The front page of the Daily Mirror today is almost wholly given over to a story which the other papers are far less interested in. The recently-installed Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr William Temple (that's him on the left, though what is being done to him I have no idea; and that's his forehead on the right), used a speech in Manchester yesterday to give 'a new charter to Britain -- a charter of social reform which will bring happiness to millions of people if applied in post-war reconstruction' (1). Its nine points are:

1. Provision of decent houses for the people of this country;
2. Every child to have adequate and right nutrition;
3. Equality in education. There shall be genuinely available to every section of society the kind of education will develop their faculties to the full;
4. Adequate leisure for personal and family life. Where the family is separated because of employment, there should be two days' holiday each week;
5. Universal recognition of holidays with wages;
6. The application of science to discover labour-saving devices, to save labour instead of labourers;
7. Wide appreciation of the fact that labour is a partner in industry, just as much as management and capital;
8. Recognition by workers and employers alike that service comes first, and the opportunity to make profit comes afterwards;
9. The opportunity for all people to achieve the dignity and decency of human personality.

An accompanying article by A. W. Brockbank says that Temple also warned against yielding 'to the lure of people who try to persuade us that it would be wise to establish such a non-party State'":

'The minority must have the right to become the majority if it can. It must be lawful to be in opposition to the Government.'

Just who he has in mind here is not made clear.

Speaking of Manchester, the Manchester Guardian reports that in 1941, crime there increased by 20.1% over 1940 (6):

The principal increases are in theft of bicycles, simple larceny, house-breaking and larceny, and false pretences and fraud.

It's not all bad news: the number of shoplifting incidents decreased by 174 to 460, possible due to 'the Limitation of Supplies Order, which reduces the quantity of goods available for display'. Manchester's Chief Constable, Sir John Maxwell, suggested that the crime surge 'might reasonably be attributed to crime conditions, the extra duties imposed on the police, and to the great advantage to the felon operating in the "black-out"'. He didn't mention the opportunities created by air raids (though of course Manchester hasn't had a really heavy blitz since 1940). According to the Daily Mirror, 'the shattered streets of Bath' have experienced 'a wave of looting' since it was bombed (1). There are 'complaints that jewellery, money and goods had disappeared from ruined homes', and 'money boxes had been wrenched from gas and electricity meters'. In response, the Home Guard in Bath was been issued with live ammunition last night:

They patrolled in pairs, and had orders to take drastic action if they saw thieves robbing bombed buildings.

Another consequence of bombing is an increased traffic in rumours. Following an outbreak of them after the Norwich raids, the Eastern Regional Commissioner, Sir Will Spens, has asked the public not to believe or pass on rumours about air raids, (Guardian, 6):

There were rumours of heavy attacks on towns not attacked. Broadcasts were alleged to have been given which were not given. The number killed was in some cases multiplied tenfold.

Norwich and especially Bath have particular cause to thank the National Fire Service -- according to Herbert Morrison, Minister of Home Security, 'now the most powerful in the world' (Daily Express, 4). He said:

The Regional Commissioner has reported to me that the N.F.S. saved a great part of Bath. Under the old system the whole town might -- almost certainly would -- have gone.

Indeed, the NFS 'has justified itself in the concentrated air raids on British "Baedeker" towns', its first real test since '1,450 local fire brigades in Britain were telescoped in 37 fire forces', with a 'Fire Control Room in Whitehall'. This means that 'The question of "town boundaries," which often led to disastrous delays, has been eliminated':

When there is a raid on any part of the country firemen and appliances from surrounding areas concentrate their energies.

Nearly three thousand people attended York Minster yesterday for 'the special service of commemoration of the victims of the air raid on Tuesday night' (Yorkshire Post, 6). The Dean of York, the Very Rev. Eric Milner-White, gave the address, drawing upon 'the motto of the West Yorkshire Regiment, Nec aspera terrent' which is repeatedly inscribed on the walls of the Minster:

'It is a motto,' said the Dean, 'which might stand for York, which its citizens had proved on April 29, 1942, for ever. The desperate moment did not find them afraid, and the rough paths had not dismayed them. On that morning, dawning red before the dawn was due, York gave its toll in the defence of our England, our Empire and our race. We do not grudge it. We have not complained. We will be proud of it. But it is a heavy payment, and there is a sore pain at our hearts. I expect it is always so. The day of grandeur is always a day of suffering.

He predicted that York would one day raise a memorial to the dead, 'a new sort of memorial', dedicated not to 'sailors, soldiers and fighting men who made great sacrifices in far-off places', but to 'warriors like these':

These were the aged who died for children they would never see. These were fathers and mothers who suffered and hallowed England's homes under the ruins of their own; these are the children who gave their years of lovely promise that freedom might play for ever in our streets.

The Yorkshire Post reprints a letter from one of the children who survived the raid, Valerie Johnson, 15, 'a senior pupil at the Convent School' which was hit by at least two bombs, one a delayed-action one. She's far less sombre than the Dean, writing to her father that 'We're school-less! We woke up early this morning with bombs dropping quite close, so we all skedaddled down to the shelters'.

When the bomb fell, the lights went out, the whole place rocked, the gas pipes broke, and we heard debris falling -- it seemed on top of us but it wasn't quite. In the next cellar six lay mistresses and one nun were buried and both the entrances to our cellar were blocked [...] All the smaller children became quite panicky, but we managed to quieten them, while being nearly suffocated by gas and coal dust [...] It was horrid in there though by ourselves, with gas leaking and the air thick with dust and children screaming and black darkness, but we came through O.K.

After 'twenty minutes -- it seemed like twenty hours' the occupants of both cellars were rescued. Five of the nuns were killed in the raid; 'three day girls in our class alone are missing' (though obviously they weren't at the school when the raid took place). The school is ruined, though two rooms might be used to teach classes in turns. The boarders have been sent home: 'Mummy was very surprised to see me, as she didn't know York had had a blitz'. There was no blitz on Saturday night, by the way, yet German radio reported in Russian that Vichy French aircraft carried out reprisals for 'the British raid on Paris' (Express, 1). The translation reads:

Last night the first French reprisal raid was carried out on several towns in Southern Britain. French airmen dropped bombs and leaflets saying that every R.A.F. raid on France would be followed by a French raid on Britain twice or three times as powerful.

The Yorkshire Post's London correspondent suggests that this is 'a German attempt to scare Russia by the suggestion that the French Air Force can deal with Britain while the main strength of the Luftwaffe is concentrated on the Eastern Front' (2).

