I’m currently looking at the air menace as portrayed in the press during the Sudeten crisis in late September-early October 1938. The interesting thing is that there isn’t much, at least not directly. There was very little scaremongering material of the type so prevalent in 1934-5, or even earlier in 1938, for example, even in the Daily Mail. Rarely does anyone actually come out and say something along the lines of ‘The danger is that Germany will attempt an aerial knock-out blow against London’. I’d guess is this is at least partly due to self-restraint on the part of editors: it would be grossly irresponsible to run headlines playing up the possibility that bombs were about to start falling on British cities, particularly given that panic was itself one of the major concerns.

But, indirectly, the shadow of the bomber was definitely there. The most obvious indication is in the amount of space devoted to discussions of air raid precautions — distribution of gas masks, digging of trenches in parks, ads for gas-proofing material, plans for the evacuation of children, emergency council meetings to discuss what to do about the fact they’d done nothing in the way of ARP for the last two years … It would have been pretty clear to most readers what all this meant, especially after the horrors of bombing in Spain and China earlier in the year were recalled.

The other signifier is the end of the world. Or, rather, talk about the end of European civilisation, the abyss towards which we are all sliding, the imminence of a second dark ages. Just taking the New Statesman: on 10 September 1938, a leader states that a war would stop Germany but ‘would probably also end European civilisation’; a letter by Paul Goulding similarly refers to the ‘breakdown of what remains of European civilisation’ if war comes; another from V. Gordon Childe (the famous archaeologist) thought that war ‘must, in fact, destroy all that in Britain still deserves the name civilisation’, though he was more concerned that Britain was going to reject Soviet aid in order to help the Fascists dismember Czechoslovakia; and L. C. Knights urged that international and social reconstruction be undertaken on the basis of humane (and socialist) values, otherwise ‘the alternative is to wait in despairing fatalism for the end of our civilisation’.¹ These sorts of sentiments are more common from the left than the right, but not exclusively so.

The problem is, though, that these statements are usually ambiguous. Obviously, my first impulse is to interpret these as references to the devastation caused by massive aerial bombardments. But they could also refer to the effects of a major land war too, and all its consequences — think of a greater Great War, plus fascism and bolshevism, and with all of the advances in military technology since 1918 thrown in. Come to think of it, that’s just the Second World War, really, which did in fact cause far more devastation than did the first (more than three times the total deaths worldwide, for example). Such a war could conceivably stretch the fabric of European society to the breaking point. And so it could be that this is what was meant by the end of civilisation.² Or, that the mobilisation of society for total war, and the loss of freedoms that went with that, would destroy it from within.

I tend to doubt this is so in most cases, because when such comments are occasionally elaborated upon, they tend to reveal air-mindedness. For example, Gordon Childe went on to speculate whether pro-appeasement intellectuals might come to wonder if ‘the bombed ruins of London and Berlin would not have been better than the skeleton of a civilisation condemned to stagnation condemned to stagnation by the denial of free enquiry’.³ And after the crisis had passed, it seems that people felt a little freer to say exactly what it was that they feared. Speaking in the House of Commons after the Munich Agreement, Chamberlain said that the government had ’saved Czecho-Slovakia from destruction and Europe from Armageddon’. Earlier, he had explained what modern war meant:

When war starts to-day, from the very first hour, before any professional soldier, sailor, or airman had been touched, it would strike the workman, the clerk, the man in the street or in the bus, and their wives and children in their homes — people burrowing underground to escape from poison gas, filled with dread of what might happen to them or those dear to them, or leaving them with maimed fathers and mothers.⁴

So, I suppose what I’m arguing is that, during the Sudeten crisis, there was a reluctance to talk about that which was most feared, at least in print, just when it seemed imminent. Which is probably very human.

1. New Statesman, 10 September 1938, 366; 17 September 1938, 412; 24 September 1938, 451; 8 October 1938, 525.
2. After all, Salisbury made similar forecasts four decades earlier, without even mentioning aircraft.
3. New Statesman, 24 September 1938, 452.
4. Manchester Guardian, 7 October 1938, p. 4.

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In late March and early April 1938, the Manchester Guardian ran a competition inviting readers to send in ‘a List, with short reasons, of Six Books with which to Furnish a Gas-proof Room’¹ — that is, a room designed to provide a temporary refuge in a gas attack. The article which discussed the entries began by noting that ‘A gas-proof room is not a desert island, at least from a literary point of view’, because desert island books are meant to be aids in survival, whereas those in a shelter are intended to divert the mind from dwelling on the danger of poison gas. So,

The competitor from Ulverston who suggested Bacon’s “Novum Organum,” “The Last Days of Pompeii,” “The City of Dreadful Night,” “Paradise Lost,” “Sighs from Hell,” by Bunyan, and Blair’s “Grave” presumably knows his own mind better than anyone else does, but most people would say that the furniture of such a room would only be complete with a revolver to be used in case the gas and bombs and literature all failed to do their work.

Despite this admonishment, many of the entries displayed a rather dark humour:

Talking about once-obtainable foods will obviously be THE diversion in the War to end Civilisation. No better guide, then, to the menu of one’s dreams than “Mrs. Beeton.”

To the common suggestion of Who’s Who, the Guardian responded by saying that this ‘would easily, in an air raid, take on the appearance of an anthology of brief obituaries’.

Other submissions were more practical:

The books must steady jittery nerves by distracting the mind from business overhead. Whilst entertainment is required, purely light literature is useless, since it does not demand sufficient concentration. Humour only irritates in moments of strain. Books giving something to do are, therefore, best.

Though just how many people could be bothered with ‘A Book of Mathematical Problems’ or ‘Any Chosen Work in Foreign Tongue, and a glossary for it’ may be questioned!

