The Boer War of 1899-1902 doesn't often appear in airpower history. This may have something to do with the fact that it took place before the invention of the aeroplane, which I suppose is reasonable. But there are still interesting and even important connections and influences to be traced. Here are a baker's half-dozen.

1. Airpower was actually used during the war, in the form of British observation balloons. The Royal Engineers deployed three balloon sections to South Africa; one was part of the besieged forces at Ladysmith while the others took part in many of the operations from Modder River to the advance on Pretoria, observing enemy troop movements and directing artillery fire. (In the photo above, British infantry are crossing the Zand while a balloon keeps an eye out for Boers.) The balloon sections seem to have been quite useful in the early part of the war, but less so in the later guerrilla phases, where the British tried to hem in the remaining Boer forces against their system of blockhouses and wire fences. It seems it was possible to make the balloons mobile by simply hitching them to a wagon, but obviously they had no independence of action and had to stick to where the main body of the troops were, which was usually where the Boer commandos weren't. Still, I wonder if anybody on the British side thought about bringing in lots of balloons to give the counterinsurgent forces eyes in the sky.
2. The Boer War was, briefly, also a phantom airship, or rather phantom balloon scare. The Boers were initially quite worried about the British balloons, for which they had no counter. It was thought they might be used to float over Boer cities to drop bombs. In October 1899 the following telegraph message was sent from (actually, the source says received by, but that makes little sense) the Transvaal headquarters:
   

   Balloons -- Yesterday evening two balloons were seen at Irene, proceeding in the direction of Springs. Official telegraphists instructed to inform the Commander in Chief about any objects seen in the sky.

Here's an example of the sort of response that was received, in this case from Vryheid:

Airship with powerful light plainly visible from here in far off distance towards Dundee. Telegraphist at Paulpietersburg also spied one, and at Amsterdam three in the direction of Zambaansland to the south east.

Shots were fired at these supposed balloons or airships, and Transvaal apparently bought powerful searchlights from Germany to sweep the skies for them (although if that's true, it must have been done before the outbreak of war, because the British imposed an effective blockade on the Boer republics). The British balloons were nowhere near the Transvaal, so the Boers were seeing what they didn't want to see, so to speak. But lest it be thought that Tommy Atkins was too sober and rational to be afflicted with such visions, General Buller's men thought they were being followed by a light which appeared at dusk, which they called the 'Boer signal'. It was probably Venus. (Source: Nigel Watson, The Scareship Mystery: A Survey of Worldwide Phantom Airship Scares (1909-1918) (Corby: Domra Publications, 2000), 109-10.)

