RAIN OF BOMBS

Milan's wonderful cathedral is here shown under a rain of dummy bombs dropped by 80 aeroplanes during recent manoeuvres of the Italians. To make the display more impressive and to ascertain the results with more certainty, luminous "bombs" were used and fell in a fiery rain upon the city -- a dire portent of future terrors

The images in this post are from Boyd Cable, 'The doom of cities', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 96-8. It was Cable's second article in a series on 'Things of tomorrow'. The text doesn't actually connect with the illustrations very well. Cable's main point is given away in the title, that in the next war cities will be ruthlessly destroyed from the air, since 'the murderous slaughter of non-combatants' is the most effective way to force a nation to surrender. While he notes that some experts are sceptical of this (Captain Turner, late of Woolwich Arsenal, Lord Castlerosse, Frederick Handley Page), he argues that 'they are flatly contradicted both by the known facts of the last war and by the preparations which we know have been made in anticipation of the next great struggle'.

Today, and as far as we can see into the future, War first of all means Air War; and Air War spells, literally and actually, the "doom of cities."

IF GAS BOMBS COME

Registered air raid shelters are one of the precautions provided in Berlin against the dangers of air raids. During practice raids on Berlin these shelters are brought into use, and here mothers and children are seen gathered in a bomb and gas proof dug-out while while the officer in charge reads aloud the official instructions to civilians in time of air raids

REALISM IN BERLIN

Rehearsals of air raid precautions in Berlin have been carried out with characteristic German thoroughness and realism. This photograph shows a motor-car which has actually been set on fire to show what disasters might occur in an actual raid

STAGING DESTRUCTION

Another example of such thoroughness is seen in this photograph showing debris piled high in a street in the Kreuzberg section of Berlin as a grim warning of what might happen if a house were struck by a bomb. But Berlin has never been bombed and no thoroughness in mock destruction can reproduce the panic of the people in a real air raid

On the illustrations, the implication is that since Britain's potential enemies are taking civil defence seriously, Britain should too. In fact, British civil defence had only just begun a few months before this article would have been published (in July 1935, when the first ARP Circular was issued to local governments by the Home Office), so it was in its very early stages. Italy and Germany had been holding quite public civil defence exercises for some years, so it's not surprising that they would be held up as exemplars. But it is surprising (or at least it was to me) to then discover that during the Second World War Italy's ARP, in particular, was actually quite primitive compared with Britain's. (See Claudia Baldoli, Andrew Knapp and Richard Overy, eds, Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe 1940-1945 (London: Continuum, 2011.) The British certainly made up for lost time.

This is an image we might particularly associate with the United States in the 1950s, when schoolchildren were taught to duck and cover in the event of the flash of an atomic blast. But its use in civil defence drills predates the Cold War (albeit without a Bert the Turtle to help kids remember the message). I've seen scattered references to it being used in ARP drills in British schools in the the 1930s, and the same thing may well have happened in the First World War. But details, and photos, seem to be rare. The above photo was actually taken in Melbourne, at Brighton Technical School, probably in 1942. (Here's another Australian one from the 1940s, and here's one from London in July 1940.) It's really just common sense: if the roof and walls are about to come crashing down and there's no time to get to a proper shelter, getting the students under their desks when the bombs started to fall would give them some protection and might save their lives.

I wonder about the handkerchiefs or rags the boys have in their mouths? My guess is that it's intended to guard against being choked with dust and plaster. Also, soaked in water, they might help against some forms of gas attack, such as chlorine. Soaking them in urine would be more effective, but that would probably be beyond the scope of most school gas drills!

Source: State Library of Victoria (via Geoff Robinson).

The images in this post are from Boyd Cable, 'Death from the skies', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 20-4 (see below).

The article itself is a short story describing an air raid in the next war. I won't summarise it in detail, but it argues for the futility of both air defence and civil defence. The RAF's interceptors never even encounter the enemy bombers (in part because they are stealthy thanks to their silenced engines, only 20% as loud as normal aircraft engines). Though the populace has been drilled well and resists panic, at least at first, they are too vulnerable. A first wave of bombers uses high explosives to block the streets with rubble, making it impossible for fire engines to pass; the second drops incendiaries which set the city ablaze and, crucially, force civilians out of their shelters; and the final wave drops poison gas, which starts killing the now-exposed people on the streets. Now the panic starts and the mob flees, their suffering increased by strafing raiders. The RAF now has its chance, but the city is doomed...

"Proof enough of what we've said so long," growled the one [Air Staff officer]. "Defence as such is a wash-out. Attack is the only useful form of defence."

"If we can hit them harder and faster and oftener than they can hit us, we win," said the other. "We can do it, too, if we have more bombers -- men and machines -- than they have."

"Yes -- if," said the other wearily. "That's what we were arguing as far back as the first R.A.F. expansion scheme in -- what as it -- 1935 and '6, wasn't it?"

