1940s

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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Folk physics (or naive physics -- there's also folk biology, folk psychology, and so on) is the term used in philosophy and psychology to describe the way we all intuitively understand the physical world to work. It's very often at odds with scientific physics (unsurprisingly or else there'd be no need for the latter). For example, we all know that in order for something to move, there has to be some force moving it. If you stop pushing a box across the floor, it will stop moving; if a car's engine stops working, the car will slow down and stop too. That's folk physics. Scientific physics disagrees: force causes acceleration, not velocity; in the absence of any other forces, once an object is set in motion it will keep moving forever. Of course it's that caveat which is responsible for the different conclusions of folk physics and scientific physics in this case: friction with the ground exerts a force on the box and the car and so robs them of their momentum. Folk physics works well enough for us in our everyday lives but would be disastrously misleading in, say, trying to dock a spacecraft to a space station.

I wonder if it's useful to apply this demarcation to military strategy? There have been attempts to formalise principles of strategy, of course, though trying to sciencise (yes, I just made that up) them by making them rigid formulae is not necessarily fruitful. Strategy has always been an art much more than a science, and as such is pretty intuitive itself. But certainly there can be (and probably usually is) a gap between what military leaders do and why they do it, and what everyone else, particularly civilians, understand them to be doing. This gap creates a space for folk strategy to exist.
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Belgrade, 1941

I've sometimes wondered if the air raids on Belgrade during the German invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941 can be considered as a knock-out blow from the air. From the accounts I've read it seems that the Luftwaffe launched a surprise attack before the declaration of war, intended as a punishment for the pro-British coup. Sometimes it is said to have been indiscriminate bombing (Hitler ordered the destruction of the city), sometimes a more targeted attack (Luftflotte 4's operational orders specified military and communication targets in the city centre). In any event there were heavy civilian casualties (the official number of dead is 2271, probably too low; 12,000 was the figure reported in the British press at the time -- either way, the toll was higher than any night of the contemporaneous Blitz, albeit spread out over a few days) and the Yugoslav government was forced to flee -- though with a Panzer army bearing down on Belgrade that was always going to happen anyway. In fact, despite their undoubted terror aspect, the Belgrade raids seem to me to be a true blitz: they were intended to disrupt a key command and logistics node ahead of a ground advance, just like Guernica in 1937 and Warsaw in 1939 (which latter had also been carried out by Luftflotte 4).
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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

RAF recruiting poster

As Alan Allport has noted, Winston Churchill's famous speech of 20 August 1940 was and is remembered for a 'single, unrepresentative sentence', i.e.:

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

The speech was given during the Battle of Britain, and 'the Few' are universally taken to be the pilots of Fighter Command, the last line of defence against the Luftwaffe. But, as Alan says, Churchill had relatively little to say about the Battle that day -- he did talk about it, but only as part of a general speech on the war situation. I suggested that if you read the line in context, it actually looks like Churchill is talking about Bomber Command, as he doesn't dwell on Fighter Command at all.
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Part of my PhD thesis involved conceptualising the various forms of defence against aerial bombardment put forward during the thirty-odd years before the Second World War: things like anti-aircraft guns, air-raid shelters, an international air force, and so on. Something I didn't include was what we might call spiritual air defence. Partly because I didn't come across much like that in my sources, and probably partly because of my own rationalistic bent. This may have been unfortunate.

What do I mean by spiritual air defence? Here's what got me thinking about it: Padre Pio, Italy's flying monk. (Technically, bilocating, but that doesn't scan as well.) Here's a sober, historical account by Claudia Baldoli:

With the intensification of bombing after the armistice in September 1943, a rumour spread across Italy that God had granted Padre Pio could fly and intercept the enemy's bombs [...] it seemed plausible that Padre Pio could fly and intercept the enemy's bombs. With the exception of Foggia, which was repeatedly bombed between May and September 1943, the area of Apulia where he lived in Gargano received no raids, and this convinced many that the rumour must be true. For decades after 1944, the supporters of his case for beatification were even able to find RAF pilots who were willing to confirm that it was indeed an apparition of a flying apparition of a flying Padre Pio which had stared at them so directly that they abandoned the mission and returned to their bases without dropping bombs.1

