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War and peace, barbarism and civilisation in Perth

18 July 2011 in Australia, Conferences and talks by Brett Holman | 4 comments

[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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Frightfulness for schrecklichkeit?

16 June 2011 in 1910s, Australia, Maps, Periodicals, Pictures, Reprisals, Rumours, Words by Brett Holman | 7 comments

Daily Mail, 15 June 1917, 6

Previously, I identified a comparison between the reprisals debate in the First World War and the reprisals debate during the Blitz as something I could do that previous writers have not (except in passing, or implicitly). I won't have time in my AAEH paper for a full-blown comparative approach, or for that matter time before then to do the research; though perhaps I could for a version for publication. But it's something I can do briefly, and it helps that I already covered this in my thesis, where I looked at the British press reactions to the Gotha summer in 1917.1
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  1. The best published source for this is Barry D. Powers, Strategy Without Slide-rule: British Air Strategy 1914-1939 (London: Croom Helm, 1976), 81ff.

Dreaming war, seeing aeroplanes — III

13 June 2011 in 1900s, 1910s, Australia, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Pictures, Rumours by Brett Holman | 4 comments

Advertiser (Adelaide), 23 April 1918, 7

On 23 April 1918, this brief article, filed from Melbourne, was the lead story in a number of Australian newspapers:

Within the past 48 hours information has come to hand which points to the probability that the realities of war will soon be brought before Australians in a most convincing fashion. Steps have been taken by the Defence authorities to cope with a situation which may at any moment assume grave proportions. More than this cannot be said for the present.1

That's not much, but it seems to have created quite a stir: according to the Perth Sunday Times, 'Australia was startled out of its somnolence'.2 The Melbourne Argus reported that 'Uneasiness was caused in Melbourne and in other centres' by the previous day's story, giving rise to 'most exaggerated rumours in the city'.3 A report in the New Zealand press also dated 24 April (but not published for another week) noted that the public in Sydney 'fairly seethed in excitement' at this news when it was published in the Daily Telegraph.4 Why? The report explains that

At the moment, Australia is suffering an attack of nerves in the matter of raiders, and any old story is accepted and sent wildly circulating. Certain definite signs of uneasiness in official circles, and certain things which cannot be hidden from the people have given colour to the wildest rumours. There is "something doing" -- but nothing to justify the excited stories of an imminent enemy attack on Australia which are now current.

So it seems that rumour had already prepared Australians to think that German naval raiders were lurking off the coast, and when they were told that 'the realities of war' might soon be present to them 'in a most convincing fashion', they believed that this meant an 'imminent enemy attack on Australia'. Or, as the Sunday Times put it, they had 'Visions of a German squadron breaking the British blockade and landing an expeditionary force on the Commonwealth coast'.5
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  1. Advertiser (Adelaide), 23 April 1918, 7; reprinted in Barrier Miner (Broken Hill), 23 April 1918, 2. A different version, originating in the Age (Melbourne) adds the sentence 'The uneasiness of the Defence authorities has been intensified by certain evidence which has come before them since Saturday morning' [20 April]: Sunday Times (Perth), 28 April 1918, 13.
  2. Sunday Times (Perth), 28 April 1918, 13.
  3. Argus (Melbourne), 24 April 1918, 9.
  4. Evening News (Wellington), 1 May 1918, 11; reprinted in Poverty Bay Herald, 4 May 1918, 7.
  5. Sunday Times (Perth), 28 April 1918, 13.

Dreaming war, seeing aeroplanes — II

11 June 2011 in 1910s, Australia, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Rumours by Brett Holman | 2 comments

At the end of March 1918, the NSW Minister for Education, Augustus James, gave a speech at North Sydney Boys' High School's prize day. No doubt with an eye on the press, he spoke rather gloomily about the war situation, especially in light of the continuing German offensive on the Western Front:

"We know to-day," he said, "that we are face to face with a crisis. At any time we may hear of the British forces being broken. The Germans may capture a portion of the French coast which the Allies are at present holding, and from it deal a blow at England. The safety of Australia depends on England. Where will Australia stand if England is beaten in this war? What would we be able to do in the event of an invasion by a foreign army? We have neither the rifles nor the trained men, nor have we a submarine or aeroplane capable of use in any attempt to drive off any enemy."1

James was not far wrong. After nearly four years of war, you might think that Australia was a vast armed camp, but in fact most men and materiel were sent overseas, to Europe or the Middle East, as soon as they were ready; much of the balance was used for training. It's unlikely that James had any inside knowledge, but at this time there was only a single aeroplane in Australia 'available for any offensive action', an F.E.2b purchased with funds donated by Alfred Muller Simpson of South Australia.2
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  1. Sydney Morning Herald, 30 March 1918, 12.
  2. James Kightly, 'Australia's first domestic battleplane', Flightpath 20:4 (2009), 54. I'm indebted to James for providing me with a copy of his article.

