You shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but you can often pick up a few interesting things about it. Here we have number 77 in the Crime-Book Society series, Black Out by Captain A. O. Pollard. Fifty-four thousand copies have been sold (or at least printed), which makes it a fairly successful title. It's not clear from the photo, but I can tell you it's a paperback and therefore cheap, which helps. The author clearly has a distinguished military background: Victoria Crosses generally weren't handed out for no reason. And, most intriguingly, the Times Literary Supplement is quoted as saying that Black Out 'Will prove very much to the taste of air-minded readers'.

And so it did. This is so even though Pollard's main claim to fame was as a soldier, not an airman: he enlisted in 1914 as a private, ended up a captain, and in addition to the VC won the MC and bar and the DCM. The Oxford DNB compares his autobiography, Fire-eater: The Memoirs of a VC (1932), to Jünger's Storm of Steel for its evocation of the joy of combat. Starting in the 1930s he wrote dozens of crime and spy thrillers, some of which were reviewed in the TLS (though I can't actually find the one quoted on the cover of Black Out seen above).

After the failure of his first marriage in 1924, Pollard joined the RAF and became a pilot. He served for less than three years, but he seems to have made more use of his flying experience in his writing than his fighting experience. He reviewed aviation-themed books for the TLS. He wrote several non-fiction books on aviation (e.g. The Royal Air Force, 1934; Epic Deeds of the RAF, 1940; Bombers over the Reich, 1941). And it seems that many, perhaps most of his thrillers involved aviation in some way. Some of the titles suggest this: The Death Flight, The Phantom 'Plane, Murder in the Air, Air Reprisal (which I think is a knock-out blow novel). Available plot summaries of others confirm this: for example, The Murder Germ features 'an excellent fight in mid-air between the hero and a homicidal maniac' (TLS, 16 October 1937), while The Secret Formula has 'Aeroplane fights and crashes' (TLS, 29 April 1939). His protagonists were often RAF or ex-RAF types: Pirdale Island opens with a flying-officer being drummed out of the service, who then gets involved in a scheme to steal the plans of a new robot aeroplane; Pollard had at least two recurring heroes who were 'air detectives', Wing-Commander Stanley Leach and, post-war, David Wilshaw. (Biggles would be an obvious comparison, but Pollard was writing before W. E. Johns, so perhaps inspiration went the other way.)

Pollard's Black Out follows this airminded formula. (Spoilers follow, if anyone really cares!) The backdrop is a little unusual, however. As the title suggests, it involves air-raid precautions, which were an increasingly prominent part of life by the time the book came out in 1938. (Which was even more the case for ARP Spy, published in 1940.) It starts during an ARP exercise, with a flight of RAF bombers flying in restricted airspace above a blacked-out area. One of the pilots, Flying-Officer Barney Leighton, thinks that mucking about in fog and complete darkness is a mug's game, and decides to 'accidentally' lose touch with his formation so that he can return to the aerodrome and a nice hot mug of cocoa. But he collides with another, unseen aeroplane and is forced to crash land in the grounds of a country mansion. He and his rear-gunner parachute to safety, but the latter is murdered while stumbling around in the dark. Leighton finds the body and the murder weapon, which unfortunately opens himself up to blackmail by the real murderers who he encounters soon after. He realises he's up against it, and he is partly to blame, but he wants to put things right. Who are these men? Why did they kill his gunner? And whose aeroplane did he bump into?

It happens that the mansion belongs to Mrs Browne-Jervoise, a wealthy widow who is well known for her involvement in a pacifist group called the League of International Harmony. And she has some talent as an orator; she is first seen haranguing a League meeting:

"I tell you my friends, that the Government is deliberately preparing for war. All this talk of rearmament, of laying in stocks of food and munitions, of training the people in Air Raid Precautions -- what else can it mean but war? Why otherwise would they spend hundreds of millions of pounds -- money wrung from you and your comrades by unjust measures and crushing taxation -- if it is not to engage in another Armageddon?

"And don't forget for one moment -- let it be written in words of fire so that all shall learn, mark, read and inwardly digest -- most of the Cabinet hold enormous stocks in munitions concerns, and though you and your wives and children may be mutilated, massacred and tortured in tens of thousands of casualties, the capitalist overlords who strut in Whitehall will emerge from the ashes of civilization glutted with riches."¹

Browne-Jervoise clearly has communist sympathies, despite her wealth. And despite her late husband having been an air vice-marshal, she hates the RAF, as is shown by her remarks when she hears Leighton's flight droning overhead:

"The playthings of the warlords!" she cried. "Unless they are destroyed root and crop the day is not far distant when they will be raining death on innocent babes and sucklings."²

