Adelaide (AKA 'Radelaide') has more to offer than transport museums, of course. On my last day there I had a look at the South Australian Museum, as well as some of the nearby sights. This copy of a Venus by Antonio Canova was apparently somewhat controversial when presented to the city in 1892, though she seems fairly demure today. Depending on the angle.
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David S. Bird. Nazi Dreamtime: Australian Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2012. An Australian equivalent of Richard Griffiths' Fellow Travellers of the Right, though this covers the Second World War period as well. The title isn't an affectation: it seems that the Aboriginal idea of the dreamtime was appropriated by pro-Nazis here as part of an attempt to forge a distinctively Australian fascism.
Jeremy Black. Avoiding Armageddon: From the Great War to the Fall of France, 1918-1940. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Black must be one of the most productive historians in history; this is the sixth book of his I've bought and that's less than 5% of the number of works listed on his LibraryThing page. Some of it doubtless recycled and I'm sure he has an army of research assistants, but still! This one is closer to my interests than most of his other books. It's a synoptic look at the anticipation of war in the 1920s and 1930s: how governments and militaries (primarily) digested the lessons of the First World War as well as the minor conflicts which came along in the interim. Black makes an effort not to be Anglo- or even Eurocentric: there's a chapter on war in the Far East and a couple each on imperial wars and third world wars. There's also a chapter on airpower, which looks like a decent overview, if necessarily brief given the scope. I must, however, query how he came to cite Neville Parton's The Evolution and Impact of Royal Air Force Doctrine 1919-1939 as a 2011 publication, when it hasn't been published even now; in fact the publisher is currently saying September 2013.
A very long time ago, I wrote a post about the claim that this (here, in cropped form) truly iconic image of the Blitz was a German propaganda fake. The claim was made by Gazza, a Millwall FC fan who maintains a website about the history of the club; and the basis for his claim was that the former Millwall home ground, the Old Den, is apparently missing the roof built over its northern terrace in 1938. Since the photograph was purportedly taken by the Luftwaffe in 1940, it must therefore be a fake. After looking at it and thinking about it far too much, I went back and forth on the issue several times while writing the post, and several more times during the ensuing discussion in the comments; ultimately, I tentatively agreed with Gazza that it was indeed a fake. But since there's only so much that can be told from the image itself, the only way I could see to resolve the question would be for somebody to go into the archives and look at its context and provenance.
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Dr Beachcombing of Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog kindly dropped me a line to alert me to his post about Public Service Broadcasting, a British music duo who draw on old propaganda and information films for inspiration and samples. A number of these are from the Second World War period, including 'Spitfire', 'London Can Take It', 'Dig For Victory', and 'Lit Up'. My favourite is the one above, 'If War Should Come'. Based on the 1939 GPO film of the same name, despite/because of the remixing and the electronica it is nicely evocative of the shadow of the bomber.
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After the AHA, I stayed in Adelaide for a few days to see the sights. I have a bit of a thing for maritime museums, so the South Australian Maritime Museum at Port Adelaide was an obvious choice. It became even more obvious when I discovered that the National Railway Museum and the South Australian Aviation Museum were both within easy walking distance of the Maritime Museum!
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Operation Millennium was the RAF's first 'thousand bomber raid', on Cologne on the night of 30 May 1942. By making a maximum effort and by using aircraft and aircrews from training units (since the Admiralty did not consent to the diversion of Coastal Command aircraft), Air Vice-Marshal Harris was able to scrounge a total of 1047 bombers, more than twice the usual number Bomber Command alone was able to field on any given night. While the intention was certainly to hurt Germany and to try out new tactics, Millennium was mostly a propaganda operation -- hence the otherwise arbitrary choice of the magic thousand. Since the heavy April raids on Lübeck and Rostock had gained very favourable press coverage, Harris wanted to follow up with a very big show indeed. So while I wasn't able to do the full post-blog of Millennium (or rather the second round of Baedeker raids which it provoked), here I will at least scan the British press reaction to see how successful Harris was in achieving his domestic objectives.
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On 17 July 1917, the London Gazette published a proclamation by George V:
We, out of Our Royal Will and Authority, do hereby declare and announce that as from the date of this Our Royal Proclamation Our House and Family shall be styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor, and that all the descendants in the male line of Our said Grandmother Queen Victoria who are subjects of these Realms, other than female descendants who may marry or may have married, shall bear the said Name of Windsor.1
Now, this was only ten days after the second Gotha raid on London, and just over a month after the first Gotha raid.2 These air raids took place in broad daylight with little interference from British air defences, and between them killed more than two hundred people, including eighteen children at the Poplar Infants School. One result, eventually, was the Royal Air Force; a more immediate one was anti-German rioting in several London suburbs. What I've often wondered is whether the House of Windsor was another result, because before the proclamation of 17 July it used to be known as the House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha.3 Did the Gothas kill the Saxe-Coburg-Gothas?
The Wikipedia article on the House of Windsor does seem to imply that this was the case, but we can do better than Wikipedia. Ian Castle says:
The [7 July] raid brought a wide variety of reactions. Sections of the bombed population turned against immigrants in their midst, considering many with foreign names to be 'Germans'. Riots broke out in Hackney and Tottenham where mobs wrecked immigrant houses and shops. Moreover, such was the anti-German feeling that four days later King George V (of the Royal House of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha) issued a proclamation announcing that the Royal family name had changed to Windsor.4
Similarly, A. D. Harvey writes:
Ten days after the air raid King George V changed the family name of the royal dynasty from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor -- the fact that German heavy bombers were also called Gotha was an unfortunate coincidence which obviously could not be allowed to persist [...]5
And likewise Ian Beckett:
[After the Gotha raids] There were riotous assaults on allegedly German-owned property in the East End and the affair not only played decisive role [sic] in the establishment of the Smuts Committee -- and, therefore, the ultimate creation of the Royal Air Force in April 1918 -- but also persuaded King George V to change his dynastic name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Windsor.6
So there are histories which claim that the Gotha raids played a significant and perhaps decisive role in convincing the monarchy to drop the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha name. But all of these discussions are quite general, and none quote any primary sources on this point. Moreover, they are all by military historians, for whom (like me) it might be obvious to look for such a connection. Unfortunately, more detailed accounts, written by historians of the monarchy, do not seem to back them up. In particular, it looks like the search for a new name for the Royal Family began before the Gotha raids took place.
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Michael Molkentin. Flying the Southern Cross: Aviators Charles Ulm and Charles Kingsford Smith. Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2012. Molkentin's first book, Fire in the Sky, was an excellent history of the Australian Flying Corps; and this one looks promising too (not to mention the two he's got planned, and he's still got a PhD to finish!) He seems to have the knack for writing accessible history informed by solid research. This one is profusely illustrated too, and focuses on the epic 1928 trans-Pacific flight by Ulm (whose logbook features heavily) and Kingsford Smith.
David Stevenson. With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918. London: Penguin, 2012. I've had 1918 on the brain recently, so buying this was a, um, no-brainer. There are at least two things to like here: that by looking at the whole year it will become apparent that the 'Year of Victory' didn't look that way for most of it; and that it's not only or even mostly a battle narrative, but also looks at 1918 in its other aspects such as the naval war and the home fronts.
Last week, the Australian Historical Association held its 31st annual conference, hosted by the University of Adelaide. The last time I was at an AHA was in 2008 (I didn't have to go far, since it was in Melbourne); it seems to have got bigger since then. Around four hundred delegates, if memory serves; up to nine concurrent sessions as well as three smaller, parallel conferences -- that's as big as history conferences get in Australia. If anything it was too big. There was an embarrassment of riches and it wasn't possible to see everything of interest; but that's to be expected (though it would have helped if the sessions were properly streamed by subject). The real problem with big conferences, I find, is that it makes the whole thing a bit fragmented. When you chat to someone in the coffee break, you probably haven't gone to many of the same sessions, let alone each other's. It's harder to get an overall sense of what's going on (though Twitter does help now). So I think I prefer the smaller, more specialist conferences and workshops. That said, it was still an absorbing week of history and well worth attending. Here are some of the highlights (for another attendee's perspective, see here, here, here and here).
There wasn't much aviation history going on, except for Erin Ihde's (New England) paper on Biggles in Australia -- which sadly I couldn't attend! But there was quite a lot of military history. Ashleigh Gilbertson (Adelaide) looked at the dedication the Tomb of the Unknown Australian Soldier in Canberra in 1993, and asked why then and not, say, in the early 1920s when the idea was first proposed. The usual answer, and one which I probably would have given myself, is that it had to do with Paul Keating's republican push, but Gilbertson argued that he played no part in the process. Instead it was a confluence of factors which made it possible by the early 1990s (for example, the principle in the world wars, that Australian soldiers would be buried near where they fell, was abandoned from Vietnam on). Christina Twomey (Monash) rather provocatively suggested that feminism 'saved' Anzac Day, which by the early 1980s appeared to be dying along with the diggers. But, she argued, feminist antiwar protests at Anzac Day ceremonies gave great copy to the press, which portrayed the women as extremists and fuelled the determination of veterans and their families to carry on. Caroline Adams (South Australia) looked at Australian nursing in the Boer War. It took some time for them to even be allowed into the rear area hospitals, and they also had a hard time enforcing modern aseptic discipline on the orderlies; but eventually they helped to increase survival rates in the wards. As these selections might suggest, the military history sessions were dominated by women (Yvonne Perkins noted that more than two thirds of the audience in one were female). Why this might be is an interesting question. Maybe it's the result of the turn towards war and society, but then the only paper on operational military history was given by a woman: Meleah Hampton (Adelaide) spoke about Australian infantry-artillery cooperation at Pozieres in 1916. She took as her title J. F. C. Fuller's dictum, 'artillery conquers and infantry occupies', but she showed what a difference discipline made to the infantry's success in following up the artillery's.
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After six years, I've decided to try out a new look for Airminded by switching to the Elemin theme. There's still a bit more tweaking to be done before I decide whether it will stay or not, but I think it's a pretty clean and minimalist style. It's also 'responsive', which means it reformats gracefully to suit the screen size, which is especially important for smartphones and tablets. Feedback welcome!
