The images in this post are from Boyd Cable, 'Death from the skies', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 20-4 (see below).

The article itself is a short story describing an air raid in the next war. I won't summarise it in detail, but it argues for the futility of both air defence and civil defence. The RAF's interceptors never even encounter the enemy bombers (in part because they are stealthy thanks to their silenced engines, only 20% as loud as normal aircraft engines). Though the populace has been drilled well and resists panic, at least at first, they are too vulnerable. A first wave of bombers uses high explosives to block the streets with rubble, making it impossible for fire engines to pass; the second drops incendiaries which set the city ablaze and, crucially, force civilians out of their shelters; and the final wave drops poison gas, which starts killing the now-exposed people on the streets. Now the panic starts and the mob flees, their suffering increased by strafing raiders. The RAF now has its chance, but the city is doomed...

"Proof enough of what we've said so long," growled the one [Air Staff officer]. "Defence as such is a wash-out. Attack is the only useful form of defence."

"If we can hit them harder and faster and oftener than they can hit us, we win," said the other. "We can do it, too, if we have more bombers -- men and machines -- than they have."

"Yes -- if," said the other wearily. "That's what we were arguing as far back as the first R.A.F. expansion scheme in -- what was it -- 1935 and '6, wasn't it?"

THINGS TO COME?

H.G. Wells, in his pre-war fantasy, "The War in the Air," proved himself an astonishing prophet, a fact that makes these "stills" from his film "Things to Come," depicting an air raid in the next war, as disturbing to consider as they are terrible to look upon.

REHEARSAL FOR DEATH

Anti-air raid drills on a mass scale have become a feature of German life. This photograph shows an elaborately staged rehearsal of a gas-bomb attack as it might affect civilians, held in the Technical High School at Charlottenburg, near Berlin.

APPREHENSION...

In "Everytown," a city of the very near future, a crowd watch and strain their ears for the first signs of approaching enemy aircraft; an A.A. gun is ready for action. The photograph is a "still" from H.G. Wells's film, "Things to Come," and though, were war to come, the street would be deserted and lights out, it suggests the atmosphere of apprehension.

... AND THEN INFERNO

In vivid and horrible contrast to the scene in the previous page are these two further impressions of a city's doom, the first representing the street a few moments only after the raid commenced, the second the same street the following day. Though again the limitations of the film studio have perhaps happily prevented the full frightfulness from being shown, there is enough of horror to suggest the fate that may overtake troops and civilians alike in the next war.

Actually, the corresponding scene in Things to Come wasn't set the next day; or at least there's no indication it's not part of the air raid sequence itself.

NIGHTMARE OF THE FUTURE

This reproduction of a German artist's idea of a scene in London during an air raid in the next war forms in all probability an all too lamentably accurate forecast. It has been suggested in responsible quarters that 100 aeroplanes could stifle a great city with a gas cloud that would rise many yards from the earth, an idea even more terrifying than the though of high-explosive bombs.

War in the Air was a partwork issued weekly, costing 7d. The first issue, in which this article would have appeared, came out on 7 November 1935, a few days before Armistice Day; once complete, all the issues were collected together in a bound volume (which is what I have) around the middle of 1936.

Boyd Cable was the pseudonym of Ernest Andrew Ewart, a Boer War veteran and newspaper correspondent during the First World War. I'm not aware of any specific expertise he might have had in aviation outside of his war experience, though he did write several books with suggestive titles: Air Men o'War (really?), The Flying Courier, Air Activity, The Soul of the Aeroplane: the Rolls-Royce Engine (okay, that one's particularly suggestive). He wrote a number of other 'Things of Tomorrow' stories in like vein for War in the Air, which I'll discuss in future posts.

The editor, Sir John Hammerton, was the doyen of partworks; Harmsworth's Universal Encyclopedia sold 12 million copies, and I suspect the wartime The Great War:The Standard History of the All-Europe Conflict and the 1933 A Popular History of the Great War (among other works) were highly influential in shaping the memory of the First World War. (Dan Todman in The Great War: Myth and Memory suggests that these and similar partworks have been neglected by historians, just what I was thinking!) War in the Air also devoted a lot of space to that war, but it was also explicitly framed as a warning about the next war, as the advertisement above, from Daily Express, 7 November 1935, 4, shows:

A Book of Vital Importance to every man, woman and child in the British Empire, called into being by the most urgent problem of our time

WAR IN THE AIR, while brilliantly recording the stirring story of the Past, is mainly concerned with the Future and this, the first publication to deal with the subject in its entirety, gives a vivid picture of the dread menace of aerial warfare [...]

THIS is no mere book of thrills and startling pictures, it is a living, vital thing that ought to enter into your life and help you the better to bear your part in the most urgent need of our time -- the need to make Britain as powerful in the Air as in times gone by she was dominant at sea.

