A couple of recent tweets from @zunguzungu (Aaron Bady):
I had to include this disclaimer: "The Scout Association does not endorse Mr. Bady's article or the use of air power against civilians"
in my upcoming article. It's a marvelous sentence.
It is indeed. But what would B-P think?
Page 4 of The Times:
For the second night in succession heavy bombers of the R.A.F. have attacked military objectives in the heart of Berlin. During the raid, which lasted over two and a half hours, two factories making electrical equipment, a power station, a foundry, and a canal bridge were all bombed.
Page 1 of the Daily Mail:
GERMANY, thanks to the R.A.F., is at last tasting the bitter medicine her Air Force administered to the defenceless Poles, Dutch, Belgians, and the French. From many neutral sources yesterday came unimpeachable evidence of the shock with which the R.A.F.'s latest raids on Berlin came to a population that was always taught to regard itself as secure. The life of Berlin, like the life of London, is being painfully revolutionised by bombs. Whole areas have had to be evacuated because of time bombs; hours of work have been advanced. And still the R.A.F. have the bombers to spare for the punishment of the would-be invading armies across the Channel.
This is a BBC interview with Group Captain Robert Lister, recorded in 1980, about his experiences as a junior officer in 20 Squadron on the North-West Frontier. He transferred there in 1935, and flew Audaxes in air control operations against Waziri tribespeople, sometimes in support of the Army, sometimes independently. He candidly notes that the 250-lb bombs were the ones which would be used against villages, but also that leaflets were invariably dropped beforehand, warning of an imminent attack.
But the clip isn't just Lister talking; it's Lister talking over his own cinefilm footage from 1935! Both from the ground and from the air, bombing and strafing Waziri villages. Also to be seen are the detonation of an improvised explosive device planted in the landing strip by the rebels, and one of the goolie chits affixed to the side of every Audax, to be used in the event of a forced landing. Fascinating stuff.
Thanks to Marc Wiggam for the lead.
After a long hiatus, a new Military History Carnival has appeared, at The Edge of the American West and H-War. (Thanks, David Silbey!) A post on combat drones at Legal History Blog caught my eye. It suggests that drones are part of a process in America, post-Vietnam, whereby the need for public support for military adventurism is minimised by the increasing use of high technology, particularly airpower, since they minimise American casualties and hence political resistance. I'd argue it goes back much further than that. Air control between the wars -- as practiced by the RAF in Iraq and the US Marine Corps in Nicaragua -- had much the same purpose. And then there's the (alleged) American preference for security through superweapons. Still, the conversations we are now having about the ethical and political ramifications of drones are interesting; the prospect of robotic warfare in the interwar period didn't lead to the same debates. We have different interests now, it seems, even with respect to the same subjects.
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]
A few days ago, a new article popped up in my RSS reader: R. M. Douglas, 'Did Britain use chemical weapons in mandatory Iraq?', Journal of Modern History, 81 (December 2009), 1-29. This was slightly odd, because it's only October and the rest of the December issue isn't online yet. The editors of JMH clearly think they've got an unusually significant paper here, one worth publishing early and with an accompanying press release. And I agree.
The question in the article's title is one I've asked before. After the First World War, Britain gained control of Iraq (or Mesopotamia) from the Ottoman Empire, not as an outright possession but under a mandate from the League of Nations. Some of Iraq's inhabitants disapproved of British rule and from 1920 rebelled. A new form of colonial policing known as air control eventually suppressed the revolt, but in the meantime the (rapidly demobilising) Army and the Royal Air Force had their hands full just containing the situation. Hence the attraction of using chemical weapons such as mustard gas against tribesmen with no experience of and no protection against this new form of warfare.
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At In the Middle, Karl Steel reviews Adriana Cavarero's book Horrorism, which, as I understand it, seeks to reorient descriptions of violence from the perspective of its perpetrators to that of its victims. This part of the review seems like a good question to ask here:
I suffer an even pettier annoyance when she writes: "Any review of the refined arts of war developed over the course of the century would have to dedicate a separate chapter to the aerial bombardments inaugurated by German forces over Guernica and Coventry" (51). Why not Italian forces over Ethiopia the year before Guernica, or, arguably, RAF forces over Sulaymaniyah? (and while it's tempting to suggest the Zeppelin raids of English, beginning in 1915, the difference between these and Sulaymaniyah, Ethiopia, or Guernica is that the English could defend themselves: the Kurds, Ethiopians, and Basques could not, and thus stand as better representatives of horrorism (unlike the inhabitants of Coventry)).
