Maps

Admittedly, not very much!

I’m giving a talk at 4pm, next Friday, 16 May 2008, in the Fritz Loewe Theatre at the School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne. The title is “Facing Armageddon: Britain and the Bomber, 1908-1941″ and it will be a broad overview of my thesis topic. It should be fun, for me at least — it’s the department where I’ve worked for many years as the IT manager, so it will nice (and perhaps challenging) to try to explain to all the geologists and climatologists exactly what it is I’ve been doing these past few years. Thanks to Malek Ghantous of the Earth Sciences Postgraduate Group for the invite and for organising this — it’s the first, and quite possibly the last, time a poster has been made to advertise a talk I’ve given!

If anybody local has nothing better to do on a Friday afternoon, you’re more than welcome to attend the talk (and enjoy the refreshments afterwards). Perhaps just drop me a line first, though, so we can anticipate any massive surge of interest (ha!) There’s a map showing where Earth Sciences is after the jump. (The lecture theatre is on the 2nd floor, right near the main entrance, just past the disused theremin/mural …)
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A curious snippet from Margaret MacMillan’s account of the Paris Peace Conference, Peacemakers (2002):

Why not give it to Hughes of Australia, suggested Clemenceau.¹

The ‘it’ was Heligoland, a small island in the North Sea, off the north-western coast of Germany. For most of the 19th century it had belonged to Britain, which swapped it for Zanzibar to Germany in 1890 — when relations between the two countries were still friendly. But then the naval arms race started up, and Heligoland became a handy place from any attempt by the Royal Navy to approach the German coast could be interfered with. Which is why, in Paris in 1919, the question arose of what to do about it.

The Admiralty naturally wanted the island back, but presumed that the Americans would object. In the end, the compromise solution adopted was to destroy all of its fortifications. Presumably Clemenceau’s suggestion was that Australia, as a nation almost as far away from Heligoland as possible, be given a Mandate over Heligoland (to add to New Guinea and Nauru), so that neither Britain nor Germany would have control over the disputed territory. I don’t know how seriously he meant it, or whether it ever had a chance of getting up. But in my mind’s eye I could see Australia dominating the North Sea from its Heligoland base with our single battlecruiser … well, no. But what would have happened if Australia had been given a Mandate over Heligoland?

Well, for a start, I don’t think Australia would have been exactly regarded as a disinterested party by Germany: British Empire and all that. In practice, there probably wouldn’t have been much difference between Australia governing Heligoland and Britain governing it: precisely because we were so far away from Europe, we had nothing to gain from it and nothing to lose, except perhaps in terms of our international reputation. I don’t see any reason why we wouldn’t use it to benefit our friend (and protecting power), Britain, in whatever way they wished.

What use would it have been to Britain? MacMillan notes that the coming of the aeroplane was another reason why Heligoland seemed newly valuable. She doesn’t explain, but seems to imply that this is because of their potential use as airbases for offensive action. I doubt that it would have been of much use for Britain in this way — it was too small to have a really big airbase (only 1 sq. km!) to be very powerful, and too close to Germany (only 70 km away) to survive for long.

But what Heligoland might have been very useful for was as a RDF (radar) station, to give Britain early warning of an incoming knock-out blow. It was actually ideally placed for this purpose.

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1. Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2002), 187.

I recently had the somewhat guilty pleasure of watching Flood, a film (from a novel) about the sudden devastation of London by a massive storm surge — predicted by a scientist who had long been dismissed as a crank — which swamps the Thames Barrier, submerges most of the city’s landmarks, kills a couple of hundred thousand people and forces most of the rest to evacuate. An even bigger disaster is averted (just in the nick of time, as it happens) and Londoners are left to clean up the mess. All very timely, given the unusually high proportion of England which was under water earlier this year.

