The Siege: Victory of the German Maidens

So there was a thing at the Modern Languages Association annual conference this year. It was about adjunct teaching blah tenure lines blah interviewing blah. Blah. My take is that, strip the precious specificity of academia away, and you're seeing a fairly typical problem of the politics of skilled labour.

Wait? You don't consider professors teaching English at a university  to be "skilled labour" in the same sense as the honest hands of toil making cool things with Very Big Machine Tools? 

A photo essay on cognitive dissonance: 

1: Cause:

2: Effect.

The "Help!!" sign is just about the definition of a shortage of skilled labour, and the skill in question is close reading. True, it is shelf schematics, as opposed to Beowulf, and it is so that buyers will know what is going to be on the shelves when they make their purchase. SAMS work doesn't have as much social capital as lecturing the children of judges and doctors on Point Grey -to put it mildly!-- but any adjunct in this country would kill for the lifestyle of our company's roving SAMS expert. 

In the face of the triple crisis of higher education, employment and demographics in this country and on this continent, it is worth contemplating the intractable mystery of skilled labour in our modern economy. Somehow, we got the story of skilled labour radically wrong. Our story is that an increased supply of skilled labour will drive the economy forward. When in fact, it just...

Oh. Wait. That's not a mystery at all.

Seventy years ago, labour worked differently. Voracious factories absorbed every hand they could, and then some more, and the Flak batteries in the park were crewed (in part) by the League of German Maidens. 

And in Belfast.. . In Belfast. . 

"In the county Tyrone, in the town of Dungannon

Where many a ruckus meself had a hand in

Bob Williamson lived there, a weaver by trade

And all of us thought him a stout-hearted blade.

On the twelfth of July as it yearly did come

Bob played on the flute to the sound of the drum

You can talk of your fiddles, your harp or your lute

But there's nothing could sound like the Old Orange Flute.

But the treacherous scoundrel, he took us all in

For he married a Papish named Bridget McGinn

Turned Papish himself and forsook the Old Cause

That gave us our freedom, religion and laws.

And the boys in the county made such a stir on it

They forced Bob to flee to the province of Connaught;

(The Clancy Brothers???)

Anyway, in the land of anger and hate, there was this:

Wikipedia (also below)

It looks a little strange, doesn't? 

Here's a plane, English as roast beef:

The Stirling doesn't look like that. It's got .. Teutonic lines, frankly. Like this.

Or even this, I fancy. 

It is also not long for this world. On the night of the 22/23 November, 469 Lancasters, 234  Halifaxes, 50 Stirlings and 11 Mosquitos, a total of 764 aircraft, attacked Germany, 670 taking pictures of Berlin. 1,285 tons of high explosive and 1,491 tons of incendiaries were dropped. No less an authority than Wikipedia has determined this to have been the single most effective attack on the capital of the Reich. 26 aircraft lost - 3.4% of the force, below the 4% cutoff calculated as an unacceptable attrition rate. But 5 of those aircraft were Stirlings, 10% of the engaged force, this for the very good reason that the Stirlings were flying almost 3000 feet below the Lancasters. AA often rather unfairly dismissed as ineffectual, as Sebastian Cox notes, literally decimated the Stirling force. Ten percent losses over 40 missions was a death sentence to the Stirling crews and prefigured a spiralling decline. The effectiveness of the force was predicated on the crews' ability to use their weapons, and without experienced crews to train them, that effectiveness would never be achieved. 

Sometime in the aftermath, Air Chief Marshal quietly stood the Stirling force down. Ten squadrons were removed from the line. When Bomber Command returned to Berlin on the night of 26/7 November, it would be with 422 planes dropping a total of only 1764 tons of bombs (443 Lancasters and 7 Mosquitoes sortieing.) 

