̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Hitler

How Churchill Waged War

sjr81 — Wed, 21 Nov 2018 09:24:05 +0000

A newly-published book by Churchill Archives Centre Director Allen Packwood illuminates the agonising decisions faced by the Prime Minister during some of the darkest and most uncertain moments of the Second World War.

Imperial War Museum

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Churchill Papers added to UNESCO’s list of the world’s greatest cultural treasures

sjr81 — Mon, 30 Nov 2015 01:00:01 +0000

Held at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Churchill College, the Churchill Papers contain a priceless collection of more than one million documents written by or belonging to the former British Prime Minister, who was born 141 years ago today.

̽��ֱ��Churchill Papers now joins treasures such as the UK’s Magna Carta, France’s Bayeux Tapestry and Iran’s Persian epic poem, the Shahnameh in being added to the Memory of the World Register.

̽��ֱ��Memory of the World Project is an international initiative to safeguard the documentary heritage of humanity against collective amnesia, neglect, the ravages of time and climatic conditions, and wilful and deliberate destruction. It calls for the preservation of valuable archive, library and private collections all over the world, as well as the reconstitution of dispersed or displaced documentary heritage, and the increased accessibility to and dissemination of these items.

Sir Winston Churchill has become a global icon and his stand against fascism in 1940 is widely seen as a critical moment in 20th century history. ̽��ֱ��archive in Cambridge contains a wealth of unique drafts, letters and papers that are not duplicated elsewhere.

Allen Packwood, Director of the Churchill Archives Centre, said: “ ̽��ֱ��archive of Sir Winston Churchill is unique and irreplaceable. It is the evidence that underpins the story of one of the most remarkable leaders of the modern era, whose stand against fascism in 1940 helped shape the world of today.

“It includes his original annotated notes for his famous international broadcasts and correspondence with the great politicians, military leaders, authors, scientists and thinkers of his age.”

Churchill’s post-1945 papers were passed to Churchill College in 1969 by his widow Clementine Churchill. ̽��ֱ��college built and opened the Churchill Archives Centre in 1973 and Sir Winston’s pre-1945 papers were transferred to the Centre from Oxford’s Bodleian Library in 1974-75.

̽��ֱ��archive allows unrivalled access into the life, times and mind of Churchill; from his early correspondence with his family, right through to letters from the 1950s where he called for a summit with the Soviet Union.

But it is the material related to his stand against Hitler and fascism that represents the heart of the collection. Among the notes and drafts for his many great speeches are his annotated copies of his ‘finest hour’ speech in June 1940.

Packwood said: “ ̽��ֱ��page is covered with his handwritten annotations in red and blue ink. It highlights how much care and attention Churchill put into this speech. He knew how much was riding on this. ̽��ֱ��country was facing a huge national crisis. France had capitulated and Britain was facing the prospect of attack and invasion.

“As you move from first draft to finished speaking notes the speech undergoes a transformation. ̽��ֱ��final note is set out in a blank verse format, set out like the Book of Psalms. It looks like poetry, it brings it to life, it gives him, I think, the rhythm, it enables that great Churchill oratory. Nowhere is that more evident in this speech than in the very final page, that great crescendo.”

All images are reproduced with the permission of the Sir Winston Churchill Archive Trust. Images of the speech and childhood letter are also copyright of the Estate of Winston S Churchill courtesy of Curtis Brown, London.

Other treasures of the archive include his speeches on the rise of Nazism and Munich in 1938, his opposition of communist domination of Eastern Europe in 1946 – including the speech where he coined the term ‘iron curtain’ – and letters where he wrestled with the destructive power of the hydrogen bomb.

̽��ֱ��Churchill Papers also contain material relating to political reform and social change in Britain, British policy in India, the shaping of the Middle East and Europe and the rise of the United States as a global power.

As well as his letters to US Presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Eisenhower, the archive holds letters to Charles De Gaulle, Stalin, six British Prime Ministers, Gandhi, Nehru and writers, painters and actors such as HG Wells, Walter Sickert and Laurence Olivier.