Amidst the scaremongering there's a very hard sell going on here, and not a little hyperbole too ('the most important and significant publication issued in this country for a generation'!) But mixing profit and patriotism never did any harm.

Brian Madison Jones. Abolishing the Taboo: Dwight D. Eisenhower and American Nuclear Doctrine, 1945-1961. (Solihull: Helion & Company, 2011).

I found Brian Jones's Abolishing the Taboo interesting for two reasons. Firstly, the subject matter: the Cold War fear of nuclear war was the successor to the interwar fear of strategic bombing. Secondly, it's the book version of a PhD dissertation, which is something I'll be tackling myself.

The Eisenhower presidency (1953-61) was when the United States created its huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, rising from the roughly 800 warheads inherited from Truman to over 18,000 by the time Kennedy came into office: as Jones notes, even after recent disarmament measures this number has never since fallen below the level when Eisenhower came into power. So this was the critical period when we (meaning the world) had to learn how to live with the Bomb. Jones's intention is to explain how and why this happened, through a focus on Eiseinhower's attempts to make nuclear technology normal: that is, as just another way of making the United States stronger and safer. Speaking as a non-specialist in this area, I think he largely succeeds in this. But I do have some criticisms.

Jones argues that Eisenhower used nuclear technology to strengthen the United States in four areas, which he uses to structure the book: the economy, the military, industry, and morality. The first is in some ways the strongest section. Eisenhower believed that 'Economic prosperity was as important as military strength, and [that] national security policy needed to reflect that balance'. His way of achieving that balance was to rely on relatively cheap nuclear weapons to offset the huge Soviet superiority in conventional arms: the New Look. The threat of massive nuclear retaliation against any Communist aggression removed the need for large and expensive standing forces in faraway lands. That much is well known, but Jones shows how Eisenhower's concerns as president derived from his experience in military command before, during and after the war, when he welcomed new technologies because the multiplied the strength of his forces. But after the war he was also worried that Truman's ballooning budget deficits were damaging the long-term strength of the American economy. New Look then seems a quite logical choice for a fiscally-conservative general turned commander-in-chief.

I found the section on Eisenhower's policies regarding the use of nuclear weapons more confusing; though, to be fair, that may be Eisenhower's fault, not Jones's. Jones stresses Eisenhower's firm belief that nuclear weapons were, after all, just another weapon, that there was no reason why there should be a taboo on their use. For example, he told a reporter, 'I know of no reason why a large explosion shouldn't be used as freely as a small explosion'. But in a press conference the following week he said that 'the concept of atomic war is too horrible for man to endure and to practice'. Such examples abound. Was Eisenhower this muddled in his thinking or is this just the logic of mutually assured destruction in action? Jones doesn't really get to grips with this, it seems to me. He suggests that Eisenhower had a preference for 'average solutions', avoiding both extreme optimism and extreme pessimism. In this case that meant putting the possibility of nuclear holocaust to one side and proceeding as if it wasn't going to happen. Taking the average of two extremes is usually misleading; but we're still here so maybe Eisenhower was right to do so.

The third section concerns Eisenhower's policies regarding industrial uses of nuclear technology. This means not only the nuclear energy industry, which Eisenhower inaugurated in 1954 by revising Truman's post-war Atomic Energy Act to allow civilian operation of nuclear power plants. (He also inaugurated it by dedicating the first such plant, Shippingport, with 'the wave of an "atomic wand" which set a bulldozer in motion from thousands of miles away'.) It also means less successful experiments such as the nuclear-powered 'atomic peace ship', NS Savannah, which for a decade carried passengers and cargo around the world; and Project Plowshare, a catch-all for experimenting with all sorts of ideas about using 'clean' nukes for large-scale engineering projects. (Only 26 nuclear explosions would have been needed to create a new, sea-level Panama canal. A test blast to create a deep harbour on the northern coast of Alaska never took place.) This is fascinating stuff, and Jones shows that Eisenhower's interest in harnessing the power of the atom for humanity's benefit was genuine, not a cynical attempt to distract attention from or to justify the nuclear weapons programme.

The final chapter is called 'Bolstering moral strength'. I think this is where Jones's structure runs out of steam. In terms of Eisenhower's nuclear policy, 'bolstering moral strength' includes early disarmament attempts and confidence-building initiatives like Open Skies. Atoms For Peace, a programme which transferred nuclear technology for peaceful uses to friendly countries, is also discussed in this chapter, though somewhat perfunctorily; it might have been a better fit in the previous chapter (or the Savannah might have been a better fit in this one). In between there is a lengthy section on the Eisenhower administration's concerns about the film version of Nevil Shute's On The Beach, even discussing it in a Cabinet meeting shortly before the December 1959 premiere. The concern was that the film might make people think the wrong things about nuclear war:

Eisenhower and his advisors feared the film would be a huge success and convince Americans that the world would be best served by unilateral nuclear disarmament and by joining radical "ban-the-bomb" organizations. On the other hand, the film threatened to erode American moral strength by feeding the overwhelming fear of nuclear war. The depictions of slow death from nuclear fallout might bring a spiritual and emotional depression.

