In May 1941, after nine months of German bombing and the evacuation of yet another British army from Europe, the Daily Mirror printed a fascinating little piece of futurism, in the form of a letter written as though it was May 1944, with Britain victorious and Germany prostrate. The headline itself gives some idea of this future shock: '"On our television set we saw CHURCHILL in BUSTED BERLIN!"' -- the television transmitters at Alexandra Palace had been switched off since September 1939. Invoking the early television experiments functions here as a promise of a better world to come, and not just because the 'bad old war days' will be over.

There isn't a lot about how the war actually went, but it would seem that it ended in 1943. There's no indication that the United States played any part in the war (though it is friendly to Britain; there are now no 'passports and visas and quotas' to bar travel between them). Or the Soviet Union for that matter (Barbarossa is still over a month away at this point). Britain seems to have won the war through bombing, or at least that's the only form of military activity mentioned:

My gosh, they've certainly got on with the work of rebuilding Berlin after those terrific winter blitzes by the R.A.F.! British authorities are directing the work. It hasn't so much been renovation as recreation, because just before the Germans sued for an armistice, there was precious little left of Berlin and it had been completely evacuated of everyone bar soldiers and A.R.P. people.

This (along with Wilhelmstrasse and Friedrichstrasse being 'just blotted out') suggests that British air raids became so heavy that Berlin had to be evacuated of all non-essential personnel. Hamburg too was hit hard: it 'was finished in the spring of 1942 and it isn't functioning as a port yet'. At some point Hitler died, though how isn't stated. It seems clear that the British air raids were the cause of the German armistice request (this was written long before unconditional surrender, of course), or perhaps that's just me.

The letter is written by Bob in London to Rosemary, who has recently moved to the United States. This gives plenty of excuses for 'remember whens', for example referring to 'the terrific emotion aroused by Victory Day':

You were still in London then, so you'll remember how wild with delight the surging crowds were when the lights of London shone again! Remember how we clambered on buses, taxis, Army lorries, whooping and shouting?

And remember how, after carrying some airmen shoulder high, the crowd spotted some men who were already starting to rebuild part of Regent-street -- and chaired them, too?

This segues into the real point of the piece, which is to imagine the postwar rebuilding of London - even Bob's return address is given as 'Dalston Garden Suburb, London, E.8.'

They've practically finished the new squares and circuses. We can see now how right the Government was in prohibiting the rebuilding of bombed crowded areas. Why, the big new square near St. Paul's gives it all the noble architectural advantages of St. Peter's, Rome. And those badly blitzed tenement blocks in East London have never been rebuilt as tenements.

Indeed, they seem to have been rebuilt as anything but housing, instead they 'reappeared as libraries, technical colleges, recreational centres'. Harry (presumably Bob and Vera's son) is studying at one for his architect's qualification:

There's been no holding him back since he obtained his diploma through the Metropolitan Improvements Society's London College, which was built on part of ruined Holborn!

All of London's railway stations are being redesigned; young Harry has entered his design for the new Victoria Station in 'the big contest run by the British National Railways Corporation'. The King and Queen recently opened the 'South London Art Palace', which has been popularly dubbed the Crystal Palace ('Queer how London customs cling!').

Bob closes by reflecting that the best legacy of the war is 'the continuation of that friendly neighbourliness that started during the war':

Remember how helpful and kind everyone was during the blitz? How people forgot about being lords, ladies, esquires and gents -- and concentrated on being human beings? Well, the spirit is still living in Britain, and sometimes I think it was worth going through the war to win that!

That, and the nationalisation of Britain's railways, a revolution in urban planning, more educational opportunities, and television. It's some way from the Beveridge Report, say, but it's a start.

This is a BBC interview with Group Captain Robert Lister, recorded in 1980, about his experiences as a junior officer in 20 Squadron on the North-West Frontier. He transferred there in 1935, and flew Audaxes in air control operations against Waziri tribespeople, sometimes in support of the Army, sometimes independently. He candidly notes that the 250-lb bombs were the ones which would be used against villages, but also that leaflets were invariably dropped beforehand, warning of an imminent attack.

But the clip isn't just Lister talking; it's Lister talking over his own cinefilm footage from 1935! Both from the ground and from the air, bombing and strafing Waziri villages. Also to be seen are the detonation of an improvised explosive device planted in the landing strip by the rebels, and one of the goolie chits affixed to the side of every Audax, to be used in the event of a forced landing. Fascinating stuff.

Thanks to Marc Wiggam for the lead.

