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In my reprisals article I argue that historians have, for the most part, underestimated popular support during the Blitz for counterbombing of German cities. I think Tom Harrisson, both during the war as head of Mass-Observation and after as author of Living Through the Blitz, had a lot to do with this. But there were no doubt other vectors. One is the contemporary psychological literature. In a discussion of the psychological effects of what he terms 'punishment' or Douhet-style bombing, Robert Pape argues that, as opposed to heavy punishment,

light punishment produces popular anger toward the attacker and, often, demands for reprisals [...] in both World Wars, British civilians who had not experienced heavy air attacks were more likely to favor an aggressive 'Bomb Berlin' policy than those who had.1

This is actually perfectly correct -- as far as it goes: people in blitzed areas were less likely to want reprisals than those in non-blitzed areas. As long as it is understood that a majority of people in blitzed areas still wanted reprisals (or at most were equally split on the question), which is what's usually forgotten.

Now Pape, who is not a historian but a political scientist, doesn't draw on Harrisson or other secondary sources for this point, but instead cites two scientific articles published shortly after the Blitz. So what do they say? The first is by Robert H. Thouless, a psychology lecturer at Cambridge, and appeared in Nature in August 1941. Most of the article is actually about the psychological problems among evacuated children and mothers, but towards the end he discusses the effects of air raids themselves. Here he says:

It was interesting to notice that while people in the most heavily raided areas were more critical and more depressed, they were nevertheless more active in A.R.P. work and saved more money than in less raided areas. They were also more inclined to reject the idea that we should undertake reprisal raids on German towns.2

Again this is probably fine as a general statement. But Thouless doesn't give a source other than 'Investigations in heavily raided areas other than London'.3 Moreover, he was reporting not on his own research but on a general discussion at a British Psychological Society meeting. As scientific evidence we should perhaps not place too much weight on it.

Pape's second source is P. E. Vernon, an education psychologist working at the University of Glasgow. In an much more substantial article than Thouless's (though with the same title!) published in the Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology in October 1941, Vernon drew on reports from more than fifty doctors and psychologists for their observations of the effect of bombing on the population at large, a methodology which he admitted to be not particularly scientific. But for his remarks on reprisals he appears not to have used this data:

Several surveys, including a Gallup poll, show that heavily bombed people are not generally in favor of reprisals. Rather it would seem that the comparatively safe urge the 'Bomb Berlin' policy.4

The 'Gallup poll' is presumably the BIPO opinion poll published in May. The other 'surveys' may include Mass-Observation data, since he says 'The most extensive investigations [of the psychological effects of bombing], most of whose results cannot be published until after the war, are those of T. Harrisson's organization -- Mass Observation'.5 If they did privately share data and ideas, Harrisson's influence may explain why Vernon misinterpreted the BIPO data, since it actually shows that heavily bombed people were, if anything, generally in favour of reprisals.

  1. Robert A. Pape, Bombing to Win: Air Power and Coercion in War (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 26; emphasis in original. [↩]
  2. Robert H. Thouless, 'Psychological effects of air raids", Nature (16 August 1941), 184-5. [↩]
  3. Ibid., 184. [↩]
  4. P. E. Vernon, 'Psychological effects of air-raids', Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 36 (1941), 469. [↩]
  5. Ibid., 457. [↩]

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One painful lesson I learned while seeing my Blitz reprisals article through to press was to stick. To. The. Bloody. Word. Limit! The article as accepted was well over and as a result I caused myself and the editors much grief while we worked to cut it down to an acceptable size. Never again.

Because they stood somewhat apart from the main argument of the article, the first cut I made was to delete two paragraphs addressing Tom Harrisson's theory, in his (generally invaluable) 1978 book Living Through the Blitz, about the demands by the British press for reprisals, which is effectively a conspiracy theory insinuating press manipulation as cover for Bomber Command's area bombing policy. Harrisson was co-founder and wartime head of Mass-Observation, and I think one of the main vectors of the idea that the British people didn't want reprisal bombing of German civilians, especially if they'd been bombed themselves (which as I argue in the article itself is, at best, misleading). In the first deleted paragraph I showed why his conspiracy theory doesn't make sense, and in the second I more tentatively (and much less convincingly, I think) gestured towards an explanation of why he came up with it. In relation to the published article, these paragraphs came just before the conclusion on page 406, and after the discussion of examples from the Mass-Observation archives of exactly the sorts of spontaneous demands of reprisals in blitzed areas that Harrisson explicitly denied ever happened. So these two paragraphs were also intended to help explain why he misrepresented the evidence in this way.

