Publications

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The other guys

So my book is a thing that now exists. But although it was formally published on 18 June, many online bookstores have waited until today to actually ship it. (I recommend using Booko to find the cheapest prices, or you can get a 10% discount by ordering directly from Ashgate.) To mark this auspicious day, I thought I'd mention the other guys -- the other books which are, more or less, also about the history of the knock-out blow theory, and so are both inspiration and competition for The Next War in the Air.

  1. George H. Quester. Deterrence Before Hiroshima: The Airpower Background of Modern Strategy. New Brunswick and Oxford: Transaction Books, 1986 [1966]. The breadth of this book is quite remarkable: there aren't many other choices if you want a comparative discussion of the bomber fear in all the major powers, though this does inevitably mean that the coverage of is Britain is not thorough enough to satisfy me. I still feel that the nuclear context in which was written distorts Quester's interests and arguments too much -- in fact, it wasn't written as history at all, but as political science (it's Quester's PhD thesis; his advisor was Samuel Huntington) -- but his argument that nuclear deterrence theory after 1945 was anticipated by airpower theorists before 1945 is inarguable.
  2. Barry D. Powers. Strategy Without Slide-Rule: British Air Strategy 1914-1939. London: Croom Helm, 1976. I have no idea what happened to Powers, but he wrote an excellent book which in many ways is the closest to my own, particularly in the way that it is concerned with civilian, unofficial and popular responses to the bomber. Sadly, though (and despite the subtitle), he doesn't cover the period after 1931 in any detail, which is a huge tease since that's when the fear was at its most intense. He also neglects the period before the First World War, which I argue is when the key ideas underlying the knock-out blow theory were formed. But I rate Strategy Without Slide-Rule very highly and cite it often.
  3. Uri Bialer. The Shadow of the Bomber: The Fear of Air Attack and British Politics, 1932-1939. London: Royal Historical Society, 1980. This is the book on the knock-out blow theory, the one that nearly everyone cites (or riffs off). And that's a problem, not because it's a bad book (it's a great book), but because, at least from my perspective, it is a surprisingly limited book. It's all there in the subtitle: not only does The Shadow of the Bomber only cover the 1930s (which, as I've said is the key period for the knock-out blow theory; but by the same token that's not when it started), but more importantly it is very focused on the elite viewpoint, at the highest political, military and civil service levels. Which is fine, and as it happens, necessary, but The Shadow of the Bomber is often cited as a generic reference for the fear of air attack in general. It's actually not very suitable for that, and my hope is that The Next War in the Air will take some of that market share.
  4. Alfred Gollin. The Impact of Air Power on the British People and Their Government, 1909-14. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. A fascinating and invaluable account of the early years of airpower politics in all its forms, from pressure groups to parliamentary debates. And for a long time the only academic monograph to treat the phantom airship scares at length -- until The Next War in the Air, that is, and even then I only look at the 1913 one. Sadly, the promised third volume of the trilogy (the first being No Longer an Island: Britain and the Wright Brothers, 1902-1909) never eventuated.
  5. Michael Paris. Winged Warfare: The Literature and Theory of Aerial Warfare in Britain, 1859-1917. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1992. The aim here is differentThe Next War in the Air, but this is a great overview of very early ideas about the uses of airpower, including (but not limited to) precursors to the knock-out blow theory. The amount of literature (fictional and non-fictional, adult and juvenile, books and articles, military and civilian) covered is staggering. But Winged Warfare is also very good on airpower politics and the RFC.
  6. Sven Lindqvist. A History of Bombing. London: Granta, 2002. I'm a bit ambivalent about this. It's good on predictive fiction about bombing, and it's written with verve and passion, but it's frankly a polemic. That mightn't matter so much if I was convinced by Lindqvist's argument that the knock-out blow theory was 'about' race (I would argue that it was more about class, but it's not an either-or thing), but I'm not; and he ignores anything that doesn't fit his thesis. The odd structure (it's not supposed to be read linearly, instead there are 24 different paths you can take through the book) also grates. Still, it's not a bad book; and it's more accessible than any other book on this list, with the exception perhaps of Patterson.
  7. Tami Davis Biddle. Rhetoric and Reality in Strategic Air Warfare: The Evolution and Reality of British and American Ideas About Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002. This is now the standard work on military ideas about strategic bombing during the period of the world wars, and it's all the more valuable for comparing these ideas with what actually happened in wartime, for both the American and the British cases. The Next War in the Air complements this by analysing civilian ideas about strategic bombing (albeit only for the British case), which Biddle does consider, but only briefly.
  8. Ian Patterson. Guernica and Total War. London: Profile Books, 2007. This came out partway through my PhD. This provides an excellent account of the bombing of Guernica, but as the title suggests this is just the point of departure. For a short introduction to the cultural responses to bombing, this is hard to beat (and much more measured than Lindqvist).
  9. Susan R. Grayzel. At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain From the Great War to the Blitz. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Since this came out after my PhD, it's not inspiration so much as competition. But while much of the period and subject matter overlaps with The Next War in the Air, the approach is very different. Notably, At Home and Under Fire approaches bombing from the perspective of gender, largely successfully. I disagree with some parts but I'm happy to assign other parts as readings for my students!
  10. Michele Haapamaki. The Coming of the Aerial War: Culture and the Fear of Airborne Attack in Inter-war Britain. London: I. B. Tauris, 2014. I recently gave The Coming of the Aerial War big props, so I won't say too much about it here. Again, the approach is different to The Next War in the Air, and the serious scholar of airpower and British culture will want to read both. Possibly the casual ones, too.

