpins all nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors — or at least the idea of the chain reaction. This flash of inspiration took place in the brain of Leó Szilárd, a refugee Jewish physicist, on 12 September 1933, at the traffic lights at the intersection of Southampton Row and Russell Square (in fact, only a few metres from where the Zeppelin bomb had fallen). Again, I walked past this spot several times a week, at least. It would have been an appropriate, if noisy, place from which to contemplate the subsequent atomic age.

Even that place, significant though it may be, has nothing to mark its connection to this past. That’s not true for the final (so far) thing I missed in Bloomsbury, the Goodge Street Deep Level Shelter. This was one of eight air raid shelters excavated between 1940 and 1942, parallel to existing Tube stations on the Northern Line. During the war, they were intended to hold 8000 people each; afterward, they could be used as the basis for an express line. Due to the end of the Blitz, none of them were used as shelters until 1944, and the new tunnel was never built. Goodge Street was in fact used by Eisenhower as a headquarters (though I think SHAEF itself was in Bushy Park); apparently he announced D-Day from here and one of the two entrances is called the Eisenhower Centre. That’s on Chenies Street, which I’m not sure I walked down; but the other is on Tottenham Court Road, and I most certainly walked past that more than once without even noticing.

Well, darn it all to heck.

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

ON THE WAR FRONT
Join our ‘Thought Barrage’

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

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

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

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

OUR NIGHTLY BROADCAST

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

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

GOVERNMENT RECOGNITION

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

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

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

Read the rest of this entry »

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This election poster and others are available from the Conservative Party Archive at the Bodleian. There’s only one other which has an aviation theme:
Read the rest of this entry »

From the Manchester Guardian, 29 September 1938, p. 6:

We are hearing and reading so much (writes a correspondent) of people talking in the streets, in public vehicles, and wherever they meet about the international situation that perhaps “Miscellany” may care to preserve for posterity this perfectly true and unvarnished record of a conversation overheard between two young women lunching together in London:

First Y.W.: What is all this about the Czechs?

Second Y.W.: My dear, I haven’t the faintest. I never read the papers, and when they start those news bulletins on the wireless I always switch off.

It’s unclear exactly when this conversation took place — assuming the above is indeed a ‘perfectly true and unvarnished record’ — but presumably it was some time in the previous few days, when the danger of war with Germany was becoming acute. If Second Y.W. wasn’t curious about the Sudeten crisis by then, with gas masks being handed out, sandbags appearing everywhere, her neighbours heading off into the countryside for safety, anti-aircraft guns being positioned around the capital, and trenches being dug in public parks … then she probably would never be.

Neville Chamberlain didn’t exactly have his finger on the pulse of the nation, but when, on 27 September, he said on the BBC ‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing’, on this evidence he was not wrong!

Some more plots from the talk I gave the other way. I was trying to think of a way to illustrate in concrete terms the problem of speed for the air defence of Britain. I came up with the following:

Simply put, it shows the length of time it would have taken for an attacking bomber to fly from the coast to London (in blue) — call it the crossing time — and the time it would take taken for a defending fighter to climb high enough to intercept (in red) — call it the intercept time. And how these changed over time, obviously. As can be seen, the fighters generally had enough time to climb high enough to intercept the bombers before they got to London, but the margin decreased over time, from 15 or so minutes during the First World War, to less than 5 in the Second.

But all this is not straightforward so I’ll explain further. To begin with, the data is slightly dodgy. It’s mostly drawn from the same source as this, which is fine as far as it goes. But that means that I’m showing how long it would have taken British bombers to penetrate from the coast to London, which was not really a great worry. Having said that, it’s probably reasonable to assume that the performance of British bombers was roughly in line with those used by Continental air forces. (And the RAF’s own air defence exercises had to make this assumption, too, because borrowing somebody else’s air force for a day wasn’t feasible.) One day I’ll create a dataset for European aircraft …
Read the rest of this entry »

