Category Archives: Arts

Arts, Books, History, Society, Spain

Book Review: ‘The Life and Death of the Spanish Republic’…

SPANISH CIVIL WAR

Following the bombing of a London warehouse in 1940 during the Blitz, copies of a book awaiting distribution of Henry Buckley’s eyewitness account of the Spanish civil war nearly never saw the light of day. A handful, however, did survive, and this posthumous publication of The Life and Death of the Spanish Republic should go some way to establishing his reputation as one of the finest foreign journalists to write on Spain.

Buckley died in 1972, but was the Daily Telegraph’s foreign correspondent in Madrid from 1929. For a decade he furiously filed dispatches from all corners of the country as its young democracy sparked, and eventually ignited and burst into full-scale civil war. With Spain’s current economic crisis in the forefront of global news, it would be fascinating to see what a reporter of Henry Buckley’s stature would have made of its present predicament.

Following a posting in Berlin, Buckley arrived in Madrid to find Spain about to be ripped apart by its own unresolved social and economic tensions. Through countless meetings and conversations with politicians, generals and workers he paints and depicts a vivid portrait of a country where ‘the mass of the people were solid in their desire to fight for their independence and for the future of the Republic as opposed to feudalism’, even though the military superiority of General Franco was to crush the country’s first experience of democracy.

In 1940, Daily Telegraph correspondent Henry Buckley published his eyewitness account of his experiences reporting form the Spanish civil war. The copies of the book, stored in a warehouse in London, were destroyed during the Blitz and only a handful of copies of his unique chronicle were saved.

In 1940, Daily Telegraph correspondent Henry Buckley published his eyewitness account of his experiences reporting form the Spanish civil war. The copies of the book, stored in a warehouse in London, were destroyed during the Blitz and only a handful of copies of his unique chronicle were saved.

Buckley’s reportage is not only of significance and great historical value, but is a model for foreign correspondents to follow. He offers passion and detailed knowledge on several leading political figures of the Republic, many of whom he knew personally, but who remain deeply controversial to this day in a Spain still struggling with the legacy of the civil war. In his collation, for instance, Buckley recalls with energy and vigour his conversations with José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the charismatic young leader of the fascist Falange movement. Whilst he is highly critical of the thugs hired by the young lawyer and parliamentarian, Buckley refers to him as ‘one of the nicest people in Madrid’, and makes narrative on the revolutionary leader’s ‘charming’ English accent.

Henry Buckley’s greatest quality as a correspondent is his sensitivity to both the human suffering and the broader significance of the conflict – his accounts are rich in colour and historical detail, as well as portraying a deeply personal tone.  As a pious and devout Christian, coupled with being a reporter for a British broadsheet newspaper, he faced multiple internal conflicts. He is clearly dismayed by the position taken by the Church, and angered by British and French non-intervention, as Franco’s better armed and organised troops gain advantage over the internationally isolated Republic. Buckley notes how the outcome of the war ‘depended almost entirely on Paris and London’, and how foreign-based financiers backed Franco over the Republic with their credit.

Journaling events with honesty and humility, often in chaotic circumstances, he openly admits when he cannot verify things, but rigorously doing so when he can. The chronicled entry concerning the vastly exaggerated Nationalist claims about the number of dead in Madrid ahead of the fall of the capital is a pointed example.

Prior to his eventual escape over the Pyrenees with the defeated Republican forces in 1939, Buckley wearily noted how democracy’s fight against the forces of Franco appeared doomed from the outset, gloomily writing that the Republic’s disadvantages were in ’everything but manpower so overwhelming that it was inadequate to try and regard it as an equal struggle’.

The Spanish civil war is a subject that has been widely covered in the last 50 years, but Buckley’s work is a rare account which generates much excitement. Its re-emergence is a reminder – to both the specialist and general reader alike – that the best frontline reporting endures long after the final shot has been fired.

