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A printed sheet of paper with white text on a red background. The text reads: "AIR RAIDS
OWING TO
INSUFFICIENT COVER
THIS STATION IS
UNSUITABLE FOR
THE PROTECTION OF PERSONS SHELTERING DURING AN AIR RAID"

So, I'm back from my long-overdue and much-needed research trip to the UK. Was it worth it? Yes!

In raw numbers, I took over 11,000 photos across 13 days at 8 archives in 5 cities.1 Obviously, since I'm not a Bomber Command AOC I'm not going to prioritise quantity over quality. But I did pretty much, er, hit all my high priority targets and look at everything I really wanted to see. I struck archival gold nearly every day; there were only one or two places where the findings were meagre, and those visits were always a bit speculative anyway. I would like to have to visited the Tfl Corporate Archives (though check out the Underground posters I did find, above and below, from 1917-18 and 1917 respectively), or one or two other Home Counties archives. But you can't see everything; and what I did see will make Home Fires Burning a much better book.

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  1. About five-sixths of these were taken at the National Archives alone. []

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Our targets are the following archives...

That's right...

Gloucestershire, TNA, LMA, SHC...

... I'm going on a research trip...

Tower Hamlets, Kent, IWM, ESBHRO.

... to the UK!

(I suppose this post should technically be called Archivwochen, but that's a little too pedantic even for me.)

It's been nearly a decade since my last visit, and that was long before I started working on Home Fires Burning. So I've built up a large pile of research questions which can only be answered in the archives. Airminded will therefore be in hiatus until July, while I holiday in England, Scotland, and Wales, and (more importantly for the purposes of this blog) research in the following archives:

I'm hoping to have some sort of Airminded meetup or meetups, so if you're in or near any of these places in late June, drop me a line!

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In the aftermath of the second German daylight Gotha raid on London, crowds watch as smoke pours from the roof of the Central Telegraph Office, struck by a 100 lb bomb, 7 July 1917

In my previous post, I discussed my concerns with the way sources are used in Neil Hanson's First Blitz.1 Here I turn to the problem of strategy, which goes more to the argument of the book. Again there are two parts to this, one broad and one narrow. I'll start with the broad.

Hanson's argument is that Germany, across almost the entire duration of the war, hoped, planned and attempted to destroy London through bombing, specifically by burning it out:

Air-dropped incendiary bombs would create firestorms engulfing entire districts of London, creating mass panic and popular unrest that would 'render it doubtful that the war can continue' and force the British Government to sue for peace.2

In other words, Germany was attempting to carry out a knock-out blow from the air against Britain – in 1915 or 1918 rather than 1940.

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  1. Neil Hanson, First Blitz: The Secret German Plan to Raze London to the Ground in 1918 (London: Doubleday, 2008). []
  2. Ibid., 7. []

A large biplane Gotha bomber seen from below

This is a continuation, of sorts, of my series of posts critiquing the recent trend of describing the air raids on Britain in the First World War as the 'First Blitz'. I've separated it out because, although it is about the best-known book to use that phrase in its title – Neil Hanson's First Blitz (2008) – my concerns aren't about that usage, but are about the book itself.1 To be clear, I'm not saying this is a bad book; in fact I am broadly in sympathy with his account and I really like some aspects of it (the chapter entitled 'Londoners unnerved' is a terrific account of what I call the Gotha shock). But it is a book that should be used carefully. And as I'm seeing it cited fairly widely (including by academic historians, not excluding me!) I think it's worth putting those concerns out there, particularly since it was not reviewed in any academic publication, as far as I can see.

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  1. Neil Hanson, First Blitz: The Secret German Plan to Raze London to the Ground in 1918 (London: Doubleday, 2008). []

German propaganda poster with a vibrant and striking image depicting swarms of British aircraft bombing an industrial site to illustrate the following quote, by British Labour Leader Johnston Hicks [sic], which appeared in the 'Daily Telegraph' on January 3rd 1918: 'One must bomb the Rhineland industrial regions with one hundred aircraft day after day, until the treatment has had its effect!’

In the previous post, I discussed some of my objections to the idea that the air raids on Britain in the FIrst World were the 'First Blitz'. I don't think my arguments were completely persuasive, even to myself (which is why I decided to work through them in public like this). But I ended by saying I had another concern, and this one I think carries more weight. However, it's not really about the First World War at all, but the Second. And it's this: the Blitz is too British.

