Film

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Last night I watched Threads, an extremely affecting BBC film from 1984 about the effects of a full-scale nuclear war on one British city, Sheffield.1 One might say it's a very British 'kitchen sink' approach to the subject, following the lives of two ordinary families during the international crisis (involving Iran -- so what else is new) leading up to the nuclear exchange, then switching to a relentless depiction of the death, confusion, suffering and struggle for existence in the days, weeks and years afterwards. 'Harrowing' is the word usually trotted out for movies like Threads; if you want to feel like you've been punched repeatedly in the stomach for two hours then you won't want to miss it. At the end of it, I let out a huge sigh of relief -- it was over, it wasn't real, I could thankfully escape back to reality again.

The reason why Airminded has a sometime interest in the Cold War is partly because -- at the risk of crossing a bridge before I come to it! -- it's an area I may go into after the PhD, but also because the fear of nuclear war is an obvious comparison to the fear of the knock-out blow. The one grew out of and replaced the other. In fact, it seems to me that they are extremely similar indeed: most of the ideas and tropes in literature anticipating nuclear war were used by the writers worrying about the effects of aerial bombardment upon British society before the Second World War. For example, the opening narration2 of Threads explains the meaning of the title (over shots of a spider weaving a web intercut with ones showing trucks transporting goods around the city):

In an urban society, everything connects. Each person's needs are fed by the skills of many others. Our lives are woven together in a fabric, but the connections that make society strong also make it vulnerable.

As the film goes on to show, a nuclear war would completely sever these connecting threads, and with them, all hope and dignity. (One of the main characters sobs in grief when he finds that he can't get any water out of the taps to comfort his wife, dying from radiation exposure.) Of those Britons who survive the attack, many millions more die for lack of food, water and medical attention. L. E. O. Charlton would have understood the point immediately. In 1938 he wrote that

Our millions are bottle-fed, and all their needs are cared for, by a system of distribution and supply so intricate, and so haphazardly evolved, that once seriously dislocated beyond the power of immediate repair they would be as helpless as new-born babes to fend for themselves.3

But there are also differences. One obvious one is radiation, and its lingering effects. After a knock-out blow, the survivors could rebuild and repopulate Britain without having to worry about no-go areas or genetic damage. Another, related and more striking difference is that the natural world would be largely unaffected by a knock-out blow, whereas a nuclear war would blight the land and the sky for generations to come. In Threads, the global thermonuclear war leads to a nuclear winter (Carl Sagan and Richard Turco are both credited as advisors), with near-freezing temperatures and stunted harvests. Britain's population drops to medieval levels. These scenes, mostly of silent people in the bare fields hunched over and grubbing for what little crops still grow, are very bleak and extremely effective. Visually, they are so dark as to be almost black, while the wind howls constantly. Nature itself has been wounded. Contrast this with a passage in Sarah Campion's 1937 novel Thirty Million Gas Masks. The protagonist is caught in a cellar in an air raid, and recalls a bicycle ride the previous May, in glorious spring:

This at least, thought Judith in December confusedly in the hot horror of her gas-mask, was unconquerable. The bombs might fall; did, in fact, fall at this moment, upon the brick and macadam of the railway bridge outside, upon the chestnut trees and the grassy bank and the dark winter-resisting laurels: the bridge might never be built again, for there might be no men to build it: but the grass would sprout of itself over the brick, and the laurel would put out a startling green bud, pale as water, and the chestnut, though split from top to bottom, would spring up in new life from the seedling now cosily safe at its foot, and bear in April a galaxy of green fingers, and in May a candle-blossom as insouciant as the free air itself. This alone, she thought as a brutal crash turned her world tipsy for a moment, this perennial birth in the face of disaster would go on invincibly to some sort of conclusion, some final flowering, however hazardous.4

Unsurprisingly, visions of the knock-out blow could sometimes turn into anti-urban, back-to-nature utopias by the back door. With the cities destroyed or emptied, the population drastically reduced, industry and commerce at an end, people could return to a simpler and therefore (of course!) better way of life, closer to the land and free of the corruptions of modernity. A Threads-style nuclear war would take this a step too far, corrupting the land as well and offering only an unrelenting and probably pointless struggle for mere existence instead. Even this, though, could be paradise to some, as shown by the survivalist fiction of the later Cold War.

