Blogging

The 13th Military History Carnival is up at The Cannon’s Mouth. I was dismayed to read I, Clausewitz’s post explaining why female breastplates don’t need breast-bulges. I suppose next we’ll be told that chainmail bikinis would provide next to nothing in terms of protection in battle.

I’ve been meaning to update my sidebar for a while now, as there are a lot of good blogs (both new and old) which I like and which are worth bringing to people’s attention. Some will already be known to readers of this site since they’re written by readers of this site!

I’ve mostly kept my rather idiosyncratic categories, but have added a new category for digital history — which I’m interested in but don’t actually do. Reading these blogs helps me to keep feeling guilty about that fact. So, here there’s academhack, Found History and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, which range from the practical to the theoretical in varying proportions.

On British history, there’s Edwardian Promenade, which I was pleased to find as the Edwardian period seems under-represented in the historioblogosphere. Edwardian Promenade is mainly about the style, fashion and etiquette of the upper classes, which I’m finding unexpectedly interesting (possibly because of my boundless ignorance of such things). Mercurius Politicus is the blog of a student doing an MA on the early modern period. So it has quite a bit on the 17th century and its historiography, the odd travel post, and Carnivalesque 36.

There are a number of great Australian blogs appearing out there. I’ve been especially impressed by the host site of this month’s History Carnival. The Vapour Trail investigates various forms of theatre in 19th century Australia and other English-speaking countries and how this illuminates broader aspects of society and culture. It’s a good place to go if you want to know why the Sentimental Bloke was sentimental and whether Circassian beauties were Circassian. Humanities researcher is very close to home for me — not because of the subject matter (medieval lit) but because the author is an academic at my own university! (Not from Historical Studies, alas, but Culture & Communication.) The title of the next one elicits some cognitive dissonance at first, but soon makes perfect sense: Space Age Archaeology. (Plus it has sputnik cakes.) And then there’s The Cerebral Mum, somebody I’ve known (but haven’t seen!) for a long time. It’s not all that historical most of the time, but it’s always an interesting read, and beside, she’s also a history undergrad. Close enough for government work.

In the military history section, there’s Zone of Influence, which isn’t directly about military history, but rather about wargames (and their history), things which I sometimes post about but never have time to play myself anymore! The War Reading Room is the blog of an independent researcher and writer on various military history topics. And then there’s the Australian War Memorial, which as I noted in the last state of the military historioblogosphere, has a new group (or group-of-groups) blog. Very airminded too — the latest post is about the restoration of a German fighter from the First World War. And even more airminded is Spitfire Site News, which is all about a single type of aeroplane — what else but the Supermarine Spitfire? One day, there’ll be a blog devoted to the Yeoman Cropmaster, and then the blogosphere will be FINAL and COMPLETE and we can all uninstall our RSS readers and go outside and play.

I was remiss in not mentioning the 12th Military History Carnival at Thoughts on Military History when it took place last month. My eye was drawn to ExecutedToday.com’s post about Harry ‘Breaker’ Morant and Peter Handcock, the Australian soldiers executed in 1902 for killing Boer prisoners-of-war. There’s still a debate about whether Kitchener issued an unwritten order to take no prisoners, meaning that the Australians were made scapegoats as a sop to either the Boer government (i.e. so it would consider peace) or to the British public. It seems unlikely to me, on the face of it, or at least unnecessary — it’s not like similar, illegal but tacitly accepted, acts were unknown in the later wars of the twentieth century.

By chance, I caught an episode of the excellent (but cancelled) Rewind the other night which dealt with the Breaker.¹ The transcript is online, and is worth a read: it does poke some holes in the scapegoaters’ arguments.

1. Rewind dealt with various mysteries and puzzles from Australian history. I missed it when it originally aired, which is a shame. It was different to most other history programmes in that it wasn’t afraid to present the viewer with primary source texts to support (or refute) an argument, or indeed to go digging around in archives for clues. I nearly stood up and applauded when, in a segment on the death of Billy Hughes’s daughter, the reporter said ‘So where to look for proof? Well, one obvious place is the National Library to look through Billy Hughes’s private papers’!

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

It’s time again for my six-monthly look at that portion of the blogosphere devoted to military history, as defined by the ‘Wars and Warriors’ section of Cliopatria’s blogroll. So, let’s begin.

Not a lot has changed since September, actually, and this plot shows why: the number of military history blogs has grown by only 13%, whereas between March and September 2007, it grew by more than 50%. Does this mean that fewer military history blogs are being started than before, or that instead Cliopatria is missing a significant portion of them? I’d be tempted to say the latter — the Cliopatricians are only human, after all, and can only add those blogs which come to their attention — but I can’t think of any they’ve missed. Also, the rate of growth of the blogosphere may be slowing — it’s hard to say, as Technorati seem to have stopped publishing their quarterly state of the blogosphere reports.
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The 11th Military History Carnival has been posted at Battlefield Biker. My pick this month is Siberian Light’s post on the Battle of Khalkin-Gol (better known, to me at least, as the Nomonhan Incident), a big tank battle fought between the USSR and Japan in August 1939. I didn’t know that it actually began as skirmishing between Mongolia and Manchukuo, puppet states of the Soviets and Japanese respectively. Though, of course, it needn’t have: a 2nd Russo-Japanese War wouldn’t have surprised many people in the 1930s, particularly given Japanese expansionism and anti-communism. Plenty did predict it, often leftists such as Tom Wintringham, who suggested in The Coming World War (1935) that a conflict between Japan and the USSR would probably spread into the next world war. It didn’t … but almost immediately, the German invasion of Poland did. Siberian Light notes that Khalkin Gol/Nomonhan did influence the course of the Second World War, as Japan’s heavy defeat there was one factor in its decision to go south in December 1941 instead of north. Probably one of the more important forgotten battles of world history, then.

