Dropping Their Eggs
Patrick Wright
- A History of Bombing by Sven Lindqvist, translated by Linda Haverty Rugg
Granta, 233 pp, £14.99, May 2001, ISBN 1 86207 415 1
- The Bomber War: Arthur Harris and the Allied Bomber Offensive 1939-45 by Robin Niellands
Murray, 448 pp, £25.00, February 2001, ISBN 0 7195 5637 6
- Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War by Frances FitzGerald
Touchstone, 592 pp, US $17.00, March 2001, ISBN 0 7432 0023 3
‘I cannot recall taking a single piss during my childhood, whether outside or at home in the outhouse, when I didn’t choose a target and bomb it. At five years of age I was already a seasoned bombardier.’ This is an unusual way of embarking on an analysis of modern warfare and its technologies, but then Sven Lindqvist has long been writing history in his own way. Oral historians know him as the author of Dig Where You Stand: How to Research a Job, a combined manifesto and manual published in 1978, based on the premise that no history has been more hidden or distorted than that of modern business. Shareholders and directors enjoy history in the form of capital, but aren’t in the least curious about the past itself. Researching the Swedish cement industry, for which his grandfather had worked, Lindqvist found nothing except crudely argued assumptions that management was always right and the shareholders always vastly more important than the workers, whose main contribution was to obstruct growth and progress. His response was to encourage people to research the history of their own workplaces to recover the information ignored in the managerial version. Within a few years of the book’s appearance, ten thousand researchers were using material from their own working lives to make history ‘dangerous’ again.
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Letters
Vol. 23 No. 17 · 6 September 2001
From Rupert Forbes
Writing about the history of bombing (LRB, 23 August), Patrick Wright makes much of 'the fictions and mythologies of warfare' – the 'fantasies of air-enforced dominion' which gleefully envisaged the wiping out of the Yellow Peril, the African Peril and any other peril which required a dose of terror from the skies. These gruesome imaginings are not, Wright insists, merely 'secondary reflections' of something in society – racial stereotyping, for instance. They are always 'intrinsic to the reality they shape and help to drive'. In other words, they prepared the public for the various bombardments and annihilations which took place in the name of empire, and possibly for Bomber Harris himself.
Can it really be the case that Garitt Serviss's Edison's Conquest of Mars, one of the yarns cited by Wright, 'in which a plane equipped with a weapon called the Disintegrator renders the Martians helpless', blazed a trail for anything other than whoops of schoolboy excitement? The next time I see an SF flick in which a jump-suited spaceship commander activates his defensive forcefield, or the like, should I muse on the alarming parallel of the Strategic Defense Initiative? If a James Bond caper has a Middle Eastern terrorist as the arch villain (though they are careful who they choose these days), is it an indication of the parameters of Britain's foreign policy? Doesn't Terry Eagleton have something to say in the same issue of the London Review about 'otherness' not being the 'most fertile of intellectual furrows'?
The best-known example of 'future war' fiction is The Invasion of 1910 by William Tufnell Le Queux, a rich slice of scaremongering which was a sensational success when published in 1906. Le Queux went on to become a self-styled 'Master of Mystery', though the biggest mystery about him was how to pronounce his name – I think it's 'Le Cue', though I've heard it, rather gratingly, as 'Le Quex'. He was, incidentally, well up on aviation, though ground forces are the thing in The Invasion of 1910, as ill-prepared Brits are caught out by the marauding Hun. 'Desperate Fighting in Essex' is the heading of one chapter. But I would venture that Le Queux's notoriety says as much about Lord Northcliffe's instinct for circulation-boosting schlock – the novel was serialised in the Daily Mail – as it does about contemporary perceptions of military possibility. The book was widely recognised for the nonsense it was; sceptics queued up to ridicule it. P.G. Wodehouse, for example, published The Swoop! Or How Clarence Saved England: A Tale of the Great Invasion (1909):
'I say,' exclaimed Horace, who sat nearest the window, 'there are two rummy-looking chaps coming to the front door, wearing a sort of fancy dress!'
'It must be the Germans,' said Reggie.
A.A. Milne composed for Punch an account of 'The Secret Army Aeroplane' in the all too imitable Le Queux style. And Heath Robinson submitted a series of drawings to the Sketch showing the devilish skill of German spies who had inveigled their way into Britain disguised as tourists, door-to-door salesmen and even classical statues at the British Museum.
Wright says we should inspect the 'cultural moment' but, in this case, that has to mean more than earnest, if rather loose, ideas about the preparation of the population for the war ahead. Besides, like many of the prophecies of war around at the time, The Invasion of 1910 missed the point: the great invasion myth turned out to be just that.
Rupert Forbes
Bath
From Christopher Small
It's surprising that, surveying forwards and back the ideology of serial bombardment, neither Patrick Wright nor, apparently, the principal author under review, Sven Lindqvist, mentions H.G. Wells – for British readers at least, by far the best-known projector in fiction of what hatches when the various machines drop their eggs. It seems odd to leave out, for instance, the early War in the Air (Wells in his Little Man phase) or The World Set Free, just pre-World War One, which introduced the atomic bomb as ultimate world liberator. It's a huge subject, the way that wishful fantasies realise themselves in actual scientific-technological achievement.
Christopher Small
Isle of Lismore