Fiery stuff. But we are not meant to sympathise with Browne-Jervoise's sentiments or the League. Her own (half-)brother-in-law, a disabled veteran soldier named Stephen Wrightson, is immediately seen to be poking fun at her lack of education to her own daughter, Phyllis (naturally the novel's love interest), who is embarrassed thereby. And the omniscient narrator tells us that the League was

Formed originally so that a few extremists with pacifist tendencies might air their views to sympathetic listeners, it had now become a vast semi-political faction which interfered in every project inaugurated for National Defence and openly denounced the members of the Government as traitors to the best interests of the people.³

Later, Air Vice-Marshal Sir Humphrey Witherspon, Director-General of Personnel at the Air Ministry, says of the League:

like most peace organizations it is thoroughly militant and aggressive. You know the sort of thing -- disarm to the last gun and then issue an ultimatum to the most heavily armed nation in the world.

"At present the principal bugbear of the League of International Harmony is the Air Raid Precautions scheme. There's a woman named Mrs. Browne-Jervois, their president, who's going up and down the country raging like a wild -- er -- bull, and calling on all and sundry to swear to die in their homes like rates before they will accept a few simple regulations devised solely for their safety.⁴

Obviously Sir Humphrey (and presumably Pollard himself) didn't have much time for pacifists. But whether he fairly described the aims of pacifist organisations or not, his perceptions probably seemed plausible enough to some of the people who read it. And some pacifist groups did oppose ARP as preparations for (and so increasing the likelihood of) war, such as the Peace Pledge Union.

But it's not just an anti-pacifist rant; Sir Humphrey suspects that the League has been working to subvert ARP by less-than-legal means. First was a small-scale strike in a government munitions factory when someone from the Home Office came to lecture them on ARP, followed by possible arson in a Birmingham gas mask store. And this seems to be confirmed when a number of arson attacks are carried out in the town of Lyttleton during a trial black-out, at the same time as Mrs Browne-Jervois is presiding over a public League meeting being held there. Every fire brigade within thirty miles is called in to fight the fires, and at least a million pounds' worth of damage is done. Police arrested a number of men wearing 'air-raid protection-outfits' and two bodies full of bullet holes.⁵ The prisoners, at least some of whom were known communists, admitted to having been paid in order to sabotage ARP for revolutionary purposes. Sir Humphrey is perplexed as to the purpose: the best explanation seems to be that they hoped to discourage other boroughs from participating in ARP, lest the same thing should happen to them.

But in fact the Third International was not behind it all. Nor -- despite a red herring involving Italian immigrants, charmingly referred to more than once as 'dagoes' and 'icecreamios', the latter insult a new one on me -- was it a foreign power. It turns out that Wrightson, Browne-Jervois' half-brother-in-law, was the one using the League as cover for the nefarious arson attacks. But why? This was perhaps the most interesting part of the book. As I noted above, Wrightson was a disabled veteran of the Great War, having joined up in 1914 and had his leg amputated after Passchendaele, and this is key to his motivations. Because of his service and his suffering, and the loss of his hopes for the future, his mind has been twisted.

"Out of the chaos through which I passed emerged a fixed resolve. I swore a mighty oath that if I ever got well again somehow I would avenge myself on the system of society that had allowed such suffering to humanity. He, he, he!''⁶

(Yes, it does actually say, 'He, he, he!' -- this is apparently frenzied laughter.) He used his half-brother's widow's money to recruit American gangsters, and with them began 'upsetting the Government's preparations for the next war'.⁷

By stopping war I shall save millions of men, women and children from suffering the agonies that I've suffered. Don't you understand? I owe it to humanity!"⁸

His interlocutor realises that Wrightson is insane, but tries one last time to get through to him.

Wrightson's face wrinkled in despair.

"There you go again -- atrocities. They're not atrocities. If only I can make the people realize what an air raid will be like, they will rise unanimously to prevent the country being plunged into war."

He sank into a chair and tears started in his eyes.

"It's so hard to make you understand; it's so hard to make anyone understand. I ..."

His voice died to a whisper and he buried his face in his hands.⁹

This portrayal might seem sympathetic, but it's at this moment of vulnerability that one of our RAF heroes launches himself at the damaged veteran and grapples him to the ground. More stuff happens, but rest assured that the madman gets what he deserves in the end, Leighton gets his name cleared and the girl, and (presumably) Britain's preparations for war continue unabated. Still, coming from the pen of such a highly decorated veteran Wrightson is a surprising and interesting villain. Combined with the unusual use of resistance to air-raid precautions as a plot device this makes Black Out an unexpectedly interesting read.

Oh, and it also has an amphibian flying-boat, an 'Aston Arrow' (something like a Defiant) and a two-man autogyro bomber. So it has all that going for it too.

