1920s

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Last year I was playing with a plotting program for Mac OS X, which was pretty good, but not quite satisfactory. I've found a better one, Plot, which is free (as in beer), fairly easy to use, and very customisable. It has its own idiosyncrasies, but I like it a lot. Here's an example plot, showing how the top speed of British combat increased up to the end of the Second World War.

Maximum speed of British combat aircraft, 1912-1945

The data are drawn from John W. R. Taylor, Combat Aircraft of the World From 1909 to the Present (New York: Paragon, 1979). This excludes aircraft which never saw service as well as those not intended for combat (though not all actually saw combat). The year is that in which it entered service (usually with the RAF), or if this wasn't given, the year when the prototype first flew. (Some aircraft unfortunately had neither, and so were omitted.) The maximum speeds, in miles per hour, are not necessarily comparable, because they were often obtained at different heights; also, they may not have been sustainable under normal conditions. But they should be broadly indicative of real-world maximums. I've classified each aircraft as either fighters (red) or bombers (blue), based upon their actual use. However, that's fairly arbitrary for the period up to 1915, which is when aircraft adapted for specialised roles began to appear. I haven't included seaplanes but I have included carrier-borne aircraft. Generally, I have only included data for the most representative version (eg not for each of the innumerable marks of Spitfire). Because of these caveats and inconsistencies, the plot should not be taken too seriously -- it's just for illustrative purposes.

...continue reading →

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

The kick-off for the football1 World Cup final is only hours away. To mark the occasion, here's Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, head of the Royal Air Force, on the correct use of airpower (in 1923, in the context of a hypothetical war with France):

Would it be best to have less fighters and more bombers to bomb the enemy and trust to their people cracking before ours, or have more fighters to bring down more of the enemy bombers. It would be rather like putting two teams to play each other at football, and telling one team they must only defend their own goal, and keep all their men on that one point. The defending team would certainly not be beaten, but they would equally certainly not win, nor would they stop the attack on their goal from continuing. I would like to make this point again. I feel that although there would be an outcry, the French in a bombing duel would probably squeal before we did. That was really the final thing. The nation that would stand being bombed longest would win in the end.2

It may not be immediately apparent, but in Trenchard's analogy, the 'goals' to be defended are the great cities of each warring nation. So goals are scored by bombing cities, killing and terrorising their inhabitants; and the 'match' won by causing a collapse in civilian morale, who will then cause their 'team' to give up.

The analogy is starting to get a bit torturous by this point! But football is not a great analogy for the standard RAF view of strategic bombing to begin with. On the one hand, it's true that in football a team which only defends can't win. On the other hand, a strong defence is still desirable, because one goal is often enough to win (or lose) a match. Equally, it's more than possible to have matches end in a draw, and not the decisive knock-out blow Trenchard predicted.

Knock-out blow ... now that's a boxing term.3 Sport and war seem to mix very easily in British history. The Duke of Wellington might not have said that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, but Henry Newbolt did compare the imperial burden to a schoolboy game of cricket, in his 1897 poem "Vitai Lampada":

There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night --
Ten to make and the match to win --
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"
The sand of the desert is sodden red, --
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; --
The Gatling's jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of schoolboy rallies the ranks,
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"
This is the word that year by year
While in her place the School is set
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind --
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"

Cricket is, of course, much more interesting to Englishmen than is war. At least, this is the case in P. G. Wodehouse's brilliant parody of the Edwardian preoccupation with the possibility of German invasion, "The swoop!" (1909). A newspaper poster proclaims

SURREY
DOING
BADLY
GERMAN ARMY LANDS IN ENGLAND

with a stop-press report that

Fry not out, 104. Surrey 147 for 8. A German army landed in Essex this afternoon. Loamshire Handicap: Spring Chicken, 1; Salome, 2; Yip-i-addy, 3. Seven ran.

Wodehouse may have been on to something. In 1940, newspaper sellers reported the progress of the Battle of Britain as though it were a cricket match: 'Biggest raid ever -- Score 78 to 26 -- England still batting',4 as did BBC radio commentators:

[T]he man's baled out by parachute -- the pilot's baled out by parachute -- he's a Junkers 87 and he's going slap into the sea and there he goes -- smash ... Oh boy, I've never seen anything so good as this -- the RAF fighters have really got these boys taped.5

It does seem a bit unsporting of the Luftwaffe to have tried to take out their defeat on the home of cricket itself, though.

