RAIN OF BOMBS

Milan's wonderful cathedral is here shown under a rain of dummy bombs dropped by 80 aeroplanes during recent manoeuvres of the Italians. To make the display more impressive and to ascertain the results with more certainty, luminous "bombs" were used and fell in a fiery rain upon the city -- a dire portent of future terrors

The images in this post are from Boyd Cable, 'The doom of cities', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 96-8. It was Cable's second article in a series on 'Things of tomorrow'. The text doesn't actually connect with the illustrations very well. Cable's main point is given away in the title, that in the next war cities will be ruthlessly destroyed from the air, since 'the murderous slaughter of non-combatants' is the most effective way to force a nation to surrender. While he notes that some experts are sceptical of this (Captain Turner, late of Woolwich Arsenal, Lord Castlerosse, Frederick Handley Page), he argues that 'they are flatly contradicted both by the known facts of the last war and by the preparations which we know have been made in anticipation of the next great struggle'.

Today, and as far as we can see into the future, War first of all means Air War; and Air War spells, literally and actually, the "doom of cities."

IF GAS BOMBS COME

Registered air raid shelters are one of the precautions provided in Berlin against the dangers of air raids. During practice raids on Berlin these shelters are brought into use, and here mothers and children are seen gathered in a bomb and gas proof dug-out while while the officer in charge reads aloud the official instructions to civilians in time of air raids

REALISM IN BERLIN

Rehearsals of air raid precautions in Berlin have been carried out with characteristic German thoroughness and realism. This photograph shows a motor-car which has actually been set on fire to show what disasters might occur in an actual raid

STAGING DESTRUCTION

Another example of such thoroughness is seen in this photograph showing debris piled high in a street in the Kreuzberg section of Berlin as a grim warning of what might happen if a house were struck by a bomb. But Berlin has never been bombed and no thoroughness in mock destruction can reproduce the panic of the people in a real air raid

On the illustrations, the implication is that since Britain's potential enemies are taking civil defence seriously, Britain should too. In fact, British civil defence had only just begun a few months before this article would have been published (in July 1935, when the first ARP Circular was issued to local governments by the Home Office), so it was in its very early stages. Italy and Germany had been holding quite public civil defence exercises for some years, so it's not surprising that they would be held up as exemplars. But it is surprising (or at least it was to me) to then discover that during the Second World War Italy's ARP, in particular, was actually quite primitive compared with Britain's. (See Claudia Baldoli, Andrew Knapp and Richard Overy, eds, Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe 1940-1945 (London: Continuum, 2011.) The British certainly made up for lost time.

This is an image we might particularly associate with the United States in the 1950s, when schoolchildren were taught to duck and cover in the event of the flash of an atomic blast. But its use in civil defence drills predates the Cold War (albeit without a Bert the Turtle to help kids remember the message). I've seen scattered references to it being used in ARP drills in British schools in the the 1930s, and the same thing may well have happened in the First World War. But details, and photos, seem to be rare. The above photo was actually taken in Melbourne, at Brighton Technical School, probably in 1942. (Here's another Australian one from the 1940s, and here's one from London in July 1940.) It's really just common sense: if the roof and walls are about to come crashing down and there's no time to get to a proper shelter, getting the students under their desks when the bombs started to fall would give them some protection and might save their lives.

I wonder about the handkerchiefs or rags the boys have in their mouths? My guess is that it's intended to guard against being choked with dust and plaster. Also, soaked in water, they might help against some forms of gas attack, such as chlorine. Soaking them in urine would be more effective, but that would probably be beyond the scope of most school gas drills!

Source: State Library of Victoria (via Geoff Robinson).

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 as 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.

In June 1936, Flight published a short story entitled 'If, 193-? A conjectural story'. It's interesting as an example of an air force view of the next war. That is, for the RAF it goes pretty much according to plan: the enemy's attempt at a knock-out blow against Britain fails, whereas the RAF plays a key part in Britain's victory. The author and illustrator, H. F. King, was only 21 or so when this story was published; in July 1940 he became a pilot officer in the RAF, and after 1945 wrote a number of books about aeroplanes (including a couple of entries in the authoritative Putnam series). I don't know what his relationship to the RAF was at this point, but he seems to have been pretty well-informed. Or perhaps he just read his Flight cover to cover every week.