The official historian of the RCAF gives the clearest account of the sequence of events, evidence, I think, of the embarrassment of the British aviation establishment. Our detailed understanding of military aircraft tends to come from the manufacturer or the veterans. The former prefer to present a well-burnished story of the procurement process ruining their perfect vision, while the latter's relationship with their aircraft is often interesting. The Lancaster was a better bomber than the Stirling --as complicated as this story is on examination-- but it carried its crews on death rides into Germany. The Stirling force would spend the rest of the war as improvised transport crews and glider tugs. Inglorious, but safer work, and they would be left to sing the praises of a surprisingly manoeuvrable machine, a sentiment on display at the Wikipedia page. 

Well, then. Let's be college students again, and steal (non-computed data)  from Wiki. 

Type	Short Stirling	Avro Lancaster	Boeing B-17	Boeing B-29
Crew	7 (First and second pilot, navigator/bomb aimer, front gunner/WT operator, two air gunners, and flight engineer	7: pilot, flight engineer, navigator, bomb aimer/nose gunner, wireless operator, mid-upper and rear gunners	Crew: 10: Pilot, co-pilot, navigator, bombardier/nose gunner,top turret gunner, radio operator, waist gunners (2), ball turret gunner, tail gunner	·         Crew: 11 (Pilot, Co-pilot, Bombardier, Flight Engineer, Navigator, Radio Operator, Radar Observer, 2 Gunners,  Central Fire Control, Tail Gunner
Length	87 ft 3 in	69 ft 4 in	74 ft 4 in	99 ft
Wingspan	99 ft 1 in	102 ft 0 in	103 ft 9 in	141 ft 3 in
Height	22 ft 9 in	20 ft 6 in	19 ft 1 in	27 ft 9 in
Wing Area	1,460 ft	1,297 sq ft	1,420 sq ft	1,736 sq ft
Aspect Ratio	6.5		7.57	11.50
Empty Weight	46,900 lb	36,457 lb	36,135 lb	74,500 lb
Loaded Weight	59,400 lb	68,000 lb	54,000 lb	120,000 lb
Max. Takeoff	70,000 lb	72,000 lb	65,500 lb	133,500 lb
Powerplant	4 Bristol Hercules II, 1,375 hp	4 Merlin XX, 1280hp	4 × Wright R-1820-97 "Cyclone" turbosupercharged radial engines, 1,200 hp	: 4 × Wright R-3350 Duplex Cyclone turbosupercharged  2,200 hp (1,640 kW) each
Max speed	282mph	282 mph at 63,000 lb at 13,000 ft	287 mph	357 mph
Cruising Speed	200mph	200 mph	182 mph	220 mph
Rate of Climb	800ft/min	720 ft/min	900 ft/min	900 ft/min
Ceiling	16,500ft	21,400 ft	35,600 ft	31850 ft
Wing Loading	44.9 lb/ft²	48.6	38.0 lb/sq ft	69.12 lb/sqft
Power/Mass	0.093 hp/lb	0.081	0.089 hp/lb	0.073 hp/lb

The comparison here isn't as useful as it might be. You really need to rigorously reference weight and altitude when you give performance numbers. Otherwise, there is a temptation to cherry pick the numbers, and long ago unfair comparisons are not always caught in the data. (Did the B-29 really have a lower service ceiling than the B-17?) V(cruise) is even more problematic. The air force can tell you what your machine is supposed to do when you crack the throttle, but it cannot tell the gaskets how much gas they should leak. What should leap out of the data is the sheer hugeness of the Stirling. In spite of being (slightly) older than the Lancaster or the massively refurbished B-17G, it is a bigger plane. The Lancaster and B-29 certainly shine comparatively as weightlifters, but let's look at actual planning data for a second.

 Here's a photographic reproduction of an actual raid planning guideline, complete with misspelled "Sterling," brought up from the bowels of the Air Ministry by Lionel Lacey-Johnston and reproduced from his 1991 Pointblank and Beyond

The implications of the Lancaster's superiority as a load-carrier over the Halifax and especially the Stirling are clear. Again, we might ask: how did the Lancaster get so good?

Well, here's another Air Ministry document, this one for public consumption. It's a detail of the wing structure design of the Short Stirling. 

The Stirling was famously crippled by its wing. It was originally borrowed from the Short Sunderland, much as the B-24 borrowed the wing of Consolidated's last flying boat. 

