Monthly Archives: October 2009

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The danger of gas bombs - Times, 26 May 1915, p. 5

This is an advertisement from The Times, 26 May 1915, 5, for the 'Life-Saving "CAVENDISH" Anti-Gas INHALER' -- in other words, a gas mask. It's a surprisingly early attempt to combine (and to cash in on) the twin threats of aerial bombardment and chemical warfare -- that is, 'The Danger of GAS BOMBS':

You can effectually avert the threatened peril to yourself and family from asphyxiating bombs dropped by the enemy's airships if you are provided with enough "CAVENDISH" INHALERS.

Lest the reader be tempted to take this advice lightly:

You cannot afford to make mistakes in this matter: it is vital. Pads and the like made with the best intentions, but without the necessary chemical knowledge, are only partly -- and for a very short time -- protective against slowly spreading vapour. They are of no use whatever when the gas is exploded and forced through every cranny into your home [...]

Closing the lower windows and doors of your house is NOT a sufficient protection against the rush of gas driven in by high explosive. You need -- for yourself and your family -- absolute protection against actual contact with the fumes.

Clearly the ad is reacting to some earlier set of ideas about how to guard against gas, but I'm not sure what their source was. It is claimed that one charge would work for half an hour, 'quite long enough for absolute security from danger' -- a bargain for 5/6 post-free.

How early is early? This is just over a month after the first large-scale use of gas at Ypres (22 April). It's also a few days before the first Zeppelin raid on London (31 May). And it's three weeks before the Metropolitan Police issued official advice to civilians about what to do in an air raid (18 June) -- most of which had to do with the possibility of a gas attack. Probably lucky the Surgical Manufacturing Company got in when they did, because the Met's commissioner gave precisely the opposite advice: no need to buy a specialised respirator, a cotton pad saturated in washing soda should suffice -- and do close ground-floor doors and windows. (See The Times, 18 June 1915, 5.)

More generally, fears of aero-chemical warfare are generally regarded as characteristic of the 1930s, which is true but shouldn't obscure earlier outbreaks of anxiety about the possibility of London being drowned in poison gas.

(I think I came across a mention of this ad in P. D. Smith's Doomsday Men, but can't find the precise reference.)

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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

A few days ago, a new article popped up in my RSS reader: R. M. Douglas, 'Did Britain use chemical weapons in mandatory Iraq?', Journal of Modern History, 81 (December 2009), 1-29. This was slightly odd, because it's only October and the rest of the December issue isn't online yet. The editors of JMH clearly think they've got an unusually significant paper here, one worth publishing early and with an accompanying press release. And I agree.

The question in the article's title is one I've asked before. After the First World War, Britain gained control of Iraq (or Mesopotamia) from the Ottoman Empire, not as an outright possession but under a mandate from the League of Nations. Some of Iraq's inhabitants disapproved of British rule and from 1920 rebelled. A new form of colonial policing known as air control eventually suppressed the revolt, but in the meantime the (rapidly demobilising) Army and the Royal Air Force had their hands full just containing the situation. Hence the attraction of using chemical weapons such as mustard gas against tribesmen with no experience of and no protection against this new form of warfare.
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The air power race. Great Britain also ran. Saturday Review, 15 December 1934, 514

It's the 75th anniversary of the MacRobertson Trophy Air Race. More specifically, it's the 75th anniversary of the day the race was won, 23 October 1934. The winners were C. W. A. Scott and Tom Campbell Black of Britain, who took just two days and twenty-three hours to cover the 18200 km from London to Melbourne. They flew in a de Havilland DH.88 Comet, named Grosvenor House, a beautifully streamlined twin-engined monoplane which was specially designed for the race. So a triumph for British aviation, then?

Well, if you've been reading the debate on a recent comments thread, you'll know it's not quite as straightforward as that. Scott and Black did win, but in second place was the Dutch-owned, US-designed Uiver, flown by K. D. Parmentier and J. J. Moll. True, it took 19 hours longer to fly the race route (albeit with an emergency stop at Albury, on the NSW-Victoria border). But that's pretty impressive when you consider that Uiver was a Douglas DC-2 -- an airliner, not designed for speed but for economy and payload. It even carried passengers for most of the race, and made many more stops than required by the race rules, as it was also blazing an air route for KLM. The Dutch actually won the race on handicap. Third was another American airliner, a Boeing 247D. The fastest British equivalent in the race was a New Zealand-owned DH.89 Dragon Rapide, which took nearly two weeks to complete the course.
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Tintagel Castle