While missing out on a Clio may have been entirely predictable, having a post included in On Line Opinion/Club Troppo’s exhibition of the best Australian blog posts of 2007 was completely unforeseen! It’s a very pleasant surprise, and the exposure is nice too (On Line Opinion has something like 145,000 readers a week, according to Wikipedia). My post is here; all of the best posts are listed here.

I have to say, though, the post in question is not something I would have picked for my best of 2007: I don’t think it’s particularly well-written or insightful. Commenter Pericles would seem to agree: ‘What a strange piece. I had thought that the practice of delving into the past and finding odd observations about “overseas” had long passed its use-by date’. Arrrgh — and here was me thinking that anything that the proper study of history was anything and everything that had happened in the past for which records still exist. Why do I never seem to get these memos? Is there some mailing list I should be on? It’s especially bad news for historians of Tocqueville and the like. And somebody should tell George Simmers that his examination of D. H. Lawrence’s opinions of Australians ‘is an entirely pointless exercise, and a stunning waste of your time and mine’, since Pericles uses that very example for our instruction. Anyway, thanks, Pericles, for letting me know — won’t happen again.

Military History Carnival #10 has been posted over at Walking the Berkshires. This month, the post I enjoyed the most was at Boston 1775, about various improvised weapon systems which ragtag insurgents hoped would turn the tide against the overwhelmingly superior forces of a colonial power. Ok, it’s a stretch to call these first submarines ‘improvised weapon systems’, as they were pioneering attempts at an entirely new mode of transportation. (The post is more about other proposed weapons, such as ‘Row-Gallies’. I want to talk about submarines though :) But they were also weapons of desperation, of the weak against the strong. The British didn’t need to invent submarines because they already ruled the waves. Why bother with such frail contraptions, more of a danger to their own crew than anyone else? Submarines have come a long way since then. They are integral parts of big navies, though for very different purposes than the Turtle (platforms for SLBMs, for example). Middle powers such as Australia like to have a few around to lurk about and deter any potential aggressors, and to add some heft to their offensive capabilities. It’s in small, coastal defence navies that submarines retain something like their original purpose, as force equalisers. It’s in the North Korean navy and its like that the true heirs of the Turtle are to be found today.

The winners of the 2007 Cliopatria Awards have been announced. These are awarded for the best history blogging in the last year. If they’re not already there, I like to add the winning blogs to my sidebar and to my RSS reader, both as a very mediocre reward to the victors, and to diversify my reading. This year, that means adding four blogs: In the Middle (best group blog), Religion in American History (best new blog), Zoom (best series of posts, which have featured here before), and Steamboats are Ruining Everything (best writing). They join Cliopatria (best post, by Timothy Burke) and Civil War Memory (best individual blog), both already there.

I’m very pleased about that last one — even though Airminded was also nominated in that category — because Kevin’s passion for his subject and for his teaching makes Civil War Memory one of my favourite blogs. I’ll also note that this means that military history blogs have won best individual blog two out of three times (Blog Them Out of the Stone Age won the inaugural award). And another military history blog (Civil Warriors) won best group blog last year. The military historioblogosphere continues its irresistable advance!

The 9th Military History Carnival is up, over at the Official Osprey Publishing Blog. This month, the post I found the most interesting is at Citizen Historian, about the part played by the Malayan Regiment in the Battle of Pasir Panjang, 13 February 1942. I certainly didn’t know that Malayans had been involved; it changes the story, somewhat, from the usual ‘imperial battleground’ narrative to one where the locals were not just bystanders in the great events happening all around them. I would like to know something about motivations though — why did Malayan men join up, what (or who) did they believe they were fighting for?

If you haven’t already, it’s time to nominate for the 2007 Cliopatria Awards for the best history blogging in six categories: best group blog, best individual blog, best new blog, best post, best series of posts, and best writing. Nominations close at the end of November. I admit that I tend to wait until late in the month before thinking too hard about this, so that it’s mostly a case of working out what the most glaring omissions are — it’s less work that way :)

Good luck to all the nominees!

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

Cranwell is a RAF base in Lincolnshire (not far from Newark or Grantham, or Lincoln for that matter). It was first established as a RNAS training station in 1915, and sortied the odd anti-zepp patrol in the next few years. In the 1930s, Frank Whittle did much of his work on jet engines here; indeed, the first flight of the Gloster E.28/39, on 15 May 1941, was from Cranwell. But it is best known as the home of the RAF’s officer training college, RAF College Cranwell (but usually called Cranwell, just to confuse things). The College was founded in 1919, and the rather splendid College Hall, seen above, opened for business in 1934.
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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.

