Recently, Martin Waligorski contacted me to see if I'd like to collaborate with him in his post-blogging project, Battle of Britain - 70 Years. I had been thinking about doing some sort of post-blogging this year to mark the 70th anniversary of 1940, but probably not until later in the year, and for the Blitz rather than the Battle. But I would like to highlight Martin's efforts somehow, as well a number of other 1940 post-blogging (and post-tweeting) exercises going on, some of which have a broad overview, while others focus on the experience from one perspective. So what I've decided to do is put up a sticky post which will stay at the top of Airminded for the duration, with links to the various blogs and the most recent posts (I won't try do this for tweets as they come too often). I'll try to keep it as up-to-date as possible, and will put a cumulative list in the sidebar. The initial list is below -- if you know of any more, please let me know. Indeed, if you're interested in contributing yourself, either at Martin's site or your own, please do!
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Blogging, tweeting and podcasting
Why don’t I care about strategy?
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]
The new Military History Carnival has been posted at Wig-Wags. One of the featured posts, The state of strategy at Kings of War -- which looks at the great strategic thinkers of history and wonders why there seem to have been relatively few in recent times -- inspired the above title. It's posed as a question, not a statement ('Why I don't care about strategy') because I'm not sure that my not caring is a good thing for a military historian, especially since I do deal with strategic thought in my work on early twentieth-century airpower. But I find myself uninterested in the eternal principles of strategy, or how to win the war in Afghanistan, or whether China will replace the United States as the world's superpower, or whether Clausewitz was right or Douhet (or vice versa, or neither or both). Or at least, I find some of these things interesting sometimes, but as somebody who lives on this planet, not as an historian.
When I first started researching my area, two of the first books I read were George Quester's Deterrence Before Hiroshima and Robin Higham's The Military Intellectuals in Britain, and I still find the latter especially useful. As it happens, both books were published in 1966, and both reflect their Cold War context very deeply. Both Quester and Higham were concerned to use their studies of the interwar fear of the bomber to draw conclusions for military thinkers in their own day. To some extent this distorted their analysis: they were much more interested in those ideas and events which seemed to parallel the development of nuclear strategy, rejecting those which did not as wrong or just uninteresting. So I think I am wary of indulging in a similar presentism. (Not that I have a gift for it.)
But is this realistic, sensible, or even defensible? Isn't part of the point of history to learn from it? Conversely, isn't it possible that I could learn something about history by studying the present day? Professionally speaking, aren't there possible gains for a military historian in fostering closer contact with those creating the military history of the future (applied military history, perhaps)? Is this simply a distaste for the reality at the core of my study -- killing, dying, suffering? Do historians of crime similarly distance themselves from their closest present-day analogues (criminologists)? Labour historians? Gender historians? Or maybe it's just me?
Aeroretronautics
All the cool kids are talking about How to be a Retronaut -- well, they were a month or two ago, I confess it's hard to keep up. How to be a Retronaut is a blog which tries to engage your sense of anachronism to try and shake your assumptions about the past. As the Retronaut puts it:
The power of anachronisms
Its all to do with the power of anachronisms – things which seem to be in the wrong time. They can be objects, words, phrases, technology, ideas, fashions – anything we associate so strongly with one time that it seems wrong in anotherWrong associations
And its that word “associate” – that’s the powerful one. Because the strange thing is, real anachronisms do not exist. They can’t. A “thing” belongs to whatever era its in. Its not the “thing” thats got it wrong, its us, and our associations. Time to change what we believe.But in that tiny, tiny moment, just before we grasp the fact that our beliefs are wrong, we get to be a Retronaut.
One of the main ways How to be a Retronaut achieves this is through the use of colour photographs taken in periods we don't normally associate with colour photographs -- 1913, for example.
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Believing is seeing
I was pleasantly surprised when A Fortean in the Archives linked (also here) to my recent post on Boer War airpower for several reasons. Firstly, because it's always nice to be linked to. Secondly, because I've been following A Fortean in the Archives for a while now: the Fortean in question is Mike Dash, a former contributing editor of Fortean Times who has a PhD in British naval history and has written a fine call-to-arms for Fortean historians called Borderlands, which deserves to be more widely read. And thirdly, because of the post itself, which is about the curious episode of Walter Powell, a Conservative MP who disappeared in 1881 when his balloon was swept out from Dorset over the English Channel. This was highly publicised in the press, and for the next week or so reports came in of sightings of Powell's balloon. Many were from fairly plausible locations (Dartmouth, Alderney, northern Spain), but a couple were from Scotland nearly a week later, which is not plausible at all. So in at least some cases, whatever they did see, it wasn't Powell in his balloon. This suggests that expectations were playing a role: having been told by the press that a balloon was lost at sea, people were apt to interpret anything aerial they didn't recognise (a planet, a Reticulan scoutship) as Powell in his balloon.
