I've been remiss in not noting the arrival of Military History Carnival #28 at Cliopatria. While it seems to be moving from a round-up of the best military history blogging to covering 'military history on the Internet' generally, there are still some good old-fashioned blogs therein. For example, Sellswords, mercenaries and condottieri presents a fascinating examination of the question: what was the reason for the inaccuracy of early modern firearms -- 'In other words, did soldiers use their firearms to its full potential?'

What I found particularly interesting were the details of experiments into musket accuracy conducted in the 18th century. For example:

Hanoverian experiments in 1790 showed that when fired at various ranges against a representative target (a placard 1.8 m high and up to 45 m long for infantry, 2.6 m high for cavalry) the following results were achieved: at 100 meters – 75% bullets hit infantry target, 83.3% cavalry, at 200 m – 37.5% and 50%, at 300 m – 33.3% and 37.5% respectively.

This statistical approach to thinking about combat seems close to what we would now call operational research, which has its origins in Britain in the Second World War (Bomber Command), the First World War (anti-aircraft gunnery), or maybe Charles Babbage's day (postal delivery), depending on who you talk to. But from my (admittedly limited) understanding of the methods of operational research, it probably could have arisen any time after the development of probability theory in the 17th century. The interest of 18th-century militaries in getting answers to questions susceptible to statistical analysis suggests that the impetus was there, so why didn't it happen sooner? For that matter (and it's a question I keep coming back to), why didn't the RAF develop them in conjunction with the bomber?

Michael Kerrigan. World War II Plans That Never Happened, 1939-1945. London: Amber Books, 2011.

As a historian, I'm probably not supposed to like counterfactuals. There are very good reasons for this. It's hard enough to reconstruct what did happen without worrying about what didn't. There are no minutes from meetings which never took place, no diaries from people who didn't exist, no newspaper reports of events which never happened. The further you depart from our timeline, the more speculation you indulge in, the more pointless it seems: thinking about the Roman Empire undergoing a steam-powered industrial revolution is fun, but what does it tell us about, well, anything to do with reality? And if objectivity is impossible to achieve when doing history, alternative history is prone to wish fulfilment and outright fantasy.

And yet I think counterfactuals can be useful. There is so much we don't know about the past, so much that we cannot now recover, but in one important sense we know more than the people we study: we know what happened in their future. Our histories of the Soviet Union, for example, will forever have to take into account the fact that it dissolved in 1991, something which nobody knew in 1917, 1921, 1945 or 1968. That makes it hard for us to truly understand how people thought about the future and, crucially, how that affected their decisions and actions in the present. Considering counterfactual scenarios can help restore this sense of contingency, of uncertainty: what did happen was not necessarily what had to to happen. Or even likely to happen. Besides, historians implicitly indulge in counterfactual thinking all the time: whenever we single out some event or person or institution as important in whatever way, we are effectively saying that if it that event hadn't happened, or if that person hadn't existed, or if that institution hadn't been created, then history would have been significantly different (for whatever definition of 'significant' works for you).

So asking 'what if...?' can at least help to ease the tyranny of actuality. But that doesn't do away with the objections I mentioned earlier. If it is to be of any use, counterfactual speculation has to be anchored in reality in some way: it can't just be about making stuff up wholesale. One obvious place to start, then, is with the ideas people had about the future. That leads directly to paleofuturism. In my own work I find the scenarios dreamed up about future warfare, whether sensational or sober, to be particularly compelling. Another way in to useful counterfactual history is through military history. I don't mean the venerable but somewhat arid 'for want of a nail' mode of alternative history, but rather looking at what the military forces thought about doing in wartime but, for one reason or another, did not actually do. It's here that we can see their dreams and nightmares most clearly.

In truth, the book I'm reviewing here -- yes, this is a book review! -- is not framed as a work of alternate history. But that it could have been is why I chose to review it. In World War II Plans That Never Happened Michael Kerrigan argues that (7):

When we see World War II as following a single triumphant trajectory, disregarding the provisional plans, the improvisatory execution, the bright ideas that came to nothing, we're forgetting the very stuff of war.

He aims to demonstrate this by examining several dozen military operations planned -- but never executed -- by both Axis and Allies between 1939 and 1945. These range from the well-known, such as Operations Sea Lion and Downfall (the seaborne invasions of Britain and Japan respectively) to the obscure like Operation Culverin, a British plan to capture Aceh, in the Dutch East Indies, for use in attacking Japanese shipping. There are also a number of weapons and other technological research programmes: for example, attempts to weaponise biological toxins (this was a time when it seemed like a good idea to think about bombing Germany with ricin-tipped needles). Then there are few odd ones which don't quite seem to fit: Operation Pastorius, a German attempt to infiltrate saboteurs into the United States may have amounted to nothing in the end, but the agents were in fact landed on American soil (where they were soon rounded up), so this doesn't seem like a plan 'that never happened' to me.

To be clear, this is not an academic text. It's very much a light, popular book, heavily illustrated with large type. With only two pages for most of the entries, there isn't a lot of space for deep analysis. But Kerrigan's critical approach helps here, as he explains why the various operational plans were never put into effect. So the various pre-1944 plans for a Second Front fell foul of British memories of Dunkirk and the lack of sufficient landing craft; an Allied occupation of the Cape Verde Islands, a valuable base for protecting shipping, was judged to be not worth the risk of alienating Portugal and Spain. Sometimes, however, he seems to assume that just because a plan was drawn up that, at least at some point, there was an accompanying intention to carry it out. But some of these plans, like the German invasion of Switzerland, were surely more contingency planning than strategic desire. There's also a lot of repetition (though given that this book is probably intended to be dipped into rather than read cover to cover, that may be by design). Sometimes this is thanks to the planners themselves: there are no less than four potential invasions of Ireland described here (one British, three German, though one of the latter was more about fomenting resistance to a possible US occupation of Eire).

The other thing I like about this book are the many reproductions of documents from government (mostly British) archives. This gives readers an insight into the arguments and objections considered by the planners, adding greatly to its interest. (At least for a historian, it does!) It's fascinating to see the British Chiefs of Staff mulling over Operation Unthinkable, a war against the Soviet Union after the defeat of Germany, possibly over the fate of Poland: 'A quick success might induce the Russians to submit to our will at least for the time being; but it might not. That is for the Russians to decide. If they want total war, they are in a position to have it' (169). I do wonder if it was necessary to also transcribe most of these documents, given that they are typewritten and that space is already limited.

Unfortunately, there are quite a few factual errors throughout World War II Plans That Never Happened. Libya was conquered by the Italians in 1912, not 1934, for example, and oil was not discovered there until after the war. As well, there are oddly elliptical statements: Kerrigan writes that while USS Kitty Hawk 'literally [...] carried aircraft, she was not an aircraft carrier like the later vessels named after her' (116). Why not just explain that it was an aircraft transporter? In fact, why mention Kitty Hawk at all in a work of this scope? There is an index, which is helpful; but no table of contents to speak of (it just lists the chapters, '1939-1941', '1942', etc) which is not. A page-and-a-bit of bibliography is probably about right for this level, but without in-text references it's often hard to work out which book might relate to a particular operation.

I do find it difficult to recommend this book wholeheartedly, even to a popular audience. But perhaps the 'woah!' factor outweighs the scholarly flaws. As an example, consider this quote: 'It was at the beginning of July 1943 that Anthony Eden sent a memo to Prime Minister Winston Churchill' (110). The memo is reproduced on the opposite page (111), and while it does indeed say 'Foreign Secretary' near the bottom, it's obvious that this is a request for Eden's advice on the matter. The memo itself is initialled 'C.P. C.A.S.', which pretty clearly stands for Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff. Which makes sense since the impetus for the memo came from Bomber Command, not the Foreign Office. Knowing the author of a document is one of the fundamentals of research, and makes you wonder what else has been missed. But let's set that aside for a minute and look at the content of the memo, dated 15 July 1943, which is a proposal by Air Chief Marshal Harris, head of Bomber Command, for a precision air attack on Rome with the objective of killing Mussolini:

Harris would use the Squadron of Lancasters (No. 617) which made the attacks on the dams. It is manned by experts and is kept for special ventures of this kind. The attack would be made just above the rooftops and which give the only chance of destroying the two buildings [Mussolini's residence and his office] without much other damage [...] I suggest that if Mussolini were killed or even badly shaken at the present time this might greatly increase the chance of our knocking Italy out at an early date and I therefore ask your permission to lay the operation on.

For Harris to propose this is completely at odds with his rather better-known espousal of area bombing techniques. It suggests that he was not averse to precision bombing if a suitable target presented itself. To bring this back to my long excursion into counterfactual history, it suggests that there were roads which Bomber Command could have taken at this stage of the war, but chose not to. In the short term, however, Mussolini was deposed just days later which rendered this operation unnecessary.

I'd never heard of this plan for a decapitation strike before, and might never have without reading World War II Plans That Never Happened. And there's more where that came from. For that reason it could interest the jaded grognard as well as those just starting out in their studies of the Second World War. But it is most valuable for restoring that sense of how the war might not have been the one we know today.

The title of this post is something which Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris did not say. There are an uncountable infinity of things Harris didn't say, but this particular one is of interest because during the Second World War it was widely believed that he did say it, and was taken to represent his aims and the aims of Bomber Command. It's part of a propaganda broadcast made to the German people in Harris's name, telling them what Bomber Command had in store for them if they did not overthrow their Nazi leaders:

Soon we shall be coming every night and every day, rain, blow, or snow -- we and the Americans [...] We are going to scourge the Third Reich from end to end if you make it necessary for us to do so. You cannot stop it, and you know it.

You have no chance.

The broadcast was picked up in Britain too, translated and printed in the daily press. In his memoirs, Harris says that he never said any of it, or even approved it; he had agreed that his name could be used on leaflets to be dropped into Germany, but this had somehow mutated into a radio broadcast. As Harris pointed out, he couldn't even speak German. Having said that, he nowhere disavows the substance of the speech, only that it understated the 'pains and dire penalties' which were 'actually meted out' to the German people by Bomber Command. Nor was he able to disavow authorship during the war. So this speech, though false, was more or less accurate and accepted as such. As I'm always looking out for ways to explore attitudes towards strategic bombing, the episode of the speech not made by Harris seems worth looking at.