Unfortunately, the Sunderland looked like this (just plain clipped from Wikipedia):

General characteristics

• Crew: 9—11 (two pilots, radio operator, navigator, engineer, bomb-aimer, three to five gunners)
• Length: 85 ft 4 in (26.0 m)
• Wingspan: 112 ft 9½ in (34.39 m)
• Height: 32 ft 10½ in (10 m)
• Wing area: 1,487 ft² (138 m²)
• Empty weight: 34,500 lb (15,663 kg)
• Loaded weight: 58,000 lb (26,332 kg)
• Powerplant: 4 × Bristol Pegasus XVIII nine-cylinder radial engine, 1,065 hp (794 kW) each

Performance

• Maximum speed: 210 mph (336 km/h) at 6,500 ft (2,000 m)
• Cruise speed: 178 mph (285 km/h) at 5,000 ft (1,500 m)
• Stall speed: 78 mph (125 km/h)
• Range: 1,780 mi (2,848 km)
• Service ceiling: 16,000 ft (4,880 m)
• Rate of climb: 720 ft/min (3.67 m/s)
• Wing loading: 39 lb/ft² (191 kg/m²)
• Power/mass: .018 hp/lb (.030 kW/kg)

Armament

• Guns:
  
  • 16× 0.303 inch (7.7 mm) Browning machine guns
  • 2× Browning 0.5 inch (12.7 mm) machine gun
• Bombs: various defensive and offensive munitions, including bombs, mines and depth charges carried internally and, some, winched out beneath the wings. Manually launched flares, sea markers and smoke-floats.

And, just for reference, its successor, the Short Shetland, looked like this:

• Crew: 11
• Length: 110 ft 0 in (33.54 m)
• Wingspan: 150 ft 4 in (45.83 m)
• Height: 37 ft 0 in (11.28 m)
• Wing area: 2,624 ft² (243.9 m²)
• Empty weight: 75,860 lb (34,481 kg)
• Loaded weight: 120,000 lb ^[5] (54,545 kg)
• Max. takeoff weight: 125,000 lb (56,818 kg)
• Powerplant: 4 × Bristol Centaurus VII 18-cylinder air-cooled radial engine, 2,500 hp (1,864 kW) each

Performance

• Maximum speed: 263 mph (229 knots, 423 km/h)
• Cruise speed: 183 mph (159 knots, 295 km/h)
• Range: 4,000 mi (3,478 nmi, 6,440 km)
• Endurance: 25 hr 50 min
• Service ceiling: 17,000 ft^[5] (5,182 m)
• Rate of climb: 900 ft/min (4.6 m/s)

Armament

• Guns: (as planned)
  • Three turrets, each with 2 × 0.5 in (12.7 mm) Browning machine guns in nose, mid-upper and tail positions, and 1× 0.5 in machine guns in port and starboard beam positions
• Bombs: Up to 4,000 lb (1,800 kg) of bombs or depth charges

112ft wingspan on the Sunderland, going up to 150 in the Shetland! 

Now, I am not privy to the thinking in the deepest recesses of Rochester, but I can see the argument for copying a successful wing. The problem is that this is in no way the "same wing." The Sunderland, like most flying boats of its day, carried its bombs in the fuselage, and winched them out onto the wing in flight in order to drop them. It's a bad idea, you see, to put the cracks of a bomb bay door in the bottom of a flying boat that is going to be crashing into the water at 70mph. 

So can you see the  logic behind redesigning the wing to take multiple bomb cells, each able to hold a 2000lb armour piercing bomb, just when you are in the middle of developing the Sunderland's follow-on? I can.

It's not a bad plan. In 1936, and even in 1939, there is a very real possibility that Britain's next enemy will be most effectively attacked by having squadrons of bombers fly over their battleships and dropping concentrated salvoes of bombs on them. It did not work out that way, of course. By 1942, it was clear that the war the Stirling was built for was going to be fought by carting massive loads of bombs over too-be-identified-later German industrial targets and dropping them. We have already seen how the Lancaster (and Mosquito) solve this problem: with massive longerons and spars capable of taking a concentrated load of bombs distributed equally around the aircraft's centre of gravity along the fuselage. The baroque complexities of the armament distribution through the wing cells is not exactly compatible with strength and simplicity.