THINGS TO COME?

H.G. Wells, in his pre-war fantasy, "The War in the Air," proved himself an astonishing prophet, a fact that makes these "stills" from his film "Things to Come," depicting an air raid in the next war, as disturbing to consider as they are terrible to look upon.

REHEARSAL FOR DEATH

Anti-air raid drills on a mass scale have become a feature of German life. This photograph shows an elaborately staged rehearsal of a gas-bomb attack as it might affect civilians, held in the Technical High School at Charlottenburg, near Berlin.

APPREHENSION...

In "Everytown," a city of the very near future, a crowd watch and strain their ears for the first signs of approaching enemy aircraft; an A.A. gun is ready for action. The photograph is a "still" from H.G. Wells's film, "Things to Come," and though, were war to come, the street would be deserted and lights out, it suggests the atmosphere of apprehension.

... AND THEN INFERNO

In vivid and horrible contrast to the scene in the previous page are these two further impressions of a city's doom, the first representing the street a few moments only after the raid commenced, the second the same street the following day. Though again the limitations of the film studio have perhaps happily prevented the full frightfulness from being shown, there is enough of horror to suggest the fate that may overtake troops and civilians alike in the next war.

Actually, the corresponding scene in Things to Come wasn't set the next day; or at least there's no indication it's not part of the air raid sequence itself.

NIGHTMARE OF THE FUTURE

This reproduction of a German artist's idea of a scene in London during an air raid in the next war forms in all probability an all too lamentably accurate forecast. It has been suggested in responsible quarters that 100 aeroplanes could stifle a great city with a gas cloud that would rise many yards from the earth, an idea even more terrifying than the though of high-explosive bombs.

War in the Air was a partwork issued weekly, costing 7d. The first issue, in which this article would have appeared, came out on 7 November 1935, a few days before Armistice Day; once complete, all the issues were collected together in a bound volume (which is what I have) around the middle of 1936.

Boyd Cable was the pseudonym of Ernest Andrew Ewart, a Boer War veteran and newspaper correspondent during the First World War. I'm not aware of any specific expertise he might have had in aviation outside of his war experience, though he did write several books with suggestive titles: Air Men o'War (really?), The Flying Courier, Air Activity, The Soul of the Aeroplane: the Rolls-Royce Engine (okay, that one's particularly suggestive). He wrote a number of other 'Things of Tomorrow' stories in like vein for War in the Air, which I'll discuss in future posts.

The editor, Sir John Hammerton, was the doyen of partworks; Harmsworth's Universal Encyclopedia sold 12 million copies, and I suspect the wartime The Great War:The Standard History of the All-Europe Conflict and the 1933 A Popular History of the Great War (among other works) were highly influential in shaping the memory of the First World War. (Dan Todman in The Great War: Myth and Memory suggests that these and similar partworks have been neglected by historians, just what I was thinking!) War in the Air also devoted a lot of space to that war, but it was also explicitly framed as a warning about the next war, as the advertisement above, from Daily Express, 7 November 1935, 4, shows:

A Book of Vital Importance to every man, woman and child in the British Empire, called into being by the most urgent problem of our time

WAR IN THE AIR, while brilliantly recording the stirring story of the Past, is mainly concerned with the Future and this, the first publication to deal with the subject in its entirety, gives a vivid picture of the dread menace of aerial warfare [...]

THIS is no mere book of thrills and startling pictures, it is a living, vital thing that ought to enter into your life and help you the better to bear your part in the most urgent need of our time -- the need to make Britain as powerful in the Air as in times gone by she was dominant at sea.

Amidst the scaremongering there's a very hard sell going on here, and not a little hyperbole too ('the most important and significant publication issued in this country for a generation'!) But mixing profit and patriotism never did any harm.

At about 5.20pm on Friday, 29 July 1938, hundreds of people saw a mysterious aeroplane diving from high over Hobart. According to Pegasus, the Hobart Mercury's aviation correspondent,

A large crowd collected near the corner of Liverpool and Murray streets, and traffic was impeded. The machine descended to a comparatively low level, yet not low enough to enable the identification numerals to be read. It was a grey biplane, larger than a Gypsy Moth.

As the watchers were preparing to rush for cover to avoid the expected crash, the machine sheered away and disappeared in the evening mists towards the south-west.

Some observers thought that they could see the aeroplane's navigation lights. Engine sounds ('described as having a peculiar note') were heard in the posh Sandy Bay area (just southwest of Hobart's centre) soon thereafter, and a single-engined aeroplane was heard over Campania (20 miles to the north) by Dudley Ransom, pilot and owner of a private aerodrome, at 7pm. Enquiries at Tasmanian and Victorian aerodromes found no aircraft aloft that evening. Nor, apparently, did it belong to the RAAF.