More seriously, that the everyday heroics of the sports field could inspire men on the battlefield is shown by the famous incident on the first day of the Somme, where Captain W. P. Nevill led men of the 8th East Surreys over the top, dribbling a football. Nevill fell, dead -- no faking there, unlike the real thing -- but his men took their objective.

Going the other way, and bringing us back to where we began, since 1966 English football fans have taunted their German counterparts with the chant "Two World Wars and one World Cup!" -- though some might argue that three World Cups is at least an equivalent record. Neither Germany nor England is playing in the final this time around: it's France vs Italy. And as Italy knocked out Australia thanks to a somewhat dubious penalty, I'm hoping that France will squeal, as Trenchard predicted -- not in terror but in joy!

  1. By which I mean soccer ... [↩]
  2. Chief of Air Staff meeting, 19 July 1923, AIR 2/1267; quoted in Neville Jones, The Beginnings of Strategic Air Power: A History of the British Bomber Force 1923-39 (London: Frank Cass, 1987), 29. Emphasis added. [↩]
  3. When the Sun crowed 'Gotcha!' at the Royal Navy's sinking of the General Belgrano in the Falklands War, it reported that 'The Navy had the Argies on their knees last night after a devastating double punch'. [↩]
  4. Quoted in Malcolm Smith, Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 63. [↩]
  5. Ibid., 62. [↩]

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It's 80 years to the day since the end of the 1926 General Strike, which lasted just nine days. It had long been anticipated or feared (depending on ideology) as the precursor to a socialist revolution, on the 1917 Bolshevik model, but this turned out not to be the case. It was begun, in somewhat half-hearted and disorganised fashion, by the Trades Union Congress on 3 May in support of the miners who were facing steep pay cuts; it ended on 12 May without any promise by the government to preserve wages. Several million workers went out on strike. But the TUC's position was virtually censored; civilian volunteers and the armed forces kept transportation and basic services going; and the peace was generally kept apart from localised and small-scale incidents. The strike did not appear to be achieving anything other than alienating middle-class opinion; and far from being revolutionary in intent, the TUC were worried about its constitutionality, which is why they were anxious to reach a compromise with the government. The miners stayed out for another 6 months or so, and gained little apart from worse conditions or losing their jobs altogether. The possibility of another general strike receded, not only because of the failure of the 1926 one, but also because of new legislation which banned sympathetic strikes.

While the possibility of an actual revolution was a bit of right-wing myth, and despite the failure of the General Strike to achieve its ends, it has been enshrined in left-wing mythology as shaking 'the British ruling class out of their thrones' and showing 'brilliantly how collective working class action can change society'. From my perspective though, it doesn't seem like the ruling class were shaken much at all. Most of the works I've read from the early 1920s display fear of the working class or socialist revolution; for example Hugh Addison's The Battle of London (London: Herbert Jenkins, n.d. [1923]) where a general strike paralyses the country ahead of a bloody worker's uprising in London and (naturally) a knock-out blow by the Germans. However, it is very noticeable that after 1926, there is a sudden drop-off in concern about the working class. This may start to to pick up again in the 1930s during the Slump, but to me this suggests that the failure of the General Strike demonstrated to the 'British ruling class' that, despite their fears, Britain was actually pretty safe from revolution. Perhaps it had deeper or longer term effects that don't show up on the level of popular literature, though.

A good, short (but old) overview of the General Strike is Geoffrey McDonald, "The defeat of the General Strike" in Gillian Peele and Chris Cook, eds, The Politics of Reappraisal 1918-1939 (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1975), 64-87.

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Essendon Football Club logo

Football, by which I mean Australian Rules, pretty much bores me to tears. Given that I live in the home of Aussie rules, it's something that I just have to put up with. Melbourne is obsessed with the sport for more than half the year, between the start of the pre-game season in February and that one day in September when the Grand Final is held and those of us who aren't fanatics can get some relief. (And look forward to the cricket and the tennis ...)

However, there is some small interest for the airminded historian. Today being Anzac Day, it is the occasion for the "traditional Anzac Day clash" (where apparently "traditional" means since 1995) between two of the original members of the Australian Football League (founded 1897, as the Victorian Football League), Collingwood and Essendon. Now, each team in the competition has a nickname, ranging from the biological (Kangaroos, Lions) to the religious (Saints, Demons) to the oddly abstract (Blues, Power). Collingwood are the Magpies, and Essendon are the Bombers -- and this is obviously where I come in.

