Introduction
The days when war was an interval between periods of peace –even the days when peace was the interval between wars – have gone.
(J.M. Richards, 1941)1
By the summer of 1941, the old concepts of peace and war had been surpassed by the realisation of a nightmare and the implementation of a policy. Airpower had transformed war and created a condition of permanent vulnerability for cities and civilians. The bombing of British cities that began in earnest in 1940 was the fulfilment of the promise of the interwar years. In the pregnant skies of the 1930s, the technology of airpower and the strategies of air war had fixed bombers on the horizon, from where war threatened to break at any moment. In 1938, as conflict moved ever closer, urban historian and theorist Lewis Mumford described the coming war as an explosion of the ‘pus-bag of vulgar pretense and power’, which had swelled in the preceding years. The period before had not been one of ‘peace’, he wrote, but was ‘equally a state of war: the passive war of warpropaganda, war-indoctrination, war-rehearsal’. In these conditions, ‘periodic preparation for defense against an attack by air’ represented ‘the materialization of a skilfully evoked nightmare’. It was through these rehearsals, carried out extensively in literature before they were in practice, that ‘the dweller in Megalopolis dies, by anticipation, a thousand deaths’. It was by the imagination of, and then planning for,
the disaster that air raids would bring that the fear of bombing was ‘fixed into routine’ before 1939.2
Mumford, foreshadowing Richards’s remarks in 1941, argued that war and the fear of war had infiltrated peacetime to such an extent that the notion of a distinct temporal period of conflict was outdated. Old ideas of peace and war had been displaced by new technologies, but also by the theories of war which developed in dialogue with the new weapons. With cities placed permanently under bombsights, the notion of ‘wartime’ was being refigured along with the urban spaces that were simultaneously recast as target zones.3 As new methods and technologies of war were trained on cities and civilians, both built environments and their inhabitants were placed on the front lines of future conflicts and cities were made into targets.
In the mid-twentieth century, planning for defence and development became increasingly entangled, as air raids were added to the catalogue of potential threats to urban life. Bombers cast their shadows over streets and buildings, as perceptions of urban space were reframed by a permanent and unpredictable threat from above. The development of modern cities occurred beneath these shadows, and the planners who attempted to sketch the future of societies often did so in anticipation of mass urban destruction. The mapping of imagined destruction onto images of urban centres created a doubled view of the future cities as sites of development and destruction. The exhortations for ‘friendly bombs’ to enact slum clearance and enable urban redevelopment were part of a culture of anxiety about social decline and material decay in cities, in which airpower was simultaneously a symbol of a new technological modernity and the defining image of a future of permanent danger and vulnerability.
The power of the air
Intense speculation about the future was fuelled by rapid advances in technology in the early twentieth century and reactions against the social and material consequences of industrialisation in Britain. Modernisation and mechanisation were at once liberating, aweinspiring and deeply troubling. These ambiguities were articulated in responses to the development of aviation in particular.4 The Architectural Review wrote in 1934 that aviation had ‘annihilated time and space’, with man suddenly able to leap over oceans and mountain ranges.5 Aviation also enabled a new vision of societies, as those with
access to the technology could raise themselves above the landscape to survey, and perhaps control, the lives of those below. The disconnection of aviators with terrestrial life was a key theme in interwar literature and thinking. Bertrand Russell warned against the inhuman power of aviation and the possibility of a government from the skies, in which man might ‘begin to feel himself a god’.6 H.G. Wells was more ambiguous, depicting airpower as both a destructive and constructive force. In his vision, airpower and chemical weapons would enable humanity to bomb civilisation back to barbarism, but it was the airmen themselves who would have the skill and knowledge to redeem and rebuild human societies.7
The preoccupation with building bombing capacity in interwar Europe reflects how belief in the power of the air reached beyond writers to policymakers and military strategists.8 In these literary and military visions, airpower and aerial war meant not only swift destruction with no hope of defence, but specifically urban destruction and mass civilian deaths. The trenches of the First World War would be replaced by burning cities choked with poison gases and whole populations wiped out in moments. Enthusiastic advocates of airpower celebrated the end to the bloody stalemate of trench warfare, while some went as far as to credit bombing with the ‘democratisation’ of war.9 Writers and artists drew vivid images of cities destroyed from the sky as Stanley Baldwin warned in the House of Commons that ‘the bomber will always get through’.10
Visions of future air war were drawn against a background shaped by both the imagined apocalypses of literature and the actual experiences and practices of bombing in the First World War which were further developed in the interwar period. After 1918, most experiments with aerial bombing were conducted by European countries above their colonies as a method of colonial policing known as ‘air control’.11 The destruction moved from the colonial periphery to mainland Europe when the power of Hitler’s air force was seen at Guernica.12 The bombardment of Spanish cities prompted headlines about the collapse of civilisation and a descent into barbarism. In Britain, it was interpreted as an indication of the unparalleled and indiscriminate destructive power of aerial bombing and Hitler’s willingness to deliberately target civilians in an attempt to destroy morale.13 The expectation in Britain was that, as soon as war was declared, British cities would be attacked instantaneously and the results would be devastating. Despite the anticipation of an immediate all-out attack from the
air, it was not until the Blitz began in September 1940 that the fears of aerial bombing were realised in British cities. It was then that the aerial war against urban centres became a reality for the British government and a part of the everyday lives of people across the country.
