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The field marshal and the ghost rockets

20 December 2009 in 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Cold War, Collective security, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Phantom airships and other panics, Radio by Brett Holman | 8 comments

Field Marshal Jan Smuts, prime minister of South Africa, broadcast a speech on the BBC on 29 September 1946. He talked about the prospects for peace in the post-war world, a subject on which he could claim some authority, since he had helped unify Anglophones and Afrikaners after the Boer War, and was involved in the Paris peace conferences after both world wars. The speech was mainly about the United Nations (or as he quaintly called it, ‘Uno’) and the growing signs of friction between the former Allies on the Security Council. And we all know how that turned out. (Churchill had given his ‘Iron Curtain’ speech in March.) But one section is somewhat confusing for modern readers:

The United States may not long continue to enjoy the sole secret of the atom bomb, and this and other no less deadly weapons will at no distant date be in the possession of other nations also. The flying bombs, now seen nightly in the west, are indications of what is going on behind the curtain. It is highly doubtful whether any new weapons, or indeed any mechanical inventions, could ever be relied on to remove the danger of war. A peaceful world order could only be safely based on a new spirit and outlook widely spread and actively practised among the nations.1

Flying bombs seen nightly in the west? What flying bombs?

Smuts was referring to reports which had been coming out of Sweden since May, and more recently from Denmark and Greece. Fast moving objects, sometimes with wings, sometimes without, were seen flashing across the sky. Some had flames shooting out the rear; others appeared to manoeuvre. Some of them crashed; residents of Malmö reported that windows were broken when a rocket ‘exploded’ over their town.2 They were sometimes even tracked on radar. A photo was even taken of one. They were seen by military personnel as well as by ordinary people. An example:

One of the mysterious bombs which in recent weeks have been passing across Sweden was seen last night by an officer of the Air Defence Department of the Defence Staff. He reports that the bomb looked like a fireball with a clear yellow flame passing at an estimated height of between 1,500 and 3,000 feet and at a considerable but quite measurable speed.3

The term now given to these objects is ghost rockets.
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  1. The Times, 30 September 1946, 5. Emphasis added.
  2. Manchester Guardian, 17 August 1946, 6.
  3. Ibid., 8 August 1946, 6.

The balloon goes up

3 September 2009 in 1930s, Civil defence, Radio, Sounds by Brett Holman | 3 comments

It’s seventy years today since Britain and France declared war on Germany. At 11.15am on Sunday 3 September 1939, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain spoke to the nation via the BBC. At 11.28am, less than a quarter of an hour later, air raid sirens went off in London and (at differing times) across much of the country. This was in fact only a false alarm, caused by an unscheduled civilian flight from France. But as far as civilians were concerned, this looked like precisely what they had been told to expect when the knock-out blow came: mass air raids simultaneous with the outbreak of war. So their reactions to the alarms give us a little insight into their fear of bombing at the end of the scaremongering 1930s.
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Monday, 3 October 1938

3 October 2008 in 1930s, Ephemera, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Radio by Brett Holman | 5 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

THE KING ON DAWN OF A NEW ERA / Thanks to Nation: Calm Resolve: 'Magnificent' Premier / HITLER IN THE SUDETEN TO-DAY / Polish Troops March In / FLOWER-DECKED GUNS / Daily Mail, 3 October 1938, p. 13

So, after all those weeks of mounting tension over the fate of the Sudetens, it’s finally being resolved: German troops have begun occupying the Sudetenland (Daily Mail, p. 13). Polish troops have also moved into Teschen, and the Czech government has agreed to let a mixed commission decide the fate of the territory claimed by Hungary. The dismemberment of Czechoslovakia has begun.

But at least it’s being done peacefully. The British are still celebrating their escape from war, in their different ways. The King has thanked his people for their steadfastness and his prime minister for his peacemaking. The churches were packed with thanksgivers yesterday, ‘Peace Sunday’. A headline in the Daily Mail (p. 3) promises ‘Fairer Days, Fatter Purses, Full Speed Ahead!‘ and claims that ‘with the crisis over and peace in our thoughts it will be the biggest and brightest October ever known’. A man was arrested in Croydon on Saturday night for driving under the influence (Manchester Guardian, p. 2). He and his passenger had been to a dance to celebrate the end of the crisis, and the passenger’s excuse was that ‘I was glad that I had not been called up’. The judge was not impressed and fined him 10s. for being ‘drunk and incapable’.
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Wednesday, 28 September 1938

28 September 2008 in 1930s, Civil defence, Ephemera, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging the Sudeten crisis, Radio by Brett Holman | 2 comments

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Sudeten crisis of August-October 1938. See here for an introduction to the series, and here for a conclusion.

