[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.

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.

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

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.

There were (possibly?) conflicting stories about why there was a flood of refugees right now, though: that from 1 April a new visa system would apply to Czechs entering Britain, or that from that date Czechs would be treated as Germans, or that they would need permission from Germany to leave. But whatever the reason, the last aeroplanes did land on 31 March, carrying, among others, 91 year old Frau Krampflicek, a 'Czech Jewess' whose family lived in Manchester. About 150 refugees arrived that day, with 3 being detained. The day before there had been 241, with 20 detained; on the first day 257, 10 detained.

The problem was that refugees qua refugees had no automatic right of entry to Britain. In keeping with poor law principles, refugees would only be allowed to stay if it could be shown they would not be a burden to the public purse. If they could show they had funds to support themselves, that was enough. In the cases of Herr Herbst and Frau Krampflicek they had family already in Britain. Many of the other refugees had sponsors of one sort or another, who would ultimately be responsible for their welfare. Those who were told to leave had little money left, and no family or sponsors in Britain; they were just desperate people.

Like the people on the flight from Warsaw. Hilde Marchant (late war correspondent in Spain) reported for the Express that they resisted being put back on the aeroplane back to Copenhagen, where they had already been refused entry and would presumably be deported again:

The men refused and cried: "We will be shot."

One asked for the Czech Consul. Another offered money, but they all had to be dragged out of the hall on to the tarmac.

One man was carried into the plane.

Another man escaped the airport entirely 'across the Purley-way, over the grounds of the swimming pool and through some factories', but was picked up by a police car. A third man, by the name of Vorosov, was pulled off the seat he was clinging onto by two policemen when he got a reprieve: 'an official from the Immigration Department came rushing through the door and said, "There is a permit for Vorosov."' So he was allowed to stay. The others were taken back on board the trimotor.

The refugees then began to beat the sides of the plane and hammered at the windows, breaking one of them.

The Danish pilot refused to take them. "They are crazy," he said to the police sergeant. Later he told me he was afraid they would commit suicide by throwing themselves out of the door of the plane.

Instead of flying out they were taken to a police station again, this time in handcuffs, with the intention that they would be put on a boat to Denmark in the morning.

In this particular story, there was a happy ending. As its name implied, the German Jewish Aid Committee dealt only with helping German Jews. Nevertheless it decided 'as a special measure to provide the necessary guarantees' for the eleven Jewish Czech refugees in question. They were given three month visas; I don't know what happened to them after that. But this was just luck, a fortunate consequence of the publicity they had received. The Manchester Guardian thought there must be a fairer and more humane way to handle such refugees:

it is surely unworthy of this country that anyone coming to these shores for the first time should receive such treatment. Even if papers are not in order it might be thought that the Government could set up an independent tribunal which could consider claims to enter on grounds of equity and real need, thereby tempering the strict and inelastic rules of the Home Office. Expulsion, if decided on then, could at least be attempted in a manner more delicate.

This was not done. Nobody could have known exactly what was in store for those who were sent back to Germany or the late Czechoslovakia, but then that's the point. In 1951, after the Second World War had created many more refugees, a United Nations conference drew up a Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Britain was one of the original signatories. It defines who is a legitimate refugee and who is not; absolves refugees from criminal charges for not following immigration procedures; and, crucially, protects refugees from being forcibly expelled to a country where they would be in danger.

Australia was also one of the original signatories to the Convention. In the last decade, as increasing numbers of people flee wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sri Lanka and elsewhere, refugees have become an incredibly toxic issue in Australian politics. Both major parties have done everything they can to dodge meeting our obligations under international law, from effectively declaring that Australian migration law no longer applies to certain areas where refugees arrive, to sending refugees to other countries while their claims are processed (most recently, the so-called Malaysian solution). The point of all this is deterrence, though the tiny numbers of people involved and the fact that the vast majority of them do turn out to be genuine refugees ought to have given someone, somewhere pause. As might the suicides and riots of refugees locked up in detention centres for years on end. Bizarrely, all the refugees that have got Australians so worked up come by boat. Nobody worries about the ones which come by plane, even though about six times as many come that way, or even about the even more numerous non-refugees who overstay their visa. Perhaps the boat people are too brown. One of the stupider political slogans of the 2010 federal election was 'stop the boats'; at least no one in 1939 Britain -- at least to my knowledge -- wanted to 'stop the planes'.