So, yes, I'm (literally and historiographically) placing The Next War in the Air next to these books. If other historians decide to do so as well, I'll be more than happy.

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I've just submitted an article for peer review, 'The airship panic of 1913: the birth of aerial theatre and the British fear of Germany on the eve of the Great War'. I'm not going to say where, since it will likely be rejected and I don't need to have a public record of my failures! But while this particular journal does allow self-archiving, it only allows authors to self-archive the pre-peer review version (which I dislike, but it's better than nothing) and then only if it is uploaded before the article is accepted. So in the unlikely event that it is accepted, I need to self-archive it now or not at all. So here it is, and here's the abstract:

In late 1912 and early 1913, people all over Britain reported seeing airships in the night sky where there were none. It was widely assumed that these 'phantom airships' were German Zeppelins, testing British defences in preparation for the next war. Conservative newspapers and patriotic leagues used the sightings to argue for a massive expansion of Britain's aerial forces, perceived to be completely outclassed by Germany's in both number and power. In many ways this panic was analogous to the much better known 1909 dreadnought panic, which took place at the height of the Anglo-German antagonism. But historians generally agree that 1913 was a time of détente between the two nations. Why, then, did Britons not only imagine that German airships were a potential threat, but imagine that they were actually flying overhead?

The answer lies in the persistence, despite improving relations, of the effects of earlier spy, invasion, and naval panics. When combined with an emerging aerial theatre, which used flying displays and aviation exhibitions to emphasise British weakness, instead of strength as with the older naval theatre, the result was the perfect Edwardian panic. The airship panic was simultaneously a spy panic, an invasion panic, and above all a naval panic: navalists argued that Germany, having lost the dreadnought race, was building Zeppelins at a furious rate in order to overcome British naval superiority, and that Britain was losing a new, aerial arms race of which it was barely even aware.

Also, since it worked so well before, I've decided to use open peer review while the article is undergoing closed peer review. If you feel like it, I'd appreciate your feedback (anonymously if you prefer) at Google Docs.

Either or both of these versions may be replaced or even disappear without notice, depending on what happens with the journal(s). Fingers crossed!

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The Next War in the Air

My book, The Next War in the Air: Britain's Fear of the Bomber, 1908-1941, is getting closer to being real. In June, in just three months, it will be in the bookstores. Soon the indexing will be undertaken. Yesterday I made the final corrections to the text, and shortly I'll receive the page proofs from Ashgate, for last-minute error checking. And it has a draft cover design! Which I must say I am rather pleased with.
...continue reading →

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Things are starting to happen with my forthcoming book, The Next War in the Air: Britain's Fear of the Bomber, 1908–1941, which is being published by Ashgate. The manuscript has just been proofread, the cover design is in the works, I have a marketing questionnaire to fill out. The book is now listed on the Ashgate website and in their First World War Centenary catalogue. Here's the book description:

In the early twentieth century, the new technology of flight changed warfare irrevocably, not only on the battlefield, but also on the home front. As prophesied before 1914, Britain in the First World War was effectively no longer an island, with its cities attacked by Zeppelin airships and Gotha bombers in one of the first strategic bombing campaigns. Drawing on prewar ideas about the fragility of modern industrial civilization, some writers now began to argue that the main strategic risk to Britain was not invasion or blockade, but the possibility of a sudden and intense aerial bombardment of London and other cities, which would cause tremendous destruction and massive casualties. The nation would be shattered in a matter of days or weeks, before it could fully mobilize for war. Defeat, decline, and perhaps even extinction, would follow. This theory of the knock-out blow from the air solidified into a consensus during the 1920s and by the 1930s had largely become an orthodoxy, accepted by pacifists and militarists alike. But the devastation feared in 1938 during the Munich Crisis, when gas masks were distributed and hundreds of thousands fled London, was far in excess of the damage wrought by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz in 1940 and 1941, as terrible as that was. The knock-out blow, then, was a myth.

But it was a myth with consequences. For the first time, The Next War in the Air reconstructs the concept of the knock-out blow as it was articulated in the public sphere, the reasons why it came to be so widely accepted by both experts and non-experts, and the way it shaped the responses of the British public to some of the great issues facing them in the 1930s, from pacifism to fascism. Drawing on both archival documents and fictional and non-fictional publications from the period between 1908, when aviation was first perceived as a threat to British security, and 1941, when the Blitz ended, and it became clear that no knock-out blow was coming, The Next War in the Air provides a fascinating insight into the origins and evolution of this important cultural and intellectual phenomenon, Britain's fear of the bomber.

