Words

• 8 Comments

•

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!

...continue reading →

• 6 Comments

•

Some perfectly ordinary banter, c. 1917:

First "Hun": "Did you see old Cole's zoom on a quirk this morning?"
Second "Hun": "No, what happened?"
First "Hun": "Oh, nothing to write home about ... stalled his 'bus and pancaked thirty feet ... crashed completely ... put a vertical gust up me ... just as I was starting my solo flip in a rumpty!"

This is the start of an article by W. A. B. entitled 'Airmen in the making', from the Daily Mail, 19 July 1917, p. 4. It's about some of the new words and phrases used by trainee RFC pilots: 'no one can claim so many strikingly original terms as the air services'. Most of the examples given weren't actually new; some of them don't seem to have survived the war; others are still familiar enough in an aviation context; and yet others are now so widely used that their aeronautical context comes as a surprise.

Hun does not here refer to one of Biggles' foes but to the trainee pilots themselves. The OED's earliest cite for this sense is 1916; a later cite from 1925 suggests that the derivation was that flight cadets tended to be highly destructive of training aircraft. Zoom (a 'soul-satisfying word') is what an aeroplane does when it is 'hauled up apruptly and made to climb for a few moments at a dangerously sharp angle'. But it seems that zooming was already something that moving objects did, especially if they made some sort of humming or other sound as they did so: an OED cite from 1904 has bees zooming against a window plane. All sorts of vehicles can zoom these days, though aircraft may have been first. But we probably use it more often to refer to cameras or image editing software. A quirk is a training aeroplane (though according to the OED it can also mean a trainee pilot), or just any which is slow and ungainly. But it's a very old word, in the sense of something odd or unusual, which seems directly related to this usage. A rumpty is a specific type of training aeroplane, namely a Maurice Farman Shorthorn. According to the RAAF Museum, it (or rather Rumpety) is an onomatopoeic word, from the sound it makes while travelling over the ground.

To stall in the aeronautical sense is of course quite familiar, but stalling in the sense of coming to a standstill is quite old (OED's first cite is c. 1460). 'Bus is short for omnibus, presumably -- a later generation of pilots might have said kite or ship. To pancake I had previously understood just to mean to land, but it can evidently also mean a sudden vertical drop (i.e. from a stall) or a crash. A solo flip is a solo flight -- does anyone take a flip anymore? And finally, a vertical gust sounds like a straightforward meteorological term, but in this context it's a 'breezy way' for the Hun to confess that seeing the crash before his own solo had, well, put the wind up him.

The other words in the article are still standard aviation terms, though to gamers of a certain age a joystick doesn't necessarily have anything to do with even simulated flight. W. A. B. ends by claiming gadget for the airmen:

But the most priceless word of all is "gadget." If the name of anything escapes you call it a "gadget" and you will be understood!

And it is indeed an excellent word. But sadly for the RFC's legacy, the OED shows that sailors were using it three decades earlier: 'if the exact name of anything they want happens to slip from their memory, they call it a chicken~fixing, or a gadjet, or a gill-guy, or a timmey-noggy, or a wim-wom'. Though perhaps we can thank the airmen for choosing to bring gadget into common use instead of chicken~fixing! (And just how do you pronounce ~ anyway?)

• 7 Comments

•

One of the things I love about the official history of the RFC and RAF in the First World War is all the maps -- multi-panel fold-out jobs showing where bombs fell in London during the Gotha raids, or the Allied front in Macedonia. That's not to mention the accompanying slip-cases stuffed full of more maps of the paths taken by Zeppelin raiders and the like. I could pore over these for hours ...

Here are a couple of the maps (or parts thereof) showing two different kinds of barrages associated with the air defence of Britain.

Aeroplane barrage line. December, 1916.

The first one is entitled 'Aeroplane barrage line. December, 1916.' It's too big to show effectively, so I've just reproduced a portion showing the coast of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. The red squares show home defence squadron HQs: 33 Squadron at Gainsborough and 76 Squadron at Ripon. The red triangles are flight stations, the red stars flight stations with searchlights, the blue circles are searchlight stations under squadron control ('aeroplane lights') and the black circles are warning control centres (Hull).

As I've discussed before, artillery barrages weren't the only kinds of barrages. Originally they seem to have just been barriers or walls of some kind (barrage originally referred to a dam). Here the barrage is composed of aeroplanes and searchlights, a wall erected to hopefully bar Zeppelins coming in over the North Sea from reaching the industrial cities behind the line. And it does look like a barrier: on the full map it stretches from Suttons Farm (later renamed Hornchurch) near London all the way up to Innerwick, east of Edinburgh (with extensions in Norfolk and Kent). But it's not a physical barrage, for the most part -- it's aerodromes and searchlights. Previously, home defence squadrons had been placed close to target areas, because of doubts about night navigation and interception. Experience had shown that these problems weren't as great as previously thought:

Now that it was clear the aeroplane patrols could be extended, it was suggested that the Flights situated near Birmingham, Sheffield and Leeds should be moved farther east as a step towards the ultimate establishment of a barrage-line of aeroplanes and searchlights parallel with the east coast of England.1

This system worked very well against Zeppelins (as one indication, note the steep drop in casualties due to airship raids from 1917 on). But not so well against Gothas.
...continue reading →

  1. H. A. Jones, The War in the Air: Being the Story of the Part Played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force, volume 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), 166. The map faces 170. [↩]

• 24 Comments

•

Here's a question of terminology which has been bugging me for some time. The Munich crisis in September and October 1938 is a well-known historical event. But the name 'Munich crisis' is misleading, because the crisis was building long before the word Munich was ever associated with it. Munich had nothing to do with the Munich crisis at all, except that it just happened to be the place where Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini and Daladier met to resolve it. (So 'Munich conference' is fine, as is 'Munich' as a shorthand for the betrayal of Czechoslovakia.) 'Czech crisis' would be better, but that's usually reserved for an earlier flap around March 1938. I tend to prefer 'Sudeten crisis', which has the virtue of indicating what the crisis was actually about. On the other hand, nobody at the time seems to have spoken of the Sudeten crisis; usually they referred to the Czech crisis, and very occasionally, after the crisis had passed, the Munich crisis. And Munich crisis is certainly the preferred term today.

So what say you? Feel free to make arguments in comments.

Edit: I have removed the poll plugin for security reasons. But here's a screenshot of the poll results as of 22 November 2011:

Munich vs Sudeten

Next up: 'Crisis' vs 'crisis'. You be the judge!

• 4 Comments

•

Sometimes I wonder how I'd react if I was perusing an early-twentieth century newspaper and came across a URL in an advertisement. Maybe http://www.aerialgymnkhana.co.uk or http://www.hobadl.org.uk. I mean, there's no physical reason why this couldn't happen -- all those characters existed back then. It's just that arranging them in such a way would have made no sense whatsoever to anyone living at the time. So I'll never see one, which is probably good for my sanity.

But I do occasionally see something reminiscent of some of our idiosyncratic online protocols: telegraphic addresses. They were the functional equivalent of postal addresses, of course: they allowed the rapid routing of a message to a physical location on the surface of the Earth. But what I find interesting about them is that they were evidently arbitrary: a person or organisation could choose its own address (apart from the geographical bit). This means that telegraphic addresses reflected something of their character -- much like personal email addresses today often do, or even more so, like an organisation's domain name does. They also often had something of the cramped style, the abrvs and runtogetherwords, of modern txtspk, which must come from a similar desire to save characters (since the longer the addresses were, the more keypresses and time it took the Morse operator, and ultimately pence it cost the sender). And this is true even of government bureaucracies like the RAF. Here are some telegraphic addresses culled from the Air Force List for January 1922.

Some are self-explanatory, such Airministry, London. Aircivil, Airministry, London is also pretty obvious, if you are aware of the existence of the Civil Aviation Department, Air Ministry. (The way the addresses are nested here is reminiscent of a subdomain, or perhaps of the old percent hack for forwarding mail from ARPANET to another network.) Airships, Bedford is the Airship Constructional Station (which must be Cardington), and Scientist, London is the Air Ministry Laboratory. Cranwell, including RAF HQ and the nascent RAF College, could be reached at Aircoll, Sleaford, though for some reason the Boys' Wing had a separate address, Avion, Sleaford.

Others require a bit more work to puzzle out. Ok, so Imwarmus, Crystal, London is the Imperial War Museum (RAF Section) at its temporary home at the Crystal Palace and Judvocate, London is the Judge Advocate General. And Cenrafhos Finch, London is the Central RAF Hospital -- but what's the Finch bit refer to? Paynavator, Westrand, London is the General Services Pay Officer, which explains 'pay', but what's a 'navator'? (Westrand = west Strand?) I think I've worked out Airgenarch, Kincross, London, the address of the Coastal Area HQ (Kincross being King's Cross): 'genarch' is an archaic word for the head of a family (as in patriarch or matriarch). Inland Area HQ could also be reached by Airgenarch, Uxbridge. Then there's Prinpustor, Watloo, London, which was the Air Ministry Publications Department. Hmm ... PRINcipal PUblications STORe, maybe? (And Watloo would be Waterloo.)

A group of meteorological addresses stand out, including Weather, London, the Air Ministry Meteorological Department (Forecasts); Meteorology, Southkens, London, a, or the, Meteorological Office (at South Kensington); Barometer, Edinburgh, another Meteorological Office; Meteorite, Liverpool for the Port Meteorological Officer there; and Meteor Experiments, Shoeburyness, a Meteorological Station. I suspect these are addresses inherited when the Air Ministry took over what is today known as the Met Office, in 1920 -- they're just a bit too inconsistent and whimsical to be part of a RAF naming scheme. Another legacy address is Ballooning, South Farnborough, for the Royal Aircraft Establishment -- which had its earliest incarnation at that location in 1905 as His Majesty's Balloon Factory.

The default address for a RAF station in Britain was Aeronautics -- so, Aeronautics, Biggin Hill or Aeronautics, London (not an aerodrome but the Central Medical Board, among other things). Aeronautics was also used for government-owned civil aerodromes such as Croydon. Ocredep was another very common one. All seventeen RAF recruiting offices used it. Officer Commanding, REcruiting DEPot?

The RAF overseas did its own thing. In fact, the address for HQ Mediterranean Group is Rafos, Malta, which could be derived from RAF OverSeas. Maybe. Some wag thought up the addresses for HQ Middle East Area, Perardua, Cairo, and its subordinate group HQs for Egypt and Palestine, Adastra, Cairo and Ismailia. Per ardua ad astra, get it? (But, for some reason, HQ Mesopotamian Group is Aviation, Baghdad.) Otherwise it's mostly a descriptive name with the prefix air-, for example Airengine, Abbassia for HQ Engine Repair Depot. Airsquad 70, Heliopolis is the address for 70 Squadron. The Base Pay Office in Egypt is Airpay, Cairo, but the one in Iraq is Paycash, Baghdad. In India, there's more uniformity. Aeronautics, Ambala for HQ RAF India, and Astral, Ambala or Peshawar, for Wing HQs. Then Aviation and a number for squadrons, e.g. Aviation 5, Quetta for 5 Squadron. And finally, Airskool, Ambala, for the RAF School (India), is so 21st-century in its use of an incorrect spelling just to save a single character that it is, in fact, quite oldskool.

• 16 Comments

•

A few days after Xmas, I felt like I should be getting back into reading something thesis-related, but at the same time I still felt like I was still in holiday mode. So I compromised and read something on topic, but a bit lighter than my usual academic fare, namely Waiting for Hitler: Voices from Britain on the Brink of Invasion by Midge Gillies (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2007). The name suggests that it's along the lines of the 'forgotten voices' type of book that seem to be everywhere lately, but I couldn't say because I haven't actually read any of them. While it's certainly heavy on quoting 'ordinary' people (Mass-Observation diarists, Dunkirk veterans, internees) and, I'm sure, doesn't break any new historiographical ground, it's based on a lot of research, is well-written, and easily moves between the big picture and the small one. I learned a lot about a topic I don't know much about, namely the British home front from the start of the Norwegian campaign in April 1940, to the start of the Blitz in September. It's easy for me to focus too much on the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, but in some ways the period leading up to them is more interesting, because people didn't know what was going to happen next and that's often when fears come out to play.