The impact of the Second World War (and the bombing war in particular) on British society remains a key topic in modern history. Social and cultural histories of Britain at war have reconfigured notions of ‘the people’s war’ and the ‘home front’ to develop a more nuanced picture of the experience of war in Britain.14 The distinct social and cultural impact of air war has been subject to new histories that move on from the classic accounts, such as those by Angus Calder and Tom Harrisson.15 Richard Overy, Susan Grayzel and Dietmar Süss in particular have drawn together a broad range of social, cultural and political sources to deepen the understanding of how people responded to the threat from the air in Britain and Germany.16 These histories have shown how air raids against cities and their civilian inhabitants were understood and incorporated into everyday life. Architectures of Survival builds on these books and engages with the idea of ‘war as a social condition’ that is central to Süss’s analysis.17 It does this, however, by focusing on government and architectural planning for the future of cities from the top down. This approach highlights the processes by which cities were transformed into targets in plans before they were in practice, rather than analysing how people lived and societies functioned under fire.
This history of visions of the future of cities analyses the ways in which the bombing of cities and civilians became embedded into British governmental thought and, to an extent, architectural and planning cultures – cultures which are necessarily concerned with picturing the shape of the world to come. The nature of air war, that bombs could fall at any moment, meant that altered perceptions of cities under the shadow of bombers were projected indefinitely into the future. The new methods of war had created a permanent threat from the skies, but one which could not be predicted. As cities became designated as the primary targets for bombs, it followed that planning for the future of cities was a crucial question for national security and national survival.
The periodisation of this study, which extends before and after the Second World War, reflects the idea that airpower and the designation of cities as targets fundamentally challenged notions of peacetime and wartime. The book is designed to contribute to the understanding
of war in the twentieth century, rather than a singular instance of conflict, as uncertainty about unpredictable attacks was translated into a condition of permanent vulnerability. In this way, it differs from more traditional studies of the impact of war, and the Second World War in particular, and engages more fully with broader questions about militarisation, the genealogies of the Cold War and the increasing interdependence of civilian and military arms of governmental planning and analysis. It builds on a historiography of air war that has begun to look beyond the Blitz and the Second World War to talk about a more international history that is not contained within the borders of 1939 and 1945.18 The broadening of the chronology of bombing in this historiography is reflected in the increasing attention to the literary and cultural imaginations of air war in the interwar period.19 Architectures of survival develops these approaches by specifically highlighting how anxieties about air raids were written into plans for the future of cities by government policymakers, as well as into the more discursive work of architects and planners. By focusing on cities, the book begins to demonstrate how fear of air raids moved out of literary speculation and into concrete planning for the future shape of Britain, but also highlights how air raids were situated within broader debates in planning regarding slum clearance and modernisation. A key element of this was the repositioning of the eye above the city.
The development of aviation technology alongside photography provided civilian and military planners with a new view of the land and of the organisation of space. The aerial view was a key component in planning approaches to cities in the mid-twentieth century, which revealed a new schematic of urban space. This synoptic view enabled cities to be perceived as distinct areas, containable in a photograph, which, despite the shapeless sprawl at the peripheries, had recognisable limits and boundaries. The aerial view flattened landscapes, abstracted urban form and shifted the balance between the perceiver and the object of perception. The view from above was the source of a liberating new vision, while also a disconcerting portent of the power of new technologies to dominate human life. This tension reflected broader responses to new technologies that promised to transform the world, but aviation and the aerial view were particularly important to the developing practices of town planning. Representations of cities as defined units helped planners to see urban development in a new way and thus propose interventions and new urban shapes.20
The same technologies of vision enabled military planners to designate targets in enemy cities on a two-dimensional image in which a city was reduced to a series of abstracted shapes and patches of light and shadow.21 The entanglement of the bomber’s-eye view with the planner’s-eye view highlights the relationship between civilian and military technologies, and techniques for seeing cities and envisioning the future.22
Historians have shown that the development of theories and practices of planning in the mid-twentieth century was highly international, and the same is true for airpower. This book, however, focuses closely on Britain. There are a number of factors that make the British case worthy of close attention, including Britain’s early commitment to strategic bombing and the identification of landscape with national character and culture. Britain’s position as both a keen advocate and practitioner of airpower, and as an island nation made newly vulnerable by aerial bombing, is significant. The level of public anxiety about air raids before the Second World War was significantly higher in Britain than in other European countries, with the United States a closer comparison. The geography perhaps contributed to the higher amount of public anxiety about air raids in these countries, and it was certainly a major factor in the belief that airpower was fundamentally rewriting the practice of war for nations that had been somewhat physically isolated. Commitment to the ideas of strategic bombing and an independent air army that would target cities and ‘vital centres’ rather than armies in the field was considerably stronger in Britain and the US than elsewhere. (In comparison, countries such as France and Germany primarily saw airpower as supporting ground offensives until relatively late.) Similarly, the projection of British power globally was never reliant on a large army, and this was reflected in support for airpower as a means of colonial control. Aviation was also understood as essential to a nation that considered itself modern as well as scientifically and technologically advanced, and military theorists repeatedly overstated the likely effects of bombing, provoking anxiety amongst Britons about their own vulnerability, as part of their efforts to secure a strong position for airpower in national defence.23 A dynamic through which anxiety was heightened by exaggerated pronouncements on bombing power reveals some of the ways in which military thinking was connected to literary speculations and was part of a broader culture of urban anxiety that was in constant dialogue with planning and architectural discourses.
