Nick Smart. Neville Chamberlain. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2010. I'm not a big reader of biographies, partly because they often aren't 'historical' enough and partly because they usually aren't about the people I'm interested in. This one satisfies on both counts.
Monthly Archives: February 2010
In the next war
'In the Next War' was a short series of books published in Britain in 1938 and 1939, edited by Basil Liddell Hart. Unlike the earlier To-day and To-morrow books which attempted to predict things to come, these were much less eclectic and much more narrowly focused on future warfare: airpower; seapower; tanks, infantry and the Territorials; gas, civilians and propaganda. The actual arrival of the next war in 1939 seems to have cut the series short, as two of these were never published (those on infantry and, to my regret, civilians).
The authors were also drawn from a more select group, as they mostly seem to have had prior credentials in their subjects (not always the case with 'To-day and To-morrow', where the ability to come up with an interesting take seems to have been at least as important as expertise). J. M. Spaight was a prolific writer on airpower, and late of the Air Ministry; Jonathan Griffin had written a couple of widely read books on similar topics (and also editor of Essential News and, oddly enough, translator of Babar the Elephant) which suggests to me that his book on civilians would have focused on ARP. (Both Spaight and Griffin were now more-or-less sceptical of the knock-out blow paradigm.) Most of the other authors were or had been in the services, mostly in the Army. Henry Thuiller had been head of the wartime Trench Warfare Supply Department (which had a responsibility for manufacture of chemical weapons), while Eric Dorman-Smith was to have a controversial career in the next war, but in the last one had served with distinction and in the meantime had experience with the Army's experiments with mechanised warfare. Sidney Rogerson was the author of Twelve Days, a popular memoir of the Somme, but I'm not sure what his qualifications for writing on propaganda were. Eric Sheppard had written a couple of books on the American Civil War, as well as what looks like a military history study guide for Sandhurst. Russell Grenfell had served in the Royal Navy and was a veteran of Jutland; he already had a number of books on naval matters to his credit (and in 1940 wrote under the pseudonym T 124, arguing that with adequate sea- and airpower, the capture of the Low Countries by a hostile nation was nothing to fear). I don't know much about Green; as he had a DFC he must have been in the RFC/RAF but here he is writing about the Territorials, with which he must have had some connection. His volume was actually advertised in advance as being by the Deputy Director General of the Territorial Army, Sir John Brown, but perhaps he had to turn this down due to his official position.
From the little I've read of it, I think 'In the Next War' is an interesting series, so I've put up a short bibliography. It certainly presents a very different take on the future than that of 'To-day and To-morrow': rather than bright and exciting, it was going to be bloody. But that the future was still thought worth writing about still reflects a faith that there probably would, after all, be some sort of world worth to live and die for.
War games: deja vu edition
Compare and contrast. The Daily Mail in 2007:
During the dark days of the Second World War, British children passed the time with marbles, hopscotch, tiddlywinks and, for a lucky few, a Monopoly set.
But over in Germany, the amusements were far less innocent.
In one version of bagatelle named Bombers over England, children as young as four were encouraged to blow up settlements by firing a spring-driven ball on to a board featuring a map of Britain and the tip of Northern Europe.
Players were awarded a maximum 100 points for landing on London, while Liverpool was worth 40.
And the Daily Mail in 2010:
British children of the time were playing marbles and hidding [sic] in air raid shelters.
But for youngsters under the Third Reich, this board game was invented to teach them the tactics of warfare - against a British foe.
The war time amusement, Adlers Luftverteidigungs spiel, which translates as the Eagle Air Defence Game, involves two or more players attacking enemy positions on a geographically illustrated board while defending friendly territory.
The supposed contrast between pacifist British kids and militarist German kids is as silly now as it was then. Apparently the Daily Mail hasn't learned anything in the interim. (I checked to see if the same person was responsible for both, but the new article is credited to the improbably-named "DAILY MAIL REPORTER".) The only difference is in the quality of the comments: last time they took the writer to task for his foolishness, now they're almost spEak You're bRanes-worthy.
No doubt there were differences between British and German games of the period -- it's hard to imagine any British equivalent of the 1936 game Juden Raus, where the aim is to force the Jews in your town to emigrate to Palestine -- but simplistic dichotomies (as the Daily Mail seems to be fond of) are not going to help us understand what they were.
