1930s

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Bluff and bluster

16 June 2009 in 1930s, Australia, Books, Civil defence, Periodicals, Quotes by Brett Holman | 5 comments

Here are a couple of interesting but spurious claims about new weapons from 1939, which I’ve come across in my recent reading.

The first is from the Melbourne Argus of 19 January 1939. It’s very brief, no more than a simple statement that the Soviet Union has announced that it has developed a death ray. This prompted a response on 20 January (p. 10) from T. H. Laby, Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. (I attended many a physics seminar in the Laby Theatre, back in the day.)

“Over and over again claims have been made to the discovery of a death-ray, and there has never been any substance in them,” he said. The whole electromagnetic spectrum, from the longest wireless waves to the shortest X-rays, is known to physicists, and none of them could be used as death-rays at any intensity at which it is possible to produce them.

Laby allowed that X-rays and sound rays (the latter not, of course, electromagnetic waves but pressure waves) could in theory be used to kill, but not in practice. He was right to be sceptical of the Soviet claim, although there is always the possibility of something new coming along to confound elderly but distinguished scientists (as actually happened with the laser in 1960). And the report from Moscow was so sketchy that all he has to go on is the term ‘death ray’, which as I’ve said before doesn’t mean its primary effect was to kill directly. As for the report itself, who knows whether the Soviets actually made this claim officially, or whether it was garbled or not. But in such uncertain times, a little misdirection about defence capabilities couldn’t hurt a friendless country.

The second dubious claim was made by H. G. Wells in an article for the London Daily Chronicle of 6 March 1939, which was reprinted in his Travels of a Republican Radical in Search of Hot Water. Having returned to Britain from a visit to Australia, Wells notes that

War does not come. That is due to the spreading realisation that the catastrophic anticipations of London, Paris, Berlin and indeed most places, being turned into gigantic holocausts, shambles, heaps of ruin and so forth have been much exaggerated.1

I’d agree with Wells that there was such a ’spreading realisation’, but the main reason he gives for this is surprising: it’s the invention of the ‘air-mine’, which seems to be carried by balloon:

The air-mine is a small, unobtrusive floater carrying a high explosive charge, detonators and suitable entanglements, that can be set to drift at any height. And it just drifts about with the wind. It is not merely unobtrusive but, as armaments go today, relatively inexpensive. You can send these things up in shoals, in clouds, in curtains, and aerial mine-sweepers have yet to be invented.2

I don’t know where Wells got this from. As far as I know, the British had no such device (although experiments were carried out with something similar during the war, at Frederick Lindemann’s insistence). Maybe it was a rumour put about by somebody official in order to boost confidence in air defence? If so, it looked like it worked on Wells, though it hardly made him look on the government with favour:

The fact remains that it is possible to cancel out the air, and that this present waste on excavations, tin-pot shelters and the like is either bare-faced jobbery or patent imbecility ….3

So there are two odd claims, both false and (maybe) both propaganda. Both certainly forgotten today.

  1. H. G. Wells, Travels of a Republican Radical in Search of Hot Water (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939), 68-9.
  2. Ibid., 69.
  3. Ibid.

Guernica, mon amour

9 May 2009 in 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Art, Cold War, Film, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Pictures, Videos by Brett Holman | No comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Guernica

A couple of years ago I outed myself as something of a philistine by admitting that I didn’t ‘get’ Guernica, and thought that direct representations — photographs — of the ruined city were more powerful, more affecting than Picasso’s masterpiece. My incomprehension generated a fair degree of discussion, which was useful, but it was having to teach Guernica this week in tutorials which finally helped me make my peace with it. More specifically, learning something of Picasso’s process of design and composition, and the politics of his commission from the Republican government, led me to a better appreciation of its symbolism. Although it depicts — or rather is inspired by — the bombing of a city, it seems to be set inside as much as outside, somehow. The woman holding a lantern could be leaning out of a window, one who survived the destruction but suffers from what she has seen. Or she could be leaning in, perhaps symbolising the inaction of the international community after seeing what had happened to Guernica. Creative ambiguity, indeed.

But the other source the students looked at this week was the 1959 French-Japanese film Hiroshima mon amour. And while I’ve come to understand something of Guernica’s power, figurative and non-literal though it may be, I now have a problem with Hiroshima mon amour. In the most simplistic terms, it is a love story between a French woman and a Japanese man, who have a doomed affair in Hiroshima, ca. 1957. But the romance is not the point. Marguerite Duras, author of the screenplay, later wrote that:

Nothing is ‘given’ at Hiroshima. Every gesture, every word, takes on an aura of meaning that transcends its literal meaning. And this is one of the principal goals of the film: to have done with the description of horror by horror, for that has been done by the Japanese themselves, but make this horror rise again from its ashes by incorporating it in a love that will necessarily be special and ‘wonderful’, one that will be more credible than if it had occurred any where else in the world a place that death had not preserved.

But if she wanted ‘to have done with the description of horror by horror’, then why did she and director Alain Resnais include — at times harrowing — documentary footage of the ruined city and the victims of the atomic bomb? (Starting from 7.53, continued in the second clip.)
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Total war and total peace

21 April 2009 in 1900s, 1930s, After 1950, Civil defence, Cold War, Film, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Space, Words by Brett Holman | 17 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

A random thought while sitting in a lecture today: if there is (or can be) such a thing as total war, does that imply that total peace is a meaningful concept?

Firstly, what is total war? One definition, drawn from the ubiquitous set of conference proceedings edited by Stig Förster et al (and more directly, from today’s lecture notes), goes something like this. Total war consists of:

  1. total aims: e.g. the destruction of an enemy nation
  2. total methods: e.g. bombing cities
  3. total mobilisation: e.g. conscription for both the armed forces and for labour
  4. total control: e.g. censorship, dictatorship

More briefly, total war is the subordination of every other consideration (law, custom, morality, etc) to the prosecution of war. Total war is an ideal form of warfare, something which can be approached more or less closely, but which can never actually be fully attained. Well, hopefully not, because that would be bad.

So what would total peace look like? I don’t think it can simply be the absence of total war; that’s just peace generically. Total peace must be total in some sense.
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The death ray men

27 March 2009 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, Books, Film, Periodicals by Brett Holman | 12 comments

A few articles have been appearing in the British press over the last few days about Harry Grindell Matthews, who (among many other things) claimed in 1924 to have invented a death ray. There’s no actual news attached to these stories, as far as I can tell, other than the fact that a new biography of the man has just come out (Jonathan Foster, The Death Ray: The Secret Life of Harry Grindell Matthews). In them, and presumably in the book, Grindell Matthews is portrayed as an unrecognised scientific genius who will now hopefully get his due. While he’s certainly a fascinating figure, and one who pops up in my thesis, I think he was another of those inventors who was as much showman as scientist, someone who claimed to have invented many amazing things but which somehow rarely seem to have resulted in a finished product.

The death ray itself is a good example of this. It was claimed to be an electromagnetic weapon which could kill over long ranges, or explode gunpowder, or stop an internal combustion engine. The last ability was key to the possible use of the death ray as an anti-aircraft weapon, and this is what most press attention at the time focused on. There was a press campaign waged on Grindell Matthews’ behalf which clamoured for the government to acquire this weapon for Britain. Officials from the Air Ministry were given a demonstration, but were unimpressed. The government was not entirely uninterested, and even offered him a thousand pounds for a successful test under their own conditions. But Grindell Matthews lost patience and hopped over to Paris to hawk the death ray there. He came back to Britain, made a film with Pathé called The Death Ray, and eventually gave up and went to America.

This sounds a lot like charlatanism. Grindell Matthews claimed much for his invention, but was reluctant to submit it to reasonable scrutiny, even when offered when more than fair compensation for his time. On the other hand, the Wright brothers, for example, had been just as suspicious when trying to sell their flyers to the world’s militaries, and ended up not making a whole lot of money from their inspiration and perspiration. So such behaviour wasn’t unprecedented. On the other other hand, the reason why the Wrights didn’t profit fully from their invention of flight was that other people duplicated it, refined it, improved it and marketed it. If Grindell Matthews was just a bad businessman, then why didn’t a practical death ray ever appear from somebody else’s lab?

It certainly wasn’t because nobody else was trying. Here’s a (partial) list of others who claimed to have invented a death ray before 1939:
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More Malcolm

4 March 2009 in 1930s, Periodicals, Quotes by Brett Holman | 7 comments

A while back I wrote a post about Sir Malcolm Campbell, devil-may-care driving fool, and his possible connection with the British Union of Fascists — specifically, the claim that he adorned Blue Bird with BUF insignia. I was sceptical, based on his fairly negative attitude in 1937, but couldn’t rule out that he’d had some earlier flirtation with them. Now Philip Coupland has kindly provided me with some contemporary evidence of the Blue Bird claim. It’s an article from the BUF newspaper, Blackshirt, 26 April 1935, 1, the entire text of which reads:

SIR MALCOLM CAMPBELL CARRIES THE FASTEST FLAG

On March 7, 1935, the Fascist pennant of the London Volunteer Transport Service was carried, at the suggestion of S.L. Vernon Pickering, by Captain Sir Malcolm Campbell, M.B.E., on his famous “Blue Bird.” On that occasion this great British patriot created a new world’s record for travelling on land. Prior to leaving England for Daytona, Sir Malcolm was offered the good wishes of the British Union of Fascists by S.L. Vernon Pickering, who himself has won over a hundred racing trophies.

So that would seem to confirm the Blue Bird story. It would be nice to have a statement from Campbell himself, or photographic evidence, or at least something not from the BUF. But it seems unlikely to have been made up, given the potential for a potentially punitive libel action. So I’m willing to take this as prima facie evidence for Campbell’s interest in fascism, in 1935 if no later (or earlier).

A tale of two cityscapes

27 February 2009 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Books, Counterfactuals, Periodicals, Plots, Thesis by Brett Holman | 5 comments

Primary sources

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

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

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

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Mirrors and lenses

8 February 2009 in 1930s, Aircraft, Art, Periodicals, Pictures, Quotes by Brett Holman | 14 comments

Japanese flying bomb / Modern Mechanix, April 1933

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

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

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

Contrast this with the American way:

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

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

8 January 2009 in 1930s, Books, Other, Periodicals, Quotes by Brett Holman | No comments

Today, I was reading an account of the Cambridge Scientists’ Anti-War Group in Gary Werskey, The Visible College (London: Allen Lane, 1978). On p. 230 I came across the following passage:

The Association of Scientific Workers strongly endorsed their work,48 as did J. B. S. Haldane.

I turned to the endnotes to check the reference, and found the following:

48. B. Holman, ‘Anti-gas Research’, Scientific Worker, vol. 10 (April 1937), pp. 150-52.

I don’t think I actually need this, but I’m tempted to track it down just to see what the B stands for!

Holiday reading

19 December 2008 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, Blogging, Film by Brett Holman | 4 comments

The 19th Military History Carnival has been posted at Military History and Warfare. For my pick from this edition I can’t go past the first entry, on the interwar RAF at Thoughts on Military History. It’s part of the first chapter of his thesis, and it’s a very good overview of the financial and operational problems faced by the RAF. I particularly like Ross’s point that the perception that the RAF was all about strategic bombing was never wholly true — it always devoted brainpower and scarce resources to problems such as army co-operation. And the perception has distorted the historiography since then. If I had to quibble, then it would be with this part:

The RAF also had to deal with the gradually changing geo-strategic situation in Europe. For example, in the mid-twenties, in a period of deteriorating relation with France, the RAF had to deal with the potential threat of what has been described as the French air menace. This, coupled with the emergence of the threat of Germany in the 1930’s led to the materialisation of a distinct home fighter force based around the concept of strategic air defence. This force starting out in 1923 as the Home Defence Air Force with a projected strength of 52 squadrons would eventually emerge as RAF Fighter Command.

There’s nothing actually incorrect here, but from my own parochial perspective I’d want to stress that while it is true that HDAF did eventually lead to Fighter Command, in theory it was supposed to be composed of 2 bomber squadrons for every fighter squadron. It was to be a striking force, not primarily an air defence force: it would defend Britain by bombing the enemy. Of course, in practice it had more fighter squadrons than bombers, because they were cheaper to build, and once the supposed French threat disappeared there was no urgency to complete the whole HDAF programme until Hitler came along. But as I say, nothing in what Ross wrote actually contradicts any of that, it’s just me being nit-picky :)

Bonus! Because I forgot to nominate anything for the Carnival this time around, here’s one I would have nominated from The Bioscope. It’s about the 1916 film The Battle of the Somme, which was recently issued on DVD by the Imperial War Museum. A hugely important film and a very illuminating post.

Howard Hawks at Melbourne Cinémathèque

2 December 2008 in 1930s, Australia, Contemporary, Ephemera, Film, Pictures by Brett Holman | 3 comments

The Dawn Patrol

This post will only be of interest to Melbourne readers. Melbourne Cinémathèque is holding a season of 1930s Howard Hawks films this month, including three of his aviation classics: Only Angels Have Wings, Ceiling Zero (both on Wednesday, 3 December) and The Dawn Patrol (Wednesday, 17 December). They’re showing at ACMI. I don’t think I’ve seen any of them so I’ll probably be there! Thanks to Cathy for the tip.

Image source: Wikipedia.

Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis: thoughts and conclusions

12 October 2008 in 1930s, Blogging, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis by Brett Holman | 12 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

So the Sudeten crisis experiment has ended. How useful has it been?

