Monthly Archives: January 2010

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If anyone came close to creating a death ray weapon by the end of the Second World War, it was the Japanese army. It wouldn't have helped them much, however, as they weren't at war with rabbits. According to Richard Overy in The Air War 1939-1945 (Washington: Potomac Books, 2005 [1980]), 195:

The lack of satisfactory evaluative machinery led for example to the diversion of considerable resources to the search for a 'death ray'; a search that Western powers had abandoned in the 1930s. By the end of the war the Japanese 'ray' could kill a rabbit after five minutes at a distance of 1,000 yards.

The reference Overy gives for this is the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, report 15, appendix XX, but this appears to be in error as that's online and has only ten appendices. According to this site, report 63 (Japanese Air Weapons and Tactics) does in fact discuss the death ray. Unfortunately I can't find that one (not for free, any way).
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Because I'm too lazy to write a proper post, here are some of my recent tweets:

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.

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After a long hiatus, a new Military History Carnival has appeared, at The Edge of the American West and H-War. (Thanks, David Silbey!) A post on combat drones at Legal History Blog caught my eye. It suggests that drones are part of a process in America, post-Vietnam, whereby the need for public support for military adventurism is minimised by the increasing use of high technology, particularly airpower, since they minimise American casualties and hence political resistance. I'd argue it goes back much further than that. Air control between the wars -- as practiced by the RAF in Iraq and the US Marine Corps in Nicaragua -- had much the same purpose. And then there's the (alleged) American preference for security through superweapons. Still, the conversations we are now having about the ethical and political ramifications of drones are interesting; the prospect of robotic warfare in the interwar period didn't lead to the same debates. We have different interests now, it seems, even with respect to the same subjects.

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Freedom has a new sound!

It is officially too darn hot today: 43° C. So naturally my thoughts turn to a colder time: the 1950s. The above image (which I found as part of x-ray delta one's wonderful Flickr stream; he also has a suitably breathless blog, ATOMIC-ANNIHILATION) would seem to be part of a public relations exercise from Convair, relating to its interceptor, the F-102A Delta Dagger. I'm not sure what year it's from exactly, but the Dagger entered service in 1956, so probably then or the following year. (So it could be an early effort from Don Draper.) Evidently there were a lot of complaints from the public about sonic booms from the Dagger, the USAF's first supersonic interceptor. The text is really something else; it almost circles right through brazen propaganda to become an honest argument that sonic booms really are good for you. Almost:

Freedom Has a New Sound!

ALL OVER AMERICA these days the blast of supersonic flight is shattering the old familiar sounds of city and countryside.

At U. S. Air Force bases strategically located near key cities our Airmen maintain their round the clock vigil, ready to take off on a moment's notice in jet aircraft like Convair's F-102A all-weather interceptor. Every flight has only one purpose -- your personal protection!

The next time jets thunder overhead, remember that the pilots who fly them are not willful disturbers of your peace; they are patriotic young Americans affirming your New Sound of Freedom!

Presumably the next panel would show the milkman clutching his ears and screaming in pain, and the one after that the homeowners sweeping up the bits of broken glass. That new sound of freedom wasn't free.

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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

'To-day and To-morrow' was a series of over a hundred essays on 'the future' of a diverse range of subjects, which were published in pamphlet form by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. between 1924 and 1931. The authors are equally varied: some were acknowledged experts in their fields, others seem to have been chosen for their ability to provoke. Some of the 'To-day and To-morrow' essays have since attained classic status; most have been forgotten. But as a whole they are an impressive testimony to a vibrant, wideranging (and idiosyncratic) kind of British futurism, and I think they deserve more attention. Some of them have been reprinted from time to time, and if you're rich you can buy nearly all of them in collected volumes through Routledge, but otherwise there are so many they are are hard to track down. So I've tried to compile a definitive list of the series' titles (which are mostly classical allusions) with links to online sources for the texts and some sort of author biography, where available. Google Books has many of them, but only snippets or previews, so I've linked to other sources where possible. Additions and corrections are welcome.

Physically, they were very small books (pott octavo, to be precise), easy to slip into a pocket, and numbered only a hundred pages or so, in large type and generous margins. Their price was 2/6, about the same price as a cheap novel, but five times the price of the later, hugely successful Penguins. So they did not attract a mass readership, but do seem to have been much read by the chattering classes. (See Peter J. Bowler, Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2009), 139.) Many of the titles went through multiple impressions. And at least one was discussed in the House of Commons.
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It's that time of year again: the winners of the 2009 Cliopatria Awards for the best history blogging have been announced! Congratulations to all the winners: Curious Expeditions (best group blog), Georgian London (best individual blog AND best new blog), A Historian's Craft (best post), The Historical Society (best series of posts), and Executed Today (best writing). As a very modest reward, they've all gone onto the list of recommended blogs on the front page. (Actually, as I read most of these blogs already, I thought some were already there ... never mind, they are now!)

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Conwy

After Cardiff, my next base of operations was to be Conwy (above), a small town on the north coast of Wales. But getting from south Wales to north Wales by rail is surprisingly difficult: there's no mainline route which doesn't spend most of its time in England, and I wanted to see some of the Welsh countryside rolling past my window! Luckily, Chris suggested a workable alternative: take a main line train to Porthmadog, take a tourist steam train from there to Blaenau Ffestiniog, and from there another mainline train to Conwy (or rather Llandudno Junction, which is walking distance from Conwy). This would take all day, but since I probably would have done one of the tourist trains anyway, I didn't lose much in the way of holidaying time. And the rail trip was worth it!
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Kamiri Searchlight (1945) by Eric Thake

The war artist is Eric Thake (1904-1982), and the family is mine, although only in the extended sense: Thake's grandparents, John and Sarah (née Prentice) Thake, were my great-great-grandparents. It was only a couple of weeks ago that my mother found this out. My paternal grandmother (who was born a Thake) did maintain that he was related, but how exactly was unclear, and his middle-class life in suburban Melbourne seemed a long way from her family on the Murray. But she was right!

Thake is a moderately important Australian artist: as one indicator of this, the Art Gallery of New South Wales holds 131 of his works in its collection. He worked in a number of different media: watercolours, photography, sketches, linocuts. In later years he even designed stamps, including a series to mark the anniversary of the first flight from Britain to Australia. He started out as a commercial artist in the 1920s, but also began to make a name for himself in less practical forms of art, including surrealism: in 1940, the director of the National Gallery of Victoria denounced Thake for being 'too modern'! Perhaps his modernity was why the Royal Australian Air Force selected him in 1944 to be an official war artist. He had already shown some interest in the technology of flight, for example in this surrealist work entitled Archaeopteryx (1941):
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