Admittedly, not very much!

I’m giving a talk at 4pm, next Friday, 16 May 2008, in the Fritz Loewe Theatre at the School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne. The title is “Facing Armageddon: Britain and the Bomber, 1908-1941″ and it will be a broad overview of my thesis topic. It should be fun, for me at least — it’s the department where I’ve worked for many years as the IT manager, so it will nice (and perhaps challenging) to try to explain to all the geologists and climatologists exactly what it is I’ve been doing these past few years. Thanks to Malek Ghantous of the Earth Sciences Postgraduate Group for the invite and for organising this — it’s the first, and quite possibly the last, time a poster has been made to advertise a talk I’ve given!

If anybody local has nothing better to do on a Friday afternoon, you’re more than welcome to attend the talk (and enjoy the refreshments afterwards). Perhaps just drop me a line first, though, so we can anticipate any massive surge of interest (ha!) There’s a map showing where Earth Sciences is after the jump. (The lecture theatre is on the 2nd floor, right near the main entrance, just past the disused theremin/mural …)


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I’ll be giving a talk entitled “From Darfur to London: P. R. C. Groves and the construction of aerial apocalypse, 1916-1922”, at the Australian Historical Association’s Biennial Conference, Locating History, 7-10 July 2008, which is conveniently being held at the University of Melbourne. Here’s the abstract:

The idea that cities could be shattered and wars won by aerial bombardment in a so-called ‘knock-out blow’ was embryonic before the Great War. After the war, such exaggerated theories became an orthodoxy among airpower theorists and, by the 1930s, among the wider British public — an important factor underlying support for pacifism, appeasement and collective security up to the Munich crisis. But the war itself was crucial to both the formulation and the propagation of the theory of the knock-out blow.

Most responsible for promoting this idea of the knock-out blow to a wider audience was General P. R. C. Groves, a veteran of both aerial and bureaucratic warfare: the British equivalent of Douhet and Mitchell. Convinced that Britain’s air defences were being dangerously neglected, he retired from the RAF in 1922 and waged a highly-visible press campaign on the issue. In so doing, Groves relied upon and popularised the theory of the knock-out blow, drawing on his experiences in using airpower against rebellion in Darfur, in trying to win the war in France, and in trying to suppress a German resurgence after 1918 — and thereby, ironically, complicated the task of dealing with Germany after 1933.

I wrote that a few months ago, and some of it strikes me as a bit strange now, but I doubt that anyone is going to be tracking how rigorously I adhere to my abstract!

I’m currently slated to talk just after lunch on the first day. I’ve never been before, but it must be Australia’s biggest history conference, with twelve parallel streams. One of these is a war and society-type stream, so I should be right — although the title that’s intriguing me the most is from one of the others: Erin Ihde’s “Do Not Panic: Hawkwind, the Cold War and ‘the Imagination of Disaster’”! I see that fellow bloggers Megan Sheehy and Melissa Bellanta will be giving papers too.

Should be fun.

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On Friday, I went along to a talk on “Great War aerial photography: a source for battlefield survey and archaeology?”, given by Birger Stichelbaut of Ghent University in Belgium. This brings the total number of in-any-way-related-to-early-20th-century-aviation talks given at the University of Melbourne during my PhD candidacy (as far as I know and excluding a couple I’ve given) to one (1). And even this was archaeological and not historical; but it kept me awake even at the quite indecent hour of 10am, so you know it must have been good!

The basic idea is to use aerial photographs of the Western Front trench system, taken over Flanders during the war itself, to help plan battlefield excavations. The main value of this is that they are more useful than contemporary trench maps, which didn’t always show every feature and also aren’t as accurate when it comes to pinpointing the location of features (to within ~30m, compared with ~10m for aerial photographs). And all sorts of things show up: the different kinds of trenches, gun emplacements, pillboxes, and so on (as well as many remnants from much longer ago). Of course, it’s not quite as simple as poring over a bunch of old photos: the full panoply of GIS techniques (photo stitching, orthorectification, georeferencing, DEM overlays, stereo pairs) are used to make sense of them and match them up to present-day photographs and other data. Most of the trenches are no longer extant, apparently, at least in Belgium, so this sort of thing would be of great benefit to projects like Plugstreet. The same techniques could also be used in other theatres and wars where trenches and aerial photographs coexist, though its utility also depends on the soil type and other factors (Gallipoli was deemed unlikely to be suitable, though I didn’t catch the reason). One interesting point: magnetic aerial surveys don’t help with determining where trenches are, because of the sheer mass of metal lying all over the battlefield.

