The War in the Air: And Particularly How Mr. Bert Smallways Fared While It Lasted is a military science fictionnovel written by H. G. Wells and published in 1908.
The novel was written in four months[2] in 1907, and was serialized and published in 1908 in The Pall Mall Magazine.
Like many of Wells's works, the novel is notable for its prophetic ideas, images, and concepts—particularly the use of aircraft for the purpose of warfare—as well as conceptualizing and anticipating events related to World War I. The novel's hero and main character is Bert Smallways, who is described as "a forward-thinking young man" and a "kind of bicycle engineer of the let's-'ave-a-look-at-it and enamel-chipping variety."[3]
Plot summary
The first three chapters of The War in the Air expound on details of the life of the novel's hero Bert Smallways and his extended family. They reside in a location called Bun Hill, a fictional, former Kentish village that had become a London suburb.
The chapters introduce Bert's brother Tom, a stolid greengrocer, who views technological progress with apprehension. Also introduced is their aged father, who recalls, with longing, the time when Bun Hill was a quiet village and he had been able to drive the local squire's carriage. The story soon shifts focus to Bert; an unimpressive, unsuccessful, not particularly gifted young man with few ideas about larger things. Bert is far from unintelligent, however and we come to know that Bert has a strong attachment to a young woman named Edna.
When bankruptcy threatens his business one summer, he and his partner abandon their shop and devise a singing act, calling themselves "the Desert Dervishes". They attempt to resolve their misfortunes by staging performances at English sea resorts. As chance would have, their initial performance is interrupted by a certain balloon that lands on the beach before them. The balloon contains a new character: Mr. Butteridge.
Butteridge is famous for his successful invention of an easily maneuverable fixed-wing aircraft, whose secret he has not revealed. We come to know that he intends to sell his secrets to the British government or, if not possible, instead to Germany. We also come to know that prior to Mr. Butteridge's invention, nobody had succeeded in producing a practical, "heavier-than-air" machine—only a few awkward devices of limited utility had been made since (such as the German "Drachenflieger" which had to be towed aloft and released from an airship). Butteridge's invention is considered a major breakthrough. The invention is highly maneuverable, capable of both very fast and very slow flight, and requires only a small area to take off and land—reminiscent of the later autogyro.
Later in the novel, Bert is carried off in Butteridge's balloon and ends up discovering Butteridge's secret plans while he is on board. Bert is clever enough to appraise his situation, and when the balloon is shot down in a secret German "aeronautic park east of Hamburg"[4] Bert tries to sell Mr. Butteridges's invention. However, he has unknowingly stumbled upon the German air fleet just as it is about to launch a surprise attack on the United States. Prince Karl Albert, the author and leader of the plan, decides to take him along for the campaign.
The Prince, world-famous as "the German Alexander" or Napoleon, is a living manifestation of German nationalism and boundless imperial ambitions—his personality as depicted by Wells in some ways resembling that of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Bert's disguise is soon seen through by the Germans, and, after he avoids being thrown overboard by the furious prince, he becomes relegated to the role of a witness to the true horror of war.
The German aerial forces, comprising airships and Drachenfliegers, are mounting their surprise attack on the United States before the Americans can build a large aerial navy; the pretext for the attack is a German demand for the US to abandon the Monroe Doctrine, so as to facilitate German imperial ambitions in South America. The Germans are, however, unaware that the "Confederation of Eastern Asia" (China and Japan) has secretly been building a massive air force. Tensions between Japan and the United States, exacerbated by the issue of American citizenship being denied to Japanese immigrants, leads to war breaking out between the Confederation of Eastern Asia and the US, whereupon the Confederation turns out to possess overwhelmingly strong aerial forces, and the US finds itself fighting a war on two fronts: the Eastern and the Western, in the air as well as on sea.