While some suggestions were fairly optimistic — ‘Holiday Guide. — To plan the next holidays’ — others, quite naturally, despaired of humanity:

Pope. — For a reminder that men were once civilised.

Boswell’s “Johnson.” — For a reminder that men were once sensible.

Urquhart’s “Rabelais.” — For a reminder that there are better kinds of nonsense than dropping gas bombs.

So, who won? Douglas Rawson (or perhaps Hawson) of Malton in Yorkshire. His list had a bit of everything:

“Anatomy of Melancholy.” — For general reading.

Italian Phrase-book. — In case of visitors.

German Phrase-book. — Same reason.

Family Bible. — Exhibiting Aryan descent.

Students’ Song-book. — For community singing.

Telephone Directory. — To call doctors, &c., or locksmith if door combination forgotten.

It might be interesting to know what reading material people actually took with them into shelters during the Blitz. Some insight could no doubt be gleaned from diaries, especially Mass-Observation ones. Did people want to be amused while the bombs fell? Educated? Tested? Though amusing, the Manchester Guardian competition quoted here does not, I think, have much bearing on the question: the readership (middle class, left-Liberal, I suppose largely Mancunian) was small and not particularly representative. More importantly, people would have submitted lists which they thought would catch the judge’s eye, in the hopes of winning the prize (two guineas), rather than the books they would really take into the refuge with them. Even more importantly, perhaps, when the air raids did eventually come, they were mostly at night, and shelterers (from HE and incendiaries rather than gas) were generally more concerned to get some sleep than to feed their heads.

Still, it’s a fascinating little glimpse into the grim humour with which the British were facing up to the horrors they believed were coming:

But perhaps in the end we should all be pessimists enough to reach out automatically for Jeremy Taylor’s little treatise on A.R.P. — “Holy Living and Holy Dying.” Its advantage is, of course, that, supposing the precautions did work after all, we could concentrate on the first half.

1. Manchester Guardian, 28 March 1938, p. 5. All other quotes from “Literature and gas”, Manchester Guardian, 6 April 1938, p. 6.

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“Slough” by John Betjeman (1937):

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.

And get that man with double chin
Who’ll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women’s tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It’s not their fault that they are mad,
They’ve tasted Hell.

It’s not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It’s not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren’t look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

David Brent’s analysis of “Slough”:

‘Right, I don’t think you solve town planning problems by dropping bombs all over the place, so he’s embarrassed himself there’ — brilliant.

But some people did think like that, or at least wanted to use the need for urban reconstruction after intensive bombing as an opportunity to build a better city. Even more common were plans for reconstruction before war came, to build a city which would better protect its inhabitants from bombing as well as provide a more pleasant way of life. Indeed, the latter might well be a byproduct of the former, as Alistair Cooke¹ suggested in a review of Lewis Mumford’s The Culture of Cities (1938). He first apologised for criticising Mumford’s penchant for ‘philosophic blueprint[s]’, and then added that:

But it is inevitable at a time when A.R.P. underlines the fact that idealism is possibly the last drive a community acts on when it decides to rebuild itself. Profit, plague, satiation, and especially fear are paramount; a regrettable conclusion that Mr. Mumford himself amply proves in his section on “War as City-Builder.”

He tells in masterly detail of the mediaeval [sic] city’s ache for security after five centuries of looting and civic bankruptcy. But it is likely that radical reform in street-planning, and (in this country) in greenbelt planning, will take effect not from somebody’s idealism but from Mr. Langdon-Davies’s insistence that air raids make such foresight inevitable. Planning for war may, in this instance, bring about peace-time playgrounds that philanthropy would never have created.²

Not all visions of the bombproofed cities of the future were so positive. Only two weeks later, the same publication reported on the British delegation’s report to the 1938 International Housing and Townplanning [sic] Congress, held in Mexico City:

Here we get in all its nakedness a picture of the life to which civilised man will be condemned if air-warfare is to be perpetuated as one of the enduring achievements of civilisation. It is true that his life would not be spent underground, but all the essentials of life would have to be duplicated underground. Car-parks would go beneath the surface so that they could be used as shelters (but according to Professor Haldane they would have to go at least 50 feet down), hospitals would have to go underground, so would museums, for the security of their contents, so should all places of public entertainment, and communications must of course be constructed underground, at a cost of about £1,000 a foot. It is just as well that we should realise what faces us even if actual war in the immediate future is avoided and only the prospect of war overhangs us.³

In a society where, apparently, it would either take the threat of war to build truly livable cities, or alternatively, that threat would force life partly underground, one can perhaps understand why ‘the hatred of modern life, the desire to see our money-civilization blown to hell by bombs’ was ‘a thing […] genuinely felt’ by the protagonist of George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). Of course, none of these things happened, but that’s another story.

1. Yes, that Alistair Cooke, though being neither American nor British I’m more familiar with Alistair Cookie.
2. Alistair Cooke, “A diary of civilisation”, Spectator, 26 August 1938, 241.
3. “The subterranean life”, Spectator, 9 September 1938, 391.

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A few days after Xmas, I felt like I should be getting back into reading something thesis-related, but at the same time I still felt like I was still in holiday mode. So I compromised and read something on topic, but a bit lighter than my usual academic fare, namely Waiting for Hitler: Voices from Britain on the Brink of Invasion by Midge Gillies (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2007). The name suggests that it’s along the lines of the ‘forgotten voices’ type of book that seem to be everywhere lately, but I couldn’t say because I haven’t actually read any of them. While it’s certainly heavy on quoting ‘ordinary’ people (Mass-Observation diarists, Dunkirk veterans, internees) and, I’m sure, doesn’t break any new historiographical ground, it’s based on a lot of research, is well-written, and easily moves between the big picture and the small one. I learned a lot about a topic I don’t know much about, namely the British home front from the start of the Norwegian campaign in April 1940, to the start of the Blitz in September. It’s easy for me to focus too much on the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, but in some ways the period leading up to them is more interesting, because people didn’t know what was going to happen next and that’s often when fears come out to play.

