Like Gaul and probably some other things, my mystery aeroplanes paper will be divided into three parts:

1. An overview of the 1918 Australian mystery aeroplane scare itself.
2. The immediate historical context which helps explain the scare, namely the threats from German raiders and of Allied defeat.
3. The bigger picture into which the scare fits, namely other mystery aircraft waves before and since, in Australia and elsewhere.

That's a fair bit to do in limited space (the paper is 20 minutes long with 10 minutes for questions; the formal version no more than 8000 words including references) so I need to have a thorough understanding of my material: what is essential and needs to be included and what is not-essential and should be left out.

So what material do I have? There are next to no secondary sources on the scare that I'm aware of, apart from passing references; conversely, the great majority of my primary sources relate to it. I first came across the scare in Australian and New Zealand newspapers from March-April 1918, and that is certainly a key aspect as I'll be arguing that press reports of mystery aeroplanes themselves helped to propagate the wave of sightings. I'll probably have another look through Trove to see if there's anything I've missed or has been digitised since I last looked. Really, though, I've already got enough here to work with.

But the press reports are only the tip of the iceberg. I've looked through domestic military intelligence files on 'Reports of suspicious aeroplanes, lights etc' held by the National Archives of Australia and these include very many more mystery aeroplane reports than were ever reported in the press. (Including Smithy's sighting.) A hand-written index, which looks like it was compiled by 3rd Military District (i.e. Victoria) late in the scare, in NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/66 lists 152 nationwide for the whole war. Of these, 135 took place in 1918 (the majority in March and April but with a substantial number in May and June and only gradually tailing off towards the Armistice) and of these, 91 were from Victoria. (Expect more statistics in future posts.) The files themselves consist of letters from concerned citizens reporting their sightings, reports on local police investigations of sightings and suspects, press clippings (usually passed on from the censor), naval and military intelligence analyses, and copies of official correspondence regarding air-sea searches for raiders. There's also a separate file, NAA: MP367/1, 512/3/1319, which has reports just from 2nd Military District (i.e. NSW). I haven't compared this with NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/66 yet but it looks like it has some sightings which didn't make it to the master file. Not that it's necessary to get every last detail down, of course. The big picture is more important.

That brings me to the contextual section of the talk/paper. In terms of primary sources, the newspapers and military intelligence files give excellent clues as to how the mystery aeroplanes were interpreted (i.e. as German aircraft operating from raiders off the coast or from inland locations). I would also like to have a look at any NAA files from the Council of Defence (roughly the equivalent of the Committee of Imperial Defence in Britain) to see if it discussed the mystery aircraft and raider threat. But at this point I need to also need to dig into the secondary literature, so I can understand the Australian political and social context. Especially since Australian history is not my thing! So for example I'm currently reading John McQuilton's Rural Australia and the Great War: From Tarrawingee to Tangambalanga (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2011), which I'm finding very useful (though unfortunately the region of Victoria it focuses on seems to have missed out on mystery aeroplanes!) Of course, there is plenty of work I can tap into on the military and naval situation, so that's fine.

The third part is in some ways the trickiest. I want to tie this scare into mystery aircraft scares in other countries (as well as invasion and spy scares). But if I'm not expert in Australian history, still less am I expert in American, New Zealand, Canadian, South African, Russian, Romanian, Norwegian, Swedish... There is some excellent work on national airmindedness to draw upon, that's no problem; but unfortunately good, academic secondary sources on the scares themselves are scarce (I hope this is just my ignorance speaking but I fear not). There are some for the 1909 and 1913 British phantom airship waves; a couple of articles on the 1897 mystery airship wave in America. The other scares I know of don't rate even that much, apart from discussions in ufological and sceptical literature. I could cite some primary sources, particularly where English is the relevant language; but for this type of comparative work (and given the word limit) having access to reliable surveys would be much better. I'll seek out secondary literature but fear I will have to resort to some primary sources here, at least to show that these scares happened. I may well end up focusing on the British parallels, as it's what I know best and seems to be the best documented, and just gesture towards the other scares. I can't do everything in this paper, after all!

