Contemporary

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"Slough" by John Betjeman (1937):

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn't fit for humans now,
There isn't grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!

Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.

And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women's tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad,
They've tasted Hell.

It's not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It's not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren't look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

David Brent's analysis of "Slough":

'Right, I don't think you solve town planning problems by dropping bombs all over the place, so he's embarrassed himself there' -- brilliant.
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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

This isn't about indigenous Australia and white Australia -- this is about all Australia

The Honourable Kevin Rudd, MP, Prime Minister of Australia, apologises to the Stolen Generations, House of Representatives, Canberra, 13 February 2008:

Therefore, for our nation, the course of action is clear, and therefore, for our people, the course of action is clear: that is, to deal now with what has become one of the darkest chapters in Australia’s history. In doing so, we are doing more than contending with the facts, the evidence and the often rancorous public debate. In doing so, we are also wrestling with our own soul. This is not, as some would argue, a black-armband view of history; it is just the truth: the cold, confronting, uncomfortable truth -- facing it, dealing with it, moving on from it. Until we fully confront that truth, there will always be a shadow hanging over us and our future as a fully united and fully reconciled people. It is time to reconcile. It is time to recognise the injustices of the past. It is time to say sorry. It is time to move forward together.

To the stolen generations, I say the following: as Prime Minister of Australia, I am sorry. On behalf of the government of Australia, I am sorry. On behalf of the parliament of Australia, I am sorry. I offer you this apology without qualification. We apologise for the hurt, the pain and suffering that we, the parliament, have caused you by the laws that previous parliaments have enacted. We apologise for the indignity, the degradation and the humiliation these laws embodied. We offer this apology to the mothers, the fathers, the brothers, the sisters, the families and the communities whose lives were ripped apart by the actions of successive governments under successive parliaments. In making this apology, I would also like to speak personally to the members of the stolen generations and their families: to those here today, so many of you; to those listening across the nation—from Yuendumu, in the central west of the Northern Territory, to Yabara, in North Queensland, and to Pitjantjatjara in South Australia.

I know that, in offering this apology on behalf of the government and the parliament, there is nothing I can say today that can take away the pain you have suffered personally. Whatever words I speak today, I cannot undo that. Words alone are not that powerful; grief is a very personal thing. I ask those non-Indigenous Australians listening today who may not fully understand why what we are doing is so important to imagine for a moment that this had happened to you. I say to honourable members here present: imagine if this had happened to us. Imagine the crippling effect. Imagine how hard it would be to forgive. My proposal is this: if the apology we extend today is accepted in the spirit of reconciliation in which it is offered, we can today resolve together that there be a new beginning for Australia. And it is to such a new beginning that I believe the nation is now calling us.

Sometimes, history doesn't need to be sought out. Sometimes it comes to you.

Sources: Parliament of Australia (text), trimba (image).

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Weddings Parties Anything, "A Tale They Won't Believe":

I have previously explained the relationship of this song to aviation history (well, it's pretty slender, to be honest), here.

Though the Weddoes split up a decade back, they're embarking on a reunion tour around Australia, which is very exciting news -- particularly since I'll be seeing them at the good old Corner Hotel in April! They're also playing, oddly enough, one show in London, on 25 April. They're sensational live, so why not mark Anzac Day in true Aussie style (i.e., rocking your socks off and, optionally, getting simultaneously smashed)? All the details are here.

Chonk on!

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Bentley Priory

A historic building which once played a key role in saving the free world is about to be lost to posterity, with barely a whimper of protest.