So where did the aeroplane come from? According to Captain A. Gregory, a flight instructor at Cambridge Aerodrome,

"There is absolutely no technical objection to the theory that that a 'plane could be catapulted from a vessel at sea," he declared, "and it would not be at all difficult for such a machine to fly up the Derwent and over the city before returning to alight on the water alongside the carrier vessel."

Pegasus agreed that it was possible that 'the machine was of foreign origin, and was catapulted from a ship at sea for strategic observations'. But for what ultimate purpose? The Launceston Register had a theory:

It has been pointed out that Tasmania would provide an admirable base for an enemy intending to attack the mainland cities, and it has even been suggested in the present instance, when steps are being taken to erect a new fort in the Derwent, an aerial survey of the locality might be of considerable value to an unfriendly power.

One reader (using the nom-de-plume Prepare) wrote in to the Mercury expressing concern about the apparent ease with which the mysterious aeroplane had penetrated Australian airspace, hinting darkly that 'foreigners have had too much access here, and know the place better than lots of the native-born'. He or she demanded air raid precautions be put in place now:

before it is too late, and we are caught like rats in a trap, cannot something be done to prepare the people in case of an attack from the air? Safety zones could be prepared and allotted, gas masks made available, and citizens, especially school children, trained how to act if occasion demanded.

The Mercury's own Day By Day columnist also believed that 'The Aeroplane That Fled' had worrying implications for Australian air defence, suggesting that

if those organisations pelting the Federal Government with requests for a Citizen Air Force use this incident as an example of how easily Hobart could be wiped off the map, they might find their views receive greater consideration. If that fails, possibly we might induce another mystery aeroplane to come and deliver a few "dud" bombs as earnest to what could be done. Why not try it?

Day By Day here alludes to a contemporary political issue: the same day that the mystery aeroplane was seen over Hobart, the Tasmanian Premier, Albert Ogilvie, was pleading for a Citizen Air Force (the Australian equivalent of the Auxiliary Air Force) squadron to be established in Tasmania, which had no RAAF units at all. Airminded Tasmanians agreed with Olgivie. I don't think it's too fanciful to suggest that the mystery aeroplane was in fact a stunt designed to highlight Tasmania's defencelessness, as Day By Day perhaps was hinting. Soon enough, however, the subject was a matter for ridicule: Mercurius (yet another Mercury columnist) suggested it was just as possible that the pilot was a prospector out looking for Lasseter's reef as 'a Japanese airman engaged on one of those peaceable bombing missions which the Japs are so fond of making as a goodwill gesture to China and Russia'. (Lasseter's reef being a fabulous discovery of gold in central Australia which was lost and never found again, and probably never existed at all: a symbol of foolish and overactive imaginations.)

A mystery aeroplane seen amid anxiety about air raids: a textbook example of negative airmindedness (at least if I were writing the textbook). But it's interesting to note that there was another mystery aeroplane in Australia in 1938, one which at first blush might be expected to fit into the same paradigm since the place where it was seen, Darwin, was in fact bombed repeatedly during the Second World War. However, although it was much more widely reported in Australian newspapers, in nearly all cases it was presented as a curiosity rather than a threat, as we'll see in a future post.

The RAF Displays held at Hendon between 1920 and 1937 were unique, in that no other air force attempted to project a vision of itself, its capabilities and its responsibilities in so public a way, on such a large scale and over such a long period. Of course, that's largely because there weren't many air forces around. Or rather, they did exist, but not independently of their nation's army and navy. Putting on such a big show was important for the RAF precisely because it was newborn: it needed to convince everyone (parliamentarians, journalists, the public, the other services, other nations) that it was necessary and/or that it was successful. Hendon seemed to have fulfilled this very well, judging by press attention and attendance numbers.

But viewed another way, the RAF Displays weren't unprecedented at all. Both the British Army and the Royal Navy had their own forms of public display. The Army had long performed in public, in fact, such ceremonies as trooping the colours, and the 19th century witnessed a huge growth in the popularity of military reviews, according to Scott Hughes Myerly 'the most popular and elaborate public manifestation of the military spectacle':

The action on the field consisted of evolutions of drill, musket volleys with blanks, and cannon salutes. Often a sham battle or mock, siege would be staged between two opposing units, or a bayonet or cavalry charge would be a part of the show.

I'm not sure of the actual content of these mock battles, though the fact they they were performed during the Napoleonic Wars suggests an obvious ideological function. For it's part, the Navy also developed fleet reviews into what Jan Rüger has termed 'a new form of public theatre'. This happened much later in the century, however, dramatically increasing in frequency after the review held for Victoria in 1887 on the occasion of her golden jubilee. By their nature, naval reviews afforded fewer opportunities for presenting narratives of actual combat. There were some, though, for example a 'mock-attack carried out by torpedo boats and submarines' at the 1909 Spithead review. Like the RAF later, and doubtless the Army before it, the Navy rather dubiously insisted that these were not mere spectacles but training for war.

