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.

Suspicions immediately fell on the Russians, who had taken possession of the German missile research station at Peenemünde, along with many of its scientists and equipment. This was where V-1 and V-2 development had taken place during the war. As the Manchester Guardian editorialised:

No one has said who starts them [the ghost rockets] on their journey, but it does not need much imagination to see Russian engineers, no doubt assisted by obedient German scientists, operating from a research station on the Baltic coast. Russia, of course, could have found a more secret practice range, bu she probably enjoys revealing a little of her plaything, just as America carefully lets us know at least enough about her bomb to hold it in respect.⁴

There was even a precedent: the Germans had test-fired many V-1s and V-2s over the Baltic, and one of the latter landed on Swedish territory. The resultant wreckage was of some use to Allied scientific intelligence in working out just how much of a threat the new rocket weapon would be. But as R. V. Jones, who was involved in both the wartime and (more peripherally) the ghost rocket investigations, pointed out, with hundreds of sightings being reported from Sweden, some proportion of the supposed rockets would have crashed and the wreckage discovered. The Swedish military did look, even searching the bottom of a lake which a winged missile had crashed into. Nothing was found (although in Most Secret War, Jones relates an amusing episode about one fragment which initially denied analysis, but which turned out to be a lump of coke).⁵

As with the phantom airship scares a generation earlier, parallels can be found nearby in time and/or space. As I noted above, ghost rockets were also reported from Denmark and Greece. Both of these countries were fairly close to the new Iron Curtain, so it wasn't too implausible to think that they too might be playing unwitting hosts to Soviet weapon tests. But then ghost rockets were also seen in Portugal, Belgium and Italy -- except for the last, much farther away from the Soviet sphere. Some of the ghost rockets were undoubtedly meteors (the Perseid meteor shower coincided with the August peak of sightings; the photo mentioned above looks a lot like a meteor to me), others may have been new and unfamiliar jet aeroplanes (Sweden received its first Vampires in June). The British Consul at Salonika thought what he saw was nothing more than a Very light.⁶ But, as usual, not everything can be explained this way.

Going backwards in time, to the early 1930s, so-called 'ghost flyers' were seen, often in snowstorms, in the northern parts of Sweden, Norway and Finland. These aircraft were seen (and heard) mainly at night, sometimes flying at low-level. But they carried no markings, and military searches found neither the ghost fliers nor the aerodrome they presumably operated from. Explanations at the time included Soviet or Japanese (!) spies, alcohol smugglers or misperception and mass delusion. Soviet or even combined Soviet-German exercises are perhaps the most likely explanation, though no archival smoking gun has been found.

And going forward a few decades, and into a different medium altogether, in the 1980s and early 1990s Swedish coastal waters were plagued by incursions from mystery submarines. This time the witnesses were Swedish naval personnel, and the submarines were detected with sonar. Again, the chief suspect was the Soviet Union (though NATO has been blamed more recently), and after the 'Whiskey on the rocks' incident of 1981, when a Soviet diesel sub ran aground near a major Swedish naval base, that's understandable. But even trained sonar operators make mistakes: one prominent incident in 1982 was, it seems, caused by a charter boat.

So, to generalise wildly about a country I know not a lot about, the Swedish ghost rockets, ghost flyers and mystery submarines sound like the paranoia of a small country stuck in between hostile blocs and trying to stay neutral. Technology made it easier for foreign powers to sneak in and spy on Swedes. Although the geopolitical context was different, this sounds a lot like the situation in Britain in 1909 and 1913. The enemy outside became the enemy within.

Back to Smuts. He didn't place much emphasis on the ghost rockets; they were just further evidence of what everyone already knew, that new weapons were changing the world (yet again), and that the world needed to change its ways in consequence. He didn't have any very compelling answers to this problem -- maybe a world government proper, one day; for the moment, he wanted the great powers to have full and frank discussions about what they really wanted from each other, rather than issuing spurious vetoes -- but that he felt he had to try was just as much a sign of the times as the ghost rockets themselves.

1. The Times, 30 September 1946, 5. Emphasis added.
2. Manchester Guardian, 17 August 1946, 6.
3. Ibid., 8 August 1946, 6.
4. Ibid., 13 August 1946, 4.
5. R. V. Jones, Most Secret War (London: Penguin, 2009 [1978]), 511-2.
6. Manchester Guardian, 7 September 1946, 6.