An illuminated tram-car which is touring Blackpool as a recruiting agent for the A.R.P. services.¹

Every autumn in Blackpool, the promenade is festooned with miles of multicoloured lights — the ‘Blackpool Illuminations‘. Part of this display involves similarly-decorated trams — the ‘Blackpool illuminated trams‘. (Or so I read, I’ve obviously never been.) This particular example featured in the 1938 illuminations, and was fitted out as a travelling advertisement for recruitment into air raid precaution jobs, such as wardens and first aid. It looks like it’s the same tram as the third one pictured here, which was built in 1937, and later rebuilt and called “Progress”. Evidently it could be modified to reflect a particular theme. In the picture above, it’s got some slogan written on the top windows — something about ARP — and a model aeroplane fore and (looks like) aft — a fighter? My favourite is in the front window: ‘A.R.P. DISPELS FEAR’.

I wonder who the intended audience was? ARP was largely a devolved responsibility; local authorities planned and implemented their own schemes. Since, I assume, the tramway was also paid for and operated by the town, it’s probably just aimed at local citizens. But of course Blackpool was also a major holiday destination (the sunny Spanish coast at this time being far more likely to receive visits from Italian bombers than British airliners!) The illuminations, then, were also an opportunity to influence visitors from a much wider area than Blackpool, particularly from the north-east. So I wonder if the Home Office played a role in encouraging such recruiting methods?

It’s probably only a coincidence, but the day when this photo was published, 27 September 1938, was practically at the peak of the Sudeten crisis. 29 September was the day when the Munich conference was announced in the papers; only on 1 October was it clear that it had succeeded in averting war (and that was the deadline Hitler had announced for resolution of the Sudeten problem). On 27 and 28 September, war seemed imminent. So as the brand-new ARP tram trundled along the promenade, its lights could have been extinguished at any time …

1. Manchester Guardian, 27 September 1938, p. 7.

The talk at Earth Sciences went well, I think. It was a good-sized audience and they seemed interested in what I had to say, judging by the questions afterwards. I also found out that one of the honorary fellows had actually lived in London during the war, and though only a child could remember watching out for V1s passing overhead and even the ‘electric’ atmosphere of the day that war was declared.

I was all set to record the talk, but forgot to fire up the audio app. At some point, I may try recording it again at home or just putting the text up. Until then, here are a couple of the graphs I used, along with some different ways of presenting the same numbers. (Except where indicated, the data is courtesy of Dan Todman, who compiled it from Home Office files. Thanks Dan!)

Firstly, this shows the civilian casualties (killed and seriously wounded) each month in Britain due to enemy action between 1939-1945. Most — all? — of these will have the result of bombing, so I’ve labeled it accordingly. (This is the counterpart of a histogram I did for 1914-1918, except that combined civilian and military casualties, and separated different forms of attack.) It’s easy to pick out the Luftwaffe’s major offensives: the biggest peak is September 1940, when the Blitz started; it ended in May 1941, after which casualties were never so high again. There’s a relative lull in January and February 1941, due largely to bad weather conditions. In April-June 1942, there’s the Baedeker Blitz and from January 1944, the Baby Blitz. Then there’s the V-1 offensive in June-September 1944 and the V-2 offensive in September 1944-March 1945.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’m currently looking at the air menace as portrayed in the press during the Sudeten crisis in late September-early October 1938. The interesting thing is that there isn’t much, at least not directly. There was very little scaremongering material of the type so prevalent in 1934-5, or even earlier in 1938, for example, even in the Daily Mail. Rarely does anyone actually come out and say something along the lines of ‘The danger is that Germany will attempt an aerial knock-out blow against London’. I’d guess is this is at least partly due to self-restraint on the part of editors: it would be grossly irresponsible to run headlines playing up the possibility that bombs were about to start falling on British cities, particularly given that panic was itself one of the major concerns.

