Contemporary

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Antler R3 (Taranaki) test

The last time Britain nuked Australia was at Maralinga on 9 October 1957, over half a century ago. The last of the Antler series of tests, code-named Taranaki (above), involved the detonation of a 25 kiloton fission bomb from a captive balloon at a height of 300 metres. The fallout 'moved east and then north-east towards the Queensland coast, missing the rain areas in New South Wales and Victoria as predicted'. Radiation levels in some areas 'slightly exceeded Level A [no health risk] for "people living in primitive conditions"', more than was predicted but not dangerously so, according to the safety criteria then in place.1 A 1985 Royal Commission however criticised the Antler tests on the grounds that '"inadequate attention was paid to Aboriginal safety", and that the patrols designed to ensure that the range was clear were "neither well planned nor well executed"'.2 Service personnel were also placed in greater than expected danger: a Canberra tasked with flying through the cloud half an hour later to collect air samples rapidly received unexpectedly high doses and had to abort the mission.3

Today the Federal Government introduced a bill into Parliament which will provide compensation and better health care for at least some of the latter group (the local Maralinga Tjarutja people received compensation in 1994). According to Warren Snowden, the Minister for Veteran Affairs:

The bill will benefit Australian personnel who participated in the British nuclear test program and their dependents by enabling compensation and health care to be provided with a minimum of delay [...] The personnel were involved in the maintenance, transporting or decontamination of aircraft used in the British nuclear test program outside the current legislated British nuclear test areas or time periods.

And there may be more to come:

The quality of the records from the test period and the secrecy surrounding the operation means that it is impossible to rule out the likelihood that new information may come to light which warrants further extension of coverage to additional groups of participants.

Not before time, either.

Image source: Nuclear Weapon Archive.

  1. Lorna Arnold and Mark Smith, Britain, Australia and the Bomb: The Nuclear Tests and Their Aftermath (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 202. [↩]
  2. Ibid., 204. [↩]
  3. Ibid., 202-3. [↩]

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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

I've been using the Internet for nearly two decades: in 1992 -- after nervously checking with the physics computer lab manager first -- I sent an email to my future Honours supervisor while she was visiting Toronto. I was quickly hooked by the promise of overcoming the tyranny of distance and transparently communicating with people all across the planet. Of course, it never worked quite like that. Of the many of the different forms of communication enabled by the Internet I've tried since then, many have fallen by the wayside (who now uses Unix talk? When was the last WAIS server shut down?), others still limp along (Gopher, IRC, Usenet) while others are in surprisingly rude health (you've probably used FTP at some point, though you may not have known it). Sometimes I was an early adopter: I set up my first webserver early in 1994, at a time when there must have been only a few thousand websites in the world. At other times I was very late to the party. But after much enthusiastic (and occasionally obsessive) participation in these and other protocols, I eventually became jaded and turned to passive consumption of content rather than creation in any form. It was only when I took up blogging at the start of my PhD that I rediscovered that early joy in talking to the world.

But the thing about blogging is that it's pretty much all about me, me, me. While I absolutely value and enjoy interacting with commenters, and hope that those who read without commenting find what I post here interesting or valuable, it's my place and I set the agenda. And I'd probably still blog even if nobody read it. So while Airminded is part of the World Wide Web, spending so much time on it could lead me to think that bombing and phantom airships and the knock-out blow are more important than they really are (which is to say, not very). As well, because my authorial voice dominates here it can lead me to think that my opinion is more important than it really is (which is to say, even less).

Which brings me to Twitter. I've blogged about tweeting a couple of times before, first when I began using Twitter in earnest, then when I reached one thousand tweets. I've now added more than 10,000 to that figure, so it's probably safe to say that I'm a Twitter addict -- er, become accustomed to using it. For link sharing, making contacts, historical musings, friendly banter and just general silliness, for sure; but there's more to it than that.

Tweeting is sometimes called microblogging, but that's a bit of a misnomer. It's true that it's possible to use Twitter just to broadcast your own thoughts or promote your own things, but unless you're already a celebrity nobody is going to listen. The real value comes from listening and (optionally) responding to what others say -- in interacting with others. With other historians, sure, but also with other people who share some interests and with others who don't.