This week I attended the bi-annual departmental Work in Progress Day, where postgrads give talks on their research. I wasn’t presenting this time around (I did earlier this year) but it turns out that two of my fellow students are also fellow bloggers! (Which, as far as I know, makes a total of three for the department, including myself.)

One I knew about already, actually: David Llewellyn’s Australia Felix. He’s doing his PhD on the influence of utilitarianism in Australian political life — for example in the genesis of the Australian constitution. His paper, which is online, takes in Aeneas, Madame de Stael, Gallipoli, Chartism and of course Jeremy Bentham. By taking as a touchstone a novel by Henry Handel Richardson, it also gave me flashbacks to English lit in high school, where I was forced to read The Getting of Wisdom. Which in retrospect wasn’t a bad book, but at the time I had a very low tolerance for any novel without spaceships or elves in it, so a coming-of-age novel set in a private girls’ school didn’t exactly cut it! Do check out David’s website and blog though.

The other blog is Megan Sheehy’s History and Web 2.0. Her MA topic is on the use of Web 2.0 tools by Australian historians, and her paper was specifically about the use of YouTube. Megan also has a post about her talk, but even better (and rather recursively!) she has put a two-part video of it on YouTube (part one, part two).

Above is the first part: you can see me arriving late at -8:37, but it’s worth watching the rest of it too :)

Welcome to Military History Carnival 7!

Wars and battles

Let’s start at the sharp end of military history: actual combat. To Flanders Fields, 1917 reflects upon the huge scale of the Passchendaele campaign on the Western Front, and how its misery was shared between Germany, Britain and its Empire. The Battlefield Biker leads us through a failed assault against American Indian tribes — though a successful retreat — by the US Army in the Washington Territory, in 1858. Naval hiring policies should probably discriminate against drunkards and rebels, or so I infer from Cardinal Wolsey’s Today in History post on the Battle of the Kentish Knock in 1652. The previous year, on the other side of England, the Isles of Scilly were also under assault, as Mercurius Politicus narrates in a beautifully illustrated post. And, getting back to the Great War period, Great War Fiction examines a slightly different form of fighting — a riot by Canadian troops waiting in Wales to be sent home.

Representations

The largest number of posts this month concern representations of war, in various forms. Errol Morris, the documentary maker (no, I didn’t know he blogged either) delved deeply into the question of which of two photographs of a road, taken during the Crimean War, came first: the one with cannonballs on the road, or the one without. It seems like a trivial question, but in trying to answer it Morris illuminates the larger question of how historians know anything about the motives of people in the past. (See also Barista’s thoughts on Morris’s posts.) We don’t have to speculate about the motives underlying Ian R. Richardson’s fabulous photos taken at an archaeological dig near the site of the First World War, Messines: as Plugstreet tells us, he was trying to recreate the feel of the haunting scenes captured by the great Australian war photographer, Frank Hurley.

Frog in a Well: China examines some pro-Japanese cartoons produced in China in the 1930s — some well after incidents like the Rape of Nanking, which one would naively expect to have cooled Chinese feelings towards Japan. A Soviet Poster A Day (yes, really!) tells us the story behind a World War Two poster about a famous Soviet sniper, entitled “That’s the way to shoot — every shell is a foe”. Or, as one of the commenters suggests, “One shot, one kill.”

History Survey recommends four movies about the Second World War, in four different languages; while a Polish blog, Historia i Media (fortunately for me, the post is in English) wonders what the historical value might be of a brand new castle, complete with electricity and modern plumbing.

Memory

UKNIWM blogged about the opening of a major new British war memorial, at Alrewas in Staffordshire. It’s unique in that it is devoted to all those military personnel who been killed in the service of their country since the end of the Second World War. As Andrew Keating points out, another novel feature is the space for 16,000 or so extra names, reserved for future deaths.

The purpose of war memorials is to ensure that future generations “never forget”. But in some places, people have never been allowed to remember: Clioaudio points us to a documentary aired by al-Jazeera on the problems Spain still has in confronting the brutal legacy of the Civil War. And there are those who remember, because they were there, but have never had their memories recorded: War in the Mediterranean stresses the urgency of getting veterans to recount their stories before it is too late.

Historiography

For want of a better word. Quite possibly the only review of Michael Howard’s new book, Liberation or Catastrophe?, to mention Lyotard is that by Investigation of a Dog — but I’m sold! Civil Warriors has an example of a gendered reading of the letters of a minor Confederate general, but make sure you read the whole of the introductory paragraph first. Actually, reading the first paragraph last (like I did) might be even more fun. More serious is Civil War Memory’s report on a lecture by Peter Carmichael on the intellectual roots of two major interpretations of Robert E. Lee (pro-Lee, moralising and “Victorian” vs anti-Lee, revisionist and “modernist”), and why they will never see eye to eye. And Blog Them Out of the Stone Age discusses an article by Richard Betts which questions (but ultimately affirms) the very idea of strategy, and how this might be useful in teaching military history.