In addition to the role of airpower, the particular planning cultures and perceptions of built and natural environments in Britain warrant attention. There are important particularities of planning cultures in Britain that have longer intellectual histories, and part of the book is about tracking those ideas through the development of airpower and seeing how older concerns about the dangers of urban congestion –and the importance of containing urban growth and preserving the countryside – were filtered through the new lens of aerial war.24 (This is a very English Britain, but in a history of ‘total war’ mobilisation that focuses on central government papers, it makes sense to talk in terms of Britain rather than England.) This is not to say that these debates about urbanism, planning and air war were limited to Britain, but that they had particular characteristics that influenced how air raids against cities were understood and incorporated into everyday urban questions. For example, planners in Britain stressed the need to have clear distinctions between country and city, with these two realms being generalised into places of tradition and peace on the one hand, and modernity and chaos on the other. The development of airpower and the imagination of attacks fed into these existing tropes and reaffirmed them. The book considers how these longer histories and continuities in thinking contributed to the normalisation of the deliberate bombing of civilians, before it happened, through associations with older ideas about country and city.
Planning uncertain futures
Military and urban planners both operate in a condition of uncertainty. They attempt to overcome the opaqueness of the future by evaluating the past and diagnosing the present, to draw visions of an imagined world to come. The inherent uncertainty in planning was articulated by Michel Foucault when he wrote that ‘a good town plan takes into account precisely what might happen’. In Foucault’s analysis, a town is not planned ‘according to a static perception that would ensure the perfection of the function there and then, but will open onto a future that is not exactly controllable, not precisely measured or measurable’. He describes this condition of uncertainty as a ‘problem of security’ or a ‘problem of the series’, whereby a mass of indefinite events will occur which can only be controlled or approached through an estimate of probabilities. This practice of calculating probabilities and writing them into plans which seek to
envisage and give some shape to the future is what he calls the ‘essential characteristic of the mechanism of security’.25
Foucault’s ‘problem of security’ describes a prevailing condition of uncertainty about future events which can only be predicted, not known, and which the town plan must attempt to account for. The unpredictable nature of air raids, but the assumed catastrophic consequences if they were to occur, meant that the threat was a ‘problem of security’ that planners for defence and development were consistently concerned by. This uncertainty was articulated in the work of planners who attempted to sketch out an image of the future city. Historians have tended to focus on the utopian aspects of planning visions of future worlds, characterised by the alluring depictions of high-tech futures and gleaming modernist dreamworlds.26 But while planners were undoubtedly fuelled by utopian ideas and fantasies of future worlds, fears and expectations of urban destruction also contributed to the development and articulation of visions of the future of cities. As the architectural historian Anthony Vidler has argued, ‘the anticipatory fear of future loss’ is a neglected narrative in histories of the twentieth century.27 And it is in part that dystopian counterpoint, the doubled vision of the future of cities, which this book seeks to bring into a clearer focus.
The impact of the expectation and experience of bombing is not just a question for histories of war and violence but also an important element of understanding cities as sites of modernity and development, and as the places where the future will be made. The focus on cities and planning distinguishes this book from more general histories of air war and bombing and begins to address the absence of war in modern urban histories.28 Contemporary work on military urbanism has discussed the embedding and mobilisation of networks and architectures of surveillance and control in cities.29 The geographers and social scientists working in this field have highlighted the importance of airpower and the connections between surveillance and bombing, particularly in relation to the use of drones in the ‘war on terror’, and have paid increasing attention to notions of urban space in military theory and practice.30 These writers have drawn on Foucault’s idea of the ‘boomerang effect’ of colonial practice, whereby techniques used in the colonial periphery are reflected back on the metropole, to discuss how methods and technologies of surveillance and control, honed in places such as Iraq and Gaza, have been normalised in western cities and populations.31 Questions about
how airpower ‘boomeranged’ back onto western countries earlier, in the mid-twentieth century, are an important part of understanding the development of strategic bombing in the Second World War. Historians have shown the continuities and connections between ‘air control’ in the 1920s and drones in the twenty-first century, and this book similarly suggests that the targeting of cities and populations reflects a persistent alignment of military and urban thinking.32 This sustained study of the specific urban nature of airpower and of the codevelopment of theories of the city and theories of bombing brings the analyses of military urbanisms, airpower and their histories more closely together.33
Histories of militarisation use a variety of approaches to demonstrate how the distinctions between military and civilian have become increasingly blurred. Political and economic histories illustrate the commitment of governments to military expenditure and the importance of war in national and international economies, while cultural and social histories can highlight how societies experience and participate in militarisation and how real and imagined war seeps into cultural consciousness.34 A history of the militarisation of cities, or more precisely of the normalisation of militarised perceptions of cities, necessarily draws on both of these approaches. It is in the nature of plans that few make it beyond the drafting board, therefore an urban history of air war and militarisation must extend to the broader cultures of urbanism while situating these closely in political debates and decision-making. Architectures of survival deals with debates and plans that for the most part did not result in fully financed schemes (to some extent, because the government preferred to spend on rearmament and offensive weapons). These attempts to reshape cities do, however, reveal telling cultural assumptions about the period in which they were conceived, which makes them valuable historical documents. As Guy Ortolano said, in urban planning ‘expectations about the future were filtered through assumptions about the present’.35 The plans and visions of cities discussed here highlight how the spatial structure of cities, their architectures, infrastructures and inhabitants, were brought under the bomber’s-eye view and incorporated into a militarised understanding of urbanism.
