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Beaufighter TF.X

One of the archives I visited during the second half of my time in London was the Archive Collection at the RAF Museum. Sadly the material I turned up, though interesting, was not overall of much relevance for my thesis. So I couldn't justify spending a second day there. But, on the bright side, the archives closed at 5pm and the museum itself at 6pm -- so I was able to able to use that hour to whiz through and have a look at the Fighter Hall, which I'd missed on my first visit.

Above is a Bristol Beaufighter TF.X torpedo bomber (well, the TF stands for torpedo fighter but that's a bit of an oxymoron, isn't it). A very versatile and heavily-armed machine, which according to the museum's sign was called the "whispering death" by the Japanese -- but Wikipedia says this is probably a propaganda legend. In front is a cannon (I assume from a Beaufighter), with a few shells in the magazine. Those things are big.
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Welcome to Military History Carnival 7!

Wars and battles

Let's start at the sharp end of military history: actual combat. To Flanders Fields, 1917 reflects upon the huge scale of the Passchendaele campaign on the Western Front, and how its misery was shared between Germany, Britain and its Empire. The Battlefield Biker leads us through a failed assault against American Indian tribes -- though a successful retreat -- by the US Army in the Washington Territory, in 1858. Naval hiring policies should probably discriminate against drunkards and rebels, or so I infer from Cardinal Wolsey's Today in History post on the Battle of the Kentish Knock in 1652. The previous year, on the other side of England, the Isles of Scilly were also under assault, as Mercurius Politicus narrates in a beautifully illustrated post. And, getting back to the Great War period, Great War Fiction examines a slightly different form of fighting -- a riot by Canadian troops waiting in Wales to be sent home.

Representations

The largest number of posts this month concern representations of war, in various forms. Errol Morris, the documentary maker (no, I didn't know he blogged either) delved deeply into the question of which of two photographs of a road, taken during the Crimean War, came first: the one with cannonballs on the road, or the one without. It seems like a trivial question, but in trying to answer it Morris illuminates the larger question of how historians know anything about the motives of people in the past. (See also Barista's thoughts on Morris's posts.) We don't have to speculate about the motives underlying Ian R. Richardson's fabulous photos taken at an archaeological dig near the site of the First World War, Messines: as Plugstreet tells us, he was trying to recreate the feel of the haunting scenes captured by the great Australian war photographer, Frank Hurley.

Frog in a Well: China examines some pro-Japanese cartoons produced in China in the 1930s -- some well after incidents like the Rape of Nanking, which one would naively expect to have cooled Chinese feelings towards Japan. A Soviet Poster A Day (yes, really!) tells us the story behind a World War Two poster about a famous Soviet sniper, entitled "That's the way to shoot -- every shell is a foe". Or, as one of the commenters suggests, "One shot, one kill."

History Survey recommends four movies about the Second World War, in four different languages; while a Polish blog, Historia i Media (fortunately for me, the post is in English) wonders what the historical value might be of a brand new castle, complete with electricity and modern plumbing.

Memory

UKNIWM blogged about the opening of a major new British war memorial, at Alrewas in Staffordshire. It's unique in that it is devoted to all those military personnel who been killed in the service of their country since the end of the Second World War. As Andrew Keating points out, another novel feature is the space for 16,000 or so extra names, reserved for future deaths.

The purpose of war memorials is to ensure that future generations "never forget". But in some places, people have never been allowed to remember: Clioaudio points us to a documentary aired by al-Jazeera on the problems Spain still has in confronting the brutal legacy of the Civil War. And there are those who remember, because they were there, but have never had their memories recorded: War in the Mediterranean stresses the urgency of getting veterans to recount their stories before it is too late.

Historiography

For want of a better word. Quite possibly the only review of Michael Howard's new book, Liberation or Catastrophe?, to mention Lyotard is that by Investigation of a Dog -- but I'm sold! Civil Warriors has an example of a gendered reading of the letters of a minor Confederate general, but make sure you read the whole of the introductory paragraph first. Actually, reading the first paragraph last (like I did) might be even more fun. More serious is Civil War Memory's report on a lecture by Peter Carmichael on the intellectual roots of two major interpretations of Robert E. Lee (pro-Lee, moralising and "Victorian" vs anti-Lee, revisionist and "modernist"), and why they will never see eye to eye. And Blog Them Out of the Stone Age discusses an article by Richard Betts which questions (but ultimately affirms) the very idea of strategy, and how this might be useful in teaching military history.

