1920s

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Flying at Salisbury Plain

A few months ago I looked at some visions of how aerial warfare might improve the city by blowing away ugly developments. Here's a similar fantasy of better planning through bombing, though the site in question is a rather surprising one: Stonehenge. From Clough Williams-Ellis's diatribe against the debeautification of the countryside, England and the Octopus (Portmeirion, 1975 [1928]), 130-1:

It is also to be hoped that some regard may be paid to pre-existing land-lubber amenities in the actual placing of aerodromes, and that the Stonehenge scandal will not be repeated. There, with all Salisbury Plain to choose from, the R.F.C. (as it then was) elected to plump down its hangars and all their sprawling appurtenances within a few hundred yards of what should be the most hallowed stones in England. Never were venerable remains less venerated, for at this very moment of writing, our late enemies having declined our military invitation to obliterate the circle with their bombs, an offensive pink bungalow is being completed hard by that, with the outrageous café adjoining, makes one almost pray for a destructive air raid.

As it now is, Stonehenge is intolerable, and by no means to be visited save by blind archæologists. Hemmed in by iron railings, guarded by a turnstile and a post-card kiosk, glowered at by the derelict aerodrome and smirked at by café and bungalow, this sacred place is indeed painful beyond bearing. If it were an even chance that a hostile air raid would destroy the circle or, alternatively, obliterate the parasitic growths about it, there are probably those who would favour the place being well and truly bombed.

As it is, Stonehenge is a mockery and a wounding of the spirit, and a fifty-fifty risk of losing it altogether or getting it back once more in its austere and immemorial loneliness might well seem a gamble worth considering.

I can't believe Williams-Ellis was actually serious: no matter how ugly Stonehenge's surrounds, surely he must have seen that they could be pulled down at some future date without having to rain bombs on the site. He's just trying to shock his readers into thinking, yes, Stonehenge really is pretty awful at the moment, maybe we should do something about it. In fact, by mid-1927 the Stonehenge Protection Committee and the National Trust had already raised enough funds to buy much of the surrounding area, as Williams-Ellis must have been aware.
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This is the talk I gave at Earth Sciences back in May. It's long and picture heavy and much of it will be be familiar to regular readers, but some people expressed some interest in it so here it is. I've lightly edited it, mainly to correct typos in my written copy. I've put in links to the Boswell drawings because they're under copyright, and I've replaced one photo because I realised it was of British Army Aeroplane No. 1b, not British Army Aeroplane No. 1a! How embarrassing.

Facing Armageddon: Britain and the Bomber, 1908-1941

Today I'm going to give you an overview of my PhD thesis topic. My broad area is the history of military aviation in the early twentieth century, so first I'll give you a little background on that.

Wright Flyer (1903)

The first heavier-than-air manned flight was made by the Wright brothers in 1903, as you can see here. Within a few years, countries around the world started thinking about how they could use this new technology for warfare.
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R33 and Grebe

Everybody loves flying aircraft carriers -- well, I do, anyway! Above is the closest the British got to the concept. In October 1926, the R33 (above) was used to carry and launch two Gloster Grebe fighters (below). These were relatively heavy aircraft, weighing over a ton each; earlier experiments had used only a single, lighter aeroplane. Although the trials seem to have been successful, I don't think any of the R100, the R101 or the planned R102 had any capacity for trapeze-launched aeroplanes.

What use might a flying aircraft carrier have been? An article in The Times explained that, should the experiment prove successful:

the first result is that the airship can carry an effective means of defence against other aircraft. Thus its value as a long-distance reconnaissance vessel, able to operate for long periods away from any protection, is increased; while and obvious corollary is that the future airships of 5,000,000 cubic feet capacity, with loads of 20 tons or more, can become aircraft carriers of the air. Six or more machines could probably be slung under the vessel and taken speedily to any threatened point in the Empire; or, alternatively, the interior space of the vessel might be designed to take aircraft with their wings folded for compact stowage.1

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  1. The Times, 20 October 1926, p. 13. [↩]

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Sometimes I wonder how I'd react if I was perusing an early-twentieth century newspaper and came across a URL in an advertisement. Maybe http://www.aerialgymnkhana.co.uk or http://www.hobadl.org.uk. I mean, there's no physical reason why this couldn't happen -- all those characters existed back then. It's just that arranging them in such a way would have made no sense whatsoever to anyone living at the time. So I'll never see one, which is probably good for my sanity.

