After 1950

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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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Official historians behaving badly

29 April 2009 in 1910s, After 1950, Australia, Books, Film, Quotes by Brett Holman | 17 comments

A belated Anzac Day post.

Here’s C. E. W. Bean, the official historian of Australia’s involvement in the First World War, on why the infamous Suvla landings on 6 August 1915 didn’t cut the Gallipoli peninsula and open the road to Constantinople:

The reasons for the failure, which affected the fate of the Australian and New Zealand forces more profoundly than any other episode in the campaign, may be laid bare by future historians, probing unflinchingly for the causes. Many of the Anzac troops, on whom it left an enduring impression, attributed it partly to the senility of the leadership, partly to the inexperience of the troops, but largely to causes which lie deeper in the mentality of the British people. The same respect for the established order which caused Kitchener to entrust the enterprise to unsuitable commanders simply because they were senior, appeared to render each soldier inactive unless his officer directed, and each officer dumb unless his senior spoke. The men had doubtless the high qualities of their race, among them orderliness, decency, and modesty; they could follow a good leader anywhere as bravely as any troops in the Peninsula. But an enterprise such as that of Suvla demanded more than the ability to follow; it required that each man, or at least a high proportion of the force, should be able to lead; and the necessary quality of decision, which even a few years’ emancipation from the social restrictions of the Old World appeared to have bred in the emigrant, was — to colonial eyes — lacking in the Suvla troops. Moreover a large proportion of the new force had come straight from the highly organised life in or around overcrowded cities, and as a result they lacked the resourcefulness required for any activity in open country. They lacked also the hardness to set a high standard of achievement for themselves, while that demanded of them by the regimental and brigade staffs was — to put it mildly — inadequate for one of the decisive battles of the war. Further, though many reports had been heard concerning the excellent physique of the New Army, the standard in that respect was very uneven. There were in reality two well-defined types, the officers as a class being tall and well developed, but a majority of the men cramped in stature, presumably as the result of life in overcrowded industrial centres under conditions not yet operative to any marked extent in the great cities in Australia.

Hmm, so it’s the fault of the British soldier for being ‘cramped in nature’ and lacking in ‘resourcefulness’ and ‘hardness’, unlike the strapping young colonials, of course. At least Bean allows himself an out, in the form of ‘future historians’. One of these historians, Robin Prior, argues that — contrary to received wisdom — the primary aim at Suvla was actually just to set up a supply base for the northern Allied forces, which it did successfully. Any advances across the peninsula were secondary to this, and in any case were never likely to amount to much given the geography, the forces available and the operational plan. Which last, as it happens, was partly authored by Captain Cecil Aspinall, who later wrote (as Aspinall-Oglander) the British official history of the Gallipoli campaign, where he was quite happy to blame the commander on the ground, the elderly but inexperienced Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Stopford, for the ‘failure’ of his plan.

Something for me to bear in mind when I talk to my students in a few weeks about the (brilliant but misleading) 1981 film Gallipoli. Especially the scene where the radio operator at the Nek, where waves of Australian soldiers have been uselessly slaughtered in assaults against Turkish trenches in support of the landings, reports that the British at Suvla have met no resistance but, instead of advancing inland, are ’sitting on the beach drinking cups of tea’. Peter Weir probably can’t be blamed for portraying the British military, officers and other ranks both, as incompetent when even the official historians are happy to do the same.

See C. E. W. Bean, Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, volume 2: The Story of ANZAC from 4 May, 1915, to the evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula, 11th edition (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1941), 715-6; Robin Prior, Gallipoli: The End of the Myth (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009), 207-9.

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 canals of Mars, 1962

15 March 2009 in 1900s, 1920s, After 1950, Before 1900, Maps, Pictures, Space, Tools by Brett Holman | 10 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Mars map (1962)

Via Bad Astronomy comes news of an update to the Mars component of Google Earth. Most interesting to me are the overlays of historical maps of Mars from the 19th and 20th centuries, including those made by Giovanni Schiaparelli (1890), Percival Lowell (1896) and E. M. Antoniadi (1909). Schiaparelli and Lowell’s maps showed the infamous canals of Mars; Antoniadi’s more detailed map did not, and is supposed to have finished off the canals as a scientific controversy, at least according to according to Steven J. Dick’s brilliant history The Biological Universe: The Twentieth-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). But from some of my own work I’ve seen evidence that the canals and the associated question of intelligent life on Mars survived into the 1920s. And now Google Earth shows me this beautiful map made by the US Air Force in 1962. This Mars was festooned with canals, half a century after they had largely been discarded by the scientific community.

A little digging shows why. The map, known as the MEC-1 prototype, was prepared to assist with the upcoming Mariner missions to Mars. E. C. Slipher, late director of the Lowell Observatory (a major centre for planetary research), helped make it. Slipher had got his start under Lowell himself in the late 1900s, and used his mentor’s old observations to compile MEC-1. So it’s no surprise it has canals, then. Slipher seems to have remained an advocate of the canals right up until his death in 1964. Perhaps fortunately for him, he didn’t live to witness Mariner 4’s flyby of Mars in 1965, which revealed an apparently dead planet. But if it had not, the USAF would have been well placed to explore the Martian megascale hydraulic system.

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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We’ll meet again

29 January 2009 in After 1950, Cold War, Film, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Videos by Brett Holman | 8 comments

I watched Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb the other night for the umpteenth time, and I found myself wondering what the ending means. Vera Lynn singing her Second World War hit ‘We’ll meet again’ over a montage of hydrogen bomb explosions (see above). I think the key has to be that — at least according to popular mythology — ‘We’ll meet again’ was a favourite song for loved ones separated by war. Here are some thoughts I came up with (or across):

  • Contrast between WWII and WWIII. No one will be meeting again after this one is over.
  • Contrast between the Good War and the Cold War. Back then we fought to save the world from the Nazis, this time we’ll be using Nazis to destroy it.
  • Yeah baby! The film has sexual metaphors and allusions all the way through it; the ending then depicts the orgasmic final embrace of the USA and USSR (i.e. what happens when couples ‘meet again’).

It’s probably none of those, of course. Any ideas?

Gort of the interplanetary police force

1 January 2009 in 1920s, After 1950, Books, Cold War, Collective security, Film, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Space, Videos by Brett Holman | 6 comments

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

I recently rewatched one of my favourite science fiction films, The Day the Earth Stood Still — the 1951 original, of course, not the currently-screening remake (which I have yet to see, but tend to doubt that it will improve over the original in any area other than special effects). I can’t remember when I last saw it, but it must have been before I started the PhD because otherwise the climactic scene would have leapt out out me and smacked me in the face, as it did the other day … (Warning: spoilers ahead.)

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S 330.15 B73

2 October 2008 in After 1950, Books, Contemporary, Ephemera, Other, Pictures by Brett Holman | 6 comments

Call slip (1950s?)

One of the fun things about reading old books that nobody else has opened for decades is what you sometimes find inside them: annotations, bookmarks, letters, racist leaflets (OK, that one was not so fun). Above is a library call slip (i.e. the bit of paper you fill in to request that a book be retrieved for you) from the SLV. I found it inside Property or Peace? by H. N. Brailsford, a socialist journalist. The book was published in 1934 but I reckon the call slip is from the 1950s, at the earliest, as there’s a stamp in the front saying it was transferred from the CAE library in 1951 or 1952 or so.
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Getting away from it all

21 August 2008 in After 1950, Blogging, Civil defence, Cold War, Links, Nuclear, biological, chemical by Brett Holman | 1 comment

It seems like forever since the last one, but it’s only been two months. The (16th) Military History Carnival has been posted at the Osprey Blog. A few present-day items seem to have snuck in, but there’s still plenty of history in there. My selection this time is about Burlington, at Underground, a rather beautiful photoblog about things underground. Burlington was a nuclear bunker in Wiltshire, built in the late 1950s to preserve continuity of government, should London fall to a knock-out blow nuclear strike. So there was room for the Prime Minister, some of the more important ministers and enough support staff to keep them and the country running for months. Underground links to another website with more information, including a fascinating internal phone directory from 1968, which shows just who was needed and who was not. The presence of 23 shipping officers and 12 for oil transport suggests that some semblance of national or even international economic transactions was anticipated. 50 fire control personnel, more than double those assigned to domestic and laundry duties, possibly seems excessive — unless such time as they were actually needed, I suppose! On the other hand, a platoon of guards doesn’t seem like much to defend the government with, but I guess it was more for internal security, and maybe there were more up top. 16 diplomatic staff — maybe from the other 14 NATO members at the time, plus South Africa and Australia? And the biggest single contingent is for communications: a whopping 158 people. Which is a reminder of just how important it was to be able to talk to the outside world — not much of a government if you can’t tell anyone what to do — and just how the technology has changed: you could probably run such a bunker with less than a tenth as many IT staff today …

A strange game

7 August 2008 in After 1950, Australia, Cold War, Film, Games and simulations, Maps, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Pictures by Brett Holman | 9 comments

WarGames

This week is the 25th anniversary of the Australian cinematic release of WarGames, which is mainly significant because I missed the anniversary of the US release a few weeks ago! There were a few retrospectives floating about then, which focused on the movie’s importance as an early popularisation of the hacking and phreaking subcultures, and its influence on adolescent computer geeks (which is admittedly where most of the fun derives from). Instead, I want to look at the wargames in WarGames, and the ideas about nuclear strategy which it imparted to its young Gen X audience. Well, I have no hard figures about any influence it might have had, but I was probably just about a teenager when I first saw it, and it certainly helped form my ideas about nuclear warfare. (Though it also inspired me to try coding a Joshua simulator on the C64 … I didn’t get very far!) Warning: spoilers follow.
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MONIAC and the warfare state

4 June 2008 in 1940s, After 1950, Australia, Games and simulations, Pictures by Brett Holman | 10 comments

Via Old is the New New, MONIAC, the MOnetary National Income Automatic Computer: an analogue hydraulic computer designed by A. W. Phillips, a New Zealander, while a student at the LSE in 1949. The prototype was apparently built out of spare Lancaster parts. And there’s one on display at the University of Melbourne, otherwise known as ‘my uni’, so obviously I had to go and have a look at it!