This book does not focus on fantastical visions of cities built underground, in the sea or outer space, but looks at the points at which planning discourses for defence and development crossed over in everyday government debates about the future of the city. The developments of
town planning theory and airpower theory run alongside one another and the multiple points of alignment reflect the particularly urban character of air war. By looking at these twin visions of the city and focusing on their penetration into debates about urban development, this book suggests that air war, real and imagined, created a new understanding of cities and urban spaces, as architectural features were refigured according to their vulnerability and susceptibility to air raids. The everyday materiality of cities, streets, cables, tunnels, houses and roads was brought into a new vision of urban planning that was increasingly articulated in terms of survival. Infrastructure technologies were the material networks of life in cities, and the maintenance of these organising and connecting systems became central to broader concerns about how to survive aerial war.
Urban infrastructure networks had been a key element in the modernisation of cities in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth century their function was reframed by the threat of air raids. Histories of the Victorian city have shown how such technologies were designed to ensure the circulation required for the health of a city and its population, and to enable governmental control over urban environments, while reforming personal habits and instilling selfgovernment with notions of freedom.36 As Martin Daunton argued, the focus on circulation ‘implied a particular vision of urban life. Arteries should be kept free of blockages or the city – like an individual – would suffer apoplexy’.37 This book follows these arguments into an era of air war and demonstrates how official concerns about social conduct in cities, the importance of circulation and the dangers of congestion were reiterated in the context of air raids. Here the identification of cities as the centre of danger and potential upheaval in modern mass societies was translated into airpower theories which imagined attacks on urban centres as crippling a nation and a war economy by facilitating urban chaos and turning the undisciplined and restive urban masses on their own governments. The shared perceptions of the dangers of cities provided a way in which strategic bombing could be understood and rhetorically elevated to a warwinning technique.
Government concerns about the resilience of infrastructure networks were central to the anxieties about the effects of air raids on cities and their inhabitants, and the answer to the urban problems of congestion and decay became an answer to the threat of air raids. The technologies of pipes, tunnels, cables, roads and streets, which would
bring about health and modernity, would also enable life and production in the city to survive bombing and prevent the panic and chaos that would result in disorder and collapse. Airpower and urbanisation meant that questions about the defence of society and maintenance of domestic security were about ensuring order in urban environments and for inhabitants at home, while provoking disorder in the enemy’s cities. Government debates about the provision and maintenance of urban infrastructure and the development of cities illustrate how civilian technologies and epistemologies were incorporated into war thinking and war preparations which looked beyond the immediate threat to a future of permanent vulnerability in which anticipated war was a constant backdrop.38
This book reconsiders the story of urban development, suburbanisation and dispersal, to highlight the connections and continuities between pre-war, wartime and post-war Britain. The Cold War imaginations of underground worlds were part of the response to the nuclear threat to cities, but they were also a continuation of debates about the vulnerability of congested urban centres to bombs. These anxious responses included proposals for mass urban dispersal and sweeping civil defence plans and were reflected in post-war architectural and urbanist cultures.39 Work on the United States in the Cold War has highlighted the influence of anxiety about nuclear war on post-1945 development, but this influence has been largely unexplored in Britain and in Europe.40 Much of the work on reconstruction and planning in Britain has focused on the successes and failures of specific modernist development schemes set against the utopian aspirations of planners.41 This book shows that in the very first years of the Cold War, and even before 1945, reconstruction plans were marked by fear and anticipation of bombing and nuclear attacks. In this period of unprecedented reconstruction planning, the techniques of zoning for city expansion and development on utopian-modernist lines was echoed in the target zoning of Intelligence Committee reports on imagined nuclear attacks on Britain. Histories of Britain in the Cold War have begun to uncover Civil Defence programmes and nuclear cultures, and this book draws connections to the longer history of the targeting of cities to highlight how these Cold War images of urban annihilation were normalised in thinking about cities and the future before 1945.42 Air raids were an ongoing concern before, during and after war, and civilian and military planning were drawn together in this context.
The transformation of societies from peacetime to wartime was a multi-dimensional process which not only mobilised entire national populations, but also destabilised and ultimately removed some of the limits on acceptable violence. The continued and focused attacks on civilian urban populations from the air was a central element in this war without boundaries. The Cold War strategies, which consisted of a list of cities to be erased by nuclear weapons in an instant, were a continuation of the logic of air war that developed in the first half of the twentieth century. As airpower ushered in a version of war where the distinctions between military and civilian become ever more opaque, and the notion of peacetime increasingly anachronistic, it is necessary to ask how these dynamics developed. With ever more sophisticated technologies, the risk to those dropping the bombs is increasingly small, but the condition of permanent vulnerability for those on the ground persists. Bombing civilian spaces in a permanent state of war has become so routine as to be numbing. But by examining how air raids were brought into civilian planning for the future of cities, perhaps it is possible to uncover the elisions and gaps in the thinking and policies that contributed to the development of this reality. Historians can help to reveal these cracks, at once denaturalising and exposing the contingency of our condition while enabling alternatives to be articulated that might contribute to the work of reshaping the world.
