1920s

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OK, I promise to stop doing that. This time, the answer seems to be: probably ...

Coming via Charlie's Diary is a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh on the new US exit strategy in Iraq, which reports that "A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President's public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower". As Charlie Stross notes, this brings to mind British air control policies, in which bombers were used to pacify and control Iraq in the 1920s (which is what L.E.O. Charlton was criticising). So is this the same thing, but with F/A-18s instead of DH.9s? Could be, because as James Corum has argued, in fact air control did not succeed by airpower alone. It was more like a combined operation, with British Army units often playing a large role. Similarly, the US Air Force won't be working alone, but in conjunction with Iraqi ground forces. Now, Corum also argues that air control was not as effective as is often claimed - for example, rebellious tribes learned to adapt to this strange new aerial weapon by developing air raid precautions: slit trenches and early warning systems. Maybe modern insurgents can adapt too. On the other hand, the modern air weapon is far more precise and powerful than anything available back then.Hersh notes that a single Marine Aircraft Wing dropped more than 500,000 tons of bombs in the Iraq war up to November 2004; that's roughly as much as the Allies dropped in Europe in 1945. So will the US exit strategy work? I guess we'll see.

Update: please ignore the footnote: as pointed out in the comments, Hersh's figure is an order of magnitude too large.

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Well, not really. Still, it's an interesting parallel.

A RAF officer, Flight-Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith, is being court-martialled for refusing to serve in Iraq. A doctor, he has already served two tours there; now he thinks that the war itself was illegal, in that it was not authorised by the United Nations. This is reminiscent of Air Commodore L.E.O. Charlton, who refused to serve in Iraq in the 1920s (he was the RAF's chief of staff there in 1923-4, much more senior than Kendall-Smith). Two differences spring to mind. Firstly, in Charlton's case, there was no official inquiry (and so no public controversy); however, his career was effectively over and he retired in 1928. Why an example is being made of Kendall-Smith is unclear, since the top brass are said not to want to make him a martyr. Secondly, Charlton's objection was moral, not legal -- he opposed the casual use of bombing against Iraqi civilians. Kendall-Smith's defence explicitly rejects any such argument; he denies being a conscientious objector. Naively, you might have expected the doctor to have moral qualms, and the career officer to be concerned about the legality of his orders!

Sources: The Times, Guardian, Oxford DNB.

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On this day in 1922, Andrew Bonar Law, the "unknown Prime Minister", began his premiership - the shortest of the twentieth century.

Here's a minor footnote to Bonar Law's career. Some time before the end of March 1913, while leader of the Unionist Party (as the Conservatives were then called), he told Charles à Court Repington, The Times's military correspondent, that the aerial threat to Britain had convinced him of the need for conscription.A.J.A. Morris, The Scaremongers: The Advocacy of War and Rearmament 1896-1914 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 429-30. This coincided with agitation by both the Navy League and the Aerial League of the British Empire, amplified by the Conservative press, for a million pounds to be spent immediately on a British aerial fleet to counter the Zeppelin menace - which itself followed hard on the heels of a wave of sightings of mysterious airships in British skies.

This seems a bit odd - I don't understand how conscription would have helped defend against airships. Nor does it seem that it was a political tactic of some sort, for even though many conservatives supported conscription, he did not propose to make it part of his party's platform. Maybe he was just trying to convince the influential Repington of his soundness on defence matters!

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This logically should have gone into the previous post about archives, but I got carried away working out what that air mail poster was about! But I had intended to mention two online archives of British newsreels: British Pathe and Movietone (slogan: "It speaks for itself"). These are great. You can search the descriptions for key words - Hendon, say, or "air raid" (or even something not aviation-related, if you are so inclined!) - and turn up all sorts of gems, like a 1923 reel showing off 'London's air defences',British Pathe 314.17. or many items about air raids during the Spanish civil war. Or one from 1938 about a 'seventy-shilling air raid shelter', which a Mr Matthews built in his backyard: it could be made gas-proof, and doubled as a playshed for the kids.Movietone 33260. My favourite is from 1929, about a French air defence technique: covering an entire town in clouds of smoke, to hide it from the enemy bombers!British Pathe 892.09.

The best part is that you can view (and often hear) the newsreels for free! If you wanted to use stills or clips in a documentary or publication, you'd have to pay. However, the online previews should be fine for most research purposes (and you can even save the British Pathe ones onto your hard drive). The search engines and the video playback can be cranky sometimes, but if you start again it will probably work better.

There's a good overview of the history of the British newsreel at the British Universities Film & Video Council, including summaries of the different series that were made, what has survived and where they can be found. There are still several major newsreel titles that don't appear to have been digitised yet (eg Gaumont, Paramount); hopefully that's only a matter of time. Newsreels were an important news medium until well after the Second World War. They had a weekly audience of millions and had an immediacy that radio and newspapers could not match (on the flipside, though, they lacked the timeliness of the former and most importantly the depth of the latter). These digitised archives make it that much easier for the historian to understand just what was being presented to the public in the many thousands of newsreels that were produced up to 1979.

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Barry D. Powers. Strategy Without Slide-Rule: British Air Strategy 1914-1939. London: Croom Helm, 1976.

NB. The subtitle is inaccurate; the period covered is really more like 1914-1931!

Powers has two objects in mind: firstly, to show that air policy should be 'seen as a complicated interaction of the factors involved -- popular conceptions, press campaigns, political thinking and military concerns', rather than purely the latter; and secondly, to 'show the extremely close interconnections between defensive concerns and offensive planning' (that is to say, offence as a form of defence).
...continue reading →

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This happened a week ago, but it's rather cool - a re-enactment of the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic by the British airmen Alcock and Brown in June 1919. They used a modified Vickers Vimy, a two-engined aircraft designed for bombing German cities. The Vimy was never used in this role, but a flight of just over 3000 km surely proved its potential - even if Brown had to keep climbing out onto the wings to remove ice from the engines! Also of note is that in completing the flight, they won the last of the Daily Mail's aviation prizes designed to promote innovation and airmindedness, a handsome £10000 - Lord Northcliffe's final legacy to aviation. (Earlier prizes included £1000 for the first aerial crossing of the English Channel, which was won by Louis Bleriot in 1909; the modern Ansari X-Prize is an astronautical version of the same idea.) The re-enactment used a beautiful replica Vimy.

1919 was a busy year for trans-Atlantic flights (compared to all the previous years, anyway). Alcock and Brown's flight overshadows the crossing made by the US Navy's NX-4 flying boat the previous month (which wasn't non-stop, and took 19 days), as well as the Royal Navy airship R34's double crossing the following month (ie there and back again). But then Alcock and Brown are themselves overshadowed by Lindbergh's non-stop flight from New York to Paris in 1927, admittedly a much longer distance of 5800 km.