This photograph of Australian soldiers was taken during the First World War. It's not particularly unusual: just a group of mates getting together to record a memento, perhaps after a weekend's carousing in the fleshpots of Cairo or Paris.

Mateship is a important concept in Australian culture. The OED defines it as 'The condition of being a mate; companionship, fellowship, comradeship' and notes that it is 'Now chiefly Austral. and N.Z.' The Australian National Dictionary gives several more specifically Australian shades of meaning, from 'An acquaintance; a person engaged in the same activity', to 'One with whom the bonds of close friendship are acknowledged, a "sworn friend"', to 'A mode of address implying equality and goodwill; freq. used to a casual acquaintance and, esp. in recent use [...], ironic'. Suffice it to say that pretty much any bloke can have occasion to call another cobber a mate, whether they are good friends or bitter enemies. (Sheilas are another question, of course.)

Mateship is a positive virtue. As C. E. W. Bean wrote in 1921, in the first volume (page 6) of his official history of Australia in the Great War:

The typical Australian [...] was seldom religious in the sense in which the word is generally used. So far as he held a prevailing creed, it was a romantic one inherited from the gold-miner and the bush-man, of which the chief article was that a man should at all times and at any cost stand by his mate. This was and is the one law which the good Australian must never break. It is bred in the child and stays with him through life.

Mateship also has strong military resonances, as Bean's interest in it might suggest. An Army News article on the unveiling of a war memorial in Papua New Guinea commemorating the Kokoda Track, the site of bitter fighting between Australians and Japanese in 1942, notes that the words courage, mateship, endurance and sacrifice are inscribed on its pillars. It further adds that these are 'words that today's Australian Army has built its foundations on'. So mateship is both an expression of Australia's egalitarian spirit and its martial one, as former Prime Minister John Howard explained in a speech given at Australia House in London in 2003:

The two world wars exacted a terrible price from us -- the full magnitude of that lost potential, of those unlived lives can never be measured. And yet, some of the most admirable aspects of Australia's national character were, if not conceived, then more fully ingrained within us by the searing experiences of those conflicts.

None more so than the concept of mateship -- regarded as a particularly Australian virtue -- a concept that encompasses unconditional acceptance, mutual and self respect, sharing whatever is available no matter how meagre, a concept based on trust and selflessness and absolute interdependence. In combat, men did live and die by its creed. 'Sticking by your mates' was sometimes the only reason for continuing on when all seemed hopeless.

I was moved by an account written by Hugh Clarke, who, like thousands of other Australian and British servicemen, endured years of senseless cruelty as a prisoner of the Japanese after the fall of Singapore. He couldn't recall a single Australian dying alone without someone being there to look after him in some way. That's mateship.

Contemporary Australia takes great pride in its egalitarian attitudes. Mud and fear and enemy fire are no respecters of class, rank or parentage and from both wars, our veterans brought back to Australian society a renewed conviction that an individual's worth should be judged -- not by those things -- but by their own talent, courage and personal virtue.

Howard was particularly fond of the concept of mateship; in 1999 he even tried to get it inserted into the preamble of the Australian constitution. It was in fact one of the sites of conflict in Australia's culture wars of the late 1990s and early 2000s: Marilyn Lake has criticised it as reinforcing white solidarity. She has a point; and it's not like Australia is the only country in the world to value mateship, even if it isn't called that. (Although one of the more charming aspects of the word 'mate' is the way it's quickly picked up and used by new arrivals to these shores.) Gender critiques are even more pointed: while women can and do use the word, and can be mates with men and and with each other, it still has a blokey feel. Idealising mateship as an inherently Australian trait is exclusionary, as Martin Ball has argued for the related concept of the 'Anzac spirit':

The Anzac tradition holds many values for us all to celebrate, but the myth also suppresses parts of Australian history that are difficult to deal with. Anzac is a means of forgetting the origins of Australia. The Aboriginal population is conveniently absent. The convict stain is wiped clean. Postwar immigration is yet to broaden the cultural identity of the population. [...] The problem with the simple patriotism of Anzac is that it runs the risk of making some of us are more Australian than others.