3. A very high proportion of senior figures in the early RFC fought in the Boer War: David Henderson (who was in fact in charge of military intelligence in the guerrilla phase of the war), Hugh Trenchard, Frederick Sykes, for example. P. R. C. Groves and L. E. O. Charlton, two early RFC officers who later became well-known airpower pundits, also fought in South Africa (Charlton was wounded and received the DSO). I'm sure there would be others. I've noted a similar geographical funnel before, mostly for the same men as it happens, and the same explanations probably apply: they actively sought out opportunity and adventure (Groves and Charlton, at least, were both volunteers), which is the sort of person most likely to try their hand at a new (and dangerous, possibly career-ending) service. Also, flying was a young man's game, but the decade's span between the end of the Boer War and the formation of the RFC meant that men who had volunteered for South Africa while young (Sykes was 22 when he volunteered for the Imperial Yeomanry) and had remained in the Army were beginning to reach ranks where they could be entrusted with serious responsibility. The other aspect to that is that the Army had expanded massively (relative to Victorian norms) to meet the needs of the war and then contracted again afterwards. Those who did hang around were likely to find themselves underemployed at various times and without prospects for promotion, and a new challenge like flying might appeal (Trenchard's biography bears this out). There are other possible effects of the Boer War which I'll come to presently.
4. From the Boer side, Jan Smuts also fought in the war, as the leader of a commando which raided deep into the Cape Colony. His connection with airpower history is, of course, as that he was asked by David Lloyd George to formulate the Imperial War Cabinet's response to the Gotha raids in 1917. The resulting eponymous reports led to the formation of the RAF in 1918 (though Henderson helped with the writing too). Someone with Smuts' many talents probably would have risen to great prominence anyway (he was already Attorney General of the Transvaal Republic at the outbreak of war) but I think the combination of the military feats he performed during the war and the political leadership he displayed during the negotiations over the peace treaty and then the Union Treaty and made him something special in British eyes. So if not for the Boer War, Smuts might not have been present at the birth of the RAF.
5. Getting into more speculative territory, I wonder if the economic warfare carried out by the British army against the Boers -- burning farms, removing livestock, imprisoning civilians, in order to cut off the commandos from their sources of supply -- influenced later airpower thinkers? Most of the theorising about economic warfare before 1914 came from navalists like Corbett, and there are definite continuities with airpower theory there. But a throwaway comment by Beau Grosscup in Strategic Terror: The Politics and Ethics of Aerial Bombardment (London and New York: Zed Books, 2006), 22, that 'Trenchard was trained in the British military tradition of offensive economic warfare' (i.e. which informed his later advocacy of strategic bombing) got me thinking. My first thought was what tradition?? and as Grosscup has a fair bit of questionable history that's still my considered opinion. But if the Army did have experience with economic warfare which might influence its strategic thought, it would have to have beeen in South Africa, the only time it had fought something like a European economy since the Crimea. And, as noted above, Henderson et al all experienced the war against the Boers at first hand. Having said that, the economic strangulation of the Boers was only part of the answer: their morale remained strong and they kept fighting until well after their military position was hopeless. And the knock-out blow is all about breaking morale. Which leads me to the next point.
6. The Boers engaged in terror warfare against the towns they besieged, Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley, by way of artillery bombardment. (I'm not making a moral judgement by using the word 'terror', and anyway the British killed far more civilians through neglect in the concentration camps.) Boer artillery was few in number, but they did have some heavy pieces, including the famous 'Long Toms'. These would periodically shell the besieged towns, generally causing few casualties but sometimes causing a great deal of fear. The bombardments had the greatest effect in Kimberley where it seems (I don't have figures, unfortunately) that a number of women and children were killed in the shelling. The defenders dug shelters, hid in the diamond mines, built their own artillery piece for counter-battery fire and even improvised a warning system (a lookout on a tower would wave a flag when he saw a puff of smoke from the Long Tom, then buglers would sound the alarm, giving civilians about 15 seconds to take cover). But Cecil Rhodes, who was in Kimberley during the siege, was not at all happy. He continually pestered military authorities about raising the siege, used his newspaper to spew venom at them for doing nothing, and even had to be restrained from physically assaulting the commander of the town's defences for delaying dispatch of yet another plea/threat to Kitchener. He had just been prevented from holding a town meeting criticising military inaction, essentially proclaiming that the town's morale was on the verge of collapse, when the relief column finally arrived. Of course, the food shortages were more important than the bombardment (Kimberley was under siege for 124 days). Still it seems to me that we have here a small-scale model of how, in some of its more genteel versions at least, the knock-out blow was supposed to lead demoralised citizens to force their government to do whatever it took to end the war.
7. Finally, was NATO's air campaign against Serbia in 1999 a vindication of the victory-through-airpower theory? The Boer War says no! At least, that's the conclusion of Kieran Webb, 'Strategic bombardment and Kosovo: evidence from the Boer War', Defense & Security Analysis 24 (2008): 303-15. Here are the concluding two paragraphs:
   

   Keegan’s argument that Kosovo was a turning point is not only countered by its rarity but also by the fact that similar circumstances had happened previously. Analysis from the Boer War found evidence of bombardment having a strategic effect at the Battle of Paardeberg in 1900. Here the leadership was susceptible to domestic pressure, and bombardment managed to minimise human casualties while it destroyed items of economic and personal value. The result was that the besieged Boers rejected the chance to escape when it was available to them and surrendered to the British even though they had not run out of food or ammunition.

   Other battles fought during the Boer War could not be won by bombardment alone. Both Boers and the British managed to find ways to withstand enemy artillery and could be defeated only through the use of ground troops. Just as Kosovo was exceptional in its era, so was Paardeberg in its time.

   Intriguing, but outside my area!

For an excellent overview of the Boer War which isn't unbalanced by an obsession with airpower, I recommend Denis Judd and Keith Surridge, The Boer War (London: John Murray, 2003).

Image source: Library of Congress.

I neglected to take note of last month's Military History Carnival 22 at Thompson-Werk. I recommend The Edge of the American West's own post on the wit and wisdom of Richard M. Nixon (though for genuine wit and and perhaps wisdom, he's not a patch on Australia's own Paul J. Keating).