1. A. O. Pollard, Black Out (London: Hutchinson & Co., n.d. [1938]), 24.
2. Ibid., 25-6.
3. Ibid., 25.
4. Ibid., 34-5.
5. Ibid., 106.
6. Ibid., 201
7. Ibid., 201.
8. Ibid., 202.
9. Ibid., 203.

On the brick wall at the side of our street door can still be seen faintly two large letters, "P. P.," which stood for Poplar Patrol. Every Friday night it was my job to collect 3d. from each house-hold that belonged to the "P.P." This paid for rent, fire and refreshments for our small front room, where three men, each in his turn, used to sit up every night.

In the event of a raid, as soon as they got the first warning they used to run and knock on every door where there was "P.P."

-- From Mrs. G. Stillwell, 9, Finnymore-road, Dagenham, Essex

Air-raid alerts in the First World War were highly variable in both form and usefulness: depending on the time and the place, they might include Boy Scout buglers, police cyclists wearing signs saying 'TAKE COVER', or maroons which sounded something like bombs going off. Government authorities dithered over whether it was even advisable to give warnings, since they could lead to unnecessary anxiety and (perhaps more importantly) lost sleep. So it was possible for civilians to not know there was an air-raid alert on at all, particularly if they were already asleep. I assume this was the reason for the Poplar Patrol: any family concerned about caught in their beds when the Zeppelins or Gothas came could subscribe their 3d. a week and be assured of a loud knock on the door, whatever the government was or wasn't doing that week.

I think Samuel Smiles would have approved of this form of community self-help. On the other hand, it might be hard luck for those who didn't (or couldn't) pay up, if a bomb fell in their street. I wonder if voluntary civil defence schemes like this created local schisms between the ins and the outs, as the more inclusive (but still mostly voluntary) air-raid precautions of the 1930s and 1940s did to a degree.

A minor question: why 'Poplar'? Poplar and Dagenham are both in east London, but aren't particularly close to each other. In fact, Dagenham wasn't considered part of London until 1926. My guess is that it is a reference to the shocking tragedy of the Upper North Street School in Poplar, which was hit by a Gotha's bomb on 13 June 1917. Eighteen children were killed, including sixteen 5- and 6-year olds. For a long time, the Poplar infants school symbolised the horrors of the new warfare, just as Guernica did after 1937.

Since the visit of the Zeppelin early on Friday morning the Maldon district has been full of rumours of mysterious motor-cars with flaming headlights which, passing along the highways, guided the airship to the area where the majority of the bombs were dropped.¹

A 'special correspondent' wrote that only one of the stories seems very plausible, presumably because it was the only one with several independent witnesses. Three couples -- two 'London ladies' staying at 'the Hut' near Lathingdon (Latchingdon?), a Mr. and Mrs. Woods who lived at 'the Cottage' also near Lathingdon, and an elderly couple in Mundon, a couple of miles away. They all told a consistent story: the ladies saw the car first, the Woods' bedroom was then illuminated by the car's headlights, and a little later it was heard in Mundon, heading towards Maldon. Half an hour later, after Maldon was bombed, the car apparently retraced the same path but in the opposite direction, and with its headlights now much dimmer.

But there were problems with the theory. Heading into Lathingdon, the car was seen arriving from a road junction, but the people living near that junction were adamant that no car passed the junction in the direction of Lathingdon. And on the other side of Lathingdon, a policeman manning a police station was equally adamant that no car passed him either (although he did see a car coming back from Maldon, the occupants of which were known to him):

Altogether the evidence is very contradictory. If the car really existed it cannot have gone so far as Lathington police station, and there is no side road upon which it could have turned off. It may be said that the lights could have been extinguished and the car taken into one of the fields, but in that case it could never have passed through Mundon, where the inhabitants believe it went to pick up the men who, according to their firm belief, had been signalling to the Zeppelin.²

This was a common story in the aftermath of air raids. After the first airship raid on Britain (19 January 1915), inhabitants of Snettisham in Norfolk reported seeing two cars pacing the airship invader, one to the right and one to the left, with occasional flashes of light upwards or onto a significant target, such as the town's medieval church which indeed suffered some bomb damage. A similar tale was told in nearby King's Lynn.³

We know now that there were no German spies motoring about East Anglia at night giving directions to incoming Zeppelins. It's an operationally pretty absurd idea, for one thing; it was hardly possible to accurately navigate a Zeppelin to a given area of coastline for a night-time rendezvous. And I doubt the church at Snettisham was very high up on German target lists, for example. Instead I'd go with the explanation offered by one anonymous 'official', that the cars 'were driven by persons who followed the course of the airship out of curiosity'.⁴ Or perhaps by military or police keeping watch on the raider.