My abstract for the Australian Historical Association's 31st Annual Conference, to be held in Adelaide this July, has been accepted. The title and abstract are as follows:

Dreaming war: airmindedness and the Australian defence panic of 1918

Between March and June 1918, Australian newspapers, police forces and military intelligence units were deluged with hundreds of reports of mysterious aeroplanes. They were seen in every state, mostly at night, by men and women, young and old, civilians and soldiers. As there were only a tiny number of aircraft operating in Australia, the sightings were presumed to be German aircraft, perhaps flown from unknown merchant raiders operating in Australian waters or by foreign spies working against Australia. The reports were taken seriously, but investigations by the authorities eventually found nothing to substantiate them. The mystery aeroplanes were phantoms.

Australia had been at war for more than three years. But it was a nation both divided and defenceless. It had gone through two bitterly-fought conscription referenda, and appeared to be threatened from within by immigrants, the Irish and the Wobblies. The vast majority of its military forces were deployed overseas, with little more than poorly-equipped training cadres remaining at home. In March 1918, newspapers carried reports that the German merchant cruiser Wolf, which had been raiding Australian waters the previous year, had flown its seaplane over Sydney unopposed and undetected. A few days later, Germany's Spring Offensive opened, nearly breaking the Allied lines for the first time since 1914. The mystery aeroplanes resulted from a new perception that Australia was directly threatened and that the war could be lost.

In this paper I will discuss what this previously obscure episode reveals about the state of mind of the Australian people after nearly four years of total war. I will compare it with other mystery aircraft panics which preceded and followed it, both in Australia and elsewhere. Finally, I will explore what these transnational phenomena tell us about early airmindedness, or the cultural responses to the coming of flight.

Much more briefly, I'll be looking at the 1918 Australian mystery aircraft scare and trying to place it into the context of what was happening at the time, both domestically and overseas, and using it as a case study to probe mystery aircraft panics more generally and what they say about airmindedness. This is the next phase of my grand plan, i.e. blog -> talk -> publish. I've already blogged about this topic a number of times; expect to see a good deal more about it over the next couple of months.

This is good/exciting and bad/scary for a number of reasons. It's good/exciting because it's the first time I'll be talking (and hopefully publishing) about mystery aircraft, despite it being a major research obsession of mine for more than a decade now. Ditto for airmindedness, despite the name of this blog. It's also good/exciting because I've been awarded an AHA/CAL Travel and Writing Bursary, which includes entry into a workshop and mentoring programme. Which is also bad/scary: that means that instead of writing my paper the night before, as is the time-honoured tradition, I have to have written a formal version two weeks beforehand. So I'm going to be busy. And the other bad/scary thing is: I'm doing Australian history! I must be crazy.

An article of mine has been accepted for publication in the September 2012 issue of the Australian Journal of Politics and History, to be entitled '"Bomb back, and bomb hard": debating reprisals during the Blitz'. I'm very pleased with this for a number of reasons. Firstly, it's been a while since I last had an article pass peer-review (and not for lack of trying either). Things were starting to look a bit lean; but now I'll have something published each year since finishing my PhD, which is not too bad a rate. Secondly, it was an invited submission for a special issue resulting from the AAEH conference in Perth last year. That's nice because it's an honour to be asked (I'll have more details on the other AAEH articles when the publication date comes around), but also because the humanities conferences are rarely published (unlike in the sciences, though there conference proceedings are not usually peer-reviewed as this one is) so it's rare to get a publication out of a talk so directly.

Finally, I think this shows the way ahead for me, assuming I continue in my current mode as an independent (slash alt-ac) historian. That is, in part, through Airminded. The initial inspiration for my AAEH paper came through post-blogging the Blitz; I worked through much of the evidence and issues here in a series of posts on various aspects of the reprisals debate. Then I presented the paper in Perth; and now I'll have an article in AJPH. Without the goal of a PhD (or a grant) to drive towards, having a process like this seems like a good way of keeping some focus and producing publishable research -- rather than just ambling along with the blog and drifting into unseriousness. Of course, there will always be unserious ambling here, and the drift will probably happen eventually; but if I can repeat this process a few times (i.e. posts to paper to article) I can hopefully keep myself at least theoretically employable for a few years more. And in fact I've already started on the next iteration, the topic of which is probably easy to guess for those paying attention! Watch this space.

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Just a brief note on a conference I attended earlier this week at Monash University, 'The Pacific War 1941-45: Heritage, Legacies & Culture'. I wasn't presenting, just listening; in fact I only decided to go at the very last minute, mainly on the basis that it seemed silly not to given that it was held in my own town!

