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The National Government and the air

5 March 2011 in 1930s, 1940s, Plots, Tools and methods, Words by Brett Holman | 2 comments

A while back, The National Archives made all Cabinet papers from 1915 to 1980 freely available for download. Now TNA Labs have created a visualisation tool for said papers, allowing you to see clouds of the 25 most frequent words and contributors for any year (month in wartime) or, using the 'flexible querying' mode, any period you specify (up to ten years). Mouse-overing each result gives the actual count and links to the relevant DocumentsOnline entries. It's something of a toy at the moment (though they encourage you to download the XML dataset it is based upon and play with it yourself). For blogging purposes, it's annoying that there's no export function: I've had to grab some screen shots to show the results. And it's not possible to search for specific words or change the stop word list. But the potential is easy to see.

Cabinet Minutes word frequency, 1931-1940

When looking at the lifetime of the National Government (1931-1940, spanning three prime ministers: Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, and Neville Chamberlain) one word inevitably caught my eye: air. At 1970 mentions over the decade, it's the fourth most common word after war (2537) , foreign (2125) and meeting (2059). Air could be used in a number of contexts, of course: the Secretary of State for the Air (a Cabinet position at this time) or Air Ministry, Royal Air Force, German air force, air routes, air raids, air raid precautions, air defence, air attack and so on. (I assume the tool is sophisticated enough to match only whole words and not just substrings.) But it suggests that the National Government spent a great deal of its time talking about the air, that it was, so to speak, airminded. (Naval, which admittedly has a somewhat narrower compass, is the only similar term and was used only 1204 times.)
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The road to Mattoon

21 January 2011 in 1940s, Civil defence, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Words by Brett Holman | 7 comments

Today I came across an article in an American publication, Science News Letter, dated 24 April 1943. The headline on page 269 reads 'Gas Attacks Expected'. The opening paragraph reads:

HITLER'S BOMBERS, if they make their expected raids on American cities, can be counted on to drop poison gases in bombs or sprays, Col. A. Gibson of the Chemical Warfare Service declared in Detroit.

This seems strange for two reasons. That German air raids on American cities were 'expected' is hard to credit, given that at this stage of the war in Europe, the tide had turned in the Allies' favour. German and Italian forces were just about to be squeezed out of North Africa; Von Paulus had surrendered his 6th Army at Stalingrad less than two months previously; the British and now the American air offensive against Germany was mounting in weight. Sure, there was clearly a long way to go and it would not have been wise to underestimate German power. (At this point in time, losses to Allied shipping from U-boat attacks were reaching critical levels, for example.) And it's true that several Amerikabomber candidates were then being developed for the Luftwaffe, though how much of this was known to the Allies (and how much to their publics) I'm not sure. But that's all still a long way from certain air raids against American cities.

And it's also strange for the claim that it was equally certain that such an attack would use poison gas against civilians. Why would Germany use gas against the United States in 1943 when it hadn't used it against Britain in 1940? Or anywhere, for that matter (extermination camps aside)? Well, maybe it would have, being more and more desperate; but how does this equate to certainty? Why were credible officials -- Gibson was the 'chief of the inspection section' at the Office of Civilian Defense, and, incidentally, a veteran of both the First World War and the Spanish-American War -- going around saying things like this?
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Airminded: the ngram

23 December 2010 in 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Words by Brett Holman | 1 comment

airminded,1920-2000

Following Ross' suggestion I've plugged airminded itself into the Google Ngram Viewer (for British English over 1920-2000 with a smoothing of 3). The word wasn't used until c. 1925 and grew in popularity until the end of the Second World War. It then began its long descent. Around 1960 its heyday was definitely over and by the late 1990s it was less popular than almost ever before. There's a noticeable dip in the years around 1940, which makes me wonder if the menace of aviation had temporarily overwhelmed its promise. But that's probably reading too much into it.

The rise and fall and rise and fall of the autogyro

21 December 2010 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Before 1900, Books, Periodicals, Plots, Tools and methods, Words by Brett Holman | 14 comments

Finally, something to justify the existence of the Internet. The Google Ngram Viewer takes the corpus of words formed by the Google Books dataset (i.e. books, journals, magazines, but not newspapers) and lets you plot the changes in frequency of selected ones over time. There are all sorts of interesting questions you could (in principle) answer with this tool, so let's give it a whirl.

aeroplane, airplane, 1890-2000

Here's a pretty basic one. Blue is aeroplane, red is airplane, the period is 1890-2000. (The smoothing in all these plots is 3 years.) Aeroplane was initially the more popular term, but airplane has predominated since about 1925. Note the peaks during the world wars -- airplane was 5 times more likely to be used in the Second World War than in the 1990s.

But we don't have to use the English corpus: there's also American English and British English. Here's the American version.
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The limits of play

16 December 2010 in 1940s, Books, Games and simulations, Words by Brett Holman | 17 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Earlier this year I was tutor for a subject which explored the idea of genre, using books, films and plays about war for this purpose. One of the texts we read was Primo Levi's account of his time in Auschwitz, If This Is A Man. One of the sections I found most interesting was Levi's lengthy account of the camp's internal, unofficial economy, which used 'prize-coupons' (sometimes given as a reward, exchangeable for Mahorca, a kind of tobacco) as currency, which could be used to buy things like shirts or extra rations of bread. Prisoners (or 'Häftlinge') would try to think up new ways to get coupons which could ultimately help them survive even a little longer. All the trading in prize-coupons going on meant that their value fluctuated 'in strict obedience to the laws of classical economics'.
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Thursday, 21 November 1940

