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[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.]

The current conflict in Gaza has attracted much media attention for the so-called Twitter war being fought between the IDF and Hamas, or, more precisely, between the @IDFSpokesperson and @AlqassamBrigade accounts and their respective followers. Insults are traded back and forth, photos and videos of rocket attacks and air strikes and their purported results (sometimes quite horrific, be warned) shared and retweeted many times over, bloggers take up virtual arms on behalf of one side or the other. @IDFSpokesperson tweets a graphic claiming that 'Hamas' goal is to kill civilians'; @AlqassamBrigade one claiming 'In Children's Day: Israel killed 26 Palestinian children!' This present form of propaganda war is sometimes (not always) presented as something new. Certainly the speed of communication and the ease by which it can be accessed by anyone who is interested is remarkable, but nothing ever looks completely new to a historian.

During the Blitz, for example, British newspapers and magazines were the medium by which both British and German propaganda messages regarding the mutual bombing war were passed to readers so that they could judge for themselves. In September 1940, The Listener noted that 'German broadcasts continue to claim that only military objectives are being attacked' by the Luftwaffe.1 By contrast, the Zeesen radio station was reported to have claimed that:

British pilots have received instructions to avoid carefully any kind of military objective and to concentrate instead on terrorising the German civilian population.2

As it was broadcast in English, this message was clearly directed at the British people themselves. Normally only those who owned a radio and were listening in on the right frequency at the right time would have received it, perhaps along with a few others by word of mouth. By reprinting it, The Listener was sharing it with a much larger audience (circulation was around 50,000 in 1939 but had risen to 129,000 by 1945). By reprinting it without editorial comment, it was trusting its readers to draw the right conclusions.
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  1. Listener, 19 September 1940, 404. [↩]
  2. Ibid. [↩]

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J. M. Spaight was a lawyer by training and a civil servant by profession, and as was such not generally prone to flights of fancy. His prewar books are scholarly and judicious compilations of various opinions and precedents regarding aerial warfare. But his wartime writing, such as The Sky's the Limit (1940) and Bombing Vindicated (1944), was much more populist, even propagandist, in tone (while never quite dispensing with the references, for which I am grateful). Volcano Island (1943) seems to have taken him the farthest from his comfort zone, if only in the striking, if overwrought, framing device: Britain as a volcanic island with Bomber Command's airfields as volcanoes (with more than a touch of Old Testament wrath in there as well):

War came to it [Britain], war horrible and overwhelming. Enemies rose up against it. The men of the evil cities which forge the arms of destruction encompassed it. Its freedom and its very existence were threatened.

Then it was that its inhabitants made their great decision. Those forges of Satan, they said, must be destroyed. But how? One way only seemed to be possible. It was the way of Vulcan. They would call Vulcan to their aid -- Vulcan who was not only the maker of arms but the master-builder of volcanoes. Volcanoes, they knew, do something more than send forth streams of lava and clouds of steam. They hurl molten blocks far and wide -- blocks that are called volcanic bombs. They noted the word. It was their inspiration. They would make their island volcanic. From it should be hurled the bombs that would strike their assailants down.1

Fortunately Spaight doesn't go on like this for the whole book. Instead he looks at various aspects of the bomber offensive against Germany as of late 1942 (he alludes to Torch and El Alamein in one place but clearly the bulk of the text was written in September-October that year). As this was a critical phase of the bomber war, with Bomber Command starting to find its feet and regain its confidence, and the USAAF just beginning to make its own contributions, so it's worth having a look at how Spaight chose to portray (and promote) it to the reading public.
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  1. J. M. Spaight, Volcano Island (London: Geoffrey Bles, 1943), 9. [↩]

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Bomber Command raid on Emden, 31 March 1941

