Monthly Archives: July 2008

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Here's a question of terminology which has been bugging me for some time. The Munich crisis in September and October 1938 is a well-known historical event. But the name 'Munich crisis' is misleading, because the crisis was building long before the word Munich was ever associated with it. Munich had nothing to do with the Munich crisis at all, except that it just happened to be the place where Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini and Daladier met to resolve it. (So 'Munich conference' is fine, as is 'Munich' as a shorthand for the betrayal of Czechoslovakia.) 'Czech crisis' would be better, but that's usually reserved for an earlier flap around March 1938. I tend to prefer 'Sudeten crisis', which has the virtue of indicating what the crisis was actually about. On the other hand, nobody at the time seems to have spoken of the Sudeten crisis; usually they referred to the Czech crisis, and very occasionally, after the crisis had passed, the Munich crisis. And Munich crisis is certainly the preferred term today.

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

Edit: I have removed the poll plugin for security reasons. But here's a screenshot of the poll results as of 22 November 2011:

Munich vs Sudeten

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

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Tecton

A bomb plunges through the floors of an office building: its denizens look on in astonishment, cower in terror or fall through the holes left in its wake. This is an illustration from a book published in March 1939 by the Tecton group of architects, Planned A.R.P., which described their plan for bomb-proofing the London borough of Finsbury. Tecton helped bring European influences to British architecture, from constructivism to Le Corbusier. In the 1930s, they designed several iconic buildings -- literally so, in the case of Finsbury Health Centre, which was used on a 1942 propaganda poster to symbolise the benefits of modern medicine.

I'll talk a bit more about the plan itself below, but it's the drawings, and especially the people, which really caught my eye. They are cartoonish, childish even, but still convey horror. They were drawn by Gordon Cullen, later a well-known architect in his own right.
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... to a wider audience! A few weeks back, I received an email from Robert Dudney, editor in chief of Air Force Magazine (published by the Air Force Association -- that's US Air Force, not Royal) seeking permission to reprint the text of Stanley Baldwin's 'the bomber will always get through' speech, which I'd posted here last year. It wasn't necessary for him to do so, since I don't own the words, nor was it necessary for him to give me credit for them, nor to send me complimentary copies of the July 2008 issue in which they appeared. But it was very courteous of him to do all of these things, so here's a plug in return.

Baldwin's speech appears as part of a regular series called The Keeper File, which excerpts various primary source texts important to the history of airpower. (They've put the whole thing online too.) There's an introductory paragraph, which quite rightly observes that 'Few famous speeches have been more misunderstood than that by Stanley Baldwin [...]', and goes on to explain its significance. Bravo, I say!

There's plenty of interest in the rest of the magazine, including: an update on the F-35 JSF programme, which will likely be equipping the RAF, RN and RAAF for decades to come (it's on schedule and under budget, apparently); Phillip Meilinger on the importance of airpower in counterinsurgency operations (which appears to be based on the talk he gave at Cranwell last year); the Allied bombing of Berlin in 1940-5; and Walter Boyne on the USAF's forgetting and relearning how to do electronic monitoring and control of the combat space over Vietnam. Overall, it's a useful insight into what the world's greatest air force is up to these days.

Bonus! Since I don't talk about the USAF much, here's a link which peacay sent me ages ago: the US Air Force History Index. This is a searchable index to 550,000 documents (out of 70 million, but you've got to start somewhere [correction: it's been pointed out to me that that's 70 million pages, not documents. The 550,000 documents indexed represent nearly all AFHRA documents for the period covered]) held by the Air Force Historical Research Agency, covering the period up to 2001. Not the documents themselves, just descriptions of them. Wish there was something like this for the PRO ...

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Neil Hanson. First Blitz: The Secret German Plan to Raze London to the Ground in 1918. London: Doubleday, 2008. This is a thick, new narrative history of the German air raids on Britain in the First World War, concentrating mainly on the aeroplane raids in 1917-8. Although written for a popular audience, it's based on a prodigious number of primary sources, both published and archival (there are plenty of periodical articles listed with which I'm not familiar, for example) -- some are even in German. This is all good! But I'm worried about that subtitle. Hanson argues that there was a plan to use Elektron incendiary bombs to burn out London in 1918, which seems plausible enough. A plan is one thing, but Hanson seems to think that it could have actually worked. Is that likely, when the more capable and numerous German bombers of 1940-1 didn't come close do doing this even on the worst nights of the Blitz? He also speaks of mass panic in London during air raids (346) ... well, as I say, he's read a lot of primary sources that I haven't, but not even the most extreme airpower advocates between the wars claimed that there had been mass panic, merely isolated cases which they quite happily extrapolated to a larger scale. Hmm. I still look forward to reading it, though.