The situation is as follows:

Through indefensible aggression Eurland had secured a number of Continental bases, the nearest being not more 400 miles distant from the English coast. It was apparent that the enemy intended to push his way toward the coast and to acquire additional aerodromes from which to operate all manner of aircraft, including his short-range fighters.

One of the few characters in the story, a planespotting young ship's engineer (perhaps modelled on the author himself) muses that it was 'Funny to be thinking about war with Eurland, of all countries. Still, there was no accounting for the machinations of the politicians'. The reader should NOT identify this 'Eurland' with any real Germany, as an editorial comment makes clear. Did I say 'Germany'? Sorry, I meant 'country'.

THIS story is not intended as a forecast. Indeed, any mention of politics, foreign countries or exact period have purposely been omitted. Rather it is intended to tell something of what might be expected should Great Britain be attacked from the air after her Royal Air Force has been made stronger than it is to-day.

This last sentence gives the game away: the story is an argument for the continuation of RAF rearmament (i.e. the one triggered by German rearmament), which had begun only a year or so earlier. King has a paragraph on how expansion has fared by the fateful year of 193-:

Some of the fighter units were still flying the Gauntlet. More were using the four-gun Gladiator and the improved Fury. The Hawker monoplane was just beginning to percolate into the Service and threatened to turn all fighter tactics topsy-turvy. We had scores of Blenheims, Battles, and Wellesleys, in addition to the obsolescent Hinds and Ansons. Our heavy bombers included the Heyford and Hendon (both due for replacement), the Whitley, and various types of more modern design.

'None of these' latter, King remarks, 'bore any trace of the slackening in the pace of bomber development during 1933, when the British Government recommended restrictions on the all-up weight of bombing aircraft', presumably referring to Britain's proposals at the World Disarmament Conference.

While Eurland's ground forces are advancing towards the coast, its bombers 'do their utmost to terrorise London'. Without air bases closer to Britain than 400 miles away, they must attack without fighter escort. Ten squadrons of twin- and four-engined bombers take off at midday and arrive over the Channel about 2pm. There they are met by the RAF:

the Gladiators and Furies had torn into the enemy formations on their way to London. Of the machines which had reached the Metropolis the majority had released their bombs south of the river. Whether by accident or judgement, a complete salvo fell in Kingston not many hundred yards from the Hawker factory. Three hundred dead were reported from the suburbs, and a quarter that number from the city. A number of large fires were started [...]

'London trembled at the thought of the night', but has protection in the form of 'night fighters, anti-aircraft guns and searchlights, the sound locators, and the Observer Corps'. Trawlers and destroyers reported the passage of enemy aircraft overhead, as did the yeomen of England:

Somewhere in Kent a little band of villagers -- one of many -- sworn in as Special Constables, took up their vantage points to wait for the raiders they knew must come and to report their height and direction. There was the parson, farmers and the baker, each inwardly thrilled that he was taking part in defending this, his country. As the schoolboys on the village green shouldered their bats and stumps and chattered off into the dusk, a car hummed up the hill and pulled into the roadside, and the constable started forward to open the door for the rubicund squire, who eased himself out on to the grass and snapped at his spaniel to camouflage his excitement.

Such scenes were common all over south-eastern England [...]

The information supplied by all these sources suggests that five waves of Eurland bombers were coming up the Thames for London. Eighty fighters (Gauntlets, Gladiators and Demons) are sent up to patrol Essex and Kent at 12,000 ft. One type in particular has some success:

The Gladiators represented the last of the dog-fighters -- highly manœuvrable biplanes in a class developed by Great Britain to a higher pitch than by any other power. Their spectacular tactics, however -- utilising incredible dives, zooms and turns were soon to be rendered obsolete with the advent of the 300 m.p.h. fighters, which showed that aerial tumbling could be performed only at comparatively low speeds. Anyone attempting to defy the laws of nature was whisked into temporary oblivion by "g" -- a force of unbounded power unleashed by the slightest movements of the hands.

