There aren't a great many sites of memory left to evoke the first bombing war, so during my recent UK trip I thought I'd make the effort to track a couple of them down. (One, Cleopatra's Needle, I did see on my first UK trip, but have never managed to make it back.)
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So, I'm back from my long-overdue and much-needed research trip to the UK. Was it worth it? Yes!
In raw numbers, I took over 11,000 photos across 13 days at 8 archives in 5 cities.1 Obviously, since I'm not a Bomber Command AOC I'm not going to prioritise quantity over quality. But I did pretty much, er, hit all my high priority targets and look at everything I really wanted to see. I struck archival gold nearly every day; there were only one or two places where the findings were meagre, and those visits were always a bit speculative anyway. I would like to have to visited the Tfl Corporate Archives (though check out the Underground posters I did find, above and below, from 1917-18 and 1917 respectively), or one or two other Home Counties archives. But you can't see everything; and what I did see will make Home Fires Burning a much better book.
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In my previous post, I discussed my concerns with the way sources are used in Neil Hanson's First Blitz.1 Here I turn to the problem of strategy, which goes more to the argument of the book. Again there are two parts to this, one broad and one narrow. I'll start with the broad.
Hanson's argument is that Germany, across almost the entire duration of the war, hoped, planned and attempted to destroy London through bombing, specifically by burning it out:
Air-dropped incendiary bombs would create firestorms engulfing entire districts of London, creating mass panic and popular unrest that would 'render it doubtful that the war can continue' and force the British Government to sue for peace.2
In other words, Germany was attempting to carry out a knock-out blow from the air against Britain – in 1915 or 1918 rather than 1940.
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This is a continuation, of sorts, of my series of posts critiquing the recent trend of describing the air raids on Britain in the First World War as the 'First Blitz'. I've separated it out because, although it is about the best-known book to use that phrase in its title – Neil Hanson's First Blitz (2008) – my concerns aren't about that usage, but are about the book itself.1 To be clear, I'm not saying this is a bad book; in fact I am broadly in sympathy with his account and I really like some aspects of it (the chapter entitled 'Londoners unnerved' is a terrific account of what I call the Gotha shock). But it is a book that should be used carefully. And as I'm seeing it cited fairly widely (including by academic historians, not excluding me!) I think it's worth putting those concerns out there, particularly since it was not reviewed in any academic publication, as far as I can see.
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In the previous post, I discussed some of my objections to the idea that the air raids on Britain in the FIrst World were the 'First Blitz'. I don't think my arguments were completely persuasive, even to myself (which is why I decided to work through them in public like this). But I ended by saying I had another concern, and this one I think carries more weight. However, it's not really about the First World War at all, but the Second. And it's this: the Blitz is too British.
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I admit the term 'First Blitz' is a convenient label for the air raids on Britain in the First World War, both as a shorthand and because there really were many similarities with the later Blitz. But nevertheless, I don't really like it, and I'm avoiding it in my own book on the topic. Why?
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You might think that the first Blitz was the Blitz, i.e. the German bombing of British cities in 1940-1941, at the time was understood as a form of blitzkrieg, which was then shortened to 'blitz' or 'Blitz'. Of course, that doesn't mean a blitz couldn't be retrospectively recognised, and indeed it was soon applied, for example, to earlier events such as the 'Rotterdam Blitz' on 14 May 1940.1 Much more recently, there has been a vogue for the term among historians writing on the German air raids on British cities in 1914-1918, variously the 'First Blitz', the 'Zeppelin Blitz' or the 'Forgotten Blitz'. Check it out:
Even discounting the fact that four of those books are from the one author, this is starting to look like a consensus.2
And why not? Many aspects of the 1940-41 raids were prefigured in 1914-18, from the bleeding obvious stuff (aircraft flying over and dropping bombs on British cities), to the ways in which the British government responded to this threat (air defence, civil defence, air offence), to the ideal emotional response on the part of civilians (British pluck, the Blitz spirit). And I can tell you from personal experience how annoying it gets to keep writing some cumbersome variation on 'the German raids on Britain in 1914-18' or 'the First World War air raids' or 'the Zeppelin and Gotha offensive', etc!
But as you can probably guess, despite my longing for a convenient shorthand I'm not fully sold on the First Blitz.3 This is partly because of the ways in which the British experience of bombing in 1914-18 was significantly different to that in 1940-41. It's also because I think that one of the key works on the above list -– the most popular one, Neil Hanson's First Blitz -- is quite problematic. But I'm not sure how sensible my objections are: analogies don't have to be exact to be useful, after all. So I'm going to post through my confusion and work out if I should learn to stop worrying and love the First Blitz.
Image source: Fredette, The Sky on Fire.
The above facsimile letter was published in the Ramsgate Thanet Advertiser on 29 April 1916. It reads:
April 7th. The writer of the first 'German messages' has been absent from Ramsgate some time now, so the 'Alien’s post-card' is by another hand. If I did not fear prosecution for "failing to register an alien," I could give the police his address to find him, as he is due to return this Wedy. here. The enclosed I found in his overcoat pocket the night before the raid (after he left here on 18th ult.)
Veritas.
To the Editor.((Thanet Advertiser (Ramsgate), 29 April 1916, 5.))
The enclosure referred to was a second letter, 'another foreign missive, addressed to “Herr Chaney, Burgomeister von Ramsgate.” It states that the Zeppelins have a nightly victory and contains some abusive epithets'.((Ibid., 22 April 1916, 2.))
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This is a reproduction made by the Bioscope of a rather cheeky poster which appeared in Newtownards in June 1915, just a week or two after the first air raid on London.
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I'm featured in the latest episode of the podcast Tales from Rat City, which is focused on unusual and sometimes bizarre aspects of the history of Ballarat, Victoria's third largest city (if you've heard of the Eureka Stockade, well, that's where that was). It's run by David Waldron (a historian at Federation University who co-authored the excellent Snarls from the Tea-tree, about Australian bigcat folklore), Tom Hodgson and Katrina Hill. As you can probably guess, 'Anzacs and airships: Australian UFO panics in the First World War' is about Australian mystery aircraft sightings in the Great War period. As well as the interview with me, it's based partly on my article 'Dreaming war' as well as the team's own original research. It's a really interesting scamper through early Australian airminded hopes and fears (ranging well beyond Ballarat and 1914-18). I particularly enjoyed the use of actors to read out the primary source quotations, including many mystery aircraft sighting reports. It's a great way to give back to these accounts of strange apparitions something of their original uncanniness.
Bonus: if you happen to be in the Ballarat area on 28 May 2023, why not go along to the Ballarat Observatory and see David's magic lantern show 'Mystery Airships: A Night of Strange Things Seen in the Skies!'? Details and tickets here.
Image source: Tales from Rat City.