But, indirectly, the shadow of the bomber was definitely there. The most obvious indication is in the amount of space devoted to discussions of air raid precautions — distribution of gas masks, digging of trenches in parks, ads for gas-proofing material, plans for the evacuation of children, emergency council meetings to discuss what to do about the fact they’d done nothing in the way of ARP for the last two years … It would have been pretty clear to most readers what all this meant, especially after the horrors of bombing in Spain and China earlier in the year were recalled.

The other signifier is the end of the world. Or, rather, talk about the end of European civilisation, the abyss towards which we are all sliding, the imminence of a second dark ages. Just taking the New Statesman: on 10 September 1938, a leader states that a war would stop Germany but ‘would probably also end European civilisation’; a letter by Paul Goulding similarly refers to the ‘breakdown of what remains of European civilisation’ if war comes; another from V. Gordon Childe (the famous archaeologist) thought that war ‘must, in fact, destroy all that in Britain still deserves the name civilisation’, though he was more concerned that Britain was going to reject Soviet aid in order to help the Fascists dismember Czechoslovakia; and L. C. Knights urged that international and social reconstruction be undertaken on the basis of humane (and socialist) values, otherwise ‘the alternative is to wait in despairing fatalism for the end of our civilisation’.¹ These sorts of sentiments are more common from the left than the right, but not exclusively so.

The problem is, though, that these statements are usually ambiguous. Obviously, my first impulse is to interpret these as references to the devastation caused by massive aerial bombardments. But they could also refer to the effects of a major land war too, and all its consequences — think of a greater Great War, plus fascism and bolshevism, and with all of the advances in military technology since 1918 thrown in. Come to think of it, that’s just the Second World War, really, which did in fact cause far more devastation than did the first (more than three times the total deaths worldwide, for example). Such a war could conceivably stretch the fabric of European society to the breaking point. And so it could be that this is what was meant by the end of civilisation.² Or, that the mobilisation of society for total war, and the loss of freedoms that went with that, would destroy it from within.

I tend to doubt this is so in most cases, because when such comments are occasionally elaborated upon, they tend to reveal air-mindedness. For example, Gordon Childe went on to speculate whether pro-appeasement intellectuals might come to wonder if ‘the bombed ruins of London and Berlin would not have been better than the skeleton of a civilisation condemned to stagnation condemned to stagnation by the denial of free enquiry’.³ And after the crisis had passed, it seems that people felt a little freer to say exactly what it was that they feared. Speaking in the House of Commons after the Munich Agreement, Chamberlain said that the government had ’saved Czecho-Slovakia from destruction and Europe from Armageddon’. Earlier, he had explained what modern war meant:

When war starts to-day, from the very first hour, before any professional soldier, sailor, or airman had been touched, it would strike the workman, the clerk, the man in the street or in the bus, and their wives and children in their homes — people burrowing underground to escape from poison gas, filled with dread of what might happen to them or those dear to them, or leaving them with maimed fathers and mothers.⁴

So, I suppose what I’m arguing is that, during the Sudeten crisis, there was a reluctance to talk about that which was most feared, at least in print, just when it seemed imminent. Which is probably very human.

1. New Statesman, 10 September 1938, 366; 17 September 1938, 412; 24 September 1938, 451; 8 October 1938, 525.
2. After all, Salisbury made similar forecasts four decades earlier, without even mentioning aircraft.
3. New Statesman, 24 September 1938, 452.
4. Manchester Guardian, 7 October 1938, p. 4.

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
Read the rest of this entry »

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.

In late March and early April 1938, the Manchester Guardian ran a competition inviting readers to send in ‘a List, with short reasons, of Six Books with which to Furnish a Gas-proof Room’¹ — that is, a room designed to provide a temporary refuge in a gas attack. The article which discussed the entries began by noting that ‘A gas-proof room is not a desert island, at least from a literary point of view’, because desert island books are meant to be aids in survival, whereas those in a shelter are intended to divert the mind from dwelling on the danger of poison gas. So,

The competitor from Ulverston who suggested Bacon’s “Novum Organum,” “The Last Days of Pompeii,” “The City of Dreadful Night,” “Paradise Lost,” “Sighs from Hell,” by Bunyan, and Blair’s “Grave” presumably knows his own mind better than anyone else does, but most people would say that the furniture of such a room would only be complete with a revolver to be used in case the gas and bombs and literature all failed to do their work.