Although Hendon itself was a pre-war site of aerial spectacle, that was a private enterprise and had nothing to do with the RFC (which probably would have been hard pressed to compete in qualitative terms anyway). So it was only after 1918 that it got into the game. The Navy held its first review in ten years in July 1924, shortly after the fifth Hendon, but as before the opportunities for creativity were limited. The Army began holding its own annual pageant in 1920, the Aldershot Command Searchlight Tattoo, a revival of an smaller event dating to the 1890s which now continued right up until the eve of war in 1939. There are many similarity with Hendon, which began the same year; the RAF seems to have even participated in Aldershot to some degree by providing aeroplanes as required. Like Hendon, Aldershot became very popular, growing from 22,000 spectators in 1922 to 300,000 by 1929 and gaining in social cachet. Again like Hendon, they were carefully choreographed and stage-managed, perhaps even more so -- there were systems of flashing lights backstage to give soldiers their cues and photographs were taken in rehearsal at 1 second intervals to see if anyone was out of step! But while there were some attempts in the early years to depict modern warfare, from 1925 the focus moved to historical re-enactments of the Army's past triumphs, especially Waterloo. So even as the Army was mechanising and experimenting in armoured warfare, to the public it chose to project an outdated style of warfare, dressing its men in redcoats rather than khaki. This is very different to the RAF's instincts when it came to public display, and it would be interesting to know what the reasons were. In any case, by dwelling on the past there was less chance of offending someone (apart from the French).

Another way to compare Hendon is internationally. Was there anything comparable to Hendon overseas? Yes, and Hendon seems to have been the direct inspiration. David Omissi notes that Italo Balbo, the senior Italian fascist, aviator and no mean impresario of aerial propaganda himself, attended Hendon in 1927 and 1932, declared that 'the RAF Display was the finest thing in aviation'. After he became Air Minister in 1929, he laid on two Giornata dell'ala, 'days of the wing' in 1930 and 1932, which sound very like Italian Hendons -- right down to mock air raids on Arab villages. But otherwise I don't know of anything quite like it. According to Peter Fritzsche, Germany had 'Carefully choreographed Nazi airshows' which attracted big crowds, but what messages they attempted to propagate beyond the obvious (i.e. airpower makes Germany powerful) is unclear. Maybe the Soviets? Scott Palmer has described in some detail Soviet airminded propaganda activities, but for the most part these revolved around big flights and agit-flights (that is, long distance record or proving flights and flying visits to remote villages). The exceptions, such as a 1927 'aerial parade in which more than three-dozen aircraft, flying in formation, spelled out the names of [Communist] Party luminaries' -- 'the largest aviation spectacle organized to date in the Soviet Union' -- don't seem to have involved anything like a Hendon set-piece. It's interesting that I'm reaching for comparisons with dictatorships here; they would seem to be the natural home for Hendon-like military aviation spectacles, and indeed the other democracies don't seem to have gone in for them. So what does that say about Britain and aviation between the wars?

It must say something, for Hendon wasn't the only form of official airminded propaganda in Britain -- far from it. The RAF was involved in a whole panoply of flying displays and other spectacles. It participated in flying displays put on by private flying clubs, such as the Birmingham Air Pageant in 1927 which had a hundred thousand visitors over two days. This included the bombing and destruction of a fake castle. A jubilee air review put on for George V in 1935 heralded more mass flypasts in the years of rearmament, helping to emphasise the RAF's strength of numbers. More significantly, in 1934 the first Empire Air Day was held at the suggestion of the Air League of the British Empire. This was the RAF's 'at home' day, where the public could visit their local military aerodrome and see what the flying life was like. Recruitment was surely a motivation, as perhaps was the desire to avoid a less-overtly warlike form of display (like Aldershot, Hendon was under increasing pressure from pacifists and the left for promoting militarism, especially to schoolchildren who were given free admission to the dress rehearsal). The latter concern may have curtailed the spread of displays resembling the Hendon set-pieces in the 1930s. As I discussed here recently, in 1924 and 1925 the RAF staged a mock aerial bombardment of London for the enjoyment of paying customers. The annual Air Defence of Great Britain (ADGB) exercises held between 1927 and 1931, which were public partly by virtue of being held around London and partly by being reported by accompanying journalists, were from 1932 held in more remote locations because they were too visible and open to misinterpretation, according to Tami Biddle. But it's possible that these types of practical propaganda simply transmuted into civil defence drills once ARP preparations began in 1935. The 1935 ADGB exercises, for example, involved practice blackouts in port cities like Chatham and Portsmouth, as Marc Wiggam explains, for the purpose of seeing how easy it was to hide a town in darkness rather than educating the public on how to prepare for air raids. This would necessarily involved aircraft flying overhead, playing the role of enemy bombers. But did RAF aircraft also take part in later, more civilian ARP exercises to increase their realism to the participants on the ground? That seems to have happened overseas, in Italy and Germany, but I'm not sure if it did in Britain.