But many bombers get through to London:

A large percentage of the projectiles contained gas, for which London was barely ready, but it was chiefly the high-explosive bombs which made that night so devilish that even the destroyers were stunned by the horror of their handiwork.

Even so, 'It would take many a night's bombing to reduce London to the heaps of ruins talked about so glibly in the pre-war Press'.

And what of Britain's own bombers? The heavies are held back until the enemy munition stores are located, but as soon as the first Eurland raid is detected, the RAF launches immediate 'reprisals' -- not against the enemy's cities but its airfields, so that 'in the event of their return, the enemy squadrons should be unable to recognise their aerodromes'. This is a job for the Blenheims whose 'superlative speed and medium-weight bomb load place them in a class which was much to be desired'. The eight Blenheim squadrons actually pass the first enemy raiders over the Channel, but neither side 'dared deviate one degree from its set course, for an engagement would have ruined any chance of success in its primary mission'. They continue at high speed towards the Eurland frontier, there meeting enemy fighters:

They would have to be good to break the Bristol formation. What luck. Fanhar 34s. No more than 250 flat out -- if that. But plenty to cope with. There must have been fifty of them. And he was the bull's-eye. Funny. Here he was leading a British force in the first aerial battle since 1918, and all his duty required of him was to open the throttle a bit wider.

Then a pneumatic drill got to work on his windscreen and instrument board. It danced around gaily, shattering the glass and clipping fragments from the casings. A boost gauge gone; a rev. counter....

Eight of the Blenheims are shot down and about the same number of Fanhars, meaning that the defenders had about twice the loss rate as the attackers. The Blenheims do their job, as one of the aircrew reflects: 'the personnel of certain squadrons, in the somewhat questionable event of their return, would go without their tea'.

After the first day, the air war repeated the same patterns but with less intensity. Eurland's 'Bombers tried for dockyards, factories, aerodromes' but find it difficult to penetrate inland.

They learned respect for the "Archies" and searchlights in the darkness of the suburbs; for the Furies which seemed to leap at them from the ground; for the incredibly fast Hawker monoplanes which showed themselves more frequently and chased them back to the coast.

For their part, the RAF's bombers had to concentrate on the ground war: 'although they managed to delay the advance of the Eurland forces toward the coast, they failed to stem it entirely'. After two months of war, Eurland arrives at the coast, taking 'four bases just across the Channel from which the fastest of her fighters could be over English soil in fifteen minutes'. The RAF harasses the airfield construction (using Hinds) and makes 'a great concerted effort to wipe out some of the main munition factories'. But it also becomes aware of rumours that Eurland

planned to follow up a period of intensive bombardment on the coastal districts of England by landing troops from a fleet of warships and commandeered liners said to be assembling at a port about 400 miles. Although there was little case to fear him on the sea, it was deemed advisable to send a reasonably strong force to reconnoitre the harbour and at the same time to inflict all possible damage on the shipping.

This operation is carried out by Singapore flying boats and Heyford bombers at dawn (see the illustrations above):

Out of the early morning mists swept the green and silver armada and, by good fortune, caught the entire harbour unprepared. As the Heyfords arranged themselves for their attack they seemed to give the observers in the Singapores just time to note the appearance of the target in its entirety. Then salvos crashed into quays, warehouses and through the thin, unarmoured decks of merchant ships ranged alongside. If ever a plan existed to use that fleet for the invasion of England an extensive revision of the programme was necessary.

The enemy fighters find it difficult to engage the Singapores skimming low over the water's surface, as they are unable to attack from below. The British bombers return home without loss.

The RAF now has the upper hand over Eurland's air force; apparently its counterforce strategy has paid off. Indeed, the war is soon over:

The turning point of the war was a week's merciless bombardment in all weathers by British machines on the big Eurland centres. Day and night, bombers of every type flew out over the Channel, to return, perhaps, after a few hours to rearm and fly off again. On one occasion a squadron of Wellesleys penetrated so far inland that it found the depot which it was to bomb almost completely lacking in defence against air attack.