One of the aspects of Waiting for Hitler I appreciated was Gillies’ attention to rumours and panics as an index of the insecurity of the British people as they prepared for a possible German invasion. These are fascinating. For example, the slit trenches being dug in Hyde Park were said to be for mass burials in the aftermath of air raids, not protection from bombs. Troops practicing machine-gunning a buoy in a Cornish harbour turned into the accidental death of a boy by machine-gun fire the next day, and then the massacre of dozens of children on the beach the next, strafed by German aeroplanes. Rumours turned the deputy Labour leader Arthur Greenwood into a traitor locked in the Tower, and pencils and chocolates into the poisoned weapons of fifth columnists. In Southampton, the smell from a pickling plant was responsible for a minor panic, when somebody thought it might be poison gas:

ARP wardens paraded in gas masks, while hairdressers slammed their windows and told customers to keep their heads in washbasins.¹

It may sound silly, but it wasn’t really, because the government’s ARP literature warned people to be wary of strange smells as possible evidence of a gas attack.

Stories abounded of new German weapons. For example:

there were tales of German experiments with a cobweb-like material that they had tested over France in 1939. The substance, which they released in large white balloon-like capsules, had covered several square kilometres and clung to people’s hands and faces. In another version it was reported that the substance had appeared over Britain, but it turned out that this was gossamer produced by spiders mating in mid-air.²

Most of these weapons didn’t exist, but the rumours helped explain to those who passed them on why so many armies were crumbling so quickly before the German onslaught. One of the weapons was quite real, however: the paratrooper.

German paratroopers had featured in the invasion of Denmark and Norway, where they were used to secure airfields as forward Luftwaffe bases or to land occupation forces. Airborne units were also used to capture key fortifications and bridges in Holland and Belgium (in particular, the state-of-the-art Fort Eben-Emael). These spectacular operations seemed to provide a crucial part of the explanation for the stunning success of the German army’s blitzkrieg, and naturally the thought arose — no doubt helped along by the extensive press coverage — that paratroopers might next fall on Britain. This was particularly worrying because much of the army was in France with the British Expeditionary Force.

Hence the invention of the ‘parashot’, one of the crop of new war words. A parashot was simply somebody standing guard in a field or somewhere all night, with a weapon such as a shotgun, waiting for a parachutist to come down. Some parashots took up the task spontaneously, but most joined the Local Defence Volunteers, later renamed the Home Guard. What I didn’t realise was that the LDV was announced as early as 14 May, just 4 days after the start of the German offensive in the West. Somehow, I had it in my head that it was a post-Dunkirk affair, only a few weeks later, which would make sense: the BEF had survived, but only just; it had lost all of its equipment; the French had surrendered (or were soon about to). Invasion seemed probable and there was little to stand in the Germans’ way. On 14 May, however, the Allied forces, though shocked by the speed of the German advance, were still intact; the BEF wasn’t yet in retreat. For anyone who remembered the miracle on the Marne in 1914 (ie, all of the senior military and political leaders), to start planning for defeat might have seemed premature. It seems clear that the new menace of the paratrooper helps explain the new zeal for an army of part-timers, schemes for which had been kicked around Whitehall since early in the war. In his BBC broadcast calling for volunteers for the LDV, Anthony Eden, the newly installed Secretary of State for War, opened by discussing at length the new danger:

I want to speak to you to-night about the form of warfare which the Germans have been employing so extensively against Holland and Belgium — namely, the dropping of troops by parachute behind the main defensive lines.³

He then explained the way in which such parachute raids would be carried out:

The troops arrive by aeroplane — but let it be remembered that any such aeroplane seeking to penetrate here would have to do so in the teeth of the anti-aircraft defences of this country. If such penetration is effected, the parachutists are then dropped, it may be by day, it may be by night. These troops are specially armed, equipped, and some of them have undergone specialised training. Their function is to seize important points, such as aerodromes, power stations, villages, railway junctions and telephone exchanges, either for the purpose of destroying them at once, or of holding them until the arrival of reinforcements. The purpose of the parachute attack is to disorganise and confuse, as a preparation for the landing of troops by aircraft.⁴

As well as activities of the contemporary fifth column across the Channel, this strongly resembles the supposed plans of the secret army of German tourists or immigrants so characteristic of the invasion scare novels before 1914, but I’ll let that pass. Eden assured his listeners that plans had been made against to defend against such an attack, however just to be on the safe side …

We want large numbers of such men in Great Britain who are British subjects, between the ages of 17 and 65, to come forward now and offer their service in order to make assurance doubly sure. The name of the new force which is now to be raised will be the “Local Defence Volunteers”. This name, Local Defence Volunteers, describes its duties in three words.⁵

That the government would feel it necessary to call for (it hoped) 150,000 or so volunteers for a second-string army shows how unnerved it was by the blitzkrieg. That 750,000 men would in fact volunteer within the first month shows how unnerved they were. There’s lots of anecdotal evidence to support this, particularly near the south and east coasts — golfers seem to have been particularly concerned that their greens might be perfect landing grounds for gliders, though perhaps this was because an invasion would interrupt their game! Rumours, urban legends practically, of spies parachuting into the country and traveling about disguised as nuns were rife (the give-away was supposedly their hairy arms).

