I'm very pleased to be able to say that I have signed a book contract with Ashgate Publishing. This contract has two key components: firstly, that I will revise my PhD thesis for publication as a book; and secondly, that Ashgate will publish said book so that people can read it. A thesis is not a book: there's much which needs be changed to make the text accessible to an wider audience. And apart from updating and revising the text, I may be making some structural changes and/or introducing some new material. It will probably be published in 2013 (apocalypse permitting, of course). Ashgate have a great record in academic history (soon to be enhanced by the publication of Gavin Robinson's book) so this is a Very Good Thing.

I don't anticipate that my blogging will fall off dramatically (at least until the deadline looms!), so I hope that you all will continue to stop by!

Edit: I should have at least mentioned the book's proposed title: The Next War in the Air: Britain's Fear of the Bomber, 1908-1941.

Let's turn now to Tolkien's The Hobbit and Smaug's attack on Lake-town (Esgaroth). In my PhD thesis I identified six characteristics of the ideal theory of the knock-out blow from the air: it would be a surprise attack, on a large scale, which would strike at the interdependent structures and civilian morale of its targets, and would wreak massive destruction with great speed. In the 1920s and 1930s, fictional and non-fictional predictions of victory through airpower would usually feature four or five out of these six. As I'll now show, The Hobbit has four: surprise, morale, speed, destruction. Of course, Lake-town isn't a modern, industrial society, nor is Smaug a technologically advanced enemy nation, so the fit isn't going to be perfect. It doesn't need to be, though.

There being so many editions of The Hobbit, it seems a bit pointless to cite page numbers here, but all my quotes come from chapter XIV, 'Fire and Water'.

Smaug's attack is sudden. Lake-Town has only a few minutes' warning after the Lonely Mountain lights up in flames:

Then warning trumpets were suddenly sounded, and echoed along the rocky shores [...] So it was that the dragon did not find them quite unprepared.

Smaug's attack shatters morale:

Already men were jumping into the water on every side. Women and children were being huddled into laden boats in the market-pool. Weapons were flung down. There was mourning and weeping [...] The Master himself was turning to his great gilded boat, hoping to row away in the confusion and save himself. Soon all the town would be deserted and burned down to the surface of the lake.

Smaug's attack is fast:

Before long, so great was his speed, they could see him as a spark of fire rushing towards them and growing ever huger and more bright [...] Still they had a little time. Every vessel in the town was filled with water, every warrior was armed, every arrow and dart was ready, and the bridge to the land was thrown down and destroyed, before the roar of Smaug's terrible approach grew loud, and the lake rippled red as fire beneath the awful beating of his wings.

Smaug's attack is destructive. It destroys Lake-town completely and kills a quarter of its inhabitants:

Fire leaped from thatched roofs and wooden beam-ends as he hurtled down and past and round again, though all had been drenched with water before he came. Once more water was flung by a hundred hands wherever a spark appeared. Back swirled the dragon. A sweep of his tail and the roof of the Great House crumbed and smashed down. Flames unquenchable sprang high into the night. Another swoop and another, and another house and then another sprang afire and fell; and still no arrow hindered Smaug or hurt him more than a fly from the marshes.

Not only do these broadly constitute a knock-out blow from the air, we can, if we're bold, point to more specific elements which are suggestive of contemporary reactions to or concerns about the bomber threat. The warning trumpets are like air-raid sirens. The panic as men drop their weapons and join the women and children fleeing onto the lake is like the terrified exodus which was predicted to precede and/or follow air raids. The filling of water vessels for use against fire was a standard part of air-raid precautions. Destroying whole towns and killing a quarter of their people is not far off what was feared would happen in the next war.

To the above, we may also add that Smaug will always get through, just as the bomber would:

Roaring he swept back over the town. A hail of dark arrows leaped up and snapped and rattled on his scales and jewel, and their shafts fell back kindled by his breath burning and hissing into the lake.

Smaug is only stopped because Bard, a captain of archers, learns at the last moment of a weak spot in the dragon's armour of jewels. He learns this by another type of Tolkienesque airpower (though admittedly not one which most airpower historians would recognise): a bird (specifically, a thrush) flies from the Lonely Mountain with this information. Note that as signals officer in his frontline service, Tolkien was responsible for his unit's carrier pigeon communications, so this seems like a link with his wartime experiences. But I say 'seems' because there's no direct evidence for it.

