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Remembering the Pacific War at Monash

9 December 2011 in 1940s, After 1950, Australia, Conferences and talks, Contemporary by Brett Holman | No comments

[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.

Nothing more than an experiment

1 November 2011 in 1910s, Contemporary, Periodicals by Brett Holman | 3 comments

Today is the one-hundredth anniversary of the first use of an aeroplane for aerial bombardment. I've already written about the longer context of Libya's history of bombing (to which can be added NATO's air campaign, which coincidentally enough has just ended), but here's where it all began, at Ain Zara on 1 November 1911:

A message from Tripoli says the aviator Gavotti, having located to-day a Turkish camp of about 2,000 men near Ain Zara, descended to within 2,000 metres of the spot and threw four bombs which exploded in the midst of the Turks. The explosions had frightful effects, and the Turks fled in all directions, the confusion being so great that not a single soldier thought of firing at the aeroplane. Gavotti had no more bombs with him, since he had contemplated nothing more than an experiment. The Turkish soldiers abandoned their camp and took shelter in caves.

(At least, according the Manchester Guardian; this account differs slightly from Gavotti's own: he dropped the fourth bomb on another oasis, presumably Taguira.) Such bombing seems to have become routine quite quickly; equally terse accounts of similar operations appeared in the British press in following days, and on 5 November the Italian government issued the first ever official communiqué concerning aerial warfare. None of this seemed to have excited much interest in Britain: it was a sideshow compared the more traditional and much bloodier battles on the ground, and the claims and counter-claims of massacres of civilians and wounded soldiers. The world has certainly come a long way since then.

Stop the planes

14 October 2011 in 1930s, After 1950, Australia, Civil aviation, Contemporary, International law, Periodicals, Pictures by Brett Holman | No comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Jewish refugees arrested at Croydon, March 1939

On 29 March 1939, Croydon airport was the site of an extraordinary scene, as the Daily Express reported:

NEARLY 400 Jewish refugees streamed into Croydon in a succession of air liners yesterday -- the biggest influx the airport had ever experienced.

They came from Danzig, the Polish Corridor, Cologne, Berlin, Vienna, Switzerland -- all over Europe.

Most of them were allowed to enter the country [...]

For example, David Herbst was allowed to stay when his wife Leishi, a former Austrian tennis star, showed up and was able to prove that Herbst 'had money in English Banks'.

[...] when some were told they would have to go back to the Continent in the morning they burst into piteous cries.

One man from Cologne dropped to his knees and pleaded, in tears, with the immigration authorities.

Wailing, he fell on his face and broke his nose. Afterwards he threatened to commit suicide.

He said his father had been taken away manacled and then shot and he believed he would be dealt with in the same way if he returned to Germany.

Herbst's travelling companions were in the same situation. The thirteen of them had chartered a Danish tri-motor for £600 to fly them out of Warsaw (one source says Cracow). Herbst got to go home with his wife; but the other twelve were detained by the police overnight.

"Nobody knows who the people are. They are a mystery crowd," it was stated by an official. "Many had little money and could not give satisfactory reasons why they should be allowed to land in England."

I assume the official was talking about legal reasons why the refugees should be allowed to land, rather than just being utterly dense; the reasons why they were fleeing were quite clear. Two weeks earlier, after threatening to bomb Prague off the map, German troops had been allowed to march in, occupying the Czech portions of Czechoslovakia which remained after the cession of the Sudetenland the previous year. Germany ended Czechoslovakia, taking Bohemia and Moravia for itself; Hungary took Carpatho-Ukraine and Slovakia became independent. This meant that suddenly Czech Jews (and those, like Herbst, who had fled from Austria after the Anschluss a year earlier) were subject to Nazi racial discrimination.
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The last time Britain nuked Australia

22 September 2011 in After 1950, Australia, Cold War, Contemporary, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Pictures by Brett Holman | 6 comments

Antler R3 (Taranaki) test

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.

#twitterstorians and the Other

7 September 2011 in Blogging and tweeting, Contemporary, Tools and methods by Brett Holman | No comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

I've been using the Internet for nearly two decades: in 1992 -- after nervously checking with the physics computer lab manager first -- I sent an email to my future Honours supervisor while she was visiting Toronto. I was quickly hooked by the promise of overcoming the tyranny of distance and transparently communicating with people all across the planet. Of course, it never worked quite like that. Of the many of the different forms of communication enabled by the Internet I've tried since then, many have fallen by the wayside (who now uses Unix talk? When was the last WAIS server shut down?), others still limp along (Gopher, IRC, Usenet) while others are in surprisingly rude health (you've probably used FTP at some point, though you may not have known it). Sometimes I was an early adopter: I set up my first webserver early in 1994, at a time when there must have been only a few thousand websites in the world. At other times I was very late to the party. But after much enthusiastic (and occasionally obsessive) participation in these and other protocols, I eventually became jaded and turned to passive consumption of content rather than creation in any form. It was only when I took up blogging at the start of my PhD that I rediscovered that early joy in talking to the world.