The speech itself is too long to quote in full here, but can be found online in Flight, 6 August 1942, 145. Here's not-Harris answering his own question about why Britain was 'bombing Germany heavily':

Why are we doing so? It is not revenge, though we do not forget Warsaw, Belgrade, Rotterdam, London, Plymouth and Coventry. We are bombing Germany, city by city, and ever more terribly, in order to make it impossible for you to go on with the war. That is our object. We shall pursue it remorselessly. City by city: Lübeck, Rostock, Cologne, Emden, Bremen, Wilhelmshaven, Duisburg, Hamburg -- and the list will grow longer and longer. Let the Nazis drag you down to disaster with them if you will. That is for you to decide.

In fine weather we bomb you by night. Already 1,000 bombers go to one town, like Cologne, and destroy a third of it in an hour's bombing. We know; we have the photographs. In cloudy weather we bomb your factories and shipyards by day. We have done that as far away as Danzig. We are coming by day and by night. No part of the Reich is safe.

Here, not-Harris addresses the question of area bombing and of the killing of civilians, including women and children:

I will speak frankly to you about whether we bomb single military targets or whole cities. Obviously we prefer to hit factories, shipyards, and railways. It damages Hitler's war machine most. But those people who work in these plants live close to them. Therefore, we hit your houses and you. We regret the necessity for this. The workers of the Humboldt-Deutz, the diesel-engine plant in Cologne, for instance -- some of whom were killed on the night of May 30 last -- must inevitably take the risk of war. Just as our merchant seamen who man ships which the U-boats (equipped with Humboldt-Deutz engines) would have tried to torpedo. Were not the aircraft workers, their wives and children, at Coventry just as much 'civilians' as the aircraft workers at Rostock and their families? But Hitler wanted it that way.

And here's not-Harris telling the German people how they can save themselves:

One final thing: It is up to you to end the war and the bombing. You can overthrow the Nazis and make peace. It is not true that we plan a peace of revenge. That is a German propaganda lie. But we shall certainly make it impossible for any German Government to start a total war again. And is not that as necessary in your own interests as in ours?

So, what were the reactions, if any, to not-Harris's speech? The Manchester Guardian, thinking back to the Blitz, doubted its efficacy as propaganda (30 July 1942, 4):

The effect of such an utterance on us would have been to make us all summon the Government and the workers to still fiercer efforts in order to repel (and afterwards repay) the threatened blows.

It also thought it unwise to predict attacks which might be thwarted by bad weather, which would 'enliven the enemy and disappoint our friends'. A letter to the editor of the Guardian by Carey Lord (31 July 1942, 4) made similar criticisms, asking 'Would it not be better to get on with the job and threaten less?' Lord claimed that he had heard 'not a few exasperated queries' from people reading not-Harris's speech, asking 'when on earth we are going to begin [heavy bombing], especially with the situation in Russia becoming more and more critical'.

The Observer (then very conservative politically), by contrast, welcomed the not-Harris speech, but more for its effects on the British people than the German. In fact, its leader claimed that it was 'welcomed by the British as a message to themselves', without, however, actually offering any evidence for this (2 August 1942, 4):

what he said was keenly studied by the British people, not because they take a sadistic glee in the prospect of an enemy nation being scourged by fire, but because they feel a passionate need for some knowledge of our own strategy and policy. If the Prime Minister had nothing to say to our own Parliament, here, perhaps, was alternative guidance, the guidance for which we wait.

The Observer clearly had an agenda here; it was evidently unhappy at the lack of explanations from Churchill and other politicians as to what Britain was doing and what it was planning to do. So it seized upon not-Harris as some indication of what the bigger picture was:

As for strategy it was clear from this that the "big bombing" is not the alternative to a Second Front, but its prelude and confirmation. As for policy, it was abundantly made plain that the scourge is devised to whip a devilish creed out of existence and not as the root-and-branch destroyer of a race.

The Observer offered no criticisms of the speech, but did wonder if the 'big bombing' could be undertaken 'without prejudice to other and possibly more important preparations?' There's the hint here of a discussion about whether Bomber Command was a wise use of limited resources, but no more than that.

There was in fact a brief debate about not-Harris's speech in Parliament. Lord Addison, the leader of the Labour party in the House of Lords, proposed a motion on 4 August criticising the broadcast. His main objection was to 'the practice of having individual officers of the different Services broadcasting statements on war aims and strategic policy', as they are not ministers. Addison also added some other criticisms for good measure: like the Guardian, he argued that bad weather had already prevented bombing on some nights, so it was foolish to boast that Germany would be bombed 'rain, blow, or snow'. That led to another criticism, of the boastful nature of the broadcast:

If you read some of the statement it seems much more like Mussolini than an Englishman. It is not a British habit to brag in advance of all you are going to do.

Before Lord Selborne answered for the government (and Addison withdrew his motion, knowing as he would have all along that it would not succeed), the Marquess of Crewe, Lord Ailwyn and the Earl of Mansfield all spoke more or less in the same vein as Addison. Crewe's response was the most interesting to me. He noted that German propaganda was using the not-Harris speech as proof that 'it is proposed to mercilessly bomb the civilian population of Germany'.