I think it’s been a very different view of the crisis. It’s small-scale, not big-picture; confused, not lucid; bottom-up, not top-down (well, sorta: it could be more bottom-up). Most accounts that I’ve read are from the diplomatic-political-military point of view: Chamberlain’s decision to fly to Berchtesgaden, Churchill’s denunciations of the Munich agreement, the lack of readiness of the RAF to defend London. Some of these things are not apparent from the day-to-day press accounts, while others are, but take on a different complexion. For example, Plan Z — Chamberlain’s flight — was not the sudden, impulsive act that it appeared to be from the press accounts which appeared on 15 September. He had in fact conceived of the idea days earlier — he announced it to Cabinet on 12 September, and had discussed the idea with Halifax even earlier. Churchill does appear in the press record from time to time, but his voice was only one among many, even among appeasement’s critics, and not the loudest. His years in the wilderness seem much more significant in retrospect: 1938 was not 1940. And the RAF is practically nowhere to be seen. Nobody’s questioning whether it’s ready for war or not, whether it can defend London or bomb Berlin — with very few exceptions, it’s just ignored, as being of no account.

The things which stand out for me are fourfold, corresponding to the evolution of the crisis itself. Firstly, there are the events on the ground in Czechoslovakia and the Sudetenland itself. The accounts publish in the British press likely were not fully accurate — rarely were British correspondents there in person, and some reports came from the Nazi-influenced German press, which definitely can’t be taken at face value. But it’s clear that there was real tension and some violence between Sudetens and Czechs, and this seems to have convinced people that there was a real problem that wasn’t going to go away.
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Saturday, 8 October 1938

8 October 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 6 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

PROBLEMS FOR BERLIN / GERMANS OUTSIDE THE ZONES / AN EXCHANGE OF POPULATIONS / NO PLEBISCITE / The Times, 8 October 1938, p. 12

As The Times reports today (p. 12), the Berlin Commission of Ambassadors which is implementing the Munich agreement has finished demarcating the major zones to be transferred to Germany, and has adjourned until Monday. But there’s still much to do. For example, there’s still the question of what to about Sudeten Germans outside the transfer zones. Originally their fate was to be decided by plebiscite, but it seems an exchange of populations is now preferred by the Commission. This might mean that the volunteers of the British Legion, who are to police the plebiscite areas, won’t be going after all (Manchester Guardian, p. 17). The British Legion Volunteer Police are nearly ready to go, however, if called upon: they paraded in their uniforms (’blue serge suit with special constable’s peaked cap’) at Olympia yesterday and will do so again today (The Times, p. 9). The President of the Legion’s North-Eastern Area, Brigadier-General E. P. A. Riddell, sent the following letter to the contingent from his section:

You are going to a foreign country as Great Britain’s representatives of peace and order. On your personal conduct, tact, and understanding depends the success of your mission. The prestige of England and the British Legion is in your keeping. One false step on your part might have disastrous results for your country and your great organization. Watch your step. I wish I were physically fit to go with you. God bless you and guide you.

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Friday, 7 October 1938

7 October 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 3 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

COMMONS SUPPORT PRIME MINISTER / 222 MAJORITY BEHIND HIM / MR. CHAMBERLAIN'S REASONS AGAINST A GENERAL ELECTION / ARMAMENTS AND PEACE / The Times, 7 October 1938, p. 14

After four days of debate, the House of Commons has voted on the government’s policy during the Sudeten crisis in general, and on the Munich agreement in particular (The Times, p. 14). The vote was won by 366 to 144, a majority of 222. The Times calls this ‘a conclusive vindication of the Prime Minister’, who was afterwards cheered by MPs. The majority is well above normal, despite abstentions from some Conservative MPs; even the terms of Labour’s dissent showed ‘unusual mildness’ according to the leading article in The Times (p. 15). On the other hand, the equivalent article in the Manchester Guardian says (p. 10) that the speeches in the debate ‘reflected all the bewilderment of the people’ and ‘the voting is not to be taken as any indication of how that feeling runs’ (meaning the ‘national feeling’). The ovation for the prime minister was not given by ‘a confident majority’, and ‘there was no real happiness about the process by which peace has been preserved’. So who’s right?
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Thursday, 6 October 1938

6 October 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | No comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

AIR BATTLE RAGES NEAR GALILEE / Troops Rushed from India and England / 'SERIOUS TURN FOR THE WORSE' - Colonial Secretary / Daily Mail, 6 October 1938, p. 11

The main headlines in today’s Daily Mail report (p. 11) on a battle raging in Palestine between ‘Arab terrorists’ and British aircraft and troops. Reinforcements are en route, and the High Commissioner has flown back to London for consultations. Hang on: this isn’t about Czechoslovakia at all! For the first time since (at least) 29 August, one of the three major papers in my sample has decided to lead with something other than the Sudeten crisis or a related issue. It’s starting to lose its hold on the public’s attention.
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Wednesday, 5 October 1938

5 October 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 9 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

SERIOUS GAPS IN DEFENCES / Sir T. Inskip's 'System Must be Improved' / PLEDGE TO DEFEND CZECHS / Daily Mail, 5 October 1938, p. 11

The Sudeten crisis, or rather its aftermath, still dominates the headlines. But the headlines themselves are getting smaller — these ones from the Daily Mail (p. 11) are only a couple of columns wide, where even a couple of days ago they were nearly the whole page across. The news today is serious enough: Inskip, the Minister for the Coordination of Defence, told the House of Commons yesterday that the crisis revealed gaps in Britain’s defences which need to be filled — though it seems he didn’t give actual details of any gaps. Commanders have been named as part of an expansion of anti-aircraft defences: three new AA divisions are to be raised for the Territorial Army (The Times, p. 8). W. J. Fawkner writes to the Daily Mail to suggest (p. 10) that service in the Territorials should be compulsory for all men aged 18 to 24 — ‘Surely this is not asking too much?’ It is for J. Fuller, though, who declares that ‘compulsory national service is something completely at variance with the British spirit’. So that’s that then.
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Tuesday, 4 October 1938

4 October 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 12 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

NO HALT IN BRITAIN'S REARMAMENT / Premier Warns the Country / GOVERNMENT'S WEAKNESS IN THE CRISIS / No Clear Warning to Hitler - Mr. Duff Cooper / Manchester Guardian, 4 October 1938, p. 11

A few days ago, Chamberlain said Munich was ‘peace for our time’. Now he, in his speech in Parliament yesterday, he is saying that there can be no let-up in the pace of rearmament (Manchester Guardian, p. 11). In particular there is to be a ‘big increase’ in the RAF, especially for ‘the defence of London’ (Daily Mail, p. 11). Hoare, the Home Secretary, said in his speech that ‘on the whole the machinery of A.R.P. had worked well’, and it was mainly a matter of filling the gaps revealed by the crisis (Manchester Guardian, p. 6). Labour MPs were vocal in response to Chamberlain’s speech: the Daily Mail’s parliamentary correspondent says (p. 10) they ‘wrecked his great hour’ and turned the occasion into ‘a shabby party fight’, and the leading article (p. 10) contrasts ‘The Government’s calm statement of the facts’ with ‘the frothy diatribes of the Socialists’. Duff Cooper’s resignation speech accused the Cabinet of being too timid to give a strong warning to Hitler, who he believed was more open to ‘the language of the mailed fist’ rather than Chamberlain’s approach of ’sweet reasonableness’ (Daily Mail, p. 5).
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Monday, 3 October 1938

3 October 2008 in 1930s, Ephemera, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes, Radio by Brett Holman | 5 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

THE KING ON DAWN OF A NEW ERA / Thanks to Nation: Calm Resolve: 'Magnificent' Premier / HITLER IN THE SUDETEN TO-DAY / Polish Troops March In / FLOWER-DECKED GUNS / Daily Mail, 3 October 1938, p. 13

So, after all those weeks of mounting tension over the fate of the Sudetens, it’s finally being resolved: German troops have begun occupying the Sudetenland (Daily Mail, p. 13). Polish troops have also moved into Teschen, and the Czech government has agreed to let a mixed commission decide the fate of the territory claimed by Hungary. The dismemberment of Czechoslovakia has begun.

But at least it’s being done peacefully. The British are still celebrating their escape from war, in their different ways. The King has thanked his people for their steadfastness and his prime minister for his peacemaking. The churches were packed with thanksgivers yesterday, ‘Peace Sunday’. A headline in the Daily Mail (p. 3) promises ‘Fairer Days, Fatter Purses, Full Speed Ahead!‘ and claims that ‘with the crisis over and peace in our thoughts it will be the biggest and brightest October ever known’. A man was arrested in Croydon on Saturday night for driving under the influence (Manchester Guardian, p. 2). He and his passenger had been to a dance to celebrate the end of the crisis, and the passenger’s excuse was that ‘I was glad that I had not been called up’. The judge was not impressed and fined him 10s. for being ‘drunk and incapable’.
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Saturday, 1 October 1938

1 October 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 9 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

IT IS PEACE FOR OUR TIME / Tumultuous Crowds Throng Downing-street as Mr. Chamberlain Speaks from No. 10 Window / WITH HIS WIFE ON PALACE BALCONY / Pact with Hitler is Only a Beginning / DUCE ASKS PREMIER TO ROME / Daily Mail, 1 October 1938, p. 11

‘IT IS PEACE FOR OUR TIME’ (Daily Mail, p. 11). Chamberlain has returned from Munich, completing his third round-trip to Germany by air in as many weeks. He has been greeted by ecstatic crowds at Heston aerodrome, at 10 Downing Street (as seen above) and at Buckingham Palace, where he appeared on the balcony — the first Prime Minister in history to be accorded this honour. His colleagues also registered their pleasure:

Our Cabinet Ministers — on the doorstep, too, became schoolboys again. They clambered about on the window sills [at No. 10], whooped wildly, and threw hats in the air.

The Sunday Dispatch is trying to cash in on all the Chamberlain-mania by telling ‘the unique life story of the man the world applauds’, in tomorrow’s edition (Daily Mail, pp. 9, 13):
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Friday, 30 September 1938

1 October 2008 in 1930s, Maps, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 4 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

AGREEMENT SIGNED AT MUNICH / Full Text of Terms / GERMAN OCCUPATION TO BEGIN TO-MORROW / New Czech State 'Guaranteed' / Manchester Guardian, 30 September 1938, p. 11

The hopes which were raised yesterday by the announcement of a four-power conference at Munich appear to have been justified (Manchester Guardian, p. 11). An agreement has been reached between Britain, Germany, France and Italy that the Sudetenland will be transferred in stages to Germany between tomorrow and 10 October. The installations in these areas are to remain intact. An international commission will decide if any other areas should hold plebsicites to decide whether they should also be transferred to Germany, to be held by the end of November. France and Britain guarantee the new Czech borders; Germany and Italy will do so once the Polish and Hungarian claims on Czech territory have been resolved. War has been averted!

Maybe. The Manchester Guardian’s diplomatic correspondent thinks (p. 11) that the agreement is only provisional, and whereas Germany was about to take all of Czechoslovakia, ‘it will now take her the whole winter and perhaps the spring to get all she wants’. Moreover, ‘many hold that a “next time” is now inevitable’. The leading article in The Times (p. 13), while generally positive, further notes that Czechoslovakia has not yet given its consent. And the outcome is hardly a discouraging precedent for the use of force in international affairs, since the threat of it has been present all along. Still, crowds at public gatherings across London cheered and clapped (Manchester Guardian, p. 11) and it’s not hard to understand why. What is hard to understand, at least for the leader-writer for the Daily Mail (p. 10), is how anyone could be less than pleased with the Munich agreement:

The Council of Munich has aroused angry protests from that professedly peace-loving body, the League of Nations Union. They cry shrilly of “menace” and “betrayal” in a resolution filled with malice against the Four-Power meeting. Cannot these fire-eaters give the statesmen a chance? Or are they determined on war at any price?

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Thursday, 29 September 1938

29 September 2008 in 1930s, Civil defence, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 9 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

HERR HITLER HOLDS HIS HAND / FOUR STATESMEN TO MEET IN MUNICH TO-DAY / SIGNOR MUSSOLINI'S COOPERATION / DRAMATIC CLIMAX TO PRIME MINISTER'S SPEECH / The Times, 29 September 1938, p. 12

Well, just look at this! This is my 28th post on the Sudeten crisis, and a new word has entered the headlines: ‘Munich’ (The Times, p. 12). See what I mean? ‘Munich’ and ‘crisis’ shouldn’t go together.

This is a very dramatic, and very hopeful development. Yesterday afternoon, Chamberlain was nearing the end of a long and important speech to the House of Commons, giving an account of his actions and the Government’s policy during the crisis. Germany was due to mobilise its forces today at 2pm, but he had asked Mussolini to use his influence with Hitler to gain a delay of at least 24 hours so that another round of diplomacy could take place. But in the course of his speech, Chamberlain was informed, firstly that the request for a delay had been granted. Then he was handed a note which bore a message from Hitler inviting Chamberlain to meet with him, Mussolini and Daladier in Munich tomorrow morning:

This is not all. I have something further to say to the House yet. I have now been informed by Herr Hitler that he invites me to meet him at Munich to-morrow morning. He has also invited Signor Mussolini and M. Daladier. Signor Mussolini has accepted, and I have no doubt that M. Daladier will also accept. I need not say what my answer will be. We are all patriots, and there can be no hon. member of this House who did not feel his heart leap that the crisis has been once more postponed to give us once more an opportunity to try what reason and goodwill and discussion will do to settle a problem which is already in sight of settlement. I go now to see what I can make of this last effort.

It’s clear that the sense of relief, of deliverance, in the House (which was packed to the rafters) at hearing this news was enormous. The Manchester Guardian’s parliamentary correspondent waxed biblical (p. 9):

Members of the House of Commons got as near to-day to a sense of the peace of God which passeth all understanding as human beings are ever likely to do. It was a brief vision, but it was clear and will not be forgotten.