One of the proposed responses, for example, was to point out that 'fallout from a war in the northern hemisphere would never reach the southern hemisphere even if the maximum number of nuclear weapons were used'. Luckily for Eisenhower, the film was not a great success either with the public or the critics, and the feared reactions never took place. I found this discussion fascinating, but it doesn't really fit with the rest of the chapter, and is just introduced with no exploration of the domestic dissent Eisenhower was facing over his nuclear policies.

There are a few other problems. The main one is the first chapter: it is clearly just the literature review from the dissertation. This is a necessary thing in a dissertation, as it shows you have critically read and mastered the available secondary literature on your topic. It's very hard to read in a book though, and not very interesting to most people, even specialists. Most advice I've read is to drop the literature review and perhaps incorporate some of it in the rest of the text. Instead, this chapter might have been used to give the more general reader an introduction to Eisenhower: his life, his achievements, and the key historiographical trends in the literature about him. (Look at me: one book contract and suddenly I'm an expert!) Another is that there are what seem to me to be surprising omissions: for example, there is very little discussion of ballistic missile development, or long-range bomber development for that matter, but surely the ability to deliver all these nuclear warheads was almost as important? I was also troubled by the numerous statements about what Eisenhower felt or knew or thought (for example, 'Eisenhower felt ill at ease with a perceived lack of consistency in Truman's actions'); perhaps I'm being pedantic but from the sources cited we can at best only tell what he said or wrote. Finally, while I applaud Helion's initiative in publishing a PhD dissertation in an affordable edition, I wish they'd left out the illustrations: they are generally too murky to add much to the text.

I've probably been a bit harsh in this review, but overall I found Jones's Abolishing the Taboo to be informative and interesting. I haven't even touched on the fascinating parallels with the British response to the threat of bombing between the wars such internationalisation and shelter policy; and in some ways Eisenhower's concern to build military strength without damaging financial strength reminds me of Chamberlain in the late 1930s. And if the topic itself interests you then it is well worth the read.

The fourth RAF Pageant took place on Saturday, 30 June 1923. The 'turn of the afternoon', as in the previous year, was 'another little Eastern drama, based on actual happenings during the War'. Once more the Wottnotts were the enemy, and once more the co-operation of air and ground forces was the theme. The main difference with 1922 was that this time the RAF was coming to the aid of a besieged garrison:

On the centre of the "stage" one saw an impressive railway bridge and sundry buildings. The small military garrison protecting this post was suddenly attacked by our old friends (or enemies?), the Wottnott Arabs. The garrison, being outnumbered, W.T.'d for help, which, before you could say "Jack Robinson," appeared in the form of three Vickers troop carriers, escorted by five Sopwith "Snipes."

But something had to be be blown up, and so the troop carriers are used ferry troops who destroy a bridge and thereby save the day.

The troop carriers landed beside the bridge, small parties of machine gunners emerging from their interiors and rushing to the assistance of the garrison. In the meanwhile the "Snipes" hold back the Wottnott Arabs with machine-gun fire, whilst the garrison emplanes in the troop carriers, and a demolition party charges under the bridge for the purpose of its utter destruction. When all was ready, the guard blew his whistle, and the troop carriers sailed away for safety. Then the bridge blew up, which so annoyed the Wottnotts that, after all falling down dead, they got up and made a dash, to the accompaniment of wild yells, for the public enclosures.

What remained of the spectators after the horrible slaughter then witness the final event of the day [the usual smokescreen-laying].

There was a change of scenery in the final for the next year's Pageant, held on Saturday, 30 June 1924. Spectators were invited to make believe that the grass at Hendon represented the sea, upon which were two enormous 'ships', essentially flat stage props cunningly painted to give the illusion of three dimensions (at least from where the spectators were standing):

One was 'an English cargo ship, the "John Henry" of Newcastle, and the other a peaceful-looking, but armed enemy merchant cruiser, the "Slevic".' The scenario here was that the Slevic ordered the John Henry to stop and prepare to be boarded. Luckily, a RAF Supermarine Seagull appeared on the scene and radioed for help. This came in two waves. The first consisted of three Fairey Flycatcher 'ship's fighters', which strafed the Slevic and put its guns out of action.

