David Cortright. Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. A history of pacifism, mainly concentrating on Britain and the United States in the 20th century, with an emphasis on the latter half.

One of the fun things about reading old books that nobody else has opened for decades is what you sometimes find inside them: annotations, bookmarks, letters, racist leaflets (OK, that one was not so fun). Above is a library call slip (i.e. the bit of paper you fill in to request that a book be retrieved for you) from the SLV. I found it inside Property or Peace? by H. N. Brailsford, a socialist journalist. The book was published in 1934 but I reckon the call slip is from the 1950s, at the earliest, as there’s a stamp in the front saying it was transferred from the CAE library in 1951 or 1952 or so.

This is the modern equivalent for the same book. Today books are requested electronically, through t he library catalogue; but it still gets turned into a printed call slip which you get with the book when it arrives. So the technology may have changed greatly, but the principle is just the same.

For some reason I was surprised to see that the call number of the book, S 330.15 B73, hasn’t changed in the last half-century. Maybe there is a Law of the Conservation of Call Numbers?

S. P. MacKenzie. The Battle of Britain on Screen: ‘The Few’ in British Film and Television Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. A short but densely-packed book, a series of cases studies of key representations of the Battle: The Lion Has Wings, The First of the Few, Angels One Five, Reach for the Sky, Battle of Britain, Piece of Cake, A Perfect Hero. Of course, The Lion Has Wings was made before the Battle, and so is anticipation, not memory. Note: review copy (not for Airminded).

Jeffry Record. The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2006. Generally speaking, I’m bored by the ritual invocation of Munich every time some foreign crisis dominates the headlines. But it’s not going to stop happening just because it bores me and it’s kinda my area (or adjacent to it, at least), so maybe I should pay more attention to it.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

I’m often surprised by the books that historians haven’t written. The years I am researching are between two and three generations distant, yet it’s not hard to find (what seem to me to be) big, important topics which deserve to have academic monographs devoted to them, but have somehow been neglected. Sometimes this might be a matter of historiographical fashion: the cultural turn in military history is still relatively young, for example, and not all areas have been touched by it yet. In others there already exists a detailed account, which was written decades ago and seems to have obviated the need for further research. Sometimes the gap in the literature seems inexplicable. And, OK, sometimes the topic isn’t all that big and important, it’s just obscure …

Here are some of the unwritten books I think I know of in my field:

• The Sudeten crisis. Of course, there are multiple accounts of this from the diplomatic, political and (to a lesser extent) military perspectives. Though, surprisingly, this is generally only at the chapter level — there aren’t many books on the Sudeten crisis proper (as opposed to the ‘lessons of Munich’) more recent than Keith Robbins’ Munich 1938 (1968). But what I’m thinking of is the crisis in Britain: a synoptical account of, yes, diplomatic, political, and military responses, but more importantly, the crisis as it impacted on and was perceived by the public. Public opinion, the press, private diaries and correspondence. How did the crisis alter Britain’s preparedness for war, both materially and psychologically? Maybe even the counterfactual question, too.
• Air raid precautions. I know of nothing more recent than the relevant volume of the official history of the Second World War, Terence H. O’Brien’s Civil Defence (1955). There have been books on aspects of ARP, evacuation seems fairly popular, for example, and some on civilian morale which are relevant. But the political, bureaucratic and financial issues involved in ARP after 1935 (or maybe early 1938) had far-reaching implications, and led to debates about conscription, democracy and deep shelters which reveal ideologies at work. O’Brien is very thorough on the legal and organisational aspects, but he was writing more than half a century ago: surely there’s something new to say? And he was not much interested in popular assent to or dissent from the government’s ARP regulations, for example.
• Transnational airmindedness.
• The Scareship Age.
• Britain and the Bomb. A bit outside of my field, so maybe I’ve missed something. What I’m thinking of is a cultural history of British responses to the possibility of nuclear warfare, from Lord Vansittart through CND, The War Game, Where the Wind Blows, Threads and “Two Tribes”. There are many books on American atomic culture, and rightly so, but there must be enough material for at least one British equivalent. Something like Paul Boyer’s By the Bomb’s Early Light (1985), perhaps.
• The Blitz. As a correspondent pointed out to me, rather incredibly there have been no academic monographs written about the Blitz. Again, there’s the official histories, but it’s spread out across a number volumes: O’Brien again, Richard Titmuss’s Problems of Social Policy (1950) and Basil Collier’s The Defence of the United Kingdom (1957). And of course it’s central to histories of the home front, and there’s Angus Calder’s The Myth of the Blitz (1991), which is more about the memory of the Blitz than than the Blitz itself. And any number of popular works. But nothing by academic historians trying to pull all these threads together.
• Zeppelin and Gotha raids. Ditto, pretty much, though in this case there’s much less to draw together because not a lot has been written about the British experience of bombing in the First World War since Barry D. Powers’ Strategy With-out Slide Rule (1976), not by academics at least.