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Wednesday, 28 September 1938

28 September 2008 in 1930s, Civil defence, Ephemera, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes, Radio by Brett Holman | 2 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

BRITISH FLEET TO BE MOBILISED / Efforts for Peace to the Last - Premier's Broadcast / REPORTED GERMAN THREAT OF FULL MOBILISATION / 'Prague Must Accept by 2 p.m. To-day' / Manchester Guardian, 28 September 1938, p. 9

The German ultimatum for the Czech withdrawal from the Sudetenland by 1 October remains. But there is a report of a new deadline: the ultimatum must be accepted by 2pm today, or else Germany will mobilise its armed forces (Manchester Guardian, p. 9). Hungary has already begun mobilising, and the Royal Navy has been given its orders this morning. It seems probably that war will start any day now — maybe tomorrow, if no way to peace can be found.

A speech by Chamberlain was broadcast by the BBC last night. He repeated his pledge to Hitler to make sure the Czechs keep their promise to hand over the Sudetenland (i.e. at a time to be decided, not by Saturday). He can’t take the Empire into war just to save one nation, there would have to be more important issues at stake.

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.

(You can hear the whole speech here, found here.) The leader-writer for the Manchester Guardian (p. 8) sees this as ‘an ungenerous reference to a gallant State that has made enormous sacrifices for peace’. In fact, the whole speech is deemed to be directed more at Hitler than at the British people, who won’t find it much in sympathy with their views. For example, Hitler is merely described as ‘unreasonable’, ‘a phrase that may become classical for its understatement’.
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Tuesday, 27 September 1938

27 September 2008 in 1930s, Civil defence, Ephemera, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 3 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

HITLER SAYS OCTOBER 1 / Patience is at an End: Czechs must give us Territory Immediately or we will Fetch it Ourselves / I WANT PEACE WITH ENGLAND / Last Demand in Europe: I Will Not Renounce It / BRITAIN & RUSSIA WILL BACK FRANCE / Daily Mail, 27 September 1938, p. 11

Hitler made a speech in Berlin last night in which he repeated the demands he made at Godesberg. Again, Czechoslovakia has until 1 October to cede the Sudetenland to Germany: otherwise he threatens to take it forcibly. But at least he promises that this is his last territorial claim in Europe. My copy of the Daily Mail headlines, p. 11, chops a bit off, so here’s the text:

HITLER SAYS OCTOBER 1
Patience is at an End: Czechs must give us Territory Immediately or we will Fetch it Ourselves
I WANT PEACE WITH ENGLAND
Last Demand in Europe: I Will Not Renounce It
BRITAIN & RUSSIA WILL BACK FRANCE

Today’s leading article in The Times (p. 13) calls this ‘tempestuous and rather offensive’, but thinks the most important point is that Hitler ‘did not seem absolutely to close the door to negotiation’.
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Monday, 26 September 1938

26 September 2008 in 1930s, Civil defence, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 8 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

HITLER'S NEW DEMANDS / Prague Decides That They Are Unacceptable / FRANCE AND BRITAIN CONFER / Midnight Cabinet: French Army Chief In London To-day / Manchester Guardian, 26 September 1938, p. 9

Unfortunately, the situation has deteriorated since Saturday (above, Manchester Guardian, p. 9). Hitler has made new demands which are described by the Manchester Guardian’s diplomatic correspondent (p. 9) as ‘fantastic’. At Berchtesgaden, a week and a half ago, Hitler said he wanted only those districts where Sudetens were a majority of the population. This was the basis of the Anglo-French plan, to which Czechoslovakia eventually agreed. And now he wants:

The immediate cession of all the territories (with scarcely any considerable exception) where there are Sudeten Germans. There is no longer any question of only such districts where they make up more than 50 per cent. Districts where they are in conspicuous minorities or even where there are no Sudeten Germans at all are included.

These areas are to be handed over to Germany on 1 October, meaning that there would be no time for the Czechs to remove any factories or fortifications. This, the correspondent speculates, is part of the point of the rush. Germany will secure its rear and gain valuable natural resources, factories and military stores. And then Germany will turn west:

She would be able to present another ultimatum, demanding, perhaps, colonies, or the surrender of the Maginot Line, or a “plebiscite” in the Flemish regions of Belgium, and so on. She would be able to back this ultimatum with a vastly superior Air Force, a vastly augmented armament, and almost complete invulnerability. In other words, she would have achieved her maximum of offensive and defensive power in relation to France and Britain.

The Czechs have, of course, rejected this ultimatum. Which, it would seem, means war. Daladier and Bonnet have again flown to London to consult with their British colleagues. Yugoslavia and Romania have promised to support Czechoslovakia if Hungary attacks, under the terms of the Little Entente; but it appears that Poland is to get its territorial demands (Teschen) without a fight (Daily Mail, p. 11). Czechoslovakia has mobilised all men under 40; a million are expected to be under arms by tomorrow (Daily Mail, p. 12).
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Saturday, 24 September 1938

24 September 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 7 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

CHAMBERLAIN-HITLER TALKS BREAK DOWN, PREMIER BACK TO-DAY / Czechs and Hungarians Mobilise: Order by Radio / Final 1 A.M. visit to Fuhrer / Germany Refuses Pledge On Troop Moves / Daily Mail, 24 September 1938, p. 9

It’s hard to believe, but it’s only a week since Chamberlain returned from his first flight to Germany. Everyone was then full of hope. He is returning from his second trip today, and hope has been replaced by despair. The above headlines from the Daily Mail (p. 9) tell us that the talks between Chamberlain and Hitler have broken down, that the Czech and Hungarian armed forces have been mobilised. On the other side of the page, Germany and France are said to be massing troops. Hitler has refused to give a pledge that German troops won’t unilaterally move into the Sudetenland in response to the Czech reoccupation of Eger. And he has set a firm time limit of one week for the conclusion of negotiations — i.e., by Saturday 1 October. After that, the implication is, he will take what he wants by force.
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Friday, 23 September 1938

23 September 2008 in 1930s, Civil defence, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 8 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

TALKS TO GO ON TO-DAY / Premier and Hitler Alone for Over Two Hours / ARMY CHIEF AS CZECH PREMIER / Mr. Chamberlain's Advice: The Danger of Incidents / Manchester Guardian, 23 September 1938, p. 9

So Chamberlain, having flown to Germany yesterday, is still there, talking to Hitler. There’s no official word on what they talked about, but afterward Chamberlain appealed (via communique) for calm in the Sudetenland and other afflicted areas, or to be precise, he ‘appeals most earnestly, therefore, to everybody to assist in maintaining from action of any kind that would be likely to lead to incidents’ (this and the above headlines are from Manchester Guardian, p. 9). The situation in Czechoslovakia is indeed looking pretty bleak. The German press is reporting more of these ‘incidents’ (the Manchester Guardian uses scare quotes, too, p. 9), including a Czech official throwing a grenade into a crowd. They also report that the Czech army is withdrawing from the Sudetenland, blowing up bridges as it goes — the Manchester Guardian doubts that any such thing has happened (p. 9) but the Daily Mail’s own correspondent, Paul Bretherton, has apparently seen this with his own eyes (p. 11. I say apparently because my printout is very poor quality at this point!) But it does seem true that two Sudeten towns have been evacuated by Czech authorities, and taken over by Sudetens (Manchester Guardian, p. 13). The Polish minority in the border town of Teschen has taken control of the Czech police stations there (Daily Mail, p. 11), or maybe they only attacked them (Manchester Guardian, p. 9). It’s very confusing, but in no sense reassuring. The British legation in Prague has instructed all British subjects to leave immediately, and an Imperial Airways H.P. 42 (Heracles, for the planespotters among you) has made a mercy dash to evacuate some of them (Daily Mail, p. 11). The other big news (Manchester Guardian, p. 9) is that the government of the Czech Prime Minister, Hodza, has resigned, to be replaced by a ‘national reconstruction’ cabinet under the Inspector General of the Army, General Jan Syrový, the popular one-eyed former commander of the legendary Czech Legion. It’s not a military government but it’s not a good look for democracy either.
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Thursday, 22 September 1938

22 September 2008 in 1930s, Civil defence, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 4 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

THE CZECHS GIVE WAY / 'Sacrifice for Peace Under Unprecedented Pressure' / MR. CHAMBERLAIN'S TASK TO-DAY / Poland and Hungary in Hitler's New 'United Front' / Manchester Guardian, 22 September 1938, p. 11

Chamberlain is meeting Hitler at Godesberg today (the headlines are from the Manchester Guardian, p. 11). The good news (for Chamberlain, anyway) is that the Czechoslovakian government has finally, and very reluctantly, accepted the Anglo-French plan for the transfer of German-majority areas to Germany. (Which, it seems, still hasn’t been officially published.) That would mean that Hitler would get what he wants without war, which is what Chamberlain is trying to avoid. The bad news is that it’s now clear that Poland and Hungary are lining up for their own pieces of Czechoslovakia: the German press is referring to a ‘united front’ of Germans, Poles and Hungarians. And the Anglo-French plan doesn’t provide for this at all. As The Times notes (p. 10):

Czechoslovakia is faced with the loss in the near future of Western Bohemia, Northern Bohemia, German Silesia, Polish Silesia, and the Hungarian Parts in the south.

Maxim Litvinov, the Soviet Foreign Minister, has announced at the League of Nations Assembly that the Soviet Union will give Czechoslovakia ‘immediate and effective assistance’ under the terms of the Soviet-Czech pact, providing France (Czechoslovkia’s other ally) does the same. But he criticised the Anglo-French plan as ‘a capitulation which was bound sooner or later to have quite catastrophic and disastrous consequences’ (The Times, p. 10).
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Wednesday, 21 September 1938

21 September 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | No comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

BACK TO GERMANY TO-MORROW / PRIME MINISTER'S DECISION / CZECHOSLOVAK REPLY RECEIVED IN LONDON / OBJECTIONS TO THE PLAN / The Times, 21 September 1938, p. 10

As indicated when he returned from Munich last week, Chamberlain is to fly back to Germany to meet with Hitler a second time. (Above headlines are from The Times, p. 10.) This time, they are meeting at Godesberg, a spa town in the Rhineland. Chamberlain will take the Anglo-French plan to Hitler, which may be a problem, because the Czech attitude to it is now characterised as ‘Neither acceptance nor rejection’. It seems that the Manchester Guardian’s scoop of yesterday was somewhat premature, for a later message from the Czech government was much more equivocal, asking for revisions to be made to the plan. France and Britain are pressuring Czechoslovakia to prove ‘a more definite reply to the Anglo-French proposals’, so that the Prime Minister and the Führer will have something to talk about.
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Tuesday, 20 September 1938

20 September 2008 in 1930s, Civil defence, Ephemera, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 4 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

CZECHS TO ACCEPT / Decision Early To-day After Five Hours' Council / TO AVOID WAR AND BLOODSHED / The Next Step: Mr. Chamberlain's Second Visit To Hitler / Manchester Guardian, 20 September 1938, p. 11

This time it’s the Manchester Guardian which has the scoop (p. 11): in late night meetings last night, the Czechs decided to accept the ‘recommendations’ of the French and British governments, albeit ‘possibly with reservations’. There’s still no official confirmation of what those recommendations are, but the London correspondent has some information from ‘responsible quarters in London’, which generally confirm the speculations of yesterday :

1. Areas in Czecho-Slovakia with a predominant German population to be ceded without a plebiscite.
2. Other areas to remain in the Czecho-Slovakian State under the federal system proposed in Dr. Benes’s Fourth Plan.
3. An international commission to “rectify” the new boundaries.
4. The independence of Czecho-Slovakia within these boundaries to be guaranteed by Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Hungary, Rumania, and Yugo-Slavia.
5. The neutralisation of Czecho-Slovakia and cancellation of her treaties of alliance.
6. The interchange of populations to be arranged by which German sympathisers within Czecho-Slovakia can go to the new German provinces and the population in these provinces that does not wish to remain there can go within the new boundaries of Czecho-Slovakia.

There doesn’t seem to have been any reaction from the German side, yet. It appears that Chamberlain’s planned second visit to Germany is going ahead, though the date is not yet set. But Henlein’s ‘Free Corps’ of Sudeten Germans is going to continue raiding Czech border posts from German territory (last night they attacked a customs post near Gr

Monday, 19 September 1938

19 September 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 4 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

ANGLO-FRENCH PLAN / Complete Agreement Announced at Midnight / 'POLICY FOR PEACEFUL SOLUTION' / Hope of More General European Settlement Later / Manchester Guardian, 19 September 1938, p. 11

Another week of crisis begins. How much longer can this go on? The most significant news from the weekend concerns another round of shuttle diplomacy — this time it’s the French Premier, Édouard Daladier, and Foreign Minister, Georges Bonnet, who have flown to London to consult with their British counterparts. The official communique, which can be read above (Manchester Guardian, p. 11) is pretty bland and just says that France and Britain are in complete agreement as to their policy over Czechoslovakia, without saying just what that is. But the Manchester Guardian’s diplomatic correspondent has some more information. It seems that they are cooling on the idea of a plebiscite of the Sudeten people to see what they want to do, and warming to the idea of ceding at least part of the Sudetenland to Germany. Of course, the Czech government hasn’t been consulted at this stage. No decision has been made on the question of an international guarantee of Czechoslovakian guarantee after a settlement. Henlein, in exile in Germany, has called for his followers to take arms and rebel against their Czech oppressors, but (perhaps surprisingly) they seem to have ignored him (p. 14).
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Behind the Line

18 September 2008 in 1930s, 1940s, Blogging, Counterfactuals by Brett Holman | 3 comments

The 17th Military History Blog Carnival has been posted at Military History and Warfare. (It was posted nearly a week ago, but I’ve been busy …) The most interesting post for me this week is on the Maginot Line, by the carnival host. He points out that, though much-maligned, the Maginot Line did its job: the Germans generally avoided a frontal assault in 1940. Even at the time of the Armistice, most of the Line still held out. Of course, that raises the question of what would have happened if the Line had been fully extended to protect the border with Belgium? Would the Germans have tried to penetrate it? Or would the Sitzkrieg have lasted for years instead of months? Even if successful, a German Army exhausted from battering its way through would not have been able to even think about invading Britain in 1940, and maybe the USSR would be off for the following year, also. Which could, paradoxically, have been very bad for Britain … Rommel might have gotten more resources and so goodbye Egypt and Suez. Or maybe Sealion would happen in 1941. Ah, the pleasures of counterfactual history and just making stuff up!