Rumours about signalling didn't always involve motorists: they could just consist of a light showing from a house. After an airship raid the Kentish coast on 17 June 1917, The Times reported:

There is an ugly rumour going round to-day that signalling was reported to the authorities to have taken place half an hour before the attack began. It is widely stated that such an incident occurred and that the Zeppelin was most deliberate in its attack. Its engines could be distinctly heard as it went round the coast, and, after going a few hundred yards, the engines were stopped while the commander took his bearings. Then it would pass along another few hundred yards, and it is believed by many that during one of these stops signals were given from the western side of the town.⁵

The occasional claims of signals to enemy aircraft I've come across from the Second World War are more like this, such as the case of Emil and Alma Wirth I've discussed previously.

So why were these types of claims made about motorists? And why did they stop? It's all clearly bound up with the pre-war spy and phantom airship scares, which indeed carried over into the early war years. More generally, I can imagine a certain type of person (curtain-twitchers, wowsers, what-have-you) disapproving of these newfangled, noisy, expensive cars and wondering if their owners really do need to be driving about at all hours, and no doubt they're up to no good anyway. So when Zeppelins came along and start dropping bombs, and cars were seen on the roads beneath, it was a good excuse to condemn an annoying member of society: the leisure motorist. As for why these suspicions faded, petrol rationing came into effect from August 1916, after which there were far fewer private cars on the roads. (And Zeppelin-chasing may have become passé by then anyway.) So busybodies had to turn to other targets. In the Second World War, car-ownership was much higher (for the middle and upper classes, at least), so driving was now longer such a minority activity, not so easily stigmatised (as the relative complacency over the horrific road toll in the 1930s perhaps suggests). But also petrol rationing came into effect straight away, so there were fewer cars on the roads during air raids, and less enthusiasm for pleasure driving. Moreover, blackout restrictions meant that cars had very little light to show. By the time heavy air raids started in August-September 1940, there would probably have been very few cars in private ownership capable of carrying on the tradition of the mystery car of Maldon ...

1. The Times, 19 April 1915, 5.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 21 January 1915, 10; 22 January 1915, 34; 23 January 1915, 10.
4. Ibid., 23 January 1915, 10.
5. Ibid., 18 June 1917, 10.

This is an advertisement from The Times, 26 May 1915, 5, for the 'Life-Saving "CAVENDISH" Anti-Gas INHALER' -- in other words, a gas mask. It's a surprisingly early attempt to combine (and to cash in on) the twin threats of aerial bombardment and chemical warfare -- that is, 'The Danger of GAS BOMBS':

You can effectually avert the threatened peril to yourself and family from asphyxiating bombs dropped by the enemy's airships if you are provided with enough "CAVENDISH" INHALERS.

Lest the reader be tempted to take this advice lightly:

You cannot afford to make mistakes in this matter: it is vital. Pads and the like made with the best intentions, but without the necessary chemical knowledge, are only partly -- and for a very short time -- protective against slowly spreading vapour. They are of no use whatever when the gas is exploded and forced through every cranny into your home [...]

Closing the lower windows and doors of your house is NOT a sufficient protection against the rush of gas driven in by high explosive. You need -- for yourself and your family -- absolute protection against actual contact with the fumes.

Clearly the ad is reacting to some earlier set of ideas about how to guard against gas, but I'm not sure what their source was. It is claimed that one charge would work for half an hour, 'quite long enough for absolute security from danger' -- a bargain for 5/6 post-free.

How early is early? This is just over a month after the first large-scale use of gas at Ypres (22 April). It's also a few days before the first Zeppelin raid on London (31 May). And it's three weeks before the Metropolitan Police issued official advice to civilians about what to do in an air raid (18 June) -- most of which had to do with the possibility of a gas attack. Probably lucky the Surgical Manufacturing Company got in when they did, because the Met's commissioner gave precisely the opposite advice: no need to buy a specialised respirator, a cotton pad saturated in washing soda should suffice -- and do close ground-floor doors and windows. (See The Times, 18 June 1915, 5.)

More generally, fears of aero-chemical warfare are generally regarded as characteristic of the 1930s, which is true but shouldn't obscure earlier outbreaks of anxiety about the possibility of London being drowned in poison gas.

(I think I came across a mention of this ad in P. D. Smith's Doomsday Men, but can't find the precise reference.)