Sources and structure
The book draws on a wide range of archive material to demonstrate how the militarisation of space and the phenomenological emergence of the city-as-target in anticipation of war began to colour everyday government discussions about urban and infrastructure planning. To do this, it combines scrutiny of committee minutes and policy debates across government departments with analysis of more discursive discussions about cities and bombing in architectural journals. The centralised nature of the British political system meant that government control over planning was relatively strong, if often reliant on delegation to local authorities. War, fear of war, and the demands of reconstruction increased central control, and therefore this study draws predominantly on central government papers held at the National Archives in London, which are supplemented by local government material for short case studies. The files are primarily
from ostensibly civilian government departments concerned with the defence and development of cities, urban infrastructure and the nation more broadly. Papers from the Home Office, the Ministry of Transport, the Cabinet Office, the Board of Trade and the Ministry of Housing and Local Government form the backbone of the research. Committee minutes from civilian governmental meetings represent a significant section of the source material used. I have chosen to do this to investigate how air raid thinking infiltrated the commonplace discussions about city planning and national development. This is not to argue that fear of bombing was the primary concern of government planners and policymakers, but to demonstrate that defence from bombs was normalised and became a routine feature of government debates about civilian urban and industrial development.
Government officials did not work in complete isolation, however, and the changing perceptions of cities under the shadow of air war in government and the civil service occurred within a broader social, cultural and intellectual context. The work of professionals concerned with urban development and architecture reveals the academic and practical engagement with the problems of the future of cities in an era of air war and broadens the notion of the ‘expert state’.43 Specialist journals offer an insight into the rich and varied discussions about the relationship between cities, destruction and aerial bombing that occurred throughout the period. As well as architects and planners, writers and artists responded to the gathering threat of bombing and the ruination of cities, by imaginatively re-inscribing urban environments. Across these different disciplines and intellectual cultures, visions of the destruction of cities from the skies relied on an imaginative picture of the future and were followed by attempts to understand the meanings and consequences of the new methods of war.
The use of source material from national and local government alongside that of architects and town planners working outside the government reflects the importance of the interactions between different groups of planners and officials concerned with cities. This book does not attempt to establish direct causal links but rather asks how both official and unofficial planners were influenced by the experience and expectation of air war. More specifically, it investigates the militarisation of architecture and town planning by analysing the pervasiveness and penetration of war-thinking amongst civilian experts. The re-designation of cities as targets occurred in culture and politics, and this book brings together the often isolated areas
of policy history and cultural history to examine how perceptions of cities shifted in an era of air war. The concentration on cities and urbanism focuses a wide-ranging interdisciplinary study that develops, and makes connections between, a number of different historiographies and approaches.
The book is organised broadly chronologically, while specific case studies are used to focus the arguments and maintain a close connection to the source material. The first two chapters analyse Britain before the bombs began to fall in 1940. The first chapter discusses the development of airpower and airpower theories, following the First World War, and the relationship between planning and architectural discourses of urban decay and danger. The role of infrastructure in the future of cities is introduced, as well as the early associations with air war and survival. The second chapter discusses the years following the establishment of the Air Raid Precautions Department within the Home Office in 1935, up to the start of the Blitz in 1940. It investigates the increasing domestication of air raid precautions in the build-up to war, and the interrelatedness of planning debates about unhealthy, congested cities and their vulnerability to air attack.
The third chapter focuses on the central period when air raids became an everyday reality in British cities. It considers how cities were materially refigured by bombing during the Second World War, and the techniques employed to keep cities functioning. As bombing became more and more routine, the topography of the city was transformed into an architecture of destruction and survival, and infrastructure turned into networks of life.
The fourth and fifth chapters analyse the visions of Britain after the Second World War. Chapter four considers how the development of atomic weapons and the ongoing fear of air attacks led to new civil defence maps of cities and new urban geographies of war. The final chapter discusses how understandings of town and country were affected by war as the national landscape was remade into one of evacuation areas and target areas. It looks in particular at visions of dispersal in reconstruction, which were a key crossover point for architects and civil defence planners.
Between 1945 and 1952, debates about protection from nuclear weapons reflected the ongoing anxiety and ambiguity provoked by airpower. In 1952, Britain successfully exploded a nuclear device in the culmination of a long-standing policy of deterrence.44 Shortly after Britain’s 1952 test, the United States exploded the first hydrogen
bomb. This immediately undermined all received knowledge about the scope of any future nuclear war and made debates about bomb shelters and structural precautions seem somewhat anachronistic. Despite the massively increased power of the weapons, the basic strategies of targeting cities remained unchanged. The conclusion draws together the arguments and suggests that cities have been remade into sites of war. It argues that a crucial part of understanding the impact of the expectation and experience of air war is highlighting how governmental and architectural perceptions of cities were transformed.
Notes
1 J.M. Richards, ‘Foreword by the Editor’, Architectural Review 90 (July 1941), p. 1.
2 Lewis Mumford, The Culture of Cities (London: Secker & Warburg, 7th edn, 1953), p. 275.
3 For the history of the concept of ‘wartime’, see Mary Dudziak, War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
4 For the ambiguous reaction to modernity, see Bernhard Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890–1945 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Peter Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars (London: Allen Lane, 2009).
5 Holbrook Jackson, ‘The Social Scene, 1901–1934’, Architectural Review, 75 (1934), p. 158.
6 Bertrand Russell, Power: A New Social Analysis (London: Gallen & Unwin, 1938), pp. 31–32.
7 This is the basic plot of the 1933 novel by H.G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come (London: Penguin, 2005).
8 Andrew Barros, ‘Razing Babel and the Problems of Constructing Peace: France, Great Britain, and Air Power, 1916–28’, The English Historical Review, 126:518 (2011), 75–115.
9 For a summary of key voices, see Phillip S. Meilinger, ‘The Historiography of Airpower: Theory and Doctrine’, The Journal of Military History, 64:2 (2000), 467–501; Italian General Giulio Douhet advocated the ‘democratisation’ of war through airpower in his influential book The Command of the Air (London: Faber & Faber, 1943, 1988 imprint); Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Air Warfare: The Evolution of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); David Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant
and Technological Nation (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991); Michael Sherry, The Rise of American Air Power: The Creation of Armageddon (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1987).