Saturday, 17 September 1938

17 September 2008 in 1930s, Australia, Civil defence, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 1 comment

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

PREMIER PLANS NEUTRAL STATE FOR CZECHS GUARANTEED BY POWERS / Hitler Asked for Plebiscite At Once / MR. CHAMBERLAIN SEES THE KING / Full Cabinet Meets To-day / Daily Mail, 17 September 1938, p. 9

Once again, the Daily Mail has big news (p. 9) that The Times and Manchester Guardian aren’t carrying (they merely have rather anodyne reports that Chamberlain has returned and has been meeting with colleagues); again I suspect it’s because we’re looking at an afternoon edition. The banner headline is truncated above, so here’s the full text:

PREMIER PLANS NEUTRAL STATE FOR CZECHS GUARANTEED BY POWERS

Chamberlain is reported to be ‘fresh, vigorous, and calmly optimistic’ after his 1200-mile round air trip. He went to Germany ‘with the determination to preserve the peace of Europe by drastic measures to reorganise the Czecho-Slovak State’.

First among these proposals was cantonisation of the Sudeten district. The second, and probably most important of them all, was his suggestion that Czecho-Slovakia should become a neutral State, under guarantee of her immediate neighbours and with an overriding guarantee by Britain, France, and Italy.

Thirdly, Mr. Chamberlain was in favour of the principle of the self-determination of the people of Czecho-Slovakia who he believed should have the right, but not necessarily immediately, to state what form of government they would prefer.

It is further stated that ‘there was not much difference of opinion between Mr. Chamberlain and Herr Hitler’. So this all sounds very encouraging.
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Friday, 16 September 1938

16 September 2008 in 1930s, Civil defence, Periodicals, Pictures, Poetry, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 7 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

SWIFT DEVELOPMENTS AT BERCHTESGADEN / PRIME MINISTER RETURNING TO-DAY / CONSULTATION WITH THE CABINET / FURTHER TALKS IN GERMANY NEXT WEEK / LORD RUNCIMAN COMING TO LONDON / The Times, 16 September 1938, p. 12

So after Chamberlain’s sudden departure for Germany yesterday comes his equally sudden return to Britain. As the above headlines (from The Times, p. 12) hint, it had been expected that he would be gone for several days in order to talk to Hitler. It’s unclear what conclusions, if any, were actually reached, but we do have an account of the tea party Hitler hosted for Chamberlain:

The conversation over the tea table was on non-political lines. Mr. Chamberlain was able to say to Herr Hitler that he had enjoyed very much his first experience of air travel.1

He mentioned that he had been much impressed by the beauty of the scenery, although to-day clouds and mists spoiled the prospect, and his surprise that cars could climb so easily the precipitous road leading from Berchtesgaden to the Berghof.

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  1. It’s certainly widely believed that this was Chamberlain’s first flight. However, recent authors have claimed that it was only his first international flight, and that he had flown domestically on political or ministerial business. But no actual evidence is offered, and it’s hard to think where he would have needed to go that he couldn’t have got to just as easily by train.

Thursday, 15 September 1938

15 September 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 2 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

DRAMATIC BRITISH MOVE FOR PEACE / MR. CHAMBERLAIN TO CONFER WITH HERR HITLER / FLYING TO GERMANY TO-DAY / A CORDIAL WELCOME FROM THE FUHRER / The Times, 15 September 1938, p. 10

Now events are moving with a startling rapidity: all the more startling because it is Britain’s sober, solid, unexciting prime minister, the 69-year old Neville Chamberlain, who is pushing them along. He has stunned the press by announcing, as can be seen in today’s headlines from The Times above (p. 10), that he will fly to Germany to meet with Hitler in person, to see if they can’t sort out the Sudeten crisis together, face to face. This is a very novel method of conducting diplomacy — though not quite as novel, perhaps, as is often made out: the victorious Allied leaders had become used to summit meetings after the war, beginning with the Paris Peace Conference itself. But there’s no doubt that, coming at such a critical juncture, it is seen as a bold and highly imaginative attempt to cut through the darkening atmospheres of racial incidents and veiled threats, to prevent war by rational, and personal, discussion.
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Wednesday, 14 September 1938

14 September 2008 in 1930s, Aircraft, Civil defence, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 6 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

A SUDETEN ULTIMATUM / Prague Give Six Hours to Withdraw Martial Law / HENLEIN ACTS ON ITS EXPIRY / Dr. Hodza Told That No Further Negotiations are Possible / DAY OF 'INCIDENTS': 12 DEAD / Manchester Guardian, 14 September 1938, p. 9

Ultimatum … martial law … 12 dead. These are not good words to be reading in the headlines (Manchester Guardian, p. 9). Yesterday, Hitler’s Nuremberg speech was interpreted as being somewhat worrying, but basically OK: after all, it could have been worse. But in the Sudetenland itself, it led to rioting, and the deaths of at least 12 people. Therefore the Czech government imposed martial law. In response, Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten German Party, demanded that martial law be withdrawn by midnight. Of course the Czechs refused to bow to such a peremptory demand from one of its own citizens, and so Henlein broke off negotiations once more. The Runciman mission is on the move again, trying to get people to talk to each other again, but it’s not looking good. As the leading article says (p. 8):

Events have moved with a terrible rapidity in Czecho-Slovakia since Herr Hitler’s speech and have now reached a grave crisis.

It ends by saying that the situation can still be saved, if Hitler and the Sudetens want to:

But is compromise desired? Is there a will to peace? The British Government, for its part, must remember that it will have to convince its own people, and other peoples, that up to the last minute of the last hour it did the utmost that it could, by appeal and by warning to Berlin, to avert catastrophe.

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Tuesday, 13 September 1938

13 September 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 4 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

HITLER'S ANGRY SPEECH / 'Self-Determination the Right of the Sudetens / GERMAN AID, IF NEED BE / Western Fortifications 'Ready Before the Winter' / Manchester Guardian, 13 September 1938, p. 13

So, Hitler’s big speech — summarised in the Manchester Guardian (p. 11), above — turned out to contain no new demands or proposals, nothing at any rate that was not implicit in Henlein’s Carlsbad speech. But it’s not so much the content as the tone which is worrying: his rhetoric was angry, violent and menacing. The demand he did make was:

I demand that the oppression of 3,500,000 [Sudetens] in Czecho-Slovakia shall end or the right of self-determination shall take its place.

He did not exclude negotiation; indeed, he said that it’s up to Prague to make an agreement with the Sudetens. But he also said:

If the democracies should be convinced that they must protect with all their means the oppressors of the Germans, then this will have grave consequences.

Although it could be read a number of ways, this sounds like a clear warning that Germany is willing to risk war with Britain and France over the Sudetenland. But still there is nothing definite: as the diplomatic correspondent says, ‘The question “war or peace” remains unanswered.’ And that’s the big question, isn’t it?
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Monday, 12 September 1938

12 September 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 1 comment

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

Goring's 'Our Arms are Strongest' / HITLER & 'AUSTRIA ONLY A BEGINNING' / Daily Mail, 12 September 1938, p. 7

I’m cheating slightly today; the above headlines — from the Daily Mail (p. 7) — aren’t, strictly speaking, about Czechoslovakia, but refer to speeches made by Nazi leaders at the Nuremberg rally on the weekend. But of course they were always going to be interpreted in the light of the continuing Sudeten crisis.

Hermann Goering was of course the head of the Luftwaffe as well as, at this time, probably second only to Hitler himself in terms of the Nazi hierarchy. Among other things, he called the Czech government ‘ridiculous dwarfs’ who were backed by ‘Moscow — the eternal, Jewish Bolshevist demons of destruction’. And he reassuringly noted that:

Germany’s air fleet is the strongest in the world. Never before in history has Germany been so strong and united as now.

Hitler didn’t refer directly to Czechoslovakia, but referred to the Anschluss of Austria in March, and added:

But this is only the beginning of our task. There are many greattasks before us which must still be solved.

Conflating these bits — which the Daily Mail has done by referencing them together in the headline — makes them sound like a threat.1 Which, let’s face it, they almost certainly were, but let’s not forget the power of selective editing to fabricate apparent meaning.
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  1. The Mail subeditor’s habit of saying ‘So-and-so’s “Thing that they said”’ or ‘So-and-so & “Other thing that they said”’ in their headlines really gets on my pip. I couldn’t even say why, it’s just annoying.

Saturday, 10 September 1938

10 September 2008 in 1930s, Ephemera, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 5 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

BRITAIN AND THE CZECHS / AMBASSADOR SEES RIBBENTROP / CONFERENCES IN LONDON / MR. ATTLEE ASKED TO NO. 10 / PRAGUE TALKS TO BE RESUMED / The Times, 10 September 1938, p. 10

Good news, bad news in these headlines from The Times (p. 10) … On the positive side, the Sudeten leaders have agreed to resume negotiations with the Czechoslovakian government. This may be related to a report into the Mährisch-Ostrau incident by a British observer, Major Sutton-Pratt, who concluded that it had been blown out of all proportions: clearly not a very good reason to break off talks. The situation in Prague is described as ‘a little easier’.

But the German press is now fuming over ‘the alleged cruelties perpetrated in the dungeons of Prague against the Sudeten Germans, which makes extremely unpleasant reading’, in a spirit expressed ‘with a unanimity which has ceased to be surprising’. And Hitler, in an address at Nuremberg to his Gauleiters (supposedly 180,000 of them) is talking tough:

In these long years you have been tried out and hardened, and have experienced for yourselves what strength there is in a community indissolubly bound together and determined to capitulate to none. You make it easy for me to be your Leader to-day. All those who count on the weakness of Germany to-day will find themselves just as mistaken.

And he’s due to make another speech at Nuremberg on Monday, specifically on foreign policy. There’s understandable nervousness about what he’s going to say.
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Friday, 9 September 1938

9 September 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 1 comment

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

SUDETENS REFUSE / Why They Cannot Negotiate at Present / PRAGUE NOT IN CONTROL / Premier Promises to Deal With Ill-Treatment of Germans / Manchester Guardian, 9 September 1938, p. 11

The headlines from the Manchester Guardian (p. 11) indicate that the situation is the same as yesterday, or a bit worse. The Sudeten leadership is still refusing to negotiate with the Czechoslovakian government, ostensibly because of the latter’s inability to maintain order in the country. This is despite a meeting between the Sudetens and the Czech Premier, Hodza, who promised that those responsible for the incident at Mährisch-Ostrau (reported yesterday) would be punished severely, and an official Czech investigation confirming that Sudetens have indeed been mistreated in the area. According to the Guardian’s diplomatic correspondent (p. 11), incidents like this could be used by the Sudeten German party to declare that the breakdown of law and order has forced them to assume control of the Sudetenland, which in turn could be a prelude to secession and union with Germany.

The view from London is grim (p. 11):

The fear is growing here [presumably in the Foreign Office] that Hitler does not desire a genuine settlement, and if there is a settlement of any sort it will only have the purpose of tiding over the period that will lead to the long-anticipated and long-prepared attack on Czecho-Slovakia.

Chamberlain is back from Scotland, and Halifax has put off his trip to Geneva (presumably something to do with the League of Nations), which was planned for tomorrow. There will be a Cabinet meeting on Monday to discuss the crisis. On the other hand, there is evidence of resistance to war inside Germany, as information given to the Geneva correspondent (p. 11) from a German source suggests that General Ludwig Beck, the Chief of the Staff of the German Army, has resigned because of his belief that ‘an attack on Czecho-Slovakia would involved Germany in a war with England, France, and Russia, and perhaps other countries’. (True: Beck did resign for just this reason.) Also, ‘There is reason to believe that General Beck’s opinion is shared by other German military leaders’. Maybe Hitler can be restrained by his own army’s unwillingness for war?
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Thursday, 8 September 1938

8 September 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 5 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

SUDETENS' NEW MOVES / Czech Offer Accepted as Basis of Negotiation / THEN HITCH OVER INCIDENT / Finally Agreement to Consider Resuming Talks / Manchester Guardian, 8 September 1938, p. 8

These headlines from the Manchester Guardian (p. 9) could be summarised: Yeah, but no, but yeah … The Sudeten leadership agreed to accept the Czech autonomy proposals (as revealed yesterday) as the basis for negotiations. Which sounds very promising! But at that point, news was received of an incident at Mährisch-Ostrau, where two Sudeten deputies (i.e. MPs in the Czech parliament) were insulted by a Czech mounted policeman during an attempt to break up a demonstration regarding Sudetens who had been arrested for possession of illegal firearms. One of the deputies claimed to have been kicked and struck by a horsewhip. The Czechs claim this was an accident, as the policeman attempted to restrain his horse. Whatever the real truth, the Sudeten leaders used this incident as a reason to break off the negotiations before they had even begun, as their communique explains:

The incident at Mährisch-Ostrau demonstrates that the Government does not control the situation sufficiently to begin the discussions in detail in the present circumstances with any success or with a possibility of bringing them to a peaceful conclusion.

