Words

A few days after Xmas, I felt like I should be getting back into reading something thesis-related, but at the same time I still felt like I was still in holiday mode. So I compromised and read something on topic, but a bit lighter than my usual academic fare, namely Waiting for Hitler: Voices from Britain on the Brink of Invasion by Midge Gillies (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2007). The name suggests that it’s along the lines of the ‘forgotten voices’ type of book that seem to be everywhere lately, but I couldn’t say because I haven’t actually read any of them. While it’s certainly heavy on quoting ‘ordinary’ people (Mass-Observation diarists, Dunkirk veterans, internees) and, I’m sure, doesn’t break any new historiographical ground, it’s based on a lot of research, is well-written, and easily moves between the big picture and the small one. I learned a lot about a topic I don’t know much about, namely the British home front from the start of the Norwegian campaign in April 1940, to the start of the Blitz in September. It’s easy for me to focus too much on the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, but in some ways the period leading up to them is more interesting, because people didn’t know what was going to happen next and that’s often when fears come out to play.

One of the aspects of Waiting for Hitler I appreciated was Gillies’ attention to rumours and panics as an index of the insecurity of the British people as they prepared for a possible German invasion. These are fascinating. For example, the slit trenches being dug in Hyde Park were said to be for mass burials in the aftermath of air raids, not protection from bombs. Troops practicing machine-gunning a buoy in a Cornish harbour turned into the accidental death of a boy by machine-gun fire the next day, and then the massacre of dozens of children on the beach the next, strafed by German aeroplanes. Rumours turned the deputy Labour leader Arthur Greenwood into a traitor locked in the Tower, and pencils and chocolates into the poisoned weapons of fifth columnists. In Southampton, the smell from a pickling plant was responsible for a minor panic, when somebody thought it might be poison gas:

ARP wardens paraded in gas masks, while hairdressers slammed their windows and told customers to keep their heads in washbasins.¹

It may sound silly, but it wasn’t really, because the government’s ARP literature warned people to be wary of strange smells as possible evidence of a gas attack.

Stories abounded of new German weapons. For example:

there were tales of German experiments with a cobweb-like material that they had tested over France in 1939. The substance, which they released in large white balloon-like capsules, had covered several square kilometres and clung to people’s hands and faces. In another version it was reported that the substance had appeared over Britain, but it turned out that this was gossamer produced by spiders mating in mid-air.²

Most of these weapons didn’t exist, but the rumours helped explain to those who passed them on why so many armies were crumbling so quickly before the German onslaught. One of the weapons was quite real, however: the paratrooper.
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1. Gillies, Waiting for Hitler, 159.
2. Ibid., 160.

A couple of weeks ago, I showed how the blitzkrieg became the Blitz. Now I’ll show how the knock-out blow became the blitzkrieg.

Despite the abandon with which the term blitzkrieg is thrown around these days to describe the “lightning” German campaigns of the early years of the Second World War, it turns out that it was not a word much used at the time by the German army or German strategists (though neither was it entirely unknown). It’s even been denied that there was even such a strategic concept as blitzkrieg, whether known by that name or not — certainly not until after the German conquest of France, usually held to be the classic example of blitzkrieg. Karl-Heinz Frieser, in his revisionist (but well-received) book The Blitzkrieg Legend opens by saying that

In sober military language, there is hardly any other word that is so strikingly full of significance and at the same time so misleading and subject to misinterpretation as the term blitzkrieg.¹

On Frieser’s account, the attack against France and the Low Countries owed less to some innovative pre-war doctrine and more to individual initiative and astute tactics, resulting in a surprising (and strange) victory.² He argues that rather than thinking of blitzkrieg as strategic in nature — a way to win a war — it might be better conceptualised as an operational idea — a way to win an operation or a campaign (Blitzoperationen, perhaps). This is important, because (according to Frieser), after the fall of France Hitler and his generals made the mistake of thinking they could blitz their way to quick victories, without paying attention to the longer-term economic foundations of a war economy. They fell into the ’semantic trap’ of blitzkrieg. Hence Barbarossa.
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1. Karl-Heinz Frieser, The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2005), 4.
2. This helps explain the otherwise puzzling halt of the panzers before Dunkirk — the German high command lost its nerve as it had lost control of its lower-echelon commanders. It wasn’t the first time they’d tried to slow the panzers down, which were usually running far ahead of the mostly non-mechanised infantry.