So where did they get a name like that? According to the club's website, the name began to be used from 1922. Other sites add that it was because that year, the club moved to new grounds at Windy Hill, near Essendon Airport, which itself was only founded in 1921. That makes some sense, the 1920s were a boom time for aviation in Australia: Qantas, the Royal Australian Air Force and the Royal Flying Doctor Service all got off the ground in that decade, which also saw the rise to fame of such great Australian aviators as Charles Kingsford-Smith and Bert Hinkler. I can see the appeal of an aviation theme for a club wanting to move with the times. But still, I have questions. As far as I can tell Essendon Airport was never used by the RAAF (which in any event was tiny in this period), so there wouldn't have been many bombers around Essendon. So was it just the airport that inspired the name? Also, why bombers, and not the more glamorous fighters, which might seem to have many positive attributes for a sporting emblem -- speed, agility, power?

I think an understanding of post-war airpower might help here. To take the second question first, fighters were faster (though not always by much) and more agile, but on the other hand they lacked the endurance of the bomber. More importantly, perhaps, the twin machine-guns of most fighters in this period hardly compared with the awesome destructive power of the high-explosive, incendiary and gas bombs that bombers could carry. Yes, that's right -- it all comes back to the theory of the knock-out blow, which was debated extensively in public throughout this period. At least, it was in the UK, but the State Library's extensive holdings on the subject leads me to suspect the debate was followed closely over here too (or at least that librarians thought that it was ...)

And that, I suggest, may help answer the first question. So 1922 was the year that Essendon started being called the Bombers; 1922 was also the year that, back in Mother England, P. R. C. Groves published an extremely influential series of articles in The Times which I think mark the real start of the knock-out blow, at least as far as public awareness is concerned.Not that anyone much seems to have actually used that term back then! (Groves' articles along with responses published in many other newspapers were republished in his Our Future in the Air: A Survey of the Vital Question of British Air Power, London: Hutchinson & Co., 1922.) Is it too much of a stretch to think that echoes of this debate made their way out to Australia, and inspired some Essendon fan watching his team train at Windy Hill while some biplanes circled lazily above? The Bombers: they will always get through the enemy defences, they will bombard the goals with devastatingly accurate kicks, they will demoralise the enemy fans with the ferocity of their attack. They will, in short, secure victory by delivering the knock-out blow.

Well, that's all speculation! There are some possible problems. One is that a few sites say that the nickname wasn't used until the 1940s. Another is the possibility that it originally had nothing directly to do with aeroplanes at all, but referred to a style of kick that Essendon players excelled at circa 1922. If either of those is true then my theory has been shot down in flames. I've looked at some academic histories of Aussie rules, but none of them talk about the origins of Essendon's nickname.If anyone is interested, the best one seems to be Rob Hess and Bob Stewart, eds, More Than a Game: An Unauthorised History of Australian Rules Football (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 1998). The chapter on the period 1915-1924 is by Dale Blair, a military historian who usually writes on the First World War. There are some people in my department who would probably know whether my suggestion is off the mark or not, or I could do some, you know, actual primary source research. But I think for the moment I have reached the limits of my extremely small interest in football :)

PS It seems that the Magpies' air defences were too strong this year: the Bombers were downed by 15.16 (106) to 12.17 (89).

Image source: Wikipedia.

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The Broken Trident

The Royal Navy is about to pay a high price for its neglect of airpower ...

Front cover of E. F. Spanner, The Broken Trident (London: E. F. Spanner, 1929).

I just like this picture for some reason. Spanner was a retired naval architect who evidently had at least one bee in his bonnet, for he wrote about half a dozen books on various aviation matters (including the inadvisability of the government's Imperial airship scheme -- well, he was right about that), and what's more, he published them all himself! The Broken Trident was originally published in 1926, and the cover above is from the 1929 "cheap edition" (price: 2/6), so either the first edition sold enough to warrant going down market, or probably more likely, he wanted to get his message out to a wider audience. There was also a German edition (1927), which I'm sure would have sold relatively well, given the effortless ease with which, in the novel, a supposedly downtrodden Germany bests a smug and complacent Britain.