As might be expected, there are a number of accounts on the web which add more details but somehow don't add plausibility. One of the better ones is an article by Malcolm Day from the September 2002 Fortean Times. This doesn't mention the rumours circulating among the Italian population, only to the claims (or claims of claims) made by Allied pilots:

In their approach to the town [San Giovanni], several pilots reported seeing an apparition in the sky in the form of a monk with upheld hands. They also described some sort of 'force-field' that prevented them flying over the target rendering them unable to drop their bombs.

Supposedly this happened repeatedly, and was verified by 'Bernardo Rosini, general of the Aeronautica Italiana, and part of the United Air Command at the time' (presumably this means the Italian Co-Belligerent Air Force, which flew on the Allied side, though not over Italian soil) and an unnamed 'US Commanding General'. Some posts on the ArmyAirForces forum provide some further (albeit conflicting) details, suggesting that the first raid took place on 16 July 1943, carried out by 5th Bombardment Wing, XII Bomber Command. An example of an eye-witness account (though written more than half a century after the event) can also be found there:

I almost killed Padre Pio.....the enclosed flight record of bombing raids, shows that Villa San Giovanni was scheduled to be wiped out with 150,000 pounds of bombs. Allied Intelligence had information (erroneous) that German troops had occupied the hospital, friary and town of San Giovanni. Two minutes from dropping the bombs, the Colonel in the lead aircraft saw an apparition of a Monk, 30,000 feet tall, and broke off the bomb-run and proceeded to the secondary target. The Colonel was a Protestant, and when he was later shown a photo of Padre Pio said that was the apparition.

A 30,000-foot tall monk would certainly seem enough to scare off anyone, but I am worried that more reliable accounts are not available. In any case, I'm more interested in the wartime rumours than the postwar stories which, as Baldoli notes, were used to argue for Pio's beatification. (I guess it helped: he was beatified in 1999 and canonised in 2002.)
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  1. Claudia Baldoli, 'Religion and bombing in Italy, 1940-1945', in Claudia Baldoli, Andrew Knapp and Richard Overy, eds, Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe 1940-1945 (London: Continuum, 2011), 147. [↩]

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The other day I received an email from Andrew Gray, a reader of this blog, alerting me to the existence of a new online newspaper archive available at ukpressonline. I've used ukpressonline before for its complete runs of the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror, which were the most popular British dailies for most of the 1930s and 1940s. But it's not a free service. I don't mind paying, but the annual subscription rates are too prohibitive for me, and so when I do pay it's only for short-term access with a specific topic in mind. So it's not something I routinely draw upon.

But what Andrew pointed out (thanks Andrew!) was a new 'World War II' subscription package covering just the years 1933 to 1945, ie from the rise of Hitler to the end of the Second World War. It's only available by annual subscription, but I think £50.00 is more than reasonable for what it offers: not only the Express and the Mirror, but also the Yorkshire Post (one of the few conservative newspapers to take a stand against appeasement), the Daily Worker (owned by the Communist Party of Great Britain), and Action and Blackshirt (published by the British Union of Fascists and its successors). And it is promised that 'In the coming months, we aim to add major regional newspapers and some of the further-left press' (I would guess that the Yorkshire Post and the Daily Worker are the first of these, actually). This is a really excellent resource for anyone interested in the British press in this period; I've already signed up and started using it.
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In a discussion of the activities of MI5's Port Control section during the First World War, Christopher Andrew mentions German musings about using biological weapons against British civilians:

The most novel as well as the most sinister form of wartime sabotage attempted by Sektion P was biological warfare. At least one of its scientists in 1916 devised a scheme to start a plague epidemic in Britain, either by infecting rats or, more improbably, by dropping plague bacilli cultures from Zeppelins over ports. The Prusso-German General Staff, however, vetoed bacteriological warfare against humans as totally contrary to international law (the Hague Laws of Warfare).1

But he doesn't provide any references. Is this plausible?