Perhaps I’m cynical, but this seems like an attempt by the Sudetens to have their cake and eat it too. Even The Times, in its leading article today, calls this move ‘childish’ and a ‘pretext’ (p. 13).
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Wednesday, 7 September 1938

7 September 2008 in 1930s, Maps, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 10 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

TERMS OF CZECH OFFER / Nine Points Conceding Most Sudeten Demands / EXTENSIVE SELF-GOVERNMENT / Proposals Would be Put in Force as Soon as Possible / Manchester Guardian, 9 September 1938, p. 9

At last, after all the endless reports of meetings to seemingly no end: actual details! As the above — from the Manchester Guardian (p. 9) — shows, the Czech autonomy proposals (first reported yesterday) were pretty generous. The Sudetens (and presumably other minorities) would get self-government, language equality, their own civil servants and police. I’m not sure what the ‘Protection for citizens against denationalization’ means — more likely something about the right to a passport than maintaining state ownership of industry!

The proposals also include ‘Guarantees for the integrity of the frontier and the unity of the State’, which seems reasonable enough. But a (later to become infamous) leading article in The Times suggests an alternative (p. 13):

In that case it might be worth while for the Czechoslovak Government to consider whether they should exclude altogether the project, which has found favour in some quarters, of making Czechoslovakia a more homogeneous State by the secession of that fringe of alien populations who are contiguous to the nation with which they are united by race. In any case the wishes of the population concerned would seem to be a decisively important element in any solution that can hope to be regarded as permanent, and the advantages to Czechoslovakia of becoming a homogeneous State might conceivably outweigh the obvious disadvantages of losing the Sudeten German districts of the borderland.

There it is: the first time (at least in my sources) that the idea of the annexation of the Sudetenland by Germany — the solution eventually adopted at Munich — was raised in the British press. The Times was often thought, somewhat unfairly, to be especially close to the British government, so a suggestion like this will make people sit up and take notice.
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Tuesday, 6 September 1938

6 September 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 2 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

CZECHS MAKE 'FINAL' CONCESSIONS / Decision at Midnight / FRANCE RECALLS RESERVISTS / Daily Mail, 5 September 1938, p. 9

Apologies for the fairly ordinary quality of the above (it’s a scan of a photocopy of a microfilm of the original …) but it illustrates a problem with relying on headlines for information, as I’m sure some people did back then as they do today. It’s from the Daily Mail, p. 9, and you can immediately see the difference in style to the other papers I’ve been using: the headlines are bigger, bolder, more ‘modern’. They are also a bit alarming. Final concessions … decision at midnight … France recalls reservists! But while the concessions are ‘believed to represent the final limit of concessions the Czechs intend to make, regardless of any pressure which may be put upon them from any quarter’, they are also described by Ralph Izzard (the Daily Mail was also up-to-date in giving its reporters their own byline, instead of, e.g., ‘our correspondent’) as ‘very generous [...] almost complete acceptance, as a basis for negotiation, of Herr Henlein’s eight Carlsbad demands’. The decision at midnight is just when the Czech leaders ended their meeting, not a deadline for acceptance of an ultimatum. So that seems positive enough, although it would seem that events are moving towards a conclusion, whatever that will be.

I seem to have misplaced my hardcopy, so I don’t have the text for the French reservists to hand, but an article in the The Times says (p. 12) that, as a precaution, the French Council of Ministers has recalled some reservists (not whole classes: it’s not a full mobilisation) in order to bring the Maginot Line up to strength, especially its technical units. Also, all leave has been cancelled. This is a reaction to the German maneuvers on the other side of the border, as well as to the general international situation, though as to that, the official French communique, ‘the general situation seems to be moving towards an appreciable détente’.

The Manchester Guardian’s diplomatic correspondent reports (p. 9) from London that:

The crisis, according to the view taken here, would seem to be approaching its most critical stage. There is reason to believe that Hitler has not yet decided between peace and war. The military precautions taken by France are regarded with full approval.

The attitude of Italy is unknown. The recent imposition of anti-Semitic measures may be designed to impress Arab opinion, but it could also be that they designed to impress German opinion. Mussolini is reported to be looking upon Tunis (a French city) as ‘a sort of African “Sudetenland”’, since there are many Italians living there. So Britain is taking ‘certain precautions in the Mediterranean’.

Monday, 5 September 1938

5 September 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 8 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

UNCERTAINTY IN PRAGUE / MANY MEETINGS / THE BERCHTESGADEN DECISIONS / BRITISH MISSION INFORMED / THE SHADOW OF NUREMBERG / The Times, 5 September 1938, p. 12

So, we’re into the second week of the crisis (or rather, the second week for which I have newspaper sources), and as these headlines from The Times indicate (p. 12), the public still doesn’t have much idea as to what’s going on. Just that there have been lots of meetings over the weekend. The leading article gives a good summary (p. 13):

NEGOTIATIONS CONTINUE

Discussion of the Czech-German problem in Bohemia has been actively continued during the week-end. LORD RUNCIMAN had a meeting with PRESIDENT BENESH on Saturday, and yesterday MR. ASHTON-GWATKIN conferred with HERR HENLEIN at his home near the German frontier. DR. KUNDT and HERR SEBEKOWSKY, the two other Sudeten leaders, had a four-hour talk with PRESIDENT BENESH on Friday and DR. KUNDT saw DR. HODZA, the Prime Minister, on Saturday.

But, after all that, no news, just more speculation. The leading article in the Manchester Guardian cautions (p. 8) against an optimistic reading of Friday’s meeting between Hitler and Henlein, upon the (still unknown) outcome of which so much depends:
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Saturday, 3 September 1938

3 September 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 7 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

HITLER AND HENLEIN /

More good news, or at least that’s how it is presented. The dailies today all have pretty similar headlines to those from The Times, above (p. 10), but their stories differ in detail. Henlein has met with Hitler and it would seem that they agreed that the Sudetens should negotiate with the Czechs on the basis of Henlein’s previously-announced demands, but without either accepting or rejecting the Czech autonomy plan. The Manchester Guardian thinks (p. 11) that Henlein is to present specific counter-proposals, and the Daily Mail says (p. 9) that Henlein has already done so in a meeting with Beneš. No details are given of these counter-proposals, but all three seem to agree that Henlein and Hitler are genuinely interested in reaching a compromise with Beneš. Such faith seems touchingly naive today, with the benefit of hindsight. Here’s another example, from The Times:
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Friday, 2 September 1938

2 September 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 3 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

HENLEIN SEES HITLER / CZECH PROPOSAL DISCUSSED / LORD RUNCIMAN'S PART / A CRUCIAL DAY / The Times, 2 September 1938, p. 12

As these headlines from The Times (p. 12) report, it’s ‘a crucial day’, because Henlein is meeting with Hitler at Berchtesgaden to discuss the Czechoslovakian autonomy proposals; and everyone assumes that Hitler will have final say over whether the Sudetens will accept or reject them, as noted in the Manchester Guardian yesterday. Otherwise, there’s not much to report. As The Times says of the Runiciman mission’s activities yesterday, ‘It was a time to wait and a time to keep silence — until the German answer should be known.’

This being a Friday, there’s a new issue of the weekly Spectator out. (Actually, I’m not sure that it was actually on the streets on Friday, but that’s what’s written on the masthead.) Its first leading article is devoted (p. 356) to the Sudeten crisis, and the first paragraph is not very reassuring:
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Thursday, 1 September 1938

1 September 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 2 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

SUDETEN GERMANS CONSIDERING REPLY TO CZECHS / Party Executive to Meet To-day / LEADERS IMPRESSED BY NEW PLAN'S POSSIBILITIES / Restrained Optimism in Prague / Manchester Guardian, 1 September 1938, p. 9

Things seem to be looking up, judging from today’s headlines in the Manchester Guardian (p. 9). The plan proposed by the Czechs yesterday is said to have ‘impressed’ the Sudetens. The plan itself is still a mystery to the public, but The Times has a few details (p. 12):

In many ways — in particular in its proposal for self-administrative cantons — it closely resembles the old Minorities Law of 1920, never brought fully into effect. However, a greater number of cantons (départements is probably an apter word) is now proposed. In 1920 there were to have been 52, of which only two would have been more than four-fifths German. Now the départements are to be smaller, in order that the line between Czech and German districts may be drawn more accurately and the German control may be wider.

No one dares hope too much yet of the German reply, but here is a sound basis of discussion coukd they accept it. Clearly the cantons would need much new administration, and German prefects and officials would naturally be chosen for the German districts. The Army and gendarmerie would remain under the Central Government, but education, social services, and a substantial measure of finance would be under the cantonal administration.

Will that be enough? On the same page, there’s a summary of Henlein’s demands, as outlined in his Carlsbad speech of 24 April:
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Wednesday, 31 August 1938

31 August 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 1 comment

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

BRITAIN AND THE CZECHS / THE MEETING OF MINISTERS / FULL AGREEMENT / U.S. AMBASSADOR AT NO. 10 / The Times, 31 August 1938, p. 10

Not a lot of news today — at least, not a lot of new news. As the above headlines from The Times, p. 10, show, the meetings which were announced on Monday and which took place on Tuesday have, er, taken place, but no public statements have been made about what transpired in them, other than that everyone concerned is agreed that Britain’s policy should be remain unchanged. There’s support too, from the Prime Minister of Australia, Joseph Lyons. The Canadian Minister of National Defence, Ian Mackenzie rather embarrassingly gushes that the British ‘are sleepless sentinels on the frontiers of freedom [...] There is nothing more magnificent in history’.

The Sudeten crisis isn’t the only thing going on in the world, of course, but it’s very big. As the eye runs across the top of this page, five out of seven of the major headlines (other than than the ones shown above) relate to the crisis in some way:
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Tuesday, 30 August 1938

30 August 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 4 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

THE SUDETEN PROBLEM / A FRESH MOVE IN PRAGUE / BENESH-HENLEIN MEETING / LONDON ACTIVITY / MINISTERS CONFER TO-DAY / The Times, 30 August 1938, p. 10

There is some hopeful news today, resulting from the flurry of activity of yesterday. From The Times, p. 10:

It became known in London late last night that, as the result of Lord Runciman’s intervention, Dr. Benesh, the President of the Czechoslovak Republic, will receive to-day Herr Henlein, the leader of the Sudeten Germans. It is likely that other Sudeten representatives will accompany Herr Henlein. The importance of the meeting is clear, and it may well decide whether or not the negotiations between the Czechoslovak Government and Herr Henlein’s party are to be resumed and on what basis.

So here we meet Dr. Edvard Beneš, President of Czechoslovakia since 1935, a very well-known and sympathetic character in the West: he had represented his country at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and been its foreign minister for most of the period since then. How fruitful this meeting will be depends on the good faith of Beneš and Henlein as much as their respective positions. But the French press is reported to be ‘more optimistic as to the prospect of an undisturbed autumn in consequence of this [British] activity’. The newspaper’s special correspondent in Prague says that there are no jingoistic feelings among the Sudetens themselves, who know they would bear the brunt of any war. Prague itself is very calm.
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Monday, 29 August 1938

29 August 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Quotes by Brett Holman | 10 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

BRITISH MOVES IN THE CZECH CRISIS / Ministers to Meet To-morrow / BERLIN AMBASSADOR CALLED TO LONDON / Lord Runciman sees Henlein. Manchester Guardian, 29 August 1938, p. 9

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 Nevile 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.
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Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis

28 August 2008 in 1930s, Blogging, Periodicals, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis by Brett Holman | 12 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

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!

Screening the knock-out blow

26 August 2008 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Film by Brett Holman | 4 comments

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.
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  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.

Name that crisis!

31 July 2008 in 1930s, Polls, Words by Brett Holman | 17 comments

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.

What is the best name for the European crisis of September-October 1938?
View Results

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

Architects of preservation

29 July 2008 in 1930s, Art, Books, Civil defence, Maps, Pictures, Quotes by Brett Holman | 3 comments

Tecton

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.
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Some Tante Jus and a conference report

19 July 2008 in 1930s, Aircraft, Australia, Civil aviation, Conferences and talks, Pictures by Brett Holman | 22 comments

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

Ju 52/3m at Croydon

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).
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Facing Armageddon

5 July 2008 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Aircraft, Art, Books, Civil defence, Conferences and talks, Film, Maps, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Phantom airships and other panics, Pictures, Plots, Quotes, Thesis, Videos by Brett Holman | 26 comments

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.

Wright Flyer (1903)

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.
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The flying aircraft carrier: why?

4 July 2008 in 1920s, 1930s, Aircraft, Books, Periodicals, Pictures, Quotes by Brett Holman | 5 comments

R33 and Grebe

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

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

Oscar foxtrot foxtrot sierra

1 July 2008 in 1910s, 1930s, 1940s, Civil defence, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Television, Travel 2007 by Brett Holman | 5 comments

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

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.

Thought balloons

24 June 2008 in 1930s, 1940s, Books, Civil defence, Periodicals, Quotes by Brett Holman | 6 comments

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

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

The madness ends here

20 June 2008 in 1920s, 1930s, Books, Quotes by Brett Holman | 2 comments

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? :)

Keep that shadow from them

14 June 2008 in 1900s, 1910s, 1930s, Archives, Art, Ephemera, Pictures by Brett Holman | 3 comments

Vote National

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:
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Overheard in London (in 1938)

28 May 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Quotes, Radio by Brett Holman | 1 comment

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!

