The article's author, B., sketches the part played by Barchester in the last war and the present one:

In the past Barchester has always fought its wars by proxy. The dignitaries of its historic past, the Proudies, the Arabins, and the Grantleys, followed the fortunes of the Army in the newspapers with a highly vociferous but none the less detached regard. Their successors of 1914 have not yet found a chronicler, but they too, though they wrought manfully in the work of caring for the thousands of troops round about and though most of them suffered the loss of a son, regarded wars as highly distressing events which happened somewhere else. The serene security of Barchester itself remained unquestioned and undisturbed even through that ordeal.

To-day it is undisturbed no longer, and if Bishop Proudie and his redoubtable wife and chaplain were living now they would hardly believe themselves to be in the same world. The Bishop would be required to take himself to shelter on an average twice a day. His wife would make his life even more of a burden, for her temper, never very equable, would not survive the strain of continually interrupted meals. Mr. Slope, like his successor of to-day, would be drafted firmly into the A.F.S., be forced to put on a scratchy uniform at a most undignified speed, and then to work under the firm and fluent direction of one of the cathedral vergers. ¹

It's very dryly done, and I doubt I would have picked it up except that I've read Framley Parsonage. I'm sure that many more people were familiar with Trollope then than now, but even so some Guardian readers were probably left wondering why they should care about this town they'd never heard of where, which seemed no different than any other, and where nothing much was happening. Perhaps that was the point, that as a nowhere it stood for everywhere:

That is the limit of our excitement so far. [Barchester] is an oasis in a desert of alarm signals which have become so frequent and so uneventful that most of us now carry a book about us to read during the next raid.²

I can't help but wonder what happened to other non-existent British places during the war. Was 221B Baker Street blitzed? Did Totleigh Towers get taken over as a rehabilitation hospital for wounded airmen? Was Avalon tilled by the Women's Land Army? Much research remains to be done.

1. Manchester Guardian, 28 August 1940, 3.
2. Ibid.

This photograph of Australian soldiers was taken during the First World War. It's not particularly unusual: just a group of mates getting together to record a memento, perhaps after a weekend's carousing in the fleshpots of Cairo or Paris.

Mateship is a important concept in Australian culture. The OED defines it as 'The condition of being a mate; companionship, fellowship, comradeship' and notes that it is 'Now chiefly Austral. and N.Z.' The Australian National Dictionary gives several more specifically Australian shades of meaning, from 'An acquaintance; a person engaged in the same activity', to 'One with whom the bonds of close friendship are acknowledged, a "sworn friend"', to 'A mode of address implying equality and goodwill; freq. used to a casual acquaintance and, esp. in recent use [...], ironic'. Suffice it to say that pretty much any bloke can have occasion to call another cobber a mate, whether they are good friends or bitter enemies. (Sheilas are another question, of course.)

Mateship is a positive virtue. As C. E. W. Bean wrote in 1921, in the first volume (page 6) of his official history of Australia in the Great War:

The typical Australian [...] was seldom religious in the sense in which the word is generally used. So far as he held a prevailing creed, it was a romantic one inherited from the gold-miner and the bush-man, of which the chief article was that a man should at all times and at any cost stand by his mate. This was and is the one law which the good Australian must never break. It is bred in the child and stays with him through life.

Mateship also has strong military resonances, as Bean's interest in it might suggest. An Army News article on the unveiling of a war memorial in Papua New Guinea commemorating the Kokoda Track, the site of bitter fighting between Australians and Japanese in 1942, notes that the words courage, mateship, endurance and sacrifice are inscribed on its pillars. It further adds that these are 'words that today's Australian Army has built its foundations on'. So mateship is both an expression of Australia's egalitarian spirit and its martial one, as former Prime Minister John Howard explained in a speech given at Australia House in London in 2003:

The two world wars exacted a terrible price from us -- the full magnitude of that lost potential, of those unlived lives can never be measured. And yet, some of the most admirable aspects of Australia's national character were, if not conceived, then more fully ingrained within us by the searing experiences of those conflicts.