Fun and games

War, or at least military history, is not always grim. As evidence, I offer two posts on Xerxes' invasion of Greece in 480 BC. Popcorn & chain mail rightfully mocks the recent movie 300 (which allegedly has something to do with Thermopylae), while the skwib uncovers the lost PowerPoint slides of the battle of Salamis. Coming Anarchy points out that, contrary to many computer games and movies, most pre-modern armies did not use uniforms, making it difficult to tell friend from foe. American Presidents Blog examines the not-so-illustrious sporting career of a future Supreme Allied Commander Europe and US President. And Osprey Publishing Blog reveals what is possibly the least inspiring eve-of-battle speech ever uttered. Well, it probably wasn't funny then, but it is now!

Included in this classification

I couldn't cram these into the above categories, which anyway are completely arbitrary. So, in no particular order: behind AotW looks at a Stetson who fell at Antietam, and traces his family connection to a more famous bearer of that name (think hats). Early Modern Whale looks at a book by Joseph Swetnam, author of The schoole of the noble and worthy science of defence and The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Inconstant Women (sadly, it's the former which is under discussion here). Quid plura? relates an incident in 1945 when a young American chaplain took the initiative to help save some of Germany's past. Thoughts on Military History uncovers a fantastic resource for anyone interested in the history of modern artillery. And bringing up the rear, The DC Traveler recommends an amphibious tour of the US capital's streets and waterways by DUKW -- though they have these in London too, and I have to say I wasn't tempted when I was there recently!

That's all for this edition of the Military History Carnival. I hope you've enjoyed reading it, as I've enjoyed writing it! (Even though it's a singularly non-airminded carnival this time around ...) Thanks to everyone who contributed suggestions.

The next Military History Carnival will be hosted by Gary Smailes on 7 November. Please send him suggestions at garysmailes at gmail dot com or use the form.

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Today is the 95th anniversary of the Sheerness Incident. Sheerness is a town at the mouth of the Medway, on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. For several centuries, it was a dockyard for the Royal Navy (the Nore Mutiny took place nearby in 1797). In 1912, Sheerness was an important part of Britain's naval defences, helping to guard the Thames Estuary -- and hence London -- against a possible German invasion.

On Monday, 14 October 1912, between about 6.30pm and 7pm, many people in Sheerness and in Queenborough, two miles to the south, heard a sound like an aeroplane engine coming from the skies overhead. Sunset was shortly after 6pm, and so it was rapidly getting dark. Some witnesses -- including a Royal Navy lieutenant -- believed they could also make out a red light, and possibly a searchlight, passing to and fro over the town. It was assumed by some townsfolk that the pilot was from the Royal Naval Aerial Service station at nearby Eastchurch, where there was a flight training school;1 perhaps the pilot was in trouble. The aerodrome was alerted by telephone, and flares were lit in an effort to guide the aircraft in. But although the engine sounds were also heard at Eastchurch, nothing was seen. By about 7pm the sound, and the light, was no longer detectable.

Where did the sounds come from? Eastchurch had no aircraft up that night, so it wasn't from there. In fact, night flying was relatively rare at the time: Claude Grahame-White was the first to do it successfully in an aeroplane, in 1910. The world of British aviation in 1912 was a small one, and if a pilot had successfully undertaken a hazardous cross-country night flight it seems unlikely that it would have remained a secret. (An unsuccessful flight, of course, would have been even harder to miss!) Newspapers no longer reported on each and every flight, but weekly aviation magazines seem to have had notices of many of them. For example, Flight reported on flights at Eastchurch by nine different pilots during the week in question, though for 14 October itself only noted that 'Lieut. Briggs was out with passenger on Monday'.2 So it seems unlikely that any British pilot was flying that night over the Isle of Sheppey.
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  1. Short Brothers was also based at Eastchurch at the time, though I've not seen this mentioned in reference to the Sheerness Incident. [↩]
  2. Flight, 19 October 1912, p. 932. [↩]

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St Paul's Cathedral

One week after Westminster Abbey, I visited the other great London church, St Paul's Cathedral. They are very different in form and function. (They are alike in not allowing photography inside, so again I've only got exterior shots. I took some more on an earlier excursion.) Westminster Abbey is medieval and gothic. St Paul's is Renaissance and baroque, one of Christopher Wren's great churches, rebuilt after the Great Fire of London.
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The Invasion of 1910

I recently had the somewhat guilty pleasure of watching Flood, a film (from a novel) about the sudden devastation of London by a massive storm surge -- predicted by a scientist who had long been dismissed as a crank -- which swamps the Thames Barrier, submerges most of the city's landmarks, kills a couple of hundred thousand people and forces most of the rest to evacuate. An even bigger disaster is averted (just in the nick of time, as it happens) and Londoners are left to clean up the mess. All very timely, given the unusually high proportion of England which was under water earlier this year.