The widening margin

27 May 2008 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Counterfactuals, Plots by Brett Holman | 13 comments

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:

Bomber time to London vs. fighter time to intercept height

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 …
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Signs of the times

22 May 2008 in 1930s, Civil defence, Periodicals, Pictures by Brett Holman | 3 comments

ARP tram at Blackpool

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 expected holocaust

17 May 2008 in 1930s, 1940s, Civil defence, Counterfactuals, Plots by Brett Holman | 11 comments

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!)

Civilian casualties in Britain due to aerial bombardment, 1939-1945 (monthly)

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.
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The end of the world as we know it

5 May 2008 in 1930s, Civil defence, Periodicals, Quotes by Brett Holman | No comments

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.

Who was Neon?

28 April 2008 in 1920s, 1930s, Before 1900, Books by Brett Holman | 12 comments

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
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  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.

The intellectual life of the British air-raid shelter

22 April 2008 in 1930s, Books, Civil defence, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Periodicals, Quotes by Brett Holman | 5 comments

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.

A stern warning of things to come

15 March 2008 in 1930s, Before 1900, Periodicals, Quotes, Radio by Brett Holman | No comments

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.

The Heligoland Mandate

11 March 2008 in 1910s, 1930s, 1940s, Australia, Before 1900, Books, Counterfactuals, Maps, Pictures, Quotes by Brett Holman | 7 comments

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.

Distances from the frontiers of heavily-armed air powers to the British coast
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  1. Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2002), 187.

What’s wrong with a little destruction?

6 March 2008 in 1930s, Civil defence, Contemporary, Periodicals, Poetry, Quotes, Television, Videos by Brett Holman | 6 comments

“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.
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Anti-Semitism in British airpower literature

1 March 2008 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, Books, Quotes by Brett Holman | 7 comments

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

Not the coming world war

20 February 2008 in 1930s, 1940s, Blogging by Brett Holman | 2 comments

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.

The Afghan air menace

12 February 2008 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, Air control, Books, Periodicals, Quotes, Thesis by Brett Holman | 7 comments

[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.)
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  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.

Black-Out

7 January 2008 in 1930s, 1940s, Civil defence, Games and simulations, Pictures, Travel 2007 by Brett Holman | No comments

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

Black-Out

While in York Castle Museum, I was surprised to come across Black-Out, a ’skilful card game — full of interest’. It’s one of the British war games I mentioned in a previous post. At that time I only had a low-res photo from the BBC website to go on, so I was glad of the chance for a closer look.
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Before Chastise, and after now

30 November 2007 in 1930s, Books, Civil defence, Contemporary, Periodicals, Quotes by Brett Holman | 4 comments

Operation Chastise was the codename for the famous ‘dambusters’ raid carried out against three German dams by 617 Squadron on the night of 17 May 1943. The idea was to breach the dams and thereby deprive the factories of the Ruhr of their electricity. As far as the standard story goes — which everyone knows from the movie1 — it was the brainchild of the engineer Barnes Wallis, chief designer of the R100 airship, the Wellesley and Wellington bombers, the bouncing bomb (as used in the raid) and the Tall Boy and Grandslam earthquake bombs.

Though he may well have had the idea independently, Wallis wasn’t the first to think of bombing dams. Having said that, I don’t actually know of many other candidates.2 L. E. O. Charlton is one possibility. In a fictional coda to The Menace of the Clouds (the preface is dated September 1937), he imagined how an international air force might respond to an Italian attack upon (an independent) Egypt. Before dawn, the ISR (International Strategic Reserve) raids Italy’s major ports, and then:

At daylight a succession of strong flights flew inland from over the Tuscan Sea and proceeded to demolish the hydro-electric installations in the Appenine [sic] chain from Liguria to Abruzzi.3

However, Charlton doesn’t actually say that the dams themselves are the targets. And his choice of words is actually more suggestive of the generators at the base of the dams.

One other possibility is … the British government. There is a suggestion in Connelly’s Reaching for the Stars that the British were thinking about the possibility of attacking the Ruhr dams as early as 1937. He gives no details.4 But it looks like this interest actually made it into the papers, albeit in a roundabout way!
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  1. Though they don’t in Germany, as I learned from a German historian when I was in London; he had never heard of the film or the raid. Which says something about the exaggerated importance attributed to Chastise in British (and Commonwealth) mythology as the representation of the bomber offensive, at least up until recently.
  2. It was common enough to think that the enemy might attack other elements of the electricity generation system, such as power stations; or that reservoirs might be rendered unusable by biological weapons. But dams are another story.
  3. L. E. O. Charlton, The Menace of the Clouds (London: William Hodge & Company, 1937), 291.
  4. Mark Connelly, Reaching for the Stars: A New History of Bomber Command in World War II (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 95.

Allenby of Armageddon

17 November 2007 in 1930s, Books, Collective security, Quotes by Brett Holman | 7 comments

I can’t say I’m terribly familiar with Lord Allenby, either the man or his career (and when I visualise him, he always looks like Jack Hawkins). But in my experience, retired field marshals are more likely to call for national service than a world state,1 so I was surprised when I came across Allenby’s Last Message: World Police for World Peace, a pamphlet containing an address given by Allenby in his role as Rector of the University of Edinburgh on 28 April 1936. Sadly, he died only a few weeks later; in fact, the pamphlet contains a preface from Allenby dated 14 May 1936, the very day he died. It was published by the New Commonwealth, a society founded by Lord Davies to proselytise for an international police force (meaning an international air force, more or less, rather than something like Interpol), which would step in and stop wars, and hopefully deter them from starting in the first place. The speech is thin on practical details, being more of a call to (collective) arms directed at the rising generation.

First, Allenby outlined the danger:

There is danger in delay, for it seems likely that, unless an effort in the right direction — a successful effort — is made soon, the present social system will crumble in ruin; and many now alive may witness the hideous wreck. Then will loom the dreadful menace of the dark ages; returning, darker, black, universal in scope, long-lasting.2

‘Recent progress in Science has now given to the machine the mastery over man its maker’,3 Allenby claimed. Scientists everywhere were ‘busily experimenting with new inventions for facilitating slaughter; [...] designing more monstrous methods of murdering their fellow men and women’.4 There would be no hesitation in attacking civilians with these new weapons in the next war. But science (by which he really means, technology) also gave him hope, for it enlarged people’s horizons:

Man is now able to navigate the atmosphere, plumb the deep seas, travel in three dimensions of space, move anywhere at a speed unimaginable to our fathers. Willingly or unwillingly, he has become a world-citizen; and the duties of that citizenship cannot be evaded; duties calling for the whole-hearted co-operation of every man and woman alive, joined in mind and purpose to promote the good and the advancement of all.5

And his solution? A world state and an international police force.

Is it too much to believe that the human intellect is equal to the problem of designing a world state wherein neighbours can live without molestation; in collective security? It does not matter what the state is called; give it any name you please: — League of Nations; Federated Nations; United States of the World. Why should there not be a world police; just as each nation has a national police force?6

It’s somehow reassuring that Allenby could retain some measure of faith in the future after fighting the Battle of Armageddon!

  1. Though for that matter, in 1930 Allenby did set up the British National Cadet Association in order to help preserve the public school cadet system after the Geddes axe. I’m sure Bobs would have approved.
  2. Allenby, Allenby’s Last Message: World Police for World Peace (London: New Commonwealth, 1936), 8.
  3. Ibid.
  4. Ibid.
  5. Ibid., 9.
  6. Ibid.

Life among the ruins

14 November 2007 in 1920s, 1930s, Film by Brett Holman | 4 comments

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’ …

The bomber will always get through

10 November 2007 in 1930s, Periodicals, Quotes by Brett Holman | 4 comments

It’s the 75th anniversary of Stanley Baldwin’s famous ‘the bomber will always get through’ speech. It’s an important text which is widely quoted, both in my primary and my secondary sources, as a testament to the fear of bombing in the 1930s. But I’ve never actually read it very closely, and I think I’m in good company because it’s usually the same couple of lines which are quoted, and the rest of it is ignored. And as it doesn’t seem to be online anywhere I thought it would be a useful exercise to transcribe it and put it up on the web.

Baldwin was not Prime Minister when he gave the speech, as is sometimes said. He had been PM twice before, in 1923-4 and 1925-9 (and would be again in 1935-7), but at this time he was Lord President of the Council, a Cabinet-level post with no major duties attached to it. Baldwin’s real importance was as leader of the Conservative Party, which had by far the most seats in Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government. He had power without responsibility, one is tempted to say.

The occasion for the speech was a debate in the House of Commons about disarmament, held on 10 November 1932 — the eve of Armistice Day. The original motion was proposed by Clement Attlee, deputy leader of the Labour Party, and read:

That, in the opinion of this House, it is an essential preliminary to the success of the forthcoming World Economic Conference that the British Government should give clear and unequivocal support to an immediate, universal, and substantial reduction of armaments on the basis of equality of status for all nations, and should maintain the principles of the Covenant of the League of Nations by supporting the findings of the Lytton Commission on the Sino-Japanese dispute.1

This was obviously an attempt to embarrass the Prime Minister, a well-known pacifist — and a hated former leader of the Labour Party. But MacDonald didn’t speak in the following debate; instead, his Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, defended the Government’s record and went into some hopeful diplomatic initiatives in some detail. George Lansbury, Labour’s leader, lashed out and accused all nations of failing to fulfill any of the international peace pacts signed since the war. Baldwin spoke last of all. According to the Times’s parliamentary correspondent, when he finished ‘There was a deep and almost emotional round of applause’ from the House.2 Of course, he was the party leader for most of the MPs, but it does seem that he had touched a chord. Baldwin had a longstanding record of concern about the air threat and his sincerity would have been evident. And — not that there was ever any doubt given the huge majority enjoyed by the National Government — Attlee’s motion was defeated by 402 votes to 44.

The following transcript of his speech is taken not from Hansard but from The Times.3 I’ve edited it lightly, mainly to move the murmurs of approval from the listening MPs into footnotes. The phrases in bold are those which are most commonly quoted.
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  1. The Times, 11 November 1932, p. 7.
  2. Ibid., p. 14.
  3. Ibid., p. 8.

The shave of the future NOW!

31 October 2007 in 1930s, Art, Ephemera, Periodicals, Pictures, Quotes by Brett Holman | 3 comments

brave new world.. TOMORROW MORNING

While trawling through newspapers I keep an eye out for interesting aircraft-related advertisements. These are not uncommon, most obviously in relation to industries which could claim some relationship with aviation (after any record-breaking flight, there was usually at least one ad pointing out how much the triumphant pilot owed to some petroleum product or other). Other companies had to try a bit harder to make some aerial connection (Lyon’s swiss rolls, for example). But this magnificent example goes way beyond most! Actually, aviation is only one element of its vision of the future, designed to sell Field-day, a shaving lotion made from olive oil.

Here’s the text which appears below the image:

What of the future? What shall we wear? Eat? Drink? Shall we live in glass houses? Travel in Gyroplanes and wear Television on our wrists? Who knows? But we do know how we shall shave — for “Field-day” is one of the ‘Things to Come’ that’s here already! Revolutionary! Incomparably better! Different — not only from lather but from other ‘brushless’ creams. Fast — for the age of speed. Blades last longer. Simple and safe, too! Safe because you can see through “Field-day” as you shave instead of blindly guessing! Made with pure Olive Oil .. free from Caustic Alkali (an essential part of lather!) Made for the Future. On sale NOW. Are you going to wait — or be one of the ‘Moderns’? For the sake of your skin and your razor-blades do step out of that rut.1

So how is the future invoked here in the pursuit of higher sales figures for Field-day? Most obviously, the city of the future has giant skyscrapers, with aeroplanes (and giant tubes of shaving lotion, ridden by a man who is clearly accustomed to boldly taking charge of his destiny in his dressing-gown) flying in between them. In fact, one of the skyscrapers is also an airport: there’s an aeroplane just taking off from it, and at the top of the tower is a windsock. Aside from the odd heliport or two, downtown airports have failed to materialise, but they remained a possibility in the 1930s.2 The text mentions such wondrous technological possibilities as glass houses, autogiros, and wrist televisions.3

Then there is the rhetorical, almost ritual, use of the names of those two great novels about the future to come out of Britain in the 1930s, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and H. G. Wells’s The Shape of Things to Come (1933) (or rather, the 1936 film-of-the-book, Things to Come). Neither of these can be said to look forwards to the future without any misgivings, however; the one is a dystopia (albeit one masquerading as a utopia), and the other might as well be, at least for the hundreds of millions of people killed along the road to a technologically-sophisticated, tunic-wearing paradise. So they might seem an odd choice for a straightforwardly optimistic (if not entirely straightfaced, perhaps) depiction of the future. But that’s par for the course: the titles of both books very quickly became a shorthand for the unknown future, often with little relation to anything in Huxley or Wells.4

Finally, there are all the key words defining the attributes which are to be associated with the future, and with Field-day: it will be revolutionary, incomparably better, different, faster, longer lasting, simple and safe. What man could resist a shaving lotion so laden with futurity? It is indeed the shave of the future, NOW. I do so want to be one of the Moderns, and I’d buy it myself, for sure — except that judging by Google, it looks like neither Field-day nor J. C. and J. Field, Ltd., its manufacturer, actually made it into this future. O brave new world, that doesn’t have such things in it!