The story is of course more complex than that. When I say 'lost to posterity', that's what I might say if I was writing an eye-catching lede for a newspaper article. The building itself is not in danger. It's currently owned by the Ministry of Defence, but is being sold to private developers. The current plan is that it will be turned into luxury flats. Even this, in itself, is not what has attracted criticism. Rather it's the failure of the current plan to acknowledge the building's history and its role in Britain's past.
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Military History Carnival #10 has been posted over at Walking the Berkshires. This month, the post I enjoyed the most was at Boston 1775, about various improvised weapon systems which ragtag insurgents hoped would turn the tide against the overwhelmingly superior forces of a colonial power. Ok, it's a stretch to call these first submarines 'improvised weapon systems', as they were pioneering attempts at an entirely new mode of transportation. (The post is more about other proposed weapons, such as 'Row-Gallies'. I want to talk about submarines though :) But they were also weapons of desperation, of the weak against the strong. The British didn't need to invent submarines because they already ruled the waves. Why bother with such frail contraptions, more of a danger to their own crew than anyone else? Submarines have come a long way since then. They are integral parts of big navies, though for very different purposes than the Turtle (platforms for SLBMs, for example). Middle powers such as Australia like to have a few around to lurk about and deter any potential aggressors, and to add some heft to their offensive capabilities. It's in small, coastal defence navies that submarines retain something like their original purpose, as force equalisers. It's in the North Korean navy and its like that the true heirs of the Turtle are to be found today.

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Nanotechnology is now starting to move out of science fiction and into the real world, though currently it's more advanced chemistry than the molecular-scale engineering foretold by K. Eric Drexler more than two decades ago. So no Strossian cornucopia machines yet, no swarms of nanobots swimming in our blood to clean out the cholesterol. But some people are already trying to think through the implications of what might lie over the technological horizon.

The November/December 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists contains a review, by Mike Tredar of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology (blog here), of Jürgen Altmann's Military Nanotechnology: Potential Applications and Preventive Arms Control (Routledge, 2006). The 'potential applications' of the book's title are both direct, for example 'specially designed warfare molecules'; and indirect, with the application of nanotech manufacturing techniques to the production of weapon systems of all types.

Thus, he [Altmann] warns, "MNT [molecular nanotechnology] production of nearly unlimited numbers of armaments at little cost would contradict the very idea of quantitative arms control," and would culminate in a technological arms race beyond control.

This is because anyone could -- with access to a nanofactory and the requisite blueprints -- construct vast quantities of very lethal weapons in very little time. Rogue states, terrorist groups, Rotary clubs. Anyone. There would be no way to police this. No hope for the future. Unless ...
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Operation Chastise was the codename for the famous 'dambusters' raid carried out against three German dams by 617 Squadron on the night of 17 May 1943. The idea was to breach the dams and thereby deprive the factories of the Ruhr of their electricity. As far as the standard story goes -- which everyone knows from the movie1 -- it was the brainchild of the engineer Barnes Wallis, chief designer of the R100 airship, the Wellesley and Wellington bombers, the bouncing bomb (as used in the raid) and the Tall Boy and Grandslam earthquake bombs.

Though he may well have had the idea independently, Wallis wasn't the first to think of bombing dams. Having said that, I don't actually know of many other candidates.2 L. E. O. Charlton is one possibility. In a fictional coda to The Menace of the Clouds (the preface is dated September 1937), he imagined how an international air force might respond to an Italian attack upon (an independent) Egypt. Before dawn, the ISR (International Strategic Reserve) raids Italy's major ports, and then:

At daylight a succession of strong flights flew inland from over the Tuscan Sea and proceeded to demolish the hydro-electric installations in the Appenine [sic] chain from Liguria to Abruzzi.3

However, Charlton doesn't actually say that the dams themselves are the targets. And his choice of words is actually more suggestive of the generators at the base of the dams.

One other possibility is ... the British government. There is a suggestion in Connelly's Reaching for the Stars that the British were thinking about the possibility of attacking the Ruhr dams as early as 1937. He gives no details.4 But it looks like this interest actually made it into the papers, albeit in a roundabout way!
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  1. Though they don't in Germany, as I learned from a German historian when I was in London; he had never heard of the film or the raid. Which says something about the exaggerated importance attributed to Chastise in British (and Commonwealth) mythology as the representation of the bomber offensive, at least up until recently. [↩]
  2. It was common enough to think that the enemy might attack other elements of the electricity generation system, such as power stations; or that reservoirs might be rendered unusable by biological weapons. But dams are another story. [↩]
  3. L. E. O. Charlton, The Menace of the Clouds (London: William Hodge & Company, 1937), 291. [↩]
  4. Mark Connelly, Reaching for the Stars: A New History of Bomber Command in World War II (London: I. B. Tauris, 2001), 95. [↩]