Which brings me back to the photograph at the start of the post. It actually isn't as straightforward as it seems. The men pictured are actually all deserters; and the reason they posed for the photograph was to taunt the military authorities they had escaped from. For it was sent to the Australian Assistant Provost Marshal in Le Havre, along with the following letter:

Sir,
With all due respect we send you this P. C. [post card] as a souvenir trusting that you will keep it as a mark of esteem from those who know you well. At the same time trusting that Nous jamais regardez vous encore [we will never see you again]. Au revoir.
Nous

The deserters -- who were apparently never caught -- are displaying mateship, humour, larrikinism and all those good things which are supposedly part of the Australian essence, but deployed in a way that cuts against the celebration of the Anzac spirit. For whatever reason, these men who had all volunteered for war decided to have nothing more to do with it, and so could be considered to be some of the first war resisters in Australian history.

NB. The photograph comes ultimately from the Australian War Memorial, but I found it in Ashley Ekins, ed., 1918 Year of Victory: The End of the Great War and the Shaping of History (Titirangi and Wollombi: Exisle Publishing, 2010). Ekins' own essay in that book on 'morale, discipline and combat effectiveness' has much to say on this topic, though unfortunately doesn't specifically discuss our ten mates above.

Last August I took up Twitter. I've just reached a thousand tweets (or will have, when this post is auto-tweeted), so it seems like an appropriate time to reflect on how useful the whole thing is.

I was initially sceptical, but I find that Twitter does complement blogging very well. It's a good place to post links to useful or interesting links which I think are worth sharing, but aren't worth a blog post (I don't like just posting links: I feel I should say something insightful to go along with it, but I don't always have something insightful to say!) Ditto for things I come across in my reading. It's not quite as good as having somebody sitting next to you who to say 'hey, look at this!' to, but then again that sort of behaviour is usually frowned upon in libraries anyway. As the wordle above shows, most of my tweets are military history-related, and still often aviation-related, but a bit more broadly construed than here on the blog. ('rt' is short for 'retweet', which reposting the tweets of other users.) I also talk about other interests or pop culture from time to time. Of course, I could do that here if I wanted, but I don't want to change the focus of the blog. The informality of Twitter makes it easier to play around.

Even more than blogging, Twitter is about who is following you and who you are following. (In round numbers, about 140 and about 100 people, respectively.) While there are a few regular Airminded commenters who are on Twitter (@thrustvector, @AirPowerHistory, @jondresner, @lifeasdaddy), I generally interact with a different set of people there. I get the sense that most of them don't read Airminded, at least not habitually -- even outside of the SEO consultants (who LOVE using the web, but only seem to actually use the web to tell other people how they can get more readers). On the other hand, there are people I've interacted with in the Twitterverse who do read Airminded, but wouldn't comment here. Informality wins again. The abbreviated and fleeting nature of tweeting makes it more liberating, in a sense, than blogging: there's only so much you can say in 140 characters, so you don't need to say something brilliant, and if you say something strikingly unbrilliant, well, it's soon lost in the stream. (On the other hand, it's surprising just how clever some people can be with so little to work with.)

My proudest Twitter moment did relate to Airminded. @ukwarcabinet is tweeting the British Cabinet's view of the Second World War, day by day (currently it's up to 4 February 1940). It's run by the National Archives (@UkNatArchives), and includes a link to the relevant Cabinet papers, which can be downloaded for free. And according to Jo Pugh (@mentionthewar), who works on it, I was partly to blame:

@Airminded I hope the @ukwarcabinet thing seems like a good idea. It was largely inspired by your post-blogging the Sudeten Crisis.

Which is very cool indeed.