Fun and games

War, or at least military history, is not always grim. As evidence, I offer two posts on Xerxes’ invasion of Greece in 480 BC. Popcorn & chain mail rightfully mocks the recent movie 300 (which allegedly has something to do with Thermopylae), while the skwib uncovers the lost PowerPoint slides of the battle of Salamis. Coming Anarchy points out that, contrary to many computer games and movies, most pre-modern armies did not use uniforms, making it difficult to tell friend from foe. American Presidents Blog examines the not-so-illustrious sporting career of a future Supreme Allied Commander Europe and US President. And Osprey Publishing Blog reveals what is possibly the least inspiring eve-of-battle speech ever uttered. Well, it probably wasn’t funny then, but it is now!

Included in this classification

I couldn’t cram these into the above categories, which anyway are completely arbitrary. So, in no particular order: behind AotW looks at a Stetson who fell at Antietam, and traces his family connection to a more famous bearer of that name (think hats). Early Modern Whale looks at a book by Joseph Swetnam, author of The schoole of the noble and worthy science of defence and The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Inconstant Women (sadly, it’s the former which is under discussion here). Quid plura? relates an incident in 1945 when a young American chaplain took the initiative to help save some of Germany’s past. Thoughts on Military History uncovers a fantastic resource for anyone interested in the history of modern artillery. And bringing up the rear, The DC Traveler recommends an amphibious tour of the US capital’s streets and waterways by DUKW — though they have these in London too, and I have to say I wasn’t tempted when I was there recently!

That’s all for this edition of the Military History Carnival. I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it, as I’ve enjoyed writing it! (Even though it’s a singularly non-airminded carnival this time around …) Thanks to everyone who contributed suggestions.

The next Military History Carnival will be hosted by Gary Smailes on 7 November. Please send him suggestions at garysmailes at gmail dot com or use the form.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

… to send me submissions for the next Military History Carnival! This will be posted at Airminded on 14 October, one week from today. I have a few suggestions already, but need more. Any posts published in the previous month and which involve military history in some way will be considered. From the Carnival’s home page:

Military is defined very broadly. It includes all levels of armed conflict — there will be no rigid definition of what is and isn’t a war — and all military experiences during peacetime. At the risk of offending latin purists, it includes navies and air forces as well as armies. Weapons, tactics, strategy, uniforms, insignia, equipment etc are all interesting and important, and so are relationships between war and society, culture, race, gender, sexuality, disability, and the non-human. Preparations for and aftermaths of wars are as significant as the wars themselves. Opposition to war needs to be considered alongside the conduct of war. Representations of war in literature, films, TV, games etc are just as valid objects of study as empirical evidence of reality (although fictional representations should be related to the real world — no fictional universes please).

About the only restriction is that here, history means “before 1 January 2001″.

So please nominate posts for inclusion, either by emailing me directly at bholman at airminded dot org, or by using the form.

Image source: London Opinion, 5 September 1914 (I think — the original magazine cover from which all imitations ultimately derive. The image itself is from World War Pictures).

But then computers so often don’t …

OK, so earlier today I upgraded my WordPress theme, Tarski, in preparation for an update to WordPress itself. After 3 hours, much cursing and many broken plugins, I mostly got things working and looking the way they were before. Then, about 6 hours later, I noticed that the Similar Posts plugin also wasn’t working, so (hoping for a quick fix) I upgraded that to the latest version. This turned out to be a bad idea, because then all pages started showing up completely blank — including admin ones. Presumably Similar Posts did something bad to the php then: that happens sometimes. So I went in with ftp and deleted Similar Posts. No change. I deleted the old Similar Posts too. Still no change! Now I’m worried that the mysql database has been hosed somehow (which would serve me right, as I decided I couldn’t be bothered backing it up earlier in the day). I reverted to the previous version of Tarski, the one I’d been using before I touched anything today. No change. Finally I reverted to a really old version of Tarski, some six months old, and that finally undid the damage. (The WordPress Default theme works as well.)

So the database actually is ok (and is now backed it up, of course …) But this all makes no sense. It was clearly Similar Posts which caused the whole problem, so why did I have revert Tarski to an ancient version to fix it? Bleh. I was quite happy with Tarski, but the way it’s being developed means that I have to rewrite more and more of it in order to make it do what I want. So maybe I’ll have to look around for another nice, clean theme.

It might just be some sort of caching thing, or I might have another look tomorrow and figure out what the problem really was, but for the moment things Airminded will not quite be itself until I can do something about it. Apologies for any inconvenience!

Update: fixed now. The problem was some extra code relating to Similar Posts which was residing in Tarski’s constants.php file, which explains why I had to go back to an old version of Tarski (when I wasn’t using Similar Posts), but not why going back to the previous version of Similar Posts didn’t work, when it had been a few minutes earlier … But as a bonus, in the process of getting Similar Posts to work again, I now understand Tarski’s new way of doing things better, so it has a reprieve :)

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Six months ago, I used Cliopatria’s list of history blogs to assess the state of the military portion of the historioblogosphere. My original plan was to do this every year, but because things move fast online I’ll update it every six months instead. I won’t waffle on too much about my methodology (if it can be called that!); for that, please refer to the original post, as well as for the plots from March 2006.