Disaster movies are a pretty venerable genre by now (there were at least three films about the Titanic made in the year after it sank). The subset which deals with destruction on the scale of a big city (or larger) -- as opposed to aeroplanes or skyscrapers -- is relatively small, and that concerned, like Flood, with the fate of London specifically is quite small indeed.1 No doubt this is because disaster movies are generally loaded with special effects and therefore are expensive, and as the US market for film is so huge, it makes more financial sense to destroy some American city rather than a British one. So there aren't all that many cinematic depictions of the end of London. But books are much cheaper to make, and in those London has been destroyed many times over.

I've been trying to think of the first time this happened. It's easy enough to find early references to the eventual ruin of London, such as H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895), Richard Jefferies' After London (1885) (in which a neo-medieval adventurer seeks his fortunes amid the city's swampy remains), or Macaulay's New Zealander (1840).2 But those only show London long after its fall, and so, properly speaking, are post-apocalyptic. The actual destruction happens off stage; it is inevitable, something to accept rather than prevent. Other candidates might include science fiction stories like Arthur Conan Doyle's The Poison Belt (1913), wherein the Earth passes through a region of toxic ether, and Professor Challenger and companions take an eerie trip through dead London afterwards.3 Or H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898), with its Martian tripods laying waste to the metropolis with their heat rays. Where else might we look?
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  1. The Day the Earth Caught Fire springs to mind (rather oddly, since I haven't seen it); Day of the Triffids and 28 Days Later too. There must be others though. [↩]
  2. Not actually a novel, a story, a paragraph or even a sentence: merely a few clauses in a book review, referring to some future time 'when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul's.' But the image caught the imagination of many who read and spread it, to the point where it practically became a cliché. See David Skilton, "Tourists at the ruins of London: the metropolis and the struggle for empire", Cercles 17, 93-119. [↩]
  3. Even if the ending is a huge cop-out. [↩]

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Your country needs you

... to send me submissions for the next Military History Carnival! This will be posted at Airminded on 14 October, one week from today. I have a few suggestions already, but need more. Any posts published in the previous month and which involve military history in some way will be considered. From the Carnival's home page:

Military is defined very broadly. It includes all levels of armed conflict — there will be no rigid definition of what is and isn’t a war — and all military experiences during peacetime. At the risk of offending latin purists, it includes navies and air forces as well as armies. Weapons, tactics, strategy, uniforms, insignia, equipment etc are all interesting and important, and so are relationships between war and society, culture, race, gender, sexuality, disability, and the non-human. Preparations for and aftermaths of wars are as significant as the wars themselves. Opposition to war needs to be considered alongside the conduct of war. Representations of war in literature, films, TV, games etc are just as valid objects of study as empirical evidence of reality (although fictional representations should be related to the real world — no fictional universes please).

About the only restriction is that here, history means "before 1 January 2001".

So please nominate posts for inclusion, either by emailing me directly at bholman at airminded dot org, or by using the form.

Image source: London Opinion, 5 September 1914 (I think -- the original magazine cover from which all imitations ultimately derive. The image itself is from World War Pictures).

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But then computers so often don't ...

OK, so earlier today I upgraded my WordPress theme, Tarski, in preparation for an update to WordPress itself. After 3 hours, much cursing and many broken plugins, I mostly got things working and looking the way they were before. Then, about 6 hours later, I noticed that the Similar Posts plugin also wasn't working, so (hoping for a quick fix) I upgraded that to the latest version. This turned out to be a bad idea, because then all pages started showing up completely blank -- including admin ones. Presumably Similar Posts did something bad to the php then: that happens sometimes. So I went in with ftp and deleted Similar Posts. No change. I deleted the old Similar Posts too. Still no change! Now I'm worried that the mysql database has been hosed somehow (which would serve me right, as I decided I couldn't be bothered backing it up earlier in the day). I reverted to the previous version of Tarski, the one I'd been using before I touched anything today. No change. Finally I reverted to a really old version of Tarski, some six months old, and that finally undid the damage. (The WordPress Default theme works as well.)

So the database actually is ok (and is now backed it up, of course ...) But this all makes no sense. It was clearly Similar Posts which caused the whole problem, so why did I have revert Tarski to an ancient version to fix it? Bleh. I was quite happy with Tarski, but the way it's being developed means that I have to rewrite more and more of it in order to make it do what I want. So maybe I'll have to look around for another nice, clean theme.

It might just be some sort of caching thing, or I might have another look tomorrow and figure out what the problem really was, but for the moment things Airminded will not quite be itself until I can do something about it. Apologies for any inconvenience!