Since they stand on their own fairly well (the reference to Marchant is to the article she published from Coventry), I thought it worth posting the deleted paragraphs here, as a sort of teaser for the real article. I haven't changed the text, except to expand the bibliographic references.
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My peer-reviewed article '"Bomb back, and bomb hard": debating reprisals during the Blitz' has just been published in the Australian Journal of Politics and History, an invited submission for a special issue on the topic 'War and Peace, Barbarism and Civilization in Modern Europe and Its Empires'. It can be downloaded from here. Here's the abstract:

In Britain, popular memory of the Blitz celebrates civilian resistance to the German bombing of London and other cities, emphasising positive values such as stoicism, humour and mutual aid. But the memory of such passive and defensive traits obscures the degree to which British civilian morale in 1940 depended on the belief that if Britain had to 'take it', then Germany was taking it as hard or harder. Contrary to the received historical account, opinion polls, Home Intelligence reports and newspaper letter columns show that a majority of the British supported the reprisal bombing of German civilians by Bomber Command. The wartime reprisals debate was the logical legacy of prewar assumptions about the overwhelming power of bombing; but it has been forgotten because it contradicts the myth of the Blitz.

I'll put up a self-archived version here in a year (if I remember!)

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The Open University's Chris A. Williams (who should be confused with the Chris Williams who comments here frequently, since they are the same person) has done a good thing by developing a nifty online simulation called Beat the Ministry, to accompany a joint OU/BBC television series -- on which Chris is lead academic consultant -- Wartime Farm (see also here and here). Beat the Ministry puts you in charge of planning British agriculture during the Second World War. You get to decide how much land to devote to farming, how many horses to use in ploughing as opposed to tractors, and how much land to allocate to the different types of livestock and crops. There are three rounds corresponding to the early, middle and late war periods. To maximise your score you need to take into account the way these choices interact with each other; for example, barley is good fodder so you probably don't want to skimp on that if you've decided to increase the number of horses used in order to reduce fuel and machine imports... and so on. There are also various crises which you'll need to respond to, such as labour shortages and the Battle of the Atlantic. Beat the Ministry is nicely done (especially the mock newsreel introductions), fun to play and should prove useful for exposing students to the kinds of decisions and factors that the real Ministry of Food had to weigh. Give it a go!

I haven't managed to actually beat the Ministry yet. But one thing I have learned: don't rely on the Australians.

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Well, not really, because it didn't exist. But never let the facts get in the way of a good title, I say. But it does mean I have to explain what I mean.

The real V-weapons developed and used by Germany in the Second War War were the V-1 flying bomb and the V-2 ballistic missile, which are well known, and the V-3 multi-chamber cannon which is not. About ten thousand V-1s were launched towards London between June and October 1944; by the time their launch sites had been overrun by the Allied forces in France the longer-ranged V-2 was in operation, and was used to bombard London and south-east England until 27 March 1945. (The last V-1 strike on Britain was actually two days later; this was a long-range variant.) The V-3 was never fired at London but two smaller-scale versions were used against Luxembourg.

V-weapon is from the German Vergeltungswaffe: reprisal weapon. Their use against London was intended as a reprisal for the British bombing of German cities. This was something that had been threatened by Nazi propaganda many times. For example, after the start of Bomber Command's campaign against Berlin in November 1943, a spokesman for the German Foreign Ministry said:

Germany will now use her secret weapon as revenge for the R.A.F. raids.1

On the one hand, Germany did not 'now use her secret weapon' on this occasion, nor on most of the others when similar threats were issued. On the other, it did have secret reprisal weapons in development and they were eventually used. The threats were not completely empty, but their constant repetition made them dubious.

One of the last of these threats emerged in late February 1945 and involved a so-called death ray (and an offensive use at that, not a defensive one as I have argued is more characteristic of the concept):

Latest German secret weapon is a V-bomb which, will release 'death-rays' sound waves of very high frequency which decompose living tissue -- reports Stockholm correspondent of the British United Press.

Hundreds of these bombs, it is reported, are being built in underground factories.

Germans in Berlin and Stockholm are now mysteriously hinting that they will use these bombs if the Germans still retain their V-bases east of the Rhine.2

Other reports suggested that 'the middle of March' had been set 'as the launching date for the new bomb'.3 It sounds like the idea was that the V-bomb would replace the high explosive warhead of the V-2, which was still in action.