Despite this admonishment, many of the entries displayed a rather dark humour:

Talking about once-obtainable foods will obviously be THE diversion in the War to end Civilisation. No better guide, then, to the menu of one’s dreams than “Mrs. Beeton.”

To the common suggestion of Who’s Who, the Guardian responded by saying that this ‘would easily, in an air raid, take on the appearance of an anthology of brief obituaries’.

Other submissions were more practical:

The books must steady jittery nerves by distracting the mind from business overhead. Whilst entertainment is required, purely light literature is useless, since it does not demand sufficient concentration. Humour only irritates in moments of strain. Books giving something to do are, therefore, best.

Though just how many people could be bothered with ‘A Book of Mathematical Problems’ or ‘Any Chosen Work in Foreign Tongue, and a glossary for it’ may be questioned!

While some suggestions were fairly optimistic — ‘Holiday Guide. — To plan the next holidays’ — others, quite naturally, despaired of humanity:

Pope. — For a reminder that men were once civilised.

Boswell’s “Johnson.” — For a reminder that men were once sensible.

Urquhart’s “Rabelais.” — For a reminder that there are better kinds of nonsense than dropping gas bombs.

So, who won? Douglas Rawson (or perhaps Hawson) of Malton in Yorkshire. His list had a bit of everything:

“Anatomy of Melancholy.” — For general reading.

Italian Phrase-book. — In case of visitors.

German Phrase-book. — Same reason.

Family Bible. — Exhibiting Aryan descent.

Students’ Song-book. — For community singing.

Telephone Directory. — To call doctors, &c., or locksmith if door combination forgotten.

It might be interesting to know what reading material people actually took with them into shelters during the Blitz. Some insight could no doubt be gleaned from diaries, especially Mass-Observation ones. Did people want to be amused while the bombs fell? Educated? Tested? Though amusing, the Manchester Guardian competition quoted here does not, I think, have much bearing on the question: the readership (middle class, left-Liberal, I suppose largely Mancunian) was small and not particularly representative. More importantly, people would have submitted lists which they thought would catch the judge’s eye, in the hopes of winning the prize (two guineas), rather than the books they would really take into the refuge with them. Even more importantly, perhaps, when the air raids did eventually come, they were mostly at night, and shelterers (from HE and incendiaries rather than gas) were generally more concerned to get some sleep than to feed their heads.

Still, it’s a fascinating little glimpse into the grim humour with which the British were facing up to the horrors they believed were coming:

But perhaps in the end we should all be pessimists enough to reach out automatically for Jeremy Taylor’s little treatise on A.R.P. — “Holy Living and Holy Dying.” Its advantage is, of course, that, supposing the precautions did work after all, we could concentrate on the first half.

1. Manchester Guardian, 28 March 1938, p. 5. All other quotes from “Literature and gas”, Manchester Guardian, 6 April 1938, p. 6.

Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, speech to the Lord Mayor’s banquet, 9 November 1897:

Remember this — that the federation of Europe is the only possible structure of Europe which can save civilisation from the desolating effects of a disastrous war. You notice that on all sides the instruments of destruction, the piling up of arms are becoming larger and larger, the powers of concentration are becoming greater, the instruments of death more active and more numerous and are improved with every year, and each nation is bound for its own safety’s sake to take part in this competition. These are the things which are done, so to speak, on the side of war. The one hope that we have to prevent this competition from ending in a terrible effort of mutual destruction which will be fatal to Christian civilisation, the one hope we have is that the Powers may be gradually brought together to act together in a friendly spirit on all questions of difference which may arise until at last they shall be welded in some international constitution which shall give to the world as a result of their great strength a long spell of unfettered and prosperous trade and continued peace.

