Brian Madison Jones. Abolishing the Taboo: Dwight D. Eisenhower and American Nuclear Doctrine, 1945-1961. (Solihull: Helion & Company, 2011).

I found Brian Jones's Abolishing the Taboo interesting for two reasons. Firstly, the subject matter: the Cold War fear of nuclear war was the successor to the interwar fear of strategic bombing. Secondly, it's the book version of a PhD dissertation, which is something I'll be tackling myself.

The Eisenhower presidency (1953-61) was when the United States created its huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, rising from the roughly 800 warheads inherited from Truman to over 18,000 by the time Kennedy came into office: as Jones notes, even after recent disarmament measures this number has never since fallen below the level when Eisenhower came into power. So this was the critical period when we (meaning the world) had to learn how to live with the Bomb. Jones's intention is to explain how and why this happened, through a focus on Eiseinhower's attempts to make nuclear technology normal: that is, as just another way of making the United States stronger and safer. Speaking as a non-specialist in this area, I think he largely succeeds in this. But I do have some criticisms.

Jones argues that Eisenhower used nuclear technology to strengthen the United States in four areas, which he uses to structure the book: the economy, the military, industry, and morality. The first is in some ways the strongest section. Eisenhower believed that 'Economic prosperity was as important as military strength, and [that] national security policy needed to reflect that balance'. His way of achieving that balance was to rely on relatively cheap nuclear weapons to offset the huge Soviet superiority in conventional arms: the New Look. The threat of massive nuclear retaliation against any Communist aggression removed the need for large and expensive standing forces in faraway lands. That much is well known, but Jones shows how Eisenhower's concerns as president derived from his experience in military command before, during and after the war, when he welcomed new technologies because the multiplied the strength of his forces. But after the war he was also worried that Truman's ballooning budget deficits were damaging the long-term strength of the American economy. New Look then seems a quite logical choice for a fiscally-conservative general turned commander-in-chief.

I found the section on Eisenhower's policies regarding the use of nuclear weapons more confusing; though, to be fair, that may be Eisenhower's fault, not Jones's. Jones stresses Eisenhower's firm belief that nuclear weapons were, after all, just another weapon, that there was no reason why there should be a taboo on their use. For example, he told a reporter, 'I know of no reason why a large explosion shouldn't be used as freely as a small explosion'. But in a press conference the following week he said that 'the concept of atomic war is too horrible for man to endure and to practice'. Such examples abound. Was Eisenhower this muddled in his thinking or is this just the logic of mutually assured destruction in action? Jones doesn't really get to grips with this, it seems to me. He suggests that Eisenhower had a preference for 'average solutions', avoiding both extreme optimism and extreme pessimism. In this case that meant putting the possibility of nuclear holocaust to one side and proceeding as if it wasn't going to happen. Taking the average of two extremes is usually misleading; but we're still here so maybe Eisenhower was right to do so.

The third section concerns Eisenhower's policies regarding industrial uses of nuclear technology. This means not only the nuclear energy industry, which Eisenhower inaugurated in 1954 by revising Truman's post-war Atomic Energy Act to allow civilian operation of nuclear power plants. (He also inaugurated it by dedicating the first such plant, Shippingport, with 'the wave of an "atomic wand" which set a bulldozer in motion from thousands of miles away'.) It also means less successful experiments such as the nuclear-powered 'atomic peace ship', NS Savannah, which for a decade carried passengers and cargo around the world; and Project Plowshare, a catch-all for experimenting with all sorts of ideas about using 'clean' nukes for large-scale engineering projects. (Only 26 nuclear explosions would have been needed to create a new, sea-level Panama canal. A test blast to create a deep harbour on the northern coast of Alaska never took place.) This is fascinating stuff, and Jones shows that Eisenhower's interest in harnessing the power of the atom for humanity's benefit was genuine, not a cynical attempt to distract attention from or to justify the nuclear weapons programme.

The final chapter is called 'Bolstering moral strength'. I think this is where Jones's structure runs out of steam. In terms of Eisenhower's nuclear policy, 'bolstering moral strength' includes early disarmament attempts and confidence-building initiatives like Open Skies. Atoms For Peace, a programme which transferred nuclear technology for peaceful uses to friendly countries, is also discussed in this chapter, though somewhat perfunctorily; it might have been a better fit in the previous chapter (or the Savannah might have been a better fit in this one). In between there is a lengthy section on the Eisenhower administration's concerns about the film version of Nevil Shute's On The Beach, even discussing it in a Cabinet meeting shortly before the December 1959 premiere. The concern was that the film might make people think the wrong things about nuclear war:

Eisenhower and his advisors feared the film would be a huge success and convince Americans that the world would be best served by unilateral nuclear disarmament and by joining radical "ban-the-bomb" organizations. On the other hand, the film threatened to erode American moral strength by feeding the overwhelming fear of nuclear war. The depictions of slow death from nuclear fallout might bring a spiritual and emotional depression.

One of the proposed responses, for example, was to point out that 'fallout from a war in the northern hemisphere would never reach the southern hemisphere even if the maximum number of nuclear weapons were used'. Luckily for Eisenhower, the film was not a great success either with the public or the critics, and the feared reactions never took place. I found this discussion fascinating, but it doesn't really fit with the rest of the chapter, and is just introduced with no exploration of the domestic dissent Eisenhower was facing over his nuclear policies.

There are a few other problems. The main one is the first chapter: it is clearly just the literature review from the dissertation. This is a necessary thing in a dissertation, as it shows you have critically read and mastered the available secondary literature on your topic. It's very hard to read in a book though, and not very interesting to most people, even specialists. Most advice I've read is to drop the literature review and perhaps incorporate some of it in the rest of the text. Instead, this chapter might have been used to give the more general reader an introduction to Eisenhower: his life, his achievements, and the key historiographical trends in the literature about him. (Look at me: one book contract and suddenly I'm an expert!) Another is that there are what seem to me to be surprising omissions: for example, there is very little discussion of ballistic missile development, or long-range bomber development for that matter, but surely the ability to deliver all these nuclear warheads was almost as important? I was also troubled by the numerous statements about what Eisenhower felt or knew or thought (for example, 'Eisenhower felt ill at ease with a perceived lack of consistency in Truman's actions'); perhaps I'm being pedantic but from the sources cited we can at best only tell what he said or wrote. Finally, while I applaud Helion's initiative in publishing a PhD dissertation in an affordable edition, I wish they'd left out the illustrations: they are generally too murky to add much to the text.

