Contemporary

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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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Mates

30 June 2010 in 1910s, 1940s, Australia, Contemporary, Periodicals, Pictures, Words by Brett Holman | 11 comments

Mates

This photograph of Australian soldiers was taken during the First World War. It's not particularly unusual: just a group of mates getting together to record a memento, perhaps after a weekend's carousing in the fleshpots of Cairo or Paris.

Mateship is a important concept in Australian culture. The OED defines it as 'The condition of being a mate; companionship, fellowship, comradeship' and notes that it is 'Now chiefly Austral. and N.Z.' The Australian National Dictionary gives several more specifically Australian shades of meaning, from 'An acquaintance; a person engaged in the same activity', to 'One with whom the bonds of close friendship are acknowledged, a "sworn friend"', to 'A mode of address implying equality and goodwill; freq. used to a casual acquaintance and, esp. in recent use [...], ironic'. Suffice it to say that pretty much any bloke can have occasion to call another cobber a mate, whether they are good friends or bitter enemies. (Sheilas are another question, of course.)
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Why don't I care about strategy?

6 June 2010 in Blogging and tweeting, Books, Cold War, Contemporary, Nuclear, biological, chemical by Brett Holman | 12 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

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

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

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

Oneupairmanship

15 May 2010 in Australia, Contemporary by Brett Holman | 30 comments

No sooner does Bomber Command get approval for its own grand memorial -- to be precise, a £3.5 million neoclassical pavilion in London's Green Park commemorating its 55,000 dead -- than Fighter Command trumps it with a proposal for an even grander memorial: a 'Battle of Britain Beacon' at the RAF Museum at Hendon, which would cost £80 million and stand 116m tall, making it 10m taller than Big Ben and visible from central London. It would also serve as a permanent exhibition hall. The bomber boys just can't catch an even break.

As I noted recently, at least the question of how Bomber Command should be remembered gets discussed in the UK, unlike in Australia. Having said that, Australia and New Zealand both already have Bomber Command memorials. Admittedly, New Zealand's memorial looks like it might originally have been designed by Nigel Tufnel on the back of a paper napkin. Then again, Australia's (much bigger) one was designed by a Kiwi and built in New Zealand. I'm sure this must be meaningful in terms of the longstanding trans-Tasman rivalry but wouldn't venture to guess how exactly!

Thanks to peacay and ErrolC for the tips.

Intertextuality

7 April 2010 in 1920s, After 1950, Air control, Contemporary, Film, Games and simulations, Pictures, Videos by Brett Holman | 4 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Watching this:

made me think of this:
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It's alive!

18 January 2010 in 1920s, 1930s, After 1950, Air control, Blogging and tweeting, Contemporary by Brett Holman | 8 comments

After a long hiatus, a new Military History Carnival has appeared, at The Edge of the American West and H-War. (Thanks, David Silbey!) A post on combat drones at Legal History Blog caught my eye. It suggests that drones are part of a process in America, post-Vietnam, whereby the need for public support for military adventurism is minimised by the increasing use of high technology, particularly airpower, since they minimise American casualties and hence political resistance. I'd argue it goes back much further than that. Air control between the wars -- as practiced by the RAF in Iraq and the US Marine Corps in Nicaragua -- had much the same purpose. And then there's the (alleged) American preference for security through superweapons. Still, the conversations we are now having about the ethical and political ramifications of drones are interesting; the prospect of robotic warfare in the interwar period didn't lead to the same debates. We have different interests now, it seems, even with respect to the same subjects.

A dispatch from Harvard by the Yarra

3 August 2009 in Australia, Contemporary by Brett Holman | 6 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

'Harvard by the Yarra' is actually the University of Melbourne, Australia (the Yarra being the major river hereabouts, though the university is not actually anywhere near it). Some wag coined the phrase to describe (and deride) the aspirations implicit in the Melbourne Model, a radical overhaul of undergraduate teaching announced in 2007. Instead of many specialised undergraduate courses, there are now (or soon will be) only six, which will be more general and will serve as feeders for professional postgraduate courses. So whereas students used to be able to enroll in a law or medicine degree straight out of high school, for example, they now must complete an undergraduate degree first. This is more like the US tertiary education system than the British one, which provided the model for the first Australian universities in the 19th century. Hence 'Harvard by the Yarra'.

But there's another similarity to Harvard. Melbourne, like most Australian universities is publicly-funded. However, like Harvard, it is a (relatively, in Australian terms) old and prestigious institution, and so it has also attracted a (again, in Australian terms) large endowment from various benefactors. You might think that this is a good thing to have in a global recession, but apparently not. A slump in the value of the university's investments combined with several other factors (for example, the loss of fees from local students) has lead to a budgetary crisis, and an announcement by the vice-chancellor of a plan to cut 220 full-time equivalent jobs over the next few years, about 3% of the total workforce, to fall on both academics and administrative staff.

