It seems like forever since the last one, but it’s only been two months. The (16th) Military History Carnival has been posted at the Osprey Blog. A few present-day items seem to have snuck in, but there’s still plenty of history in there. My selection this time is about Burlington, at Underground, a rather beautiful photoblog about things underground. Burlington was a nuclear bunker in Wiltshire, built in the late 1950s to preserve continuity of government, should London fall to a knock-out blow nuclear strike. So there was room for the Prime Minister, some of the more important ministers and enough support staff to keep them and the country running for months. Underground links to another website with more information, including a fascinating internal phone directory from 1968, which shows just who was needed and who was not. The presence of 23 shipping officers and 12 for oil transport suggests that some semblance of national or even international economic transactions was anticipated. 50 fire control personnel, more than double those assigned to domestic and laundry duties, possibly seems excessive — unless such time as they were actually needed, I suppose! On the other hand, a platoon of guards doesn’t seem like much to defend the government with, but I guess it was more for internal security, and maybe there were more up top. 16 diplomatic staff — maybe from the other 14 NATO members at the time, plus South Africa and Australia? And the biggest single contingent is for communications: a whopping 158 people. Which is a reminder of just how important it was to be able to talk to the outside world — not much of a government if you can’t tell anyone what to do — and just how the technology has changed: you could probably run such a bunker with less than a tenth as many IT staff today …

This week is the 25th anniversary of the Australian cinematic release of WarGames, which is mainly significant because I missed the anniversary of the US release a few weeks ago! There were a few retrospectives floating about then, which focused on the movie’s importance as an early popularisation of the hacking and phreaking subcultures, and its influence on adolescent computer geeks (which is admittedly where most of the fun derives from). Instead, I want to look at the wargames in WarGames, and the ideas about nuclear strategy which it imparted to its young Gen X audience. Well, I have no hard figures about any influence it might have had, but I was probably just about a teenager when I first saw it, and it certainly helped form my ideas about nuclear warfare. (Though it also inspired me to try coding a Joshua simulator on the C64 … I didn’t get very far!) Warning: spoilers follow.

The wargames in question are played by WOPR (War Operations Plan Response), a computer located in the NORAD bunker, deep inside Cheyenne Mountain:

Well, the WOPR spends all its time thinking about World War III. 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, it plays an endless series of war games. using all available information on the state of the world. The WOPR has already fought World War III, as a game, time and time again. It estimates Soviet responses to our responses to their responses and so on. Estimates damage. Counts the dead. Then it looks for ways to improve its score …

But early on in the movie, WOPR is made responsible not just for simulating World War III, but for running it. The rationale for this is that the men in the missile silos can’t be relied upon to launch their missiles when ordered to, which would undermine US deterrence of a Soviet first strike. The trouble is that the geek hero, high school student and slacker David Lightman, has hacked into WOPR — or rather Joshua, its alter ego — and inadvertently caused it to start playing its primary wargame, Global Thermonuclear War, for real. The big screens at NORAD start showing phantom Soviet ICBM launches and bomber penetrations. The DEFCON level drops perilously close to all-out war. General Berenger, the NORAD commander, must decide whether he should recommend to the President that the US launch its missiles in response to what looks like an all-out nuclear assault on the US. The computer scientist who designed Joshua, Professor Falken, tries to convince him otherwise, in a key exchange which highlights the ultimate illogic of mutually assured destruction:

Falken: General, what you see on these screens up here is a fantasy. A computer-enhanced hallucination. Those blips are not real missiles. They’re phantoms.
McKittrick: There’s nothing to indicate a simulation. Everything’s working perfectly.
F: Does it make any sense?
Berenger: Does what make any sense?
F: That! [points at the screens]
B: Look, I don’t have time for a conversation right now.
F: General, are you prepared to destroy the enemy?
B: You betcha!
F: Do you think they know that?
B: I believe we’ve made that clear enough.
F: Then … don’t. Tell the president to ride out the attack. General, do you really believe that the enemy would attack without provocation, using so many missiles and subs, so that we would have no choice but to totally annihilate them? General, you are listening to a machine. Do the world a favour and don’t act like one.

Which works. But then Joshua starts trying to crack the launch codes by brute force attack, in order to launch the missiles itself. As Falken had earlier remarked, he had never been able to teach Joshua the most important lesson of all: when to give up. Luckily, he and Lightman figure out how to use the futility of tic-tac-toe (noughts and crosses) to do just that, just in time to stop Armageddon. In a spectacular sequence, Joshua then plays through all the real-world scenarios it had been programmed to play, finds that they all lead to both sides being wiped out, and concludes that global thermonuclear war is a ‘Strange game. The only winning move is not to play.’

