Ronnie Scott, ed. The Real 'Dad's Army': The War Diaries of Col. Rodney Foster. London: Virago, 2011. Foster was a retired Indian Army officer who commanded a Home Guard company in Kent in the Second World War. Looks interesting: takes a lively interest in the progress of the war, but is also engaged with his local community; has a liking for double exclamation marks. What clinched it for me was the first sentence of the entry for 16 July 1944: 'Robots came over at regular intervals all morning from 10 a.m.'
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In the middle of the First World War, the Australian government found itself preoccupied with the possibility of civil unrest, perhaps even rebellion. In December 1916 the Hughes government passed the Unlawful Associations Act, which proscribed the Australian branch of the Industrial Workers of the World. The Wobblies had campaigned strongly against conscription in the October referendum, and proscription was Hughes's revenge for the No vote. But more than that, he believed that every IWW member was armed, and that many were of German extraction and thus potentially treasonous. Determined to be prepared for any eventuality, by the start of February 1917, the government had assembled 900 armed men, chosen for their political reliability, in each state's capital city, backed up with a machine gun. Melbourne, as the national capital, was the best defended. It had an AIF infantry battalion, a reserve company, the District Guard, two 18-pounder guns, two machine-gun sections, and 50 light-horsemen.
It also had two aeroplanes at its disposal, for 'their great moral effect':
(a) To overawe rioters by their presence in the air.
(b) To cooperate with the Artillery.
(c) To assist in dispersing the rioters by the use of machine guns and revolvers and by dropping bombs or hand grenades.
What was that last part again?
To assist in dispersing the rioters by the use of machine guns and revolvers and by dropping bombs or hand grenades.
I find this quite extraordinary, that an Australian government was preparing to strafe and bomb its own citizens for the crime of rioting. That's the sort of thing that dictators do. But should I be surprised? Let's look at some similar cases from around the same time.
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The images in this post are from Boyd Cable, 'Death from the skies', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 20-4 (see below).
The article itself is a short story describing an air raid in the next war. I won't summarise it in detail, but it argues for the futility of both air defence and civil defence. The RAF's interceptors never even encounter the enemy bombers (in part because they are stealthy thanks to their silenced engines, only 20% as loud as normal aircraft engines). Though the populace has been drilled well and resists panic, at least at first, they are too vulnerable. A first wave of bombers uses high explosives to block the streets with rubble, making it impossible for fire engines to pass; the second drops incendiaries which set the city ablaze and, crucially, force civilians out of their shelters; and the final wave drops poison gas, which starts killing the now-exposed people on the streets. Now the panic starts and the mob flees, their suffering increased by strafing raiders. The RAF now has its chance, but the city is doomed...
"Proof enough of what we've said so long," growled the one [Air Staff officer]. "Defence as such is a wash-out. Attack is the only useful form of defence."
"If we can hit them harder and faster and oftener than they can hit us, we win," said the other. "We can do it, too, if we have more bombers -- men and machines -- than they have."
"Yes -- if," said the other wearily. "That's what we were arguing as far back as the first R.A.F. expansion scheme in -- what as it -- 1935 and '6, wasn't it?"
I received this request for assistance from Jean Dewaerheid, a Belgian writer who is working with Peter Haas and Pierre-Antoine Courouble to track down wooden bomb eyewitnesses:
Three authors (from Belgium, Germany and France) have been working for years on a bizarre subject: the dropping of dummy wooden bombs on wooden airplanes.
In order to deceive the Allies during the Second World War, the Germans built fake airfields on the continent, often with runways and sometimes with buildings, but always with fake wooden planes, called "Attrappen". Strange stories can be heard in which allied airplanes made fun of them by dropping wooden bombs on which they had sometimes painted remarks like "Wood for Wood".
Herbert A. Johnson. Wingless Eagle: U.S. Army Aviation through World War I. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Looks at not just the actual flying stuff (the first flights, the expedition against Pancho Villa, the expansion for war) but the media portrayal of such (e.g. chapter 2, 'Army aviation in the media fishbowl'). So I think it will be very much to my taste; not bad for a bargain table find!
Helen M. Kinsella. The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian. Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2011. As the title suggests it's not really the sort of book you turn to for who said (or did) what to whom and why; it's also written by a political scientist, not a historian, but we'll let that pass. Starts with medieval codes of warfare but mostly concentrates on the 20th century, especially the 1949 IV Geneva Convention and the 1977 Protocol to it.
The title of this little series is a nod to David Walker's Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850-1939. As the title suggests, Walker argues that Australia's relationship with Asia in the decades before and after Federation was largely characterised by fear about immigration, imports and invasion. Peter Stanley, in Invading Australia: Japan and the Battle for Australia, 1942, fleshes out the last of these fears through a discussion of novels and books from the 1930s which discussed the prospect of war with Japan (or at least an unnamed or Ruritanian Asian enemy). For example, in Erle Cox's Fool's Harvest (1938/1939), Australia is attacked and invaded by 'Cambasia' in September 1939, beginning with a massive air raid on Sydney which causes 200,000 civilian casualties. Britain is unable to help, as it has been attacked by Germany, Italy and France; a British fleet at Singapore is sunk. The Australian armed forces are ill-equipped to defend the nation, and after a month Cambasia is victorious at the last battle of the war, at Seymour in central Victoria. A resistance movement is eventually suppressed after increasingly brutal reprisals. The south-eastern part of Australia eventually regains a limited independence in 1966, but the majority of the population still labours under the Cambasian yoke.