Of course, I was mostly there to gawk at the stunning photos (the one above, from Rosebud’s WWI and Early Aviation Image Archive, really doesn’t do them justice. That’s an FE.8, incidentally). At the start of the war, they were taken on an amateur basis, with a camera stuck over the side of the aeroplane; by the end, specialised cameras with long focal lengths had been developed, so that photographs could be taken from altitudes safe from anti-aircraft and ground fire. Stichelbaut has many thousands of these images, gathered from various archives around the world. Interestingly (and unfortunately) most of his German photos were found in the archives of the former Bavarian army, since those taken by virtually all the other German armies were destroyed in the Second World War. He showed a map of the European distribution of where the German photos were taken; all fronts were covered to some degree, but the vast majority were in the northern part of the Western Front (i.e., where the Bavarian army was). There were some which rather oddly appeared to be of somewhere in the south of France, hundreds of miles from the front, but these hadn’t been checked yet and were probably due to the French habit of reusing the names of their villages!

I would have liked more details about how all this work has actually been used. One interesting snippet was the difference between German cemeteries and Allied ones. From 1915 the Germans constructed elaborate cemeteries for their war dead, not far from the front lines (close enough to turn up in photoreconaissance, at least). These show up very clearly in the photos, and there are no equivalents on the Allied side of the lines. But after the war, the German cemeteries were torn down, while the victorious Allies created their own funereal landscapes, which are so characteristic of that part of the world. Another snippet was the location of a Zeppelin shed near Ghent, I think Gontrode. Stichelbaut’s departmental host is actually from that village, and so now he knows why his grandparents’ windmill was knocked down by the Germans so the foundations could be used for an anti-aircraft emplacement! Although this was fortuitous, as one of the audience remarked it shows that there’s an opportunity to integrate the archaeology with social and local histories. But these were the only hints of applications of the project beyond its uses for trench (re)digging.

Something I should have asked was, is the data going to made available to the public in any way? There are obvious possibilities for Google Earth layers and the like. Of course, I don’t know who funded the work and there may well be copyright issues involved too. I assumed that such a technologically sophisticated project would have an equally sophisticated website, but I can’t find one at all, beyond a brief mention — at least not in English. But if you’ve got access to Antiquity, you can read Stichelbaut’s paper describing the project.

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

Cranwell is a RAF base in Lincolnshire (not far from Newark or Grantham, or Lincoln for that matter). It was first established as a RNAS training station in 1915, and sortied the odd anti-zepp patrol in the next few years. In the 1930s, Frank Whittle did much of his work on jet engines here; indeed, the first flight of the Gloster E.28/39, on 15 May 1941, was from Cranwell. But it is best known as the home of the RAF’s officer training college, RAF College Cranwell (but usually called Cranwell, just to confuse things). The College was founded in 1919, and the rather splendid College Hall, seen above, opened for business in 1934.

On 22 and 23 August 2007, I was fortunate to be able to attend a conference at Cranwell on the subject of “Air Power, Insurgency, and the ‘War on Terror’”. This was jointly hosted by the Air Power Studies Division of King’s College London, and by the RAF Centre for Air Power Studies (RAF CAPS), newly formed out of the Air Power Studies Division, Air Historical Branch, and Directorate of Defence Studies. The purpose of RAF CAPS is described as follows:

The Centre aspires to strengthen the relationship between academia and the RAF and to utilise the enhanced collaboration to develop and stimulate thinking about air power in both areas, as well as more broadly throughout the United Kingdom. The RAF CAPS is ideally placed to enhance the RAF’s current and future operational effectiveness by improving the ability of the Service to apply lessons from the past to both the present and the future.

This is a very worthwhile endeavour, and I wish RAF CAPS every success. They’ve made a good start with their website: there’s a page for job listings, a link to Air Power Review (which they are now responsible for), and even a space for a blog, though it’s currently empty.

Staying on a RAF base for a night was a novel experience. In fact even before I got onto the base, I sat behind an Air Chief Marshal (retired) on the bus, which was stopped at the gates by a young woman with a very big gun. But I’m too much of a civilian to have enjoyed even the minimal restrictions I had to observe as a guest (I’ve already mentioned the tie thing) — I never would have made it in the military!

That’s the lawn in front of College Hall; you could land a 504K on that … quite possibly the intention!