There's lots to be done.

MRS. MARY COUCHMAN, twenty-four-year-old warden in a small Kentish village, sat smoking a cigarette in the wardens' post. She was resting between warnings.

Suddenly the sirens sounded again.

She saw her little boy, with two friends, playing some distance away.

The cigarette still in her hand, Mrs. Couchman ran out of the post. Bombs began to fall as she ran.

The children, Johnnie Lusher, aged four, Gladys Ashsmith, aged seven, and her four-year-old son Brian, stood in the street, frightened by the scream and thud of the bombs.

Gathering them in her arms, she huddled over them, protecting them with her own body.

Bombs were still thudding down only a short distance away.

There she crouched, to save the children from flying shrapnel and debris.

A "Daily Mirror" photographer was on the spot when the incident occurred.

He took this picture.

Afterwards, when the planes had passed over, he told Mrs. Couchman, "You are a brave woman."

"Oh, it was nothing. Somebody had to look after the children," was her reply.

Even allowing for journalistic exaggeration, it's a great photograph.

Source: Daily Mirror, 17 October 1940, 1 (though this copy of the photo is from In Focus).

This is the programme for an air display called 'London Defended' which was part of the 1925 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley (in Wembley Stadium, in fact, before it became Wembley Stadium). I must admit to having missed this one (and its predecessor in 1924), but it sounds like it was comparable to the longer-lived Hendon pageant. Here's the description from Wikipedia, which is based partly on the above programme (original research much?):

From May 9 to June 1, 1925 No. 32 Squadron RAF flew an air display six nights a week entitled "London Defended" Similar to the display they had done the previous year when the aircraft were painted black it consisted of a night time air display over the Wembley Exhibition flying RAF Sopwith Snipes which were painted red for the display and fitted with white lights on the wings tail and fueselage. The display involved firing blank ammunition into the stadium crowds and dropping pyrotechnics from the aeroplanes to simulate shrapnel from guns on the ground, Explosions on the ground also produced the effect of bombs being dropped into the stadium by the Aeroplanes. One of the Pilots in the display was Flying officer C. W. A. Scott who later became famous for breaking three England Australia solo flight records and winning the MacRobertson Air Race with co-pilot Tom Campbell Black in 1934.

Firing blanks into the crowds -- those were the days!

And the crowds apparently did appreciate the spectacle: the stadium was at capacity on more than one occasion. The Observer's special representative reported on -- gushed about, in fact -- the opening performance (10 May 1925, 13):

[...] "London Defended," which is to be acted from 8.15 to 10 p.m. every week-day evening till May 30, is whole-hearted a spectacle as could well be imagined. We have seen nothing like it before in the open air and on such a scale it could only shown in the open air. It has all the ingredients of exciting drama, with some stately pageantry -- as the musical ride of the Metropolitan Police -- super-added. Some few of its features were seen last year, notably the very lovely eddying and curvetting of aeroplanes studded from wing-tip to wing-tip with coloured lights, "shifted anew" with every move of the pilot. But the bulk of the drama is new and originally and unblushingly full of thrills.

London is attacked by hostile planes, incendiary bombs are dropped, and conveniently set fire to a tall building up which the fire escapes elongate themselves with breathless speed. Anti-aircraft guns punctuate with a glorious din the general cries and explosions, and the rattle of the fire-engines tearing around the track.

This was followed by a re-enactment of the Great Fire of London, whether to emphasise the danger of incendiaries or just to pile on more spectacle I'm not sure. (Though to read that 'The drama ends with the Phœnix-like appearance of Wren's St. Paul's in the place of the fire [...]' is actually a little chilling.) As there was also a mounted display by the Metropolitan Police, I suppose the 'London defended' theme can't be interpreted solely in military terms.

The Manchester Guardian's reporter also enjoyed the opening night's 'air raid spectacle' (11 May 1925, 9), though perhaps not as unrestrainedly as the Observer's had:

The vigour and vividness of the presentation of the spectacle of "London Defended," at the Stadium at night, well merited the applause of the great gathering in the auditorium.

All the thrills of a night air attack were accorded in one of the main spectacles. Warning of an invasion was sounded, and, as searchlights swept the sky, a squadron of aeroplanes, with fairy lights under their wings, soared overhead. Through the fire of anti-aircraft guns the raiders reached their objective, and a building at the west end of the Stadium was set alight by incendiary bombs, and a large tower at the east end also burst into flames. The conquest of the flames by the fire brigade, after a display of rescues by fire escapes, was an equally exciting spectacle.