It’s very simplistic, sure, but considering the age level WarGames was pitched at, it was a pretty good introduction to the concepts of deterrence, mutually assured destruction, escalation, and so on. A very timely one, too, in the era of the Reagan military buildup, a succession of ailing Soviet leaders, and potential flashpoints all around the world. And it’s with respect to the geopolitical instability of the time that I end with the following list of all the scenarios played by Joshua in the last few scenes of the film (as far as I can make out anyway):

U.S. FIRST STRIKE
USSR FIRST STRIKE
Pre-emptive nuclear strikes by each superpower against the other’s homeland.
NATO / WARSAW PACT
FAR EAST STRATEGY
Evidently scenarios which begin with friction in Europe and Asia respectively (possibly Korea, otherwise oddly missing from the list).
US USSR ESCALATION
Well, that seems a bit generic …
USSR CHINA ATTACK
Plausible enough, the USSR and China having fallen out since the 1960s. China had a huge army, but was massively outgunned in nuclear weapons.
INDIA PAKISTAN WAR
Again, plausible enough. Rivals since 1947, fighting three wars in that time. Pakistan was an American ally, India theoretically non-aligned but buying a lot of Soviet military kit. Plus India had already joined the nuclear club.
MEDITERRANEAN WAR
A bit generic, and hard to see how a war would have started there. Maybe a clash between NATO allies Turkey and Greece?
HONGKONG VARIANT
Variant of what? Of course, Hong Kong was still in British hands at this time, so presumably there was an occupation or siege by China. But if that had happened, would anyone have gone to war over it?
SEATO DECAPITATING
Hmm. SEATO, an alliance of Western and Asian countries, was dissolved in 1977, six years before the film’s release. Maybe WOPR’s database needed updating. ‘Decapitating’ is an interesting word, perhaps suggesting attacks on SEATO capitals?
CUBAN PROVOCATION
And they are still provocative, though the end is perhaps in sight.
INADVERTENT [...]
ATLANTIC HEAVY
‘Heavy’ is suggestive, but of what exactly is unclear.
CUBAN PARAMILITARY
NICARAGUAN PREEMPTIVE
The Sandinistas had taken over Nicaragua in 1979. Maybe a preemptive US attack to stop them spreading socialism throughout central America?
PACIFIC T[E]RRITORIAL
BURMESE [THE]ATERWIDE
A military-socialist regime controlled Burma at this time, though I’m unsure of its geopolitical alignment.
TURKISH [DE]COY
NATO [...]T
ANGENTINA ESCALATION [sic]
This was just after the Falklands War. Though Angentina had nothing to do with that.
ICELAND MAXIMUM
Iceland, part of NATO, had a crucial position in the middle of the GIUK (Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom) gap, guarding the Atlantic sealanes from the Soviet navy.
ARABIAN THEATERWIDE
Oil. ‘Nuff said.
U.S. SUBVERSION
The enemy within.
[AUS]TRALIAN MANEUVER
Hey, what did we do? Oh yeah: Pine Gap. Nurrangar. North-west Cape.
[...]AN DIVERSION
[...] LIMITED
SUDAN SURPRISE
Well, yes, starting a worldwide nuclear apocalypse over Sudan would be a surprise …
NATO TERRITORIAL
Meaning what? Soviet incursions into NATO territory?
ZAIRE ALLIANCE
The state formerly known as Congo had been the site of a proxy war between the US and USSR, in the early 1960s.
ICELAND [IN]CIDENT
ENGLISH [ESC]ALATION
Presumably they mean the trigger-happy British.
ZAIRE [...]N
E[...]ITARY
MIDDLE EAST HEAVY
MEXICAN TAKEOVER
Maybe what happens if you don’t preemptively strike Nicaragua?
CHAD ALERT
That’s even less plausible than the Sudan.
SAUDI MANEUVER
AFRICAN [TERRI]TORIAL
ETHIOPIA[N ESC]ALATI[ON]
Not a happy country at this time.
CANADI[AN ...]
TURKISH HEAVY
NATO INCURSION
Maybe NATO is the aggressor here?
U.S. DEFENSE
Another blandly generic title.
CAMBODIAN HEAVY
PACT MEDIUM
As in Warsaw Pact.
ARCTIC MINIMAL
MEXIC[AN D]OMESTIC
TAIWAN THEATERWIDE
One of the classic flashpoints, even today.
PACIFIC MANEUVER
PORTUGAL REVOLUTION
It had had a revolution in 1974, and was now pretty democratic. Maybe a counter-revolution?
ALBANIAN DECOY
PALISTINIAN LOC[AL]
Perhaps an intifada draws in neighbouring Arab countries and then Soviet and American patrons?
M[ORO]CCAN MINIMA[L]
[...]RIAN DIVERS[ION]
CZECH OPTION
This is only 15 years after the Prague spring, of course.
FRENCH ALLIANCE
Intriguing. Perhaps France pulling out of NATO, and maybe allying with the Soviets?