First, let’s look at the number of blogs in the military historioblogosphere. This increased by just over 50% in six months, i.e. an annualised rate of more than 100%, which is considerably faster growth than in the year to March 2007. This is now only slightly slower than the rate of growth of the blogosphere as a whole, which as of April 2007 was doubling every 320 days (as measured by Technorati. Of course that rate may have changed by now). Some 13% of the blogs in the March 2007 list don’t appear in the current version, which, sustained over a year, would be a touch higher than the churn rate last time.
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Military History Carnival #6 is up at Armchair General. The stand-out post this month is a rebuttal of the alleged decline in military history at American universities, undertaken by David Stone at The Russian Front (which is an ambitious — and very stylish! — new group blog on Russian military and diplomatic history, the editor-in-chief of which is none other than Scott Palmer of The Avia-Corner). Stone uses some actual data to show that, no, as far as we can tell, there were more military historians in US history departments, in absolute terms, in 2005 than there were in 1975: nearly three times as many, in fact. The total number of historians employed has risen even more dramatically, so the proportion of military historians has in fact decreased (from 2.4% to 1.9%). So there’s still room to argue that there’s a relative decline going on. But I suspect the real complaint of the declinists is, as Stone discusses near the end of his post, that there’s less “real” military history being done — less operational-type stuff and more of the war-and-society variety. As somebody whose research is firmly of the latter school I’d hardly complain if that were so (which is not to say at all that operational history is unnecessary, unimportant or uninteresting); but again, some decent statistics (as opposed to cherry-picking and anecdotes) are needed to show whether this is even true or not.

Also noted from this carnival, a new blog: War and Game, dealing with both wargaming and history. It’s an eclectic mix of topics, including some very airminded ones — see for example the current top post on what was nearly the RAF’s first-ever raid on Berlin in November 1918. Looks like a blog worth following.

By the way, the next Military History Carnival will be appear here on Airminded on 14 October! So please send me nominations by email at bholman at airminded dot org or use the form.

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

So, after just under two months in London, it’s time to leave. Tomorrow morning I’m on the train¹ to York, then after that, Hexham (near Hadrian’s Wall), Edinburgh, Rome² before finally getting back to good old Melbourne-town on 18 September. It should be a great way to cap off what has already been a fantastic trip, and will also give me a chance to unwind a bit before I plunge into the task of assessing the material I’ve gathered here in London.

So what have I been up to? From my posts it probably seems as if I’ve spent all my time sightseeing, but (in case my supervisor is reading this!) actually that was only one or two days a week. Apart from attending two conferences, giving one presentation, and meeting with a number of aviation historians, the rest of the week was usually spent in some archive or library, including:

• British Library (newspapers, books and manuscripts)
• Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, King’s College London
• Department of Documents, Imperial War Museum
• Royal Aeronautical Society Library
• Air League
• Archive Collection, RAF Museum London
• Science Museum Library

I got to see most of what I wanted; though an extra day at RAeS and the RAF Museum would have been most useful, and I never made it to places like the Marx Memorial Library or the British Film Institute. And I may even spend half a day at the National Library of Scotland while in Edinburgh, though that’s looking doubtful now. I printed or photocopied over 3000 pages, mostly from microfilmed newspapers, and took nearly 1600 photos of documents. And that’s excluding the transcriptions I made of other documents which didn’t seem worth filling out a form to get photocopied. I have no idea if this is a lot in relative terms, but in absolute terms the idea of going through all that is making me feel faint!

There have been a few surprises along the way. The most surprising thing, and a pleasant surprise at that, was bumping into Alex Dickson at the RAF Museum, who is doing his PhD on the origins of the RAF Volunteer Reserve; we eventually realised that we’d corresponded some time back, but completely by chance he had come down from Scotland to visit the RAF Museum on the one day that I was there, and to look at the same papers too! Sometimes it’s a very very small world indeed.

Another surprise was that in this day and age (viz, the Internet Age) I should have to print out 3000 pieces of paper (the university library at home allows you to save to a USB stick, though the process is slightly cumbersome). And because I can’t carry 3000 pieces of paper with me, I had to send them home in a big box, along with some books, totalling 25kg: I don’t even want to say how much that cost! And because I was paranoid about the big box going missing on the way to Australia (and therefore wasting most of my trip here), I took the precaution of taking photos of each and every page beforehand. Some of them may be a bit blurry, but it will be far better than nothing if disaster strikes. Digital technology to the rescue, that’s great and all; but it seems like there are one or two intermediate steps which could be eliminated here!

But the most surprising thing I learned here was how to put on a tie — surprised that I had to do it at all! I’ve never needed to wear one before and would have quite happily gone to my grave never having learned how to tie one. But one of the conferences I went to was at RAF Cranwell; and even civilians needed to adhere to a minimum standard of dress (”Planters”) while in the main building. Including, for men, the wearing of a tie. So first I had to buy a tie, which vaguely went with the shirts I brought with me, then learn how to put it on (the night before the conference). Of course that wasn’t hard at all, but it wasn’t anything I had expected to be doing here in London either.

