In 1910, two Army officers, Second Lieutenant Bowle-Evans and Lieutenant Cammell independently put forward a new idea for an anti-aircraft weapon: the vortex ring gun.

In principal, it involved the formation of a vortex in the air, by the firing of an explosive charge inside a conical 'gun' which, if it were pointed upwards, would propel the vortex towards the intended airborne target on which, it was suggested, the violent air movement within the vortex would have a sufficiently destructive effect. Some practical support for the theory was provided firstly by a Dr Pernter of Germany who had some years earlier carried out some experimental firings which were said to have torn apart birds and other objects, and secondly by the farmers of a large region ranging from Hungary to northern Italy, who appeared to use such guns routinely in the belief that they could disperse hailstorms.

These proposals seem to have been made to the War Office; in any case a year later the Secretary of State for War, Richard Haldane, was corresponding on the subject with Sir Oliver Lodge, the eminent physicist. Lodge told Haldane that 'I really think the thing is worth a trial', but although he proposed acquiring a vortex ring gun from Piedmont for testing purposes it's unclear whether this ever happened.

The idea of using a vortex ring gun for air defence was aired in public at an Aeronautical Society lecture given on 3 December 1913 by Captain C. M. Waterlow, Royal Engineers, on the topic of the 'The coming airship'. In a discussion of the potential for aerial combat between aeroplanes and airships, Waterlow thought the former would be disadvantaged because of its inferior weight-carrying capacity: the airship could afford to be much better armed. This is perhaps not surprising since he was himself an airship pilot. When it came to the weapons which would be used, he suggested vortex rings:

The question of a suitable weapon had hardly been considered, but he would remark that there were great possibilities in the use of vortex rings, such as had been used in France in connection with vineyards. To show the destructive effects that they can produce, he stated that when fired horizontally they were capable of breaking up a wooden fence at a distance of 100 yards.

The basic principle behind vortex ring guns is quite sound: a smoke ring is a common form of vortex ring, and toy vortex guns can bought or even made at home. Practical uses are a bit more dubious. The use of vortex ring guns (or hail cannon) to disperse hailstorms has a long history but little scientific evidence to back it up. More recently, militaries have looked at vortex ring guns as non-lethal weapons, to knock people down, but they don't seem to be able to do this even over a distance as short as 30 metres.

So the utility of vortex rings in air defence seems doubtful -- to us. It wasn't as clear a century ago. Pernter was a respected scientist who demonstrated vortex rings at the British Association in 1903 (and apparently eventually concluded that they didn't work for weather modification, so he wasn't simply a crank). There was at least widespread anecdotal evidence, from the United States as well as Europe, for the effectiveness of hail cannon. And in the era of wood and wire the idea of knocking an aeroplane out of the sky by, more or less, pushing some air at it wasn't as silly as it would have been a decade or two later. They hardly needed any encouragement to crash as it was. (I read Waterlow's reported comment about vortex ring guns in aeroplane vs airship combat as referring to the aeroplane's armament but it seems to me it would profit the airship more.)

However. If we step back and take a broad overview of ideas for anti-aircraft weapons in the first few decades of the twentieth century then, taken as a whole they do look rather mad ('wildly creative' was how I put it in my thesis). Setting aside spiritual forms of air defence, at one extreme there was the death ray, which I've discussed here several times, which had varied proposed applications but was most desired for its ability to stop engines and bring bombers down. At the other are what we would consider mundane anti-aircraft weapons, because they actually existed and were effective to some degree: anti-aircraft guns and balloon barrages. Even these could have some odd ideas attached to them, such as the giant Lee-Enfield rifle described by the Daily Express in 1935. It was sometimes suggested that the cables used to tether Britain's barrage balloons were enhanced somehow, to make them more dangerous beyond the physical damage caused to a colliding aeroplane. Shaw Desmond, in his 1938 novel Chaos, imagined London defended by a balloon apron with 'Lethal wires [...] suspended which, upon contact, could wipe out the enemy bombers automatically'. This was somewhat science-fictional, but around the same time two more serious and well-informed writers, J. M. Spaight and C. C. Turner, also used the word 'lethal' to describe barrage balloon cables: it could just mean 'electrified'.

That was far from the end of the barrage's potential. Desmond also proposed explosive balloons, detonated either by radio or by proximity. Again, he wasn't alone: Stefan Possony, a Czech diplomat Air Ministry official, proposed 'a barrage of bombs suspended either from balloons or some type of machine built on the principle of the helicopter'. He also thought that helicopters or autogyros could be used to replace barrage balloons and fighter interceptors, as they could be armed with guns, bombs and searchlights: any 'aeroplanes, which manage to pierce the wall of ropes, can easily be destroyed by dropping bombs fitted with time fuzes on them'.

Another variation on the barrage used rockets. Arch Whitehouse, writing during the Phoney War, attributed to Harry 'Death Ray' Grindell Matthews the idea of the 'torpedo-rocket', which would explode at a set height 'and release a whole slew of 6-ft. diameter parachutes from which two-pound bombs will dangle at the end of long lengths of entangling steel wires'. J. F. C. Fuller cut out the middleman and proposed using large (anything up to twenty tons) liquid-fuelled rockets to shoot down aircraft directly:

The first nation which discovers how to build a practical rocket of one ton in weight will have at its disposal a most powerful anti-aircraft weapon which, acting like a depth-charge, may render flight in formations highly dangerous.