This is a useful reminder that phantom airship 'scares' were only incidentally due to fear; the real cause was expectation. An even clearer example comes from Canada in 1896. The context was the attempt by S. A. Andrée, a Swedish engineer, to reach the North Pole by air. His plan was to launch in a balloon from Danskøya, an island near Spitsbergen, and drift north with the wind. After reaching the pole, the balloon would eventually land in Canada or Russia. The Swedish and international press covered the preparations for the voyage in some detail. On 30 June, the balloon was inflated, and Andrée and his two companions announced their intention to start for the pole when the wind was favourable.
The very next day, some people in Winnipeg saw a balloon they identified as Andrée's, far off in the distance, which excited some comment in the press. More interestingly, on 3 July, the chief of the Kispiox people and a group of trappers saw something balloon-like, brightly-lit and travelling north while at Blackwater Lake in British Columbia. Not far away, on the Skeena river, an Aboriginal boy saw something very similar on the same date. Both of these reports were relayed through a local Indian Affairs agent, who had warned the locals that they were 'liable' to see Andrée's balloon travelling north over the next month, and presumably accepted the sightings as being reliable.
And so they did, or rather 'did', because Andrée's balloon never left the ground. The wind at Danskøya kept blowing steadily south, and the expedition was put off until the following year. Free ballooning was not at all common in the 1890s, and it's unlikely that anyone would have tried it over the wilds of British Columbia. So there was nothing to see along the Skeena, yet something was seen, precisely because something was expected.
The Andrée expedition did set off in 1897, on 11 July, but the balloon crashed into pack ice after only two days and 300 miles. Andrée and his companions tried to return on foot, but perished before reaching safety. Their fate was unknown until 1930. It will come as no surprise that more phantom sightings of Andrée's balloon were reported from Canada: this time from Rivers Inlet, Kamlooms [edit: more likely Kamloops], Victoria, Goldstream, Douglas, Winnipeg, Rossland, Souris and Honora. Most spectacularly, thousands of people in Vancouver saw 'a very bright red star surrounded by a luminous halo' to the south for a quarter of hour on 13 August, which again was identified with the now-wrecked Andrée balloon. With mystery aircraft, expectation is everything.
Source: Robert E. Bartholomew and George S. Howard, UFOs & Alien Contact: Two Centuries of Mystery (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1998), chapter 3.
Only Nixon could go to Greco-Bactria
Military History Carnival #23 has been posted at The Edge of the American West and H-War. My eye was immediately drawn to a post (more of an article, really) on the Greco-Bactrian Kingdom at Sparta: Journal of Ancient Spartan and Greek History. This was a remnant of Alexander the Great's conquests in central Asia in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC, which was mostly Hellenistic in culture but also incorporated local influences. I've always found the Greco-Bactrians fascinating; one day I'll have to learn more about them.
I neglected to take note of last month's Military History Carnival 22 at Thompson-Werk. I recommend The Edge of the American West's own post on the wit and wisdom of Richard M. Nixon (though for genuine wit and and perhaps wisdom, he's not a patch on Australia's own Paul J. Keating).
Military History Carnival 21
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]
Welcome to the restored Military History Carnival, a round-up of the best military history blogging of the last month. Since history is just one damn thing after another, let's try this as a chronology.
327-5 BCE: Alexander the Great's army fights yeti in India.
122 CE: Construction of Hadrian's wall begins in order to amuse 20th century children.
1202: Venice builds a fleet of Landing Ships (Knight) for the Fourth Crusade.
1861-5: Black Confederates probably don't exist, but if they did here's what it would take to convince reasonable historians.
1914-9: The First World War sees horses used in a wide variety of roles. Men and women had their roles too.
1915: The many burdens of the poor bloody infantry.
1915: The first Zeppelin raid on Britain.
1915: Fighting at Gallipoli inspires a British sailor-poet to write of ancient Ilium.
1915: An earlier American intervention in Haiti.
1918: Gladys Wake, a Canadian nurse who died on active service in France.
1931-7: Why Metrovicks got into gas turbine research.
1939: 'Keep Calm and Carry On': then an unused morale-boosting poster, now a wildly successful internet meme.
1939-45: Why most RAF war dead served in bombers.
1940: Coventry and the aeroplane.
1942: George Herbert Walker Bush becomes the youngest American naval aviator to fly solo.
1948: President Truman sets a precedent for today by ordering the end of segregation in the US armed forces.
1948-9: An earlier international humanitarian airlift.
This edition of the Military History Carnival was brought to you by the year 1915. Thanks go to all those who sent in suggestions. If you'd like to host a future carnival, please contact the Battlefield Biker.