But I do occasionally see something reminiscent of some of our idiosyncratic online protocols: telegraphic addresses. They were the functional equivalent of postal addresses, of course: they allowed the rapid routing of a message to a physical location on the surface of the Earth. But what I find interesting about them is that they were evidently arbitrary: a person or organisation could choose its own address (apart from the geographical bit). This means that telegraphic addresses reflected something of their character -- much like personal email addresses today often do, or even more so, like an organisation's domain name does. They also often had something of the cramped style, the abrvs and runtogetherwords, of modern txtspk, which must come from a similar desire to save characters (since the longer the addresses were, the more keypresses and time it took the Morse operator, and ultimately pence it cost the sender). And this is true even of government bureaucracies like the RAF. Here are some telegraphic addresses culled from the Air Force List for January 1922.

Some are self-explanatory, such Airministry, London. Aircivil, Airministry, London is also pretty obvious, if you are aware of the existence of the Civil Aviation Department, Air Ministry. (The way the addresses are nested here is reminiscent of a subdomain, or perhaps of the old percent hack for forwarding mail from ARPANET to another network.) Airships, Bedford is the Airship Constructional Station (which must be Cardington), and Scientist, London is the Air Ministry Laboratory. Cranwell, including RAF HQ and the nascent RAF College, could be reached at Aircoll, Sleaford, though for some reason the Boys' Wing had a separate address, Avion, Sleaford.

Others require a bit more work to puzzle out. Ok, so Imwarmus, Crystal, London is the Imperial War Museum (RAF Section) at its temporary home at the Crystal Palace and Judvocate, London is the Judge Advocate General. And Cenrafhos Finch, London is the Central RAF Hospital -- but what's the Finch bit refer to? Paynavator, Westrand, London is the General Services Pay Officer, which explains 'pay', but what's a 'navator'? (Westrand = west Strand?) I think I've worked out Airgenarch, Kincross, London, the address of the Coastal Area HQ (Kincross being King's Cross): 'genarch' is an archaic word for the head of a family (as in patriarch or matriarch). Inland Area HQ could also be reached by Airgenarch, Uxbridge. Then there's Prinpustor, Watloo, London, which was the Air Ministry Publications Department. Hmm ... PRINcipal PUblications STORe, maybe? (And Watloo would be Waterloo.)

A group of meteorological addresses stand out, including Weather, London, the Air Ministry Meteorological Department (Forecasts); Meteorology, Southkens, London, a, or the, Meteorological Office (at South Kensington); Barometer, Edinburgh, another Meteorological Office; Meteorite, Liverpool for the Port Meteorological Officer there; and Meteor Experiments, Shoeburyness, a Meteorological Station. I suspect these are addresses inherited when the Air Ministry took over what is today known as the Met Office, in 1920 -- they're just a bit too inconsistent and whimsical to be part of a RAF naming scheme. Another legacy address is Ballooning, South Farnborough, for the Royal Aircraft Establishment -- which had its earliest incarnation at that location in 1905 as His Majesty's Balloon Factory.

The default address for a RAF station in Britain was Aeronautics -- so, Aeronautics, Biggin Hill or Aeronautics, London (not an aerodrome but the Central Medical Board, among other things). Aeronautics was also used for government-owned civil aerodromes such as Croydon. Ocredep was another very common one. All seventeen RAF recruiting offices used it. Officer Commanding, REcruiting DEPot?