The biggest and best example of this, for me, has been following the Arab Spring, particularly the revolutions in Egypt and Libya. Not just the news (and the rumours), but the commentary coming from those living through them: their experiences, hopes, fears. I confess this was a bit of an eye-opener for me. Intellectually, of course, I knew that people living in autocracies are like people everywhere else, but hearing the diversity of their responses (even within the limitations of 140 characters) I recognised them as individuals at a more basic level. It became impossible for me to discount the revolutions as quarrels in far away countries between people of whom I knew nothing. Twitter help me humanise an important period in contemporary history. That's something that I don't think any of those older protocols, from email on, could have helped me to do, not in practice. It's not transparent at all, of course, and it is as subject to biases and deceptions as any other form of human communication; but using Twitter is really the closest I've come to entering the global village I glimpsed nearly two decades ago.

Because it's #twitterstorians Day, I really should have said something about the specifically historical uses (and limitations) of Twitter. Luckily there are plenty of others who have done that:

@katrinagulliver (who is responsible) · @jliedl · @jondresner · @kathryntomasek · @kellyhignett · @kelly_j_baker · @lottelydia · @markcheathem · @publichistorian · @raherrmann · @sharon_howard (with a special shout-out for The Broadside) · @wilkohardenberg

PS If you don't already follow me on Twitter, I'm @Airminded!

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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Golden fist, crushed jet

Libya now holds an unfortunate record. It is the country which has the longest experience of aerial bombardment. Libya was first bombed in 1911, by Italy; now, in 2011, it is being bombed by its own air force. That makes it just under a century from the first bomb to the latest.

It helps that Libya was the very first country to experience aerial bombardment from aeroplanes and from airships. I'm using the word 'country' here in a loose sense, as it was then part of the Ottoman Empire (technically, the provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica). Italian forces landed in Tripoli in early October 1911, after a (naval) bombardment. Its total air forces in Libya never totalled more than nine aeroplanes and two airships. The aeroplanes first carried out a bombing mission on 1 November 1911, attacking Ain Zara (one bomb) and Taguira (three bombs). The two airships didn't go into action until March 1912, but still managed to carry out over 300 sorties between them before the end of hostilities in October. The effect of airpower on the Italian victory was negligible, but a precedent was set.
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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

I know. Writing about Wikipedia is so 2006. And yes, finding errors in Wikipedia articles is not exactly difficult. But I have a bee in my bonnet which needs releasing.

Wikipedia's page on the Blitz has a section entitled 'Commencement on September 6'. This is how it currently reads (sans hyperlinks and superscripts):

There is a misconception that the Blitz started on September 7, 1940. Bombs began dropping the night of September 6 and continued for the full day of the 7th and on into the morning of the 8th. Saturday 7th was the first full day and has officially and erroneously become known as the day the Blitz started. Hermann Göring launched bombers and the first bombs caused damage the night of September 6.

Quoted in the The Manchester Guardian is Göring's communiqué:

Attacks of our Air Force on objectives of special military and economical value in London, which began during the night of September 6, were continued during the day and night of September 7 with exceptionally strong forces using bombs of the heaviest caliber.

A witness recalled the evening of Friday September 6, 1940:

My name is John Davey. I was born on December 27th 1924 in South Moltom [sic - Molton] Road, Custom House, West Ham, and a couple of miles from the Royal Docks. In September 1940, on the Friday evening of the weekend the docks were first blitzed, I was sitting with my friend in his house. At about 7 p.m. there was a series of explosions and the shattering of glass. We ran into the road and saw at the end a flame that shot into the sky, seeming to light up the whole area. My friend and I and lots of others ran towards the fire.
—BBC, WW2 People's War

The first damage to property on September 7 was recorded at eight minutes past midnight, a grocer’s shop at 43 Southwark Park Road, SE16.

It has long been the accepted, but erroneous, view that the London Blitz lasted 57 consecutive nights starting on September 7 1940 and ending November 1. In actuality September 6 makes 57 nights and not September 7. The historian AJP Taylor wrote of such an error:

… it is the fault of previous legends which have been repeated by historians without examination. These legends have a long life.

This is really quite silly. Yes, it's true that the accepted date of 7 September 1940 as the start of the London Blitz is a bit misleading, since there was a non-trivial amount of bombing before that date (e.g. see here). Judging from contemporary press accounts, 7 September certainly seemed to mark an important change in German bombing strategy, but more one of quantity than quality -- almost more an inflection point than a turning point. In retrospect we tend not to see it that way, which is fine. But we could recognise that -- leaving aside the eventual reification involved in the name 'the Blitz' itself -- the 'start of the Blitz' was less clearly defined then than it seems now.
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I've recently been reading Peter Ewer's Wounded Eagle: The Bombing of Darwin and Australia's Air Defence Scandal, which I found to be unexpectedly interesting, but not always in a good way. Wounded Eagle has much less about the Second World War than I'd thought: much of the early part of the book is taken up with a detailed analysis of the origins of the Empire Air Mail Scheme (EAMS) in the 1930s, and then there's a long account of the Royal Australian Air Force's pre-war procurement policy. There's a lot of interesting stuff here: one particular surprise for me was the accidental way in which British radar research was accidentally revealed to the Australian government by a young physicist returning home from studying at Cambridge. The Australians asked if this was true, and the British sheepishly said that it was and only then began sharing its data with the Dominions! Even more surprising, perhaps, is that the RAAF, having got its hands on some British radar sets in 1940, showed next to no interest in them. Only the Australian Army did anything with them, for use with coastal defence batteries.