Shuttleworth Collection
The final stop on my trip was London, where I stayed for most of a week (thanks, Jakob and Sarah, for putting me up!) I had big plans, but ended up spending most of my time at British Library Newspapers doing research for an article. But first I got to spend a weekend looking at old aeroplanes, thanks to JDK who put me in touch with Trevor, who kindly offered his services as a chauffeur and guide. On the Saturday, we visited the fabled Shuttleworth Collection at Old Warden in Bedfordshire, which was holding an evening flying display.
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Military History Carnival 21
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]
Welcome to the restored Military History Carnival, a round-up of the best military history blogging of the last month. Since history is just one damn thing after another, let's try this as a chronology.
327-5 BCE: Alexander the Great's army fights yeti in India.
122 CE: Construction of Hadrian's wall begins in order to amuse 20th century children.
1202: Venice builds a fleet of Landing Ships (Knight) for the Fourth Crusade.
1861-5: Black Confederates probably don't exist, but if they did here's what it would take to convince reasonable historians.
1914-9: The First World War sees horses used in a wide variety of roles. Men and women had their roles too.
1915: The many burdens of the poor bloody infantry.
1915: The first Zeppelin raid on Britain.
1915: Fighting at Gallipoli inspires a British sailor-poet to write of ancient Ilium.
1915: An earlier American intervention in Haiti.
1918: Gladys Wake, a Canadian nurse who died on active service in France.
1931-7: Why Metrovicks got into gas turbine research.
1939: 'Keep Calm and Carry On': then an unused morale-boosting poster, now a wildly successful internet meme.
1939-45: Why most RAF war dead served in bombers.
1940: Coventry and the aeroplane.
1942: George Herbert Walker Bush becomes the youngest American naval aviator to fly solo.
1948: President Truman sets a precedent for today by ordering the end of segregation in the US armed forces.
1948-9: An earlier international humanitarian airlift.
This edition of the Military History Carnival was brought to you by the year 1915. Thanks go to all those who sent in suggestions. If you'd like to host a future carnival, please contact the Battlefield Biker.
[Update: fixed an embarrassingly-bad description which suggests I barely bothered to read the link. Sorry Gavin!]
The difficult second article
I've just had another article accepted, this time by the Journal of Contemporary History: 'The air panic of 1935: British press opinion between disarmament and rearmament' (the panic in question being over the creation of the Luftwaffe). It should appear in early 2011. And it was a difficult article, actually. I originally carved it out of two chapters of my thesis, with a 'theoretical' part and 1935 as a case study. But while the referees thought it had merit overall, they weren't convinced by the theory and thought the case study too weak. So I decided to ditch the theory, do some more research and focus on the 1935 air panic. I spent most of the summer rewriting it, and luckily it's paid off! Although I'm allowed to put a pre-peer review copy on the web, I've decided not to because it has very little in common with the final version. But I'm sure the world can wait to read it!
The red balloon scare of 1940
I hadn't come across this before. @ukwarcabinet recently linked to some informal notes of a War Cabinet meeting held on 8 February 1940. It was pretty quiet, even for the Bore War, and 'Some of the subjects discussed were rather discussed by way of filling in time'. Including this:
At the end of the Meeting there was a reference to a scare which had started through a red balloon floating about in the Eastern Counties. This balloon had been sent up for meteorological purposes, but it had apparently given rise to a scare that gas balloons were being let loose by the Germans. The London Passenger Transport Board had told their employees to be ready to put on their gas-masks!
It seems they weren't particularly concerned by this incident, despite what it might have said about the fragility of morale. The scare wasn't kept secret; the Manchester Guardian had already reported it that morning (p. 7), with some extra details:
"ENEMY GAS"
Harmless Balloons Start RumoursExtraordinary rumours in Eastern English and Scottish coastal districts followed the discovery yesterday of a number of small balloons. These were harmless British meteorological balloons but stories which had spread in various parts of the country had suggested that they were of enemy origin and that they contained dangerous gas.
At King's Lynn (Norfolk) these stories led to the police issuing the following statement:--
The enemy has dropped balloon toys which may contain gas, highly inflammable, and explode on being touched or handled by lines attached. Police and observer corps should be informed if any are found.
The balloons are used for testing atmospheric conditions and occasionally they sink to the ground without bursting. They are harmless except that they contain hydrogen, and are therefore likely to explode if brought into contact with a naked flame.