There's so much of interest today that I'll have to pass over -- I haven't even mentioned the continuing bad news from Burma, which dominates most of the big headlines; nor the Express's critique of Saturday's mock invasion of Westminster (much too unrealistic: 'EVEN FIFTH COLUMNISTS REFUSED TO BE "CADS"', 3); nor yet Sir Stafford Cripps on Britain's commitment to Indian independence after the war. But I must at least quote from two letters to the editor. The first, in the Guardian is from E. Lindsay, possibly Erica, the wife of A. D. Lindsay, Master of Balliol (the address is given as 'The Master's Lodging, Balliol College', 4). She says it is 'a terrible thing' in this just war 'to have one's single mind and purpose sullied and hammered from within':

Yet this thing happens when the B.B.C. offers us, as for our encouragement, the evidence of civilian refugees streaming out of a bombed German port.

Surely we are mature enough of mind and purpose to understand that there is a war to be waged involving mortal suffering which all must mourn and of which none need boast, sullying themselves and their cause. If those responsible for the presentation of news on the wireless could hear the comments of simple people who have already tasted the full horrors of bombing they would know how little such descriptions are in tune with the temper of our nation in its great crusade.

The second appears in the Yorkshire Post and is from R. A. Chadwick of Leeds, who urges that to preserve peace after the war the Allies should decree 'that no German, Italian or Japanese shall own an aeroplane, fly an aeroplane, make an aeroplane, operate an air line, or own, occupy, manage, or be employed on any aerodrome', and further 'that no aeroplane can be flown anywhere in the world unless both the 'plane and the pilot are licensed by Britain, the U.S.A., Russia and China (all four of them)' (2).

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the Baedeker Blitz. See here for an introduction to the series.

]]> http://airminded.org/2012/05/04/monday-4-may-1942/feed/ 1 http://airminded.org/2011/03/15/saturday-15-march-1941/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=saturday-15-march-1941 http://airminded.org/2011/03/15/saturday-15-march-1941/#comments Tue, 15 Mar 2011 12:45:11 +0000 Brett Holman http://airminded.org/?p=6458

The war news today is much closer to home for the Glasgow Herald than usual. A big air raid last night on 'a Central district of Scotland' (5) is vividly described, as though the reporter had witnessed it: readers would know for themselves just how far away it was.

One Nazi 'plane which appeared to be heading for home was spotted by searchlights, and immediately there was a road of gunfire as battery after battery opened up and poured shells into the apex of the searchlights.

The crackle of bursting shells followed a maze of flashes. When the gunfire stopped and the 'plane emerged from the barrage one of its engines could be heard misfiring. The 'plane seemed to be in difficulties and gradually losing height.

On the ground, civil defence workers 'toiled side by side with firemen after bombs scored a direct hit on a tenement building':

As rescue workers struggled to break down the massive barriers of broken stone and secure the safety of those feared trapped in the debris the fire-fighters poured a continuous stream of water to keep down the creeping flames.

But this isn't all. On the previous night, Clydeside itself received a heavy raid which wrecked 'Houses, churches, schools': some people were killed when an air-raid shelter received a direct hit. ARP services are praised for working smoothly and heroically through the bombing. As for the air raid victims (emphasis in original):

The people of the blitzed districts spent yesterday recovering property and furniture from partially ruined homes and settling down in new billets, while a few had the tragic task of tracing missing relatives.

It was this courageous attitude to the situation which characterised the outlook of every victim of the blitz to their misfortune.

"Tell the world that we here in Scotland can also take it," said a smiling invalid in one of the rest centres.

There's more on Thursday night's raid -- already being called 'The Clydeside Blitz' (7) -- on other pages. One is especially emotive (6):

The long, fierce attack on a Clydeside town on Thursday night, in which working-class homes, trim villas and bungalows, and a few industrial establishments were set ablaze, was carried out with a grim and revolting sadism by relays of raiders.

The article asserts that 'What angered Clydeside' about the raid was that it seemed to be 'a deliberate adventure in terrorism'.

For what other purpose, they argued, could the raiders be bombing again and again an already tenement? For what other reason did renewed showers of bombs fall among little houses which were already blazing and shattered?

But, another article on the same page asserts:

All the violence of a merciless night of incessant bombing of a Clydeside town, with its train of homeless families, many of them suffering the ordeal of sudden bereavement, failed utterly to weaken the splendid morale of the population.

If the raid was intended to strike a blow at industry it failed, the assault falling in the main on a working-class community, which has revealed itself as heroic as any elsewhere affected by air attack on a large scale.

The leading article today is somewhat more restrained. It notes that this, the 'first long and heavy air raid that Clydeside has suffered' (4) could hardly be considered a surprise considering its importance as an industrial centre and as a port. It also notes the 'remarkable record of 13 night raiders brought down' as evidence that Britain's night defences have improved greatly since 'the long weeks of autumn and early winter, when the Germans were able to bomb London and other English towns night after night almost with impunity'. Given that the Luftwaffe's ability to hit 'targets of real military targets has been far below that of the R.A.F.', it predicts that it may be forced to give up 'attacks of a mainly terroristic and indiscriminate type' and stick to 'tactics of the kind which our airmen have made our own', demonstrating 'the inferiority of the Nazis [...] more clearly than ever'. (This is an unusual argument: how does an effective air defence make precision bombing easier instead of harder?)

Meanwhile, the people of Clydeside, by intensifying their effort for victory, can prove to the world and the enemy that their reactions to frightfulness from the air are not less formidable than the reactions of the Londoners or the men of the English Midlands.

One such reaction: Ellen Wilkinson, Labour MP for Jarrow, on a visit to blitzed Swansea: 'Thank God we can hit back. I never realised what a vindictive person I was until I went through this city.'

RAF Bomber Command raided Hamburg for the second night in a row Thursday night, 'the "heaviest yet" raid on the city' (5). The Air Ministry claims that 'Shipbuilding yards, docks, and warehouses suffered badly'. The German News Agency, on the other hand, says that

"Most of the bombs again fell in residential districts as the violent anti-aircraft forced the British pilots to release their bombs without taking aim," it was stated."

Reid wraps up his series of articles on peace aims today by reiterating his call for 'a Military Union modelled on the British Commonwealth of Nations' (4), which must have 'the strongest air force in the world' and 'undertake to protect its members automatically and unquestionally if any of them is attacked'. He considers membership. It sadly can't be assumed that the United States won't withdraw into isolation again. The Union would then have to be restricted to Europe and Africa 'since it dare not repeat the error of the League of Nations by accepting members which it cannot protect'. Ideally it would only be composed of nations with 'Democracy and economic freedom' which, unlike 'socialism and dictatorship', are 'guarantees of peaceable policies'. Finally there is the question of Germany. It can have no place in the military union; it 'will have to be disarmed far more completely than in 1919, and the country will have to be occupied for many years'; its 'industrial power [...] will have to be broken or controlled'. Germany will have to learn its 'lesson of peaceable self-control' before it could join a 'European Union'.