10 Stanley Baldwin’s famous speech ‘A Fear for the Future’ to the House of Commons in November 1932 provides a clear articulation of these fears, see HC Deb 10 November 1932, vol. 270, cols 630–635, URL: http:// hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1932/nov/10/international-af fairs#S5CV0270P0_19321110_HOC_284 [accessed 23 October 2013].
11 For Britain, see Priya Satia, ‘The Defense of Inhumanity: Air Control and the British Idea of Arabia’, The American Historical Review, 111:1 (2006), 16–51; and David Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force 1919–1939 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990).
12 Uri Bialer, ‘“Humanization” of Air Warfare in British Foreign Policy on the Eve of the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 13:1 (1978), 79–96.
13 Dietmar Süss, Death from the Skies: How the British and Germans Survived Bombing in World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 41–42.
14 Sonya O. Rose, Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Britain 1939–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Penny Summerfield and C.M. Peniston-Bird, Contesting Home Defence: Men, Women and the Home Guard in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007).
15 Angus Calder, The People’s War: Britain 1939–45 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969); Angus Calder, Myth of the Blitz (London: Jonathan Cape, 1991); Tom Harrisson, Living through the Blitz (London: Collins, 1976).
16 Richard Overy, The Bombing War: Europe 1939–1945 (London: Penguin, 2014); Süss, Death from the Skies; Susan Grayzel, At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
17 Süss, Death from the Skies, p. 8. Süss takes this concept from Jan-Philipp Reemtsma, Krieg ist ein Gesellschaftszustand: Reden zur Eröffnung der Ausstellung ‘Vernichtungskrieg. Verbrechen der Wehrmacht 1941–1944’ (Hamburg, 1998).
18 Richard Overy, Claudia Baldoli and Andrew Knapp (eds), Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe, 1940–1945 (London: Continuum, 2011); Stefan Goebel and Derek Keene (eds), Cities into Battlefields: Metropolitan Scenarios, Experiences and Commemorations of Total War, Historical Urban Studies (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011); Toshiyuki Tanaka and Marilyn Blatt Young (eds), Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth Century History (New York: New Press, 2009).
19 For an overview of the history of bombing and its literary imaginings, see Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing, trans. Linda Haverty Rugg (London:
Granta, 2nd edn, 2002). A key essay for Britain is Martin Ceadel, ‘Popular Fiction and the Next War, 1918–1939’, in Frank Gloversmith (ed.), Class, Culture and Social Change: A New View of the 1930s (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1980), pp. 161–184. Interwar literature is a key element in Grayzel, At Home and Under Fire; Michele Haapamäki, The Coming of the Aerial War: Culture and the Fear of Airborne Attack in InterWar Britain (London: IB Tauris, 2014); Brett Holman, The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908–1941 (Oxford: Routledge, 2nd edn, 2016).
20 Jeanne Haffner, The View from Above: The Science of Social Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), pp. 14, 16.
21 See Paul K. Saint-Amour, ‘Applied Modernism: Military and Civilian Uses of the Aerial Photomosaic’, Theory, Culture & Society, 28:7–8 (2011), pp. 241–269.
22 For an analysis of the importance of new technologies and aerial photography to ideas about cities and landscapes, see Haffner, The View from Above; Paul K. Saint-Amour, ‘Modernist Reconnaissance’, Modernism/ Modernity, 10:2 (16 May 2003), pp. 349–380; Kitty Hauser, Shadow Sites: Photography, Archaeology, and the British Landscape, 1927–1955 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For the impact of the aerial view on urbanism and architecture more generally, see Adnan Morshed, Impossible Heights: Skyscrapers, Flight, and the Master Builder (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); M. Christine Boyer, ‘Aviation and the Aerial View: Le Corbusier’s Spatial Transformations in the 1930s and 1940s’, Diacritics 33:3 (2003), pp. 93–116.
23 Overy, The Bombing War, pp. 41–55.
24 For two books that consider the aerial view and war in relation to landscape, see David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion Books, 1998); Hauser, Shadow Sites.
25 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78, ed. Arnold Davidson, trans. Graham Burchell (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 20.
26 For example, Tessa Morrison, Unbuilt Utopian Cities 1460 to 1900: Reconstructing their Architecture and Political Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2016); Joseph Rykwert, The Seduction of Place: The History and Future of the City (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2nd edn, 2004); Rosemary Wakeman, Practicing Utopia: An Intellectual History of the New Town Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).
27 Anthony Vidler, ‘Air War and Architecture’, in Julia Hell and Andreas Schönle (eds), Ruins of Modernity (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 20.
28 The major volume of the urban history of modern Britain almost entirely neglects the influence of war on urban development: Martin Daunton (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Modern Britain, Vol. III:
1840–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). For architecture and the Second World War, see Jean-Louis Cohen, Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War (London: Hazan, 2011).
29 See especially Stephen Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (London: Verso, 2nd edn, 2011). There are a number of edited volumes which introduce the field: Stephen Graham (ed.), Cities, War, and Terrorism: Towards an Urban Geopolitics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004); Derek Gregory and Allan Pred (eds), Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror, and Political Violence (London: Routledge, 2007); Deborah Cowen and Emily Gilbert (eds), War, Citizenship, Territory (London: Routledge, 2008).
