[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]
Watching this:
made me think of this:
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Contemporary
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.
A dispatch from Harvard by the Yarra
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]
'Harvard by the Yarra' is actually the University of Melbourne, Australia (the Yarra being the major river hereabouts, though the university is not actually anywhere near it). Some wag coined the phrase to describe (and deride) the aspirations implicit in the Melbourne Model, a radical overhaul of undergraduate teaching announced in 2007. Instead of many specialised undergraduate courses, there are now (or soon will be) only six, which will be more general and will serve as feeders for professional postgraduate courses. So whereas students used to be able to enroll in a law or medicine degree straight out of high school, for example, they now must complete an undergraduate degree first. This is more like the US tertiary education system than the British one, which provided the model for the first Australian universities in the 19th century. Hence 'Harvard by the Yarra'.
But there's another similarity to Harvard. Melbourne, like most Australian universities is publicly-funded. However, like Harvard, it is a (relatively, in Australian terms) old and prestigious institution, and so it has also attracted a (again, in Australian terms) large endowment from various benefactors. You might think that this is a good thing to have in a global recession, but apparently not. A slump in the value of the university's investments combined with several other factors (for example, the loss of fees from local students) has lead to a budgetary crisis, and an announcement by the vice-chancellor of a plan to cut 220 full-time equivalent jobs over the next few years, about 3% of the total workforce, to fall on both academics and administrative staff.
This doesn't come at a good time for the Faculty of Arts, which has already been struggling to deal with its own deep budget deficits over the last couple of years. This is partly due to curriculum changes imposed by the Melbourne Model, but also to a shift in the way funds are allocated by the university. There has been much publicity about this in recent months, as Arts tried to reduce salary expenditure by encouraging academic staff to take early retirement or go on long-term leave without pay. It's lost about 65 academics through these measures. The School of Historical Studies, where I completed my PhD studies, has been the focus of much of this attention. What was perhaps the leading history department in Australia is being slowly strangled by the need to do more with less. And with the recent spate of bad news, a recovery in the near future seems unlikely.
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The fire
I don't have anything deep or moving to say about the bushfires which destroyed several towns on the north-east edge of Melbourne on Saturday (try here instead). Everyone I know is (I think) safe, which is the first thing to say, but beyond that ... the official death toll is currently 181, but is sure to go higher. Many have suffered burns. Many more have lost their homes. A temporary morgue has been set up, and tent villages are springing up in nearby towns. I don't know what I can say about all that. What I guess I can and perhaps should do is put the disaster in some sort of historical context. It's what I did for New Orleans and London, so let's see if I can do it for my home town.
Bushfires are an annual event in southern Australia. We've had bad ones before: Ash Wednesday (1983), Black Friday (1939), Black Thursday (1851). (The above image is a detail from William Strutt's massive 1864 painting Black Thursday, February 6th 1851.) Most are started by natural causes (such as lightning), some by arsonists, if you can believe it. Every summer we hear the warnings, and with global warming we can likely expect more frequent and more dangerous fires. Sydney had a close shave in 2001; Canberra had it worse in 2003. The current one is the worst of them all.
We've had more than a decade of drought already, so the countryside is very, very dry. A heatwave last week (three consecutive days over 40 degrees) primed the situation; then Melbourne's highest temperature ever was recorded on Saturday (46.4 degrees) and with it came very strong winds. A firestorm swept through and over towns like Marysville and Kinglake with very little warning; but even those who were prepared often did not survive. The standard advice is stay or go: that is, decide to stay put and defend your house, or decide to go, and go early. Don't dither, decide on one or the other and stick to it. But the firefront moved so fast and was so intense that people didn't have time to leave in good order, nor were they able to effectively protect their properties. Some panicked and tried to flee when the fire bore down on them; apparently a number of bodies have been found in burned out cars.
This inevitably reminds me of 1945, or 1941 or 1937, of responses to the danger of bombing. Evacuation was one such response then, as it is now to the threat of bushfires. Householders were given advice on how best to defend against fire. The CFA is somewhat analogous to the AFS, both volunteer, part-time firefighting organisations. Even air-raid shelters are making a comeback. Half a century ago and more, it seems that the use of dugouts as fire refuges was fairly widespread (though with mixed success). There's some talk of reviving the practice, with updated technology, and I think there's a lot to be said for the idea. It also seems that stay-or-go is to be reviewed. Maybe it will be changed into just go, or stay-in-a-shelter.