One evening a squadron of Battles returning from a raid reported much less opposition than was usual. That same night, when well on its way to the target, a squadron of Whitleys was recalled by wireless. And that signified only one thing.

'If, 193-?' is interesting as prediction. Based on the aircraft is use one might pick 1938 as the 'actual' year. But in some ways it's 1940, when Germany advanced to the Channel coast in a few weeks, took aerodromes within fighter range of southern England and began to prepare an invasion force. In most ways, of course, it's not (and one could just as easily say it's 1934, when the Army got money for a Field Force to secure the Low Countries against their occupation and use as a launch site for a knock-out blow, or 1909, when bolts from the blue were all the rage). It seems odd now to read that fast monoplane fighters (the not-yet-Hurricane and the largely unknown Spitfire) would make dogfights a thing of the past; but biplanes are more manoeuvrable in general, and without much experience to go on it wasn't an absurd idea. The special constables/Observer Corps thing, with its popular basis, seems a bit like an airminded Home Guard; though the idealised vision of village life is hardly Tom Wintringham.

As I said, King's scenario pretty much is as the RAF would have written it; some of the episodes even sound like they were inspired by certain of the Hendon set pieces, and it seems a bit unsporting that the British bombers fare are able to press home their attacks in the teeth of air defences when the enemy bombers are not. I'm not sure how closely the idea that counter-bombing aerodromes and aircraft factories in retaliation for a knock-out blow corresponded to actual RAF doctrine; but it was widely described to the public as such in the 1930s. It certainly avoided thorny questions about the morality of bombing cities; and King is noticeably coy on this point when it comes to describing the effects on civilians of British bombing of Eurland's 'centres'. 'If, 193-?' is a relatively rare attempt to imagine the next war in a way that didn't scare the hell out of its readers. But remember that proviso: if. If the RAF continues to expand. P. R. C. Groves and other pro-rearmament writers who did try to scare the hell out of their readers did so by envisaging a world where the RAF was not big enough. King was really just showing the other side of the same coin.

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 last time Britain nuked Australia was at Maralinga on 9 October 1957, over half a century ago. The last of the Antler series of tests, code-named Taranaki (above), involved the detonation of a 25 kiloton fission bomb from a captive balloon at a height of 300 metres. The fallout 'moved east and then north-east towards the Queensland coast, missing the rain areas in New South Wales and Victoria as predicted'. Radiation levels in some areas 'slightly exceeded Level A [no health risk] for "people living in primitive conditions"', more than was predicted but not dangerously so, according to the safety criteria then in place. A 1985 Royal Commission however criticised the Antler tests on the grounds that '"inadequate attention was paid to Aboriginal safety", and that the patrols designed to ensure that the range was clear were "neither well planned nor well executed"'. Service personnel were also placed in greater than expected danger: a Canberra tasked with flying through the cloud half an hour later to collect air samples rapidly received unexpectedly high doses and had to abort the mission.

Today the Federal Government introduced a bill into Parliament which will provide compensation and better health care for at least some of the latter group (the local Maralinga Tjarutja people received compensation in 1994). According to Warren Snowden, the Minister for Veteran Affairs:

The bill will benefit Australian personnel who participated in the British nuclear test program and their dependents by enabling compensation and health care to be provided with a minimum of delay [...] The personnel were involved in the maintenance, transporting or decontamination of aircraft used in the British nuclear test program outside the current legislated British nuclear test areas or time periods.

And there may be more to come:

The quality of the records from the test period and the secrecy surrounding the operation means that it is impossible to rule out the likelihood that new information may come to light which warrants further extension of coverage to additional groups of participants.

Not before time, either.

Image source: Nuclear Weapon Archive.

In a discussion of the activities of MI5's Port Control section during the First World War, Christopher Andrew mentions German musings about using biological weapons against British civilians:

The most novel as well as the most sinister form of wartime sabotage attempted by Sektion P was biological warfare. At least one of its scientists in 1916 devised a scheme to start a plague epidemic in Britain, either by infecting rats or, more improbably, by dropping plague bacilli cultures from Zeppelins over ports. The Prusso-German General Staff, however, vetoed bacteriological warfare against humans as totally contrary to international law (the Hague Laws of Warfare).