And that's the problem: there's no direct evidence that any of the similarities or parallels I've written about here are more than coincidences. Tolkien seems to have written little about the writing of The Hobbit, perhaps because it was done as a kind of side-project to his own elaborations of the mythology of Middle Earth. Later, when he was writing The Lord of the Rings, he corresponded extensively with his adult son Christopher about his progress, sending him drafts and so on. So there we have a lot to go on. But as far as I can see there's little like this for The Hobbit. (The various drafts for The Hobbit have been published, so that would be one place to look.) Nor have I found any evidence that Tolkien took much interest in discussions of the character of the next war, though I could easily have missed it if it exists. And it seems that while The Hobbit was published in 1937, the year of Guernica and about the height of bomber anxiety, it was substantially complete around 1932 or so, which is fairly early for a knock-out blow novel.

Conversely, it's easy to see, and to prove, that Tolkien was hugely influenced by northern European mythologies from Finland to Anglo-Saxon England. This was his bread and butter, after all. He himself often noted that the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf was a critical inspiration for his writing. In 1936, he gave an important lecture entitled 'Beowulf: the monsters and the critics'; the following year The Hobbit was published. It would strain credulity to suggest that the third and final monster defeated by Beowulf, an unnamed dragon, was not in Tolkien's mind when he created Smaug: it even leaves its lair for the same reason as Smaug, enraged because one of its treasures is stolen. And, also like Smaug, the dragon in Beowulf goes on an aerial killing spree (this is from a modern translation):

The despoiler was soon
spitting out flames
and burning down buildings,
bringing men death
and enormous dread;
it had no intention
of leaving anything
alive in that country.

Given this, it's reasonable to ask whether looking for contemporary influences from the fear of the bomber is worthwhile at all. I think it is, but it has to be done carefully. Just because mythology was Tolkien's dominant influence doesn't mean that there can be no others. Smaug is not the bomber, but Smaug is not Beowulf's dragon either: there are other dragons in there too.

This is why I keep coming back to Tolkien's own experience in war. I discussed in the previous post how his earliest attempt at writing the mythology of Middle Earth was written during the war (and was certainly influenced by it), while back in England recovering from trench fever. During his convalescence in 1916 he stayed in and around Hull, near the North Sea. Hull was raided by Zeppelins a dozen or so times; Tolkien witnessed one of these raids from afar and experienced another while staying in the town. I don't know if he ever wrote about what he saw, but another eyewitness did, Basil Liddell Hart (who was also sent there to convalesce after serving at the front). Liddell Hart was very much struck by the sight of civilians trekking out of Hull. In 1925, in Paris, or the Future of War, he wrote:

Who that saw it will ever forget the nightly sight of the population of a great industrial and shipping town, such as Hull, streaming out into the fields on the first sound of the alarm signals? Women, children, babies in arms, spending night after night huddled in sodden fields, shivering under a bitter wintry sky –- the exposure must have caused far more harm than the few bombs dropped from two or three Zeppelins.

This experience was one of the keys to Liddell Hart's belief in the power of the bomber in the 1920s and early 1930s; it and similar incidents were responsible for the idea that civilians would evacuate cities in panic when air raids took place. But it's hard not to think also of the people of Lake-town fleeing into the night onto the lake when Smaug attacked. So did the Hull raids also influence Tolkien when writing The Hobbit? I think it must have done.

In the next and last post, I'll look at what we can learn about Tolkien's attitudes to total war from his later writing.

Part of my PhD thesis involved conceptualising the various forms of defence against aerial bombardment put forward during the thirty-odd years before the Second World War: things like anti-aircraft guns, air-raid shelters, an international air force, and so on. Something I didn't include was what we might call spiritual air defence. Partly because I didn't come across much like that in my sources, and probably partly because of my own rationalistic bent. This may have been unfortunate.

What do I mean by spiritual air defence? Here's what got me thinking about it: Padre Pio, Italy's flying monk. (Technically, bilocating, but that doesn't scan as well.) Here's a sober, historical account by Claudia Baldoli:

With the intensification of bombing after the armistice in September 1943, a rumour spread across Italy that God had granted Padre Pio could fly and intercept the enemy's bombs [...] it seemed plausible that Padre Pio could fly and intercept the enemy's bombs. With the exception of Foggia, which was repeatedly bombed between May and September 1943, the area of Apulia where he lived in Gargano received no raids, and this convinced many that the rumour must be true. For decades after 1944, the supporters of his case for beatification were even able to find RAF pilots who were willing to confirm that it was indeed an apparition of a flying apparition of a flying Padre Pio which had stared at them so directly that they abandoned the mission and returned to their bases without dropping bombs.