In an earlier article, Reid had discarded the idea of a federal union. But Sir Robert B. Greig, of Barnton, either did not read it or was not convinced by it, for he yesterday gave a speech at Stirling Rotary Club in favour of one. He pointed to the danger of aviation as justification (6):

"When you look at the modern aeroplane you would say it was invented and built by a superman," Sir Robert continued. "But look what has happened. 'Planes have been used by people with an ape mind, not a human mind. That is the danger we are up against. Science will run away from us altogether and we shall destroy civilisation unless there is a controlling power, and the first controlling power should be that of the prevention of war. Unless we have a Federal Union which has an overriding Government over and above national sovereignties I do not see how we can prevent war.

To end on a lighter note, the third leading article today is on war slang. It suggests that the present war has produced fewer than the last one, but notes the following: winkle bag, cigarette; gin palace, a large wireless truck; rompers, 'the Army pet name for the new battle dress' (4); quads, gun-pulling tractor ('an affectionate memorial of the horse').

The "fed up" of the last war has become "browned off" in this -- a phrase in which a culinary reference is retained.

Only time will tell which of these terms, if any, will enter into general use; 'But English will not be English if it does not open hospitable doors to a proportion of these latest outcasts'.

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the Baedeker Blitz. See here for an introduction to the series.

]]> http://airminded.org/2011/03/15/saturday-15-march-1941/feed/ 2 http://airminded.org/2010/03/22/ban-the-airship/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=ban-the-airship http://airminded.org/2010/03/22/ban-the-airship/#comments Mon, 22 Mar 2010 12:06:03 +0000 Brett Holman http://airminded.org/?p=3754

In February 1912, the International Arbitration League issued 'A Memorial Against the Use of Armed Airships', an early proposal for arms control. The memorial claimed that 'For the first time, in the face of a new development of the arts of fighting, nations possess both the conscience and the machinery necessary to check that development effectually'. The new development was the military aeroplane, which had first been used as a weapon only three months before, by the Italians against Turkish forces in Libya. The great powers were starting to form their first tiny air forces: Britain's Air Battalion was formed in April 1911.

It's not clear exactly what the League was proposing; it seems to have been a moratorium on military aircraft. The arguments it gave display a curious mixture of insight and naivety:

There are many who believe that aerial warfare, by reason of its sheer horror, must prove a blessing in disguise, frightening men from war. To those we say: Civilisation does not sanction the ravages of a new and arrestable form of disease, in order that men through horror may be the more eager to join hands in stamping out all forms of sickness. And further, you under-rate the fortitude and adaptability of human nature, which has long proved that it can endure all forms of terror.

There are some who insist that the art of flying will never reach full development without the stimulus of war. To such we suggest that the story of mankind does not leave us without hope that where there is demand, even when only for the purposes of peaceful life, there will also be supply. If the art of flying be delayed a few years by the resolve of men to use that art for mutual help, and not for mutual destruction, the world will be no loser.

There are many who argue that because men fight on earth and water, they may just as well fight in the air. To these we answer: There has never yet been a moment when it was practically possible to ban the war machines of earth or water. There is a moment when it is practically possible to ban those of the air. That moment is now -- before the use of these machines is proved; before great vested interests have formed.

Some two hundred British intellectuals -- artists, writers, clergy, scientists (all men, I might add) -- signed up to the memorial, including Wilfred Scawen Blunt, J. B. Bury, Walter Crane, Arthur Conan Doyle, Edward Elgar, John Galsworthy, H. Rider Haggard, Thomas Hardy, Frederic Harrison, H. H. Henson, J. A. Hobson, Jerome K. Jerome, Ray Lankester, Lord Lister (who died only a few days later), Oliver Lodge, John Masefield, Gilbert Murray, William Osler, Arthur Pinero, A. F. Pollard, Arthur Quiller-Couch, Joseph Rowntree, Seebohm Rowntree, William Rossetti, William Temple, Alfred Russel Wallace and (of course) H. G. Wells.

An impressive list. In response, Flight had only an anonymous prehistoric skeleton recently unearthed in Norfolk, about which it spun a tale of wise elders begging the inventor of the stone ax to destroy his new weapon 'in the name of humanity'. The point was that the International Arbitration League and the two hundred intellectuals had not taken human nature into account.

Without going quite so far as to say that man's natural instincts lead him to murder, and the appropriation of those things which are not his, whether we regard man as an individual or as a community, the real cause is not very far removed from this. Until all this is changed -- until, that is, human nature has undergone a complete change -- "memorials of protest" against armaments at large and the components of which they consist, are merely in the nature of pious resolutions which do no one any harm if they achieve little good.

'A Memorial Against the Use of Armed Airships' seems to have had little effect; even the Manchester Guardian, which as a Radical newspaper ought to have been sympathetic, thought the International Arbitration League was on a hiding to nothing. Its best chance came twenty years later, when the World Disarmament Conference did consider banning bombers or limiting their use, but the various proposals collapsed as each delegation guarded its own national interest. In other words, because of human nature writ large. The skeleton from Norfolk was right.

This is the talk I gave at Earth Sciences back in May. It's long and picture heavy and much of it will be be familiar to regular readers, but some people expressed some interest in it so here it is. I've lightly edited it, mainly to correct typos in my written copy. I've put in links to the Boswell drawings because they're under copyright, and I've replaced one photo because I realised it was of British Army Aeroplane No. 1b, not British Army Aeroplane No. 1a! How embarrassing.

Facing Armageddon: Britain and the Bomber, 1908-1941

Today I'm going to give you an overview of my PhD thesis topic. My broad area is the history of military aviation in the early twentieth century, so first I'll give you a little background on that.

The first heavier-than-air manned flight was made by the Wright brothers in 1903, as you can see here. Within a few years, countries around the world started thinking about how they could use this new technology for warfare.

This is the British Army's first aeroplane, which wasn't very successful but did at least make the first ever flight in Britain. In 1914, the First World War broke out and this pushed aviation along very quickly. At first, aeroplanes were mostly used to find and report on the movements of enemy troops, but soon they were used to drop bombs on them too.

And when aircraft became powerful enough, they started to bomb targets far behind enemy lines. This is the German Gotha G.IV, which was used to bomb London in 1917 and 1918. Of course, each country also developed fast fighter aircraft to try to shoot down their opponents' slow bomber and reconnaissance aircraft.

Here's one of the most famous fighters of the First World War, the British Sopwith Camel, as flown by both Biggles and Snoopy. It was fast, agile, and armed with twin machine guns.