Then the second wave arrived:

Suddenly, five Blackburn "Dart" torpedo 'planes arrived on the scene, and making for the "Slevic" launched their torpedos. The latter were observed to fall one after the other and travel a short distance towards their object before finally disappearing from view in the grass (sorry! sea!!). Then a few awful moments passed, when, suddenly, with a loud boom a column of smoke and "water" shot high up into the air at the "Slevic's" bows, exposing to view, immediately after, a huge ragged hole in her bows. Almost at the same time the other torpedoes found the mark, one right amidships. There was a terrific explosion, a mass of dense black smoke mixed with flying fragments of "Slevic" following by a column of what appeared to be a mixture of smoke and steam. Gradually this cleared away -- and the "Slevic" had completely disappeared!

Thus concluded what in Flight's opinion 'was, undoubtedly, the best scenic display the Pageant has yet given -- equal to any other we have seen'. British Pathe liked the sinking of the Slevic too, choosing it to open their newsreel coverage.

So successful was it, in fact, that the finale to the next Hendon -- held on Saturday, 27 June 1925, and now renamed the RAF Display -- was very similar. The commerce raider this time was found sheltering in a tropical river rather than sailing on the open sea, so the RAF didn't send in torpedo bombers. Instead, the Seagull and the Flycatchers reprised their 1924 roles, and then:

After a short interval a fleet of heavy bombers, consisting of three Avro "Aldershots," and nine Vickers "Virginias," arrived on the scene from a base conveniently situated close at hand, and with few Oh very direct hits put an end to the cruiser's nasty bad habits.

If there's a theme to these set pieces, it's substitution: i.e. the substitution of airpower for military power and seapower. Anything the Army and Navy can do, the RAF can do better. It can patrol the Empire's reaches more efficiently and more effectively, bringing greater force to bear more quickly than can even tanks and battlecruisers. (Indeed, another Hendon standby at this stage was the bombing and destruction of a tank.) Certainly, as Major F. A. de V. Robertson, noted, 'The public probably never stopped to inquire how nine "Virginias" and three "Aldershots" [based in Britain] arrived off the coast of Africa, or wherever it was'. But that's precisely why the Hendon spectaculars made such powerful propaganda for the RAF.

A recent comment by J Campbell raised the question of whether Nevil Shute's 1949 novel No Highway was in fact a prediction of the De Havilland Comet airliner's metal fatigue problems, which led to two crashes ('hull losses', in industry parlance) in 1954. My response was that it seemed unlikely that Shute had any particular insider knowledge which could have led to such a prediction (made before the prototype had even flown) given that he had already been out of the aircraft manufacturing business for some years. (And if he did have reason to think that the Comet would have metal fatigue, why not warn de Havilland instead of writing a novel?) My own suggestion was that instead No Highway might have been loosely inspired by the R101 disaster back in 1930, a formative moment in Shute's life. Having read the novel now, I don't have any actual evidence for this, but there is an intriguing additional parallel which may have been overlooked (or not, I'm no Shute scholar).

In Shute's novel -- spoilers ahead -- the tailplane of the (fictional) Rutland Reindeer (seen above, from the 1951 film version No Highway In The Sky) is believed by an RAE scientist named Theodore Honey to be susceptible to metal fatigue. The story revolves around the efforts of Honey and Scott, his superior at Farnborough, to prove that an earlier Reindeer crash was due to metal fatigue and so ground the Reindeer fleet before disaster strikes. The obstacles include a slapdash investigation of the previous accident, entrenched interests at the Reindeer's manufacturer Rutland and its operator CATO, the (also fictional) Commonwealth Atlantic Transport Organisation, the novelty of Honey's fatigue theory (inspired by recent advances in nuclear physics!), and Honey's own diffident character and his eclectic interests, including pyramidology, British Israelism, the Second Coming (predicted for 1994), interplanetary rocket travel and spiritualism. Of which more in a moment.

Now, the R101 did not crash as a result of metal fatigue, rather from loss of lift and lack of control, which proved fatal during a violent gale over France on 4 October 1930. Forty-eight people were killed, including its captain, Flight Lieutenant Carmichael Irwin, the Air Minister, Lord Thomson, and the Director of Civil Aviation, Sefton Brancker. At the time, Shute (or Nevil Norway as he then was) was an aeronautical engineer who had helped to design the R100 (the 'capitalist' airship which was in heated competition with the 'socialist' R101). The disaster effectively marked the end of his career in airships; even though R100 was quite successful it was scrapped along with the Imperial Airship Scheme, and he was out of a job. He then went and co-founded Airspeed Ltd.

Shute's thoughts on R101 are recorded in his autobiography, Slide Rule (London: Vintage Books, 2009 [1954]), 46:

A man's own experiences determine his opinions, of necessity. I was thirty-one years old at the time of the R.101 disaster, and my first close contact with senior civil servants and politicians at work was in the field of airships, where I watched them produce disaster. That experience still colours much of my thinking. I am very willing to recognise the good in many men of these two classes, but a politician or civil servant is still to me an arrogant fool till he is proved otherwise.