And the firestorm makes me think of Tokyo or Hamburg. The casualties are far lower, of course, but then so are the population densities. (Is there a danger that one of these bushfires could penetrate deep into a big city like Melbourne? Perhaps, but there is far less combustible fuel -- meaning dead eucalyptus leaves and the like -- lying around in urban areas, so my guess is they'd progress much more slowly.) I saw a photo somewhere of a man standing beside his burnt-out car; there were silvery rivulets on the ground which was where molten metal had flowed from it. Some people spoke of getting into baths and spas when the fire came by. That made me shudder when I recalled those who had been boiled alive when sheltering in water tanks in Dresden. It's not the same but I guess these images and ideas are part of my intellectual toolkit now and they're some of the things I use to make sense of the world.
Please consider making a donation for the relief of the bushfire victims through the Australian Red Cross.
Image source: State Library of Victoria.
Howard Hawks at Melbourne Cinémathèque
This post will only be of interest to Melbourne readers. Melbourne Cinémathèque is holding a season of 1930s Howard Hawks films this month, including three of his aviation classics: Only Angels Have Wings, Ceiling Zero (both on Wednesday, 3 December) and The Dawn Patrol (Wednesday, 17 December). They're showing at ACMI. I don't think I've seen any of them so I'll probably be there! Thanks to Cathy for the tip.
Image source: Wikipedia.
S 330.15 B73
One of the fun things about reading old books that nobody else has opened for decades is what you sometimes find inside them: annotations, bookmarks, letters, racist leaflets (OK, that one was not so fun). Above is a library call slip (i.e. the bit of paper you fill in to request that a book be retrieved for you) from the SLV. I found it inside Property or Peace? by H. N. Brailsford, a socialist journalist. The book was published in 1934 but I reckon the call slip is from the 1950s, at the earliest, as there's a stamp in the front saying it was transferred from the CAE library in 1951 or 1952 or so.
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David Philips, 1946-2008
As Chris noted here the other day, David Philips died recently. David was a recently retired associate professor in the School of Historical Studies at the University of Melbourne, where he taught for three decades, and had an international reputation in the study of crime and policing in 19th century Britain and the comparative study of relations between settlers and indigenous people in Britain's colonies. A South African expatriate, he was long active in the anti-apartheid movement and human rights issues more generally. He was the author, co-author or co-editor of more than a half-dozen books, from Crime and Authority in Victorian England: The Black Country 1835-1860 (1977) to (with Julie Evans, Pat Grimshaw and Shurlee Swain) Equal Subjects, Unequal rights: Indigenous Peoples in British Settler Colonies, 1830-1910 (2003).
Back in 2003-4, I was one of David's students, so I thought it appropriate to write a little about him. It was only for a semester, at the end of my honours year (technically, postgraduate diploma, but pretty much the same thing). I was already half-way through my honours thesis; my original supervisor had to take a sabbatical in order to write, and as David was the only other British historian around, he was the obvious replacement. I wish I could say that we hit it off immediately and saw eye to eye on how my project was going and where it should be going, but we didn't quite. I've always thought that must have been difficult, to be dropped into the middle of a student's research without any idea of where they are coming from and having had no opportunity to influence the course it has taken. There's no choice at that late stage but to run with it.
So I was grateful to David for taking me on. And in the end, although our relationship was not always easy, he did help me produce the best thesis I could write, so I'm grateful for that too. Some of the ideas from that thesis have unexpectedly carried over into my current research, so his influence lives on! We also had fun: although aviation history was not his area, he was a widely-read and intellectually curious person, and as I recall he was quite fascinated by air combat in the Great War, which meant I had to dredge up bits and pieces I'd read about Fokker interrupter gear years before, or the vulnerability of Zeppelins to incendiary bullets. David's early death, only a year after his retirement, is a loss to the historical community as well as to his family.
A memorial service for David will be held on Monday 8 September at 4:30pm at Melba Hall (map here) on Royal Parade, at the University of Melbourne. All are welcome.
No Strzelecki
Director Baz Luhrmann (Strictly Ballroom, Moulin Rouge) has been working on a new film, called Australia. As the name perhaps suggests, it's a sweeping saga of this wide, brown land of ours: the men who conquered it, the women who loved them, the cattle, the dust, the flies ... well, it sounds pretty dull to me, to be honest. But I saw an extended trailer before Indy IV the other day, and it seems that Australia does have a couple of points of interest for the airminded film-goer.
The first is hinted at in this set photo. It shows Nicole Kidman ('our Nic') and, if I'm not mistaken, Bill Hunter (who is contractually obliged to appear in every major Australian motion picture) in a boat with 'QANTAS EMPIRE AIRWAYS LTD' written on the side. Well, since Qantas have not, historically, been known for their watercraft, presumably there'll be a Short Empire flying boat around somewhere! Such as the QEA Empire boat pictured above, VH-ABB Coolangatta. That's excellent -- we don't see enough of these strangely beautiful aircraft these days. But a few scenes with a CGI flying boat are probably not enough to get me into the cinema.
