In the later 1930s, the 7th Marquess of Londonderry acquired the somewhat unkind nickname of the 'Londonderry Herr', a pun on the Londonderry Air (the tune to which 'Danny Boy' is usually set). This came about because he was thought to be rather too enthusiastic about the prospect of Anglo-German reconciliation. My impression is that he was a sincere but misguided philo-German, rather than a genuine fellow traveller of the right (although he was definitely too eager to excuse German anti-semitism).

But if Londonderry was somewhat misunderstood, he certainly didn't do himself any favours. Above is the cover of his defence of his activities and plea for appeasement of Nazi Germany, Ourselves and Germany (London: Robert Hale, 1938). Yes, that is the Nazi eagle dotted all over the cover, alongside the British lion:

The frontispiece photograph shows Londonderry with a couple of his mates:

To be fair, Ourselves and Germany was well-received when it was published at the start of April 1938. It was well-timed, too: the Anschluss had taken place just three weeks earlier, putting the German problem firmly back on the national agenda. So the thoughts of a former cabinet minister (Secretary of State for Air, 1931-5) who had met with senior Nazi leaders were bound to be of interest. And if Londonderry's fondest hopes had come true, then Ourselves and Germany would have been remembered as his contribution to a lasting peace between the two countries, rather than a collection of hostages to fortune.

As an aside, my copy (technically a long-term loaner, thanks Paul!) came with this 'with compliments' slip in the back:

The recipient, Sir Arthur Robinson KCMG, was an Australian politician, a conservative state and federal MP. I assume W. J. Robinson was a relative, perhaps a cousin or nephew. 95 Gresham Street is in the City, between the Bank of England and the Guildhall, a pretty upmarket address. Whoever he was, he popped a copy off to Melbourne post-haste, only a couple of weeks after publication. He must have assumed Sir Arthur was keen to read it.

Airminded is hosting the next edition of the Military History Carnival on 15 February. Please send me suggestions for the best military history blogging since 17 January, either by email (bholman at airminded dot org), by web (here or here) or by twitter (@Airminded or tagged #mhc21). Thanks!

Image source: Wikipedia.

It is officially too darn hot today: 43° C. So naturally my thoughts turn to a colder time: the 1950s. The above image (which I found as part of x-ray delta one's wonderful Flickr stream; he also has a suitably breathless blog, ATOMIC-ANNIHILATION) would seem to be part of a public relations exercise from Convair, relating to its interceptor, the F-102A Delta Dagger. I'm not sure what year it's from exactly, but the Dagger entered service in 1956, so probably then or the following year. (So it could be an early effort from Don Draper.) Evidently there were a lot of complaints from the public about sonic booms from the Dagger, the USAF's first supersonic interceptor. The text is really something else; it almost circles right through brazen propaganda to become an honest argument that sonic booms really are good for you. Almost:

Freedom Has a New Sound!

ALL OVER AMERICA these days the blast of supersonic flight is shattering the old familiar sounds of city and countryside.

At U. S. Air Force bases strategically located near key cities our Airmen maintain their round the clock vigil, ready to take off on a moment's notice in jet aircraft like Convair's F-102A all-weather interceptor. Every flight has only one purpose -- your personal protection!

The next time jets thunder overhead, remember that the pilots who fly them are not willful disturbers of your peace; they are patriotic young Americans affirming your New Sound of Freedom!

Presumably the next panel would show the milkman clutching his ears and screaming in pain, and the one after that the homeowners sweeping up the bits of broken glass. That new sound of freedom wasn't free.

This is an advertisement from The Times, 26 May 1915, 5, for the 'Life-Saving "CAVENDISH" Anti-Gas INHALER' -- in other words, a gas mask. It's a surprisingly early attempt to combine (and to cash in on) the twin threats of aerial bombardment and chemical warfare -- that is, 'The Danger of GAS BOMBS':

You can effectually avert the threatened peril to yourself and family from asphyxiating bombs dropped by the enemy's airships if you are provided with enough "CAVENDISH" INHALERS.

Lest the reader be tempted to take this advice lightly:

You cannot afford to make mistakes in this matter: it is vital. Pads and the like made with the best intentions, but without the necessary chemical knowledge, are only partly -- and for a very short time -- protective against slowly spreading vapour. They are of no use whatever when the gas is exploded and forced through every cranny into your home [...]

Closing the lower windows and doors of your house is NOT a sufficient protection against the rush of gas driven in by high explosive. You need -- for yourself and your family -- absolute protection against actual contact with the fumes.

Clearly the ad is reacting to some earlier set of ideas about how to guard against gas, but I'm not sure what their source was. It is claimed that one charge would work for half an hour, 'quite long enough for absolute security from danger' -- a bargain for 5/6 post-free.

How early is early? This is just over a month after the first large-scale use of gas at Ypres (22 April). It's also a few days before the first Zeppelin raid on London (31 May). And it's three weeks before the Metropolitan Police issued official advice to civilians about what to do in an air raid (18 June) -- most of which had to do with the possibility of a gas attack. Probably lucky the Surgical Manufacturing Company got in when they did, because the Met's commissioner gave precisely the opposite advice: no need to buy a specialised respirator, a cotton pad saturated in washing soda should suffice -- and do close ground-floor doors and windows. (See The Times, 18 June 1915, 5.)

More generally, fears of aero-chemical warfare are generally regarded as characteristic of the 1930s, which is true but shouldn't obscure earlier outbreaks of anxiety about the possibility of London being drowned in poison gas.

(I think I came across a mention of this ad in P. D. Smith's Doomsday Men, but can't find the precise reference.)