This too was something Grindell Matthews had been working on in the mid-1930s.

As a last example, J. M. Kenworthy, a Labour MP, past lieutenant-commander in the Royal Navy and the future Lord Strabolgi, claimed in 1927 that 'we now have improved projectiles and improved guns, with gas shells capable of producing a gas barrage in the air'.

Despite the frequent claims, like Kenworthy's, that these weapons were in development or even in service, very few of them ever seem to have been given serious official consideration. But government scientists did sometimes work along the same lines. Experiments with anti-aircraft rockets, though much smaller than Fuller's, eventually bore some fruit, though more for ground attack than air defence. The case of the aerial mine programme is fairly well known, which had the support of Frederick Lindemann, Churchill's confidant and scientific advisor. Aerial mines consisted of a long length of cable with a parachute on one end and a small bomb on the other: bombers would lay these in the path of an oncoming air raid. The idea got a pretty fair run during the Blitz, but was found wanting. Research was also conducted into ways to increase the 'lethality' (there's that word again) of balloon barrage cables by attaching bombs to them. Like the rockets this seems to have been turned into an offensive weapon, as deployed in Operation Outward, Britain's anticipation of the Japanese Fu-Go balloons: 99,000 balloons were released between 1942 and 1944 to drift across the North Sea, about half trailing cables to wreck the German electrical grid and half with incendiaries to start forest fires.

No other form of response to the threat of a knock-out blow from the air elicited such 'wildly creative' technological thinking as did anti-aircraft defences. Many of the ones discussed here do look mad, but the same desire for a defensive superweapon which made the vortex ring gun appealing led to radar (itself inspired by the death ray) and the proximity fuze. It also led, much later, to the Strategic Defense Initiative, of which Possony was an early advocate. Blind alleys are inherent in blue sky research (to mix metaphors); perhaps the price of vigilance is eternal freedom.

Don Charlwood's No Moon Tonight has a reputation as one of the best Bomber Command memoirs. Charlwood was a Victorian who joined the RAAF in 1941, trained as a navigator in Canada under the Empire Air Training Scheme, and then flew in Halifaxes and Lancasters with 103 Squadron at Elsham Wolds. Having survived his tour of 30 ops in 1942 and 1943, he stayed in aviation after the war, albeit on the ground as a civil air traffic controller. No Moon Tonight was originally published in 1956 and was the first of more than a dozen books by Charlwood, some memoirs, some aviation history, some Victorian history. In 1986 he wrote that the book was 'kindly received both in Australia and Britain', and that 'letters from ex-aircrew men of various nationalities began to tell me I had not been alone in my response to the Bomber Command experience'. It's one aspect of that response I'm interested in here: his feelings about the morality of area bombing.

Charlwood wrote himself that this had been one of his reasons for writing No Moon Tonight:

I wanted to give some thought to the morality of the task we were called upon to do -- something that after the war led to widespread condemnation of the bomber offensive.

It's not a question that he ever gives a final judgement on, or even really tries to weigh up; but it does from time to time puncture the narrative with great force. Often it is tied up with the fear of death, his own and that of his comrades. This is a theme which is much in evidence throughout the book, much more so than the morality of area bombing per se, as he notes the loss of other members of his squadron and, which touched him more deeply, of many of the 'Twenty Men', as he called them, his fellow Australian classmates from Canada: twelve were killed flying for Bomber Command.

Charlwood initially questions whether area bombing was just enough to justify the deaths of so many good Allied airmen, not enemy civilians. For example, shortly after joining 103 Squadron, before starting on ops himself (apart from one during operational training), Charlwood learns that another Halifax crew has gone missing after a raid on Cologne. Although he only knew their navigator, Munns, slightly, he knew he was a family man and he starts to brood over the loss (I've added the bold emphasis in all the quotations which follow):

In ten years, would the loss of his [Munns's] life appear justifiable, or would it be evident that he had been led into a wrong or unnecessary course, that he had cast the pearl of his life before swine? Perhaps the only man who should go to Bomber Command was the man who had seen for himself that mass killing was the only way to a better world.

I knew, that day, that I had no such conviction. I felt in need of it. I wished that I could believe that we were bombing evil and making way for good. I wished that I could feel this with the intensity that a father would feel in defending his family with no thought of himself. The only alternative was not to think. We had committed ourselves and could now do nothing. If our service life conflicted with our thinking then our thinking must cease. We could not afford to fritter our strength on endless questioning, or in the luxury of frustration or sorrow.

