WE ARE ALWAYS pleased to learn of a new post on Professor Palmer's most interesting blog, the Avia-Corner. It is the first place one would turn in order to learn about the often murky world of Soviet aviation. However, his latest rant -- there is unfortunately no other word for it -- caught us by surprise, for it is aimed squarely at Airminded itself. It seems that the good professor has taken exception to our previous post, which happened to refer to one of his in what was by no means an unfriendly spirit. As the reaction is out of all proportion to the supposed offence, the suspicion occurs that it is officially inspired. The possible motivations for this scarcely need explaining, but a reply must here be given.
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After 1950
Dueling YouTubes
It's always interesting to see echoes of the golden age of aviation in today's pop culture. At the Avia-Corner, Scott Palmer ends an update on the search for Amelia Earhart with a related music video: Amelia Earhart versus the Dancing Bear, by The Handsome Family. Well, I'll see his 'aviatrix lost at sea, never to be found' and raise him the 'mother proud of [a] little boy'.
This aviatrix is Amy Johnson; I've written about her in relation to this song -- The Golden Age of Aviation by the Lucksmiths -- before. But I like it so much, it deserves a second airing.
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Concrete memory
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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Five to
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]
[Image removed at the request of the copyright holder.]
The minute hand of the famous Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has just moved closer to apocalypse: it is now set at five minutes to midnight. This is the most dangerous level it has been since 1988. The dangers currenty facing humanity are summarised thus:
The world stands at the brink of a second nuclear age. The United States and Russia remain ready to stage a nuclear attack within minutes, North Korea conducts a nuclear test, and many in the international community worry that Iran plans to acquire the Bomb. Climate change also presents a dire challenge to humanity. Damage to ecosystems is already taking place; flooding, destructive storms, increased drought, and polar ice melt are causing loss of life and property.
Obviously, the precise position is fairly arbitrary -- the relative movement back and forth is more significant, i.e. whether the world is getting more dangerous or not -- but it's interesting to reflect on the past movements of the minute hand:
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Historical maps online
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.
Still at the edge of forever: for Carl
Ten years ago today, Carl Sagan died. He had been a hero of mine since childhood, since I first watched Cosmos. I would kick the rest of the family out of the lounge room, close the door, turn off the lights, pull the beanbag up to the TV as close as possible, and let Carl show me the Universe and its history. From Empedocles and the water-thief, to the discovery of volcanoes on Io; from Lowell's dreams of Martian cities dying beside canals choked with dust, to Wolf Vishniac's death in Antarctica while paving the way for the search for life on Mars; the Big Bang, the Tunguska Event and the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. I can't have been much into double digits when I first watched Cosmos, if that; heady stuff indeed for a young boy. His own joy in the search for knowledge was palpable, infectious, inspirational -- to the extent that I cannot understand how anyone could ever feel any differently. Here's a short clip from one episode of Cosmos, "The edge of forever": more metaphysics than physics, but if you've never seen it before, it will give you an idea of his style; and if you have seen it before, it will transport you again. It still sends shivers down my spine.
Not only did I adore Cosmos the series, and Cosmos the book, I also inhaled his other books: The Cosmic Connection, Broca's Brain, The Dragons of Eden; and later, Contact, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors, The Demon-haunted World. Carl hugely influenced my basic worldview: rationality is our best tool for understanding the world, secular humanism our best antidote for the fact that we can never be perfectly rational. We are not at the centre of the Universe, which is anyway indifferent to our presence; but we are sentient, and that is a precious thing, or ought to be, to ourselves and perhaps to others.
The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky.1
Carl's love for astronomy also helped steer me into pursuing astronomy as a career. From about the time I saw Cosmos on, I had a burning desire to become an astronomer and explore the Universe too. I nearly did too; I started a PhD and was nearly a year into it when I realised that (a) I wasn't very good at it and (b) I wasn't enjoying it very much. That's not Carl's fault, of course, but astronomy was such a hard thing for me to let go of, having made it a part of me for so long, and that's partly a testament to his eloquence and his passion. To cut a long story short, I switched to an MSc as a sort of consolation prize, while pondering what to do next. And it was during this time that I learned of Carl's illness. He continued to work and to write. A friend, a fellow astro postgrad, saw him speak at a conference in Hawaii and reported that he looked distressingly ill.
Ten years ago today, I sobbed like a child into my girlfriend's arms, and I must confess that I am tearing up even now. (Having Vangelis's "Heaven & Hell Part 1" playing in the background probably doesn't help.) Carl Sagan is gone, and he is sorely missed, but his influence will remain -- at least for as long as I live, and I suspect for much longer than that.
Other memories of Carl which have crossed my personal blog horizon: Bad Astronomy Blog, Centauri Dreams, Respectful Insolence, Cocktail Party Physics, Butterflies and Wheels, a great one from Larvatus Prodeo, and most poignantly of all, from his wife and collaborator Ann Druyan. These are all part of a larger blog commemoration effort (the results of which can be seen here), and the blogless can join in too.