After the war ended in 1918, aviation technology continued to progress, though not quite as quickly. By the 1930s, air forces were starting to be equipped with sleek biplanes such as this Hawker Hart, which was the fastest aeroplane in the Royal Air Force -- which is a bit startling since it was actually a bomber and not a fighter!

The late 1930s witnessed the birth of a new generation of aircraft, powerful monoplanes with maximum speeds well in excess of 200 or even 300 miles per hour. They were also better armed than earlier aircraft: these Hawker Hurricane fighters had 8 machine guns.

This is one of the bombers that the Hurricane would be defending Britain against, the Ju 88, Germany's most effective bomber. It could carry up to 2.5 tons of bombs. Germany built over 14000 of these bombers by the end of 1945.

Finally, this is one of the most powerful bombers of the war, the British Avro Lancaster. It was capable of carrying up to 10 tons worth of high explosive or incendiary bombs to Berlin and beyond.

But that's all just by way of introduction. My research isn't actually about aeroplanes as such or how they were used. What I'm looking at is the fear of bombing in Britain in the early twentieth century, from the early days of flight before the First World War, up until the end of the Blitz on British cities in 1941. More specifically, I'm interested in how the threat of aerial bombardment of cities was debated in the public sphere, as distinct from what was being discussed behind closed doors by the government and the armed forces. A number of historians have written excellent studies of British air strategy and air policy. Many of them mention the pervasive fear of bombing on the part of the British public, especially in the 1930s, but nearly always, they just take this fear as a given, and don't spend much time trying to understand it or its origins. This annoyed me, because the little that they did tell me about the popular fear of bombing was fascinating, and I wanted to know more: why was the public scared of bombing, and what were they afraid would happen? Hence the thesis!

However, it's very difficult to measure public opinion itself, especially before the introduction of opinion polls (which means virtually all of the period I'm studying). You can get the occasional odd glimpse into what the average person really thought about the dangers of bombers coming over and blowing them up, but perhaps not enough to do a whole thesis on. So instead I'm focusing on some of the most important influences on public opinion: primarily books, journals and newspapers which discussed the air menace and what should be done about it. And to a lesser extent, I also use things like cinema newsreels, films and radio broadcasts. Concerned citizens -- often professionals such as military experts, doctors, or scientists -- used all of these forums to present predictions of what would happen to cities and civilians under air attack, along with their proposals about how to solve the problem. Novelists took the serious speculations of the experts and turned them into nightmarish visions of what future wars held in store for the inhabitants of great cities. These fictional scenarios in turn coloured much of the debate about bombing. In fact, fictional and non-fictional discussions about bombing were often remarkably similar to each other.

So, what was the threat? Most people today have probably heard of, for example, Guernica, the Blitz or Dresden, which are all still potent symbols of the horrors of total war. This is Guernica, a small town of about 5000 people in the Basque country in northern Spain. In April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War it was devastated by a German air raid.

London was bombed by the Luftwaffe on 57 consecutive nights from 7 September 1940, forcing more than 200,000 people to take shelter in the underground railway stations every night. Here are just some of them in Elephant and Castle.

And this photo was taken from a British aeroplane during the Allied air raids on the German city of Dresden in the middle of February 1945. The little points of light are incendiary bombs, which started a massive firestorm. About 30,000 people -- men, women and children -- were killed in these raids.

But as terrible as these events were -- and there are many more I could have mentioned -- they were nothing compared with the predictions made before the war. Essentially, the widespread belief in the 1920s and 1930s was that at the beginning of the next war, a huge fleet of enemy bombers would suddenly strike at London and other cities and destroy them with high explosive bombs, incendiaries, and poison gas, causing hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties within a matter of hours or days, shattering essential infrastructure and leading to mass panic. Under such circumstances, it was widely assumed that Britain's government would be forced to surrender within days or weeks of the outbreak of war. This is what was sometimes called the 'knock-out blow', that is, the sudden blow which would knock Britain out of the war.

This graph shows the effects of the German air raids on Britain in the First World War. 'Casualties' means the number of people killed or seriously wounded, in this case in each month. Green shows the casualties caused by airships, and red the casualties caused by aeroplanes. Note that it peaks at about 600 casualties in any one month.

And this is the equivalent graph for the Second World War. The peak casualties per month has shot up to more than 16000. That's September 1940, when the Blitz began. In all, there were more than 146000 civilian casualties in Britain during the war, around a third of whom were killed.

Now, here's a comparison between what actually happened in 1939-1945 and what British government officials in 1938 predicted might happen if a war started in 1939 -- that's the knock-out blow: over a million casualties per month, half of them fatalities, over only two months. Nearly two orders of magnitude more destructive than what actually happened. These estimates were not plucked out of thin air, but they weren't much more than naive extrapolations from the First World War experience: divde the number of casualties between 1914 and 1918 by the tonnage of bombs dropped, and then multiply by the number of bombers the enemy had and the amount of bombs they could carry. This turned out to be a huge exaggeration, but you can see why everyone was so worried!

In extreme versions of the knock-out blow, civilisation itself would collapse, as the complex webs of commerce, transport and social control which bind society together break apart, leaving people to fend for themselves as best they could. From the perspective of a later generation, this sounds a lot like the effects of nuclear war.

And in fact in 1966 Harold Macmillan, a former Conservative Prime Minister who had been a backbench MP in the 1930s, wrote that 'We thought of air warfare in 1938 rather as people think of nuclear warfare today'. It could in fact mean the end of life as we know it.

I'll now give you some typical examples of how this fear of the bomber was manifested in literature and the arts. The following quotes are from a knock-out blow novel published in 1934 called Invasion from the Air. Firstly, the enemy air force attacks suddenly, with little or no warning, just after or even before the declaration of war:

At five minutes to twelve on that fateful night Germany struck from the clouds. The blow was totally unexpected, for the declaration of war by Britain against Germany and Italy had no more than been conveyed to the departing Ambassadors [...] London's bewildered eight millions were precipitated into actual war conditions before the majority of them knew there was a war.

Secondly, the attack is massive in scale:

Squadron after squadron assailed the cities and towns in waves, each wave having its separate duty and aims. Upwards of two hundred enemy aircraft -- fighters, bombers and [poison gas] sprayers -- were brought down that morning as against only fifty British machines, but eight hundred broke though all attempts to stop them.

And thirdly, it is devastatingly destructive:

Thousands of people were killed or burnt to death or died subsequently insane at the memory of that battle, while, as always after the raids, vast numbers developed later the agonies of poisoned
lungs and throats, eyes and nasal passages [...] When the battle had passed Regent's Park was scarred with great pits where explosive bombs had fallen [...] the bodies of old and young, broken and mutilated, lay everywhere.