The RAF overseas did its own thing. In fact, the address for HQ Mediterranean Group is Rafos, Malta, which could be derived from RAF OverSeas. Maybe. Some wag thought up the addresses for HQ Middle East Area, Perardua, Cairo, and its subordinate group HQs for Egypt and Palestine, Adastra, Cairo and Ismailia. Per ardua ad astra, get it? (But, for some reason, HQ Mesopotamian Group is Aviation, Baghdad.) Otherwise it's mostly a descriptive name with the prefix air-, for example Airengine, Abbassia for HQ Engine Repair Depot. Airsquad 70, Heliopolis is the address for 70 Squadron. The Base Pay Office in Egypt is Airpay, Cairo, but the one in Iraq is Paycash, Baghdad. In India, there's more uniformity. Aeronautics, Ambala for HQ RAF India, and Astral, Ambala or Peshawar, for Wing HQs. Then Aviation and a number for squadrons, e.g. Aviation 5, Quetta for 5 Squadron. And finally, Airskool, Ambala, for the RAF School (India), is so 21st-century in its use of an incorrect spelling just to save a single character that it is, in fact, quite oldskool.

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From Peter Stansky, The First Day of the Blitz: September 7, 1940 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), 10:

Bertrand Russell wrote in 1936 that when London was bombed it would be "one vast raving bedlam, the hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for help, the city will be a pandemonium."

It's a great quote, and one I use myself in the current draft of my thesis. Except that there I attribute it to J. F. C. Fuller in 1923! You wouldn't think it was easy to confuse Russell (interests: philosophy, pacifism, free love) with Fuller (interests: armoured warfare, fascism, yoga) but this isn't the first time I've seen this misattribution made. Obviously there's a bit of copying of other people's (erroneous) footnotes going on, though I think Stansky is the first I've come across to do the right thing and note where he got the quotation from: Ken Young and Patricia L. Garside, Metropolitan London: Politics and Urban Change, 1837-1981 (London: Edward Arnold, 1982), 222. Which does indeed attribute the quote to Russell and not Fuller. Whether Young and Garside are the original source of the mistake, I don't know. The Russell book in question, Which Way to Peace? (London: Michael Joseph, 1936), 37, does have the passage, but says fairly clearly that it's a quote from Fuller (although without giving the title of the source!)

So here's the original quote from the original source:

I believe that, in future warfare, great cities, such as London, will be attacked from the air, and that a fleet of 500 aeroplanes each carrying 500 ten-pound bombs of, let us suppose, mustard gas, might cause 200,000 minor casualties and throw the whole city into a panic within half an hour of their arrival. Picture, if you will, what the result will be: London for several days will be one vast raving Bedlam, the hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for help, the city will be in pandemonium. What of the government at Westminster? It will be swept away by an avalanche of terror. Then will the enemy dictate his terms, which will be grasped at like a straw by a drowning man. Thus may a war be won in forty-eight hours and the losses of the winning side may be actually nil!

J. F. C. Fuller, The Reformation of War (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1923), 150.

I should add that The First Day of the Blitz is very good, and this mistake shouldn't be held against it ... although I do wonder who Paul Overy (193) and Daniel Tolman (198) are? :)

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Some more plots from the talk I gave the other way. I was trying to think of a way to illustrate in concrete terms the problem of speed for the air defence of Britain. I came up with the following:

Bomber time to London vs. fighter time to intercept height

Simply put, it shows the length of time it would have taken for an attacking bomber to fly from the coast to London (in blue) -- call it the crossing time -- and the time it would take taken for a defending fighter to climb high enough to intercept (in red) -- call it the intercept time. And how these changed over time, obviously. As can be seen, the fighters generally had enough time to climb high enough to intercept the bombers before they got to London, but the margin decreased over time, from 15 or so minutes during the First World War, to less than 5 in the Second.

