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Body horror in the Blitz

7 August 2011 in 1930s, 1940s, Archives, Books, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Rumours by Brett Holman | 5 comments

Fears of poison gas attacks during the Blitz don't receive much attention from historians, and with good reason: not only did they not take place, but the evidence (for example, the number of gas masks being carried about) suggests that most people were complacent about the possibility. But not all. On 2 September 1940, a Mass-Observation investigator in London heard the following from a woman in her mid-30s:

There's a nasty rumour going around that Hitler's going to start using a gas this week that's going to penetrate women's bodies through their sex organs. Women will have to go about wearing sanitary towels all the time. Its [sic] going to cause a lot of disturbance.

Scientific implausibility aside, this rumour encapsulates the horror of gas, that it permeates inside the body and kills from within; and that as a product of science it might be developed into new and even more horrific forms. On the other, though, here the horror is a very gendered one, perhaps drawing upon existing anxieties about women's centrality to total war's front line (i.e. the home front) and the difficulties of maintaining feminine hygiene in a time of rationing and shortages. (The woman who passed on the rumour is described as 'normally much too "respectable" to mention such a subject', suggesting to the investigator how badly it had shaken her morale.) Or perhaps it has something to do with a perceived Nazi obsession with race and reproduction.

I wonder if there's a literary origin to this rumour. Shaw Desmond's rather science-fictional knock-out blow novel Chaos (1938) has a weapon which is reminiscent, though there it affects both sexes:

Then there was the Genital Gas, which was said to destroy the genitals of men and women, to make them childless for ever, and to turn their faces into smiling masks for them to strike horror amidst their fellows.

There's no way of knowing, but the 1940 rumour does sound like it could easily have started out as idle speculation inspired by something like the 1938 novel, and mutated into specifics and certainties from there.

More THATCamp thoughts

26 March 2011 in Archives, Australia, Blogging and tweeting, Conferences and talks, Maps, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Tools and methods, Words by Brett Holman | 1 comment

So, THATCamp Melbourne is over. It was pretty much as I expected, which is to say it was excellent. I'm not going to write a conference report (you should have been following #thatcamp on Twitter for that!) but two sessions did give me ideas for digital history projects I might like to do. One day. If I get the time.

One came out of the unofficial API Tim Sherratt reverse-engineered for Trove Newspapers. (Why the National Library of Australia won't release an official API is a bit mysterious.) He uses that to scrape Trove to do searches and display results which aren't possible with the interface offered by the NLA, such as plotting the frequency of Australian vs British/Briton. Are there any publicly accessible datasets which I use which could benefit from the same treatment? Yes, there are. The first one I thought of was the Flight archive, which is a great resource burdened with a limited interface. (But it's fantastic that it exists at all: Flightglobal is a commercial operation and they didn't need to open up their back issues like this at all, if they didn't want to.) I think this is easily doable. A second one is much more ambitious: The National Archives catalogue. It's frustrating that you can't do keyword search across their digitised collections; all you can do is search the descriptions in the catalogue, and these are by their nature limited. A scraper would help here. But the problem there is that you can't download documents directly, even when they are free; you have to add to a 'shopping cart', pay £0.00 for it and wait for an email to arrive. Possibly this could be automated; possibly not.

The other idea I had was to use SahulTime (or its eventual successor, possibly called TemporalEarth) to display the British scareship waves. SahulTime is something like Google Earth, but it allows you to map events/documents/people/objects in time as well as space. Matthew Coller, the developer, originally devised it to represent archaeological data on migration into Australia across the ice-age land bridge, but it is just as useful for historical data. So I could use this to show when and where the scareships were seen, showing how the waves started and evolved, with links to the primary sources. SahulTime is also good at displaying uncertainty in time, which is helpful where I have only vague information about when a sighting happened. The same could be done for uncertainty in space, though that's a bit trickier conceptually.

One day... if I get the time...

Churchill and that UFO story

9 August 2010 in 1910s, 1940s, After 1950, Archives, Contemporary, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Rumours, Space by Brett Holman | 8 comments

There have been a lot of stories in the press recently with titles like 'Churchill ordered UFO cover-up, National Archives show'. Actually, the TNA files -- part of an ongoing series of releases of UFO-related files -- don't show this at all, as is clear if you read the article more closely.

The cover-up is supposed to have taken place in the Second World War.

Nick Pope, who used to investigate UFO sightings for the MoD, said: "The interesting thing is that most of the UFO files from that period have been destroyed.

"But what happened is that a scientist whose grandfather was one of his [Churchill's] bodyguards, said look, Churchill and Eisenhower got together to cover up this phenomenal UFO sighting, that was witnessed by an RAF crew on their way back from a bombing raid.

"The reason apparently was because Churchill believed it would cause mass panic and it would shatter people's religious views."