Thanks to everyone who has shown me great hospitality while I’ve been here; you’ve helped make this trip memorable and not just productive! I look forward to catching up with you all some time in the future, here most likely, or in Melbourne if you ever happen to visit. I should have some form of net access while traveling, so I don’t expect a real blog hiatus, though how much I’ll be able to post is another question. Probably more travel blogging, I’m sorry to say: I promise there will be plenty more of the traditional Airminded fare when I get back to Australia! Er, and more travel blogging too, I suppose.

1. I know: not very airminded of me.
2. That one is by plane!

As part of the BBC’s Summer of British Film, The Dam Busters will be showing next week at selected cinemas across the UK. I’ll be seeing it, with at least one Airminded regular, at the Peckham Multiplex next Tuesday at 7.30pm, for the surprisingly reasonable price of 99p. Any readers who would like to come along would be most welcome; give me a shout in the comments or directly, and we’ll arrange … something.

It’s always a pleasure to see classic movies the way they were meant to be seen, on the big screen. (Although “big” is a relative term, especially here given that it’s at a multiplex!) And it is a classic: bombers, boffins, bouncing bombs, a stirring musical score and an unflinching portrayal of Bomber Command’s area bombing policy. Well, obviously that last part is a lie — but it’s still well worth seeing.

I don’t often link to interesting posts from Modern Mechanix because once you start, where do you stop? But I am compelled to point out this one which reprints an October 1934 Modern Mechanix and Inventions article about an American (presumably) idea for a solar-powered flying airfield.

It’s as simple as putting a landing strip for aeroplanes on top of an airship, and covering the rest of the top surface with ’solar photo cells’ (i.e., solar panels). The article suggests that one application would be that ‘Planes could land on the dirigible, floating over the sea, to refuel for trans-ocean passenger service’.

So, going one way, this links to other contemporary ideas for routinising flight over the Atlantic (in particular), such as the seadrome and Project Habbakuk. In another direction, it links to modern solar-powered airships designed for stratospheric surveillance. And finally, it links to real-life flying aircraft carriers such as the USS Macon and fictional ones such as HMS Whatever-it-was in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

There’s no information given in the article about whose idea this was. The suspicion arises that it was invented purely to justify putting an airship on the front cover … not too different from this post, really!

For a long, long time, there was only Zeppelin vs. Pterodactyls: the poster. Then there was ZvP: the movie mashup, followed by ZvP: the cartoon mashup. And now there’s ZvP: the webcomic, along with ZvP: the t-shirt!

I obviously wasn’t responsible for creating any of this. I wasn’t even the first to blog about ZvP. But through the stochastic wonders of the blogosphere, my post about it was picked up by blogs more popular than my own, which then spread the word to a much larger audience, with the results that you see above. So I do feel as though I can claim a very modest share of the credit for this ZvP revival!

And I may just have to buy the t-shirt …

The fifth Military History Carnival is up. A lot of good stuff; the post I enjoyed most was at History is Elementary, on the evolution of camouflage in the First World War — it’s not only informative but enables us to vicariously share in the pleasure of teaching. And all that camouflage reminds me of Fed Square back home …

Ships painted in dazzle camouflage schemes, in particular, look incredible, but I wonder if people at the time found them jarring and disconcerting? These did not look like the familiar symbols of British naval might that people had grown up with. Just another alienating marker of hyperindustrialised warfare to add to the pile, I guess, and I’m sure the topic has been done to death, historiographically speaking.

Military History Carnival Edition Four has clearly been timed to catch me in transition from the southern to the northern hemisphere, so I’m a couple of days late in posting about it. For me, the most interesting post was Philobiblon’s on the suggestion that the so-called Glorious Revolution was successful because the Dutch ships were more technologically advanced than the English ones — in particular, they were faster and so were able to sweep in and unload their troops before the Royal Navy had time to react. This reminds me of Palmerston’s remark in 1845 to the effect that steam power made the same scenario possible at that time. I wonder if 1688 influenced his thinking on this matter?

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

Hello everybody, I seem to have got here at last, it’s been a long long time but here I am and jolly glad I am to be here at last (to quote Amy Johnson). I’ve been in Blighty for almost 24 hours at this point; here are some random thoughts and observations. Of course these are based only on what I’ve seen today, and should not be taken as representative of London or Britain as a whole!