Bert Smallways is present as the Germans first attack an American naval fleet in the Atlantic, utterly obliterating it and proving Dreadnoughts to be obsolete and helpless against aerial bombardment. The Germans then appear over New York City, bomb several key points, and establish that they have the city at their mercy, whereupon the mayor, with the consent of the White House, offers New York's surrender. However, the surrender announcement rouses the population's patriotic fury; local militias rebel and manage to destroy a German airship over Union Square using a concealed artillery piece. Following this, the vengeful prince orders a wholesale destruction, airships moving along Broadway and systematically raining death and destruction on the population below.
Following the destruction of New York, the far inferior American flying machines launch a suicidal attack on the overwhelming German force. They are almost completely obliterated, but cripple the Germans. The prince's flagship is disabled, and is unable to avoid being driven north by gale-force winds, eventually crashlanding in Labrador. Bert becomes an official member of the crew, as they struggle to survive in the freezing wilderness, befriends an English-speaking German junior officer, and for a time feels strong fellowship towards his crew mates. After a week they are picked up by another German airship, and carried directly into the fray of a ferocious new battle.
According to the prince's plans for the attack on the US, simultaneously with the subduing of New York, other German forces had landed at Niagara Falls, summarily evicted all the American population as far as Buffalo, and set to work building a large German airfield on American soil. However, the Asians – who have their own plans of conquest in America, and have already destroyed San Francisco – send their aerial forces over the Rocky Mountains and engage the Germans in battle, seeking to conquer or destroy the Niagara base.
View from Goat Island of the sky in which Bert Smallways saw the battle between German and Asian airships.
The Asiatic air fleet is equipped with large numbers of lightweight one-man flying machines called Niais, which appear to be ornithopters, armed with a gun carried by the pilot firing explosive bullets "loaded with oxygen" (i.e. incendiary bullets) for use against the hydrogen-filled airships. The Asians prove overwhelmingly superior, and the German airships are either destroyed or forced to flee, eventually surrendering to the Americans; only a few remain with Prince Karl Albert, who attempts a heroic last stand.
Bert is stranded on Goat Island in the middle of Niagara Falls, where he finds a crashed Niais and discovers that Prince Karl Albert and a surviving German officer share the island with him. Their clash of personalities eventually culminates in a life-or-death confrontation, and Bert – originally gentle and sickened by bloodshed – overcomes his civilised scruples and kills the prince. Bert then manages to repair the Asian flying machine and escapes from the island on it, crash-landing near Tanooda, New York.
Upon making contact with local Americans, Bert learns that the Asiatic forces have landed "a million men" on the western seaboard. The original German–American conflict, which had set off the conflagration, is almost forgotten in the massive conflict with the Asian forces – a conflict carried out with great savagery, neither side taking prisoners. All over the US, Chinese Americans are being lynched and in some places the lynching extends to blacks as well.
Bert learns that the war is going badly for the Americans, who are unable to withstand the superior Asian flying machines; the Americans mourn the loss of the Butteridge machine which might have turned the tide, if its inventor had not died suddenly shortly before the outbreak of war, taking his secret with him. Bert discloses that the plans for Butteridge's flying machine are in his possession, whereupon a local militia leader named Laurier urges him to turn the plans over to the president.
After an adventurous ride through war-ravaged upstate New York they find the president hiding out in "Pinkerville on the Hudson." The president proceeds to have copies printed and distributed widely all over the US, as well as sent to Europe. However, the results are not quite as expected. A decisive Asiatic victory is, indeed, averted – but there is no American or European victory, either. The Butteridge machine is cheap, easy and quick to build, and needs no big fields to take off or land – which mean it can be built and operated not only by national governments, but also by private groups, local militias, and even bandits – a development which tends to break up the war into a vast, incoherent multitude of localised struggles and which accelerates the already-begun process of break-up and disintegration of the world's nations.
While Bert experiences directly the events in America, news about what has happened in the rest of the world (specifically, in his native England) is few and scattered, with newspapers reduced to a single page before finally ceasing publication altogether; still, he hears with great alarm that London had shared the fate of New York.
The omniscient author, whose point of view is that of a future historian documenting the war and its aftermath, reveals information not available to Bert. The German assault on the US had bypassed Germany's European rivals, whose air fleets were considered too puny to constitute a threat, with the intention of totally dominating them once the Americans had been subdued. However, the alarmed United Kingdom, France, Spain and Italy pooled their aerial resources into a single strong force, passed through Swiss airspace after destroying that country's own flying machines, and devastated Hamburg and Berlin. The Germans mobilised a counter-attack which destroyed London and Paris, but then, as in America, the feuding Europeans were faced with an enormous attack from Asia.
The Asiatic fleet had attacked a combined Anglo-Indian aerial force, captured the Burmese airfields, Australia, and the Pacific islands. They then struck westwards, capturing the Middle East and South Africa and starting to build airships at Cairo, Damascus and Johannesburg. Moving further northwards, they soon reached Armenia then defeating the German forces in the Battle of the Carpathians before attacking Western Europe.
A global financial collapse is caused by hostile nations freezing assets, and the end of the credit system. This is referred to as "the Panic," which is followed by "The Purple Death." The War in the Air, the Panic, and the Purple Death bring about "[w]ithin the space of five years" a total collapse of "the whole fabric of civilisation."[5] But Bert Smallways, fixated on his amorous attachment, returns home after many adventures to kill a rival and win the hand of his beloved Edna; they marry and have eleven children. We are assured in the final chapter that "our present world state, orderly, scientific, and secured,"[6] would be eventually established, but that future is many decades or centuries off. For the plot's present time, the novel reverts to the ensuing fortunes of the Smallways family as England relapses into a sort of an agricultural barbaric age, Bert Smallways doing very well as a kind of tribal chieftain, occasionally resorting to bloodthirsty acts and his civilized scruples long forgotten.
Themes
Joseph Pennell's 1918 prophetic Liberty bond poster calls up the pictorial image of a bombed New York City, totally engulfed in a firestorm, similar to how New York City is bombed in the book.
The story was written in 1907 and depicts a war happening in the late 1910s – then a future history, which can be considered as a retroactive alternate history. The basic assumption behind the plot is that immediately after the Wright Brothers's first successful flight in 1903, all of the world's major powers became aware of the decisive strategic importance of air power, and embarked on a secret arms race to develop this power (there is a reference to the Wright Brothers themselves disappearing from public view, having been recruited for a secret military project of the US government – as were other aviation pioneers in their own respective countries). The general public is virtually unaware of this arms race, until it finally bursts out in a vastly destructive war which destroys civilisation.
In actual history, it took politicians and generals several decades to fully grasp these strategic implications. Moreover, the limited effect of the World War I German airship raids on London proved airships far from being the overwhelming destructive weapon depicted in Wells' book, nor were the early aeroplanes of the 1900s and 1910s capable of such massive bombings and destruction. Thus, the visions conjured by Wells were prophetic of the Second World War rather than the First one. (In fact, the actual First World war – characterised by very rigid fronts and a clear advantage of defence over offence – turned out to be the diametrical opposite of the one depicted by Wells, a completely fluid war with no clear fronts, and with a devastating offence against which no effective defence is possible.)
The latter parts of the book feature a post-apocalyptic theme – i.e., worldwide use of weapons of mass destruction and the war ending with no victors but with the total collapse of civilisation and the disintegration of all warring powers – which prefigures the themes of the later extensive literature depicting the aftermath of a Third World War. A similar theme appears in Wells' later The Shape of Things to Come. In a sense, "Things to Come" is a kind of sequel to The War in the Air. Though the details of the war in the latter book are different, its outcome is essentially the same – a complete disintegration of civilisation. "Things to Come" concentrates on the reconstruction of the world after this vast destruction and the creation of a peaceful, prosperous world state – and it depicts pilots and their aircraft as having a key role in re-building and unifying the world, just as they had a key role in destroying it. Also the major semi-historical chapters – interspersed in "The War in the Air" between the depictions of Bert Smallways' personal adventures, and written from the perspective of a future historian looking back with compassion at Twentieth Century people and their lethal nationalistic folly – clearly prefigure the tone of "Things to Come".
The idea of Japan and China uniting into a single power, the "Confederation of East Asia", prefigures "Eastasia" which is one of the three world powers in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four. The military might and ability attributed to the Sino–Japanese alliance is clearly and manifestly inflated: constructing far more airships and flying machines than all the rest of the world put together; waging simultaneous all-out wars of conquest against the United States, Britain, Germany, and other powers; performing the gigantic logistical task of transporting a million people across the Pacific within a few days while at the same time conducting extensive military operations all over Asia, Africa, Europe and North America.
As was pointed out by George Bright,[7] there was no way that a sober analysis of Japan and China's economic and military potential would have led Wells to attribute to them such might – even assuming, as the book does, an incredibly fast industrialisation of China, a backward and predominantly agrarian country at the time of writing. Rather, this theme is clearly linked to fears of the "Yellow Peril", which came about as a response to increasing Chinese emigration to the Western world.
Specifically, Wells' book is considered to have been influenced by M. P. Shiel's novel The Yellow Danger,[8] which also influenced novelist Jack London's The Unparalleled Invasion (1910).[9] A bit of scepticism on this issue is retained in The War in the Air in a passage where a German officer, hearing of the massive Asiatic offensive, remarks with astonishment: "The Yellow Peril was a peril, after all!".[10]
The recent Japanese success in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, the first time when an Asian army had proved superior to a European one, was fresh in the memory of Wells' readers, the worldwide Asian assault depicted being in effect a monstrously magnified echo of the Japanese surprise attack on Port Arthur.
The background of Bert Smallways bears some resemblance to Wells' own – a working-class family in a London suburb (which is similar to Wells' native Bromley), with a struggling small shop. Jessica, Bert's strong-willed but narrow-minded sister in law – a former domestic servant who rose to a kind of petit bourgeois respectability and who tries to make Bert an errand boy in the family shop – resembles Wells' mother who intended him to be a draper. Bert seeks to break out of this background, as Wells did, but fails to gain the higher education which Wells got, and in the conditions of worldwide collapse he ends up as a semi-Medieval peasant eking out a bare subsistence.
Bert's basic moral attitudes go through three distinct stages. To begin with, he tends to glorify war, patriotism and jingoism, and supports his nation becoming involved in wars in a haze of quasi-patriotic fever – this in a shallow way, derived from the popular press and without having or expecting to have a personal experience of war and bloodshed. When on board the German air fleet, Bert is exposed to a mounting series of horrors and bloody scenes which make him increasingly sickened. The same process is shared with Lieutenant Kurt, the young English-speaking German whom Bert befriends; a professional military officer, Kurt had in fact not witnessed war before, either, and he is equally sickened and vehemently rejects the idea that people should be "blooded" to make them used to violence and bloodshed. When marooned on Goat Island and finding himself locked in a deadly confrontation with the two equally marooned Germans, Bert is full of compunctions and does not want to kill them. After having killed the Prince, Bert speaks to the kitten he had rescued in the middle of all the carnage, telling the innocent little creature of his regrets at having committed this act. Moreover, Bert does spare the other German officer roaming the island, even when having him in his gun sights. Nevertheless, Bert did become "blooded" through the killing of the Prince, and undergoes further unspecified "violent incidents" during his harrowing crossing of the Atlantic and then while crossing on foot a starving English countryside which is fast reverting to barbarism. A year later, he returns to his beloved Edna and discovers she is being intimidated by a local strongman seeking to add her to his "harem". Bert feels no hesitation or compunction about shooting the man out of hand and taking over his gang.