The scientist 'said' this in 1999, nearly half a century after the incident is supposed to have taken place and a quarter century after his grandfather died. So it's only hearsay: there is no evidence from the war itself or from any witnesses that this cover-up actually took place.
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The red balloon scare of 1940

12 February 2010 in 1940s, Archives, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Rumours by Brett Holman | 7 comments

I hadn't come across this before. @ukwarcabinet recently linked to some informal notes of a War Cabinet meeting held on 8 February 1940. It was pretty quiet, even for the Bore War, and 'Some of the subjects discussed were rather discussed by way of filling in time'. Including this:

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

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

"ENEMY GAS"
Harmless Balloons Start Rumours

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gas!

27 June 2009 in 1940s, Archives, Civil defence, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Periodicals by Brett Holman | 5 comments

The National Archives have released a couple of files (here and here) relating to mustard gas in the Second World War. I'm too cheap to pay to download them from TNA so I'm relying on news reports -- luckily this is a blog and not a refereed publication!

The first is about a series of seminars held in 1943 by the Ministry of Food and the Ministry of Home Security. Their purpose was to inform 'civilians' -- just who exactly is not clear from the article, but I'm guessing civil defence personnel rather than people pulled off the street -- about the effects of mustard gas on food, by way of practical demonstrations. The overall conclusion seems to have been that it was more of a nuisance than anything else, as most things could be decontaminated. (Cheese is particularly resistant, apparently.) This would have been a relief to a number of prewar writers, who predicted that that food supplies were vulnerable to gas attack. Two points. One is that I'm glad that I don't go to the kind of seminars which involve a risk of mustard gas exposure (22 civilians suffered 'side-effects', according The Times, along with 3 officials.) The second is the question of why 1943? Early in that year Allied victory was sealed in North Africa and a German army surrendered at Stalingrad. Perhaps the worry was that with Germany now on the retreat, Hitler might try something desperate to regain the initiative. Or, if the seminars were organised after the devastating raids on Hamburg in July, perhaps it was thought that the Luftwaffe might retaliate. (It did still have this capability, as the Baby Blitz the following year showed -- though this was conventional, not chemical.)

The second story is that in May 1944, Britain 'considered' (as the headline in The Times has it) using mustard gas against Tokyo. But it would be easy to read too much into this. The report in question -- entitled 'Attack on Tokyo with gas bombs' -- clearly isn't any sort of operational plan but simply an intellectual exercise designed to provide the top brass with the basis for informed decision-making. (One giveaway is that the author was a boffin, a Professor D. Brunt, who I'd guess was the meteorologist David Brunt.) Still, it's always a bit confronting to ponder the thinking behind statements like 'In the densely built areas of Japanese-type buildings, where the streets are narrow, the flow of a gas cloud would be hindered by the narrowness of the streets'. Phosgene could also be used, which would cause large civilian casualties, but the conclusion was that incendiaries would be best, perhaps followed up a few days later with mustard as an area-denial weapon. (Another suggestion was gas first to cause civilians to flee, then incendiaries, though there's no suggestion in the article that this was in order to minimise casualties.) Again, why 1944? It's not like Bomber Command was about to start operations against Japan. But the invasion of France was imminent, and with it the prospect of a heavy toll of British military casualties. At this stage of the war manpower was starting to run out. So the eventual need to provide forces for the invasion of Japan must have been daunting for British planners; and for that reason, using technology to substitute for manpower would have been attractive. And in fact, later in the year Churchill committed a large contingent of heavy bombers to the war against Japan, Tiger Force -- which didn't go in action because it was trumped by another labour-saving device, the atomic bomb. (Well, that and the Soviet Union's still relatively ample reserves of manpower.)

This post is 100% link-free

29 November 2008 in Archives, Other by Brett Holman | 9 comments

I've just noticed this odd condition for the use of the Imperial War Museum's collections website:

Links to our website may only be included in other websites with our prior written permission.

Source: http, followed by a colon, then two forward slashes, then www, a dot, iwmcollections, another dot, org, a third dot, uk, another forward slash, and then terms, one last dot, and finally php.

One I forgot to write

21 October 2008 in 1900s, Archives, Blogging and tweeting by Brett Holman | 2 comments

XVIII Military History Carnival is up at Chronologi Cogitationes. This month I'm picking a post from a new blog, Wacht Am Tyne, on the centenary of the first flight (powered, controlled, heavier-than-air) in Britain, which was achieved by Samuel Franklin Cody on 16 October 1908. (I had a photo of British Army Aeroplane No. 1a in an earlier post.) Three reasons: firstly, because I was going to write about this myself but completely forgot; secondly, because it's an interesting post even though (or because) it's not at all the one I would have written; thirdly because, according to the blog's About page, it's intended for:

anyone who enjoys reading about military history, has ever gone to the IWM on their own, or has ever re-enacted the Battle of Waterloo using condiment packets and empty glasses at their local

Check (obviously), check, and check ... well, actually I can't remember doing Waterloo -- Cannae was always my favourite, and more recently Trafalgar, but I think that's close enough for me to be in the target demographic!