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Arts, Britain, Government, History, Military, Science, Second World War

Britain: ‘RAF and the ‘Battle of the Beams’…

R.V JONES: ‘RADIO WAVES & ELECTRONIC JAMMING’

ON THE AFTERNOON of September 7, 1940, the first German bombers came rumbling up the Thames, to drop their bombs on London in the opening act of what became known as the “Blitz.” They were followed by a further 250 Luftwaffe bombers, unloading the first instalment of a massive payload of some 14,000 tons of high explosive that rained down on London until May of the following year.

The trial by fire that started more than 70 years ago is often depicted as a triumph of human resilience, a refusal by ordinary people to submit to terror. And so it was. But it was also a victory for a less known aspect of applied science, for, alongside the ferocious aerial combat another secret, electronic war was taking place, known to very few at the time and little appreciated since.

We rightly celebrate military victory in the Battle of Britain and civilian grit in the Blitz, but Britain’s astonishing scientific triumph in what Winston Churchill later called “the Battle of the Beams” has often been too easily overlooked. It saved countless thousands of lives, confused the German assault and helped to stave off the threat of invasion. This battle was fought, not with bombs and bullets, but radio waves. In the age of Shock and Awe, this covert scientific battle offers a timely reminder that ingenuity is just as important in war as brute force.

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THREE MONTHS before the Blitz began, a 28-year-old scientist named Reginald Victor (R. V.) Jones was summoned to Downing Street to address the cabinet on the subject of radio beams. Churchill had become increasingly worried by intelligence reports suggesting that the Nazis had developed some kind of secret ray that could magically guide the Luftwaffe bombers to their targets, even when flying at night and in dense cloud.

Though outnumbered, heroic RAF pilots flying nimble and venomous Spitfires and Hurricanes saw off the Luftwaffe, their decisive victory finally coming on September 15, 1940.

An RAF officer working in technical intelligence, Jones had begun studying German radio navigation systems several months earlier and offered the Cabinet a most alarming conclusion: the Germans were using two narrow radio beams transmitted from separate locations in continental Europe to pinpoint strategic locations in Britain. In effect, the German bomber pilot could follow one radio beam until it intersected with the other beam and then drop his payload – directly over the target.

Night-bombing made bombers safer from interception by fighters and anti-aircraft systems, but finding a target in the blackout or bad weather using traditional navigation was tricky. German scientists, it seemed, had solved the problem: they codenamed it “Knickebein”, meaning “crooked leg”, a reference either to the shape of the intersecting beams or the bent appearance of the transmitting antennae. The Germans could never resist a hinting code-word – the German codename for their long-range radar system, for example, was “Heimdall”, after the Norse god with the power to see over vast distances. But the British were similarly addicted to code-wordplay. With admirable understatement, this threatening new German radio navigation system was given the codename “Headache”; the countermeasures required to defeat it were named, perhaps appropriately, “Aspirin”.

 

TO TACKLE the problem, R.V. Jones turned for help to medicine. Electro-diathermy sets were used in hospitals to destroy abnormal tissue and to cauterise wounds. Suitably modified, they also proved highly effective at jamming the Knickebein transmissions and were now deployed to send out a blizzard of radio noise over a wide range of frequencies.

Hermann Goering, the Luftwaffe chief, had given Hitler his personal pledge that the radio navigation system was invulnerable. He was far wide of the mark and so, increasingly, were his bombers. During the crucial months of September and October 1940, as the Luftwaffe night-raids mounted in intensity, Jones and his fellow scientists became ever more adept at jamming and diverting the radio beams, using more powerful radio transmitters to “inject” the Knickebein signals with confusing Morse code elements.

Deprived of reliable electronic direction, the Luftwaffe crews could become disorientated at night. One pilot was said to have landed in Dover, thinking he was back in France. Bombs intended for vital and heavily populated targets fell relatively harmlessly in fields and hills. According to some estimates, as much as 80 per cent of the German night bombs missed their target. Intercepted messages between German ground controllers and Luftwaffe pilots unable to locate their targets provided vital evidence that the beam-jammers were having the desired effect.