The British War Cabinet considered 'The possible Spread of Epidemics by dropping Germs from the Air' during its meeting on 9 February 1917.2 It accepted the advice from experts from the Royal Society, the Army Medical Service and the Local Government Board that the possibility was remote, and that any outbreak would be easily contained. Consequently Cabinet decided that 'no further action was required'. The expert reports themselves are quite interesting. That from Dr Arthur Newsholme, the chief medical officer of the Local Government Board, notes press reports of 'poisoned sweets and garlic saturated with garlic being stated to have been dropped at Constanza [Romania] from enemy aeroplanes'. Closer to home, the Board itself received a letter claiming that 'according to information "from a reliable source," infected sweetmeats had been dropped over Sheffield'.3 But, Newsholme added, no evidence had been produced in either case.

None of this relates to bubonic plague, however. And in Martin Hugh-Jones's summary of known (that is, by the British) wartime German biological warfare plans, plague is not mentioned.4 Most of the actual biological warfare activity by Germany during the First World War was directed towards anthrax and glanders, for use against horses, sheep and cattle. Nor does Hugh-Jones know of German wartime proposals to spread disease from the air (as opposed to proposals after the war, which is the focus of his article).

But bubonic plague can be weaponised and deployed from the air. Japan's Unit 731 proved that in China in 1940 and 1941, not only in controlled experiments but in field trials. And by field trials I mean, of course, bombing civilian areas with bubonic plague. There were at least four separate attacks, involving at most a handful of Japanese aircraft: Chuhsien, 4 October 1940; Ningpo, 27 October 1940; Kinhwa, 28 November 1940; and Changteh, 4 November 1941. The plague was not dropped in bombs but usually by way of fleas and grain; in two cases plague bacilli were detected by local hospitals. Only in Kinhwa did no outbreak of plague follow; a hundred people died in Ningpo alone.5

So it does seem possible that German scientists considered using Zeppelins to rain black death upon Britain, and that it may even have worked. The British experts may have underestimated the potential of this form of aerial attack; and the psychological impact might have been far greater than the medical one. Then again, the great influenza pandemic in 1918 didn't disrupt the war to any great extent, and it killed far more people than any plague would have done. So the War Cabinet's lack of concern was justified, in the non-event.

  1. Christopher Andrew, The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5 (London: Allen Lane, 2009), 78. [↩]
  2. Minutes, War Cabinet meeting 59, 9 February 1917, CAB 23/1. See also the discussion in Marion Girard, A Strange and Formidable Weapon: British Responses to World War I Poison Gas (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 84-6. [↩]
  3. Letter, A. Newsholme, Appendix II, War Cabinet meeting 59, 9 February 1917, CAB 23/1. For the Constanza incident, Newsholme cites the News Chronicle and The Times, both of 13 October 1916. I can't find the latter article, but there is something similar in The Times, 27 October 1916, 9. [↩]
  4. Martin Hugh-Jones, 'Wickham Steed and German biological warfare research', Intelligence and National Security 7 (1992), 381-3. [↩]
  5. Ed Regis, The Biology of Doom: The History of America's Secret Germ Warfare Project (New York: Owl Books, 2000), 17-9. [↩]

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Fears of poison gas attacks during the Blitz don't receive much attention from historians, and with good reason: not only did they not take place, but the evidence (for example, the number of gas masks being carried about) suggests that most people were complacent about the possibility. But not all. On 2 September 1940, a Mass-Observation investigator in London heard the following from a woman in her mid-30s:

There's a nasty rumour going around that Hitler's going to start using a gas this week that's going to penetrate women's bodies through their sex organs. Women will have to go about wearing sanitary towels all the time. Its [sic] going to cause a lot of disturbance.1

Scientific implausibility aside, this rumour encapsulates the horror of gas, that it permeates inside the body and kills from within; and that as a product of science it might be developed into new and even more horrific forms. On the other, though, here the horror is a very gendered one, perhaps drawing upon existing anxieties about women's centrality to total war's front line (i.e. the home front) and the difficulties of maintaining feminine hygiene in a time of rationing and shortages. (The woman who passed on the rumour is described as 'normally much too "respectable" to mention such a subject', suggesting to the investigator how badly it had shaken her morale.) Or perhaps it has something to do with a perceived Nazi obsession with race and reproduction.