And, on at least one occasion, paratroopers were actually seen floating from the sky:

The concept of the German storm-trooper descending from the sky was so vividly etched on people’s imaginations that it led to a nationwide optical illusion on the stormy Thursday following the invasion of Holland [16 May]. Such was the hysteria about aerial attack that several people mistook silver barrage balloons lit up by flashes of lightning for parachutists. The sightings gained credibility because the Evening Standard had reported that some Germans wore sky-blue uniforms and used transparent parachutes that allowed them to drift to earth invisibly.⁶

Unfortunately, Gillies doesn’t give any references for this, and the extent of the sightings is unclear.⁷ But such a panic fits perfectly into the precedent set by the phantom airships three decades earlier: people are told that strange new enemies are coming by air; they scan the sky anxiously, paying closer attention to it than they normally would; they then see something unfamiliar or under unusual conditions and assume it’s the terrible new weapon they’ve been warned about.⁸ And it’s an air panic too, even if it doesn’t involve Zeppelins or bombers.

So it looks like I’ve got yet more material to try and cram into my thesis somehow. Bigger is better, right?

1. Gillies, Waiting for Hitler, 159.
2. Ibid., 160.
3. The Times, 15 May 1940, p. 3. The full text is online.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Gillies, Waiting for Hitler, 60.
7. It’s ‘a nationwide optical illusion’, yet only involves ’several people’. James Hayward, Myths and Legends of the Second World War (Stroud: Sutton, 2003) has a chapter on the paratrooper panic and hairy nuns, but doesn’t appear to mention this particular incident.
8. It’s true that the phantom airships in 1909 and 1912-3 were seen in peacetime. I would argue that, coming off the back the intense Anglo-German naval rivalry, the spy mania, the invasion novels and all the rest of it, some people felt virtually under siege by Germany already. There’s a degree of circularity in that argument — but I think the loop is broken by the fact that non-existent airships were seen during the First World War itself.

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Long-time reader, second-time commenter Ian Evans was in the Royal Observer Corps in York at the end of the 1950s. Here he describes how the ROC, in addition to retaining something like its planespotting functions during the Second World War, took on the job of measuring the Third:

When I joined the ROC (1958) it was still pretty much an RAF auxiliary, officers with handlebar moustaches and all. We spotted, reported and plotted aircraft in a very similar manner to our WW2 predecessors, though things had been simplified and speeded up, with special procedures for fast low flying aircraft (Rats). The nuclear reporting role was just being introduced, the observer posts were given “bunkers”, a small underground room with bunks and stores, airlock and reinforced tunnel to the surface, a nuclear burst recorder (a souped-up pinhole camera), a pressure recorder to measure the blast strength, a Geiger counter to measure the fallout, and individual dosimeters (we were rather cynical about these).

The operating theory was that there would be sufficient political warning for the observers to man their posts, they would wait for the noise to stop, surface, extract the recording paper from their recorders, read off the bearing and altitude of the burst and the peak overpressure. This would then be phoned in to Group HQ where we would plot the (hopefully several) bearings, and get the position of the detonation. Then, using the reported overpressures, plus sets of tables and nomograms we woud evaluate the bomb power and report back to…..anyone still alive. After that the posts would report radiation levels at regular intervals until…

Which is quite a terrifying job description (luckily they didn’t have to do risk assessments in those days!)

But, of course, there was plenty of terror to go around. Long-time reader and commenter CK pointed out a 1982 BBC documentary called “Nuclear War: A Guide to Armageddon” (written and produced by Mick Jackson, director of Threads) about the effects of a nuclear war and how civilians should prepare for it.

(Parts two and three: `Are you prepared to use force to keep others out’ of your shelter?) One of the sources cited at the start is Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan’s classic The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (Department of Defense and Energy Research and Development Administration, 1977), which is now available online.

The title of this post, of course, comes from Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s 1984 classic “Two Tribes”:¹

Aside from the general Cold War theme, the link with the rest of this post is the voice at the start of the video which says, ‘… the air attack warning sounds like. This is the sound’, followed by a siren. The voice belongs to actor Patrick Allen, who had previously said similar things as the narrator of the British government’s series of civil defence films, Protect and Survive, successors of the ARP pamphlets of the 1930s. Inevitably, the films are also all available on YouTube.

Thank you to CK and especially Ian for their comments.

1. I didn’t realise that the title comes from the opening narration in Australia’s own great contribution to the end of the world, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior: ‘For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all.’

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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.

While in York Castle Museum, I was surprised to come across Black-Out, a ’skilful card game — full of interest’. It’s one of the British war games I mentioned in a previous post. At that time I only had a low-res photo from the BBC website to go on, so I was glad of the chance for a closer look.

So here’s what I can make out of the gameplay. There are up to four players who driving a car or lorry across a blacked-out London. Each player starts in a corner of the map corresponding to the colour of their vehicle, and presumably wins by getting to the opposite corner. (The corners are Hyde Park Corner, Marble Arch, Holborn, Charing Cross.) The board is a map of London which bears some relation to the actual geography of the city (as Monopoly does not). But it’s not marked into squares or numbers or anything, so it’s a bit unclear how movement works.

One clue is the arrows drawn across the streets at intervals, each with a symbol beside it. These symbols seem to relate to various civil defence organisations or objects: Air Raid Precautions, Auxiliary Fire Service London, Metropolitan Police (?), fire hose, fire helmet, buckets of sand, fire extinguishers (?), a siren (?), a kerbside pillar of some sort (?), a red cross, a yellow cross, a blue and white ribbon (?). Presumably they are obstacles of some sort (and maybe opportunities too), and it’s the successful navigation through these hazards which determines success or failure.