The conference itself was of a high standard. Its purpose was to examine the role played by airpower in past counter-insurgency operations and to try to draw lessons for current and future wars. So, the papers were a mix of historical case studies, reports on operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and broader overviews — more war studies than history. Of course, the historical papers were of most direct interest to me, particularly those dealing with RAF air control policies: Group Captain Neville Parton’s “Air power and insurgency: early RAF doctrine” (which showed the evolution of air control doctrine, and made the very good point that unlike strategic bombing, air control operations constituted the RAF’s concrete experience of bombing in the interwar period) and Air Vice-Marshal Peter Dye’s “Royal Air Force operations in southwest Arabia 1917-1967″ (fascinating to see the continuities over such a long period, but also how political changes, both international and local, made air control policies more difficult to sustain). Probably the most enjoyable papers were some of those on operations I knew little about: for example, Richard Grossman’s “‘Looks suspicious’: the U.S. Marines’ air campaign against the Sandino insurgents of Nicaragua, 1927-1933′ (a real eye-opener: poor intelligence and little understanding of the cultural context often led to bombing of civilians with no connection to the insurgents, which oddly enough was counterproductive), or David Jordan’s “Air power in urban insurgencies: the battles of Surabaya and Fallujah” (in both cases good intelligence was gathered beforehand and drastically improved effectiveness). Of course, there was much on present-day operations too, and there were attempts by distinguished historians like James Corum and Philip Meilinger to draw more general principles about the application of airpower in the 21st century.

The participants were probably 70% military (mostly RAF, of course). I was impressed by the attentiveness of the senior officers (the Chief of Air Staff was in attendance) to the conclusions drawn by the various speakers: this conference was not for show, or a mere academic exercise, but a real attempt to learn from the successes and failures of the past. Nor were they only interested in learning how to destroy things more efficiently, or in a more discriminating fashion: there was much discussion of non-lethal uses of airpower, such as for reconnaissance or even just keeping the enemies’ heads down, restricting their mobility. (Which strikes me as a return to 1914 conceptions of airpower, in some ways.) Having said that, my favourite new phrase from the conference was undoubtedly “the kinetic effects of airpower”, meaning precisely the ability to destroy things from the air, using the awesome power of kinetic energy. As an ex-physicist, that’s a phrase I can get on board with!

Speaking of King’s and war studies, I’ve recently come across an excellent group blog called Kings of War, run by three KCL War Studies academics: David Betz, Theo Farrell and Patrick Porter. Only occasionally historical, but it’s still good clean fun.

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This week I attended the bi-annual departmental Work in Progress Day, where postgrads give talks on their research. I wasn’t presenting this time around (I did earlier this year) but it turns out that two of my fellow students are also fellow bloggers! (Which, as far as I know, makes a total of three for the department, including myself.)

One I knew about already, actually: David Llewellyn’s Australia Felix. He’s doing his PhD on the influence of utilitarianism in Australian political life — for example in the genesis of the Australian constitution. His paper, which is online, takes in Aeneas, Madame de Stael, Gallipoli, Chartism and of course Jeremy Bentham. By taking as a touchstone a novel by Henry Handel Richardson, it also gave me flashbacks to English lit in high school, where I was forced to read The Getting of Wisdom. Which in retrospect wasn’t a bad book, but at the time I had a very low tolerance for any novel without spaceships or elves in it, so a coming-of-age novel set in a private girls’ school didn’t exactly cut it! Do check out David’s website and blog though.

The other blog is Megan Sheehy’s History and Web 2.0. Her MA topic is on the use of Web 2.0 tools by Australian historians, and her paper was specifically about the use of YouTube. Megan also has a post about her talk, but even better (and rather recursively!) she has put a two-part video of it on YouTube (part one, part two).