The other day I came across a fascinating article by H. L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore. Mencken was very interested in colloquial English, and to this end penned “War words in England”, published in the February 1944 American Speech, about new words coming into use in the British press as a result of the war. Some are still familiar today (like decontamination — for some reason I’d never realised it was first used in connection with anti-gas precautions), some are still familiar enough though no longer current (siren-suit, appropriate attire for the lady shelterer), others are long forgotten (at least, they’re new to me, e.g., to spitfire and to hurricane — to shoot down an enemy plane). He generally avoided invented words which never gained much popularity, along with acronyms or words formed from them.

Here are some of the more interesting words listed by Mencken.

First there’s blitzkrieg/blitz and derivatives: blitzfighter, an ‘airman or soldier engaged in fighting against a blitzkrieg‘;¹ blitzflu, a ‘mild influenza, sudden in its attack’, which struck during the winters of 1941-2 and 1942-3; blitzlull, a break in a blitz; blitzpeace, a peace offensive by Hitler; fireblitzed, ‘Of an area devastated by air bombardment’; flare-blitz, bombers dropping flares. And of course sitzkrieg, a slow war: according to Newsweek (4 March 1940), in coining this the RAF ’scored a direct pun on the word blitzkrieg‘. Despite it’s popularity, there were evidently many people who didn’t like having to use a German word so often — one alternative was to raff (i.e. RAF) a target, another to ruhr it (as in the Ruhr valley, a heavily-industrialised and often-bombed area of western Germany — kind of a reverse coventration). But the Children’s Newspaper thought that the large number of warlike foreign words imported into English perhaps ‘proves that our national genius is for peace rather than war’ (26 July 1941).

Another cluster relates to air raids and associated experiences: flitter, ‘One who sleeps away from home to escape air alarms’ (more usually called a trekker); goofer, someone who doesn’t take shelter during an air raid; jitterbug, `A nervous person’, according to Mencken’s quotes this seems to have a favourite of Cabinet ministers; roof-spotter, somebody watching out for bombers (ie so as to warn the business below that a raid was actually approaching, otherwise work would have to cease everytime an alert sounded); shelteritis, rheumatism; skelter, an air-raid shelter.

Evacuee (from the French evacué) is a word still in use which appears to derive from directly from preparations for air attack in the 1930s; the first use in The Times is from 1938, in the aftermath of Munich. But as with blitzkrieg, there was much resistance at first: ‘Evacuees has a dreadfully alien and official sound, and the novelty of the word is as uncomfortable as new paint’ (Western Evening Herald, 28 October 1939). Many alternatives were proposed, unsuccessfully it seems: pilgrims, shelterers, sojourners, refugees, war guests, ‘Itler’s orphans, movers, exodists/exos (from exodus), dumpees/dumpies, agisters (as though they were farm animals), removee, migrant, transient, scatterer. More successful variants (according to Mencken) were evacuatrix, a female evacuee; guinea-pig, an evacuee or billeted soldier; seavacuation, overseas evacuation, particularly of children; vackie/vack/vickie, abbreviation of evacuee.

Finally, a grab-bag of miscellaneous terms: battle bowler, the helmet worn by soldiers and ARP wardens, a term first heard during the First World War; block-buster, a bomb which can destroy a whole city block (a fun fact to tell students in tutes, I’ve found); bomphlet/bomphleteer, propaganda pamphlets dropped by air and the airmen who drop them; chatter-bug, a civilian who spreads military secrets; parashot/parashooter/paraspotter, Home Guards who are watching for paratroops (itself a new word) — parashot was a very common word in the summer of 1940, which is a testament to the fear of airborne invasion at the time; shiver-sister, a scared civilian (with chatterbug, an invention of Harold Nicolson, apparently); and telefootler, ‘a word for those selfish people who indulge in idle gossip and time-wasting talks on the telephone’ (Herne Bay Press, 1 March 1941). I think this last word should be revived — we all know a telefootler or two, I’m sure.