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

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

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

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

Well, darn it all to heck.

This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.

]]> http://airminded.org/2008/07/01/oscar-foxtrot-foxtrot-sierra/feed/ 5 http://airminded.org/2008/06/14/showdown/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=showdown http://airminded.org/2008/06/14/showdown/#comments Sat, 14 Jun 2008 09:12:06 +0000 Brett Holman http://airminded.org/?p=514

I was invited this week to take part in a 'round table' discussion between Major Paul Moga (USAF), Professor James Arthur Mowbray (Air War College), and selected bloggers with an interest in aviation (including Scott Palmer of the Avia-Corner). I'm not sure the producers realised that I'm down under, but although the scheduled time for the chat actually was at a reasonable hour, my time, I had to decline because of a prior engagement. At least it spared everyone concerned the trouble of translating my native Strine on the fly ...

The purpose was to advertise a documentary series called Showdown: Air Combat, which starts this Sunday on the Military Channel. Which I'm happy to do in this case, because the aforementioned discussion has been made freely available online. Of course I won't be able to watch it, but it looks interesting: the basic idea being to replay, using warbirds or RC models, ten notable dogfights from the First World War on. Sadly, only one episode features a British aeroplane, that on the Red Baron's last flight.

The discussion can be played below, or listened to here. It lasts for about 45 minutes.

At one point (about 25 minutes in), Prof. Mowbray says that the aeroplane was always viewed as one of the most expensive weapon systems, and that so when Douhet started talking about fleets of thousands of bombers, everybody laughed at him because nobody could afford that many. Of course, in a discussion like this there's not the time to fully qualify one's remarks, and I'd hate for anyone to take me to task for a mistake made when speaking off the cuff, but I can't agree. Before 1914, people like Claude Grahame-White often made the argument that you could buy a thousand aeroplanes, say, for the cost of one dreadnought -- and it might only take one bomb from one aeroplane to sink that dreadnought. A bargain at twice the price, if true. And at the end of the war, the great powers did have massive fleets of aircraft -- the RAF had over 22000 aircraft on its books (though this number includes every category of aeroplane: reserves, trainers, obsolete models and probably scraps of broken wing sitting in the corner of the hangar). It probably would have had many more had the war continued into 1919. But don't let my pedantry put you off having a listen!

I was remiss in not mentioning the 12th Military History Carnival at Thoughts on Military History when it took place last month. My eye was drawn to ExecutedToday.com's post about Harry 'Breaker' Morant and Peter Handcock, the Australian soldiers executed in 1902 for killing Boer prisoners-of-war. There's still a debate about whether Kitchener issued an unwritten order to take no prisoners, meaning that the Australians were made scapegoats as a sop to either the Boer government (i.e. so it would consider peace) or to the British public. It seems unlikely to me, on the face of it, or at least unnecessary -- it's not like similar, illegal but tacitly accepted, acts were unknown in the later wars of the twentieth century.

By chance, I caught an episode of the excellent (but cancelled) Rewind the other night which dealt with the Breaker. The transcript is online, and is worth a read: it does poke some holes in the scapegoaters' arguments.

"Slough" by John Betjeman (1937):

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.

And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women's tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad,
They've tasted Hell.

It's not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It's not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren't look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

David Brent's analysis of "Slough":

'Right, I don't think you solve town planning problems by dropping bombs all over the place, so he's embarrassed himself there' -- brilliant.

But some people did think like that, or at least wanted to use the need for urban reconstruction after intensive bombing as an opportunity to build a better city. Even more common were plans for reconstruction before war came, to build a city which would better protect its inhabitants from bombing as well as provide a more pleasant way of life. Indeed, the latter might well be a byproduct of the former, as Alistair Cooke suggested in a review of Lewis Mumford's The Culture of Cities (1938). He first apologised for criticising Mumford's penchant for 'philosophic blueprint[s]', and then added that:

But it is inevitable at a time when A.R.P. underlines the fact that idealism is possibly the last drive a community acts on when it decides to rebuild itself. Profit, plague, satiation, and especially fear are paramount; a regrettable conclusion that Mr. Mumford himself amply proves in his section on "War as City-Builder."

He tells in masterly detail of the mediaeval [sic] city's ache for security after five centuries of looting and civic bankruptcy. But it is likely that radical reform in street-planning, and (in this country) in greenbelt planning, will take effect not from somebody's idealism but from Mr. Langdon-Davies's insistence that air raids make such foresight inevitable. Planning for war may, in this instance, bring about peace-time playgrounds that philanthropy would never have created.