Similarly, being on ops didn't change his feelings about bombing, but being part of a crew did change how he dealt with them: essentially, he had to suppress them. Late in the winter of 1942-3, Max Bryant, one of the Twenty Men, is posted to Elsham. After talking to Max about squadron life, Charlwood realises that he has found what he never had before, something he calls 'enthusiasm':

I still had little belief in the rectitude of our war or any other war, nor could I believe that more good than evil would arise from our mass bombing. That Keith [Webber] and Wilf Burrows and Col Miller and now, probably, Max himself should die, was still something too ghastly to contemplate. And yet, on the squadron one could not for long admit cynicism, or pessimism, even in the face of the worst. Whatever my frame of mind had been when we had come to Elsham, I realized that now it had changed. Then I had been alone; now I had become one with a crew and a squadron. To demean them was impossible.

Thoughts of what they were actually doing to the people below sometimes intruded during operations. Sort of. Here is Charlwood on an attack on Essen, I think on the night of 13 January 1943. (The photo above was taken of Essen's centre after a raid on 5 March.)

I would try to tell myself then that this was a city, a place inhabited by beings such as ourselves, a place with the familiar sights of civilization. But the thought would carry little conviction. A German city was always this, this hellish picture of flame, gunfire and searchlights, an unreal picture because we could not hear it or feel its breath. Sometimes, when the smoke rolled back and we saw streets or buildings, I felt startled. Perhaps if we had seen the white, upturned faces of people, as over England we sometimes did, our hearts would have rebelled....

That last sentence suggests that, in fact, their hearts did not rebel. They were still troubled, though. Of a raid on Turin on the night of 4 February 1943, Charlwood wrote:

We looked down incredulously. Under the light of the moon the city was mercilessly exposed -- houses, churches, gardens, even statuary along the streets. The crews wheeled and dived, exulting as the Germans exulted over lightly-defended Britain in 1940. And yet, perhaps the minds of the attackers would have been easier if the Italians had attempted to defend their city. As it was, we blew women and children to pieces, unopposed by their men.

To say 'we blew women and children to pieces' is quite explicit. It's almost self-incriminating, except that the blame is displaced onto Italian men for failing to defend their women and children. If it wasn't for that, Charlwood seems to say, he would have felt much better about blowing the women and children of Turin to pieces.

After completing his tour, Charlwood was posted to Lichfield as a navigation instructor. From this period, early summer 1943, he quotes a letter from another of the Twenty Men, Johnnie Gordon, who also has finished his first tour. Gordon is even blunter about his qualms:

'Sometimes my conscience troubles me about the blind mass-murdering of the "main force". I think Bomber Command's policy is fixed too relentlessly on mere victory by annihilation. That is impossible. Britain at present seems to lack men who can look beyond the victory. I think Bomber Command's policy, though it makes the victory more certain and earlier, may make a real peace impossible.'

Here, the 'blind mass-murdering of the "main force"' (the heavy bomber groups which comprised the bulk of Bomber Command), which used area bombing tactics, is implicitly contrasted with the precision bombing of the Pathfinders and, even more, 617 Squadron, which had spectacularly broken the Ruhr dams only a month or two before. In fact soon afterwards, Gordon turns up in Lichfield on leave and tells Charlwood that he has volunteered for another tour, this time with the Dam Busters. Charlwood asks him straight out what he thinks of area bombing (which he usually refers to as 'mass bombing'):

'What is your opinion of the mass bombing the main force do?' I said.

'I don't like it,' he answered. 'I suppose it achieves its purpose, but it's wrong. Now it has reached fantastic proportions and we haven't anyone big enough to stop it. I suppose it will go on until all the beauty and culture are bombed out of Europe.'

Later Gordon asks Charlwood why he thinks he volunteered for 617 Squadron:

'[...] Why do you think I volunteered for special duties? Tell me honestly now. I have such a poor opinion of my own motives that I won't mind what you say.'

I said, 'It might have been because you believed mass bombing to be wrong and this move was perhaps a sort of atonement. That and the fascination of ops life.'

Nowhere in this section does Charlwood indicate his own opinion of area bombing, whether he agreed with his friend's critique or not. He himself tried unsuccessfully to get back onto ops with a regular squadron, but tellingly only as part of his old crew: comradeship was more important than life or death, his own or others.

Because No Moon Tonight was written in the decade after the war, it is difficult to know to what extent Charlwood's memory of his thoughts and feelings during it might have changed by the time he came to set them down in writing. 1956 was not 1943 and, whether consciously or not, events in the years in between might have introduced biases. As noted above, he himself referred to 'widespread condemnation of the bomber offensive' after the war as a reason why he discussed the morality question. That could have led him to give more weight to it in his book than he had done during the war itself. (Though 'widespread condemnation' strikes me as more characteristic of the 1980s, when he wrote those words, than the 1950s, and more of Britain than Australia.)

The passage about 617 Squadron and the suggestion that it carried out a less morally suspect form of strategic bombing is also interesting. The film version of The Dam Busters came out in 1955, the year before Charlwood's book, and was a big success in Australia as in Britain. Perhaps, just as Charlwood suggested Gordon joined the Dam Busters as an atonement, the success of the film functioned as a sort of atonement by proxy for him. But he doesn't mention the film (or Paul Brickhill's book) so that's only speculation on my part.