Above is the first part: you can see me arriving late at -8:37, but it’s worth watching the rest of it too :)

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The week before last, I had the opportunity to present a talk about my PhD topic at an Open University summer school (cheers Chris!) It was the first time I’ve given a talk about the thesis as a whole and I think it went OK — I don’t know that I’m getting better as a public speaker but at least I’m not so nervous these days. But I had intended to show a scene from the 1936 science fiction classic, Things to Come (adapted by H. G. Wells from his own 1933 novel, The Shape of Things to Come). For once the technology worked; but I’d queued up the wrong scene on the DVD and so after a few attempts at finding the right part I gave up. But thanks to YouTube, here’s the scene the students didn’t get to see. It’s the air raid on Everytown on Christmas eve, 1940:

I think it’s very well done, and would have been very impressive on a big screen. For the small screen, there’s a new special edition DVD, which I must get around to buying …

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The title relates to both the content of a paper I gave yesterday at the School’s Work In Progress Day, and to my own state of mind beforehand! I think it went well, though — at least there was no rotten fruit thrown at the end! — which is good because it was the first real outing for my current chapter on defence panics. The deadly-dull paper title was “Moral panics, defence panics and the British air panic of 1934-5″, and here’s the abstract:

The sociological concept of moral panic was developed to describe and explain how societies react to internal threats to their values and interests, such as crime or deviant behaviour, with particular emphasis on the roles played by the media and expert opinion. In this paper I will argue that the reactions of a society to external, military threats — “defence panics” — can develop in essentially the same way as moral panics, and can be analysed using a similar framework. My main example will be drawn from the British air panic of 1934-5 over the threat of illegal German aerial rearmament.

For the record, these are the main defence panic candidates I’m interested in, some of which I’ve discussed here before:

• phantom airship scare, 1913
• Gotha raids on London, 1917
• “French” air menace, 1922
• Hamburg gas disaster, 1928
• German germ warfare experiments, 1934
• German air menace, 1934-5
• Guernica, 1937; Barcelona, 1938; Canton, 1938; Munich crisis, 1938
• the Blitz, 1940

I had a slide up with Airminded’s URL but stupidly forgot to actually mention it. So if anyone who heard my talk has managed to find their way here despite this, hello and well done! Amazingly, there was actually one student there who already reads Airminded — I was very chuffed to learn that reading it is less boring than working :) — but I quite rudely forgot to ask their name. If they or anyone else from the session would like to drop me a line, they can drop me a line here in the comments, or via the contact form. I’d like to hear from you!

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As I mentioned in the previous post I plan to attend some conferences while I’m overseas. The first is Air Power, Insurgency and the ‘War on Terror’ which is being held at Cranwell, the Royal Air Force College, on 22 and 23 August 2007. I submitted an abstract for this, which wasn’t accepted — which I don’t actually mind as it would have required a fair bit of research on topics I wouldn’t otherwise have done, no bad thing in itself but I don’t have the time at the moment! And it’s a very good programme anyway, with some top-notch names and several papers at least touching on British air control policies in the interwar period.

The second is Politics of Fear in the Cold War, to be held at the Hamburg Institute for Social Research (Hamburger Institut für Sozialforschung), 5-7 September. In many ways the era of the knock-out blow was just a foretaste of the atomic age, and the parallels between the two is a subject that fascinates me. No programme is available yet, in fact no information beyond the call for papers, but just from that alone it looks like a lot of fun.

So that’s the listening part … what about the talking? Well, I’m scheduled to give a talk at a summer school on war and society which is being held at Queen Mary, University of London from 30 July to 2 August. I can’t tell you the title of the summer school because I don’t know myself :) But I’ll be talking about my thesis as a whole. As part of my preparation for this, I’m giving a couple of presentations in my department — a Monday night postgraduate seminar on 21 May, which will also be a general overview, and a Work In Progress Day talk on 31 May, probably on defence panics. (That’s assuming I get around to letting the WIPD organisers know about this …)

Finally, an event which I sadly won’t be able to attend: Graffiti Day at Birkbeck College on 4 May (yes, this Friday). Paul Hodges, who kindly dropped me a line with some accommodation advice, will be giving a talk entitled “Written on the bomb: munitions graffiti of modern warfare” — things like this, I imagine. That’s the only item on the programme to do with military history, but the rest look interesting too, so if you’re in London this Friday and have the time, it might be worth turning up.

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30 Sqn D.H.9A at 9700 ft over Peri Magurum.

A friend has alerted me to a thread on the Something Awful forums (thanks, Mike!) One of the users has access to a collection of photos taken by an RAF sergeant who served with 30 Squadron in the early 1920s, which unfortunately looks like it is going to be sold and broken up. But luckily scans of them of them are being posted first, and there are some fantastic pictures of Iraq, Palestine and Egypt, many taken from the air, including several of an air raid carried out against a Kurdish town — air control in action! Naturally, I can’t resist posting some of the best ones here, but there are plenty more on the original thread, including the Holy Land, the Suez Canal, dusky maidens, scorpions, a cross-Africa flight from Cairo to Nigeria, and the promise of more to come. I’ve had to shrink these to fit them onto the page, so click on them to see the full-size version.