MONIAC

The MONIAC is currently on the 1st floor of the Economics and Commerce building (on the Parkville campus, off Professors Walk), just opposite the lifts, if anyone wants to visit (though it will probably move to the new building on Berkeley St when that’s finished). It’s a bit over 6 feet high. The bit of paper stuck to the door reads:

MONIAC stands for:
Monetary National Income Analogue Computer

The MONIAC is a hydraulic model of the economy which was used originally in the teaching of economies. Today, econometric modelling is undertaken in modern Research Computer Laboratories. Visit the Commerce Research Laboratory on this floor to compare the vastly changed environment for teaching and research.

The MONIAC was designed by A. W. Phillips, (an engineer turned economist of “Phillips Curve” fame) who constructed a working model of the Keynesian System utilising coloured water (representing incomes, expenditures, etc) flowing through pipes.

Only 3 or 4 models were built and this is the only known model in Australia. A working model is located in London. The cost of restoring this MONIAC to working has been quoted in the vicinity of $40,000+!

BY THE WAY:

The “Computer” had a reputation for leaking during demonstration!

Could this be the origin of terms used a great deal by Keynesian Economists namely, “Injections” and “Leakages”?

Expressions of interest in contributing to the restoration may be made to the Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Commerce.

However, Wikipedia says that there were 12 to 14 units made. MONIAC caused a sensation at the time (at least among economists!), and was lampooned in Punch. His creation probably helped put Phillips on the fast-track to a full professorship.

The working model in London would be one that’s at the Science Museum; there’s another at Cambridge, and the original prototype is being restored at Leeds.

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When two tribes go to war

14 January 2008 in After 1950, Civil defence, Cold War, Music, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Quotes, Television, Videos by Brett Holman | 14 comments

Long-time reader, second-time commenter Ian Evans was in the Royal Observer Corps in York at the end of the 1950s. Here he describes how the ROC, in addition to retaining something like its planespotting functions during the Second World War, took on the job of measuring the Third:

When I joined the ROC (1958) it was still pretty much an RAF auxiliary, officers with handlebar moustaches and all. We spotted, reported and plotted aircraft in a very similar manner to our WW2 predecessors, though things had been simplified and speeded up, with special procedures for fast low flying aircraft (Rats). The nuclear reporting role was just being introduced, the observer posts were given “bunkers”, a small underground room with bunks and stores, airlock and reinforced tunnel to the surface, a nuclear burst recorder (a souped-up pinhole camera), a pressure recorder to measure the blast strength, a Geiger counter to measure the fallout, and individual dosimeters (we were rather cynical about these).

The operating theory was that there would be sufficient political warning for the observers to man their posts, they would wait for the noise to stop, surface, extract the recording paper from their recorders, read off the bearing and altitude of the burst and the peak overpressure. This would then be phoned in to Group HQ where we would plot the (hopefully several) bearings, and get the position of the detonation. Then, using the reported overpressures, plus sets of tables and nomograms we woud evaluate the bomb power and report back to…..anyone still alive. After that the posts would report radiation levels at regular intervals until…

Which is quite a terrifying job description (luckily they didn’t have to do risk assessments in those days!)

But, of course, there was plenty of terror to go around. Long-time reader and commenter CK pointed out a 1982 BBC documentary called “Nuclear War: A Guide to Armageddon” (written and produced by Mick Jackson, director of Threads) about the effects of a nuclear war and how civilians should prepare for it.


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Whiskey tango foxtrot

10 December 2007 in After 1950, Cold War, Nuclear, biological, chemical by Brett Holman | 3 comments

Sometimes I worry about the British.

So close and yet (thankfully) so far (so far)

9 November 2007 in After 1950, Blogging, Cold War, Nuclear, biological, chemical by Brett Holman | No comments

Gary Smailes has put together Military History Carnival 8, and it’s a good one. The item which, inevitably, appealed to me most was Damned Interesting’s account of incidents where the world nearly stumbled into an accidental nuclear holocaust. (But wait, there were more!) Obviously, a scenario where the survival of a significant proportion of humanity, and of civilisation itself, depends upon accidents not happening is not a particularly good thing. But we got WarGames out of it, so on balance I think we’re ahead.

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.

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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Getting here from there

5 July 2007 in After 1950, Art, Australia, Books, Pictures, Television, Videos by Brett Holman | 7 comments

The big trip to the UK looms. It’s my first and I’m greatly looking forward to it — all the more so because I have long been fascinated by the place and its history. Although I can’t say it was always my plan to do a PhD in British military aviation history, looking back, there were some clues:

Hawker Hurricane

Go ahead and laugh! This is a drawing I did when I was 9 or 10. It shows a Hawker Hurricane,1 specifically PZ865, “The Last of the Many”, the final production unit. I proudly showed it to our neighbour across the road, who (as I recall) had been in the air force in the war (which back then, meant the Second World War). All I can remember of his reaction was that he said the nose was too long for a Hurricane, and well, he was right :)
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  1. As the cunningly-drawn faux brass plate at the bottom informs the viewer. LOL.

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, as I have previously argued.4 Otherwise I like Haigh’s take on it.

And what happened to Nevil Shute? After moving to Australia in 1950 and buying the country’s first dishwasher, and writing a few more books, he died in 1960. And after that?

The decline of Shute’s reputation is unremarkable: it simply attests the perishability of popular art. Shute sold 15 million books in his lifetime, but he aspired to neither literary immortality nor critical approval: “The book which thrills the reviewer with its artistic perfection will probably not be accepted by the public, while a book which the public value for its contents will probably seem trivial and worthless artistically to the reviewer.” His obscurity also reflects the contours of the book market: the middle-class, middlebrow novelist of ideas is a discontinued line.5

Still, he wrote one book of almost geopolitical significance; that’s more than most writers can aspire to.

  1. Gideon Haigh, “Shute the messenger: how the end of the world came to Melbourne”, The Monthly, June 2007, 52.
  2. Ibid., 53.
  3. Ibid., 47.
  4. Haigh has clearly benefited from reading Paul Brians’ Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, but doesn’t seem to have any comparable sources for the knock-out blow literature. That’s ok, but you know, he could have asked me!
  5. Haigh, “Shute the messenger”, 46.

The movie that time forgot

25 May 2007 in After 1950, Film, Pictures by Brett Holman | 20 comments

The latest Fortean Times (June 2007) has a great article by Kim Newman on Hammer Films, the much-loved British horror film production company. While discussing the early 1970s, when Hammer’s fortunes were declining, he refers in passing to ‘the tragically unmade Zeppelin vs Pterodactyls‘. That’s all he said, but it was enough … could it have been a cross-over between two of my favourite genres — lost world movies and airship movies? Indeed it could. Here’s a poster Hammer mocked up to pique the interest of potential investors:

Zeppelin v Pterodactyls

And I managed to find a very brief plot summary:

The story was along the lines of THE LAND THAT TIME FORGOT, with a German Zeppelin being blown off-course during a bombing raid on London and winding up at a “lost continent”-type place.

Oh man … tragically unmade is right! What more you could want from a film, I ask you.

Still, it does remind me of two Amicus productions (which can easily pass for Hammer movies in a darkened cinema …), The Land that Time Forgot (1975) and its sequel The People that Time Forgot (1977). In Land (which I’m not sure I’ve seen), it’s a German U-boat which finds the lost world, during the First World War. In People (which I have), a steamship sets out to look for the survivors of the first film, and in the process its amphibian seaplane gets into a dogfight with a pterodactyl. So at least between the two they have some of the elements of the abortive ZvP. But nothing so gloriously cheesy as a Zeppelin (and anachronistic trapeze fighters) versus pterodactyls.

Guernica — III

16 May 2007 in 1930s, After 1950, Periodicals, Quotes by Brett Holman | 2 comments

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

The Nationalist version of Guernica — that it wasn’t bombed by fascist aircraft, but instead set alight by the Basque defenders themselves — was not widely accepted at the time, but for decades afterwards it was still plausible enough for some people to believe. As late as 1969, letters like this could appear in The Times without comment:

In The Times of June 26, which I read in Paris, PHS repeats a hoary old myth and invents a new one. Not even Picasso, to my knowledge, has accused General Franco’s forces of bombing Guernica and causing the deaths of two thousand people. The usual myth is that the Nazis were responsible. This view, however, is incompatible with the evidence of the German Foreign Ministry Archives and with other evidence now available, some of which I analysed in my book on Franco.