Source: Lord Lytton, BBC Empire Service broadcast, 18 August 1938; quoted in Listener, 1 September 1938, 430. Emphasis added.

A curious snippet from Margaret MacMillan’s account of the Paris Peace Conference, Peacemakers (2002):

Why not give it to Hughes of Australia, suggested Clemenceau.¹

The ‘it’ was Heligoland, a small island in the North Sea, off the north-western coast of Germany. For most of the 19th century it had belonged to Britain, which swapped it for Zanzibar to Germany in 1890 — when relations between the two countries were still friendly. But then the naval arms race started up, and Heligoland became a handy place from any attempt by the Royal Navy to approach the German coast could be interfered with. Which is why, in Paris in 1919, the question arose of what to do about it.

The Admiralty naturally wanted the island back, but presumed that the Americans would object. In the end, the compromise solution adopted was to destroy all of its fortifications. Presumably Clemenceau’s suggestion was that Australia, as a nation almost as far away from Heligoland as possible, be given a Mandate over Heligoland (to add to New Guinea and Nauru), so that neither Britain nor Germany would have control over the disputed territory. I don’t know how seriously he meant it, or whether it ever had a chance of getting up. But in my mind’s eye I could see Australia dominating the North Sea from its Heligoland base with our single battlecruiser … well, no. But what would have happened if Australia had been given a Mandate over Heligoland?

Well, for a start, I don’t think Australia would have been exactly regarded as a disinterested party by Germany: British Empire and all that. In practice, there probably wouldn’t have been much difference between Australia governing Heligoland and Britain governing it: precisely because we were so far away from Europe, we had nothing to gain from it and nothing to lose, except perhaps in terms of our international reputation. I don’t see any reason why we wouldn’t use it to benefit our friend (and protecting power), Britain, in whatever way they wished.

What use would it have been to Britain? MacMillan notes that the coming of the aeroplane was another reason why Heligoland seemed newly valuable. She doesn’t explain, but seems to imply that this is because of their potential use as airbases for offensive action. I doubt that it would have been of much use for Britain in this way — it was too small to have a really big airbase (only 1 sq. km!) to be very powerful, and too close to Germany (only 70 km away) to survive for long.

But what Heligoland might have been very useful for was as a RDF (radar) station, to give Britain early warning of an incoming knock-out blow. It was actually ideally placed for this purpose.

Read the rest of this entry »

1. Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2002), 187.

“Slough” by John Betjeman (1937):

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.

And get that man with double chin
Who’ll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women’s tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It’s not their fault that they are mad,
They’ve tasted Hell.

It’s not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It’s not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren’t look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

David Brent’s analysis of “Slough”:

‘Right, I don’t think you solve town planning problems by dropping bombs all over the place, so he’s embarrassed himself there’ — brilliant.
Read the rest of this entry »

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.
Read the rest of this entry »

1. Andrew Boyle, Trenchard (London: Collins, 1962), 469.

The 11th Military History Carnival has been posted at Battlefield Biker. My pick this month is Siberian Light’s post on the Battle of Khalkin-Gol (better known, to me at least, as the Nomonhan Incident), a big tank battle fought between the USSR and Japan in August 1939. I didn’t know that it actually began as skirmishing between Mongolia and Manchukuo, puppet states of the Soviets and Japanese respectively. Though, of course, it needn’t have: a 2nd Russo-Japanese War wouldn’t have surprised many people in the 1930s, particularly given Japanese expansionism and anti-communism. Plenty did predict it, often leftists such as Tom Wintringham, who suggested in The Coming World War (1935) that a conflict between Japan and the USSR would probably spread into the next world war. It didn’t … but almost immediately, the German invasion of Poland did. Siberian Light notes that Khalkin Gol/Nomonhan did influence the course of the Second World War, as Japan’s heavy defeat there was one factor in its decision to go south in December 1941 instead of north. Probably one of the more important forgotten battles of world history, then.