Nuclear, biological, chemical

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Illustrated London News, 6 September 1913, 363

A recent post at Ptak Science Books alerted me to the existence of page 363 of the Illustrated London News for 6 September 1913. Not that I was surprised by this in general terms, but I was unaware of what was on it: an artist's impression of a both a flying aircraft carrier -- which idea I've discussed before -- and an airship drone -- which I haven't.

As the images above and below show, the idea was that the 'parent dirigible' (which looks very much like a Zeppelin) would carry several of these 40-foot long 'crewless, miniature air-ships' slung underneath it, and then launch them when in range of a target (here a fortification). The smaller airship would then be controlled by radio to fly drop its bombs 'on any desired spot'.
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One sub-species of military intellectual is the retired field marshal (or admiral, or air marshal) who, at the end of a long career, sets down their thoughts on the future of warfare for the interested reader. Even though they may be quite famous, their essays into futurism are nowadays read less often than that of their junior counterparts, full-time military intellectuals like J. F. C. Fuller or L. E. O. Charlton, who had substantial careers in the military but left while still relatively young (and may well have borne chips on their shoulders due to their usually enforced early retirement). Partly this is due to their naturally having written less -- often just a few pages at the end of their memoirs. Often it would be due to writing and intellectualism not being something which came naturally to them. But because of their great experience (and, greater experience of the heights of strategy than the Fullers and the Charltons, one might add), it's worth looking at what the retired field marshals have to say.
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Today I came across an article in an American publication, Science News Letter, dated 24 April 1943. The headline on page 269 reads 'Gas Attacks Expected'. The opening paragraph reads:

HITLER'S BOMBERS, if they make their expected raids on American cities, can be counted on to drop poison gases in bombs or sprays, Col. A. Gibson of the Chemical Warfare Service declared in Detroit.

This seems strange for two reasons. That German air raids on American cities were 'expected' is hard to credit, given that at this stage of the war in Europe, the tide had turned in the Allies' favour. German and Italian forces were just about to be squeezed out of North Africa; Von Paulus had surrendered his 6th Army at Stalingrad less than two months previously; the British and now the American air offensive against Germany was mounting in weight. Sure, there was clearly a long way to go and it would not have been wise to underestimate German power. (At this point in time, losses to Allied shipping from U-boat attacks were reaching critical levels, for example.) And it's true that several Amerikabomber candidates were then being developed for the Luftwaffe, though how much of this was known to the Allies (and how much to their publics) I'm not sure. But that's all still a long way from certain air raids against American cities.

And it's also strange for the claim that it was equally certain that such an attack would use poison gas against civilians. Why would Germany use gas against the United States in 1943 when it hadn't used it against Britain in 1940? Or anywhere, for that matter (extermination camps aside)? Well, maybe it would have, being more and more desperate; but how does this equate to certainty? Why were credible officials -- Gibson was the 'chief of the inspection section' at the Office of Civilian Defense, and, incidentally, a veteran of both the First World War and the Spanish-American War -- going around saying things like this?
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Cmnd. 124, Defence: Outline of Future Policy, is one of the most famous (and infamous) documents in British military history. It's better known as the 1957 Defence White Paper, or the Sandys White Paper after the Minister of Defence responsible for it, Duncan Sandys. It ended National Service, committed Britain to nuclear deterrence, and foreshadowed drastic cuts in conventional force levels. Aviation bore the brunt of these last. Fighter Command was to be abolished (though in the end it won a reprieve, at least until 1967) and a large number of advanced fighter types under development for the RAF were cancelled, including the Avro 720, the Fairey Delta 2, the Hawker Siddeley P.1121, and the Saunders-Roe SR.177. Only the English Electric P.1 and TSR-2 were spared (the latter only temporarily). Unsurprisingly, all this was controversial then and remains so today for those who remember such things. Certainly, the White Paper was a cost-cutting exercise: Sandys had a brief from the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, to find savings of £100 million from the defence estimates. But my interest here is the intellectual context of the Sandys White Paper: it wasn't just about saving money.
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Daily Mai, 28 September 1940, 1

The Luftwaffe launched mass daylight raids against London and Bristol yesterday, 'the most widespread of the war' according to the Daily Mail (1), and with the largest losses since 15 September, too. German losses are reported to be 130 aircraft and about 300 aircrew, while the British lost 34 fighters and 19 pilots. Many people watched the battles from the ground, and 'cheered as raider after raider fell'.
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The Times, 24 September 1940, 4

Things are on the move again, at least in French West Africa. De Gaulle's Free French, assisted by the Royal Navy, are attempting to wrest control of Dakar from their Vichy brethren. A naval battle was raging there yesterday afternoon, though presumably it is over now. According to the Ministry of Information, this action was necessary because the 'Germans were making were making persistent efforts to bring Dakar under their control' (4). According to the Vichy foreign minister, M. Baudoin, this is worse than Mers-el-Kebir, as it is 'not simply a question simply of ships, which might be taken by Germans or Italians, but of a British desire for French property'.
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Daily Mail, 23 September 1940, 1

There is tragic news today. Not that there has been any shortage of that lately, but this is on a different scale, at least qualitatively. A British passenger liner has been sunk by a U-boat in the Atlantic, with heavy loss of life. The ship -- its name has not yet been published -- was evacuating children to safety in Canada: eighty-three are reported lost, and only seven rescued. Two hundred and eleven others also perished, including seven other children not part of the official evacuation programme. The Daily Mail reports (1) that:

Some of the children were trapped in the ship or killed by the explosion.

Others suffered from exposure in life-boats and on rafts, which were swept by wind, waves, rain, and hail for hours before they could be picked up by a British warship.

A full list of the lost children is given on page 5, and stories from the survivors on page 6.
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Suddenly a long tongue of the spume thrust straight downwards, and then sprayed like an immense puff of smoke.

This illustration, by A. C. Michael, is from T. Donovan Bayley's 'When the sea failed her' which appeared in Pall Mall Magazine in May 1909. It's subtitled 'The story of a war between England and the allies, and the terrible way it ended'. It's that terrible ending which makes this story stand out for me.
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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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Given that it climaxes on board an airship which is carrying a devastating new chemical weapon, Sapper's fourth Bulldog Drummond novel The Final Count (1926) is somewhat disappointing from an airminded point of view. The poison gas is not intended for use against a city, or to terrorise an enemy, but to cover up a boringly mundane (if large-scale) theft.

But there is still much of interest. Hovering in the background of The Final Count is the threat of warfare, especially aero-chemical warfare. George Simmers noted some time back that this novel seems to present an unusually early example of the feeling that the Great War had been futile. That's my impression too, from a slightly different angle. The events described in the novel take place in 1927 (i.e. the near future of the time of publication in 1926), and Europe seems to be on the brink of war again. That's at odds with my impression of the mid-1920s, certainly after the Locarno treaties of 1925; it's not that there were no tensions between nations, but there was little feeling that war was likely any time soon. Perhaps Sapper needed to exaggerate the possibility of conflict in order to find employment for Drummond and his band of merry vigilantes, preferably against the Bolshevik menace.

The poison mentioned above was originally developed near the end of the Great War by Robin Gaunt, a British chemist serving in the British army. It's actually a liquid (as was mustard 'gas') which causes instantaneous (and very painful) death if applied under the skin. This made it impractical as a battlefield weapon, because the intended victims would need to already have some minor cuts to allow the poison to get in. There is also the problem of how to spray a liquid over a large area. The plan put forward was to use tanks for this purpose (a la J. F. C. Fuller in The Reformation of War).
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