Even so, “Aspirin” was far from a cure-all remedy. The German bombers still caused appalling damage. London represented a target too vast to miss, even at night. A derivative of Knickebein radio navigation, known as “X Apparatus” was used to guide 400 Luftwaffe pilots to Coventry on November 14, 1940. Because of a technical error, the British jammer stations attacked the wrong frequency. The city was devastated, 568 people died, and Joseph Goebbels coined the term “Coventriert” to describe a particularly satisfactory level of destruction.

But how many more lives might have been lost, how many key military and industrial installations would have been destroyed and with what effect on the progress of war, if the Luftwaffe had been able to continue precise bombing under cover of darkness? Churchill was never in any doubt that science had played a pivotal role in blunting the Blitz. He dubbed R.V. Jones the “man who bent the bloody beams”.

 

R.V. JONES, who died in 1997, was a remarkable warrior, but one who believed in trickery and creativity as the antidote to savagery. In 1993, the CIA founded an intelligence award named in his honour, for “scientific acumen applied with art in the cause of freedom”. Yet, in this country, which he did so much to defend, so secretly, his is not a household name.

The Blitz and the Battle of Britain are synonymous terms that have left an enduring legacy of proud national stereotypes; the Spitfire pilot, the ambulance driver, the unbowed housewife sweeping up after the bombs had left their mark.

Just as important, although much less lauded, was the scientist in his lab, using a medical gadget to baffle and confuse Hitler’s bombers.

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Arts, Books, First World War, History

Books/History: ‘Meeting the Enemy: The Human Face of the Great War’…

HISTORICAL REFERENCE WITH A DIFFERENCE

As the centenary of the Great War approaches, a tide of new books about it is due for publication. It must be the most written-about war in history.

Richard van Emden’s ‘Meeting the Enemy: The Human Face of the Great War’, though, is a World War I historical reference with a difference. Emden is a specialist who has found a literary niche, little explored, charting the personal contacts between Britons and Germans and their feelings about each other as the war progressed.

It began on both sides in a blaze of patriotic bluster. Crowds poured into Berlin’s main thoroughfare, Unter den Linden, as they did in London’s Piccadilly and Pall Mall. In Berlin they bellowed, ‘Deutschland, Deutschland, Über Alles’; in London, ‘Rule Britannia!’

The phrases of the hour in Britain were: ‘We must stand by France’ (German troops were already in Belgium) and ‘It will be over in three months’. Why three months, nobody precisely knew.

There were many more German immigrants in Britain than Britons in Germany. They faced internment, with dire consequences for their families, who were eventually supported by meagre grants from their government.

There was fury in Germany at Britain’s declaration of war, along with widespread feelings of betrayal. Only the previous year, George V visited his cousin the Kaiser, and was pictured wearing a ‘pickelhaube’ – a spiked, plumed German helmet matching the German leader’s. Now King George was pictured on a postcard as ‘der Judas von England’.

The Kaiser was honorary colonel of a regiment of British dragoons and an Admiral of the Fleet to boot. His British orders and decorations were packed in brown paper and delivered to the British Embassy with a message that he had no further use for them.

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NEVERTHELESS, he ordered that the English Church in Berlin, built as a present to his English mother, was to be kept open, and its pastor, the Rev Henry Williams, left at liberty for the duration.

The diaries of Rev William’s are much quoted, describing how life in Germany deteriorated when the Allied blockade began to bite.

Anti-German feelings ran high in Britain at the war’s opening and flared again with the sinking of the Lusitania off Southern Ireland in 1915, drowning more people than the Titanic had.

A remarkable book reveals how warring troops bonded in the trenches.

A remarkable book reveals how warring troops bonded in the trenches.

There were riots in the Lusitania’s home port of Liverpool, with the shops of German immigrants being looted and burnt. This rancour was markedly absent from the front line in Flanders, where the famous Christmas truce took place in 1914. Everyone knows that it started with men in both trenches singing Christmas carols and shouting ‘Merry Christmas’ to each other, then climbing out of their trenches to exchange gifts and friendly talk in no man’s land.

In some places the truce lasted into January, until orders came from above that war must be resumed. Officers on both sides synchronised their watches, agreeing to start again in an hour, saluted each other and went back to their respective trenches.

Those in the higher echelons of the British Army were furious at the spontaneous fraternising – pictures of which appeared in the newspapers. When Christmas approached in 1915, they threatened dire punishment if it should happen again.

But it did – at least in the Scots’ Guards section of the front. Their company commander, Sir Iain Colquhoun, agreed to a German suggestion of a truce to bury the dead lying in no man’s land. This developed into full-scale fraternising. The Germans danced to a mouth organ.

Captain Colquhoun was court-martialled and reprimanded. All leave was cancelled for six months as punishment.

Some other friendly contacts were surprising. When the British took over part of the French sector in 1915, they were met with a message left on the barbed wire, fixing a rendezvous for the exchange of newspapers.

One British officer was told that German officers had been in the habit of crossing over in the evenings for a game of bridge with their French opponents. That stopped when they found the British waiting for them.

Many deserters crossed the line at night to surrender and escape further fighting. A Sergeant Dawson, bogged down in the mud of no man’s land, could only wait to be captured. When he surrendered to the five Germans who pulled him out, they assured him: ‘No, we are your prisoners. Take us to your headquarters.’ He was helplessly lost, but they knew the way.

Prisoners were remarkably well-treated. Captain Wilfred Birt, who died in Cologne hospital after a stoic struggle with painful wounds, was given a slap-up military funeral in the cathedral by Germans. Serving British officers were invited to attend, and were allowed free passage back to their side afterwards.

Another imprisoned British captain was allowed three weeks’ leave to go home to see his dying mother. He gave his promise to return, kept his word … then set about trying to escape as usual.

The highest display of mutual esteem occurred between the fighter pilots who were in combat above the lines. They carried no parachutes, as they were too bulky for narrow cockpits. So when a machine caught fire, the pilot was faced with the choice of burning or jumping.

German pilots made a habit of finding their victims, alive or dead. If dead, they dropped details of their names and burial sites over the British lines. If alive, they would invite them to a slap-up meal in their mess.

Both sides were ruthless to each other in the air but observed the rules of chivalry on the ground. When the German ace Max Immelmann was killed, a British pilot dropped a wreath and message of condolence on his airfield.

When fellow ace Werner Voss was shot down doing battle against seven opponents at once, the victorious pilot said: ‘If only I could have brought him down alive.’

This illustrated the difference between personal combat and the industrialised warfare of machine guns and artillery barrages on the ground. When it was possible to know your enemy individually, hatred was seldom shown.

A brigadier, Hubert Rees, who was captured during the Germans’ last offensive in March 1918, was ordered to a car that took him to the top of a plateau. Here he was ushered forward to meet the Kaiser, who questioned him then said: ‘Your country and mine ought not to be fighting each other. We should be fighting together. I had no idea that you would fight me.’

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HE ASKED: ‘Does England wish for peace?’ Rees replied: ‘Everyone wishes for peace.’

After the Kaiser had gone into exile and Rees had been released from captivity and was wandering about Berlin, he witnessed the return of the Prussian Guards to the city, often described as a ‘triumph’.

Rees had a different word for it – pathetic. ‘Companies of boys and over-age men. Officers without swords. Rusty weapons, broken-down horses drawing limbers. As a military spectacle it was lamentable.’

As British troops occupied the Rhineland, a British guardsman wrote: ‘The people welcomed us as rescuers from anarchy.’ Also from starvation. Their British ‘guests’ were a vital source of food from the Army’s well-stocked canteens.

The ban on fraternisation had to be lifted. ‘Our fellows would open their tunics to show their scars. The German boys would do the same,’ wrote a private soldier. Only weeks after they had been doing their best to kill each other, they behaved like comrades in arms.

– ‘Meeting the Enemy: The Human Face of the Great War’ written by Richard van Emden is published by Bloomburg at £20.

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