Note that these death rays are actually sound waves, which is unusual as they tend to be described as some form of electromagnetic radiation. Apparently Germany did experiment with sonic weapons but it's hard to see how a sound bomb could work as described here. There were other possibilities for superscientific weapons: a rather good newspaper article about the sound bombs also discusses alpha rays, electron rays and dirty bombs in addition to electromagnetic death rays (including radio or 'Hertzian' waves), and notes rumours about German and Japanese research.4

Oddly, this article was published in Australia, as were all of the press reports I've cited here. It's actually quite hard to find references to German death rays in the British press. Perhaps censorship is the reason, whether official or self (though many of the vaguer reprisal threats were published). Or maybe it's just that Australian newspapers weren't hit so hard by newsprint shortages (most British newspapers were mere shadows of their prewar selves by this time) so needed more filler material. Maybe it was simply thought too ridiculous. But the sound bomb death ray threat did make its way to the British people somehow, as the diary entry of London woman Ruby Thompson for 9 March 1945 attests:

Hitler promises to annihilate us with a Death Ray after March 15 He is supposed to have visited Berlin today, which we have bombed now for seventeen nights in succession. Oh, this war! Who will survive it!

Whether she or anyone else believed the death ray threat is hard to say. But with the V-2s still raining down it would have been hard to dismiss completely out of hand.

  1. Advocate (Burnie), 26 November 1943, 1. [↩]
  2. Courier-Mail (Brisbane), 27 February 1945, 1. [↩]
  3. Mail (Adelaide), 10 March 1945, 6. [↩]
  4. Ibid. [↩]

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The Sykes Plan (or Memo, I'll use them interchangeably here) is an infamous document, at least among those airpower historians interested in the early RAF. Major-General Frederick Sykes was the second Chief of the Air Staff (CAS), that is the professional head of the RAF; the Plan is infamous because it cost him his job. He took up the position less than two weeks after the RAF was formed on 1 April 1918, succeeding Major-General Trenchard who had had an unhappy tenure due to clashes with the Air Minister, Lord Rothermere (who ended up resigning himself). Sykes was a key figure in the prewar RFC, commanding its Military Wing, and had played an important role as chief of staff (and sometimes commander) of the RFC in France. After that he had his own field command, of the RNAS in the Dardanelles. Thereafter he served in a number of non-aviation administrative roles, organising the Machine Gun Corps and serving as General Wilson's deputy at the Supreme War Council.

Sykes was CAS for most of the dramatic events of 1918: he took charge when the German spring offensive was at its most threatening and was still in office when the Armistice was signed in November. When peace threatened, Sykes had to consider what form the postwar RAF would take. With the help of Lieutenant-Colonel P. R. C. Groves, his friend and Director of Flying Operations, by early December he produced a 'Memorandum by the Chief of the Air Staff on air-power requirements of the Empire', AKA the Sykes Memo.1 It proved far too ambitious, and more to the point, costly. Churchill, the new Air Minister, needed economy and was not impressed. Sykes was out and Trenchard was back in, and this time he stayed there for more than a decade.

So how did Sykes cut his own throat? Above all he wanted a big RAF, keeping as much as possible of its wartime strength. In fact, at first he proposed 348 squadrons, which was optimistic considering that in March 1918 the RFC and RNAS combined had only 168 squadrons.2 However, I haven't seen that plan and I wonder if those 348 squadrons were actually intended to be mostly cadres in peacetime, say flights rather than whole squadrons, to facilitate rapid expansion in an emergency. In that case it might only be about the same size as the 1918 RAF (though of course the extra aircraft and men required would need to be got from somewhere). The final version of the Plan did use cadre squadrons for just this purpose. But even so it was still larger than Trenchard's more palatable proposal of only 82 squadrons.
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  1. F. H. Sykes, From Many Angles: An Autobiography (London: George G. Harrap & Company, 1942), 558-74. [↩]
  2. John Robert Ferris, Men, Money and Diplomacy: The Evolution of British Strategic Foreign Policy, 1919-26 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 68; John James, The Paladins: A Social History of the RAF up to the Outbreak of World War II (London and Sydney: Macdonald, 1990), 243. [↩]

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Flight reported on 16 March 1912 that 'A "Mystery" Aeroplane' was recently seen flying over Warmley, near Bristol:

MANY of the residents of Warmley were considerably excited, says a local paper, at the imposing spectacle of a splendidly illuminated aeroplane passing over the village at a tremendous rate. Certain other people at Bristol and neighbouring places apparently saw the same spectacle, but their version of the story is that a brilliant meteor passed over the district. Aeroplanes are getting to be very speedy birds nowadays, but speeds enough to render machines incandescent have not yet been realised. Will some kind pilot go down to Warmley and show the inhabitants what an aeroplane is really like?

