1920s

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At In the Middle, Karl Steel reviews Adriana Cavarero's book Horrorism, which, as I understand it, seeks to reorient descriptions of violence from the perspective of its perpetrators to that of its victims. This part of the review seems like a good question to ask here:

I suffer an even pettier annoyance when she writes: "Any review of the refined arts of war developed over the course of the century would have to dedicate a separate chapter to the aerial bombardments inaugurated by German forces over Guernica and Coventry" (51). Why not Italian forces over Ethiopia the year before Guernica, or, arguably, RAF forces over Sulaymaniyah? (and while it's tempting to suggest the Zeppelin raids of English, beginning in 1915, the difference between these and Sulaymaniyah, Ethiopia, or Guernica is that the English could defend themselves: the Kurds, Ethiopians, and Basques could not, and thus stand as better representatives of horrorism (unlike the inhabitants of Coventry)).

Firstly, my petty criticism of the sentence quoted from the book would be that Germany didn't inaugurate aerial bombardment at either Guernica or Coventry. As Steel notes, there were plenty of earlier instances; I would probably point the Bulgarian bombing of the Turkish city of Adrianople in late 1912 as the inauguration of aerial bombardment of civilians. I would also quibble with Steel, and point out that while Britain as a nation could defend itself against bombing during the First World War, on an individual level its citizens could not shoot back, send up fighters or retaliate through counterbombing. At the point in time when the bombs were actually falling, can we say that the horror experienced by Kurdish victims of British air control was greater than that of British victims of the Zeppelins and Gothas? Conversely, non-Western, non-state targets of bombing tried a surprisingly wide range of strategies, up to and including their own small air forces.

But then what would be the best example of horrorism in the case of aerial bombardment? I'd pick Dresden, February 1945. Not only was is it one of the most devastating episodes in the history of bombing in and of itself, but it was one of the few cases when the horror was so great that it was felt by the perpetrators (or at least the perpetrating culture) as well as the victims. But then that's probably missing the point of horrorism altogether.

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Last year I wrote a post in which I tried to work out the identity of Neon, the author of an eccentric but popular diatribe against aviation entitled The Great Delusion (1928). I concluded it was 'probably' Bernard Acworth, and not his third cousin (by marriage) Marion Acworth, as is usually suggested. Giles Camplin kindly offered to reprint my post in Dirigible, the journal of the Airship Heritage Trust which he edits. I took the opportunity to do some more research and reflection, which just confused the issue! To cut a long story short, I still think Bernard was Neon, but suggest that Marion did have input to or at least influence on The Great Delusion. And if you do want the long story, see the Summer 2009 edition of Dirigible!

Not surprisingly, there are a number of articles on interesting subjects in this issue: an obscure airship built in Staffordshire in 1909 by a Mr Deakin; the almost-equally-obscure story of the Britannia Airship Committee, an attempt to fund and build a rigid airship for the Navy in 1913-4; Zeppelin raids on England; sound detectors of the north-east coast; and more! Well worth a read.

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Tarrant Tabor

The Tarrant Tabor, a prototype bomber designed and built in 1918-9. There were high hopes among strategic bombing advocates (including P. R. C. Groves) for this giant machine, but by the time it was ready for its maiden flight in May 1919, the war was over and its purpose now unclear. Not that this mattered much, for that first flight was abortive:
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A few articles have been appearing in the British press over the last few days about Harry Grindell Matthews, who (among many other things) claimed in 1924 to have invented a death ray. There's no actual news attached to these stories, as far as I can tell, other than the fact that a new biography of the man has just come out (Jonathan Foster, The Death Ray: The Secret Life of Harry Grindell Matthews). In them, and presumably in the book, Grindell Matthews is portrayed as an unrecognised scientific genius who will now hopefully get his due. While he's certainly a fascinating figure, and one who pops up in my thesis, I think he was another of those inventors who was as much showman as scientist, someone who claimed to have invented many amazing things but which somehow rarely seem to have resulted in a finished product.

