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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Earlier this year I was tutor for a subject which explored the idea of genre, using books, films and plays about war for this purpose. One of the texts we read was Primo Levi's account of his time in Auschwitz, If This Is A Man.1 One of the sections I found most interesting was Levi's lengthy account of the camp's internal, unofficial economy, which used 'prize-coupons' (sometimes given as a reward, exchangeable for Mahorca, a kind of tobacco) as currency, which could be used to buy things like shirts or extra rations of bread. Prisoners (or 'Häftlinge') would try to think up new ways to get coupons which could ultimately help them survive even a little longer. All the trading in prize-coupons going on meant that their value fluctuated 'in strict obedience to the laws of classical economics'.2
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  1. To me a Holocaust memoir didn't seem to fit into the category of 'war' as well as most of the other chosen texts, but that's neither here nor there now. [↩]
  2. Primo Levi, If This Is A Man/The Truce (London: Abacus, 1987), 86. [↩]

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Roger Beaumont. Might Backed by Right: The International Air Force Concept. Westport and London: Praeger, 2001. Some library gap-filling: it's the only book on the history of the international air force idea there is, so I ought to have it. Doesn't devote enough attention to the 1920s and 1930s for my liking, but for once I at least did something about it rather than just sat back and complained.

Matthew Grant. After the Bomb: Civil Defence and Nuclear War in Britain, 1945-68. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. One I've been looking forward to for a while. But why aren't there any similar books on ARP?

George H. Quester. Deterrence Before Hiroshima: The Airpower Background of Modern Strategy. New York, London and Sydney: John Wiley & Sons, 1966. More gap-filling. Again it's a unique book -- there's nowhere else you can turn for an overview of intellectual reactions to the coming of the bomber in such a wide variety of countries (well, the major powers anyway), especially chapters 5 and 6 on the interwar period. The main problem, aside from it being published in 1966 (there was a 1986 reprint with a new introduction, but unfortunately that didn't discuss the more recent secondary literature) is hinted at in the title: it's a contribution to Cold War IR theory, not history.

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Cmnd. 124, Defence: Outline of Future Policy, is one of the most famous (and infamous) documents in British military history. It's better known as the 1957 Defence White Paper, or the Sandys White Paper after the Minister of Defence responsible for it, Duncan Sandys. It ended National Service, committed Britain to nuclear deterrence, and foreshadowed drastic cuts in conventional force levels. Aviation bore the brunt of these last. Fighter Command was to be abolished (though in the end it won a reprieve, at least until 1967) and a large number of advanced fighter types under development for the RAF were cancelled, including the Avro 720, the Fairey Delta 2, the Hawker Siddeley P.1121, and the Saunders-Roe SR.177. Only the English Electric P.1 and TSR-2 were spared (the latter only temporarily). Unsurprisingly, all this was controversial then and remains so today for those who remember such things. Certainly, the White Paper was a cost-cutting exercise: Sandys had a brief from the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, to find savings of £100 million from the defence estimates. But my interest here is the intellectual context of the Sandys White Paper: it wasn't just about saving money.
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Ian Castle. London 1914-17: The Zeppelin Menace. Oxford and New York: Osprey Publishing, 2008.

Ian Castle. London 1917-18: The Bomber Blitz. Oxford and Long Island City: Osprey Publishing, 2010.

Kate Moore. The Battle of Britain. Oxford and Long Island City: Osprey Publishing, 2010.

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

These are all review copies! For those familiar with Osprey books, the two books by Castle are from their 'Campaign' series; but instead of showing the clash of armies, the numerous maps show the fall of bombs. The other two are in a more unusual coffee table format, lavishly illustrated with contemporary photographs (Moore's draws upon the Imperial War Museum archives, Mortimer's on the Mirror group of newspapers).

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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

I know. Writing about Wikipedia is so 2006. And yes, finding errors in Wikipedia articles is not exactly difficult. But I have a bee in my bonnet which needs releasing.

Wikipedia's page on the Blitz has a section entitled 'Commencement on September 6'. This is how it currently reads (sans hyperlinks and superscripts):

There is a misconception that the Blitz started on September 7, 1940. Bombs began dropping the night of September 6 and continued for the full day of the 7th and on into the morning of the 8th. Saturday 7th was the first full day and has officially and erroneously become known as the day the Blitz started. Hermann Göring launched bombers and the first bombs caused damage the night of September 6.