As might be expected, there are a number of accounts on the web which add more details but somehow don't add plausibility. One of the better ones is an article by Malcolm Day from the September 2002 Fortean Times. This doesn't mention the rumours circulating among the Italian population, only to the claims (or claims of claims) made by Allied pilots:

In their approach to the town [San Giovanni], several pilots reported seeing an apparition in the sky in the form of a monk with upheld hands. They also described some sort of 'force-field' that prevented them flying over the target rendering them unable to drop their bombs.

Supposedly this happened repeatedly, and was verified by 'Bernardo Rosini, general of the Aeronautica Italiana, and part of the United Air Command at the time' (presumably this means the Italian Co-Belligerent Air Force, which flew on the Allied side, though not over Italian soil) and an unnamed 'US Commanding General'. Some posts on the ArmyAirForces forum provide some further (albeit conflicting) details, suggesting that the first raid took place on 16 July 1943, carried out by 5th Bombardment Wing, XII Bomber Command. An example of an eye-witness account (though written more than half a century after the event) can also be found there:

I almost killed Padre Pio.....the enclosed flight record of bombing raids, shows that Villa San Giovanni was scheduled to be wiped out with 150,000 pounds of bombs. Allied Intelligence had information (erroneous) that German troops had occupied the hospital, friary and town of San Giovanni. Two minutes from dropping the bombs, the Colonel in the lead aircraft saw an apparition of a Monk, 30,000 feet tall, and broke off the bomb-run and proceeded to the secondary target. The Colonel was a Protestant, and when he was later shown a photo of Padre Pio said that was the apparition.

A 30,000-foot tall monk would certainly seem enough to scare off anyone, but I am worried that more reliable accounts are not available. In any case, I'm more interested in the wartime rumours than the postwar stories which, as Baldoli notes, were used to argue for Pio's beatification. (I guess it helped: he was beatified in 1999 and canonised in 2002.)

This being history, there are always other examples. For example, the yogic flyers who, it was promised, would obviate the need for an anti-ballistic missile shield by jumping around on crash mats. This, they claimed, would reduce hostility throughout the world and so prevent an attack from taking place in the first place. (They scheduled a press conference in Washington DC to announce their plans on the morning of 11 September 2001. I don't know how it went.) Which itself is reminiscent of the efforts of Dion Fortune's Fraternity of the Inner Light, which between 1939 and 1942 used the combined psychic efforts of its members to influence the war in Britain's favour. Another British occultist, Gerald Gardner (a key figure in the founding of Wicca), also used magic to fight for Britain, performing a rite at the Rufus Stone on 31 July 1940, designed to prevent the coming German invasion. Later claims that yet another famous magician used his powers in an MI5 operation designed to lure Rudolf Hess to Britain, appear to be unfounded: Aleister Crowley's diaries show that the Great Beast did no such thing, though in February 1941 he did have an idea for 'a union of magicians to beat the Nazis' which he didn't follow through with.

Again, though, these are the efforts of (self-appointed, magical) elites. And we're drifting away from the air war too. What about popular beliefs in spiritual air defence? How about the vision of Christ seen by people in the village of Firle, near Lewes in Sussex, in November 1940:

The shepherd, Mr. Fowler, of Firle, told how he saw a white line spread across the sky and from it appeared a vision of Christ crucified on the Cross.

Then six angels took form, he said. They had long, white wings and one was playing a harp.

The vision lasted for two minutes then faded.

[...] he was not the only one who had seen the angels.

A Newhaven evacuee, Mrs. Steer, of The Street, Firle, and her sister, Mrs. Evans, said:

"We could see the nail in the crossed feet of Christ."

But although the vision was seen in the sky, it apparently was not specifically related to the air war in any way by those who saw it. Steer said that 'The village is taking the vision as a sign for a British victory'. A Daily Mirror reporter who interviewed Fowler found the shepherd wondering if 'it really was Christ come to help put our world straight again'. It's not quite what I'm after.

Perhaps A. E. Cook was inspired by the Firle visions. He was a munitions worker who saw believed that he saw angels 'all in white' converging on the cross on top of the dome of St Paul's Cathedral in London:

Those angels... were loved ones that had been taken away from us, but who, nevertheless, are still with us; yes, they and thousands of others... are still with us, watching over London, watching over Coventry, watching over Plymouth, watching over Bristol; watching over all those towns of ours that have felt the ruthlessness of German bombing.