I've probably been a bit harsh in this review, but overall I found Jones's Abolishing the Taboo to be informative and interesting. I haven't even touched on the fascinating parallels with the British response to the threat of bombing between the wars such internationalisation and shelter policy; and in some ways Eisenhower's concern to build military strength without damaging financial strength reminds me of Chamberlain in the late 1930s. And if the topic itself interests you then it is well worth the read.

Michael Kerrigan. World War II Plans That Never Happened, 1939-1945. London: Amber Books, 2011.

As a historian, I'm probably not supposed to like counterfactuals. There are very good reasons for this. It's hard enough to reconstruct what did happen without worrying about what didn't. There are no minutes from meetings which never took place, no diaries from people who didn't exist, no newspaper reports of events which never happened. The further you depart from our timeline, the more speculation you indulge in, the more pointless it seems: thinking about the Roman Empire undergoing a steam-powered industrial revolution is fun, but what does it tell us about, well, anything to do with reality? And if objectivity is impossible to achieve when doing history, alternative history is prone to wish fulfilment and outright fantasy.

And yet I think counterfactuals can be useful. There is so much we don't know about the past, so much that we cannot now recover, but in one important sense we know more than the people we study: we know what happened in their future. Our histories of the Soviet Union, for example, will forever have to take into account the fact that it dissolved in 1991, something which nobody knew in 1917, 1921, 1945 or 1968. That makes it hard for us to truly understand how people thought about the future and, crucially, how that affected their decisions and actions in the present. Considering counterfactual scenarios can help restore this sense of contingency, of uncertainty: what did happen was not necessarily what had to to happen. Or even likely to happen. Besides, historians implicitly indulge in counterfactual thinking all the time: whenever we single out some event or person or institution as important in whatever way, we are effectively saying that if it that event hadn't happened, or if that person hadn't existed, or if that institution hadn't been created, then history would have been significantly different (for whatever definition of 'significant' works for you).

So asking 'what if...?' can at least help to ease the tyranny of actuality. But that doesn't do away with the objections I mentioned earlier. If it is to be of any use, counterfactual speculation has to be anchored in reality in some way: it can't just be about making stuff up wholesale. One obvious place to start, then, is with the ideas people had about the future. That leads directly to paleofuturism. In my own work I find the scenarios dreamed up about future warfare, whether sensational or sober, to be particularly compelling. Another way in to useful counterfactual history is through military history. I don't mean the venerable but somewhat arid 'for want of a nail' mode of alternative history, but rather looking at what the military forces thought about doing in wartime but, for one reason or another, did not actually do. It's here that we can see their dreams and nightmares most clearly.

In truth, the book I'm reviewing here -- yes, this is a book review! -- is not framed as a work of alternate history. But that it could have been is why I chose to review it. In World War II Plans That Never Happened Michael Kerrigan argues that (7):

When we see World War II as following a single triumphant trajectory, disregarding the provisional plans, the improvisatory execution, the bright ideas that came to nothing, we're forgetting the very stuff of war.

He aims to demonstrate this by examining several dozen military operations planned -- but never executed -- by both Axis and Allies between 1939 and 1945. These range from the well-known, such as Operations Sea Lion and Downfall (the seaborne invasions of Britain and Japan respectively) to the obscure like Operation Culverin, a British plan to capture Aceh, in the Dutch East Indies, for use in attacking Japanese shipping. There are also a number of weapons and other technological research programmes: for example, attempts to weaponise biological toxins (this was a time when it seemed like a good idea to think about bombing Germany with ricin-tipped needles). Then there are few odd ones which don't quite seem to fit: Operation Pastorius, a German attempt to infiltrate saboteurs into the United States may have amounted to nothing in the end, but the agents were in fact landed on American soil (where they were soon rounded up), so this doesn't seem like a plan 'that never happened' to me.

To be clear, this is not an academic text. It's very much a light, popular book, heavily illustrated with large type. With only two pages for most of the entries, there isn't a lot of space for deep analysis. But Kerrigan's critical approach helps here, as he explains why the various operational plans were never put into effect. So the various pre-1944 plans for a Second Front fell foul of British memories of Dunkirk and the lack of sufficient landing craft; an Allied occupation of the Cape Verde Islands, a valuable base for protecting shipping, was judged to be not worth the risk of alienating Portugal and Spain. Sometimes, however, he seems to assume that just because a plan was drawn up that, at least at some point, there was an accompanying intention to carry it out. But some of these plans, like the German invasion of Switzerland, were surely more contingency planning than strategic desire. There's also a lot of repetition (though given that this book is probably intended to be dipped into rather than read cover to cover, that may be by design). Sometimes this is thanks to the planners themselves: there are no less than four potential invasions of Ireland described here (one British, three German, though one of the latter was more about fomenting resistance to a possible US occupation of Eire).

The other thing I like about this book are the many reproductions of documents from government (mostly British) archives. This gives readers an insight into the arguments and objections considered by the planners, adding greatly to its interest. (At least for a historian, it does!) It's fascinating to see the British Chiefs of Staff mulling over Operation Unthinkable, a war against the Soviet Union after the defeat of Germany, possibly over the fate of Poland: 'A quick success might induce the Russians to submit to our will at least for the time being; but it might not. That is for the Russians to decide. If they want total war, they are in a position to have it' (169). I do wonder if it was necessary to also transcribe most of these documents, given that they are typewritten and that space is already limited.

Unfortunately, there are quite a few factual errors throughout World War II Plans That Never Happened. Libya was conquered by the Italians in 1912, not 1934, for example, and oil was not discovered there until after the war. As well, there are oddly elliptical statements: Kerrigan writes that while USS Kitty Hawk 'literally [...] carried aircraft, she was not an aircraft carrier like the later vessels named after her' (116). Why not just explain that it was an aircraft transporter? In fact, why mention Kitty Hawk at all in a work of this scope? There is an index, which is helpful; but no table of contents to speak of (it just lists the chapters, '1939-1941', '1942', etc) which is not. A page-and-a-bit of bibliography is probably about right for this level, but without in-text references it's often hard to work out which book might relate to a particular operation.