Finally, one postwar context which can be glimpsed in No Moon Tonight is the Cold War. Of the briefing before his crew's final op, Charlwood writes:

Burton and Harding his Canadian navigator peered at the screen, listening to the usual recitation of defences, Pathfinder plans and weather. So it would go on after tonight had passed; so it might go on for another generation in another war against another enemy.

In 1956, 'another war against another enemy' was very much a possibility. The wartime alliance had fractured into opposing camps. The former enemy had itself been split into two: in May 1955 West Germany was admitted into NATO and the same month East Germany became a founding member of the Warsaw Pact. A war would have been fought with new weapons: both the United States and the Soviet Union now had hydrogen bombs, the latter first testing its version in 1955. But Charlwood's intuition that the same scenes he had witnessed would be reenacted probably wasn't too far off the mark: the year before Sputnik, nukes were still carried by bombers. Not long after Charlwood's No Moon Tonight was published and not many miles away, Nevil Shute would have been writing On The Beach. Is it fanciful to suggest that in his own way Charlwood was responding to the same existential threat to civilisation as Shute?

Charlwood did keep a wartime diary, which he quoted from occasionally, both here and probably in Journeys Into Night (which I haven't read, but is based on the diaries and letters of The Twenty). The State Library of Victoria holds a copy of his diary; if I'm there with a spare hour or two I must have a look at it.

I have been very remiss in not noting until now the posting of Military History Carnival #30 at Cliopatria. It's a good one, as usual. The post I found most interesting this time is at Bring the Heat, Bring the Stupid (as it was last time, actually) on the US Linebacker II bombing offensive against North Vietnam in December 1972. It strikes me that this was really the last Second World War-style strategic bombing campaign fought by a major power, at least in terms of having to fight through determined air defences. These included fighters and anti-aircraft (in the form of missiles rather than guns), though with the latter much the most dangerous -- to the USAF's surprise and loss. The US lost 16 of the 207 B-52s it deployed in the eleven-day campaign -- 8 out of 99 on one night alone -- which was an unsustainable casualty rate, especially when you consider that the factories back home weren't churning out plentiful replacements as they had done in the Second World War. Still, the USAF successfully adapted to the threat (or North Vietnam started running out of SAMs, take your pick): by the last few days it was running out of targets but no longer out of aircraft. Compare with Desert Storm less than two decades later, when (despite some scary moments) the Coalition as a whole lost only 42 aircraft to enemy action in over 100,000 sorties.

And speaking of Cliopatria, I must note with regret its passing. I was a member at the end of its 8.5 years, an opportunity of which I definitely did not make best use. My thanks go to Ralph Luker for affording me that wasted opportunity, but much more for making Cliopatria one of the few history blogs to even try to link the disparate elements of the historioblogosphere together. I hope he enjoys the copious amounts of free time his blogging retirement will doubtless free up!

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).

Military History Carnival #29 is up at Cliopatria. There are quite a few airpower posts this time around; consider this one at Bring the Heat, Bring the Stupid on the DEW Line, the North American continental early warning system built in the 1950s and lasting into the 1980s. I knew about the DEW Line itself, a radar chain built along the north coast of Canada and Alaska to provide early warning of Soviet bombers. But I didn't know about the Texas Towers, effectively radars sited on oil rigs, nor did I know about the radar picket lines formed from destroyer escorts and Lockheed Constellations. The former bring to mind the Maunsell forts in the Thames and Mersey estuaries, some of which were for air defence, fitted with AA and searchlights (though I'm not sure if they were used for early warning as such). The latter remind me of suggestions made in 1939 (April) by the pseudonymous Ajax for both sea pickets ('observation ships equipped with sound locators, detectors, range-finders, and searchlights') and air pickets ('reconnaissance air-cruisers', five-man flying boats with long range and endurance) to extend the pitiful range of land-based sound locators and give some warning of an impending air raid on London. Nothing new etc.

Brian Madison Jones. Abolishing the Taboo: Dwight D. Eisenhower and American Nuclear Doctrine, 1945-1961. (Solihull: Helion & Company, 2011).

I found Brian Jones's Abolishing the Taboo interesting for two reasons. Firstly, the subject matter: the Cold War fear of nuclear war was the successor to the interwar fear of strategic bombing. Secondly, it's the book version of a PhD dissertation, which is something I'll be tackling myself.

The Eisenhower presidency (1953-61) was when the United States created its huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, rising from the roughly 800 warheads inherited from Truman to over 18,000 by the time Kennedy came into office: as Jones notes, even after recent disarmament measures this number has never since fallen below the level when Eisenhower came into power. So this was the critical period when we (meaning the world) had to learn how to live with the Bomb. Jones's intention is to explain how and why this happened, through a focus on Eiseinhower's attempts to make nuclear technology normal: that is, as just another way of making the United States stronger and safer. Speaking as a non-specialist in this area, I think he largely succeeds in this. But I do have some criticisms.