Double trouble

10 June 2011 in Australia, Periodicals, Publications by Brett Holman | 1 comment

Flightpath, vol 22 no 4

I have an article in the May 2011 issue of Flightpath, an Australian warbirds magazine. It's on one of my pet interests, the fear of the commercial bomber between the wars. James Kightly, who will be familiar to regular commenters here as JDK, contributes a complementary look at the reality of transport-bomber conversions. There are many other articles of interest, including one on Tiger Force (also by James), along with some glorious photographs, so get into it! It's available in all good newsagents in Australia and New Zealand, and I suspect really, really good ones overseas.

Dreaming war, seeing aeroplanes — I

9 June 2011 in 1910s, Aircraft, Australia, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Pictures, Rumours by Brett Holman | 2 comments

Wölfchen

While researching a possible British mystery aeroplane in 1936, which turned out to be nothing interesting, I came across a genuine mystery aeroplane scare which I'd never heard of before, from Australia and New Zealand in March and April 1918. I'm sure somebody else must have noticed it before now, as it was trivial to find using Trove and Papers Past. But I haven't been able to find mention of it in my usual sources, so here's what I've got so far.

Firstly, some context. In March 1918, it was getting on for four years since the start of the Great War. The soldiers of Australia and New Zealand had been engaged in combat for just under three of those years, two of them on the Western Front. The armies there seemed to be in a deadlock. All that can be done is to keep the two ANZAC corps supplied with men and munitions; but in Australia it is only a few months since the public rejected conscription for a second time, in a bitterly divisive plebiscite. If victory seemed to be a long way off, at least so did defeat.
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A myth of the Blitz?

31 May 2011 in 1940s, Australia, Blogging and tweeting, Conferences and talks, Reprisals by Brett Holman | 9 comments

I'm giving a talk at the XXII Biennial Conference of the Australasian Association for European History, being held in Perth this July. It's a big conference with some big names (e.g. Omer Bartov, Richard Bosworth, John MacKenzie), and there's an appropriately big theme: 'War and Peace, Barbarism and Civilisation in Modern Europe and its Empires'. My talk will be about the reprisals debate in Britain during the Blitz. Here's the original title and abstract:

'Bomb back and bomb hard': A myth of the Blitz

In Britain, popular memory of the Blitz celebrates civilian resistance to the German bombing of London and other cities, emphasising positive values such as stoicism, humour and mutual aid. This 'Blitz spirit' is still called to mind during times of national crisis, for example in response to the July 2005 terrorist bombings in London.

But the memory of such passive and defensive traits obscures the degree to which British civilian morale in 1940 and 1941 depended on the belief that if Britain had to 'take it', then Germany was taking it as hard or even harder. As the Blitz mounted in intensity, Home Intelligence reports and newspaper letter columns featured calls for heavier reprisals against German cities. Propaganda, official and unofficial, responded by skirting a fine distinction between reporting the supposedly heavy bombardment of strictly military targets in urban areas and gloating over the imagined suffering of German civilians. That the RAF's bombing efforts over Germany at this time were in fact wildly inaccurate and largely ineffective is beside the point: nobody in Britain was aware of this yet.

In this paper I will try to restore a sense of these forgotten aspects of the 'Blitz spirit', and attempt to locate their origins in pre-war attitudes to police bombing in British colonies and mandates, and in reactions the predicted knock-out blow from the air which dominated popular perceptions of the next war in the 1920s and 1930s.

A more recent and abbreviated version:

'Bomb back and bomb hard': the reprisals debate during the Blitz

It is often argued that there was little enthusiasm in Britain for reprisals against German cities in retaliation for the Blitz, unlike the First World War. There was in fact a serious contemporary debate about whether enemy civilians could or should be targets of bombing, which I will show derived from the prewar and wartime public understanding of the potential and proper use of airpower.

As these perhaps show, my thinking on the reprisals question is changing a bit, which is not surprising since I'm still researching it. What I plan to do over the next few weeks is to do some of my thinking out loud by way of blogging -- appropriately, since I became interested in this topic while post-blogging the Blitz. So watch this space!