The angels of St Paul's are more clearly related to the bomber war than the Jesus of Firle (though 'watching over' blitzed towns is still much more passive than flying overhead and intercepting bombers or erecting a force field). Vanessa Chambers quotes Cook's vision as an example of resorting to the supernatural in order to cope with the psychological stresses of the Blitz. But she argues that this was a rare response. Much more characteristic was the dramatic increase in interest in superstitions, charms and astrology, particularly in the form of newspaper horoscopes. The latter seems to have replaced the spiritualism of the First World War as the dominant esoteric response of the British people to war.

In fact, Chambers suggests that this supernatural turn can be likened to the fatalistic attitude of soldiers on the battlefield: if there's a bullet out there with your name on it, there's nothing you can do about it but accept what happens. Again, this is a passive, internal form of air defence (which I'm relieved to note is covered in my thesis's schema in the first section of chapter three). It may well be that the British people felt that their active defences were well enough provided for by the government, in the form of Fighter Command, Bomber Command, and Anti-Aircraft Command, whereas Italians felt entirely undefended and so had greater need of supernatural assistance. Or perhaps, as they say, more research is required.

A tweet from William J. Turkel alerted me to the possibility of using 18th century-style fonts in LaTeX. The most noticeable difference from modern typesetting is the long s, but there are different ligatures too. There are a number of ways to do it but the easiest way is with the inbuilt Kepler Fonts package. (The Fell Types are far prettier, but look difficult, or at least tedious, to install. Font management is one of LaTeX's biggest weaknesses.) Just insert the following in your preamble and you're done:

\usepackage[fullveryoldstyle]{kpfonts}

Well, almost. This simply replaces every s with a long s, which is not right. Most importantly, long s is generally not used at the end of a word, so you need to replace these with 's='. Here's what the first paragraph of my thesis looks like when done this way:

I wish I'd known about this before submitting it.

Shirley Jacobs writes to inform me that the W E Johns Appreciation Society now has a website. It's clearly quite an active group -- there's a magazine, Biggles Flies Again, published twice a year, and regular meetings with the next in Derby on 24 October. Via the site, one can keep up with W. E. Johns, Biggles, Worrals et al in the press, or explore the wider world of Bigglesiana on the web. (Which introduced me to a site devoted to Popular Flying, a magazine edited by Johns which featured articles by a number of airpower writers familar to me, such as J. M. Spaight, E. Colston Shepherd, Arch Whitehouse and Nigel Tangye.)

At one point I had managed to work in a brief reference to Biggles in my thesis, but sadly had to cut it for reasons of space. So here's what I was going to say!

And even Biggles, the flying adventurer whose popularity with boys dates from this period, got into the act [of popularising the knock-out blow theory] in Biggles and the Black Peril (published 1935), foiling German plans to set up navigational beacons on the English coast in preparation for a sudden and massive air attack.

I started this PhD not far off four years ago. Yesterday I received my examiners' reports, and they both recommended that I 'be awarded the PhD degree without further examination or amendment' (though not without criticism, I must add). So now all that remains for me to do is submit two permanent bound copies to the university, and then I get to wear the much-coveted silly hat!

So, the thesis is done, if not dusted. What do I do now?

The first thing to do is to earn a living. That's now sorted, at least for the next few months; I'm doing a bit more IT work and, more interestingly, some sessional tutoring for the Arts Faculty. I last did that in 2006, so it's useful to be able to burnish my teaching credentials. The two subjects I'm tutoring are called Total War in Europe: World War One and From Homer to Hollywood. I'm enjoying both very much so far. Total War in Europe is of course right up my alley: this week in tutes we discussed militarism before 1914, and next week we'll be looking at the July Crisis. It's hard to make that material uninteresting, but I'm the man for the job. From Homer to Hollywood is an interdisciplinary breadth subject (for those familiar with the terminology of the Melbourne Model) for first year students, which examines representations of war in a variety of poems, novels, plays, paintings and films. We've started off with the Iliad and The Song of Roland; later we'll get to do War and Peace, Guernica and the film Gallipoli, among many other things. It's a bit outside my comfort zone in terms of approach (more litcrit than historical) but I'm learning a lot and enjoying teaching the first years.

Then there's the career. It's not exactly a good time to be looking for academic jobs (when is it ever), but I'm going to give it a bash. I need to publish though, and if I can get, say, two papers in the pipeline this year, that will help with that. I've got plenty of ideas, but as yet little inclination to get stuck into writing again. That will have to change! There's also the thesis-to-book process to begin, assuming it isn't roundly rubbished by the examiners, of course.