Update: fixed now. The problem was some extra code relating to Similar Posts which was residing in Tarski's constants.php file, which explains why I had to go back to an old version of Tarski (when I wasn't using Similar Posts), but not why going back to the previous version of Similar Posts didn't work, when it had been a few minutes earlier ... But as a bonus, in the process of getting Similar Posts to work again, I now understand Tarski's new way of doing things better, so it has a reprieve :)

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

It's 50 years since Sputnik I lifted off. Although I was airminded as a kid, I was much more spaceminded. So 1957 was always a crucial year in my understanding of history back then: it was where the modern age began. (In fact the very first historical work I ever I started -- but never finished! -- was a history of the space race from Sputnik on. I can't have been older than 12 so it's not exactly sophisticated ...)

More than that, to me 1957 was where the future began. A future where humans would spread out into the solar system and then explore the universe beyond. And who knows? Maybe I'd even get to take part in that somehow! That future hasn't quite worked out the way I'd envisaged it -- yet -- but of course, I'm in good company where failing to predict the future is concerned. There's a good article by Michael J. Neufeld in the July/August 2007 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, on Wernher von Braun's proposals for manned orbital battle stations. In the early 1950s, von Braun predicted that these would be used to deploy nuclear weapons in orbit. For example, in a conference paper published in 1951, he wrote that

Our space station could be utilized as a very effective bomb carrier, and for all present-day means of defense, a non-interceptible one.1

and that

The political situation being what it is, with the Earth divided into a Western and an Eastern camp, I am convinced that such a station will be the inevitable result of the present race of armaments.2

Neufeld makes the point that for all his expertise in rocketry -- including leading the V2's development team -- von Braun's obsession with space stations meant that he failed to realise that ballistic missiles actually made a lot more sense as a delivery platform for nuclear weapons, rather than space-launched hypersonic gliders -- a space station being a relatively big and very predictable target, for one thing.3

Von Braun wasn't the only one arguing along those lines. There were others. The science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein co-authored a popular article in 1947 for Collier's Magazine which suggested putting nukes in orbit. In a novel published the following year, Space Cadet, he expanded upon this idea. Now, I read Space Cadet probably a couple of dozen times when I was a kid, but haven't for a long time so I'll have to rely upon the Wikipedia page to explain:

The Space Patrol is entrusted by the worldwide Earth government with a monopoly on nuclear weapons, and is expected to maintain a credible threat to drop them on Earth from orbit as a deterrent against breaking the peace. [...] The cadets are taught that they should renounce their allegiance to their country of origin and replace it by a wider allegiance to humanity as a whole and to all of the sentient species of the Solar System.

It never occurred to me before now, but this is nothing more than the international air force concept, so beloved of liberal internationalists in the 1930s (it was included in the Labour Party's manifesto for the 1935 general election, for example), but now updated for the coming space age! Only now instead of pilots of all nations standing by, ready to drop high explosives on any aggressor nation, it would be astronauts with atom bombs. Plus ça change ... sometimes, anyway.

When I was 12, I understood that Sputnik I was part of a 'Race for Space' between two superpowers, as I put it, but I mainly saw it it as a straightforward -- if impressive -- technical achievement, which the Soviet Union managed to do first. I certainly didn't have much clue about the bigger picture of the Cold War or the historical background to the decision to launch a small sphere into orbit, though. Now it's hard for me to see things in any other way, as all of the above probably demonstrates. But sometimes it's good just to forget about all that context and just appreciate the thing-in-itself.

So I'll end by reverting to age 12 and saying wow, that is just so ace!

  1. Quoted in Michael J. Neufeld, "Wernher von Braun's ultimate weapon", Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, July/August 2007, 53. [↩]
  2. Quoted in ibid. [↩]
  3. But the fact that von Braun was still trying to sell the public on manned space stations in 1965 with no military role beyond reconnaissance suggests that it's more that he just really, really liked space stations, rather than that he wasn't aware of the potential of ballistic missiles. [↩]

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Probably my favourite place to research in London was the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King's College London, where I spent the better part of two weeks digging through several personal archives. It's a very pleasant environment to work in, and the staff were very helpful in accommodating this rude colonial's requests, even at short notice! (Plus they actually sent me the roughly 200 pages of photocopies I ordered; I still haven't got the batch I ordered from the British Library, and quite possibly won't now, since it shouldn't take a month to arrive by airmail ...) KCL lies between Strand and the Victoria Embankment, near Waterloo Bridge; I'd usually take the Tube to Embankment and walk up from there, keeping my eye out for anything interesting along the way ...

Imperial Camel Corps Memorial

This is the Imperial Camel Corps memorial in Victoria Embankment Gardens. I've previously written about a relative who was in the ICC and knew there was a memorial to it in London (in itself a bit odd, as most of them were Australians), which I vaguely thought I should seek out while I was there. Turns out I didn't have to as I stumbled across it completely by chance! It's quite a striking -- though incongruous, amid all the green -- statue, though the photo probably exaggerates the size of it.
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