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Something which continues to surprise me (but probably shouldn't, by now) is the way that people were evidently still worried, well into the Blitz, that Germany had not yet unleashed its full aerial might against Britain. That is, that despite victory in the Battle of Britain, and at least enduring the first few months of the Blitz, they worried that they still might have to face a German attempt at a knock-out blow. Here are some examples drawn from the diaries and letters of Harold Nicolson, Bloomsburyite, author, National Labour MP and former diplomat, during his time as a junior minister at the Ministry of Information. Monitoring national morale was part of his job, so he had a privileged view of the war, much more so than the vast majority of the populace anyway. But if anything this seems to have made him more pessimistic about the near future, not less.

This is from a letter Nicolson wrote on 31 December 1940 to his wife Vita Sackville-West, after a visit to the blitzed city of Bristol, and a conversation with Lieutenant-General Alexander (then GOC Southern Command, later Allied supreme commander in the Mediterranean):

He thinks the Battle of England has already begun -- Coventry, Southampton, Bristol, the City. They will burn and destroy them one by one. ‘Archie Wavell’, he says, 'mops up 40,000 Libyans and we claim a victory. In two hours the Germans destroy 500 years of our history.' I do think we are going through a hellish time.1

A few weeks later, on 23 January 1941, he wrote in his diary about his visit to Cambridge. There he spoke to Sir William Spens, Master of Corpus Christi and (more importantly) the regional commissioner for ARP for the eastern region, and so a potential dictator, really, of the area in case of invasion, or indeed a decapitating strike on London:

He feels that it would be dangerous to be complacent about the public morale. He feels that the people lack imagination and are not aware of the terrific ordeals which lie ahead. He admits that they have shown some sense of proportion about the Libyan victories, but he is not sure that they realise how gigantic the German knock-out blow will be when it comes.2

Finally, another diary entry, written on 26 January 1941, just a few days later. This time Nicolson is recording his own thoughts. First he discusses the recent successes in North and East Africa -- it's noticeable how in each of these entries, pessimism about the war against Germany undercuts the good news from the war against Italy -- and then writes:

But all this is mere chicken-feed. We know that the Great Attack is impending. We know that in a week or two, a day or two, we may be exposed to the most terrible ordeal that we have ever endured. The Germans have refrained from attacking us much during the last ten days since they do not wish to waste aeroplanes and petrol on bad weather. But when the climate improves they may descend upon us with such force as they have never employed before. Most of our towns will be destroyed.3

Perhaps surprisingly, Nicolson ends this entry on a defiant note: no doubt inspired by Churchill, whom he admired, though perhaps also with an eye on posterity, given that he'd already written nearly two dozen books. (Assuming that there was going to be a posterity, of course!)

I sit here in my familiar brown room with my books and pictures round me, and once again the thought comes to me that I may never see them again. They may well land their parachute and airborne troops behind Sissinghurst and the battle may take place over our bodies. Well, if they try, let them try. We shall win in the end.4

Alexander, Spens and Nicolson were all part of the ruling elite. They plainly feared that the worst was yet to come. Were their views shared more widely? Mass-Observation is probably the best place to look.

  1. Harold Nicolson, Diaries and Letters 1939-1945 (London: Collins, 1967), 132. []
  2. Ibid., 140. []
  3. Ibid., 141. []
  4. Ibid. []

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I've written before about some of the discoveries one can make while wandering around the ERC Library at Melbourne. (Which used to be the 'Education Resource Centre Library' but, after the renovations are complete, will be backronymed into the 'Eastern Resource Centre'.) I'm sure lots of university libraries have a section like this -- at least where they haven't been moved offsite or worse -- a ghetto full of old books that nobody is interested in any more, except historians. I've found about 50 books in the ERC relevant to my research, from The Great War of 189-- (1893) to Civil Defence in War (1941). I can get most of them at the SLV (or the BL, if I happen to be in London), but the nice thing about them being in the ERC is that I can borrow them, take them home, and read them at my leisure instead of having to pore over them in a reading room.

I thought I'd mined the ERC pretty thoroughly, but now I'm not so sure! This evening I swung by after work to pick up a couple of books. I found one with no trouble, but the other one wasn't there. Instead, a different book with the same author and call number was there, so I think the catalogue is incorrect here. In fact, I know it's incorrect, because on a shelf nearby I stumbled across a cache of books on air raid precautions which aren't even in the catalogue! And I know this because only a couple of weeks ago I spent about $50 photocopying chunks of two of them, one at the SLV and the other at the Ballieau special collections. If they'd been listed in the catalogue I could have just borrowed them, and directed that money elsewhere!

