Thanks to Jonathan for the tip: the Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe 1940-1945 project is holding a workshop at the University of Reading on 13 March 2009, on 'War, Bombing, and Trauma: World War 2 and Comparative Perspectives'. It's free but the registration deadline is 3 March 2009. They are also holding an international conference at the University of Exeter on 10-13 September 2009, which will explore the 'variety of political and cultural responses to bombing carried out against predominantly urban targets in Britain, France, Germany and Italy during the Second World War'. They both sound like entirely too much fun!
Conferences and talks
Some Tante Jus and a conference report
Here are a couple of photos I used in my AHA talk last week:
This is a Lufthansa Ju 52/3m, one of the great airliners of the 1930s, at Croydon aerodrome, ca. 1936. Other operators included Swissair, Aeroflot, and British Airways (an ancestor of the current airline of the same name).
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Facing Armageddon
This is the talk I gave at Earth Sciences back in May. It's long and picture heavy and much of it will be be familiar to regular readers, but some people expressed some interest in it so here it is. I've lightly edited it, mainly to correct typos in my written copy. I've put in links to the Boswell drawings because they're under copyright, and I've replaced one photo because I realised it was of British Army Aeroplane No. 1b, not British Army Aeroplane No. 1a! How embarrassing.
Facing Armageddon: Britain and the Bomber, 1908-1941
Today I'm going to give you an overview of my PhD thesis topic. My broad area is the history of military aviation in the early twentieth century, so first I'll give you a little background on that.
The first heavier-than-air manned flight was made by the Wright brothers in 1903, as you can see here. Within a few years, countries around the world started thinking about how they could use this new technology for warfare.
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Doing my part to bridge the Two Cultures
Admittedly, not very much!
I'm giving a talk at 4pm, next Friday, 16 May 2008, in the Fritz Loewe Theatre at the School of Earth Sciences, University of Melbourne. The title is "Facing Armageddon: Britain and the Bomber, 1908-1941" and it will be a broad overview of my thesis topic. It should be fun, for me at least -- it's the department where I've worked for many years as the IT manager, so it will nice (and perhaps challenging) to try to explain to all the geologists and climatologists exactly what it is I've been doing these past few years. Thanks to Malek Ghantous of the Earth Sciences Postgraduate Group for the invite and for organising this -- it's the first, and quite possibly the last, time a poster has been made to advertise a talk I've given!
If anybody local has nothing better to do on a Friday afternoon, you're more than welcome to attend the talk (and enjoy the refreshments afterwards). Perhaps just drop me a line first, though, so we can anticipate any massive surge of interest (ha!) There's a map showing where Earth Sciences is after the jump. (The lecture theatre is on the 2nd floor, right near the main entrance, just past the disused theremin/mural ...)
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From Darfur to London in Melbourne
I'll be giving a talk entitled “From Darfur to London: P. R. C. Groves and the construction of aerial apocalypse, 1916-1922”, at the Australian Historical Association's Biennial Conference, Locating History, 7-10 July 2008, which is conveniently being held at the University of Melbourne. Here's the abstract:
The idea that cities could be shattered and wars won by aerial bombardment in a so-called 'knock-out blow' was embryonic before the Great War. After the war, such exaggerated theories became an orthodoxy among airpower theorists and, by the 1930s, among the wider British public -- an important factor underlying support for pacifism, appeasement and collective security up to the Munich crisis. But the war itself was crucial to both the formulation and the propagation of the theory of the knock-out blow.
Most responsible for promoting this idea of the knock-out blow to a wider audience was General P. R. C. Groves, a veteran of both aerial and bureaucratic warfare: the British equivalent of Douhet and Mitchell. Convinced that Britain's air defences were being dangerously neglected, he retired from the RAF in 1922 and waged a highly-visible press campaign on the issue. In so doing, Groves relied upon and popularised the theory of the knock-out blow, drawing on his experiences in using airpower against rebellion in Darfur, in trying to win the war in France, and in trying to suppress a German resurgence after 1918 -- and thereby, ironically, complicated the task of dealing with Germany after 1933.
I wrote that a few months ago, and some of it strikes me as a bit strange now, but I doubt that anyone is going to be tracking how rigorously I adhere to my abstract!
I'm currently slated to talk just after lunch on the first day. I've never been before, but it must be Australia's biggest history conference, with twelve parallel streams. One of these is a war and society-type stream, so I should be right -- although the title that's intriguing me the most is from one of the others: Erin Ihde's "Do Not Panic: Hawkwind, the Cold War and 'the Imagination of Disaster'"! I see that fellow bloggers Megan Sheehy and Melissa Bellanta will be giving papers too.