But he doesn't provide any references. Is this plausible?

The British War Cabinet considered 'The possible Spread of Epidemics by dropping Germs from the Air' during its meeting on 9 February 1917. It accepted the advice from experts from the Royal Society, the Army Medical Service and the Local Government Board that the possibility was remote, and that any outbreak would be easily contained. Consequently Cabinet decided that 'no further action was required'. The expert reports themselves are quite interesting. That from Dr Arthur Newsholme, the chief medical officer of the Local Government Board, notes press reports of 'poisoned sweets and garlic saturated with garlic being stated to have been dropped at Constanza [Romania] from enemy aeroplanes'. Closer to home, the Board itself received a letter claiming that 'according to information "from a reliable source," infected sweetmeats had been dropped over Sheffield'. But, Newsholme added, no evidence had been produced in either case.

None of this relates to bubonic plague, however. And in Martin Hugh-Jones's summary of known (that is, by the British) wartime German biological warfare plans, plague is not mentioned. Most of the actual biological warfare activity by Germany during the First World War was directed towards anthrax and glanders, for use against horses, sheep and cattle. Nor does Hugh-Jones know of German wartime proposals to spread disease from the air (as opposed to proposals after the war, which is the focus of his article).

But bubonic plague can be weaponised and deployed from the air. Japan's Unit 731 proved that in China in 1940 and 1941, not only in controlled experiments but in field trials. And by field trials I mean, of course, bombing civilian areas with bubonic plague. There were at least four separate attacks, involving at most a handful of Japanese aircraft: Chuhsien, 4 October 1940; Ningpo, 27 October 1940; Kinhwa, 28 November 1940; and Changteh, 4 November 1941. The plague was not dropped in bombs but usually by way of fleas and grain; in two cases plague bacilli were detected by local hospitals. Only in Kinhwa did no outbreak of plague follow; a hundred people died in Ningpo alone.

So it does seem possible that German scientists considered using Zeppelins to rain black death upon Britain, and that it may even have worked. The British experts may have underestimated the potential of this form of aerial attack; and the psychological impact might have been far greater than the medical one. Then again, the great influenza pandemic in 1918 didn't disrupt the war to any great extent, and it killed far more people than any plague would have done. So the War Cabinet's lack of concern was justified, in the non-event.

Fears of poison gas attacks during the Blitz don't receive much attention from historians, and with good reason: not only did they not take place, but the evidence (for example, the number of gas masks being carried about) suggests that most people were complacent about the possibility. But not all. On 2 September 1940, a Mass-Observation investigator in London heard the following from a woman in her mid-30s:

There's a nasty rumour going around that Hitler's going to start using a gas this week that's going to penetrate women's bodies through their sex organs. Women will have to go about wearing sanitary towels all the time. Its [sic] going to cause a lot of disturbance.

Scientific implausibility aside, this rumour encapsulates the horror of gas, that it permeates inside the body and kills from within; and that as a product of science it might be developed into new and even more horrific forms. On the other, though, here the horror is a very gendered one, perhaps drawing upon existing anxieties about women's centrality to total war's front line (i.e. the home front) and the difficulties of maintaining feminine hygiene in a time of rationing and shortages. (The woman who passed on the rumour is described as 'normally much too "respectable" to mention such a subject', suggesting to the investigator how badly it had shaken her morale.) Or perhaps it has something to do with a perceived Nazi obsession with race and reproduction.

I wonder if there's a literary origin to this rumour. Shaw Desmond's rather science-fictional knock-out blow novel Chaos (1938) has a weapon which is reminiscent, though there it affects both sexes:

Then there was the Genital Gas, which was said to destroy the genitals of men and women, to make them childless for ever, and to turn their faces into smiling masks for them to strike horror amidst their fellows.

There's no way of knowing, but the 1940 rumour does sound like it could easily have started out as idle speculation inspired by something like the 1938 novel, and mutated into specifics and certainties from there.