Jones argues that Eisenhower used nuclear technology to strengthen the United States in four areas, which he uses to structure the book: the economy, the military, industry, and morality. The first is in some ways the strongest section. Eisenhower believed that 'Economic prosperity was as important as military strength, and [that] national security policy needed to reflect that balance'. His way of achieving that balance was to rely on relatively cheap nuclear weapons to offset the huge Soviet superiority in conventional arms: the New Look. The threat of massive nuclear retaliation against any Communist aggression removed the need for large and expensive standing forces in faraway lands. That much is well known, but Jones shows how Eisenhower's concerns as president derived from his experience in military command before, during and after the war, when he welcomed new technologies because the multiplied the strength of his forces. But after the war he was also worried that Truman's ballooning budget deficits were damaging the long-term strength of the American economy. New Look then seems a quite logical choice for a fiscally-conservative general turned commander-in-chief.

I found the section on Eisenhower's policies regarding the use of nuclear weapons more confusing; though, to be fair, that may be Eisenhower's fault, not Jones's. Jones stresses Eisenhower's firm belief that nuclear weapons were, after all, just another weapon, that there was no reason why there should be a taboo on their use. For example, he told a reporter, 'I know of no reason why a large explosion shouldn't be used as freely as a small explosion'. But in a press conference the following week he said that 'the concept of atomic war is too horrible for man to endure and to practice'. Such examples abound. Was Eisenhower this muddled in his thinking or is this just the logic of mutually assured destruction in action? Jones doesn't really get to grips with this, it seems to me. He suggests that Eisenhower had a preference for 'average solutions', avoiding both extreme optimism and extreme pessimism. In this case that meant putting the possibility of nuclear holocaust to one side and proceeding as if it wasn't going to happen. Taking the average of two extremes is usually misleading; but we're still here so maybe Eisenhower was right to do so.

The third section concerns Eisenhower's policies regarding industrial uses of nuclear technology. This means not only the nuclear energy industry, which Eisenhower inaugurated in 1954 by revising Truman's post-war Atomic Energy Act to allow civilian operation of nuclear power plants. (He also inaugurated it by dedicating the first such plant, Shippingport, with 'the wave of an "atomic wand" which set a bulldozer in motion from thousands of miles away'.) It also means less successful experiments such as the nuclear-powered 'atomic peace ship', NS Savannah, which for a decade carried passengers and cargo around the world; and Project Plowshare, a catch-all for experimenting with all sorts of ideas about using 'clean' nukes for large-scale engineering projects. (Only 26 nuclear explosions would have been needed to create a new, sea-level Panama canal. A test blast to create a deep harbour on the northern coast of Alaska never took place.) This is fascinating stuff, and Jones shows that Eisenhower's interest in harnessing the power of the atom for humanity's benefit was genuine, not a cynical attempt to distract attention from or to justify the nuclear weapons programme.

The final chapter is called 'Bolstering moral strength'. I think this is where Jones's structure runs out of steam. In terms of Eisenhower's nuclear policy, 'bolstering moral strength' includes early disarmament attempts and confidence-building initiatives like Open Skies. Atoms For Peace, a programme which transferred nuclear technology for peaceful uses to friendly countries, is also discussed in this chapter, though somewhat perfunctorily; it might have been a better fit in the previous chapter (or the Savannah might have been a better fit in this one). In between there is a lengthy section on the Eisenhower administration's concerns about the film version of Nevil Shute's On The Beach, even discussing it in a Cabinet meeting shortly before the December 1959 premiere. The concern was that the film might make people think the wrong things about nuclear war:

Eisenhower and his advisors feared the film would be a huge success and convince Americans that the world would be best served by unilateral nuclear disarmament and by joining radical "ban-the-bomb" organizations. On the other hand, the film threatened to erode American moral strength by feeding the overwhelming fear of nuclear war. The depictions of slow death from nuclear fallout might bring a spiritual and emotional depression.

One of the proposed responses, for example, was to point out that 'fallout from a war in the northern hemisphere would never reach the southern hemisphere even if the maximum number of nuclear weapons were used'. Luckily for Eisenhower, the film was not a great success either with the public or the critics, and the feared reactions never took place. I found this discussion fascinating, but it doesn't really fit with the rest of the chapter, and is just introduced with no exploration of the domestic dissent Eisenhower was facing over his nuclear policies.

There are a few other problems. The main one is the first chapter: it is clearly just the literature review from the dissertation. This is a necessary thing in a dissertation, as it shows you have critically read and mastered the available secondary literature on your topic. It's very hard to read in a book though, and not very interesting to most people, even specialists. Most advice I've read is to drop the literature review and perhaps incorporate some of it in the rest of the text. Instead, this chapter might have been used to give the more general reader an introduction to Eisenhower: his life, his achievements, and the key historiographical trends in the literature about him. (Look at me: one book contract and suddenly I'm an expert!) Another is that there are what seem to me to be surprising omissions: for example, there is very little discussion of ballistic missile development, or long-range bomber development for that matter, but surely the ability to deliver all these nuclear warheads was almost as important? I was also troubled by the numerous statements about what Eisenhower felt or knew or thought (for example, 'Eisenhower felt ill at ease with a perceived lack of consistency in Truman's actions'); perhaps I'm being pedantic but from the sources cited we can at best only tell what he said or wrote. Finally, while I applaud Helion's initiative in publishing a PhD dissertation in an affordable edition, I wish they'd left out the illustrations: they are generally too murky to add much to the text.