So the knock-out blow would bring the horrors of the trenches of the Great War into everyone's homes.

The Fall of London: Waterloo, by James Boswell (1933)

Next, here are some drawings which were actually commissioned for the novel I've just quoted from, but in the end weren't actually used. They show the aftermath of the attacks, as the terrified mob revolts and rampages through London. Wrecked trains at Waterloo Station.

The Fall of London: Corner House, by James Boswell (1933)

A patrolling soldier in gas gear tramping past the body of a woman.

The Fall of London: The Colosseum, by James Boswell (1933)

The rioting crowds, clashing with troops. An upper and middle-class fear of the unruly mob goes back at least to the time of the French revolution; more recently, since 1918 there had been an increase in working-class assertiveness and the example of the Russian Revolution to worry about. So the fear of the knock-out blow was not only about the possibility of war but also reflected other anxieties about British society.

Now, I'll show you a clip from the 1936 film Things To Come, which was adapted from a novel by HG Wells. This was a history of the future in three parts, and was a big-budget spectacular for its day. The first part of Things To Come features a graphic depiction of a gas attack on a city called Everytown, which bears a suspicious similarity to London. It was Wells' argument that the destruction of modern society by total warfare was a necessary prelude to its recreation into a technocratic, utopian world state.

So much for the threat of the knock-out blow. What could be done about it? Surprisingly, the obvious answer, the one that actually did work in the Battle of Britain -- air defence by fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft guns, harnessed to a sophisticated command and control system -- was given little credit. It was widely believed that bombers were too fast and too well-armed to be shot down, at least in sufficient numbers to stop an attack.

I'll show you a graph which helps explain this pessimism. First here's a map showing Britain in relation to Europe, and some of the directions from which enemy bombers might attack. Ideally, the defending fighters would intercept the bombers before they reached London, the biggest and most important city. But there weren't nearly enough fighters to keep up a standing patrol, so they'd have to wait until an air raid was detected, and then take off to intercept it. However incoming aircraft could usually only be detected once they'd crossed the coast. And it's only about 50 miles, give or take, from the coast to London. The problem was that as technology improved and bombers got faster, there was less and less time for the fighters to react.

This graph shows in blue the time in minutes it would take for a bomber to cross the 50 miles from the coast to London. In the First World War, this could take around half an hour. By the Second World War, this time was down to only 10 minutes or so. The points in red show the time taken for the defending fighters to take off and climb to the height of the attacking bombers. As you can see this time is generally less than the crossing time, so in theory the fighters would have time to find the bombers and hopefully shoot them down. But lots of things could go wrong -- the bombers might be detected late, the detection might not be reported soon enough, the bombers might have changed course or be hiding in cloud and so on. So the greater the margin of safety the better. In the 1930s, this margin was only 5 to 10 minutes which was not reassuring at all. Air defence exercises in the early 1930s seemed to confirm the difficulty of intercepting bombers before they could reach their target.

As the former and future prime minister Stanley Baldwin pessimistically told Parliament in 1932,

I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed, whatever people may tell him. The bomber will always get through

A widely-quoted remark at the time and for years afterwards. He went on to offer the standard alternative: essentially to bomb the enemy harder than they bombed Britain.

The only defence is in offence, which means that you have got to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves. I mention that so that people may realise what is waiting for them when the next war comes.

One solution, then, was a bigger air force so that Britain could kill more women and children more quickly than any enemy.

This was a solution generally favoured by those on the political right, such as the Hands Off Britain Air Defence League. This is a leaflet they distributed in 1933 or 1934. As you can see, they ask 'Why wait for a bomber to leave Berlin at 4 o'clock and wipe out London at 8?'

Their demand is for the creation of 'a new winged army of long-range British bombers to smash the foreign hornets in their nests'. This was in fact the official Royal Air Force strategy at the time, pretty much, though due to years of disarmament and budget cuts, it did not have nearly enough aircraft to carry it out. The British governments of the 1930s did begin to rearm, but were reluctant to do so too quickly for fear of harming the economic recovery or offending the Germans.

There were also those, generally on the political left, who rejected the logic of two nations trading massive blows with each other, for it seemed likely that even the victor in such a war would be devastated. What alternatives were there? One was to mitigate the effects of bombing, by preparing Air Raid Precautions, or ARP as it was known. This could mean everything from training civilians in how to survive poison gas attacks, to the construction of deep shelters able to accommodate thousands of people during air raids. Although this sounds unobjectionable, some pacifists could and did argue that ARP was a mere palliative, and might actually invite war by making Britain feel over-confident about its ability to withstand a knock-out blow. So they favoured more radical solutions such as complete disarmament, or at least the abolition of military aircraft. But this in turn encountered problems. During the 1920s and early 1930s, the idea developed among aviation specialists that large civilian aircraft such as airliners could be easily turned into bombers, more or less by strapping bombs under the wings. This possibility undermined disarmament efforts because it was feared that once all nations had disbanded their air forces, an aggressor could arm its airliners and hold the rest of the civilised world to ransom. So, one proposed solution to this dilemma was to place the civil aviation industries of all countries under international control.

From there it was a logical step for many supporters of collective security to propose the formation of an international air force, a very popular position in the early 1930s for parts of the left and one which was under serious consideration at the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva in 1932. An international air force would harness the devastating power of the bomber to uphold collective security, because if one country attacked another it would immediately be bombed itself by the combined air forces of the world. It was also attractive to some people as a possible foundation of a world state, which would end war forever by ending nations themselves.

So, I've explained what people thought bombing would do, and what they thought could be done about it. I would lastly like to talk about the discourse itself, how these problems and solutions were propagated from specialists to the public. In the ordinary course of things, most people don't pay much attention to even existential threats such as terrorism, nuclear warfare, asteroid impacts, or indeed the knock-out blow. They may well be aware of them, and even anxious about them to some degree, but such information as they may pick up from the media, books or conversations with acquaintances will be random, fragmentary and possibly unpersuasive. It often takes some crisis, real or perceived, to concentrate people's minds on the supposed threat to society, and here the mass media plays a key role in creating the perception that there is a threat, and in suggesting solutions to the threat. So I suggest that this process is very much like the concept of a moral panic, as proposed by the sociologist Stanley Cohen in 1972. Usually this is a media-driven panic about the danger posed to society by some group within it -- like criminals, drug users, religious cults. But it seems to me that something closely analogous can happen in relation to external threats to society. To distinguish these incidents from moral panics, though, I call them defence panics. Defence panics seem almost endemic in Britain in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Initially these expressed fears about the loss of British naval supremacy and the possibility of invasion by a foreign power such as France or later Germany. The most famous expression of this was the great dreadnought panic of 1909, when an intense press campaign called for the laying down of 8 new battleships to pre-empt a supposed acceleration in the German naval construction programme. But only a couple of months later, there was a similar panic, this time time over German airships, and this panic was itself repeated on a larger scale in 1913. From then until the Second World War, the threat of air attack was unparalleled in its ability to create defence panics. Examples include scares over the size of European air forces in 1922 and 1935, claims about German preparations for biological warfare in 1934, the bombing of Spanish and Chinese cities in 1938 which were part of the background to the Munich crisis, itself a major defence panic, and finally the shocks of the Gotha air raids on London in 1917 and the Blitz in 1940.