He then goes on to propound his theory that the decent civil servants tend to be those who have independent means, because only they are willing to give truly independent advice and risk being sacked. (Of course, being civil servants, they have no skills which would enable them to get another job.) I must say that the civil servants in No Highway don't conform well to this jaundiced view; only one is truly incompetent (the accident investigator responsible for the aforementioned slapdash report), two are the novel's sympathetic protagonists, and the rest are either portrayed as assisting the protagonists or resisting them through legitimate technical concerns. But on the whole, Shute does seem cynical of the whole process: it works, but in the end only thanks to an intervention from the Other World.

In the novel, Honey holds a séance, with his twelve-year old daughter Elspeth as the medium. The aim is to try and help Scott find the tailplane from the first crash, which is lying somewhere in the vast Labrador forest. They will then be able to tell definitively whether it sheared off due to metal fatigue, as Honey's theory predicts. Elspeth uses a planchette to produce various squiggles and a fragmentary phrase, 'UNDER THE FOOT OF THE BEAR', which does prove to reveal the location of the Reindeer's tailplane. Shute doesn't really address whether spiritualism is 'true' in the book, or whether it's just a coincidence. But the whole episode, which is pretty much the climax of No Highway, made me think of Eileen Garrett's R101 séance.

This took place two days after the crash (and a day after full accounts hit the press) and was held in the laboratory of the famous (and infamous) psychic investigator, Harry Price. Garrett's spirit guide Uvani spoke through her first, and then the spirit of Flight Lieutenant Irwin, late commander of the R101 (they were actually trying to contact Arthur Conan Doyle instead). Irwin, or rather 'Irwin', provided an account of his (and R101's) last moments, including technical details of why the disaster took place. According to a book Price published in 1933, Leaves From a Psychist's Case-Book, a transcript of the séance was provided to the Air Ministry to assist in their investigations, though its existence seem not to have been publicly revealed until July 1931, well after the commission of inquiry's report was released in March 1931. The transcript and Price's account of the séance can be read online, along with a commentary by 'Mr. X', apparently Will Charlton, supply officer at R101's Cardington base. Mr. X found that many of the statements made by 'Irwin' were correct, some of which were unknown at the time of the séance, and most of which were made in plausible technical language, unlikely to have been known by non-experts. For example, 'Irwin' said that there was 'Severe tension on the fabric, which is chafing'; which Mr. X: thought 'Very probable. Terms correct'. On the other hand, some remarks were deemed 'obscure', while others seem less impressive to me. For example, Price places great weight on 'Irwin's' statement 'Same with S.L.8 - tell Eckener':

THE S.L.8 HAS BEEN VERIFIED AS THE NUMBER OF A GERMAN AIRSHIP - S.L. STANDING FOR SCHÜTTE LANZ. THIS VERIFIED ONLY AFTER X HAD BEEN THROUGH COMPLETE RECORDS OF GERMAN AIRSHIPS (i.e. IT WAS NOT KNOWN TO HIM OFF-HAND). BUT IT WOULD BE KNOWN TO IRWIN. DR. ECKENER IS THE CONSTRUCTOR OF THE "GRAF ZEPPELIN."

Well, yes, SL8 was the German airship Schütte-Lanz 8, but it wouldn't have taken any great amount of research to come up with this: it was mentioned in the popular book by Joseph Morris, German Air Raids on Britain 1914-1918 (1925), for example. Also, 'Irwin' seems to imply that the same thing happened to SL8 as happened to R101. But SL8 died a peaceful death in 1917, being dismantled after a record number of missions for any Schütte-Lanz airship. So it's a mystifying reference anyway.

While Garrett, a very well-known Irish medium, seems to have escaped accusations of fraud during her career, the same is not true of Price. And I have no independent verification that the transcript published by Price and scrutinised by Mr. X after the inquiry was in fact the same one sent to the Air Ministry just after the crash, or indeed if it was sent at all. Or, if it was, whether anyone paid it any attention. However, a Major Oliver Villiers of the Air Ministry did participate in Garrett's later R101 séances, though whether in an official capacity I'm not sure. It's possible that the transcript was altered to fit the inquiry findings; it's possible that Villiers, Charlton or someone else supplied Garrett and Price with technical information, wittingly or unwittingly. There are other criticisms. But perhaps Mrs Garrett really did receive Flight Lieutenant Irwin's final report...

All that aside, however, it seems possible to me that the real R101 séance inspired the fiction Reindeer one. Both featured 'true' details about an air accident, supplied by a technical näif, which were later confirmed by more scientific investigators. The parallel is not quite direct, as the Reindeer séance didn't involve communication with dead airmen, nor did it directly reveal information about an accident. But it is, as I said, intriguing.