One of the aspects of Waiting for Hitler I appreciated was Gillies' attention to rumours and panics as an index of the insecurity of the British people as they prepared for a possible German invasion. These are fascinating. For example, the slit trenches being dug in Hyde Park were said to be for mass burials in the aftermath of air raids, not protection from bombs. Troops practicing machine-gunning a buoy in a Cornish harbour turned into the accidental death of a boy by machine-gun fire the next day, and then the massacre of dozens of children on the beach the next, strafed by German aeroplanes. Rumours turned the deputy Labour leader Arthur Greenwood into a traitor locked in the Tower, and pencils and chocolates into the poisoned weapons of fifth columnists. In Southampton, the smell from a pickling plant was responsible for a minor panic, when somebody thought it might be poison gas:

ARP wardens paraded in gas masks, while hairdressers slammed their windows and told customers to keep their heads in washbasins.1

It may sound silly, but it wasn't really, because the government's ARP literature warned people to be wary of strange smells as possible evidence of a gas attack.

Stories abounded of new German weapons. For example:

there were tales of German experiments with a cobweb-like material that they had tested over France in 1939. The substance, which they released in large white balloon-like capsules, had covered several square kilometres and clung to people's hands and faces. In another version it was reported that the substance had appeared over Britain, but it turned out that this was gossamer produced by spiders mating in mid-air.2

Most of these weapons didn't exist, but the rumours helped explain to those who passed them on why so many armies were crumbling so quickly before the German onslaught. One of the weapons was quite real, however: the paratrooper.
...continue reading →

  1. Gillies, Waiting for Hitler, 159. [↩]
  2. Ibid., 160. [↩]

•

A couple of weeks ago, I showed how the blitzkrieg became the Blitz. Now I'll show how the knock-out blow became the blitzkrieg.

Despite the abandon with which the term blitzkrieg is thrown around these days to describe the "lightning" German campaigns of the early years of the Second World War, it turns out that it was not a word much used at the time by the German army or German strategists (though neither was it entirely unknown). It's even been denied that there was even such a strategic concept as blitzkrieg, whether known by that name or not -- certainly not until after the German conquest of France, usually held to be the classic example of blitzkrieg. Karl-Heinz Frieser, in his revisionist (but well-received) book The Blitzkrieg Legend opens by saying that

In sober military language, there is hardly any other word that is so strikingly full of significance and at the same time so misleading and subject to misinterpretation as the term blitzkrieg.1

On Frieser's account, the attack against France and the Low Countries owed less to some innovative pre-war doctrine and more to individual initiative and astute tactics, resulting in a surprising (and strange) victory.2 He argues that rather than thinking of blitzkrieg as strategic in nature -- a way to win a war -- it might be better conceptualised as an operational idea -- a way to win an operation or a campaign (Blitzoperationen, perhaps). This is important, because (according to Frieser), after the fall of France Hitler and his generals made the mistake of thinking they could blitz their way to quick victories, without paying attention to the longer-term economic foundations of a war economy. They fell into the 'semantic trap' of blitzkrieg. Hence Barbarossa.
...continue reading →

  1. Karl-Heinz Frieser, The Blitzkrieg Legend: The 1940 Campaign in the West (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2005), 4. [↩]
  2. This helps explain the otherwise puzzling halt of the panzers before Dunkirk -- the German high command lost its nerve as it had lost control of its lower-echelon commanders. It wasn't the first time they'd tried to slow the panzers down, which were usually running far ahead of the mostly non-mechanised infantry. [↩]

•

The other day I came across a fascinating article by H. L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore. Mencken was very interested in colloquial English, and to this end penned "War words in England", published in the February 1944 American Speech, about new words coming into use in the British press as a result of the war. Some are still familiar today (like decontamination -- for some reason I'd never realised it was first used in connection with anti-gas precautions), some are still familiar enough though no longer current (siren-suit, appropriate attire for the lady shelterer), others are long forgotten (at least, they're new to me, e.g., to spitfire and to hurricane -- to shoot down an enemy plane). He generally avoided invented words which never gained much popularity, along with acronyms or words formed from them.

Here are some of the more interesting words listed by Mencken.

First there's blitzkrieg/blitz and derivatives: blitzfighter, an 'airman or soldier engaged in fighting against a blitzkrieg';1 blitzflu, a 'mild influenza, sudden in its attack', which struck during the winters of 1941-2 and 1942-3; blitzlull, a break in a blitz; blitzpeace, a peace offensive by Hitler; fireblitzed, 'Of an area devastated by air bombardment'; flare-blitz, bombers dropping flares. And of course sitzkrieg, a slow war: according to Newsweek (4 March 1940), in coining this the RAF 'scored a direct pun on the word blitzkrieg'. Despite its popularity, there were evidently many people who didn't like having to use a German word so often -- one alternative was to raff (i.e. RAF) a target, another to ruhr it (as in the Ruhr valley, a heavily-industrialised and often-bombed area of western Germany -- kind of a reverse coventration). But the Children's Newspaper thought that the large number of warlike foreign words imported into English perhaps 'proves that our national genius is for peace rather than war' (26 July 1941).

Another cluster relates to air raids and associated experiences: flitter, 'One who sleeps away from home to escape air alarms' (more usually called a trekker); goofer, someone who doesn't take shelter during an air raid; jitterbug, `A nervous person', according to Mencken's quotes this seems to have a favourite of Cabinet ministers; roof-spotter, somebody watching out for bombers (ie so as to warn the business below that a raid was actually approaching, otherwise work would have to cease everytime an alert sounded); shelteritis, rheumatism; skelter, an air-raid shelter.

Evacuee (from the French evacué) is a word still in use which appears to derive from directly from preparations for air attack in the 1930s; the first use in The Times is from 1938, in the aftermath of Munich. But as with blitzkrieg, there was much resistance at first: 'Evacuees has a dreadfully alien and official sound, and the novelty of the word is as uncomfortable as new paint' (Western Evening Herald, 28 October 1939). Many alternatives were proposed, unsuccessfully it seems: pilgrims, shelterers, sojourners, refugees, war guests, 'Itler's orphans, movers, exodists/exos (from exodus), dumpees/dumpies, agisters (as though they were farm animals), removee, migrant, transient, scatterer. More successful variants (according to Mencken) were evacuatrix, a female evacuee; guinea-pig, an evacuee or billeted soldier; seavacuation, overseas evacuation, particularly of children; vackie/vack/vickie, abbreviation of evacuee.

Finally, a grab-bag of miscellaneous terms: battle bowler, the helmet worn by soldiers and ARP wardens, a term first heard during the First World War; block-buster, a bomb which can destroy a whole city block (a fun fact to tell students in tutes, I've found); bomphlet/bomphleteer, propaganda pamphlets dropped by air and the airmen who drop them; chatter-bug, a civilian who spreads military secrets; parashot/parashooter/paraspotter, Home Guards who are watching for paratroops (itself a new word) -- parashot was a very common word in the summer of 1940, which is a testament to the fear of airborne invasion at the time; shiver-sister, a scared civilian (with chatterbug, an invention of Harold Nicolson, apparently); and telefootler, 'a word for those selfish people who indulge in idle gossip and time-wasting talks on the telephone' (Herne Bay Press, 1 March 1941). I think this last word should be revived -- we all know a telefootler or two, I'm sure.

So the conclusion seems to be that having a war now and then is good for linguistic diversity.