Dr Alice Prochaska, Chair of the Sir Winston Churchill Archive Trust, which owns the papers for the nation, said: “It is a fantastic privilege and a very great pleasure to see the Sir Winston Churchill Archive inscribed at as part of the Memory of the World. This amazing documentary resource brings benefit to scholars, schools and citizens: a legacy to future generations from one of the world’s greatest leaders; and a source of endless fascination and inspiration for students and citizens in every nation.”

Winston Churchill’s vast archive – including his wartime speeches, letters to Stalin and three US Presidents – has been added to UNESCO’s International Memory of the World Register.

̽��ֱ��archive of Sir Winston Churchill is unique and irreplaceable.

Allen Packwood

reproduced with the permission of the Sir Winston Churchill Archive Trust

Sir Winston Churchill, 1945

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Opinion: Building Hitler’s supergun: the plot to destroy London and why it failed

Anonymous — Mon, 23 Nov 2015 12:06:45 +0000

̽��ֱ��V-3 “supergun” was meant to win the war for Germany. In 1943, for the first time since World War II began, Hitler was on the back foot. Allied bombs were devastating German cities and the Fuhrer was rattled. His proposed V-3 cannon would be the biggest gun the world had seen.

̽��ֱ��V-3 was built in a truly enormous bunker buried deep in a chalk hill in northern France. Millions of tonnes of rock were excavated by hand and among the workers were hundreds of slave labourers. In its original conception, 25 barrels were to point at London – about 100 miles away – delivering up to one bomb per minute and to create an environment of fear that would turn the course of the war back in Hitler’s favour. And it was a doomed secret “drone” mission to destroy the V-3 that led to the death of Joe Kennedy Junior, a pilot and older brother of the future US president, John F. Kennedy.

Artistic reconstruction of the V-3

̽��ֱ��workings of the German supergun remain something of a mystery, because so much of it was destroyed and so few photographs and documents have survived. We estimated that a projectile reaching London must achieve speeds in excess of 1,500 metres per second. Each barrel of Hitler’s gun was 130 metres long, inclined at 50 degrees and we worked out that this is the perfect angle to reach London - they seem to have got it right.

A prototype of the V-3 in Laatzig, Germany (now Poland), 1942. Cropbot/Wikipedia, CC BY-SA

̽��ֱ��projectile was to be accelerated by means of a sequence of charges along the barrel. Precise timing of these additional charges was very important and it has been supposed that this was done electrically. In our research for a TV documentary on Channel Four, PBS Nova and National Geographic International, we found no evidence for this. Photographs from the time have no sign of electrical wiring or triggering devices and our own experiments suggest that the charges were triggered by the heat of the advancing gas behind the projectile.

Hitler’s engineers had great difficulty perfecting the all-important timing, we think because of leakage of hot gas past the seal behind the projectile. They encountered other problems with their design, particularly to perfect a shape of projectile that would be aerodynamic at supersonic speeds. It had to remain stable without the benefit of spin (the barrel was not rifled) but in early tests the projectile was found to tumble uncontrollably. This problem was never solved, as far as we know. ̽��ֱ��Allies knew nothing of the supergun until Canadian forces overran the site after D-Day. But they knew that for the Germans to be expending that many resources on the site – they were certainly up to no good.

It wasn’t easy to see how to destroy the supergun. ̽��ֱ��Americans planned to attack the installation with a “drone” (not known by that name back then) which was a remote-controlled heavy bomber packed with 12 tonnes of high explosives. ̽��ֱ��idea was to crash the unmanned aircraft directly into the site at Mimoyecques, near Calais. ̽��ֱ��mission, code named Project Anvil, ended badly.

̽��ֱ��Joe Kennedy Jr mission

Lt Joseph P Kennedy Jr died over Suffolk on a mission to destroy the V-3. Jbarta/Wikipedia

Joe Kennedy Junior was piloting a B-24 Liberator on August 12 1944. He and co-pilot Wilford Willy were supposed to take the plane up to cruising altitude, set the correct course and bail out. A second aircraft flying nearby was to take over the controls (aided by a primitive television transmission system). But completely without warning, the plane exploded over Blythburgh in Suffolk only 20 minutes after it had taken off. Kennedy and Willy were killed and their bodies never found, such was the violence of the explosion.