Twitter promises to be even better than a bunch of RSS feeds for keeping tabs on conferences, jobs and general academic gossip. I say 'promises' because academia is, as usual, slow to cotton on to new media, and the critical mass of #twitterstorians isn't quite there yet for Twitter to be an essential way to keep up to date with your own field. Which is one reason why I'm writing this post: sign up, follow @Airminded, and tweet! If you choose not to, you can still get an idea of what I'm tweeting by looking at the bottom of the sidebar on Airminded's home page.

The 1st use of the word "Luftwaffe" in The Times was on 24 May 1939, as the owner of 2 yachts entered in a race to Germany.

The 1st use of the word "Luftwaffe" in the Manchester Guardian was on 30 Nov 1939, in a commentary on the different national air forces.

The 1st use of the word "Luftwaffe" in the Observer was on 5 June 1938, again in reference to a yacht race.

The 1st use of the word "Luftwaffe" in Parliament may have been on 21 Feb 1940, in a question about air strengths: http://bit.ly/6yQL6d

It seems that "Luftwaffe" was not in wide circulation in English before c. 1939. It's somewhat anachronistic then, to use it for the 1930s.

... at least when talking about Britain and its fear of the German air force. But "Luftwaffe" is entrenched, and so much handier!

I can add some other data points. The first use in the New York Times was on 17 February 1940, as part of the name of a German propaganda film (D III 88, Die neue deutsche Luftwaffe greift an). Less authoritatively (because incomplete), the first mention in the Google Newspaper Archive is from 15 January 1939 in the Chicago Daily Tribune (in an article entitled 'The Nazi air force').

As might be expected, aviation periodicals were onto the word 'Luftwaffe' earlier. Flight first used it on 11 March 1937, in an article about a visit to a German squadron. Aeroplane used it as early as 1 April 1936, in the title of a German-language book being reviewed (Die deutsche Luftwaffe by Kürbs), but there could easily be an earlier use. Oddly, the OED gives The Times in 1935 as the earliest cite, although I can't find it in the online version:

1935 Times 23 May 15/1 The armed forces are henceforth known collectively as the Wehrmacht (Defence Force) and consist of the Army (Heer), Navy (Kriegsmarine), and the Air Arm (Luftwaffe).

But I stand by the conclusion I originally tweeted, i.e. that 'Luftwaffe' was not a widely used term in English before around 1939 (in fact, more like 1940). Between 1935, when the Luftwaffe was officially founded, and the start of the war, it generally seems to have been referred to as 'the German Air Force' or some variation thereof (as I noted in response to a query from @clioandme).

Well, so what, one might ask? Not very much, I'd have to answer. I'm fairly pedantic about avoiding anachronistic words -- I consciously nearly always write 'aeroplane', for example, instead of 'airplane' (an Americanism, I think, in my period at least) or 'plane' (only common from the late 1930s, at least in written British English). But although the man on the Clapham omnibus might have looked confused if asked in 1935 or 1938 if he was afraid of the Luftwaffe, it was a term used by some English speakers at the time (and presumably all German speakers), it was widely used in the somewhat important period 1939-45, it's an accepted term today (that it's in the OED is significant), and it's precise and concise. It's too useful to discard, even if it were possible to do so. So all I hope for is that just pointing out the slight anachronicity of 'Luftwaffe' for the years 1935 to 1939 will satisfy my inner pedant.

A couple of interesting posts at The Russian Front suggest that the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 should be thought of as a World War Zero, or alternatively that the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8 should be. It's often useful to play around with the names we give to historical events and phenomena, because it reminds us that they are just names. And this is an old game for historians (as Dave Stone notes) -- the Seven Years' War is sometimes considered to be the first world war (if not the First World War). But I'm not sure in what sense the Russo-Japanese and Russo-Turkish wars qualify as world wars. Shouldn't the primary determinant of this be that they were fought on a world scale? Even the epic, doomed voyage of the Baltic fleet to Tsushima isn't enough to make the Russo-Japanese War a world war, as all the actual fighting was localised to a relatively small region in Manchuria (if you set aside a few potshots at British trawlers).