21 November 2010 in 1940s, Air defence, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging 1940-2, Radio, Reprisals, Words by Brett Holman | 3 comments

Daily Mirror, 21 November 1940, 1

I was going to end this section of the post-blog with yesterday's post, but who could resist a front page like this? It's so emotive and manipulative. The scene itself is tragic enough: the mass burial and funeral of 172 men, women and children killed in the blitz on Coventry last Thursday night. Another seventy will be buried today. But to that the Daily Mirror adds (1) portentous capitalisation ('the Tragedy of Coventry'); (2) a rousing declaration ('WE SHALL REMEMBER!') combined with a graphic of Coventry in flames; (3) the archaic insults ('HUNS RAID', 'the Hun's massacre'). There's more on page 7, along with photographs of the open grave, and on the back page. The Mirror is milking Coventry for all it's worth. And who knows, maybe it's worth a lot.
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This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the Baedeker Blitz. See here for an introduction to the series.

Sunday, 17 November 1940

17 November 2010 in 1940s, Civil defence, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging 1940-2, Reprisals, Words by Brett Holman | No comments

I have an embarrassment of Sunday papers now: the Observer, the Sunday Express, News of the World and The People. The last named (which has sales of more than 3 million per issue) has Coventry on the front page, but halfway down and underneath a photograph of a pig (I couldn't say why). US-British cooperation, the brave HMS Jervis Bay and the Italian evacuation of Koritza in the face of the Greek advance are the stories which are given top billing instead.

Sunday Express, 17 November 1940, 1

The other three have chosen Coventry as their lead story. The Sunday Express has this banner headline stretching the entire width of the front page. The story, written by Geoffrey Winn, continues on the back page where the headline is explained as a conversation overheard in the Cathedral (12):

Round me there are old folk, three generations together, grandfather, daughter, son. All of them week have not only looked on the cathedral as the centre point of their city. But have entered there to pray.

AT MY SIDE I HEAR SOME ONE SAY, IN A QUIET VOICE TO A BOY IN AIR FORCE UNIFORM: "PLEASE GOD, YOU WILL AVENGE WHAT WAS DONE TO US AND OUR BEAUTIFUL CATHEDRAL ON THURSDAY NIGHT."

He nods, too moved to speak. Then another voice said to some one else near-by: "Excuse me. But please remember this is still a church."

With a murmur of apology the man at once removes his hat.

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This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the Baedeker Blitz. See here for an introduction to the series.

Saturday, 16 November 1940

16 November 2010 in 1940s, Air defence, Civil defence, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging 1940-2, Words by Brett Holman | 8 comments

Daily Express, 16 November 1940, 1

News of Coventry's tragedy -- Hilde Marchant, writing on the front page of the Daily Express, above, says the city was 'Guernicaed' all Thursday night -- has reached the morning press (though it was announced by the government yesterday and would have been reported on the BBC and in the evening papers). Initial reports are that casualties amount to about a thousand people, killed or wounded. It is clearly a great shock to the nation: the Manchester Guardian's London correspondent says that the news 'has hit Londoners, I believe, harder than any of the attacks on themselves' (6). It's the first time an urban centre outside the capital has been blitzed in this way. Those who have already experienced London's intense bombardment can imagine how much harder to cope it would have been for the much smaller city of Coventry. For the rest of us, Marchant gives a sense of the devastation:

The shopping centre of Coventry is one choking mass of ruins, fire, and people who, by some miracle, have emerged alive.

They walk through this skeleton of the city centre with faces stained black, breathing the smoke of their homes, trying to find their families and friends, not sure of the way through their own streets.

The front page features a photograph of the suddenly ruined Coventry Cathedral.
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This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the Baedeker Blitz. See here for an introduction to the series.

The R word

16 October 2010 in 1930s, 1940s, Periodicals, Plots, Reprisals, Tools and methods, Words by Brett Holman | 5 comments

Reprisals: all mentions, 1939-1945

The word 'reprisals' popped up during my 1940 post-blogging quite frequently. After one post I had the idea of checking whether it could be used as an index of British attitudes towards the bombing of Germany throughout the rest of the war. The short answer is: not really. But it was still worth trying.

With The Times and the Manchester Guardian/Observer databases I can luckily do this in a semi-automated fashion. Automated because I can do keyword searches on the full text of the newspapers, semi because the interfaces are crude and require manually stepping through the date range to bin the data. For example, searching for the word 'reprisals' in The Times database between 1 and 31 July 1940 gives 16 articles; doing the same between 1 and 31 August 1940 gives 18 articles; and so on. I then put these numbers together and plot the results.
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Post-blogging 1940: preliminary thoughts and conclusions

9 October 2010 in 1940s, Blogging and tweeting, Civil defence, Periodicals, Post-blogging 1940-2, Words by Brett Holman | 11 comments

7 October was not the end of the Blitz or even of the Battle of Britain, but it is the end of my post-blogging of 1940, at least for now. The main reason for this is because I'm running out of primary sources, especially the Daily Mail. But as I think I've shown, in the preceding week or two the press (at least the parts available to me) seems to have decided that a turning point in the air battle had been reached: that the Luftwaffe had been decisively repulsed by day and that the invasion was not coming. Also, the early shock of the bombing of London had worn off -- after three weeks or so it was clear that this was no knock-out blow -- and the problems in the shelters were starting to be resolved by a number of well-publicised measures. So late September/early October turns out to be as good a place to stop as any.
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This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the Baedeker Blitz. See here for an introduction to the series.

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