Of course that is completely untrue. What Sir Arthur Harris did say -- and it cannot be contradicted -- was that in making attacks on purely military objectives such as dockyards or factories by bombing, it is not possible to avoid a certain loss of civilian life and destruction of the houses in which people who are not actually engaged in the Army live. That we all recognize in considering the attacks that have been made on this country. We draw a clear line of distinction between the casualties which have been inflicted on civilians in the immediate neighbourhood of military objects of attack, and the loss of life which has occurred in such places as Bath or Exeter. Undoubtedly that warning or caution was what was contained in the broadcast of Sir Arthur Harris.

This is the closest I've found in this episode to any discussion of the reprisals question which was so urgent during the Blitz, and it's a reaffirmation of the principle of selecting purely military objectives, or rather a denial that civilians were Bomber Command's target. A fair reading of not-Harris's speech, but not an accurate reading of Harris's thinking.

The postwar debate about area bombing implicitly assumes that it was not an inevitable strategy, that there were other choices, whether more moral or more wise or both. Rarely are any potential turning points identified, points when these other choices could have been made. I suspect that, in part, it's because there weren't very many, at least not as many as one might think. (Harris rightly points out that he was not the author of the area bombing policy, for example; it was in place before he assumed command of Bomber Command and the RAF's reliance on heavy bombers had been planned long before the war.) This particular point in time might have been one: Bomber Command was still relatively small and not obviously effective at scourging anything. The war had widened hugely in scope since Churchill ordered the bomber offensive back in 1940: the Soviet Union and the United States were now allies, and Japan an enemy. Resources used to make Halifaxes and Lancasters could have been diverted eastwards instead, or marshalled at home for a cross-channel invasion in 1943. But the question of ending or scaling down the bomber offensive did not seem to have arisen. Can you blame a whole nation for lack of imagination?

Cmnd. 124, Defence: Outline of Future Policy, is one of the most famous (and infamous) documents in British military history. It's better known as the 1957 Defence White Paper, or the Sandys White Paper after the Minister of Defence responsible for it, Duncan Sandys. It ended National Service, committed Britain to nuclear deterrence, and foreshadowed drastic cuts in conventional force levels. Aviation bore the brunt of these last. Fighter Command was to be abolished (though in the end it won a reprieve, at least until 1967) and a large number of advanced fighter types under development for the RAF were cancelled, including the Avro 720, the Fairey Delta 2, the Hawker Siddeley P.1121, and the Saunders-Roe SR.177. Only the English Electric P.1 and TSR-2 were spared (the latter only temporarily). Unsurprisingly, all this was controversial then and remains so today for those who remember such things. Certainly, the White Paper was a cost-cutting exercise: Sandys had a brief from the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, to find savings of £100 million from the defence estimates. But my interest here is the intellectual context of the Sandys White Paper: it wasn't just about saving money.

The thinking was that the coming of nuclear weapons, especially thermonuclear ones, had radically altered the nature of warfare. Here's how Sandys explained the basis of the White Paper to the House of Commons, on 16 April 1957:

The policy which we submit to the House in the White Paper is founded on the recognition of two basic facts. The first is that, in present circumstances. it is impossible effectively to defend this country against an attack with hydrogen bombs [...]

The second basic fact on which this policy is based is the fact that, whether we like it or not, we cannot go on devoting such a large part of our resources—and, in particular, of manpower—to defence. Since it must now be accepted that adequate protection against all-out nuclear attack is impossible, we believe that the British people will agree that the available resources of the nation should be concentrated not upon preparations to wage war so much, as upon trying to prevent that catastrophe from ever happening.

So the next war was likely to be a nuclear one, with little role for conventional forces such as the British Army of the Rhine. In the air, it was considered that the era of manned combat aircraft was drawing to a close, to be replaced by the guided missile. Sandys again:

We are unquestionably moving towards a time when fighter aircraft will be increasingly replaced by guided missiles and V-bombers by ballistic rockets, but all that will not happen overnight. The introduction of these new weapons will be a gradual process, extending over a good number of years, and even then there will still remain a very wide variety of roles for which manned aircraft will continue to be needed.

Here he was signalling a change to the established order, the one which had proved effective enough in the last war. Even against manned Soviet bombers, Fighter Command would need to be almost perfectly effective in order to be of any use at all: according to the Strath Report of 1955, just 10 hydrogen bombs used against Britain could cause 12 million civilian casualties. Civil defence measures might save many of these and preserve civil authority after a nuclear war, but only at the staggering (peacetime, of course) cost of £2 billion. And when bombers were eventually replaced by supersonic, long-range missiles, the air defence problem would become insoluble. Yes, this all sounds very familiar: the H-bomber will always get through, as the Daily Mail put it. The only way to stop it was to prevent it from taking off in the first place.

Sandys was born in 1908, the year of the first aeroplane flight in Britain. Most politicians of his generation would have been very aware of the shadow of the bomber in the 1930s (even the somewhat older Macmillan later said 'We thought of air warfare in 1938 rather as people think of nuclear warfare today'), but Sandys perhaps had more experience of it than most. He became a Conservative MP in 1935, and married Winston Churchill's daughter that same year. In 1937 he became an officer in a Territorial anti-aircraft brigade protecting London. This led to the 'Sandys affair' in 1938: he alleged, in Parliament, that British air defences were inadequate. During the war, still in the Territorials, he apparently commanded a rocket-firing AA battery which apparently shot down a German bomber. He was also stationed near a missile proving ground at Aberporth at one point. And of course he was in London during the V2 blitz. So Sandys knew something about air defence and something about rockets, even if they were a far cry from the new monsters on the horizon in the late 1950s. Perhaps he was primed to be the author of this new paradigm?