[Update: fixed an embarrassingly-bad description which suggests I barely bothered to read the link. Sorry Gavin!]
1000 tweets later
Last August I took up Twitter. I've just reached a thousand tweets (or will have, when this post is auto-tweeted), so it seems like an appropriate time to reflect on how useful the whole thing is.
I was initially sceptical, but I find that Twitter does complement blogging very well. It's a good place to post links to useful or interesting links which I think are worth sharing, but aren't worth a blog post (I don't like just posting links: I feel I should say something insightful to go along with it, but I don't always have something insightful to say!) Ditto for things I come across in my reading. It's not quite as good as having somebody sitting next to you who to say 'hey, look at this!' to, but then again that sort of behaviour is usually frowned upon in libraries anyway. As the wordle above shows, most of my tweets are military history-related, and still often aviation-related, but a bit more broadly construed than here on the blog. ('rt' is short for 'retweet', which reposting the tweets of other users.) I also talk about other interests or pop culture from time to time. Of course, I could do that here if I wanted, but I don't want to change the focus of the blog. The informality of Twitter makes it easier to play around.
Even more than blogging, Twitter is about who is following you and who you are following. (In round numbers, about 140 and about 100 people, respectively.) While there are a few regular Airminded commenters who are on Twitter (@thrustvector, @AirPowerHistory, @jondresner, @lifeasdaddy), I generally interact with a different set of people there. I get the sense that most of them don't read Airminded, at least not habitually -- even outside of the SEO consultants (who LOVE using the web, but only seem to actually use the web to tell other people how they can get more readers). On the other hand, there are people I've interacted with in the Twitterverse who do read Airminded, but wouldn't comment here. Informality wins again. The abbreviated and fleeting nature of tweeting makes it more liberating, in a sense, than blogging: there's only so much you can say in 140 characters, so you don't need to say something brilliant, and if you say something strikingly unbrilliant, well, it's soon lost in the stream. (On the other hand, it's surprising just how clever some people can be with so little to work with.)
My proudest Twitter moment did relate to Airminded. @ukwarcabinet is tweeting the British Cabinet's view of the Second World War, day by day (currently it's up to 4 February 1940). It's run by the National Archives (@UkNatArchives), and includes a link to the relevant Cabinet papers, which can be downloaded for free. And according to Jo Pugh (@mentionthewar), who works on it, I was partly to blame:
@Airminded I hope the @ukwarcabinet thing seems like a good idea. It was largely inspired by your post-blogging the Sudeten Crisis.
Which is very cool indeed.
Twitter promises to be even better than a bunch of RSS feeds for keeping tabs on conferences, jobs and general academic gossip. I say 'promises' because academia is, as usual, slow to cotton on to new media, and the critical mass of #twitterstorians isn't quite there yet for Twitter to be an essential way to keep up to date with your own field. Which is one reason why I'm writing this post: sign up, follow @Airminded, and tweet! If you choose not to, you can still get an idea of what I'm tweeting by looking at the bottom of the sidebar on Airminded's home page.
The trumpet calls
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]
Airminded is hosting the next edition of the Military History Carnival on 15 February. Please send me suggestions for the best military history blogging since 17 January, either by email (bholman at airminded dot org), by web (here or here) or by twitter (@Airminded or tagged #mhc21). Thanks!
Image source: Wikipedia.
It’s alive!
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.
Dreams of a colder war
It is officially too darn hot today: 43° C. So naturally my thoughts turn to a colder time: the 1950s. The above image (which I found as part of x-ray delta one's wonderful Flickr stream; he also has a suitably breathless blog, ATOMIC-ANNIHILATION) would seem to be part of a public relations exercise from Convair, relating to its interceptor, the F-102A Delta Dagger. I'm not sure what year it's from exactly, but the Dagger entered service in 1956, so probably then or the following year. (So it could be an early effort from Don Draper.) Evidently there were a lot of complaints from the public about sonic booms from the Dagger, the USAF's first supersonic interceptor. The text is really something else; it almost circles right through brazen propaganda to become an honest argument that sonic booms really are good for you. Almost:
Freedom Has a New Sound!
ALL OVER AMERICA these days the blast of supersonic flight is shattering the old familiar sounds of city and countryside.
At U. S. Air Force bases strategically located near key cities our Airmen maintain their round the clock vigil, ready to take off on a moment's notice in jet aircraft like Convair's F-102A all-weather interceptor. Every flight has only one purpose -- your personal protection!
The next time jets thunder overhead, remember that the pilots who fly them are not willful disturbers of your peace; they are patriotic young Americans affirming your New Sound of Freedom!
Presumably the next panel would show the milkman clutching his ears and screaming in pain, and the one after that the homeowners sweeping up the bits of broken glass. That new sound of freedom wasn't free.