It seems like forever since the last one, but it’s only been two months. The (16th) Military History Carnival has been posted at the Osprey Blog. A few present-day items seem to have snuck in, but there’s still plenty of history in there. My selection this time is about Burlington, at Underground, a rather beautiful photoblog about things underground. Burlington was a nuclear bunker in Wiltshire, built in the late 1950s to preserve continuity of government, should London fall to a knock-out blow nuclear strike. So there was room for the Prime Minister, some of the more important ministers and enough support staff to keep them and the country running for months. Underground links to another website with more information, including a fascinating internal phone directory from 1968, which shows just who was needed and who was not. The presence of 23 shipping officers and 12 for oil transport suggests that some semblance of national or even international economic transactions was anticipated. 50 fire control personnel, more than double those assigned to domestic and laundry duties, possibly seems excessive — unless such time as they were actually needed, I suppose! On the other hand, a platoon of guards doesn’t seem like much to defend the government with, but I guess it was more for internal security, and maybe there were more up top. 16 diplomatic staff — maybe from the other 14 NATO members at the time, plus South Africa and Australia? And the biggest single contingent is for communications: a whopping 158 people. Which is a reminder of just how important it was to be able to talk to the outside world — not much of a government if you can’t tell anyone what to do — and just how the technology has changed: you could probably run such a bunker with less than a tenth as many IT staff today …

Recently I’ve come across a number of really good websites about the Blitz. Oddly, none of them are about London, but instead are about the experience of some of Britain’s other blitzed cities. Maybe London is just too big a subject, and the smaller scale of the regional blitzes is more congenial to thorough exploration.

So here’s the list:

• Bristol
• Coventry
• Exeter
• Glasgow
• Liverpool

I’d be grateful for any additions.

Via the WWII mailing list comes the welcome news that Flight International is putting its entire run of back issues online, as one searchable PDF per magazine page. So far, the following years have been scanned: 1909-1932, 1935-1940, 1948, 1955-1961, 1964, 1966-1968, 1997-2004. The archive can either be browsed (note that you have to click the “Next page” link to move to the next group of four page listings, which wasn’t immediately obvious to me) or searched by keyword.

The significance of this is that Flight was one of the two major British aviation magazines throughout most of my period, and the longest-running (though not, I think actually the first: Pemberton Billing’s short-lived Aerocraft has that honour). I’ve actually already looked at Flight, which is available at the SLV, so if I would rather have had the harder-to-find Aeroplane put online instead; but Australian holdings of the early issues of Flight are fragmentary so this is good too.

There are no charges for access, at least for now, which is surprising (and welcome). No indications that this will change in future, but it would probably be wise to make the most of this while it’s free!

This is very cool: the Australian War Memorial, Australia’s foremost military history museum, seems to be getting into blogging in a big way! Today, there was an announcement on H-War (and Victoria’s cross? is already on the case) of a group blog running in conjunction with an exhibition about Australia’s participation in the big Western Front battles of 1917: To Flanders Fields, 1917. It’s maintained by a group of AWM curators and historians: Peter Burness, Craig Tibbitts, Shaune Lakin and Anne-Marie Condé.

That’s all I was going to mention, but I noticed that the AWM has set up a subdomain called blog.awm.gov.au, which suggested that there might be other AWM blogs out there. Now, that page is completely blank, so I used my Google-fu to see if I could find anything else using that domainname. And there are four more blogs! Focus: photography & war 1945-2006; Gallipoli Battlefield Tour 2007; George Lambert: Gallipoli & Palestine Landscapes; Lawrence of Arabia & the Light Horse. All of them accompany AWM exhibitions, except for the Gallipoli tour one, obviously. Presumably they won’t be updated after their associated exhibition ends, but then there’ll be other blogs to replace them.

The AWM is to be applauded for this. They all look very interesting and are already well-established, with posts on a variety of intriguing topics, with some fantastic illustrations to boot (drawing on one of the Memorial’s strengths there). A lot of effort has been put into them and it shows. But I wonder why I haven’t come across any of these blogs before? Partly it’s because I don’t visit the AWM homepage often enough — they’re all listed there quite prominently (so much for Google-fu!) But another part of the answer would seem to be that the AWM’s bloggers haven’t tried to hook into the rest of the historioblogosphere — there are no links to other blogs in their sidebars or posts (that I could see anyway). Whether this is by design or by accident I can’t say — I can see why they’d want to focus on their own content — but I think they’re missing out on promotional opportunities by neglecting the social networking aspect of blogging. Hopefully a bit of linkage in their direction will show them what they are missing.

I don’t want to end on even that slightly sour note, as I do think this is really exciting, so I’ll point to one post by Anne-Marie Condé which caught my eye. It’s about the Australian War Records Section, formed in London in May 1917, effectively the origins of the AWM itself, and features some photographs and artefacts associated with it, such as a 1918-pattern pair of anti-gas goggles and a stuffed carrier pigeon. There’s also some more good news: the AWM is digitising the war diaries of Australian Army units involved in the various wars of the twentieth century. The project is only its early days, but this is going to be a tremendous resource for historians and genealogists. I was disappointed, though, to discover that war diary entries don’t begin with sentences like ‘Dear war diary, today we launched another futile assault against Turkish positions at Lone Pine …’ :D

… all those years of habitually talking like a pilot to the consternation of all and sundry, then somebody goes along and organises The First International Talk Like A Pilot Day and I go and miss it! It was yesterday, 19 May 2007. Wizard idea though, what — absolutely spiffing. Next year I’ll be there with bells on, and top button carefully undone.

They also provide a link to The Aircrew Dictionary, which purportedly describes how real RAF aircrew speak. Well, maybe Douglas Bader and Guy Gibson used such foul language, but I’m sure Kenneth More and Richard Todd would never have!

(Thanks to Jeremy Boggs for the tip.)

The US Air Force Historical Studies Office has put up several dozen monographs on the history of the USAF and its predecessors, PDFs available for free download. It seems to be more narrowly focused than the similar effort by Air University Press, as only a few titles look like they might discuss the RAF in any detail: D-Day 1944: Air Power Over the Normandy Beaches and Beyond by Richard P. Hallion (1994), Preemptive Defense: Allied Air Power Versus Hitler’s V-Weapons, 1943-1945 by Adam L. Gruen (1998) and, rather oddly, Coningham: A Biography of Air Marshal Sir Arthur Coningham by Vincent Orange (1992). The most interesting, however, given a recent post here, is The Command of the Air by Giulio Douhet (1927, translated 1942). Via WWII mailing list.

New Popular Edition Maps is an attempt to produce a copyright-free database of British postcodes. It does this by asking people to hunt around on a clickable, zoomable map of the UK for places for which they know the postcode (e.g. their home), and then enter that postcode at that spot. It’s a bit like a stripped-down Google Maps; and you can search the map by placename or postcode. But what’s interesting about this is that the maps used are out-of-copyright Ordnance Survey maps (1 mile to the inch) from the 1940s and early 1950s, which could be useful for historians or teachers, though these are obviously not the intended audience. Unfortunately Northern Ireland and most of Scotland is missing. (The National Library of Scotland has the OS maps of Scotland from the 1920s.)

Finding this inspired me to do a bit of a search for other online historical maps of Britain which similarly attempt to cover the whole country. (There’s a useful list of out-of-copyright maps here.) Old-maps.co.uk has been around a while and uses OS maps from the late 19th century. Vision of Britain (which site has lots of historical statistics which you can slice various ways, and which I must explore more thoroughly one day) is more sophisticated, and has a neat trick of switching between different maps depending upon the zoom level: for example going from a 1921 large-scale map to a 1904 OS one to a NPE map. It also has 19th-century maps and a 1930s land utilisation map. But possibly the most interesting is Old Ordnance Survey Maps, which is based upon OS maps from the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. The coverage is very much incomplete; but it uses the Google Maps API, which means that it has a familiar interface for users, and could be used for mashups. It already overlays the regular Google Maps satellite and street maps. There are also handy links to take you to the same location at old-maps.co.uk and Vision of Britain. I can think of some improvements (for example, printing the publication date on each map) but this approach has tremendous potential.

Frederick Lanchester was a clever British engineer. He was one of the pioneers of the British automotive industry, but his main interest was in aviation, particularly aerodynamic theory. In my opinion, he has a good claim to be the first person to elucidate the knock-out blow concept, in his book Aircraft in Warfare: The Dawn of the Fourth Arm (London: Constable & Co., 1916) — which also happens to be a very early example of what was later termed operations or operational research. And as I’ve found out recently, he’s also a business guru in Japan!