There was, in fact, a minor Nationalist air raid, in which the targets were a railway station and an arms factory. Some German bombs may also have fallen on the town. But the massive destruction was caused by systematic dynamiting of one quarter of Guernica — and one quarter only — by the retreating Republicans.

Ironically, Picasso’s masterpiece probably celebrated a non-event.1

This was written by Brian Crozier, author of Franco: A Biographical History (1967), among other works.2

Such views are now impossible to sustain; we now know that the raid was indeed conducted by the Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion, Germany’s main contribution to Franco’s war effort. I’m not sure when exactly, but at some point the diaries and reports of Lieutenant Colonel (later Field Marshal) Wolfram von Richthofen became available. Von Richthofen was the chief of staff of the Condor Legion.3 And it was he who planned the Condor Legion’s operations, including the attack on Guernica.
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  1. The Times, 9 July 1969, p. 11.
  2. I haven’t heard of Crozier before (although he was born in FNQ); he seems to have had an active career as a globe-trotting conservative pundit. I wonder if he ever retracted the claims he made in The Times?
  3. He was also a distant cousin of the Red Baron, and was himself a fighter ace in the First World War.

Airship vs. A-bomb

6 May 2007 in After 1950, Aircraft, Cold War, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Pictures, Quotes by Brett Holman | 8 comments

The A-bomb won:

Plumbbob/Stokes and blimp

I wouldn’t have thought it was necessary to detonate a 19 kiloton nuclear weapon to see what it would do to an airship, but that’s just what the US Department of Energy did on 7 August 1957. Well, to be fair, the primary purpose was probably to test a prototype of the W30 nuclear warhead; the airship thing was just a bonus. The test, codenamed Stokes, was part of Operation Plumbbob, a series of 29 above-ground detonations carried out at the Nevada Test Site between May and October 1957. Statistically speaking, the radiation released into the atmosphere from Plumbbob would be expected to have caused 1900 civilian deaths from thyroid cancer — a small price to pay for the knowledge gained, I think we’d all agree.
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Unthinking the thinkable

5 April 2007 in After 1950, Blogging, Cold War, Music, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Other, Videos by Brett Holman | 2 comments

WE ARE ALWAYS pleased to learn of a new post on Professor Palmer’s most interesting blog, the Avia-Corner. It is the first place one would turn in order to learn about the often murky world of Soviet aviation. However, his latest rant — there is unfortunately no other word for it — caught us by surprise, for it is aimed squarely at Airminded itself. It seems that the good professor has taken exception to our previous post, which happened to refer to one of his in what was by no means an unfriendly spirit. As the reaction is out of all proportion to the supposed offence, the suspicion occurs that it is officially inspired. The possible motivations for this scarcely need explaining, but a reply must here be given.
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Dueling YouTubes

3 April 2007 in After 1950, Australia, Contemporary, Music, Other, Videos by Brett Holman | 3 comments

It’s always interesting to see echoes of the golden age of aviation in today’s pop culture. At the Avia-Corner, Scott Palmer ends an update on the search for Amelia Earhart with a related music video: Amelia Earhart versus the Dancing Bear, by The Handsome Family. Well, I’ll see his ‘aviatrix lost at sea, never to be found’ and raise him the ‘mother proud of [a] little boy’.

This aviatrix is Amy Johnson; I’ve written about her in relation to this song — The Golden Age of Aviation by the Lucksmiths — before. But I like it so much, it deserves a second airing.
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Concrete memory

11 February 2007 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Art, Australia, Contemporary, Pictures, Quotes by Brett Holman | 26 comments

Australian Ex-Prisoner of War Memorial

And marble, and granite, and wood …

I wrote recently that every town in Australia seems to have a war memorial. Here are some examples, photos I took over a three day period without going too far out of my way. This post is image-heavy, but everyone has broadband now don’t they?
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Five to

20 January 2007 in After 1950, Cold War, Contemporary, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Pictures, Plots, Quotes by Brett Holman | 1 comment

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Doomsday Clock

The minute hand of the famous Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has just moved closer to apocalypse: it is now set at five minutes to midnight. This is the most dangerous level it has been since 1988. The dangers currenty facing humanity are summarised thus:

The world stands at the brink of a second nuclear age. The United States and Russia remain ready to stage a nuclear attack within minutes, North Korea conducts a nuclear test, and many in the international community worry that Iran plans to acquire the Bomb. Climate change also presents a dire challenge to humanity. Damage to ecosystems is already taking place; flooding, destructive storms, increased drought, and polar ice melt are causing loss of life and property.

Obviously, the precise position is fairly arbitrary — the relative movement back and forth is more significant, i.e. whether the world is getting more dangerous or not — but it’s interesting to reflect on the past movements of the minute hand:
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Historical maps online

28 December 2006 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Before 1900, Links, Maps, Tools by Brett Holman | 1 comment

New Popular Edition Maps is an attempt to produce a copyright-free database of British postcodes. It does this by asking people to hunt around on a clickable, zoomable map of the UK for places for which they know the postcode (e.g. their home), and then enter that postcode at that spot. It’s a bit like a stripped-down Google Maps; and you can search the map by placename or postcode. But what’s interesting about this is that the maps used are out-of-copyright Ordnance Survey maps (1 mile to the inch) from the 1940s and early 1950s, which could be useful for historians or teachers, though these are obviously not the intended audience. Unfortunately Northern Ireland and most of Scotland is missing. (The National Library of Scotland has the OS maps of Scotland from the 1920s.)

Finding this inspired me to do a bit of a search for other online historical maps of Britain which similarly attempt to cover the whole country. (There’s a useful list of out-of-copyright maps here.) Old-maps.co.uk has been around a while and uses OS maps from the late 19th century. Vision of Britain (which site has lots of historical statistics which you can slice various ways, and which I must explore more thoroughly one day) is more sophisticated, and has a neat trick of switching between different maps depending upon the zoom level: for example going from a 1921 large-scale map to a 1904 OS one to a NPE map. It also has 19th-century maps and a 1930s land utilisation map. But possibly the most interesting is Old Ordnance Survey Maps, which is based upon OS maps from the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. The coverage is very much incomplete; but it uses the Google Maps API, which means that it has a familiar interface for users, and could be used for mashups. It already overlays the regular Google Maps satellite and street maps. There are also handy links to take you to the same location at old-maps.co.uk and Vision of Britain. I can think of some improvements (for example, printing the publication date on each map) but this approach has tremendous potential.

Still at the edge of forever: for Carl

20 December 2006 in After 1950, Blogging, Books, Other, Pictures, Quotes, Space, Television, Videos by Brett Holman | 3 comments

Carl Sagan in 1980

Ten years ago today, Carl Sagan died. He had been a hero of mine since childhood, since I first watched Cosmos. I would kick the rest of the family out of the lounge room, close the door, turn off the lights, pull the beanbag up to the TV as close as possible, and let Carl show me the Universe and its history. From Empedocles and the water-thief, to the discovery of volcanoes on Io; from Lowell’s dreams of Martian cities dying beside canals choked with dust, to Wolf Vishniac’s death in Antarctica while paving the way for the search for life on Mars; the Big Bang, the Tunguska Event and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. I can’t have been much into double digits when I first watched Cosmos, if that; heady stuff indeed for a young boy. His own joy in the search for knowledge was palpable, infectious, inspirational — to the extent that I cannot understand how anyone could ever feel any differently. Here’s a short clip from one episode of Cosmos, “The edge of forever”: more metaphysics than physics, but if you’ve never seen it before, it will give you an idea of his style; and if you have seen it before, it will transport you again. It still sends shivers down my spine.

Not only did I adore Cosmos the series, and Cosmos the book, I also inhaled his other books: The Cosmic Connection, Broca’s Brain, The Dragons of Eden; and later, Contact, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, The Demon-haunted World. Carl hugely influenced my basic worldview: rationality is our best tool for understanding the world, secular humanism our best antidote for the fact that we can never be perfectly rational. We are not at the centre of the Universe, which is anyway indifferent to our presence; but we are sentient, and that is a precious thing, or ought to be, to ourselves and perhaps to others.

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.1

Carl’s love for astronomy also helped steer me into pursuing astronomy as a career. From about the time I saw Cosmos on, I had a burning desire to become an astronomer and explore the Universe too. I nearly did too; I started a PhD and was nearly a year into it when I realised that (a) I wasn’t very good at it and (b) I wasn’t enjoying it very much. That’s not Carl’s fault, of course, but astronomy was such a hard thing for me to let go of, having made it a part of me for so long, and that’s partly a testament to his eloquence and his passion. To cut a long story short, I switched to an MSc as a sort of consolation prize, while pondering what to do next. And it was during this time that I learned of Carl’s illness. He continued to work and to write. A friend, a fellow astro postgrad, saw him speak at a conference in Hawaii and reported that he looked distressingly ill.

