Thesis

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Thesis wordle

Partly in lieu of the thing itself, but mainly just for fun, here are some word clouds of my thesis (generated with Wordle). So the above image shows the 75 most frequent words in the entire document, with the biggest word being the most common. (So it's something to do with air and war and London then ...) Below are clouds for each chapter. I just copied the text from the PDF file into Wordle; it works pretty well, except for some reason that process introduces weird breaks in some words. I don't really spend a significant chunk of chapter 4 talking about counter-os and ensives!

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The Next War in the Air: Civilian Fears of Strategic Bombardment in Britain, 1908-1941

Introduction
The knock-out blow; Imagining the next war in the air; Historiography of the knock-out blow; The structure of this thesis

I. Threats

1. Origins of the knock-out blow theory, 1893-1931
The doom of the great city, 1893-1916; Will civilisation crash? 1916-1931; Conclusion

2. Evolution of the knock-out blow theory, 1932-1941
Menace, 1932-1935; Towards Armageddon, 1935-1937; The air defence of Britain, 1937-1939; Victory in the air, 1939-1941; Conclusion

II. Responses

3. Adaptation
Psychology; Politics; Dispersal and evacuation; Protection; Conclusion

4. Resistance
Air defence; Anti-aircraft weapons; The counter-offensive; Conclusion

5. Internationalism
Limitation; Disarmament; Collective security; Internationalisation; Conclusion

III. Crises

6. Defence panics
The problem of public opinion; The press in early twentieth century Britain; Moral panics and defence panics; Defence panics, 1847-1914; Air panics, 1908-1941; Conclusion

7. The German air menace, 1913, 1922 and 1935
Emergence; Reactions; Resolution; Conclusion

8. Barcelona, Canton and London, 1938
Emergence; Reactions; Resolution; Conclusion

9. The battles of London, 1917 and 1940
Emergence; Reactions; Resolution; Conclusion

Conclusion

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I received a letter from the university today, containing a form which is ominously entitled 'Completion Report for PhD Candidates'. I guess they are expecting to receive a thesis from me in the not too distant future!

One of the things I have to finalise is the title of the thesis. According to the form, it's currently called 'The Impact of Airpower on the British People, 1908-1939'. That's the bland title I picked more than 4 years ago, when I only had the vaguest idea of what I wanted to do, and it's clearly influenced by -- or lifted from -- Alfred Gollin's classic The Impact of Airpower on the British People and their Government, 1909-14. I've had a better one -- or at least, more accurate one -- picked out for a while, but wasn't sure if it's what I'm going to go with. But I'm out of time, and haven't had any bright ideas, so I'm probably stuck with it now!

To my mind, a good title should be descriptive -- it should give some idea of what it's actually about. If it's intriguing and memorable, that's a bonus. With that in mind, here's my provisional title:

The Next War in the Air: Britain and the Bomber, 1908-1941

So straightaway, this tells you the period and geographical focus -- it's early twentieth century Britain. The words 'war', 'air' and 'bomber' show that it's about aerial warfare, specifically bombing. But the first clause as whole, 'the next war in the air', hopefully suggests that it's about anticipations of bombing more than the actual thing.

I think that's all fine. But I'm not sure about the next clause, 'Britain and the bomber'. Yes, the thesis can be described as a study of the relationship between Britain and the bomber. I also chose it because I like alittle alliteration, and because it's the title of an article I cite (as is 'the next war in the air'). And it's a nod to England and the Aeroplane, too. But is it promising too much? As a study of 'Britain and the bomber' it's missing many things, such as (for example) nearly everything the RAF did or said on the subject. Or the Air Ministry or the rest of the government. That's not a problem for the thesis (I hope!) because my subject is about popular, civilian, unofficial ideas about and responses to the threat of bombing, and there's plenty of excellent histories of British air policy and RAF doctrine already out there. But maybe it's a problem for the thesis title -- it doesn't get across the idea that I'm writing about the public sphere. I could tweak it a little, and say 'British society' instead of 'Britain', or something like that. I'm a sucker for a nice turn of phrase, though, and that would spoil the things I like about it ...