I've probably been a bit harsh in this review, but overall I found Jones's Abolishing the Taboo to be informative and interesting. I haven't even touched on the fascinating parallels with the British response to the threat of bombing between the wars such internationalisation and shelter policy; and in some ways Eisenhower's concern to build military strength without damaging financial strength reminds me of Chamberlain in the late 1930s. And if the topic itself interests you then it is well worth the read.

The last time Britain nuked Australia was at Maralinga on 9 October 1957, over half a century ago. The last of the Antler series of tests, code-named Taranaki (above), involved the detonation of a 25 kiloton fission bomb from a captive balloon at a height of 300 metres. The fallout 'moved east and then north-east towards the Queensland coast, missing the rain areas in New South Wales and Victoria as predicted'. Radiation levels in some areas 'slightly exceeded Level A [no health risk] for "people living in primitive conditions"', more than was predicted but not dangerously so, according to the safety criteria then in place. A 1985 Royal Commission however criticised the Antler tests on the grounds that '"inadequate attention was paid to Aboriginal safety", and that the patrols designed to ensure that the range was clear were "neither well planned nor well executed"'. Service personnel were also placed in greater than expected danger: a Canberra tasked with flying through the cloud half an hour later to collect air samples rapidly received unexpectedly high doses and had to abort the mission.

Today the Federal Government introduced a bill into Parliament which will provide compensation and better health care for at least some of the latter group (the local Maralinga Tjarutja people received compensation in 1994). According to Warren Snowden, the Minister for Veteran Affairs:

The bill will benefit Australian personnel who participated in the British nuclear test program and their dependents by enabling compensation and health care to be provided with a minimum of delay [...] The personnel were involved in the maintenance, transporting or decontamination of aircraft used in the British nuclear test program outside the current legislated British nuclear test areas or time periods.

And there may be more to come:

The quality of the records from the test period and the secrecy surrounding the operation means that it is impossible to rule out the likelihood that new information may come to light which warrants further extension of coverage to additional groups of participants.

Not before time, either.

Image source: Nuclear Weapon Archive.

One sub-species of military intellectual is the retired field marshal (or admiral, or air marshal) who, at the end of a long career, sets down their thoughts on the future of warfare for the interested reader. Even though they may be quite famous, their essays into futurism are nowadays read less often than that of their junior counterparts, full-time military intellectuals like J. F. C. Fuller or L. E. O. Charlton, who had substantial careers in the military but left while still relatively young (and may well have borne chips on their shoulders due to their usually enforced early retirement). Partly this is due to their naturally having written less -- often just a few pages at the end of their memoirs. Often it would be due to writing and intellectualism not being something which came naturally to them. But because of their great experience (and, greater experience of the heights of strategy than the Fullers and the Charltons, one might add), it's worth looking at what the retired field marshals have to say.

So here's one: Marshal of the RAF Sir Arthur Harris, head of Bomber Command in 1942-5. The final chapter of his 1947 memoir Bomber Offensive is called 'Summing up and the future of warfare'. He is unsurprisingly adamant that the strategic bomber was the supreme weapon of the Second World War, making an indispensable contribution to Allied victory. But it was a close-run thing, because the British government didn't quite realise its importance:

In the war of 1939-45 England could just, though only just, afford to neglect to the extent that she did the weapon which at the time should have dominated all her strategy. The fact that both her enemies neglected this weapon to a markedly greater extent, and also that their folly gave England two great allies, made it possible for us to win the war even though the greater part of our national resources went into the production of less powerful and sometimes wholly obsolete weapons.

The German and Japanese neglect of strategic bombing Harris puts down to the undue influence of their generals and admirals, who wanted and got air forces designed to support their own services, instead of being able to act independently. Of course, he's also projecting his own interpretation of the RAF's interwar battles against the Army and the Royal Navy, which he acidly notes tried to strangle it to death more than once. But he's not just settling old scores (though he does do that too). He warns that

In no future war can we count on such folly as the Germans and the Japanese showed or such neglect by our enemies of whatever may be the most powerful weapon at hand.

So Britain can't afford to neglect this 'most powerful weapon' as it did after the last war. That's his warning for the the next war, and more importantly the current peace.

The catch is that this weapon is no longer the bomber: 'I myself regard the bomber as having had its day in the last war'. (This, only two years since he commanded one of the most powerful bomber forces ever.) Despite his thirty years (and two world wars) in the service, Harris is no unthinking air force man. But he believes his successors will be, that the air marshals of the future will be as reactionary with regards to new weapons as the generals and admirals were in the past.

Obviously, the new weapon Harris is talking about is the atomic bomb. He cautions against 'the obvious line of defence for the bomber', which is 'to insist upon its use for the dropping of atomic bombs'. Of course, the bomber could be used for that. But it would be better to deliver them by 'a missile which has no crew and is directed by radar and mechanical means'. And even a missile wouldn't be necessarily. Harris argues that atomic weapons are becoming smaller and easier to produce, and 'my own opinion is that an ordinary embassy official, or, for that matter, a commercial traveller or tourist' will 'eventually' be just as good a way as delivering atomic bombs to an enemy city as a missile, and 'potentially more secretive'.