BRITISH FLEET TO BE MOBILISED / Efforts for Peace to the Last - Premier's Broadcast / REPORTED GERMAN THREAT OF FULL MOBILISATION / 'Prague Must Accept by 2 p.m. To-day' / Manchester Guardian, 28 September 1938, p. 9

The German ultimatum for the Czech withdrawal from the Sudetenland by 1 October remains. But there is a report of a new deadline: the ultimatum must be accepted by 2pm today, or else Germany will mobilise its armed forces (Manchester Guardian, p. 9). Hungary has already begun mobilising, and the Royal Navy has been given its orders this morning. It seems probably that war will start any day now — maybe tomorrow, if no way to peace can be found.

A speech by Chamberlain was broadcast by the BBC last night. He repeated his pledge to Hitler to make sure the Czechs keep their promise to hand over the Sudetenland (i.e. at a time to be decided, not by Saturday). He can’t take the Empire into war just to save one nation, there would have to be more important issues at stake.

How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing.

(You can hear the whole speech here, found here.) The leader-writer for the Manchester Guardian (p. 8) sees this as ‘an ungenerous reference to a gallant State that has made enormous sacrifices for peace’. In fact, the whole speech is deemed to be directed more at Hitler than at the British people, who won’t find it much in sympathy with their views. For example, Hitler is merely described as ‘unreasonable’, ‘a phrase that may become classical for its understatement’.
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Overheard in London (in 1938)

28 May 2008 in 1930s, Periodicals, Radio by Brett Holman | 1 comment

From the Manchester Guardian, 29 September 1938, p. 6:

We are hearing and reading so much (writes a correspondent) of people talking in the streets, in public vehicles, and wherever they meet about the international situation that perhaps “Miscellany” may care to preserve for posterity this perfectly true and unvarnished record of a conversation overheard between two young women lunching together in London:

First Y.W.: What is all this about the Czechs?

Second Y.W.: My dear, I haven’t the faintest. I never read the papers, and when they start those news bulletins on the wireless I always switch off.

It’s unclear exactly when this conversation took place — assuming the above is indeed a ‘perfectly true and unvarnished record’ — but presumably it was some time in the previous few days, when the danger of war with Germany was becoming acute. If Second Y.W. wasn’t curious about the Sudeten crisis by then, with gas masks being handed out, sandbags appearing everywhere, her neighbours heading off into the countryside for safety, anti-aircraft guns being positioned around the capital, and trenches being dug in public parks … then she probably would never be.

Neville Chamberlain didn’t exactly have his finger on the pulse of the nation, but when, on 27 September, he said on the BBC ‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing’, on this evidence he was not wrong!

E. H. Carr on the failure of British airmindedness

7 April 2008 in 1940s, Interviews, Periodicals, Radio by Brett Holman | 7 comments

E. H. Carr in conversation with Collin Brooks, BBC Home Service, 30 September 1940:

After 1919 we were always worrying about keeping up our naval supremacy. And, of course, we were right. But what did we do about the Air Force? Hardly anything. We just let it dwindle away. We thought air power of so little importance that there was a time early in the nineteen-thirties when there were six countries in the world with air forces bigger than ours. And as you know, we had not really made up the leeway when war began. If we had only outnumbered the Germans in the air as we did at sea, how different it all would have been! Well now, why did we care so much about our Navy and so little about our Air Force? Simply because our Navy had been tremendously important before 1914 — in fact for three centuries or more — and to keep a strong Navy was all part of getting back to normal, whereas we had no Air Force before 1914, and therefore Air Forces were abnormal and we thought them a nuisance. But I believe you can hardly overestimate the harm we have done ourselves by this habit of trying all the time to get back to an old world instead of bracing ourselves to the job of building a new and different one.1

So, according to Carr, in the postwar period, the British never accorded airpower the same respect as they did for seapower, simply because they were too attached to tradition. So they refused to adapt to the new reality, or in other words, did not become sufficiently airminded, and paid the price for this failure. His whole talk was not actually about airpower or even warfare as such; he was using this as an example of a widespread flaw, as he saw it, in the British psyche.

The end of September 1940 might seem a strange time to be complaining about Britain’s aerial weakness. The Luftwaffe had been assaulting the country since mid-August with little success. London itself came under continuous and heavy attack from 7 September, when the Blitz began. By the point of Carr’s broadcast, many (not all, yet) commentators in the press had already concluded that that if this was the worst that Germany could do, then the storm could be weathered.

But there was still room for criticism: the subtitle of the broadcast was ‘How did we get here?’, and Carr could have been referring to the fact that Britain was the one being attacked (if it had the bigger air force, it could have been doing the attacking — though if press accounts were to be believed, it was already doing so very effectively — or at least deterred attack by Germany). Or, perhaps more likely given his reference to the relative size of the RAF at the start of the war, that it wouldn’t have come to war at all, that Germany wouldn’t have dared invade Poland or occupy Bohemia and Moravia, etc, for fear of a powerful Bomber Command.