An advertisement for Imperial Airways from the Daily Telegraph, 30 January 1935, emphasising its role in delivering airmail to the Empire: twice weekly to 'the East' (presumably India, Singapore, Hong Kong), once a week to Australia (a service which had only just begun the previous month), and twice weekly to Cape Town. A lot of effort went into selling the idea of air mail to the public, as this post at The British Postal Museum & Archive shows. Here, the modern lines of the Imperial A.W. 15 Atalanta is contrasted with the traditional garb of the imperial subjects in the background. The message is that technology will modernise the running of the Empire and help bind it together.

While in Wales recently I chanced upon a copy of Robert Stradling's Your Children Will Be Next: Bombing and Propaganda in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008). My description at the time was that this book 'Argues that the memory of Guernica has obscured earlier atrocities, especially the 1936 bombing of Getafe near Madrid'. Now that I've read Your Children Will Be Next, it's clear that I seriously misrepresented Stradling's argument in one crucial respect: he doesn't believe the Getafe atrocity ever actually happened, or at least if it did, there's no good evidence for it now. And that, nevertheless, this non-event had important consequences for the propaganda battle in Spain, for the subsequent memory of the Spanish Republic, and for our own reactions to the use of airpower against civilian targets. It's such an interesting and important book that it's worth correcting my mistake, and digging bit deeper into Stradling's thesis.

Firstly, what was supposed to have happened at Getafe? I must admit to not having heard of the incident before. It was claimed (mainly in the foreign left-wing press) that on 30 October 1936, Nationalist (meaning German) bombers deliberately bombed civilians in Getafe, a small town near Madrid, flying low to mark their victims and killing dozens of children. Photographs of their bodies, with identification labels on their chests, were used in several Republican propaganda productions, the best-known of which is shown above: 'If you tolerate this, your children will be next', a combined appeal to humanity and self-interest. Stradling traces the propagation and influence of The Poster, as he calls it: it was used by both the Communists and the Labour Party in Britain for their pamphlets (below is the Imperial War Museum's copy of the latter's). It helped turn opinion in the democracies against the Nationalists in this crucial early part of the war, when a swift victory by Franco had seemed assured. Memoirs and poems from the period attest to the power of its imagery.

But Stradling searches for evidence of this attack on Getafe in Spanish newspapers and potential eyewitness accounts by Spaniards and foreigners, and really can't find any, beyond some dubious memoirs published later. Nor are there any municipal records of the bombing, though the town's capture by Nationalist forces a few days later could explain this. Stradling argues that the story of Getafe was concocted by Communist propagandists in Madrid. Getafe may or may not have been bombed on the date in question -- it was the site of an important Republican military airfield -- but deliberate targeting of civilians is unlikely, in his opinion (239). And the dead children in the photographs didn't live in Getafe at all, but in Madrid, so if they were killed by bombs anywhere it was there. (The name of the girl in The Poster is María Santiago.) This does puzzle me though: Stradling doesn't tell us why bombing in Getafe was deemed as better propaganda than Madrid, and indeed the images soon became detached from Getafe specifically and stood for Nationalist atrocities against women and children generally, as even The Poster above shows: it nowhere mentions Getafe, only Madrid. Getafe had meaning only for a few short months in late 1936.

One of the virtues of this book is the attention Stradling pays to the bombing of cities by both sides in the war, despite the perception -- then and now -- that this was something only the Nationalists did. The Republic characterised its own attacks on Nationalist-held cities as having military objectives or being reprisals. They were little noticed outside Spain at the time, and are virtually forgotten now. Instead the Nationalist air raids on cities and towns came to stand for fascist barbarism and for the war itself: Guernica above all, of course -- and then Guernica came to stand for Guernica, something I've remarked upon before. (Stradling uses the Basque name for the city, Gernika, to distinguish it from Picasso's painting.) These won the propaganda war for the Republic, in Stradling's view, but it was Getafe which created the narrative which accounts of these later air raids conformed to: the raids were militarily unjustified attempts at creating terror among civilians, and killed disproportionate numbers of women and children. Stradling suggests that this also set the pattern for propaganda treatment of air raids from the Second World War to Lebanon (xi, xii-xiv), though he exaggerates here: the same pattern was evident in the First World War, and it was part and parcel of the moral case against the knock-out blow theory. Still, although it's by no means a complete history Your Children Will be Next is certainly the best account of the air war against Spanish civilians I've come across.

Stradling writes also about the connections between Wales and the war in Spain. I can't judge whether these are as strong as he claims (though the fact that a Welsh band released a hit song in 1998 called "If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next" is suggestive). But his suggestion that the both the burning, in September 1936, of a RAF bombing school by Welsh nationalists and the reaction to it was intensified by the outrage over the contemporary bombings in Spain (18-21) is an interesting one. But a greater appreciation of the civil defence context would help here: that Welsh government officials were undertaking training in preparation for air raids (181) surely has more to do with the British government ARP programme which began in 1935 than any solidarity with Spanish civilians.

Stradling constantly and ostentatiously qualifies his conclusions. This is because of the hold the memory of the Spanish Republic still has over many people today: any approach towards moral equivalence between it and the Nationalists is seen as almost on a par with being pro-Hitler, or at least pro-Mussolini. And, ironically, this is partly a legacy of the very propaganda exercises Stradling explores so thoroughly. The Poster and its like did their work well.

Image source.

Adrian Gregory. The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Took a little while to get out here; looks like it was worth the wait.

Airminded is hosting the next edition of the History Carnival on 1 June. Please send me suggestions for the best history blogging since 1 May, either by email (bholman at airminded dot org), by web (here or here) or by del.ici.ous (tagged historycarnival). Thanks!

Image source: Weapons on the Wall.

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

Image source: Wikipedia.