'The bomber will always get through' gets through

25 July 2008 in Archives, Blogging and tweeting, Periodicals by Brett Holman | 1 comment

... to a wider audience! A few weeks back, I received an email from Robert Dudney, editor in chief of Air Force Magazine (published by the Air Force Association -- that's US Air Force, not Royal) seeking permission to reprint the text of Stanley Baldwin's 'the bomber will always get through' speech, which I'd posted here last year. It wasn't necessary for him to do so, since I don't own the words, nor was it necessary for him to give me credit for them, nor to send me complimentary copies of the July 2008 issue in which they appeared. But it was very courteous of him to do all of these things, so here's a plug in return.

Baldwin's speech appears as part of a regular series called The Keeper File, which excerpts various primary source texts important to the history of airpower. (They've put the whole thing online too.) There's an introductory paragraph, which quite rightly observes that 'Few famous speeches have been more misunderstood than that by Stanley Baldwin [...]', and goes on to explain its significance. Bravo, I say!

There's plenty of interest in the rest of the magazine, including: an update on the F-35 JSF programme, which will likely be equipping the RAF, RN and RAAF for decades to come (it's on schedule and under budget, apparently); Phillip Meilinger on the importance of airpower in counterinsurgency operations (which appears to be based on the talk he gave at Cranwell last year); the Allied bombing of Berlin in 1940-5; and Walter Boyne on the USAF's forgetting and relearning how to do electronic monitoring and control of the combat space over Vietnam. Overall, it's a useful insight into what the world's greatest air force is up to these days.

Bonus! Since I don't talk about the USAF much, here's a link which peacay sent me ages ago: the US Air Force History Index. This is a searchable index to 550,000 documents (out of 70 million, but you've got to start somewhere [correction: it's been pointed out to me that that's 70 million pages, not documents. The 550,000 documents indexed represent nearly all AFHRA documents for the period covered]) held by the Air Force Historical Research Agency, covering the period up to 2001. Not the documents themselves, just descriptions of them. Wish there was something like this for the PRO ...

Keep that shadow from them

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

Vote National

A poster from the 1935 general election, showing, quite literally, the shadow of the bomber. The National Government was a coalition comprising the Conservatives and two splinter parties, National Labour and the Liberal Nationals. With Stanley Baldwin at its head, the National Government went to the people on a platform of peace and prosperity. The poster doesn't spell out how peace was to be secured (no doubt one of its virtues), namely through a commitment to the League of Nations and collective security, and moderate rearmament, particularly in the air. It's interesting that at this stage, aeroplanes were still evidently equated with biplanes. Monoplanes were certainly becoming prominent by this time, but they weren't necessarily seen as more 'modern' than the familiar biplane. (As indeed they weren't: Blériot used a monoplane to fly the Channel back in 1909.)

This election poster and others are available from the Conservative Party Archive at the Bodleian. There's only one other which has an aviation theme:
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The spirit of grief

25 February 2008 in 1900s, 1910s, Archives, Art, Biographies, Pictures by Brett Holman | No comments

Spirit of Ecstasy

I've finally gotten around to adding Montagu of Beaulieu (pronounced 'Bewley', apparently) to my irregular series of biographies of airpower propagandists. He's an important, but somewhat neglected figure, some of whose papers I've examined (those held at King's College London). He helped found the Air League of the British Empire in 1909, and devised the influential 'nerve centre' theory, which argued that the destruction of critical infrastructure would be one of the chief dangers of aerial bombardment in the next war:

an attempt would certainly be made to paralyse the heart of the nation by attacking certain nerve centres in London, the destruction of which would impede or entirely destroy the means of communication by telephone, telegraph, rail, and road.

Later, in 1916, he stumped across the country giving speeches criticising the government for its failure to expand aircraft production sufficiently, and to call for the formation of an independent air force, the Imperial Air Service. He was a Conservative MP, then a Conservative peer, and all the time very wealthy (if you call 10,000 acres wealthy, anyway).

But today I'm going to talk about Montagu's personal life, and the way it impinged on his public one. The photo above shows the 'Spirit of Ecstasy', the mascot adorning the bonnet of every Rolls-Royce -- every one since Montagu put an early version on his Silver Ghost in 1911, that is, for he was a huge motoring enthusiast, and had his friend, the sculptor Charles Sykes, design it for him. Supposedly, the model Sykes used was Montagu's own secretary and mistress, Eleanor Thornton. (Though there's an alternate, and possibly more convincing, theory minimising the role of Thornton and Montagu.)
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