This is the talk I gave at Earth Sciences back in May. It’s long and picture heavy and much of it will be be familiar to regular readers, but some people expressed some interest in it so here it is. I’ve lightly edited it, mainly to correct typos in my written copy. I’ve put in links to the Boswell drawings because they’re under copyright, and I’ve replaced one photo because I realised it was of British Army Aeroplane No. 1b, not British Army Aeroplane No. 1a! How embarrassing.

Facing Armageddon: Britain and the Bomber, 1908-1941

Today I’m going to give you an overview of my PhD thesis topic. My broad area is the history of military aviation in the early twentieth century, so first I’ll give you a little background on that.

The first heavier-than-air manned flight was made by the Wright brothers in 1903, as you can see here. Within a few years, countries around the world started thinking about how they could use this new technology for warfare.

This is the British Army’s first aeroplane, which wasn’t very succesful but did at least make the first ever flight in Britain. In 1914, the First World War broke out and this pushed aviation along very quickly. At first, aeroplanes were mostly used to find and report on the movements of enemy troops, but soon they were used to drop bombs on them too.

And when aircraft became powerful enough, they started to bomb targets far behind enemy lines. This is the German Gotha G.IV, which was used to bomb London in 1917 and 1918. Of course, each country also developed fast fighter aircraft to try to shoot down their opponents’ slow bomber and reconnaissance aircraft.

Here’s one of the most famous fighters of the First World War, the British Sopwith Camel, as flown by both Biggles and Snoopy. It was fast, agile, and armed with twin machine guns.

After the war ended in 1918, aviation technology continued to progress, though not quite as quickly. By the 1930s, air forces were starting to be equipped with sleek biplanes such as this Hawker Hart, which was the fastest aeroplane in the Royal Air Force — which is a bit startling since it was actually a bomber and not a fighter!

The late 1930s witnessed the birth of a new generation of aircraft, powerful monoplanes with maximum speeds well in excess of 200 or even 300 miles per hour. They were also better armed than earlier aircraft: these Hawker Hurricane fighters had 8 machine guns.

This is one of the bombers that the Hurricane would be defending Britain against, the Ju 88, Germany’s most effective bomber. It could carry up to 2.5 tons of bombs. Germany built over 14000 of these bombers by the end of 1945.

Finally, this is one of the most powerful bombers of the war, the British Avro Lancaster. It was capable of carrying up to 10 tons worth of high explosive or incendiary bombs to Berlin and beyond.

But that’s all just by way of introduction. My research isn’t actually about aeroplanes as such or how they were used. What I’m looking at is the fear of bombing in Britain in the early twentieth century, from the early days of flight before the First World War, up until the end of the Blitz on British cities in 1941. More specifically, I’m interested in how the threat of aerial bombardment of cities was debated in the public sphere, as distinct from what was being discussed behind closed doors by the government and the armed forces. A number of historians have written excellent studies of British air strategy and air policy. Many of them mention the pervasive fear of bombing on the part of the British public, especially in the 1930s, but nearly always, they just take this fear as a given, and don’t spend much time trying to understand it or its origins. This annoyed me, because the little that they did tell me about the popular fear of bombing was fascinating, and I wanted to know more: why was the public scared of bombing, and what were they afraid would happen? Hence the thesis!

However, it’s very difficult to measure public opinion itself, especially before the introduction of opinion polls (which means virtually all of the period I’m studying). You can get the occasional odd glimpse into what the average person really thought about the dangers of bombers coming over and blowing them up, but perhaps not enough to do a whole thesis on. So instead I’m focusing on some of the most important influences on public opinion: primarily books, journals and newspapers which discussed the air menace and what should be done about it. And to a lesser extent, I also use things like cinema newsreels, films and radio broadcasts. Concerned citizens — often professionals such as military experts, doctors, or scientists — used all of these forums to present predictions of what would happen to cities and civilians under air attack, along with their proposals about how to solve the problem. Novelists took the serious speculations of the experts and turned them into nightmarish visions of what future wars held in store for the inhabitants of great cities. These fictional scenarios in turn coloured much of the debate about bombing. In fact, fictional and non-fictional discussions about bombing were often remarkably similar to each other.

So, what was the threat? Most people today have probably heard of, for example, Guernica, the Blitz or Dresden, which are all still potent symbols of the horrors of total war. This is Guernica, a small town of about 5000 people in the Basque country in northern Spain. In April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War it was devastated by a German air raid.

London was bombed by the Luftwaffe on 57 consecutive nights from 7 September 1940, forcing more than 200,000 people to take shelter in the underground railway stations every night. Here are just some of them in Elephant and Castle.

And this photo was taken from a British aeroplane during the Allied air raids on the German city of Dresden in the middle of February 1945. The little points of light are incendiary bombs, which started a massive firestorm. About 30,000 people — men, women and children — were killed in these raids.

But as terrible as these events were — and there are many more I could have mentioned — they were nothing compared with the predictions made before the war. Essentially, the widespread belief in the 1920s and 1930s was that at the beginning of the next war, a huge fleet of enemy bombers would suddenly strike at London and other cities and destroy them with high explosive bombs, incendiaries, and poison gas, causing hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties within a matter of hours or days, shattering essential infrastructure and leading to mass panic. Under such circumstances, it was widely assumed that Britain’s government would be forced to surrender within days or weeks of the outbreak of war. This is what was sometimes called the ‘knock-out blow’, that is, the sudden blow which would knock Britain out of the war.

This graph shows the effects of the German air raids on Britain in the First World War. ‘Casualties’ means the number of people killed or seriously wounded, in this case in each month. Green shows the casualties caused by airships, and red the casualties caused by aeroplanes. Note that it peaks at about 600 casualties in any one month.

And this is the equivalent graph for the Second World War. The peak casualties per month has shot up to more than 16000. That’s September 1940, when the Blitz began. In all, there were more than 146000 civilian casualties in Britain during the war, around a third of whom were killed.