Turned on the wireless, and I was on the point of sitting down for a well-earned rest, when pandemonium suddenly broke out -- the wailing of hundreds of sirens like souls in torment. I was filled with an ecstasy of thrilling and exquisite panic -- it was war then, or war and an air raid to coincide with it, or even an air raid forestalling a declaration of war.¹

His analysis of the possibilities here shows an awareness of the knock-out blow scenario, though the word 'even' suggests that (contrary to many pre-war predictions) he hadn't considered a surprise attack to be very likely. Or perhaps it serves to underline that this would be the most dramatic possibility, which would enhance the thrillingness of his panic? He continues:

I rushed frantically up and down the house, throwing hard-boiled eggs and pyjamas into a suitcase, dashed down to the garage, leapt into the car, and drove it out with such abandon that I buckled a wing and had to go forward again before I could extricate it -- all to the accompaniment of the terrifying siren blasts. I shouted to wardens who were rushing past to enquire what it signified, thinking it might be the way of signifying war, but was told 'it's an air-raid', and immediately had visions of the wave upon wave of German bombers which we had been told to expect ushering in their idea of the 'lightning war'. Meanwhile I careered madly up to Holland Park Avenue till a warden forcibly directed me into Ladbroke Grove and made me take cover, which I did in a garage with a skylight and open front!²

Again, he's got a clear idea of what war is supposed to be like and it's clearly shaping his reactions. (His reference to 'lightning war' might date the setting down on paper of this account to some weeks later, after the press had popularised the word 'blitzkrieg'. But not necessarily.) He's not the only one, the air raid warden who makes him take cover presumably thought the streets were no place to be during an air raid. But the lawyer had somewhere to get to:

After some minutes I thought I heard the all clear, so got into the car and dashed on to the Convent. When I had almost arrived there, I was again stopped by a warden and told to take cover. I and party of civilians accordingly knocked at the door of one house but the good woman refused us admission. Whereupon the warden rushed up in an absolute frenzy of rage and nearly pulverized her, and she promptly collapsed and led us all down to a most evil-smelly basement, where we waited for quarter-hour or so before the all-clear was given.³

Here we can see some of the shifts in normal relationships caused by the threat of bombing. There had been some concerns voiced before the war, particularly by the left, that air-raid wardens would become busybodies or worse, bullies, especially in working-class areas. And on this lawyer's account, not only are wardens stopping people from driving on the roads and telling them to take cover, but they are apparently free to physically threaten householders and force them to let groups of strangers into their homes. An Englishwoman's home is now everyone's castle, it would seem. There's also a little whiff of panicky-mob here (and a prefiguring of a classic Twilight Zone episode), which again is the sort of thing the knock-out blow experts had warned would happen.

On arriving at the station I found everyone standing to their stretchers, fully equipped in anti-gas clothing, and not only ready but expecting to be sent out at any moment. I was told to rush and get a steel helmet and service respirator, then that there was no spare equipment, so a helmet was snatched off the first man we came to and crammed on my head, I was told to take my civilian respirator and as I had in my car topboots and mackintosh I was soon more or less suitably arrayed for the fray, and 'stood by' in my car with engine periodically ticking over, ready to dash a stretcher party to the scene of action when the call came.⁴

We now see the reason for all his rushing about: he is evidently an ARP volunteer, and as he owns a car (not quite a luxury item for the middle classes by 1939, but not something everyone has either) it would have been his job to ferry first-aiders and casualties around. So he had an important (exciting, dangerous) job to do. Also, note the emphasis on gas protection. While there's not enough anti-gas gear to go around, it's clearly felt that it was important to be prepared for gas attack, as per the standard knock-out blow scenario. So our lawyer improvises gas protection with a civilian gas mask, a raincoat and riding boots!

Actually nothing happened and by 1 o'clock the alarm was quite over. I then learnt for the first time that German had been given a real ultimatum expiring at 11 o'clock that morning.⁵

He had spent an hour and a half in a state of panic and he didn't really know why -- expect that the sirens had gone off and a warden told him an air raid was on it's way. Here's one person who had internalised the knock-out blow narrative.

But it must be emphasised that, while the above experience was no doubt not unique, it was not all that typical either. Most people probably felt some degree of nervousness in the minutes after the first alarm, but not necessarily so as anyone else would notice. Or if they did panic, it was only momentary. And routine kept some people on a steady course, no matter what they felt. As a contrast to the lawyer's escapades, I'll note just one other person's reaction, that of a civil servant in Croydon. After the sirens, she felt 'funky for a while', but continued helping her mother to do the washing, while their neighbours piled into an Anderson shelter.⁶ Now that's some stiff upper lip!

Sound sources: Chamberlain's speech is from Wikipedia; unfortunately I've forgotten where I got the sirens from!

1. Quoted in Tom Harrisson, Living Through the Blitz (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 50. Emphasis in Harrisson.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 50-1.
5. Ibid., 51.
6. Ibid., 46.