So the conclusion seems to be that having a war now and then is good for linguistic diversity.

1. H. L. Mencken, “War words in England”, American Speech, 19 (1944), 3-15; JSTOR. All quotes from this source.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

The German bombing of London and other British cities between September 1940 and May 1941 is referred to as “the Blitz”, a contemporary term which, if not actually coined by the press, was certainly popularised by it. Blitz is short for blitzkrieg, German for “lightning war”, which was the label given to the spectacularly mobile armoured offensives, strongly supported by tactical bombing, which led to the rapid conquests of Poland and France. Sometimes it is suggested that it was inappropriate or inaccurate to apply a word having to do with fast-paced ground combat, involving Panzers and Stukas, to a fundamentally different type of warfare, a strategic bombing campaign lasting nine months in which no territory was exchanged and no soldiers even saw each other. For example, after noting the popular origins of blitz, A. J. P. Taylor added as a footnote:

Popular parlance was, of course, wrong. ‘Blitz’ was lightning war. This was the opposite.¹

The Wikipedia page on the Blitz says:

The German military doctrine of speed and surprise was described as Blitzkrieg, literally lightning war, from which the British use of blitz was derived. While German air-supported attacks on Poland, France, the Netherlands and other countries may be described as blitzkrieg, the prolonged strategic bombing of London did not fit the term.

I’d like to suggest here that while it’s true that the Blitz wasn’t a lightning war, nonetheless it was a blitzkrieg. Confused? Hopefully I can explain …

Firstly, note that initially blitz and blitzkrieg were synonymous terms. So immediately after the first big raids on London on 7 September 1940, the Daily Express was already using the familiar term: ‘Blitz bombing of London goes on all night’.² But at the same time, the Spectator was calling it a blitzkrieg:

The full purpose of the Blitzkrieg may have been more fully revealed by the time these lines are read. Its immediate object no doubt is to break morale.³

(Blitzkrieg seems to have been more common at first, but after a month or so it was replaced by blitz.) I think this is significant, because it shows that the British didn’t think of the Blitz as something fundamentally different from blitzkrieg. It was the blitzkrieg, as applied to the attempted conquest of Britain — which, being separated from the Continent by the English Channel, obviously wasn’t going to play out in exactly the same way as it did in Poland and the West.
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1. A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 [1965]), 501.
2. Daily Telegraph, 9 September 1940, p. 1; quoted in OED entry for “blitz”.
3. “A decisive hour”, Spectator, 13 September 1940, 260. Emphasis in original.

Last year I talked about J. M. Spaight’s The Sky’s the Limit (here, here and here), and how its account of the then-developing Battle of Britain was somewhat surprising to anyone familiar with the standard narrative of the summer of 1940. Which is not at all to say that the standard narrative is wrong, just that things quite naturally looked different while the Battle was still in progress.

Now I’m looking at press accounts of the beginning of the Blitz, September and early October 1940, and again I’m finding things which don’t seem to have made it into the received picture. One very striking one is the apparently near-universal opinion that the Me 109 fighter was inferior to British fighters: not just a little bit, but greatly; not just to the Spitfire, but to the Hurricane as well.¹ So for example, the Manchester Guardian’s air correspondent confidently reported that

That Göring’s air force has had no single-seat fighter that could compare with the Spitfire or the Hurricane is a fact that has been obvious since the very start of the war in the air against Britain and the replacement of the Messerschmitt 109, that has suffered so heavily at the hands of R.A.F. fighter squadrons, by something better was to be expected.²