One factlet I've enjoyed dropping on the heads of students is the origin of the word 'blockbuster'. Now it is widely understood to mean a hugely successful movie (as well as a once-highly successful video rental chain -- remember those?). It has even been claimed that this is the original sense of the word: supposedly, in the 1920s a blockbuster was 'a movie whose long line of customers could not be contained on a single city block'. But with Google Books and online newspaper archives it's easy to disprove this etymology: blockbuster does not appear before 1942 and then it referred to a bomb which was so big it could destroy a whole city block.
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When I started my PhD, I hoped to examine fictional representations of aerial bombardment in plays as well as in novels, newspapers and other written sources, but had to abandon this intention because I found very few which discussed the next war in the air in any detail. There are a few where it appears in the background, such as Karel Čapek's Power and Glory (1938), which is much more about poison gas than aerial warfare. The threat of bombing is more important in Wings Over Europe (1928), written by Robert Nichols and Maurice Browne, though this is more of a throwback to older narratives of the world being held to ransom by a league of scientists which possesses the ultimatum weapon (in this case the Guild of United Brain Workers has atomic bombs in aeroplanes circling the world's capitals) rather than owing anything to contemporary airpower theory.

But, as I found with cinematic representations, there were some plays about the knock-out blow. One such is Night Sky, which premiered at London's prestigious Savoy Theatre on 6 January 1937 under the direction of Maurice Elvey.1 The producer was Clifford Whitley; the playwright was L. du Garde Peach, better known (at least to some) as the author of Oliver Cromwell: An Adventure from History (1963).
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  1. As it happens, a decade earlier Elvey had directed the film version of Noel Pemberton Billing's play, High Treason, which also featured the danger of aerial bombardment -- though as he was apparently the most prolific British film director ever we shouldn't read too much into this. [↩]

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[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.]

Washington Post, 2 June 1918, SM1

New York waited for an air raid in June 1918. For thirteen nights from 4 June, much of the city was blacked out to avoid giving German pilots any assistance in locating targets to bomb. The New York Times reported the following day that:

Electric signs and all lights, except street lamps and lights in dwellings, were out in this city last night in compliance with orders issued by Police Commissioner Enright at the suggestion of the War Department, as a precaution against a possible attack by aircraft from a German submarine. A system for signalling by sirens in case the approach of aircraft should be detected was devised by the police and signal officers yesterday to warn persons to get under cover.1

While coastal and anti-aircraft batteries readied their guns, aviators went up to check the effectiveness of the blackout, resulting in its extension. After the third night, it was reported that

The lower part of the city was in almost complete darkness, the number of street lights being reduced and those that burned being dimmer. Every downtown skyscraper was almost entirely dark, the shades in the rooms which were lighted being drawn.2

City officials met to discuss other civil defence measures, including air raid sirens and shelters. A particular concern was the evacuation of skyscrapers during business hours:

It was pointed out that in case of such a raid in the daytime the danger of loss of life from panic in swarming down the stairs and into elevators would be greater than the danger of bomb explosions.3

It was decided that the best thing to do would be to designate certain floors as evacuation points. These plans were probably not put into effect, however, as the last night of blackout was 16 June; on 17 June all police precincts were ordered to 'Resume normal lighting throughout the city until further orders'.4 There was evidently some embarrassment now, as the War Department and the New York Police Department each claimed that the blackout was the other's idea. In any event, the exercise doesn't seem to have been repeated.
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  1. New York Times, 5 June 1918, 1. See also Paul G. Halpern, A Naval History of World War I (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1994), 431. [↩]
  2. New York Times, 7 June 1918, 2. [↩]
  3. Ibid., 15 June 1918, 6. [↩]
  4. Ibid., 18 June 1918, 24. [↩]

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Neil Arnold. Shadows in the Sky: The Haunted Airways of Britain. Stroud: The History Press, 2012. A compilation of, mostly, strange things seen in the sky over Britain. Everything from dragons, fish, battles, and UFOs to, naturally, phantom airships (and ghost aircraft, as in actual ghosts). Lots of interesting details but not much in the way of references.