Ten years ago today, I sobbed like a child into my girlfriend’s arms, and I must confess that I am tearing up even now. (Having Vangelis’s “Heaven & Hell Part 1″ playing in the background probably doesn’t help.) Carl Sagan is gone, and he is sorely missed, but his influence will remain — at least for as long as I live, and I suspect for much longer than that.

Other memories of Carl which have crossed my personal blog horizon: Bad Astronomy Blog, Centauri Dreams, Respectful Insolence, Cocktail Party Physics, Butterflies and Wheels, a great one from Larvatus Prodeo, and most poignantly of all, from his wife and collaborator Ann Druyan. These are all part of a larger blog commemoration effort (the results of which can be seen here), and the blogless can join in too.

Image source: Wikipedia.

  1. Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York and Avenel: Wings Books, 1995 [1980]), 4.

Great minds

10 December 2006 in 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Books, Periodicals, Quotes, Space, Videos by Brett Holman | 7 comments

Anthony Eden at a United Nations Association rally at the Albert Hall, 1 March 1947:

Mr. EDEN and M. JAN MASARYK, Czechoslovak Foreign Minister, were the other principal speakers. Of international affairs, Mr. EDEN said: “Our planet has become very small. We are nearer to San Francisco to-day than we were to Paris 100 years ago. We are all so closely interdependent; we have to rub shoulders whether we would or no.

“Can we learn this lesson of interdependence? If we can there is no limit to the standard of material prosperity and, I believe, of human happiness to which mankind can attain. If we cannot learn it, then a future conflict, with the added horror of modern weapons, may seal the doom of the human race. The choice is as simple as that. Suspicions, jealousies, even hostility, are as easy to engender between nations as between neighbours. Sometimes I think the people of this distracted planet will never really get together until they find someone in [sic] Mars to get mad against.”

Governments, Mr. Eden added, were not much wiser than the peoples they led. If the peoples would reach understanding the Governments would reach it, too.1

I can’t resist pointing out that nearly a decade later, Eden went on to prove that his own government, at least, was not very wise! The ‘added horror of modern weapons’ refers, of course, the atom bomb (Masaryk’s message was that ‘unless we were very careful we could slip back from the Atomic to the Stone Age in a matter of a few weeks’); and the reason why the world was so small was, in part, the aeroplane.

Eden’s suggestion that the people of Earth needed a Martian threat to set aside their differences brings to mind Ronald Reagan’s much later musings along the same lines (source):

I doubt Eden inspired Reagan, but he did apparently inspire the author of the first book to use the term “flying saucer” in the title: Bernard Newman, whose The Flying Saucer was published by Victor Gollancz in 1948. I haven’t read it, but judging from a summary in a Magonia article by Philip Taylor, it’s about a group of scientists who fake flying saucer crashes in order to fool governments into believing that there is indeed an extraterrestrial threat:

An international league of scientists springs into action and with remarkable speed the differences between the world’s governments dissolve under the ‘Martian’ threat. The final chapter sees every international political problem speedily resolved, from the Middle East to Northern Ireland. This 1948 fantasy is very much of its time: it was published in the very month of the Russian blockade of Berlin. Newman’s heroes find a way around the frustrating limitations of the new United Nations, with, in the background, the emergence of the super-power blocs and the omniscience of the atomic scientists all playing their part.

As it happens, I own another book by Newman (who wrote many), Armoured Doves: A Peace Novel (London: Jarrolds, 1937 [1931]), as it’s relevant to my thesis research. I haven’t read it yet, but it seems to share at least one theme with The Flying Saucer, namely that of a group of pacifist scientists imposing peace upon the world, though in this case by use of a death ray rather than a disinformation campaign.

Incidentally, the Magonia article is also worth reading for the account of Gerald Heard’s theory for the origins of flying saucers — that they were spacecraft piloted by giant bees from Mars! Yes, I said giant bees. Heard was an unconventional thinker (obviously) and a pacifist, who hung out with Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood in California. But in the early 1930s, he was well-known as the BBC’s first science commentator. And, inevitably it seems, he’s also a person of interest to me, contributing an essay entitled “And suppose we fail? After the next war” to Challenge to Death (London: Constable & Co., 1934), about the depths British society would sink into after a knock-out blow. It’s all one seamless tapestry, isn’t it.

  1. The Times, 3 March 1947, p. 6.

A world war in a day

26 October 2006 in 1930s, After 1950, Cold War, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Quotes by Brett Holman | 2 comments

Last month, I noted a parallel between certain pre- and post-Hiroshima nuclear warfare narratives. Here’s an even more common one, this time between the knock-out blow itself and nuclear warfare.

Here’s the American astronomer Carl Sagan, from the final chapter (”Who speaks for Earth?”) of the 1980 companion book to his acclaimed television series, Cosmos:

By the ninth decade of the twentieth century the strategic missile and bomber forces of the Soviet Union and the United States were aiming warheads at over 15,000 designated targets. No place on the planet was safe. The energy contained in these weapons, genies of death patiently awaiting the rubbing of the lamps, was far more than 10,000 megatons — but with the destruction concentrated efficiently, not over six years but over a few hours, a blockbuster for every family on the planet, a World War II every second for the length of a lazy afternoon.1

Compare with Lord Ponsonby in the House of Lords, October 1933:

The next war, if there is one, is going to be as different from the last war as the last war was from the Battle of Hastings. During the four years of the Great War 300 tons of bombs were dropped on this country. In the next war 300 tons of bombs are going to be dropped on the great cities of this country in the first half-hour.2

And with P. R. C. Groves, in Behind the Smoke Screen (1934):

“Whereas in the late war some 300 tons of bombs were dropped in this country by the Germans, air forces today could drop almost the same weight in the first twenty-four hours and continue this scale of attack indefinitely.” That estimate, made by the Air Staff [in 1926], was based on the number and known ‘performance’ of the bombers possessed by France. Since then the striking power of the French Air Force, which is the accepted standard of measurement in Europe, has been doubled. Hence, and given the same supposition as regards the distance of the objective, it has now a bombing or striking capacity of 600 tons daily.3

And finally, with Sir Malcolm Campbell, in The Peril from the Air (1937):

But nobody need think that war from the air next time will bear any relation to the happenings of 1914-18. What must be realized is that the development of the air arm has made it possible for an enemy to drop a 1,000 [sic] tons of bombs on London in a single day and night. That is, four times the weight that fell on the whole country during four years of war.4

There are many more examples that I could supply, but that will do. It’s the same rhetorical device, isn’t it: take the awful destruction of the last war, multiply it, and compress it to fit a timescale of hours instead of years. (And as time goes by, and technology progresses and forces expand, multiply it some more.) It’s an effective one, too, whichever war you are talking about: if you don’t find the thought of a world war in a day a sobering one, then you are probably Curtis LeMay or Arthur Harris. So here we see an instance where the rhetoric of the Cold War was developed first for the knock-out blow, long before the Manhattan Project.

  1. Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York and Avenel: Wings Books, 1995 [1980]), 321-2.
  2. Lord Ponsonby, Manchester Guardian, 28 October 1933; quoted in Patrick Kyba, Covenants without the Sword: Public Opinion and British Defence Policy, 1931-1935 (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1983), 88.
  3. P. R. C. Groves, Behind the Smoke Screen (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 147-8. Emphasis in original.
  4. Malcolm Campbell, The Peril of the Air (London: Hutchinson & Co., n.d. [1937]), 49. Emphasis in original.

Battle of Britain and the Battle of Britain

15 September 2006 in 1940s, After 1950, Film by Brett Holman | 54 comments

Since I shamefully forgot to blog Battle of Britain Day last year, I made sure not to repeat this mistake this year. I’m marking the occasion by re-watching the classic 1969 film Battle of Britain, directed by Guy Hamilton. I must confess that I love this film. It’s not just because of the the fantastic aerial action sequences, featuring several dozen real Spitfires, Hurricanes, Me 109s and He 111s.1 Well, it’s mainly because of that (and the music, oh yes, the music — Ron Goodwin’s stirring and bombastic theme as well as the William Walton piece in the dreamlike “duel in the sky” sequence [edit: actually called "Battle in the air"]) but it’s also because it manages to encapsulate just about every theme, anecdote, stereotype and myth about the Battle going. ‘Call me Meyer’? Check. The Big Wing debate? Check. ‘Yellow-nosed bastards’? Check. WAAFs and their plotting tables? Check. Home Guards armed with pitch-forks? Check. Galland asking Goering for a squadron of Spitfires? Check. Over-enthusiastic and unintelligible Poles engaging the enemy against orders? Check. Civilians huddled in Tube stations? Check. ‘Achtung! Spitfire!’ Check. Fresh-faced young pilots rushed into action and to their deaths after only a few hours’ training? Check. I could go on and on, and in fact I will! The invasion barges assembling in France? Check. The close escort order? Check. The importance of radar? Check. The turn on London? Check. RAF fighter pilots unbuttoning their top button? Check. OK, I’ll stop now! But my point is that Battle of Britain is your one-stop shop for reaffirming the myth of 1940, and is, to me, all the more enjoyable for it. And as such, the film is probably partly responsible for the heated reaction last month to the claim that it was the Royal Navy which ’saved’ Britain in 1940, not the RAF (Blog Them Out of the Stone Age had a good post on the matter).