The emphasis in both press accounts is very much on the entertainment, the spectacle of the show. But there must have been a propaganda element to it as well: employing a squadron in this way six nights out seven for the better part of a month would have been no small matter. And certainly that's what the Hendon pageant was about, impressing the public (and the politicians and the press) with the power and hence the value of the RAF. But the defensive focus at Wembley is interesting. At Hendon, the climactic setpieces (which I've long been meaning to write a post about...) were offensive in nature, showing British bombers blowing up a corner of some foreign field. Wembley, on the other hand, was about Britain being attacked and, apparently -- despite the squadron in question being equipped with fighters -- not being defended in the air, only from the ground. This is more reminiscent of the much more serious (but also well-publicised) annual air defence exercises held in the late 1920s and early 1930s, in which the bomber usually got through. And the Home Office's Committee of Imperial Defence's ARP sub-committee first met in 1924, shortly before the first British Empire Exhibition, so I wonder if it's only a coincidence to see city bombing and civil defence put on such prominent display at this point in time. I'd be very interested to know what the official rationale for 'London Defended' was.

Image source: Wikipedia, though I originally noticed it on the background of the website for the upcoming Shock and Awe conference!

Let's turn now to Tolkien's The Hobbit and Smaug's attack on Lake-town (Esgaroth). In my PhD thesis I identified six characteristics of the ideal theory of the knock-out blow from the air: it would be a surprise attack, on a large scale, which would strike at the interdependent structures and civilian morale of its targets, and would wreak massive destruction with great speed. In the 1920s and 1930s, fictional and non-fictional predictions of victory through airpower would usually feature four or five out of these six. As I'll now show, The Hobbit has four: surprise, morale, speed, destruction. Of course, Lake-town isn't a modern, industrial society, nor is Smaug a technologically advanced enemy nation, so the fit isn't going to be perfect. It doesn't need to be, though.

There being so many editions of The Hobbit, it seems a bit pointless to cite page numbers here, but all my quotes come from chapter XIV, 'Fire and Water'.

Smaug's attack is sudden. Lake-Town has only a few minutes' warning after the Lonely Mountain lights up in flames:

Then warning trumpets were suddenly sounded, and echoed along the rocky shores [...] So it was that the dragon did not find them quite unprepared.

Smaug's attack shatters morale:

Already men were jumping into the water on every side. Women and children were being huddled into laden boats in the market-pool. Weapons were flung down. There was mourning and weeping [...] The Master himself was turning to his great gilded boat, hoping to row away in the confusion and save himself. Soon all the town would be deserted and burned down to the surface of the lake.

Smaug's attack is fast:

Before long, so great was his speed, they could see him as a spark of fire rushing towards them and growing ever huger and more bright [...] Still they had a little time. Every vessel in the town was filled with water, every warrior was armed, every arrow and dart was ready, and the bridge to the land was thrown down and destroyed, before the roar of Smaug's terrible approach grew loud, and the lake rippled red as fire beneath the awful beating of his wings.

Smaug's attack is destructive. It destroys Lake-town completely and kills a quarter of its inhabitants:

Fire leaped from thatched roofs and wooden beam-ends as he hurtled down and past and round again, though all had been drenched with water before he came. Once more water was flung by a hundred hands wherever a spark appeared. Back swirled the dragon. A sweep of his tail and the roof of the Great House crumbed and smashed down. Flames unquenchable sprang high into the night. Another swoop and another, and another house and then another sprang afire and fell; and still no arrow hindered Smaug or hurt him more than a fly from the marshes.

Not only do these broadly constitute a knock-out blow from the air, we can, if we're bold, point to more specific elements which are suggestive of contemporary reactions to or concerns about the bomber threat. The warning trumpets are like air-raid sirens. The panic as men drop their weapons and join the women and children fleeing onto the lake is like the terrified exodus which was predicted to precede and/or follow air raids. The filling of water vessels for use against fire was a standard part of air-raid precautions. Destroying whole towns and killing a quarter of their people is not far off what was feared would happen in the next war.

To the above, we may also add that Smaug will always get through, just as the bomber would:

Roaring he swept back over the town. A hail of dark arrows leaped up and snapped and rattled on his scales and jewel, and their shafts fell back kindled by his breath burning and hissing into the lake.

Smaug is only stopped because Bard, a captain of archers, learns at the last moment of a weak spot in the dragon's armour of jewels. He learns this by another type of Tolkienesque airpower (though admittedly not one which most airpower historians would recognise): a bird (specifically, a thrush) flies from the Lonely Mountain with this information. Note that as signals officer in his frontline service, Tolkien was responsible for his unit's carrier pigeon communications, so this seems like a link with his wartime experiences. But I say 'seems' because there's no direct evidence for it.