The death ray itself is a good example of this. It was claimed to be an electromagnetic weapon which could kill over long ranges, or explode gunpowder, or stop an internal combustion engine. The last ability was key to the possible use of the death ray as an anti-aircraft weapon, and this is what most press attention at the time focused on. There was a press campaign waged on Grindell Matthews' behalf which clamoured for the government to acquire this weapon for Britain. Officials from the Air Ministry were given a demonstration, but were unimpressed. The government was not entirely uninterested, and even offered him a thousand pounds for a successful test under their own conditions. But Grindell Matthews lost patience and hopped over to Paris to hawk the death ray there. He came back to Britain, made a film with Pathé called The Death Ray, and eventually gave up and went to America.

This sounds a lot like charlatanism. Grindell Matthews claimed much for his invention, but was reluctant to submit it to reasonable scrutiny, even when offered when more than fair compensation for his time. On the other hand, the Wright brothers, for example, had been just as suspicious when trying to sell their flyers to the world's militaries, and ended up not making a whole lot of money from their inspiration and perspiration. So such behaviour wasn't unprecedented. On the other other hand, the reason why the Wrights didn't profit fully from their invention of flight was that other people duplicated it, refined it, improved it and marketed it. If Grindell Matthews was just a bad businessman, then why didn't a practical death ray ever appear from somebody else's lab?

It certainly wasn't because nobody else was trying. Here's a (partial) list of others who claimed to have invented a death ray before 1939:
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No. But let me explain ...

One of the nice things about tutoring is that you're getting paid to learn things (unless you happen to know everything about whatever it is that you are tutoring already, which I don't). And one thing I've learned recently is that the First World War started because French aircraft bombed western Germany. That was the German claim, anyway. Here's the relevant part of the German declaration of war on France on 3 August 1914, a letter from the German ambassador, Baron Wilhelm von Schoen, to Raymond Poincaré, the President of France:

The German administrative and military authorities have established a certain number of flagrantly hostile acts committed on German territory by French military aviators.

Several of these have openly violated the neutrality of Belgium by flying over the territory of that country; one has attempted to destroy buildings near Wesel; others have been seen in the district of the Eifel; one has thrown bombs on the railway near Carlsruhe and Nuremberg.

I am instructed, and I have the honour to inform your Excellency, that in the presence of these acts of aggression the German Empire considers itself in a state of war with France in consequence of the acts of this latter Power.

I don't think there is any doubt now that these aerial incidents never happened, and were invented by Germany to excuse its preplanned and unprovoked invasion of France and Belgium. The French government immediately denied the charges -- though it would, wouldn't it?

But that denial didn't put the question to rest. There was some discussion in the letters columns of the New York Times in 1916, and in 1917 a Liberal MP, J. M. Robertson, published a pamphlet called German Truth and a Matter of Fact. This last seems reasonably convincing, as it is based on some unofficial German investigations which found no evidence for any prewar aerial incursions. And at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the (Allied) commission on war guilt dismissed the charges as 'entirely false'. As late as 1929, though, the inimitable Harry Elmer Barnes questioned this narrative of falsification (JSTOR, see also transcript at eccentric revisionist website). While Barnes didn't claim that the air raids had happened, he did argue that the French had tampered with the telegrams sent by Berlin to Schoen so as to mutilate the portions relating to claims of ground incursions by the French. Schoen was therefore unable to mention these in his declaration of war and had to rely on the (admittedly mistaken, though not falsified) bombing stories. The French denied that any such 'mutilation' took place.

Why air raids anyway? I was thinking that they were plausible claims which were difficult to disprove, since aeroplanes come and go without leaving much trace (other than the odd bomb crater), unlike, say, a fully-fledged cavalry incursion across the frontier. But if Barnes/Schoen are to be believed, Germany did claim that France violated its terra firma too. It may have been intended to tar France with the brush of frightfulness, though bombs falling harmlessly near a railway track don't really do much in that direction. Again, if the reports were mistakes and not simply made up, it could be that they were phantom-airship type reports made by members of the public, which would not be at all surprising given the German mobilisation and the expectation that war would soon begin. Though actual explosions are harder to explain, admittedly.