Now, here’s a comparison between what actually happened in 1939-1945 and what British government officials in 1938 predicted might happen if a war started in 1939 — that’s the knock-out blow: over a million casualties per month, half of them fatalities, over only two months. Nearly two orders of magnitude more destructive than what actually happened. These estimates were not plucked out of thin air, but they weren’t much more than naive extrapolations from the First World War experience: divde the number of casualties between 1914 and 1918 by the tonnage of bombs dropped, and then multiply by the number of bombers the enemy had and the amount of bombs they could carry. This turned out to be a huge exaggeration, but you can see why everyone was so worried!

In extreme versions of the knock-out blow, civilisation itself would collapse, as the complex webs of commerce, transport and social control which bind society together break apart, leaving people to fend for themselves as best they could. From the perspective of a later generation, this sounds a lot like the effects of nuclear war.

And in fact in 1966 Harold Macmillan, a former Conservative Prime Minister who had been a backbench MP in the 1930s, wrote that ‘We thought of air warfare in 1938 rather as people think of nuclear warfare today’. It could in fact mean the end of life as we know it.

I’ll now give you some typical examples of how this fear of the bomber was manifested in literature and the arts. The following quotes are from a knock-out blow novel published in 1934 called Invasion from the Air. Firstly, the enemy air force attacks suddenly, with little or no warning, just after or even before the declaration of war:

At five minutes to twelve on that fateful night Germany struck from the clouds. The blow was totally unexpected, for the declaration of war by Britain against Germany and Italy had no more than been conveyed to the departing Ambassadors [...] London’s bewildered eight millions were precipitated into actual war conditions before the majority of them knew there was a war.

Secondly, the attack is massive in scale:

Squadron after squadron assailed the cities and towns in waves, each wave having its separate duty and aims. Upwards of two hundred enemy aircraft — fighters, bombers and [poison gas] sprayers — were brought down that morning as against only fifty British machines, but eight hundred broke though all attempts to stop them.

And thirdly, it is devastatingly destructive:

Thousands of people were killed or burnt to death or died subsequently insane at the memory of that battle, while, as always after the raids, vast numbers developed later the agonies of poisoned
lungs and throats, eyes and nasal passages [...] When the battle had passed Regent’s Park was scarred with great pits where explosive bombs had fallen [...] the bodies of old and young, broken and mutilated, lay everywhere.

So the knock-out blow would bring the horrors of the trenches of the Great War into everyone’s homes.

The Fall of London: Waterloo, by James Boswell (1933)

Next, here are some drawings which were actually commissioned for the novel I’ve just quoted from, but in the end weren’t actually used. They show the aftermath of the attacks, as the terrified mob revolts and rampages through London. Wrecked trains at Waterloo Station.

The Fall of London: Corner House, by James Boswell (1933)

A patrolling soldier in gas gear tramping past the body of a woman.

The Fall of London: The Colosseum, by James Boswell (1933)

The rioting crowds, clashing with troops. An upper and middle-class fear of the unruly mob goes back at least to the time of the French revolution; more recently, since 1918 there had been an increase in working-class assertiveness and the example of the Russian Revolution to worry about. So the fear of the knock-out blow was not only about the possibility of war but also reflected other anxieties about British society.

Now, I’ll show you a clip from the 1936 film Things To Come, which was adapted from a novel by HG Wells. This was a history of the future in three parts, and was a big-budget spectacular for its day. The first part of Things To Come features a graphic depiction of a gas attack on a city called Everytown, which bears a suspicious similarity to London. It was Wells’ argument that the destruction of modern society by total warfare was a necessary prelude to its recreation into a technocratic, utopian world state.

So much for the threat of the knock-out blow. What could be done about it? Surprisingly, the obvious answer, the one that actually did work in the Battle of Britain — air defence by fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft guns, harnessed to a sophisticated command and control system — was given little credit. It was widely believed that bombers were too fast and too well-armed to be shot down, at least in sufficient numbers to stop an attack.

I’ll show you a graph which helps explain this pessimism. First here’s a map showing Britain in relation to Europe, and some of the directions from which enemy bombers might attack. Ideally, the defending fighters would intercept the bombers before they reached London, the biggest and most important city. But there weren’t nearly enough fighters to keep up a standing patrol, so they’d have to wait until an air raid was detected, and then take off to intercept it. However incoming aircraft could usually only be detected once they’d crossed the coast. And it’s only about 50 miles, give or take, from the coast to London. The problem was that as technology improved and bombers got faster, there was less and less time for the fighters to react.

This graph shows in blue the time in minutes it would take for a bomber to cross the 50 miles from the coast to London. In the First World War, this could take around half an hour. By the Second World War, this time was down to only 10 minutes or so. The points in red show the time taken for the defending fighters to take off and climb to the height of the attacking bombers. As you can see this time is generally less than the crossing time, so in theory the fighters would have time to find the bombers and hopefully shoot them down. But lots of things could go wrong — the bombers might be detected late, the detection might not be reported soon enough, the bombers might have changed course or be hiding in cloud and so on. So the greater the margin of safety the better. In the 1930s, this margin was only 5 to 10 minutes which was not reassuring at all. Air defence exercises in the early 1930s seemed to confirm the difficulty of intercepting bombers before they could reach their target.

As the former and future prime minister Stanley Baldwin pessimistically told Parliament in 1932,

I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed, whatever people may tell him. The bomber will always get through

A widely-quoted remark at the time and for years afterwards. He went on to offer the standard alternative: essentially to bomb the enemy harder than they bombed Britain.

The only defence is in offence, which means that you have got to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves. I mention that so that people may realise what is waiting for them when the next war comes.

One solution, then, was a bigger air force so that Britain could kill more women and children more quickly than any enemy.

This was a solution generally favoured by those on the political right, such as the Hands Off Britain Air Defence League. This is a leaflet they distributed in 1933 or 1934. As you can see, they ask ‘Why wait for a bomber to leave Berlin at 4 o’clock and wipe out London at 8?’

Their demand is for the creation of ‘a new winged army of long-range British bombers to smash the foreign hornets in their nests’. This was in fact the official Royal Air Force strategy at the time, pretty much, though due to years of disarmament and budget cuts, it did not have nearly enough aircraft to carry it out. The British governments of the 1930s did begin to rearm, but were reluctant to do so too quickly for fear of harming the economic recovery or offending the Germans.