Firstly, my petty criticism of the sentence quoted from the book would be that Germany didn't inaugurate aerial bombardment at either Guernica or Coventry. As Steel notes, there were plenty of earlier instances; I would probably point the Bulgarian bombing of the Turkish city of Adrianople in late 1912 as the inauguration of aerial bombardment of civilians. I would also quibble with Steel, and point out that while Britain as a nation could defend itself against bombing during the First World War, on an individual level its citizens could not shoot back, send up fighters or retaliate through counterbombing. At the point in time when the bombs were actually falling, can we say that the horror experienced by Kurdish victims of British air control was greater than that of British victims of the Zeppelins and Gothas? Conversely, non-Western, non-state targets of bombing tried a surprisingly wide range of strategies, up to and including their own small air forces.
But then what would be the best example of horrorism in the case of aerial bombardment? I'd pick Dresden, February 1945. Not only was is it one of the most devastating episodes in the history of bombing in and of itself, but it was one of the few cases when the horror was so great that it was felt by the perpetrators (or at least the perpetrating culture) as well as the victims. But then that's probably missing the point of horrorism altogether.
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]
Not a phrase I ever expected to come across, but here it is, in David Omissi's Air Power and Colonial Control, the context being the introduction of one the most successful aircraft of the interwar period, the Hawker Hart:
The Hart was soon found to be suitable for India; fifty-seven aircraft were accordingly fitted with desert equipment, large tyres and extra fuel; they flew with three Indian squadrons until 1939. Their high performance was particularly values on the Frontier as they were the only aircraft which could meet the Afghan air menace on equal terms, especially after 1937 when the Afghans began to employ the Hind, itself a high-speed derivative of the Hart. Others served in Egypt and Palestine.1
Afghanistan established an independent air force as early as 1924, though it was easy enough for the British to dismiss as the only Afghan who could fly an aeroplane was made its Chief of Air Staff! But though small in European terms, with mainly Soviet assistance and aircraft the Afghan Air Force became quite efficient within a few years, and was used in several air control operations of its own, against rebellious tribes in outlying areas. Britain eventually felt it had to edge the Soviets out in order to gain some influence over it, hence the supply of Hinds (8 in 1937, another 20 ordered in 1939).
Although Omissi's subject -- air control, the use of airpower in Imperial policing, or in other words, the British air menace -- is ostensibly quite some distance from strategic bombing, I found that reading his book illuminated aspects of my own work (and sadly, this means I've broken my New Year's resolution already). Partly this is because he has chosen less jarring terms than I have ('mitigation'? what was I thinking?) but it's more because he provides a typology of indigenous responses (in practice) to being bombed which transfers pretty well to ideas being worked out, at the same time, in Britain (in theory) about how it would or should respond to being bombing. Although Omissi doesn't describe it as such, it's almost a spectrum of responses, varying with the capacity of the society under attack to resist, which in turn is going to depend largely on the resources available, but also on other factors such geography and climate. (That doesn't quite work, though, because the responses aren't mutually exclusive.)
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Cranwell is a RAF base in Lincolnshire (not far from Newark or Grantham, or Lincoln for that matter). It was first established as a RNAS training station in 1915, and sortied the odd anti-zepp patrol in the next few years. In the 1930s, Frank Whittle did much of his work on jet engines here; indeed, the first flight of the Gloster E.28/39, on 15 May 1941, was from Cranwell. But it is best known as the home of the RAF's officer training college, RAF College Cranwell (but usually called Cranwell, just to confuse things). The College was founded in 1919, and the rather splendid College Hall, seen above, opened for business in 1934.
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It's Lord Baden-Powell, Chief Scout, who at one stage in the 1930s seems to have had a regular spot in the Daily Mail's "Boys & Girls" section, teaching the future imperial overlords all about their wonderful Empire. In the 18 March 1938 issue, he contributed a piece called "Policeman aeroplanes", along with the following rather cute drawing:
(I apologise for the blurriness, I don't have access to a scanner at the moment and so a photo of a printout is the best I can do.) B-P explains how aeroplanes can keep restless natives in line:
The other day, in passing through Aden, we heard that two of the tribes of Arabs in the district had broken out into war against each other. Before they could get very far with it, the Royal Air Force had an aeroplane hovering over them like a policeman. The aeroplane dropped notices to tell them that they were to stop fighting at once, and make peace and go home.
So although aeroplanes have done so much in speeding up transport, so that people can travel and mails can go in a few days where it used to take several weeks, aeroplanes also have their uses in many other directions, and will go on becoming more and more useful when you fellows grow up to pilot them.1
So RAF air control policies -- the use of airpower in internal security roles -- are, according to Baden-Powell, much like a firm but kindly neighbourhood bobby breaking up scuffling schoolboys. Nobody even gets hurt, isn't that nice!
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