What I don't know is the extent to which Sandys' rejection of air defence and civil defence was supported by expert opinion in the public sphere. There must have been equivalents of the 1930s air prophets writing books and articles declaring that the day of the aeroplane was over, and that there was no defence against the Bomb. But the contours of the literature are less familiar to me, and the obvious parallels with the 1930s could be misleading. For one thing I'm sure that American military intellectuals were much more influential now than they had been before the war. And for another, after Hiroshima and Bikini only the delusional could discount the terrible power of nuclear weapons. There was still plenty of room for guesswork in the calculations, but it was a question of the difference between total destruction and almost-total destruction. So, whereas in 1939 a local government like Finsbury might want a comprehensive shelter system to protect its citizens against bombing; in the 1950s Coventry and St Pancras controversially rejected civil defence entirely as a pointless waste of money. Still, things like CND and world federalism do seem like throwbacks to the 1930s, if now with an added sense of urgency. What about militarist alternatives, though? Was the nuclear deterrent the only positive proposal for adaptation to the new era? I don't know.

The problem was basing Britain's entire defence posture on the theory of a nuclear knock-out blow meant it was less able to respond to less extreme but perhaps more plausible threats. Sandys argued that if British conventional forces turned out to be insufficient in a time of war, then tactical nuclear weapons could be used without risk of escalation into an all-out nuclear exchange. Well, perhaps they could have been, but he was lucky this idea was never put to the test (as were many other people, come to think of it). This is the problem with potential revolutions in military affairs. What if P. R. C. Groves had managed in the 1920s to convince the British government to base its air defence on a big fleet of airliners? What if the World Disarmament Conference had led to an international (or at least European) air force in the mid-1930s? Or, for that matter, if air forces were to convert to combat drones in the near future? It's risky to turn the dreams of experts into reality. In 1957, though, I can see why Sandys thought the risk had to be run.

Further reading: G. C. Peden, Arms, Economics and British Strategy: From Dreadnoughts to Hydrogen Bombs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), chapter 6; Matthew Grant, 'Home defence and the Sandys Defence White Paper, 1957', Journal of Strategic Studies 31 (2008), 925-49.

On this day in 1945, the third atomic bomb was dropped on Tokyo. Or, rather, might have been had not Japan surrendered on 15 August. For a long time, I've believed that the two bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the only ones which would be available for a month or two. But a comment at Edge of the American West pointed me in the direction of a memo recording the conversation between General John E. Hull and Colonel L. E. Seeman on 13 August, about atomic bomb production in the next few months. And it turns out that there was one ready to be shipped out to Tinian at that very moment. According to Seeman, it would be ready for use on 19 August.

As for where it would be used, I got that from the first chapter of Michael Gordin's Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War. He says there that the third drop would 'probably' have been on Tokyo. That surprises me a little, given that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen from a list of cities spared from conventional bombing so that the effects of the atomic bombs could be better assessed. Tokyo wasn't on that list (the other cities were Kokura and Niigata). Perhaps the thinking was that two 'test' drops were enough, and that if no surrender followed, it was time for a higher-value morale target? It could be questioned how much of Tokyo was left to destroy after the 65 conventional (or fire) raids which had already taken place. Or perhaps a decapitating strike was intended, to take out Hirohito and his ministers? Though that might actually make surrender more difficult to organise.

Clearly I'll have to add Gordin's book to my to-read list ...

I've been reading a little about the Dardanelles campaign of 1915; not the famous landings in April but the failed naval campaign which preceded them in February and March. The basic idea was that British and French forces would sweep the Bosphorus clear of mines, knock out the Turkish naval guns on either side of the straits, proceed to Constantinople and then receive Turkey's surrender. In the event, the first two parts of this plan failed rather spectacularly (three battleships were lost to mines in a single day), but even if they hadn't, just how a fleet of warships was supposed to make a country surrender has never been very clear, at least not to me.

It's tempting to see this as a sort of naval knock-out blow. Constantinople, the Turkish capital, would be under the guns of the Allied battleships. Turkey had no significant navy of its own, besides the ex-German battlecruiser Goeben which would have been hugely outnumbered, so the city would be open to a devastating naval bombardment. So perhaps the sheer moral effect of this would cause a collapse. And it seems the Turks feared this. On 18 March, the day of the attempted breakthrough, according to Robert Massie:

Meanwhile, in Constantinople, the government and the populace were convinced that the Allied fleet would break through. All Turks respected the near legendary power of the British navy; no one believed that a collection of ancient forts and guns at the Dardanelles could bar its way. Accordingly, word of the massive bombardment precipitated an exodus from the capital. The state archives were evacuated and hidden; the banks were emptied of gold; many affluent Turks already had sent their families away. The distance from Gallipoli to Constantinople was only 150 miles; most Turks expected that less than twelve hours after they entered the Sea of Marmara, British battleships would arrive off the Golden Horn.