Finally, there's blogging. I do intend to keep writing at Airminded, although I'm not really sure what I'll have to say -- the problem with a research blog is that when you're not doing research, you're probably not going to be blogging that much either! That is something I'll have to cope with though, as I've just been made a member of Cliopatria, in place of the now-defunct Revise and Dissent. It's an honour but one which I'll have to work at justifying.

Some more navel-gazingpost-thesis analysis. Above is a plot of the number of primary sources (1908-1941) I cite by date of publication. (Published sources only, excluding newspaper articles -- of which there are a lot -- and government documents. Also, it's not just airpower stuff, though it mostly is.) I actually have no idea if it's a lot or not, and I'm sure there are some selection effects in there. But, although I've certainly not attempted any sort of statistical analysis (nor will I!), I think some features of the plot reflect real features of the airpower literature of period, at least as it relates to the bombing of civilians.

Firstly, there's a substantial increase in the number of sources in the 1930s, particularly from 1934 when there is a big peak. I argue in the thesis that this was only partly and indirectly due to the obvious reason (the arrival of Hitler in 1933). The more important reason was the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva, which ran between 1932 and 1934 (actually it went longer, but was dead in the water when Germany walked out). This roused airpower writers -- whether pro- or anti-disarmament -- to action, and gave them a reason to explain to the public the effects of bombing on cities. The slight rise from the late 1920s is also due to the conference, I think, or rather the optimistic Locarno-era preparations for it. The big peak in 1927 is a bit odd, though. Let's call that an outlier.

The other two noticeable peaks are in 1909 and 1938. The first was very early in the public's awareness of flight. That really started in 1908, but the possible defence implications came to the fore in 1909 -- the founding of the Aerial League of the British Empire, the first phantom airship panic, the publication of the first serious books on the topic. And of course the dreadnought panic -- it was a peak year for Anglo-German rivalry. The 1938 peak was the culmination of the building concern over the previous decade. What the plot doesn't show is that, unlike previous years, it was largely sceptical, based on evidence from the Spanish Civil War. The Sudeten crisis that September showed that the fear of the knock-out blow still had a strong grip on the public and the press. But afterwards there's a sharp decline in interest, which I maintain is real.

This is the same thing, but for secondary sources (i.e. published after 1941; again not just works on airpower). There's a superficial similarity, in that both plots slope upwards from left to right. But in this case that's much more likely to be an artifact, a function of the sources I've read and chosen to cite. Naturally I'm going to have a bias towards more recent sources, which build upon and extend earlier research. Earlier works will often lack the perspective that comes with distance, and they can be harder to find too, as libraries shuffle them to the stacks to offsite stores or dispose of them altogether.

Just as importantly, at least when it comes to policy studies, earlier secondary sources also lacked access to primary sources, despite being closer in time to them. That's something which does show up here. In the years after the Second World War, government documents were still confidential, and so it's mainly only the official histories which are of much use today, along with official document collections. (In some cases, in fact, they have not yet been superseded.) From the late 1950s, the (brand-new) 50-years rule meant that Edwardian-era documents began to become publicly available, and then First World War documents. If this had continued, it would have taken until the 1980s until historians had access to official sources for the 1930s! But luckily, in 1968 the fifty-year rule became a thirty-year rule, and by the mid-1970s the whole of the Second World War period was open for research. And that's exactly when the first detailed studies of British airpower policy, outside of the official histories, began to appear.

But I wonder what would have happened if the fifty-year rule had remained in place. Would airpower historians have been forced to look more widely for sources, instead of mining the (extremely rewarding) seams of government archives? Perhaps my own area would have been thoroughly worked over long ago?

Partly in lieu of the thing itself, but mainly just for fun, here are some word clouds of my thesis (generated with Wordle). So the above image shows the 75 most frequent words in the entire document, with the biggest word being the most common. (So it's something to do with air and war and London then ...) Below are clouds for each chapter. I just copied the text from the PDF file into Wordle; it works pretty well, except for some reason that process introduces weird breaks in some words. I don't really spend a significant chunk of chapter 4 talking about counter-os and ensives!

Introduction:

Chapter 1:

Chapter 2:

Chapter 3:

Chapter 4:

Chapter 5:

Chapter 6:

Chapter 7:

Chapter 8:

Chapter 9:

Conclusion:

1. Submit PhD thesis. done