There are some very good websites devoted to Threads: I particularly recommend Don't Panic, Mr Mainwaring: Threads, while the site at Action After Warnings is extremely comprehensive. But above all, watch the film.

  1. Interestingly, it was co-produced by the Nine Network in Australia; however I don't remember it being shown here, whereas I do remember The Day After, or perhaps it was just the controversy surrounding it. [↩]
  2. Actually, the narration was one of the weakest parts of the film: although used sparingly, the documentary-style voiceovers kept pulling me out of the story, a reminder that it wasn't real. For some reason, the more frequent textual overlays were far less jarring, and also more informative. [↩]
  3. L. E. O. Charlton, G. T. Garratt and R. Fletcher, The Air Defence of Britain (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1938), 102. [↩]
  4. Sarah Campion, Thirty Million Gas Masks (London: Peter Davies, 1937), 173. [↩]

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Executive Council of the New Commonwealth. An International Air Force: Its Functions and Organisation. London: The New Commonwealth, 1934. A submission to the International Congress in Defence of Peace, February 1934, detailing the organisation and role of an international air force.

Lawrence Freedman. The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Third edition. An authoritative history. Starts in the right place, with the knock-out blow.

P. R. C. Groves. Our Future in the Air. London, Bombay and Sydney: George G. Harrap & Co., 1935. Not to be confused with his 1922 book of the same name. This is about both the danger of Britain falling behind in civil aviation and the danger of air attack.

Mick Jackson, dir. Threads. BBC Worldwide, 2005 [1984]. The UK's answer to the The Day After. I've never seen it before; I'll have to track down a copy of The War Game next. Come to that, it's years since I've seen The Day After ...

Patrick Kyba. Covenants without the Sword: Public Opinion and British Defence Policy, 1931-1935. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1983. Studying public opinion before polling or even Mass-Observation is extremely difficult; this is a pioneering attempt, drawing upon metropolitan and provincial newspapers, the Peace Ballot, by-elections, and so on.

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As promised, here are a couple of captures from the 1939 propaganda film The Lion Has Wings, which dramatised the RAF attack on Wilhelmshaven of 4 September 1939. The actual results of the raid were meagre; one Blenheim crashed into the fo'c'sle of the cruiser Emden, while the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer was hit by bombs which failed to explode. Below are the corresponding scenes from the film (obviously model shots), which are nothing like what actually happened - it's pretty clear that the film makers were using their dramatic license to the full!

The first successful attack, by implication upon a pocket battleship:

The Lion Has Wings

The second attack, on what looks like a submarine:


The Lion Has Wings

Image source: Adrian Brunel, Brian Desmond Hurst, and Michael Powell, dirs. [The] Lion has Wings. Magna Pacific, 2002 [1939].

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Chronomedia is a very nicely done chronology of developments in just about all forms of audio-visual mass media, covering a wide span but inevitably concentrating on Britain and America in the 20th century. Lots of interesting little tit-bits: the first film shot from an aircraft in flight was in September 1908; while in September 1939, British cinemas were closed to prevent mass casualties in the event of air raids - after a couple of weeks, they were open again, which I guess shows just how long it took people to realise that the knock-out blow wasn't actually imminent!

One thing I find fascinating is how rapidly television was developing in Britain (as well as in Germany and the United States) before the war: John Logie Baird's London studio broadcast a television play as early as 1930, entitled The man with a flower in his mouth (about which, see The World's Earliest Television Recordings Restored); while the BBC's first female television presenter was a Miss Elizabeth Cowell in August 1936. Of course, many of these transmissions were just experiments, but a regularly scheduled service from the Alexandra Palace began later in 1936, which continued until 1 September 1939.

There are some reminiscences of these pioneering broadcasts at Television Heaven, culled from a book by television critic Kenneth Baily, Here's Television (1950). There was no nightly news, but the latest Gaumont and Movietone newsreels were shown several times a week. Other than that, current events and concerns were addressed, after a fashion. The programme for Armistice Day 1936 was described in the Evening News:

From the London Television Station last night was broadcast the most deeply-moving Armistice Day programme I have ever heard from the BBC. It took the form of scenes from the German film 'West Front 1918,' followed by scenes in England in peace-time, and it ended on that note of dedication for the prevention of another catastrophe which most people have felt so strongly this Armistice anniversary. These vivid, and at times terrible pictures, were accompanied by an admirable commentary spoken by Cecil Lewis . . .

