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I went on a mini-spending spree this week -- mini because Vintage have recently cut their prices in Australia and are cheap as chips.

Graham Greene. Brighton Rock. London: Vintage Books, 2004 [1938]. 'Now a major motion picture'.

Aldous Huxley. Ape and Essence. London: Vintage Books, 2005 [1949]. I couldn't resist this after reading the blurb, which begins: 'In February 2108, the New Zealand Rediscovery Expedition reaches California.' Huxley's atomic war novel.

Nevil Shute. Slide Rule: The Autobiography of an Engineer. London: Vintage Books, 2009 [1954]. Shute's account of his early career as an aeronautical engineer, when he worked on the R100 and co-founded Airspeed. Vintage have reissued most, if not all, of Shute's back catalogue and I will no doubt be buying more of them!

Rex Warner. The Aerodrome: A Love Story. London: Vintage Books, 2007 [1941]. A book I've been wanting to read since before starting my PhD. Fascism and aviation in Deep England.

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The Black Peril

In Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), Patrick Deer discusses airminded fiction for boys from the 1930s and suggests that (78):

In their own cheery way, these boys' flying stories echo the mythos of the flying übermenschen so dear to the fascist imagination. In their patriotic exuberance, these flying stories remain disturbingly oblivious to the darker side of British air power, curiously out of step with the apocalyptic fears so much a feature of 1930s popular culture.

I'm not so sure about this. I'll grant the first sentence -- Biggles himself is certainly a flying übermensch -- but then again, didn't just about all adventure fiction, of whatever subgenre, feature steel-eyed square-jawed two-fisted men of action? And flying adventure stories would necessarily simply have flying versions of same. Still, it's not wrong as such.

The second sentence is more problematic. Most airpower writing of the 1930s was 'oblivious to the darker side of British air power', if you place the emphasis on 'British'. It wasn't a problem for Britain to possess airpower, because it believed to be peaceful and non-aggressive, and could be trusted to use it responsibly. It was everybody else's airpower which was the problem. Similarly, the 'apocalyptic fears so much a feature of 1930s popular culture' were almost always about London being wiped off the face of the Earth, and not, say, Hamburg or Dresden. Only pacifists denounced British airpower as such (and by 'only', I don't mean to imply their views were not widely shared, but they were in a minority, at least in print). It should not be surprising that juvenile fiction did not do this as well.
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Juliet Gardiner. The Blitz: The British Under Attack. London: HarperPress, 2010. Another example of anniversary publishing, but I wouldn't have misgivings about buying a Juliet Gardiner book. Except... I worry that it will cover too much of the same ground as her Wartime.

Robin Higham and Frederick W. Kagan, eds. The Military History of the Soviet Union. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010 [2002]. The definite article seems oddly, well, definite. But the table of contents does look comprehensive: airminded contributions include 'The Soviet air force, 1917-1991' by Mark O'Neill and 'Soviet/Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces, 1945-2000' by Stephen J. Zaloga.

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Today I came across an article in an American publication, Science News Letter, dated 24 April 1943. The headline on page 269 reads 'Gas Attacks Expected'. The opening paragraph reads:

HITLER'S BOMBERS, if they make their expected raids on American cities, can be counted on to drop poison gases in bombs or sprays, Col. A. Gibson of the Chemical Warfare Service declared in Detroit.

This seems strange for two reasons. That German air raids on American cities were 'expected' is hard to credit, given that at this stage of the war in Europe, the tide had turned in the Allies' favour. German and Italian forces were just about to be squeezed out of North Africa; Von Paulus had surrendered his 6th Army at Stalingrad less than two months previously; the British and now the American air offensive against Germany was mounting in weight. Sure, there was clearly a long way to go and it would not have been wise to underestimate German power. (At this point in time, losses to Allied shipping from U-boat attacks were reaching critical levels, for example.) And it's true that several Amerikabomber candidates were then being developed for the Luftwaffe, though how much of this was known to the Allies (and how much to their publics) I'm not sure. But that's all still a long way from certain air raids against American cities.

And it's also strange for the claim that it was equally certain that such an attack would use poison gas against civilians. Why would Germany use gas against the United States in 1943 when it hadn't used it against Britain in 1940? Or anywhere, for that matter (extermination camps aside)? Well, maybe it would have, being more and more desperate; but how does this equate to certainty? Why were credible officials -- Gibson was the 'chief of the inspection section' at the Office of Civilian Defense, and, incidentally, a veteran of both the First World War and the Spanish-American War -- going around saying things like this?
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Kate Moore. The Battle of Britain. London and Long Island City: Osprey Publishing, 2010.

Gavin Mortimer. The Blitz: An Illustrated History. London and Long Island City: Osprey Publishing, 2010.

