It's well known that in the Blitz, London's Underground stations were used by civilians as ad hoc air raid shelters. Indeed, photos of platforms crowded with huddled people taking cover from the bombs on the surface are iconic and practically the first thing you likely think of when the Blitz is mentioned. (I'm sure you don't need me to show you one, but here you go anyway.) In fact, only a minority of Londoners sheltered in the Tube: the peak was 177,000 shelterers on 27 September 1940, after three weeks of heavy bombing. That's a lot, but as Tom Harrisson pointed out it's no more than 5% of the population of London at the time.1
Surprisingly, that number is also much less than the estimated peak use of the Tube as air raid shelters in the First World War. The best figure available for that seems to be 300,000, as given on 22 February 1918 by Lord George Hamilton, chairman of the Central London Railway (speaking about the whole UERL network):
The use of the Underground railways as air raid shelters has materially affected our operations in recent months. In the stations of the three Tube railways there have been as many as 300,000 people taking shelter at one time.2
The Official History gives the same number, presumably from the same source but tying it more specifically to the Harvest Moon raids at the end of September 1917:
When the first raid of the series had been made, on the 24th of September, a concourse of people, estimated at about 100,000, had rushed to take shelter in the underground railways. On each subsequent night, whether raids were made or not, the numbers grew to a maximum estimated total of 300,000.3
H.A. Jones, The War in the Air: Being the Story of the Part Played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force, vol. 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), 89-90. [↩]
1BoB is The First Battle of Britain: The Air War Over England, 1917–1918 (hereafter 1BoB), which sounds like a book but is actually a wargame. I bought my copy back in April 2009, not long after I submitted my PhD, at which point I noted that 'I try to avoid buying wargames because I never seem to actually play them'. It took me nearly 16 years, but over the end-of-year break I finally got around to having a crack at 1BoB! My rather thin reasoning was that I should be writing the 1917 chapter of Home Fires Burning later this year, so playing it out as a game might give me some insight into the operational dynamics of the Gotha raids. I mean, it could also be fun, that's a sufficient reason too, I guess?
I won't go too much into the game itself here; the 1BoB page at BoardGameGeek has reviews and discussions as well as images of the game components, if you'd like a better idea of what it's actually like to play. It was fun (even played solitaire), and there's a lot I appreciate as a historian of the raids about the design of 1BoB and the thinking behind it. For example, morale (both civilian and military) is a key concept: the accumulation of morale points (MP) is important for determining victory, but also for enabling the expansion of forces and infrastructure. (If London gets a big raid, that's good for Germany's chance of winning the game, but it also allows the British to build up its air defences in response to public outrage.) Both sides start out with relatively minimal forces, but they can be expanded in a number of directions according to different strategic choices. (Civil defence and early warning are both modelled, along with air units and AA. Or the British player can build up a bomber force in Flanders and try a counterforce strategy - they can even bring an aircraft carrier into operation, if they want to try and Tondern the German aerodromes.) Aircraft are rated for speed, pursuit, combat, bombardment/strafing and endurance ability; the map extends from Aldershot to Ghent. So a lot of research and thought has gone into 1BoB. (The accompanying article – it's a game-in-a-magazine – lists Cole and Cheesman, Fredette, and Morris, among its sources.) This is almost the only game to model the Gotha raids; luckily it's a pretty good one.1
However! As I began to play (as documented in a very messy Bluesky thread), I did come across rules and gameplay which were at variance with my understanding of how the air war over Britain unfolded in 1917 and 1918. So I started thinking about how 1BoB could be adapted to make it more historically, and soon I had a bunch of rule modifications that I'm, rather arrogantly, calling 1BoB+. I mainly used game mechanics and concepts which are already in the game, and I tried to avoid making the game unplayable. But I haven't tested it extensively (or much at all...), and it's very unlikely unbalanced now. Nevertheless, here are the notes explaining my suggested changes. The changes themselves are in a separate PDF (see the link at the bottom of the post). Caveat emptor and all that. They won't make much sense without a copy of 1BoB itself, but the rules are online if you're interesting in digging into that level of detail.