There is no reason why the parts of an atomic bomb [...] should not be brought in bit by bit by seemingly innocent people and assembled anywhere where cover can be found, in an Embassy, attic, lodging, or a ship in harbour. The threat of its presence could then be used to back an ultimatum, or it could be used to destroy outright the area in which it was placed.

He predicts, indeed, that future wars will not be fought by the military at all, but by 'the scientists, the diplomats, and the "cloak and dagger men."' There will be 'no need to embroil millions in production and in battle for many years' when the whole war can be decided 'in a few seconds by the exercise of a little chicanery on the part of a very few persons'.

Harris can see only one way of ensuring that future British weapons policy will not be dominated by one or other of the services, with their 'inevitable tendency [...] to get tied to a particular and invariably obsolete weapon', such as cavalry (recalling his time at Camberley, the Army Staff College) or battleships (he discusses the fate of his friend Tom Phillips, commander of Force Z, at some length) or bombers:

There must be only one service; the survival of three of them at this stage in the development of armaments is wholly idiotic

The new service would likely be called the 'Defence Force' (though this 'is a gesture not of war but of inferiority', according to Harris). Its commanders would have to be free from prejudice in favour of one type of weapon or another, and be ready to '[flit] from one overwhelming weapon to another', as science dictated. (As an example of the next overwhelming weapon he suggests something like a dirty bomb, which might be used against cities or troops.)

But Harris doesn't sound very optimistic that a single service would be enough, it must be said. The book's last paragraph begins:

My part in the next war will be to be destroyed by it; I cannot doubt that if there is a war within the next quarter of a century it will certainly destroy a very great part of the civilised world and disrupt it entirely. Perhaps, after all, that may be the best solution. Any part of the human race that imagines that its survival is either necessary or outstandingly desirable must indeed, in the light of history, be thought to have an extraordinary conceit of itself.

Harris suggests, not very convincingly, that a 'world federation, a government of the world powerful enough to determine the policy of every country' is the only alternative. He ends by very briefly noting his return to his beloved Africa after the end of his accidental career as a bomber baron. But it's his suggestion that perhaps a nuclear apocalypse might be 'the best solution' to the problems of war and peace which stuck in my mind after I closed his book.

Cmnd. 124, Defence: Outline of Future Policy, is one of the most famous (and infamous) documents in British military history. It's better known as the 1957 Defence White Paper, or the Sandys White Paper after the Minister of Defence responsible for it, Duncan Sandys. It ended National Service, committed Britain to nuclear deterrence, and foreshadowed drastic cuts in conventional force levels. Aviation bore the brunt of these last. Fighter Command was to be abolished (though in the end it won a reprieve, at least until 1967) and a large number of advanced fighter types under development for the RAF were cancelled, including the Avro 720, the Fairey Delta 2, the Hawker Siddeley P.1121, and the Saunders-Roe SR.177. Only the English Electric P.1 and TSR-2 were spared (the latter only temporarily). Unsurprisingly, all this was controversial then and remains so today for those who remember such things. Certainly, the White Paper was a cost-cutting exercise: Sandys had a brief from the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, to find savings of £100 million from the defence estimates. But my interest here is the intellectual context of the Sandys White Paper: it wasn't just about saving money.

The thinking was that the coming of nuclear weapons, especially thermonuclear ones, had radically altered the nature of warfare. Here's how Sandys explained the basis of the White Paper to the House of Commons, on 16 April 1957:

The policy which we submit to the House in the White Paper is founded on the recognition of two basic facts. The first is that, in present circumstances. it is impossible effectively to defend this country against an attack with hydrogen bombs [...]

The second basic fact on which this policy is based is the fact that, whether we like it or not, we cannot go on devoting such a large part of our resources—and, in particular, of manpower—to defence. Since it must now be accepted that adequate protection against all-out nuclear attack is impossible, we believe that the British people will agree that the available resources of the nation should be concentrated not upon preparations to wage war so much, as upon trying to prevent that catastrophe from ever happening.

So the next war was likely to be a nuclear one, with little role for conventional forces such as the British Army of the Rhine. In the air, it was considered that the era of manned combat aircraft was drawing to a close, to be replaced by the guided missile. Sandys again:

We are unquestionably moving towards a time when fighter aircraft will be increasingly replaced by guided missiles and V-bombers by ballistic rockets, but all that will not happen overnight. The introduction of these new weapons will be a gradual process, extending over a good number of years, and even then there will still remain a very wide variety of roles for which manned aircraft will continue to be needed.

Here he was signalling a change to the established order, the one which had proved effective enough in the last war. Even against manned Soviet bombers, Fighter Command would need to be almost perfectly effective in order to be of any use at all: according to the Strath Report of 1955, just 10 hydrogen bombs used against Britain could cause 12 million civilian casualties. Civil defence measures might save many of these and preserve civil authority after a nuclear war, but only at the staggering (peacetime, of course) cost of £2 billion. And when bombers were eventually replaced by supersonic, long-range missiles, the air defence problem would become insoluble. Yes, this all sounds very familiar: the H-bomber will always get through, as the Daily Mail put it. The only way to stop it was to prevent it from taking off in the first place.