Nearly seventy years later, reasonable people still can and do disagree over the relative merits of these fighters. But I think you would be hard-pressed these days to find anyone who would claim that the Me 109 was not comparable in air combat to the Spitfire, and substantially (though certainly not overwhelmingly) superior to the Hurricane. The reason for the underrating of the Me 109 is not hard to find, when British claims for German losses were routinely too high by a factor of two or three. But I suspect Fighter Command pilots wouldn’t have been so sanguine, regardless of the numbers!
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1. Since we’re talking day fighters, technically this probably should be classified as the Battle of Britain, not the Blitz, but in some ways this is is an artificial and unhelpful distinction.
2. Manchester Guardian, 19 September 1940, p. 5. The ’something better’ was the mythical He 113.

This post is about a revelation I had a while back, which those of you with a firmer grasp of the English language than I will think is nothing at all new (and you’re right!) The thing is that I’d always been puzzled by the word barrage. This gets used a lot by journalists: ‘the minister faced a barrage of criticism for her decision’, ‘the home team’s late barrage of goals sealed their victory’, and so on. Obviously, this is related to the artillery barrages so characteristic of trench warfare on the Western Front, intense bombardments which were usually the prelude to an attack across no-man’s land. There were several kinds of artillery barrage, for example hurricane barrages (shorter but even more intense) [edit: bzzzt, wrong, see below] and creeping barrages (moving just ahead of the advancing troops). There was also the anti-aircraft barrage, where the targets are up in the sky instead of on the ground. So it’s easy to see how the civilian uses of barrage came from the military ones (or perhaps vice versa); the sense of the word in both would seem to be something like the raining of blow after furious blow upon an opponent.

OK, but what about barrage balloons? They didn’t rain furious blows upon anything, they just sat there swaying in the breeze, on the off chance that enemy aircraft might fly down low and hit their mooring cables. And what was the deal with balloon barrages,¹ which confusingly were composed of barrage balloons? And then there were anti-submarine barrages, essentially nets stretched across maritime choke-points such as the Strait of Dover or the mouth of the Adriatic. None of these things have the very active quality of the previously-mentioned barrages — they’re all in fact very passive indeed. It’s hard to see what the one sort of barrage has to do with the other, but since they are all called barrages and arose during the same period of the two world wars, presumably there’s some logic to it all. But what?
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1. In the First World War these were called balloon aprons, a slightly different idea where the balloons were also connected to each other by horizontal cables, from which yet more cables were suspended. I’m not sure why balloon aprons were abandoned by the Second World War; perhaps because they were more fiddly to deploy?

The earliest cite for the word ‘airport’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1919:

1919 Aerial Age Weekly 14 Apr. 235/1 There is being established at Atlantic City the first ‘air port’ ever established, the purposes of which are..to provide a municipal aviation field,..to supply an air port for trans-Atlantic liners, whether of the seaplane, land aeroplane or dirigible balloon type.

As is often the case with the OED’s cites, earlier ones can be found (though not many, it is true). The following is from March 1914, from a proposal by the Aerial League of the British Empire to decentralise flying by setting up airfields around Britain:

The time will come when, with the development of aviation, every town of any importance will need an air-port as it now needs a railway station.¹

Now, it seems pretty obvious that ‘airport’ was coined by analogy with the much older word ’seaport’, just like ‘air power’ and ’sea power’. I don’t doubt that this is mostly true, but there is another possibility too. The word ‘air-port’ (with hyphen) did in fact exist before the coming of flight: it referred to a hole for ventilation, especially on a ship or in an engine — what today might be called an air intake or outlet. I’ll come back to this in a moment.
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1. The Times, 16 March 1914, p. 5. Emphasis added.

The B-17 is one of the most famous aircraft used in the Second World War. It was known as the Flying Fortress. Or perhaps I should say the Flying Fortress^TM, for it was actually registered as a trademark by Boeing (well, Wikipedia says so, anyway). The phrase was supposedly coined by a journalist in an article which appeared in the 16 July 1935 issue of the Seattle Times, after he witnessed the rollout of the prototype Model 299. It’s an apt enough name, given the number of defensive machine-guns (13 or more on the mid-war B-17G).