None more so than the concept of mateship -- regarded as a particularly Australian virtue -- a concept that encompasses unconditional acceptance, mutual and self respect, sharing whatever is available no matter how meagre, a concept based on trust and selflessness and absolute interdependence. In combat, men did live and die by its creed. 'Sticking by your mates' was sometimes the only reason for continuing on when all seemed hopeless.

I was moved by an account written by Hugh Clarke, who, like thousands of other Australian and British servicemen, endured years of senseless cruelty as a prisoner of the Japanese after the fall of Singapore. He couldn't recall a single Australian dying alone without someone being there to look after him in some way. That's mateship.

Contemporary Australia takes great pride in its egalitarian attitudes. Mud and fear and enemy fire are no respecters of class, rank or parentage and from both wars, our veterans brought back to Australian society a renewed conviction that an individual's worth should be judged -- not by those things -- but by their own talent, courage and personal virtue.

Howard was particularly fond of the concept of mateship; in 1999 he even tried to get it inserted into the preamble of the Australian constitution. It was in fact one of the sites of conflict in Australia's culture wars of the late 1990s and early 2000s: Marilyn Lake has criticised it as reinforcing white solidarity. She has a point; and it's not like Australia is the only country in the world to value mateship, even if it isn't called that. (Although one of the more charming aspects of the word 'mate' is the way it's quickly picked up and used by new arrivals to these shores.) Gender critiques are even more pointed: while women can and do use the word, and can be mates with men and and with each other, it still has a blokey feel. Idealising mateship as an inherently Australian trait is exclusionary, as Martin Ball has argued for the related concept of the 'Anzac spirit':

The Anzac tradition holds many values for us all to celebrate, but the myth also suppresses parts of Australian history that are difficult to deal with. Anzac is a means of forgetting the origins of Australia. The Aboriginal population is conveniently absent. The convict stain is wiped clean. Postwar immigration is yet to broaden the cultural identity of the population. [...] The problem with the simple patriotism of Anzac is that it runs the risk of making some of us are more Australian than others.

Which brings me back to the photograph at the start of the post. It actually isn't as straightforward as it seems. The men pictured are actually all deserters; and the reason they posed for the photograph was to taunt the military authorities they had escaped from. For it was sent to the Australian Assistant Provost Marshal in Le Havre, along with the following letter:

Sir,
With all due respect we send you this P. C. [post card] as a souvenir trusting that you will keep it as a mark of esteem from those who know you well. At the same time trusting that Nous jamais regardez vous encore [we will never see you again]. Au revoir.
Nous

The deserters -- who were apparently never caught -- are displaying mateship, humour, larrikinism and all those good things which are supposedly part of the Australian essence, but deployed in a way that cuts against the celebration of the Anzac spirit. For whatever reason, these men who had all volunteered for war decided to have nothing more to do with it, and so could be considered to be some of the first war resisters in Australian history.

NB. The photograph comes ultimately from the Australian War Memorial, but I found it in Ashley Ekins, ed., 1918 Year of Victory: The End of the Great War and the Shaping of History (Titirangi and Wollombi: Exisle Publishing, 2010). Ekins' own essay in that book on 'morale, discipline and combat effectiveness' has much to say on this topic, though unfortunately doesn't specifically discuss our ten mates above.

A false alarm on a housing estate of parachutists occasioned by a flock of pigeons resulted in about half the tenants rushing to the roof and the rest rushing to the shelters in the basement. In the melee several women fainted. These people are normally calm and collected. They seem to need more advice as to what to do and how to do it on such occasions.¹

It's hard to imagine how an ordinary flock of pigeons could be mistaken for descending parachutists. But if there's one thing I've been hammering over and over on this blog, it's this: fear can make people see danger in the innocuous, whether it's footpaths, meteors, motor cars, Venus, Venus, weather balloons, or even nothing at all. Having said that, there's less evidence of widespread misperception of this sort (as opposed to rumours, of which there are many, though with frustratingly few details) in the MOI reports than I might have expected.

1. Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang, eds., Listening to Britain: Home Intelligence Reports on Britain's Finest Hour, May to September 1940 (London: The Bodley Head, 2010), 91.

Battle of Britain Day by Day - 28 July 1940
Duxford Operations Blog - 28 July 1940
Orwell Diaries - 28 July 1940
Spitfire Site - 24 July 1940
World War II Day-By-Day - 28 July 1940
World War II Today - 26 July 1940

@RAFDuxford1940
@ukwarcabinet
@BattleofBritain
1940 Chronicle
Battle of Britain Pilot's Blog

See also: an introduction; and an aggregation blog.

Twitter:
@RAFDuxford1940 - Twitter version of the Operations Blog
@ukwarcabinet - the view from the Cabinet (The National Archives)
@BattleofBritain - apparently from the diary of a trainee RAF fighter pilot

It's Anzac Day once again. On Anzac Day, Australia remembers some things but forgets others. We remember the sacrifices of the original Anzacs at Gallipoli, but forget that it wasn't only Australians who suffered. We remember the many thousands of young Australians who have fought in foreign wars since then, but forget to ask why they were there. We remember that war can bring out the best in people, but forget that it can also bring out the worst.

One thing we tend to forget is Australia's part in the bombing of Europe in the Second World War. There are a few memorials and exhibits, but when we think of Anzacs we usually think of slouch hats, not flying helmets.

Eight Royal Australian Air Force squadrons served with RAF Bomber Command at various times: 455, 458, 460 (members of which can be seen above arranged in front of -- and on top of -- one of their Lancasters), 462, 463, 464, 466 and 467. Many other Australians flew with RAF heavy bomber squadrons, just as many non-Australians did with the RAAF squadrons. (Often outnumbering the Australians, in fact: when 462 was formed, only one of its aircrew was Australian.) In total, around 10,000 Australians served in Bomber Command during the war, at stations like this one at Waddington, home to 463 and 467 Squadrons for the war's last eighteen months.

The butcher's bill was enormous: of those 10,000, nearly 3500 Australian airmen were killed, out of 10,500 RAAF deaths for the whole war and 39,300 for all three services. That is, one in eleven of Australian service personnel who died in the war did so while serving in Bomber Command. One in three of those Australians who fought their war in the night skies above Europe never came home again. Two hundred men from 463 Squadron were killed in the eight months before D-Day, 130 per cent of its establishment strength.

Above is a RAAF Lancaster of 463 Squadron over Normandy in July 1944. One of its engines is on fire and the crew are about to bail out; two were killed and three taken prisoner.

But to focus on just the Australian casualties would also be a form of forgetting. They didn't join Bomber Command to die but to fight. RAAF aircrew and squadrons played an important role in many of Bomber Command's most famous operations: busting the Ruhr dams, the Amiens prison raid, sinking the Tirpitz. But they also took part in all of the RAF's big assaults on German cities: Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, and so many others.

Above is one of 460 Squadron's Lancasters bombing Freiburg on the night of 27 November 1944, part of a raid which killed about 3000 civilians.

This is Dresden on 14 February 1945, the day after the Allies began their attack on the city. Three RAAF squadrons -- 460, 463 and 467 -- helped to create the firestorm in which 25,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed. At a minimum, the Combined Bomber Offensive killed at least 300,000 civilians in Germany, and many thousands more in occupied Europe. Some proportion of those were killed by Australians -- under British command, true, but with the acquiescence and approval of the Australian government and the great majority of its people. Unlike in Britain, the moral questions surrounding the area bombing of cities in the Second World War have never been controversial in Australia, or even seriously questioned, not at the time, not afterwards. They are glossed over. And when our bomber boys are remembered, just what they bombed is not.