This is the Khadimain Mosque in Baghdad, 4 March 1924.

RAF Hinaidi, the main aerodrome in Baghdad.

The extended 30 Sqn family, including wives and children.

A fine study of the D.H.9A, the RAF’s workhorse imperial policing aircraft in the early 1920s, over the Bazian Pass in Kurdistan. The pilot is Flight Lieutenant Kinkead, a First World War fighter ace who was later killed in training for a Schneider Trophy attempt.

Kinkead again, alongside Squadron Leader Robb and Flight Officer French.

And this is what they were all out in Iraq for. A 520 lb bomb being dropped on Sulaimaniyah in Kurdistan, 27 May 1924 …

… and a 230 lb bomb the next morning …

… and the final results. These three photos are all of the same general area, taken from different angles. It doesn’t look particularly devastated, but then the point was not destruction but punishment. It’s interesting that Sulaimaniyah was clearly a fairly substantial town at that time, which contrasts with the impression given by many contemporary accounts that villages and encampments — tents and camels — were the usual targets of police actions.

This would be a good place to mention that a conference on Air Power, Insurgency and the ‘War on Terror’ is being held at RAF Cranwell on 22-3 August 2007 (thanks to Dan Todman for the pointer). It’s not purely a history conference, but they are looking for ‘Historical case studies of air power against insurgencies’, of which the British experience of air control in Iraq would be a prime example. Deadline for abstracts is 1 November.

Update: good news — the album won’t be broken up, nor will it be sold (it might be donated, one day). And here’s one last picture, from one of the later posts:

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[I posted this last Wednesday, but somehow, it was marked as “private” rather than “published”, so nobody saw it but me! So I’m fixing that and bumping it to the top.]

The talk went off pretty well, I think — at least I didn’t hear any snoring and got some good questions at the end. The best part, though, was that “Four” Meaher (whose own paper on the political uses of the myth of the “great betrayal” — ie of Australia, by Britain, in 1941-2 — was one of the highlights of the day for me) put me on to this most amusing song called “The Deepest Shelter in Town”, the lyrics of which are below. Googling, it turns out that it was sung by an English comedienne, Florence Desmond (whose first husband, incidentally, was one of the winners of the 1934 London to Melbourne Centenary Air Race, Tom Campbell Black). The reference to Herbert Morrison dates it to his early days at the Home Office (where he was responsible for air raid precautions), ie from October 1940, when he took over from John Anderson — the height of the Blitz, which fits (though otherwise, the late 1930s might be an even better fit, when the left were attacking the government over the lack of deep air raid shelters).

Don’t run away, mister,
Oh stay and play, mister.
Don’t worry if you hear the siren go.
Though I’m not a lady of the highest virtue,
I wouldn’t dream of letting anything hurt you.
And so before you go,
I think you ought to know
I got a cozy flat,
There’s a place for your hat.
I’ll wear a pink chiffon negligee gown.
And do I know my stuff?
But if that’s not enough,
I’ve got the deepest shelter in town.
I’ve got a room for two,
A radio that’s new,
An alarm clock that won’t let you down.
And I’ve got central heat,
But to make it complete,
I’ve got the deepest shelter in town.
Ev’ry modern comfort
I can just guarantee.
If you hear the siren call,
Then it’s probably me.
And sweetie, to revert,
I’ll keep you on the alert.
I won’t even be wearing a frown.
So you can hang around here
Until the “all clear,”
In the deepest shelter in town.
Now, honey, I don’t sing
Of an Anderson thing,
Climbing in one, you look like a clown.
But if you came here to see
Why Sir John would agree
I’ve got the deepest shelter in town.
Now Mr. Morrison
Says he’s getting things done,
And he’s a man of the greatest renown.
But before it gets wrecked,
I hope he’ll come and inspect
The deepest shelter in town.
Now, I was one of the first
To clear my attic of junk.
But when it comes to shelters,
Now-a-days, it’s all bunk.
So, honey, don’t get scared,
It’s there to be shared!
And you’ll feel like a king with a crown.
So please don’t be mean,
Better men than you have been
In the deepest shelter in town.

Now, what she meant by ‘I’ve got the deepest shelter in town’ I’m sure I don’t know, but I imagine she looked something like this when she was singing it!

Image source: Virtual History Film.

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