The Twenty-Fifth Hour (1940), by Herbert Best (better known as the author of the 'Desmond the dog detective' books, though not by much), may well be the last knock-out blow novel, the last novel where (conventional) bombers play the decisive part in a war. In this war, indeed, they are too decisive, knocking away the underpinnings of modern life and destroying civilisation. I don't know for sure that it is the last, but it was published right before the Blitz (it was the Times Literary Supplement's pick of the week for 24 August 1940) and it's hard to imagine any more attempts to visualise the knock-out blow after that. I could be (and would love to be) wrong, though. It certainly presents a very late example of the genre, and so it's worth examining its vision of war.

The novel is set several years after the war (which is evidently not the Second World War), after European society has broken down, and so we only get a fragmentary picture of what actually happened, through characters' memories; and even they did not fully comprehend the chain of events which destroyed the old world. The one which replaced it is grim indeed, with roving bands of ex-soldiers raping and pillaging their way across Europe in the aftermath of the war proper, followed by the gradual elimination of even this vestige of order. Agriculture is soon impossible, and wild game is too few to sustain the population which survived the war (overpopulation seems to be Best's overarching theme; he sees it as a key cause of war). Cannibalism is the only solution, leading inevitably to the near-impossibility of sustaining any group larger than a single individual. Only in a few places is this possible, for example in fortifications in north-west Europe (perhaps the Maginot Line) and in Gibraltar; in empty Istanbul two Englishmen strike up a brief alliance (well, they are both Oxbridge men). But the emphasis is very much on the bleakness of post-apocalyptic life: only the strong, the smart and the fortunate can survive; everyone else is food.

As far as it can be pieced together, then, the war -- which seems to take place in the mid-1940s or 1950s -- went like this. It was begun by Russia 'with fighting on her east and south-west borders', and involved Britain, France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Spain and Denmark, among others. There is little news of the Americas 'except an early rumour that germ warfare had broken out in Brazil'. Soon the bombing began: 'Rome had burned in very truth, Rome, Paris, London and a hundred other cities, in one simultaneous conflagration'.

Already the important cities and the munition centres had been burned out by air attacks, by reprisal following upon reprisal until each side could claim each new act of terrorism an act of justifiable and righteous vengeance. For technical reasons the air forces of the world were formed of bombers, not fighters; planned for offence, not defence. The terrorizing of civilians, not the killing of fighting men, was the accepted aim. One air force attacked and was met by no air defence. The opposing air force retaliated by bombing, spraying, gassing and burning out the civilians of the first power. The theory was that your own civilians would stand up under the slaughter, but that the enemy civilians would be broken in morale and disorganized. If they did not immediately sue for peace, their factories and munition works would be unable to make good the wastage in planes and engines, replace the stores of oil, gasolene [sic], high explosives, lethal gases.

As for the other arms, 'The air strategy of "offence-not-defence" had been imposed on both armies and navies with the result that nations abandoned their Maginot and Siegfried lines'.

Armies, actuated by this 'spirit of the new offensive', marched, but made no attempt to hold their elaborate defence lines nor to make contact with the enemy and fight for decisive victory. Their function was to occupy enemy territory, to wipe out the ground equipment of the enemy bombers while their own bombers increased the disorganization of the enemy state.

Fitzharding, one of the protagonists, fought as a lieutenant in Britain's 'new Air Auxiliary Infantry'. Near the end of the war proper, he took part in a company-sized airborne night assault against 'a German bombing base in enemy-occupied Holland'. This was around the time that 'one of the later air raids had liquidated the Civilian Administrator [of Britain] and all his emergency staff of government'. From this point,

Nations were ceasing to be nations. That [the airborne assault] must have been one of the last organized movements ordered by the British Government before it melted out of existence. For, ironically enough, the new system of warfare upon civilians, 'realistic warfare', it had been called at the time, proved too efficient. Nations were too disorganized to sue for peace. Troops, well in the heart of each other's country, found their home communications gone, no instructions, no supplies, no ammunition. Desperate civilians were burning large tracts of country, removing anything eatable that they could find, poisoning wells with dead bodies, while armies broke into corps, into divisions, into smaller and smaller units which, living on the land, sought to percolate back home. Now, more than ever, enemy forces avoided each other. There was no time for the luxury of fighting pointless battles [...]