After the Exeter conference my holiday proper began. I travelled by train down to Cornwall, to Truro where I made my base for the next few days. Truro is the county seat, though it's not a big town by any means. (Nowhere in Cornwall is, which is part of its charm.) It does have the Royal Cornwall Museum, which I looked through on my first morning there. Among the Roman coins and old coaches is the so-called Arthur stone, which was found at Tintagel Castle -- which is where I went in the afternoon.
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Daily Telegraph

An advertisement for Imperial Airways from the Daily Telegraph, 30 January 1935, emphasising its role in delivering airmail to the Empire: twice weekly to 'the East' (presumably India, Singapore, Hong Kong), once a week to Australia (a service which had only just begun the previous month), and twice weekly to Cape Town. A lot of effort went into selling the idea of air mail to the public, as this post at The British Postal Museum & Archive shows. Here, the modern lines of the Imperial A.W. 15 Atalanta is contrasted with the traditional garb of the imperial subjects in the background. The message is that technology will modernise the running of the Empire and help bind it together.

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Exeter Cathedral

Later the same day that I arrived at Heathrow and visited Salisbury, I was down in the southwest of England -- Exeter, to be precise. I was there for a conference but arrived a day early so I could have a poke around. There are indeed some things very worth seeing in Exeter, although the city centre was very heavily blitzed on 4 May 1942, destroying many fine historic buildings. Above is a stained glass window in Exeter Cathedral commemorating that night.
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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next

While in Wales recently I chanced upon a copy of Robert Stradling's Your Children Will Be Next: Bombing and Propaganda in the Spanish Civil War 1936-1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2008). My description at the time was that this book 'Argues that the memory of Guernica has obscured earlier atrocities, especially the 1936 bombing of Getafe near Madrid'. Now that I've read Your Children Will Be Next, it's clear that I seriously misrepresented Stradling's argument in one crucial respect: he doesn't believe the Getafe atrocity ever actually happened, or at least if it did, there's no good evidence for it now. And that, nevertheless, this non-event had important consequences for the propaganda battle in Spain, for the subsequent memory of the Spanish Republic, and for our own reactions to the use of airpower against civilian targets. It's such an interesting and important book that it's worth correcting my mistake, and digging bit deeper into Stradling's thesis.

Firstly, what was supposed to have happened at Getafe? I must admit to not having heard of the incident before. It was claimed (mainly in the foreign left-wing press) that on 30 October 1936, Nationalist (meaning German) bombers deliberately bombed civilians in Getafe, a small town near Madrid, flying low to mark their victims and killing dozens of children. Photographs of their bodies, with identification labels on their chests, were used in several Republican propaganda productions, the best-known of which is shown above: 'If you tolerate this, your children will be next', a combined appeal to humanity and self-interest. Stradling traces the propagation and influence of The Poster, as he calls it: it was used by both the Communists and the Labour Party in Britain for their pamphlets (below is the Imperial War Museum's copy of the latter's). It helped turn opinion in the democracies against the Nationalists in this crucial early part of the war, when a swift victory by Franco had seemed assured. Memoirs and poems from the period attest to the power of its imagery.
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I bought these at Foyles a few hours before my plane was due to depart, and had them mailed to me. Not necessarily the cheapest way to go, but I was in a hurry!

Jeremy Black. Rethinking Military History. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2004. Probably nobody is better qualified to write a book with this title -- I've only got 60 or 70 books to go before I've got his entire opus.

Bob Clarke. Britain's Cold War. Stroud: The History Press, 2009. Looks like a useful overview of, well, Britain's Cold War -- civil defence, the American presence, the Royal Observer Corps, and so on.

Sebastian Cox and Peter Gray, eds. Air Power History: Turning Points from Kitty Hawk to Kosovo. Abingdon and New York: Frank Cass, 2002. A collection of essays on diverse topics by historians such as Tami Biddle, John Ferris, James Corum and John Buckley.

Michael D. Gordin. Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007. Having said I needed to add this book to my reading list, I couldn't not buy it when I saw a copy!

Tsuyoshi Hasegawa. Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman and the Surrender of Japan. Cambridge and London: Belknap Press, 2005. An important and controversial book which I seem to run into frequently in various threads and blogs, so again something worth reading so I can stay abreast of the debate.

Samuel Hynes. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. London: Pimlico, 1992. Another gap in my library filled. As much about the fifteen years after the war as the war itself.

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Stonehenge

It must be about to time to start posting photos from my trip (blame Alan!) My first destination was in Wiltshire, and is best introduced by Nigel Tufnel:

In ancient times, hundreds of years before the dawn of history, lived a strange race of people: the Druids. No one knows who they were, or what they were doing. But their legacy remains -- hewn into the living rock of Stonehenge.

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