Somebody needs to write these books! And if they could get them published in the next six months or so, I’d really appreciate it :)

A few months ago I looked at some visions of how aerial warfare might improve the city by blowing away ugly developments. Here’s a similar fantasy of better planning through bombing, though the site in question is a rather surprising one: Stonehenge. From Clough Williams-Ellis’s diatribe against the debeautification of the countryside, England and the Octopus (Portmeirion, 1975 [1928]), 130-1:

It is also to be hoped that some regard may be paid to pre-existing land-lubber amenities in the actual placing of aerodromes, and that the Stonehenge scandal will not be repeated. There, with all Salisbury Plain to choose from, the R.F.C. (as it then was) elected to plump down its hangars and all their sprawling appurtenances within a few hundred yards of what should be the most hallowed stones in England. Never were venerable remains less venerated, for at this very moment of writing, our late enemies having declined our military invitation to obliterate the circle with their bombs, an offensive pink bungalow is being completed hard by that, with the outrageous café adjoining, makes one almost pray for a destructive air raid.

As it now is, Stonehenge is intolerable, and by no means to be visited save by blind archæologists. Hemmed in by iron railings, guarded by a turnstile and a post-card kiosk, glowered at by the derelict aerodrome and smirked at by caré and bungalow, this sacred place is indeed painful beyond bearing. If it were an even chance that a hostile air raid would destroy the circle or, alternatively, obliterate the parasitic growths about it, there are probably those who would favour the place being well and truly bombed.

As it is, Stonehenge is a mockery and a wounding of the spirit, and a fifty-fifty risk of losing it altogether or getting it back once more in its austere and immemorial loneliness might well seem a gamble worth considering.

I can’t believe Williams-Ellis was actually serious: no matter how ugly Stonehenge’s surrounds, surely he must have seen that they could be pulled down at some future date without having to rain bombs on the site. He’s just trying to shock his readers into thinking, yes, Stonehenge really is pretty awful at the moment, maybe we should do something about it. In fact, by mid-1927 the Stonehenge Protection Committee and the National Trust had already raised enough funds to buy much of the surrounding area, as Williams-Ellis must have been aware.

But what about that aerodrome? Yes, there was indeed an aerodrome at Stonehenge, which after all is (and was) near a major Army training area. According to this Q&A page at the Centre for First World War Studies at the University of Birmingham, Stonehenge aerodrome (I’m not sure if that was its proper name) was in use between 1917 and 1921, initially for the training of bomber squadrons, including some which used big Handley Page O/400s. At various times it was home to No.1 School of Aerial Navigation and Bomb Dropping and the School of Army Cooperation. The buildings were not demolished until 1929.

And the aerodrome was very close to Stonehenge. Wiltshire County Council has a description of the aerodrome site and a map, which I’ve used to make the below. So it was a bit under a kilometre away, straddling the current position of the A303 which is the current blight on Stonehenge’s landscape.

View Larger Map

I wonder if there were any close encounters between Stonehenge and a bomber? (The photo at the top, from Wiltshire County Council, may well be a composite, and from the design of the aeroplane dates to well before the construction of the aerodrome.) One snippet I found on the web suggests that the RFC may have thought Stonehenge was a flight hazard, since it supposedly recommended that it be demolished. I find that very hard to believe, even aside from the fact that the source for this is a desk calendar by way of a blog, but if it is true then we may be thankful that wiser heads decided that the war against Germany could be won without such extreme measures being necessary.

A bomb plunges through the floors of an office building: its denizens look on in astonishment, cower in terror or fall through the holes left in its wake. This is an illustration from a book published in March 1939 by the Tecton group of architects, Planned A.R.P., which described their plan for bomb-proofing the London borough of Finsbury. Tecton helped bring European influences to British architecture, from constructivism to Le Corbusier. In the 1930s, they designed several iconic buildings — literally so, in the case of Finsbury Health Centre, which was used on a 1942 propaganda poster to symbolise the benefits of modern medicine.

I’ll talk a bit more about the plan itself below, but it’s the drawings, and especially the people, which really caught my eye. They are cartoonish, childish even, but still convey horror. They were drawn by Gordon Cullen, later a well-known architect in his own right.

The scything effect of splinters (i.e. shrapnel) on pedestrians.

A crowd crushes into a covered trench shelter in a blind panic, unaware that there is an empty shelter just down the street.

This shelter is full. A woman has fainted. The buildings above ground are already broken shells; another raid appears to be in progress. The shelter warden tries to keep anyone else from coming in.