David Clarke. The UFO Files: The Inside Story of Real-life Sightings. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Second edition. By contrast, though this is also aimed at a popular audience it's well-referenced, mostly to files held by the National Archives. Indeed, it's published in association with and on behalf of the National Archives, with which Clarke, who lectures in journalism at Sheffield Hallam, has been working closely to secure the release of formerly classified UFO files. Aaand there's good coverage of phantom airships, which is not surprising since Clarke was one of the first people to investigate them seriously.

Paul Dickson. Sputnik: The Shock of the Century. New York: Walker & Company, 2001. As the title suggests, this focuses on the psychological responses to Sputnik in America, more than the technological and political ones (though those are covered too). I remember hearing good things about this book when it first came out but never got around to getting it; today I found it in a bargain bookshop so it wasn't a hard purchase to justify.

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What was the response to the Canterbury Baedeker raids? There was actually surprisingly little direct comment in the British press, but the major theme was to reaffirm that British raids on German cities were not reprisals but attacks on legitimate targets; whereas German raids on British cities were not even reprisals but merely spite. In a leading article, the Times, said of the RAF's attack on Cologne that 'the airmen who demolished military targets hard by were able, by German admission, to spare the cathedral', whereas

The authors of the so-called 'reprisal' raid on Canterbury, having for its sole objective the destruction of historic buildings of great beauty, stand self-condemned.1

Similarly, in the opinion of the Western Daily Press:

While it is easy to perceive a poetic justice in what Germany is now going through, it is not for the purpose of exacting vengeance that the mammoth raids of the R.A.F. are being conducted. Unlike the Germans, who make targets of our cathedrals, we are not interested in destroying the antiquities of the Reich. But we are interested in the centres of German war production, and it against these that the heaviest onslaughts will be directed.2

For the Gloucester Journal, while Bomber Command's attacks are indeed the 'fulfilment of the open warning, long since given, that every ton of bombs dropped on Britain shall be returned in ten-fold measure to the Hun', they 'are much more than mere reprisals [...] They are part, an integral and essential part, of the vital battle of supplies, by which the ultimate issue of the war will be decided'.3 The Bishop of London, Geoffrey Fisher, speaking before the London Diocesan Conference, thought the RAF's raids justified:

Canterbury and Cologne had each in its own country a very special place in religious life and sentiment. Canterbury had no military significance; Cologne, as a centre of war industries, had, and its destruction on a large scale was legitimate and a legitimate cause for satisfaction.

At least William Temple, the Archbishop of Canterbury, while also not doubting that the RAF's attacks were legitimate -- here speaking specifically of Lübeck and Rostock -- added that 'proper satisfaction must always be accompanied by distress of soul at the misery and suffering inflicted thereby upon thousands of homes'.4
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  1. The Times, 3 June 1942, 5. [↩]
  2. Western Daily Press (Bristol), 3 June 1942, 3. [↩]
  3. Gloucester Journal, 6 June 1942, 6. [↩]
  4. The Times, 9 June 1942, 2. [↩]

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On 1 April 1909, the citizens of Pittsburg (between 1891 and 1911 the 'h' was omitted) were the victims of a rather cruel April Fool's joke. An afternoon edition of one of the city's newspapers (the Pittsburg Dispatch reported the story so probably wasn't the hoaxer) informed them that Japan had invaded the United States:

The report reached Pittsburg about 2 o'clock this afternoon [1 April 1909] through the medium of the early edition of a facetious afternoon which appeared on the street with a flaring red line, 'Japanese Strike Awful Blow to America an [sic] April 1. Japs Invade America, Destroy Fleets, Capture Cities, Slay Inhabitants and Make April 1 an Awful Day in History.'1

The scenario was that a Japanese fleet had bombarded and destroyed San Francisco and Oakland, as well as sinking American ships and landing ground forces. In addition, 'gigantic aerial Japanese monsters' -- presumably meaning airships (though you never know) -- 'were crossing the Rockies, hurling bombs on the earth below and leaving devastation and ruin in their wake'.2 A later bulletin brought the news that recent president Theodore Roosevelt had deposed the captain of the Hamburg (which was taking him to safari in Kenya), and had turned the ship around to bring help to his stricken nation.

