This was one of several colour images of wartime London published by the Daily Mail (for which see a much bigger version; but do not read the comments). I have nothing interesting to say about it; I just like it, is all.
(Via @lucyinglis and @fleming77.)
Michael Kerrigan. World War II Plans That Never Happened, 1939-1945. London: Amber Books, 2011.
As a historian, I'm probably not supposed to like counterfactuals. There are very good reasons for this. It's hard enough to reconstruct what did happen without worrying about what didn't. There are no minutes from meetings which never took place, no diaries from people who didn't exist, no newspaper reports of events which never happened. The further you depart from our timeline, the more speculation you indulge in, the more pointless it seems: thinking about the Roman Empire undergoing a steam-powered industrial revolution is fun, but what does it tell us about, well, anything to do with reality? And if objectivity is impossible to achieve when doing history, alternative history is prone to wish fulfilment and outright fantasy.
And yet I think counterfactuals can be useful. There is so much we don't know about the past, so much that we cannot now recover, but in one important sense we know more than the people we study: we know what happened in their future. Our histories of the Soviet Union, for example, will forever have to take into account the fact that it dissolved in 1991, something which nobody knew in 1917, 1921, 1945 or 1968. That makes it hard for us to truly understand how people thought about the future and, crucially, how that affected their decisions and actions in the present. Considering counterfactual scenarios can help restore this sense of contingency, of uncertainty: what did happen was not necessarily what had to to happen. Or even likely to happen. Besides, historians implicitly indulge in counterfactual thinking all the time: whenever we single out some event or person or institution as important in whatever way, we are effectively saying that if it that event hadn't happened, or if that person hadn't existed, or if that institution hadn't been created, then history would have been significantly different (for whatever definition of 'significant' works for you).
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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]
So the XXII Biennial Australasian Association for European History Conference is over, and I must say it's the best conference I've been to, for a number of reasons. It was well-organised, despite some added difficulties such as being jointly hosted by and held at two universities, the University of Western Australia and Murdoch University. That's easy to gloss over but some conferences don't manage to rise to the occasion. The locations were pretty, both the campuses and the city (though it was rainy on the first day, it would probably be unfair to blame the organisers for that). And the food provided at the session breaks was scrumptious.
Oh yes, the history! Two parallel sessions running over four days, so there was a lot of history to be had. The talks were excellent, and the conference theme -- 'War and Peace, Barbarism and Civilisation in Modern Europe and its Empires' -- came through strongly. Because I rather shamefully didn't livetweet the conference, I'll note here some of the papers which interested me for one reason or another. (Any errors are my own.)
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Rather more seaminded than airminded, the result of having visited two maritime museums today.
Mike Dash. Batavia's Graveyard: The True Story of the Mad Heretic Who Led History's Bloodiest Mutiny. London: Phoenix, 2003. See here.
Richard Guilliatt and Peter Hohnen. The Wolf. North Sydney: William Heinemann, 2009. See here.
M. McCarthy, ed. HMAS Sydney (II). Welshpool: Western Australian Museum, 2010. See here.
Since my AAEH talk is in four days, I'd better start actually putting the pieces I've scattered over this blog together into something (ideally) coherent which can be presented in 20 minutes (with 10 for questions). So here's a stab at a plan:
The essence of reprisals is that if one belligerent deliberately violates the accepted rules of warfare then the other belligerent, for the sake of protecting himself, may resort by way of retaliation to measures which, in ordinary circumstances, would be illegal.
That's a legal definition; it excludes the desire for mere revenge as illegitimate, but of course this was an important motivation for many.
Picked these up at the closing-down sale of a very good bookshop (so not Borders, obviously).
Terry Charman. Outbreak 1939: The World Goes to War. London: Virgin Books, 2009. I very distinctly remember not going to the IWM exhibition this accompanied when I was last in London. An almost minute-by-minute account of 3 September 1939, sandwiched between a chronology of the months before and thematic chapters on the remainder of the year. Despite the subtitle, very much from the British point of view.
David Kynaston. A World to Build. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. The first half of Kynaston's acclaimed Austerity Britain 1945-1951, so just covering the years 1945-8 -- a fact of which I may not have been sufficiently aware when I bought it.