2010 was seventy years after 1940, and in the usual way saw the publication of a number of new books about the pivotal events of that year. Almost none of which I read, or even bought. Mainly because, perhaps unfairly, I tend to suspect books published to coincide with historical anniversaries of simply reheating and reserving the same old stories. Which is fine for those readers not familiar with the old stories, but I don't need half-a-dozen narrative histories of the Battle of Britain saying the same thing. One or two will do. (It's a bit different for the Blitz, which as a whole attracts less attention from authors and publishers, and then usually only on specific raids or cities; though the tropes here are probably even more entrenched than for the Battle.)
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Peter Hennessy. The Secret State: Preparing for the Worst 1945-2010. London: Penguin, 2010. Second edition. The instant classic on how the British government has gone about defending the realm, particularly in preparations for the Third World War. Hennessy has updated it with information from masses of newly declassified files from the Cold War, and has a first stab at telling the story of the post 9/11-era.

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Zeppelin Building

59-61 Farringdon Road in London is also known as the Zeppelin Building. I don't know when it received this name; possibly only recently. But it owes it to the fact that its predecessor on the site was destroyed during an air raid on the night of 8 September 1915. The most famous of the Zeppelin commanders, Captain Heinrich Mathy, flew L.13 across central London, dropping bombs from Russell Square to Liverpool Street Station. He and his crew killed 22 people, injured 87 and did over half a million pounds worth of damage, the single most destructive Zeppelin raid of the war. Below is the plaque at the site which commemorates both the destruction of the original premises and its rebuilding in 1917, an act of some optimism and defiance since 'the world war' was still going on with no clear winner in sight.
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I've never been to a Cliopatria Awards ceremony, but I imagine it is full of glitz and glamour, tuxedos and ball gowns. As the best history bloggers of the past year, the winners certainly deserve to be feted in this way. But instead of my applause all I can give them is a little recognition, by writing this post and adding their respective blogs to Airminded's sidebar. 2010's winners are: U.S. Intellectual History (best group blog), The Renaissance Mathematicus (best blog), Ph.D. Octopus (best new blog), A Blast from the Past (best post), Disunion (best series of posts), and Lapata of Chapati Mystery (best writing). Congratulations to all of you!

I must admit to being particularly pleased to see A Blast from the Past in there, as its author, Mike Dash, is someone who I was reading long before I started blogging, and who comments here himself from time to time. (Also because I suspect I was reading his original blog at the Charles Fort Institute long before any other history bloggers!) I already have Mike's other blog, A Fortean in the Archives, listed; it overlaps a lot with A Blast from the Past which is why I haven't previously listed them both, but I see he's planning to differentiate them more in future so I'm happy to rectify this omission.

Also noteworthy is that one of the other winners, Disunion, is a military history blog. In fact, it's a very ambitious and high-powered group blog, hosted by the New York Times, which is post-blogging the American Civil War from go to woah. They're still some months off from the war's start, as they're just up to the start of 1861. It will be fascinating to follow this one over the next few years.

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Times, 4 January 1941, 4

Though Bardia has not yet fallen, Australian infantry and British troops have broken through its perimeter and taken 5000 Italian soldiers prisoner in a dawn attack (The Times, 4).

The Australians, who hitherto had taken part only in small-scale raids, had the honour of leading the way through gaps caused first by our guns and then by our tanks.

The Allied front is now bulging into the town's defensive lines, and it seems only a matter of time until it falls (a period which 'depends entirely on the "guts" of the defenders', according to a 'military spokesman').
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Manchester Guardian, 3 January 1941, 5

A Bomber Command raid Wednesday night against Bremen, Germany's second-largest seaport, is described by the Manchester Guardian as 'R.A.F. Answers London Fire Raid' (5). The dropping of 20,000 incendiary bombs seems to be the basis for this. Whether the Bremen raid would technically count as a 'reprisal' (from the British point of view, anyway) is doubtful since the accompanying article from the Air Ministry News Service -- also reprinted in full by The Times (4) -- strongly emphasises the military nature of the targets:

The chief objectives of the night were the great shipbuilding yards in which warships of all kinds, and especially submarines, are under construction, the Deutsche Vacuum Oil refinery, railway communications, warehouses beside the harbours, the Gebrüder Nielson rice and starch mills, the Focke-Wulf air frame factory, and many other industrial targets.

All of these targets were reported to have been hit, in some cases very hard. The fires from the Gebrüder Nielson mills could be seen from the Dutch border, and the whole affair was said in one combat report to be 'Much greater than Mannheim', the previous benchmark of a successful raid. (The Air Ministry modestly describes this one as a 'brilliant offensive operation.)
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