Books

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Christopher Andrew. The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5. London: Allen Lane, 2009. Most valuable for me on the Edwardian spy mania, but looks like a fun read for the rest of the thousand-odd pages.

R. V. Jones. Most Secret War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939-1945. London: Penguin, 2009 [1978]. A reprint of this important autobiography; no doubt it’s been superseded as a history of the wizard war but at the time it was groundbreaking.

Evelyn August. The Black-out Book: One-hundred-and-one Black-out Nights’ Entertainment. Oxford and New York: Osprey, 2009 [1939]. A facsimile reprint containing jokes, puzzles, games, trivia and other bits and pieces: giving a lower-brow (and I’m sure more accurate) impression of what people actually did in shelters than this. Evelyn August was the pseudonym of Sydney and Muriel Box.

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next

While in Wales recently I chanced upon a copy of Robert Stradling’s Your Children Will Be Next: Bombing and Propaganda in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008). My description at the time was that this book ‘Argues that the memory of Guernica has obscured earlier atrocities, especially the 1936 bombing of Getafe near Madrid’. Now that I’ve read Your Children Will Be Next, it’s clear that I seriously misrepresented Stradling’s argument in one crucial respect: he doesn’t believe the Getafe atrocity ever actually happened, or at least if it did, there’s no good evidence for it now. And that, nevertheless, this non-event had important consequences for the propaganda battle in Spain, for the subsequent memory of the Spanish Republic, and for our own reactions to the use of airpower against civilian targets. It’s such an interesting and important book that it’s worth correcting my mistake, and digging bit deeper into Stradling’s thesis.

Firstly, what was supposed to have happened at Getafe? I must admit to not having heard of the incident before. It was claimed (mainly in the foreign left-wing press) that on 30 October 1936, Nationalist (meaning German) bombers deliberately bombed civilians in Getafe, a small town near Madrid, flying low to mark their victims and killing dozens of children. Photographs of their bodies, with identification labels on their chests, were used in several Republican propaganda productions, the best-known of which is shown above: ‘If you tolerate this, your children will be next’, a combined appeal to humanity and self-interest. Stradling traces the propagation and influence of The Poster, as he calls it: it was used by both the Communists and the Labour Party in Britain for their pamphlets (below is the Imperial War Museum’s copy of the latter’s). It helped turn opinion in the democracies against the Nationalists in this crucial early part of the war, when a swift victory by Franco had seemed assured. Memoirs and poems from the period attest to the power of its imagery.
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I bought these at Foyles a few hours before my plane was due to depart, and had them mailed to me. Not necessarily the cheapest way to go, but I was in a hurry!

Jeremy Black. Rethinking Military History. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2004. Probably nobody is better qualified to write a book with this title — I’ve only got 60 or 70 books to go before I’ve got his entire opus.

Bob Clarke. Britain’s Cold War. Stroud: The History Press, 2009. Looks like a useful overview of, well, Britain’s Cold War — civil defence, the American presence, the Royal Observer Corps, and so on.

Sebastian Cox and Peter Gray, eds. Air Power History: Turning Points from Kitty Hawk to Kosovo. Abingdon and New York: Frank Cass, 2002. A collection of essays on diverse topics by historians such as Tami Biddle, John Ferris, James Corum and John Buckley.

Michael D. Gordin. Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007. Having said I needed to add this book to my reading list, I couldn’t not buy it when I saw a copy!

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa. Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman and the Surrender of Japan. Cambridge and London: Belknap Press, 2005. An important and controversial book which I seem to run into frequently in various threads and blogs, so again something worth reading so I can stay abreast of the debate.

Samuel Hynes. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. London: Pimlico, 1992. Another gap in my library filled. As much about the fifteen years after the war as the war itself.

The Invasion of 1910

William le Queux’s The Invasion of 1910 is today one of the best-remembered of the Edwardian invasion novels (at least to anyone interested in the topic). Not because of any literary value — very few people read it today, and I can’t blame them — but because of its contemporary success. It was commissioned by the press magnate Lord Northcliffe and serialised in his Daily Mail in 1906. And heavily promoted in all his papers, as we can see here — this is a full page ad from The Times (13 March 1906, 11). The Invasion of 1910 was a huge hit, selling many newspapers and over a million books in a couple of dozen languages, making it the most successful future war story since The Battle of Dorking back in 1871. Northcliffe being Northcliffe, there was also a political objective: the scuppering of the government’s proposed Territorial Force, which was widely derided by Conservatives as an ineffective substitute for conscription (sorry, ‘national service’). The ad and the book both feature a personal recommendation by Field Marshal Lord Roberts, president of the National Service League.
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I bought these the other day, about 17000 km away — except for one which was a gift.

The Battle of Britain: An Air Ministry Account of the Great Days from 8th August — 31st October 1940. London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1941. Thanks, Simon!

Angus Calder. The People’s War: Britain 1939-1945. London: Pimlico, 1992 [1969]. A classic which I’ve not yet read.

Richard Overy. The Air War 1939-1945. Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2005 [1980]. Likewise, I’m afraid to say! This edition has an essay on the most important updates to the literature since 1980.

Martin Pugh. We Danced All Night: A Social History of Britain Between the Wars. London: Vintage Books, 2009. What you’d expect from the title, but also has a whole chapter on ‘the romance and the menace of aviation’.

Sonya O. Rose. Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939-1945. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. One way to tell when a book has become a classic is when other books start alluding to it in their own titles …

Jonathan Foster. The Death Ray: The Secret Life of Harry Grindell Matthews. Inventive Publishing, 2009. As seen here. Another find in a Welsh museum bookshop — I should go to Wales more often!