Update: I was looking at another book of Spanner's today, Armaments and the Non-combatant: To the 'Front-line' Troops of the Future (London: Williams and Norgate, 1927), which is a non-fictional rendition of many of the ideas in The Broken Trident. So obviously not all of his books were self-published (as I stated above), at least the first editions, contrary to what the cover of The Broken Trident suggests. In Armaments and the Non-combatant, Spanner notes (p. 295) that he wrote The Broken Trident (among other books) as a novel because 'in that form I thought it easy to present facts and probabilities so that they might gain the attention of technical men of all shades of thought and also the attention of ''the man in the street''', and appends excerpts from its favourable reviews. The title page also notes that he's the 'Inventor of the Duct Keel system of Ship Construction, the "Soft-ended Ship" system of Bow Construction, the "Spanner" Strain Indicator, etc'.

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Another bit from the Earl of Halsbury's 1944 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1926), this time from p. 217. It's a couple of weeks after a massive Russo-German air strike on London, Paris, and in fact most of the bigger cities of western Europe. Two members of a group making its way to the southern coast of Cornwall wonder just how much further British society has to sink after the enormous dislocation caused by the knock-out blow:
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As everyone knows, cockroaches are supposedly the only creatures able to survive a nuclear explosion.Which may be an exaggeration, but not by much. Well, I think I've found the pre-atomic, chemical equivalent! It's from a novel published in 1926:

Poison gas in the open is one thing. Dropped on a densely populated town like London it's quite another. Suppose you dropped enough to make a lethal atmosphere all over London to a depth of forty feet, not a single living thing could survive, not one -- except flies. Curiously enough, they are immune.

Source: the Earl of Halsbury, 1944 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1926), 25.Halsbury is better known to airpower history as Lord Tiverton, a pioneering British air strategist in the First World War.

This is a new one on me, I wonder if this idea became as popular as the cockroach version later did?

It also has grave implications for the future of life on this planet, because chemical weapons are easier to develop than nuclear ones and so that will give the flies an advantage over the cockroaches in the eternal struggle for supremacy ...

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I was in the bowels of the ERC library at Melbourne Uni the other day, scavenging for primary sources, when a book called The Peril of the White caught my eye - not because it has anything to do with my topic, but because of the author, who has one of the most splendidly silly names in modern British history: Sir Leo Chiozza Money. The silliest name, of course, belongs to Admiral Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, whose other claim to fame was leading the diplomatic mission to the USSR in August 1939 to see if Stalin was interested in an alliance with Britain. (He wasn't.) Sir Leo was a Liberal and then Labour politician who is unfortunately mostly remembered for having been caught in a park late at night with a young lady, while in the middle of giving her what he claimed was 'career advice' (apparently not intended as a euphemism). Anyway, he was also a writer, and his The Peril of the White was published in 1925. The 'peril' of the title is that of race suicide, due to the slowing birth-rate of European and European-descended peoples. More particularly, his worry was that this would place European control of the rest of the world's peoples in doubt, since their birth-rate remained high:

It is for ever true that we must renew or die. The European stock cannot presume to hold magnificent areas indefinitely, even while it refuses to people them, and to deny their use and cultivation to races that sorely need them.Leo Chiozza Money, The Peril of the White (London: W. Collins Sons & Co, 1925), 159.

He graphically illustrated the problem with this colour plate in the frontispiece (click to see larger version):

The Peril of the White

Pretty standard stuff for the time, I think. But it's interesting that Chiozza Money ends on a plea for racial tolerance, arguing strongly against any kind of slavery, formal or economic: 'Every private act and every act of legislation which denies respect to mankind of whatever race will have to be paid for a hundredfold'.Ibid, 168. Though of course, his ultimate reason for being nice to the natives was to keep them happy and therefore quiet.

Now, all of the above is interesting, but it's not why I am writing this. I found a slip of paper in between the pages of the book. Normally I love this kind of "found history" - it's a glimpse into and a connection with a previous reader's life. Things like tram tickets, pieces of paper with notes scribbled on them, newspaper clippings, ex libris stamps and bookplates, gift inscriptions: for me, it's part of the pleasure of old books. But this was rather less pleasurable: it was a little leaflet entitled 'White and Proud!', calling for 'white pride' and apparently issued by a group called the White Student Union (with a PO Box in West Heidelberg). Somebody had obviously stuck it in The Peril of the White thinking that anyone interested in Chiozza Money's ideas might be receptive to an updated version. And indeed there are similarities: both list cultural and scientific achievements attributed to the 'White Race', and argue that its members need to remember these and thereby develop racial self-respect. But surely most people who go to the trouble to look up this obscure book are likely to be scholars who want to research Chiozza Money's ideas, not revive them!