Turned on the wireless, and I was on the point of sitting down for a well-earned rest, when pandemonium suddenly broke out -- the wailing of hundreds of sirens like souls in torment. I was filled with an ecstasy of thrilling and exquisite panic -- it was war then, or war and an air raid to coincide with it, or even an air raid forestalling a declaration of war.¹

His analysis of the possibilities here shows an awareness of the knock-out blow scenario, though the word 'even' suggests that (contrary to many pre-war predictions) he hadn't considered a surprise attack to be very likely. Or perhaps it serves to underline that this would be the most dramatic possibility, which would enhance the thrillingness of his panic? He continues:

I rushed frantically up and down the house, throwing hard-boiled eggs and pyjamas into a suitcase, dashed down to the garage, leapt into the car, and drove it out with such abandon that I buckled a wing and had to go forward again before I could extricate it -- all to the accompaniment of the terrifying siren blasts. I shouted to wardens who were rushing past to enquire what it signified, thinking it might be the way of signifying war, but was told 'it's an air-raid', and immediately had visions of the wave upon wave of German bombers which we had been told to expect ushering in their idea of the 'lightning war'. Meanwhile I careered madly up to Holland Park Avenue till a warden forcibly directed me into Ladbroke Grove and made me take cover, which I did in a garage with a skylight and open front!²

Again, he's got a clear idea of what war is supposed to be like and it's clearly shaping his reactions. (His reference to 'lightning war' might date the setting down on paper of this account to some weeks later, after the press had popularised the word 'blitzkrieg'. But not necessarily.) He's not the only one, the air raid warden who makes him take cover presumably thought the streets were no place to be during an air raid. But the lawyer had somewhere to get to:

After some minutes I thought I heard the all clear, so got into the car and dashed on to the Convent. When I had almost arrived there, I was again stopped by a warden and told to take cover. I and party of civilians accordingly knocked at the door of one house but the good woman refused us admission. Whereupon the warden rushed up in an absolute frenzy of rage and nearly pulverized her, and she promptly collapsed and led us all down to a most evil-smelly basement, where we waited for quarter-hour or so before the all-clear was given.³

Here we can see some of the shifts in normal relationships caused by the threat of bombing. There had been some concerns voiced before the war, particularly by the left, that air-raid wardens would become busybodies or worse, bullies, especially in working-class areas. And on this lawyer's account, not only are wardens stopping people from driving on the roads and telling them to take cover, but they are apparently free to physically threaten householders and force them to let groups of strangers into their homes. An Englishwoman's home is now everyone's castle, it would seem. There's also a little whiff of panicky-mob here (and a prefiguring of a classic Twilight Zone episode), which again is the sort of thing the knock-out blow experts had warned would happen.

On arriving at the station I found everyone standing to their stretchers, fully equipped in anti-gas clothing, and not only ready but expecting to be sent out at any moment. I was told to rush and get a steel helmet and service respirator, then that there was no spare equipment, so a helmet was snatched off the first man we came to and crammed on my head, I was told to take my civilian respirator and as I had in my car topboots and mackintosh I was soon more or less suitably arrayed for the fray, and 'stood by' in my car with engine periodically ticking over, ready to dash a stretcher party to the scene of action when the call came.⁴

We now see the reason for all his rushing about: he is evidently an ARP volunteer, and as he owns a car (not quite a luxury item for the middle classes by 1939, but not something everyone has either) it would have been his job to ferry first-aiders and casualties around. So he had an important (exciting, dangerous) job to do. Also, note the emphasis on gas protection. While there's not enough anti-gas gear to go around, it's clearly felt that it was important to be prepared for gas attack, as per the standard knock-out blow scenario. So our lawyer improvises gas protection with a civilian gas mask, a raincoat and riding boots!

Actually nothing happened and by 1 o'clock the alarm was quite over. I then learnt for the first time that German had been given a real ultimatum expiring at 11 o'clock that morning.⁵

He had spent an hour and a half in a state of panic and he didn't really know why -- expect that the sirens had gone off and a warden told him an air raid was on it's way. Here's one person who had internalised the knock-out blow narrative.

But it must be emphasised that, while the above experience was no doubt not unique, it was not all that typical either. Most people probably felt some degree of nervousness in the minutes after the first alarm, but not necessarily so as anyone else would notice. Or if they did panic, it was only momentary. And routine kept some people on a steady course, no matter what they felt. As a contrast to the lawyer's escapades, I'll note just one other person's reaction, that of a civil servant in Croydon. After the sirens, she felt 'funky for a while', but continued helping her mother to do the washing, while their neighbours piled into an Anderson shelter.⁶ Now that's some stiff upper lip!

Sound sources: Chamberlain's speech is from Wikipedia; unfortunately I've forgotten where I got the sirens from!

1. Quoted in Tom Harrisson, Living Through the Blitz (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 50. Emphasis in Harrisson.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid., 50-1.
5. Ibid., 51.
6. Ibid., 46.

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'.

Chamberlain is still 'The Man of the Hour' (the name of a Pathé newsreel brought out about his life as well as his handling of the crisis: The Times, p. 10). The new Westminster Hospital has been endowed with £1,000 for a bed, to be named 'The Neville Chamberlain Bed', 'in perpetual remembrance of great efforts made by the Prime Minister in the cause of European peace' (The Times, p. 9). Lucio, in the Manchester Guardian (p. 6) quotes some of the more fulsome paeans of praise from the press, for example this one from James Douglas in Saturday's Daily Express:

God has raised up in Neville Chamberlain a deliverer. Are we going to waste him? Are we as great as he is? Are we as noble? Are we as pure in heart? Beware of the old evil that is lurking within us, thirsting to destroy us.

More prosaically, there is speculation (in Manchester Guardian, p. 9) that if the House of Commons is hostile to Chamberlain's report on Munich today, then he may take the country to a general election to capitalise on his popularity among the people. (An election isn't due until 1940.) Chamberlain has already lost one minister over Munich, Duff Cooper, the First Lord of the Admiralty. His resignation speech, if fiery enough, could spark a revolt among those backbenchers who think too high a price has been paid for peace. Certainly Labour will be critical: one prominent Labour MP, Harold Nicolson, spoke in Manchester on Saturday and said (Manchester Guardian, p. 11):

We have betrayed a valiant little country and a great democratic idea. There are many people who feel that in so doing we have achieved peace for a generation. They are wholly mistaken. We have not achieved peace for a generation: we have achieved it only for eight months.

And the 'Peace Pact' which Chamberlain signed with Hitler was 'not worth the paper it is written on'.

The preparations for war are winding down. There's much less ARP news in the papers today, and much of what there is is of a minor nature (such as a warning not to test gas masks in gas ovens! Manchester Guardian, p. 10). Sydney King-Farlow, in a letter to the editor of The Times (p. 14), describes the disaster which has been averted:

Had war come upon us, and it was hanging on a hair, it would have begun with repeated attacks by fleets of aircraft which speedily would have converted the capital cities of Europe into heaps of smoking rubble. The noblest works of man which belong not only to particular countries but to the whole world would have disappeared for ever and the destruction of human life would have been appalling.

He asks if this is not an opportune moment to try to reach an international agreement to prohibit the bombing of architectural and historical treasures in the great cities? (King-Farlow was a former chief justice in places like Gibraltar and Cyprus, so perhaps it's not surprising that he turned to the law.) Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury, expressed similar sentiments in his BBC broadcast last night, but was rather more ambitious (Daily Mail, p. 13):

Surely it is required of nations who have seen the horrors of modern warfare staring them in the face that they should, as a sign of recovered sanity, determine that once for all the use of bombing aircraft shall cease.

The leading article in The Times (p. 13) looks forward to:

an era when the race in armaments will be seen for the madness that it is and will be abandoned because it has ceased even to be profitable.

Whereas the Daily Mail (p. 12) calls for the government to fill the gaps in Britain's defences, noting particularly that:

The Air Force, both by the production of machines and the training of personnel, must be made, at top speed, second to none.

Members of the Royal Observer Corps have been released back into civilian life, albeit subject to a recall at only two hours' notice (Manchester Guardian, p. 13). The Air Ministry has been swamped with offers of service of various kinds and regrets that it may take some time to respond to them all. And the Admiralty has announced that those reservists who have been called up but have not yet actually taken up a post can stay at home or return there.

The London Brick Company is clearly proud of the part it played in the crisis.

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'.