And I'm glad I did go. Although the area is just outside my own (same war, different theatre) there were plenty of interesting comparisons and contrasts to be made. For example, there was a paper by Jan McLeod (Newcastle) analysing one air raid, the Japanese bombing of an Australian army hospital at Soputa in Papua in 1942. The following year the incident was studied by a retired judge to see if it should be referred to the United Nations Commission for the Investigation of War Crimes. Despite understandably heated emotions, it was decided not to since the hospital was situated right next to a valid target, 7th Division HQ, and a road carrying supplies to forward areas went straight past it. Now I want to know if anyone in Britain debated referring the Blitz or portions thereof to the Commission. (Goering was tried at Nuremberg, of course, but the tribunal's judgement makes no reference to aerial bombardment at all, save his threat to Hacha in May 1939 to bomb Prague if Czechoslovakia resisted German occupation.) Richard Waterhouse (Sydney) gave an overview of his research into the mood in Australia in the months following the start of the Japanese offensive. Initially it was fairly complacent thanks to the confidence in Fortress Singapore, but as the Japanese advance began to seem irresistible and the prospect of bombing and invasion opened up, signs panic began to appear. In fact, what he described reminded me very much of the Sudeten crisis in Britain a few years before: people fleeing the cities, trenches being dug in public spaces. Maybe somebody needs to look at such panics from a transnational perspective...

As always, one of the best things about going to conferences is being able to put faces to names, such as Ken Inglis and Joan Beaumont (ANU): big names in Australian military history. (I found Joan's talk, on Thai memorialisation of the Thai-Burma railway, one of the most interesting of the conference.) I'd already met Jay Winter (Yale) -- not that he'd remember me! -- at Exeter; he was very kind about my book news. And of course it's good to meet other 'early career researchers', as the official jargon goes here in Australia (shout out to Elizabeth Roberts, Lachlan Grant, and Adrian Threlfall goes here). It's starting to feel a bit odd though, turning up to conferences and having to explain to everyone I talk to that I'm an independent historian (and looking for work... slightly hysterical laugh goes here); I always seem to be the only one doing that, except for people at the other end of their careers, who have retired but are still researching and writing. It's just me, nobody made me feel in the slightest unwelcome, but I worry about it.

To get back to the history: the conference wasn't only about memory, but that seemed to me to be the largest thread running through it. My sense is that Australian historians are as interested in the memory of war as their British counterparts, but have perhaps been more interested in official forms of memory such as war memorials. (Aside from Jay's keynote, for example, there wasn't anything on films; though I was pleased to hear Paula Hamilton (UTS) in her own keynote mention the importance now of computer games in forming ideas about war.) And of course we remember different things here: POW means Changi not Colditz; Janet Watson's (Connecticut) keynote showed that V-J day commemorations in Britain in 1985 and 1995 were very much tacked on to V-E day ones, and in fact barely discussed at all due to the difficult issues involved; in Australia we tend to ignore our role in the war against Germany and Italy and focus on the one against Japan, meaning that Kokoda comes to rival Gallipoli and subjects like Australian participation in area bombing are completely ignored (as Bruce Scates (Monash) noted in passing -- it's not just me!) The upcoming series of 70th anniversaries will be very interesting to watch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

So the XXII Biennial Australasian Association for European History Conference is over, and I must say it's the best conference I've been to, for a number of reasons. It was well-organised, despite some added difficulties such as being jointly hosted by and held at two universities, the University of Western Australia and Murdoch University. That's easy to gloss over but some conferences don't manage to rise to the occasion. The locations were pretty, both the campuses and the city (though it was rainy on the first day, it would probably be unfair to blame the organisers for that). And the food provided at the session breaks was scrumptious.

Oh yes, the history! Two parallel sessions running over four days, so there was a lot of history to be had. The talks were excellent, and the conference theme -- 'War and Peace, Barbarism and Civilisation in Modern Europe and its Empires' -- came through strongly. Because I rather shamefully didn't livetweet the conference, I'll note here some of the papers which interested me for one reason or another. (Any errors are my own.)