30 Derek Gregory is a key voice here; see, for example, his ‘The Everywhere War’, Geographical Journal, 177:3 (2011), pp. 238–250; and his ‘Lines of Descent’, in Peter Adey, Mark Whitehead and Alison J. Williams (eds), From Above: War, Violence and Verticality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 41–69.
31 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (London: Penguin, 3rd edn, 2004), p. 103. This is a recurring argument in Graham, Cities Under Siege.
32 For the practice of airpower and the airpower theories of the interwar period, see Priya Satia, ‘Drones: A History from the British Middle East’, Humanity: An International Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development, 5:1 (2014), pp. 1–31.
33 Stephen Graham raises the importance of connecting the histories of cities and airpower in Vertical: The City from Satellites to Bunkers (London and New York: Verso, 2016), p. 66.
34 For the political economy of militarisation in Britain, see David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Two classic cultural histories of the Cold War demonstrated how war penetrates deep into cultures and societies: Paul S. Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (New York: Pantheon, 1985); Alan Nadel, Containment Culture: American Narrative, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 1995).
35 Guy Ortolano, ‘Planning the Urban Future in 1960s Britain’, The Historical Journal, 54:2 (2011), p. 494.
36 Patrick Joyce, The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City (London: Verso, 2003); Chris Otter, The Victorian Eye: A Political History of Light and Vision in Britain, 1800–1910 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2008). For the importance of infrastructure in the making and functioning of urban environments and the politics of everyday, see Vanessa Taylor and Frank Trentmann, ‘Liquid Politics: Water and the
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LA GUERRE DE BURGONDIE
Maître du royaume le plus vaste et le plus solide de l'Europe, Clovis était devenu l'arbitre de l'Occident. Seul, parmi les souverains de son voisinage, il se sentait vraiment roi. Les Francs barbares vénéraient en lui le représentant le plus glorieux de leur dynastie nationale; les Francs de race Gallo-Romaine[2] le saluaient comme le défenseur de leur foi et de leur civilisation. Il pouvait, sans inquiétude, tourner toute son attention du côté du midi; en arrière de lui il n'avait que des alliés, dans son royaume que des sujets fidèles. Il n'en était pas de même de ses voisins, les rois visigoths, ostrogoths ou burgondes. En Burgondie, tout spécialement, le trône était assiégé de soucis sans nombre, et le roi ne pouvait envisager sans inquiétude l'avenir de la dynastie. Les troubles confessionnels étaient à l'ordre du jour, la défiance sévissait entre indigènes et barbares; au sein de la famille royale elle-même régnaient des dissensions fatales. Il y avait là autant d'invitations tacites à l'intervention étrangère. Jeune, ambitieux, chef d'un peuple belliqueux, conscient du courant de sympathies qui du fond des royaumes ariens dirigeait vers lui les espérances catholiques, Clovis ne pouvait manquer de répondre avec empressement à un appel explicite qui lui viendrait de Burgondie. Cet appel ne tarda pas à se faire entendre, et il partit de la dynastie burgonde elle-même.
[2] Voir pour la justification de ce terme mon mémoire sur La France et les Francs dans la langue politique du moyen âge Reçue des questions historiques, t 57 ) Le royaume des Burgondes avait eu, dès l'origine, une destinée bizarre et semée de vicissitudes. En 413, à la suite des troubles de la grande invasion, les Burgondes étaient parvenus à passer jusque sur la rive gauche du Rhin, où Worms était devenue leur capitale. Là, au contact des indigènes catholiques, une partie d'entre eux avait embrassé la foi romaine[3] , et l'on eût pu croire qu'ils étaient appelés à remplir quelque grande mission dans l'histoire du monde naissant. Les traditions épiques de l'Allemagne ont conservé le
souvenir de ce premier royaume burgonde, et le poème des Niebelungen a enchâssé dans ses récits la description de la brillante cour de Worms, où trois rois jeunes et vaillants régnaient entourés d'un peuple de héros. Mais le royaume de Worms n'eut qu'une existence éphémère. Aétius, en 435, infligea à l'armée burgonde une défaite sanglante, dans laquelle périt le roi Gunthar, et, deux ans après, les Huns, sans doute excités par lui, exterminèrent presque le reste. C'est ce dernier désastre qui est devenu plus tard, dans l'épopée germanique, le massacre des héros burgondes à la cour d'Attila. Il était cependant de l'intérêt de l'Empire de conserver les débris d'une nation qui lui avait déjà rendu des services dans sa lutte contre les Alamans, et qui avait toujours fait preuve de dispositions plus bienveillantes que les autres barbares. En 443, il accueillit donc sur son territoire les Burgondes fugitifs, et leur assigna sur les deux rives du Rhône, avec Genève pour capitale et à peu près pour centre, la région montagneuse alors connue sous le nom de Sapaudia[4] . Ce fut là le noyau du deuxième royaume des Burgondes. Les barbares s'y établirent et partagèrent le sol avec les propriétaires indigènes, d'après un règlement calqué sur celui qu'on appliquait, dans les provinces, à l'occasion des logements militaires. Les Romains durent livrer chacun à son hôte,—c'est ainsi que la loi appelait le soldat,—le tiers de sa maison et de ses esclaves, les deux tiers de ses terres et la moitié de ce qu'il possédait en forêts[5] . Seulement, ces logements militaires d'un nouveau genre étaient définitifs, et l'hôte s'installa pour toujours avec femme et enfants. On comprend les souffrances que l'arrivée des nouveaux venus dut causer à la population indigène, et que d'amers souvenirs soient restés attachés, pour elle, aux premiers jours de la nationalité burgonde. Les racines du royaume plongeaient, pour ainsi dire, dans une spoliation universelle qui ne se laissait pas oublier, toute légale qu'elle fût, et que de nombreuses violences individuelles devaient rendre plus insupportable encore. Un saint de cette époque a flétri avec une courageuse indignation les excès que les barbares se permettaient envers des populations inoffensives et désarmées, et dans une de ces inspirations prophétiques comme en avaient si souvent les grands solitaires, il prédit aux Burgondes l'arrivée
d'autres hôtes qui leur appliqueraient leur propre mesure, et avec lesquels il leur faudrait partager à leur tour[6] .