This doesn't come at a good time for the Faculty of Arts, which has already been struggling to deal with its own deep budget deficits over the last couple of years. This is partly due to curriculum changes imposed by the Melbourne Model, but also to a shift in the way funds are allocated by the university. There has been much publicity about this in recent months, as Arts tried to reduce salary expenditure by encouraging academic staff to take early retirement or go on long-term leave without pay. It's lost about 65 academics through these measures. The School of Historical Studies, where I completed my PhD studies, has been the focus of much of this attention. What was perhaps the leading history department in Australia is being slowly strangled by the need to do more with less. And with the recent spate of bad news, a recovery in the near future seems unlikely.
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The fire

10 February 2009 in Art, Australia, Civil defence, Contemporary, Pictures by Brett Holman | 4 comments

Black Thursday, February 6th 1851 by William Strutt (detail)

I don't have anything deep or moving to say about the bushfires which destroyed several towns on the north-east edge of Melbourne on Saturday (try here instead). Everyone I know is (I think) safe, which is the first thing to say, but beyond that ... the official death toll is currently 181, but is sure to go higher. Many have suffered burns. Many more have lost their homes. A temporary morgue has been set up, and tent villages are springing up in nearby towns. I don't know what I can say about all that. What I guess I can and perhaps should do is put the disaster in some sort of historical context. It's what I did for New Orleans and London, so let's see if I can do it for my home town.

Bushfires are an annual event in southern Australia. We've had bad ones before: Ash Wednesday (1983), Black Friday (1939), Black Thursday (1851). (The above image is a detail from William Strutt's massive 1864 painting Black Thursday, February 6th 1851.) Most are started by natural causes (such as lightning), some by arsonists, if you can believe it. Every summer we hear the warnings, and with global warming we can likely expect more frequent and more dangerous fires. Sydney had a close shave in 2001; Canberra had it worse in 2003. The current one is the worst of them all.

We've had more than a decade of drought already, so the countryside is very, very dry. A heatwave last week (three consecutive days over 40 degrees) primed the situation; then Melbourne's highest temperature ever was recorded on Saturday (46.4 degrees) and with it came very strong winds. A firestorm swept through and over towns like Marysville and Kinglake with very little warning; but even those who were prepared often did not survive. The standard advice is stay or go: that is, decide to stay put and defend your house, or decide to go, and go early. Don't dither, decide on one or the other and stick to it. But the firefront moved so fast and was so intense that people didn't have time to leave in good order, nor were they able to effectively protect their properties. Some panicked and tried to flee when the fire bore down on them; apparently a number of bodies have been found in burned out cars.

This inevitably reminds me of 1945, or 1941 or 1937, of responses to the danger of bombing. Evacuation was one such response then, as it is now to the threat of bushfires. Householders were given advice on how best to defend against fire. The CFA is somewhat analogous to the AFS, both volunteer, part-time firefighting organisations. Even air-raid shelters are making a comeback. Half a century ago and more, it seems that the use of dugouts as fire refuges was fairly widespread (though with mixed success). There's some talk of reviving the practice, with updated technology, and I think there's a lot to be said for the idea. It also seems that stay-or-go is to be reviewed. Maybe it will be changed into just go, or stay-in-a-shelter.

And the firestorm makes me think of Tokyo or Hamburg. The casualties are far lower, of course, but then so are the population densities. (Is there a danger that one of these bushfires could penetrate deep into a big city like Melbourne? Perhaps, but there is far less combustible fuel -- meaning dead eucalyptus leaves and the like -- lying around in urban areas, so my guess is they'd progress much more slowly.) I saw a photo somewhere of a man standing beside his burnt-out car; there were silvery rivulets on the ground which was where molten metal had flowed from it. Some people spoke of getting into baths and spas when the fire came by. That made me shudder when I recalled those who had been boiled alive when sheltering in water tanks in Dresden. It's not the same but I guess these images and ideas are part of my intellectual toolkit now and they're some of the things I use to make sense of the world.

Please consider making a donation for the relief of the bushfire victims through the Australian Red Cross.

Image source: State Library of Victoria.

Howard Hawks at Melbourne Cinémathèque

2 December 2008 in 1930s, Australia, Contemporary, Ephemera, Film, Pictures by Brett Holman | 3 comments

The Dawn Patrol

This post will only be of interest to Melbourne readers. Melbourne Cinémathèque is holding a season of 1930s Howard Hawks films this month, including three of his aviation classics: Only Angels Have Wings, Ceiling Zero (both on Wednesday, 3 December) and The Dawn Patrol (Wednesday, 17 December). They're showing at ACMI. I don't think I've seen any of them so I'll probably be there! Thanks to Cathy for the tip.

Image source: Wikipedia.

S 330.15 B73

2 October 2008 in After 1950, Books, Contemporary, Ephemera, Other, Pictures by Brett Holman | 7 comments

Call slip (1950s?)

One of the fun things about reading old books that nobody else has opened for decades is what you sometimes find inside them: annotations, bookmarks, letters, racist leaflets (OK, that one was not so fun). Above is a library call slip (i.e. the bit of paper you fill in to request that a book be retrieved for you) from the SLV. I found it inside Property or Peace? by H. N. Brailsford, a socialist journalist. The book was published in 1934 but I reckon the call slip is from the 1950s, at the earliest, as there's a stamp in the front saying it was transferred from the CAE library in 1951 or 1952 or so.
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