There were also those, generally on the political left, who rejected the logic of two nations trading massive blows with each other, for it seemed likely that even the victor in such a war would be devastated. What alternatives were there? One was to mitigate the effects of bombing, by preparing Air Raid Precautions, or ARP as it was known. This could mean everything from training civilians in how to survive poison gas attacks, to the construction of deep shelters able to accommodate thousands of people during air raids. Although this sounds unobjectionable, some pacifists could and did argue that ARP was a mere palliative, and might actually invite war by making Britain feel over-confident about its ability to withstand a knock-out blow. So they favoured more radical solutions such as complete disarmament, or at least the abolition of military aircraft. But this in turn encountered problems. During the 1920s and early 1930s, the idea developed among aviation specialists that large civilian aircraft such as airliners could be easily turned into bombers, more or less by strapping bombs under the wings. This possibility undermined disarmament efforts because it was feared that once all nations had disbanded their air forces, an aggressor could arm its airliners and hold the rest of the civilised world to ransom. So, one proposed solution to this dilemma was to place the civil aviation industries of all countries under international control.

From there it was a logical step for many supporters of collective security to propose the formation of an international air force, a very popular position in the early 1930s for parts of the left and one which was under serious consideration at the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva in 1932. An international air force would harness the devastating power of the bomber to uphold collective security, because if one country attacked another it would immediately be bombed itself by the combined air forces of the world. It was also attractive to some people as a possible foundation of a world state, which would end war forever by ending nations themselves.

So, I’ve explained what people thought bombing would do, and what they thought could be done about it. I would lastly like to talk about the discourse itself, how these problems and solutions were propagated from specialists to the public. In the ordinary course of things, most people don’t pay much attention to even existential threats such as terrorism, nuclear warfare, asteroid impacts, or indeed the knock-out blow. They may well be aware of them, and even anxious about them to some degree, but such information as they may pick up from the media, books or conversations with acquaintances will be random, fragmentary and possibly unpersuasive. It often takes some crisis, real or perceived, to concentrate people’s minds on the supposed threat to society, and here the mass media plays a key role in creating the perception that there is a threat, and in suggesting solutions to the threat. So I suggest that this process is very much like the concept of a moral panic, as proposed by the sociologist Stanley Cohen in 1972. Usually this is a media-driven panic about the danger posed to society by some group within it — like criminals, drug users, religious cults. But it seems to me that something closely analogous can happen in relation to external threats to society. To distinguish these incidents from moral panics, though, I call them defence panics. Defence panics seem almost endemic in Britain in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Initially these expressed fears about the loss of British naval supremacy and the possibility of invasion by a foreign power such as France or later Germany. The most famous expression of this was the great dreadnought panic of 1909, when an intense press campaign called for the laying down of 8 new battleships to pre-empt a supposed acceleration in the German naval construction programme. But only a couple of months later, there was a similar panic, this time time over German airships, and this panic was itself repeated on a larger scale in 1913. From then until the Second World War, the threat of air attack was unparalleled in its ability to create defence panics. Examples include scares over the size of European air forces in 1922 and 1935, claims about German preparations for biological warfare in 1934, the bombing of Spanish and Chinese cities in 1938 which were part of the background to the Munich crisis, itself a major defence panic, and finally the shocks of the Gotha air raids on London in 1917 and the Blitz in 1940.

In the end, the knock-out blow never took place, because the power of the bomber was greatly exaggerated. But the belief that it could happen itself shaped how the British prepared to fight the war that did come. The internationalist solutions such as disarmament or the international air force never worked, because few nations could even contemplate giving up their sovereignty like this. Britain did invest in trying to avoid the worst effects of a knock-out blow, with air raid shelters and plans to evacuate the cities. But their ARP schemes were never very comprehensive, and individuals did little to prepare for bombing on their own behalf until war came. Far more was spent on the armed forces, and most important here was air defence. Even though in the early 1930s nearly everyone was pessimistic about the fighter’s chances against the bomber, effort was still put into improving them, resulting in fighters like the Hurricane which I showed earlier. These played a essential part in blunting the bomber offensive in 1940, at least in daylight. But another crucial technological component of the solution to the the problem of the bomber came, bizarrely, from almost pseudoscientific attempts to find an electromagnetic death ray. Death rays didn’t help shoot down bombers, but radar did help find them.

A top-secret chain of radar stations around the coast was set up in 1939, just in time for the Second World War. This had an effective range of 120 miles. So instead of only being seen when they crossed the coast, bombers could now be detected far out to sea.

Returning to our graph showing how long it took for bombers to cross the 50 miles from the coast to London. With radar, this distance effectively increased to 170 miles.

I’ve factored that into this graph, and as you can see, from 1939 the defenders had a much greater warning time, 30 to 40 minutes. Radar tilted the balance greatly towards the defenders. No longer was it a certainty that the bomber would always get through.

So part of the answer to the problem of the bomber came from an unexpected quarter. But it didn’t just arrive by accident, it only came because people were worried about the problem and were looking hard for a solution. Sometimes, muddling through and hoping for the best just isn’t good enough, not when the survival of civilisation is at stake.

Image sources: Wikimedia Commons (Wright Flyer, Avro Lancaster); RAF (here and here); Gotha GIV; RAFA Costa Blanca; World-War-2-Planes.com; Guernica, specchio del Novecento; Caring on the Home Front; Wikipedia; Airminded (here, here and here); YouTube; Norman Macmillan, The Chosen Instrument (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1938), 21; eBay; David Davies, Suicide or Sanity? An Examination of the Proposals before the Geneva Disarmament Conference (London: Williams and Norgate, 1932); An International Air Force: Its Functions and Organisation (London: The New Commonwealth, 1934). I can’t find where the photo of the Hurricanes came from; but it’s almost certainly under Crown Copyright.

Since coming home from London, I keep coming across interesting things which I could have seen while I was there, but didn’t. Which is not at all surprising, given the city’s size and history, but it’s true even in the relatively restricted confines of Bloomsbury, where I was staying and got to know fairly well (or so I thought). My first inkling of this came when I was watching Black Books for the nth time, and idly wondered where the exterior location filming was done. Practically around the corner from where I was staying, as it happens; I must have walked past the street it’s in on an almost daily basis, if not down the very street itself. If I’d known I would have gone in and bought a book, even at the risk of being verbally abused for my troubles!