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C. G. Burge, ed. The Air Annual of the British Empire 1939. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1939. A comprehensive overview of the state of the British aviation industry as of the start of 1939, from the big aircraft manufacturers down to (for example) Cellon Ltd., makers of cellulose dope since 1911. Also articles on the state of the art and future prospects in many aspects of aviation, lots and lots of advertisements, and some very interesting statistics and other reference material at the back (if you intend to fly to Zanzibar, you must give the Aviation Control Officer at Kisauni Customs Aerodrome two hours' notice -- telegraph 'Aviation Zanzibar').
Joseph Heller. Catch-22. London: Vintage Books, 2011 [1962]. A true classic, which I haven't read since high school. To mark the 50th anniversary of its original publication, includes 50 pages of reviews and commentary, some of the latter by Heller himself. Christmas win!
John Slessor. The Great Deterrent: A Collection of Lectures, Articles, and Broadcasts on the Development of Strategic Policy in the Nuclear Age. London: Cassell & Company, 1957. Published by Slessor after retiring as Chief of the Air Staff, though some of the pieces date as far back as 1933. The 'great deterrent' is the hydrogen bomb, but (in these pre-Sandys, pre-Sputnik days) delivered by good old-fashioned bombers, not missiles: 'It is the bomber that could turn the vast spaces that were Russia's prime defence against Napoleon and Hindenburg and Hitler into a source of weakness rather than strength'.
The RAF Displays held at Hendon between 1920 and 1937 were unique, in that no other air force attempted to project a vision of itself, its capabilities and its responsibilities in so public a way, on such a large scale and over such a long period. Of course, that's largely because there weren't many air forces around. Or rather, they did exist, but not independently of their nation's army and navy. Putting on such a big show was important for the RAF precisely because it was newborn: it needed to convince everyone (parliamentarians, journalists, the public, the other services, other nations) that it was necessary and/or that it was successful. Hendon seemed to have fulfilled this very well, judging by press attention and attendance numbers.
But viewed another way, the RAF Displays weren't unprecedented at all. Both the British Army and the Royal Navy had their own forms of public display. The Army had long performed in public, in fact, such ceremonies as trooping the colours, and the 19th century witnessed a huge growth in the popularity of military reviews, according to Scott Hughes Myerly 'the most popular and elaborate public manifestation of the military spectacle':
The action on the field consisted of evolutions of drill, musket volleys with blanks, and cannon salutes. Often a sham battle or mock, siege would be staged between two opposing units, or a bayonet or cavalry charge would be a part of the show.
I'm not sure of the actual content of these mock battles, though the fact they they were performed during the Napoleonic Wars suggests an obvious ideological function. For it's part, the Navy also developed fleet reviews into what Jan Rüger has termed 'a new form of public theatre'. This happened much later in the century, however, dramatically increasing in frequency after the review held for Victoria in 1887 on the occasion of her golden jubilee. By their nature, naval reviews afforded fewer opportunities for presenting narratives of actual combat. There were some, though, for example a 'mock-attack carried out by torpedo boats and submarines' at the 1909 Spithead review. Like the RAF later, and doubtless the Army before it, the Navy rather dubiously insisted that these were not mere spectacles but training for war.
David Crotty. A Flying Life: John Duigan and the First Australian Aeroplane. Melbourne: Museum Victoria, 2010. The first Australian-built aeroplane to fly, to be specific. Also covers Duigan's career as an AFC RE8 pilot on the Western Front where he won his Military Cross.
Malcolm Hall. From Balloon to Boxkite: The Royal Engineers and Early British Aeronautics. Stroud: Amberley Publishing, 2010. J. E. Capper, Baden Baden-Powell, Samuel F. Cody and all the other magnificent men. Briefly covers late-19th century military ballooning but really gets going with the South African War, ending up with the Air Battalion, the RFC's immediate predecessor. Lots of illustrations.
Augustine Meaher IV. The Australian Road to Singapore: The Myth of British Betrayal. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010. The book of the thesis of a former fellow PhD student. As the title suggests, it's a strong attack on the prevalent idea (hi David Day!) that the British failure to defend Singapore amount to a betrayal of Australia, arguing that instead it was we who failed to devote enough resources to our own military forces in the 1920s and 1930s.
Aussie, Aussie, Aussie; oi, oi, oi.
Neville Meaney. A History of Australian Defence and Foreign Policy, 1901-23. Volume 1,The Search for Security in the Pacific, 1901-14. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009 [1976]. Neville Meaney. A History of Australian Defence and Foreign Policy, 1901-23. Volume 2, Australia and World Crisis, 1914-1923. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009. I want to understand Australia's perceptions of the outside world in the First World War period and what effect those perceptions might have had on the home front. This now-completed two-volume work does try to cover both high diplomacy and domestic politics so I hope it's a good start here.
Christopher Waters. Australia and Appeasement: Imperial Foreign Policy and the Origins of World War II. London and New York: I. B. Tauris & Co., 2012. A book from the future! This looks like fun. As the subtitle suggests, I think it will be of interest to more than just Australian historians: lukewarm support from the Dominions was one reason why Chamberlain hesitated to go to war over the Sudetenland, for example. It does seem a bit odd, however, that while Japan does get a fair few mentions in the index, the focus is on Europe. Especially with the nice photo of 'Pig-Iron Bob' Menzies on the dustjacket...
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