But even that isn't really why I'm writing this. My initial reaction to the leaflet is why. The leaflet looks fairly old - pre-laser printer days, anyway: part of it even looks to be typed (you know, on a typewriter), and from "internal evidence" I would guess it was written some time during the 1980s. (It looks like the book itself may not have been borrowed since at least 1988, so it's possible that the leaflet could have lain there undisturbed since then.) When I first saw the leaflet, my first instinct was to put it back in the book and leave it there - because it's an historical artefact, a kind of primary text on racism in Australian universities in the 1980s, and as an historian I have no right to tamper with it! But then I thought, that's stupid. This was less than two weeks after the shameful race riots in Sydney, after which our esteemed Prime Minister had stated that 'I do not accept that there is underlying racism in this country.' Well, here's some underlying racism right here, and I'm not leaving this filth lying around to possibly influence some impressionable young mind, as remote as that possibility may be. So I borrowed the book, and took the leaflet, and when the book gets returned, the leaflet won't.

Now, my initial reaction was pretty silly. It's not like libraries are in the business of preserving things that people stick in their books, and nor is it likely that some future PhD student will go trawling the library shelves in search of such found history for their thesis. So I'm under no obligation to leave the leaflet there. But it does raise the question of what's history and what isn't. Even as I wrote this post, I had no problems quoting and scanning parts of Chiozza Money's racialist (if not overtly racist) tract, but I can't bring myself to do the same for the White Student Union leaflet. It just feels wrong, somehow, even though they both express much the same ideas, and the leaflet carefully refrains from denigrating non-whites. I guess it's just too close to home, both in time and space. My rule of thumb is generally that if something happened in my lifetime, then it's not history, since it's that much harder to be objective about it. And on top of that, here's somebody perverting MY university's library system to disseminate their racist propaganda. As a scholar, I try to be disinterested about the things I study, but I should not be disinterested in important contemporary issues. My act was a completely trivial one, but after Cronulla, it's the least that I could do.

Anyway, it turns out that in 1931 Sir Leo wrote another book, called Can War be Averted?, which does in fact sound possibly relevant to my topic. So I'm off to the ERC to check it out - hopefully without an unpleasant surprise this time ...

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From the just-because-I-can department.

RAF growth, 1920-39

As an ex-physicist, I like to see numerical data plotted in a graph, as well as in tabular form - it's much easier to visualise what's going on. I don't have any particular need for this right now, but I've been playing around with a few plotting packages anyway. The figure above was made with pro Fit (OS X only), which has a free trial version, limited in the number of graphs, data points, etc, that can be in use at one time. It's easy to use and the end result is pleasing enough to the eye. The main problem I found is that the legend isn't a separate object to the graph, so I can't shift it to make room for a longer axis label. But I like it otherwise, so I think I will stick with it for the moment.

The data itself is taken from the tables in the back of John James, The Paladins: A Social History of the RAF up to the Outbreak of World War II (London and Sydney: Macdonald, 1990) - tables 5 (for the Air Estimates, ie the Air Ministry's, and effectively the RAF's, budget), 9 (UK squadrons only) and 15 (from which I derived the number of squadrons in 1939). A few remarks: the number of squadrons tracks the budget fairly closely. I would have expected there to be a year or two lag, because as James points out, men have to be trained, aircraft orders placed and land for airfields purchased well in advance of a squadron coming into being. I guess the squadrons may not have been effective initially, though. Secondly, despite the deterrence policy of Trenchard's RAF, and the authorisation of 35 bomber to 17 fighter squadrons for the Home Defence Air Force in 1923, there were actually slightly more fighter squadrons than bombers right up to 1935. Finally, the graph shows how weak the RAF was in fighters at the time of Munich in 1938 (and just plotting raw numbers actually understates this, as Fighter Command mostly had obscolescent types at the time).

Addendum: I forgot to mention that James doesn't say if the Air Estimate figures are in adjusted pounds or not - so I assume they are not.

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We have ... under the stress of war, made practical discoveries in the art of government almost comparable to the immense discoveries made at the same time in the art of flying.

Economist and social reformer William Beveridge, on the advances in government forced by the First World War; quoted in John Stevenson, British Society 1914-45 (London: Allen Lane, 1984), 90. Undated but Google Print suggests 1920.