I do find it difficult to recommend this book wholeheartedly, even to a popular audience. But perhaps the 'woah!' factor outweighs the scholarly flaws. As an example, consider this quote: 'It was at the beginning of July 1943 that Anthony Eden sent a memo to Prime Minister Winston Churchill' (110). The memo is reproduced on the opposite page (111), and while it does indeed say 'Foreign Secretary' near the bottom, it's obvious that this is a request for Eden's advice on the matter. The memo itself is initialled 'C.P. C.A.S.', which pretty clearly stands for Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff. Which makes sense since the impetus for the memo came from Bomber Command, not the Foreign Office. Knowing the author of a document is one of the fundamentals of research, and makes you wonder what else has been missed. But let's set that aside for a minute and look at the content of the memo, dated 15 July 1943, which is a proposal by Air Chief Marshal Harris, head of Bomber Command, for a precision air attack on Rome with the objective of killing Mussolini:

Harris would use the Squadron of Lancasters (No. 617) which made the attacks on the dams. It is manned by experts and is kept for special ventures of this kind. The attack would be made just above the rooftops and which give the only chance of destroying the two buildings [Mussolini's residence and his office] without much other damage [...] I suggest that if Mussolini were killed or even badly shaken at the present time this might greatly increase the chance of our knocking Italy out at an early date and I therefore ask your permission to lay the operation on.

For Harris to propose this is completely at odds with his rather better-known espousal of area bombing techniques. It suggests that he was not averse to precision bombing if a suitable target presented itself. To bring this back to my long excursion into counterfactual history, it suggests that there were roads which Bomber Command could have taken at this stage of the war, but chose not to. In the short term, however, Mussolini was deposed just days later which rendered this operation unnecessary.

I'd never heard of this plan for a decapitation strike before, and might never have without reading World War II Plans That Never Happened. And there's more where that came from. For that reason it could interest the jaded grognard as well as those just starting out in their studies of the Second World War. But it is most valuable for restoring that sense of how the war might not have been the one we know today.

Kate Moore. The Battle of Britain. London and Long Island City: Osprey Publishing, 2010.

Gavin Mortimer. The Blitz: An Illustrated History. London and Long Island City: Osprey Publishing, 2010.

2010 was seventy years after 1940, and in the usual way saw the publication of a number of new books about the pivotal events of that year. Almost none of which I read, or even bought. Mainly because, perhaps unfairly, I tend to suspect books published to coincide with historical anniversaries of simply reheating and reserving the same old stories. Which is fine for those readers not familiar with the old stories, but I don't need half-a-dozen narrative histories of the Battle of Britain saying the same thing. One or two will do. (It's a bit different for the Blitz, which as a whole attracts less attention from authors and publishers, and then usually only on specific raids or cities; though the tropes here are probably even more entrenched than for the Battle.)

So I was at first a bit reluctant to say yes when asked to review two new books by Osprey Publishing on the Battle and the Blitz. And I have to say my heart sank when I began to read the first of these, Kate Moore's The Battle of Britain. Churchill is the problem here. We get Churchill the prophet, Churchill the orator, Churchill the airminded, Churchill the brave, Churchill the man of the hour. These are all real Churchills, but they neglect other Churchills: Churchill the cutter of defence budgets, Churchill the institutionaliser of the ten-year rule, Churchill the primary author of the Norwegian disaster. There's no reason why the story of the Battle can't be told without giving a more rounded picture of Churchill (i.e. than the one he himself bequeathed to us), but perhaps that's not very commercially-minded of me.

But the book gets much better (and Churchill does not in fact appear prominently in it). Given the space constraints (200 generously illustrated pages, albeit in a coffee-table format), Moore does a remarkable job of telling the story of not just the Battle itself -- understandably concentrating on the most intense days -- but also the events leading up to it, from the immediate (the Kanalkampf, Dunkirk) to the more distant (the suppression and rebirth of the German air force). Not only that, but she writes with style and some verve, making my earlier fears happily redundant. The extensive use of eyewitness accounts (usually from oral interviews and memoirs, from pilots, WAAFs and civilians) also helps to keep the story fresh. And as usual with Osprey's publications the illustrations are excellent, ranging from a downed and disguised British pilot photographed while on the run after Dunkirk to a contemporary painting by a 14-year old eyewitness in Kent entitled Night Raid 1940. (Both the interviews and the illustrations are largely drawn from the archives of the Imperial War Museum.)

Moore, correctly in my view, argues throughout that the balance of forces, of reserves and of losses actually favoured the RAF at all times. Yes, the Luftwaffe amassed an aerial 'armada' of nearly three thousand aircraft for its attack against Britain. But all its bombers and even its Me 110s were just targets for Fighter Command. In air superiority terms the numbers of fast single-engine fighters were all that mattered and these were nearly even. She is also sceptical of the Luftwaffe's ability to do serious damage to the targets that mattered, such as RDF stations and sector control rooms. That's even if it had recognised how important these were to the British air defence system, which it didn't. Overall, while not minimising the bravery of Britain's defenders (and its German attackers), Moore comes remarkably close to suggesting that in purely strategic terms the Battle of Britain didn't really matter all that much. So this is no potboiler.

While it is physically similar to Moore's book, Gavin Mortimer's The Blitz has a very different focus. While he does cover the military aspects of the campaign, including the changing motivations of the Luftwaffe (for example in stepping up the intensity of its attacks early in 1941 to disguise the redeployment of aircraft in preparation for Barbarossa), Mortimer is understandably more interested in what was happening on the ground in Britain. He spends little time on the background to the Blitz (whether intentionally or not, this means the two books complement each other quite well), instead diving into the first day, 7 September 1940, and continuing through to the V-1 and V-2 attacks in the last year of the war. London gets much of the attention, of course, but by no means all: Coventry, Merseyside, Plymouth, Belfast and so on all get their due. (I was a little surprised to read that Lady Londonderry had written to her husband, 'All sorts of rot going on here. Air raid warnings and black-outs! As if anyone cared or wished to bomb Belfast', 129. But not very.)