But I’ve noticed that the phrase “flying fortress” actually predates the debut of the Model 299 by several years, at least in British aviation literature. I can’t say whether or not the American journalist was aware of it, but to me it looks like “flying fortress” was used widely enough to be considered a generic term for a certain type of aircraft: the self-defending bomber.
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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Earlier this summer, I read several studies of national airmindedness, which inspired two previous posts. By way of a coda, here’s a reading list on airmindedness, comprising these works and others I am aware of, along with some scattered thoughts as to what it all means.

• Joseph J. Corn. The Winged Gospel: America’s Romance with Aviation, 1900-1950. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.
• David Edgerton. England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Academic and Professional, 1991.
• Leigh Edmonds. “How Australians were made airminded.” Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture 7 (1993).
• Peter Fritzsche. A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1992.
• Scott W. Palmer. Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Jonathan Vance. High Flight: Aviation and the Canadian Imagination. Toronto: Penguin, 2002.

There are plenty of important gaps, at least in English: in particular, French and Italian airmindedness would certainly repay close study. Non-Western airmindednesses, too, perhaps? Similarly, there isn’t much in a comparative or global vein, but I do know of the following:

• Bernhard Rieger. Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890-1945. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005.
• Robert Wohl. A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908-1918. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994.
• Robert Wohl. The Spectacle of Flight: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1920-1950. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2005.

So, what is this “airmindedness” thing that I keep bandying about? In contemporary usage, it referred to the abstract state of being airminded, that is, enthusiastic about flight. Scott Palmer (who blogs at The Avia-Corner) defines it slightly differently:

I have chosen to employ “air-mindedness” in reference to the particular set of cultural traditions, symbols, and markers that, combined with existing political culture and social institutions, constitute a given nation’s response to the airplane […] Although Americans, Britons, Germans, and French may all be said to have been enthusiastic about aviation (or, air-minded), the specific manifestations of that enthusiasm (air-mindedness) were the products of those nations’ unique historical and cultural traditions.¹

I like this definition, because it highlights the connections between aviation and the larger narratives of a nation’s history. The works cited above demonstrate these connections. In Russia, aviation continued a pattern (going back to Peter the Great) of trying to compensate for perceived inferiority in comparison with the West by jump-starting entire industries and exaggerating successes, which anyway were often more symbolic than useful. In Germany, widespread enthusiasm for Zeppelins served as a unifying symbol for a nation only a generation old, while in the Weimar period the new sport of gliding became a way of expressing hostility to the Versailles treaty. In the United States, an enormous faith in technology (combined with the more traditional kind of religious faith) led to hopes for an airborne millennium, with an aeroplane in every family’s garage. In Australia, like Germany a new nation, the motivation was more practical: the need to bind together cities and towns separated by hundreds of miles of trackless bush and desert, as well as to shorten the effective distance to the mother country. In Britain, the primary concern was how to defend the integrity of the nation against the power of the bomber, but by the same token, there also appeared to be possibilities for holding the Empire together by use of airpower, military and commercial.

Leigh Edmonds (talking about the Australian context, but it applies more generally) suggests that the word “airmindedness” fell into disuse after the 1930s, because people were now ’so airminded that to use the word would have been as useless as referring to all people as bipeds’.² There’s something in that: flying is now taken for granted and air travel democratised. Most members of affluent societies, and affluent members of poorer ones, can choose to fly, and usually do, for long distances. But it seems to me that it’s not that everyone is now airminded, rather it’s that airmindedness itself is superfluous, because aviation’s potential has largely been realised. Faith and imagination (a word which appears in the title of four of the books listed above) are no longer required to see the benefits of flight: just go to any international airport and watch all the people come and go. There’s no need for aerial evangelism anymore, and so airmindedness is now more personal than public, a hobby or a job rather than a vocation.³ But as I hope I’ve at least hinted at here, the study of historical airmindedness is much more than an exercise in mere nostalgia: it’s a way to explore a nation’s hopes and fears.

