And marble, and granite, and wood ...
I wrote recently that every town in Australia seems to have a war memorial. Here are some examples, photos I took over a three day period without going too far out of my way. This post is image-heavy, but everyone has broadband now don't they?
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Note: This map DOES NOT show real air routes, from 1920 or any other year! They are purely imaginary.
While writing the post on old maps, I happened upon the following example, which is labelled 'The world -- principal air routes' and dated to 1920 by the host site, Hipkiss' Scanned Old Maps:
The only other information given is that it is from The People's Atlas and produced by the London Geographical Institute.
Now, this is interesting, because it most certainly does NOT show air routes in 1920: there were very, very few, and they certainly didn't criss-cross the world as this map suggests. Many of these routes had not been flown at all, let alone by regularly scheduled services. For example, here's a close-up of the North Atlantic:
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New Popular Edition Maps is an attempt to produce a copyright-free database of British postcodes. It does this by asking people to hunt around on a clickable, zoomable map of the UK for places for which they know the postcode (e.g. their home), and then enter that postcode at that spot. It's a bit like a stripped-down Google Maps; and you can search the map by placename or postcode. But what's interesting about this is that the maps used are out-of-copyright Ordnance Survey maps (1 mile to the inch) from the 1940s and early 1950s, which could be useful for historians or teachers, though these are obviously not the intended audience. Unfortunately Northern Ireland and most of Scotland is missing. (The National Library of Scotland has the OS maps of Scotland from the 1920s.)
Finding this inspired me to do a bit of a search for other online historical maps of Britain which similarly attempt to cover the whole country. (There's a useful list of out-of-copyright maps here.) Old-maps.co.uk has been around a while and uses OS maps from the late 19th century. Vision of Britain (which site has lots of historical statistics which you can slice various ways, and which I must explore more thoroughly one day) is more sophisticated, and has a neat trick of switching between different maps depending upon the zoom level: for example going from a 1921 large-scale map to a 1904 OS one to a NPE map. It also has 19th-century maps and a 1930s land utilisation map. But possibly the most interesting is Old Ordnance Survey Maps, which is based upon OS maps from the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. The coverage is very much incomplete; but it uses the Google Maps API, which means that it has a familiar interface for users, and could be used for mashups. It already overlays the regular Google Maps satellite and street maps. There are also handy links to take you to the same location at old-maps.co.uk and Vision of Britain. I can think of some improvements (for example, printing the publication date on each map) but this approach has tremendous potential.
This is odd:
To my readers, then, let me explain again that a pursuit plane should not carry out any pursuing. It should be a machine designed for fighting. It should have the qualities of fast climb, reasonable manœuvrability and gun-power. It should be simple in design and cheap to produce, because it will take the actual brunt of all air fighting. Its top speed means absolutely nothing, for unless it can get into the sky quickly -- and often -- and engage the enemy and prevent him from carrying out his mission, you might as well place it alongside Lindbergh's We in the Smithsonian Institute, or with the model of the original Wright biplane in the South Kensington Museum.1
OK, so the history of American aviation is not really my area, but surely Lindbergh's plane was the Spirit of St. Louis, not the We? It's probably the most famous individual aircraft in history -- though that does not necessarily mean it was the most famous in 1940 -- and its flight across the Atlantic in 1927 was still well within living memory. How could an aviation writer get the name wrong?
The writer in question was probably better known as Arch Whitehouse, and better known in the US, where he lived, than in Britain, the land of his birth. He was a prolific writer of pulp air adventure stories, as well as popular histories and accounts of the Great War in the air and the exploits of various devil-may-care flying fools, who continued to write into the 1970s. This is quite impressive, as he was born in 1895 and was actually a veteran of the Royal Flying Corps -- first as an observer-gunner, then as a pilot. Whitehouse's bio in Hell in Helmets coyly notes that 'Certain semi-official sources'2 credited him with shooting down 16 German aeroplanes. Maybe this shows that his memory wasn't particularly reliable, as at most he may have had 4 kills. More likely, it seems that he was something of a serial exaggerator.
Even so, it's hard to think of a motive for intentionally calling Lindbergh's plane by the wrong name (although he clearly had little time for the Lone Eagle, at least in his role as an instant military aviation expert); it's such a trivial error. Aside from the possibility that my copy is actually from a parallel universe (I did acquire it through inter-library loan, so anything's possible), I can only think that Whitehouse (and his editor) had a momentary lapse of reason and confused the plane Lindbergh made his transatlantic flight in with the book Lindbergh wrote about that flight, which was published in 1927 and was in fact entitled "We". That's the obvious connection between "Lindbergh" and "We", and I suppose we all make mistakes from time to time. But for somebody whose entire career revolved around aviation to make such an elementary mistake about his subject would be like a physicist confusing a neutron with a proton.