But in his post, John Steinberg does give a list of reasons for his argument regarding the Russo-Japanese War (which comes out of research for a two-volume work he co-edited entitled The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero). It seems to me that most of them are not actually about geographical extent but rather other sorts of scale -- of battles, of casualties, of finance, and so on. That is, in Steinberg's formulation the Russo-Japanese War sounds something like an approach towards total war, not a world war. If that's the case then I find this statement surprising:

As for the concept of World War Zero, most western military historians continue to view the Russo-Japanese War as a regional conflict rooted in the age of imperialism. Historians in Asia, appear much more respective.

I thought the Russo-Japanese War was well-known among western military historians (if not among contemporary western military staffs) for its bloodiness. Hew Strachan, for example, refers to it quite often (well, on 30 pages out of 1139) in volume I of The First World War. It's also a common element in diplomatic histories of the war's origins, for Russia's defeat had a tremendous impact on the strategic calculations of all the other Great Powers. So it seems to me that western historians are quite comfortable in seeing the Russo-Japanese War as a step along the road to total war and/or to the First World War in several respects. I think I must be missing something here.

A random thought while sitting in a lecture today: if there is (or can be) such a thing as total war, does that imply that total peace is a meaningful concept?

Firstly, what is total war? One definition, drawn from the ubiquitous set of conference proceedings edited by Stig Förster et al (and more directly, from today's lecture notes), goes something like this. Total war consists of:

1. total aims: e.g. the destruction of an enemy nation
2. total methods: e.g. bombing cities
3. total mobilisation: e.g. conscription for both the armed forces and for labour
4. total control: e.g. censorship, dictatorship

More briefly, total war is the subordination of every other consideration (law, custom, morality, etc) to the prosecution of war. Total war is an ideal form of warfare, something which can be approached more or less closely, but which can never actually be fully attained. Well, hopefully not, because that would be bad.

So what would total peace look like? I don't think it can simply be the absence of total war; that's just peace generically. Total peace must be total in some sense.

One approach might be to say that total peace is the subordination of every consideration to the prosecution of peace. But why would this be necessary? Perhaps as a sublimation for the martial impulse, a moral equivalent of war. William James called for 'gilded youths' to be conscripted in 'the immemorial human warfare against nature', that is to say to do dirty and unpleasant jobs such as mining, construction, roadbuilding, which would knock some sense into them and make them better people. James was inspired in part by H. G. Wells, who himself later had similar ideas. For example, in his screenplay for Things to Come (1936) he imagined a peaceful future civilisation which turns its energies towards the exploration of the Universe, by way of the construction of a giant space gun.

But it's hard (for me, at least) to imagine any real society devoting itself so totally to peaceful pursuits. Fear and greed are, unfortunately, more powerful motivating forces than altruism or even curiosity. Indeed, even in Things to Come the rationalists have to face down a rebellion which fears where progress will lead and wants to tear down the space gun.

So perhaps a total peace is more negative: the subordination, in peacetime, of every other consideration to preparing for total war. Like total war itself, this would be a never-realised ideal. But, also like total war, there are times when it is approached more closely than at other times. One such period might be the Cold War. But to the same extent that total war became unthinkable after the advent of nuclear weapons, so too would total peace become unnecessary: if the war was actually fought, it could not be won, and so the preparations for it would have been pointless. And how total can the Cold War be said to have been? Most people in the West, at least, lived out their lives without being greatly affected by it.

Another period when a total peace might have occurred would have been before the Second World War. Think civil defence, peacetime conscription, the coordination of labour to maximise armaments production, the building up of bomber forces. In Britain, at least, these initiatives were only secondarily intended to prepare the nation for total war. Their primary aim was to deter an attack altogether. So perhaps total peace was actually the (inevitably, only partial) reorganisation of society to try to prevent a total war from starting in the first place?