But the thing about blogging is that it's pretty much all about me, me, me. While I absolutely value and enjoy interacting with commenters, and hope that those who read without commenting find what I post here interesting or valuable, it's my place and I set the agenda. And I'd probably still blog even if nobody read it. So while Airminded is part of the World Wide Web, spending so much time on it could lead me to think that bombing and phantom airships and the knock-out blow are more important than they really are (which is to say, not very). As well, because my authorial voice dominates here it can lead me to think that my opinion is more important than it really is (which is to say, even less).

Which brings me to Twitter. I've blogged about tweeting a couple of times before, first when I began using Twitter in earnest, then when I reached one thousand tweets. I've now added more than 10,000 to that figure, so it's probably safe to say that I'm a Twitter addict -- er, become accustomed to using it. For link sharing, making contacts, historical musings, friendly banter and just general silliness, for sure; but there's more to it than that.

Tweeting is sometimes called microblogging, but that's a bit of a misnomer. It's true that it's possible to use Twitter just to broadcast your own thoughts or promote your own things, but unless you're already a celebrity nobody is going to listen. The real value comes from listening and (optionally) responding to what others say -- in interacting with others. With other historians, sure, but also with other people who share some interests and with others who don't.

The biggest and best example of this, for me, has been following the Arab Spring, particularly the revolutions in Egypt and Libya. Not just the news (and the rumours), but the commentary coming from those living through them: their experiences, hopes, fears. I confess this was a bit of an eye-opener for me. Intellectually, of course, I knew that people living in autocracies are like people everywhere else, but hearing the diversity of their responses (even within the limitations of 140 characters) I recognised them as individuals at a more basic level. It became impossible for me to discount the revolutions as quarrels in far away countries between people of whom I knew nothing. Twitter help me humanise an important period in contemporary history. That's something that I don't think any of those older protocols, from email on, could have helped me to do, not in practice. It's not transparent at all, of course, and it is as subject to biases and deceptions as any other form of human communication; but using Twitter is really the closest I've come to entering the global village I glimpsed nearly two decades ago.

Because it's #twitterstorians Day, I really should have said something about the specifically historical uses (and limitations) of Twitter. Luckily there are plenty of others who have done that:

@katrinagulliver (who is responsible) · @jliedl · @jondresner · @kathryntomasek · @kellyhignett · @kelly_j_baker · @lottelydia · @markcheathem · @publichistorian · @raherrmann · @sharon_howard (with a special shout-out for The Broadside) · @wilkohardenberg

PS If you don't already follow me on Twitter, I'm @Airminded!

Libya's century as a target

19 March 2011 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Air control, Contemporary, Pictures by Brett Holman | 6 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Golden fist, crushed jet

Libya now holds an unfortunate record. It is the country which has the longest experience of aerial bombardment. Libya was first bombed in 1911, by Italy; now, in 2011, it is being bombed by its own air force. That makes it just under a century from the first bomb to the latest.

It helps that Libya was the very first country to experience aerial bombardment from aeroplanes and from airships. I'm using the word 'country' here in a loose sense, as it was then part of the Ottoman Empire (technically, the provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica). Italian forces landed in Tripoli in early October 1911, after a (naval) bombardment. Its total air forces in Libya never totalled more than nine aeroplanes and two airships. The aeroplanes first carried out a bombing mission on 1 November 1911, attacking Ain Zara (one bomb) and Taguira (three bombs). The two airships didn't go into action until March 1912, but still managed to carry out over 300 sorties between them before the end of hostilities in October. The effect of airpower on the Italian victory was negligible, but a precedent was set.
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Against original research

30 November 2010 in 1940s, Contemporary, Periodicals, Tools and methods by Brett Holman | 17 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

I know. Writing about Wikipedia is so 2006. And yes, finding errors in Wikipedia articles is not exactly difficult. But I have a bee in my bonnet which needs releasing.

Wikipedia's page on the Blitz has a section entitled 'Commencement on September 6'. This is how it currently reads (sans hyperlinks and superscripts):

There is a misconception that the Blitz started on September 7, 1940. Bombs began dropping the night of September 6 and continued for the full day of the 7th and on into the morning of the 8th. Saturday 7th was the first full day and has officially and erroneously become known as the day the Blitz started. Hermann Göring launched bombers and the first bombs caused damage the night of September 6.

Quoted in the The Manchester Guardian is Göring's communiqué:

Attacks of our Air Force on objectives of special military and economical value in London, which began during the night of September 6, were continued during the day and night of September 7 with exceptionally strong forces using bombs of the heaviest caliber.