This is a gripping story. Mortimer has an eye for telling details which vividly portray the terror and the surreality of the Blitz. For example, he describes the strange sights and smells of London's docklands on the first night, when warehouses full of rum, paint, rubber, pepper, grain, sugar and tea went up in flames: tea fires, it seems, are 'sweet, sickly and very intense' (25). Then there was the woman seen by one special constable tottering down the street, holding an umbrella and singing 'I'm Singin' in the Rain': but 'The only rain coming down was the incendiary bombs' (44). Of course there are also many stories, stirring, tragic, or both, of those who suffered under the bombs and those who tried to minimise their impact. The illustrations for The Blitz add immeasurably to its value: they are drawn almost entirely from the Daily Mirror's archives, and unlike some of the Imperial War Museum's photographs have rarely been published since the war. In fact, many of them might not have been published even then: Mortimer discusses the censorship of images and provides examples of what was allowed to be seen by the public and what wasn't.

The Blitz isn't without problems. I think Mortimer overrates the effectiveness of Beaufighter nightfighters equipped with airborne interception radar, at least early on. He occasionally gives too much credence to primary sources: the Ministry of Home Security may have thought that German incendiaries worked by 'burning the body of electrons' (41) in the magnesium casing, but it's scientific nonsense. But such errors are few. Overall this is an excellent book; together with The Battle of Britain it goes a long way towards undermining my scepticism about the value of anniversary publishing.

Ian Castle. London 1914-17: The Zeppelin Menace. Oxford and New York: Osprey Publishing, 2008. Illustrated by Christa Hook.

Ian Castle. London 1917-18: The Bomber Blitz. Oxford and Long Island City: Osprey Publishing, 2010. Illustrated by Christa Hook.

As the titles suggest, these two entries in Osprey's long-running Campaign series dovetail nicely. One takes as its subject the Zeppelin raids on London during the First World War, the other the Gotha and Giant raids on London. Together they provide a concise overview of London's first encounters with aerial bombardment.

'Concise' is key. Each book is just 96 pages long and amply illustrated (more on which later). That doesn't leave a lot of room for discussion, so the text can't always be as detailed as one would like. (For example, in the 1917-18 volume, Castle is incredulous that in March 1917, Britain's anti-aircraft guns were ordered not to fire on aircraft even if identified as German, unless expressly ordered. There must have been a reason for this, misguided or not, but Castle doesn't say what it was.) The focus on London helps: the Zeppelin raids on the Midlands and Hull can be covered in just a sentence or two, as can the Gotha raids on the south-east coast of England. But conversely, after having gone to the trouble of explaining the who, what, when and why of the bombing campaigns it's a shame that Castle has to skimp on the where. Still, London was undoubtedly the major object of the German raiders and so choosing it as the subject here is not unwarranted.

The books follow a common format: after an introduction setting out the origins of the campaigns, there's a chronology, notes on the leaders of each side and the strategies they employed. At the end come a brief bibliography, an order of battle and an index. There's also a page on London's few remaining scars of and memorials to the air raids.

In between are narrative accounts of the air raids themselves. By comparison with the Second World War, these were smaller and fewer and so each one can be described in some detail. It's not quite true to say the reader learns about the fall and effect of each and every bomb, but if you look at the accompanying maps it's not quite untrue either. These show the flightpaths (where known) of the various airships and bombers and where they dropped their bombs. Insets (more common in the Zeppelin book than the bomber one) are sometimes added to allow individual street-level detail. The death and destruction caused by the German raiders, of course, is not neglected; nor are the losses they themselves suffered (increasingly at the hands of the British defenders as time went on, but also thanks to a devastatingly high accident rate). Shifts in strategy and organisation on both sides come through clearly; advances in technology less so. I could wish for more detail on the popular response to the air raids, but then I always do.

It's no discredit to Castle's clear and succinct text (or to Hook's detailed illustrations of particular scenes and incidents) to say that the best thing about these books are the photographs. Nearly all are contemporary, the vast majority of which I haven't seen before, and all are well chosen. They portray such things as bomb-wrecked houses, sinking Zeppelins, and police warnings. Some are really quite remarkable, such as one taken from an airborne Gotha showing plumes of smoke rising over central London. Most interesting to me were the large number of British propaganda postcards depicting Zeppelins, a topic I've examined before. Again, many were new to me. My only criticism is that the captions no more than hint that the images are very likely fake (though I think one or two might be genuine).

If you're after concise, interesting and accurate books on the Blitz before the Blitz, London 1914-17 and London 1917-18 are probably what you're looking for.

Daniel Swift. Bomber County: The Lost Airmen of World War Two. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2010.

This book is a very different way to approach the Allied bomber offensives of the Second World War. It is not a history of strategic bombing policy, nor is it a history of the machines used to carry it out, of the men who flew them, or the damage they did. While it is well-researched and has elements of all of these types of history, Bomber County is not really a history at all, but an account of a personal quest to understand the life and death of one airman, and more originally a plea for recognising the importance of the genre of bomber poetry.

One of Daniel Swift's grandfathers was the great Australian war correspondent Alan Moorehead, who after the war lived in a villa in Tuscany and received literary visitors of the calibre of Hemingway. But it's his other grandfather who concerns him here, Squadron Leader James Swift, a Lancaster pilot in the Pathfinders who was shot down over the North Sea in 1943. His body washed ashore on the Dutch coast and was buried by the German occupation forces with full military honours -- despite the fact that he was on his way to rain bombs down on the city of Münster in their homeland. Swift starts here, and then jumps back to try and work out how his grandfather got to this point, reading his letters, service record, squadron diaries and in fact anything relevant he can lay his hands on. He makes effective use, for example, of an account by one of his grandfather's fellow trainee pilots, who passed through a training camp in Lancashire at exactly the same time. Swift also talks to surviving RAF veterans, most memorably a lively 85-year-old WAAF driver named Alma, who gives him (and his readers) a sense of the urgency of the life led by these young people on a bomber base, constantly in the presence of death. Their need now for their war to be remembered and acknowledged is almost as touching. There are many gaps in the story he is able to tell of his grandfather, but while he sometimes speculates Swift is always candid about what he can and can't know, always grounding his text in the primary sources.