But there were also things I didn’t know about which were more relevant to my research. Chronologically, I stumbled across the earliest when flipping through a new Osprey book, London, 1914-1917: The Zeppelin Menace by Ian Castle. It’s got these nice maps showing the tracks of individual Zeppelins across the city, and where their bombs fell. And from one of the raids, there were two nearby, one in the south-east corner of Russell Square Gardens and the other in Queen Square. Unfortunately I was too poor (or at least too responsible) to buy the book, and I can’t remember what the date of the raid was. Judging from this, it would appear to be 8 September 1915. And the Bedford Hotel on Southampton Row was hit on 24 September 1917 by one of the first Gotha night raiders.

Anyway, I’ve been to former bomb sites before. A more truly unique event which took place in Bloomsbury was the discovery of the nuclear chain reaction which underpins all nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors — or at least the idea of the chain reaction. This flash of inspiration took place in the brain of Leó Szilárd, a refugee Jewish physicist, on 12 September 1933, at the traffic lights at the intersection of Southampton Row and Russell Square (in fact, only a few metres from where the Zeppelin bomb had fallen). Again, I walked past this spot several times a week, at least. It would have been an appropriate, if noisy, place from which to contemplate the subsequent atomic age.

Even that place, significant though it may be, has nothing to mark its connection to this past. That’s not true for the final (so far) thing I missed in Bloomsbury, the Goodge Street Deep Level Shelter. This was one of eight air raid shelters excavated between 1940 and 1942, parallel to existing Tube stations on the Northern Line. During the war, they were intended to hold 8000 people each; afterward, they could be used as the basis for an express line. Due to the end of the Blitz, none of them were used as shelters until 1944, and the new tunnel was never built. Goodge Street was in fact used by Eisenhower as a headquarters (though I think SHAEF itself was in Bushy Park); apparently he announced D-Day from here and one of the two entrances is called the Eisenhower Centre. That’s on Chenies Street, which I’m not sure I walked down; but the other is on Tottenham Court Road, and I most certainly walked past that more than once without even noticing.

Well, darn it all to heck.

In late March and early April 1938, the Manchester Guardian ran a competition inviting readers to send in ‘a List, with short reasons, of Six Books with which to Furnish a Gas-proof Room’¹ — that is, a room designed to provide a temporary refuge in a gas attack. The article which discussed the entries began by noting that ‘A gas-proof room is not a desert island, at least from a literary point of view’, because desert island books are meant to be aids in survival, whereas those in a shelter are intended to divert the mind from dwelling on the danger of poison gas. So,

The competitor from Ulverston who suggested Bacon’s “Novum Organum,” “The Last Days of Pompeii,” “The City of Dreadful Night,” “Paradise Lost,” “Sighs from Hell,” by Bunyan, and Blair’s “Grave” presumably knows his own mind better than anyone else does, but most people would say that the furniture of such a room would only be complete with a revolver to be used in case the gas and bombs and literature all failed to do their work.

Despite this admonishment, many of the entries displayed a rather dark humour:

Talking about once-obtainable foods will obviously be THE diversion in the War to end Civilisation. No better guide, then, to the menu of one’s dreams than “Mrs. Beeton.”

To the common suggestion of Who’s Who, the Guardian responded by saying that this ‘would easily, in an air raid, take on the appearance of an anthology of brief obituaries’.

Other submissions were more practical:

The books must steady jittery nerves by distracting the mind from business overhead. Whilst entertainment is required, purely light literature is useless, since it does not demand sufficient concentration. Humour only irritates in moments of strain. Books giving something to do are, therefore, best.

Though just how many people could be bothered with ‘A Book of Mathematical Problems’ or ‘Any Chosen Work in Foreign Tongue, and a glossary for it’ may be questioned!

While some suggestions were fairly optimistic — ‘Holiday Guide. — To plan the next holidays’ — others, quite naturally, despaired of humanity:

Pope. — For a reminder that men were once civilised.

Boswell’s “Johnson.” — For a reminder that men were once sensible.

Urquhart’s “Rabelais.” — For a reminder that there are better kinds of nonsense than dropping gas bombs.

So, who won? Douglas Rawson (or perhaps Hawson) of Malton in Yorkshire. His list had a bit of everything:

“Anatomy of Melancholy.” — For general reading.

Italian Phrase-book. — In case of visitors.

German Phrase-book. — Same reason.

Family Bible. — Exhibiting Aryan descent.

Students’ Song-book. — For community singing.

Telephone Directory. — To call doctors, &c., or locksmith if door combination forgotten.

It might be interesting to know what reading material people actually took with them into shelters during the Blitz. Some insight could no doubt be gleaned from diaries, especially Mass-Observation ones. Did people want to be amused while the bombs fell? Educated? Tested? Though amusing, the Manchester Guardian competition quoted here does not, I think, have much bearing on the question: the readership (middle class, left-Liberal, I suppose largely Mancunian) was small and not particularly representative. More importantly, people would have submitted lists which they thought would catch the judge’s eye, in the hopes of winning the prize (two guineas), rather than the books they would really take into the refuge with them. Even more importantly, perhaps, when the air raids did eventually come, they were mostly at night, and shelterers (from HE and incendiaries rather than gas) were generally more concerned to get some sleep than to feed their heads.

Still, it’s a fascinating little glimpse into the grim humour with which the British were facing up to the horrors they believed were coming:

But perhaps in the end we should all be pessimists enough to reach out automatically for Jeremy Taylor’s little treatise on A.R.P. — “Holy Living and Holy Dying.” Its advantage is, of course, that, supposing the precautions did work after all, we could concentrate on the first half.

1. Manchester Guardian, 28 March 1938, p. 5. All other quotes from “Literature and gas”, Manchester Guardian, 6 April 1938, p. 6.