Image source: Wikipedia.
- Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York and Avenel: Wings Books, 1995 [1980]), 4. [↩]
Great minds
Anthony Eden at a United Nations Association rally at the Albert Hall, 1 March 1947:
Mr. EDEN and M. JAN MASARYK, Czechoslovak Foreign Minister, were the other principal speakers. Of international affairs, Mr. EDEN said: "Our planet has become very small. We are nearer to San Francisco to-day than we were to Paris 100 years ago. We are all so closely interdependent; we have to rub shoulders whether we would or no.
"Can we learn this lesson of interdependence? If we can there is no limit to the standard of material prosperity and, I believe, of human happiness to which mankind can attain. If we cannot learn it, then a future conflict, with the added horror of modern weapons, may seal the doom of the human race. The choice is as simple as that. Suspicions, jealousies, even hostility, are as easy to engender between nations as between neighbours. Sometimes I think the people of this distracted planet will never really get together until they find someone in [sic] Mars to get mad against."
Governments, Mr. Eden added, were not much wiser than the peoples they led. If the peoples would reach understanding the Governments would reach it, too.1
I can't resist pointing out that nearly a decade later, Eden went on to prove that his own government, at least, was not very wise! The 'added horror of modern weapons' refers, of course, the atom bomb (Masaryk's message was that 'unless we were very careful we could slip back from the Atomic to the Stone Age in a matter of a few weeks'); and the reason why the world was so small was, in part, the aeroplane.
Eden's suggestion that the people of Earth needed a Martian threat to set aside their differences brings to mind Ronald Reagan's much later musings along the same lines (source):
I doubt Eden inspired Reagan, but he did apparently inspire the author of the first book to use the term "flying saucer" in the title: Bernard Newman, whose The Flying Saucer was published by Victor Gollancz in 1948. I haven't read it, but judging from a summary in a Magonia article by Philip Taylor, it's about a group of scientists who fake flying saucer crashes in order to fool governments into believing that there is indeed an extraterrestrial threat:
An international league of scientists springs into action and with remarkable speed the differences between the world's governments dissolve under the 'Martian' threat. The final chapter sees every international political problem speedily resolved, from the Middle East to Northern Ireland. This 1948 fantasy is very much of its time: it was published in the very month of the Russian blockade of Berlin. Newman's heroes find a way around the frustrating limitations of the new United Nations, with, in the background, the emergence of the super-power blocs and the omniscience of the atomic scientists all playing their part.
As it happens, I own another book by Newman (who wrote many), Armoured Doves: A Peace Novel (London: Jarrolds, 1937 [1931]), as it's relevant to my thesis research. I haven't read it yet, but it seems to share at least one theme with The Flying Saucer, namely that of a group of pacifist scientists imposing peace upon the world, though in this case by use of a death ray rather than a disinformation campaign.
Incidentally, the Magonia article is also worth reading for the account of Gerald Heard's theory for the origins of flying saucers -- that they were spacecraft piloted by giant bees from Mars! Yes, I said giant bees. Heard was an unconventional thinker (obviously) and a pacifist, who hung out with Aldous Huxley and Christopher Isherwood in California. But in the early 1930s, he was well-known as the BBC's first science commentator. And, inevitably it seems, he's also a person of interest to me, contributing an essay entitled "And suppose we fail? After the next war" to Challenge to Death (London: Constable & Co., 1934), about the depths British society would sink into after a knock-out blow. It's all one seamless tapestry, isn't it.
- The Times, 3 March 1947, p. 6. [↩]
A world war in a day
Last month, I noted a parallel between certain pre- and post-Hiroshima nuclear warfare narratives. Here's an even more common one, this time between the knock-out blow itself and nuclear warfare.