John Macleod. River of Fire: The Clydebank Blitz. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2010. This will complement the press viewpoint I gained of the Clydebank blitz through post-blogging it. And it's always good to get a non-London perspective on the Blitz.
Colin Smith. England's Last War Against France: Fighting Vichy 1940-1942. London: Phoenix, 2010. A certain occasional commenter here would probably love this book. Or maybe not, as it seems to be based on evidence.
Edward M. Spiers. A History of Chemical and Biological Weapons. London: Reaktion Books, 2010. Well, who needs excuses to buy books about CBW? It looks to be weighted more towards recent decades than the First World War and interwar period which interests me most, however.
Another source of information about public opinion on reprisals during the Blitz is hearsay -- what people reported that other people thought. This can give us an insight into contemporary judgements of the public mood. But, as with letters to the editor, hearsay is highly problematic too. It's only possible to get a good grasp on what other people think if you mix with them and talk to them (the 'everyone is complaining about how difficult it is to find servants this year' problem). So the insights may apply only to fairly narrow sections of the community. More dangerously, it's a common rhetorical trick to claim that what you think is what 'everyone' thinks, that what you're saying is what 'everyone' is saying. So as with letters to the editor, I find such claims more persuasive when they go against the grain, when someone admits that they are going against the majority. But if the overall picture points one way, that has evidentiary value too.
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In my previous post I identified three newspapers which published extended correspondence from their readers about reprisals during the Blitz -- The Times, the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Mail -- one of which provided its own analyses of all the letters it received -- the Mail. To try and assess whether these newspapers might have let their own biases on the subject of reprisals influence their selection and/or analysis of the letters they chose to publish (e.g. if the newspaper was pro-reprisals, perhaps pro-reprisal letters were more likely to be published), I'm now going to look at their editorial positions.
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After opinion polls, the rest of the evidence for public opinion on reprisals is more impressionistic. I've already noted the conclusions of those who have plumbed the Mass-Observation archives (and Tom Harrisson didn't just plumb the archives, he ran Mass-Observation during the war), and as I haven't done that myself I'll let them stand. But there are other primary sources. One is the traditional one of the newspaper letters column. These are great because they apparently give you access to the thoughts of people who are otherwise lost to history, the men and women on the Clapham omnibus (substitute regionally-specific public transport systems as appropriate). Before opinion polls, letters to the editor were one of the most important ways of gauging public opinion available, and in 1940-1 they still would have been read as such.
But these letters come with huge problems too. They are filtered at every stage. Someone has to have an opinion on something (so the incurious and apathetic are selected against). They have to be able to read and write (so the illiterate are selected against). They have to actually decide to write and post a letter (so the busy are selected against). And then their letter has to be read and selected for publication by someone at the newspaper, and they could do this on any number of factors: whether it is well-written (or poorly-written, if the newspaper wants to mock its author), whether it is original or representative, whether it is controversial, who the author is (not always humble). High-minded newspapers published mostly serious letters; more populist newspapers might not have letters columns at all. Some newspapers tried to publish a representative sample of the opinions received (The Times was one); others were happy to present a more partisan selection. And maybe some letters were made up entirely; no doubt most were edited for style or length. So there were many, many potential biases, and we can't simply assume that the letters published represent the voice of the people. But taken collectively I think they represent voices of the people.
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Let's tackle the question of public opinion head on. Did the British people want reprisal bombing to be carried out against the German people? How can we tell? Can we even tell?
If we wanted to gauge public opinion on a particular question today, we'd carry out an opinion poll. As luck would have it, Britain's first opinion polling organisation, the British Institute of Public Opinion (BIPO, later the Gallup Organization), was set up in 1937, and during the Blitz it did carry out polling on the reprisals issue.
In October 1940, BIPO polled on the question (among others):
In view of the indiscriminate German bombing of this country, would you approve or disapprove if the R.A.F. adopted a similar policy of bombing the civilian population of Germany?
The result was a dead heat: 46% of respondents approved and 46% disapproved. (The balance didn't know.) But I think there's a problem with BIPO's sample here. From a sample size of 2100 people, apparently selected through door-knocking and street interviews, only 46% were women. I'm not a demographer, but I would have expected slightly more women than men: that's the normal gender balance, and wartime conditions would skew that even further.
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