The first bombers didn't fly but sailed: they were warships known as bomb vessels, which mounted heavy mortars firing explosive shells. These could be used in naval battles, but weren't very accurate and so were usually used to attack targets on land, including cities. The French navy used bomb vessels to bombard Genoa in 1684, which according to N. A. M. Rodger was 'a demonstration of terrorism which had horrified Europe and gone far to isolate France'.¹ The Royal Navy developed the idea further (putting the mortars on turntables to make them easier to aim, sometimes replacing the mortars with rocket launchers) and used them against Copenhagen in 1807.

Mats Fridlund is doing some very interesting work tying together the bombing of cities across the ages and the technologies used in their defence, from Copenhagen to 9/11 and after, water buckets gas masks, bomb shelters and bollards. He sees these as aspects of something he calls terrormindedness, the way that 'terror becomes incorporated into citizens' everyday lives', precisely by way of those defensive technologies. There's definitely something in that, though I would add that processes such as evacuation were also important.

Image: The Battle of Copenhagen, 2 April 1801 by Nicholas Pocock (Wikipedia) -- the British only threatened to bombard that time, but I suspect it looked much the same in 1807.

1. N. A. M. Rodger, The Command of the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649-1815 (London: Penguin, 2004), 155.

The first is about a series of seminars held in 1943 by the Ministry of Food and the Ministry of Home Security. Their purpose was to inform 'civilians' -- just who exactly is not clear from the article, but I'm guessing civil defence personnel rather than people pulled off the street -- about the effects of mustard gas on food, by way of practical demonstrations. The overall conclusion seems to have been that it was more of a nuisance than anything else, as most things could be decontaminated. (Cheese is particularly resistant, apparently.) This would have been a relief to a number of prewar writers, who predicted that that food supplies were vulnerable to gas attack. Two points. One is that I'm glad that I don't go to the kind of seminars which involve a risk of mustard gas exposure (22 civilians suffered 'side-effects', according The Times, along with 3 officials.) The second is the question of why 1943? Early in that year Allied victory was sealed in North Africa and a German army surrendered at Stalingrad. Perhaps the worry was that with Germany now on the retreat, Hitler might try something desperate to regain the initiative. Or, if the seminars were organised after the devastating raids on Hamburg in July, perhaps it was thought that the Luftwaffe might retaliate. (It did still have this capability, as the Baby Blitz the following year showed -- though this was conventional, not chemical.)

The second story is that in May 1944, Britain 'considered' (as the headline in The Times has it) using mustard gas against Tokyo. But it would be easy to read too much into this. The report in question -- entitled 'Attack on Tokyo with gas bombs' -- clearly isn't any sort of operational plan but simply an intellectual exercise designed to provide the top brass with the basis for informed decision-making. (One giveaway is that the author was a boffin, a Professor D. Brunt, who I'd guess was the meteorologist David Brunt.) Still, it's always a bit confronting to ponder the thinking behind statements like 'In the densely built areas of Japanese-type buildings, where the streets are narrow, the flow of a gas cloud would be hindered by the narrowness of the streets'. Phosgene could also be used, which would cause large civilian casualties, but the conclusion was that incendiaries would be best, perhaps followed up a few days later with mustard as an area-denial weapon. (Another suggestion was gas first to cause civilians to flee, then incendiaries, though there's no suggestion in the article that this was in order to minimise casualties.) Again, why 1944? It's not like Bomber Command was about to start operations against Japan. But the invasion of France was imminent, and with it the prospect of a heavy toll of British military casualties. At this stage of the war manpower was starting to run out. So the eventual need to provide forces for the invasion of Japan must have been daunting for British planners; and for that reason, using technology to substitute for manpower would have been attractive.¹ And in fact, later in the year Churchill committed a large contingent of heavy bombers to the war against Japan, Tiger Force -- which didn't go in action because it was trumped by another labour-saving device, the atomic bomb. (Well, that and the Soviet Union's still relatively ample reserves of manpower.)

1. Just as it had been in a similar stage in the First World War: see Eric Ash, Sir Frederick Sykes and the Air Revolution, 1912-1918 (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 1999).

The first is from the Melbourne Argus of 19 January 1939. It's very brief, no more than a simple statement that the Soviet Union has announced that it has developed a death ray. This prompted a response on 20 January (p. 10) from T. H. Laby, Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. (I attended many a physics seminar in the Laby Theatre, back in the day.)

"Over and over again claims have been made to the discovery of a death-ray, and there has never been any substance in them," he said. The whole electromagnetic spectrum, from the longest wireless waves to the shortest X-rays, is known to physicists, and none of them could be used as death-rays at any intensity at which it is possible to produce them.