The other thing to remember is that nobody will read the damn thing anyway, so it doesn't really matter too much what I call it :)

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No, I'm not heading for Venus, nor am I travelling back in time in the USS Nimitz. But it is the final countdown nonetheless. I'm in the last few months of my PhD, and plan to submit it in late February 2009, just under four months away. I'm on track for that, I think -- I'm halfway through the last chapter now, and then there's just the conclusion to go, and then the process of serious redrafting begins. As far as word limit goes, the thesis as a whole is currently just under 80,000 words, which is just about perfect -- according to the PhD handbook, I should 'aim to write a thesis of 80,000 words', but can write 'up to 100,000 words without seeking special permission'. So it should end up comfortably within that range (though that may depend on how much of my grotesquely excessive verbiage I cut from the earlier chapters!)

Between that and the fact that I'm a little burned out after the interminable Sudeten crisis, I probably won't be blogging as often as usual for the next little while. But I won't be going on hiatus, so please check back every so often!

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This is the talk I gave at Earth Sciences back in May. It's long and picture heavy and much of it will be be familiar to regular readers, but some people expressed some interest in it so here it is. I've lightly edited it, mainly to correct typos in my written copy. I've put in links to the Boswell drawings because they're under copyright, and I've replaced one photo because I realised it was of British Army Aeroplane No. 1b, not British Army Aeroplane No. 1a! How embarrassing.

Facing Armageddon: Britain and the Bomber, 1908-1941

Today I'm going to give you an overview of my PhD thesis topic. My broad area is the history of military aviation in the early twentieth century, so first I'll give you a little background on that.

Wright Flyer (1903)

The first heavier-than-air manned flight was made by the Wright brothers in 1903, as you can see here. Within a few years, countries around the world started thinking about how they could use this new technology for warfare.
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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Not a phrase I ever expected to come across, but here it is, in David Omissi's Air Power and Colonial Control, the context being the introduction of one the most successful aircraft of the interwar period, the Hawker Hart:

The Hart was soon found to be suitable for India; fifty-seven aircraft were accordingly fitted with desert equipment, large tyres and extra fuel; they flew with three Indian squadrons until 1939. Their high performance was particularly values on the Frontier as they were the only aircraft which could meet the Afghan air menace on equal terms, especially after 1937 when the Afghans began to employ the Hind, itself a high-speed derivative of the Hart. Others served in Egypt and Palestine.1

Afghanistan established an independent air force as early as 1924, though it was easy enough for the British to dismiss as the only Afghan who could fly an aeroplane was made its Chief of Air Staff! But though small in European terms, with mainly Soviet assistance and aircraft the Afghan Air Force became quite efficient within a few years, and was used in several air control operations of its own, against rebellious tribes in outlying areas. Britain eventually felt it had to edge the Soviets out in order to gain some influence over it, hence the supply of Hinds (8 in 1937, another 20 ordered in 1939).

Although Omissi's subject -- air control, the use of airpower in Imperial policing, or in other words, the British air menace -- is ostensibly quite some distance from strategic bombing, I found that reading his book illuminated aspects of my own work (and sadly, this means I've broken my New Year's resolution already). Partly this is because he has chosen less jarring terms than I have ('mitigation'? what was I thinking?) but it's more because he provides a typology of indigenous responses (in practice) to being bombed which transfers pretty well to ideas being worked out, at the same time, in Britain (in theory) about how it would or should respond to being bombing. Although Omissi doesn't describe it as such, it's almost a spectrum of responses, varying with the capacity of the society under attack to resist, which in turn is going to depend largely on the resources available, but also on other factors such geography and climate. (That doesn't quite work, though, because the responses aren't mutually exclusive.)
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  1. David E. Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force 1919-1939 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), 142; emphasis added. [↩]

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I've just spent two months at various libraries and archives in the UK. As I've noted previously, I now have a huge amount of extra primary source material to go through. Sure, in the abstract, more is better, but in concrete terms, how will this help make my thesis better than it would otherwise have been?