This is probably to be expected, since Swift is a scholar, a professor of English at an American college. Which leads to the second, and I think it is fair to say more substantial, thread in his book: the poetry of bombing. He starts here by noting the almost universally-held opinion that where the First World War produced great poetry, the Second did not. (Intriguingly, Swift shows that this idea surfaced among poets and critics as early as the winter of 1939-40, hardly long enough to give the new war a chance.) At first glance this seems incontestable. Great War poetry is practically a genre all to itself, one which many people encounter in school. But I suspect far fewer people could come up with the name of a major poet whose work is in some sense defined by the Second World War as that of Owen or Gurney, say, is by the First. (I couldn't have, for what it's worth.)

In Bomber County Swift makes a good case that this is all wrong. Great poetry did come out of the Second World War, out of the bombing war, to be specific. He argues that (38):

Bombing was to the Second World War what the trenches were to the First: a shocking and new form of warfare, wretched and unexpected, and carried out at a terrible scale of loss. Just as the trenches produced the most remarkable poetry of the First World War, so too did the bombing campaigns foster a haunting set of poems during the Second. But this is no simple process, for they are not equivalent geographies. Bombing, if we take the whole of it, is always double. It was a kind of war conducted in the cities and the planes, shared between the bombers and the bombed, and so it asks for a split reckoning, a thinking in two places.

Except for the word 'unexpected' this seems right to me.

As for the poets themselves, there were those who were already established, or were establishing themselves, when the war began: Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, W. H. Auden. These men were all affected by the air war, and wrote poems such as Eliot's 'Little Gidding' (1942), which Swift explains as being 'rooted in the inside-out physics of bomb damage' (127):

Ash on an old man's sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house --
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse

But none of them actually flew in it: they spent their war on the ground, at most being bombed. And sometimes not even that: Auden stayed in the United States for the duration (though he had experienced bombing in China in 1938). Afterwards, Spender and Auden saw the results of the Allied raids on Germany firsthand, Spender with the Allied Control Commission, Auden with the United States Strategic Bombing Survey, leading respectively to 'Responsibility: to the pilots who destroyed Germany, spring 1945' and 'Memorial for the city'.

A second group of poets were airmen, though they achieved their fame after the war and not necessarily because of it: Randall Jarrell, James Dickey (both later Poet Laureates), John Ciardi. Dickey and Ciardi both served in the Pacific theatre, Ciardi as a B-29 gunner, Dickey in night fighters (though as Swift shows, the latter considerably exaggerated his war service, falsely claiming to have been over Nagasaki when the atomic bomb was dropped, for example). Jarrell washed out of flying training, but stayed in the USAAF as ground crew. Even so, to my mind he wrote some of the best poetry of the air war. This is from 'Eighth Air Force' (1948), about what bombers crews did after a raid:

The other murderers troop in yawning;
Three of them play Pitch, one sleeps, and one
Lies counting missions, lies there sweating
Till even his heart beats: One; One; One.

Swift doesn't remark on the fact that these three are all Americans (perhaps because his book is not structured as clumsily as this review). Vietnam perhaps had something to do with this; American bombers were again in action over (against) enemy cities, and now much more controversially. Dickey's poems about the firebombing of Japan found an appreciative audience among some critics of US involvement in south-east Asia.

A final group of bomber poets were also airmen, but never achieved fame for their poetry. Often this is because they died in the war, though as Swift notes, this hadn't harmed the posthumous career of Owen from the earlier war. To be honest, it's also because they weren't great poets. Nor did they aspire to be. They mostly wrote poetry for themselves, sometimes just a few lines of doggerel in a boyish scrapbook account of their war, as a way of expressing their feelings about what they were doing. This is the work of Pilot Officer John Byrne, writing in 1944:

Is it not fitting
That we also honour the many
That gave their lives in smashing
The heart of the Nazi war machine
In the Ruhr-valley.

To his credit, Swift does not denigrate these humbler poets for their lack of skill, but reads them as closely as he does Eliot or Jarrell.

Bomber County is impressively researched, both in terms of primary and secondary sources, and very well written. I do have some reservations, mostly because I would like to know more. Where are the female voices? Women didn't bomb, but they were bombed. Did none of them write poetry about it? (Virginia Woolf is an important figure early on in the book -- an anecdote of her exulting in a German air raid is striking -- but she wasn't a poet.) The origins of bombing in the First World War are rather glossed over (though it's interesting to learn that at one point Owen became enamoured of flying, and tried to transfer to the RFC): D. H. Lawrence's 'Bombardment' might have been worth considering here. More importantly, even though the book is very personal in many ways, it's hard to make out what Swift himself thinks about his grandfather: about his being someone who, having flown dozens of missions over Germany, must have been responsible for the deaths and maiming of many civilians, some in places that he knew well (he met his future wife, Daniel Swift's grandmother, in Hamburg). He certainly discusses the moral question -- in fact, he suggests that it is what makes bomber poetry both possible and powerful -- but indirectly, through discussing the opinions of others, both then and later. Poetry depends upon indirectness, and academics practice it to a fault, but this book is neither poetry nor academic and a little more bluntness, at least at the end, would have made it more powerful.

Still, Bomber County is an excellent book which I'd recommend to anyone interested in a different look at the bomber war, or even as a first book for someone uninitiated in it.

NB. Review copy provided by Penguin.

Pierre-Antoine Courouble. The Riddle of the Wooden Bombs. Toulon: Les Presses du Midi, 2009.

One of my early posts on this blog was about a story which goes something like the following. The Germans are constructing a fake airfield to decoy Allied bombers, with dummy aircraft made out of wood. On the day it is finished, a RAF bomber swoops down and drops a single bomb on it -- a bomb made of wood. The Germans look foolish: having tried to outsmart the Allies, it is they who are outsmarted. A moral victory for the good guys!