As The Twenty-Fifth Hour begins, Fitzharding is leading one of these military remnants, wandering somewhere in a snowbound eastern Europe, planning an attack against a château which has warmth, food, and women. Some years later he is alone, hunting and hunted, until he meets the other Oxbridge man, a former Foreign Office attaché who muses on the end of civilisation:

the destruction of communications, leaving people concentrated in rings around bombed-out cities, millions of them. And all the elaborate organizations which gave them water, light, food and their daily necessities gone, wiped out. Army corps dependent on long lines of communication for munitions, fuel, oil, food, and these communications gone. Even the fundamental agriculture on machinery, fertilizers, oil fuel, not living on what it produced, but needing to exchange sugar-beets or rye or wheat or even cattle for the farmers' necessities of life. Everybody dependent on everybody else and communications gone.

All of this is an utterly classic knock-out blow scenario, which could easily have been written a decade earlier (in outline it's very reminiscent of H. G. Wells's The Shape of Things to Come, though much less didactic, more interesting as a novel). The mystery is why it was published so late. Knock-out blow novels dried up in the last years before the war, as the government's military and civil defence preparations bore fruit, and experts re-evaluated their belief that effective air defence was impossible. Part of the answer, I think, is that Best was writing about the next war from the perspective of the current one (presumably after a negotiated peace). The prominent references to paratroops almost certainly date the writing of the book to after May 1940, as does the dismissive reference to the Maginot Line. From mid-1940, the rapid conquest of France and the low countries certainly appeared to restore the mobility of armies after the long stalemates of 1914-8. Best was extrapolating that trend into the future to an extreme fluidity, a complete lack of front lines. He evidently viewed this as pointing in the same direction as bombing, i.e. towards the objective of completely disorganising the enemy home front. Unfortunately, in the next war (perhaps with more and bigger bombers, though Best doesn't discuss this), bombing simply becomes too effective at destruction for civilisation to survive. Thus The Twenty-Fifth Hour, the last of the knock-out blow novels, and one of the few post-apocalyptic ones, neatly prefigures the later nuclear warfare novels.

The Twenty-Fifth Hour is a pretty good read. Although it's obviously quite gloomy, without giving away the ending I will suggest that the title gives reason for hope: the twenty-fifth hour is the first hour of a new day.

Military History Carnival #27 is now up at Cliopatria. One of the posts featured is from Zenobia: Empress of the East and concerns a recent scholarly suggestion (made by Simon James, an archaeologist) that in the 3rd century CE, Sassanid soldiers used chemical weapons against Dura-Europos, a Roman fortress city on the Euphrates. As a weapon, gas is associated with the First World War so strongly now that it's always surprising to think of it being used before then (or at least considered: I've long been meaning to write a post on Thomas Cochrane, Lord Dundonald, and his chemical warfare proposals in the Napoleonic and Crimean wars). The post at Zenobia is quite detailed, so I won't recap the argument here; instead I'll confine myself to a couple of remarks.

Firstly, the gas in question is sulfur dioxide, described as 'a poisonous gas, that turns to acid in the lungs when inhaled'. I'm not a chemist or a medical doctor, but while sulfur dioxide is no doubt highly unpleasant, it's not particularly dangerous. It would now be classed as an irritant or lachrimator (i.e. tear gas). I don't think it's ever been used as a weapon in modern times (though only because Cochrane's idea was turned down by the Admiralty). Secondly, one of the criticisms of Jones's idea made at Zenobia is that there is no written record of this stratagem being used at Dura-Europos or anywhere else, either by the Sassanids or the Romans. That's the sort of problem historians always have with archaeology, though; and it's precisely because the written record is so patchy that archaeology is necessary. The way gas was used at Dura-Europos, if it was used at all, meant that it could only be used in a very limited number of tactical situations and so might not have been used very often, or have interested contemporary writers. It's still probably doubtful that anything of the sort happened, but it's certainly intriguing to ponder.