Laby allowed that X-rays and sound rays (the latter not, of course, electromagnetic waves but pressure waves) could in theory be used to kill, but not in practice. He was right to be sceptical of the Soviet claim, although there is always the possibility of something new coming along to confound elderly but distinguished scientists (as actually happened with the laser in 1960). And the report from Moscow was so sketchy that all he has to go on is the term 'death ray', which as I've said before doesn't mean its primary effect was to kill directly. As for the report itself, who knows whether the Soviets actually made this claim officially, or whether it was garbled or not. But in such uncertain times, a little misdirection about defence capabilities couldn't hurt a friendless country.

The second dubious claim was made by H. G. Wells in an article for the London Daily Chronicle of 6 March 1939, which was reprinted in his Travels of a Republican Radical in Search of Hot Water. Having returned to Britain from a visit to Australia, Wells notes that

War does not come. That is due to the spreading realisation that the catastrophic anticipations of London, Paris, Berlin and indeed most places, being turned into gigantic holocausts, shambles, heaps of ruin and so forth have been much exaggerated.¹

I'd agree with Wells that there was such a 'spreading realisation', but the main reason he gives for this is surprising: it's the invention of the 'air-mine', which seems to be carried by balloon:

The air-mine is a small, unobtrusive floater carrying a high explosive charge, detonators and suitable entanglements, that can be set to drift at any height. And it just drifts about with the wind. It is not merely unobtrusive but, as armaments go today, relatively inexpensive. You can send these things up in shoals, in clouds, in curtains, and aerial mine-sweepers have yet to be invented.²

I don't know where Wells got this from. As far as I know, the British had no such device (although experiments were carried out with something similar during the war, at Frederick Lindemann's insistence). Maybe it was a rumour put about by somebody official in order to boost confidence in air defence? If so, it looked like it worked on Wells, though it hardly made him look on the government with favour:

The fact remains that it is possible to cancel out the air, and that this present waste on excavations, tin-pot shelters and the like is either bare-faced jobbery or patent imbecility ....³

So there are two odd claims, both false and (maybe) both propaganda. Both certainly forgotten today.

1. H. G. Wells, Travels of a Republican Radical in Search of Hot Water (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939), 68-9.
2. Ibid., 69.
3. Ibid.

Noel Pemberton Billing has received a bit of criticism around here, and mostly for good reason. He couldn't design a decent aeroplane for toffee, he peddled lurid conspiracy theories, he was a relentless self-promoter. But I don't think he was a complete fool. He clearly had a fertile imagination (overly so, Maud Allen would have said) and sometimes he was on the money. Take his ideas for Britain's air defence, as expounded in his 1916 pamphlet Air War: How to Wage It.

There were two major problems at the time. The first was that Zeppelins were raiding British cities and weren't being intercepted, despite the existence of a substantial home defence establishment. It wasn't that they couldn't be intercepted, but that they couldn't be intercepted consistently. (Shooting them down was another a problem, of course.) The problem was one of command, control, communications and intelligence (C³I, though you can add letters to taste). Information about incoming Zeppelins and their locations usually wasn't timely or accurate, making it hard for fighters to find them in the dark. And most squadrons were based near the coast, meaning that the enemy was usually past the defences by the time the alarm was raised.

The second problem was that because the targets of the raiders were difficult to determine -- and for that matter, the Zeppelin crews themselves often didn't know where they were and dropped their bombs almost at random -- as a precaution alerts had to be sounded and lights blacked-out over large areas of the country. This disrupted sleep and production far more than was necessary.

So Pemberton Billing proposed dividing up the country (meaning England and Wales) into one hundred air defence districts (which seem to correspond to counties or other civil divisions), as shown in the map above. Each district has five sub-districts; for example the one covering East Yorkshire might look like the map below.

Each sub-district would contain: a listening post, 100 feet high with sound detectors pointing east, west, north and south; a searchlight; an anti-aircraft gun; and one or two aeroplanes. But just as important to PB's scheme was the co-ordination between the centre, the districts and sub-districts.

PB presents a little vignette of how his system would work in practice. In Whitehall is the 'Commander-in-Chief, Air Defence'. He stands before a glass map of England and Wales. When intelligence from the North Sea (presumably from the fleet or trawlers) indicates that four Zeppelins are approaching the coast, he orders a 'Stand to Arms' signal to be sent to all districts via dedicated telegraph lines. This tells them to prepare for a raid. Next, a 'Darken' signal is sent to all coastal districts (only) ordering their commanders to instruct local police and power companies to institute a black-out. Then all districts wait.

More importantly, they listen. When one of the coastal sound detectors hears engine sounds, it informs the district headquarters, which in turn informs the C-in-C 'within ten seconds'. The C-in-C now knows where the Zeppelins are, and orders aircraft in that district and adjacent ones into the air to intercept them. At the same time, those districts are immediately ordered to darken; nearby districts are to darken more gradually. But in most of the country, life carries on as normal, and will continue to do so unless and until raiders actually approach. And 'so complete is the control from Whitehall, so perfect the system of intelligence, that in a moment, should other counties be threatened, the pressing of a button will put in operation the same offensive and defensive plans'.