Incidentally, in this respect Brooks was an appropriate choice as Carr’s interlocutor: he was Lord Rothermere’s righthand man throughout the 1930s, and was chosen by him to manage the National League of Airmen in 1935. As such he was involved in one of the most ambitious attempts to create an airminded Britain. (Though nothing is made of this in the discussion/interview, and anyway it’s not clear to me how interested he was in the air problem himself, rather than because Rothermere told him to be.)

But, all seriousness aside, this opens up a whole new field of historical inquiry: what did the other great historiographical writers think about airpower? Did Elton grow up fearing the shadow of the bomber? Did Braudel sign on to the international air force concept? What did Collingwood think of the Zeppelin menace? Was Ranke in favour of military ballooning? (Don’t) watch this space …

  1. “Taking stock — I. How did we get here?”, Listener, 10 October 1940, 508.

A stern warning of things to come

15 March 2008 in 1930s, Before 1900, Periodicals, Radio by Brett Holman | No comments

Prime Minister Lord Salisbury, speech to the Lord Mayor’s banquet, 9 November 1897:

Remember this — that the federation of Europe is the only possible structure of Europe which can save civilisation from the desolating effects of a disastrous war. You notice that on all sides the instruments of destruction, the piling up of arms are becoming larger and larger, the powers of concentration are becoming greater, the instruments of death more active and more numerous and are improved with every year, and each nation is bound for its own safety’s sake to take part in this competition. These are the things which are done, so to speak, on the side of war. The one hope that we have to prevent this competition from ending in a terrible effort of mutual destruction which will be fatal to Christian civilisation, the one hope we have is that the Powers may be gradually brought together to act together in a friendly spirit on all questions of difference which may arise until at last they shall be welded in some international constitution which shall give to the world as a result of their great strength a long spell of unfettered and prosperous trade and continued peace.

Source: Lord Lytton, BBC Empire Service broadcast, 18 August 1938; quoted in Listener, 1 September 1938, 430. Emphasis added.

GBS on the KOB

22 February 2007 in 1930s, Periodicals, Pictures, Radio by Brett Holman | 7 comments

Part of a BBC broadcast by George Bernard Shaw, entitled ‘Whither Britain?’, 6 February 1934:

Are we to be exterminated by fleets of bombing aeroplanes which will smash our water mains, cut our electric cables, turn our gas supplies into flame-throwers, and bathe us and our babies in liquid-mustard gas from which no masks can save us? Well, if we are it will serve us right, for it will be our own doing. But let us keep our heads. It may not work out in that way. What will London do when it finds itself approached by a crowd of aeroplanes capable of destroying it in half-an-hour? London will surrender. White flags and wireless messages ‘Don’t drop your bombs; we give in’ will fill the air. But our own squadrons will have already started to make the enemies’ capitals surrender. From Paris to Moscow, from Stockholm to Rome, the white flags will go up in every city.1

Shaw accepts a key tenet of the knock-out blow here: that it is awesomely destructive. So much so that the immediate impulse would be to surrender. But he also accepts another tenet: that it is extremely fast. He uses this to paint an absurd picture of the capitals of Europe therefore surrendering simultaneously. In effect, the knock-out blow is so powerful that it is pointless to attempt it. Flight (the more moderate of the two British aviation weeklies) quoted Shaw because he illustrated its editorial position, that the bombing of civilians as such would not happen, just as dum-dum bullets were not used in the late war, and prisoners were not tortured to death: ‘absolutely unrestrained warfare is unthinkable. A line must be drawn somewhere’.2 It was therefore sensible to ban bombing of civilians (as opposed to legitimate military targets), but not to ban bombers altogether, as some were trying to get the Disarmament Conference at Geneva to do. Even worse would be to ban fighters, because they were a sure defence against airliners converted into bombers.

I didn’t know that GBS had spoken on the wireless about the threat of bombing. It was only in looking through another, printed, source that I came across this excerpt. As it happens, Shaw’s broadcast (part of a series of twelve; another speaker was H. G. Wells) has been preserved3 and can be purchased, or even listened to for free (if you are in the British Library).

Radio Times, 1934

But more generally, I wonder what the best way to find information about the contents of early radio broadcasts is? Infax is great, but very incomplete for my period, has only very basic search capabilities, and limited information as to content. Ditto for the British Library Sound Archive. I think the best sources are likely to be the Radio Times and The Listener. The former isn’t available here (before 1959, anyway); I’ve never seen a copy and I don’t even know how detailed its information would be. But I see that the State Library carries The Listener — apparently more highbrow and so probably a better bet anyway — from September 1937 onwards, so that’s something.

Image source: TV & Radio Bits.