Shelterers in a basement suffocating to death as the fire above consumes their oxygen. Formations of bombers wheel overhead.

Another basement. The floor of the building above has collapsed into it, crushing the occupants.

As these images suggest, Tecton were very much against the use of both trenches and basements as air raid shelters, both of which which were widely advocated during the Sudeten crisis as offering both quick and cheap protection. Many trenches were indeed dug in September 1938, but were not placed with much regard to the actual population density (especially since the most crowded areas of cities were those with the least amount of open area for trenches). They were also prone to flooding. Basements in turn suffered were the last place you’d want to be in case of gas attack, unless they were fitted with expensive ventilation systems. They also usually had very narrow entrances, leading to the possibility of mobs of panicked people trampling each other to death in their desperation (as had happened at Bishopsgate and Mile End in 1918, and was to happen again at Bethnal Green tube in 1943).

Tecton, of course, had a better solution in mind: purpose-built underground, multistorey shelters. There were to be 15 of these spaced around Finsbury borough. In peacetime they would serve as car parks (for which there was also a growing demand as middle-class car ownership rates started to climb). In wartime, they could hold 7600 people (a second design could hold 12300) spaced out along a ramp spiralling downwards around a service core.

Inside a Tecton shelter. It looks very pleasant — music playing over the Tannoy, couples strolling about, arm-in-arm. But it was meant for serious business. The shelter plan has two spacious entrances for orderly ingress and egress, air locks so that ARP workers could enter and leave without letting poison gas into the shelter, gas decontamination areas for both men and women, air filtration systems, food stores, water supplies, first aid areas. But the Home Office rejected the Tecton plan, and other deep shelter schemes, arguing in the Hailey report that an enemy could disrupt production by forcing the population to take shelter. It favoured dispersal instead, meaning spreading out targets to minimise damage. ¹ The Tecton scheme was never executed, either at Finsbury or elsewhere.

Joseph Meisel gives the Tecton scheme high marks for cost-effectiveness, but with hindsight it seems to me to be deficient in two ways.² The first is the lack of beds: it wasn’t anticipated that people would be spending their nights in shelters. Nobody did, much, and it’s something that could have been fixed relatively easily, of course, but it suggests that their calculations for other necessities, like sanitation, might also have been off the mark.

The other shortcoming is the emphasis on gas protection — which wasn’t needed, as it turned out — and the relative neglect of the danger from high explosive bombs. Meisel calls the Tecton shelter an example of a deep shelter, but the top level isn’t very deep at all — there’s only about 30 13.5 feet of sand and concrete between it and the surface. That seems a bit thin: a big bomb could penetrate that. By contrast the system of tunnels proposed by J. B. S. Haldane the previous year was at least 60 feet below the surface, more expensive but certainly safer.³

Of course, using hindsight is unfair, since I have it and Tecton didn’t. Besides, during the war most public shelters had no sanitation beyond the most primitive provisions, at least initially, so Tecton was doing better than most on that score. Their underground shelter certainly offered much better protection than either the flooded trench shelters of 1938 (below) or the flimsy brick surface shelters of 1940.⁴

Source: Tecton, Planned A.R.P.: Based on the Investigation of Structural Protection Against Air Attack in the Metropolitan Borough of Finsbury (London: Architectural Press, 1939).

1. Joseph S. Meisel, “Air raid shelter policy and its critics in Britain before the Second World War”, 20th Century British History 5 (1994), 313-4.
2. Ibid., 319.
3. J. B. S. Haldane, A. R. P. (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938).
4. And it was far less silly and far more grounded in reality than the one they note on p. 72:

   A suggestion was recently put forward, in all seriousness, for a shelter consisting of a huge steel globe, which would stand in the street, and would simply roll away if it were hit.

   .

Neil Hanson. First Blitz: The Secret German Plan to Raze London to the Ground in 1918. London: Doubleday, 2008. This is a thick, new narrative history of the German air raids on Britain in the First World War, concentrating mainly on the aeroplane raids in 1917-8. Although written for a popular audience, it’s based on a prodigious number of primary sources, both published and archival (there are plenty of periodical articles listed with which I’m not familiar, for example) — some are even in German. This is all good! But I’m worried about that subtitle. Hanson argues that there was a plan to use Elektron incendiary bombs to burn out London in 1918, which seems plausible enough. A plan is one thing, but Hanson seems to think that it could have actually worked. Is that likely, when the more capable and numerous German bombers of 1940-1 didn’t come close do doing this even on the worst nights of the Blitz? He also speaks of mass panic in London during air raids (346) … well, as I say, he’s read a lot of primary sources that I haven’t, but not even the most extreme airpower advocates between the wars claimed that there had been mass panic, merely isolated cases which they quite happily extrapolated to a larger scale. Hmm. I still look forward to reading it, though.