Another clue is that there seem to be three different directions a player can go in from each corner, so from Hyde Park Corner they could go down Park Lane, Piccadilly or Constitution Hill. It’s a ’skilful game’, so I think the player gets to choose which direction to go in, which way to turn at corners. Since it doesn’t seem that the players could interact with each other (i.e. to slow each other down somehow), there’s probably some random element too, or else there wouldn’t be much replayability once the fastest routes have been figured out. It’s also a ‘card game’, but unfortunately none of the cards are shown, so I can only guess at what they might do. One possibility is that they dictate movement (e.g. ‘move to the nearest AFS post’). Another is they are random events (e.g. ‘you fail to stop at a sentry point and the Home Guard shoots you dead’).

That’s about all I can say from the information to hand, except to add that it must date to between 1938 and 1941 (the years the AFS operated). It looks like it could be an amusing game for children, with more possibilities for skill than Snakes and Ladders type games, and with the added bonus of teaching a bit of London geography. But it’s also a reflection of life in a city made strange and unfamiliar by the hazards of the blackout.

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In a previous post, I looked at some of Arthur C. Clarke’s predictions, made in 1946, about how rockets would change the types of weapons and vehicles used by military forces of the future.¹ He got some hits (space stations) but, on balance, more misses (rocket mines, more turret fighters). In the latter half of his paper, Clarke steps back to consider the broader implications of rockets for future warfare, and does rather better.

These are grim, given the advent of atomic weapons. It may be the case that for every weapon, Clarke says, a defence is eventually evolved. But

During the interval between the adoption of a new weapon and its countering, the damage done to the material structure of civilization grows steadily greater, and there must come a time at last when breakdown occurs. The present state of Germany shows how nearly that point had been reached even with the weapons of the pre-atomic age.²

One particularly interesting possibility Clarke considers is that of ‘radiation war’.³ He notes that the vast majority of the radiation emitted by an atomic bomb must fall outside the visible spectrum, concluding that ‘the bomb acts as an X-ray generator of unimaginable power’.⁴ So a bomb could be detonated at high altitudes to blind large numbers of people, or to ruin huge areas of crops. Atomic bombs carried by long-range rockets would be the ‘ultimate weapon’.⁵

Such attacks might in time assume even more vicious forms. The rockets might be detonated nearer to the ground to induce artificial radioactivity which would compel the evacuation of the areas affected. Neutron and gamma-ray warheads might be developed against which only great thicknesses of rock could provide protection. And most terrible of all would be the threat — even if it were no more than that — of X-ray mutation. This might well daunt a race which would fight to the death against ordinary weapons.⁶

Armies, navies and air forces would still have their uses — atomic-tipped rockets wouldn’t have been much use in Burma, for example; and at sea, the ‘mobile rocket launcher, almost certainly a submersible’ has great potential⁷ — but they will ultimately deploy only once the first rocket strike (quite possibly a surprise, Pearl Harbor-style attack) has secured victory. In the air, piloted aircraft will give way to unmanned vehicles operated by ‘controllers sitting in safety before television screens’.⁸ Fully-automatic aircraft may even be possible, since

All possible combat manœuvres can be analyzed and recorded by suitable coding in machines of the punched-card type. It is conceivable that “battle integrators” may be constructed along these lines, capable of making operational decisions in a matter of milliseconds according to changing combat conditions.⁹

In fact, such computers could be used to make strategic decisions as well as tactical ones, leading to a ‘new type of warfare which would be too swift and complex for detailed human control […] the apotheosis of mechanized war’.¹⁰

Clarke closes with a section on the problem of defence. Actually, the problem is bigger than that: he quotes the Smyth Report to the effect that

civilization may soon have the means to commit suicide at will. The problem that now confronts us is not one of defence but of survival.¹¹

He considers, but swiftly rejects, the idea that civilisation could move underground more or less permanently, to save itself from the bomb. Firstly, it would be practically impossible to arrange a food supply for a massive population of people for an indefinite period of time. Secondly, and more importantly, even deep underground there would be no guarantee of safety:

The penetrating power of a rocket falling from a hundred miles or more is enormous and would enable atomic warheads to be exploded at a considerable depth. Such “ground depth charges” could collapse or severely damage any cavity that could be built without an impossible amount of labour.¹²

The good news is that the British Empire, being so vast, is ‘probably the least vulnerable target in the world’.¹³ The bad news is that Britain itself is indefensible, and so Clarke concludes that

the removal to Canada of the Central Government and the Service Departments must be carried out as a permanent measure. It would be impossible to do this after a war had started, and there would certainly be insufficient prior warning to enable such a vast transfer of administration to be made.¹⁴

But ultimately he doubts whether even a political unit as big as the Commonwealth could work effectively during an atomic war.¹⁵ The only winning move in this game is not to play:

In other words, the problem is political and not military at all. A country’s armed forces can no longer defend it; the most they can promise is the destruction of the attacker.¹⁶

So, the United Nations is mankind’s last, best hope for peace. How can rockets help it with this task? By backing up an international air force:

even if there is no intention of using them except as a last resort, the World Security Council should for psychological reasons possess long-range rockets. However, the weapons which it would use if force proved necessary would be the air contingents of its members, employing ordinary explosives and machines of the type that exist to-day. Behind these would be the threat, never materializing save in dire emergency, of the mightier forces against which there could be no defence.¹⁷

The international rocket force would need, according to Clarke, no more than 20 launch sites for world coverage. The personnel would come from every nation, and ‘It would be the aim to inculcate in these men a supra-national outlook’,¹⁸ much like the Red Cross. That most of them would be ’scientific’ types would doubtless help this process along. And as support, they would need access to a research organisation that no nation could match:

This body might in time act as the nucleus around which the scientific service of the World State would form, perhaps many years in advance of its political realization.¹⁹

He sees this international force as only temporary, needed only until such time as ‘a world economic system is functioning smoothly, when all standards of living are approaching the same level, when no national armaments are left’.²⁰

I’m sure the RAF implied no endorsement of Clarke’s views by publishing them in RAF Quarterly!

