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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, maybe they were related by marriage?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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In 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.

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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.

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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.

This map, taken from The Chosen Instrument (1938) by Norman Macmillan (no relation, as far as I’m aware), shows the ranges from the various ‘heavily-armed air powers’ (France, Germany, Italy) to Britain. I’ve marked the rough range of a hypothetical Chain Home RDF station on Heligoland in red: it covers the entire German north-west coastline very handily.² So, assuming the Luftwaffe respected Dutch neutrality, any bombers they sent to Britain would have to pass through Heligoland’s detection radius. Heligoland could then give warning to London that a knock-out blow was imminent. At the cruising speed of a He 111, and depending on the flight path, that could be 1.5-2 hours additional warning (or even more if the bombers formed up in range of Heligoland). Very handy, even though the actual targets wouldn’t be known until the English coast was crossed.

Obviously, there are a whole bunch of caveats. I’m obviously assuming that, not only is Dutch neutrality respected (and the Low Countries not invaded, for that matter), but also that France has not been conquered. This is not our 1940, in other words, but a scenario often envisaged in the 1930s, where Germany suddenly attacks Britain without any warning. I’m also assuming that Germany doesn’t assault Heligoland first, or cut its communications with Britain (whether radio or cable).³ But even these acts would at least give warning that an attack was imminent, which is more than the British got in the usual nightmare imaginings. Finally, and perhaps least reasonably, I’m assuming that Britain (well, Australia) would not have handed it back to Germany. Heligoland in foreign hands would have been a major irritant to German nationalists, and unlike the case with the ex-German colonies, Hitler wouldn’t have been merely posturing when he said he wanted it back. So, very likely, giving it back to Germany would probably have been one of the first acts of appeasement.

The only reason to keep it, frankly, would be as an early warning post. Even then, would the Air Ministry risk placing such a valuable piece of technology as radar right under the German’s noses, where they could study its emissions at their leisure and quickly capture it in wartime?⁴ Probably not. Though even without RDF (which in any case was secret until 1941), the British public might gain some measure of confidence, whether false or not, just from being told that there were ‘observers’ on Heligoland who would give advance warning of a massive aerial armada heading their way.

Still, it would seem that, even in this alternate history, the Heligoland Mandate would have come to exactly nothing in the end, just as it did in ours. An interesting and diverting nothing, though.

Image source: Norman Macmillan, The Chosen Instrument (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1938), 21.

1. Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2002), 187.
2. Chain Home Low, for detecting low-level aircraft, had a much shorter range. But it would still cover a useful area of sea.
3. Another thought: a German army which had prepared for an opposed landing on Heligoland might also be a bit better prepared for an opposed landing in Kent …
4. Germany had radar too, of course, but they did not well understand the capabilities of the British system or how it would be used — even after the Graf Zeppelin II made several trips parallel to the English coast, loaded with radio detection gear, in what must have been among the first ELINT air missions ever.

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“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.

But some people did think like that, or at least wanted to use the need for urban reconstruction after intensive bombing as an opportunity to build a better city. Even more common were plans for reconstruction before war came, to build a city which would better protect its inhabitants from bombing as well as provide a more pleasant way of life. Indeed, the latter might well be a byproduct of the former, as Alistair Cooke¹ suggested in a review of Lewis Mumford’s The Culture of Cities (1938). He first apologised for criticising Mumford’s penchant for ‘philosophic blueprint[s]’, and then added that:

But it is inevitable at a time when A.R.P. underlines the fact that idealism is possibly the last drive a community acts on when it decides to rebuild itself. Profit, plague, satiation, and especially fear are paramount; a regrettable conclusion that Mr. Mumford himself amply proves in his section on “War as City-Builder.”

He tells in masterly detail of the mediaeval [sic] city’s ache for security after five centuries of looting and civic bankruptcy. But it is likely that radical reform in street-planning, and (in this country) in greenbelt planning, will take effect not from somebody’s idealism but from Mr. Langdon-Davies’s insistence that air raids make such foresight inevitable. Planning for war may, in this instance, bring about peace-time playgrounds that philanthropy would never have created.²

Not all visions of the bombproofed cities of the future were so positive. Only two weeks later, the same publication reported on the British delegation’s report to the 1938 International Housing and Townplanning [sic] Congress, held in Mexico City:

Here we get in all its nakedness a picture of the life to which civilised man will be condemned if air-warfare is to be perpetuated as one of the enduring achievements of civilisation. It is true that his life would not be spent underground, but all the essentials of life would have to be duplicated underground. Car-parks would go beneath the surface so that they could be used as shelters (but according to Professor Haldane they would have to go at least 50 feet down), hospitals would have to go underground, so would museums, for the security of their contents, so should all places of public entertainment, and communications must of course be constructed underground, at a cost of about £1,000 a foot. It is just as well that we should realise what faces us even if actual war in the immediate future is avoided and only the prospect of war overhangs us.³

In a society where, apparently, it would either take the threat of war to build truly livable cities, or alternatively, that threat would force life partly underground, one can perhaps understand why ‘the hatred of modern life, the desire to see our money-civilization blown to hell by bombs’ was ‘a thing […] genuinely felt’ by the protagonist of George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). Of course, none of these things happened, but that’s another story.