So if a moral effect was intended, it seems like it was starting to work. But as I say, it's frustratingly unclear in the histories and biographies I have to hand just what the Allies expected was going to happen. There's a suggestion that Kitchener thought the morale of the Turkish army would break; maybe there would be another revolution; or maybe the soldiers eventually landed at Gallipoli could have been used to take Constantinople instead. Of course, there would have been other benefits from forcing the straits: opening the sea lanes to Russia, foremost among them.

Whether or not the Dardanelles operation was supposed to have been a naval knock-out blow, it may have had some influence on the development of the aerial knock-out blow. Frederick Sykes was a relatively early believer in the power of strategic bombing, as far as the RAF was concerned, but even the exhaustive semi-biography by Eric Ash doesn't pin down when he did adopt it. (Ash suggests before the war, but doesn't really show this.) But from July 1915, Sykes was the commander of the RNAS in the eastern Mediterranean, including the Dardanelles. He would have been aware that Constantinople was the ultimate objective of the campaign, and he did in fact propose bombing the city from the air to undermine Turkish morale and interdict supply. Perhaps this problem of how to get at Constantinople, and maybe rumours of the panic in March, got him thinking about the potential power of the bomber in ending a war? The same applies to P. R. C. Groves, who was Sykes' chief of staff, and would again be his subordinate in 1918 when they were the RAF's Chief of Air Staff and Director of Flying Operations respectively, and were very keen to bomb Germany as hard as possible. I've looked at Groves' papers, however, and there's not enough evidence there to say whether he believed in anything like the knock-out blow before late 1917. All I can say is that the lure of Constantinople could have been one influence on the air extremism of Groves and Sykes.

Some more navel-gazingpost-thesis analysis. Above is a plot of the number of primary sources (1908-1941) I cite by date of publication. (Published sources only, excluding newspaper articles -- of which there are a lot -- and government documents. Also, it's not just airpower stuff, though it mostly is.) I actually have no idea if it's a lot or not, and I'm sure there are some selection effects in there. But, although I've certainly not attempted any sort of statistical analysis (nor will I!), I think some features of the plot reflect real features of the airpower literature of period, at least as it relates to the bombing of civilians.

Firstly, there's a substantial increase in the number of sources in the 1930s, particularly from 1934 when there is a big peak. I argue in the thesis that this was only partly and indirectly due to the obvious reason (the arrival of Hitler in 1933). The more important reason was the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva, which ran between 1932 and 1934 (actually it went longer, but was dead in the water when Germany walked out). This roused airpower writers -- whether pro- or anti-disarmament -- to action, and gave them a reason to explain to the public the effects of bombing on cities. The slight rise from the late 1920s is also due to the conference, I think, or rather the optimistic Locarno-era preparations for it. The big peak in 1927 is a bit odd, though. Let's call that an outlier.

The other two noticeable peaks are in 1909 and 1938. The first was very early in the public's awareness of flight. That really started in 1908, but the possible defence implications came to the fore in 1909 -- the founding of the Aerial League of the British Empire, the first phantom airship panic, the publication of the first serious books on the topic. And of course the dreadnought panic -- it was a peak year for Anglo-German rivalry. The 1938 peak was the culmination of the building concern over the previous decade. What the plot doesn't show is that, unlike previous years, it was largely sceptical, based on evidence from the Spanish Civil War. The Sudeten crisis that September showed that the fear of the knock-out blow still had a strong grip on the public and the press. But afterwards there's a sharp decline in interest, which I maintain is real.

This is the same thing, but for secondary sources (i.e. published after 1941; again not just works on airpower). There's a superficial similarity, in that both plots slope upwards from left to right. But in this case that's much more likely to be an artifact, a function of the sources I've read and chosen to cite. Naturally I'm going to have a bias towards more recent sources, which build upon and extend earlier research. Earlier works will often lack the perspective that comes with distance, and they can be harder to find too, as libraries shuffle them to the stacks to offsite stores or dispose of them altogether.

Just as importantly, at least when it comes to policy studies, earlier secondary sources also lacked access to primary sources, despite being closer in time to them. That's something which does show up here. In the years after the Second World War, government documents were still confidential, and so it's mainly only the official histories which are of much use today, along with official document collections. (In some cases, in fact, they have not yet been superseded.) From the late 1950s, the (brand-new) 50-years rule meant that Edwardian-era documents began to become publicly available, and then First World War documents. If this had continued, it would have taken until the 1980s until historians had access to official sources for the 1930s! But luckily, in 1968 the fifty-year rule became a thirty-year rule, and by the mid-1970s the whole of the Second World War period was open for research. And that's exactly when the first detailed studies of British airpower policy, outside of the official histories, began to appear.

But I wonder what would have happened if the fifty-year rule had remained in place. Would airpower historians have been forced to look more widely for sources, instead of mining the (extremely rewarding) seams of government archives? Perhaps my own area would have been thoroughly worked over long ago?

The 17th Military History Blog Carnival has been posted at Military History and Warfare. (It was posted nearly a week ago, but I've been busy ...) The most interesting post for me this week is on the Maginot Line, by the carnival host. He points out that, though much-maligned, the Maginot Line did its job: the Germans generally avoided a frontal assault in 1940. Even at the time of the Armistice, most of the Line still held out. Of course, that raises the question of what would have happened if the Line had been fully extended to protect the border with Belgium? Would the Germans have tried to penetrate it? Or would the Sitzkrieg have lasted for years instead of months? Even if successful, a German Army exhausted from battering its way through would not have been able to even think about invading Britain in 1940, and maybe the USSR would be off for the following year, also. Which could, paradoxically, have been very bad for Britain ... Rommel might have gotten more resources and so goodbye Egypt and Suez. Or maybe Sealion would happen in 1941. Ah, the pleasures of counterfactual history and just making stuff up!