In the end, the knock-out blow never took place, because the power of the bomber was greatly exaggerated. But the belief that it could happen itself shaped how the British prepared to fight the war that did come. The internationalist solutions such as disarmament or the international air force never worked, because few nations could even contemplate giving up their sovereignty like this. Britain did invest in trying to avoid the worst effects of a knock-out blow, with air raid shelters and plans to evacuate the cities. But their ARP schemes were never very comprehensive, and individuals did little to prepare for bombing on their own behalf until war came. Far more was spent on the armed forces, and most important here was air defence. Even though in the early 1930s nearly everyone was pessimistic about the fighter's chances against the bomber, effort was still put into improving them, resulting in fighters like the Hurricane which I showed earlier. These played a essential part in blunting the bomber offensive in 1940, at least in daylight. But another crucial technological component of the solution to the the problem of the bomber came, bizarrely, from almost pseudoscientific attempts to find an electromagnetic death ray. Death rays didn't help shoot down bombers, but radar did help find them.

A top-secret chain of radar stations around the coast was set up in 1939, just in time for the Second World War. This had an effective range of 120 miles. So instead of only being seen when they crossed the coast, bombers could now be detected far out to sea.

Returning to our graph showing how long it took for bombers to cross the 50 miles from the coast to London. With radar, this distance effectively increased to 170 miles.

I've factored that into this graph, and as you can see, from 1939 the defenders had a much greater warning time, 30 to 40 minutes. Radar tilted the balance greatly towards the defenders. No longer was it a certainty that the bomber would always get through.

So part of the answer to the problem of the bomber came from an unexpected quarter. But it didn't just arrive by accident, it only came because people were worried about the problem and were looking hard for a solution. Sometimes, muddling through and hoping for the best just isn't good enough, not when the survival of civilisation is at stake.

Image sources: Wikimedia Commons (Wright Flyer, Avro Lancaster); RAF (here and here); Gotha GIV; RAFA Costa Blanca; World-War-2-Planes.com; Guernica, specchio del Novecento; Caring on the Home Front; Wikipedia; Airminded (here, here and here); YouTube; Norman Macmillan, The Chosen Instrument (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1938), 21; eBay; David Davies, Suicide or Sanity? An Examination of the Proposals before the Geneva Disarmament Conference (London: Williams and Norgate, 1932); An International Air Force: Its Functions and Organisation (London: The New Commonwealth, 1934). I can't find where the photo of the Hurricanes came from; but it's almost certainly under Crown Copyright.

It's the 75th anniversary of Stanley Baldwin's famous 'the bomber will always get through' speech. It's an important text which is widely quoted, both in my primary and my secondary sources, as a testament to the fear of bombing in the 1930s. But I've never actually read it very closely, and I think I'm in good company because it's usually the same couple of lines which are quoted, and the rest of it is ignored. And as it doesn't seem to be online anywhere I thought it would be a useful exercise to transcribe it and put it up on the web.

Baldwin was not Prime Minister when he gave the speech, as is sometimes said. He had been PM twice before, in 1923-4 and 1925-9 (and would be again in 1935-7), but at this time he was Lord President of the Council, a Cabinet-level post with no major duties attached to it. Baldwin's real importance was as leader of the Conservative Party, which had by far the most seats in Ramsay MacDonald's National Government. He had power without responsibility, one is tempted to say.

The occasion for the speech was a debate in the House of Commons about disarmament, held on 10 November 1932 -- the eve of Armistice Day. The original motion was proposed by Clement Attlee, deputy leader of the Labour Party, and read:

That, in the opinion of this House, it is an essential preliminary to the success of the forthcoming World Economic Conference that the British Government should give clear and unequivocal support to an immediate, universal, and substantial reduction of armaments on the basis of equality of status for all nations, and should maintain the principles of the Covenant of the League of Nations by supporting the findings of the Lytton Commission on the Sino-Japanese dispute.

This was obviously an attempt to embarrass the Prime Minister, a well-known pacifist -- and a hated former leader of the Labour Party. But MacDonald didn't speak in the following debate; instead, his Foreign Secretary, Sir John Simon, defended the Government's record and went into some hopeful diplomatic initiatives in some detail. George Lansbury, Labour's leader, lashed out and accused all nations of failing to fulfill any of the international peace pacts signed since the war. Baldwin spoke last of all. According to the Times's parliamentary correspondent, when he finished 'There was a deep and almost emotional round of applause' from the House. Of course, he was the party leader for most of the MPs, but it does seem that he had touched a chord. Baldwin had a longstanding record of concern about the air threat and his sincerity would have been evident. And -- not that there was ever any doubt given the huge majority enjoyed by the National Government -- Attlee's motion was defeated by 402 votes to 44.

The following transcript of his speech is taken not from Hansard but from The Times. I've edited it lightly, mainly to move the murmurs of approval from the listening MPs into footnotes. The phrases in bold are those which are most commonly quoted.

I find myself at the close of a most interesting debate which has been well worth while -- I myself should not have regretted a second day -- in which there have been a number of most interesting contributions, in profound agreement with one of two of the opening observations of Mr. Lansbury. Disarmament, in my view, will not stop war; it is a matter of the will to peace.

It is often said that two natural instincts make for the preservation of the race -- reproduction of the species and the preservation of the species by fighting for safety. The right hon. gentleman is perfectly right. That fighting instinct, although he did not say it, is the oldest instinct we have in our nature; and that is what we are up against. I agree with him that the highest duty of statesmanship is to work to remove the causes of war. That is the difficult and the constant duty of statesmen, and that is where true statesmanship is shown.

But what you can do by disarmament, and what we all hope to do, is to make war more difficult. It is to make it more difficult to start; it is to make it pay less to continue; and to that I think we ought to direct our minds.

I have studied these matters myself for many years. My duty has made me Chairman for five years of the Committee of Imperial Defence. I have sat continuously for 10 years on that Committee, except during the period when the present Opposition were in power, and there is no subject that interests me more deeply nor which is more fraught with the ultimate well or ill being of the human race.