• the flight(s) went very smoothly (almost literally, only a few minor patches of turbulence), no major delays. I missed out on the window seat from Sydney but as it was dark for most of the flight that’s no great loss.
• going through Customs/Immigration is not as bad as I expected (particularly given the recent bomb plot).
• public transport prices are ridiculously high.
• Tube trains seem a bit, well, poky — very narrow. Presumably that’s a consequence of it being cheaper to make the tunnels narrower.
• my first thought on the trip in from Heathrow was that the suburbs reminded me a bit of parts of inner Sydney. Except here it went on forever, in Australian cities good old suburban sprawl soon sets in.
• Bloomsbury is rather nice. Lots of nice old buildings and leafy parks. Quiet. And so clean!
• after I got settled in at Goodenough College, I went for a random wander. Found Oxford Street and made my way back to the British Museum, which is like 5 minutes’ walk from the college. How cool is that?
• I evidently put the mozza¹ on Leo Amery a couple of years ago by remarking how often he turns up in my research. I’ve hardly ever come across him since then! But here he is again at last, not exactly in my research but as one of the founders of Goodenough in 1930.
• four-way traffic lights seem weird to me.
• I was surprised at how fast the traffic moves along Oxford Street — without parked cars to act as a buffer, seems like it would be easy for a pedestrian on the footpath trip over and get your head split open by a double-decker bus. Of course, it was a Sunday, so maybe the traffic is jammed the rest of the week.
• I keep thinking I see familiar faces among the crowd when walking down the street. Since just about everybody I know is on the other side of the planet, this seems unnecessarily perverse.
• I can see I’m going to end up with pockets of loose change — I’m bad enough at home! But now that I look at it, the coins are mostly similar enough in shape and colour to Australian numerical equivalents that I’ll get by. 5p/5c, 10p/10c, 50p/50c are very close. £1 coins look like $2 coins. 20p coins just look weird. We don’t have 1c and 2c coins anymore in Australia, I’ll have to get used to counting in units of less than 5 again. And paper banknotes! That’s a blast from the past.
• so many internet kiosks out in the street, like phone booths. Is that a sign of progress or the lack thereof? In Melbourne, the few there are don’t seem to get used much.
• it IS possible to go the British Museum and not see either the Rosetta Stone or the Elgin Marbles. Like I said, it’s only 5 minutes away … I’ll be back!
• I wasn’t tempted by the overpriced food inside the museum, the hotdogs being sold out the front were very tasty and much cheaper.
• speaking of which, what’s with all the hotdog vendors? It’s not something I’d associated with English cuisine. Catering to American tourists, perhaps?
• speaking of which, it’s true what they say about American tourists.
• I would just like to thank the many generations of British plunderers of the cultural heritage of conquered and otherwise downtrodden peoples for helping to make such a brilliant museum. You guys rock!
• so did the Aztecs.
• when both your mum and Douglas Adams tell you not to forget your towel, you should listen. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to find somewhere to buy a towel in this town.
• on the other hand, every second shop around here seems to sell luggage, among other things. OK, there’s lots of tourists about, but don’t most of them already have luggage?
• the concept of “service” doesn’t seem to have made it into the philosophy of customer relations here yet.
• but the nanny state ethos seems ingrained: trains telling me to mind the gap between the train and the platform, markings on the road telling me which way to look when I cross, no taps in the shower to let me do something as radical as adjusting the temperature of the water to my liking (though to be honest that probably has more to do with the nature of student accommodation than anything else).
• biggest culture shock of the day: not being able to find anywhere that sells 500ml bottles/cartons of chocolate-flavoured milk (my currently-preferred way to get a chocolate fix). Neither Waitrose nor Tesco Express had any such thing, maybe this is more popular down under. On the other hand: mmmm, Milka. Hard to get back home.
• I got massively ripped off on a 5m ethernet cable on Oxford Street. On the other hand, I did successfully haggle for perhaps the first time in my life, so I consider it a moral victory.
• Royal London Homeopathic Hospital, LOL. Is there a Royal London Placebo Hospital as well, or would that be redundant?
• you call that a night?! It’s 5am and already bright as, well, day.
• despite all my efforts and disruptions to my normal schedule, my body clock is evidently still on GMT+10.

Despite some of the grumbles above, it’s fantastic to be here. As I said to a friend the other day, there’d be no point in coming if it was exactly like home!

Airminded will likely become something of a travel blog for the next couple of months, which will no doubt bore my UK readers (for which I apologise). But there’ll also be more of the usual aeroplaney stuff too, particularly once I get stuck into the British Library …

Edit: the photo was added two months later!

1. Austral. colloq., “jinxed”.

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

For the first time in nearly two years, the number of books I have out from the uni library has dropped to zero. Which can mean only one thing: I’m about to fly out to the UK! There will be a blogging hiatus but it’s not likely to be more than a few days, if that.

TTFN.

Image source: some page in Japanese.

This is very cool: the Australian War Memorial, Australia’s foremost military history museum, seems to be getting into blogging in a big way! Today, there was an announcement on H-War (and Victoria’s cross? is already on the case) of a group blog running in conjunction with an exhibition about Australia’s participation in the big Western Front battles of 1917: To Flanders Fields, 1917. It’s maintained by a group of AWM curators and historians: Peter Burness, Craig Tibbitts, Shaune Lakin and Anne-Marie Condé.