But all this is not straightforward so I'll explain further. To begin with, the data is slightly dodgy. It's mostly drawn from the same source as this, which is fine as far as it goes. But that means that I'm showing how long it would have taken British bombers to penetrate from the coast to London, which was not really a great worry. Having said that, it's probably reasonable to assume that the performance of British bombers was roughly in line with those used by Continental air forces. (And the RAF's own air defence exercises had to make this assumption, too, because borrowing somebody else's air force for a day wasn't feasible.) One day I'll create a dataset for European aircraft ...
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A comment from Melissa got me thinking about gender and the knock-out blow, which is admittedly not something I do very often. There are certainly a number of ways into this subject. The most obvious would be to look at the fact that airpower would bring war onto British soil for the first time since at least Culloden (ok, or since the Great War, if you want to be pedantic), thus threatening British women (and children) directly and on a large scale. Pointing this out was a powerful argument in favour of taking the threat of bombing seriously, and was widely deployed. So one could look at that construction. Or there's the gendered language which was occasionally used to describe aerial warfare, such as Trenchard's analogy of a football match, with victory going to the side which struck hardest and in their manly way made the defenders 'squeal' first. Very playing-fields-of-Eton.

Another way would be the simple one of looking at what men and women wrote about the knock-out blow, and how it might have differed in style, content and reception. Certainly most of the writers on the subject were men, which is to be expected since only men had experience of air combat and so could plausibly present themselves as experts. But, particularly from the 1930s, a number of women writers did venture their opinions on the coming era of air war, generally from the pacifist viewpoint: H. M. Swanwick, Barbra Donington (with her husband, Robert), Sarah Campion, and of course Vera Brittain. (A notable non-pacifist, was the famous aviatrix Amy Johnson who wrote for the bellicose Daily Mail in the mid-1930s.) However, male writers could be dismissive of their arguments in highly gendered terms, when they bothered to note them at all. For example, W. Horsfall Carter wrote a pamphlet entitled Peace Through Police to rebut Swanwick's works Frankenstein and his Monster: Aviation for World Service and New Wars for Old (both 1934). He thought that her attack on the idea of an international air force had 'all the misdirected fervour of a militant suffragette' and referred to her as a 'sentimentalist'.1

All honour to the pacifists whose consuming idealism and "conscience" impels them to denounce war and all its works. But when the heart is stronger than the head the result is a peace babel totally ineffective for the realistic business of peacemaking.2

Read: don't you worry your pretty little head about it, let us hard-headed menfolk sort things out!

But there was one woman who was not so easily dismissed, for she wrote the most influential attack upon the very idea of the overwhelming superiority of the bomber to be written in the interwar period. The Great Delusion: A Study of Aircraft in Peace and War was published in 1927, inspired at least one book-length rebuttal (Murray F. Sueter's Airmen or Noahs: Fair Play for our Airmen; The Great "Neon" Air Myth Exposed, 1928), and was still being cited as a prime example of airpower scepticism over a decade later. Its author was pseudonymous. Who was Neon?3
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  1. W. Horsfall Carter, Peace Through Police (London: New Commonwealth, 1934), 6. [↩]
  2. Ibid., 3. [↩]
  3. She also wrote at least one article: Neon, "The future of aerial transport", Atlantic Monthly, January 1928, also in a sceptical vein. [↩]

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In 1923, the Salisbury Committee enquired into the proper relationship between the RAF, on the one hand, and the Army and Navy, on the other. According to Andrew Boyle's biography of Hugh Trenchard, the then Chief of the Air Staff quoted a recent statement by Sir Ian Hamilton (the commander at Gallipoli) at some point during this inquiry:

Surely we who have witnessed the Germans doing star turns over London and the second exodus of the Jews, surely we will be worse than Thomas Didymus if we do not put the conquest of the air above the conquest of the sea?1

This needs a little explaining. The bit about the Germans must be a reference to the Gotha raids on London in 1917-8, when the German bombers seemed to come and go with impunity. Thomas Didymus, Google informs me, was the apostle Thomas, so I suppose this is a reference to doubting Thomas, meaning that with all this evidence, there's no longer any reason to doubt that the air is more important than the sea. And the second exodus of the Jews? Admittedly, I haven't read all of Hamilton's article (or whatever it was), but still, I'm pretty sure that this is an anti-Semitic libel.