I don’t see why it has to be an either/or situation. The RAF was the first line of defence, the Navy was the second (and the Army, the third). Massively inferior as they were at sea, the Germans had absolutely no chance whatsoever, unless they had air superiority. Even then, of course, it would have been decidedly dicey and perhaps impossible. However, it never came to that, because the RAF did their job (and not just Fighter Command, but Bomber Command and Coastal Command too, in attacking the invasion ports and airfields, at great cost). But the Navy’s strength was essential to Britain’s victory. It was why Germany was forced to fight Britain in the air in the first place — without the Navy, maybe Germany could have chanced an invasion against the battered Army.

Rather than the inter-service rivalry question, I think that the persistence of the myth of ‘The Few’ is more interesting, and more telling. In Battle of Britain, Dowding (Laurence Olivier) says something to the effect that his men needed a 4:1 kill ratio just to keep even, ie to shoot down four German aircraft for every British one lost. (Actually, he elides aircraft and aircrew, but it’s clear the former was meant.) But as Stephen Bungay argues in The Most Dangerous Enemy: A History of the Battle of Britain (London: Aurum Press, 2000), once production, reserves, and training are taken into account, it was the other way around. The Luftwaffe had sustained heavy losses in the spring of 1940, which was very bad seeing as it had been built to maximise front-line strength, to the neglect of reserves. And despite having an apparently huge superiority in numbers, the key comparison was in numbers of fighters, and single-seat fighters at that, where the Luftwaffe only had a slight edge. Every German aircraft shot down over Britain meant a permanent loss of aircrew (with the exception of one who got away), whereas British pilots who were shot down were often soon back at their squadrons. In addition, despite all the predictions in the pre-war literature about the Germans carefully drawing their plans about when and where to strike Britain for maximum damage, the Luftwaffe’s target plan was abysmal. Intelligence was either poor or ignored, key targets were neglected in favour of unimportant ones, and the nature of Dowding’s command and control organisation was not understood, despite its descent (with modifications) from the system which they’d come up against in the First World War. The question is less, could Germany have won the Battle of Britain? and more, could Britain have lost it? And furthermore, why has this been forgotten? Why not take pride in Fighter Command’s thorough and professional preparation for the defence of Britain, rather treating it as an heroic fight against the odds? My pat answer is that it’s probably because the former smacks of German militarism, while the latter suits the English amateur sporting ideal. But I’m sure there are other possible explanations.

PS I forgot to include some links about the film. There are disappointingly few. The usual: Wikipedia and IMDB. A couple of pages about the filming, here and here (that one shows that model Me 110s were constructed for the film, but they don’t appear in the film, as far as I know). Finally, one has to wonder if Susannah York’s character had time-traveled to 1940 from 1969, judging by her hairstyle …

PPS I also forgot to mention this claim that it wasn’t the RAF who won the Battle of Britain, or even the RN, but the Dutch! You may ask how that is possible, since they were only in the war for 5 days. The answer to this is that the Dutch destroyed many aircraft which were supposedly due to be used for an airborne landing in Britain later that month. Yes, apparently Germany was so confident of knocking off France that they were planning to simultaneously launch the biggest overseas invasion in history. As can be seen, I wasn’t persuaded, but perhaps I am too unimaginative.

  1. Supposedly, together they composed the 35th largest air force at the time. If so, then since it was flying unarmed piston engined aircraft, it was an air force that even New Zealand could have beaten.

Sad news for small boys of all ages

2 September 2006 in 1910s, 1930s, After 1950, Contemporary, Pictures by Brett Holman | 2 comments

Airfix Spitfire Mk 21

Airfix Spitfire Mk 21, a work in progress. Image source: Airfix gallery, user HawkerTempest5.

It looks like Airfix, Britain’s oldest and most famous manufacter of plastic model aeroplanes (among other things), might be going under.

It will probably not surprise readers of this site to learn that I had a collection of model aeroplanes as a boy. It was small but diverse: a Mustang, a Kaydet, a Lancaster, a F-16 (and some ships too, the USS Pennsylvania and the Santa Maria) … maybe some others I can’t remember now. (They did not long survive the arrival of a baby brother.) However, I lacked the patience and the dexterity to be very good at making them. Probably the low point was the Lancaster. I didn’t have the right colour paints, so it ended up being painted in the highly distinctive but … erm … somewhat unhistorical camouflage scheme of the Desert Air Force. Not only that, but I laid it on so thickly that if it were scaled up to full-size, I doubt it would ever have gotten off the ground under the weight of all that paint!

Airfix started making scale models in the 1950s (its first aeroplane was a 1/72 scale Spitfire in 1955). The first plastic scale models were the Frog Penguins, starting with a Gloster Gladiator in 1936. But it seems that the basic idea goes back a few years earlier, when the components were made from solid wood (so-called “solid scale” models), with some metal and acetate. In fact, an article at CollectAir suggests that the honour for originating the concept should go to the Air League of the British Empire:

A Junior Air League section was formed by A.J. Holladay, called the “Skybird League” in 1933 and the decision was made to market commercial solid-scale model kits of current model airplanes in 1:72 scale. Many “Skybird” members who crafted models from these kits and drawings later became RAF pilots such as Neville Duke. This was a civilian commercial endeavour, nevertheless it was the progenitor of the government recognition model program for the British and for the U.S., both of which would come belatedly.

I haven’t been able to verify this yet, but it makes sense. The Air League had always been interested in promoting an airminded youth: as early as April 1909, only two months after it was founded, the Aerial League of the British Empire (as it was then known) staged a balloon flight and leaflet-dropping competition with the Boy Scouts, at Battersea Gasworks. Under J. A. Chamier in the 1930s, the Air League lobbied the government to set up an air cadet scheme, which bore fruit in the shape of the Air Defence Cadet Corps, formed in 1938 (today’s Air Cadets Organisation is a direct descendent).

So swearing over the placement of fiddly decals and the smudging of acetate canopies with glue goes back a long way. If Airfix disappears, there will be other companies to carry on the tradition (the industry is particularly strong in Japan), but it will still be a sad day.

Threads

30 August 2006 in 1930s, After 1950, Cold War, Film, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Quotes, Television by Brett Holman | 3 comments

Last night I watched Threads, an extremely affecting BBC film from 1984 about the effects of a full-scale nuclear war on one British city, Sheffield.1 One might say it’s a very British ‘kitchen sink’ approach to the subject, following the lives of two ordinary families during the international crisis (involving Iran — so what else is new) leading up to the nuclear exchange, then switching to a relentless depiction of the death, confusion, suffering and struggle for existence in the days, weeks and years afterwards. ‘Harrowing’ is the word usually trotted out for movies like Threads; if you want to feel like you’ve been punched repeatedly in the stomach for two hours then you won’t want to miss it. At the end of it, I let out a huge sigh of relief — it was over, it wasn’t real, I could thankfully escape back to reality again.

The reason why Airminded has a sometime interest in the Cold War is partly because — at the risk of crossing a bridge before I come to it! — it’s an area I may go into after the PhD, but also because the fear of nuclear war is an obvious comparison to the fear of the knock-out blow. The one grew out of and replaced the other. In fact, it seems to me that they are extremely similar indeed: most of the ideas and tropes in literature anticipating nuclear war were used by the writers worrying about the effects of aerial bombardment upon British society before the Second World War. For example, the opening narration2 of Threads explains the meaning of the title (over shots of a spider weaving a web intercut with ones showing trucks transporting goods around the city):

In an urban society, everything connects. Each person’s needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a fabric, but the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable.

As the film goes on to show, a nuclear war would completely sever these connecting threads, and with them, all hope and dignity. (One of the main characters sobs in grief when he finds that he can’t get any water out of the taps to comfort his wife, dying from radiation exposure.) Of those Britons who survive the attack, many millions more die for lack of food, water and medical attention. L. E. O. Charlton would have understood the point immediately. In 1938 he wrote that

Our millions are bottle-fed, and all their needs are cared for, by a system of distribution and supply so intricate, and so haphazardly evolved, that once seriously dislocated beyond the power of immediate repair they would be as helpless as new-born babes to fend for themselves.3

But there are also differences. One obvious one is radiation, and its lingering effects. After a knock-out blow, the survivors could rebuild and repopulate Britain without having to worry about no-go areas or genetic damage. Another, related and more striking difference is that the natural world would be largely unaffected by a knock-out blow, whereas a nuclear war would blight the land and the sky for generations to come. In Threads, the global thermonuclear war leads to a nuclear winter (Carl Sagan and Richard Turco are both credited as advisors), with near-freezing temperatures and stunted harvests. Britain’s population drops to medieval levels. These scenes, mostly of silent people in the bare fields hunched over and grubbing for what little crops still grow, are very bleak and extremely effective. Visually, they are so dark as to be almost black, while the wind howls constantly. Nature itself has been wounded. Contrast this with a passage in Sarah Campion’s 1937 novel Thirty Million Gas Masks. The protagonist is caught in a cellar in an air raid, and recalls a bicycle ride the previous May, in glorious spring:

This at least, thought Judith in December confusedly in the hot horror of her gas-mask, was unconquerable. The bombs might fall; did, in fact, fall at this moment, upon the brick and macadam of the railway bridge outside, upon the chestnut trees and the grassy bank and the dark winter-resisting laurels: the bridge might never be built again, for there might be no men to build it: but the grass would sprout of itself over the brick, and the laurel would put out a startling green bud, pale as water, and the chestnut, though split from top to bottom, would spring up in new life from the seedling now cosily safe at its foot, and bear in April a galaxy of green fingers, and in May a candle-blossom as insouciant as the free air itself. This alone, she thought as a brutal crash turned her world tipsy for a moment, this perennial birth in the face of disaster would go on invincibly to some sort of conclusion, some final flowering, however hazardous.4

Unsurprisingly, visions of the knock-out blow could sometimes turn into anti-urban, back-to-nature utopias by the back door. With the cities destroyed or emptied, the population drastically reduced, industry and commerce at an end, people could return to a simpler and therefore (of course!) better way of life, closer to the land and free of the corruptions of modernity. A Threads-style nuclear war would take this a step too far, corrupting the land as well and offering only an unrelenting and probably pointless struggle for mere existence instead. Even this, though, could be paradise to some, as shown by the survivalist fiction of the later Cold War.