Here's the American astronomer Carl Sagan, from the final chapter ("Who speaks for Earth?") of the 1980 companion book to his acclaimed television series, Cosmos:
By the ninth decade of the twentieth century the strategic missile and bomber forces of the Soviet Union and the United States were aiming warheads at over 15,000 designated targets. No place on the planet was safe. The energy contained in these weapons, genies of death patiently awaiting the rubbing of the lamps, was far more than 10,000 megatons -- but with the destruction concentrated efficiently, not over six years but over a few hours, a blockbuster for every family on the planet, a World War II every second for the length of a lazy afternoon.1
Compare with Lord Ponsonby in the House of Lords, October 1933:
The next war, if there is one, is going to be as different from the last war as the last war was from the Battle of Hastings. During the four years of the Great War 300 tons of bombs were dropped on this country. In the next war 300 tons of bombs are going to be dropped on the great cities of this country in the first half-hour.2
And with P. R. C. Groves, in Behind the Smoke Screen (1934):
"Whereas in the late war some 300 tons of bombs were dropped in this country by the Germans, air forces today could drop almost the same weight in the first twenty-four hours and continue this scale of attack indefinitely." That estimate, made by the Air Staff [in 1926], was based on the number and known 'performance' of the bombers possessed by France. Since then the striking power of the French Air Force, which is the accepted standard of measurement in Europe, has been doubled. Hence, and given the same supposition as regards the distance of the objective, it has now a bombing or striking capacity of 600 tons daily.3
And finally, with Sir Malcolm Campbell, in The Peril from the Air (1937):
But nobody need think that war from the air next time will bear any relation to the happenings of 1914-18. What must be realized is that the development of the air arm has made it possible for an enemy to drop a 1,000 [sic] tons of bombs on London in a single day and night. That is, four times the weight that fell on the whole country during four years of war.4
There are many more examples that I could supply, but that will do. It's the same rhetorical device, isn't it: take the awful destruction of the last war, multiply it, and compress it to fit a timescale of hours instead of years. (And as time goes by, and technology progresses and forces expand, multiply it some more.) It's an effective one, too, whichever war you are talking about: if you don't find the thought of a world war in a day a sobering one, then you are probably Curtis LeMay or Arthur Harris. So here we see an instance where the rhetoric of the Cold War was developed first for the knock-out blow, long before the Manhattan Project.
- Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York and Avenel: Wings Books, 1995 [1980]), 321-2. [↩]
- Lord Ponsonby, Manchester Guardian, 28 October 1933; quoted in Patrick Kyba, Covenants without the Sword: Public Opinion and British Defence Policy, 1931-1935 (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1983), 88. [↩]
- P. R. C. Groves, Behind the Smoke Screen (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 147-8. Emphasis in original. [↩]
- Malcolm Campbell, The Peril of the Air (London: Hutchinson & Co., n.d. [1937]), 49. Emphasis in original. [↩]
Battle of Britain and the Battle of Britain
Since I shamefully forgot to blog Battle of Britain Day last year, I made sure not to repeat this mistake this year. I'm marking the occasion by re-watching the classic 1969 film Battle of Britain, directed by Guy Hamilton. I must confess that I love this film. It's not just because of the fantastic aerial action sequences, featuring several dozen real Spitfires, Hurricanes, Me 109s and He 111s.1 Well, it's mainly because of that (and the music, oh yes, the music -- Ron Goodwin's stirring and bombastic theme as well as the William Walton piece in the dreamlike "duel in the sky" sequence [edit: actually called "Battle in the air"]) but it's also because it manages to encapsulate just about every theme, anecdote, stereotype and myth about the Battle going. 'Call me Meyer'? Check. The Big Wing debate? Check. 'Yellow-nosed bastards'? Check. WAAFs and their plotting tables? Check. Home Guards armed with pitch-forks? Check. Galland asking Goering for a squadron of Spitfires? Check. Over-enthusiastic and unintelligible Poles engaging the enemy against orders? Check. Civilians huddled in Tube stations? Check. 'Achtung! Spitfire!' Check. Fresh-faced young pilots rushed into action and to their deaths after only a few hours' training? Check. I could go on and on, and in fact I will! The invasion barges assembling in France? Check. The close escort order? Check. The importance of radar? Check. The turn on London? Check. RAF fighter pilots unbuttoning their top button? Check. OK, I'll stop now! But my point is that Battle of Britain is your one-stop shop for reaffirming the myth of 1940, and is, to me, all the more enjoyable for it. And as such, the film is probably partly responsible for the heated reaction last month to the claim that it was the Royal Navy which 'saved' Britain in 1940, not the RAF (Blog Them Out of the Stone Age had a good post on the matter).
I don't see why it has to be an either/or situation. The RAF was the first line of defence, the Navy was the second (and the Army, the third). Massively inferior as they were at sea, the Germans had absolutely no chance whatsoever, unless they had air superiority. Even then, of course, it would have been decidedly dicey and perhaps impossible. However, it never came to that, because the RAF did their job (and not just Fighter Command, but Bomber Command and Coastal Command too, in attacking the invasion ports and airfields, at great cost). But the Navy's strength was essential to Britain's victory. It was why Germany was forced to fight Britain in the air in the first place -- without the Navy, maybe Germany could have chanced an invasion against the battered Army.