The most immediate benefit is for the chapter I'm currently working on, on defence panics. The primary sources for this are newspapers and other periodicals, a few of which I can get here, but not the single most important one: the right-wing and populist Daily Mail, a major advocate of aerial armaments over my period. I was able to survey the relevant dates (covering periods between 1913 and 1940) of the Daily Mail for all of the panics I'm interested in. (I also looked at a couple of months' worth of the Evening News, another Rothermere paper, from 1935; and the aviation magazine, the Aeroplane.) Ideally I would have examined other important conservative newspapers such the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph as well, but realistically I was never going to have enough time for that: scanning page after page of microfilmed newspapers for the occasional article of interest is very time-consuming, and it took me almost a month as it was! But now I know how the most influential press scaremonger in the British press portrayed the aerial menace, and so my chapter will be that much better.

The second chapter with which my research will help is a projected one on the organisation of aerial advocacy: that is, which organisations promoted aerial armaments, who joined them, what did they argue, how were they financed? I'm now in a position to be able to talk about groups such as the Air League of the British Empire, the Navy League (oddly enough), and the National League of Airmen. I will partly be viewing these through the prisms of some of their key figures: P. R. C. Groves, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, and Norman Macmillan, the personal archives of all of whom I was able to examine in London. I'll supplement this with information about their activities from their journals and/or the press, and I also have the Air League's minute books for 1909-1941 to draw upon. I guess with this chapter, the question I want to answer is: where were the leagues? Anyone familiar with navalism before the First World War will recall that the Navy League and Imperial Maritime League were very active in trying to alert public opinion to the need for more battleships to counter the growing German fleet. I expected something similar would be the case with airmindedness, yet the Air League has been almost invisible in my research so far. And it turns out that this was actually a criticism the Air League had to face several times in its early history. Once I've sifted through all the data I should be better able to explain why this was.

Finally, my (already-written) chapters on the origin and evolution of the knock-out blow will need to be updated somewhat in light of some of the books and archival sources I looked at. Nothing major -- just refining and clarifying the narrative in places. For example, I now know a bit more about when and why F. W. Lanchester wrote Aircraft in Warfare (1916), a key text in the creation of the knock-out blow paradigm. Actually, now that I think of it, the main advantage here is probably an increased confidence that I've got the the story largely right: although I obviously can't be sure that something startling might turn up, I've at least now filled in the more glaring gaps in my review of the literature.

Of course I picked up a lot of other things of interest here and there along the way, and there are the intangible benefits of meeting other researchers working on related topics as well. Overall, my thesis will certainly be much the better for the time I spent in the UK; it was two months very well spent!

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The title relates to both the content of a paper I gave yesterday at the School's Work In Progress Day, and to my own state of mind beforehand! I think it went well, though -- at least there was no rotten fruit thrown at the end! -- which is good because it was the first real outing for my current chapter on defence panics. The deadly-dull paper title was "Moral panics, defence panics and the British air panic of 1934-5", and here's the abstract:

The sociological concept of moral panic was developed to describe and explain how societies react to internal threats to their values and interests, such as crime or deviant behaviour, with particular emphasis on the roles played by the media and expert opinion. In this paper I will argue that the reactions of a society to external, military threats -- "defence panics" -- can develop in essentially the same way as moral panics, and can be analysed using a similar framework. My main example will be drawn from the British air panic of 1934-5 over the threat of illegal German aerial rearmament.

For the record, these are the main defence panic candidates I'm interested in, some of which I've discussed here before:

  • phantom airship scare, 1913
  • Gotha raids on London, 1917
  • "French" air menace, 1922
  • Hamburg gas disaster, 1928
  • German germ warfare experiments, 1934
  • German air menace, 1934-5
  • Guernica, 1937; Barcelona, 1938; Canton, 1938; Munich crisis, 1938
  • the Blitz, 1940

I had a slide up with Airminded's URL but stupidly forgot to actually mention it. So if anyone who heard my talk has managed to find their way here despite this, hello and well done! Amazingly, there was actually one student there who already reads Airminded -- I was very chuffed to learn that reading it is less boring than working :) -- but I quite rudely forgot to ask their name. If they or anyone else from the session would like to drop me a line, they can drop me a line here in the comments, or via the contact form. I'd like to hear from you!