1. Yes, that Alistair Cooke, though being neither American nor British I’m more familiar with Alistair Cookie.
2. Alistair Cooke, “A diary of civilisation”, Spectator, 26 August 1938, 241.
3. “The subterranean life”, Spectator, 9 September 1938, 391.

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In 1923, the Salisbury Committee enquired into the proper relationship between the RAF, on the one hand, and the Army and Navy, on the other. According to Andrew Boyle’s biography of Hugh Trenchard, the then Chief of the Air Staff quoted a recent statement by Sir Ian Hamilton (the commander at Gallipoli) at some point during this inquiry:

Surely we who have witnessed the Germans doing star turns over London and the second exodus of the Jews, surely we will be worse than Thomas Didymus if we do not put the conquest of the air above the conquest of the sea?¹

This needs a little explaining. The bit about the Germans must be a reference to the Gotha raids on London in 1917-8, when the German bombers seemed to come and go with impunity. Thomas Didymus, Google informs me, was the apostle Thomas, so I suppose this is a reference to doubting Thomas, meaning that with all this evidence, there’s no longer any reason to doubt that the air is more important than the sea. And the second exodus of the Jews? Admittedly, I haven’t read all of Hamilton’s article (or whatever it was), but still, I’m pretty sure that this is an anti-Semitic libel.

Anti-Semitism was not uncommon in interwar Britain. This is well-known, but it’s sometimes represented as merely unpleasant and relatively benign — which it certainly was when compared with some other countries. However, it could go beyond mere unpleasantness into real ugliness. One idea which was floating around in airpower writing in the early 1920s is that Jews were especially likely to crack under the pressure of bombing. And that supposedly, during the Gotha and other air raids on London, rich Jews had fled the city for the safety of the seaside resorts — Hamilton’s ’second exodus’ — while poor ones stayed in the East End but ran around in a blind panic.

Sometimes Jews were referred to in code. For example, the authors of Air Raid Damage in London (1923), published by the British Fire Prevention Committee, referred to ‘aliens’, which I think would have been commonly understood to mean, primarily, Jews (the Aliens Act of 1905 was largely aimed against Jewish immigration). They asserted that during air raids, ‘the average Londoner, both male and female, showed his usual equanimity and sang-froid, often under most trying circumstances’, but then added that:

Any individual who was panic-stricken or lost his morale was the exception, but where he did, it was largely due to the bad influence of the alien or semi-alien population, who, with but few exceptions, behaved in a manner that was both despicable and dangerous.²

So their implication is that while the British behaved splendidly, the aliens did not — but then, they’re not really British anyway, are they? The trashier more popular end of the spectrum of knock-out blow novels was more blatantly anti-Semitic, and often owed as much to fears of ‘the enemy in our midst’ as to the fear of the bomber. William le Queux, the grand master of really, really bad invasion and spy novels, tried his hand at an air-scare story in 1920, The Terror of the Air. In le Queux’s world, even being bombarded with pamphlets is enough to send Jews over the edge:

The atmosphere before was electrical; the fall of the leaflets let loose the storm. Babel broke forth. Miles away people heard the noise of the shouting and screaming. The scene was bad enough in the purely English districts, but in the East End, in Soho, and similar quarters where Jews and foreigners of all types were still herded together, swamping the native population, the panic was indescribable.³

Even the Earl of Halsbury’s relatively classy 1944 features a pretty clear, negative Jewish stereotype: a ‘more than usually fat and prosperous-looking diner’ named Griesheim, ‘with large pudgy hands and an oleaginous smile’ and worth over £2 million. When the air raid begins he tramples over the woman in front of him in his rush to get out of the restaurant, and a young Englishman is forced to punch his ‘bloated jaw’ to show him that this sort of thing just isn’t done.⁴

By the 1930s, this sort of thing was becoming rarer — possibly because events in Germany were making expressions of anti-Semitism less acceptable.⁵ One writer who did repeat it was the retired RAF officer L. E. O. Charlton. In War over England (1936), in a section on the First World War air raids, he wrote that

The foreign folk in the crowded East End district were singularly liable to an unreasoning panic, particularly the preponderating Jewish element […] it is an undoubted fact that in the air-raid periods they were far more subject to alarm than the body of the people with whom they dwelt […] the distress of Jewish mothers and children was very difficult to soothe. They would scream loudly, tearing their clothes and beating their breasts […] bands of young aliens belonging to neutral or allied countries, shedding every vestige of manhood, would behave like animals of the wild, sometimes brutally trampling people to death in a mad, insensate rush for safety.