But the High Court of Australia recently put an end to offshore processing; the Government attempted to overturn this by introducing new legislation, but due to its minority position in the lower House needed the support of the Opposition. Even though the Opposition supports offshore processing, for political reasons it refused; and so the bill never came to a vote. As a result, yesterday the Government decided to re-introduce onshore processing after all. Hopefully this will in time lead to a way of treating refugees in a way that is worthy of this country.

WILL SHE FIND REFUGE HERE?

While efforts to deport refugees by air failed at Croydon yesterday, this young refugee, clutching her doll, arrived at the airport from Cologne.

Image sources: Wikipedia; Daily Express, 31 March 1939, p. 13.

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.

[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!

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

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.

Libya then became an Italian colony for three decades. But it wasn't a pacified one until well into the 1930s. Italy presumably used its airpower to help crush dissent, as did Britain, France and Spain in their own Middle Eastern and North African possessions. Unfortunately I have no specific information about Italian air operations in interwar Libya, but it's probably safe to say they were somewhere towards the less humanitarian end of the air control spectrum.

Then there was the Second World War, when between 1940 and 1943 Axis and Allied armies washed back and forth over Libya. By and large, this was not the Libyan people's war, and they don't figure much in histories of it. But they could not have escaped its effects. Bombers from both sides would have attacked primarily military objectives -- logistical interdiction was especially important in the desert war -- but towns and villages were bombed too, and towns and villages have inhabitants, and most of those inhabitants were Libyans. So they suffered as well.

Libya became an independent kingdom in 1951. As far as I can tell there was no bombing during the kingdom's existence. There may have been some during several coup attempts in the late 1960s and early 1970s (the first of which, in 1969, was the one in which Colonel Gaddafi first rose to prominence). There was definitely bombing during Libya's war with Egypt in July 1977. Gaddafi, now in power, started it, very ill-advisedly; Egyptian forces counter-attacked and bombed towns in the east of Libya.

Then, of course, there was the American bombing of Libya on 15 April 1986. This was in retaliation for a Libyan terrorist attack in Berlin, when a disco was blown up in West Berlin. USAF F-111s flying from Britain and US Navy A-6s, A-7s and F/A-18s dropped their bombs on barracks, airfields, air defence sites and the Murat Sidi Bilal camp. Murat Sidi Bilal was chosen in an apparent attempt to kill Gaddafi himself. Obviously this failed, but about 60 other Libyans were killed, including about 15 civilians (though one claimed victim, Gaddafi's adopted daughter Hanna, appears not to have existed). One F-111 and its crew were shot down by Libyan air defences.

And now we come to the present day. I won't attempt to summarise recent events in detail. Briefly, the Libyan air force has been bombing pro-democracy forces and areas, including protesters in the capital, Tripoli, and other civilian targets in Benghazi, Libya's second-largest city. Remarkably, it seems that some pilots have refused to do so, landing their aircraft in Malta or handing them over to the revolutionaries (who now have their own small, but free, air force). It has even been claimed that one pilot intentionally flew his aircraft into a pro-Gaddafi barracks in Tripoli.

Gaddafi's use of airpower against his own people has played a large part in outraging world opinion, and helped motivate calls for the UN to authorise a no-fly zone over Libya. (The idea of a no-fly zone harks back to the international air force and related ideas, but I won't go into that now.) But bombed civilians evidently weren't quite enough to justify the no-fly zone; it took serious military reverses for the revolutionaries and the prospect of their sudden collapse to bring about an authorisation from the UN Security Council, which came about in just the last 24 hours.

A no-fly zone itself would likely involve further bombing of Libya, in order to eliminate threatening Libyan anti-aircraft and radar sites. But if so, I hope those will be the last bombs to fall on Libyan soil. Democracy and bombing don't go well together.

Oh, and the previous record holder for the longest experience of bombing? Ironically enough it was Italy, with ninety-five years (from Venice in 1849 to the end of the Second World War in 1945).

Image source: The Atlantic

[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.