Some more plots from the talk I gave the other way. I was trying to think of a way to illustrate in concrete terms the problem of speed for the air defence of Britain. I came up with the following:

Simply put, it shows the length of time it would have taken for an attacking bomber to fly from the coast to London (in blue) -- call it the crossing time -- and the time it would take taken for a defending fighter to climb high enough to intercept (in red) -- call it the intercept time. And how these changed over time, obviously. As can be seen, the fighters generally had enough time to climb high enough to intercept the bombers before they got to London, but the margin decreased over time, from 15 or so minutes during the First World War, to less than 5 in the Second.

But all this is not straightforward so I'll explain further. To begin with, the data is slightly dodgy. It's mostly drawn from the same source as this, which is fine as far as it goes. But that means that I'm showing how long it would have taken British bombers to penetrate from the coast to London, which was not really a great worry. Having said that, it's probably reasonable to assume that the performance of British bombers was roughly in line with those used by Continental air forces. (And the RAF's own air defence exercises had to make this assumption, too, because borrowing somebody else's air force for a day wasn't feasible.) One day I'll create a dataset for European aircraft ...

How are the numbers derived? First, the bombers (blue). This is just the distance from the coast to London divided by each bomber's maximum speed (which is not necessarily realistic). Why the coast? Because it was only when the incoming raiders crossed the coast that they could be detected by ground observers, and fighters dispatched to intercept them. What is the distance from the coast to London? Well, obviously it varies, depending on which direction the enemy came from (and some writers expressed fears that they would fly up the Thames Estuary and avoid detection). Looking at a map, 50 miles seems like a reasonable approximation.

Next, the fighters (red). The time it takes for a fighter to climb meet the bombers is the height of the raid divided by the climb rate of each fighter. This climb rate is a bit of a problem. I don't a good source for this number and had to plunder Wikipedia. That's bad enough in itself, but it's worse because the data is inconsistent. Sometimes -- when it's not missing -- it's expressed in feet per minute, and sometimes in the number of minutes to reach a given height. Obviously one can be turned into the other, but actually both are only approximations, and I've had to extrapolate and interpolate from these to get a usable number. What height would the bombers be at? Well, that varied -- it was higher on average during the Second World War than in the First because aircraft were more capable, and also because bombers tried to climb higher to escape the fighters. I've assumed that this height was 10000 ft in the 1910s, 15000 ft in the 1920s, 20000 ft in the 1930s, and 25000 ft in the 1940s. I just plucked these numbers out of the air, more or less, but they seem to work well in terms of keeping the red and blue trends in touch with each other. If anything they are probably underestimates.

Some other points. Firstly, the fighters would generally have to move horizontally to intercept the bombers, as well as vertically. This plot says nothing about that. But given the edge fighters had in speed and the location of their aerodromes, they should be able to cover that distance while climbing. Secondly, the data points are for the year each aircraft entered into RAF service. But since they remained in service for several year, at least, the data points should really be horizontal lines.

Thirdly, I'm assuming a perfect command, control, communications and intelligence system. Fighter Command (and its predecessors) was good, but it still took a finite but non-zero amount of time for sightings to be reported, sifted, collated and reported, and then for squadrons to be allocated, given orders, and take off. Also there was a chance that raids might not be observed, that squadrons could be given the wrong vector, that the enemy could be missed in cloud -- so the greater the gap between the red data points and the blue ones the better. The more inefficient Fighter Command, the narrower the margin for error.

Now we can show what difference radar made. The Chain Home system came into operation in 1939 and had an effective range of 120 miles. What this means here is that instead of only having to cross 50 miles from the coast to London after being detected by the observers on the coast, the bombers now had to cross 170 miles after being detected. As the above plot shows, this pushed up the crossing time dramatically: from 1939, the defenders could generally expect to have around 40 minutes' warning of any raids. The margin for error increased dramatically, from only 5 minutes or less, to more than half an hour, which is far better. In theory, the defending fighter squadrons would now have plenty of time to get in position before the enemy arrived. Of course, that's not the whole battle, but it's a good start!

Lastly, here's a counterfactual which I've long wondered about. Between 1933 and 1935, the Air Ministry put a fair amount of effort into researching the feasibility of using acoustic mirrors as a comprehensive early warning system. The acoustic mirrors were, mostly, concrete hemispheric dishes for focusing sound, which had been used as early as 1916. The biggest ones, at Dungeness in Kent and Maghtab in Malta, were 200 feet long curved walls. Land was actually purchased along the Thames Estuary for the beginnings of a national acoustic mirror system, but work never started because radar came along. But if it hadn't, then in 1940 Fighter Command might have relied upon a network of these acoustic mirrors all along the coast. How useful would they have been?

The experimental mirrors had a maximum detection range of 22 miles (on very windy days it was a lot less). I'll be generous and call it 25 miles, which is then added to the 50 miles from the coast to London for a total distance of 75 miles. The Thames Estuary acoustic mirrors probably would have come online in 1936, and so again I'll be generous, and assume that London at least would have a working early warning system from that year.