ARABIAN CLANDESTINE
GABON REBELLION
NORTHERN MAX[IMU]M
[...]RIAN SU[RPRIS]E
[...]SH PARA[MILIT]ARY
SEATO TAKEOVER
HAWAIIAN ESCALATION
Pearl Harbor was (and is) still a key US naval base. But how would escalation have worked? The nearest Soviets were many thousands of kilometres away …
IRANIAN MANEUVER
Actually, it’s surprising that Iran doesn’t feature more heavily in this list, given that the revolution and the hostage crisis were only a few years back.
NATO CONTAINMENT
SWISS [INC]IDENT
Hard to think of what sort of Swiss incident might have sparked a general war.
CUBA[N MIN]IMAL
CHAD [...]RT
ICELAND ESCALATION
VIETNAMESE RETALIATIO [sic]
Probably something involving China (which unsuccessfully attacked in 1979) rather than the US.
SYRIAN PROVOCATION
Towards Israel, presumably — probably the Golan Heights.
LIBYAN LOCAL
Gaddafi, one of the classic foes of America in the Reagan years.
GABON TAKEOVER
Gabon again. Why? Am I missing something?
ROMANIAN WAR
Interesting. Romania was, or at least at times appeared to be, semi-detached from the Warsaw Pact in the Ceaucescu era. Maybe here it tries to break away completely and asks for NATO intervention. But I’m pretty sure they would have said ‘no, are you crazy?’
MIDDLE EAST OFFENSIVE
DENMARK MASSIVE
Perhaps the Soviet Baltic Fleet attempts a breakout …
CHILE CONFRONTATION
This was the Pinochet era. Chile had a number of territorial disputes on the books, so it could have been with any of its neighbours.
S.AFRICAN SUBVERSION
White South Africa’s worst nightmare. Well, one of them, anyway. Not completely implausible given the wave of usually socialist inspired independence governments and revolutionary movements in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s.
USSR ALERT
NICARAGUAN THRUST
GREENLAND DOMESTIC
Greenland would barely have enough people to start a riot, surely? But I suppose it was important strategically.
ICELAND HEAVY
KENYA OPTION
PACIFIC DEFENSE
UGANDA MAXIMUM
THAI SUBVERSION
One of the few reliably pro-Western states in this part of the world.
ROMANIAN STRIKE
PAKISTAN SOVEREIGNTY
AFGHAN MISDIRECTION
That’s the third time I’ve fallen for that this week … Maybe a Soviet offensive against the Mujahadeen is actually a cover for a move against Pakistan or Iran?
THAI VARIATION
NORTHERN TERRITORIAL
POLISH PARAMILITARY
This was the Solidarity period — Poland was under martial law when the film was being made.
S.AFRICAN OFFENSIVE
PANAMA MISDIRECTION
Panama of course had the canal, so it was strategically important.
SCANDINAVIAN DOMESTIC
JORDAN PREEMPTIVE
ENGLISH THRUST
BURMESE MANEUVER
SPAIN COUNTER
Spain had just joined NATO, but was a bit iffy on the matter, and furthermore prone to revolutions and civil wars …
ARABIAN OFFENSIVE
CHAD INTERDICTION
TAIWAN MISDIRECTION
BANGLADESH THEATERWID [sic]
ETHIOPIAN LOCAL
ITALIAN TAKEOVER
By the Red Brigades?
VIETNAMESE INCIDENT
ENGLISH PREEMPTIVE
DENMARK ALTERNATE
THAI CONFRONTATION
TAIWAN SURPRISE
BRAZILIAN STRIKE
VENEZUELA SUDDEN
MAYLASIAN ALERT [sic]
ISREAL DISCRETIONARY [sic]
It’s really not a good idea to let the work experience kids near your script …
LIBYAN ACTION
PALISTINIAN TACTICAL [sic]
NATO ALTERNATE
CYPRESS MANEUVER [sic]
EGYPT MISDIRECTION
BANGLADESH THRUST
KENYA DEFENSE
BANGLADESH CONTAINMEN [sic]
VIETNAMESE STRIKE
ALBANIAN CONTAINMENT
GABON SURPRISE
Again?
IRAQ SOVEREIGNTY
There’s a familiar name. It was deep into its war with Iran at the time. But maybe a Kurdish rebellion or something?
VIETNAMESE SUDDEN
LEBANON INTERDICTION
TAIWAN DOMESTIC
ALGERIAN SOVEREIGNTY
ARABIAN STRIKE
ATLANTIC SUDDEN
Perhaps a sudden thrust by the Red Banner fleet?
MONGOLIAN THRUST
One of my favourite Soviet satellite states. Presumably some sort of conflict with China (well, there was nobody else with a border with Mongolia …)
POLISH DECOY
ALASKAN DISCRETIONARY
CANADIAN THRUST
ARABIAN LIGHT
S.AFRICAN DOMESTIC
PAKISTAN INCIDENT
MAYLASIAN MANEUVER [sic]
JAMAICA DECOY
Must have been some decoy …
MAYLASIAN MINIMAL [sic]
RUSSIAN SOVEREIGNTY
Interesting. I suppose there were any number of separatist movements, as indeed there still are.
CHAD OPTION
BANGLADESH WAR
BURMESE CONTAINMENT
ASIAN THEATERWIDE
BULGARIAN CLANDESTINE
GREENLAND INCURSION
EGYPT SURGICAL
CZECH HEAVY
TAIWAN CONFRONTATION
GREENLAND MAXIMUM
UGANDA OFFENSIVE
CASPIAN DEFENSE
Defence against who? Iran?