Peter London. U-Boat Hunters: Cornwall’s Air War, 1916-19. Truro: Dyllansow Truran, 1999. RNAS airship and aeroplane anti-submarine operations: some success under pretty trying conditions.

Richard Overy. 1939: Countdown to War. London: Allen Lane, 2009. I’ve now met the author!

Robert Stradling. Your Children Will Be Next: Bombing and Propaganda in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008. Argues that the memory of Guernica has obscured earlier atrocities, especially the 1936 bombing of Getafe near Madrid. A complete chance find in the shop at the National Museum Cardiff (though it might have been cheaper to order it over the net than fly to Wales to buy it).

On 22 August 1849, the Republic of San Marco surrendered to Austria. The Republic was formed after a revolt in Venice against Austrian rule in March 1848. The Austrians eventually besieged Venice, leading to starvation and outbreaks of cholera in the city. During this siege, they launched the first air raids in history, by unmanned balloons which floated over Venice carrying bombs. The British press didn’t take any notice of this at the time, but the following account appeared in the Morning Chronicle a week after the surrender:

The Soldaten Freund publishes a letter from the artillery officer Uchatius, who first proposed to subdue Venice by ballooning. From this it appears that the operations were suspended for want of a proper vessel exclusively adapted for this mode of warfare, as it became evident, after a few experiments had been made, that, as the wind blows nine times out of ten from the sea, the balloon inflation must be conducted on board ship; and this was the case on July the 15th, the occasion alluded to in a former letter, when two balloons armed with shrapnels ascended from the deck of the Volcano war steamer, and attained a distance of 3,500 fathoms in the direction of Venice; and exactly at the moment calculated upon, i. e., at the expiration of twenty-three minutes, the explosion took place. The captain of the English brig Frolic, and other persons then at Venice, testify to the extreme terror and the morale effect produced on the inhabitants.

A stop was put to further exhibitions of this kind by the necessity of the Vulcan going into docks to undergo repairs, which the writer regrets the more, as the currents of wind were for a long time favourable to his schemes. One thing is established beyond all doubt (he adds), viz., that bombs and other projectiles can be thrown from balloons at a distance of 5,000 fathoms, always provided the wind be favourable. 1

Some comments. It’s hard to find reliable information on these attacks. The best account I’ve seen is by Lee Kennett and he’s not sure how many balloons were released, saying that the largest number he has seen is two hundred.2 This doesn’t fit well with the Morning Chronicle article, which seems to suggest that only two balloon bombs were ever launched. This is supposedly based on a letter written by the inventor of the balloon bombs, Franz von Uchatius, so if it’s accurate should be preferred over secondary sources.3

But whether the number was two or two hundred, it doesn’t seem like the balloon bombs had much effect on the course of the siege, which went on for another five weeks — despite the reference made in the Morning Chronicle to ‘the extreme terror and the morale effect produced on the inhabitants’. That was clearly what was intended, as the bombs were released (or maybe detonated) by a timer, and couldn’t possibly hit specified targets from a balloon drifting above the city.4 More importantly, the bombs used were filled with shrapnel, which isn’t much use for anything but killing and maiming people. So there were few qualms on the part of the Austrians about targeting and killing civilians. Which they went on to do with presumably much greater efficiency when they later bombarded the city with more conventional artillery, averaging a thousand shells a day.5

Finally, the air raids of 1849 seem to have had as little impact on the wider world (at least the English-speaking part of it) as they did on Venice. As noted above, there was very little notice taken in the British press, and I’ve come across only one meager reference to Venice in books published before 1914 (and that in a book translated from the German, written by the German military balloonist Hermann Moedebeck). So it doesn’t seem like they inspired anyone to find a better way to bomb cities from the air; that was an idea which had to be invented all over again. Which it was, of course, and Venice’s next air raid was on 24 May 1915.

  1. Morning Chronicle, 29 August 1849, 5.
  2. Lee Kennett, A History of Strategic Bombing (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982), 6.
  3. Kennett does state that two bombs were used in the first armed test, but that this was carried out on 12 July, with another ’series’ of tests on 15 July.
  4. Which is not to say they were just released at random; the balloon-bombardiers had to take windspeed into account when calculating how long to set the timer for, so that it would go off over Venice — though the wind could then change direction after launch, of course.
  5. Lawrence Sondhaus, Naval Warfare, 1815-1914 (London: Routledge, 2001), 47.

On this day in 1945, the third atomic bomb was dropped on Tokyo. Or, rather, might have been had not Japan surrendered on 15 August. For a long time, I’ve believed that the two bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the only ones which would be available for a month or two. But a comment at Edge of the American West pointed me in the direction of a memo recording the conversation between General John E. Hull and Colonel L. E. Seeman on 13 August, about atomic bomb production in the next few months. And it turns out that there was one ready to be shipped out to Tinian at that very moment. According to Seeman, it would be ready for use on 19 August.

As for where it would be used, I got that from the first chapter of Michael Gordin’s Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War. He says there that the third drop would ‘probably’ have been on Tokyo. That surprises me a little, given that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen from a list of cities spared from conventional bombing so that the effects of the atomic bombs could be better assessed. Tokyo wasn’t on that list (the other cities were Kokura and Niigata). Perhaps the thinking was that two ‘test’ drops were enough, and that if no surrender followed, it was time for a higher-value morale target? It could be questioned how much of Tokyo was left to destroy after the 65 conventional (or fire) raids which had already taken place. Or perhaps a decapitating strike was intended, to take out Hirohito and his ministers? Though that might actually make surrender more difficult to organise.

Clearly I’ll have to add Gordin’s book to my to-read list …

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