Image sources: Key Publishing Ltd Aviation Forums; er, Airminded.

NB: this post is glacial blogging.

Thanks to Frank Herrera for pointing me to British Fact and German Fiction. It's a British propaganda film just under fifteen minutes long, made in 1917 by the Thanhouser Company for the Department of Information. Since it has Portuguese Spanish intertitles (luckily with more recent English subtitles), it was obviously shown overseas, though from the comments in Nicholas Reeves' Official British Film Propaganda During the First World War (1986) it does seem it was intended for domestic consumption. I can't embed the film here but you can watch it at the appropriately named Europa Film Treasures website.

The 'German fiction' referred to was a letter supposedly published in a German newspaper claiming to be an eyewitness account of serious damage caused to various London icons -- the Tower of London, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Bridge, Hyde Park, Piccadilly Circus, Charing Cross Station, the Bank of England, Trafalgar Square, St Paul's Cathedral, Liverpool Street Station, Buckingham Palace -- by German air raids in July, August and September. I say supposedly because as the Imperial War Museum notes (IWM 443), the newspaper is hard to identify based on the English title given, the Westphalia Daily News. But if the German press did claim this, it was an own goal because this film shows that the locations were still all intact, at least as of 25 and 26 September when the film was supposedly shot. Again, I say supposedly, because this is established by a policeman holding a placard showing the date in many of the scenes, but we have to take this on trust. In this case, however, there's no reason I can see for the DOI to fake the date, as it was quite true that the damage done was vastly exaggerated by the letter-writer, and in fact simply made up. There is also footage of some of the places German bombs did hit: working class homes, small businesses, the road in front of a hotel. The text sarcastically says these are the Germans' idea of 'munition factories', though the British (like everyone else who ever dropped bombs in anger) were just as prone to claiming they only bombed military targets.

The resulting film is a fascinating document of London at war. Although it must be said that for the most part it doesn't look much different to London at peace: the streets are full of traffic, people are out doing their shopping, commuters are running to catch their buses (as in the above -- that's Piccadilly Circus, with the base of Eros on the left). There are perhaps a few more men in uniform than usual, including a crowd of Australian soldiers sightseeing in St Paul's.

This is a New Zealand medic who gave first aid to civilians wounded by a bomb dropped outside the Bedford Hotel on Southampton Row (off Russell Square) on the night of 25 September, despite his own head wound. His name isn't given; I like the way he is standing in the shadows, as though uncomfortable with the attention. Thirteen people were killed in this incident (eleven according to the film) after ignoring official instructions to take cover, as the text archly notes.

A 14 year old boy was killed inside this dairy in King's Cross Road when it was hit on the night of 24 September. This period marked the start of the 'harvest moon' raids, when the Gothas and (for the first time) Giants attacked London nearly every night for a week, until 1 October. This led to some interesting reactions, which unfortunately British Fact and German Fiction doesn't show: shops starting closing early to let employees get home before dark, people gathered in parks to watch the show, and others bedded down in the Tube stations. In psychological terms, the harvest moon raids were perhaps more significant than the daylight Gotha raids of June and July, even though they killed fewer people.

While it does implicitly point out the immorality of the German raids, the film ends with some statistics emphasising how tiny the human cost was in statistical terms: for the first nine months of 1917, there were only 940 casualties (191 dead, 749 wounded) in London due to air raids, which amounted to 27 dead per million given the city's population of 7 million. For the same period the number of dead and wounded due to road accidents (probably for Britain as a whole) was 14591. So nothing to worry about, then. If only the British had believed their own propaganda ... I would have had to find a different topic!

Bonus airminded footage: Wilbur Wright and his Flying Machine, a French film shot in Italy on 24 April 1909. With Wilbur Wright flying his Flyer. And. Flying. With. The. Camera. On. Board! Astounding. I think it must be worth following the Europa Film Treasures blog for their latest gems.

In lieu of a more substantial post, here are some flying aeroplanes. Clicking the above picture will take you to a British Pathé newsreel issued on 7 July 1938, showing 'Britain's latest air fighter', also known as the Supermarine Spitfire Mk I. Unfortunately the narration is missing, but I think this is the first production Spitfire, K9787 (at least, I can make out a -87 serial number in places), which first flew in May 1938. That looks like Jeffrey Quill in the cockpit about a third of the way through. A photo on page 18 of the 28 June issue of The Times shows a Spitfire in flight, noting that it was 'undergoing acceptance trials', and the newsreel footage was presumably part of the same Air Ministry propaganda exercise. Other newsreel companies produced similar items.