Watching this:

made me think of this:

and this:

and this:

and, because I happen to be marking my students' essays about it, this:

Sometimes it would be nice to be able to switch off and forget.

It is officially too darn hot today: 43° C. So naturally my thoughts turn to a colder time: the 1950s. The above image (which I found as part of x-ray delta one's wonderful Flickr stream; he also has a suitably breathless blog, ATOMIC-ANNIHILATION) would seem to be part of a public relations exercise from Convair, relating to its interceptor, the F-102A Delta Dagger. I'm not sure what year it's from exactly, but the Dagger entered service in 1956, so probably then or the following year. (So it could be an early effort from Don Draper.) Evidently there were a lot of complaints from the public about sonic booms from the Dagger, the USAF's first supersonic interceptor. The text is really something else; it almost circles right through brazen propaganda to become an honest argument that sonic booms really are good for you. Almost:

Freedom Has a New Sound!

ALL OVER AMERICA these days the blast of supersonic flight is shattering the old familiar sounds of city and countryside.

At U. S. Air Force bases strategically located near key cities our Airmen maintain their round the clock vigil, ready to take off on a moment's notice in jet aircraft like Convair's F-102A all-weather interceptor. Every flight has only one purpose -- your personal protection!

The next time jets thunder overhead, remember that the pilots who fly them are not willful disturbers of your peace; they are patriotic young Americans affirming your New Sound of Freedom!

Presumably the next panel would show the milkman clutching his ears and screaming in pain, and the one after that the homeowners sweeping up the bits of broken glass. That new sound of freedom wasn't free.

The war artist is Eric Thake (1904-1982), and the family is mine, although only in the extended sense: Thake's grandparents, John and Sarah (née Prentice) Thake, were my great-great-grandparents. It was only a couple of weeks ago that my mother found this out. My paternal grandmother (who was born a Thake) did maintain that he was related, but how exactly was unclear, and his middle-class life in suburban Melbourne seemed a long way from her family on the Murray. But she was right!

Thake is a moderately important Australian artist: as one indicator of this, the Art Gallery of New South Wales holds 131 of his works in its collection. He worked in a number of different media: watercolours, photography, sketches, linocuts. In later years he even designed stamps, including a series to mark the anniversary of the first flight from Britain to Australia. He started out as a commercial artist in the 1920s, but also began to make a name for himself in less practical forms of art, including surrealism: in 1940, the director of the National Gallery of Victoria denounced Thake for being 'too modern'! Perhaps his modernity was why the Royal Australian Air Force selected him in 1944 to be an official war artist. He had already shown some interest in the technology of flight, for example in this surrealist work entitled Archaeopteryx (1941):

Thake's paintings for the RAAF certainly betray an interest in the hardware of war. My favourite is the one at the top of the post, Kamiri Searchlight (1945), which he painted at Noemfoor Island off Western New Guinea. The searchlight belonged to an American anti-aircraft battery, sited on a former Japanese airfield.

This one is called Liberator's Face (1945).

It's not clear to me if Wrecked House, Darwin (1945) shows a ruin left after one of Darwin's air raids; it might simply be a derelict house. But it was understood at the time as depicting bomb damage. I don't think the Japanese were responsible for the rude drawings, though.

Thake is perhaps best remembered today for the wry series of linocuts he produced for his Christmas cards every year from 1941, and this is probably the best-known, An Opera House in every home (1972). A few years ago, I was lucky to see a retrospective exhibition of his Christmas card images (it was literally held across the road from my workplace) and more than his war work I fancy they gave me a keen insight into his personality, or at least the humorous side of it.

Here's the man himself, working on a portrait of Lieutenant-General Yamada, the captured commander of 48th Division on Timor.

The United States may not long continue to enjoy the sole secret of the atom bomb, and this and other no less deadly weapons will at no distant date be in the possession of other nations also. The flying bombs, now seen nightly in the west, are indications of what is going on behind the curtain. It is highly doubtful whether any new weapons, or indeed any mechanical inventions, could ever be relied on to remove the danger of war. A peaceful world order could only be safely based on a new spirit and outlook widely spread and actively practised among the nations.¹

Flying bombs seen nightly in the west? What flying bombs?