As that page also notes, one of the first outside broadcasts featured a very small-scale air raid defence exercise!

Within ten weeks of the start of television, Cecil Lewis had taken cameras outside, at night. He provided an actuality programme about anti-aircraft defence. The 61st (11th London)AA Brigade RA demonstrated two ack-ack guns; and the 36th AA Battalion RE handled three searchlights, while RAF planes were specially flown over the Palace.

This co-operative "exercise" staged "a short action repelling the attack of hostile aircraft." The very wording of that programme announcement breathed something of the oddity which most of us found in an exploit that seemed far from reality in 1936. Four years later the flash and crackle of a much mightier barrage surrounded the Alexandra Palace, and echoed through television studios emptied by a real war.

One would like to know why this subject was chosen ... was it just because the sounds and images were dramatic, or was it intended as a reassurance that all was well (since the bombers were repelled)? Maybe both.

Finally, an indication of just who was watching these shows can be found from a BBC viewer survey in mid-1939 (by which time the total audience was an estimated 20,000):

The returns surprised the BBC in showing that television viewing was not confined to any one income group. Taking a sample of 1,200 of the questionnaires, it was found that 28 had been filled in by labourers; and scores were returned by shopkeepers, salesmen and school teachers.

There were more working- and lower middle-class viewers than expected (though still a minority), which is interesting given the expense involved (eg 48 guineas for a 15-inch 1939 Cossor - though it also doubled as a radio! See Television History - The First 75 Years for more.) Still, 20,000 is a tiny number of viewers, especially when you consider that in 1939 there were 990 million cinema admissions! That's a whole lotta Clark Gable.

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This logically should have gone into the previous post about archives, but I got carried away working out what that air mail poster was about! But I had intended to mention two online archives of British newsreels: British Pathe and Movietone (slogan: "It speaks for itself"). These are great. You can search the descriptions for key words - Hendon, say, or "air raid" (or even something not aviation-related, if you are so inclined!) - and turn up all sorts of gems, like a 1923 reel showing off 'London's air defences',British Pathe 314.17. or many items about air raids during the Spanish civil war. Or one from 1938 about a 'seventy-shilling air raid shelter', which a Mr Matthews built in his backyard: it could be made gas-proof, and doubled as a playshed for the kids.Movietone 33260. My favourite is from 1929, about a French air defence technique: covering an entire town in clouds of smoke, to hide it from the enemy bombers!British Pathe 892.09.

The best part is that you can view (and often hear) the newsreels for free! If you wanted to use stills or clips in a documentary or publication, you'd have to pay. However, the online previews should be fine for most research purposes (and you can even save the British Pathe ones onto your hard drive). The search engines and the video playback can be cranky sometimes, but if you start again it will probably work better.

There's a good overview of the history of the British newsreel at the British Universities Film & Video Council, including summaries of the different series that were made, what has survived and where they can be found. There are still several major newsreel titles that don't appear to have been digitised yet (eg Gaumont, Paramount); hopefully that's only a matter of time. Newsreels were an important news medium until well after the Second World War. They had a weekly audience of millions and had an immediacy that radio and newspapers could not match (on the flipside, though, they lacked the timeliness of the former and most importantly the depth of the latter). These digitised archives make it that much easier for the historian to understand just what was being presented to the public in the many thousands of newsreels that were produced up to 1979.

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Richard Griffiths. Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933-9. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983. I love this book. So I bought it. A brilliantly readable study of who liked the Nazis and why, including a few pages specifically on 'the world of aviation' (137-41).

Adrian Brunel, Brian Desmond Hurst, and Michael Powell, dirs. [The] Lion has Wings. Magna Pacific, 2002 [1939]. A quickie propaganda docudrama (started after the outbreak of war, and released in November), emphasising the power of the RAF. Yes, that's Powell as in Powell-and-Pressburger. Stars Ralph Richardson and Merle Oberon, produced by Alexander Korda.

Tim Whelan, dir. Q Planes. Magna Pacific, 2002 [1939]. An amusing piece of pre-war espionage fluff about experimental planes being stolen via the use of a ray gun, which stops engines at a distance (a recurring idea between the wars). Could be held partly responsible for both The Avengers and Thunderball! Stars Laurence Olivier and Ralph Richardson, produced by Alexander Korda.