Of course, it’s not uncommon for writers on military strategy to have their ideas redeployed to serve commercial ends — any large bookshop is likely to stock Sun Tzu, Karl von Clausewitz or even Miyamoto Musashi, more for the benefit of would-be captains of industry than military history buffs. And the decisions of the great commanders of history have been combed for insights into sound management practice. But this is the first time I’ve seen an airpower strategist used in this way.

Aircraft in Warfare introduced what are known as Lanchester’s Laws. In it, he argued that in “ancient” battles (that is, before gunpowder), the number of soldiers fighting at any one time was the same on both sides — because one soldier could physically only fight against one enemy soldier at a time. (Think of masses of infantry armed with swords, pressing up behind the thin line of men at the front actually doing the fighting.) Therefore, all else being equal, the number of casualties inflicted by each army was proportional to its size. It made no difference, then, if an army of 500 men separately fought two enemy armies of 250 men each, or one combined army of 500 men; the outcome would be the same (and very much in doubt, as the sides are equally strong in both cases).

By contrast, in “modern” warfare, combat occurs at range. This means that every soldier in an army can be in combat simultaneously; they don’t have to wait until they are standing next to the enemy in order to fight them. This means that the rate (not the absolute number) of casualties inflicted by an army is proportional to its size. I’ll spare you the differential equations, but what this boils down to is that the effective strength of a pre-modern army varies as the number of men, N, and that of a modern army varies as N². (Hence Lanchester’s own name for his law, the n-square law.) Taking the example of a 500-strong army again, while it would still be evenly matched against another 500-strong force, it would comfortably defeat two 250-men armies, which are each only a quarter (not half) as strong as they would be combined. (Because 250² + 250² = 125000 < 250000 = 500².) In fact, the army of 500 could consecutively fight two armies of 400 and 300 on equal terms. (Because 400² + 300² = 160000 + 90000 = 250000 = 500².) In other words, in modern warfare numbers count, and count much more heavily than in ancient warfare.

I’ll let sporting goods mogul Katsuro Ogino explain further:

Two countries are at war, one has an air force of 100 planes and the other has only 10. Let’s assume the skies are clear and that the planes and pilots are equally good. If the two forces were to meet in a dogfight, how many planes would be left after the battle?

Ninety on one side and none on the other.

Wrong. Statistical analysis suggests the result would be approximately ten losses to two. It would seem that the obvious implication for business as well as battle is that the bigger, stronger side always wins.

So, this would seem to suggest that victory always goes to the big battalions, right? Not so fast:

But what if the outnumbered side managed to knock out three or four planes? This would constitute a victory of sorts. In other words, use of tactical ploys can provide the underdog with a momentary local advantage over his superior opponent.

What do you mean by a local advantage?

Scoring in a specific area even if the overall battle is lost. For example, the commander of the smaller force tells one of his pilots to fly ahead as bait, in an effort to pull out four or five of the enemy in pursuit. If the tactic works, the remaining nine planes would outnumber the pursuers, and shoot some or all of them down, with only three or four losses of their own. Of course, the enemy might not fall for the ruse, but the point is that careful planning can improve your chances.

Lanchester himself used the example of Nelson at Trafalgar, where his fleet of 27 ships was outnumbered by the French and Spanish fleet, 33-strong. The n-square law would predict, then, a British defeat. But Nelson’s ships smashed through the enemy line, splitting it into smaller groups which could be defeated in detail, thereby making the n-square law work for the Royal Navy.

OK, maybe there’s something to this, and maybe there’s not (operations research analysts are still interested in his ideas, at least), but how does all this help one build a commercial empire? Ogino again:

What does that have to do with the ski business?

I’ll tell you. My brother (Teibu Ogino, now chairman of Victoria’s board) and I inherited some property in Kanda from our father. We had always liked sking and decided to go into the business, opening our first shop in 1972, just when the sport was gaining in popularity. There were other sporting-goods stores in the area, but we managed to do pretty well and soon opened two branches in the same neighborhood.
Several years later, we were considering expanding into other big markets like Osaka and Sopporo. But one of my friends, a proponent of the Lanchester theory [consultant and author Shinichi Yano - ed] who now runs a management-consulting firm in Tokyo, said it would be suicidal to branch out too early.
“Secure your home base first,” he said. “Don’t spread your forces too thin; instead, concentrate on your home ground.” So we kept our fourth, fifth, sixth and even our seventh shops in Kanda, where we now control abot 60% of the floor space. We also have about 60% of the sales, surpassing competitors such as Alpen and Mizuno, neither of which has more than 20% of the business in kanda.