Long-time reader, second-time commenter Ian Evans was in the Royal Observer Corps in York at the end of the 1950s. Here he describes how the ROC, in addition to retaining something like its planespotting functions during the Second World War, took on the job of measuring the Third:

When I joined the ROC (1958) it was still pretty much an RAF auxiliary, officers with handlebar moustaches and all. We spotted, reported and plotted aircraft in a very similar manner to our WW2 predecessors, though things had been simplified and speeded up, with special procedures for fast low flying aircraft (Rats). The nuclear reporting role was just being introduced, the observer posts were given “bunkers”, a small underground room with bunks and stores, airlock and reinforced tunnel to the surface, a nuclear burst recorder (a souped-up pinhole camera), a pressure recorder to measure the blast strength, a Geiger counter to measure the fallout, and individual dosimeters (we were rather cynical about these).

The operating theory was that there would be sufficient political warning for the observers to man their posts, they would wait for the noise to stop, surface, extract the recording paper from their recorders, read off the bearing and altitude of the burst and the peak overpressure. This would then be phoned in to Group HQ where we would plot the (hopefully several) bearings, and get the position of the detonation. Then, using the reported overpressures, plus sets of tables and nomograms we woud evaluate the bomb power and report back to…..anyone still alive. After that the posts would report radiation levels at regular intervals until…

Which is quite a terrifying job description (luckily they didn’t have to do risk assessments in those days!)

But, of course, there was plenty of terror to go around. Long-time reader and commenter CK pointed out a 1982 BBC documentary called “Nuclear War: A Guide to Armageddon” (written and produced by Mick Jackson, director of Threads) about the effects of a nuclear war and how civilians should prepare for it.

(Parts two and three: `Are you prepared to use force to keep others out’ of your shelter?) One of the sources cited at the start is Samuel Glasstone and Philip J. Dolan’s classic The Effects of Nuclear Weapons (Department of Defense and Energy Research and Development Administration, 1977), which is now available online.

The title of this post, of course, comes from Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s 1984 classic “Two Tribes”:¹

Aside from the general Cold War theme, the link with the rest of this post is the voice at the start of the video which says, ‘… the air attack warning sounds like. This is the sound’, followed by a siren. The voice belongs to actor Patrick Allen, who had previously said similar things as the narrator of the British government’s series of civil defence films, Protect and Survive, successors of the ARP pamphlets of the 1930s. Inevitably, the films are also all available on YouTube.

Thank you to CK and especially Ian for their comments.

1. I didn’t realise that the title comes from the opening narration in Australia’s own great contribution to the end of the world, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior: ‘For reasons long forgotten, two mighty warrior tribes went to war and touched off a blaze which engulfed them all.’

In a previous post, I looked at some of Arthur C. Clarke’s predictions, made in 1946, about how rockets would change the types of weapons and vehicles used by military forces of the future.¹ He got some hits (space stations) but, on balance, more misses (rocket mines, more turret fighters). In the latter half of his paper, Clarke steps back to consider the broader implications of rockets for future warfare, and does rather better.

These are grim, given the advent of atomic weapons. It may be the case that for every weapon, Clarke says, a defence is eventually evolved. But

During the interval between the adoption of a new weapon and its countering, the damage done to the material structure of civilization grows steadily greater, and there must come a time at last when breakdown occurs. The present state of Germany shows how nearly that point had been reached even with the weapons of the pre-atomic age.²

One particularly interesting possibility Clarke considers is that of ‘radiation war’.³ He notes that the vast majority of the radiation emitted by an atomic bomb must fall outside the visible spectrum, concluding that ‘the bomb acts as an X-ray generator of unimaginable power’.⁴ So a bomb could be detonated at high altitudes to blind large numbers of people, or to ruin huge areas of crops. Atomic bombs carried by long-range rockets would be the ‘ultimate weapon’.⁵

Such attacks might in time assume even more vicious forms. The rockets might be detonated nearer to the ground to induce artificial radioactivity which would compel the evacuation of the areas affected. Neutron and gamma-ray warheads might be developed against which only great thicknesses of rock could provide protection. And most terrible of all would be the threat — even if it were no more than that — of X-ray mutation. This might well daunt a race which would fight to the death against ordinary weapons.⁶

Armies, navies and air forces would still have their uses — atomic-tipped rockets wouldn’t have been much use in Burma, for example; and at sea, the ‘mobile rocket launcher, almost certainly a submersible’ has great potential⁷ — but they will ultimately deploy only once the first rocket strike (quite possibly a surprise, Pearl Harbor-style attack) has secured victory. In the air, piloted aircraft will give way to unmanned vehicles operated by ‘controllers sitting in safety before television screens’.⁸ Fully-automatic aircraft may even be possible, since

All possible combat manœuvres can be analyzed and recorded by suitable coding in machines of the punched-card type. It is conceivable that “battle integrators” may be constructed along these lines, capable of making operational decisions in a matter of milliseconds according to changing combat conditions.⁹

In fact, such computers could be used to make strategic decisions as well as tactical ones, leading to a ‘new type of warfare which would be too swift and complex for detailed human control [...] the apotheosis of mechanized war’.¹⁰

Clarke closes with a section on the problem of defence. Actually, the problem is bigger than that: he quotes the Smyth Report to the effect that

civilization may soon have the means to commit suicide at will. The problem that now confronts us is not one of defence but of survival.¹¹

He considers, but swiftly rejects, the idea that civilisation could move underground more or less permanently, to save itself from the bomb. Firstly, it would be practically impossible to arrange a food supply for a massive population of people for an indefinite period of time. Secondly, and more importantly, even deep underground there would be no guarantee of safety:

The penetrating power of a rocket falling from a hundred miles or more is enormous and would enable atomic warheads to be exploded at a considerable depth. Such “ground depth charges” could collapse or severely damage any cavity that could be built without an impossible amount of labour.¹²

The good news is that the British Empire, being so vast, is ‘probably the least vulnerable target in the world’.¹³ The bad news is that Britain itself is indefensible, and so Clarke concludes that

the removal to Canada of the Central Government and the Service Departments must be carried out as a permanent measure. It would be impossible to do this after a war had started, and there would certainly be insufficient prior warning to enable such a vast transfer of administration to be made.¹⁴