The hoax led to dramatic scenes on the streets of Pittsburg:

Within half an hour after the 'news' appeared upon the streets the down town thoroughfares were black with people. Smithfield street, in front of the publication office of the paper was one seething mass of humanity, fighting and struggling to get within reading distance of the bulletin boards [...] So great had the crowd become at this time that extra police had been called to keep order. Men clawed at each other, tore clothes and fought.3

A police detective named George Cole even began recruiting his colleagues into 'a volunteer military company'.3 Others didn't want to wait so long for the violence to start:

[...] one lone Chinaman sauntered down the street. He was not a Japanese, but he was yellow, and the mob was in a mood to vent its spite. But John Chinaman saw them coming and he is possibly running yet.3

The crowds eventually got the idea that they'd been hoaxed after the constant repetition of the date, and then dissipated.
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  1. Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, 12 May 1909, 5. It was reprinted in full in several New Zealand newspapers: e.g., Evening Post (Wellington), 19 May 1909, 2. It also appeared in truncated form in an Australian newspaper, which is where I originally found it: Queenslander (Brisbane), 29 May 1909, 10. [↩]
  2. Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, 12 May 1909, 5. [↩]
  3. Ibid. [↩] [↩] [↩]

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[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.]

In the published version of his 2008 Lord Trenchard Memorial Lecture, Richard Overy concluded that now

air power is projected for its potential political or moral impact. In Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan it is the political dividend that has been central to the exercise of air power, just as it was when Trenchard’s Independent Force flew against German cities in 1918 with the hope that a demoralised urban population might pressure the German government to make peace. In this sense it might be possible to argue, without stretching the history too far, that the RAF has begun to forge a new sense of identity in the past two decades more compatible with the traditions of Trenchardism.1

My interest here is in that last word, 'Trenchardism'. Overy nowhere defines it -- in fact, it's the only time it occurs in his article -- but as an airpower historian I have a pretty good idea what he means, despite the fact that it's actually a relatively uncommon term. Marshal of the Royal Air Force (as he ended up) Lord Trenchard is well-known for his belief in strategic bombing as a war-winning weapon, particularly through its effects on morale, and as the RAF's Chief of the Air Staff from 1919 to 1930 he was in a position to promote it. This sense of Trenchardism, something like Douhetism, seems straightforward enough, and it's the sense in which I've encountered it in the secondary literature.2 But here I'm interested in other uses of this word Trenchardism: specifically the way it is used in a a Wikipedia article of that name which was created recently by Jo Pugh of The National Archives, who invites additions and comments (as discussed on Twitter).3 There, Trenchardism is taken beyond simply an enthusiasm for bombing, indeed beyond the military sphere entirely. The dilemma is that in so doing it risks diluting Trenchardism past the point of usefulness. But equally, it highlights a contemporary understanding of Trenchardism which is very different to that we understand now. Are they reconcilable? And if not, which should we prefer?
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  1. Richard Overy, 'Identity, politics and technology in the RAF's history', RUSI Journal 153 (2008), 74-7. Thanks to Ross Mahoney for this reference. [↩]
  2. E.g. 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), 239, 291. [↩]
  3. I won't here discuss the question of whether Wikipedia is an appropriate place for original research. See also Richard Jenson, 'Military history on the electronic frontier: Wikipedia fights the War of 1812', Journal of Military History 76 (2012), 1165-82. [↩]

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I'm honoured to have been asked to be a member of the new Society for Military History Blog. The other members are Lieutenant Colonel Robert Bateman, Mark Grimsley, Jamel Ostwald, and Brian Sandberg. I've been involved in a couple of previous group blogs; this one is obviously more focused in topic (albeit 'military history' is not particularly narrow!) and will also be more structured in the sense that we'll be sticking to a schedule, with a post every couple of days. It's good to see the SMH taking advantage of social media to promote academic military history and I'll be doing my best to help it do so.