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Rutland Reindeer

A recent comment by J Campbell raised the question of whether Nevil Shute's 1949 novel No Highway was in fact a prediction of the De Havilland Comet airliner's metal fatigue problems, which led to two crashes ('hull losses', in industry parlance) in 1954. My response was that it seemed unlikely that Shute had any particular insider knowledge which could have led to such a prediction (made before the prototype had even flown) given that he had already been out of the aircraft manufacturing business for some years. (And if he did have reason to think that the Comet would have metal fatigue, why not warn de Havilland instead of writing a novel?) My own suggestion was that instead No Highway might have been loosely inspired by the R101 disaster back in 1930, a formative moment in Shute's life. Having read the novel now, I don't have any actual evidence for this, but there is an intriguing additional parallel which may have been overlooked (or not, I'm no Shute scholar).

In Shute's novel -- spoilers ahead -- the tailplane of the (fictional) Rutland Reindeer (seen above, from the 1951 film version No Highway In The Sky) is believed by an RAE scientist named Theodore Honey to be susceptible to metal fatigue. The story revolves around the efforts of Honey and Scott, his superior at Farnborough, to prove that an earlier Reindeer crash was due to metal fatigue and so ground the Reindeer fleet before disaster strikes. The obstacles include a slapdash investigation of the previous accident, entrenched interests at the Reindeer's manufacturer Rutland and its operator CATO, the (also fictional) Commonwealth Atlantic Transport Organisation, the novelty of Honey's fatigue theory (inspired by recent advances in nuclear physics!), and Honey's own diffident character and his eclectic interests, including pyramidology, British Israelism, the Second Coming (predicted for 1994), interplanetary rocket travel and spiritualism. Of which more in a moment.
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I've previously posted some of Gorden Cullen's artwork for the Tecton Group's 1939 book Planned A.R.P.. Here are some more of his cute drawings dealing with an awful subject. In this case, he is illustrating the 'general agreement among experts' on the threat posed by the bomber.

(a) The range, speed, and carrying capacity of bombers have increased enormously since the last war.1

Planned ARP

This was a commonplace observation and was demonstrably true, as anyone who knew anything at all about aviation would know.

(b) In order to avoid anti-aircraft fire, balloon barrages, etc., the attacking bombers will probably fly at a height of not less than 12,000 to 15,000 feet. Although the pilot might be able to dive to a much lower altitude, he would, in all probability, be afraid to do so, as the risk would not seem worth while.

This is somewhat unusual; it was more common to denigrate the effective of anti-aircraft defences. The experience of the Spanish civil war might have been responsible for this, though the author(s) do say that the war there isn't likely much of a guide as the conditions are so different there.
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  1. Tecton, Planned A.R.P.: Based on the Investigation of Structural Protection Against Air Attack in the Metropolitan Borough of Finsbury (London: Architectural Press, 1939), 14. [↩]

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Charles Sowerwine. France Since 1870: Culture, Society and the Making of the Republic. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Second Edition. French history is one of my weak points. If I'd taken one of Chips' classes -- he retired from my former department a few years ago -- I might not have needed to buy his book. But I probably would have anyway!

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One sub-species of military intellectual is the retired field marshal (or admiral, or air marshal) who, at the end of a long career, sets down their thoughts on the future of warfare for the interested reader. Even though they may be quite famous, their essays into futurism are nowadays read less often than that of their junior counterparts, full-time military intellectuals like J. F. C. Fuller or L. E. O. Charlton, who had substantial careers in the military but left while still relatively young (and may well have borne chips on their shoulders due to their usually enforced early retirement). Partly this is due to their naturally having written less -- often just a few pages at the end of their memoirs. Often it would be due to writing and intellectualism not being something which came naturally to them. But because of their great experience (and, greater experience of the heights of strategy than the Fullers and the Charltons, one might add), it's worth looking at what the retired field marshals have to say.
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A tweet from William J. Turkel alerted me to the possibility of using 18th century-style fonts in LaTeX. The most noticeable difference from modern typesetting is the long s, but there are different ligatures too. There are a number of ways to do it but the easiest way is with the inbuilt Kepler Fonts package. (The Fell Types are far prettier, but look difficult, or at least tedious, to install. Font management is one of LaTeX's biggest weaknesses.) Just insert the following in your preamble and you're done:

\usepackage[fullveryoldstyle]{kpfonts}

Well, almost. This simply replaces every s with a long s, which is not right. Most importantly, long s is generally not used at the end of a word, so you need to replace these with 's='. Here's what the first paragraph of my thesis looks like when done this way:

I wish I'd known about this before submitting it.

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Airminded in the UK Web Archive

Airminded has been archived by the British Library's UK Web Archive, which 'contains websites that publish research, that reflect the diversity of lives, interests and activities throughout the UK, and demonstrate web innovation'. It's one of (at present) 487 blogs, 461 history websites, and 47 international relations, diplomacy and peace websites thus indexed. As you can see from the screenshot above, they've archived Airminded on 19 November 2010, and presumably will do at other points in the future.

This is nice because it's something I can cite in job or grant applications to show that my blogging has some sort of 'national significance'. Well, at least it would do in the UK -- it might not be as useful in Australia. And yes, I did point out to the BL that the blog is written in Australia (and hosted in the United States), but they seem not to mind!

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The title of this post is something which Air Marshal Sir Arthur Harris did not say. There are an uncountable infinity of things Harris didn't say, but this particular one is of interest because during the Second World War it was widely believed that he did say it, and was taken to represent his aims and the aims of Bomber Command. It's part of a propaganda broadcast made to the German people in Harris's name, telling them what Bomber Command had in store for them if they did not overthrow their Nazi leaders:

Soon we shall be coming every night and every day, rain, blow, or snow -- we and the Americans [...] We are going to scourge the Third Reich from end to end if you make it necessary for us to do so. You cannot stop it, and you know it.

You have no chance.

The broadcast was picked up in Britain too, translated and printed in the daily press. In his memoirs, Harris says that he never said any of it, or even approved it; he had agreed that his name could be used on leaflets to be dropped into Germany, but this had somehow mutated into a radio broadcast. As Harris pointed out, he couldn't even speak German. Having said that, he nowhere disavows the substance of the speech, only that it understated the 'pains and dire penalties' which were 'actually meted out' to the German people by Bomber Command.1 Nor was he able to disavow authorship during the war. So this speech, though false, was more or less accurate and accepted as such. As I'm always looking out for ways to explore attitudes towards strategic bombing, the episode of the speech not made by Harris seems worth looking at.
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  1. Arthur Harris, Bomber Offensive (Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military Classics, 2005 [1947]), 115. [↩]