There are some very good websites devoted to Threads: I particularly recommend Don’t Panic, Mr Mainwaring: Threads, while the site at Action After Warnings is extremely comprehensive. But above all, watch the film.

  1. Interestingly, it was co-produced by the Nine Network in Australia; however I don’t remember it being shown here, whereas I do remember The Day After, or perhaps it was just the controversy surrounding it.
  2. Actually, the narration was one of the weakest parts of the film: although used sparingly, the documentary-style voiceovers kept pulling me out of the story, a reminder that it wasn’t real. For some reason, the more frequent textual overlays were far less jarring, and also more informative.
  3. L. E. O. Charlton, G. T. Garratt and R. Fletcher, The Air Defence of Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1938), 102.
  4. Sarah Campion, Thirty Million Gas Masks (London: Peter Davies, 1937), 173.

At Mouquet Farm

18 August 2006 in 1910s, 1920s, After 1950, Australia, Family history, Pictures, Quotes by Brett Holman | 21 comments

It’s exactly 40 years since the Battle of Long Tan, a notable feat of Australian arms during the Vietnam War. But I have a more personal anniversary in mind — yesterday was 90 years to the day since my great-grand uncle John Joseph Mulqueeney was killed by an artillery round during the Somme campaign, on 17 August 1916. As I wrote a brief memorial about him last year on Remembrance Day, today I thought I would look at the online sources I used for that post.

The first thing to note is that the Australian War Memorial website is absolutely superb for researching family members who served in wartime. By entering a surname on their search page, choosing a war and specifying whether they were killed in action or not, you can obtain a wealth of information, including Red Cross records, embarkation rolls, lists of decorations awarded, and so on. There are also two important external links: one to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for the location of graves (though the AWM link is actually broken at the moment), and another to the National Archives of Australia, where service records can be obtained (hopefully online, if not photocopies can be ordered).

In looking through these records, the big surprise was that Private Mulqueeney did not die at Gallipoli, as my family’s oral tradition held. Upon reflection, the reason for this is obvious — over the years, as the family members who could remember John themselves passed away, the succeeding generations assimilated fragments of his story into what little they knew of the war, and that increasingly came to mean Gallipoli. Unlike Gallipoli and in contrast to the situation in Britain, the Somme has little meaning for modern Australians. And in family history terms, having a relative who fought at Gallipoli has a cachet that is probably only second to having First Fleet convict blood running in your veins.

His service records were perhaps the most interesting, and sobering, find. Here’s part of the attestation paper filled out when he enlisted. Note the bureaucratic scrawls all over it, and in particular the very final KILLED IN ACTION stamped across the top — naturally, such a common occurrance merits a labour-saving device like a rubber stamp.

Attestation Paper

From his casualty form, we can trace his movements in the last months of his life. On 7 March 1916 he disembarked at Alexandria from the troopship Wandilla and on 29 March (presumably after further training) re-embarked, this time on the Transylvania, arriving in Marseilles to join the BEF on 4 April. He then presumably moved to the Australian depot at Etaples, where he remained for over two months: his group of reinforcements joined the 4th Battalion on 13 June. I’m not sure where the unit was then — I’d need to check a unit history or war diary for that — but it was another two months before he was killed, near Mouquet Farm. He was a well-behaved soldier, with nothing to mar his conduct sheet (where his character is recorded as “good”).

John Mulqueeney’s death added more pages to his service record than his life ever did. Six relate to the forwarding of his personal effects to his father, Timothy:

Writing Case, Tie, Key, Letters, Cards, Photo, 2 Pen Holders, Holdall, Housewife, 4 Brushes, 2 Combs, Scarf.

A receipt slip from 1921, to certify that (I think) his mother, Sarah, had received his ‘Memorial Scroll and King’s Message’. Stamps for his service medals: 1914/15 Star (presumably because he enlisted in 1915), British War Medal, Victory Medal.

Service medals

A positive reply to a family request for a photograph of his grave at Courcelette British Cemetary. Perhaps saddest of all, a form letter evidently for the purpose of informing his family which troopship he will be coming home on, never to be filled in, never to be sent.

Coming home

Finally, there are the records of the Australian Red Cross Society Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau’s enquiries on behalf of his family. They wrote to his comrades, asking for more information than the terse Department of Defence telegram would have provided.

We should be most grateful for any details you could send us concerning 4572 MULQUEENEY 4th Batt. A.I.F. and would also be glad iff [sic] you would add a short personal description, or any points that would sa tisfy [sic] his relatives that no error had been made.

There were six replies, including one from his sergeant. Pte. Hutchinson (himself recovering in the Eastbourne Military Hospital) provided the following information in December 1916:

Informant states that on Aug.17th. 1916, at the Pozieres Sector, a friend, Pte. McBride asked him to go with him into the next bay to see if “old Mul” [?] was alright as he did not think he had moved for a little time. Informant went, they found Mulqueeney dead, shot through the head, death must have been instantaneous. This was during the big bombardment. They buried him just beyond the bay, and informed the Sergt. Informant took some letters which he is sending to the Mother with details and also has pay book which he will forward to the right quarter as soon as he can do so.

That same month, Pte. Dickman wrote from Etaples:

He was killed at Moquet [sic] Farm about the middle of August. We were in the trenches. He was observing. I saw him killed by a shell, which burst near the parapet, and a piece hit him in the head. He belonged to IV Pl. A.Co. I knew him quite well. He was buried in a shell hole near by. A rough cross was put on his grave.

I hope that knowing how John Mulqueeney died, the return of his effects, the photo of his grave and so on, somehow provided some solace to his family. I can only imagine the pain they carried with them for the rest of their lives. My own sadness in examining these remains of his life can only be the palest (and somehow unearned) reflection of their grief. And of course, this was merely one, not particularly remarkable, death from a very bloody war. Scale all of that up by a factor of 10 or 40 million or so, and that’s one huge reason why the First World War is still worth studying.

Beautiful games and others

10 July 2006 in 1910s, 1920s, 1940s, After 1950, Before 1900, Contemporary, Quotes, Words by Brett Holman | 3 comments

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

The kick-off for the football1 World Cup final is only hours away. To mark the occasion, here’s Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, head of the Royal Air Force, on the correct use of airpower (in 1923, in the context of a hypothetical war with France):

Would it be best to have less fighters and more bombers to bomb the enemy and trust to their people cracking before ours, or have more fighters to bring down more of the enemy bombers. It would be rather like putting two teams to play each other at football, and telling one team they must only defend their own goal, and keep all their men on that one point. The defending team would certainly not be beaten, but they would equally certainly not win, nor would they stop the attack on their goal from continuing. I would like to make this point again. I feel that although there would be an outcry, the French in a bombing duel would probably squeal before we did. That was really the final thing. The nation that would stand being bombed longest would win in the end.2

It may not be immediately apparent, but in Trenchard’s analogy, the ‘goals’ to be defended are the great cities of each warring nation. So goals are scored by bombing cities, killing and terrorising their inhabitants; and the ‘match’ won by causing a collapse in civilian morale, who will then cause their ‘team’ to give up.

The analogy is starting to get a bit torturous by this point! But football is not a great analogy for the standard RAF view of strategic bombing to begin with. On the one hand, it’s true that in football a team which only defends can’t win. On the other hand, a strong defence is still desirable, because one goal is often enough to win (or lose) a match. Equally, it’s more than possible to have matches end in a draw, and not the decisive knock-out blow Trenchard predicted.