Something which continues to surprise me (but probably shouldn’t, by now) is the way that people were evidently still worried, well into the Blitz, that Germany had not yet unleashed its full aerial might against Britain. That is, that despite victory in the Battle of Britain, and at least enduring the first few months of the Blitz, they worried that they still might have to face a German attempt at a knock-out blow. Here are some examples drawn from the diaries and letters of Harold Nicolson, Bloomsburyite, author, National Labour MP and former diplomat, during his time as a junior minister at the Ministry of Information. Monitoring national morale was part of his job, so he had a privileged view of the war, much more so than the vast majority of the populace anyway. But if anything this seems to have made him more pessimistic about the near future, not less.

This is from a letter Nicolson wrote on 31 December 1940 to his wife Vita Sackville-West, after a visit to the blitzed city of Bristol, and a conversation with Lieutenant-General Alexander (then GOC Southern Command, later Allied supreme commander in the Mediterranean):

He thinks the Battle of England has already begun — Coventry, Southampton, Bristol, the City. They will burn and destroy them one by one. ‘Archie Wavell’, he says, ‘mops up 40,000 Libyans and we claim a victory. In two hours the Germans destroy 500 years of our history.’ I do think we are going through a hellish time.¹

A few weeks later, on 23 January 1941, he wrote in his diary about his visit to Cambridge. There he spoke to Sir William Spens, Master of Corpus Christi and (more importantly) the regional commissioner for ARP for the eastern region, and so a potential dictator, really, of the area in case of invasion, or indeed a decapitating strike on London:

He feels that it would be dangerous to be complacent about the public morale. He feels that the people lack imagination and are not aware of the terrific ordeals which lie ahead. He admits that they have shown some sense of proportion about the Libyan victories, but he is not sure that they realise how gigantic the German knock-out blow will be when it comes.²

Finally, another diary entry, written on 26 January 1941, just a few days later. This time Nicolson is recording his own thoughts. First he discusses the recent successes in North and East Africa — it’s noticeable how in each of these entries, pessimism about the war against Germany undercuts the good news from the war against Italy — and then writes:

But all this is mere chicken-feed. We know that the Great Attack is impending. We know that in a week or two, a day or two, we may be exposed to the most terrible ordeal that we have ever endured. The Germans have refrained from attacking us much during the last ten days since they do not wish to waste aeroplanes and petrol on bad weather. But when the climate improves they may descend upon us with such force as they have never employed before. Most of our towns will be destroyed.³

Perhaps surprisingly, Nicolson ends this entry on a defiant note: no doubt inspired by Churchill, whom he admired, though perhaps also with an eye on posterity, given that he’d already written nearly two dozen books. (Assuming that there was going to be a posterity, of course!)

I sit here in my familiar brown room with my books and pictures round me, and once again the thought comes to me that I may never see them again. They may well land their parachute and airborne troops behind Sissinghurst and the battle may take place over our bodies. Well, if they try, let them try. We shall win in the end.⁴

Alexander, Spens and Nicolson were all part of the ruling elite. They plainly feared that the worst was yet to come. Were their views shared more widely? Mass-Observation is probably the best place to look.

1. Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1939-1945 (London: Collins, 1967), 132.
2. Ibid., 140.
3. Ibid., 141.
4. Ibid.

I’ve written before about some of the discoveries one can make while wandering around the ERC Library at Melbourne. (Which used to be the ‘Education Resource Centre Library’ but, after the renovations are complete, will be backronymed into the ‘Eastern Resource Centre’.) I’m sure lots of university libraries have a section like this — at least where they haven’t been moved offsite or worse — a ghetto full of old books that nobody is interested in any more, except historians. I’ve found about 50 books in the ERC relevant to my research, from The Great War of 189– (1893) to Civil Defence in War (1941). I can get most of them at the SLV (or the BL, if I happen to be in London), but the nice thing about them being in the ERC is that I can borrow them, take them home, and read them at my leisure instead of having to pore over them in a reading room.

I thought I’d mined the ERC pretty thoroughly, but now I’m not so sure! This evening I swung by after work to pick up a couple of books. I found one with no trouble, but the other one wasn’t there. Instead, a different book with the same author and call number was there, so I think the catalogue is incorrect here. In fact, I know it’s incorrect, because on a shelf nearby I stumbled across a cache of books on air raid precautions which aren’t even in the catalogue! And I know this because only a couple of weeks ago I spent about $50 photocopying chunks of two of them, one at the SLV and the other at the Ballieau special collections. If they’d been listed in the catalogue I could have just borrowed them, and directed that money elsewhere!

I wonder what other uncatalogued treasures are hidden in the ERC? The only way to find out would be a call number-to-call number search, starting with the usual suspects …