But this is not what the Wikipedia article is talking about. Instead it chooses an equally precise date for the start of the Blitz, 6 September, and says that this is more accurate than 7 September. Somehow, it seems, every historian since 1940 and every witness who wrote about it at the time or later has somehow forgotten that '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'. The citations for this are just two. One is from the Manchester Guardian (9 September 1940, 2), a reprint of a Luftwaffe communiqué vaguely claiming attacks on London beginning on the night of 6 September and 'continued during the day and night of September 7'. This is a source which should be used with caution: did the Guardian quote the communiqué accurately? Did the Luftwaffe communiqué tell the truth? What sort of 'attacks' were carried out on the night of 6 September, lone raiders or formation raids? Then there is an account from a Blitz eyewitness taken from the BBC's WW2 People's War site. He says that the first raids on the Royal Docks took place on the Friday evening of that weekend, that is 6 September. Well, he was living in West Ham at the time, so he would know, wouldn't he? But this is account written down over sixty years later. Whether it was Friday night or Saturday night seems like something which one could be mistaken about after all that time. And doesn't this one account need to be balanced against others?

The only other evidence given is that the first bomb damage recorded in London on 7 September occurred shortly after midnight. This fits in with the narrative here of continue bombing throughout 7 September. But was it continuous? Only on a naive reading. The source given for this is an excellent spreadsheet published by the Guardian. Note that it only gives data for the one day, so we can't compare it to a typical pre-Blitz night, or what happened on the supposed first day of the Blitz, 6 September. But even so it shows that the raid (which is certainly known to historians) in the early hours of 7 September was only moderate at best. Around 50 bombs were recorded up to around 2.30am, with only another 20 or so falling in the next twelve hours (with gaps of up to two hours between them), and about 15 in the two and a half hours after that. That takes us to just before 5pm which is when the bombing really starts to escalate: there are nearly 760 bombs recorded in the 7 hours until midnight (and it didn't stop then, either: that's just when the Guardian's spreadsheet does). So if you are going to start counting individual bombfalls, there was definitely a big quantitative change on the evening of 7 September.

The icing on this cake is the totally pointless quote from A .J. P. Taylor's The Origins of the Second World War. Yes, historians do sometimes repeat 'previous legends [...] without examination'! So what? This is not evidence that it has happened here. And note the artful use of this quote: Taylor has written 'of such an error'. A careless reader might think that Taylor is talking about this 'error', when of course he's not (he's on about pre-war diplomacy).

And then there's the smug, self-congratulatory tone of both the article and its Talk page (current revision):

Isn’t it rather exciting to be in on the correction of a widespread, albeit small, but important corner of recorded history?

I swore I would never again but the Sept 7 inaccuracy was too important to leave uncorrected; it did my ego some good too.

Once again an historical inaccuracy, this time an error in arithmetic, has been perpetuated for decades.

The thing is, this is not the Wikipedia way. One of the cardinal rules of Wikipedia is No original research:

Wikipedia does not publish original research. The term "original research" refers to material—such as facts, allegations, ideas, and stories—not already published by reliable sources. It also refers to any analysis or synthesis of published material to advance a position not advanced by the sources.

The Blitz article -- at least this section of it, which has been there for nearly three months now -- fails to uphold this principle. The idea that the Blitz began on 6 September seems to have appeared out of thin air: it is not already published by reliable sources (whether they be right or wrong). Nobody says this, and even if they did, it would be wrong in this case to choose them over everybody else who chooses 7 September. There's nothing wrong with original research -- I'm quite fond of it myself -- but it's not what an encyclopedia is for. And if you're going to do it, do it right.

Of course, this being Wikipedia I should just roll up my sleeves and go to work editing the article myself. That's also the Wikipedia way. But I've tried that before and come up against stubborn editors who refuse to let go of their misconceptions. Wikipedia has its own processes for judging original research disputes. If I had much faith in the system I'd use it. And this is only the most egregious example (at least to my mind). So instead I'm going to post this here and hope that the 'Romanian plane' effect will work to my advantage.

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.

Relations between the Dominion and the Mother Country were not always easy, that much is true. British air force officers, civil servants and cabinet ministers were often contemptuous of their colonial counterparts. The wrangling over the procurement of aircraft for the RAAF does not show them to best advantage, as Ewer shows. They were often not often honest -- that is to say, they lied -- about the shortcomings of the aircraft and engine types they tried (mostly successfully) to push onto the RAAF. Indeed, on Ewer's account British aviation technology was inherently outdated, the product of a lazy, complacent engineering and business culture. He points to the Society of British Aircraft Constructors (SBAC) as a major cause of this, describing it as a 'cartel':

While Conservative Governments [sic] railed through the 1920s against the greed of trade unions, the racket operated by SBAC ensured good profits for its members, regardless of aircraft performance or the cost of construction.