The details are usually vague and vary between tellings (it happened in France, or Belgium, or Egypt; late in the Second War, early on, or even in the First World War; sometimes it is the British who are on the receiving end of the wooden bomb; rarely does anyone claim to be an eyewitness). It sounds a lot like a joke, or an urban legend, which is what it has usually been dismissed as. I tried to work out if there was any truth to the story but have to admit I didn't get very far.

You might not think that there was anyway much to be said about such an obscure and perhaps trivial topic. Well, you'd be wrong! Pierre-Antoine Courouble has spent several years researching the wooden bombs and the result is this meticulously-endnoted 237-page book, The Riddle of the Wooden Bombs. He has scoured libraries, stalked bulletin boards, harassed museums and interviewed veterans for any information which might confirm that somebody, somewhere did drop wooden bombs on a fake airfield. And I would say he is successful in this task: he has found some wooden bombs in museum collections, and perhaps more importantly, found some eyewitnesses. There are still some gaps, but it does look like the wooden bomb story did happen in reality, and more than once.

The bigger question is: why? Courouble looks at a number of explanations, the most intriguing of which is that the wooden bombs were part of a SOE psychological warfare operation. This might sound fanciful, and admittedly there's no hard evidence for it (most SOE files were apparently lost at the end of the war, and many still are not open). But the lift to civilian morale in occupied France is very noticeable in many of the accounts Courouble has unearthed, and the relish with which the stories have been retold by veteran pilots speaks to similar effects in unoccupied Europe. And some of the wooden bombs apparently also carried propaganda leaflets inside ('Wood for wood, iron for iron'). It doesn't seem too fanciful to suggest that SOE perhaps carried out some wooden bomb operations, and fanned rumours of many more, as part of their brief to set Europe ablaze. But that is speculation, and Courouble rightly hesitates to claim more than the evidence can bear, leaving a (perhaps) final resolution to future researchers. He (again, I think, rightly) decided against looking at operational records and the like, in favour of canvassing the quickly-dwindling veteran community, but that should be the next place to look.

Along the way, Courouble also looks into the history of military decoys and training bombs, and there are some excellent photos of wooden pocket battleships and wooden coastal defence guns, as well as wooden Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs. The writing style is lively and always interesting; there are a few places where the translation from the original French perhaps falls short (mostly military terminology) but it's perfectly readable. (And how many books written in English have a simultaneous publication in French?) Although Courouble never claims to be a professional historian, I certainly appreciate his attention to detail and his doubt over hypotheses; and as noted his endnotes are extensive. I would like to have seen a table of contents and/or an index: the main text is over two hundred pages long, which is a bit too long to be flipping back and forth looking for certain passages.

It might be asked why such an obscure topic deserves a book all to itself. My answer would be: because, as Courouble shows, it happened! And because nobody has studied it in any depth until now. Anyone who likes following historical detective work, or traveling down the lesser-known byways of history, might enjoy Courouble's book. And certainly anyone with any interest in the wooden bomb riddle at all will want to read The Riddle of the Wooden Bombs.

Jörg Friedrich's book The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945, was first published in Germany in 2002. In 2006, it was published in an English translation (by Allison Brown) by Columbia University Press. The Fire consists of seven sections: Weapon, Strategy, Land, Protection, We, I and Stone. These chart the development of aerial attack on Germany during the Second World War, the counter-measures undertaken by authorities, the experience of those under attack and the destruction wreaked upon cities and culture. The book received extensive publicity when it came out in Germany: according to the Columbia blurb, it features 'meticulous research' into a strategy the wisdom of which 'has never been questioned.' At the end of last year, we -- Dan Todman and Brett Holman -- received unsolicited copies for review. Despite some anxieties about the implications of such a marketing strategy (for the profession as a whole and for individual careers), we decided to collaborate on a review in the form of a conversation, which we'll post at Airminded and Trench Fever and highlight at Cliopatria and Revise and Dissent.

Dan Todman: It's very clear from the way this book is presented and the way it has been publicised that it's meant to be contentious. If we start with the moral aspect of strategic bombing -- a key area for recent literary and philosophical debate by writers such as W. G. Sebald and A. C. Grayling -- there are times when Friedrich comes close to saying something explosive in his treatment of German civilians as innocent victims. Yet he always backs off from the logical endpoint of his argument. Here is Friedrich describing the essential randomness of bombing for "terror":

The annihilation principle does not ask such questions. Not until it is too late does everyone know that they can be struck. Terror does not seek to achieve anything; its regime is absolute. It comes out of the blue, needs no reasons, atones no guilt. Its success might be unconditional subjection, but even that does not end the horror. It makes no deals; its resolve is inscrutable and its aim, absurd.
...
... there was no correlation between the annihilation of the Jews and the annihilation by bombs. And no analogy. And death by gas will not create one. (296)

Ultimately, even in his epilogue written for the English translation, it seems to me that Friedrich makes a moral judgement on bombing only by implication.

Brett Holman: He does always seem to step back from the brink when he is about to actually come to a conclusion. (I say "seem" because he very often uses such flowery, allusive language that I sometimes find it hard to work out what he is saying.) And yes, that epilogue was disappointingly tame -- it was his chance to explain the purpose of The Fire to a readership very different to the one it was originally written for.

But the whole tenor of the book does lean towards the Germans-as-victims side of things. Or what is much worse, suggesting that area bombing is equivalent to the Holocaust -- despite his explicit denial of same in the above quote. I'm not the first person to notice that he often uses words like "crematorium" when describing the effects of incendiary bombing, which is perhaps apt but certainly unfortunate in this context. At one point Friedrich calls 5 Group 'No. 5 Mass Destruction Group' (306), which I thought was perhaps a mistranslation. Judging from Jög Arnold's H-German review, it may well be -- he translates the original German as 'group of mass extermination Nr. 5', which is even worse! To me, Friedrich's choice of words seems very pointed, and very telling.

It's also odd how the victims of Allied bombing always seem to be nuns and children, never Nazi officials or Gestapo agents. (Which, by the way, echoes wartime propaganda -- critics of which cynically marvelled at the amazing accuracy of the enemy's unguided bombs in seeking out orphanages and nursing homes.) Never does he admit that any hits on factories, or disruption of production due to loss of workers or infrastructure had anything more than a minor, temporary effect. The impression I got from reading The Fire was that bombing didn't help the Allies win the war at all, and only killed innocents.