And that's the problem: there's no direct evidence that any of the similarities or parallels I've written about here are more than coincidences. Tolkien seems to have written little about the writing of The Hobbit, perhaps because it was done as a kind of side-project to his own elaborations of the mythology of Middle Earth. Later, when he was writing The Lord of the Rings, he corresponded extensively with his adult son Christopher about his progress, sending him drafts and so on. So there we have a lot to go on. But as far as I can see there's little like this for The Hobbit. (The various drafts for The Hobbit have been published, so that would be one place to look.) Nor have I found any evidence that Tolkien took much interest in discussions of the character of the next war, though I could easily have missed it if it exists. And it seems that while The Hobbit was published in 1937, the year of Guernica and about the height of bomber anxiety, it was substantially complete around 1932 or so, which is fairly early for a knock-out blow novel.

Conversely, it's easy to see, and to prove, that Tolkien was hugely influenced by northern European mythologies from Finland to Anglo-Saxon England. This was his bread and butter, after all. He himself often noted that the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf was a critical inspiration for his writing. In 1936, he gave an important lecture entitled 'Beowulf: the monsters and the critics'; the following year The Hobbit was published. It would strain credulity to suggest that the third and final monster defeated by Beowulf, an unnamed dragon, was not in Tolkien's mind when he created Smaug: it even leaves its lair for the same reason as Smaug, enraged because one of its treasures is stolen. And, also like Smaug, the dragon in Beowulf goes on an aerial killing spree (this is from a modern translation):

The despoiler was soon
spitting out flames
and burning down buildings,
bringing men death
and enormous dread;
it had no intention
of leaving anything
alive in that country.

Given this, it's reasonable to ask whether looking for contemporary influences from the fear of the bomber is worthwhile at all. I think it is, but it has to be done carefully. Just because mythology was Tolkien's dominant influence doesn't mean that there can be no others. Smaug is not the bomber, but Smaug is not Beowulf's dragon either: there are other dragons in there too.

This is why I keep coming back to Tolkien's own experience in war. I discussed in the previous post how his earliest attempt at writing the mythology of Middle Earth was written during the war (and was certainly influenced by it), while back in England recovering from trench fever. During his convalescence in 1916 he stayed in and around Hull, near the North Sea. Hull was raided by Zeppelins a dozen or so times; Tolkien witnessed one of these raids from afar and experienced another while staying in the town. I don't know if he ever wrote about what he saw, but another eyewitness did, Basil Liddell Hart (who was also sent there to convalesce after serving at the front). Liddell Hart was very much struck by the sight of civilians trekking out of Hull. In 1925, in Paris, or the Future of War, he wrote:

Who that saw it will ever forget the nightly sight of the population of a great industrial and shipping town, such as Hull, streaming out into the fields on the first sound of the alarm signals? Women, children, babies in arms, spending night after night huddled in sodden fields, shivering under a bitter wintry sky –- the exposure must have caused far more harm than the few bombs dropped from two or three Zeppelins.

This experience was one of the keys to Liddell Hart's belief in the power of the bomber in the 1920s and early 1930s; it and similar incidents were responsible for the idea that civilians would evacuate cities in panic when air raids took place. But it's hard not to think also of the people of Lake-town fleeing into the night onto the lake when Smaug attacked. So did the Hull raids also influence Tolkien when writing The Hobbit? I think it must have done.

In the next and last post, I'll look at what we can learn about Tolkien's attitudes to total war from his later writing.

In July, 1917, a new scheme for warning the people of London of impending air raids was adopted. When enemy aircraft were approaching, policemen with a notice warning passers-by to "take cover" went out on bicycles, blowing their whistles to attract attention. When all danger had passed, Boy Scouts went round blowing bugles.

Caption and image source: Hamilton Fyfe, 'Might and menace of raiding giants', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1935?]), 344.

Shortly after the Blitz began in earnest, Conservative MP Victor Cazalet wrote to the editor of The Times to urge that the RAF carry out reprisals against German cities for the 'indiscriminate bombing' of London. 'The attack on the civil population is a military weapon', he argued. 'Can we possibly afford to give Germany a monopoly of this weapon?'

Cazalet's letter ignited (or, rather, re-ignited) a debate about the efficacy and morality of reprisals. Less contoversial, however, was the way he thought reprisals should be carried out:

We should, I suggest, designate some 12 German towns, and openly declare that unless this indiscriminate bombing ceases we intend to wipe out each night one of these German cities. Let each one of the towns selected anticipate when their turn may be coming. If they evacuate them all -- we will choose 12 others.

Cazalet was convinced that this would have 'a most striking and speedy effect upon the German population [...] Widespread bombing will quickly disillusion them', given their reliance on propaganda for knowledge of how the war was progressing.