Anti-Semitism was not uncommon in interwar Britain. This is well-known, but it's sometimes represented as merely unpleasant and relatively benign -- which it certainly was when compared with some other countries. However, it could go beyond mere unpleasantness into real ugliness. One idea which was floating around in airpower writing in the early 1920s is that Jews were especially likely to crack under the pressure of bombing. And that supposedly, during the Gotha and other air raids on London, rich Jews had fled the city for the safety of the seaside resorts -- Hamilton's 'second exodus' -- while poor ones stayed in the East End but ran around in a blind panic.
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  1. Andrew Boyle, Trenchard (London: Collins, 1962), 469. [↩]

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Not a phrase I ever expected to come across, but here it is, in David Omissi's Air Power and Colonial Control, the context being the introduction of one the most successful aircraft of the interwar period, the Hawker Hart:

The Hart was soon found to be suitable for India; fifty-seven aircraft were accordingly fitted with desert equipment, large tyres and extra fuel; they flew with three Indian squadrons until 1939. Their high performance was particularly values on the Frontier as they were the only aircraft which could meet the Afghan air menace on equal terms, especially after 1937 when the Afghans began to employ the Hind, itself a high-speed derivative of the Hart. Others served in Egypt and Palestine.1

Afghanistan established an independent air force as early as 1924, though it was easy enough for the British to dismiss as the only Afghan who could fly an aeroplane was made its Chief of Air Staff! But though small in European terms, with mainly Soviet assistance and aircraft the Afghan Air Force became quite efficient within a few years, and was used in several air control operations of its own, against rebellious tribes in outlying areas. Britain eventually felt it had to edge the Soviets out in order to gain some influence over it, hence the supply of Hinds (8 in 1937, another 20 ordered in 1939).

Although Omissi's subject -- air control, the use of airpower in Imperial policing, or in other words, the British air menace -- is ostensibly quite some distance from strategic bombing, I found that reading his book illuminated aspects of my own work (and sadly, this means I've broken my New Year's resolution already). Partly this is because he has chosen less jarring terms than I have ('mitigation'? what was I thinking?) but it's more because he provides a typology of indigenous responses (in practice) to being bombed which transfers pretty well to ideas being worked out, at the same time, in Britain (in theory) about how it would or should respond to being bombing. Although Omissi doesn't describe it as such, it's almost a spectrum of responses, varying with the capacity of the society under attack to resist, which in turn is going to depend largely on the resources available, but also on other factors such geography and climate. (That doesn't quite work, though, because the responses aren't mutually exclusive.)
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  1. David E. Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force 1919-1939 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), 142; emphasis added. [↩]

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What was the first post-apocalyptic film? This is something I've wondered for a while. First, I should define what I mean by a "post-apocalyptic film". It's one which posits some great global catastrophe which shatters civilisation.1 It can show that catastrophe but the focus has to be on what happens afterwards: how do people survive, what problems do they face, can they rebuild civilisation in some form, or is it a struggle to hold on to what they've got? Nearly everything everybody took for granted has been swept away or changed out of all recognition -- social classes, political institutions, gender relations, fast food chains. People with guns have a big advantage -- until they start running out of bullets. And so on. Mad Max 2 and 3 are classic post-apocalyptic films (Mad Max itself is borderline, as it is interestingly set in a world sliding into chaos, but society is still holding together -- just). So is Threads, though it spends more time on the apocalypse itself. Children of Men arguably is; Dr Strangelove isn't, because it ends with the End.

In short, post-apocalyptic films show life among the ruins, and so should be distinguished from their near relations, apocalypse and disaster films, which don't attempt to show the long-term consequences of their particular catastrophes; though of course there is a grey area where the genres shade into each other.