This was the British public's introduction to the Spitfire, at least on a large scale. The prototype, K5054, was on display at the 1936 RAF Pageant, but it took two years to get into production, and in those years biplanes still formed the air defence of Britain. I'm surprised that the British government didn't make more of their fast new fighters (the Hurricane debuted only a little earlier) in propaganda terms in late 1938. Of course, there weren't very many of them yet. But just the sight of them cavorting across cinema screens might have increased public confidence in Fighter Command, and weakened support for appeasement. On second thoughts, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised after all.

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Watching this:

made me think of this:

and this:

and this:

and, because I happen to be marking my students' essays about it, this:

Sometimes it would be nice to be able to switch off and forget.

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

A couple of years ago I outed myself as something of a philistine by admitting that I didn't 'get' Guernica, and thought that direct representations -- photographs -- of the ruined city were more powerful, more affecting than Picasso's masterpiece. My incomprehension generated a fair degree of discussion, which was useful, but it was having to teach Guernica this week in tutorials which finally helped me make my peace with it. More specifically, learning something of Picasso's process of design and composition, and the politics of his commission from the Republican government, led me to a better appreciation of its symbolism. Although it depicts -- or rather is inspired by -- the bombing of a city, it seems to be set inside as much as outside, somehow. The woman holding a lantern could be leaning out of a window, one who survived the destruction but suffers from what she has seen. Or she could be leaning in, perhaps symbolising the inaction of the international community after seeing what had happened to Guernica. Creative ambiguity, indeed.

But the other source the students looked at this week was the 1959 French-Japanese film Hiroshima mon amour. And while I've come to understand something of Guernica's power, figurative and non-literal though it may be, I now have a problem with Hiroshima mon amour. In the most simplistic terms, it is a love story between a French woman and a Japanese man, who have a doomed affair in Hiroshima, ca. 1957. But the romance is not the point. Marguerite Duras, author of the screenplay, later wrote that:

Nothing is 'given' at Hiroshima. Every gesture, every word, takes on an aura of meaning that transcends its literal meaning. And this is one of the principal goals of the film: to have done with the description of horror by horror, for that has been done by the Japanese themselves, but make this horror rise again from its ashes by incorporating it in a love that will necessarily be special and 'wonderful', one that will be more credible than if it had occurred any where else in the world a place that death had not preserved.

But if she wanted 'to have done with the description of horror by horror', then why did she and director Alain Resnais include -- at times harrowing -- documentary footage of the ruined city and the victims of the atomic bomb? (Starting from 7.53, continued in the second clip.)

Is this not a description of horror by horror? It's true that the rest of the film does away with this literalness, but it seems like the concrete needs to exist before the abstract, which I find some consolation.

Something else strikes me about this sequence. It's not just about Hiroshima. The fish being dumped for fear of radiation poisoning surely refers to the panic in Japan after the Lucky Dragon 5 incident in 1954. And the sequence starting with 'It will begin again' is a clear reference to a future nuclear war. So it's also about the Cold War and about World War III. And what this has to do with the rest of the film, with the Frenchwoman's present-day affair with the Japanese architect and the flashbacks to her wartime affair with the German soldier, is not clear to me. More reflection (and education!) needed.

For those with more refined artistic sensibilities than me, Hiroshima mon amour is available online. And Guernica can be seen at the Reina Sofia in Madrid, or, in tapestry form, at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

Image source: Wikipedia.

A belated Anzac Day post.

Here's C. E. W. Bean, the official historian of Australia's involvement in the First World War, on why the infamous Suvla landings on 6 August 1915 didn't cut the Gallipoli peninsula and open the road to Constantinople:

The reasons for the failure, which affected the fate of the Australian and New Zealand forces more profoundly than any other episode in the campaign, may be laid bare by future historians, probing unflinchingly for the causes. Many of the Anzac troops, on whom it left an enduring impression, attributed it partly to the senility of the leadership, partly to the inexperience of the troops, but largely to causes which lie deeper in the mentality of the British people. The same respect for the established order which caused Kitchener to entrust the enterprise to unsuitable commanders simply because they were senior, appeared to render each soldier inactive unless his officer directed, and each officer dumb unless his senior spoke. The men had doubtless the high qualities of their race, among them orderliness, decency, and modesty; they could follow a good leader anywhere as bravely as any troops in the Peninsula. But an enterprise such as that of Suvla demanded more than the ability to follow; it required that each man, or at least a high proportion of the force, should be able to lead; and the necessary quality of decision, which even a few years' emancipation from the social restrictions of the Old World appeared to have bred in the emigrant, was -- to colonial eyes -- lacking in the Suvla troops. Moreover a large proportion of the new force had come straight from the highly organised life in or around overcrowded cities, and as a result they lacked the resourcefulness required for any activity in open country. They lacked also the hardness to set a high standard of achievement for themselves, while that demanded of them by the regimental and brigade staffs was -- to put it mildly -- inadequate for one of the decisive battles of the war. Further, though many reports had been heard concerning the excellent physique of the New Army, the standard in that respect was very uneven. There were in reality two well-defined types, the officers as a class being tall and well developed, but a majority of the men cramped in stature, presumably as the result of life in overcrowded industrial centres under conditions not yet operative to any marked extent in the great cities in Australia.