Giuseppe Finaldi's (UWA) paper was entitled 'The Italian conquest of Libya one hundred years on', and by way of introduction he discussed Italy's pioneering use of bombing in 1911! That was a nice way for an aviation to slip into the first session of a conference. But there were other aviation links too. Lee Kersten (Adelaide) delved into the University of Adelaide's archives and one of the gems she came up with was a 1916 letter from Sir Douglas Mawson, the Antarctic explorer, to Adelaide's Registrar. It included Mawson's thoughts after experiencing a Zeppelin raid:

I was in London for the two big air raids when Zepellins [sic] were destroyed. There was really very little damage at all and the German stories were ludicrously untrue. It is certain that that class of craft will never compete with the aeroplane.

Can't argue with him there, really. James Curry (UWA) examined the Wehrmacht's legacy in the US Army (at least up until the 1990s), in the form of air-land battle doctrine (a blitzkrieg by any other name...). Anne Matters (Flinders) didn't mention airpower, but I found her discussion of Britain's Mesopotamia policy in 1915-21 illuminating: as War Minister, Churchill wanted to withdraw the Army from outlying regions of Iraq (but was vetoed by the Foreign Office for reasons of prestige) well before Trenchard came along with his air control idea. Reto Hofmann's (Columbia) talk on Japanese views of the Abyssinian War (at first sympathising with Abyssinia due to a shared status as non-European empires, then swinging towards Italy for reasons of realpolitik) was most interesting to me for the concern shown by the Japanese public over the Italian use of gas against Abyssinians. And finally, I'm not even sure if Andrew Webster (Murdoch) spoke about aviation in his talk entitled 'Towards a new history of the League of Nations', as I sadly decided to go to the other session; but as he's written on France and the international air force idea, he deserves a shout-out here!

To other topics. Omer Bartov's (Brown) paper used the experiences of a small town in Galicia during the First World War as a way to examine the role of violence in ethnically-mixed communities; hopefully the prelude to a book. Iva Glisic (UWA) was fascinating on Futurists in the Russian Civil War: unlike in their Italian homeland where they were associated with Fascism, in Russia Futurists were committed to the Bolsheviks. Robert Gerwarth (University College, Dublin) gave an overview of a big project project he's running examining paramilitary violence in Europe after the First World War (it's not just the Freikorps!). Elizabeth Roberts (Western Sydney) examined Second World War debates within the British psychiatric and medical professions about the effects of war on military personnel, still a surprisingly under-researched topic compared with the First World War. And John Dickie (University College, London) offered an entertaining examination of 'the origins of the ‘ndrangheta, the mafia of Calabria', in his view influenced by revolutionary freemasons in Italian prisons.

Some of the papers addressed big questions. William Mulligan (University College, Dublin) asked if the traditional view of a militarised Europe permanently on the brink of war needs revising. Jan Rueger (Birkbeck) asked if the revision of the traditional view of an Anglo-German antagonism needs revising. And Maartje Abbenhuis (Auckland) proposed that 19th century neutrality needs to be recognised as a great-power tactic and a normal one, rather than the outlier it seems to be from the perspective of the 20th century.

My own paper (sandwiched between James Curry's, noted above, and Patrick Major (Reading), who looked at the representation of German, particularly soldiers, in the Second World War) passed off okay, I think. I didn't have a chance at a run-through beforehand, which I needed. But on the other hand I largely spoke off the cuff, which I'm not much chop at, and yet it seems that the audience understood me -- or at least so I gather from the questions after the talk and discussions later in the conference. Now to write it up for publication.

And so, to the future. There was some disquiet about the prospects for European history in Australia (and those of us hailing from Melbourne did not help). Our host, the renowned Italian historian Richard Bosworth, marked his retirement from UWA with this conference (attendees Dick Geary from Nottingham and John MacKenzie from Lancaster, both AAEH stalwarts, also retired recently). But on the strength of the papers presented here -- with more than a little help from our overseas friends! -- I think we'll do okay. The breadth of intellectual endeavour on display was inspiring, and reminded me of all the good things academia still has to offer. Roll on AAEH XXIII, Wellington 2013!

Since my AAEH talk is in four days, I'd better start actually putting the pieces I've scattered over this blog together into something (ideally) coherent which can be presented in 20 minutes (with 10 for questions). So here's a stab at a plan:

1. First thing is to explain what I'm talking about: the public debate about reprisal bombing of German cities during (and for) the Blitz, especially September and October 1940. A definition of reprisals would be useful here; here's a contemporary one from A. L. Goodhart, What Acts of War are Justifiable? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 25:
   

   The essence of reprisals is that if one belligerent deliberately violates the accepted rules of warfare then the other belligerent, for the sake of protecting himself, may resort by way of retaliation to measures which, in ordinary circumstances, would be illegal.