Not all visions of the bombproofed cities of the future were so positive. Only two weeks later, the same publication reported on the British delegation's report to the 1938 International Housing and Townplanning [sic] Congress, held in Mexico City:

Here we get in all its nakedness a picture of the life to which civilised man will be condemned if air-warfare is to be perpetuated as one of the enduring achievements of civilisation. It is true that his life would not be spent underground, but all the essentials of life would have to be duplicated underground. Car-parks would go beneath the surface so that they could be used as shelters (but according to Professor Haldane they would have to go at least 50 feet down), hospitals would have to go underground, so would museums, for the security of their contents, so should all places of public entertainment, and communications must of course be constructed underground, at a cost of about £1,000 a foot. It is just as well that we should realise what faces us even if actual war in the immediate future is avoided and only the prospect of war overhangs us.

In a society where, apparently, it would either take the threat of war to build truly livable cities, or alternatively, that threat would force life partly underground, one can perhaps understand why 'the hatred of modern life, the desire to see our money-civilization blown to hell by bombs' was 'a thing [...] genuinely felt' by the protagonist of George Orwell's Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). Of course, none of these things happened, but that's another story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The title of this post, of course, comes from Frankie Goes To Hollywood's 1984 classic "Two Tribes":

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

Thank you to CK and especially Ian for their comments.

The big trip to the UK looms. It's my first and I'm greatly looking forward to it -- all the more so because I have long been fascinated by the place and its history. Although I can't say it was always my plan to do a PhD in British military aviation history, looking back, there were some clues:

Go ahead and laugh! This is a drawing I did when I was 9 or 10. It shows a Hawker Hurricane, specifically PZ865, "The Last of the Many", the final production unit. I proudly showed it to our neighbour across the road, who (as I recall) had been in the air force in the war (which back then, meant the Second World War). All I can remember of his reaction was that he said the nose was too long for a Hurricane, and well, he was right :)

I used to draw a lot when I was a kid. Later on it was mostly spaceships and robots, but at this stage there were more aeroplanes than anything else. They were mostly from the Second World War and, aside from a few German adversaries in the background, they're all British. Not Australian, and certainly not American. This was a definite bias on my part: I was also a keen (if inept) maker of model aeroplanes, and when I was given a model of perhaps the greatest fighter of the war, the North American P-51 Mustang, I did not hesitate to stick the RAF decals on it instead of the USAAF ones.

So why was I so pro-British? One big part of it must have been finding Paul Brickhill's biography of Douglas Bader, Reach for the Sky (1954), on my grandfather's bookshelf. I must have read it a dozen times or more. Of course the story of Bader's triumph over the loss of his legs was inspiring, but the part I loved best was about the Battle of Britain itself. The gallant few against the enemy hordes. Dorniers and Hurricanes, Duxford and North Weald, Hugh Dundas and Denis Crowley-Milling. I didn't understand it all but trying to work it out was part of the fun. And I definitely understood that the Brits were the goodies and Jerry the baddies.

So I grew up barracking for the British. This is probably a bit strange in Australia today, and perhaps requires some explanation, because Britain is nowhere near as important to us as it once was, on almost any measure you care to name. I knew they were on our side in the war, and probably had some vague idea that there was some sort of close relationship between Australia and the British going back to Captain Cook. I grew up in a smallish country town, and I suspect there was a residual affection for Britain there which disappeared much earlier in the more cosmopolitan cities. (When we moved down to Melbourne a few years later, nobody I knew cared about the war, much less 242 Squadron -- which is when I turned to drawing spaceships.) But there was another, more important source of my Anglophilia: television. At this time -- the early 1980s -- there were many more British television shows airing in Australia that there are today, or at least it seems that way to me. British sitcoms, in particular, were common even on commercial channels, where today they are not to be found at all. (I don't exactly miss shows of the calibre of Love Thy Neighbour, but what about something that's actually good, like Spaced?) They only show American sitcoms now (Australian ones are almost never worth watching), which is perhaps surprising given that the Australian sense of humour supposedly has more in common with the British equivalent than the American.