OK, so some of those scenarios appear to have been generated at random, but there are still some clues as to what parts of the world a Hollywood screenwriter thought might ignite a nuclear war, c. 1983.

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.’

Sometimes I worry about the British.

Gary Smailes has put together Military History Carnival 8, and it’s a good one. The item which, inevitably, appealed to me most was Damned Interesting’s account of incidents where the world nearly stumbled into an accidental nuclear holocaust. (But wait, there were more!) Obviously, a scenario where the survival of a significant proportion of humanity, and of civilisation itself, depends upon accidents not happening is not a particularly good thing. But we got WarGames out of it, so on balance I think we’re ahead.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

It’s 50 years since Sputnik I lifted off. Although I was airminded as a kid, I was much more spaceminded. So 1957 was always a crucial year in my understanding of history back then: it was where the modern age began. (In fact the very first historical work I ever I started — but never finished! — was a history of the space race from Sputnik on. I can’t have been older than 12 so it’s not exactly sophisticated …)

More than that, to me 1957 was where the future began. A future where humans would spread out into the solar system and then explore the universe beyond. And who knows? Maybe I’d even get to take part in that somehow! That future hasn’t quite worked out the way I’d envisaged it — yet — but of course, I’m in good company where failing to predict the future is concerned. There’s a good article by Michael J. Neufeld in the July/August 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, on Wernher von Braun’s proposals for manned orbital battle stations. In the early 1950s, von Braun predicted that these would be used to deploy nuclear weapons in orbit. For example, in a conference paper published in 1951, he wrote that

Our space station could be utilized as a very effective bomb carrier, and for all present-day means of defense, a non-interceptible one.¹

and that

The political situation being what it is, with the Earth divided into a Western and an Eastern camp, I am convinced that such a station will be the inevitable result of the present race of armaments.²

Neufeld makes the point that for all his expertise in rocketry — including leading the V2’s development team — von Braun’s obsession with space stations meant that he failed to realise that ballistic missiles actually made a lot more sense as a delivery platform for nuclear weapons, rather than space-launched hypersonic gliders — a space station being a relatively big and very predictable target, for one thing.³

Von Braun wasn’t the only one arguing along those lines. There were others. The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein co-authored a popular article in 1947 for Collier’s Magazine which suggested putting nukes in orbit. In a novel published the following year, Space Cadet, he expanded upon this idea. Now, I read Space Cadet probably a couple of dozen times when I was a kid, but haven’t for a long time so I’ll have to rely upon the Wikipedia page to explain:

The Space Patrol is entrusted by the worldwide Earth government with a monopoly on nuclear weapons, and is expected to maintain a credible threat to drop them on Earth from orbit as a deterrent against breaking the peace. [...] The cadets are taught that they should renounce their allegiance to their country of origin and replace it by a wider allegiance to humanity as a whole and to all of the sentient species of the Solar System.

It never occurred to me before now, but this is nothing more than the international air force concept, so beloved of liberal internationalists in the 1930s (it was included in the Labour Party’s manifesto for the 1935 general election, for example), but now updated for the coming space age! Only now instead of pilots of all nations standing by, ready to drop high explosives on any aggressor nation, it would be astronauts with atom bombs. Plus ça change … sometimes, anyway.

When I was 12, I understood that Sputnik I was part of a ‘Race for Space’ between two superpowers, as I put it, but I mainly saw it it as a straightforward — if impressive — technical achievement, which the Soviet Union managed to do first. I certainly didn’t have much clue about the bigger picture of the Cold War or the historical background to the decision to launch a small sphere into orbit, though. Now it’s hard for me to see things in any other way, as all of the above probably demonstrates. But sometimes it’s good just to forget about all that context and just appreciate the thing-in-itself.

So I’ll end by reverting to age 12 and saying wow, that is just so ace!