Taking all this into account, the results can be seen above. And sadly the acoustic mirrors wouldn't have made much difference -- a margin of only about 10 minutes, not much improved on the 5 minutes with no warning system. Of course, even a few minutes' extra warning was worth having, but the Air Ministry was right to terminate development of the acoustic mirror network in order to concentrate on the far more promising radar.

John Ferris has argued against the idea that 'Air defence in Britain began during 1934 and only because radar was developed', and that the importance of the C³I system -- ultimately a legacy of the First World War -- has been underestimated by historians: it was 'ideally preadapted to radar'. And he's right. Even without effective early warning, as long as the enemy bombers could be intercepted and shot down on their way back home, air defence could still work by inflicting prohibitive casualties. Except, that is, when the casualties from bombing were predicted to be massive, and then a failure to stop the bomber getting through would have devastating consequences. Radar was part of the antidote to the fear of the knock-out blow. Or rather it could have been, if it hadn't remained secret until 1941 ...

(Just to repeat: the data and assumptions underlying these plots are on the dubious side, and are not fit for any purpose, probably including this one!)

The talk at Earth Sciences went well, I think. It was a good-sized audience and they seemed interested in what I had to say, judging by the questions afterwards. I also found out that one of the honorary fellows had actually lived in London during the war, and though only a child could remember watching out for V1s passing overhead and even the 'electric' atmosphere of the day that war was declared.

I was all set to record the talk, but forgot to fire up the audio app. At some point, I may try recording it again at home or just putting the text up. Until then, here are a couple of the graphs I used, along with some different ways of presenting the same numbers. (Except where indicated, the data is courtesy of Dan Todman, who compiled it from Home Office files. Thanks Dan!)

Firstly, this shows the civilian casualties (killed and seriously wounded) each month in Britain due to enemy action between 1939-1945. Most -- all? -- of these will have the result of bombing, so I've labeled it accordingly. (This is the counterpart of a histogram I did for 1914-1918, except that combined civilian and military casualties, and separated different forms of attack.) It's easy to pick out the Luftwaffe's major offensives: the biggest peak is September 1940, when the Blitz started; it ended in May 1941, after which casualties were never so high again. There's a relative lull in January and February 1941, due largely to bad weather conditions. In April-June 1942, there's the Baedeker Blitz and from January 1944, the Baby Blitz. Then there's the V-1 offensive in June-September 1944 and the V-2 offensive in September 1944-March 1945.

I thought it might be instructive to compare what actually happened with what was predicted would happen: if the knock-out blow had attempted and if pre-war estimates of German airpower had been correct. I derived this from figures provided by Richard M. Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy (London: H.M.S.O., 1950), 9 and 12-3, which were estimates made circa 1938 by government bodies for a war starting in 1939. These lead to the following assumptions:

1. the Luftwaffe could deliver 3500 tons of bombs on London in the first 24 hours of an attack, and an average of 700 tons per day for some weeks thereafter (Committee of Imperial Defence)
2. the casualties caused per ton of bombs dropped would be 48 (24 killed, 24 seriously wounded) (ARP Department, Home Office)
3. the war would last for 60 days (CID)

It's then simple to calculate that a German knock-out blow launched on 3 September 1939 would have led to a bit over 1.1 million casualties in September and a bit over a million in October, 168000 on the first day of war. More than a million fatalities in just two months.

It's easy to quibble with these assumptions -- for example, I'm using the most pessimistic multiplier for casualties, but that's partly because it's easy to relate it to the definition of casualties I'm already using. And my assumption that the 700 tons per day could be kept up for 60 days may well be too high, but I can't find anything better. The CID did estimate in 1937 that an aerial war of this length would kill 600,000 and wound 1.2 million, so that shows that I'm in the right range and also that officials did make these sorts of calculations at the time.

Anyway, the point of the histogram is to show that the actual bombing, as bad as it was, was nothing like as terrible as 'the expected holocaust' (as Tom Harrison termed it), and I think it succeeds -- you can just make out the Blitz and the V-1 attacks, but they're just tiny blips. However, precisely because of the huge disparity in scale, it's hard to make a meaningful comparison.

In his graphs of all British casualties, Dan opted for running cumulative figures rather than monthly ones, and that is indeed better for showing the overall picture -- whereas monthly is better at showing intensity, I think. So, here's my actual vs. predicted plot redone in cumulative fashion. Even by the end of five and a half years of total war, the scale of the knock-out blow isn't even approached. (In fact, I think that even when military casualties are taken into account, the knock-out blow still wins handily.)

Here's a different way to present the monthly data. This time I've plotted the casualties on a log scale. This is good for showing changes in the order of magnitude, and it's immediately apparent that the knock-out blow was around two orders of magnitude (i.e., about 100 times) more intense than the worst month of the Blitz.

Finally, the cumulative casualty figures on a log scale. So, overall, the civilian experience of bombing over the whole of the Second World War (mainly meaning the Blitz) was about one order of magnitude (i.e. about 10 times) less devastating than the knock-out blow predicted shortly before the war.

The knock-out blow would have been 100 times more intense and 10 times more devastating than the Blitz was -- I'll have to remember that!