I wonder what other uncatalogued treasures are hidden in the ERC? The only way to find out would be a call number-to-call number search, starting with the usual suspects ...

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Here are a couple of photos I used in my AHA talk last week:

Ju 52/3m at Croydon

This is a Lufthansa Ju 52/3m, one of the great airliners of the 1930s, at Croydon aerodrome, ca. 1936. Other operators included Swissair, Aeroflot, and British Airways (an ancestor of the current airline of the same name).
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Anthony Burke. Fear of Security: Australia's Invasion Anxiety. Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Britain isn't the only country to go into periodic panics about its vulnerability to invasion, after all. This book ostensibly begins in 1788, but looks like it mostly deals with the Cold War and after.

Andrew J. Rotter. Hiroshima: The World's Bomb. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. As the name suggests, a global history of the Bomb, highlighting the extent to which its development was an international race. Correctly notes the continuities with strategic bombing theory. NB. out of four titles so far published in Oxford's "The Making of the Modern World Series", this makes three that I've bought ...

Peter Stanley. Invading Australia: Japan and the Battle for Australia, 1942. Camberwell: Viking, 2008. Every so often, I get into arguments on the net with someone who claims that Japan was poised to invade Australia in 1942, and who therefore is someone who is wrong on the Internet. I used to have to point them at this paper by Peter Stanley. Now I can point them at his book instead.

John T. Whitaker. Fear Came on Europe. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1937. Just when one is tempted to agree with Evo Shandor that society is too sick to survive, somebody performs an act of random kindness. I found this in my pigeonhole at work this week, from a senior colleague with whom I've had many enjoyable chats over the years, who thought it might be of interest to me. And it is! Whitaker was an American journalist who covered the League of Nations at Geneva, including the World Disarmament Conference, and also the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. Lots of gloomy foreboding about the failure of internationalism and the descent into war. Thanks Lindsay!

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

The Research Quality Framework (RQF) was a proposal by the previous Australian federal government to introduce a set of metrics by which the research output of university departments can be measured. Something like the Research Assessment Exercise in Britain, certainly in principle (I don't know enough about either to say how alike they were in practice). The new federal government scrapped the RQF earlier this year. It's gone, dead, buried. Instead we're getting something called the Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) Initiative, which is completely different, and much better. Personally, I think I preferred the RQF -- more interesting possibilities for backronyms there.

I don't really have an objection to this type of thing, in principle. But as everyone knows (including, I'm sure, those who devise them) performance metrics can lead to perverse incentives. The average length of time people have to wait for elective surgery would seem to be a good one for hospitals, but not if they start turning people away rather than hire more doctors or expand facilities in order to reduce this metric. Or even worse, start turning them out before they are fully recovered.

So the precise metrics used matter. And one of the ERA metrics seems to be causing a lot of concern: the ranking of journals, both international and Australian, in terms of quality. Publishing in high quality journals scores more highly than publishing in low quality journals, and in the end this presumably translates into more dollars. Seems fair enough on the face of it: obviously most historians would prefer to publish in high journals whenever possible anyway, with or without an ERA. But who decides which journal gets what rank?

The short answer is: not historians. The longer answer is the Australian Research Council (ARC), which is the peak body in this country for distributing research grants. In the first instance they are relying on journal impact factors (a measure of how often articles from a journal are cited by other journals), which at first glance would seem to discriminate against historians, for whom monographs are a hugely important means of publishing research. Maybe there's a way of correcting for that, I don't know. Anyway, there are four ranks, ranging from C at the bottom, through B and A, to A* at the top. [Spinal Tap reference here] A* is defined as follows:

Typically an A* journal would be one of the best in its field or subfield in which to publish and would typically cover the entire field/subfield. Virtually all papers they publish will be of a very high quality. These are journals where most of the work is important (it will really shape the field) and where researchers boast about getting accepted. Acceptance rates would typically be low and the editorial board would be dominated by field leaders, including many from top institutions.

This is supposed to represent the top 5% of all journals in a field or subfield. A is like A*, only less so, and represents the next 15%; B, the next 30%; C, the bottom 50%. I can see a danger for perverse incentives here, at least for Australian journals (international journals won't notice a couple of submissions more or less): C rank journals might get even fewer quality articles submitted to them, because these will be directed to the A*s, As and Bs first: how can they then hope to climb up to B? So ranking journals in this way not only measures the quality of journals, it might actually fix them in place: a self-fulfilling metric.