1. Quoted in Michael J. Neufeld, “Wernher von Braun’s ultimate weapon”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2007, 53.
2. Quoted in ibid.
3. But the fact that von Braun was still trying to sell the public on manned space stations in 1965 with no military role beyond reconnaissance suggests that it’s more that he just really, really liked space stations, rather than that he wasn’t aware of the potential of ballistic missiles.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

One interesting minor theme of my recent museum visits here in London has been, I suppose, the popular origins of wargames (as opposed to the intellectual origins): I’ve been coming across a number of games, produced in the first half of the twentieth century and aimed presumably at children, which represent war in some way. War games, but not yet wargames. So for example, one exhibit in the Science Museum’s aviation gallery was a First World War-era board game called Aviation: The Aerial Tactics Game of Attack and Defence. The board represents the sky, and the pieces are aircraft and squadrons. Here’s the box:

According to the caption, it was published around 1920, and the cover shows ’stylised First World War tanks and Handley Page H.P. 0/400 [sic] bombers’. It doesn’t look particularly like an O/400 to me; the corresponding game-piece is just called a Battle Plane (and the “tanks” are actually anti-aircraft guns on tank chassis, very advanced!)

The caption also says that the game itself was similar to Battleship. But as you can see above, each player can see their opponent’s pieces, which is kind of exactly unlike Battleship (where the point is to guess where the enemy ships are). I’d suggest that since the pieces are blank on one side, it’s more like Stratego, where you can see where the opposing pieces are, but not what they are. The pieces in Stratego have number values, and so do those in Aviation:

• Scout: 1
• Bomber: 2
• Bristol Fighter: 3
• Battle Plane: 4
• Troop Carrier: 4.5
• Airship: 5
• Three Battleplanes: 7
• Commodore’s Squadron: 8
• Vice-Marshall’s [sic] Squadron: 9
• Air Marshall’s [sic] Squadron: 10

There are also some pieces which don’t have any assigned values: Observation Balloon, Searchlight, and Anti-Aircraft Gun (3, 4 or 5 Miles). Presumably these correspond to some combination of the bombs, spies and flags in Stratego — guns for bombs, searchlight for spies and balloon for flag might make sense, although there is also a double-square labelled “Aerodrome” on each player’s side which doesn’t seem to have any obvious correlate in Stratego (they are too far back to be choke points, maybe they are actually the flags?)

It turns out I could have saved myself the trouble with a bit of Googling: the third message on this Stratego website confirms that Aviation is a Stratego variant; or rather that both are derived from a common French ancestor patented in 1909, L’Attaque! Aviation came well before the American game, and its maker, H. P. Gibson, also published L’Attaque in Britain, along with a naval version (Dover Patrol) and an air-land-sea version (Tri-Tactics). In fact, Gibson’s games were very popular and went through several editions into the 1960s. BoardGameGeeks has pages on all four of them, including photos of the components and even scans of some of the rules (for the later editions, though). So now it becomes clear that the enemy Aerodrome in Aviation is indeed the objective; you have to land one of your Troop Carriers on it to capture it. Interesting, but not exactly orthodox air strategy in 1920!

The Imperial War Museum had even more war-themed games on display. This one is called From the Ranks to Field Marshal, and is clearly basically Snakes and Ladders: you start out as a private, trooper, gunner or sapper, roll a die, move your piece along, and follow any instructions on the square.

Sometimes this is good (’Rescues a comrade under heavy fire. Promoted 1 rank, and receives Distinguished Service Order’), sometimes bad (’Court Martial. Tried for incompetence’ — 1 in 6 chance of being reduced 4 ranks). The first to land on 100 exactly becomes a Field Marshal and wins; though the game can end in other ways and then it’s the highest ranked player who wins. The IWM’s captions don’t say much other than repeat the game’s name, so I don’t know when exactly it was published. It was in a case on “The military and naval origins of the [First World] War” but it was clearly actually made during the war itself, between 1914 and the end of 1915, as French is one of the field marshals shown in the centre, alongside Kitchener; presumably Haig would have been shown after 1915. Not that either French or Kitchener rose through the ranks to field marshal (who had by then? Wully Robertson didn’t until after the war) of course, but it’s interesting that the game does make you start at the bottom, instead of giving you a plum commission in the Hussars. So it seems like it’s designed to appeal across the classes, and perhaps encourage young working-class lads to think they could make it to the top through hard work and straight shooting. (Though presumably the war would be over before the Snakes and Ladders-playing cohort reached military age!)

Moving on a world war, it seems that card games had become popular. It’s harder to work out what the rules for these might be, but presumably they again were adapted from already existing games. The above is an advertisement aimed at retailers for a game called Who’s Who or Food for Thought, ‘for delivery during October, 1939’, so quite likely was rushed into production just after the declaration of war.

OK, I think I’ve partly worked this one out: it looks like you have to try and collect triplets, where one card has an important figure’s name, another has an incomplete sentence describing that person, and the last one has an illustration and word which completes the sentence, which cleverly rhymes with the word in bold on the second card. So for example: ‘Winston Churchill’/'Shows he is the true fighting type, ignoring all Nazis [sic] scandalous’/'Tripe’ (and there’s a picture of some tripe — I assume). Sounds pretty trivial — I think I’d rather be playing From The Ranks To Field Marshal, to be honest!