I wonder if there's a literary origin to this rumour. Shaw Desmond's rather science-fictional knock-out blow novel Chaos (1938) has a weapon which is reminiscent, though there it affects both sexes:

Then there was the Genital Gas, which was said to destroy the genitals of men and women, to make them childless for ever, and to turn their faces into smiling masks for them to strike horror amidst their fellows.2

There's no way of knowing, but the 1940 rumour does sound like it could easily have started out as idle speculation inspired by something like the 1938 novel, and mutated into specifics and certainties from there.

  1. Mass-Observation Archive, TC 65/4/B. [↩]
  2. Shaw Desmond, Chaos (London: Hutchinson & Co., n.d. [1938]), 451. A review of Chaos caused the Communist Daily Worker to take aim at the Conservative Evening Standard for its depiction of the next war, though having read the novel myself really I can't understand what the complaint is. Then again, the point was politics, not literature. See Novae Terrae 25 (August 1938), 43. [↩]

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The Scareship Age, 1892-1946

A couple of months ago, Alun Salt did a very nice thing for me: he unexpectedly assembled some of the posts I've written here about phantom airships into an e-book. Using that as the basis, I've had a go at learning how to do e-books myself. (Alun recommended using Jutoh, an e-book project manager, and I'm glad he did.) So I've tweaked things a bit; added a few of the recent phantom airship posts I've written recently, played with the cover image, and the result is The Scareship Age, 1892-1946, available in the two most common e-book formats: EPUB, an open format, and MOBI, the format used by Amazon's Kindle. You can download them here, from the Downloads page, or from the sidebar on Airminded's front page. They are of course free, as in Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.

I have tried this sort of thing before, with my Sudeten crisis posts, but that was as a PDF which is not really suited for e-books; and with all the images it turned out to be quite bloated at 5.6 Mb. The Scareship Age comes in at 0.5 Mb for the EPUB and 0.9 Mb for the MOBI, which is much better. Now that I have a better idea about how e-books work, I'll have another go at the Sudeten crisis. But not now!

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The Twenty-Fifth Hour (1940), by Herbert Best (better known as the author of the 'Desmond the dog detective' books, though not by much), may well be the last knock-out blow novel, the last novel where (conventional) bombers play the decisive part in a war. In this war, indeed, they are too decisive, knocking away the underpinnings of modern life and destroying civilisation. I don't know for sure that it is the last, but it was published right before the Blitz (it was the Times Literary Supplement's pick of the week for 24 August 1940) and it's hard to imagine any more attempts to visualise the knock-out blow after that. I could be (and would love to be) wrong, though. It certainly presents a very late example of the genre, and so it's worth examining its vision of war.

The novel is set several years after the war (which is evidently not the Second World War), after European society has broken down, and so we only get a fragmentary picture of what actually happened, through characters' memories; and even they did not fully comprehend the chain of events which destroyed the old world. The one which replaced it is grim indeed, with roving bands of ex-soldiers raping and pillaging their way across Europe in the aftermath of the war proper, followed by the gradual elimination of even this vestige of order. Agriculture is soon impossible, and wild game is too few to sustain the population which survived the war (overpopulation seems to be Best's overarching theme; he sees it as a key cause of war). Cannibalism is the only solution, leading inevitably to the near-impossibility of sustaining any group larger than a single individual. Only in a few places is this possible, for example in fortifications in north-west Europe (perhaps the Maginot Line) and in Gibraltar; in empty Istanbul two Englishmen strike up a brief alliance (well, they are both Oxbridge men). But the emphasis is very much on the bleakness of post-apocalyptic life: only the strong, the smart and the fortunate can survive; everyone else is food.
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