̽��ֱ��circumstances of Kennedy’s death weren’t well known for the best part of 70 years. Recent documents have been found that show that the bomb-arming mechanism was flawed and that efforts to make it safe only exacerbated the hazards. In our documentary we show that solenoids – a type of electromagnet – used for arming the bombs were likely to have overheated causing premature detonation.

This tragedy was all in vain. Unknown to the allies at the time, the complex at Mimoyecques had been abandoned after it was successfully destroyed in a bombing raid on July 6 1944. British engineer Barnes Wallis, the brains behind the bouncing bomb, had developed the Tallboy bomb. Dropped from a height of 15,000ft it was designed to bury itself deep into the chalk and to trigger a small earthquake. Eight Tallboys hit the supergun site and the network of tunnels and the foundations, bunkers and munitions stores were all damaged beyond repair.

̽��ֱ��genius of Barnes Wallis cannot be overstated. He had worked out the right shape for the nose cone of the Tallboy so that it would remain aerodynamic while approaching the speed of sound and at the same time being strong enough to penetrate 15 metres underground. He discovered that if the fins were tilted by only 5 degrees the bomb would spin, stabilising it in flight.

It is unlikely that the supergun would ever have been a successful game-changing weapon, even if the Normandy landings had failed. ̽��ֱ��numerous technical challenges of the gun itself were proving difficult to resolve but perhaps more importantly a fixed gun installation is an easy target. If it hadn’t been the Tallboys of July 6, or the ill-fated Kennedy mission of August 12, then the installation at Mimoyecques would have been destroyed one way or another before it could do much damage to London.

But from a purely engineering perspective I’m sorry that it was never test-fired (though it’s hard to imaging how to do that safely!) I would like to have seen it work. What an amazing contraption.

Hugh Hunt, Reader in Engineering Dynamics, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge

This article was originally published on ̽��ֱ��Conversation. Read the original article.

̽��ֱ��opinions expressed in this article are those of the individual author(s) and do not represent the views of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge.

Hugh Hunt (Department of Engineering) discusses the engineering behind the V-3 “supergun”, the weapon that was meant to win the Second World War for Germany.

Wikimedia Commons / Sanders, T.R.B.

Mimoyecques eastern site reconstruction

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Inside Hitler’s mind

bjb42 — Fri, 04 May 2012 00:01:46 +0000

A secret analysis of Adolf Hitler’s mental state which was drawn up by British Intelligence in April 1942 has been uncovered by a researcher, having apparently lain unread since the war.

̽��ֱ��document was found among a collection of papers belonging to the family of Mark Abrams, a social scientist who worked with the BBC’s Overseas Propaganda Analysis Unit and the Psychological Warfare Branch, during World War II. Written just as the war was starting to turn against Hitler, it shows that British analysts had noticed signs of developing paranoia in his speechmaking and – chillingly – a growing preoccupation with what he called “the Jewish poison”.

̽��ֱ��paper came to light after Dr Scott Anthony, who is working on the history of public relations at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge, began tracking down Abrams’ peers and relatives. Abrams, who died in 1994, was a pioneer of market research and opinion polling. He was the man responsible for the ABC1 classification system, famously predicted the rise of the teenager in 1959 and was a key figure in Harold Wilson’s modernisation of the Labour Party.

Marked “Secret”, the analysis was commissioned by Abrams at a time when his analytical talents were needed for the war effort. ̽��ֱ��document itself was written by J. T. MacCurdy, a Cambridge academic working alongside him. Anthony has spoken to experts on both Nazi Germany and the history of psychology, but nobody appears to have known about this report until now.

“At the time that it was written, the tide was starting to turn against Germany,” Anthony said. “In response Hitler began to turn his attentions to the German home front.”

“This document shows that British Intelligence sensed this happening. MacCurdy recognised that, faced with external failure, the Nazi leader was focusing on a perceived ‘enemy within’ instead – namely the Jews. Given that we now know that the Final Solution was commencing, this makes for poignant reading.”