First, though, while my comments below are often framed as criticisms of 1BoB, one thing I learned in this process is that game design is actually very hard! It's one thing to come up with a 'more historical' rule; it's another thing altogether to figure out how that change interacts with the other rules, let alone how it affects gameplay. I continually dithered over to whether to make this change or that change, decisively deciding one way before completely changing my mind a few minutes later. (In fact, I've kept tinkering with 1BoB+ even while writing this post…) And I had the advantage of having something to work with – creating a whole game from scratch would be far harder! More philosophically, I had to think about whether I wanted to merely allow historical behaviour or outcomes, or encourage them, or actually enforce them. It turns out that sometimes one approach is best, while sometimes another provides a better balance. One example is fighter escorts. 1BoB allows fighters to accompany bomber groups; if I've done my sums right, the Albatros D.1s in the game can (just) escort all the way to Woolwich on the eastern edge of London. The Germans absolutely did not use fighter escorts over Britain during the First World War. So should I ban this somehow? Well, in terms of contemporary capabilities, it does seem that it was technically possible, even allowing a fuel margin for combat. So why didn't it happen? James Kightly rightly warned that we shouldn't project backwards what we think was obvious based on later experience; Dreadnought Holiday pointed to problems in coordinating fighters and bombers flying together over a long distance, especially given the lack of W/T. I'd agree with both, but I also note that in game terms, a D.1 is no better in defensive air-to-air combat than a Gotha (though it is slightly superior to a Giant); and there is a limit to how many aircraft can be stacked together. So the German player can include fighter escorts if they want, but it would only provide a marginal increase in combat survivability, and would come at a substantial drop in bombardment power. It's up to them which way they want to go. Details aside, this allows and even encourages historical behaviour, but it doesn't enforce it. It allows experimentation and deviation from what did happen which, after all, is part of the point of turning a war into a game. Props to Joseph Miranda for a fundamentally solid design!
The only other one I know of is an expansion for Luftschiff, which I also have; but it's more of a mission simulator than an operational or strategic game. [↩]
The world is a bad place right now, and a lot of that has to do with bombing civilians. And it's impossible for me to look at the news from Gaza, or from Ukraine, and not think of my own current book project on the bombing of British civilians in the First World War. But I don't know whether what's happening now makes my history more necessary, or more inadequate. It hardly seems comparable. I just don't know how to think about it.
This is the frontispiece illustration from John E. Gurdon, The Sky Trackers (London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1931). Gurdon was an RFC ace (28 victories, all in Brisfits) and after the war took up writing aviation adventure stories so he could discharge a bankruptcy. The Sheffield Daily Telegraph, noting that 'Columbus, setting out in a sailing ship to traverse an unknown world, had no greater possibility of adventure ahead of him than have the children of the aeroplane age', called The Sky Trackers 'a breathlessly exciting and a very well written yarn of detective work by aeroplane in the Far East, [which] will certainly get hold of anyone who reads it'.((Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 10 December 1931, 4.))
The painting itself is by S. Drigin, a Russian émigré who seems to have done quite a few aviation-themed illustrations in a career mainly spent working in the pulp and comic industries. The (non-crashing and burning) aeroplane is identified in the text as a 'Weare Wolf two-seater' ('low wing cantilever monoplane, 275 h.p. Typhoon engine, cruising speed 125 m.p.h., carries fuel for seven hours, climbs like a lift, and is as nippy as a dragon-fly').((John E. Gurdon, The Sky Trackers (London: Frederick Warne & Co., 1931), 3.)) It looks to me to be somewhere between a Bernard 20 and a Bernard H.V. 120 (which was entered in the Schneider Trophy the year Sky Trackers was published), but I'm open to suggestions!
PS Thanks again to Bart Ziino for the book -- attending the AHA is getting to be almost worth it alone for the aviation treasures he finds for me!
In September 1909, rather late in Invasion's run, an article appeared in Pearson's Weekly explaining not only some of the pyrotechnical mechanics behind the spectacle, but also the underlying airpower theory. Because it was not merely an popular entertainment and a commercial one at that, but a response to the question 'Invasion by aeroplane, is it possible?'((Pearson's Weekly (London), 9 September 1909, 204.))
While you're waiting for me to write Home Fires Burning, here are some other books (mostly) on the same topic, whether wholly or in substantial part. This is not meant to be in any way a comprehensive list; it's merely what I have found to be most useful. I've included links to out-of-copyright/open access versions, where available.
Last night I had my first full-on anxiety dream about nuclear war since the 1980s. As ICBM trails arced across the blue sky overhead, I ran for the safety of a nearby shelter -- and confirmed that the Third World War had started by getting out my phone to check my social media feeds.
Of course, I'm quite safe here in Australia. It's not my home town which is being shelled by Russian artillery, not my family which is being killed in Putin's unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine. The risk of escalation is not non-zero, but would be increased dramatically if the calls from some quarters for a no-fly zone -- in some ways, an ad hoc kind of international air force -- were heeded. But, despite the dreams of liberal militarists, airpower is not a bloodless panacea; air war always has been real war. It's not a cheap way to avoid fighting. Fortunately everybody with a direct say in the matter seems to be well aware that a NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine would be a very bad idea indeed. So, I probably should be able to sleep easier than I am. But there's a very interwar kind of trauma involved in reliving an existential fear all over again. We've all been here before, again.
So I'm writing a book. Why? There are already many histories of the German air raids on Britain in the First World War: in my proposal, I listed eleven published since the 1980s alone, and even that is hardly exhaustive. Many of these are excellent -- Ian Castle's books, in particular, are required reading on this topic -- and I would not add to the pile unless I felt I could add something original. So what will make Home Fires Burning different? Why should anyone want to read it? Here's the (lightly-edited) rationale I gave in my proposal: