7 October was not the end of the Blitz or even of the Battle of Britain, but it is the end of my post-blogging of 1940, at least for now. The main reason for this is because I'm running out of primary sources, especially the Daily Mail. But as I think I've shown, in the preceding week or two the press (at least the parts available to me) seems to have decided that a turning point in the air battle had been reached: that the Luftwaffe had been decisively repulsed by day and that the invasion was not coming. Also, the early shock of the bombing of London had worn off -- after three weeks or so it was clear that this was no knock-out blow -- and the problems in the shelters were starting to be resolved by a number of well-publicised measures. So late September/early October turns out to be as good a place to stop as any.
...continue reading
Words
Friday, 4 October 1940
Politics intrudes onto the front page of the Daily Mail today, in the form of a Cabinet reshuffle. But this being wartime, people are perhaps more likely to invest these normally mundane ministerial changes with great significance. The Mail certainly does, leading with the story that Sir John Reith, former Director-General of the BBC (and more recently chairman of Imperial Airways, Minister of Information and Minister of Transport) has been given the job of planning for the post-war reconstruction of Britain, or at least its buildings -- though the 'large-scale slum clearances' envisaged would certainly have a social impact. Reith will also be looking at more immediate repairs for those buildings which can't wait, and 'in all probability start[ing] an immediate investigation into the question of providing more and better air-raid shelters'. But it's the optimistic 'Planning now for day of victory' angle which the Mail plays up.
The other big change is probably the promotion by Churchill of Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour, into the War Cabinet in order to 'represent the trade unions'. The reshuffle was occasioned by the resignation of Neville Chamberlain as Lord President of the Council, on the grounds of ill health. He may be up for a peerage.
...continue reading
Sunday, 29 September 1940
Friday witnessed the signing of the 'Axis-Japanese Pact' in Berlin. The Observer's diplomatic correspondent believes the pact is 'chiefly aimed at the United States', and 'is intended to steal a march on what is regarded as the inevitable alignment of Britain, America, Russia, and China' (7):
Under it, the Axis and Japan pledge each other military aid should any of them be attacked by a Power not at present involved in the European or China wars.
The belief that America will eventually enter the war is a common one (and reflected here by the claim that the likely American response to the pact will be to step up aid to Britain). But I'm surprised to see Russia being thought of in the same way; it's not so long ago that British men were volunteering to help defend Finland against the Red Army.
...continue reading
Monday, 23 September 1940
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.
...continue reading
Monday, 16 September 1940
There's no doubt what's newsworthy today. The Daily Mail trumpets the big battle over the Home Counties yesterday, the 'most shattering defeat' the Luftwaffe has ever experienced (1):
The Air Ministry state that between 350 and 400 enemy aircraft were launched in two waves against London and south-east England.
Of these no fewer than 175 were shot down, four of them by A.A. fire. This is a proportion of nearly one in two destroyed. All these are "certainties," for the total does not include "probables."
The R.A.F. lost 30 'planes, and ten of the pilots are safe.
Mates
This photograph of Australian soldiers was taken during the First World War. It's not particularly unusual: just a group of mates getting together to record a memento, perhaps after a weekend's carousing in the fleshpots of Cairo or Paris.
Mateship is a important concept in Australian culture. The OED defines it as 'The condition of being a mate; companionship, fellowship, comradeship' and notes that it is 'Now chiefly Austral. and N.Z.' The Australian National Dictionary gives several more specifically Australian shades of meaning, from 'An acquaintance; a person engaged in the same activity', to 'One with whom the bonds of close friendship are acknowledged, a "sworn friend"', to 'A mode of address implying equality and goodwill; freq. used to a casual acquaintance and, esp. in recent use [...], ironic'. Suffice it to say that pretty much any bloke can have occasion to call another cobber a mate, whether they are good friends or bitter enemies. (Sheilas are another question, of course.)
...continue reading
1000 tweets later
Last August I took up Twitter. I've just reached a thousand tweets (or will have, when this post is auto-tweeted), so it seems like an appropriate time to reflect on how useful the whole thing is.
I was initially sceptical, but I find that Twitter does complement blogging very well. It's a good place to post links to useful or interesting links which I think are worth sharing, but aren't worth a blog post (I don't like just posting links: I feel I should say something insightful to go along with it, but I don't always have something insightful to say!) Ditto for things I come across in my reading. It's not quite as good as having somebody sitting next to you who to say 'hey, look at this!' to, but then again that sort of behaviour is usually frowned upon in libraries anyway. As the wordle above shows, most of my tweets are military history-related, and still often aviation-related, but a bit more broadly construed than here on the blog. ('rt' is short for 'retweet', which reposting the tweets of other users.) I also talk about other interests or pop culture from time to time. Of course, I could do that here if I wanted, but I don't want to change the focus of the blog. The informality of Twitter makes it easier to play around.
Even more than blogging, Twitter is about who is following you and who you are following. (In round numbers, about 140 and about 100 people, respectively.) While there are a few regular Airminded commenters who are on Twitter (@thrustvector, @AirPowerHistory, @jondresner, @lifeasdaddy), I generally interact with a different set of people there. I get the sense that most of them don't read Airminded, at least not habitually -- even outside of the SEO consultants (who LOVE using the web, but only seem to actually use the web to tell other people how they can get more readers). On the other hand, there are people I've interacted with in the Twitterverse who do read Airminded, but wouldn't comment here. Informality wins again. The abbreviated and fleeting nature of tweeting makes it more liberating, in a sense, than blogging: there's only so much you can say in 140 characters, so you don't need to say something brilliant, and if you say something strikingly unbrilliant, well, it's soon lost in the stream. (On the other hand, it's surprising just how clever some people can be with so little to work with.)
My proudest Twitter moment did relate to Airminded. @ukwarcabinet is tweeting the British Cabinet's view of the Second World War, day by day (currently it's up to 4 February 1940). It's run by the National Archives (@UkNatArchives), and includes a link to the relevant Cabinet papers, which can be downloaded for free. And according to Jo Pugh (@mentionthewar), who works on it, I was partly to blame:
@Airminded I hope the @ukwarcabinet thing seems like a good idea. It was largely inspired by your post-blogging the Sudeten Crisis.
Which is very cool indeed.
Twitter promises to be even better than a bunch of RSS feeds for keeping tabs on conferences, jobs and general academic gossip. I say 'promises' because academia is, as usual, slow to cotton on to new media, and the critical mass of #twitterstorians isn't quite there yet for Twitter to be an essential way to keep up to date with your own field. Which is one reason why I'm writing this post: sign up, follow @Airminded, and tweet! If you choose not to, you can still get an idea of what I'm tweeting by looking at the bottom of the sidebar on Airminded's home page.
The rise of ‘Luftwaffe’
Because I'm too lazy to write a proper post, here are some of my recent tweets:
The 1st use of the word "Luftwaffe" in The Times was on 24 May 1939, as the owner of 2 yachts entered in a race to Germany.
The 1st use of the word "Luftwaffe" in the Manchester Guardian was on 30 Nov 1939, in a commentary on the different national air forces.
The 1st use of the word "Luftwaffe" in the Observer was on 5 June 1938, again in reference to a yacht race.
The 1st use of the word "Luftwaffe" in Parliament may have been on 21 Feb 1940, in a question about air strengths: http://bit.ly/6yQL6d
It seems that "Luftwaffe" was not in wide circulation in English before c. 1939. It's somewhat anachronistic then, to use it for the 1930s.
... at least when talking about Britain and its fear of the German air force. But "Luftwaffe" is entrenched, and so much handier!
I can add some other data points. The first use in the New York Times was on 17 February 1940, as part of the name of a German propaganda film (D III 88, Die neue deutsche Luftwaffe greift an). Less authoritatively (because incomplete), the first mention in the Google Newspaper Archive is from 15 January 1939 in the Chicago Daily Tribune (in an article entitled 'The Nazi air force').
As might be expected, aviation periodicals were onto the word 'Luftwaffe' earlier. Flight first used it on 11 March 1937, in an article about a visit to a German squadron. Aeroplane used it as early as 1 April 1936, in the title of a German-language book being reviewed (Die deutsche Luftwaffe by Kürbs), but there could easily be an earlier use. Oddly, the OED gives The Times in 1935 as the earliest cite, although I can't find it in the online version:
1935 Times 23 May 15/1 The armed forces are henceforth known collectively as the Wehrmacht (Defence Force) and consist of the Army (Heer), Navy (Kriegsmarine), and the Air Arm (Luftwaffe).
But I stand by the conclusion I originally tweeted, i.e. that 'Luftwaffe' was not a widely used term in English before around 1939 (in fact, more like 1940). Between 1935, when the Luftwaffe was officially founded, and the start of the war, it generally seems to have been referred to as 'the German Air Force' or some variation thereof (as I noted in response to a query from @clioandme).
Well, so what, one might ask? Not very much, I'd have to answer. I'm fairly pedantic about avoiding anachronistic words -- I consciously nearly always write 'aeroplane', for example, instead of 'airplane' (an Americanism, I think, in my period at least) or 'plane' (only common from the late 1930s, at least in written British English). But although the man on the Clapham omnibus might have looked confused if asked in 1935 or 1938 if he was afraid of the Luftwaffe, it was a term used by some English speakers at the time (and presumably all German speakers), it was widely used in the somewhat important period 1939-45, it's an accepted term today (that it's in the OED is significant), and it's precise and concise. It's too useful to discard, even if it were possible to do so. So all I hope for is that just pointing out the slight anachronicity of 'Luftwaffe' for the years 1935 to 1939 will satisfy my inner pedant.
Zeroth World Wars
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]
A couple of interesting posts at The Russian Front suggest that the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5 should be thought of as a World War Zero, or alternatively that the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-8 should be. It's often useful to play around with the names we give to historical events and phenomena, because it reminds us that they are just names. And this is an old game for historians (as Dave Stone notes) -- the Seven Years' War is sometimes considered to be the first world war (if not the First World War). But I'm not sure in what sense the Russo-Japanese and Russo-Turkish wars qualify as world wars. Shouldn't the primary determinant of this be that they were fought on a world scale? Even the epic, doomed voyage of the Baltic fleet to Tsushima isn't enough to make the Russo-Japanese War a world war, as all the actual fighting was localised to a relatively small region in Manchuria (if you set aside a few potshots at British trawlers).
But in his post, John Steinberg does give a list of reasons for his argument regarding the Russo-Japanese War (which comes out of research for a two-volume work he co-edited entitled The Russo-Japanese War in Global Perspective: World War Zero). It seems to me that most of them are not actually about geographical extent but rather other sorts of scale -- of battles, of casualties, of finance, and so on. That is, in Steinberg's formulation the Russo-Japanese War sounds something like an approach towards total war, not a world war. If that's the case then I find this statement surprising:
As for the concept of World War Zero, most western military historians continue to view the Russo-Japanese War as a regional conflict rooted in the age of imperialism. Historians in Asia, appear much more respective.
I thought the Russo-Japanese War was well-known among western military historians (if not among contemporary western military staffs) for its bloodiness. Hew Strachan, for example, refers to it quite often (well, on 30 pages out of 1139) in volume I of The First World War. It's also a common element in diplomatic histories of the war's origins, for Russia's defeat had a tremendous impact on the strategic calculations of all the other Great Powers. So it seems to me that western historians are quite comfortable in seeing the Russo-Japanese War as a step along the road to total war and/or to the First World War in several respects. I think I must be missing something here.
Total war and total peace
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]
A random thought while sitting in a lecture today: if there is (or can be) such a thing as total war, does that imply that total peace is a meaningful concept?
Firstly, what is total war? One definition, drawn from the ubiquitous set of conference proceedings edited by Stig Förster et al (and more directly, from today's lecture notes), goes something like this. Total war consists of:
- total aims: e.g. the destruction of an enemy nation
- total methods: e.g. bombing cities
- total mobilisation: e.g. conscription for both the armed forces and for labour
- total control: e.g. censorship, dictatorship
More briefly, total war is the subordination of every other consideration (law, custom, morality, etc) to the prosecution of war. Total war is an ideal form of warfare, something which can be approached more or less closely, but which can never actually be fully attained. Well, hopefully not, because that would be bad.
So what would total peace look like? I don't think it can simply be the absence of total war; that's just peace generically. Total peace must be total in some sense.
...continue reading