He cites as a source Sebastian Ritchie's Industry and Air Power: The Expansion of British Aircraft Production, 1935-1941. But Ritchie paints a very different picture of SBAC. Profitability for its members was mixed, the competition between them for orders was tough, market leaders of the 1920s such as Handley Page became also-rans in the 1930s. And if SBAC was a cartel, it was a pretty weak one. In 1931 it did indeed try to act in concert to undermine the competitive tendering process, but the Air Ministry held firm. The result was that Hawker's bid to build its Harts at £2300 per aeroplane was undercut by fellow SBAC member Vickers, which quoted at £1800 for the same aircraft. In later contracts the price fell to £1475. This is hardly the sign of a powerful cartel. That aside, it's certainly true the backwardness of the British aviation is something which reasonable people can and do argue about, but Ewer shows no awareness that there's even a debate about this at all (it would have been nice to see some references to David Edgerton for the case against, or even Correlli Barnett for the case for).

For Ewer, the story is one of greedy British capitalists, with Air Ministry collusion, wanting to capture the Australian market for themselves. That may well have been part of the story, but he does not seem to consider that, from the British point of view, there might have been other considerations. For example, the need to preserve, and then to expand, Britain's aircraft production capacity to meet its rearmament and then wartime needs. This was the rationale for SBAC's monopoly on Air Ministry orders in the first place. The RAF itself had to accept designs ordered almost off the drawing board and (often in consequence) large numbers of obsolescent aircraft for these reasons (see, e.g., the Fairey Battle). Why should the RAAF, itself a second-rate air force at the time, have been treated any differently?

Ewer might respond to this that if the British had been upfront about what they wanted, the Australians would have had the freedom to choose alternative American or even Australian designs (Lawrence Wackett is one of his heroes, though he concedes one who needed careful handling). The Bristol Beaufort and its Taurus engines are the villains here. But again there's a bigger picture. He notes but dismisses the British argument that standardisation of types (airframes and/or engines) across the Empire would be an advantage in wartime. Yet he himself is highly critical of the abandonment of a proposed Australian Air Expeditionary Force (AAEF) early in the war. This would have comprised six RAAF squadrons, to accompany the 2nd AIF to the Middle East. But how could such a force have been maintained in the field, on the other side of the world and dependent on the RAF's supply system, if it had been using some weird Wackett fighter or American engines? They would have to be supplied from Australia or (worse) America, something which couldn't be guaranteed in wartime anyway. Using British products was the safer choice.

On EAMS, Ewer again comes down strongly on the Australian side. The British wanted to use flying boats on the route from Singapore to Sydney; the Australians argued that landplanes would be better, as they would have a longer range and be able to carry a greater weight of cargo, making them more economical and hence more profitable to run. (The connection with Australian air defence seems to be that the landplane proposal would have led to more and more useful aerodromes to Australia's north.) On this analysis, the decision to use flying boats does seem pretty stupid. But once again the British point of view is neglected. They weren't just setting up an air route from Singapore to Sydney, but, sensibly or not, a network of air routes linking Britain with the Empire. In his Air Empire: British Imperial Civil Aviation, 1919-39, Gordon Pirie, another ex-colonial (South African this time) explains the attraction of flying boats for the EAMS:

In the face of demand for increasingly large civilian aircraft [...] flying boats of a new 'Empire' design promised considerable savings for passengers and airline operator [...] Constructing landplanes with undercarriages strong enough to bear additional weight was expensive, and the increased dead weight of aircraft diminished their payload [...] Additional financial savings would accrue from using flying boats rather than landplanes because it would not be necessary to strengthen aprons and landing strips so they could bear the weight of increasingly heavy airframes [...] A final consideration was the high cost of aircraft fuel at inland aerodromes compared with the seaboard price that was half as high at many points on the Empire routes.

And then there was safety: flying boats could land on the open sea in an emergency, whether it be technical or political. The British undoubtedly pressured the Australian government, and the resulting scheme was not ideally suited for Australian conditions; but the Australian point of view was not the only one which we should consider.