I'm not against Anzac Day at all. It's good to have a day to remember those who fought and those who died for us. But Anzac Day allows us to talk about some things to do with Australia's wars, and not about others. If we remember the great and heroic deeds done in our name, we should also remember those things which are perhaps less comfortable to dwell on. And ask why they happened, and whether they could happen again.

Image sources: Australian War Memorial P03127.002, SUK13470, SUK13775, UK2288, UK2416.

Further reading: Alan Stephens, The Royal Australian Air Force (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001), chapter 5.

In the summer of 1940, strange patterns like these began to appear in the sky over southern England. Today they wouldn't be thought so unusual (except that they are on the twisty side), for contrails are a common sight now, especially over London. Seventy years ago, however, they were a little mysterious, even to those in the aviation community, and even though similar phenomena had sometimes been seen before. Flight reported in July that year:

Some readers may have observed lately what they at first thought to be sky-writing, and a member of the staff of Flight saw a particularly good example on Sunday afternoon, July 7, over London. The same sort of thing had been seen previously, but this was the best example to date and exhibited some features not observed on other occasions. For the benefit of those who have not seen the phenomenon it consists of a thin line of what looks like white cloud, or perhaps of very white smoke made by a sky-writing aeroplane.

While it was allowed that the clouds might be caused by 'the discharge of white smoke from a military aeroplane for some purpose connected with the war', the explanation ultimately plumped for was pretty close to the mark: so-called 'visible vortices':

The explanation which has been given before as a possible reason for visibility of these vortices is that there is condensation of moisture. Such condensation might perhaps be caused in regions of low pressure which may be those parts of the vortex where the velocity is highest. Perhaps there is significance in the fact that it is at the tip of the airscrew (where the blade velocity is greatest) that the visible ring occurs. A fog formed by reduction of pressure can be seen in tunnelling work under the earth when, in order to keep out water, compressed air is supplied to the working face. The men, to get out, have to go into a chamber where the pressure is reduced before they can go into atmospheric pressure. During this decompression, the whole chamber may be filled with fog.

In the case of the trail behind an aeroplane, the condensation theory might be correct as there is plenty of water vapour in the products of combustion in the exhaust gas. If the atmospheric conditions are right, the condensation would certainly cause a visible trail.

But even though (as we now know) this explanation was essentially correct, there was as yet no proof, and there followed considerable correspondence from readers. (Some helpfully suggested that that the visible vortices might be used to track enemy aircraft, either by fighters underneath during the day, or by searchlights at night.) By September Flight felt it had enough information to tentatively confirm its earlier hypothesis, and also to note that there were two types of visible vortices: long-lived helical ones from engine exhaust ('slipstream trails'), and short-lived ones from wingtips ('wing tip trails'). In 1942 de Havilland published a similar but more technical explanation of both types of contrail, so it seems that Flight's theory had become widely accepted. A mathematical theory of contrail formation was independently formulated in Germany in 1941 and in the United States in 1953.

Science aside, the contrails quickly became part of the Battle of Britain and its memory, tracing out the deadly dogfights overhead, as suggested by Paul Nash's 1941 painting Battle of Britain (IWM ART LD1550):

Image sources: Flight, 5 September 1940, e; BBC.

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.

And the Daily Mail in 2010:

British children of the time were playing marbles and hidding [sic] in air raid shelters.

But for youngsters under the Third Reich, this board game was invented to teach them the tactics of warfare - against a British foe.

The war time amusement, Adlers Luftverteidigungs spiel, which translates as the Eagle Air Defence Game, involves two or more players attacking enemy positions on a geographically illustrated board while defending friendly territory.

The supposed contrast between pacifist British kids and militarist German kids is as silly now as it was then. Apparently the Daily Mail hasn't learned anything in the interim. (I checked to see if the same person was responsible for both, but the new article is credited to the improbably-named "DAILY MAIL REPORTER".) The only difference is in the quality of the comments: last time they took the writer to task for his foolishness, now they're almost spEak You're bRanes-worthy.

No doubt there were differences between British and German games of the period -- it's hard to imagine any British equivalent of the 1936 game Juden Raus, where the aim is to force the Jews in your town to emigrate to Palestine -- but simplistic dichotomies (as the Daily Mail seems to be fond of) are not going to help us understand what they were.

At the end of the Meeting there was a reference to a scare which had started through a red balloon floating about in the Eastern Counties. This balloon had been sent up for meteorological purposes, but it had apparently given rise to a scare that gas balloons were being let loose by the Germans. The London Passenger Transport Board had told their employees to be ready to put on their gas-masks!

It seems they weren't particularly concerned by this incident, despite what it might have said about the fragility of morale. The scare wasn't kept secret; the Manchester Guardian had already reported it that morning (p. 7), with some extra details:

"ENEMY GAS"
Harmless Balloons Start Rumours

Extraordinary rumours in Eastern English and Scottish coastal districts followed the discovery yesterday of a number of small balloons. These were harmless British meteorological balloons but stories which had spread in various parts of the country had suggested that they were of enemy origin and that they contained dangerous gas.

At King's Lynn (Norfolk) these stories led to the police issuing the following statement:--

The enemy has dropped balloon toys which may contain gas, highly inflammable, and explode on being touched or handled by lines attached. Police and observer corps should be informed if any are found.

The balloons are used for testing atmospheric conditions and occasionally they sink to the ground without bursting. They are harmless except that they contain hydrogen, and are therefore likely to explode if brought into contact with a naked flame.

So the story is that British meteorologists launched some weather balloons which came down in the eastern parts of England and Scotland. Passers-by found them, thought them suspicious, and reported them to authorities, which in turn made public statements that they were dangerous German weapons -- either incendiary devices or actual poison gas bombs. In more normal times, it's unlikely that a stray weather balloon would be interpreted as something dangerous, just something curious. Now, with the war strangely calm and the expected bombers nowhere to be seen, it's more understandable that people would be jittery and overreact to mundane (if rare) sights (it had happened before and would happen again). And it certainly had to be considered that the Germans might try to use some sort of secret weapon against Britain. But the fact that the scare seems to have happened simultaneously in widely separated places -- London, Norfolk, Scotland -- suggests that there was something else going on too. Was the Met Office trying out a new balloon design? Perhaps it was the red colour mentioned in the War Cabinet discussion which made the balloons look especially sinister? Anyway, it's another scare to add to my list.

PS I think I should get credit for not mentioning Nena. Until now.

It must be time for some plots. The data here is taken from Richard Overy, The Air War 1939-1945 (Washington: Potomac Books, 2005 [1980]), 120, and represents the bomb tonnage delivered between 1940 and 1945 by Germany on Britain (including V-weapons) in blue, and by Britain and the United States on Europe as a whole (meaning Germany, mostly, but also France, Italy, the Netherlands, etc) in red. The first two years cover the Battle of Britain and the Blitz; the last four the Combined Bomber Offensive. Germany dealt out more aerial punishment than it (or its allies and conquests) received only in 1940; from 1943 Britain and the United States dropped vastly more bombs than the Luftwaffe could ever dream of doing. And here is part of the reason why:

This is the number of bombers built by Germany and by Britain and the United States for the same period, though no data is given for Germany in 1945. I'm not sure if the German numbers include V-weapons this time, and I think the numbers for both sides are for any type of bomber, regardless of how or where it was used. So US Navy dive bombers destined for the Pacific would count, and of course after mid-1941 the Kampfgruppen were otherwise engaged. By the same token, however, a single-engined Stuka carrying less than a thousand pounds of bombs is given equal weight to a four-engined Lancaster carrying 14000 lb, so this plot actually underestimates the true scale of the Anglo-American dominance in the production war.

It all turned out pretty much as 'Bomber' Harris told the British public it would, in June 1942:

The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.