Random thoughts have a low probability of being useful, however. More considered thoughts would be welcome!

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:

First "Hun": "Did you see old Cole's zoom on a quirk this morning?"
Second "Hun": "No, what happened?"
First "Hun": "Oh, nothing to write home about ... stalled his 'bus and pancaked thirty feet ... crashed completely ... put a vertical gust up me ... just as I was starting my solo flip in a rumpty!"

This is the start of an article by W. A. B. entitled 'Airmen in the making', from the Daily Mail, 19 July 1917, p. 4. It's about some of the new words and phrases used by trainee RFC pilots: 'no one can claim so many strikingly original terms as the air services'. Most of the examples given weren't actually new; some of them don't seem to have survived the war; others are still familiar enough in an aviation context; and yet others are now so widely used that their aeronautical context comes as a surprise.

Hun does not here refer to one of Biggles' foes but to the trainee pilots themselves. The OED's earliest cite for this sense is 1916; a later cite from 1925 suggests that the derivation was that flight cadets tended to be highly destructive of training aircraft. Zoom (a 'soul-satisfying word') is what an aeroplane does when it is 'hauled up apruptly and made to climb for a few moments at a dangerously sharp angle'. But it seems that zooming was already something that moving objects did, especially if they made some sort of humming or other sound as they did so: an OED cite from 1904 has bees zooming against a window plane. All sorts of vehicles can zoom these days, though aircraft may have been first. But we probably use it more often to refer to cameras or image editing software. A quirk is a training aeroplane (though according to the OED it can also mean a trainee pilot), or just any which is slow and ungainly. But it's a very old word, in the sense of something odd or unusual, which seems directly related to this usage. A rumpty is a specific type of training aeroplane, namely a Maurice Farman Shorthorn. According to the RAAF Museum, it (or rather Rumpety) is an onomatopoeic word, from the sound it makes while travelling over the ground.

To stall in the aeronautical sense is of course quite familiar, but stalling in the sense of coming to a standstill is quite old (OED's first cite is c. 1460). 'Bus is short for omnibus, presumably -- a later generation of pilots might have said kite or ship. To pancake I had previously understood just to mean to land, but it can evidently also mean a sudden vertical drop (i.e. from a stall) or a crash. A solo flip is a solo flight -- does anyone take a flip anymore? And finally, a vertical gust sounds like a straightforward meteorological term, but in this context it's a 'breezy way' for the Hun to confess that seeing the crash before his own solo had, well, put the wind up him.

The other words in the article are still standard aviation terms, though to gamers of a certain age a joystick doesn't necessarily have anything to do with even simulated flight. W. A. B. ends by claiming gadget for the airmen:

But the most priceless word of all is "gadget." If the name of anything escapes you call it a "gadget" and you will be understood!

And it is indeed an excellent word. But sadly for the RFC's legacy, the OED shows that sailors were using it three decades earlier: 'if the exact name of anything they want happens to slip from their memory, they call it a chicken~fixing, or a gadjet, or a gill-guy, or a timmey-noggy, or a wim-wom'. Though perhaps we can thank the airmen for choosing to bring gadget into common use instead of chicken~fixing! (And just how do you pronounce ~ anyway?)

Here are a couple of the maps (or parts thereof) showing two different kinds of barrages associated with the air defence of Britain.

The first one is entitled 'Aeroplane barrage line. December, 1916.' It's too big to show effectively, so I've just reproduced a portion showing the coast of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. The red squares show home defence squadron HQs: 33 Squadron at Gainsborough and 76 Squadron at Ripon. The red triangles are flight stations, the red stars flight stations with searchlights, the blue circles are searchlight stations under squadron control ('aeroplane lights') and the black circles are warning control centres (Hull).