Ewer is highly critical of the Empire Air Training Scheme (EATS), too. He makes the valid point that in 1939-40 the RAAF was essentially turned into a cadre force, not a fighting one: instead of being posted to Europe or the Middle East and gaining combat and leadership experience, most of its pilots and senior officers had to stay home as flight instructors or airfield commanders to churn out aircrew for Bomber Command and the war over Europe. Air Marshal Richard Williams, three-times former RAAF Chief of the Air Staff, was reduced to surveying for good spots for EATS airfields. Ewer thinks the RAAF should instead have been a fighting force right from the start of the war, sending the AAEF to fight overseas and setting up an air defence system to protect the 'indispensible' Sydney-Wollongong-Newcastle industrial area from Japanese carrier strikes. But again, seen in a bigger context EATS played a vital role in sustaining the RAF's war effort: it otherwise would have found it hard to find the airmen to crew its heavy bombers for the offensive against Germany, and the open skies to train them in. Of course, the strategic bombing offensive, and Australia's contribution to it, can be criticised, but Ewer doesn't do this either, merely criticising the watered-down Australian Article XV squadrons and lack of an Australian air group within Bomber Command. By these lights it would seem the only Australian contributions which should be counted were those made by national formations. Perhaps it would have been better for Australia to have more national formations in the fight. Would it have been better for the Allies, though?

More subtly, there seems to be an Anglophobic strain running through Wounded Eagle. Australian achievements are lauded (Australians, especially Williams, always seem to be writing 'brilliant' memoranda on this or that) while any British ones are passed over in silence. Britons themselves are never portrayed in a positive light. In fact, there's often a bit of what might in cricket be called sledging going on. Here are three examples. The captain and crew of the first EAMS flight to Sydney is said to have only 'modest achievements' to their credit. Marshal of the RAF Sir Edward Ellington, a former RAF Chief of the Air Staff who conducted a review of the RAAF in 1938, is casually described as 'dyspeptic'. And RAF Squadron Leader Harper's air combat victories against the Luftwaffe are qualified with the word 'allegedly'. None of this is necessary; none of this is supported. Perhaps it's because all of them criticised or slighted Australians or Australian institutions (refusing to let an Australian official inspect his aeroplane, pointing out RAAF shortcomings, and being an admittedly appalling and anti-Australian commander of an Australian (albeit RAF/EATS) fighter squadron in Malaya, respectively) and so deserve a bit of rubbishing in return. But I'm Australian myself and can't get too worked up about what the Poms thought of us back then. Ewer cites Babette Smith's book, Australia's Birthstain (i.e. its convict origins), at a couple of points and no doubt many of them did look down on us. But as I said above, the reality was that the RAAF was a small, second-rank air force from a small, remote, not-very-industrialised country and it's to be expected that the British would think they knew better. It's not worth getting upset about.

Which brings me to the real targets of Ewer's attack: those Australians who agreed that the British knew better. He singles out three in particular: S. M. Bruce, a former prime minister who was essentially Australia's first High Commissioner in London (or ambassador, in effect); R. G. Casey, Treasurer from 1935 to 1940, and Robert Menzies, first Attorney-General and then Prime Minister from 1939 to 1941 (and again from 1949 to 1966). In Ewer's view these men were deceitful in their relations with their Australian colleagues while colluding with the British on issues such as the EAMS and RAAF procurement. And I think he's right. He even goes so far as to describe Casey's actions as 'betrayal', while he says of Menzies that 'he delivered up Australian interests to London'. But I would suggest (without, admittedly, knowing any of the secondary literature on the topic) that to use such loaded terms is ahistorical. Australia was not yet a truly independent nation, either legally (the Statute of Westminster, promulgated in 1931, was not enacted here until 1942) or culturally. It is natural enough that there would be those who felt that Britain's interests and Australia's were identical, that defending the Motherland was protecting their homeland, that serving the Empire was a higher duty than just serving the Commonwealth. Ewer himself admits as much when he writes of those who believed in a '"British Australia" as a viable half-way house between colonial life and Mother England"'. As such it is simplistic to view the actions of Bruce, Casey and Menzies in narrowly nationalistic terms: I doubt they thought they were being disloyal to Australia in any way, even if they recognised they were being duplicitous. (Ewer pointedly prefaces each chapter with a quote from The Prince, though I'm not sure if he's thinking of the British or the pro-British as the Machiavellians.) In terms of air policy, Australia was no longer part of Britain's air empire, but it was still a Dominion of the air, so to speak, not yet a republic.