So, there are a couple of points of interest here. Firstly, there’s the very early prediction of ‘radiation war’. I’ve suggested before that pre-1945, the radiation effects of atomic bombs were not well understood. Here’s some evidence, then, that not very long after the first atomic explosions, there was enough publicly available information to put together a fairly accurate picture of the longer-term and larger-scale effects of a nuclear war. (The fact that Clarke had immersed himself in 1930s pulp science fiction may have helped enlarge his imagination on this point too!) For that matter, in contrast to the first part of the paper, Clarke made quite a few accurate predictions: not just intercontinental ballistic missiles, which one might think was obvious,²¹ but also submarine-launched ballistic missiles, nuclear bunker busters, and unmanned aerial vehicles.²²

Secondly, it’s clear that Clarke was the very model of a liberal internationalist. His list of the causes of war — economics and armaments, more or less — speaks to the former, and his proposed solution to the latter. I don’t know if Clarke was aware of groups like the New Commonwealth, who took pretty much the same line in the early 1930s (minus the rockets!) but it seems to me that the international air (rocket) force and the world state were temptations that many others of a technocratic persuasion had succumbed to before and since. And it’s surely no coincidence that H. G. Wells was a huge influence upon Clarke, and Wells was practically obsessed with pretty much the same ideas in his later years (he died in 1945).

I’ll close by quoting Clarke’s two closing paragraphs in full, because they show just how strongly he felt about the need to reconstruct the world system, and also because the last paragraph, in particular, sounds very Clarke.

Only along these or similar lines of international collaboration can security be found: any attempt by great powers to seek safety in their own strength will ultimately end in a disaster which may be measureless.

Upon us, the heirs to all the past and the trustees of a future which our folly can slay before its birth, lies a responsibility no other age has ever known. If we fail in our in our generation those who come after us may be too few to rebuild the world when the dust of the cities has descended and the radiation of the rocks has died away.²³

We’ll never know whether Clarke was correct in his belief that an international air and rocket force could have ensured world peace. But we do know that he was wrong to say that disaster awaited us without such a force: we’ve managed to survive for more than sixty years. (So far, anyway!) I’m sure Clarke would be quite happy to admit that he was wrong about this, since that’s allowed him to reach his four score and ten.

Happy birthday, Sir Arthur!

1. Arthur C. Clarke, “The rocket and the future of warfare”, RAF Quarterly, March 1946, 61-9; reprinted in Arthur C. Clarke, Ascent to Wonder: A Scientific Autobiography (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1984), 71-9.
2. Ibid., 76.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 77.
6. Ibid., 77.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 78.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 79.
15. It may seem odd to us now that anyone would even think that the Commonwealth would ever function like that, but of course it just had, in the war just past.
16. Ibid; emphasis in original.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. But wasn’t: see Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (London: Indigo, 2000), 16-7, where incidentally he discusses the May 1945 Lords debate I’ve talked about before.
22. OK, there were pre-atomic and pre-rocket precursors for most of these too.
23. Clarke, Ascent to Wonder, 79.

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Operation Chastise was the codename for the famous ‘dambusters’ raid carried out against three German dams by 617 Squadron on the night of 17 May 1943. The idea was to breach the dams and thereby deprive the factories of the Ruhr of their electricity. As far as the standard story goes — which everyone knows from the movie¹ — it was the brainchild of the engineer Barnes Wallis, chief designer of the R100 airship, the Wellesley and Wellington bombers, the bouncing bomb (as used in the raid) and the Tall Boy and Grandslam earthquake bombs.

Though he may well have had the idea independently, Wallis wasn’t the first to think of bombing dams. Having said that, I don’t actually know of many other candidates.² L. E. O. Charlton is one possibility. In a fictional coda to The Menace of the Clouds (the preface is dated September 1937), he imagined how an international air force might respond to an Italian attack upon (an independent) Egypt. Before dawn, the ISR (International Strategic Reserve) raids Italy’s major ports, and then:

At daylight a succession of strong flights flew inland from over the Tuscan Sea and proceeded to demolish the hydro-electric installations in the Appenine [sic] chain from Liguria to Abruzzi.³

However, Charlton doesn’t actually say that the dams themselves are the targets. And his choice of words is actually more suggestive of the generators at the base of the dams.

One other possibility is … the British government. There is a suggestion in Connelly’s Reaching for the Stars that the British were thinking about the possibility of attacking the Ruhr dams as early as 1937. He gives no details.⁴ But it looks like this interest actually made it into the papers, albeit in a roundabout way!