It's not particularly important, and I already know to take Arch with a grain of salt anyway. It's just like I said ... odd!
I've been reading Respectful Insolence for quite a while now, but I somehow missed Orac's post critiquing Richard Dawkins' comments on Arthur Harris and the bombing of civilians in the Second World War, and how the development of precision-guided munitions ("smart bombs") reflects a change in the moral zeitgeist since then. Fortunately, Jonathan Dresner pointed out it to me; unfortunately (and unusually), I think Orac is wrong. That's ok: he's got more important things to do with his time than studying the history of strategic bombing, such as surgery and medical research. But since he brought the subject up ...
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30 Sqn D.H.9A at 9700 ft over Peri Magurum.
A friend has alerted me to a thread on the Something Awful forums (thanks, Mike!) One of the users has access to a collection of photos taken by an RAF sergeant who served with 30 Squadron in the early 1920s, which unfortunately looks like it is going to be sold and broken up. But luckily scans of them of them are being posted first, and there are some fantastic pictures of Iraq, Palestine and Egypt, many taken from the air, including several of an air raid carried out against a Kurdish town -- air control in action! Naturally, I can't resist posting some of the best ones here, but there are plenty more on the original thread, including the Holy Land, the Suez Canal, dusky maidens, scorpions, a cross-Africa flight from Cairo to Nigeria, and the promise of more to come. I've had to shrink these to fit them onto the page, so click on them to see the full-size version.
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Between the wars, it was a commonplace that poison gas would be used in the next war, would be used in large quantities, and would probably be used against civilians. This was a natural enough assumption; after all, it was used liberally enough in the Great War, and it was widely assumed that science would have discovered even more lethal gases.1 As for civilians, they were now in the front line, as the Zeppelins and Gothas had shown.
Of course, gas wasn't used in the Second World War,2 probably because of the fear of retaliation in kind, i.e., deterrence worked. This could not be assumed a priori, of course, particularly since it was in fact in use throughout the period 1919-39. The best known, and the most egregious, example was by the Italians in Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia), in 1935-6. There were other instances too, but I don't think I've ever seen a comprehensive list (though this isn't bad).
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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]
Five years ago yesterday, like so many others I watched in horror and confusion as the September 11 attacks unfolded on the other side of the planet and on my TV screen. It seemed so novel and so strange, to think of humble airliners being used as weapons. (I still catch myself looking up at the sky when I hear one flying low, and wondering for a second -- 'Is it going to ... ?') But it wasn't really all that novel. Airliners and terror go way back.
However, it wasn't that people were worried that airliners in flight would be seized by terrorists and flown into important buildings. Instead, the fear was that a nation's airliners could be quickly and easily turned into bombers and used en masse to deliver a knock-out blow against an unsuspecting victim. In the 1920s and early 1930s, this idea was very widespread in Britain, at least among those people who were thinking about how to win, or better yet, prevent the next war.
It's exactly 40 years since the Battle of Long Tan, a notable feat of Australian arms during the Vietnam War. But I have a more personal anniversary in mind -- yesterday was 90 years to the day since my great-grand uncle John Joseph Mulqueeney was killed by an artillery round during the Somme campaign, on 17 August 1916. As I wrote a brief memorial about him last year on Remembrance Day, today I thought I would look at the online sources I used for that post.
The first thing to note is that the Australian War Memorial website is absolutely superb for researching family members who served in wartime. By entering a surname on their search page, choosing a war and specifying whether they were killed in action or not, you can obtain a wealth of information, including Red Cross records, embarkation rolls, lists of decorations awarded, and so on. There are also two important external links: one to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for the location of graves (though the AWM link is actually broken at the moment), and another to the National Archives of Australia, where service records can be obtained (hopefully online, if not photocopies can be ordered).
In looking through these records, the big surprise was that Private Mulqueeney did not die at Gallipoli, as my family's oral tradition held. Upon reflection, the reason for this is obvious -- over the years, as the family members who could remember John themselves passed away, the succeeding generations assimilated fragments of his story into what little they knew of the war, and that increasingly came to mean Gallipoli. Unlike Gallipoli and in contrast to the situation in Britain, the Somme has little meaning for modern Australians. And in family history terms, having a relative who fought at Gallipoli has a cachet that is probably only second to having First Fleet convict blood running in your veins.
His service records were perhaps the most interesting, and sobering, find. Here's part of the attestation paper filled out when he enlisted. Note the bureaucratic scrawls all over it, and in particular the very final KILLED IN ACTION stamped across the top -- naturally, such a common occurrance merits a labour-saving device like a rubber stamp.