On that note, it's interesting that the National Library of Australia's Cataloguing in Publication service has assigned Wounded Eagle to (among more obvious choices) the subject 'Republicanism -- Australia'. The issue of an Australian republic is not mentioned once in the book, but as I've argued it's a very nationalistic work, and it does seem to be that way inclined. Not that there's anything wrong with that, per se; I'm a republican myself, I voted for an Australian republic in 1999 and hope to see one come to pass in my lifetime. But wanting to cut constitutional ties with Britain need not entail Anglophobia, at least not in my book. (If I ever write one, that is.)

For an excellent example of a national-but-not-nationalistic aviation history, see Michael Molkentin's The Australian Flying Corps in the First World War (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010), which even covers some of the same ground as Wounded Eagle in its account of the destruction of the Turkish 7th Army by the RAF and the Australian Flying Corps. Molkentin shows that Australians can write military history which incorporates a wider view, as I've called for before; Ewer, I'm sorry to say, does not.

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

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.

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.

Let's take a closer look at the claim itself. The scientist -- whose name has understandably been redacted from the documents (DEFE 24/2013, pages 205-9 and 273-7) -- was an astrophysicist working on software for 'spacecraft thermal engineering', writing from Leicester. According to his account, his grandfather, who died in 1973, was in the RAF during the war and 'was part of the personal bodyguard of Winston Churchill during the times when the Bunkers were in use for protection'. The Ministry of Defence files don't comment on whether this was the case, but as it could be checked easily enough it doesn't seem likely that the scientist would have made this up. (I don't think the MoD was particularly interested, one way or the other.) Though bound by the Official Secrets Act, the bodyguard did tell one person about this incident: his then-nine-year old daughter (which makes the story that much harder to rely upon). Initially, the scientist said that

My grandfather witnessed the discussion of the event both by Mr. Churchill and Mr. Eisenhower in the United States, and the great concern it caused in both countries.

Taken literally, this would seem to suggest the discussion took place between Churchill and Eisenhower in the US, which would mean it took place in or around one of the Allied conferences in Washington or Quebec in 1942, 1943 or 1944. But as far as I can see Eisenhower didn't attend these, and anyway the reference to 'Bunkers' suggests Britain, where he was much more likely to bump into Churchill. So I think we should probably read the above as Eisenhower of the United States.

Here's the meat of the story.

A report from an RAF aircrew approaching the east coast of England sometime in the early 1940's was discussed by leaders in the UK and the US.

The aircraft was intercepted by an object of unknown origin, which matched course and speed with the aircraft for a time and then underwent an extremely rapid acceleration away from the aircraft probably with non-ballistic or non-aerodynamic flight characteristics. Photographs and/or film was obtained by this aircrew showing a metallic arrow-shaped body [but see below]. This even was discussed by Mr Churchill and General Eisenhower, neither of whom knew what had been observed. There was a general inability for either side to match a plausible account to these observations, and this caused a high degree of concern.

After talking again to his mother, the scientist added some further details in a later letter:

1. The RAF aircraft was a reconnaissance plane returning to England to either France or Germany during the latter part of the War.
2. The encounter with the unknown object occurred close to or over the English coastline.
3. The observed object was undetected until it was close to the aircraft. It was suddenly observed by the aircrew appearing at the side of the aircraft at a very high speed; then it very rapidly matched its speed with that of the aircraft.
4. It appeared to "hover" noiselessly relative to the aircraft for a time. One of the photographic airmen began to take photographs of it. It appeared metallic but its shape was not described. (Please disregard my earlier comment about an "arrow-shaped" body, this appears to have been an error on my part).
5. The object very suddenly disappeared, leaving no trace of its earlier presence.
6. During the discussion with Mr. Churchill, a consultant (who worked in the Cumbria area during the War) dismissed any possibility that the object had been a missile, since a missile could not suddenly match its speed with a slower aircraft and then accelerate again. He declared that the event was totally beyond any imagined capabilities of the time. Another person at the meeting raised the possibility of an unidentified flying object, at which point Mr. Churchill declared that the incident should be immediately classified for at least 50 years and its status reviewed by a future Prime Minister.

Finally, the scientist summarised his claim as follows, adding some information about the motivation behind the cover-up not repeated elsewhere:

It is claimed that my grandfather, [redacted] was present during a debate between Winston Churchill and Mr. Eisenhower during World War II involving making a decision about an unexpected incident experienced by a RAF bomber aircrew returning to the UK after a mission into Germany. Mr Churchill is reported to have made a declaration to the effect of the following:

"This event should be immediately classified since it would create mass panic amongst the general population and destroy one's belief in the Church."