   That's a legal definition; it excludes the desire for mere revenge as illegitimate, but of course this was an important motivation for many.

2. Next comes the problem: I will discuss the existing historiography on the reprisals debate, showing that the consensus is that the British people did not demand reprisals, and those who did weren't the ones who were bombed. (Only Mark Connelly differs on this point to any substantial degree.) I think this is wrong; in fact the desire for reprisals predominated at least among those who cared enough to voice their opinion, and possibly among the population as a whole, if only slightly.
3. Now on to the first of the important bits: the shape of the reprisals debate. I'll discuss the two major axes of opinion: morality and effectiveness, and give some examples. I'll also point to an important subset of the reprisals demand, reprisals after notice. And I will show that the near-universal assumption was that Bomber Command was capable of carrying out precise and devastating air raids.
4. The second of the important bits: assessing how popular the demand for reprisals actually was. Here I will discuss the BIPO opinion poll data, letters to the editor, and hearsay, setting these in the context of the editorial positions of the newspapers concerned. These lines of evidence all point towards public opinion being in favour of reprisals.
5. Now to explain it all, largely in terms of pre-war ideas (which wartime reporting had done little to change by this point), with reference to the previous war, the knock-out blow theory, the bomber will always get through and air control. Essentially, the pre-war belief in the power of the bomber was the reason why there was a debate about reprisals at all; if it had been realised just how weak Bomber Command really was the question would not have arisen.
6. Finally, to sum up: overall the British people, I believe, did want reprisal bombing during the Blitz. Any questions?

I'm giving a talk at the XXII Biennial Conference of the Australasian Association for European History, being held in Perth this July. It's a big conference with some big names (e.g. Omer Bartov, Richard Bosworth, John MacKenzie), and there's an appropriately big theme: 'War and Peace, Barbarism and Civilisation in Modern Europe and its Empires'. My talk will be about the reprisals debate in Britain during the Blitz. Here's the original title and abstract:

'Bomb back and bomb hard': A myth of the Blitz

In Britain, popular memory of the Blitz celebrates civilian resistance to the German bombing of London and other cities, emphasising positive values such as stoicism, humour and mutual aid. This 'Blitz spirit' is still called to mind during times of national crisis, for example in response to the July 2005 terrorist bombings in London.

But the memory of such passive and defensive traits obscures the degree to which British civilian morale in 1940 and 1941 depended on the belief that if Britain had to 'take it', then Germany was taking it as hard or even harder. As the Blitz mounted in intensity, Home Intelligence reports and newspaper letter columns featured calls for heavier reprisals against German cities. Propaganda, official and unofficial, responded by skirting a fine distinction between reporting the supposedly heavy bombardment of strictly military targets in urban areas and gloating over the imagined suffering of German civilians. That the RAF's bombing efforts over Germany at this time were in fact wildly inaccurate and largely ineffective is beside the point: nobody in Britain was aware of this yet.

In this paper I will try to restore a sense of these forgotten aspects of the 'Blitz spirit', and attempt to locate their origins in pre-war attitudes to police bombing in British colonies and mandates, and in reactions the predicted knock-out blow from the air which dominated popular perceptions of the next war in the 1920s and 1930s.

A more recent and abbreviated version:

'Bomb back and bomb hard': the reprisals debate during the Blitz

It is often argued that there was little enthusiasm in Britain for reprisals against German cities in retaliation for the Blitz, unlike the First World War. There was in fact a serious contemporary debate about whether enemy civilians could or should be targets of bombing, which I will show derived from the prewar and wartime public understanding of the potential and proper use of airpower.

As these perhaps show, my thinking on the reprisals question is changing a bit, which is not surprising since I'm still researching it. What I plan to do over the next few weeks is to do some of my thinking out loud by way of blogging -- appropriately, since I became interested in this topic while post-blogging the Blitz. So watch this space!

So, THATCamp Melbourne is over. It was pretty much as I expected, which is to say it was excellent. I'm not going to write a conference report (you should have been following #thatcamp on Twitter for that!) but two sessions did give me ideas for digital history projects I might like to do. One day. If I get the time.