There were many British shows I watched regularly at the time, but there were two I (along with all my friends) adored in particular, which were usually shown every weeknight on the ABC (the Australian equivalent of the BBC), almost continually repeated: The Goodies and Doctor Who. These were hugely effective vehicles for spreading ideas about British culture and history, usually stereotypical, distorted and out of context to be sure, but they did help me gain some sort of appreciation of this thing called "Britain". Doctor Who is still well-known today, and deservedly winning new fans in its current incarnation, so I'll talk more about The Goodies, which is much more obscure these days. The Goodies were three men, Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden, and Bill Oddie, who were willing to do "anything, anytime, anywhere", which usually ended up being some absurd job like setting up a pirate radio station and post office (in a submarine just outside the 3-mile limit, naturally), and nearly always involved oversized props at one point or another. One of the three would often end up catching megalomania, with the other two teaming up against him to cut him down to size, which is interesting when you consider that each character represented a social class (upper, middle, working) and if you take the whole thing too seriously, which you shouldn't!

To be honest not all of it has aged that well (sitcoms often don't) and I'm not sure if anyone would find it funny if they hadn't grown up with it; but I still enjoy them, and if you've got half an hour to spare have a look at this episode, "War babies" (in three parts), which was originally broadcast in 1980 and is set during the Second World War.



There's a lot in here, tropes and references which I absorbed impressionistically but only came to understand more fully many years later: newsreels, Neville Chamberlain, war fears, Lady Chatterley's Lover, public schools, conkers, stereotypically dense German sentries, air raid sirens, gas masks, and above all, Winston Churchill: the voice, the cigars, the siren suit, the V sign, we shall fight on the beaches, never in the field of human conflict. And to cap it all off, a surreal replay of both 25 December 1914 and 30 July 1966, coming down to a penalty shootout between Churchill's two-year-old bionic double and a German tank.

Hmmm, come to think of it, it's probably a miracle I don't have more misconceptions about British history than I already do ...

Here in Australia, we're just catching up on the last two series of Foyle's War, a British detective drama which differs from the estimated 734 other British detective dramas in existence by being set in Sussex during the Second World War. This is a very large part of its charm (though due regard must be given to the performances of the three leads, Michael Kitchen, Honeysuckle Weeks, and Anthony Howell -- classic English diffidence and stiff-upper-lippery all round, if you like that sort of thing). The war is used very well, I think -- plots generally revolve around some aspect of wartime experience, such as black marketeering, conscientious objectors, homegrown fascists. The Blitz and the threat of invasion overshadow the early episodes; the Yanks turn up in the later ones and start stealing all the women.

But the episode which screened last Sunday, "Bad blood", initially didn't look very promising in terms of its use of history. There were some uncharacteristically clunky references to various battles and personalities shovelled into a couple of conversations, along the lines of 'well it looks like Russia's done for, Stalingrad will be next to fall (wink wink) and what about old Rommel, eh?' Though it does at least allow us to date one scene to a period of approximately 5 minutes on the morning of 19 August 1942, because we are told that 'it looks like things might work out in Dieppe'! But all of that was forgiven as the central plot unfolded ...

This time, it was about biological warfare experiments: the episode opens with sheep being exposed to (what we later learn is) weaponised, airborne anthrax on a Sussex beach. I'm not going to quibble and say that this episode should therefore have been set on a remote Scottish island, as that's where the real anthrax experiments were carried out. (OK, I suppose I did just say that.) Later, as our heroes are rifling through the house of a Quaker scientist who's legged it, they find some papers in German, which include the phrase: Luft-Gas-Angriff, or "aero-chemical attack". So the story is already starting to stray into my areas of interest. But wait -- there's more.

As one of the secretive types in charge of the anthrax project explains to Chief Superindendent Foyle, the government has to develop biological weapons in case the Germans use them against Britain. Why do they think that might happen? Because

The Germans were experimenting with bacteriological weapons on the Paris Metro and London Underground systems almost 10 years ago -- at least that's what we believe.

Ah-ha! Now that's a clear reference to the Wickham Steed affair, a fairly obscure episode in British history. Which just happens to be one of the defence panics I am researching at the moment!

Henry Wickham Steed was a famous British journalist with a reputation for scoops. He had been The Time's man in Vienna before the First World War; later he became editor of that paper for a few years, before going on to edit Review of Reviews. In 1934, he published a sensational article in Nineteenth Century and After entitled "Aerial warfare: secret German plans". He claimed to have received through unofficial channels records relating to German biological weapons research, including scientific experiments carried out in July 1933 by German secret agents in and around certain Paris Metro and London Underground stations (which of course had served as air raid shelters in the First World War, and would do so again in the Second). These experiments supposedly involved the release of non-toxic marker bacteria into the ventilation systems of the stations, to see how they spread. In itself this was harmless, but the point was to test whether toxic bacteria could be delivered by bombs to the city above, penetrate into the stations below, and infect the civilians huddled inside. So this is what that line of dialogue in Foyle's War is talking about.