But ultimately he doubts whether even a political unit as big as the Commonwealth could work effectively during an atomic war.¹⁵ The only winning move in this game is not to play:

In other words, the problem is political and not military at all. A country’s armed forces can no longer defend it; the most they can promise is the destruction of the attacker.¹⁶

So, the United Nations is mankind’s last, best hope for peace. How can rockets help it with this task? By backing up an international air force:

even if there is no intention of using them except as a last resort, the World Security Council should for psychological reasons possess long-range rockets. However, the weapons which it would use if force proved necessary would be the air contingents of its members, employing ordinary explosives and machines of the type that exist to-day. Behind these would be the threat, never materializing save in dire emergency, of the mightier forces against which there could be no defence.¹⁷

The international rocket force would need, according to Clarke, no more than 20 launch sites for world coverage. The personnel would come from every nation, and ‘It would be the aim to inculcate in these men a supra-national outlook’,¹⁸ much like the Red Cross. That most of them would be ’scientific’ types would doubtless help this process along. And as support, they would need access to a research organisation that no nation could match:

This body might in time act as the nucleus around which the scientific service of the World State would form, perhaps many years in advance of its political realization.¹⁹

He sees this international force as only temporary, needed only until such time as ‘a world economic system is functioning smoothly, when all standards of living are approaching the same level, when no national armaments are left’.²⁰

I’m sure the RAF implied no endorsement of Clarke’s views by publishing them in RAF Quarterly!

So, there are a couple of points of interest here. Firstly, there’s the very early prediction of ‘radiation war’. I’ve suggested before that pre-1945, the radiation effects of atomic bombs were not well understood. Here’s some evidence, then, that not very long after the first atomic explosions, there was enough publicly available information to put together a fairly accurate picture of the longer-term and larger-scale effects of a nuclear war. (The fact that Clarke had immersed himself in 1930s pulp science fiction may have helped enlarge his imagination on this point too!) For that matter, in contrast to the first part of the paper, Clarke made quite a few accurate predictions: not just intercontinental ballistic missiles, which one might think was obvious,²¹ but also submarine-launched ballistic missiles, nuclear bunker busters, and unmanned aerial vehicles.²²

Secondly, it’s clear that Clarke was the very model of a liberal internationalist. His list of the causes of war — economics and armaments, more or less — speaks to the former, and his proposed solution to the latter. I don’t know if Clarke was aware of groups like the New Commonwealth, who took pretty much the same line in the early 1930s (minus the rockets!) but it seems to me that the international air (rocket) force and the world state were temptations that many others of a technocratic persuasion had succumbed to before and since. And it’s surely no coincidence that H. G. Wells was a huge influence upon Clarke, and Wells was practically obsessed with pretty much the same ideas in his later years (he died in 1945).

I’ll close by quoting Clarke’s two closing paragraphs in full, because they show just how strongly he felt about the need to reconstruct the world system, and also because the last paragraph, in particular, sounds very Clarke.

Only along these or similar lines of international collaboration can security be found: any attempt by great powers to seek safety in their own strength will ultimately end in a disaster which may be measureless.

Upon us, the heirs to all the past and the trustees of a future which our folly can slay before its birth, lies a responsibility no other age has ever known. If we fail in our in our generation those who come after us may be too few to rebuild the world when the dust of the cities has descended and the radiation of the rocks has died away.²³

We’ll never know whether Clarke was correct in his belief that an international air and rocket force could have ensured world peace. But we do know that he was wrong to say that disaster awaited us without such a force: we’ve managed to survive for more than sixty years. (So far, anyway!) I’m sure Clarke would be quite happy to admit that he was wrong about this, since that’s allowed him to reach his four score and ten.

Happy birthday, Sir Arthur!

1. Arthur C. Clarke, “The rocket and the future of warfare”, RAF Quarterly, March 1946, 61-9; reprinted in Arthur C. Clarke, Ascent to Wonder: A Scientific Autobiography (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1984), 71-9.
2. Ibid., 76.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 77.
6. Ibid., 77.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid., 78.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Ibid.
14. Ibid., 79.
15. It may seem odd to us now that anyone would even think that the Commonwealth would ever function like that, but of course it just had, in the war just past.
16. Ibid; emphasis in original.
17. Ibid.
18. Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Ibid.
21. But wasn’t: see Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible (London: Indigo, 2000), 16-7, where incidentally he discusses the May 1945 Lords debate I’ve talked about before.
22. OK, there were pre-atomic and pre-rocket precursors for most of these too.
23. Clarke, Ascent to Wonder, 79.

Nearly a year ago, I wrote about a childhood hero of mine, on the tenth anniversary of his death. Today, I’m writing about another one, and it’s a happier occasion: it’s Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s 90th birthday!

Clarke has always been my favourite of the ‘big three’ post-war science fiction writers: he evokes a sense of wonder at the universe that was mostly missing in Asimov and Heinlein, as much as I loved their stories.¹ From the decaying billion-year-old city of Diaspar in Against the Fall of Night (1953), to the giant interstellar interloper in Rendezvous with Rama (1973), to the last visitors from home in Songs of Distant Earth (1986), Clarke’s universe is indifferent to humanity’s presence, but it’s precisely our human qualities which make its immensities explicable and bearable. It’s terrific stuff, at its best Wellsian and Stapledonian, and just talking about it makes me want to go re-read it all again …

I was casting around for some way to connect Clarke to the themes of this blog. I could have speculated on the parallels between the British Interplanetary Society, in which he was heavily involved from the 1930s to the 1950s, and aviation advocacy groups like the Royal Aeronautical Society or the Air League of the British Empire. Or there’s his wartime work for the RAF on ground control approach radar. Or the way his experience of being billeted in the bombed-out East End in 1941 apparently inspired him to write a chapter on space warfare which he later used in Earthlight.² Or the fact that the first publication of his famous idea for communication satellites in geosynchronous (or ‘Clarke’) orbits was in a letter on potential scientific applications of V2 rockets, which appeared in the February 1945 issue of Wireless World — at a time when V2s were still falling on London!³