Hmm, so it's the fault of the British soldier for being 'cramped in nature' and lacking in 'resourcefulness' and 'hardness', unlike the strapping young colonials, of course. At least Bean allows himself an out, in the form of 'future historians'. One of these historians, Robin Prior, argues that -- contrary to received wisdom -- the primary aim at Suvla was actually just to set up a supply base for the northern Allied forces, which it did successfully. Any advances across the peninsula were secondary to this, and in any case were never likely to amount to much given the geography, the forces available and the operational plan. Which last, as it happens, was partly authored by Captain Cecil Aspinall, who later wrote (as Aspinall-Oglander) the British official history of the Gallipoli campaign, where he was quite happy to blame the commander on the ground, the elderly but inexperienced Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Stopford, for the 'failure' of his plan.

Something for me to bear in mind when I talk to my students in a few weeks about the (brilliant but misleading) 1981 film Gallipoli. Especially the scene where the radio operator at the Nek, where waves of Australian soldiers have been uselessly slaughtered in assaults against Turkish trenches in support of the landings, reports that the British at Suvla have met no resistance but, instead of advancing inland, are 'sitting on the beach drinking cups of tea'. Peter Weir probably can't be blamed for portraying the British military, officers and other ranks both, as incompetent when even the official historians are happy to do the same.

See C. E. W. Bean, Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, volume 2: The Story of ANZAC from 4 May, 1915, to the evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula, 11th edition (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1941), 715-6; Robin Prior, Gallipoli: The End of the Myth (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009), 207-9.

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

A random thought while sitting in a lecture today: if there is (or can be) such a thing as total war, does that imply that total peace is a meaningful concept?

Firstly, what is total war? One definition, drawn from the ubiquitous set of conference proceedings edited by Stig Förster et al (and more directly, from today's lecture notes), goes something like this. Total war consists of:

1. total aims: e.g. the destruction of an enemy nation
2. total methods: e.g. bombing cities
3. total mobilisation: e.g. conscription for both the armed forces and for labour
4. total control: e.g. censorship, dictatorship

More briefly, total war is the subordination of every other consideration (law, custom, morality, etc) to the prosecution of war. Total war is an ideal form of warfare, something which can be approached more or less closely, but which can never actually be fully attained. Well, hopefully not, because that would be bad.

So what would total peace look like? I don't think it can simply be the absence of total war; that's just peace generically. Total peace must be total in some sense.

One approach might be to say that total peace is the subordination of every consideration to the prosecution of peace. But why would this be necessary? Perhaps as a sublimation for the martial impulse, a moral equivalent of war. William James called for 'gilded youths' to be conscripted in 'the immemorial human warfare against nature', that is to say to do dirty and unpleasant jobs such as mining, construction, roadbuilding, which would knock some sense into them and make them better people. James was inspired in part by H. G. Wells, who himself later had similar ideas. For example, in his screenplay for Things to Come (1936) he imagined a peaceful future civilisation which turns its energies towards the exploration of the Universe, by way of the construction of a giant space gun.

But it's hard (for me, at least) to imagine any real society devoting itself so totally to peaceful pursuits. Fear and greed are, unfortunately, more powerful motivating forces than altruism or even curiosity. Indeed, even in Things to Come the rationalists have to face down a rebellion which fears where progress will lead and wants to tear down the space gun.

So perhaps a total peace is more negative: the subordination, in peacetime, of every other consideration to preparing for total war. Like total war itself, this would be a never-realised ideal. But, also like total war, there are times when it is approached more closely than at other times. One such period might be the Cold War. But to the same extent that total war became unthinkable after the advent of nuclear weapons, so too would total peace become unnecessary: if the war was actually fought, it could not be won, and so the preparations for it would have been pointless. And how total can the Cold War be said to have been? Most people in the West, at least, lived out their lives without being greatly affected by it.

Another period when a total peace might have occurred would have been before the Second World War. Think civil defence, peacetime conscription, the coordination of labour to maximise armaments production, the building up of bomber forces. In Britain, at least, these initiatives were only secondarily intended to prepare the nation for total war. Their primary aim was to deter an attack altogether. So perhaps total peace was actually the (inevitably, only partial) reorganisation of society to try to prevent a total war from starting in the first place?

Random thoughts have a low probability of being useful, however. More considered thoughts would be welcome!