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The Invasion of 1910

I recently had the somewhat guilty pleasure of watching Flood, a film (from a novel) about the sudden devastation of London by a massive storm surge -- predicted by a scientist who had long been dismissed as a crank -- which swamps the Thames Barrier, submerges most of the city's landmarks, kills a couple of hundred thousand people and forces most of the rest to evacuate. An even bigger disaster is averted (just in the nick of time, as it happens) and Londoners are left to clean up the mess. All very timely, given the unusually high proportion of England which was under water earlier this year.

Disaster movies are a pretty venerable genre by now (there were at least three films about the Titanic made in the year after it sank). The subset which deals with destruction on the scale of a big city (or larger) -- as opposed to aeroplanes or skyscrapers -- is relatively small, and that concerned, like Flood, with the fate of London specifically is quite small indeed.1 No doubt this is because disaster movies are generally loaded with special effects and therefore are expensive, and as the US market for film is so huge, it makes more financial sense to destroy some American city rather than a British one. So there aren't all that many cinematic depictions of the end of London. But books are much cheaper to make, and in those London has been destroyed many times over.

I've been trying to think of the first time this happened. It's easy enough to find early references to the eventual ruin of London, such as H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895), Richard Jefferies' After London (1885) (in which a neo-medieval adventurer seeks his fortunes amid the city's swampy remains), or Macaulay's New Zealander (1840).2 But those only show London long after its fall, and so, properly speaking, are post-apocalyptic. The actual destruction happens off stage; it is inevitable, something to accept rather than prevent. Other candidates might include science fiction stories like Arthur Conan Doyle's The Poison Belt (1913), wherein the Earth passes through a region of toxic ether, and Professor Challenger and companions take an eerie trip through dead London afterwards.3 Or H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898), with its Martian tripods laying waste to the metropolis with their heat rays. Where else might we look?
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  1. The Day the Earth Caught Fire springs to mind (rather oddly, since I haven't seen it); Day of the Triffids and 28 Days Later too. There must be others though. [↩]
  2. Not actually a novel, a story, a paragraph or even a sentence: merely a few clauses in a book review, referring to some future time 'when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.' But the image caught the imagination of many who read and spread it, to the point where it practically became a cliché. See David Skilton, "Tourists at the ruins of London: the metropolis and the struggle for empire", Cercles 17, 93-119. [↩]
  3. Even if the ending is a huge cop-out. [↩]

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Military History Carnival #6 is up at Armchair General. The stand-out post this month is a rebuttal of the alleged decline in military history at American universities, undertaken by David Stone at The Russian Front (which is an ambitious -- and very stylish! -- new group blog on Russian military and diplomatic history, the editor-in-chief of which is none other than Scott Palmer of The Avia-Corner). Stone uses some actual data to show that, no, as far as we can tell, there were more military historians in US history departments, in absolute terms, in 2005 than there were in 1975: nearly three times as many, in fact. The total number of historians employed has risen even more dramatically, so the proportion of military historians has in fact decreased (from 2.4% to 1.9%). So there's still room to argue that there's a relative decline going on. But I suspect the real complaint of the declinists is, as Stone discusses near the end of his post, that there's less "real" military history being done -- less operational-type stuff and more of the war-and-society variety. As somebody whose research is firmly of the latter school I'd hardly complain if that were so (which is not to say at all that operational history is unnecessary, unimportant or uninteresting); but again, some decent statistics (as opposed to cherry-picking and anecdotes) are needed to show whether this is even true or not.

Also noted from this carnival, a new blog: War and Game, dealing with both wargaming and history. It's an eclectic mix of topics, including some very airminded ones -- see for example the current top post on what was nearly the RAF's first-ever raid on Berlin in November 1918. Looks like a blog worth following.

By the way, the next Military History Carnival will be appear here on Airminded on 14 October! So please send me nominations by email at bholman at airminded dot org or use the form.