From his casualty form, we can trace his movements in the last months of his life. On 7 March 1916 he disembarked at Alexandria from the troopship Wandilla and on 29 March (presumably after further training) re-embarked, this time on the Transylvania, arriving in Marseilles to join the BEF on 4 April. He then presumably moved to the Australian depot at Etaples, where he remained for over two months: his group of reinforcements joined the 4th Battalion on 13 June. I'm not sure where the unit was then -- I'd need to check a unit history or war diary for that -- but it was another two months before he was killed, near Mouquet Farm. He was a well-behaved soldier, with nothing to mar his conduct sheet (where his character is recorded as "good").
John Mulqueeney's death added more pages to his service record than his life ever did. Six relate to the forwarding of his personal effects to his father, Timothy:
Writing Case, Tie, Key, Letters, Cards, Photo, 2 Pen Holders, Holdall, Housewife, 4 Brushes, 2 Combs, Scarf.
A receipt slip from 1921, to certify that (I think) his mother, Sarah, had received his 'Memorial Scroll and King's Message'. Stamps for his service medals: 1914/15 Star (presumably because he enlisted in 1915), British War Medal, Victory Medal.
A positive reply to a family request for a photograph of his grave at Courcelette British Cemetary. Perhaps saddest of all, a form letter evidently for the purpose of informing his family which troopship he will be coming home on, never to be filled in, never to be sent.
Finally, there are the records of the Australian Red Cross Society Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau's enquiries on behalf of his family. They wrote to his comrades, asking for more information than the terse Department of Defence telegram would have provided.
We should be most grateful for any details you could send us concerning 4572 MULQUEENEY 4th Batt. A.I.F. and would also be glad iff [sic] you would add a short personal description, or any points that would sa tisfy [sic] his relatives that no error had been made.
There were six replies, including one from his sergeant. Pte. Hutchinson (himself recovering in the Eastbourne Military Hospital) provided the following information in December 1916:
Informant states that on Aug.17th. 1916, at the Pozieres Sector, a friend, Pte. McBride asked him to go with him into the next bay to see if "old Mul" [?] was alright as he did not think he had moved for a little time. Informant went, they found Mulqueeney dead, shot through the head, death must have been instantaneous. This was during the big bombardment. They buried him just beyond the bay, and informed the Sergt. Informant took some letters which he is sending to the Mother with details and also has pay book which he will forward to the right quarter as soon as he can do so.
That same month, Pte. Dickman wrote from Etaples:
He was killed at Moquet [sic] Farm about the middle of August. We were in the trenches. He was observing. I saw him killed by a shell, which burst near the parapet, and a piece hit him in the head. He belonged to IV Pl. A.Co. I knew him quite well. He was buried in a shell hole near by. A rough cross was put on his grave.
I hope that knowing how John Mulqueeney died, the return of his effects, the photo of his grave and so on, somehow provided some solace to his family. I can only imagine the pain they carried with them for the rest of their lives. My own sadness in examining these remains of his life can only be the palest (and somehow unearned) reflection of their grief. And of course, this was merely one, not particularly remarkable, death from a very bloody war. Scale all of that up by a factor of 10 or 40 million or so, and that's one huge reason why the First World War is still worth studying.
As promised, here's a revamped version of the speed plot I did the other day, this time distinguishing between biplanes (and triplanes), monoplanes and jets (just the one -- the Meteor). It's now a bit harder to read, though -- it's still red for fighters and blue for bombers, but now biplanes are represented by crosses (of the appropriate colour), monoplanes by open triangles, and jets by filled triangles. Also I noticed that my criteria for inclusion in the dataset had changed part-way through, so I've added a few aircraft to make that consistent (mainly torpedo-bombers) -- I'll update the original post shortly.
This shows very clearly the big jump that came with the move to monoplanes in the mid-1930s. And not just in fighters -- bomber speeds increased by around 100 mph. In fact, the last British biplane fighters, introduced in 1937, could barely keep up with their own bombers. Again, cubic spline fits to the various combinations illustrate this. (Referring to the left-hand endpoint of each fit, they correspond to biplane fighters, biplane bombers, monoplane fighters and monoplane bombers.)
Looking at the data again, there is another feature worth remarking upon. Based solely on the number of models entering production (ie, and not on the actual numbers of aircraft that were built), the period up to about 1925 is dominated by fighters, while the period from then up to the start of the Second World War is dominated by bombers. For the 1914-8 period, I think this is explained by the constant battle for air superiority over the Western Front, which saw new fighters rushed into service every few months to counter new German types. But I'm somewhat surprised that there were so many fighter types introduced in the early-to-mid 1920s, given that the bomber orthodoxy was supposedly being established at this time (though some of the fighters were for export or were otherwise speculative ventures, not designed to Air Ministry specifications). For the bombers, the reason would probably be the desire for a heavy bomber as a deterrent, but more so the increasing need for specialised aircraft adapted for different roles, as opposed to the "general purpose" aircraft common in the 1920s.