  1. H. L. Mencken, "War words in England", American Speech, 19 (1944), 3-15; JSTOR. All quotes from this source. [↩]

• 54 Comments

•

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

The German bombing of London and other British cities between September 1940 and May 1941 is referred to as "the Blitz", a contemporary term which, if not actually coined by the press, was certainly popularised by it. Blitz is short for blitzkrieg, German for "lightning war", which was the label given to the spectacularly mobile armoured offensives, strongly supported by tactical bombing, which led to the rapid conquests of Poland and France. Sometimes it is suggested that it was inappropriate or inaccurate to apply a word having to do with fast-paced ground combat, involving Panzers and Stukas, to a fundamentally different type of warfare, a strategic bombing campaign lasting nine months in which no territory was exchanged and no soldiers even saw each other. For example, after noting the popular origins of blitz, A. J. P. Taylor added as a footnote:

Popular parlance was, of course, wrong. 'Blitz' was lightning war. This was the opposite.1

The Wikipedia page on the Blitz says:

The German military doctrine of speed and surprise was described as Blitzkrieg, literally lightning war, from which the British use of blitz was derived. While German air-supported attacks on Poland, France, the Netherlands and other countries may be described as blitzkrieg, the prolonged strategic bombing of London did not fit the term.

I'd like to suggest here that while it's true that the Blitz wasn't a lightning war, nonetheless it was a blitzkrieg. Confused? Hopefully I can explain ...

Firstly, note that initially blitz and blitzkrieg were synonymous terms. So immediately after the first big raids on London on 7 September 1940, the Daily Express was already using the familiar term: 'Blitz bombing of London goes on all night'.2 But at the same time, the Spectator was calling it a blitzkrieg:

The full purpose of the Blitzkrieg may have been more fully revealed by the time these lines are read. Its immediate object no doubt is to break morale.3

(Blitzkrieg seems to have been more common at first, but after a month or so it was replaced by blitz.) I think this is significant, because it shows that the British didn't think of the Blitz as something fundamentally different from blitzkrieg. It was the blitzkrieg, as applied to the attempted conquest of Britain -- which, being separated from the Continent by the English Channel, obviously wasn't going to play out in exactly the same way as it did in Poland and the West.
...continue reading →

  1. A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 [1965]), 501. [↩]
  2. Daily Telegraph, 9 September 1940, p. 1; quoted in OED entry for "blitz". [↩]
  3. "A decisive hour", Spectator, 13 September 1940, 260. Emphasis in original. [↩]

• 13 Comments

•

Last year I talked about J. M. Spaight's The Sky's the Limit (here, here and here), and how its account of the then-developing Battle of Britain was somewhat surprising to anyone familiar with the standard narrative of the summer of 1940. Which is not at all to say that the standard narrative is wrong, just that things quite naturally looked different while the Battle was still in progress.

Now I'm looking at press accounts of the beginning of the Blitz, September and early October 1940, and again I'm finding things which don't seem to have made it into the received picture. One very striking one is the apparently near-universal opinion that the Me 109 fighter was inferior to British fighters: not just a little bit, but greatly; not just to the Spitfire, but to the Hurricane as well.1 So for example, the Manchester Guardian's air correspondent confidently reported that

That Göring's air force has had no single-seat fighter that could compare with the Spitfire or the Hurricane is a fact that has been obvious since the very start of the war in the air against Britain and the replacement of the Messerschmitt 109, that has suffered so heavily at the hands of R.A.F. fighter squadrons, by something better was to be expected.2

Nearly seventy years later, reasonable people still can and do disagree over the relative merits of these fighters. But I think you would be hard-pressed these days to find anyone who would claim that the Me 109 was not comparable in air combat to the Spitfire, and substantially (though certainly not overwhelmingly) superior to the Hurricane. The reason for the underrating of the Me 109 is not hard to find, when British claims for German losses were routinely too high by a factor of two or three. But I suspect Fighter Command pilots wouldn't have been so sanguine, regardless of the numbers!
...continue reading →

  1. Since we're talking day fighters, technically this probably should be classified as the Battle of Britain, not the Blitz, but in some ways this is is an artificial and unhelpful distinction. [↩]
  2. Manchester Guardian, 19 September 1940, p. 5. The 'something better' was the mythical He 113. [↩]