Monday, 19 May 1941

19 May 2011 in 1940s, Air defence, Australia, Periodicals, Pictures, Post-blogging 1940 by Brett Holman | 1 comment

The Times, 19 May 1941, 4

There is a lot going on in the Mediterranean and African theatres at the moment. The big news, as reported here by The Times, is that Italian forces in northern Abyssinia have asked for surrender terms (4). They, along with the Duke of Aosta, Viceroy of Abyssinia, are holed up in 'the mountain stronghold of Amba Alagi', where they are being battered by Indian and South African troops. According to the delayed dispatch of The Times's correspondent, Italian morale was very low nearly a week ago, and must be on the verge on breaking by now:

It is a strange twist of fortune that has made the caves where Haile Selassie once sheltered the refuge of the Duke of Aosta's Army. Its disintegration goes on constantly. Deserters at night time steal their own lorries to make a getaway. Many reach the security of our lines. Some are not so lucky.

Once Amba Alagi falls, there will be only two remaining centres of Italian resistance left in Abyssinia.
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This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Battle of Britain and the Blitz. See here for an introduction to the series.

Defending and making Willunga

27 April 2011 in Australia, Before 1900, Family history, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Pictures by Brett Holman | 2 comments

Captain Thomas Atkinson of the Willunga Volunteers, c. 1870

A belated Anzac Day post.

Willunga is a small town in South Australia, not far south of Adelaide, not far from the coast. It was settled by Europeans in 1839, only a couple of years after the colony itself was established. It was a farming area, cattle mostly, and slate quarrying soon became an important industry. By 1860, it had its own militia unit: the Willunga Rifle Volunteers (or Volunteer Rifles, or Willunga Company -- the name varies from source to source). Why did a small country town need a defence force?

There are two reasons that occur to me. The first is, obviously, for defence. South Australia is a long way from anywhere, even the rest of Australia, so it's hard to imagine anyone invading it. But turn that around: it's precisely because South Australia was so far away from anywhere that South Australians felt the need to make some provision for their own defence. As a colony, South Australia was ultimately defended by Britain. But neither the British Army nor the Royal Navy had any units stationed there: the closest would have been in Western Australia or New South Wales (or, later, Victoria): a very long way indeed before interstate railways began to link up in the 1880s. (And even then each colony used its own gauge. The states still do.)
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Happy birthday, RAAF

31 March 2011 in 1920s, Australia, Books, Periodicals by Brett Holman | 5 comments

The Royal Australian Air Force turns 90 today. It was officially formed as an independent service out of the old Australian Flying Corps on 31 March 1921 (making it three years less one day younger than the Royal Air Force). At first it was just the Australian Air Force: it didn't get the Royal prefix until August, thus becoming the familiar RAAF (usually pronounced 'raff').

Why did Australia plump for an independent air arm? It went very early for this: of the other Dominions, still largely dependent on Britain for defence, Canada waited until 1924, New Zealand until 1934 and South Africa not until 1951 1920. The major powers were similarly unhurried: Italy's air arm went independent in 1923 but France waited until 1933; the United States and Japan didn't do so until after the Second World War.

According to Alan Stephens, The Royal Australian Air Force (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001), the prime minister, Billy Hughes, was particularly keen on aviation and pushed things along quickly. But there was no strategic theory of independent air power underpinning the precise form this would take. There was little concern about strategic bombing, hardly surprising as the arrival of an aeroplane from anywhere was front page news and potential enemies were many thousands of miles away. So the new air force was intended to be devoted to co-operation with the army and the navy, in support of Imperial defence and the Singapore strategy.

Interservice rivalry and finance were key to the RAAF's actual form. With limited funds available, a single service had the advantage of efficiency, avoiding duplication in flying schools, aircraft repair organisations and other overheads. It also meant that neither senior service would have to see its rival have control over the lion's share of aviation resources. They were happy to see a junior, weak organisation with little real independence, which could be relied upon to support them as needed.

One welcome and immediate result of the new service was jobs, as this list in the Mercury of 31 March shows. (Though there were complaints from ex-AFC men about the pay rates and conditions of employment.) Interestingly, among the usual propeller makers, cooks, machinists and so on, the RAAF declared that it had need of airship riggers and balloon basket makers. As far as I know, the RAAF never operated any airships (or balloons), but I would guess the idea would have been to use them for maritime reconnaissance and anti-submarine warfare.

Otherwise, the formation of the RAAF seems to have excited little interest in the in the Australian press (the most informative article I could find was from the Western Argus of 21 March). The British press paid even less attention: I found nothing in The Times, the Guardian or the Observer, and only one brief article in the 24 March issue Flight. Which strikes me as a bit odd, though perhaps it reflects the insubstantial nature of the shadow of the bomber (and military aviation in general) in Britain during the immediate post-war period.

So: many happy returns, RAAF -- at least until the end of war!

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