Monthly Archives: September 2005

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Richard Griffiths. Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933-9. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. I love this book. So I bought it. A brilliantly readable study of who liked the Nazis and why, including a few pages specifically on 'the world of aviation' (137-41).

Adrian Brunel, Brian Desmond Hurst, and Michael Powell, dirs. [The] Lion has Wings. Magna Pacific, 2002 [1939]. A quickie propaganda docudrama (started after the outbreak of war, and released in November), emphasising the power of the RAF. Yes, that's Powell as in Powell-and-Pressburger. Stars Ralph Richardson and Merle Oberon, produced by Alexander Korda.

Tim Whelan, dir. Q Planes. Magna Pacific, 2002 [1939]. An amusing piece of pre-war espionage fluff about experimental planes being stolen via the use of a ray gun, which stops engines at a distance (a recurring idea between the wars). Could be held partly responsible for both The Avengers and Thunderball! Stars Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson, produced by Alexander Korda.

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Giffard's airship

Well, as has kindly been pointed out to me, I missed Mers-el-Kebir day, and I missed Battle of Britain day - but I haven't forgotten Henri Giffard day! On this day in 1852, near Paris, Giffard (sporting a top hat for the momentous occasion) made the first ever airship flight, covering a distance of 17 miles in about 3 hours. The airship was steam-powered (a whole 3 horsepower). This was the first controlled, powered flight in history. The shadow of the Zeppelin begins here!

Image source: Smithsonian Institution (negative 73-05535).

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Harold Nicolson. Public Faces: A Novel. London: Constable, 1932. A fantasy by the well-known diplomat, politician and diarist (and husband of Vita Sackville-West) about what might happen in 1939 if his political friends were in power, and the storm clouds of war gathering again. I'm not quite sure if it technically counts as an air war novel, as I haven't read it yet, but if not, it is at least from a related genre: the plot revolves around the development and use of atomic bombs (by Britain) - an early use of the concept - which nearly pushes the world into the abyss.

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David Butler and Gareth Butler. Twentieth-Century British Political Facts, 1900-2000. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000. Eighth edition. The bible. Well, a bible, anyway.

Zara Steiner. The Lights that Failed: European International History 1919-1933. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. If this is up to the standards of her Britain and the Origins of the First World War, then it's an instant classic! Over 800 pages long, and a sequel on the period 1933-1939 is promised.

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One of my current tasks is to define an hypothesis. This is the question that I will be seeking to answer in my thesis, and so it's what my research will revolve around. It's not an easy thing to do. I know what I'd like to research, but you don't get a PhD for just reading a lot of books or whatever. There needs to be a point to your research: a why as well as a what. And I haven't really been getting to grips with that. Until very recently, that is - oddly enough the night before I had a meeting with both my supervisors! Funny how that happens.

What I think the thesis is about is the political uses of catastrophe (a word my supervisor came up with, which I rather like) - how the commonly-held fear of air attack was used by different groups and individuals for different ends. Because what strikes me as interesting is the way that for example, pacifists used exactly the same apocalyptic imagery of the knock-out blow as their ideological opponents, but used it for completely different purposes. So, to take just one example, virtually everyone agreed that the next war would see London in flames and tens or hundreds of thousands dead from bombs and gas within days or weeks. If you were a pacifist, this "proved" that international disarmament was an urgent necessity. But if you were a militarist (not necessarily the word I want, but it will do), then this "proved" that instead Britain needed lots of bombers of its own to act as a deterrent and/or reprisal force.

It's still not quite there. But this formulation allows me to talk about most of the things that interest me about my overall topic ... the relationship between fascism and aviation ... the strange hatred the Peace Pledge Union seems to have had for air-raid precautions ... the idea that airpower might provide a basis for world government ... all sorts of things. So I'm on the right track!

Now, if only I could finally settle on my exact chronological focus ...

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John Robert Ferris. Men, Money, and Diplomacy: The Evolution of British Strategic Foreign Policy, 1919-1926. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. A key reference on a somewhat neglected period.

Boris Ford, ed. The Cambridge Cultural History. Volume 8: Early 20th Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Because I need more culture!

Peter Lewis. The British Bomber since 1914: Sixty-Five Years of Design and Development. London: Putnam, 1980. 3rd edition. Possibly the standard reference book on the subject. Lots of nice pictures too.

Norman Macmillan. The Royal Air Force in the World War. Volume 1: 1919-1940. London: George G. Harrap, 1942. This is partly of interest to me because it's a near-contemporary history of the RAF in the interwar period, and also because of the author: he was Rothermere's choice to head the National League of Airmen in 1935.

Malcolm Smith. British Air Strategy between the Wars. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. Another widely-cited work on RAF air strategy before 1939 ... I can never have too many of these!

The Next Five Years: An Essay in Political Agreement. London: Macmillan, 1935. A manifesto in the "what is to be done?" vein. It's mostly about the need for economic planning and so on, but there's also a long section on collective security and how to improve it, including a bit about air disarmament and the need for international control of civil aviation (so that airliners couldn't be converted into bombers) and maybe an international air force too. Not too surprising given some of the people involved: Clifford Allen, Robert Cecil, Gilbert Murray, Arthur Salter, H.G. Wells, Wickham Steed ...

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Check out Rosebud's WWI and Early Aviation Image Archive for thousands of wonderful contemporary images of pre-1920 aircraft. Here are a couple, particularly relevant to my interests.

Zeppelins

According to the caption, these are the Zeppelins "L 13, L 12, and L 10 on a bombing mission" - clearly taken from a fourth Zeppelin. If this was a raid on Britain, it would have to be that of the night of 9/10 August 1915, according to Cole and Cheeseman the only time when all three airships were on the same mission (and there were two other airships along on the same raid, L9 and L11). It would have to be near the start of the mission, as it's still light enough for the photo to be taken, and anyway the airships would have separated as they neared the English coast.

Gotha G.IV

Again according to the caption, a "Gotha G.IV of KG3 in flight over London". Whether true or not, it's how a Gotha would have looked to frightened Londoners in the summer of 1917 ... if it was flying particularly low, anyway! The original source for the photo is evidently here, also well worth a look.

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When you are writing a thesis, nearly everything starts to look relevant to your topic. Unfortunately, that's the case with the unfolding tragedy in New Orleans. Although it was a natural disaster, not man-made, and involved wind and water, not fire and gas, what Katrina did to New Orleans is something very like what the aerial "knock-out blow" was supposed to do to London. Although the casualty rates are (thankfully and so far) much lower than the hundreds of thousands or more projected for massed bombers attacking a large city back in the 1920s and 1930s, the scale of the physical destruction is similar, and the breakdown in law and order is almost exactly what authorities feared back then - though perhaps with less looting and more rioting (a particular worry in the nation's capital). London's test, when it came, was less severe than expected, and precisely because the threat was overestimated, Britain was well prepared for it. Sadly, it seems to have been the other way around with Katrina.