On 29 March 1938, the Daily Mail noted that Leslie Burgin, the Minister for Transport, had sent an ‘urgent’ message to the Port of London Authority, a message which caused it to cancel its public inquiry into a proposal for a Thames barrage at Woolwich, scheduled to start that very day. (Here, barrage means ‘dam’, not artillery fire — though the meanings are related, of course …)

He [Burgin] told them that the Committee of Imperial Defence had reported that the construction of the barrage would have “very serious disadvantages” from the standpoint of defence, and that the Government would be compelled to veto the project if it were promoted.⁵

The article explained further:

Experts had warned the Government that an appalling disaster might ensue if such a barrage was successfully attacked by bombs from the air. At low tide shipping and life would be imperilled in the lower reaches of the river.⁶

I should explain here that the proposed Thames barrage wasn’t a hydroelectric dam, nor was it primarily a flood defence like the modern Thames Barrier (which is about a kilometre upriver from the proposed barrage site). Its main purpose was to make the Thames above Woolwich tideless. This, the Thames Barrage Association asserted, would be a good thing because it would ease the access of ships and boats into the various London docks (which were, as I understand it, enclosed by a lock and kept at constant water level).⁷ It would also make it much easier to deliver coal to the various power stations along the river (the colliers couldn’t pass under the various bridges at high tide, it seems). Also, the tides also washed sewage, dumped into the estuary below Gallions Reach, as far upriver as Chelsea: the barrage would reduce this by four-fifths. And it would help prevent flooding. Among the minor benefits would be a reduced need for barge roads, which could be used for an airport beside the Thames (Battersea Reach was proposed). Essentially, the Thames above Woolwich would become one giant enclosed lock. In engineering terms, this was a trifle; in 1932, the Dutch completed construction of the Afsluitdijk, which enclosed the Zuider Zee at a similar height to the proposed barrage, and with two locks — and that’s 32 km long.

The London Port Authority was never very keen on the barrage anyway, but the Thames Barrage Association, which had been pushing the idea for a few years, was definitely not happy with this turn of events. It kept fighting the good fight — one of its leading lights, the engineer J. H. O. Bunge, published a book in 1944 called The Tideless Thames in Future London — but the barrage was never built. I’m not sure why, though eventually the decline of the great docks upstream of Woolwich would have undermined its main purpose. But presumably there is some intellectual relationship between the barrage and the Barrier, which began construction in 1974.

So, getting back to bombs. It seems likely to me that the CID’s analysis of the vulnerability of the Thames barrage drew in some way upon their study of the Ruhr dams. Obviously there are important differences between bombing the barrage and bombing the dams. The latter were much higher; the height of the Thames tide at Woolwich is about 7 metres, on average, whereas the hole breached in the Möhne dam was more than 10 times that in height. So, all else being equal, the rate of flow of water out of the breached barrage would have been much less than in the German dams. Fewer people would be at risk downstream (only people close to the shore might be affected). Actually, the greater danger might be to shipping upstream as the river suddenly emptied; this could cause great chaos in the docks. On the other hand, there would be less disruption of electricity to London’s factories — though there would be some because, as noted above, coal was delivered to the Thames power stations by barge.

Breaching such a relatively small dam might not require fancy bouncing bombs; conventional bombs might do the trick, with luck. Not that there is any sign here that anyone considered that there it might actually be difficult to attack a dam successfully. Of course, it wouldn’t be desirable to give away too much operational information in a public statement … but the urgency of Burgin’s message does give the impression that blowing up dams would be an easy thing to do. And this fits in with the widespread impression in the 1930s (and, as far as the public was concerned, during the war) that pinpoint bombing was easily achievable. In reality, of course, it wasn’t (as the Butt Report showed). Still, determined low-level attacks would probably have been able to put the lock out of action, at least, with consequent disruption to food and fuel imports into London. So Burgin was probably wise to put a stop to the barrage plan, even if he did so in an unnecessarily alarming fashion.⁸

Another aspect to the decision to drop the barrage is that it’s an example — if a negative and, I think, a rare one — of the effect that the possibility of bombing had on urban planning. This was much talked about in Britain in the 1930s. For example, in September 1938, the Spectator reported that the British delegation to an international urban planning congress in Mexico City

revealed in all its nakedness a picture of the life to which civilised man will be condemned if air-warfare is to be perpetuated as one of the enduring achievements of civilisation. It is true that his life would not be spent underground, but all the essentials of life would have to be duplicated underground. Car-parks would go beneath the surface so that they could be used as shelters […] hospitals would have to go underground, so would museums, for the security of their contents, so should all places of public entertainment, and communications must of course be constructed underground, at a cost of about £1,000 a foot.⁹

Despite its supposed necessity, in practice very little of this type of thing was ever carried out. I suppose it’s easier, and a lot cheaper, to not build something you wanted to, for fear of air attack, than to build something that you otherwise wouldn’t have done, for the same reason. If that makes sense. And admittedly, the underground hospitals and museums turned out not to be necessary, and the money was put to better use elsewhere. But the same sorts of choices — yes if it’s easy, no if it’s hard, despite the apparently dire threat faced — were made in the Cold War,¹⁰ and we’ll probably end up making the same non-choices with regards to modern-day threats like climate change. This time, however, we may regret it.¹¹

1. Though they don’t in Germany, as I learned from a German historian when I was in London; he had never heard of the film or the raid. Which says something about the exaggerated importance attributed to Chastise in British (and Commonwealth) mythology as the representation of the bomber offensive, at least up until recently.
2. It was common enough to think that the enemy might attack other elements of the electricity generation system, such as power stations; or that reservoirs might be rendered unusable by biological weapons. But dams are another story.
3. L. E. O. Charlton, The Menace of the Clouds (London: William Hodge & Company, 1937), 291.
4. Mark Connelly, Reaching for the Stars: A New History of Bomber Command in World War II (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 95.
5. Daily Mail, 29 March 1938, p. 4.
6. Ibid.
7. E. F. Spanner thought that these locks were themselves a point of vulnerability to air attack.
8. Though I guess it probably wouldn’t have been finished before the war, anyway.
9. Spectator, 9 September 1938, 391.
10. E.g. with regards to meaningful shelter programs to protect civilian populations from nuclear warfare. See David Miller, The Cold War: A Military History (London: John Murray, 1998), 149.
11. Though for a more hopeful lesson from history, see this suggestion by Mark Roodhouse, which draws on the British experience of rationing during the world wars for advice to policymakers looking at implementing carbon rationing.