Wickham Steed's article caused a minor sensation, which is what I will be looking at. At the time it was published, the Nazis had been in power for over a year and were widely believed to be building an illegal air force, which some people (I'm looking at you, Viscount Rothermere) claimed was already bigger than the RAF. So when that was combined with evidence of German curiosity about the vulnerability to biological weapons of what would likely be the biggest British and French air raid shelters in wartime, it's understandable that some people got nervous. The government began to take the possibility of a German biological weapons programme more seriously, and eventually started making preparations, such as stockpiling vaccines.

What are we to make of Wickham Steed's accusations? Well, in 1992 an epidemiologist named Martin Hugh-Jones took a close look at the affair and wrote an excellent history paper on it. He analysed what is known of the records Wickham Steed claimed to have received (the papers themselves are long gone), and concluded that they were scientifically worthless, because of the lack of proper controls. He speculates that the experiments were indeed carried out, but not on the orders of the German government, and not by trained scientists, but rather by over-enthusiastic students of a course on biological warfare for military personnel and civil defence workers, which was held regularly in Berlin. But it's also possible that Wickham Steed was duped and that the papers were forged: perhaps by Nazis, perhaps by anti-Nazis.

All of that is just a long-winded way of thanking the creator and writer of Foyle's War, Anthony Horowitz, for taking the time and the effort to use some obscure bits of history as colour in his show, and thereby allowing me to feel smug in the knowledge that I was one of the few people on the planet to get the reference :)

All good things must come to an end, and the next season of Foyle's War will sadly be the last.

Ten years ago today, Carl Sagan died. He had been a hero of mine since childhood, since I first watched Cosmos. I would kick the rest of the family out of the lounge room, close the door, turn off the lights, pull the beanbag up to the TV as close as possible, and let Carl show me the Universe and its history. From Empedocles and the water-thief, to the discovery of volcanoes on Io; from Lowell's dreams of Martian cities dying beside canals choked with dust, to Wolf Vishniac's death in Antarctica while paving the way for the search for life on Mars; the Big Bang, the Tunguska Event and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. I can't have been much into double digits when I first watched Cosmos, if that; heady stuff indeed for a young boy. His own joy in the search for knowledge was palpable, infectious, inspirational -- to the extent that I cannot understand how anyone could ever feel any differently. Here's a short clip from one episode of Cosmos, "The edge of forever": more metaphysics than physics, but if you've never seen it before, it will give you an idea of his style; and if you have seen it before, it will transport you again. It still sends shivers down my spine.

Not only did I adore Cosmos the series, and Cosmos the book, I also inhaled his other books: The Cosmic Connection, Broca's Brain, The Dragons of Eden; and later, Contact, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, The Demon-haunted World. Carl hugely influenced my basic worldview: rationality is our best tool for understanding the world, secular humanism our best antidote for the fact that we can never be perfectly rational. We are not at the centre of the Universe, which is anyway indifferent to our presence; but we are sentient, and that is a precious thing, or ought to be, to ourselves and perhaps to others.

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

Carl's love for astronomy also helped steer me into pursuing astronomy as a career. From about the time I saw Cosmos on, I had a burning desire to become an astronomer and explore the Universe too. I nearly did too; I started a PhD and was nearly a year into it when I realised that (a) I wasn't very good at it and (b) I wasn't enjoying it very much. That's not Carl's fault, of course, but astronomy was such a hard thing for me to let go of, having made it a part of me for so long, and that's partly a testament to his eloquence and his passion. To cut a long story short, I switched to an MSc as a sort of consolation prize, while pondering what to do next. And it was during this time that I learned of Carl's illness. He continued to work and to write. A friend, a fellow astro postgrad, saw him speak at a conference in Hawaii and reported that he looked distressingly ill.

Ten years ago today, I sobbed like a child into my girlfriend's arms, and I must confess that I am tearing up even now. (Having Vangelis's "Heaven & Hell Part 1" playing in the background probably doesn't help.) Carl Sagan is gone, and he is sorely missed, but his influence will remain -- at least for as long as I live, and I suspect for much longer than that.

Other memories of Carl which have crossed my personal blog horizon: Bad Astronomy Blog, Centauri Dreams, Respectful Insolence, Cocktail Party Physics, Butterflies and Wheels, a great one from Larvatus Prodeo, and most poignantly of all, from his wife and collaborator Ann Druyan. These are all part of a larger blog commemoration effort (the results of which can be seen here), and the blogless can join in too.

Image source: Wikipedia.