Smuts was referring to reports which had been coming out of Sweden since May, and more recently from Denmark and Greece. Fast moving objects, sometimes with wings, sometimes without, were seen flashing across the sky. Some had flames shooting out the rear; others appeared to manoeuvre. Some of them crashed; residents of Malmö reported that windows were broken when a rocket 'exploded' over their town.² They were sometimes even tracked on radar. A photo was even taken of one. They were seen by military personnel as well as by ordinary people. An example:

One of the mysterious bombs which in recent weeks have been passing across Sweden was seen last night by an officer of the Air Defence Department of the Defence Staff. He reports that the bomb looked like a fireball with a clear yellow flame passing at an estimated height of between 1,500 and 3,000 feet and at a considerable but quite measurable speed.³

The term now given to these objects is ghost rockets.

Suspicions immediately fell on the Russians, who had taken possession of the German missile research station at Peenemünde, along with many of its scientists and equipment. This was where V-1 and V-2 development had taken place during the war. As the Manchester Guardian editorialised:

No one has said who starts them [the ghost rockets] on their journey, but it does not need much imagination to see Russian engineers, no doubt assisted by obedient German scientists, operating from a research station on the Baltic coast. Russia, of course, could have found a more secret practice range, bu she probably enjoys revealing a little of her plaything, just as America carefully lets us know at least enough about her bomb to hold it in respect.⁴

There was even a precedent: the Germans had test-fired many V-1s and V-2s over the Baltic, and one of the latter landed on Swedish territory. The resultant wreckage was of some use to Allied scientific intelligence in working out just how much of a threat the new rocket weapon would be. But as R. V. Jones, who was involved in both the wartime and (more peripherally) the ghost rocket investigations, pointed out, with hundreds of sightings being reported from Sweden, some proportion of the supposed rockets would have crashed and the wreckage discovered. The Swedish military did look, even searching the bottom of a lake which a winged missile had crashed into. Nothing was found (although in Most Secret War, Jones relates an amusing episode about one fragment which initially denied analysis, but which turned out to be a lump of coke).⁵

As with the phantom airship scares a generation earlier, parallels can be found nearby in time and/or space. As I noted above, ghost rockets were also reported from Denmark and Greece. Both of these countries were fairly close to the new Iron Curtain, so it wasn't too implausible to think that they too might be playing unwitting hosts to Soviet weapon tests. But then ghost rockets were also seen in Portugal, Belgium and Italy -- except for the last, much farther away from the Soviet sphere. Some of the ghost rockets were undoubtedly meteors (the Perseid meteor shower coincided with the August peak of sightings; the photo mentioned above looks a lot like a meteor to me), others may have been new and unfamiliar jet aeroplanes (Sweden received its first Vampires in June). The British Consul at Salonika thought what he saw was nothing more than a Very light.⁶ But, as usual, not everything can be explained this way.

Going backwards in time, to the early 1930s, so-called 'ghost flyers' were seen, often in snowstorms, in the northern parts of Sweden, Norway and Finland. These aircraft were seen (and heard) mainly at night, sometimes flying at low-level. But they carried no markings, and military searches found neither the ghost fliers nor the aerodrome they presumably operated from. Explanations at the time included Soviet or Japanese (!) spies, alcohol smugglers or misperception and mass delusion. Soviet or even combined Soviet-German exercises are perhaps the most likely explanation, though no archival smoking gun has been found.

And going forward a few decades, and into a different medium altogether, in the 1980s and early 1990s Swedish coastal waters were plagued by incursions from mystery submarines. This time the witnesses were Swedish naval personnel, and the submarines were detected with sonar. Again, the chief suspect was the Soviet Union (though NATO has been blamed more recently), and after the 'Whiskey on the rocks' incident of 1981, when a Soviet diesel sub ran aground near a major Swedish naval base, that's understandable. But even trained sonar operators make mistakes: one prominent incident in 1982 was, it seems, caused by a charter boat.

So, to generalise wildly about a country I know not a lot about, the Swedish ghost rockets, ghost flyers and mystery submarines sound like the paranoia of a small country stuck in between hostile blocs and trying to stay neutral. Technology made it easier for foreign powers to sneak in and spy on Swedes. Although the geopolitical context was different, this sounds a lot like the situation in Britain in 1909 and 1913. The enemy outside became the enemy within.