DT: Indeed -- with the possible addition of the unfortunate slave workers or prisoners of war who are also mentioned in the text. I wonder if there's a double problem here: first of the sources Friedrich uses, and secondly, as you note, of his/his translator's syntax/rhetorical style. As Arnold notes, much of the work on the effects of bombing on the ground comes from local/regional histories in which that victim discourse was bound to be strong. As it happens, much of this material was new to me, and I'm grateful for the chance to access German works that would otherwise be unavailable to me, but I'm wary about knowing the context in which they were produced (particularly where Friedrich's footnoting is not exactly of academic standard).

In terms of style and translation, my perhaps prejudiced reaction was that this was a very 'non-British' book. The high emotional register in which Friedrich writes, and the rhetorical devices he employs, are not the default mode of most English language historians, even those working for the popular market. The Fire reads as a very constructed text. I found this offputting, even after I had read myself into the book. It may just be the limited selection of books that I've read, but my impression is that for the 'respectable' market at which author and publisher seem to be aiming, this is a more accepted mode elsewhere in Europe. Sometimes, I have to say, I think it works in the sense that it leads the reader to make a connection they might otherwise not. One might say that this is a topic about which emotion should run high: but not, I would suggest, to the exclusion of sense.

It's also an inadequate translation for a supposedly academic press to have put out. To take a repeated example, anti-aircraft guns don't fire 'grenades', they fire 'shells'. To me, that suggests a translator without the background knowledge to make sense of what they're reading, and a press that didn't bother to send the translated text to an English-language academic reader before publication. This is not just snippy military historian nit-picking accuracy stuff. If you can't get that right, what else have you ignored?

BH: Like you I wonder about the sources. For one thing, he draws upon David Irving extensively, who isn't just a Holocaust denier but also untrustworthy when it comes to the bombing of Germany, as Richard J. Evans showed (Telling Lies About Hitler, 2002). I agree, the small errors (and it's not just the military stuff: when was Churchill ever an 'attache' (272)?) suggest an unfamiliarity with the material, at least on the Allied side of things: the book would have benefited enormously from an expert reader. This is important -- for one thing, while he often suggests that this or that particular city had no important war industries, and so -- by implication -- shouldn't have been bombed, he rarely asks whether the Allies knew this, or delves deeply enough into the philosophy of area bombing, if I can put it like that, to see what effects Bomber Command intended and what it thought it was achieving.

DT: This area of accuracy is vital, it seems to me, if one wants to make the sort of big splash which Friedrich and his publishers plainly do. The risk in relying on synthesis is that you pick up moral as well as factual judgments. Given Irving's celebrity and downfall, it seems strange to treat him as an unproblematic source. Relying on local historians' judgements that 'there was no war industry' implies a misunderstanding of what total war entails.

BH: Where Friedrich comes closest to my own area of research, for example in his account of the origins of strategic bombing (in section 2, "Strategy"), his narrative is generally poor, and he says some very strange things. The strangest perhaps is when he claims that Churchill 'pioneered this concept' of strategic bombing, and that 'he had a planned thousand-bomber attack on Berlin' while Minister of Munitions in 1918 (51). For one thing, the Minister of Munitions didn't get to plan air raids; at most he planned aircraft and bomb production. For another, the idea and practice of strategic bombing was by 1918 firmly entrenched; there had been much pre-war speculation about the possibility, and the first strategic air raids on cities were carried out in 1914. Churchill did play a small role, while at the Admiralty, in fostering the early strategic strikes launched by the Royal Naval Air Service (which Friedrich doesn't mention), but as an account of the origins of strategic bombing, this grossly exaggerates Churchill's role and is utterly inadequate.

DT: Do you think this is a matter of confusion, or of a misreading of another source? The reference here is to Churchill's Thoughts and Adventures (1932).

BH: I've got the relevant bit of Thoughts and Adventures here. If this was Friedrich's only source for this passage, he's reading far too much into it. Churchill writes only in very general terms about the offensive planned for 1919, and doesn't even talk about his own role. Maybe it's a reading backwards of Churchill's role in the Second World War, as the leader who ordered the bombing of Germany and poured resources into the task? It would certainly be very neat if that same leader invented strategic bombing in the first place, but history is rarely neat!

DT: This lack of consideration of moral/factual/analytical judgements extends to the part bombing played in winning the war. I think that The Fire makes it clear, entirely unintentionally, that it did help the Allies win. No-one reading Friedrich's chapters on the measures put in place to defend cities can be in much doubt about the resources that bombing soaked up. To put it in simple terms, there was a hell of a lot of concrete under the ground in Germany that wasn't being used to make field fortifications and a lot of guns pointing skywards rather than at the advancing ranks of T34s in the East, not to mention a substantial scientific effort. This link isn't drawn.

BH: I wondered about that too, and wondered why he didn't wonder about it. He makes some rather forced conclusions. For example, on p. 278 he notes that a Bomber Command raid on Nuremberg destroyed a Panther tank production line, and then says that by that time -- 2 January 1945 -- 'tanks were no longer helping Germany advance'. It seems to me that this implies (again, he won't just come out and say it) that Nuremberg was a pointless and therefore unjustified, target, just because Germany was on the defensive.

DT: Yes: it's a slightly strange argument that having moved over to the offensive, the Allies should have held back. More to the point, it ignores the logic (and the extensive scholarship) of total war. De-escalation in the middle of an enormous global conflict might be something for which we'd retrospectively wish, but it's hard to see how it would have happened.

BH: In similar fashion, he spends a lot of time talking about the Allied advance into Germany -- which reinforces the impression of Germans as victims -- and not so much about why the Allies had to attack Germany in the first place. Of course, every reader is likely to have a pretty good idea of why, but surely there should have been a more extended discussion of Germany's own efforts at city bombing -- Belgrade, Rotterdam, Warsaw. Guernica isn't even in the index, and Coventry is mainly invoked to show that German city bombing was as nothing in comparison to what they received in return.