1. Palmer, Dictatorship of the Air, 2-3.
2. Edmonds, “How Australians were made airminded.”
3. Of course, this is a common fate for new technologies, from railways to telephones to (probably, one day) the Internet.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

The kick-off for the football¹ World Cup final is only hours away. To mark the occasion, here’s Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, head of the Royal Air Force, on the correct use of airpower (in 1923, in the context of a hypothetical war with France):

Would it be best to have less fighters and more bombers to bomb the enemy and trust to their people cracking before ours, or have more fighters to bring down more of the enemy bombers. It would be rather like putting two teams to play each other at football, and telling one team they must only defend their own goal, and keep all their men on that one point. The defending team would certainly not be beaten, but they would equally certainly not win, nor would they stop the attack on their goal from continuing. I would like to make this point again. I feel that although there would be an outcry, the French in a bombing duel would probably squeal before we did. That was really the final thing. The nation that would stand being bombed longest would win in the end.²

It may not be immediately apparent, but in Trenchard’s analogy, the ‘goals’ to be defended are the great cities of each warring nation. So goals are scored by bombing cities, killing and terrorising their inhabitants; and the ‘match’ won by causing a collapse in civilian morale, who will then cause their ‘team’ to give up.

The analogy is starting to get a bit torturous by this point! But football is not a great analogy for the standard RAF view of strategic bombing to begin with. On the one hand, it’s true that in football a team which only defends can’t win. On the other hand, a strong defence is still desirable, because one goal is often enough to win (or lose) a match. Equally, it’s more than possible to have matches end in a draw, and not the decisive knock-out blow Trenchard predicted.

Knock-out blow … now that’s a boxing term.³ Sport and war seem to mix very easily in British history. The Duke of Wellington might not have said that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, but Henry Newbolt did compare the imperial burden to a schoolboy game of cricket, in his 1897 poem “Vitai Lampada”:

There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night –
Ten to make and the match to win –
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,
But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”
The sand of the desert is sodden red, –
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; –
The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of schoolboy rallies the ranks,
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”
This is the word that year by year
While in her place the School is set
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind –
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”

Cricket is, of course, much more interesting to Englishmen than is war. At least, this is the case in P. G. Wodehouse’s brilliant parody of the Edwardian preoccupation with the possibility of German invasion, “The swoop!” (1909). A newspaper poster proclaims

SURREY
DOING
BADLY
GERMAN ARMY LANDS IN ENGLAND

with a stop-press report that

Fry not out, 104. Surrey 147 for 8. A German army landed in Essex this afternoon. Loamshire Handicap: Spring Chicken, 1; Salome, 2; Yip-i-addy, 3. Seven ran.

Wodehouse may have been on to something. In 1940, newspaper sellers reported the progress of the Battle of Britain as though it were a cricket match: ‘Biggest raid ever — Score 78 to 26 — England still batting’,⁴ as did BBC radio commentators:

[T]he man’s baled out by parachute — the pilot’s baled out by parachute — he’s a Junkers 87 and he’s going slap into the sea and there he goes — smash … Oh boy, I’ve never seen anything so good as this — the RAF fighters have really got these boys taped.⁵

It does seem a bit unsporting of the Luftwaffe to have tried to take out their defeat on the home of cricket itself, though.

More seriously, that the everyday heroics of the sports field could inspire men on the battlefield is shown by the famous incident on the first day of the Somme, where Captain W. P. Nevill led men of the 8th East Surreys over the top, dribbling a football. Nevill fell, dead — no faking there, unlike the real thing — but his men took their objective.

Going the other way, and bringing us back to where we began, since 1966 English football fans have taunted their German counterparts with the chant “Two World Wars and one World Cup!” — though some might argue that three World Cups is at least an equivalent record. Neither Germany nor England is playing in the final this time around: it’s France vs Italy. And as Italy knocked out Australia thanks to a somewhat dubious penalty, I’m hoping that France will squeal, as Trenchard predicted — not in terror but in joy!