Disaster movies are a pretty venerable genre by now (there were at least three films about the Titanic made in the year after it sank). The subset which deals with destruction on the scale of a big city (or larger) — as opposed to aeroplanes or skyscrapers — is relatively small, and that concerned, like Flood, with the fate of London specifically is quite small indeed.¹ No doubt this is because disaster movies are generally loaded with special effects and therefore are expensive, and as the US market for film is so huge, it makes more financial sense to destroy some American city rather than a British one. So there aren’t all that many cinematic depictions of the end of London. But books are much cheaper to make, and in those London has been destroyed many times over.

I’ve been trying to think of the first time this happened. It’s easy enough to find early references to the eventual ruin of London, such as H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885) (in which a neo-medieval adventurer seeks his fortunes amid the city’s swampy remains), or Macaulay’s New Zealander (1840).² But those only show London long after its fall, and so, properly speaking, are post-apocalyptic. The actual destruction happens off stage; it is inevitable, something to accept rather than prevent. Other candidates might include science fiction stories like Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt (1913), wherein the Earth passes through a region of toxic ether, and Professor Challenger and companions take an eerie trip through dead London afterwards.³ Or H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), with its Martian tripods laying waste to the metropolis with their heat rays. Where else might we look?
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1. The Day the Earth Caught Fire springs to mind (rather oddly, since I haven’t seen it); Day of the Triffids and 28 Days Later too. There must be others though.
2. Not actually a novel, a story, a paragraph or even a sentence: merely a few clauses in a book review, referring to some future time ‘when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.’ But the image caught the imagination of many who read and spread it, to the point where it practically became a cliché. See David Skilton, “Tourists at the ruins of London: the metropolis and the struggle for empire”, Cercles 17, 93-119.
3. Even if the ending is a huge cop-out.

WHAT AUSTRALIA WOULD BE LIKE UNDER HUN RULE. — An original recruiting poster which was used with great success in South Australia. Tasmania, it will be noted, becomes Kaisermania, and the idols of the Huns have provided other place-names.

This is from the Daily Mail, 3 July 1917, p. 8, and would appear to be a South Australian recruiting poster, showing how the map of Australia might be redrawn if Germany won. Australia itself becomes “New-Germany”; Perth becomes Tirpitzburg; Adelaide, Hindenburg; Brisbane, Bernhardiburg; Sydney, Nietscheburg [sic]; Tasmania (not Hobart), Kaisermania; and, most appropriately from my point of view, Melbourne would be renamed Zeppelinburg!

I don’t think much has been written on German plans for Australia in the event of victory in the First World War, probably because the Germans themselves gave very little thought to the place. However, it seems unlikely that Germany would have wanted to take over Australia lock, stock and barrel; better to turn us into some sort of client state instead. They’d probably have wanted to take a few of Britain’s colonial possessions in the area, and perhaps would have insisted upon reparations or favourable trade terms. And our battlecruiser HMAS Australia — which caused von Spee such headaches in 1914 — would no doubt have had to go. No independent foreign policy, perhaps (not that we had much of one as it was!) But we probably wouldn’t have had to go so far as to need to translate such phrases as “don’t come the raw prawn with me, mate” into German — fortunately!

This idea that we had to fight Germany in France in order to prevent the Kaiser’s victory parade down Swanston St had obvious potential as a motivational device, and was used in stories and films as well. Did people really believe it? The Daily Mail said that the poster had ‘great success’, so perhaps they did.

This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

One interesting minor theme of my recent museum visits here in London has been, I suppose, the popular origins of wargames (as opposed to the intellectual origins): I’ve been coming across a number of games, produced in the first half of the twentieth century and aimed presumably at children, which represent war in some way. War games, but not yet wargames. So for example, one exhibit in the Science Museum’s aviation gallery was a First World War-era board game called Aviation: The Aerial Tactics Game of Attack and Defence. The board represents the sky, and the pieces are aircraft and squadrons. Here’s the box:

According to the caption, it was published around 1920, and the cover shows ’stylised First World War tanks and Handley Page H.P. 0/400 [sic] bombers’. It doesn’t look particularly like an O/400 to me; the corresponding game-piece is just called a Battle Plane (and the “tanks” are actually anti-aircraft guns on tank chassis, very advanced!)
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The earliest cite for the word ‘airport’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1919:

1919 Aerial Age Weekly 14 Apr. 235/1 There is being established at Atlantic City the first ‘air port’ ever established, the purposes of which are..to provide a municipal aviation field,..to supply an air port for trans-Atlantic liners, whether of the seaplane, land aeroplane or dirigible balloon type.

