Tomorrow I’m starting a bit of an experiment, an idea I had after doing a post on Human Smoke a few months back. We’re coming up on the 70th anniversary of the Sudeten crisis, which, as I noted recently, was a crisis long before Munich had anything to do with it. Long before. The Munich Conference was on 29 September 1938, but the Sudeten issue was already prominent in British newspapers a full month earlier, and didn’t start to fade until early October.

So, what I thought I’d do is put up a post every day showing how the crisis was unfolding in the press on the same date 70 years ago. Hopefully this will convey something of the steady rise — and sharp decline — of tension: from concern, to anxiety, to fear, to intense relief. I’ll start with 29 August 1938 and go through to 8 October (six days out of every seven, at least — I haven’t looked at any Sunday papers), and will draw on The Times, the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Mail, as well as a couple of weeklies, the Spectator and the New Statesman. (George Orwell started keeping his diary in early August 1938, so I’ll be keeping an eye out for his thoughts on the crisis too.) I’m not exactly sure how I’ll write the posts, but they won’t be very dense, at least at first: maybe just the headlines, to show what a not-particularly interested reader might pick up just by flicking the pages. We’ll see how it evolves.

This means that my more usual fare will be thin on the ground for the next 5 or 6 weeks, so apologies to those wanting more aeroplanes and bombs!

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

… 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 …

Stephen Biddle. Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle. Princeton and Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2004. An analytical and numerical approach to working out which side should be victorious in battle. I see nothing in the index to suggest that there’s an answer to the classic dilemma: U.S.S Enterprise vs. a star destroyer, which would win? A missed opportunity.

A while back I learned from Investigations of a Dog of TD Word Count, a WordPress plugin which totals up all the words published in a blog’s posts and pages. In just over three years of blogging, Airminded has racked up 250,664 words! To put that in perspective, the PhD I’ve been working on for nearly all of that period is only supposed to be between 80,000 and 100,000 words. Hmm, maybe I could have finished it by now if it hadn’t been for this blog …

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

The 15th Military History Carnival has been posted at Cardinal Wolsey’s This Day In History. This time around, I’d like to contrast two styles of blog conversation. The first is at Crooked Timber, on the differing memories of the Great War in America and Europe, and the bearing this may have on attitudes to war and peace: not only the post itself but the 170-comment long discussion thread, which features regular Airminded commenter Chris Williams. (See also the cross-post at John Quiggin’s own blog, and some comments at Trench Fever.) It’s a good example of somebody posting some interesting ideas which resulted in a thorough discussion (though not without its frustrations, and it’s a shame that Crooked Timber threads seem to close after such a short time). But while intense, it’s pretty localised in time and blog-space.

Compare this with the reaction to a post (which had nothing to do with military history and so wasn’t in the Carnival) at Mercurius Rusticus attacking the role and influence of women in the history profession, and gender history in general. The post has now been taken down (Ralph Luker quotes some of it), apparently permanently, though it was up and down a couple of times before that, and for a while the whole blog was closed to all but invited readers. (Another post, quite innocuous as far as I could see, was taken down after being mentioned in a comment at Cliopatria.) Mercurius Rusticus himself (and presumably he’s a he) seems uninterested in discussing or defending what he’s said in any sensible way: his comments on the matter to date have all been written in the style of a 17th-century scholar, or so I take it. Which is amusing enough but, unless this is an accepted style of discourse amongst early modern historians, seems pretty disrespectful to his interlocutors. As is his most recent post.

But the thing is that this hostility to debate doesn’t matter too much, because there are plenty of other places for people to respond, comment, point and laugh. The ones that have come across my feed reader include: Cliopatria (here, here and here), Tenured Radical (here and here), Historiann, Early Modern Notes, Investigations of a Dog, Europe Endless, and Progressive Historians. Mercurius Rusticus isn’t doing himself any favours with his evasiveness, but in any event the historioblogosphere is doing a good job of analysing the issue without his further input.

My own attitude is pretty much the same as it was in a somewhat-different context two years ago:

I would have thought that anything that happened in the past is a ‘worthwhile’ subject for study by historians. Anything!