Rather than the inter-service rivalry question, I think that the persistence of the myth of 'The Few' is more interesting, and more telling. In Battle of Britain, Dowding (Laurence Olivier) says something to the effect that his men needed a 4:1 kill ratio just to keep even, ie to shoot down four German aircraft for every British one lost. (Actually, he elides aircraft and aircrew, but it's clear the former was meant.) But as Stephen Bungay argues in The Most Dangerous Enemy: A History of the Battle of Britain (London: Aurum Press, 2000), once production, reserves, and training are taken into account, it was the other way around. The Luftwaffe had sustained heavy losses in the spring of 1940, which was very bad seeing as it had been built to maximise front-line strength, to the neglect of reserves. And despite having an apparently huge superiority in numbers, the key comparison was in numbers of fighters, and single-seat fighters at that, where the Luftwaffe only had a slight edge. Every German aircraft shot down over Britain meant a permanent loss of aircrew (with the exception of one who got away), whereas British pilots who were shot down were often soon back at their squadrons. In addition, despite all the predictions in the pre-war literature about the Germans carefully drawing their plans about when and where to strike Britain for maximum damage, the Luftwaffe's target plan was abysmal. Intelligence was either poor or ignored, key targets were neglected in favour of unimportant ones, and the nature of Dowding's command and control organisation was not understood, despite its descent (with modifications) from the system which they'd come up against in the First World War. The question is less, could Germany have won the Battle of Britain? and more, could Britain have lost it? And furthermore, why has this been forgotten? Why not take pride in Fighter Command's thorough and professional preparation for the defence of Britain, rather treating it as an heroic fight against the odds? My pat answer is that it's probably because the former smacks of German militarism, while the latter suits the English amateur sporting ideal. But I'm sure there are other possible explanations.
PS I forgot to include some links about the film. There are disappointingly few. The usual: Wikipedia and IMDB. A couple of pages about the filming, here and here (that one shows that model Me 110s were constructed for the film, but they don't appear in the film, as far as I know). Finally, one has to wonder if Susannah York's character had time-traveled to 1940 from 1969, judging by her hairstyle ...
PPS I also forgot to mention this claim that it wasn't the RAF who won the Battle of Britain, or even the RN, but the Dutch! You may ask how that is possible, since they were only in the war for 5 days. The answer to this is that the Dutch destroyed many aircraft which were supposedly due to be used for an airborne landing in Britain later that month. Yes, apparently Germany was so confident of knocking off France that they were planning to simultaneously launch the biggest overseas invasion in history. As can be seen, I wasn't persuaded, but perhaps I am too unimaginative.
- Supposedly, together they composed the 35th largest air force at the time. If so, then since it was flying unarmed piston engined aircraft, it was an air force that even New Zealand could have beaten. [↩]
Sad news for small boys of all ages
Airfix Spitfire Mk 21, a work in progress. Image source: Airfix gallery, user HawkerTempest5.
It looks like Airfix, Britain's oldest and most famous manufacter of plastic model aeroplanes (among other things), might be going under.
It will probably not surprise readers of this site to learn that I had a collection of model aeroplanes as a boy. It was small but diverse: a Mustang, a Kaydet, a Lancaster, a F-16 (and some ships too, the USS Pennsylvania and the Santa Maria) ... maybe some others I can't remember now. (They did not long survive the arrival of a baby brother.) However, I lacked the patience and the dexterity to be very good at making them. Probably the low point was the Lancaster. I didn't have the right colour paints, so it ended up being painted in the highly distinctive but ... erm ... somewhat unhistorical camouflage scheme of the Desert Air Force. Not only that, but I laid it on so thickly that if it were scaled up to full-size, I doubt it would ever have gotten off the ground under the weight of all that paint!
Airfix started making scale models in the 1950s (its first aeroplane was a 1/72 scale Spitfire in 1955). The first plastic scale models were the Frog Penguins, starting with a Gloster Gladiator in 1936. But it seems that the basic idea goes back a few years earlier, when the components were made from solid wood (so-called "solid scale" models), with some metal and acetate. In fact, an article at CollectAir suggests that the honour for originating the concept should go to the Air League of the British Empire:
A Junior Air League section was formed by A.J. Holladay, called the "Skybird League" in 1933 and the decision was made to market commercial solid-scale model kits of current model airplanes in 1:72 scale. Many "Skybird" members who crafted models from these kits and drawings later became RAF pilots such as Neville Duke. This was a civilian commercial endeavour, nevertheless it was the progenitor of the government recognition model program for the British and for the U.S., both of which would come belatedly.
I haven't been able to verify this yet, but it makes sense. The Air League had always been interested in promoting an airminded youth: as early as April 1909, only two months after it was founded, the Aerial League of the British Empire (as it was then known) staged a balloon flight and leaflet-dropping competition with the Boy Scouts, at Battersea Gasworks. Under J. A. Chamier in the 1930s, the Air League lobbied the government to set up an air cadet scheme, which bore fruit in the shape of the Air Defence Cadet Corps, formed in 1938 (today's Air Cadets Organisation is a direct descendent).
So swearing over the placement of fiddly decals and the smudging of acetate canopies with glue goes back a long way. If Airfix disappears, there will be other companies to carry on the tradition (the industry is particularly strong in Japan), but it will still be a sad day.