1. By which I mean soccer …
2. Chief of Air Staff meeting, 19 July 1923, AIR 2/1267; quoted in Neville Jones, The Beginnings of Strategic Air Power: A History of the British Bomber Force 1923-39 (London: Frank Cass, 1987), 29. Emphasis added.
3. When the Sun crowed ‘Gotcha!’ at the Royal Navy’s sinking of the General Belgrano in the Falklands War, it reported that ‘The Navy had the Argies on their knees last night after a devastating double punch’.
4. Quoted in Malcolm Smith, Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 63.
5. Ibid., 62.

If you were wondering what the biggest and loudest air raid siren of all time is, then wonder no more, because it’s the American Chrysler Victory Siren, made in the 1950s. Well, I don’t know for sure that it was — I’d like to see what the Soviets had to offer — but it was clearly a mighty impressive piece of hardware: 12 feet long; 3 tons in weight; and 138 decibels at a distance of 100 feet! (120 dB is the pain threshold.) These were dotted all over the United States — 20 in Detroit alone.

You can hear one of the few remaining examples in action here. It certainly sends a chill down my spine, which is perhaps strange as nuclear drills were not a feature of my youth here in Australia, so I only know the sound of such sirens second-hand. But I can’t help but imagine what would have been happening to the communities these sirens were meant to warn, as the missiles (or in the 1950s, the bombs) rained down. Which in turn leads one to marvel at the optimistic choice of the name Victory Siren … though I suppose the Defeat Siren (”If you can hear this, you’re already dead”) might not have sold so well!¹

1. Of course, nuclear war looked somewhat more winnable in the 1950s, and civil defence correspondingly less pointless, than was later the case. But still.

The War Room reports the short list of names for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter:

• Black Mamba
• Cyclone
• Lightning II
• Piasa
• Reaper
• Spitfire II

As noted at the War Room, most of these names are really, really bad, and sound like something a 12 year old boy would come up with.¹ Of interest here is the homage to great fighter planes of yore — the Spitfire and the P-38 Lightning. (At least, I assume that Lightning II refers to that and not the English Electric Lightning, itself one of the great post-war fighters.) Presumably, Spitfire II is on the list because of the British participation in the project (though their US$2 billion is just a drop in the bucket, when compared with the projected total cost of US$244 billion). Cyclone sounds like it would have fitted in well alongside the Hurricane, Tempest, Typhoon and Whirlwind, too. Other than those choices, these are some pretty silly names. Piasa is more likely to evoke feelings of slight puzzlement than dread.

Still, fair’s fair: the British have made some aircraft with pretty silly names too. Such as the Fawn. The Flycatcher. The Tabloid. The Iris. It’s lucky the next war didn’t start in 1931, when the Blackburn Iris (a seaplane) entered service; imagine how dreadfully embarassed the aircrew would have been to have been seen by the enemy flying around in something named after a flower.

Of course, the name of a combat aircraft is irrelevant to its actual performance. I guess the only real purpose is for propaganda, particularly on the home front. In that light, it’s interesting that the names given to British fighters² become more aggressive-sounding over time — think of the difference between the Siskin III (a ’small songbird’, according to the OED) of the mid-1920s and the Spitfire of the late 1930s. If you are staring total air war in the face, you might as well put yourself in the mood …

1. Of course, the only people, other than 12 year old boys, who will care what the JSF is called are 12 year old boys at heart anyway :)
2. Bombers generally were generally named after places — Overstrand, Bombay, Wellington, Manchester.

Currently, I’m tracing the evolution of the idea of the knock-out blow, the massive aerial bombardment that could knock a country out of the war. Though the idea intself has earlier antecedents, the first use of the phrase itself in this context that I’ve found so far is this, in a well-known (at least to airpower historians) lecture given in April 1914 by the engineer Colonel Louis Jackson:

If a flight of aeroplanes passed over the city, each one dropping a dozen incendiary bombs in different places, would not the result be more than the fire brigade could cope with? If a Zeppelin dropped half a ton of guncotton on to the Admiralty or the War Office, as she might do if not interfered with, what would be the result, in disorganization and discouragement? What would be the effect of cutting off the water supply of the East End, or sinking food-ships in the Thames? These things seem incredible to us, who have only known of wars on the frontiers. I confess I am reluctant to go to the length of my own arguments, but if it is conceded that London is within the range of action of a hostile Zeppelin or two, and a flight of aeroplanes, such action will soon be possible; and this is the age of the “knock-out blow” in everything. Would any ruler harden his heart to such action? Who can say?