What the world suffers from is a sense of fear, a want of confidence; and it is a fear held instinctively and without knowledge very often. But my own view -- and I have slowly and deliberately come to this conclusion -- is that there is no one thing that is more responsible for that fear -- and I am speaking of what Mr. Attlee called the common people, of whom I am the chief -- than the fear of the air.

Up to the time of the last War civilians were exempt from the worst perils of war. They suffered sometimes from hunger, sometimes from the loss of sons and relatives serving in the Army. But now, in addition to this, they suffered from the constant fear not only of being killed themselves, but, what is perhaps worse for a man, of seeing his wife and children killed from the air. These feelings exist among the ordinary people throughout the whole of the civilized world, but I doubt if many of those who have that fear realize one or two things with reference to the cause of that fear.

That is the appalling speed which the air has brought into modern warfare; the speed of the attack. The speed of the attack, compared with the attack of an army, is as the speed of a motor-car to that of a four-in-hand. In the next war you will find that any town within reach of an aerodrome can be bombed within the first five minutes of war to an extent inconceivable in the last War, and the question is, Whose moral will be shattered quickest by that preliminary bombing?

I think it is well also for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed, whatever people may tell him. The bomber will always get through, and it is very easy to understand that if you realize the area of space. Take any large town you like on this island or on the Continent within reach of an aerodrome. For the defence of that town and its suburbs you have to split up the air into sectors for defence. Calculate that the bombing aeroplanes will be at least 20,000ft. high in the air, and perhaps higher, and it is a matter of mathematical calculation that you will have sectors of from 10 to hundreds of cubic miles.

Imagine 100 cubic miles covered with cloud and fog, and you can calculate how many aeroplanes you would have to throw into that to have much chance of catching odd aeroplanes as they fly through it. It cannot be done, and there is no expert in Europe who will say that it can. The only defence is in offence, which means that you have got to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves. I mention that so that people may realize what is waiting for them when the next war comes.

The knowledge of this is probably more widespread on the Continent than in these islands. I am told that in many parts of the Continent open preparations are being made to educate the population how best to seek protection. They are being told by lectures; they have considered, I understand. the evacuation of whole populated areas which may find themselves in the zone of fire; and I think I remember to have seen in some of our English illustrated papers pictures of various experiments in protection that are being made on the Continent. There was the Geneva Gas Protocol, signed by 28 countries in June, 1925, and yet I find that in these experiments on the Continent people are being taught the necessary precautions to take against the use of gas dropped from the air.

I will not pretend that we are not taking our precautions in this country. We have done it. We have made our investigations much more quietly, and hitherto without any publicity, but considering the years that are required to make preparations any Government of this country in the present circumstances of the world would have been guilty of criminal negligence had they neglected to make their preparations. The same is true of other nations. What more potent cause of fear can there be than this kind of thing that is going on on the Continent? And fear is a very dangerous thing. It is quite true that it may act as a deterrent in people's minds against war, but it is much more likely to make them want to increase armaments to protect them against the terrors that they know may be launched against them.

We have to remember that aerial warfare is still in its infancy, and its potentialities are incalculable and inconceivable. How have the nations tried to deal with this terror of the air? I confess that the more I have studied this question the more depressed I have been at the perfectly futile attempts that have been made to deal with this problem. The amount of time that has been wasted at Geneva in discussing questions such as the reduction of the size of aeroplanes, the prohibition of bombardment of the civil population, the prohibition of bombing, has really reduced me to despair. What would be the only object of reducing the size of aeroplanes? So long as we are working at this form of warfare every scientific man in the country will immediately turn to making a high-explosive bomb about the size of a walnut and as powerful as a bomb of big dimensions, and our last fate may be just as bad as the first.

The prohibition of the bombardment of the civil population, the next thing talking about, is impracticable so long as any bombing exists at all. In the last War there were areas where munitions were made. They now play a part in war that they never played in previous wars, and it is essential to an enemy to knock these out, and so long as they can be knocked out by bombing and no other way you will never in the practice of war stop that form of bombing.

The prohibition of bombing aeroplanes or of bombing leads you to two very obvious considerations when you have examined the question. The first difficulty about that is this -- will any form of prohibition, whether by convention, treaty, agreement, or anything you like not to bomb be effective in war? Quite frankly, I doubt it and, in doubting it, I make no reflection on the good faith of either ourselves or any other country. If a man has a potential weapon and has his back to the wall and is going to be killed, he will use that weapon whatever it is and whatever undertaking he has given about it, The experience has shown us that the stern test of war will break down all conventions.

I will remind the House of the instance which I gave a few weeks ago of the preparations that are being made in the case of bombing with gas, a material forbidden by the Geneva Protocol of 1925. To go a little more closely home, let me remind the House of the Declaration of London, which was in existence in 1914, and which was whittled away bit by bit until the last fragment dropped into the sea in the early spring of 1916.

Sir Austen Chamberlain (Foreign Secretary in Baldwin's second government) here interjected to say that 'It was never ratified.'

No, but we regarded it as binding. Let me also remind the House what I reminded them of before -- of two things in the last War. We all remember the cry that was raised when gas was first used, and it was not long before we used it. We remember also the cry that was raised when civilian towns were first bombed. It was not long before we replied, and quite naturally. No one regretted seeing it done more than I did. It was an extraordinary instance of the psychological change that comes over all of us in times of war. So I rule out any prospect of relief from these horrors by any agreement of what I may call local restraint of that kind.

As far as the air is concerned there is, as has been most truly said, no way of complete disarmament except the abolition of flying. We have never known mankind to go back on a new invention. It might be a good thing for this world, as I heard some of the most distinguished men in the air service say, if men had never learned to fly. There is no more important question before every man, woman, and child in Europe than what we are going to do with this power now that we have got it. I make no excuse for bringing before the House to-night this subject, to ventilate it in this first assembly of the world, in the hope that what is said here may be read in other countries and may be considered and pondered, because on the solution of this question not only hangs our civilization, but before that terrible day comes, there hangs a lesser question but a difficult one, and that is the possible rearmament of Germany with an air force.

There have been some paragraphs in the Press which looked as though they were half inspired, by which I mean they look as though somebody had been talking about something he had no right to, to someone who did not quite comprehend it. There have been paragraphs on this subject in which the suggestion was put forward for the abolition of the air forces of the world and the international control of civil aviation. Let me put that in a slightly different way. I am firmly convinced, and have been for some time, that if it is possible the air forces of the world ought to be abolished, but if they are you have got civil aviation, and in civil aviation you have your potential bombers. It is all very well using the phrase "international control," but nobody knows quite what it means, and the subject has never been investigated. That is my answer to Captain Guest.