So the story is that British meteorologists launched some weather balloons which came down in the eastern parts of England and Scotland. Passers-by found them, thought them suspicious, and reported them to authorities, which in turn made public statements that they were dangerous German weapons -- either incendiary devices or actual poison gas bombs. In more normal times, it's unlikely that a stray weather balloon would be interpreted as something dangerous, just something curious. Now, with the war strangely calm and the expected bombers nowhere to be seen, it's more understandable that people would be jittery and overreact to mundane (if rare) sights (it had happened before and would happen again). And it certainly had to be considered that the Germans might try to use some sort of secret weapon against Britain. But the fact that the scare seems to have happened simultaneously in widely separated places -- London, Norfolk, Scotland -- suggests that there was something else going on too. Was the Met Office trying out a new balloon design? Perhaps it was the red colour mentioned in the War Cabinet discussion which made the balloons look especially sinister? Anyway, it's another scare to add to my list.
PS I think I should get credit for not mentioning Nena. Until now.
National Space Centre
Some Britons I've spoken to claim to be unaware that their country has a National Space Centre. Well, it does and it's in Leicester. I know this because Chris Williams took me there.
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1000 tweets later
Last August I took up Twitter. I've just reached a thousand tweets (or will have, when this post is auto-tweeted), so it seems like an appropriate time to reflect on how useful the whole thing is.
I was initially sceptical, but I find that Twitter does complement blogging very well. It's a good place to post links to useful or interesting links which I think are worth sharing, but aren't worth a blog post (I don't like just posting links: I feel I should say something insightful to go along with it, but I don't always have something insightful to say!) Ditto for things I come across in my reading. It's not quite as good as having somebody sitting next to you who to say 'hey, look at this!' to, but then again that sort of behaviour is usually frowned upon in libraries anyway. As the wordle above shows, most of my tweets are military history-related, and still often aviation-related, but a bit more broadly construed than here on the blog. ('rt' is short for 'retweet', which reposting the tweets of other users.) I also talk about other interests or pop culture from time to time. Of course, I could do that here if I wanted, but I don't want to change the focus of the blog. The informality of Twitter makes it easier to play around.
Even more than blogging, Twitter is about who is following you and who you are following. (In round numbers, about 140 and about 100 people, respectively.) While there are a few regular Airminded commenters who are on Twitter (@thrustvector, @AirPowerHistory, @jondresner, @lifeasdaddy), I generally interact with a different set of people there. I get the sense that most of them don't read Airminded, at least not habitually -- even outside of the SEO consultants (who LOVE using the web, but only seem to actually use the web to tell other people how they can get more readers). On the other hand, there are people I've interacted with in the Twitterverse who do read Airminded, but wouldn't comment here. Informality wins again. The abbreviated and fleeting nature of tweeting makes it more liberating, in a sense, than blogging: there's only so much you can say in 140 characters, so you don't need to say something brilliant, and if you say something strikingly unbrilliant, well, it's soon lost in the stream. (On the other hand, it's surprising just how clever some people can be with so little to work with.)
My proudest Twitter moment did relate to Airminded. @ukwarcabinet is tweeting the British Cabinet's view of the Second World War, day by day (currently it's up to 4 February 1940). It's run by the National Archives (@UkNatArchives), and includes a link to the relevant Cabinet papers, which can be downloaded for free. And according to Jo Pugh (@mentionthewar), who works on it, I was partly to blame:
@Airminded I hope the @ukwarcabinet thing seems like a good idea. It was largely inspired by your post-blogging the Sudeten Crisis.
Which is very cool indeed.
Twitter promises to be even better than a bunch of RSS feeds for keeping tabs on conferences, jobs and general academic gossip. I say 'promises' because academia is, as usual, slow to cotton on to new media, and the critical mass of #twitterstorians isn't quite there yet for Twitter to be an essential way to keep up to date with your own field. Which is one reason why I'm writing this post: sign up, follow @Airminded, and tweet! If you choose not to, you can still get an idea of what I'm tweeting by looking at the bottom of the sidebar on Airminded's home page.
The wind vs. the whirlwind
It must be time for some plots. The data here is taken from Richard Overy, The Air War 1939-1945 (Washington: Potomac Books, 2005 [1980]), 120, and represents the bomb tonnage delivered between 1940 and 1945 by Germany on Britain (including V-weapons) in blue, and by Britain and the United States on Europe as a whole (meaning Germany, mostly, but also France, Italy, the Netherlands, etc) in red. The first two years cover the Battle of Britain and the Blitz; the last four the Combined Bomber Offensive. Germany dealt out more aerial punishment than it (or its allies and conquests) received only in 1940; from 1943 Britain and the United States dropped vastly more bombs than the Luftwaffe could ever dream of doing. And here is part of the reason why:
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