Overseas Propaganda Analysis began in 1939 and was later linked to the Psychological Warfare Division. Each week, its staff produced an analysis of all overseas broadcasts in Germany and occupied Europe.

Abrams, already a world-renowned expert in the analysis of public opinion, believed that transcripts of the broadcasts could be close-read for propaganda and intelligence purposes. In an interview with his grandson, recorded in the 1980s and also included in the materials Anthony has helped the university acquire, he explained that doing so could reveal “latent content” – hidden, and almost subconscious insights into the enemy’s state of mind. By 1942, this highly successful technique was feeding directly into the work of Allied counter-propagandists.

This analysis was one such exercise, covering a radio speech Hitler had given on April 26, 1942. According to its opening lines, the aim was “to reconstruct, if possible, what was in Hitler’s mind when he composed and delivered the speech. Its content would presumably reflect his morbid mental tendencies on the one hand and special knowledge available to him on the other.”

MacCurdy refers to an earlier report in which he had spotted three such “morbid tendencies”, classifying these as “Shamanism”, “Epilepsy” and “Paranoia”. ̽��ֱ��first, a term of MacCurdy seems to have borrowed from anthropology, referred to Hitler’s hysteria and compulsion to feed off the energy of Nuremberg Rally-style audiences. By now it was in decline, and his report refers to the “dull flatness of the delivery”.

̽��ֱ��other two tendencies were, however, developing. “Epilepsy” referred to Hitler’s cold and ruthless streak, but also a tendency to lose heart when his ambitions failed. MacCurdy thought the outcome of Operation Barbarossa, which had stalled the previous winter, had exposed this fatalism, and he wrote that Hitler’s speech betrayed “a man who is seriously contemplating the possibility of utter defeat.”

Most alarming, however, was Hitler’s growing paranoia. By this, MacCurdy meant the Nazi leader’s “Messiah complex”, in which he believed he was leading a chosen people on a crusade against an Evil incarnate in the Jews. He felt that this was starting to become a dominant tendency in Hitler’s mind. ̽��ֱ��paper notes an extension of the “Jew phobia” and says that Hitler now saw them not just as a threat to Germany, but as a “universal diabolical agency”.

̽��ֱ��timing of such an analysis could not have been more prescient. Weeks before the speech, senior Nazis had set plans in motion for the Final Solution – an intensification of the mass extermination of Jews.

Neither MacCurdy nor Abrams could have known the appalling repercussions Hitler’s mental state was to have, but they clearly saw it in development. “Hitler is caught up in a web of religious delusions,” MacCurdy concluded. “ ̽��ֱ��Jews are the incarnation of Evil, while he is the incarnation of the Spirit of Good. He is a god by whose sacrifice victory over Evil may be achieved. He does not say this in so many words, but such a system of ideas would rationalise what he does say that is otherwise obscure."

An archive of documents about Abrams’ life and work is held by the Churchill Archives, ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge. Mark Abrams’ family are adding the original copy of the psychoanalysis to this collection, which means that it will be available to researchers for the first time. Anthony has speculated that Abrams, who was of Jewish parentage, might have held on to his copy because of his background.

Anthony’s research will attempt to unravel the contribution Abrams made to the construction of social knowledge. “ ̽��ֱ��story of his life and work reveals something of the changing ways in which public opinion has been weighed and measured, about the methods by which British democracy has tried to aggregate and respond to the demands of the electorate and by doing so has shaped some of the demands they were attempting to reflect,” he said. “This wartime work was obviously for a very specific purpose, but the growth of advertising agencies and market research after the war meant that many of the lessons learnt in the war would be applied, and built on, in the post-war period.”

A secret report, previously unknown to historians, shows how British Intelligence was tracking Hitler’s growing preoccupation with “the enemy within” on the eve of the Final Solution.

British Intelligence sensed this happening. Faced with external failure, the Nazi leader was focusing on a perceived ‘enemy within’ instead – namely the Jews.

Scott Anthony

Dominic Abrams / Churchill Archives, Cambridge.

An extract from the original psychoanalysis.

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