But then I found that in March 1946, RAF Quarterly published a prize-winning essay by Clarke on “The rocket and the future of warfare”, which was outside Clarke’s usual range of topics, but well within mine — just too perfect a fit to ignore! But it’s not available online like his satellite stuff, and nobody around here has the RAF Quarterly. Luckily it was reprinted in Ascent to Wonder, a compilation of his more technical papers, so I made an impromptu trip to the State Library this afternoon to check its copy.⁴

Clarke begins with some technical background on rocket propulsion, and draws up four classes of rocket, both manned and un-manned: short-range (e.g. Katyushas, bazookas), medium-range (e.g. Me 163, Wasserfall), long-range (e.g. V2 or A4, A9/A10), and infinite range (i.e. spacecraft). He suggests that the advent of anti-tank rockets may spell the end of tank warfare, since now a few soldiers can destroy the largest tanks. Buried rockets could even be used as anti-tank mines. He is greatly impressed by the amount of firepower carried by rocket-equipped aircraft, noting that a fully-loaded Mosquito is equivalent to a cruiser with 6-inch guns. And foreseeing a great future for air-to-air rockets, Clarke suggests that

a possible line of development is the heavily armed “destroyer” fitted with rocket-launching turrets. The rockets would be aimed by radar and detonated by proximity fuses when they approached their targets. The larger projectiles might even be guided, either from the launching plane or from the ground.⁵

But, moving into the medium range category, these would soon be replaced by aircraft which are themselves rocket-propelled. Clarke sees these as an almost insuperable threat to bomber streams, since they are so fast; massive barrages from defending destroyers might be one defence, but a better one would be speeds too high for interception.

The speed of attack is steadily increasing and the 3,400 miles an hour of A4 is merely the beginning. Against such speeds men can never hope to fight. Skill and courage and resolution — in the end all are of no avail, for there comes at last a time when only machines can fight machines.⁶

And conventional bombers would not have a chance against unmanned, ground-controlled rockets, homing in on the infrared emissions from their engines. At sea, rockets will probably replace fighters as air cover for fleets, meaning the end of the carrier. At long ranges, rockets have tremendous potential as offensive weapons — probably more cost-effective at short ranges than conventional bombers — the more so since there is currently no defence against them once they have been launched:

The only defence of any kind would be the guided rocket, and one can visualize the development of small machines capable of accelerations of 100 g. or more and homing on radiation, radar or even local gravity fields.⁷

But even so, there’d be only seconds in which to intercept the incoming rocket. Clarke even ponders ‘atomically propelled rockets [...] flying under continuous thrust at very high accelerations along constantly “randomed” paths’.⁸ These would be even harder to intercept, since their ultimate destination would not be clear until it was too late. He sees little point in the development of rocket bombers (i.e. capable of returning to base to rearm for another mission); single-use rockets can carry a greater proportion of explosive load. Finally, in the ‘infinite range’ category — spacecraft — Clarke pretty much dismisses chemical rockets as useless for anything other than scientific exploration. But if atomic power were to be used for propulsion …

The least of the achievements we may expect to see is the establishment of stations in closed orbits at heights of a thousand miles or more, circling the world in periods of a few hours like artificial moons. The Germans were indeed planning such stations, and they present an attractive solution to the problem of world surveillance and control.⁹

This is getting pretty long, so I’ll stop there for the moment, and save Clarke’s analysis of the bigger picture for another post. Just a few closing observations.

Many of the details of Clarke’s predictions didn’t pan out (such as the super-Defiant rocket turret fighters), but that’s an occupational hazard of technological prophecy. It’s interesting (to me at least) that he dismisses the bomber, until now the premier weapon of mass destruction, but replaces it with the rocket, which will always get through, will tempt its possessor into making sneak attacks, and so on. From the language he uses, I don’t get the feeling he has read much of the airpower prophets of previous decades, though he does mention Seversky by name; and surely he would have been well up on his Wells.

It’s a bit odd that Clarke barely mentions the jet engine, another recent invention which as it turned out, has been far more widely used than rockets. Aside from the fact that the essay competition was specifically about rockets in warfare, I suppose Clarke might have assumed that anything jets can do, rockets can do better — or at least faster, which seems to have meant much the same thing to him.

I was surprised by all the references, accurate for the most part, to experimental German weapons. I would have thought that details of these would still have been secret so soon after the war’s end. Obviously that’s not the case! The reference to German plans for space stations seems a bit of a stretch, though this page suggests there was some basis for it, and certainly von Braun continued to be obsessed with the idea of orbital battle stations.

Next up: radiation war, battle integrators, and — surprise, surprise — yet another incarnation of the international police force idea.

1. Asimov’s non-fiction more than made up for this lack, of course.
2. Neil McAleer, Odyssey: The Authorised Biography of Arthur C. Clarke (London: Victor Gollancz, 1992), 47.
3. Arthur C. Clarke, “V2 for ionosphere research?”, Wireless World, February 1945, 58. His better known paper devoted to geosynchronous communication satellites was published in the same journal the following October. See here for more on both articles.
4. Arthur C. Clarke, “The rocket and the future of warfare”, RAF Quarterly, March 1946, 61-9; reprinted in Arthur C. Clarke, Ascent to Wonder: A Scientific Autobiography (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1984), 71-9.
5. Ibid., 73.
6. Ibid., 74.
7. Ibid., 75.
8. Ibid; emphasis in original.
9. Ibid., 76.

Sometimes I worry about the British.

Gary Smailes has put together Military History Carnival 8, and it’s a good one. The item which, inevitably, appealed to me most was Damned Interesting’s account of incidents where the world nearly stumbled into an accidental nuclear holocaust. (But wait, there were more!) Obviously, a scenario where the survival of a significant proportion of humanity, and of civilisation itself, depends upon accidents not happening is not a particularly good thing. But we got WarGames out of it, so on balance I think we’re ahead.

Or, at least, not very likely. In June 1922, the Daily Mail printed a two-column article under the headline “Our lost air power” (a title it used for just about all of its air-scare stuff that year).¹ The author’s name is not given, but is described as ‘An Armament Expert’, who until recently was on the ‘Allied Commission to Germany’. The bulk of the article concerns two types of aerial bombs he inspected while overseeing German compliance with the disarmament clauses of the Versailles treaty.