If gender history isn’t your thing (and I’ve already confessed that it’s not an approach that I often adopt myself) then just don’t do it. I simply don’t get why any historian would be offended by the fact that other historians choose to do things differently to themselves — let alone feel the need to attack them for it. History is such a vast subject that we need to illuminate it from as many angles as possible in order to approach a true understanding of it.

I was invited this week to take part in a ’round table’ discussion between Major Paul Moga (USAF), Professor James Arthur Mowbray (Air War College), and selected bloggers with an interest in aviation (including Scott Palmer of the Avia-Corner). I’m not sure the producers realised that I’m down under, but although the scheduled time for the chat actually was at a reasonable hour, my time, I had to decline because of a prior engagement. At least it spared everyone concerned the trouble of translating my native Strine on the fly …

The purpose was to advertise a documentary series called Showdown: Air Combat, which starts this Sunday on the Military Channel. Which I’m happy to do in this case, because the aforementioned discussion has been made freely available online. Of course I won’t be able to watch it, but it looks interesting: the basic idea being to replay, using warbirds or RC models, ten notable dogfights from the First World War on. Sadly, only one episode features a British aeroplane, that on the Red Baron’s last flight.

The discussion can be played below, or listened to here. It lasts for about 45 minutes.

At one point (about 25 minutes in), Prof. Mowbray says that the aeroplane was always viewed as one of the most expensive weapon systems, and that so when Douhet started talking about fleets of thousands of bombers, everybody laughed at him because nobody could afford that many. Of course, in a discussion like this there’s not the time to fully qualify one’s remarks, and I’d hate for anyone to take me to task for a mistake made when speaking off the cuff, but I can’t agree. Before 1914, people like Claude Grahame-White often made the argument that you could buy a thousand aeroplanes, say, for the cost of one dreadnought — and it might only take one bomb from one aeroplane to sink that dreadnought. A bargain at twice the price, if true. And at the end of the war, the great powers did have massive fleets of aircraft — the RAF had over 22000 aircraft on its books (though this number includes every category of aeroplane: reserves, trainers, obsolete models and probably scraps of broken wing sitting in the corner of the hangar). It probably would have had many more had the war continued into 1919. But don’t let my pedantry put you off having a listen!

The 14th Military History Carnival is up at Investigations of a Dog. It’s a big one! I direct readers’ attention particularly to a series of posts by Paul Brewer at The War Reading Room: here, here, here, here, here, and here. The subject is a new book by Nicholson Baker called Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of Civilization, which has been reviewed widely and panned roundly, at least by historians. Baker’s subject is the origins of the Second World War and his approach is to quote and juxtapose contemporary newspaper and magazine articles. I haven’t read it, but have flicked through it in the bookshop and can understand why reviews have been negative. The extracts are presented with little or no context and are arranged in such a way as to imply close causal connections between events which would seem to have little to do with each other, and it’s all wrapped up in an irritatingly portentous tone. I didn’t buy it, can you tell?

But while he doesn’t excuse Baker’s ‘dishonest history’, Paul argues that most reviewers (the historian ones, at least) seem not to have understood the point of Human Smoke. It’s not a history as such, nor an argument that the Second World War was not a good/just/necessary war (though I think Baker is sympathetic to such views). After all, Baker is a novelist, not an historian (or journalist). Instead, it’s an attempt to understand how an American observer of world events in the 1930s and early 1940s might arrive at a pacifist-isolationist position:

We experience an event, such as the ongoing War in Iraq, in a piecemeal form, filtered by two editors - one is located at our source of information, whether radio or newspaper in 1939, and the other is our own selection of what to pay close attention to. Baker’s book shows us how one reader might have perceived the oncoming war and decided that the cost of fighting it might not have been worth it.

If that’s right, it sounds more interesting than I originally thought; and in a way it’s not too far from some of my own work. I make pretty heavy use of newspapers in one of my chapters to show what the average person on the street was being told about the dangers of bombing, though I’m not restricting myself to only one political vantage point, nor (I hope!) conflating unrelated events in a naive way. In any event, thanks to Paul’s posts I may reconsider my decision not to buy Human Smoke. If I ever have a spare $35 lying around, anyway.

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.