Two-thirds of the population now have their gas masks or have been fitted for one, according to the Daily Mail (p. 3). A gas-proof kennel has been developed for pets (p. 7), and the Home Office says they've finally got a means of gas-protection for babies in protection (The Times, p. 12). Plans are being made for the evacuation of schoolchildren from London. This will not be compulsory, but if parents give their consent their children will be evacuated with their school. Some public schools, orphanages and 'schools for physical defectives' have already been evacuated (p. 15). The government is ready for food rationing: 50 million ration cards and 18 million application forms (one for every household) have been printed. The police have issued black-out instructions for houses and motor-vehicles. Trench-digging, of course, is proceeding as fast as possible, in many places continuing through the night.

In quiet Lincoln's Inn Fields, for example, trenches were being dug, and during the luncheon hour huge crowds of office workers were inspecting them, many, no doubt, with the Home Office plan for protective trenches in private gardens in their minds, wanting to see how experts constructed these splinter-proof shelters.

The imminence of war is altering behaviour and creating new problems. There's been a run on petrol in London's suburbs, as car-owners fill up their tanks in anticipation of rationing (p. 7). Though it also has to do with

the increase in the volume of traffic on the arterial roads, caused by the fact that many men are taking their wives and families to live in the country.

The Postmaster-General has appealed to telephone subscribers to limit their non-essential conversations as much as possible. These are causing unusually heavy demands on trunk and local telephone systems, leading to delays for essential calls (p. 10). The BBC has warned the public to ignore rumours, such as the one that 'normal railway services are to close down on Friday night' (p. 10). And instances of ARP profiteering have emerged: in one case, a local official in Essex was placing a telephone order, turned away for a moment, and then when he returned to the call was told that the price for whatever it was that he was ordering had gone up by £3 per ton (Manchester Guardian, p. 3)!

Speaking of which, here are some advertisements which use the crisis as their selling point: From the Manchester Guardian (p. 7), Cephos cold and headache remedy:

From the same newspaper (p. 10), British Cellophane (i.e. to gas-proof windows and protect against flying glass shards):

And from the Daily Mail, Zylex, for lining your garden trench shelter (p. 3):

I haven't been able to pay much attention to the letters columns for a while, because there is just too much else going on. Rest assured that they have been busy. Here's one I can't resist noting, because it's by a man named Fleming -- Ian Fleming.¹ It's a long letter, in The Times (p. 12); in it he argues for the appeasement of Hitler on the basis of the relevant parts of the Nazi Party's original 25-point programme issued in February 1920. Essentially this boils down to (1) the union of all German-speaking peoples; (2) the equality of Germany with respect to other nations; and (3) colonies for food and emigration. Fleming sees these principles as consistent with Hitler's recent actions, and so Britain should treat his demands as sincere. And since appeasing Germany is the only way to peace, this is what should be attempted. But he adds that:

If and when Herr Hitler refuses a settlement on these lines -- if, that is to say, it is made clear that Germany already aims once again at world domination by aggression -- then it will be time to organize this country on a wartime basis and announce to Germany that we shall fight at the first act of aggression against our fundamental treaty obligations.

Although in his closing sentence he seems to hold out neutrality as another option:

[...] then it will be time to turn a reluctant ear either to the dangerous counsels of the slaughter-house brigade or to the bemused vapourings of those who long for the day when England is another Holland and out of the fight forever.

Not an atypical sentiment in Britain in late September 1938, I'd say, although his familiarity with early Nazi policy is rather more unusual!

1. I thought I might actually have discovered something that nobody else was aware of, but somebody noticed it back in June!

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!

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.

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.

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).

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.

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:

• A Mr Adolf Hitler has appeared in 602 productions since the 1930s, most often alongside Hermann Goering, Franklin Roosevelt, Neville Chamberlain, Benito Mussolini and Winston Churchill. I imagine they were some sort of British Rat Pack or perhaps a troupe of comedians.
• The earliest recording in the catalogue looks to be The End of Savoy Hill, broadcast on 14 May 1932, a retrospective of the BBC's first decade. Precisely because of the lack of recordings, it featured people like John Reith, Vita Sackville-West and Dick Sheppard re-reading things they'd said on the radio years before!
• Britain's greatest gift to the world?

More here and here. Via Boing Boing.

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

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.