Back to Smuts. He didn't place much emphasis on the ghost rockets; they were just further evidence of what everyone already knew, that new weapons were changing the world (yet again), and that the world needed to change its ways in consequence. He didn't have any very compelling answers to this problem -- maybe a world government proper, one day; for the moment, he wanted the great powers to have full and frank discussions about what they really wanted from each other, rather than issuing spurious vetoes -- but that he felt he had to try was just as much a sign of the times as the ghost rockets themselves.

1. The Times, 30 September 1946, 5. Emphasis added.
2. Manchester Guardian, 17 August 1946, 6.
3. Ibid., 8 August 1946, 6.
4. Ibid., 13 August 1946, 4.
5. R. V. Jones, Most Secret War (London: Penguin, 2009 [1978]), 511-2.
6. Manchester Guardian, 7 September 1946, 6.

• Harry Delacombe, 1907-1910. Obituary: 21 January 1959.
• Hubert Walter, at least 1915-1916, perhaps 1914-1917. Obituary: 22 December 1933.
• Colin Cooper, 1919? Obituary: 30 March 1938.
• Ronald Carton, c.1919-1923. Obituary: 11 July 1960.
• C.G. Colebrook, 1923-1930. Obituary: 30 August 1930.
• E. Colston Shepherd, 1929-1939. Obituary: 2 August 1976.
• [Edit: Oliver Stewart, 1939-1940. Obituary: 23 December 1976. See below.]
• Arthur Narracott, 1940-1967. Obituary: 17 May 1967.

There are some gaps and contradictions here. There could be a gap between Shepherd and Narracott of a year or two, enough for somebody else to do the job. Colebrook was air correspondent until 1930, but Shepherd started in 1929. That may be because Colebrook was ill towards the end and died in harness, so perhaps Shepherd started to take over some of the workload before then. Cooper seems to have been air correspondent for only a short time, as he resigned from the RAF in 1919, when Northcliffe gave him the job, but Ronald Carton (better known as the crossword compiler!) did the job for four years from 1919 (he covered Alcock and Brown). The job was said to be vacant when Colebrook started, so there may be another short gap there. All I know of Walter (a scion of the family which founded The Times) is that he there in 1915-6. He was in Berlin until (perhaps) 1914 and went overseas again in 1917, so presumably those years represent the endpoints of his occupancy. And I don't know who held the job in the crucial years between 1910 and 1914. Oddly, according to their obituaries, three men had the honour of being the first aeronautical correspondent of The Times: Walter, Cooper and Carton. Which is odd, since Delacombe predated all of them!

My main reason for doing this to work out whether P. R. C. Groves was ever The Times's aeronautical correspondent, as both Barry Powers and Uri Bialer have written (without giving any more information). As far as I can tell, he was not. There's no mention of this in his personal archive or publications, and as the above shows, no gap for him to fit into. He didn't retire from the RAF until 1922, and there was no vacancy until 1923. Groves did write some articles for The Times in 1922 and 1923, but they appeared under his own name - except for one article early in 1922, which used a phrase which was highly characteristic of Groves and appeared only days before the first of his official articles. But it wasn't bylined 'Our aeronautical correspondent' as would be usual, but 'An aeronautical correspondent'. It was an anonymous, freelance contribution, not from somebody on staff. So I can't see how Groves could have been the aeronautical correspondent for The Times.

Edit: thanks to Rose Wild of the Times Archive Blog, who picked up my post on Twitter, I can now fill in one of the gaps: Oliver Stewart, previously a long-serving air correspondent for the Morning Post, helped out at The Times in 1939-1940.

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.)

Is this not a description of horror by horror? It's true that the rest of the film does away with this literalness, but it seems like the concrete needs to exist before the abstract, which I find some consolation.

Something else strikes me about this sequence. It's not just about Hiroshima. The fish being dumped for fear of radiation poisoning surely refers to the panic in Japan after the Lucky Dragon 5 incident in 1954. And the sequence starting with 'It will begin again' is a clear reference to a future nuclear war. So it's also about the Cold War and about World War III. And what this has to do with the rest of the film, with the Frenchwoman's present-day affair with the Japanese architect and the flashbacks to her wartime affair with the German soldier, is not clear to me. More reflection (and education!) needed.

For those with more refined artistic sensibilities than me, Hiroshima mon amour is available online. And Guernica can be seen at the Reina Sofia in Madrid, or, in tapestry form, at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Image source: Wikipedia.

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.