Let's start there. I don't see why there would have been any need for a decision regarding the classification of this incident: it was wartime, and information concerning all military operations was classified unless and until cleared for public release. Of course, the exact level of classification could have been up for debate, but there was surely no great danger that the public was about to learn of an RAF aircraft being intercepted by an ultra-high-tech vehicle of unknown origin.

The bit about it destroying 'belief in the Church' is a bit odd. This is presumably a reference to a belief that this high-tech vehicle had to be of extraterrestrial origin, an idea which is nowhere explicitly addressed in the story above (unless it is the reference to the object as an 'unidentified flying object', a term definitely not in use during the war but which in common usage is often taken to mean an extraterrestrial spacecraft). Some theologians (and Tom Paine) have argued that the plurality of worlds question is problematic for Christianity (e.g. did the crucifixion save all sentient beings everywhere in the universe or did every single inhabited planet have its own salvation event?) But it seems unlikely that this was the first concern that would have popped into Churchill's head. I'm sure he would have read The War of the Worlds at some point; was he not worried about the intentions of this highly advanced alien race? For Churchill to worry about the effect of such revelations on the morale of a war-weary British populace, on the other hand, does sound about right, though people might have found them cause for hope rather than fear.

The weirdly cryptic reference to the consultant who worked in the Cumbrian area (is this really a description you'd pass on to your nine year old daughter?) also leads to the extraterrestrial inference. But I don't see how he could categorically claim that it was impossible for the object to be a missile, because a missile couldn't slow down to match an aircraft's speed and then accelerate again. It certainly implies a high degree of control for a (presumably) unmanned vehicle, but that could have been supplied from a nearby mothership (an aeroplane, not a spaceship!) Still, I can see someone like R. V. Jones making persuasive technical arguments as to why such a vehicle was beyond current technology. (Jones himself would be an obvious choice for the 'consultant', especially given his later interest in ghost rockets and flying saucers, but he worked in London during the war.)

Turning to the purported incident itself, the details are a bit suspect. An RAF photo reconnaissance mission over 'France or Germany during the latter part of the War' would most likely have been carried out by a Spitfire or a Mosquito. There's a suggestion that the aircraft involved had more than one aircrew, in which case it would have to be a Mosquito. But somewhere along the process of retelling the story the idea seems to have crept in that photo reconnaissance work involved pointing a camera out the cockpit window ('One of the photographic airmen began to take photographs of it') which of course was not the case: the cameras were fitted inside special bays and could not have been used in this ad hoc fashion. (Not to mention that all the film probably would have been exposed over enemy territory.) Perhaps this part has just been garbled.

Another detail which doesn't make sense is that the object 'appeared to "hover" noiselessly relative to the aircraft for a time'. I'm not sure how you could tell from inside a multi-engined aircraft whether something outside wasn't making a sound. This is a description common to many (post-war) UFO accounts and I'd suggest that in this part of the story contamination has set in: this is what UFOs sound like (or rather don't sound like), so even if it's not plausible the detail is added, quite probably subconsciously. Much like the whole phantom airship thing, in fact.

Which brings me to my last point. Previously, Churchill's known involvement in the history of the UFO phenomenon essentially consisted of two episodes. The first was the Sheerness incident in 1912, when as First Lord of the Admiralty he oversaw an investigation into the possible overflight of a naval base by a German Zeppelin. This was something he was inclined to believe in, at least if his comments to the Committee of Imperial Defence are to be believed. So I tend to think that thirty years later his tendency would similarly have been to suspect perverted Nazi (but still human) scientists rather than extraterrestrials. Of course, there was the Cumbrian consultant to convince Churchill that nobody on this planet could have been responsible for what the RAF PR crew saw. But if he was so convinced, and on the evidence of the scientist's mother's father's story he was, then why -- in Churchill's other known UFO connection -- did he fire off a memo in 1952, during his second premiership, asking 'What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth?' Didn't he already know that the truth was disturbing enough to shake the foundations of religious belief?

No, as it stands this story fails a few basic sanity checks and no confidence can be placed in it. The scientist who told it to the MoD seems to have been sincere enough, but I have the feeling that somewhere down the line a leg was being pulled.

Having said all that, the question of wartime UFO sightings by Allied aircrew ('foo fighters') is a very interesting one, which I must one day look into ...