  1. Daily Mail, 8 May 1937, p. 14.
  2. For example, in 1935 the Corporation of London was reported to be considering buying up land for a city airport along the south bank of the Thames, possibly near (or between?) London Bridge and Tower Bridge. Another possibility was to actually build a landing platform over the Thames itself. Daily Mail, 2 February 1935, p. 5. Even more extraordinary was the proposal made in 1931 by Charles Glover, an architect, for an elevated airport above the railway siding yards at King’s Cross and St Pancras stations. This would have taken the form of a wheel half a mile across, with the spokes acting as runways. There is a drawing and a bit more detail in Felix Barker and Ralph Hyde, London As It Might Have Been (London: John Murray, 1995 [1982]), 212.
  3. So we’re still not in “the future” yet, although an increasing number of people effectively have a television in their pockets or hand bags, combined with telephone, still camera, movie camera, gramophone …
  4. Yes, “brave new world” is itself lifted from Shakespeare, where it’s used differently; but The Times could only find occasion to quote the phrase twice in the almost-century-and-a-half before the publication of Huxley’s novel, and then used it at least 11 times in the rest of the 1930s (not including direct references to the book or to The Tempest).

Making an airminded youth (and a gliding model aeroplane)

24 October 2007 in 1930s, Aircraft, Periodicals, Pictures by Brett Holman | 16 comments

Model plane

Here’s something a bit different. It’s a paper model aeroplane which I made from a design published on 30 June 1934 in “Boys and Girls”, the weekly children’s supplement to the Daily Mail. The claim is made there that it glides, but sadly all mine does is stall and then enter a tailspin … but perhaps somebody taking greater care in making the model will have greater success! A PDF of the plan can be downloaded from here (size 1.4 Mb) and then printed out onto an A4-sized sheet of paper, if anyone wants to try it. The only other materials needed are a thin, stiff piece of card (for backing), glue, a match (for the wheel axle), a pin (for the propeller), tissue paper or something similar (to weight the nose, in the event that the model is actually airworthy). And scissors. The instructions are in the PDF; here are some tips based on my own experience:

  • It does make it a lot easier if you fold where appropriate before you assemble the model!
  • Take especial care to score along the lines on the rear fuselage section, as otherwise it will be out of shape and the tail assembly won’t sit straight.
  • There’s no need to make the left and right tabs on the forward underside of the fuselage overlap precisely, as the “fuselage closing strip” is then going to be too wide for the fuselage at the front and will spoil the aeroplane’s clean lines.

I think the original was in colour, but the microfilm I printed it from was not, so unfortunately it’s a little drab. The colours could be worked out from the roundel and added with a paint program — or even just coloured in on the paper — but that would require more energy than I was prepared to expend :)

“Boys and Girls” would often include an aviation-related cartoon or story — in fact, one of the regular strips followed the adventures of Phil and Fifi, the “flying twins” — but this edition was chock-full of airminded goodness. The Whisker Pets see an aeroplane and decide to make their own (hilarity ensues); a stork-powered air show entertains the inhabitants of Treasure Island (’I like being an airwoman’, says Penelope the parrot); two panels list “Famous flyers’ great flights” (including some not so famous now, such as the non-stop flight of Codos and Rossi from New York to Syria in 1933); and on the Pet & Hobby Page, Teddy Tail provides some hints on how to make airworthy model aircraft — which I clearly should have read before making mine! This was obviously intended to coincide with the annual RAF Pageant held at Hendon on the very same day, a hugely popular air show: 200,000 attended that year, a record crowd — despite the best efforts of pacifist demonstrators outside the front gates.

This being the Daily Mail, there was probably another agenda besides getting plane-crazy youngsters to remind their parents to buy their favourite right-wing newspaper that Saturday: to make even more plane-crazy youngsters. The need to create an airminded youth was a common theme in the Rothermere press in the 1930s. For example, just two days earlier, Amy (Johnson) Mollison’s regular aviation column had been entitled “Don’t discourage the young idea in flying”,1 in reference to an Air Ministry ban on solo flying under the age of 17, after a 16-year old boy had been killed doing just that near Scarborough. And, near the end of the year, Lord Rothermere himself contributed an article called “Make the youth of England air-minded! Has Germany 10,000 aeroplanes?”2 — the question explaining and justifying the demand.

The RAF roundels on the model aeroplane mark it out as a machine of war, not a pleasure craft or commercial aeroplane. So while I had fun making and trying to fly it, I was also replaying (in a very small way) the mobilisation of youth for the next air war. I wonder how many of the adolescent boys and girls who made it before me joined the RAF or the ATA when the prospect of war became reality, just five years later?

  1. Daily Mail, 28 June 1934, p. 4.
  2. Daily Mail, 4 December 1934, p. 15.

Seventy-two gas masks

12 October 2007 in 1930s, Books, Civil defence, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Pictures, Quotes by Brett Holman | 13 comments

27 gas masks

The above photograph, and all of the following, are from Poison Gas (London: Union of Democratic Control, 1935).
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Destroying London

9 October 2007 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, After 1950, Before 1900, Books, Contemporary, Film, Maps, Pictures, Quotes by Brett Holman | No comments

The Invasion of 1910

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?
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  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.

Companions

4 October 2007 in 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Books, Cold War, Collective security, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Periodicals, Quotes, Space, Videos by Brett Holman | 4 comments

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

It’s 50 years since Sputnik I lifted off. Although I was airminded as a kid, I was much more spaceminded. So 1957 was always a crucial year in my understanding of history back then: it was where the modern age began. (In fact the very first historical work I ever I started — but never finished! — was a history of the space race from Sputnik on. I can’t have been older than 12 so it’s not exactly sophisticated …)

More than that, to me 1957 was where the future began. A future where humans would spread out into the solar system and then explore the universe beyond. And who knows? Maybe I’d even get to take part in that somehow! That future hasn’t quite worked out the way I’d envisaged it — yet — but of course, I’m in good company where failing to predict the future is concerned. There’s a good article by Michael J. Neufeld in the July/August 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, on Wernher von Braun’s proposals for manned orbital battle stations. In the early 1950s, von Braun predicted that these would be used to deploy nuclear weapons in orbit. For example, in a conference paper published in 1951, he wrote that

Our space station could be utilized as a very effective bomb carrier, and for all present-day means of defense, a non-interceptible one.1

and that

The political situation being what it is, with the Earth divided into a Western and an Eastern camp, I am convinced that such a station will be the inevitable result of the present race of armaments.2

Neufeld makes the point that for all his expertise in rocketry — including leading the V2’s development team — von Braun’s obsession with space stations meant that he failed to realise that ballistic missiles actually made a lot more sense as a delivery platform for nuclear weapons, rather than space-launched hypersonic gliders — a space station being a relatively big and very predictable target, for one thing.3

Von Braun wasn’t the only one arguing along those lines. There were others. The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein co-authored a popular article in 1947 for Collier’s Magazine which suggested putting nukes in orbit. In a novel published the following year, Space Cadet, he expanded upon this idea. Now, I read Space Cadet probably a couple of dozen times when I was a kid, but haven’t for a long time so I’ll have to rely upon the Wikipedia page to explain:

The Space Patrol is entrusted by the worldwide Earth government with a monopoly on nuclear weapons, and is expected to maintain a credible threat to drop them on Earth from orbit as a deterrent against breaking the peace. [...] The cadets are taught that they should renounce their allegiance to their country of origin and replace it by a wider allegiance to humanity as a whole and to all of the sentient species of the Solar System.

It never occurred to me before now, but this is nothing more than the international air force concept, so beloved of liberal internationalists in the 1930s (it was included in the Labour Party’s manifesto for the 1935 general election, for example), but now updated for the coming space age! Only now instead of pilots of all nations standing by, ready to drop high explosives on any aggressor nation, it would be astronauts with atom bombs. Plus ça change … sometimes, anyway.

When I was 12, I understood that Sputnik I was part of a ‘Race for Space’ between two superpowers, as I put it, but I mainly saw it it as a straightforward — if impressive — technical achievement, which the Soviet Union managed to do first. I certainly didn’t have much clue about the bigger picture of the Cold War or the historical background to the decision to launch a small sphere into orbit, though. Now it’s hard for me to see things in any other way, as all of the above probably demonstrates. But sometimes it’s good just to forget about all that context and just appreciate the thing-in-itself.

So I’ll end by reverting to age 12 and saying wow, that is just so ace!

  1. Quoted in Michael J. Neufeld, “Wernher von Braun’s ultimate weapon”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2007, 53.
  2. Quoted in ibid.
  3. But the fact that von Braun was still trying to sell the public on manned space stations in 1965 with no military role beyond reconnaissance suggests that it’s more that he just really, really liked space stations, rather than that he wasn’t aware of the potential of ballistic missiles.

Alert the amphibious squadron!

29 August 2007 in 1930s, Aircraft, Art, Blogging, Periodicals, Pictures by Brett Holman | No comments

I don’t often link to interesting posts from Modern Mechanix because once you start, where do you stop? But I am compelled to point out this one which reprints an October 1934 Modern Mechanix and Inventions article about an American (presumably) idea for a solar-powered flying airfield.

Modern Mechanix October 1934

It’s as simple as putting a landing strip for aeroplanes on top of an airship, and covering the rest of the top surface with ’solar photo cells’ (i.e., solar panels). The article suggests that one application would be that ‘Planes could land on the dirigible, floating over the sea, to refuel for trans-ocean passenger service’.

So, going one way, this links to other contemporary ideas for routinising flight over the Atlantic (in particular), such as the seadrome and Project Habbakuk. In another direction, it links to modern solar-powered airships designed for stratospheric surveillance. And finally, it links to real-life flying aircraft carriers such as the USS Macon and fictional ones such as HMS Whatever-it-was in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

There’s no information given in the article about whose idea this was. The suspicion arises that it was invented purely to justify putting an airship on the front cover … not too different from this post, really!

War games: tabloid edition

21 August 2007 in 1930s, 1940s, Books, Games and simulations, Periodicals, Quotes by Brett Holman | 8 comments

I’ve been reading the Daily Mail quite a lot since I’ve been here, but only issues published in 1940 or earlier. So I’m grateful to Jakob for pointing me in the direction of an article in today’s edition about German boardgames from the Second World War. It’s fascinating, but why is it news? Ostensibly because a German collector is auctioning them in Britain, but really the point would seem to be to contrast the bloodthirsty German kids of 1940 with their far more innocent British counterparts:

During the dark days of the Second World War, British children passed the time with marbles, hopscotch, tiddlywinks and, for a lucky few, a Monopoly set.

But over in Germany, the amusements were far less innocent.

In one version of bagatelle named Bombers over England, children as young as four were encouraged to blow up settlements by firing a spring-driven ball on to a board featuring a map of Britain and the tip of Northern Europe.

Players were awarded a maximum 100 points for landing on London, while Liverpool was worth 40.

It’s not just the Mail either. Says the Sun:

WARTIME Nazi board games rewarding German children for “blowing up” British targets have been unearthed.

The 1940s toys show that while UK kids played marbles and tiddlywinks, German youngsters were trying to score points by destroying London.

The Daily Mirror titles its story “Sick ‘blast Brits’ Nazi toys found” and adds that ‘Board games based on snakes and ladders and battleships also get a disturbing Nazi twist’.

Well, Nazis are an easy target, aren’t they — even juvenile ones. But of course, as I’ve discussed here recently, British children played war games too, so it’s really rather silly to pretend that they spent the whole war playing tiddlywinks, whereas the kinder on the other side of the North Sea were plotting the destruction of Britain. And to their credit, most of the commenters on the articles have seen through this too (one even mentioned L’Attaque!)
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How popular was Things to Come?

15 August 2007 in 1930s, Books, Film, Tools by Brett Holman | 8 comments

While I’m on the topic of Things to Come, I should correct a mistake I made in the talk I gave at the summer school. I said that Things to Come didn’t do particularly well at the box office. I still haven’t found any actual figures for that, but I’ve found what may be better, a ranking of its popularity out of all films shown in Britain in 1936. It turns out it was the 9th most popular film that year, out of over a hundred shown, so obviously it should actually be counted as a success. (Given that it was also an expensive film to make, it may not have turned much of a profit, if any, and that may have been what I was thinking of.)

This information comes from a very interesting exercise in quantitative history, John Sedgwick’s Popular Filmgoing in 1930s Britain: A Choice of Pleasures (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2000). What Sedgwick did was take a sample of cinemas and go through their programmes to see how many weeks each feature film was shown for, and whether it had first or second billing, to be used as a weight. He also came up with a weighting for each cinema, based on its capacity to earn revenue (more seats and/or higher ticket prices means more weight). The number of weeks a film was shown for at a given cinema is then multiplied by the billing weight and the cinema weight, and this number was summed across all cinemas the film was shown at, to arrive at a popularity statistic, POPSTAT, for the film. Just in case that explanation failed to confuse you, here’s the equation defining POPSTAT, from p. 71 of his book:1

POPSTAT equation

To the extent that POPSTAT actually means something, I suppose it is the potential total earnings of a film, and this in turn reflects the judgement of cinema managers as to whether cinema patrons would actually come to see the film, which in its turn would have been based upon how well the film was actually doing (ie, is it worth keeping it on for another week?) So in the end, assuming that cinema managers were responding to market forces, POPSTAT does indirectly measure something of a film’s popularity.2 For the record, Things to Come has a POPSTAT of 40.65, just behind Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Swing Time (40.95 — so close as makes no difference) but comfortably ahead of the Dickens adaptation, A Tale of Two Cities (34.18). The most popular film of the year was Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (83.26). Most films in the top 100 had POPSTATs in the teens. (The results for 1934-6 are actually online as an appendix to a seminar given by Sedgwick.)

And if you don’t trust all that number-crunching, then here’s one data point Sedgwick mentions, relating specifically to Things to Come: its run at the Leicester Square Theatre (where it premiered, as it happens) was 9 weeks, with the longest run for that cinema in 1932-7 being 11 weeks. So, I think it can safely be said that it wasn’t a flop (contra me). 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, as in the clip in the previous post. In fact, I don’t know of any. So however successful Things to Come actually was — and it should be remembered that this may have been due more to the visually stunning scenes set in 2036 than the more depressing scenes set in 1940 — it’s not something film producers rushed out to emulate.

