The Press and Technology III: World War II and Aviation Technology

French History, 2014

This article explores the impact of aviation as the subject of propaganda during the First World War. Aviation was not a tool of overall importance for the war as a whole, but it was overrepresented in the media. Three distinct types of newspaper, aiming respectively at the home front, the trenches and occupied populations, are examined here in order to set out a comparative window on French public opinion during wartime. The study breaks down the myths built up by the military and the press and underlines the way discourse varied according to the target public, as well as the difficulties of constructing a propaganda that would raise enthusiasm for war in areas directly affected by hostilities, whether the trenches or the occupied zones. The impact of this propaganda allows us further to evaluate not only the important degree of communication between different French groups, but also between propagandists and journalists.

On the dawn of twentieth century, the first engine powered airplane made a successful flight, making a centuries old dream reality. In the following years, curious spectators at fairs across Europe watched with amazement brave pilots flying around in their odd looking machines. The aeroplane was an attraction without real purpose, however, the Great War changed that, making airplane an essential part of every future military operation. Rapid development of airframes and engines, followed with successful installation of machine gun on the centerline in front of a pilot, and cameras to provide detailed images of surveyed areas largely contributed in making the legacy for airplane to become an ultimate war machine.

Revised and adapted as Chapter 2 of my book Imagining Flight: Aviation and Popular Culture (2003)

Breathless announcements of the Next Big Thing, and glittering promises about how it will Change Your Life are part of everyday life in the late 20th century. Yet—if you take the long view—that state of affairs is unusual. The idea that you can forecast technological change only makes sense if you think of it as a constant, ongoing part of life. The idea that you’d want to only makes sense if technology changes fast enough for your audience to see the future you’re describing. Broadly speaking, that makes technological forecasting a pastime of the industrialized world in the 20th century. Powered flight became possible at just about the time citizens of the industrialized world began to find technological forecasts interesting. Not surprisingly, a great deal of ink was expended imagining the future of flight. Between 1900 and 1915 alone, the subject inspired novels, short stories, poetry, paintings, and scores of magazine articles—the latter not just in specialized titles, but in the likes of Harper’s Weekly and The North American Review. These forecasts—like most technological forecasts from years past—are interesting not for being right or wrong but for being revealing. They are windows into the early workings of the aviation business, into the minds of the writers who produced them, and into the workings of the societies (for my purposes, Britain and America) that produced them, fa"

2018

The "release" of new technology to users often finds those users developing their own ways of using the technology – ones that the creators of the technology never envisioned. This process is required in technologies where the creators are so focused on the technical difficulties of how to do something that they devote little thought to why someone might want to do it or, in other words, how the new technology will be used. The airplane is one such technology. Its inventors, Orville and Wilbur Wright, gave little thought to how their technology might be used until it came time to try to sell it to someone. Even then, their proposed military applications for the airplane were vague. While the US military did buy their invention, it required much thought and experience with the new technology before a clear doctrine could emerge governing its use. Today, aviation is a vital part of the United States military forces. The United States Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force e...

Close Encounters in War Journal, 2022

The advent of aeroplanes during the Great War gave birth to an unprecedented form of interrelation between the human and the machine. Like cavalrymen, who had to be expert riders before becoming soldiers, pilots were supposed to master their machines before they could fly them into battle. Therefore, their military drilling included engineering, mechanics, flying theory, and aerial tactics as well as shooting practice. However, as the pilots began to take part in the battles public interest more and more focused on the romantic aspect of flying and duelling. Unlike infantrymen, who barely managed to see their opponents, the pilots were able to engage their adversaries in close-range duels over the trenches, thanks to the technological means of the aeroplane. Thus, the new ‚aerial cavalry‛ depicted in papers and posters and the heroic figures of aces soon became instruments of propaganda. The crude reality of flying and fighting aboard the fragile and often unreliable planes emerges, instead, from the memoirs of the pilots, who were both fascinated and terrified by that new technological warfare. This paper will compare a number of memoirs of pilots from different countries (e.g. Baracca, Bishop, Collishaw, Fonck, Immelmann, Mannock, McCudden, MacLachanan, Richthofen, Udet, and others) to understand how the new aerial warfare was perceived, elaborated and depicted by those who experienced it directly. It will also analyse the rhetorical strategies that the authors of the selected memoirs used to harmonise the legend of the ‚air cavalry‛ with the harsh reality of newborn warfare, oscillating between wonder and horror. Eventually, the paper will claim that the reference to chivalric honour was only a way to embellish a new brutal form of technological warfare.