As is often the case with the OED’s cites, earlier ones can be found (though not many, it is true). The following is from March 1914, from a proposal by the Aerial League of the British Empire to decentralise flying by setting up airfields around Britain:

The time will come when, with the development of aviation, every town of any importance will need an air-port as it now needs a railway station.¹

Now, it seems pretty obvious that ‘airport’ was coined by analogy with the much older word ’seaport’, just like ‘air power’ and ’sea power’. I don’t doubt that this is mostly true, but there is another possibility too. The word ‘air-port’ (with hyphen) did in fact exist before the coming of flight: it referred to a hole for ventilation, especially on a ship or in an engine — what today might be called an air intake or outlet. I’ll come back to this in a moment.
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1. The Times, 16 March 1914, p. 5. Emphasis added.

This is my third post about maps out of the last four, so I’ve given in and made a Maps category. It’s not just me: there are another three posts about maps at Breathing History, and also at Philobiblon and My London Your London about an exhibition at the British Library about maps of London. And then The War Room alerted me to a great blog called strange maps, the subject of which is just what it sounds like — fascinating and unusual maps of all kinds: historical, fictional, satirical, political. There are three Second World War era maps produced for propaganda purposes: one supposedly showing German war aims, another supposedly showing Allied war aims, and one especially interesting to me, supposedly showing a 1934 German map of a supposed aerial threat from Czechoslovakia:

The provenance of the map is not clear — it’s labelled in German ‘A small state threatens Germany’, but under that is another label in English explaining that it was ‘published in Germany in 1934 to create fear of Czech bombing’, so who knows when or where it was published in English, or even if it was ever actually published in German. My guesses would be 1938-40, a British newspaper, and yes, but the online source doesn’t say. Anyway, plotting the range of aircraft in order to demonstrate the threat of bombing was common enough by this time, as I’ve previously discussed.

There’s no doubt that Germans in the 1930s lived under the shadow of the bomber: by 1934, the Nazi-founded Reich Civil Defence League already had 2.5 million members, and the prospect of morale bombing would have been especially disturbing to believers in the Dolchstoss legend, that Germany had not been defeated in the field in 1918 but “stabbed in the back” by weak-willed civilians. Hitler described Czechoslovakia as a dagger aimed at the heart of Germany. But Czechoslovakia never came close to bombing Germany; instead it was Goering who threatened the aerial destruction of Prague, to make sure that Czechoslovakian forces didn’t resist the illegal German occupation of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939 (sorry, I mean the liberation of Slovakia). Assuming it is actually genuine, this map would have been one small justification for the progressive German campaign against the Czechs.

While writing the post on old maps, I happened upon the following example, which is labelled ‘The world — principal air routes’ and dated to 1920 by the host site, Hipkiss’ Scanned Old Maps:

The only other information given is that it is from The People’s Atlas and produced by the London Geographical Institute.

Now, this is interesting, because it most certainly does NOT show air routes in 1920: there were very, very few, and they certainly didn’t criss-cross the world as this map suggests. Many of these routes had not been flown at all, let alone by regularly scheduled services. For example, here’s a close-up of the North Atlantic:
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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.