In the following weeks a number of letters published in The Times made a similar suggestion of reprisals after notice -- half a dozen by my count (including another one by Cazalet clarifying his position); Another five appeared in the Manchester Guardian from the end of September. The Daily Mirror columnist Cassandra had already demanded in August that the RAF 'BOMB THESE TEN TOWNS'! after giving a warning along the following lines:

THE POLICY OF HIS MAJESTY'S GOVERNMENT WAS, AND IS, TO AVOID RETALIATION AND MASS REPRISALS AGAINST CIVILIANS. IF, HOWEVER, THE GERMAN GOVERNMENT CONTINUES TO BOMB BRITISH CIVILIANS, THE FOLLOWING TOWNS WILL BE SUBJECT TO INTENSE AERIAL BOMBARDMENT AFTER TEN DAYS' NOTICE FROM THE RECEIPT OF THIS COMMUNICATION:-- HANOVER, BERLIN, MUNSTER, LEIPZIG, DRESDEN, WIESBADEN, FRANKFURT, NUREMBERG, MUNICH, SALZBURG. THIS WARNING IS TO GIVE THE GERMAN GOVERMENT AMPLE TIME TO EVACUATE ALL NON-MILITARY PERSONNEL FROM THESE CITIES. THEIR HOUSES AND THEIR PROPERTY WILL, HOWEVER, BE SYSTEMATICALLY DESTROYED.

In December, the bishop of devastated Coventry thought that Britain 'might well be morally justified' in deciding to institute reprisals for indiscriminate bombing, though he hoped it would not come to that; 'In any event he assumed that the Government would give warning of their intention to retaliate unless this kind of attack was stopped.'

I think there are a few things going on here. One is the common overestimation of the abilities of Bomber Command at this time. This didn't just extend to a belief in the accuracy of its bombing, but also in its ability to actually destroy cities. For example, J. Price Williams thought that 'a notice that one of the populous modern industrial towns would (after a day or two for evacuation) be razed to the ground would probably act as a deterrent'. Needless to say, Bomber Command could not do this at will; by 1944-5 it was just about able to, but in 1940 it just did not have the numbers, the equipment, the training, the doctrine or the experience. This was a hangover from the pre-war knock-out blow theory.

More significantly, the idea of reprisals after notice was an attempt to find a moral way of fighting modern war. A widespread view was that Britain was fighting a just war using just methods, whereas Germany was not. But what if German methods were effective? What if fighting dirty gave Hitler an advantage over the British and their notions of fair play? Deliberately killing innocents, everyone agreed (or asserted that everyone agreed), was not something the British would ever do, but there were other ways of giving the Germans a taste of their own medicine and undermining their morale. By destroying the enemies' cities but not their lives, Britain could simultaneously keep the moral high ground, placate neutral opinion and bring the end of the war closer.

Now, this idea of bombing after notice was never part of Bomber Command's doctrine. But it had been used by other parts of the RAF, those engaged before the war in the air control of places like Iraq and Waziristan. As Cazalet himself put it in a second letter to The Times:

I never advocated indiscriminate bombing of women and children. I advocate the same policy as various British Governments have in the past applied to troublesome tribes in outlying parts of the Empire. Notice is given that unless certain conditions are fulfilled by a specified date a particular village will be bombed. The inhabitants evacuate them, but their homes are destroyed.

Nor was Cazalet the only one to draw the comparison. Captain C. W. R. Hooper of the Royal Indian Navy (though writing from Cheltenham) wrote that since '[we] don't want to retaliate by killing German women and children',

I suggest we should adopt the system used on the N.W. Frontier of India -- namely, warn the German Government of our intention to bomb Berlin as long as they continue to bomb London, giving them 48 hours' notice to evacuate their women and children and saying that after that period of time, at our selected time, we shall bomb Berlin.

If any German women or children 'suffer' in the bombing, Hooper went on to say, then it would be the Germans' own fault for not evacuating them in time. That seems to me to be a bit of wilful ignorance on Hooper's part (and he wasn't the only one): he would surely have known from London's own experience in 1938, 1939 and 1940 that a city couldn't be evacuated in such a short time. But then again, perhaps the aim wasn't wholly humanitarian. If the intention was to cause civilian suffering (and perhaps a knock-out blow), then a panicked exodus from a doomed city would do nicely.

Is it going too far to suggest that this application of imperial policing methods to total war implies an intellectual equivalence between the two? Since the British saw themselves as superior both to the barbarians over in Germany and out in the Empire, perhaps the same methods which had cheaply and effectively subdued the one could be used to subdue the other. And Britain, being the civilised party in these disputes, had to assume (or at least be seen to assume) a benevolent posture even as it was dealing out punishment. I don't think much of Sven Lindqvist's argument (in A History of Bombing) that bombing was 'about' imperialism, but in this particular instance it looks like one variant of it was imported from the periphery to the metropole.

Except, of course, that it was all just talk; reprisals after notice never actually took place. But the interest in it during the early Blitz suggests to me that it could have been revived later to publicly justify Bomber Command's area bombing policy. Conversely, it could have been championed by opponents of bombing as a compromise way to humanise the air war. Probably in neither case were reprisals after notice even contemplated by the absolutists on either side.