The above has been written in narrative form in order to convey as simply as possible the principle of a system which, with the existing wireless, telegraphic, and telephonic facilities, could be established within a few weeks. It will be noticed that this plan of mine concentrates on central control, without which any system of aerial defence will prove illusory. Not only is the introduction of some such system imperative, if we are to meet the existing situation calmly, but effectively, but it is on such lines that we can eventually guarantee protection against attack from the air.

Whatever one thinks of the specifics of PB's air defence system, he has clearly grasped the importance of command, control, communications and intelligence. He even uses all of these terms, bar communications, but he has that covered too, with his 'wireless, telegraphic, and telephonic facilities'.

Air War came out in late February 1916, but evidently it was composed of articles previously published in the Daily Mail, the Referee and Reynolds. (It definitely has a 'cut-and-paste' feel to it.) At this time, authorities were still grasping for an effective response to the Zeppelins, which is why PB published his book and, indeed, why he was in between by-election campaigns in which he ran as independent. (He lost the first one, obviously, but won the second.) Eventually the RFC developed a barrage system which was less complex than PB's area-based defence, but it proved effective enough. Defence against the Gothas spurred on further developments, resulting in LADA, and by the 1930s the air defence of Britain was entrusted to an system not unlike PB's, though with bigger 'districts' (sectors) and more vertical organisation (AA, intelligence, fighters in separate organisations). PB's C-in-C even uses a plotting room not unlike that Dowding was to use in 1940, except with lights on a map to show which districts had raiders overhead, instead of WAAFs pushing counters around.

So, Pemberton Billing was not so dumb after all. And I haven't even mentioned his invention of iTunes in 1925 ...

Source: N. Pemberton-Billing, Air War: How to Wage It (London: Gale & Polden, 1916), 25-32.

A random thought while sitting in a lecture today: if there is (or can be) such a thing as total war, does that imply that total peace is a meaningful concept?

Firstly, what is total war? One definition, drawn from the ubiquitous set of conference proceedings edited by Stig Förster et al (and more directly, from today's lecture notes), goes something like this. Total war consists of:

1. total aims: e.g. the destruction of an enemy nation
2. total methods: e.g. bombing cities
3. total mobilisation: e.g. conscription for both the armed forces and for labour
4. total control: e.g. censorship, dictatorship

More briefly, total war is the subordination of every other consideration (law, custom, morality, etc) to the prosecution of war. Total war is an ideal form of warfare, something which can be approached more or less closely, but which can never actually be fully attained. Well, hopefully not, because that would be bad.

So what would total peace look like? I don't think it can simply be the absence of total war; that's just peace generically. Total peace must be total in some sense.

One approach might be to say that total peace is the subordination of every consideration to the prosecution of peace. But why would this be necessary? Perhaps as a sublimation for the martial impulse, a moral equivalent of war. William James called for 'gilded youths' to be conscripted in 'the immemorial human warfare against nature', that is to say to do dirty and unpleasant jobs such as mining, construction, roadbuilding, which would knock some sense into them and make them better people. James was inspired in part by H. G. Wells, who himself later had similar ideas. For example, in his screenplay for Things to Come (1936) he imagined a peaceful future civilisation which turns its energies towards the exploration of the Universe, by way of the construction of a giant space gun.

But it's hard (for me, at least) to imagine any real society devoting itself so totally to peaceful pursuits. Fear and greed are, unfortunately, more powerful motivating forces than altruism or even curiosity. Indeed, even in Things to Come the rationalists have to face down a rebellion which fears where progress will lead and wants to tear down the space gun.

So perhaps a total peace is more negative: the subordination, in peacetime, of every other consideration to preparing for total war. Like total war itself, this would be a never-realised ideal. But, also like total war, there are times when it is approached more closely than at other times. One such period might be the Cold War. But to the same extent that total war became unthinkable after the advent of nuclear weapons, so too would total peace become unnecessary: if the war was actually fought, it could not be won, and so the preparations for it would have been pointless. And how total can the Cold War be said to have been? Most people in the West, at least, lived out their lives without being greatly affected by it.

Another period when a total peace might have occurred would have been before the Second World War. Think civil defence, peacetime conscription, the coordination of labour to maximise armaments production, the building up of bomber forces. In Britain, at least, these initiatives were only secondarily intended to prepare the nation for total war. Their primary aim was to deter an attack altogether. So perhaps total peace was actually the (inevitably, only partial) reorganisation of society to try to prevent a total war from starting in the first place?

Random thoughts have a low probability of being useful, however. More considered thoughts would be welcome!