What is your overall market share?

Victoria accounts for some 30% of ski and skiwear sales in greater Tokyo region, but probably only about 10% nationwide. Other companies such as the giant discount chain, the Daiei, sell skis and skiwear. But they also sell bread and butter and thousands of other products, too. We expect sales of about $557 million this year, but Daiei will probably pull in about 25 times as much. They would crush us if we tried to compete with them as general-purpose stores, but in the area of skis, they can’t touch us.
Take our highly specialized stores in Kanda:
There is one primarily for women, one for kids, and so on. Some of our floors are devoted entirely to gloves or goggles. Customers come to Victoria because they know they’ll find exactly what they want. The whole point of the Lanchester theory is to become the dominant player in your own field.

Well, that’s all well and good. Dominate your home market before even thinking about taking on the big guys, focus on your core business rather than trying to compete in all areas. Sounds sensible. But what I haven’t seen is what Lanchester has to do with all this. What is the justification for applying Lanchester’s n-square in the business world, for which it was not developed? The struggle for market share may well be likened to a battle metaphorically, but that doesn’t mean that the strength of a business can be equated to the square of the number of its stores, or its capitalisation, or its market share, or something like that. Perhaps a justification can be found in one of Lanchester Press’s publications. There are some hints on their website:

There are many popular books available to the business community that purport to show how strategy based on a mixture of Sun-Tzu, Mishima, Attilla the Hun et al. seasoned with a dash of Von Clausewitz can be used as a basis of marketing strategy. However, all of these books were written before machanized warfare developed and deal only with the one-on-one combats that takes place under Lanchester’s Linear Law. In reality, the art and practice of military technology has progressed somewhat since the days of the samurai warrior. A few well-aimed bursts from a machine gun will dispatch a fair-sized army of samurai warriors.

Today, sales and marketing takes place under Lanchester’s N-Squared Law. Since there are always multiple participants in any given market sector. Of course there are a few special cases of one-on-one competition, such as Boeing and Airbus (the only two manufacturers of jumbo jets) and in wide screen cinema projectors (Imax and Iworks the only two manufacturers of wide screen systems). Consequently, Western marketers are going into battle with, at best, half a theory and ignorant of the power of Lanchester’s principle of concentration and the N-Squared Law.

I remain unconvinced. It all seems a bit flaky to me. But I wonder if Lanchester Press would be interested in my book proposal, Strike Hard, Strike Sure: The RAF’s Most Motivational Mottos and How They Can Grow Your Business …

Scott W. Palmer, an associate professor at Western Illinois University, has a new book due out this month entitled Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia. In 10 words or less, it’s about Russian airmindedness up to the end of 1945. This in itself is a good thing, but what makes it even better is that Scott has set up a website to promote the book (including excerpts in PDF format), as well as a blog, The Avia-Corner. In his first post, he explains that Dictatorship of the Air is not just a book, but

is meant to be the beginning of a conversation about the relationship between culture and technology and how this relationship has contributed to the development of the modern world. The “Avia-Corner” weblog is intended to further the discussion begun by [Dictatorship of the Air].

He also highlights a gallery of Soviet posters promoting airmindedness, which he has put online and plans to expand.

So, I welcome Scott into the tiny fraternity of aviation history bloggers, and look forward to more from him in the future!

If you were wondering what the biggest and loudest air raid siren of all time is, then wonder no more, because it’s the American Chrysler Victory Siren, made in the 1950s. Well, I don’t know for sure that it was — I’d like to see what the Soviets had to offer — but it was clearly a mighty impressive piece of hardware: 12 feet long; 3 tons in weight; and 138 decibels at a distance of 100 feet! (120 dB is the pain threshold.) These were dotted all over the United States — 20 in Detroit alone.

You can hear one of the few remaining examples in action here. It certainly sends a chill down my spine, which is perhaps strange as nuclear drills were not a feature of my youth here in Australia, so I only know the sound of such sirens second-hand. But I can’t help but imagine what would have been happening to the communities these sirens were meant to warn, as the missiles (or in the 1950s, the bombs) rained down. Which in turn leads one to marvel at the optimistic choice of the name Victory Siren … though I suppose the Defeat Siren (”If you can hear this, you’re already dead”) might not have sold so well!¹

1. Of course, nuclear war looked somewhat more winnable in the 1950s, and civil defence correspondingly less pointless, than was later the case. But still.