  1. You can create your own using a LaTeX-based generator. Try it, it’s fun!
  2. The exact numbers should be taken with a grain of salt — I doubt four significant figures can be meaningful with such a dataset. One important caveat is the cinema sample. Not every cinema in Britain is used but only a selection of West End and first-run provincial cinemas. But unless films were markedly more popular in their second runs, I don’t think this would matter too much.

The destruction of Everytown, 1940

15 August 2007 in 1930s, Conferences and talks, Film, Videos by Brett Holman | 4 comments

The week before last, I had the opportunity to present a talk about my PhD topic at an Open University summer school (cheers Chris!) It was the first time I’ve given a talk about the thesis as a whole and I think it went OK — I don’t know that I’m getting better as a public speaker but at least I’m not so nervous these days. But I had intended to show a scene from the 1936 science fiction classic, Things to Come (adapted by H. G. Wells from his own 1933 novel, The Shape of Things to Come). For once the technology worked; but I’d queued up the wrong scene on the DVD and so after a few attempts at finding the right part I gave up. But thanks to YouTube, here’s the scene the students didn’t get to see. It’s the air raid on Everytown on Christmas eve, 1940:

I think it’s very well done, and would have been very impressive on a big screen. For the small screen, there’s a new special edition DVD, which I must get around to buying …

War games

5 August 2007 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, After 1950, Australia, Cold War, Ephemera, Games and simulations, Maps, Periodicals, Pictures, Quotes, Travel 2007 by Brett Holman | 16 comments

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:

Aviation

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!)
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Ello, ello, ello, what’s all this then?

20 July 2007 in 1930s, Air control, Art, Periodicals, Pictures, Quotes by Brett Holman | 5 comments

It’s Lord Baden-Powell, Chief Scout, who at one stage in the 1930s seems to have had a regular spot in the Daily Mail’s “Boys & Girls” section, teaching the future imperial overlords all about their wonderful Empire. In the 18 March 1938 issue, he contributed a piece called “Policeman aeroplanes”, along with the following rather cute drawing:

(I apologise for the blurriness, I don’t have access to a scanner at the moment and so a photo of a printout is the best I can do.) B-P explains how aeroplanes can keep restless natives in line:

The other day, in passing through Aden, we heard that two of the tribes of Arabs in the district had broken out into war against each other. Before they could get very far with it, the Royal Air Force had an aeroplane hovering over them like a policeman. The aeroplane dropped notices to tell them that they were to stop fighting at once, and make peace and go home.

So although aeroplanes have done so much in speeding up transport, so that people can travel and mails can go in a few days where it used to take several weeks, aeroplanes also have their uses in many other directions, and will go on becoming more and more useful when you fellows grow up to pilot them.1

So RAF air control policies — the use of airpower in internal security roles — are, according to Baden-Powell, much like a firm but kindly neighbourhood bobby breaking up scuffling schoolboys. Nobody even gets hurt, isn’t that nice!
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  1. Daily Mail, 18 March 1938, p. 21.

From knock-out blow to blitzkrieg

3 July 2007 in 1930s, 1940s, Books, Periodicals, Quotes, Words by Brett Holman | No comments

A couple of weeks ago, I showed how the blitzkrieg became the Blitz. Now I’ll show how the knock-out blow became the blitzkrieg.

Despite the abandon with which the term blitzkrieg is thrown around these days to describe the “lightning” German campaigns of the early years of the Second World War, it turns out that it was not a word much used at the time by the German army or German strategists (though neither was it entirely unknown). It’s even been denied that there was even such a strategic concept as blitzkrieg, whether known by that name or not — certainly not until after the German conquest of France, usually held to be the classic example of blitzkrieg. Karl-Heinz Frieser, in his revisionist (but well-received) book The Blitzkrieg Legend opens by saying that

In sober military language, there is hardly any other word that is so strikingly full of significance and at the same time so misleading and subject to misinterpretation as the term blitzkrieg.1

On Frieser’s account, the attack against France and the Low Countries owed less to some innovative pre-war doctrine and more to individual initiative and astute tactics, resulting in a surprising (and strange) victory.2 He argues that rather than thinking of blitzkrieg as strategic in nature — a way to win a war — it might be better conceptualised as an operational idea — a way to win an operation or a campaign (Blitzoperationen, perhaps). This is important, because (according to Frieser), after the fall of France Hitler and his generals made the mistake of thinking they could blitz their way to quick victories, without paying attention to the longer-term economic foundations of a war economy. They fell into the ’semantic trap’ of blitzkrieg. Hence Barbarossa.
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  1. Karl-Heinz Frieser, The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2005), 4.
  2. This helps explain the otherwise puzzling halt of the panzers before Dunkirk — the German high command lost its nerve as it had lost control of its lower-echelon commanders. It wasn’t the first time they’d tried to slow the panzers down, which were usually running far ahead of the mostly non-mechanised infantry.

War of words

26 June 2007 in 1930s, 1940s, Civil defence, Periodicals, Quotes, Words by Brett Holman | No comments

The other day I came across a fascinating article by H. L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore. Mencken was very interested in colloquial English, and to this end penned “War words in England”, published in the February 1944 American Speech, about new words coming into use in the British press as a result of the war. Some are still familiar today (like decontamination — for some reason I’d never realised it was first used in connection with anti-gas precautions), some are still familiar enough though no longer current (siren-suit, appropriate attire for the lady shelterer), others are long forgotten (at least, they’re new to me, e.g., to spitfire and to hurricane — to shoot down an enemy plane). He generally avoided invented words which never gained much popularity, along with acronyms or words formed from them.

Here are some of the more interesting words listed by Mencken.

First there’s blitzkrieg/blitz and derivatives: blitzfighter, an ‘airman or soldier engaged in fighting against a blitzkrieg‘;1 blitzflu, a ‘mild influenza, sudden in its attack’, which struck during the winters of 1941-2 and 1942-3; blitzlull, a break in a blitz; blitzpeace, a peace offensive by Hitler; fireblitzed, ‘Of an area devastated by air bombardment’; flare-blitz, bombers dropping flares. And of course sitzkrieg, a slow war: according to Newsweek (4 March 1940), in coining this the RAF ’scored a direct pun on the word blitzkrieg‘. Despite it’s popularity, there were evidently many people who didn’t like having to use a German word so often — one alternative was to raff (i.e. RAF) a target, another to ruhr it (as in the Ruhr valley, a heavily-industrialised and often-bombed area of western Germany — kind of a reverse coventration). But the Children’s Newspaper thought that the large number of warlike foreign words imported into English perhaps ‘proves that our national genius is for peace rather than war’ (26 July 1941).

Another cluster relates to air raids and associated experiences: flitter, ‘One who sleeps away from home to escape air alarms’ (more usually called a trekker); goofer, someone who doesn’t take shelter during an air raid; jitterbug, `A nervous person’, according to Mencken’s quotes this seems to have a favourite of Cabinet ministers; roof-spotter, somebody watching out for bombers (ie so as to warn the business below that a raid was actually approaching, otherwise work would have to cease everytime an alert sounded); shelteritis, rheumatism; skelter, an air-raid shelter.

Evacuee (from the French evacué) is a word still in use which appears to derive from directly from preparations for air attack in the 1930s; the first use in The Times is from 1938, in the aftermath of Munich. But as with blitzkrieg, there was much resistance at first: ‘Evacuees has a dreadfully alien and official sound, and the novelty of the word is as uncomfortable as new paint’ (Western Evening Herald, 28 October 1939). Many alternatives were proposed, unsuccessfully it seems: pilgrims, shelterers, sojourners, refugees, war guests, ‘Itler’s orphans, movers, exodists/exos (from exodus), dumpees/dumpies, agisters (as though they were farm animals), removee, migrant, transient, scatterer. More successful variants (according to Mencken) were evacuatrix, a female evacuee; guinea-pig, an evacuee or billeted soldier; seavacuation, overseas evacuation, particularly of children; vackie/vack/vickie, abbreviation of evacuee.

Finally, a grab-bag of miscellaneous terms: battle bowler, the helmet worn by soldiers and ARP wardens, a term first heard during the First World War; block-buster, a bomb which can destroy a whole city block (a fun fact to tell students in tutes, I’ve found); bomphlet/bomphleteer, propaganda pamphlets dropped by air and the airmen who drop them; chatter-bug, a civilian who spreads military secrets; parashot/parashooter/paraspotter, Home Guards who are watching for paratroops (itself a new word) — parashot was a very common word in the summer of 1940, which is a testament to the fear of airborne invasion at the time; shiver-sister, a scared civilian (with chatterbug, an invention of Harold Nicolson, apparently); and telefootler, ‘a word for those selfish people who indulge in idle gossip and time-wasting talks on the telephone’ (Herne Bay Press, 1 March 1941). I think this last word should be revived — we all know a telefootler or two, I’m sure.

So the conclusion seems to be that having a war now and then is good for linguistic diversity.

  1. H. L. Mencken, “War words in England”, American Speech, 19 (1944), 3-15; JSTOR. All quotes from this source.

From blitzkrieg to blitz

20 June 2007 in 1930s, 1940s, Periodicals, Quotes, Words by Brett Holman | 7 comments

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

The German bombing of London and other British cities between September 1940 and May 1941 is referred to as “the Blitz”, a contemporary term which, if not actually coined by the press, was certainly popularised by it. Blitz is short for blitzkrieg, German for “lightning war”, which was the label given to the spectacularly mobile armoured offensives, strongly supported by tactical bombing, which led to the rapid conquests of Poland and France. Sometimes it is suggested that it was inappropriate or inaccurate to apply a word having to do with fast-paced ground combat, involving Panzers and Stukas, to a fundamentally different type of warfare, a strategic bombing campaign lasting nine months in which no territory was exchanged and no soldiers even saw each other. For example, after noting the popular origins of blitz, A. J. P. Taylor added as a footnote:

Popular parlance was, of course, wrong. ‘Blitz’ was lightning war. This was the opposite.1

The Wikipedia page on the Blitz says:

The German military doctrine of speed and surprise was described as Blitzkrieg, literally lightning war, from which the British use of blitz was derived. While German air-supported attacks on Poland, France, the Netherlands and other countries may be described as blitzkrieg, the prolonged strategic bombing of London did not fit the term.

I’d like to suggest here that while it’s true that the Blitz wasn’t a lightning war, nonetheless it was a blitzkrieg. Confused? Hopefully I can explain …

Firstly, note that initially blitz and blitzkrieg were synonymous terms. So immediately after the first big raids on London on 7 September 1940, the Daily Express was already using the familiar term: ‘Blitz bombing of London goes on all night’.2 But at the same time, the Spectator was calling it a blitzkrieg:

The full purpose of the Blitzkrieg may have been more fully revealed by the time these lines are read. Its immediate object no doubt is to break morale.3

(Blitzkrieg seems to have been more common at first, but after a month or so it was replaced by blitz.) I think this is significant, because it shows that the British didn’t think of the Blitz as something fundamentally different from blitzkrieg. It was the blitzkrieg, as applied to the attempted conquest of Britain — which, being separated from the Continent by the English Channel, obviously wasn’t going to play out in exactly the same way as it did in Poland and the West.
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  1. A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 [1965]), 501.
  2. Daily Telegraph, 9 September 1940, p. 1; quoted in OED entry for “blitz”.
  3. ”A decisive hour”, Spectator, 13 September 1940, 260. Emphasis in original.

What happened to Nevil Shute

10 June 2007 in 1930s, After 1950, Australia, Books, Cold War, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Periodicals, Quotes by Brett Holman | 10 comments

It’s not often that I happen across a discussion of knock-out blow novels outside specialist literature, so I was interested to see that Gideon Haigh (probably best known as a cricket writer, but also a fine essayist) talks about Nevil Shute’s What Happened to the Corbetts (1939) in the current issue of The Monthly. The article itself (which is not online; a precis of sorts is available from the Sunday Telegraph) is about On the Beach, published fifty years ago this month: ‘arguably Australia’s most important novel’1 since it was the first really popular novel to deal with nuclear war and human extinction, selling 4 million copies worldwide.

In retrospect, 1957 was a hinge point in the Cold War, when passive resignation about nuclear arms began yielding to alarm and horror. It was the year that the CND was founded in Britain and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy was established in the US; it was the year that the National Council of Churches warned that the arms race might “lead directly to a war that will destroy civilization”. In 1955, fewer than one-fifth of Americans knew what fallout was; by 1958, seven in ten were saying they would favour a worldwide organisation to prohibit nuclear weapons.

How many people during that transition read JB Priestley’s ‘Russia, the Atom and the West’ in the New Statesman? Or heard the Nobel-winning chemist Linus Pauling rail against nuclear arms? And how many read On the Beach? Nevil Shute’s novel was the great popular work on the gravest matter besetting civilisation.2

Haigh is right to see that the two books have a great deal in common.

What Happened, like On the Beach, is a conventional novel on an unconventional, very nearly taboo, subject: the civilian experience of war, with its trials of disaster and displacement. It is not, however, an anti-war novel. To write against war when its coming was inevitable would have struck Shute as pointless posturing. He was arguing not for peace but for preparedness, to ready Britons “for the terrible things that you, and I, and all the citizens of the cities in this country may one day have to face together”. On the novel’s release in April 1939, a thousand copies were distributed to workers in Air Raid Precautions. It was “the entertainer serving a useful purpose”.3

But I don’t know that I agree that the subject of the ‘civilian experience of war’ was ‘very nearly taboo’. There were plenty of novels dealing with this subject written in the 1920s and 1930s, at least as it related to aerial warfare. It’s just that virtually all of the others were sensationalistic trash in comparison to What Happened to the Corbetts