Quoted in the The Manchester Guardian is Göring's communiqué:

Attacks of our Air Force on objectives of special military and economical value in London, which began during the night of September 6, were continued during the day and night of September 7 with exceptionally strong forces using bombs of the heaviest caliber.

A witness recalled the evening of Friday September 6, 1940:

My name is John Davey. I was born on December 27th 1924 in South Moltom [sic - Molton] Road, Custom House, West Ham, and a couple of miles from the Royal Docks. In September 1940, on the Friday evening of the weekend the docks were first blitzed, I was sitting with my friend in his house. At about 7 p.m. there was a series of explosions and the shattering of glass. We ran into the road and saw at the end a flame that shot into the sky, seeming to light up the whole area. My friend and I and lots of others ran towards the fire.
—BBC, WW2 People's War

The first damage to property on September 7 was recorded at eight minutes past midnight, a grocer’s shop at 43 Southwark Park Road, SE16.

It has long been the accepted, but erroneous, view that the London Blitz lasted 57 consecutive nights starting on September 7 1940 and ending November 1. In actuality September 6 makes 57 nights and not September 7. The historian AJP Taylor wrote of such an error:

… it is the fault of previous legends which have been repeated by historians without examination. These legends have a long life.

This is really quite silly. Yes, it's true that the accepted date of 7 September 1940 as the start of the London Blitz is a bit misleading, since there was a non-trivial amount of bombing before that date (e.g. see here). Judging from contemporary press accounts, 7 September certainly seemed to mark an important change in German bombing strategy, but more one of quantity than quality -- almost more an inflection point than a turning point. In retrospect we tend not to see it that way, which is fine. But we could recognise that -- leaving aside the eventual reification involved in the name 'the Blitz' itself -- the 'start of the Blitz' was less clearly defined then than it seems now.
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James Hamilton-Paterson. Empire of the Clouds: When Britain's Aircraft Ruled the World. London: Faber and Faber, 2010. 'When' is the decade or two after 1945. Apparently not quite as triumphalist as the subtitle would suggest. Has a rather Commando cover featuring a Vulcan. Looks like fun.

Patrick Wright. Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. I was in the mood for a Cold War history when I came across this. I enjoyed Wright's Tank and I hope this will display a similar combination of verve and erudition.

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Nominations for the 2010 Cliopatria Awards for history blogging are open until the end of November. As usual there are six categories: Best Group Blog, Best Individual Blog, Best New Blog, Best Post, Best Series of Posts, and Best Writer. I think it's been a bumper crop this year as far as number of nominations is concerned, maybe the best so far. But don't let that stop you adding your own!

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Daily Mirror, 21 November 1940, 1

I was going to end this section of the post-blog with yesterday's post, but who could resist a front page like this? It's so emotive and manipulative. The scene itself is tragic enough: the mass burial and funeral of 172 men, women and children killed in the blitz on Coventry last Thursday night. Another seventy will be buried today. But to that the Daily Mirror adds (1) portentous capitalisation ('the Tragedy of Coventry'); (2) a rousing declaration ('WE SHALL REMEMBER!') combined with a graphic of Coventry in flames; (3) the archaic insults ('HUNS RAID', 'the Hun's massacre'). There's more on page 7, along with photographs of the open grave, and on the back page. The Mirror is milking Coventry for all it's worth. And who knows, maybe it's worth a lot.
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Daily Express, 20 November 1940, 1

According to the Daily Express, the 'ever-increasing power behind Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal's master-plan for crippling Hitler's war industries' is beginning to yield results (1). The giant Krupp factory (nearly always rendered as 'Krupps' in the British press) at Essen had three 'sections [...] put out of commission', which must be considered especially impressive as it is 'officially stated' that they 'has been built underground because of their importance'. A big ocean liner, SS Europa, was damaged in an air raid on the Bremen docks. Other targets attacked recently include the oil industry at Hanover ('completely destroyed') and the Fokker aircraft factory at Amsterdam.

None of this helped London and the Midlands last night, which were heavily bombed last night. According to German radio, Coventry and Birmingham were said by German radio to be the targets in the latter, though this is not yet confirmed by the government. In one of the towns,

Practically every suburb was involved. Civilian homes were the main target, and several were wrecked before the attack slackened off shortly after midnight.

Damage to industrial buildings was reported to be small.

But 'Many casualties are feared in the two towns'.
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