I initially thought the first was H. G. Wells's Things to Come (1936), the middle section of which is unmistakably post-apocalyptic. Three decades after the start of a world war, fighting still continues, only now it's between the inhabitants of what's left of Everytown, and the tribes living in the hills, squabbling over a coal mine. An epidemic has killed half the population of the planet, but now that it is over, the town is recovering. Petrol is scarce, so a double-decker bus now serves as a butcher shop, and cars are drawn by horses, though people still wistfully remember how far they used to travel in them ...

But was there anything earlier? There's no reason why there couldn't be. Wells didn't invent the post-apocalyptic novel; that honour belongs to Mary Shelley. Her triple-decker The Last Man was published, anonymously, in 1826, and traces the fortunes of one Englishman as the rest of humanity succumbs to a plague. He ends up alone, wandering among empty museums and palaces, and then setting off in a boat down the east coast of Africa. As it happens, a no-budget version was filmed this year, though it appears to have traded the melancholy for large volumes of automatic weapons fire.

So, I turned to the venerable IMDb.2 This only has incomplete information for early films, particularly silent-era ones, but it's better than nothing; and it has a system of plot keywords, such as Post Apocalyptic and Last Man on Earth, which can be used to pick out likely candidates from before Things to Come. There are four in total, three American and one French. Actually, two of them, It's Great to Be Alive (1933) and El Último varon sobre la Tierra ('The last man on Earth'; 1933 -- though it's in Spanish it appears to be a US production) are remakes of The Last Man on Earth (1924). The catastrophe in these three films is a plague which kills only men; all men are wiped out, except one, who then has every woman in the picture competing over his affections. These three don't take the apocalypse very seriously, however: they are all comedies, and the later versions are musicals to boot. I doubt their makers were very interested in exploring what might happen to society should one sex die out (beyond suggesting that a female US president would allow the White House to be overrun by cats); they sound more like nudge-nudge wink-wink male fantasies of getting rid of all of the competition. (One link I found referred to the title of one of the films as It's Great to Be Alive When You're the Last Man on Earth, which says it all, really.)

The fourth candidate is Sur un air de Charleston (1927), a short film made by Jean Renoir. Here, the premise seems to be that a future war has wiped out Europe. An African airman lands in the ruins of Paris, sees a white woman, who proceeds to ... show him the Charleston. He learns to dance it as well. Then they fly away again. Oh, there's a chimp too. Well, I suppose it could be argued that it's some sort of commentary on the pervasiveness of American popular culture (not just the Charleston, but the African is played by an African-American dancer wearing blackface!) or an inversion of white anthropologists watching and recording indigenous dances, or something. But the indications are that it was just a bit of fluff which Renoir didn't even bother to edit into a proper film (that was done later). If there was a point, it was to show off his wife's dancing, and to play around with some film effects.

These all do appear to be post-apocalyptic films of a sort, but, at best -- and without having seen any of them, I must add -- they are amusing opportunities for seeing the world turned upside down, not serious excursions into the land of What If ...? In drawing such a distinction, am I just being a snob? Maybe it's just my own peculiar bias; for example in my own research I look for novels which treat the idea of city bombing seriously enough to have thought through the consequences of their suppositions. The authors think what they describe might really happen; so their readers might too. So I look for something similar in post-apocalyptic works too. But still, I'm happy to give the title of first post-apocalyptic film to The Last Man on Earth, for now; Things to Come can be the first serious post-apocalyptic film :)

PS To keep tabs on what's happening after the apocalypse, check out Quiet Earth.

  1. I think it has to be global, or least nearly global in its effects. If for some reason Australia's cities were wiped out by swarms of meteorites, say, but the rest of the world was unaffected, the survivors wouldn't be left to fend for themselves, there'd be rescue efforts, rehabilitation etc. At the very least, I guess the people affected by the catastrophe have to believe that it's pretty much global, that there's no help coming from elsewhere, and so they have to fend for themselves. [↩]
  2. Incidentally, probably the website I've been using the longest -- I can remember when it was called the 'Cardiff Movie Database Browser' ... [↩]