Wells later republished several of his works with William Heinemann of London, who had recently been purchased by Doubleday. These versions contained numerous edits to the works and are collectively referred to as the "Heinemann text". In this 1924 version, Bert and Edna live happily ever after, producing eleven children. In the epilogue of this version, we meet up with Bert's brother, Tom, again. Tom is now an "old man" at 63 years of age, and speaks to the youngest of Bert's children, his nephew Teddy, about "the good old days." He recounts his time as a prosperous greengrocer, and describes an abundant life that his nephew finds hard to believe. He then follows through, describing all the events that happened "back home," offering correlation to Bert's adventure in the rest of the text. Although events differ between the brothers' stories, the sentiment of civilization's unraveling is presented in much the same emotion of regret and loss, showing similarity to Bert's earlier feelings on life events. Tom is surprised and disturbed to find his nephew "was blooded" when he was only six years old, exhibiting Bert's apparent change in attitude toward that process. Tom goes on to relate ghost stories to his nephew, weaving in the characters mentioned by the narrator in the first few chapters. Tom describes the sequence of events that caused the destruction of Bun Hill, and in the end Teddy agrees that it "shouldn't have happened" the way it did. We leave Tom in his conviction that "somebody somewhere ought to have stopped something" and "it ought not to have ever begun."
Reception
One biographer has called The War in the Air "an extraordinary concoction—as if H.G. had shaken up Kipps and The War of the Worlds and poured out a new story that would appeal both to those who liked his social comedies and those who had been impressed by his early fantasies of terror."[11]Beatrice Webb annoyed Wells by preferring The War in the Air to Tono-Bungay, which Wells regarded as his masterpiece.[12]
A bomber is a military combat aircraft designed to attack ground and naval targets by dropping air-to-ground weaponry, launching torpedoes, or deploying air-launched cruise missiles. The first use of bombs dropped from an aircraft occurred in the Italo-Turkish War, with the first major deployments coming in the First World War and Second World War by all major airforces causing devastating damage to cities, towns, and rural areas. The first purpose built bombers were the Italian Caproni Ca 30 and British Bristol T.B.8, both of 1913. Some bombers were decorated with nose art or victory markings.
A Zeppelin is a type of rigid airship named after the German inventor Ferdinand von Zeppelin who pioneered rigid airship development at the beginning of the 20th century. Zeppelin's notions were first formulated in 1874 and developed in detail in 1893. They were patented in Germany in 1895 and in the United States in 1899. After the outstanding success of the Zeppelin design, the word zeppelin came to be commonly used to refer to all rigid airships. Zeppelins were first flown commercially in 1910 by Deutsche Luftschiffahrts-AG (DELAG), the world's first airline in revenue service. By mid-1914, DELAG had carried over 10,000 fare-paying passengers on over 1,500 flights. During World War I, the German military made extensive use of Zeppelins as bombers and as scouts, resulting in over 500 deaths in bombing raids in Britain.
Strategic bombing is a military strategy used in total war with the goal of defeating the enemy by destroying its morale, its economic ability to produce and transport materiel to the theatres of military operations, or both. It is a systematically organized and executed attack from the air which can utilize strategic bombers, long- or medium-range missiles, or nuclear-armed fighter-bomber aircraft to attack targets deemed vital to the enemy's war-making capability. The term terror bombing is used to describe the strategic bombing of civilian targets without military value, in the hope of damaging an enemy's morale.
Hugo Eckener was the manager of the Luftschiffbau Zeppelin during the inter-war years, and also the commander of the famous Graf Zeppelin for most of its record-setting flights, including the first airship flight around the world, making him the most successful airship commander in history. He was also responsible for the construction of the most successful type of airships of all time. An anti-Nazi who was invited to campaign as a moderate in the German presidential elections, he was blacklisted by that regime and eventually sidelined.
A flying ace, fighter ace or air ace is a military aviator credited with shooting down five or more enemy aircraft during aerial combat. The exact number of aerial victories required to officially qualify as an ace is varied, but is usually considered to be five or more.
This is a list of aviation-related events from 1914.