As I've discussed before, artillery barrages weren't the only kinds of barrages. Originally they seem to have just been barriers or walls of some kind (barrage originally referred to a dam). Here the barrage is composed of aeroplanes and searchlights, a wall erected to hopefully bar Zeppelins coming in over the North Sea from reaching the industrial cities behind the line. And it does look like a barrier: on the full map it stretches from Suttons Farm (later renamed Hornchurch) near London all the way up to Innerwick, east of Edinburgh (with extensions in Norfolk and Kent). But it's not a physical barrage, for the most part -- it's aerodromes and searchlights. Previously, home defence squadrons had been placed close to target areas, because of doubts about night navigation and interception. Experience had shown that these problems weren't as great as previously thought:

Now that it was clear the aeroplane patrols could be extended, it was suggested that the Flights situated near Birmingham, Sheffield and Leeds should be moved farther east as a step towards the ultimate establishment of a barrage-line of aeroplanes and searchlights parallel with the east coast of England.¹

This system worked very well against Zeppelins (as one indication, note the steep drop in casualties due to airship raids from 1917 on). But not so well against Gothas.

This map shows the anti-aircraft gun barrage in and around London in October (or so) 1917, which were there to defend against night raiders -- aeroplanes, now, much more than airships. Not that the guns were particularly effective, but they were heavily used. So heavily used, in fact, that there was a serious concern that London would soon run out of AA guns through wear and tear (each gun lasted for a maximum of 1500 rounds, and 14000 rounds total were fired on 30 September alone).²

But the barrages on this map, the red lines, do not show the location of the guns. They show lines in the sky along which a number of guns could be brought to bear (which explains why they are mostly made of arcs). So, again, the barrages are barriers. As the note in the top left corner explains:

Note. This type of barrage, usually known as 'Linear', allotted fuzes, bearings, and quadrant elevations so that fire could be directed at a particular altitude over a definite area. The barrages varied in length and form according to the situation and number of the guns which could be brought to bear. The height of the barrage could be varied at will. Orders for this form of barrage were given only occasionally, usually to 'screen' certain important objectives or to catch raiding aeroplanes whose courses were doubtful.

So, if I understand this correctly, if Gothas were seen approaching Woolwich Arsenal from the south-east, several guns would receive the order 'Ace of Spades' and would then swing to pre-determined settings to set up a barrier of fire for the raiders to fly into. If they flew on instead towards the Isle of Dogs, the order 'Robin Hood' would then be sent, and a new barrier would be set up, probably drawing on some of the same guns but with others joining in too.

There were also guns arrayed along the grid squares, the original scheme to which the linear barrages were a supplement. There is a hint that the linear barrages were meant to be a more efficient, more selective alternative, to help with the wear and tear problem.

As an aside, I wonder who came up with the barrage names? Some of them could be standard military issue: Kingfisher, Mercury, Union Jack. But what about Noisy Norah, Charley's Aunt or Dandy Dick? (The last two, at least, seem to be the names of popular farces.) Did the gun crews have a say in it, or were they named on the whim of some bored junior officer?

1. H. A. Jones, The War in the Air: Being the Story of the Part Played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force, volume 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), 166. The map faces 170.
2. H. A. Jones, The War in the Air: Being the Story of the Part Played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force, volume 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), 85-6. The map faces 89.

So what say you? Feel free to make arguments in comments.

Next up: 'Crisis' vs 'crisis'. You be the judge!

But I do occasionally see something reminiscent of some of our idiosyncratic online protocols: telegraphic addresses. They were the functional equivalent of postal addresses, of course: they allowed the rapid routing of a message to a physical location on the surface of the Earth. But what I find interesting about them is that they were evidently arbitrary: a person or organisation could choose its own address (apart from the geographical bit). This means that telegraphic addresses reflected something of their character -- much like personal email addresses today often do, or even more so, like an organisation's domain name does. They also often had something of the cramped style, the abrvs and runtogetherwords, of modern txtspk, which must come from a similar desire to save characters (since the longer the addresses were, the more keypresses and time it took the Morse operator, and ultimately pence it cost the sender). And this is true even of government bureaucracies like the RAF. Here are some telegraphic addresses culled from the Air Force List for January 1922.