Sandys was born in 1908, the year of the first aeroplane flight in Britain. Most politicians of his generation would have been very aware of the shadow of the bomber in the 1930s (even the somewhat older Macmillan later said 'We thought of air warfare in 1938 rather as people think of nuclear warfare today'), but Sandys perhaps had more experience of it than most. He became a Conservative MP in 1935, and married Winston Churchill's daughter that same year. In 1937 he became an officer in a Territorial anti-aircraft brigade protecting London. This led to the 'Sandys affair' in 1938: he alleged, in Parliament, that British air defences were inadequate. During the war, still in the Territorials, he apparently commanded a rocket-firing AA battery which apparently shot down a German bomber. He was also stationed near a missile proving ground at Aberporth at one point. And of course he was in London during the V2 blitz. So Sandys knew something about air defence and something about rockets, even if they were a far cry from the new monsters on the horizon in the late 1950s. Perhaps he was primed to be the author of this new paradigm?

What I don't know is the extent to which Sandys' rejection of air defence and civil defence was supported by expert opinion in the public sphere. There must have been equivalents of the 1930s air prophets writing books and articles declaring that the day of the aeroplane was over, and that there was no defence against the Bomb. But the contours of the literature are less familiar to me, and the obvious parallels with the 1930s could be misleading. For one thing I'm sure that American military intellectuals were much more influential now than they had been before the war. And for another, after Hiroshima and Bikini only the delusional could discount the terrible power of nuclear weapons. There was still plenty of room for guesswork in the calculations, but it was a question of the difference between total destruction and almost-total destruction. So, whereas in 1939 a local government like Finsbury might want a comprehensive shelter system to protect its citizens against bombing; in the 1950s Coventry and St Pancras controversially rejected civil defence entirely as a pointless waste of money. Still, things like CND and world federalism do seem like throwbacks to the 1930s, if now with an added sense of urgency. What about militarist alternatives, though? Was the nuclear deterrent the only positive proposal for adaptation to the new era? I don't know.

The problem was basing Britain's entire defence posture on the theory of a nuclear knock-out blow meant it was less able to respond to less extreme but perhaps more plausible threats. Sandys argued that if British conventional forces turned out to be insufficient in a time of war, then tactical nuclear weapons could be used without risk of escalation into an all-out nuclear exchange. Well, perhaps they could have been, but he was lucky this idea was never put to the test (as were many other people, come to think of it). This is the problem with potential revolutions in military affairs. What if P. R. C. Groves had managed in the 1920s to convince the British government to base its air defence on a big fleet of airliners? What if the World Disarmament Conference had led to an international (or at least European) air force in the mid-1930s? Or, for that matter, if air forces were to convert to combat drones in the near future? It's risky to turn the dreams of experts into reality. In 1957, though, I can see why Sandys thought the risk had to be run.

Further reading: G. C. Peden, Arms, Economics and British Strategy: From Dreadnoughts to Hydrogen Bombs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), chapter 6; Matthew Grant, 'Home defence and the Sandys Defence White Paper, 1957', Journal of Strategic Studies 31 (2008), 925-49.

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

The new Military History Carnival has been posted at Wig-Wags. One of the featured posts, The state of strategy at Kings of War -- which looks at the great strategic thinkers of history and wonders why there seem to have been relatively few in recent times -- inspired the above title. It's posed as a question, not a statement ('Why I don't care about strategy') because I'm not sure that my not caring is a good thing for a military historian, especially since I do deal with strategic thought in my work on early twentieth-century airpower. But I find myself uninterested in the eternal principles of strategy, or how to win the war in Afghanistan, or whether China will replace the United States as the world's superpower, or whether Clausewitz was right or Douhet (or vice versa, or neither or both). Or at least, I find some of these things interesting sometimes, but as somebody who lives on this planet, not as an historian.

When I first started researching my area, two of the first books I read were George Quester's Deterrence Before Hiroshima and Robin Higham's The Military Intellectuals in Britain, and I still find the latter especially useful. As it happens, both books were published in 1966, and both reflect their Cold War context very deeply. Both Quester and Higham were concerned to use their studies of the interwar fear of the bomber to draw conclusions for military thinkers in their own day. To some extent this distorted their analysis: they were much more interested in those ideas and events which seemed to parallel the development of nuclear strategy, rejecting those which did not as wrong or just uninteresting. So I think I am wary of indulging in a similar presentism. (Not that I have a gift for it.)

But is this realistic, sensible, or even defensible? Isn't part of the point of history to learn from it? Conversely, isn't it possible that I could learn something about history by studying the present day? Professionally speaking, aren't there possible gains for a military historian in fostering closer contact with those creating the military history of the future (applied military history, perhaps)? Is this simply a distaste for the reality at the core of my study -- killing, dying, suffering? Do historians of crime similarly distance themselves from their closest present-day analogues (criminologists)? Labour historians? Gender historians? Or maybe it's just me?