The Observatory, an astronomical journal, reported the same sighting in similarly sarcastic terms:

[...] witness the following account of a large triple-headed fireball, visible on March 6 at 8h 5m, which passed over Ireland, ending in the Irish Sea near the Isle of Man. I am indebted to Mr. Denning for the following newspaper extract:--

Excitement was caused among residents of Warmley on Wednesday evening at the imposing spectacle of a splendidly-illuminated aeroplane rate, and came from the direction of Bath and went on towards Gloucester.

Tremendous indeed! But we are prepared for anything now-a-days.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to find the newspaper account apparently used by both Flight and the Observatory (quite possibly the Bristol Western Daily News, which the BNA has but not for 1912). At least the Observatory provides a date, 6 March 1912, and, if its identification is accepted, a time about two hours after sunset so quite dark ('8h 5m' would be 8.05pm; before 1 January 1925 astronomers began their days at noon rather than midnight).
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Yorkshire Post, 1 June 1942, 1

Picking up where I left off nearly a month ago, let's turn to the reaction of the provincial press to the thousand bomber raid on Cologne on the night of 30 May 1942. The Yorkshire Post's main front page story on 1 June 1942 (above) concentrated on the operation itself. It claimed that 'CONSIDERABLY more than 1,000 R.A.F. bombers -- probably 1,250 aircraft' -- were involved, which is one of highest estimates I've seen after the Daily Mirror's 'MORE THAN 1,500' (of course, the true number was little over a thousand). In tactical terms, 'The plan for saturating the defences of Cologne was an undoubted success':

'We had the guns absolutely foxed,' a pilot said. Hundreds of others had the same report to make. Nightfighters were seen, but never enough to interfere with the attack.

An accompanying article by the paper's military correspondent added that 'The Germans were out-manœuvred at interception work [...] the Luftwaffe, short of fighters, failed'. The first leading article (2) pointed out that RAF losses, at 44 aircraft, were proportionately lower than those suffered by the Luftwaffe in its most recent raids ('on east and south-east coastal areas on Friday [29 May] night'), 7 out of 50.
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At Investigations of a Dog, Gavin Robinson (as seen on Twitter!) has started post-blogging the letters of Nehemiah Wharton, a sergeant in the Parliamentary army during the English Civil War. The first letter is up: 16 August 1642. Gavin provides context and interpretation, but he's also transcribing the letters in full since the published transcriptions apparently aren't very good. Even without aeroplanes it should be interesting!

It's been a while since I've noted any new post-blogging initiatives here. The concept is alive and well, but I think it has really taken off on Twitter. I follow a number of 'post-tweeting' accounts there, mostly military in nature: @the_60s_at_50, @missilecrisis62, @gallipoli_live, @ukwarcabinet, and @RealTimeWWII. The last two are my favourites, and are long term projects: the former (run by the National Archives) is up to this day in 1942, the latter this day in 1940. Here are the last three tweets from each, to give a flavour of what they do:

Even more than post-blogging, post-tweeting can convey a sense of the immediacy of events as they happened. But post-blogging is better for providing context and interpretation. There's a place for both.

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Some common themes here, more or less unintentional...

Pam Oliver. Raids on Australia: 1942 and Japan's Plans for Australia. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010. The title is a bit misleading. Oliver examines Japanese activities in Australia, commercial, government, and individual, in the decades before 1942, as well as Australian government and popular suspicions of Japanese espionage and hostile intentions. Not a believer in the 'he's coming south' myth, I'm glad to see, though surprisingly she doesn't seem to cite Peter Stanley on this.

Michael Swords and Robert Powell, with Clas Svahn, Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, Bill Chalker, Barry Greenwood, Richard Thieme, Jan Aldrich, and Steve Purcell. UFOs and Government: A Historical Enquiry. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2012. Not your usual UFO book by any means. In fact it's not about UFOs as such, but rather the way governments have responded to UFOs: a perfectly legitimate line of historical inquiry! The focus is inevitably on the United States and from 1947 on. But there are also chapters on Australia, Spain and France. Of most interest to me are the ones on the foo fighters of the Second World War and even more so, on the ghost flyers of 1932-4 and the ghost rockets of 1946. It's very hard to get sober, reliable accounts of these episodes so I'm very glad to have this book.

H. F. B. Wheeler and A. M. Broadley. Napoleon and the Invasion of England: The Story of the Great Terror. Stroud: Nonsuch, 2007 [1908]. Covers both French plans and British fears. I'm sure it's been overtaken by more recent scholarship but it uses a lot of primary sources, which extends the shelf life. Moreover I'm intrigued by the fact that it was first published in the middle of another invasion scare, this time with the Kaiser as the bogey; the introduction even refers to the contemporary debate about whether the proposed Channel Tunnel would (literally) undermine Britain's security.