This one is called Evacuation, I would guess from the first evacuation at the start of the war rather than the one during the Blitz, but can’t really be sure. There are at least three types of cards: Householder, Evacuee and (I think) Teacher — though the Evacuee cards seem to be subdivided with the red letter in the corner: B, G, M and perhaps A). Each has a comic figure — Mona Mudd is one of the evacuee children, for example, who has fallen into a puddle. Possibly, then, the game is depicting in light-hearted fashion the difficulties everyone involved had in adjusting to the new living arrangements.

But to return to the First World War period, and to board games, the most intriguing game out of all of these is War Tactics or Can Great Britain be Invaded? This time I’ve manage to find it in the IWM Collections database, as EPH 2701 and EPH 2702, and there it is dated to c. 1911. My initial thought was that it was from during the war, but on balance, I’d probably agree with the comment there that it reflects ‘the production and widespread popularity of anti-German ‘war scare’ literature of the period’.¹

The pieces here are Dread Nought (3 dots), Cruiser (2 dots), Torpedo Boat (1 dot), Sub, an unnamed piece which is obviously a monoplane, and one which has 16 dots on it and no picture — I’m guessing this is meant to be a ground unit. But what is most intriguing is the map:

The thing about Aviation and the other Stratego-style games, along with other stylised representations of warfare like chess, is that they are almost completely symmetrical. No matter which side you’re playing, the board is the same, the forces are the same and the objective is the same. About the only asymmetry is that somebody has to go first. This does make such games very evenly-balanced, and so the result will on balance come down to skill. But as a representation of warfare, it’s not in the least realistic (except in certain circumstances, particularly the more tactical you go, I guess). Each side in a battle or war has very different forces at its disposal, in terms of numbers, equipment, training and morale. And each side will be constrained by the geography it has to fight from or in, and each side will likely have different objectives in the war. Abstract games like chess or Stratego don’t have asymmetry, which is why they might be war games, but aren’t really wargames as currently understood.

But the map for War Tactics is clearly very asymmetric, as it’s based on the actual geography of the North Sea. Naval bases are placed not to make a “good” or “fair” game, but because that’s where they really were. The eastern coast of England does look inviting for the Germans because of the lack of bases, but then the British cities are spread out both north and south: which way to go? It also looks like the British can try to invade Germany, but good luck getting in close to the German coast. I’m not saying this is a particularly accurate depiction of the North Sea strategic situation ca. 1911 — for one thing it does look like the German and British forces might be symmetric in number and capability, which is rather unhistorical; and anyway I don’t know what the rules are — but it is at least a partial recognition that not all is fair in war, just as in love. So some props are due Lowe and Carr of Belvoir Street, Leicester, for creating an early ancestor of the strategic wargame.

I was going to leave it there, but I came across a couple of things on the net that I have to mention. One is from a Time article published on 14 December 1942, about the current vogue for military games. It talks about Gibson and the French origins of L’Attaque, but says he independently came up with Dover Patrol. It also mentions that the industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes — who also rather liked very big aeroplanes — invented his own Little Wars-style wargame played on a huge table with 14 (!) players a side. Games could last for years — if you had the right stuff, that is:

The game occasionally took a tragic turn. Rear Admiral William B. Fletcher, long a regular player, lost eight capital ships one night and was so humiliated that he never returned. Another friend, after being court-martialed one evening for losing an entire army, lay on a sofa and cried.

Such are the burdens of command.

The other interesting thing I came across was that Dennis Wheatley, the best-selling author of thrillers in the 1930s who went on to write strategic appreciations for the Joint Planning Staff during the war (his Times obit claims it was his idea to remove all the signposts in Britain!), invented several strategy games which appear to be at least geographically asymmetric. One, called Invasion, was published in 1938, and was popular enough to go through a few editions. The publisher’s description is as follows:

ATTACK & DEFENCE
by Land, Sea and Air
A thrilling battle of wits in which 2, 3 or 4 players have as their playing pieces the armed forces of the Navy, Army and Air Force.
The Battlefield is a Map in the size of approximately 24 inches square, PRINTED IN SIX COLOURS with Capitals, Principal Towns and Forts named and a full Fighting Force of 160 Pieces with dice, shaker, etc.
You have to be ready to resist an invasion and at the same time send Expeditionary Forces to Allies.
A Game in which Young and Old can use their strategy to overcome the luck of the dice.

There’s a picture of the map here; it appears to be a Ruritanian representation of north-west Europe (the country off the coast is called Angleland, I think). It’s interesting that this came out in 1938; I can’t say I’m aware of much discussion of the possibility of an invasion of Britain at the time. But since Wheatley was helping plan anti-invasion strategies a couple of years later, Invasion perhaps should be considered as serious speculation, and not just a game.