The high emotional register you mention was certainly strange for a book from an academic press. Ultimately, however, I think it is quite effective. As I read the central section of the book, "Land" -- which visits each part of Germany in turn, describing the history of various cities, their experience in the war and the air raids they endured -- I moved through several stages: at first horror at the lives destroyed, and the way they were destroyed, through fire and suffocation; then numbness and even boredom at the repetition; and finally crushing despair as the enormous extent of destruction became clear. Much of this material was new to me also, as too were the later sections ("Protection", on Germany's civil defence system, was especially fascinating to me). It's constructed, as you say, but at least it's artfully so.

DT: I absolutely agree, and I think that this is a primary reason to recommend the book to English language readers. For me, the final section, "Stone", which concentrates on the damage to German architectural, cultural and intellectual heritage was particularly affecting. In part, this was because it was a part of strategic bombing which, rather stupidly, I'd never thought about, whilst being aware in general terms of the damage that must have been done. More than that, however, it seemed to me a clear example of what was tragic about strategic bombing. Inevitably, bombing cities meant the destruction of much of what had been good or valuable in German culture, that which might have offered a conceptual alternative to the nihilism of Nazism. Friedrich's point, I suppose, would be that this applied to people as well as artefacts, books and buildings. It doesn't necessarily follow, however, that strategic bombing was a failure, or that it shouldn't have taken place.

BH: Yes. In fact, all through this whole section, I couldn't help but wonder -- if Germany was so cultured, so civilised, how and why did it put itself in a position where other nations thought they had no option but to obliterate its cities? It's an old, old question, though, and not one we are likely to answer here ...

DT: What about the reception of the book? How controversial do you think it actually is?

BH: It takes two to make a controversy: one to say something and the other to be outraged by it. Have you seen much evidence of the latter? It's probably unlikely that The Fire could have as much effect in English-speaking countries as it did in Germany, where it was a best-seller and led to a flood of recollections about living through the bombing. But I would have expected some sensitivity to a German coming close to saying that British airmen murdered his countrymen in their hundreds of thousands. Or can such a viewpoint be tolerated in Britain today? (I've seen nothing about it in Australia yet, even though many thousands of Australian airmen participated in Bomber Command's attacks on German cities.)

DT: You're right. Freidrich's book is only just on the way out here, but so far as I can see there has been nothing like the reaction the publisher would like. It may still come. But my feeling is that it won't. See, for example, David Cesarani's Independent review. I'd suggest four reasons for this. First, the idea of strategic bombing as the bad bit of Britain's good war is well established. That doesn't mean that it is understood or morally resolved. But saying that British airmen killed lots of German civilians is not exactly new: I think you'd arouse more controversy going on TV to justify the iconic Dresden bombing than you would do by claiming it was an awful tragedy that we shouldn't have done. If anything, the quandary over strategic bombing serves to spotlight the high purpose for which most Britons like to think they fought. Second, the proportion of the British population directly involved in bombing and still surviving is extremely small, whereas the proportion of the German population who can still configure themselves, if they choose, as victims, is large. Third, there has always been a strand of British thought which sees the Nazi era as a tragedy for Germany. Friedrich's book, with its celebration of the cultural heritage Germany lost, fits that understanding rather well. Fourth, there will be much here which is new to British readers -- not the Bomber Command stuff, all too obviously drawn from the Official History, Middlebrook and Hastings, but the descriptions of what was going on on the ground. Novelty will overcome outrage.

BH: That's probably not such a bad thing, because for me the main value of The
Fire is in the account of the effects of the bombing. The cultural loss that you mention was just staggering, and I too had little idea of this. I like your suggestion about the connection between the questionable morality of bombing and the unquestioned justness of Britain's cause. It's almost like a myth of the bomber offensive -- "well, it was a dirty job, but we had to do it ..." I wonder if this attitude has been present all along, or whether it has evolved more recently? Frederick Taylor's bestselling Dresden (2002) probably played a part in this process (and may have pre-empted some of the sales of The Fire), but unflinching accounts of the British bombing of Germany go back to at least Len Deighton's Bomber (1970), and yes, even Irving's The Destruction of Dresden (1963). As you say, that Allied airmen killed hundreds of thousands of German civilians is not a shocking concept in the English-speaking world, at least to anyone who's been paying attention. Friedrich's ambiguous stance on the "was it murder?" question will probably result in The Fire having little impact in Britain and elsewhere -- whereas it was probably necessary in Germany, given remaining taboos and sensitivities.

DT: I suspect that this 'dirty job but had to be done' aspect was present at some level from the war itself. Mark Connelly's history of Bomber Command, Reaching for the Stars (2001), is quite good on this aspect. I think there's also an undercurrent of (technological?) pride which doesn't get spoken about in liberal circles except jokingly, and which is part of a national myth -- "we always start wars badly, we're not fighters by nature, but don't rouse us or we'll give you back twice what you gave us." Again, hopefully the value in Friedrich's book here will be to make people think about the broader moral implications without necessarily rejecting the overall strategy.

So. A useful book, but not a good work of history? A populist work, with some relevance to historians? Would you let undergraduates read it? Would you buy it for a research library?

BH: The short answer: 'It depends'! I couldn't recommend The Fire as an investigation into how or why the Allies bombed Germany, or whether it was moral for them to do so -- at least, not by itself. It's much more valuable as an account of what the bombing did to Germans and their heritage -- but it does neglect the economic effects.

DT: Agreed. I'd be reluctant to set it as class reading for undergraduates, but I might well use it as a comparative text (perhaps with Taylor's Dresden) in an MA class.

BH: Yes. Paul Addison's and Jeremy A. Crang's edited collection Firestorm (2006) or Grayling's Among the Dead Cities (2006) might also be good points of comparison. But as a primary source for understanding modern Germany's changing relationship with its past, The Fire is probably essential. We've been fairly critical of it here, but overall I think we'd both agree that it manages to be more than the sum of its parts.

Jörg Friedrich. The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Distributed in Australia by Footprint Books.

I haven't really done any proper (as in critical) book reviews here before, but I'll be posting one in the near future. This made me worry about possible conflicts of interest. Which is probably completely silly and ridiculously self-important. Nonetheless, I've written a review policy for Airminded.