This is a list of aviation-related events from 1915:
This is a list of aviation-related events from 1918:
World War I was the first major conflict involving the large-scale use of aircraft. Tethered observation balloons had already been employed in several wars, and would be used extensively for artillery spotting. Germany employed Zeppelins for reconnaissance over the North Sea and Baltic and also for strategic bombing raids over Britain and the Eastern Front.
Armageddon 2419 A.D. is a science fiction novella by Philip Francis Nowlan that first appeared in the August 1928 issue of the pulp magazine Amazing Stories. A sequel called The Airlords of Han was published in the March 1929 issue of Amazing Stories. Both stories are now in the public domain in the U.S. according to the Project Gutenberg website. In the 1960s, Nowlan's two novellas were combined by editor Donald A. Wollheim into one paperback novel, titled Armageddon 2419 A.D.
Invasion literature is a literary genre that was popular in the period between 1871 and the First World War (1914–1918). The invasion novel first was recognized as a literary genre in the UK, with the novella The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer (1871), an account of a German invasion of England, which, in the Western world, aroused the national imaginations and anxieties about hypothetical invasions by foreign powers; by 1914 the genre of invasion literature comprised more than 400 novels and stories.
Zeppelin LZ 104 and nicknamed Das Afrika-Schiff, was a World War I German dirigible. It is famous for having attempted a long-distance resupply mission to the beleaguered garrison of Germany's East Africa colony.
Aerial ramming or air ramming is the ramming of one aircraft with another. It is a last-ditch tactic in air combat, sometimes used when all else has failed. Long before the invention of aircraft, ramming tactics in naval warfare and ground warfare were common. The first aerial ramming was performed by Pyotr Nesterov in 1914 during the First World War. In the early stages of World War II the tactic was employed by Soviet pilots, who called it taran, the Russian word for "battering ram".
Strategic bombing during World War I was principally carried out by the United Kingdom and France for the Entente Powers and Germany for the Central Powers. Most the belligerents of World War I eventually engaged in some form of strategic bombing. The aerial bombing of cities, intended to destroy the enemy's morale, was introduced by the Germans in the opening days of the war. A multi-national air force to strike at Germany was planned but never materialized.
During World War I, the national air services involved developed their own methods of assessing and assigning credit for aerial victories.
Goliath is a biopunk/steampunk novel by Scott Westerfeld, and illustrated by Keith Thompson. The novel is the third and final installment in the Leviathan series after Behemoth, released on September 20, 2011.
William Thomas Whisner Jr. was a career officer and pilot in the United States Air Force, retiring as a colonel with 30 years of military service. He was a fighter ace with Army Air Forces over Europe in World War II and a jet fighter ace with the Air Force in the Korean War.
Wing Commander Mark Henry Brown, was a Canadian-born flying ace who served with the Royal Air Force (RAF) during the Second World War. Credited with having shot down at least fifteen German aircraft, he was the first Canadian pilot to become a flying ace during the war. He was killed in action in November 1941 over Sicily.
No. 485 (NZ) Squadron was a fighter squadron established for service during the Second World War. It was the first New Zealand squadron formed under Article XV of the Empire Air Training Plan. Although many of its flying personnel were largely drawn from the Royal New Zealand Air Force, the squadron served in Europe under the operational and administrative command of the Royal Air Force.
William Thomas Edward Rolls was a British flying ace of the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve (RAFVR) during the Second World War. He was credited with the destruction of at least 17 aircraft of the Axis powers.
↑ Arnold Bennett's diary is the source of this information, which states that the book earned 3,000 pounds for Wells. Norman and Jeanne Mackenzie, H.G. Wells: A Biography (Simon and Schuster, 1973), p. 234. Wells wrote Tono-Bungay concurrently but regarded the latter as so superior artistically that he ultimately finished up The War in the Air in order to get it out of the way, so that he could concentrate his efforts on the more important novel. David C. Smith, H.G. Wells: Desperately Mortal: A Biography (Yale UP, 1986), p. 203.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