That’s all I was going to mention, but I noticed that the AWM has set up a subdomain called blog.awm.gov.au, which suggested that there might be other AWM blogs out there. Now, that page is completely blank, so I used my Google-fu to see if I could find anything else using that domainname. And there are four more blogs! Focus: photography & war 1945-2006; Gallipoli Battlefield Tour 2007; George Lambert: Gallipoli & Palestine Landscapes; Lawrence of Arabia & the Light Horse. All of them accompany AWM exhibitions, except for the Gallipoli tour one, obviously. Presumably they won’t be updated after their associated exhibition ends, but then there’ll be other blogs to replace them.

The AWM is to be applauded for this. They all look very interesting and are already well-established, with posts on a variety of intriguing topics, with some fantastic illustrations to boot (drawing on one of the Memorial’s strengths there). A lot of effort has been put into them and it shows. But I wonder why I haven’t come across any of these blogs before? Partly it’s because I don’t visit the AWM homepage often enough — they’re all listed there quite prominently (so much for Google-fu!) But another part of the answer would seem to be that the AWM’s bloggers haven’t tried to hook into the rest of the historioblogosphere — there are no links to other blogs in their sidebars or posts (that I could see anyway). Whether this is by design or by accident I can’t say — I can see why they’d want to focus on their own content — but I think they’re missing out on promotional opportunities by neglecting the social networking aspect of blogging. Hopefully a bit of linkage in their direction will show them what they are missing.

I don’t want to end on even that slightly sour note, as I do think this is really exciting, so I’ll point to one post by Anne-Marie Condé which caught my eye. It’s about the Australian War Records Section, formed in London in May 1917, effectively the origins of the AWM itself, and features some photographs and artefacts associated with it, such as a 1918-pattern pair of anti-gas goggles and a stuffed carrier pigeon. There’s also some more good news: the AWM is digitising the war diaries of Australian Army units involved in the various wars of the twentieth century. The project is only its early days, but this is going to be a tremendous resource for historians and genealogists. I was disappointed, though, to discover that war diary entries don’t begin with sentences like ‘Dear war diary, today we launched another futile assault against Turkish positions at Lone Pine …’ :D

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

Since my previous “web log beg” worked so well, here’s another. Because this is my first trip to Europe, and could well be my last for a long time, I’d like to do a bit of travel in September to have a look around (I get kicked out of the college on 3 September to make way for the regular students, so I either become an itinerant or fly straight home). It will just be for a couple of weeks or maybe a bit longer, since I’ll be running out of both time and money by then. So where to go?

I’ve just confirmed that the Hamburg conference is actually on; that starts on 5 September (6, really) and finishes on 7. So I may as well make my way straight there. After that I’ll have about 10 days, give or take — I’m due to fly back (from Heathrow) on 17 September but I can change that. What can I fit in in that time? What should I see and do? Some parameters: I’ll have a medium-sized suitcase with me, probably partially-stuffed with books, so backpacking is out. I won’t be driving, and it’s years since I’ve ridden a bike so I don’t see myself doing that. So I’m already limiting myself to places which are good for walking, public transport or (if all else fails) touristy coach trips. I’m not too old for hostels (I think!), but would probably prefer hotels if I can afford it — which I probably can’t, but anyway I can worry about that later.

As for what I’d like to see: well, British history-type stuff obviously. Military history, planes, all that good stuff — yes of course. But I can get a lot of that in and around London. I love museums and the like; picturesque country landscapes are nice but we have some of that here, so that’s less of a priority. And since I’m from a young country, where the built environment dates to no earlier than the 19th century (with one exception), I have a hunger to see really old things. Early modern, medieval would be great; even earlier would be better. I’m a sucker for anything Roman, so Rome is an obvious choice. I don’t have any Italian but they’ve been fleecing tourists for over two thousand years, so I’m sure I’d manage. I’d like to visit the Western Front battlefields in Flanders, particularly Pozières, but I figure I can probably do that earlier in the summer as a day or overnight trip. I also want to visit Cornwall: my patrilineal ancestors came from there, there’s Tintagel and other fun pseudo-Arthurian connections, it’s got that almost-Celtic-fringe thing happening, and it looks pretty in the pics. What about Scotland? I hear Edinburgh is nice. South is Hadrian’s Wall, north the Highlands — all good. Is there anywhere else I should be thinking about? How long does take to “do” these places, particularly in the absence of a car? 10 days is presumably only enough for two (plus Hamburg) once travel is factored in.

As you can see, I’m pretty clueless about the whole thing, so any and all clues would be most helpful! I don’t have to decide everything right now, but there is a time factor: as part of my ticket to the UK, I get a free BA “internal” flight, which could be to Rome or Edinburgh (is it even sensible to fly from London to Edinburgh? it’s such an itty bitty distance, or seems that way to an Australian), but apparently not to Hamburg (I’ll have to double-check that though). Which is fantastic, but I basically have to decide where by Friday! Arghh, pressure.

I don’t often mention the various history carnivals here, which makes me a bad netizen; but I’m trying to get into the habit of picking out my favourite post from the monthly Military History Carnival. MilHisCar III is now up, and although a great post on the military origins of the phrase “basket case” did catch my eye, I have to go with the two posts I myself nominated from Old is the New New, on the esoteric and military-industrial origins (via wargaming) of role-playing games. Further proof, if it were needed, that Rob MacDougall is king of the geek/historians!