  1. Quoted in Flight, 15 February 1934, 141.
  2. 15 February 1934, 141.
  3. You’ll have to search for it yourself, thanks to the BL’s ignorance of the value of stable URLs. Searching for what seems to be an alternative title, ‘Are we heading for war?’, should take you straight to it.

Me to BBC: you guys rock!

27 April 2006 in Links, Radio, Television by Brett Holman | 4 comments

The BBC has put online a catalogue of recordings held of its radio and television broadcasts since about 1930! Not the recordings themselves, mind you, but details such as broadcast dates, participants, and programme summaries, in many cases. Nor is it a complete record of what was broadcast: if it wasn’t recorded (as many early programmes were not), then it’s not in there.1 But still, this is a most excellent resource for researchers. They’ve done it in a quite sophisticated way, too, all very Web 2.0 with RSS, RDF and tag clouds, and they have also done the right thing by allowing re-use of the data for non-commercial purposes (there must be some interesting possibilities for scraping). My only regret is that there is so little from my period; the archive evidently doesn’t start thickening out until the 1950s.

Some notes on getting around: searching could be easier, from an historian’s point of view. You can search by description, or contributor, which are useful, but there is no way to search a range of dates, nor is it set up for browsing dates. If you have a specific day in mind, then you can go straight to it by using a URI of the form http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/on_this_day/yyyy/mm/dd. For example to see what the archive has for 30 January 1965, the URI is http://open.bbc.co.uk/catalogue/infax/on_this_day/1965/01/30. To see what the catalogue has for a particular year, the best way would seem to be to go to the advanced search page and enter the desired year in the description field; the vast majority of results will actually be from later programmes, but the older ones will be at the bottom of the page. I’m sure searching will improve in future, after all it is a prototype, in the BBC’s very non-Web 2.0 language.

Here’s a few random things I’ve found:

More here and here. Via Boing Boing.

  1. Although, oddly enough, some future programmes seem to be listed.

From Munich to the planet Mars

9 March 2006 in 1930s, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Radio, Space by Brett Holman | 7 comments

There’s an interesting article on the rise of radio news in the United States in the late 1930s, in the February 2006 issue of History Today: “On the right wavelength” by David Culbert. One thing I learned from this article was that it was the Munich crisis in September 1938 which made radio news reporting respectable (not unlike how the Iraq invasion of Kuwait and the first Gulf War made CNN’s fortune). Before that it seems that in America, radio news was not taken very seriously; but CBS’s virtually round-the-clock live reporting of the events in Europe was listened to by millions, and for the first time radio became the preferred news source for most people.

Then in a throwaway line, almost, Culbert links this to the famous Orson Welles broadcast of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds, which took place at the end of the following month. This was done as a mock live newscast, reporting the news of the Martian invasion of New Jersey, and “Some listeners, presumably those who tuned in late, apparently ran from their homes in complete terror. It was felt by many that such fears were related to residual concerns about radio’s round the clock coverage of the Munich story”. (It should be noted that many accounts exaggerate the degree of panic that occurred — it’s not like millions or even thousands of people headed for the hills. That some people did panic, however, is undeniable.)

This suddenly made the usual explanations for the panic that I’ve read a lot more sensible. It has often been suggested, for example, that the people scared by the broadcast didn’t actually think that the Martians were invading, but rather that the Germans were, and the Mars thing was a mistake or a subterfuge. As one of the listeners reported:

The announcer said a meteor had fallen from Mars and I was sure he thought that, but in the back of my head I had the idea that the meteor was just a camouflage. It was really an airplane like a Zeppelin that looked like a meteor and the Germans were attacking us with gas bombs.1

But I could never understand quite why Americans would have such an intense fear of Germany — it’s not like the situation in Edwardian Britain, where the German threat was an order of magnitude more plausible at least (though still exaggerated), and was intensively rehearsed in the media for a decade.2 From my admittedly limited knowledge of US history, there was no comparable perceived threat to the American homeland in the late 1930s. That the Munich crisis took place only a month before the Welles broadcast does help make sense of this, to a degree. That there was massive interest in the US in following the course of the Munich crisis helps more. That radio news broadcasts were the favoured means of doing this helps even more. And that the popularity of radio news was very recent, so that more people than ever before were listening to it, trusting it as a reliable source of information, and yet were perhaps not completely familar with its conventions (indeed, those conventions were still evolving) — that helps the most to explain how it was that the War of the Worlds broadcast caused a limited, localised but briefly intense panic about a German/Martian airborne/spaceborne assault upon New Jersey.

  1. Quoted in Robert E. Bartholomew and Hilary Evans, Panic Attacks: Media Manipulation and Mass Delusion (Stroud: Sutton, 2004), 54-5. Italics in original.
  2. And leading to the phantom airship scares, a phenomenon somewhat comparable to the War of the Worlds panic.