Knock-out blow … now that’s a boxing term.3 Sport and war seem to mix very easily in British history. The Duke of Wellington might not have said that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, but Henry Newbolt did compare the imperial burden to a schoolboy game of cricket, in his 1897 poem “Vitai Lampada”:

There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night –
Ten to make and the match to win –
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,
But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”
The sand of the desert is sodden red, –
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; –
The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of schoolboy rallies the ranks,
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”
This is the word that year by year
While in her place the School is set
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind –
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”

Cricket is, of course, much more interesting to Englishmen than is war. At least, this is the case in P. G. Wodehouse’s brilliant parody of the Edwardian preoccupation with the possibility of German invasion, “The swoop!” (1909). A newspaper poster proclaims

SURREY
DOING
BADLY
GERMAN ARMY LANDS IN ENGLAND

with a stop-press report that

Fry not out, 104. Surrey 147 for 8. A German army landed in Essex this afternoon. Loamshire Handicap: Spring Chicken, 1; Salome, 2; Yip-i-addy, 3. Seven ran.

Wodehouse may have been on to something. In 1940, newspaper sellers reported the progress of the Battle of Britain as though it were a cricket match: ‘Biggest raid ever — Score 78 to 26 — England still batting’,4 as did BBC radio commentators:

[T]he man’s baled out by parachute — the pilot’s baled out by parachute — he’s a Junkers 87 and he’s going slap into the sea and there he goes — smash … Oh boy, I’ve never seen anything so good as this — the RAF fighters have really got these boys taped.5

It does seem a bit unsporting of the Luftwaffe to have tried to take out their defeat on the home of cricket itself, though.

More seriously, that the everyday heroics of the sports field could inspire men on the battlefield is shown by the famous incident on the first day of the Somme, where Captain W. P. Nevill led men of the 8th East Surreys over the top, dribbling a football. Nevill fell, dead — no faking there, unlike the real thing — but his men took their objective.

Going the other way, and bringing us back to where we began, since 1966 English football fans have taunted their German counterparts with the chant “Two World Wars and one World Cup!” — though some might argue that three World Cups is at least an equivalent record. Neither Germany nor England is playing in the final this time around: it’s France vs Italy. And as Italy knocked out Australia thanks to a somewhat dubious penalty, I’m hoping that France will squeal, as Trenchard predicted — not in terror but in joy!

  1. By which I mean soccer …
  2. Chief of Air Staff meeting, 19 July 1923, AIR 2/1267; quoted in Neville Jones, The Beginnings of Strategic Air Power: A History of the British Bomber Force 1923-39 (London: Frank Cass, 1987), 29. Emphasis added.
  3. When the Sun crowed ‘Gotcha!’ at the Royal Navy’s sinking of the General Belgrano in the Falklands War, it reported that ‘The Navy had the Argies on their knees last night after a devastating double punch’.
  4. Quoted in Malcolm Smith, Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 63.
  5. Ibid., 62.

Sounds like … victory?

25 June 2006 in After 1950, Civil defence, Cold War, Links, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Words by Brett Holman | 1 comment

If you were wondering what the biggest and loudest air raid siren of all time is, then wonder no more, because it’s the American Chrysler Victory Siren, made in the 1950s. Well, I don’t know for sure that it was — I’d like to see what the Soviets had to offer — but it was clearly a mighty impressive piece of hardware: 12 feet long; 3 tons in weight; and 138 decibels at a distance of 100 feet! (120 dB is the pain threshold.) These were dotted all over the United States — 20 in Detroit alone.

You can hear one of the few remaining examples in action here. It certainly sends a chill down my spine, which is perhaps strange as nuclear drills were not a feature of my youth here in Australia, so I only know the sound of such sirens second-hand. But I can’t help but imagine what would have been happening to the communities these sirens were meant to warn, as the missiles (or in the 1950s, the bombs) rained down. Which in turn leads one to marvel at the optimistic choice of the name Victory Siren … though I suppose the Defeat Siren (”If you can hear this, you’re already dead”) might not have sold so well!1

  1. Of course, nuclear war looked somewhat more winnable in the 1950s, and civil defence correspondingly less pointless, than was later the case. But still.

A tale they won’t believe

8 April 2006 in 1920s, After 1950, Australia, Before 1900, Books, Music, Quotes by Brett Holman | 6 comments

Another bit from the Earl of Halsbury’s 1944 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1926), this time from p. 217. It’s a couple of weeks after a massive Russo-German air strike on London, Paris, and in fact most of the bigger cities of western Europe. Two members of a group making its way to the southern coast of Cornwall wonder just how much further British society has to sink after the enormous dislocation caused by the knock-out blow:
Read the rest of this entry »

(Nearly) a century of circles

15 February 2006 in 1910s, 1930s, After 1950, Cold War, Ephemera, Maps, Pictures by Brett Holman | 9 comments

Japanese ARP poster - bomber ranges

In my previous post I talked about some Japanese ARP posters from 1938. One in particular (above; click for larger version) is very revealing: it shows exactly whose bombers the Japanese were worried about, by plotting circles on a map of Japan and its neighbours, representing the radius of action1 of bombers from potential enemies. It turns out they were afraid of everybody’s, except for the country they were actually at war with (China). The brown circle shows the radius of action of American bombers from the Philippines; black, British bombers from Hong Kong; green, Russian bombers from Vladivostok; yellow, American bombers from Alaska; and blue is in the middle of the ocean — American carrier-borne bombers, most likely. The circles are marked with a number, probably a distance: 2000 km? That would make some sense, as it was very roughly the radius of action of the B-17s that were just entering service in the US Army in 1938 (though not in substantial numbers until 1941).

This sort of map is quite common these days, particularly in highlighting the danger from rogue states. For example, here’s one centred on North Korea, from a website criticising Clinton’s foreign policy:

North Korea - missile ranges

The circles here are not the radii of action of bombers, of course, but the ranges of missiles.2 But the principle is the same. There’s a subtle difference, though: the Japanese one projects a defensive outlook: it shows the circles encroaching on Japanese territory and so emphasizes how vulnerable Japan is. The North Korean map, on the other, does not highlight the threat to any particular country, but instead demonstrates how North Korean missiles threaten all of its neighbours — that is to say, just how rogueish a state it is.

Here’s another missile-era map, this time quite an historic one from the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 (looks like it was drawn up by the CIA). This is more like the Japanese map: though the threat is from Cuba, the centre of the map is shifted towards the United States, to show just how much of the country would fall under the shadow of Soviet missiles (but by the same token, de-emphasising the threat to South America).

Cuba - missile ranges

I haven’t come across many other pre-Second World War examples, though I’m sure they exist. The only other one I currently know of is British, and is very early, dating from 1913:

Germany - airship ranges

This time it’s not bombers or missiles that are the threat, but Zeppelins. (Love that OTT title!) The map is centred on Heligoland, which another map in the same magazine claimed was the site of an airship station. The caption says that the outer circle (600 miles) represents the radius for Zeppelins; the 300 mile circle is for aeroplanes. It ’should bring home to every patriot the vital necessity of Britain putting her house in order forthwith, by the grant of adequate provision in the nation’s Estimates to enable us to make up the heavy leeway from which this country already suffers’. Indeed it should; those circles are very dark, aren’t they? Though that might just be the poor quality of my photocopy …

Image sources: National Archives of Japan; Clinton Foreign Policy Page; John F. Kennedy Library; Flight, 1 March 1913, 248.

  1. No more than half the maximum range of an aircraft, assuming they return to the base from which they took off.
  2. As missiles don’t return to base, their radius of action is equal to their range.

Russians

4 February 2006 in After 1950, Cold War, Music, Nuclear, biological, chemical by Brett Holman | 9 comments

Twenty years ago this week, Sting’s song “Russians” entered the US top 40:

In Europe and America, there’s a growing feeling of hysteria
Conditioned to respond to all the threats
In the rhetorical speeches of the Soviets
Mr. Krushchev said we will bury you
I don’t subscribe to this point of view
It would be such an ignorant thing to do
If the Russians love their children too
How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer’s deadly toy
There is no monopoly of common sense
On either side of the political fence
We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology
Believe me when I say to you
I hope the Russians love their children too
There is no historical precedent
To put the words in the mouth of the President
There’s no such thing as a winnable war
It’s a lie that we don’t believe anymore
Mr. Reagan says we will protect you
I don’t subscribe to this point of view
Believe me when I say to you
I hope the Russians love their children too
We share the same biology
Regardless of ideology
What might save us me and you
Is that the Russians love their children too

Although I didn’t really encounter it until a year or two later, this song expressed a lot of my fears (and hopes) about nuclear war and the end of the world (which as you may have noticed, hasn’t happened. Yet.) Despite the peacenik overtones, though, it’s essentially an affirmation of mutually-assured destruction: our being able to kill their children is the best way to make sure they don’t kill us.

Did anyone ever write a “Germans”? Was light entertainment used to comment on the shadow of the bomber in the same way that Sting, and many others, later used it to comment on the shadow of the Bomb? Did popular music express popular fears? I wouldn’t be at all surprised to find topical references to gas masks and searchlights in songs of the later 1930s, for example, but I don’t know that popular singers and songwriters took themselves seriously enough, back then, to try to comment meaningfully on such weighty topics as the next war and what it’s going to do everyone listening to their songs. But then, I don’t know much about popular music in my period — something else to add to the list of things to read up on!