Some are self-explanatory, such Airministry, London. Aircivil, Airministry, London is also pretty obvious, if you are aware of the existence of the Civil Aviation Department, Air Ministry. (The way the addresses are nested here is reminiscent of a subdomain, or perhaps of the old percent hack for forwarding mail from ARPANET to another network.) Airships, Bedford is the Airship Constructional Station (which must be Cardington), and Scientist, London is the Air Ministry Laboratory. Cranwell, including RAF HQ and the nascent RAF College, could be reached at Aircoll, Sleaford, though for some reason the Boys' Wing had a separate address, Avion, Sleaford.

Others require a bit more work to puzzle out. Ok, so Imwarmus, Crystal, London is the Imperial War Museum (RAF Section) at its temporary home at the Crystal Palace and Judvocate, London is the Judge Advocate General. And Cenrafhos Finch, London is the Central RAF Hospital -- but what's the Finch bit refer to? Paynavator, Westrand, London is the General Services Pay Officer, which explains 'pay', but what's a 'navator'? (Westrand = west Strand?) I think I've worked out Airgenarch, Kincross, London, the address of the Coastal Area HQ (Kincross being King's Cross): 'genarch' is an archaic word for the head of a family (as in patriarch or matriarch). Inland Area HQ could also be reached by Airgenarch, Uxbridge. Then there's Prinpustor, Watloo, London, which was the Air Ministry Publications Department. Hmm ... PRINcipal PUblications STORe, maybe? (And Watloo would be Waterloo.)

A group of meteorological addresses stand out, including Weather, London, the Air Ministry Meteorological Department (Forecasts); Meteorology, Southkens, London, a, or the, Meteorological Office (at South Kensington); Barometer, Edinburgh, another Meteorological Office; Meteorite, Liverpool for the Port Meteorological Officer there; and Meteor Experiments, Shoeburyness, a Meteorological Station. I suspect these are addresses inherited when the Air Ministry took over what is today known as the Met Office, in 1920 -- they're just a bit too inconsistent and whimsical to be part of a RAF naming scheme. Another legacy address is Ballooning, South Farnborough, for the Royal Aircraft Establishment -- which had its earliest incarnation at that location in 1905 as His Majesty's Balloon Factory.

The default address for a RAF station in Britain was Aeronautics -- so, Aeronautics, Biggin Hill or Aeronautics, London (not an aerodrome but the Central Medical Board, among other things). Aeronautics was also used for government-owned civil aerodromes such as Croydon. Ocredep was another very common one. All seventeen RAF recruiting offices used it. Officer Commanding, REcruiting DEPot?

The RAF overseas did its own thing. In fact, the address for HQ Mediterranean Group is Rafos, Malta, which could be derived from RAF OverSeas. Maybe. Some wag thought up the addresses for HQ Middle East Area, Perardua, Cairo, and its subordinate group HQs for Egypt and Palestine, Adastra, Cairo and Ismailia. Per ardua ad astra, get it? (But, for some reason, HQ Mesopotamian Group is Aviation, Baghdad.) Otherwise it's mostly a descriptive name with the prefix air-, for example Airengine, Abbassia for HQ Engine Repair Depot. Airsquad 70, Heliopolis is the address for 70 Squadron. The Base Pay Office in Egypt is Airpay, Cairo, but the one in Iraq is Paycash, Baghdad. In India, there's more uniformity. Aeronautics, Ambala for HQ RAF India, and Astral, Ambala or Peshawar, for Wing HQs. Then Aviation and a number for squadrons, e.g. Aviation 5, Quetta for 5 Squadron. And finally, Airskool, Ambala, for the RAF School (India), is so 21st-century in its use of an incorrect spelling just to save a single character that it is, in fact, quite oldskool.