Anyway, it's an interesting sidelight on the July Crisis, and perhaps an anticipation of the later belief that the next war would begin in the air.

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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Mars map (1962)

Via Bad Astronomy comes news of an update to the Mars component of Google Earth. Most interesting to me are the overlays of historical maps of Mars from the 19th and 20th centuries, including those made by Giovanni Schiaparelli (1890), Percival Lowell (1896) and E. M. Antoniadi (1909). Schiaparelli and Lowell's maps showed the infamous canals of Mars; Antoniadi's more detailed map did not, and is supposed to have finished off the canals as a scientific controversy, at least according to according to Steven J. Dick's brilliant history The Biological Universe: The Twentieth-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). But from some of my own work I've seen evidence that the canals and the associated question of intelligent life on Mars survived into the 1920s. And now Google Earth shows me this beautiful map made by the US Air Force in 1962. This Mars was festooned with canals, half a century after they had largely been discarded by the scientific community.

A little digging shows why. The map, known as the MEC-1 prototype, was prepared to assist with the upcoming Mariner missions to Mars. E. C. Slipher, late director of the Lowell Observatory (a major centre for planetary research), helped make it. Slipher had got his start under Lowell himself in the late 1900s, and used his mentor's old observations to compile MEC-1. So it's no surprise it has canals, then. Slipher seems to have remained an advocate of the canals right up until his death in 1964. Perhaps fortunately for him, he didn't live to witness Mariner 4's flyby of Mars in 1965, which revealed an apparently dead planet. But if it had not, the USAF would have been well placed to explore the Martian megascale hydraulic system.

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Primary sources

Some more navel-gazingpost-thesis analysis. Above is a plot of the number of primary sources (1908-1941) I cite by date of publication. (Published sources only, excluding newspaper articles -- of which there are a lot -- and government documents. Also, it's not just airpower stuff, though it mostly is.) I actually have no idea if it's a lot or not, and I'm sure there are some selection effects in there. But, although I've certainly not attempted any sort of statistical analysis (nor will I!), I think some features of the plot reflect real features of the airpower literature of period, at least as it relates to the bombing of civilians.

Firstly, there's a substantial increase in the number of sources in the 1930s, particularly from 1934 when there is a big peak. I argue in the thesis that this was only partly and indirectly due to the obvious reason (the arrival of Hitler in 1933). The more important reason was the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva, which ran between 1932 and 1934 (actually it went longer, but was dead in the water when Germany walked out). This roused airpower writers -- whether pro- or anti-disarmament -- to action, and gave them a reason to explain to the public the effects of bombing on cities. The slight rise from the late 1920s is also due to the conference, I think, or rather the optimistic Locarno-era preparations for it. The big peak in 1927 is a bit odd, though. Let's call that an outlier.

The other two noticeable peaks are in 1909 and 1938. The first was very early in the public's awareness of flight. That really started in 1908, but the possible defence implications came to the fore in 1909 -- the founding of the Aerial League of the British Empire, the first phantom airship panic, the publication of the first serious books on the topic. And of course the dreadnought panic -- it was a peak year for Anglo-German rivalry. The 1938 peak was the culmination of the building concern over the previous decade. What the plot doesn't show is that, unlike previous years, it was largely sceptical, based on evidence from the Spanish Civil War. The Sudeten crisis that September showed that the fear of the knock-out blow still had a strong grip on the public and the press. But afterwards there's a sharp decline in interest, which I maintain is real.

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

I recently rewatched one of my favourite science fiction films, The Day the Earth Stood Still -- the 1951 original, of course, not the currently-screening remake (which I have yet to see, but tend to doubt that it will improve over the original in any area other than special effects). I can't remember when I last saw it, but it must have been before I started the PhD because otherwise the climactic scene would have leapt out out me and smacked me in the face, as it did the other day ... (Warning: spoilers ahead.)