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Borough of Ramsgate ... Public meeting ... To consider recommendations to the responsible authorities for the more adequate protection of the coast against hostile aircraft. T. S. Chayney, Mayor. 26th March 1916.

I admit the term 'First Blitz' is a convenient label for the air raids on Britain in the First World War, both as a shorthand and because there really were many similarities with the later Blitz. But nevertheless, I don't really like it, and I'm avoiding it in my own book on the topic. Why?

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Gotha bomber over Tower Hamlets, seen from above

You might think that the first Blitz was the Blitz, i.e. the German bombing of British cities in 1940-1941, at the time was understood as a form of blitzkrieg, which was then shortened to 'blitz' or 'Blitz'. Of course, that doesn't mean a blitz couldn't be retrospectively recognised, and indeed it was soon applied, for example, to earlier events such as the 'Rotterdam Blitz' on 14 May 1940.1 Much more recently, there has been a vogue for the term among historians writing on the German air raids on British cities in 1914-1918, variously the 'First Blitz', the 'Zeppelin Blitz' or the 'Forgotten Blitz'. Check it out:

  • Andrew P. Hyde, The First Blitz: The German Air Campaign against Britain 1917–1918 (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2002).
  • Neil Faulkner and Nadia Durrani, In Search of the Zeppelin War: The Archaeology of the First Blitz (Stroud: Tempus, 2008).
  • Neil Hanson, First Blitz: The Secret German Plan to Raze London to the Ground in 1918 (London: Doubleday, 2008).
  • Ian Castle, The First Blitz: Bombing London in the First World War (Oxford: Osprey, 2015).
  • Neil Storey, Zeppelin Blitz: The German Air Raids on Great Britain during the First World War (Stroud: History Press, 2015).
  • Ian Castle, Zeppelin Onslaught: The Forgotten Blitz 1914–1915 (Barnsley: Frontline, 2018).
  • Ian Castle, The First Blitz in 100 Objects (Philadelphia: Frontline Books, 2019).
  • Ian Castle, Zeppelin Inferno: The Forgotten Blitz 1916 (Philadelphia: Frontline, 2022).((There's also a journal article: Paul Fantom, ‘Zeppelins over the Black Country: The Midlands’ first blitz’, Midland History 39, no. 2 (2014): 236–254.))

Even discounting the fact that four of those books are from the one author, this is starting to look like a consensus.2

And why not? Many aspects of the 1940-41 raids were prefigured in 1914-18, from the bleeding obvious stuff (aircraft flying over and dropping bombs on British cities), to the ways in which the British government responded to this threat (air defence, civil defence, air offence), to the ideal emotional response on the part of civilians (British pluck, the Blitz spirit). And I can tell you from personal experience how annoying it gets to keep writing some cumbersome variation on 'the German raids on Britain in 1914-18' or 'the First World War air raids' or 'the Zeppelin and Gotha offensive', etc!

But as you can probably guess, despite my longing for a convenient shorthand I'm not fully sold on the First Blitz.3 This is partly because of the ways in which the British experience of bombing in 1914-18 was significantly different to that in 1940-41. It's also because I think that one of the key works on the above list -– the most popular one, Neil Hanson's First Blitz -- is quite problematic. But I'm not sure how sensible my objections are: analogies don't have to be exact to be useful, after all. So I'm going to post through my confusion and work out if I should learn to stop worrying and love the First Blitz.

Image source: Fredette, The Sky on Fire.

  1. In fact the term 'blitz' in the sense of air raids does seem to have slightly preceded the Blitz proper, judging from BNA, but only by a few days or weeks. []
  2. Compare with the other 'first' contender, the 'First Battle of Britain'. There's only one book I know of with this in the title: Raymond H. Fredette, The Sky on Fire: The First Battle of Britain 1917–1918 and the Birth of the Royal Air Force (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). As that was first published more than half a century ago, it doesn't seem like it's going to catch on. []
  3. It's not in the working title of my next book, currently Home Fires Burning: Britain's First War from the Air, 1914–1918, though admittedly this is not entirely stable from draft to draft! []