Contents: Introduction; Part I Threats: Constructing the knock-out blow, 1908-1931;The bomber ascendant, 1932-1941. Part II Responses: Living with the bomber: adaptation; The only defence is in offence: resistance; Wings over the world: negotiation. Part III Crises: Defence panics and air panics; The German air menace: 1913, 1922 and 1935; Barcelona, Canton and London: 1938; The Battles of London: 1917 and 1940; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Most importantly, it now has an official price and publication date: £70 (hardcover) and June 2014 respectively (though they're different on Amazon in the UK and the US). There will also be ePUB and PDF editions.

Time to start saving up your pennies!

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A year has passed since my article on the debate in Britain over whether to bomb German civilians in reprisal for the Blitz was published. Under the Australian Journal of Politics and History's self-archiving policy I can now upload my own copy of the final, peer-reviewed text for anyone to read for free. So here it is. And here is the abstract:

In Britain, popular memory of the Blitz celebrates civilian resistance to the German bombing of London and other cities, emphasizing positive values such as stoicism, humour and mutual aid. But the memory of such passive and defensive traits obscures the degree to which British civilian morale in 1940 depended on the belief that if Britain had to 'take it', then Germany was taking it as hard or harder. Contrary to the received historical account, opinion polls, Home Intelligence reports and newspaper letter columns show that a majority of the British supported the reprisal bombing of German civilians by Bomber Command. The wartime reprisals debate was the logical legacy of prewar assumptions about the overwhelming power of bombing; but it has been forgotten because it contradicts the myth of the Blitz.

AJPH's attitude to self-archiving is more generous than some journals I could name. Or at least it was -- its RoMEO entry doesn't seem to suggest 12 months as a standard embargo period, if I'm reading it right, but (maybe) 24. There's nothing I can see about it on AJPH's website either, so maybe it has got worse in the meantime. Hopefully not. In any case, my agreement says what it says.

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My peer-reviewed article, 'Dreaming war: airmindedness and the Australian mystery aeroplane scare of 1918', has now been published in the latest issue of History Australia, which can be found here. This is the abstract:

Numerous false sightings of mysterious aeroplanes, thought to be German and hostile, were reported by ordinary people around Australia in the Autumn of 1918. These reports were investigated by defence authorities, who initiated a maximum effort to find the merchant raiders presumed to be the source of the aeroplanes. The scare is interpreted in the context of reports that a German seaplane had flown over Sydney in 1917; fears that the German offensive in France would lead to an Allied defeat; wartime paranoia about German subversion; and the growth of negative airmindedness thanks to the wartime press.

As I've previously discussed, this is my first mystery aircraft article, and hopefully not my last!

I'm also self-archiving the version originally submitted to History Australia, that is, before it was peer-reviewed. This can be downloaded for free from here. I don't normally like to do this, since the text usually changes significantly after peer-review. That is indeed the case here: I swapped the introduction with the following section, the graphics have been redone, and there are some other smaller, but important, changes. But, per my contributor agreement with History Australia, this is only version I am allowed to self-archive. Because this mystery aeroplane scare is virtually unknown, I'd like to make the information and ideas in the article widely available, even if not necessarily in the form that I would like. Otherwise, if you aren't a member of the Australian Historical Association or don't have institutional access to History Australia, the final, peer-reviewed (and better!) version should be open-access in 2015.

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History Australia, the journal of the Australian Historical Association, has accepted my article 'Dreaming war: airmindedness and the Australian mystery aeroplane scare of 1918' for publication in the August 2013 issue. This is the second time my blogging to conference paper to peer-reviewed article workflow has borne fruit. I stumbled across the scare nearly two years ago, became curious, and started digging in the National Archives of Australia about six months later. Once I was convinced there was something to the topic, I proposed a talk for the AHA's 2012 conference, and when that was accepted started blogging around the material intensively (here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). With some help from the AHA/CAL writing workshops, the AHA National Writing Cluster pilot, and of course the article's referees, I can now (well, soon, anyway) say that I'm an Australian historian in both senses of the term!

My plan is to use this article as the foundation for a larger project on mystery aircraft scares. Ultimately this could embrace scares in Australia, Britain (the next and current phase), New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, the United States, and maybe even beyond. To do this right will involve archival research and so at least some funding from somewhere. Because there's little existing historiography on mystery aircraft to draw upon, my idea is to use this article to show that the topic is a solid one which is worth further research, and to suggest where I'm going with it. Ideally this project would lead to a book, but even if it doesn't work out that way I'll at least get a few articles out of it. For now, getting an article on the Australian mystery aeroplane scare of 1918 out there is a good start.