At least the ARC is seeking input from historians (and indeed, all researchers in Australia in all fields) about the proposed ranks, but what effect this will have is anyone's guess. The ARC has already extended the deadline for submissions from next week to mid-August, so they're clearly aware of the 'large interest' the journal ranks have aroused.
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1908 was the year that aviation, and its possible consequences, burst into British consciousness. In July, the British press reported on a long-duration flight over Germany of the Zeppelin LZ4, which proved that controlled lighter than air flight was practical, and in August, on the flights in France of Wilbur Wright, which very publicly proved that controlled heavier than air flight was too.1 At home, H. G. Wells' The War in the Air was published in January and the first controlled heavier than air flight took place in October.2

In amongst all these, culminating a century ago today, was Britain's first (very minor) air panic.3 (Well, the first since the Napoleonic Wars, perhaps, but I'm not sure what impact that plan had in Britain.) On 11 July 1908, the Daily Mail published an interview with Rudolf Martin, a civil servant who had recently been dismissed from his position in the German Imperial Statistical Bureau for publicly predicting the imminent collapse of the Russian Empire.4 In 1907 Martin had written a novel called Berlin-Bagdad, which foresaw a German empire of the air, which tolerated and even helped Britain in its own imperial difficulties. However, in 1908 he was less friendly: he predicted that Germany could conquer Britain by airlanding troops in waves of 350,000, delivered by thousands of Zeppelins.

In my judgment it would take two years for us to build motor-airships enough simultaneously to throw 350,000 men into Dover via Calais. During the same night, of course, a second transport of 350,000 men could follow. The newest Zeppelin airship can comfortably carry fifty persons from Calais to Dover.5

I'm not sure that France would be altogether pleased at having 700,000 German soldiers assemble at Calais, but then Martin seems to have thought that one way or another, Germany's aerial power harnessed to its mighty army would make everyone else fall in line behind it:

The development of motor-airship navigation will lead to a perpetual alliance between England and Germany. The British fleet will continue to rule the waves, while Germany's airships and land armies will represent the mightiest Power on the Continent of Europe.

This interview was paired with comments from a British aviation expert, Major Baden Baden-Powell, on the recent flight of LZ4:

What this great revelation means is this, so far as we are concerned, although the fact is insufficiently realised. In time of war we should no longer be an island, and our mighty fleet would cease to be our first line of defence. A dozen great Dreadnoughts would be helpless when faced with the task of repelling a swift fleet of foreign airships sailing high above the earth.

He demanded that the government spend at least £100,000 on British airships, at least as fast as the German ones, if not faster, for

Of two opposing airships the faster will be able to outmanœuvre the adversary and hold it at its mercy.

The leading article in the same issue said that both Martin and, to a lesser degree, Baden-Powell were guilty of allowing their 'imagination to run a little too fast'.6 However, it too considered it wise 'to appropriate money to enable us at least to keep abreast of Continental enterprise.'7

What's interesting about Martin's proposal, and the reaction to it in Britain, is the obvious link with more traditional invasion panics. His enormous fleet of Zeppelins is not used to rain death and destruction upon London, but to enable a large army to be landed on British shores without having to face the Royal Navy first. The airships are just another way to effect the bolt from the blue, like a Channel tunnel or a secret weapon. Martin apparently didn't even think of landing the invaders anywhere other than Dover, where every second fictional enemy of Britain had landed in the past generation.

It's also worth noting that panics of this type, of invasion by air, were very rare; I can think of only one other in my period, the parachutist panic of 1940. I'm not really sure why, but I'd guess it's a matter of perceptions of relative threat. In 1908, there was no knock-out blow theory: the Mail's leader seems quite sanguine about its conclusion that dreadnoughts would be safe from bombing whereas 'a good deal of damage could be done to great industrial centres'.7 In mid-1940, the bomber threat had not materialised, for whatever reason,8 but the Germans were dropping paratroops all over the place. Momentarily, these dangers may have seemed more worrying than bombing. Or maybe they were just too silly to be believable.

Anyway: along with Wells, Martin is why I start in 1908 and not any other year.

  1. Admittedly, LZ4 was wrecked at Echterdingen in August, but the massive and spontaneous response of the German people, raising funds to fund a replacement Zeppelin, more than made up for this. []
  2. Depending what you think of Horatio Phillips' multiplane hop in 1907. []
  3. See Alfred Gollin, No Longer an Island: Britain and the Wright Brothers, 1902-1909 (London: Heinemann, 1984), 334-9. []
  4. Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908-1918 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 295. The Mail calls him a Privy Councillor, but that seems unlikely: he is described as 'low-ranking' by Wohl, 76. []
  5. Daily Mail, 11 July 1908, p. 5. All quotations from this source unless otherwise specified. []
  6. Ibid., p. 4. []
  7. Ibid. [] []
  8. Not over Britain, anyway, though it had over Warsaw and Rotterdam, of course. []