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The above photograph, and all of the following, are from Poison Gas (London: Union of Democratic Control, 1935).

SAVING THE BABY. — M. Jean, of Paris, observed that ordinary gas masks had the effect of strangling babies and small children. So he proposes to sew them up in an old cow’s hide on the principle shown above. Father stands by — if still alive — and pumps fresh air into the skin.

TRAINING THE YOUNG. — Training the young to use gas masks, which may or may not be effective in the horrible future which is before them if the present war propaganda is successful. Notice the children’s bare legs, entirely unprotected against the two most probable gases — mustard gas and Lewisite.

MUZZLED FOR WAR. — These masks will be no more effective for animals than they are for human beings. And no government has yet suggested any scheme for training animals to use gas masks.

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This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.

Sunday no. 4 was the occasion (after the spooky Big Ben) for my visit to the Imperial War Museum London, which of course was always going to be a highlight of my sightseeing here.

The building itself was not quite what I expected, however. While aesthetically pleasing, it doesn’t seem grand enough, somehow. What I didn’t realise, before my visit, was that it was not purpose built for the IWM: it was originally Bedlam. I suppose I’m comparing it with the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne, and the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. Both of these were built after the First World War; they are wholly or in part memorials to the war dead, and both are visually very striking. I am reliably informed that the IWM has a memorial function as well, at least in intention, but I have to say this didn’t really come across — not when compared with the AWM, for example, which although it too is mainly a museum, is centred around the Hall of Memory (with the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier), leading up to which is a long reflective pool and an eternal flame, enclosed by cloisters, along the walls of which are the names of over a hundred thousand Australians who have died in war. I wonder what it says about the different ways in which Australians and Britons remember their wars?

Those huge guns, by the way, are from the battleships HMS Ramillies and HMS Resolution and are of 15-inch calibre. And, to be fair, I must point out that the biggest gun at the AWM is only a 12-inch one, from the battlecruiser HMAS Australia :)

Alright, enough of that, get on with the cool stuff already. This is (part of) the Large Exhibits Hall, the first room visitors see. And yes, they are all large exhibits! In this photo there’s a He 162 “People’s Fighter” (though as far as I know, there wasn’t one in every garage) and a Sopwith Camel (to which the roundel at the top of the post belongs); below them, a Polaris sub-launched ballistic missile (AKA Britain’s “independent” nuclear deterrent); and around that, a T-34 tank, a Jagdpanther tank destroyer and a French 75.

I couldn’t work out what this was at first. It was obviously something aerial, First World War-era by the looks of it — I’m ashamed to say I had to read the sign to find out that it’s actually a Zeppelin observation car, which was dropped on a long cable underneath the airship in order to get location fixes below cloud cover. That is to say, with a man inside, who would give directions to the Zeppelin by telephone. It is thought to have been lost from LZ90 on the night of 2 September 1916.

Genesis of the Daleks? Well, no, actually it’s a Churchill Mark VII infantry tank.

Now this was rather impressive. It’s a British 1650-lb bomb — from the First World War, not the Second. It’s over 6 feet tall. According to the caption, four bombs of this type were dropped by O/400 bombers — presumably from Trenchard’s Independent Force — in an October 1918 raid on Kaiserslautern (which was to suffer much more destruction from the air in 1944). Behind are naval and artillery shells ranging from 14 to 18 inches.

A close-up of the Jagdpanther pictured earlier. According to the sign, it was knocked out by Allied gunfire and I assume these holes are the damage.

I spent most of the rest of the afternoon in the basement, in the permanent displays relating to the wars of the twentieth century — I thought they did a very good job of contextualising the items on display. This is a bronze eagle from the Speer-designed Reich Chancellery — Hitler’s office building — (in)complete with bullet holes from the Battle of Berlin.

Take cover — it’s a Zepp! Just kidding, it’s only a photo of a model of a Zeppelin, L33, which was forced down at Little Wigborough on the night of 24 September 1916 after a raid on London, and reverse engineered into the successful British airships, R33 and R34.

The badge and pennant of the Blackshirt Automobile Club; Malcolm Campbell supposedly displayed something like these on Bluebird.

Why, it’s an old friend, C 5422. The RAF Museum had a similarly huge reproduction on display. Somebody really should say something …

Some of the most interesting displays were those relating to ARP. I had no idea about things like the mustard gas detector paper shown above. Mustard gas is actually usually a liquid under normal conditions, with a boiling point of just 14° Celsius. So it is persistent and lies around in pools and drops, waiting for some unprotected soul to blunder into it. Hence the detector paper:

If after a raid you notice suspicious patches on walls, floors, doors, etc., fix of piece of Gas Detector Paper about 5 ins. x 3 ins. to a stick, and apply to the suspicious patches. If Mustard Gas is present the Gas Detector Paper will instantly turn PINK.

A charred roof tile from Hiroshima.

Back in the Large Exhibits Hall. A Spitfire showing off its elliptical wings.

A Be2c of the Royal Flying Corps. You can see the roundels on the top of the upper wings from underneath, which shows how thin the canvas is.

The Spitfire’s rival in beauty, the P-51 Mustang. Drop tanks ftw.

I didn’t catch what these were about — children’s drawings near the entrance, evidently something to do with the camouflage exhibition so maybe it’s this. They all seemed to have an anti-gun theme (not anti-war as such), so I wondered if that was spontaneous or had they been coached to draw to that theme? Still, they were rather touching.

I didn’t get a chance to see the IWM’s art collection, or the Falklands exhibition, or a bunch of other things. Nearly everywhere I go, I keep saying “I’ll have to go back”, but that’s looking less and less likely as my time here draws to a close!

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