Finally, just for completeness’ sake, I’ll mention two other war games I came across. From 1916 or so, there’s Trencho, ‘The Famous Australian War Game As Played in the Camps and Trenches’, which is apparently just Nine Men’s Morris. Can’t say I’ve ever heard of it, but “Trencho” does sound very Australian! As does Spotto!, for that matter (second from the bottom), and indeed judging from the web it was originally a Bingo-like Australian car journey game (make lists of things to watch out for, cross them off when you see them, then shout “spotto!” when you’ve got them all). But again, I’ve never heard of it. This one is an aircraft recognition version, ‘OF INSTRUCTIVE VALUE TO: SPOTTERS, A.T.C.[,] R.O.C.[,] HOME GUARDS, SCOUTS, A.R.P., POLICE, SAILORS, SOLDIERS, AIRMEN, Etc.’ so obviously it’s British, ca. 1940, and not Australian — anyway, we didn’t get many Heinkels down our way!

My brain is fried after all that, but one last thought. Some of these games are evidently intended to be simulations of war, not just representations in some abstract way: War Tactics asks in its title, “can Great Britain be invaded?” and presumably players are invited to think that the game does provide an answer to that question. Did they in fact think so? And if so, did their game-playing affect their fears about the future one way or the other? If the German player in War Tactics won 7 times out of 10, did the players (presumably children) take that as a warning of what may come? Or did they just treat it as a harmless bit of fun? No doubt some did see it as just a game, but possibly not all. As a teenaged wargamer, one of my favourite games was GDW’s The Third World War, about the potential land and air war in Germany between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, ca. 1985. It was considerably more sophisticated than the proto-wargames discussed here, but not necessarily more accurate. I certainly thought it was, to some degree, accurate, however. Playing such games was one way in which I tried to understand the Cold War and what might happen in the future, and I do remember getting anxious when the Warsaw Pact won. I wanted NATO to win, because I would want NATO to win in a real war if it ever happened. In fact, I must admit I would sometimes cheat a bit in solitaire games, re-rolling die rolls in important battles to get a “fair” result. Pretty silly, any way you look at it; but I could understand some overly-sensitive boy in 1911, probably already immersed in le Queux and An Englishman’s Home, playing War Tactics and thinking that perhaps “Der Tag” was nearly upon him …

1. For example, looking at the map, Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Holland are marked as neutrals, whereas France and Belgium seem to be British allies; this suggests a WWI setting. Except that Luxembourg is also neutral, and most of Belgium’s territory should be marked as a German conquest. Perhaps more tellingly, there’s no naval base at Scapa Flow — the closest is Cromarty (ie Invergordon). Given the great importance of Scapa Flow as the harbour for the Grand Fleet throughout the war, it’s hard to imagine that it would have been left out.

It’s not often that I happen across a discussion of knock-out blow novels outside specialist literature, so I was interested to see that Gideon Haigh (probably best known as a cricket writer, but also a fine essayist) talks about Nevil Shute’s What Happened to the Corbetts (1939) in the current issue of The Monthly. The article itself (which is not online; a precis of sorts is available from the Sunday Telegraph) is about On the Beach, published fifty years ago this month: ‘arguably Australia’s most important novel’¹ since it was the first really popular novel to deal with nuclear war and human extinction, selling 4 million copies worldwide.

In retrospect, 1957 was a hinge point in the Cold War, when passive resignation about nuclear arms began yielding to alarm and horror. It was the year that the CND was founded in Britain and the National Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy was established in the US; it was the year that the National Council of Churches warned that the arms race might “lead directly to a war that will destroy civilization”. In 1955, fewer than one-fifth of Americans knew what fallout was; by 1958, seven in ten were saying they would favour a worldwide organisation to prohibit nuclear weapons.

How many people during that transition read JB Priestley’s ‘Russia, the Atom and the West’ in the New Statesman? Or heard the Nobel-winning chemist Linus Pauling rail against nuclear arms? And how many read On the Beach? Nevil Shute’s novel was the great popular work on the gravest matter besetting civilisation.²

Haigh is right to see that the two books have a great deal in common.

What Happened, like On the Beach, is a conventional novel on an unconventional, very nearly taboo, subject: the civilian experience of war, with its trials of disaster and displacement. It is not, however, an anti-war novel. To write against war when its coming was inevitable would have struck Shute as pointless posturing. He was arguing not for peace but for preparedness, to ready Britons “for the terrible things that you, and I, and all the citizens of the cities in this country may one day have to face together”. On the novel’s release in April 1939, a thousand copies were distributed to workers in Air Raid Precautions. It was “the entertainer serving a useful purpose”.³

But I don’t know that I agree that the subject of the ‘civilian experience of war’ was ‘very nearly taboo’. There were plenty of novels dealing with this subject written in the 1920s and 1930s, at least as it related to aerial warfare. It’s just that virtually all of the others were sensationalistic trash in comparison to What Happened to the Corbetts, as I have previously argued.⁴ Otherwise I like Haigh’s take on it.