Source: Louis Jackson, “The defence of localities against aerial attack”, Journal of the Royal United Services Institution, 58 (June 1914), 712-3. (Emphasis added.)

Obviously Jackson isn’t calling such an attack the knock-out blow, it’s just a knock-out blow, so the phrase was not yet synonymous with the concept. I’m not really sure what he means about it being ‘the age of the “knock-out blow” in everything’ … boxing would be the obvious reference, but that alone hardly qualifies as ‘everything’. Perhaps he means that it was used in military/naval circles more generally: for example, a couple of years later, Lloyd George was claiming that the Somme offensive was the ‘knock-out blow’ against Germany,¹ clearly a non-aerial context, and it was applied to other offensives too. At some point thereafter (certainly by the 1930s), though, I think the term was widely understood to refer to aerial bombardment alone, even to a significant extent in popular discourse–at least when preceded by the definite article. Jackson’s lecture and article may have suggested that terminology to air strategists, or it might just be a case of convergent evolution.

1. Quoted in A.J.P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 [1965]), 62.

• A flying machine is an aeroplane (qv).
• A dirigible balloon (or just dirigible) is an airship (qv).
• An aeroplane is the wing of a flying machine (qv).
• Airship collectively describes both flying machines and dirigible balloons (qqv).

Get it? (Got it.) Good!

Seriously, I’m glad the meanings of these words were rationalised within a few years: what a head-ache it would be to have constantly qualify them all through my thesis!

Sources: R.P. Hearne, Aerial Warfare (London and New York: John Lane,
1909); Fred T. Jane, ed, All the World’s Air-ships (Flying Annual)
(London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1909).

Trench Fever reports on a seminar by Stefan Goebel on the post-war memorialisation of Coventry’s bombing in 1940. Hence today’s word for the day: ”coventrate”. It’s a good example of a word or phrase coined in a mean-spirited way (in this case, by the Germans), but which ends up being adopted by those whom it was meant to spite - like ”big bang” or ”queer”. By the end of the war, it was the Germans who were themselves being coventrated.

coventrate, v. (temporary.) To bomb intensively; to devastate sections of (a city) by concentrated bombing, such as that inflicted on Coventry, Warwickshire, in November 1940. So coventrating vbl. n.; coventration.
1940 Hutchinson’s Pict. Hist. War 2 Oct.-26 Nov. 221 German bombers made prolonged mass attacks..on Coventry… And..they invented the verb ‘to coventrate’ to describe the indiscriminate mass murder of civilians. 1940 New Statesman 21 Dec. 647 The fact was that ‘Coventrating’ meant that the nerves and sinews and muscles of local government were wrenched and lacerated. 1942 L. E. O. CHARLTON Britain at War 22 Possibility of another ‘coventration’ of a manufacturing centre. 1944 H. HAWTON Night Bombing viii. 126 It was the Germans themselves who had coined so gloatingly the verb ‘to coventrate’.

Source: OED. (Nice to see Charlton getting a guernsey!)

I doubt that the word was used much after 1945, though I would be interested to hear otherwise! Here is one example from that year, from a newspaper article about rugby union teams trying to get back on their feet after the war, which suggests that it was still then regarded as unfamiliar (as it is in quotes - so are all the OED cites, for that matter).

In the Midlands, too, Coventry not only refused to be ”Coventrated” by the enemy; they retained most of their veterans and, both at home and abroad - meaning London - did much to maintain the old standards of Midland forward play.

Source: The Times, 18 September 1945, p. 8.