[3] Paul Orose, , 32
[4] Longnon, p. 69; Binding, pp. 16 et suiv.
[5] Prosper, a 443; Marius, a 456; Lex Burgundionum, tit 54; Frédégaire, , 46 Voir sur cette question des partages Gaupp, Die Germanischen Ansiedelungen und Landtheilungen, pp 85 et suivantes
[6] Vita Lupicini, dans les Acta Sanctorum des Bollandistes, t. III de mars (25). p. 265.
Les années, en s'écoulant, n'avaient en rien amélioré cette situation de malaise et d'hostilité mutuelle. Deux nations restaient en présence l'une de l'autre, ou, pour mieux dire, vivaient l'une sur l'autre. Partout le Romain sentait sur ses épaules le poids de ce barbare qui avait pris son bien, qui parlait une langue inintelligible, et qui était étranger à sa vie sociale et intellectuelle. Tout l'éloignait de lui, et ce qui aurait dû l'en rapprocher, le voisinage et la cohabitation, ne servait qu'à rafraîchir sans cesse le souvenir des humiliations et des violences de la première heure. La religion, ailleurs si puissante à éteindre les conflits et à rapprocher les cœurs, restait désarmée ici: au lieu d'unir elle divisait. Car les Burgondes, séduits par l'exemple des autres nations de leur race, venaient de passer en grande majorité à l'arianisme, si bien qu'on ne se rencontrait plus même au pied des autels. Telle était la situation intérieure dans celui des royaumes hérétiques où le vainqueur était le moins inhumain, et où les rois veillaient avec le plus de soin à préserver les droits de leurs sujets de race romaine. Aussi, tandis que dans le royaume franc la fusion des races se fit dès le premier jour, avec une rapidité étonnante, en Burgondie, elle était à peine commencée au début du e siècle. Chaque fois que le chroniqueur national de ce peuple parle d'un de ses compatriotes, il a soin de nous dire s'il est de race burgonde ou romaine[7] , et le fait d'une constatation pareille est à lui seul la preuve que l'on continuait d'avoir conscience de la distinction des deux peuples. [7] V. mon article ci-dessus cité. pp. 375-376.
Les Burgondes, d'ailleurs, ne furent jamais les ennemis de l'Empire. Campés, comme on vient de le dire, au milieu d'une province romaine, ils entendaient payer l'hospitalité qu'ils recevaient. Ils étaient les soldats de Rome, et ils observaient loyalement le pacte conclu entre eux et les empereurs. En échange des terres romaines, ils donnaient leur sang, et le versaient sans marchander. Ils furent à Mauriac en 451, combattant sous les drapeaux de cet Aétius qui, fidèle à la politique romaine, se servait tour à tour des Huns contre les Burgondes, et des Burgondes contre les Huns. Tant qu'ils vécurent comme peuple, ils gardèrent une vraie dévotion à l'Empire. Que le maître du monde fût à Rome ou à Byzance, ils ne cessèrent d'être à ses pieds, et de lui parler dans des termes d'une obéissance humble et pour ainsi dire servile. Rome les récompensa avec des insignes et avec des dignités. A l'un de leurs rois, Gundioch, celui que le pape Hilaire appelait son fils[8] , elle donna le titre de maître des milices; un autre, Chilpéric, reçut les honneurs du patriciat. Les rois burgondes étaient donc de grands personnages, mais comme fonctionnaires romains plus encore que comme monarques indépendants. Gondebaud hérita du titre de patrice qu'avait porté son oncle; cela lui permit, à un moment donné, de créer un empereur: il est vrai que c'était le faible et éphémère Glycérius. Ces rois se considéraient de plus en plus comme faisant partie du corps de l'Empire, et comme constitués à sa défense. Ils ne prêtèrent pas l'oreille aux suggestions de Romains qui, comme le préfet Arvandus, leur offraient le partage de la Gaule avec les Visigoths. Lorsque ceux-ci, ambitieux et entreprenants à l'excès, mirent la main sur Arles et sur Marseille, et manifestèrent l'intention de soumettre toute la Gaule, les Burgondes furent dans ce pays les meilleurs soutiens de l'Empire agonisant, et ils allèrent tenir garnison à Clermont en Auvergne, pour mettre à l'abri d'un coup de main ce dernier poste de la civilisation romaine[9] On ne leur en sut pas gré dans ce monde de décadents: on trouvait qu'ils faisaient fuir les Muses, et qu'ils sentaient mauvais avec leurs cheveux frottés de beurre rance[10] . Finalement, un empereur de rencontre abandonna sans combat, aux conquérants barbares, cette province qui n'avait eu que des barbares pour défenseurs. Euric et ses Visigoths entrèrent à Clermont en vertu du pacte conclu avec eux par Julius Nepos,