Charlton at least suggested that this behaviour was ‘probably the result of harsh treatment and persecution through the ages from every nation under the sun’.⁶ But unsurprisingly, the fascist J. F. C. Fuller left out that part when quoting the socialist Charlton’s book the following year.⁷ Again, the message is that the ‘real’ British are made of sterner stuff than the inferior foreign types living among them, who will be a liability in wartime.

To be sure, this repellent anti-Semitic streak was only present in a fairly small fraction of books about the next war from the air in the 1920s and 1930s. (Perhaps because it wouldn’t help their arguments to suggest that only a minority of a city’s inhabitants would break under the pressure of bombing.) But then again, neither did many writers take trouble to refute this libel. The only one I’ve come across is J. M. Spaight, in Air Power and War Rights (1924):

No doubt, on the whole, London took the air raids with dignity and composure, but no one who is acquainted with the facts can admit that the people who left London to crowd into Maidenhead, Manchester, Brighton and other safer towns, were exclusively “Jews and aliens.”⁸

So, thank you, Spaight, for not being an anti-Semite!

1. Andrew Boyle, Trenchard (London: Collins, 1962), 469.
2. E. C. P. Monson and Ellis Marsland, Air Raid Damage in London (London: British Fire Prevention Committee, 1923), 8.
3. William le Queux, The Terror of the Air (London: Herbert Jenkins, n.d [1920]), 71.
4. Earl of Halsbury, 1944 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1926), 89, 97.
5. Not for Hamilton though: by this time he was a Nazi sympathiser, possessed of an anti-Semitism which ‘had a distinct racial edge to it, beyond the conventional anti-Jewish sentiment which was commonplace at the time in much of the British upper class, in that he was prepared to stipulate negative physical features and behavioural characteristics of Jews’. Ian Kershaw, Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and Britain’s Road to War (London: Allen Lane, 2004), 55.
6. L. E. O. Charlton, War over England (London, New York and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1936), 13.
7. J. F. C. Fuller, Towards Armageddon: The Defence Problem and its Solution (London: Lovat Dickson, 1937), 168.
8. J. M. Spaight, Air Power and War Rights (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1924), 9. Spaight also quoted a historian of the war to the same effect, A. F. Pollard’s Short History of the Great War, 308, which I haven’t seen.

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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.

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

So here’s what I can make out of the gameplay. There are up to four players who driving a car or lorry across a blacked-out London. Each player starts in a corner of the map corresponding to the colour of their vehicle, and presumably wins by getting to the opposite corner. (The corners are Hyde Park Corner, Marble Arch, Holborn, Charing Cross.) The board is a map of London which bears some relation to the actual geography of the city (as Monopoly does not). But it’s not marked into squares or numbers or anything, so it’s a bit unclear how movement works.

One clue is the arrows drawn across the streets at intervals, each with a symbol beside it. These symbols seem to relate to various civil defence organisations or objects: Air Raid Precautions, Auxiliary Fire Service London, Metropolitan Police (?), fire hose, fire helmet, buckets of sand, fire extinguishers (?), a siren (?), a kerbside pillar of some sort (?), a red cross, a yellow cross, a blue and white ribbon (?). Presumably they are obstacles of some sort (and maybe opportunities too), and it’s the successful navigation through these hazards which determines success or failure.

Another clue is that there seem to be three different directions a player can go in from each corner, so from Hyde Park Corner they could go down Park Lane, Piccadilly or Constitution Hill. It’s a ’skilful game’, so I think the player gets to choose which direction to go in, which way to turn at corners. Since it doesn’t seem that the players could interact with each other (i.e. to slow each other down somehow), there’s probably some random element too, or else there wouldn’t be much replayability once the fastest routes have been figured out. It’s also a ‘card game’, but unfortunately none of the cards are shown, so I can only guess at what they might do. One possibility is that they dictate movement (e.g. ‘move to the nearest AFS post’). Another is they are random events (e.g. ‘you fail to stop at a sentry point and the Home Guard shoots you dead’).

That’s about all I can say from the information to hand, except to add that it must date to between 1938 and 1941 (the years the AFS operated). It looks like it could be an amusing game for children, with more possibilities for skill than Snakes and Ladders type games, and with the added bonus of teaching a bit of London geography. But it’s also a reflection of life in a city made strange and unfamiliar by the hazards of the blackout.

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