One came out of the unofficial API Tim Sherratt reverse-engineered for Trove Newspapers. (Why the National Library of Australia won't release an official API is a bit mysterious.) He uses that to scrape Trove to do searches and display results which aren't possible with the interface offered by the NLA, such as plotting the frequency of Australian vs British/Briton. Are there any publicly accessible datasets which I use which could benefit from the same treatment? Yes, there are. The first one I thought of was the Flight archive, which is a great resource burdened with a limited interface. (But it's fantastic that it exists at all: Flightglobal is a commercial operation and they didn't need to open up their back issues like this at all, if they didn't want to.) I think this is easily doable. A second one is much more ambitious: The National Archives catalogue. It's frustrating that you can't do keyword search across their digitised collections; all you can do is search the descriptions in the catalogue, and these are by their nature limited. A scraper would help here. But the problem there is that you can't download documents directly, even when they are free; you have to add to a 'shopping cart', pay £0.00 for it and wait for an email to arrive. Possibly this could be automated; possibly not.

The other idea I had was to use SahulTime (or its eventual successor, possibly called TemporalEarth) to display the British scareship waves. SahulTime is something like Google Earth, but it allows you to map events/documents/people/objects in time as well as space. Matthew Coller, the developer, originally devised it to represent archaeological data on migration into Australia across the ice-age land bridge, but it is just as useful for historical data. So I could use this to show when and where the scareships were seen, showing how the waves started and evolved, with links to the primary sources. SahulTime is also good at displaying uncertainty in time, which is helpful where I have only vague information about when a sighting happened. The same could be done for uncertainty in space, though that's a bit trickier conceptually.

One day... if I get the time...

Later this week I'm going to THATCamp Melbourne. What's THATCamp, you ask? THATCamp stands for The Humanities and Technology Camp. It's an unconference devoted to exploring the ways in which the humanities and digital technology can work together. It is informal and collegial: attendees vote on the programme on the first morning. It's practical and hands-on: digital projects are often started during the camp, or tools written, or software installed. The first THATCamp was held at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University in Virginia in 2008; last year there were 17 held around the world, including one in Canberra. Melbourne's is being held at the University of Melbourne, where I work and near where I live, so it would be hard to justify not going!

But the truth is that I did have qualms, because I don't consider myself a digital historian. Sure, there's the blog. But that's about communication, not research; and research comes first. And apart from using digitised sources where possible, my research methods are quite traditional. I find sources, I read them, I compare them, I draw conclusions, and so on. I imagine Gibbon did much the same.

In some ways, this is surprising. In my day job I work in systems administration and IT support, so it's not like I don't know my way around computers. And before history, I studied astrophysics, which has long used digital technology as an integral part of its methods. Indeed, about the first thing you do when you start out learning how to do astrophysical research is to become familiar with the analysis software you'll be using. And my masters project was entirely computational: I wrote, tested and debugged code. (Written in Fortran 77, no less!) So I'm sure that, when I came to do my PhD, I could have handled a project which was much more digital and less traditional in its approach if I'd wanted to.

But that's the thing: I didn't want to. Why leave a career in IT for one in history (and I still hope that will happen) and do the same kind of thing, just for a different end? Fiddle around with Apache installs, write justifications for storage arrays, think about database structures. That's what I want to get away from. What I want to do is read old books, uncover forgotten ideas, meet interesting (albeit usually dead) people. (And tell the world about it, which is where blogging comes in.) I would guess that most historians have similar motivations. And that's the problem for digital history. The types of people who are attracted to doing history are not likely to be attracted to doing digital history. (I have similar reservations about Anthony Grafton's recent call for more collaboration between historians, in emulation of the sciences. We tend to play better alone.)

This is not because digital history has no value: it clearly has vast potential. But at the moment it still belongs to the hackers, those who enjoy creating visualisation tools and XML datasets. It won't realise its potential until every historian is a digital historian, and that won't happen until doing digital history is as natural and painless as... well, as natural and painless as doing traditional history is, anyway. The technology needs to adapt itself to the users, in other words, not the other way around. Well, in reality both will happen; but we aren't there yet.

That said, I'm still excited to be going to THATCamp, and to seeing all the cool ideas and smart people. And I do hope to get more involved in digital history myself, rather than maintaining my current watching brief. But you can understand why I haven't come up with a cool session idea of my own. Or perhaps you can't? Am I being too cautious, too reactionary, too -- dare I say it -- Luddite?