In my previous post I talked about some Japanese ARP posters from 1938. One in particular (above; click for larger version) is very revealing: it shows exactly whose bombers the Japanese were worried about, by plotting circles on a map of Japan and its neighbours, representing the radius of action¹ of bombers from potential enemies. It turns out they were afraid of everybody’s, except for the country they were actually at war with (China). The brown circle shows the radius of action of American bombers from the Philippines; black, British bombers from Hong Kong; green, Russian bombers from Vladivostok; yellow, American bombers from Alaska; and blue is in the middle of the ocean — American carrier-borne bombers, most likely. The circles are marked with a number, probably a distance: 2000 km? That would make some sense, as it was very roughly the radius of action of the B-17s that were just entering service in the US Army in 1938 (though not in substantial numbers until 1941).

This sort of map is quite common these days, particularly in highlighting the danger from rogue states. For example, here’s one centred on North Korea, from a website criticising Clinton’s foreign policy:

The circles here are not the radii of action of bombers, of course, but the ranges of missiles.² But the principle is the same. There’s a subtle difference, though: the Japanese one projects a defensive outlook: it shows the circles encroaching on Japanese territory and so emphasizes how vulnerable Japan is. The North Korean map, on the other, does not highlight the threat to any particular country, but instead demonstrates how North Korean missiles threaten all of its neighbours — that is to say, just how rogueish a state it is.

Here’s another missile-era map, this time quite an historic one from the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 (looks like it was drawn up by the CIA). This is more like the Japanese map: though the threat is from Cuba, the centre of the map is shifted towards the United States, to show just how much of the country would fall under the shadow of Soviet missiles (but by the same token, de-emphasising the threat to South America).

I haven’t come across many other pre-Second World War examples, though I’m sure they exist. The only other one I currently know of is British, and is very early, dating from 1913:

This time it’s not bombers or missiles that are the threat, but Zeppelins. (Love that OTT title!) The map is centred on Heligoland, which another map in the same magazine claimed was the site of an airship station. The caption says that the outer circle (600 miles) represents the radius for Zeppelins; the 300 mile circle is for aeroplanes. It ’should bring home to every patriot the vital necessity of Britain putting her house in order forthwith, by the grant of adequate provision in the nation’s Estimates to enable us to make up the heavy leeway from which this country already suffers’. Indeed it should; those circles are very dark, aren’t they? Though that might just be the poor quality of my photocopy …

Image sources: National Archives of Japan; Clinton Foreign Policy Page; John F. Kennedy Library; Flight, 1 March 1913, 248.

1. No more than half the maximum range of an aircraft, assuming they return to the base from which they took off.
2. As missiles don’t return to base, their radius of action is equal to their range.

Aside from the whole shadow-of-the-bomber thing, I have an amateur (okay - more amateur, then) interest in the Cold War and the fear of nuclear war. Partly because of the obvious continuities and parallels with the area I’m studying, but also because I’m old enough to remember the last flowering of nuclear paranoia in the 1980s. Anyway, from time to time I may post items on the subject. Here’s one: a map of the continental US showing the probable radiation exposure from a full-scale Soviet nuclear strike.¹ It’s based on data compiled in 1986 by FEMA, and it would hardly have been comforting for policymakers - the ‘low risk’ areas in yellow represent an estimated exposure in a week of up to 3000 roentgens for unprotected persons, which would still kill many people and leave many more very sick. It looks like it was assumed that the Soviets were following a counterforce strategy - most of the heavily populated regions seem relatively unscathed (though you can say goodbye to Hollywood), and the main targets would seem to be in Montana and the Midwest, where most of the ICBM silos were.

1980s pop cultural landmarks of note: Lawrence, Kansas, was definitely in danger, in the high risk zone sandwiched between two very high risk zones. Goose Island, Oregon, doesn’t exist, but it doesn’t look like it could have been ‘just three miles from a primary target’ as the prof claimed. Calumet, Colorado, also doesn’t exist, but would have been at low risk - go Wolverines! And Cheyenne Mountain, Colorado, unsurprisingly appears to be in a high risk zone, but they wouldn’t have been too worried about that, would they.

1. Jonas Siegel, “The original nuclear nightmare”, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September/October 2005, 38-9.