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The 19th Military History Carnival has been posted at Military History and Warfare. For my pick from this edition I can't go past the first entry, on the interwar RAF at Thoughts on Military History. It's part of the first chapter of his thesis, and it's a very good overview of the financial and operational problems faced by the RAF. I particularly like Ross's point that the perception that the RAF was all about strategic bombing was never wholly true -- it always devoted brainpower and scarce resources to problems such as army co-operation. And the perception has distorted the historiography since then. If I had to quibble, then it would be with this part:

The RAF also had to deal with the gradually changing geo-strategic situation in Europe. For example, in the mid-twenties, in a period of deteriorating relation with France, the RAF had to deal with the potential threat of what has been described as the French air menace. This, coupled with the emergence of the threat of Germany in the 1930’s led to the materialisation of a distinct home fighter force based around the concept of strategic air defence. This force starting out in 1923 as the Home Defence Air Force with a projected strength of 52 squadrons would eventually emerge as RAF Fighter Command.

There's nothing actually incorrect here, but from my own parochial perspective I'd want to stress that while it is true that HDAF did eventually lead to Fighter Command, in theory it was supposed to be composed of 2 bomber squadrons for every fighter squadron. It was to be a striking force, not primarily an air defence force: it would defend Britain by bombing the enemy. Of course, in practice it had more fighter squadrons than bombers, because they were cheaper to build, and once the supposed French threat disappeared there was no urgency to complete the whole HDAF programme until Hitler came along. But as I say, nothing in what Ross wrote actually contradicts any of that, it's just me being nit-picky :)

Bonus! Because I forgot to nominate anything for the Carnival this time around, here's one I would have nominated from The Bioscope. It's about the 1916 film The Battle of the Somme, which was recently issued on DVD by the Imperial War Museum. A hugely important film and a very illuminating post.

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Last year I gave a lecture where I said that Things to Come, the 1936 Alexander Korda production of H. G. Wells' novel The Shape of Things to Come, was not a very popular film, that not many people would have seen it. I had to retract that, but I then said that

I stand by my other point, however, which was that Things to Come is actually very singular, at least in British feature films: there are very few depictions of a city being turned to rubble by air attack

Now I have to retract that too, as since then I've compiled an -- admittedly short -- list of interwar British films which do depict cities being destroyed by bombing, or at least coming under the threat of air attack.

Some of these I did know about, such as The Airship Destroyer (1909). It's now available on YouTube, under an alternate title, Battle in the Clouds. In it, an airship bombs a city, which is last seen in flames. I'm not sure if either of the sequels, The Aerial Anarchists and Pirates of 1920 (both 1911) had anything comparable.

There's a long gap after that. The Flight Commander (1927) climaxes with Sir Alan Cobham bombing a Chinese village, which was filmed at the RAF Pageant, but that's more air control than strategic bombing. In High Treason (1928), written by Noel Pemberton Billing, an aerial war is threatened, but averted. There were a few American films set during the First World War which showed Zeppelin raids on London, including The Sky Hawk (1929) and Hell's Angels (1930), but they're, well, American.1

Things to Come (1936) was actually, I think, the first proper (i.e. scary) depiction in a British film of the effects of a truly devastating air raid. But there were others over the next few years. A pair of short instructional films, The Gap (1937) and The Warning (1939), have long piqued my interest, but unfortunately I didn't get to see them while in London. The Gap was a recruiting film for the Territorial Army, which manned Britain's anti-aircraft guns. London is hit by a surprise air raid, and because there are not enough AA gunners it is devastated. The Warning was aimed at drawing in volunteers for air raid precautions, and portrays the terrible aftermath of an air attack on Nottingham. Air defences swing into action, but do little to prevent the carnage.
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  1. I think one or the other of these was the source of a similar scene in a British film from the 1930s or 1940s, or perhaps it was from the Korda documentary Conquest of the Air (1936, but not released until 1938). I can't for the life of me remember what film I saw it in, but the scene was too short and too lavish to have been made specially. [↩]