The first was the elektron bomb. Though this sounds like it might be an exotic weapon based on the latest advances in atomic physics, it’s actually just an incendiary, for setting cities ablaze. But this was something special. In contrast to the crude, and fairly ineffective, incendiaries used by the Germans against London during the war, the elektron burned so hotly that it could burn through armour plate, and what’s more, once ignited it could not be extinguished. As it weighed less than pound and was only nine inches long, thousands could be carried per bomber (or airliner). The German High Command thought it had a war-winning weapon, since

A fleet of aeroplanes would carry sufficient to set all London alight, past any hope of saving.

But — fortunately for London — the war ended before sufficient numbers of elektron bombs were available to the German forces.

The other weapon revealed by An Armament Expert was a small globe, made of glass and only four inches across. Inside the globe was a dark brown liquid: an unspecified form of poison gas (mustard, I’d guess). When the globe is dropped from an aeroplane and hits the ground, the glass shatters and generates ‘thousands of cubic feet of poisonous gas’. If used against London, the gas would permeate into cellars and tunnels, and lie in the streets for weeks.

One raid using such bombs would paralyse the very heart of our Empire, and bring a horrible death to most of London’s citizens.

How horrible? Imagine:

That girl with the baby sitting opposite to you on the Tube — can you see that girl rushing wildly and blindly away, pressing that same little mite’s face to her breast in a hopeless attempt to shield it from the fumes? Can you see her face drawn in the most horrible of death agonies and the baby’s lips covered with blood and mucus? A horrible description? A very horrible, yet very possible, fact.

Again, London was lucky to avoid being gassed during the war. This time, Germany had sufficient numbers of gas globes, but the ‘Secret Service’ knew this, and made it known to the Germans that Britain had them too, and would use them in large numbers against German cities if any fell on British soil.

Here we have an expert eyewitness describing two horrible new weapons, both of which were nearly used against civilians in the last war and which will certainly be used against civilians in the next war. So what’s the problem? Simply that one of these existed and the other is — I believe — made up!

The elektron bomb was very real, and was in fact very similar to the incendiaries used by both sides in the Second World War. (And before: the Condor Legion’s elektrons set Guernica ablaze.) “Elektron” was the name given by the Germans to magnesium alloy; the bomb casing was made of this, surrounding a thermite core. When the bomb ignited, the thermite would burn hotly (up to 2500 °C) and violently, but quickly (lasting less than a minute). This would be long enough, however, to set the elektron casing on fire, which could burn for around 15 minutes at 1500 °C. Between the thermite and the magnesium alloy, the risk of fire spreading from an elektron bomb was obviously great. A householder or ARP warden who encountered one of these could control it with the use of water, sand and/or Redhill container, but as An Armament Expert quite rightly pointed out, even a single bomber could carry thousands of elektron incendiaries, and so the prospect opened up of a city being overwhelmed by fire.

But glass globes as gas delivery systems — that’s a different story. As I’ve written before, it can be difficult to find reliable information on early chemical weapons (outside of the First World War, of course), and I’ve not yet found a good description of what an aerial gas bomb actually would have looked like. Surely, though, using fragile glass globes would be utterly daft: accidents happen, and the chances of breaking one or more during transport or arming would have to be rather high. Imagine some poor erk dropping dropping one of these on his foot! And I can’t see any reason why a modification of a normal explosive bomb couldn’t be used (just as artillery shells were used to deliver gas), or perhaps something like a Livens canister (basically a big metal drum, with a small explosive charge to disperse the gas). I’ve only ever seen one other reference to the use of glass globes as bombs, by the Swiss biochemist and pacifist Gertrud Woker. But she was actually speaking of biological weapons. Anyway, judging from my notes, she gave no indication that she knew anything specific, merely claiming that it was probably how biological weapons would be delivered.²

So on the one hand, An Armament Expert has given an accurate description of the latest thing in incendiary bombs; on the other, an apparently completely made up one of the gas bomb of the next war. And he claimed to have seen both of these with his own eyes. Was he lying? Was he mistaken? Was he hoaxed? (Or am I wrong about the globes?) It’s impossible to know, now, especially as his identity is unknown. But that very cloak of anonymity would have provided cover for a knowing fabrication. Taking liberties with the truth might have seem justified (to quote the rationale for the article given by the Daily Mail’s leading article writer)

in order that our people may understand calmly the dangers which threaten, and insist on the country being put in a position to repel them, and if necessary to forestall them by seeking out the enemy and destroying him in his own country before he destroys ours.³

If you firmly believe that there’s a threat to your nation which requires urgent action — ‘The position is quite clear. We have lost our air-power. We must get it back quickly’⁴ — isn’t a little sexing-up excusable? Well, no … but if that is indeed what happened here (and I haven’t shown that) it probably didn’t hurt the Daily Mail and it definitely didn’t stop it from a future career in serial exaggeration, as its increasingly ludicrous estimates of German air strength in the 1930s (I think peaking at 40,000 front-line aircraft) were to show.

1. Daily Mail, 20 June 1922, pp. 9-10. All quotes taken from this article unless otherwise specified.
2. G. Woker, “Chemical and bacteriological warfare”, in Inter-Parliamentary Union, What Would Be the Character of a New War? (London: P. S. King & Son, 1931).
3. Daily Mail, 20 June 1922, p. 8.
4. Ibid.

The above photograph, and all of the following, are from Poison Gas (London: Union of Democratic Control, 1935).

SAVING THE BABY. — M. Jean, of Paris, observed that ordinary gas masks had the effect of strangling babies and small children. So he proposes to sew them up in an old cow’s hide on the principle shown above. Father stands by — if still alive — and pumps fresh air into the skin.

TRAINING THE YOUNG. — Training the young to use gas masks, which may or may not be effective in the horrible future which is before them if the present war propaganda is successful. Notice the children’s bare legs, entirely unprotected against the two most probable gases — mustard gas and Lewisite.

MUZZLED FOR WAR. — These masks will be no more effective for animals than they are for human beings. And no government has yet suggested any scheme for training animals to use gas masks.