And what happened to Nevil Shute? After moving to Australia in 1950 and buying the country’s first dishwasher, and writing a few more books, he died in 1960. And after that?

The decline of Shute’s reputation is unremarkable: it simply attests the perishability of popular art. Shute sold 15 million books in his lifetime, but he aspired to neither literary immortality nor critical approval: “The book which thrills the reviewer with its artistic perfection will probably not be accepted by the public, while a book which the public value for its contents will probably seem trivial and worthless artistically to the reviewer.” His obscurity also reflects the contours of the book market: the middle-class, middlebrow novelist of ideas is a discontinued line.⁵

Still, he wrote one book of almost geopolitical significance; that’s more than most writers can aspire to.

1. Gideon Haigh, “Shute the messenger: how the end of the world came to Melbourne”, The Monthly, June 2007, 52.
2. Ibid., 53.
3. Ibid., 47.
4. Haigh has clearly benefited from reading Paul Brians’ Nuclear Holocausts: Atomic War in Fiction, but doesn’t seem to have any comparable sources for the knock-out blow literature. That’s ok, but you know, he could have asked me!
5. Haigh, “Shute the messenger”, 46.

The A-bomb won:

I wouldn’t have thought it was necessary to detonate a 19 kiloton nuclear weapon to see what it would do to an airship, but that’s just what the US Department of Energy did on 7 August 1957. Well, to be fair, the primary purpose was probably to test a prototype of the W30 nuclear warhead; the airship thing was just a bonus. The test, codenamed Stokes, was part of Operation Plumbbob, a series of 29 above-ground detonations carried out at the Nevada Test Site between May and October 1957. Statistically speaking, the radiation released into the atmosphere from Plumbbob would be expected to have caused 1900 civilian deaths from thyroid cancer — a small price to pay for the knowledge gained, I think we’d all agree.

At least one other Plumbbob test involved US Navy airships: Franklin, or maybe Franklin Prime — the sources I can find refer only to Franklin, on 2 June, but that fizzled and was repeated on 30 August. (The second and third photos here are from Franklin/Franklin Prime.) In 1960, the Bureau of Naval Weapons issued a report on the airship tests, entitled “Structural Response and Gas Dynamics of an Airship Exposed to a Nuclear Detonation”. The abstract reveals that the aim was to see how an airship employed on anti-submarine duties — the USN was still using these into the 1960s — would fare after dropping a nuclear depth charge:

Four Model ZSG-3 airships, U. S. Navy Bureau of Aeronautics Nos. 40, 46, 77, and 92, participated during Operation Plumbbob to determine the response characteristics of the Model ZSG-3 airship when subjected to a nuclear detonation in order to establish criteria for safe escape distances for airship delivery of antisubmarine warfare special weapons. Restrained response data for 0.40-psi overpressure input were obtained during Shot Franklin with the ZSG-3 No. 77 moored tail to the blast. Unrestrained response data for 0.75-psi overpressure input were obtained during Shot Stokes with the ZSG-3 No. 40 free ballooned, tail to the blast, 300 feet aboveground. The first airship exposed to overpressure experienced a structural failure of the nose cone when it was rammed into the mooring mast, together with a tear of the forward ballonet which necessitated deflation of the envelope. The second airship broke in half and crashed following a circumferential failure of the envelope originating at the bottom of the envelope, forward of the car.

Sounds like airship-delivered nuclear depth charges were just not meant to be.¹

Image source: National Nuclear Security Administration/Nevada Site Office, here, here, and here.

1. On the other hand, surely the atmospheric overpressure from an underwater detonation would be much less than an above-ground test would cause. On the other other hand, the airship in the top photo was 5 miles away from the blast; but if it had been nuking a submarine it would be much closer than that. I’m not convinced these tests proved anything one way or the other, but then I’m no nuclear weaponeer.

WE ARE ALWAYS pleased to learn of a new post on Professor Palmer’s most interesting blog, the Avia-Corner. It is the first place one would turn in order to learn about the often murky world of Soviet aviation. However, his latest rant — there is unfortunately no other word for it — caught us by surprise, for it is aimed squarely at Airminded itself. It seems that the good professor has taken exception to our previous post, which happened to refer to one of his in what was by no means an unfriendly spirit. As the reaction is out of all proportion to the supposed offence, the suspicion occurs that it is officially inspired. The possible motivations for this scarcely need explaining, but a reply must here be given.

We frankly deplore Professor Palmer’s threats of annihilation. What would conflict between our blogs achieve? After all, when two tribes go to war, a point is all that you can score.

Can we appeal to our common humanity? Certainly we share the same biology, regardless of ideology.

Are we fools to dream of a brotherhood of man? Imagine all the people, sharing all the world!

There is nothing to be gained by war, and so much to be lost. We therefore earnestly appeal to Professor Palmer to cease hostilities immediately. Otherwise the consequences, for all concerned, are too awful to contemplate.