The second is much more central to the story, it seems: the Japanese air raids on Darwin on 19 February 1942, carried out by the four fleet carriers of Nagumo's task force and land-based bombers from the East Indies. About 240 aircraft attacked the harbour and airfield; 10 ships were sunk and about 250 people killed. To date, it's the heaviest and costliest attack by an enemy on an Australian target.
Which would seem to make it a fitting subject for an epic Australian film. Except that there was no Blitz-style, Darwin-can-take-it stoicism here. In fact, what happened was not unlike the pre-war predictions of the effects of an aerial knock-out blow. Half the town's population of 2500 (most women and children had been evacuated in December) fled south after the raid, along with a fair number of RAAF service personnel -- the so-called 'Adelaide River Stakes' (Adelaide River being a small town about 60 km south of Darwin).1 It's true enough that the two air raids were taken as a sign of imminent invasion, not unreasonably since Fortress Singapore had surrendered just four days earlier, along with most of the 8th Division AIF; and Darwin was a long way from any help. And it has been suggested that the deserting servicemen had been given confusing orders. That doesn't explain the fact that one of them got as far as Melbourne (about 4000 km away!) before stopping. Or, more seriously, the looting which took place in Darwin the night after the raid, perpetrated by servicemen (including some military police). There was certainly bravery -- not least from the USAAF pilots who took to the air to defend Darwin in their P-40s, though greatly outnumbered -- but overall, it's a pretty inglorious episode in Australia's military history. (And an example of something which Australians might do well to remember on ANZAC Day.)
So, it will be interesting to see how the raid's aftermath is depicted in Australia. Telling anything like the full story would seem to cut against the intended epic nature of the film. But it sounds like Luhrmann does does intend to tell this part of Australia's history:
Darwin was attacked 64 times in six months ... The government (disguised) the truth: 2000 whites were killed and non-whites were not counted, so the toll was far greater," he said. "But everything in the film will be in service to a great romance ... Facts will be moved around but not in a way that fundamentally disturbs the truth.
I may have to see it after all ...
(The title of this post, as Australians of a certain age may have guessed, is an homage to that great maker of epic films, Warren Perso, the 'last Aussie auteur'.)
Image source: Wikimedia Commons.
- See here; the relevant volumes of the official history, Douglas Gillison, Royal Australian Air Force, 1939-1942 (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1962), 426-32, and Paul Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1942-1945 (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1970), 141-4; and the relevant volume of the centenary history of defence, Alan Stephens, The Royal Australian Air Force (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001), 136-9. [↩]
Mark my words
This will end in tears: Zeppelins to make tourist flights over London. (Via Airshipworld.)
Image source: from the front cover of Louis Gastine, War in Space: or, an Air-craft War between France and Germany (London and Felling-on-Tyne: Walter Scott Publishing, 1913). (OK, it's Paris, not London -- so I cheated.) The oldest paperback I own, incidentally.
Out of the depths
This has been all over the news here today, though I suspect interest is somewhat less outside Australia: the wreck of HMAS Sydney has been found. On 19 November 1941, Sydney was returning to Fremantle, Western Australia, after escorting a troopship north to Sunda Strait. It encountered the German commerce raider Kormoran somewhere out in the Indian Ocean, and a battle ensued. When the engagement broke off, both ships were mortally wounded. (Kormoran's wreck was itself found only a few days ago.) About 320 out of Kormoran's crew of nearly 400 were eventually rescued, but there were no survivors at all from Sydney. Its 645 dead represent the Royal Australian Navy's greatest wartime loss.
The press reports seem to follow the same line -- a 66-year old mystery solved. The location of the Sydney's wreck was unknown because no radio signal was ever received from her during or after the battle, and the Kormoran's lifeboats had drifted a long way before rescue. But that's actually only part of the mystery. The real mystery -- or at least the one which is the real reason for the long-standing interest in finding the wreck, and for the accompanying conspiracy theories -- is how did a modern warship like Sydney come to be sunk by Kormoran, a converted merchantman?
This does seem strange, on the face of it. Sydney was a modern Leander-class light cruiser, commissioned in 1935. It was much faster than Kormoran (32 knots to 19), more heavily armoured, and more powerfully armed. Kormoran was on its first (and only) cruise: in nearly a year's sail from Germany it had encountered nothing more fearsome than defenceless merchantmen. Sydney, by contrast, had previously had a successful career in the Mediterranean. In particular, in the Battle of Cape Spada in July 1940 she led a British destroyer squadron (correction: flotilla) into action against a pair of Italian light cruisers, which fled before her. Sydney's accurate gunnery disabled the Bartolomeo Colleoni, which was then despatched by torpedoes from the destroyers. It doesn't seem credible that the proud victor of Cape Spada could be sunk by a lowly commerce raider.
Except, that is, if you look a bit more closely:
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