Ewer's book is full of such pointed criticisms, and that's the problem. This polemic has two targets: the British, and pro-British Australian politicians. The latter are outside my area, though I'll talk about them later. But I like to think I know a bit about the British by now, particularly when it comes to aeroplanes, so let's start there.
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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Hindenburg, 6 May 1937

There's been much discussion in various places and in various ways recently about the woeful state of the humanities in various university systems around the English-speaking world, particularly in light of the Browne Review in the UK -- for example, at Larvatus Prodeo (also here and here), Skepticlawyer, zunguzungu (a response to this animation, 'So you Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities'), Edge of the American West, and an article by James Vernon at GlobalHigherEd. I don't have much substantive to add, though I very much agree with Vernon's conclusion:

A good deal is at stake. We must defend the vision of a publicly funded university able to support classes in subjects that do not generate economic benefits. Economic utility is not the measure of who we are or who we want to become.

However, my main reason for posting this was that I didn't think I could live with myself if -- being the kind of blogger I am -- I passed up the chance to use that title.

Image source: Wikipedia.

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There have been a lot of stories in the press recently with titles like 'Churchill ordered UFO cover-up, National Archives show'. Actually, the TNA files -- part of an ongoing series of releases of UFO-related files -- don't show this at all, as is clear if you read the article more closely.

The cover-up is supposed to have taken place in the Second World War.

Nick Pope, who used to investigate UFO sightings for the MoD, said: "The interesting thing is that most of the UFO files from that period have been destroyed.

"But what happened is that a scientist whose grandfather was one of his [Churchill's] bodyguards, said look, Churchill and Eisenhower got together to cover up this phenomenal UFO sighting, that was witnessed by an RAF crew on their way back from a bombing raid.

"The reason apparently was because Churchill believed it would cause mass panic and it would shatter people's religious views."

The scientist 'said' this in 1999, nearly half a century after the incident is supposed to have taken place and a quarter century after his grandfather died. So it's only hearsay: there is no evidence from the war itself or from any witnesses that this cover-up actually took place.
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Mates

This photograph of Australian soldiers was taken during the First World War. It's not particularly unusual: just a group of mates getting together to record a memento, perhaps after a weekend's carousing in the fleshpots of Cairo or Paris.

Mateship is a important concept in Australian culture. The OED defines it as 'The condition of being a mate; companionship, fellowship, comradeship' and notes that it is 'Now chiefly Austral. and N.Z.' The Australian National Dictionary gives several more specifically Australian shades of meaning, from 'An acquaintance; a person engaged in the same activity', to 'One with whom the bonds of close friendship are acknowledged, a "sworn friend"', to 'A mode of address implying equality and goodwill; freq. used to a casual acquaintance and, esp. in recent use [...], ironic'. Suffice it to say that pretty much any bloke can have occasion to call another cobber a mate, whether they are good friends or bitter enemies. (Sheilas are another question, of course.)
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[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?

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No sooner does Bomber Command get approval for its own grand memorial -- to be precise, a £3.5 million neoclassical pavilion in London's Green Park commemorating its 55,000 dead -- than Fighter Command trumps it with a proposal for an even grander memorial: a 'Battle of Britain Beacon' at the RAF Museum at Hendon, which would cost £80 million and stand 116m tall, making it 10m taller than Big Ben and visible from central London. It would also serve as a permanent exhibition hall. The bomber boys just can't catch an even break.

As I noted recently, at least the question of how Bomber Command should be remembered gets discussed in the UK, unlike in Australia. Having said that, Australia and New Zealand both already have Bomber Command memorials. Admittedly, New Zealand's memorial looks like it might originally have been designed by Nigel Tufnel on the back of a paper napkin. Then again, Australia's (much bigger) one was designed by a Kiwi and built in New Zealand. I'm sure this must be meaningful in terms of the longstanding trans-Tasman rivalry but wouldn't venture to guess how exactly!

Thanks to peacay and ErrolC for the tips.