Should be fun.
Over Flanders fields
On Friday, I went along to a talk on "Great War aerial photography: a source for battlefield survey and archaeology?", given by Birger Stichelbaut of Ghent University in Belgium. This brings the total number of in-any-way-related-to-early-20th-century-aviation talks given at the University of Melbourne during my PhD candidacy (as far as I know and excluding a couple I've given) to one (1). And even this was archaeological and not historical; but it kept me awake even at the quite indecent hour of 10am, so you know it must have been good!
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RAF Cranwell and a conference
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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Jeremy Bentham and Web 2.0
This week I attended the bi-annual departmental Work in Progress Day, where postgrads give talks on their research. I wasn't presenting this time around (I did earlier this year) but it turns out that two of my fellow students are also fellow bloggers! (Which, as far as I know, makes a total of three for the department, including myself.)
One I knew about already, actually: David Llewellyn's Australia Felix. He's doing his PhD on the influence of utilitarianism in Australian political life -- for example in the genesis of the Australian constitution. His paper, which is online, takes in Aeneas, Madame de Stael, Gallipoli, Chartism and of course Jeremy Bentham. By taking as a touchstone a novel by Henry Handel Richardson, it also gave me flashbacks to English lit in high school, where I was forced to read The Getting of Wisdom. Which in retrospect wasn't a bad book, but at the time I had a very low tolerance for any novel without spaceships or elves in it, so a coming-of-age novel set in a private girls' school didn't exactly cut it! Do check out David's website and blog though.
The other blog is Megan Sheehy's History and Web 2.0. Her MA topic is on the use of Web 2.0 tools by Australian historians, and her paper was specifically about the use of YouTube. Megan also has a post about her talk, but even better (and rather recursively!) she has put a two-part video of it on YouTube (part one, part two).
Above is the first part: you can see me arriving late at -8:37, but it's worth watching the rest of it too :)
The destruction of Everytown, 1940
The week before last, I had the opportunity to present a talk about my PhD topic at an Open University summer school (cheers Chris!) It was the first time I've given a talk about the thesis as a whole and I think it went OK -- I don't know that I'm getting better as a public speaker but at least I'm not so nervous these days. But I had intended to show a scene from the 1936 science fiction classic, Things to Come (adapted by H. G. Wells from his own 1933 novel, The Shape of Things to Come). For once the technology worked; but I'd queued up the wrong scene on the DVD and so after a few attempts at finding the right part I gave up. But thanks to YouTube, here's the scene the students didn't get to see. It's the air raid on Everytown on Christmas eve, 1940:
I think it's very well done, and would have been very impressive on a big screen. For the small screen, there's a new special edition DVD, which I must get around to buying ...
Panic!
The title relates to both the content of a paper I gave yesterday at the School's Work In Progress Day, and to my own state of mind beforehand! I think it went well, though -- at least there was no rotten fruit thrown at the end! -- which is good because it was the first real outing for my current chapter on defence panics. The deadly-dull paper title was "Moral panics, defence panics and the British air panic of 1934-5", and here's the abstract:
The sociological concept of moral panic was developed to describe and explain how societies react to internal threats to their values and interests, such as crime or deviant behaviour, with particular emphasis on the roles played by the media and expert opinion. In this paper I will argue that the reactions of a society to external, military threats -- "defence panics" -- can develop in essentially the same way as moral panics, and can be analysed using a similar framework. My main example will be drawn from the British air panic of 1934-5 over the threat of illegal German aerial rearmament.
For the record, these are the main defence panic candidates I'm interested in, some of which I've discussed here before:
- phantom airship scare, 1913
- Gotha raids on London, 1917
- "French" air menace, 1922
- Hamburg gas disaster, 1928
- German germ warfare experiments, 1934
- German air menace, 1934-5
- Guernica, 1937; Barcelona, 1938; Canton, 1938; Munich crisis, 1938
- the Blitz, 1940
I had a slide up with Airminded's URL but stupidly forgot to actually mention it. So if anyone who heard my talk has managed to find their way here despite this, hello and well done! Amazingly, there was actually one student there who already reads Airminded -- I was very chuffed to learn that reading it is less boring than working :) -- but I quite rudely forgot to ask their name. If they or anyone else from the session would like to drop me a line, they can drop me a line here in the comments, or via the contact form. I'd like to hear from you!