An unpleasant surprise

22 December 2005 in 1920s, After 1950, Australia, Contemporary, Pictures by Brett Holman | 11 comments

I was in the bowels of the ERC library at Melbourne Uni the other day, scavenging for primary sources, when a book called The Peril of the White caught my eye – not because it has anything to do with my topic, but because of the author, who has one of the most splendidly silly names in modern British history: Sir Leo Chiozza Money.1 Sir Leo was a Liberal and then Labour politician who is unfortunately mostly remembered for having been caught in a park late at night with a young lady, while in the middle of giving her what he claimed was ‘career advice’ (apparently not intended as a euphemism). Anyway, he was also a writer, and his The Peril of the White was published in 1925. The ‘peril’ of the title is that of race suicide, due to the slowing birth-rate of European and European-descended peoples. More particularly, his worry was that this would place European control of the rest of the world’s peoples in doubt, since their birth-rate remained high:

It is for ever true that we must renew or die. The European stock cannot presume to hold magnificent areas indefinitely, even while it refuses to people them, and to deny their use and cultivation to races that sorely need them.2

He graphically illustrated the problem with this colour plate in the frontispiece (click to see larger version):

The Peril of the White

Pretty standard stuff for the time, I think. But it’s interesting that Chiozza Money ends on a plea for racial tolerance, arguing strongly against any kind of slavery, formal or economic: ‘Every private act and every act of legislation which denies respect to mankind of whatever race will have to be paid for a hundredfold’.3 Though of course, his ultimate reason for being nice to the natives was to keep them happy and therefore quiet.

Now, all of the above is interesting, but it’s not why I am writing this. I found a slip of paper in between the pages of the book. Normally I love this kind of “found history” – it’s a glimpse into and a connection with a previous reader’s life. Things like tram tickets, pieces of paper with notes scribbled on them, newspaper clippings, ex libris stamps and bookplates, gift inscriptions: for me, it’s part of the pleasure of old books. But this was rather less pleasurable: it was a little leaflet entitled ‘White and Proud!’, calling for ‘white pride’ and apparently issued by a group called the White Student Union (with a PO Box in West Heidelberg). Somebody had obviously stuck it in The Peril of the White thinking that anyone interested in Chiozza Money’s ideas might be receptive to an updated version. And indeed there are similarities: both list cultural and scientific achievements attributed to the ‘White Race’, and argue that its members need to remember these and thereby develop racial self-respect. But surely most people who go to the trouble to look up this obscure book are likely to be scholars who want to research Chiozza Money’s ideas, not revive them!

But even that isn’t really why I’m writing this. My initial reaction to the leaflet is why. The leaflet looks fairly old – pre-laser printer days, anyway: part of it even looks to be typed (you know, on a typewriter), and from “internal evidence” I would guess it was written some time during the 1980s. (It looks like the book itself may not have been borrowed since at least 1988, so it’s possible that the leaflet could have lain there undisturbed since then.) When I first saw the leaflet, my first instinct was to put it back in the book and leave it there – because it’s an historical artefact, a kind of primary text on racism in Australian universities in the 1980s, and as an historian I have no right to tamper with it! But then I thought, that’s stupid. This was less than two weeks after the shameful race riots in Sydney, after which our esteemed Prime Minister had stated that ‘I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country.’ Well, here’s some underlying racism right here, and I’m not leaving this filth lying around to possibly influence some impressionable young mind, as remote as that possibility may be. So I borrowed the book, and took the leaflet, and when the book gets returned, the leaflet won’t.

Now, my initial reaction was pretty silly. It’s not like libraries are in the business of preserving things that people stick in their books, and nor is it likely that some future PhD student will go trawling the library shelves in search of such found history for their thesis. So I’m under no obligation to leave the leaflet there. But it does raise the question of what’s history and what isn’t. Even as I wrote this post, I had no problems quoting and scanning parts of Chiozza Money’s racialist (if not overtly racist) tract, but I can’t bring myself to do the same for the White Student Union leaflet. It just feels wrong, somehow, even though they both express much the same ideas, and the leaflet carefully refrains from denigrating non-whites. I guess it’s just too close to home, both in time and space. My rule of thumb is generally that if something happened in my lifetime, then it’s not history, since it’s that much harder to be objective about it. And on top of that, here’s somebody perverting MY university’s library system to disseminate their racist propaganda. As a scholar, I try to be disinterested about the things I study, but I should not be disinterested in important contemporary issues. My act was a completely trivial one, but after Cronulla, it’s the least that I could do.

Anyway, it turns out that in 1931 Sir Leo wrote another book, called Can War be Averted?, which does in fact sound possibly relevant to my topic. So I’m off to the ERC to check it out – hopefully without an unpleasant surprise this time …

  1. The silliest name, of course, belongs to Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, whose other claim to fame was leading the diplomatic mission to the USSR in August 1939 to see if Stalin was interested in an alliance with Britain. (He wasn’t.)
  2. Leo Chiozza Money, The Peril of the White (London: W. Collins Sons & Co, 1925), 159.
  3. Ibid, 168.

Early signs of MADness

6 November 2005 in 1930s, After 1950, Books, Cold War, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Periodicals by Brett Holman | 3 comments

On this day in 1952, the United States detonated the first hydrogen bomb, at Eniwetok Atoll in the Marsall Islands. Possibly not coincidentally, the October 2005 issue of History Today features an absorbing article by Geoffrey Best entitled “Winston Churchill, the H-Bomb and nuclear disarmament”. I have a quibble though …

Best quotes a 1953 speech by Churchill in the House of Commons, describing it as ’startlingly original’ (p. 39):

These fearful scientific discoveries cast their shadow on every thoughtful mind, but nevertheless I believe that we are justified in feeling that there has been a diminution of tension and that the probabilities of another world war have diminished, or at least become more remote … Indeed, I have sometimes the odd thought that the annihilating character of these agencies may bring an utterly unforeseeable security to mankind.

In other words, Churchill was an early proponent of MAD (mutually assured destruction). But there is nothing new under the Sun: compare Churchill’s words with (for example) those of airpower pundit J.M. Spaight in 1938,1 that the bigger that air forces became, the better, for then

the nations may fear to unleash the monsters they have bred. That would be the greatest, the most welcome contribution that air power could make to the next war – that the next war never in fact comes.

It’s exactly the same idea, that war was now so terrible that another one would destroy civilisation, and so paradoxically arming to the teeth actually makes the world safer, because no world leader could be that stupid. Of course, this didn’t turn out to be the case in the 1930s, partly because bombing wasn’t nearly as devastating as had been feared, but also because it wasn’t actually tried. No country in 1939 had a bomber force large enough to deter other countries from going to war with it.

Anyway, to get back to Best’s article, I don’t think the quoted speech was particularly original of Churchill; he must have been exposed to similar arguments before 1939. But I’m sure that it’s because the article was written for a popular audience, that it wasn’t hedged about with enough caveats to suit a pedant like me – after all, Best was writing books before I was born! And he has a new one out too, Churchill and War, which looks to be required reading.

  1. J.M. Spaight, Air Power in the Next War (1938), 175; quoted in Malcolm Smith, British Air Strategy Between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), 49.

Fallout – boy!

10 October 2005 in After 1950, Cold War, Maps, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Periodicals by Brett Holman | No comments

Aside from the whole shadow-of-the-bomber thing, I have an amateur (okay – more amateur, then) interest in the Cold War and the fear of nuclear war. Partly because of the obvious continuities and parallels with the area I’m studying, but also because I’m old enough to remember the last flowering of nuclear paranoia in the 1980s. Anyway, from time to time I may post items on the subject. Here’s one: a map of the continental US showing the probable radiation exposure from a full-scale Soviet nuclear strike.1 It’s based on data compiled in 1986 by FEMA, and it would hardly have been comforting for policymakers – the ‘low risk’ areas in yellow represent an estimated exposure in a week of up to 3000 roentgens for unprotected persons, which would still kill many people and leave many more very sick. It looks like it was assumed that the Soviets were following a counterforce strategy – most of the heavily populated regions seem relatively unscathed (though you can say goodbye to Hollywood), and the main targets would seem to be in Montana and the Midwest, where most of the ICBM silos were.

1980s pop cultural landmarks of note: Lawrence, Kansas, was definitely in danger, in the high risk zone sandwiched between two very high risk zones. Goose Island, Oregon, doesn’t exist, but it doesn’t look like it could have been ‘just three miles from a primary target’ as the prof claimed. Calumet, Colorado, also doesn’t exist, but would have been at low risk – go Wolverines! And Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, unsurprisingly appears to be in a high risk zone, but they wouldn’t have been too worried about that, would they.

  1. Jonas Siegel, “The original nuclear nightmare”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September/October 2005, 38-9.

Oxfordshire to Iraq

10 August 2005 in 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Contemporary, Nuclear, biological, chemical by Brett Holman | No comments

This is very tangentially relevant to my topic: it has been found that anthrax samples given to Iraq by the US in the 1980s can be traced back to a cow which died in Oxfordshire in 1937. British scientists weaponised anthrax taken from this cow for their biological warfare tests during the Second World War and the strain was eventually made available to the Americans, who then passed in on the Iraq in the 1980s. A major reason for the British research was the fear that Germany would develop and use biological weapons against the UK, most likely from the air. Therefore, British fears of air attack in the mid-20th century helped fuel American fears of terrorist attack in the early 21st century.

Well, it works for me!