In my view, it is necessary for the nations of the world concerned to devote the whole of their mind to this question of civil aviation, to see if it is possible so to control civil aviation that such disarmament would be feasible. I say the nations concerned, because this is a subject on which no nation that has no air force or no air sense has any qualification to express a view; and I think that such an investigation should only be made by the nations which have air forces and who possess an air sense.

Undoubtedly, although she has not an air force, Germany should be a participant in any such discussion which might take place. Such an investigation under the most favourable circumstances would be bound to last a long time, for there is no more difficult or more intricate subject, even assuming that all the participants were desirous of coming to a conclusion. So in the meantime there will arise the question of disarmament only, and on that I would only say a word. Captain Guest raised a point there and pointed out quite truly that this country had never even carried out the programme of the Bonar Law Government in 1922-23 as the minimum for the safety of this country. He expressed a fear -- a very natural and proper fear -- lest we, with a comparatively small air force among the large air forces of the world, should disarm from that point, and the vast difference between our strength and that of some other countries would remain relatively as great as it was to-day. That kind of disarmament does not recommend itself to the Government. I assure my right hon. friend that the point which he raised has been very present to our minds, and, in my view, the position is amply safeguarded. I would make only one or two other observations; my desire having been to direct the minds of people to this subject. It has never really been much discussed or thought out, and yet to my mind it is far the most important of all the questions of disarmament, for all disarmament hangs on the air, and as long as the air exists you cannot get rid of that fear of which I spoke and which I believe to be the parent of many troubles.

One cannot help reflecting that during the tens or hundreds of millions of years in which the human race has been on this earth, it is only within our generation that we have secured the mastery of the air, and, I do not know how the youth of the world may feel, but it is no cheerful thought to the older men that having got that mastery of the air we are going to defile the earth from the air as we have defiled the soil for nearly all the years that mankind has been on it.

This is a question for young men far more than it is for us. They are the men who fly in the air, and future generations will fly in the air more and more. Few of my colleagues around me here will see another great war. I do not think that we have seen the last great war, but I do not think that there will be one just yet. At any rate, if it does come we shall be too old to be of use to anyone. But what about the younger men, they who will have to fight out this bloody issue of warfare; it is really for them to decide. They are the majority on the earth. It touches them more closely. The instrument is in their hands.

There are some instruments so terrible that mankind has resolved not to use them. I happen to know myself of at least three inventions deliberately proposed for use in the last War and which were never used. Potent to a degree and, indeed, I wondered at the conscience of the world. If the conscience of the young men will ever come to feel that in regard to this one instrument the thing will be done. But if they do not feel like that ... As I say, the future is in their hands, but when the next war comes and European civilization is wiped out, as it will be and by no force more than by that force, then do not let them lay the blame on the old men, but let them remember that they principally and they alone are responsible for the terrors that have fallen on the earth.

Shorter Baldwin: he believes that fear is a principal cause of war, most importantly fear of bombing. This is because civilians are now directly exposed to death from the air, unlike in wars of the past. There can be no sure defence against bombing ('the bomber will always get through') and, if war comes, the only way to win is to bomb the enemy harder than they can bomb you ('you have got to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves'). All Europe is preparing for such a war, as is Britain, and these preparations are themselves causing fear. There's not much that can be done to limit bombing by legal means -- technology moves too rapidly, and anyway, such conventions are usually broken in wartime. The possible conversion of civil aircraft into bombers would undermine any disarmament regime, so really the big question is how to bring civil aircraft under some sort of international control to prevent this from happening. Germany should be included in discussions of this, to forestall its claims on creating an air force. But, it is ultimately a question for today's youth, as it is they who fly, and it is they who will fight in the next war. And it will be their responsibility if European civilisation should perish in another great war.

So, Baldwin was not saying simply that there's no hope if the bombers should come (though he is pretty much saying that): he thought there was something which could be done to prevent bombers coming at all, namely their abolition along with the internationalisation of civil aviation, to prevent airliners from being used as makeshift bombers. It's only a slender hope -- interestingly, one which was more commonly associated with left-liberal politics at the time -- but it does save Baldwin's speech from being a mere counsel of despair, as it is usually represented. But then the question becomes, why didn't the government, of which Baldwin was the driving force, do more to support similar proposals at the Disarmament Conference, then in session at Geneva?

The front cover of Victor Lefebure's Common Sense about Disarmament (London: Victor Gollancz, 1932); the artist's name is Douglas L. Dick. (I also have a colour scan -- the title is in red and the background is a cream tint -- but it's rather muddy and much less striking than the monochrome version above.) Note the cluster of bombs hurtling down towards the already orphaned and probably homeless child. And the four-engine monoplane bombers up in the sky are a futuristic touch, given the state of the art at that time.

Major Lefebure (not LeFebure, as the internets seem to think) had a wide experience in gas warfare, ranging from participating in British gas attacks on the Western Front to surveying the German chemical industry after Versailles. He also became involved in the business of making chemicals himself, specifically dye production, though I am not sure at what level. He wrote several books on the subjects of chemical warfare and disarmament, including The Riddle of the Rhine in 1921 (an American edition is available at Project Gutenberg), and this one, where he argues for the need to regulate the means of production for any disarmament regime to be effective.

P. R. C. Groves explains why, in his view, Britain in the early 1930s was possessed by a 'national defeatism', namely the idea that war was immoral and should be banned, and the nations disarmed:

The origins of the malady may be summarized as: the Voluntary System, the Somme and Passchendaele. The sacrifice of the flower of an entire generation -- largely owing to the ineptitude of the military mind, though the responsibility is at the moment immaterial -- implied the loss of a leavening virile influence in our national life. And this loss has vastly increased the influence of the feminists, the clericals, the doctrinaires and the dreamers, because it has decreased the normal healthy counterpoise to it. These well-intentioned idealists argue on a plane which has no relation to reality. Consequently their conclusions are false. The path which they advocate leads not to peace but to perdition. There is but one way to peace, and it lies through justice established and maintained by collective responsibility.

So there are three parts to this. Firstly, the idea of a "lost generation", the premature deaths of Britain's best and brightest in the Great War. Secondly, the evil results of the loss of their manly influence: feminists and pacifists running riot. Thirdly, his rejection of this in favour of the (presumably virile!) solution of collective security (he endorses Lord Davies' New Commonwealth Society and the right wing of the League of Nations Union).

I tend to agree that it was because of the deaths of so many young men that the idea that war was inherently immoral became popular. But it seems to me (and I realise I'm going out on a limb here :) that this was more because of the fact of their deaths, and the perception that they were sacrificed to no useful purpose, rather than the supposed loss of a generation of masculine leaders. The sheer brute facts of the war, and the disillusionment with its results, were bound to influence what people thought about the use of force in international affairs.