A witness recalled the evening of Friday September 6, 1940:

My name is John Davey. I was born on December 27th 1924 in South Moltom [sic - Molton] Road, Custom House, West Ham, and a couple of miles from the Royal Docks. In September 1940, on the Friday evening of the weekend the docks were first blitzed, I was sitting with my friend in his house. At about 7 p.m. there was a series of explosions and the shattering of glass. We ran into the road and saw at the end a flame that shot into the sky, seeming to light up the whole area. My friend and I and lots of others ran towards the fire.
—BBC, WW2 People's War

The first damage to property on September 7 was recorded at eight minutes past midnight, a grocer’s shop at 43 Southwark Park Road, SE16.

It has long been the accepted, but erroneous, view that the London Blitz lasted 57 consecutive nights starting on September 7 1940 and ending November 1. In actuality September 6 makes 57 nights and not September 7. The historian AJP Taylor wrote of such an error:

… it is the fault of previous legends which have been repeated by historians without examination. These legends have a long life.

This is really quite silly. Yes, it's true that the accepted date of 7 September 1940 as the start of the London Blitz is a bit misleading, since there was a non-trivial amount of bombing before that date (e.g. see here). Judging from contemporary press accounts, 7 September certainly seemed to mark an important change in German bombing strategy, but more one of quantity than quality -- almost more an inflection point than a turning point. In retrospect we tend not to see it that way, which is fine. But we could recognise that -- leaving aside the eventual reification involved in the name 'the Blitz' itself -- the 'start of the Blitz' was less clearly defined then than it seems now.
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A Dominion of the air

11 November 2010 in 1930s, 1940s, Aircraft, Australia, Books, Civil aviation, Contemporary by Brett Holman | 12 comments

I've recently been reading Peter Ewer's Wounded Eagle: The Bombing of Darwin and Australia's Air Defence Scandal, which I found to be unexpectedly interesting, but not always in a good way. Wounded Eagle has much less about the Second World War than I'd thought: much of the early part of the book is taken up with a detailed analysis of the origins of the Empire Air Mail Scheme (EAMS) in the 1930s, and then there's a long account of the Royal Australian Air Force's pre-war procurement policy. There's a lot of interesting stuff here: one particular surprise for me was the accidental way in which British radar research was accidentally revealed to the Australian government by a young physicist returning home from studying at Cambridge. The Australians asked if this was true, and the British sheepishly said that it was and only then began sharing its data with the Dominions! Even more surprising, perhaps, is that the RAAF, having got its hands on some British radar sets in 1940, showed next to no interest in them. Only the Australian Army did anything with them, for use with coastal defence batteries.

Ewer's book is full of such pointed criticisms, and that's the problem. This polemic has two targets: the British, and pro-British Australian politicians. The latter are outside my area, though I'll talk about them later. But I like to think I know a bit about the British by now, particularly when it comes to aeroplanes, so let's start there.
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Oh, the humanities!

29 October 2010 in Contemporary, Pictures by Brett Holman | 1 comment

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Hindenburg, 6 May 1937

There's been much discussion in various places and in various ways recently about the woeful state of the humanities in various university systems around the English-speaking world, particularly in light of the Browne Review in the UK -- for example, at Larvatus Prodeo (also here and here), Skepticlawyer, zunguzungu (a response to this animation, 'So you Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities'), Edge of the American West, and an article by James Vernon at GlobalHigherEd. I don't have much substantive to add, though I very much agree with Vernon's conclusion:

A good deal is at stake. We must defend the vision of a publicly funded university able to support classes in subjects that do not generate economic benefits. Economic utility is not the measure of who we are or who we want to become.

However, my main reason for posting this was that I didn't think I could live with myself if -- being the kind of blogger I am -- I passed up the chance to use that title.

Image source: Wikipedia.

Churchill and that UFO story

9 August 2010 in 1910s, 1940s, After 1950, Archives, Contemporary, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Rumours, Space by Brett Holman | 8 comments

There have been a lot of stories in the press recently with titles like 'Churchill ordered UFO cover-up, National Archives show'. Actually, the TNA files -- part of an ongoing series of releases of UFO-related files -- don't show this at all, as is clear if you read the article more closely.

The cover-up is supposed to have taken place in the Second World War.

Nick Pope, who used to investigate UFO sightings for the MoD, said: "The interesting thing is that most of the UFO files from that period have been destroyed.

"But what happened is that a scientist whose grandfather was one of his [Churchill's] bodyguards, said look, Churchill and Eisenhower got together to cover up this phenomenal UFO sighting, that was witnessed by an RAF crew on their way back from a bombing raid.

"The reason apparently was because Churchill believed it would cause mass panic and it would shatter people's religious views."

The scientist 'said' this in 1999, nearly half a century after the incident is supposed to have taken place and a quarter century after his grandfather died. So it's only hearsay: there is no evidence from the war itself or from any witnesses that this cover-up actually took place.
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