Naturally, this is not what the voice of the firm will say in 1942. It will instead suggest that the Air Ministry was "presumably" thinking of conserving hangar space. The splatbook literature will take this factoid and run with it, and, if I recall correctly, it even features in John Jame's still unparalleled social history of the RAF that attempts to reconstruct the history of its buildup in terms of -gasp- its workforce! Wikipedia suggests that the limit was an attempt to cap Short Bros.' ambitions. The force of the Air Ministry's sharp "Now cut that out," is, however, perhaps underplayed. After all, even the Air Ministry could not say for sure in 1939 that Rochester was wrong. 

The problem here is that it is somewhat weird and contingent that there is even a four-engined bomber under development in Britain in the spring of 1939. Short Brothers being one of the problem children firms of the mid war, get little credit for their achievements before it. Whatever one thinks of the operational fiasco associated with them, the Empire Boats line was a massive industrial success. The Stirling made a credible alternative to the Ministry's first choice, the Supermarine 317. 

Now let's think about that for a moment. Vickers was a good engineering firm. It bought Supermarine because Supermarine was good at what it did, too. The story as it is told on Wikipedia is that Reginald Mitchell's death brought everything to a halt, but the subsequent history of the Spitfire is vindication enough of Joseph Smith as a designer. The retreat from the 317 is not to be explained in terms of an individual tragedy. It is a recognition of just how hard it was to design and build amodern four engined bomber that did not turn out to be oversized and underwhelming, the kind of monster that in retrospect leaves one asking, "What were they thinking?" * We are looking at the limits of engineering management, circa 1939, here.

From any reasonable perspective, the Stirling was a grand success on the morning of 14 May 1939. It was not a secret, having been revealed by the French and American press. Albeit that this was still a rumour amongst less accurate ones, the fact that Short also had a contract to build a four-engined long range airliner made the existence of this "Stirling" seem pretty likely. What I am saying is that there was no really compelling reason not to fly the Stirling amongst the other spectacular prototypes exhibited in the "Parliamentary Garden Party" thrown by the Government that June in a desperate attempt to prove to the world, and especially Hitler, that the British air force really was rearming with effect. I don't know if the Stirling would have been exhibited that day, and it is a little hopeful that it would have finally got the whole "reap the whirlwind" thing through Berlin's head. Then, of course, the prototype Stirling collapsed its undercarriage landing from its test flight.

So much for that idea.

Whirlwind reaping was further set back by a spectacular low altitude raid in August 1940 that damaged the factory and destroyed 10 completed Stirlings on the ground. I would repeat Wikipedia's idle prattle about how this bombing set the Stirling project back by a year, but since everyone knows that strategic bombing was a pointless waste of resources, I won't muddy the water with pointless facts. What we do know is that the first Stirling attack on continental targets took place on 10/11 February 1941. 2,383 were built, and, as noted, they were withdrawn from combat just as the weight of the strategic offensive began to tell.

It was a painful story, complicated by the choice of locations to build the aircraft. Rochester looks like a bad choice of location, the tip of Kent being far too close to enemy air bases, but it is not a good idea to waste factories, and Sunderlands were built there in numbers. Stirling production was devolved to the Austin plant at Longland in the Midlands, and then to Belfast, where Short had cooperated with shipbuilder Harland and Wolf to build an aircraft plant with an inglorious record of producing some of the RAF's least successful bomber projects (1,2).  What could you do? Belfast somehow managed to be full of skilled labour with nothing to do, and when they didn't have anything to do, they took out their boredom on Catholics.** Not a good plan for a country that aims to ally itself with the United States. (Theme music that's not "The Wearing of the Green.") 

And so the machines of Belfast were flung at the League of German Girls, and the Giant Wurzburg-directed blind fire predicted brackets gripped the giant planes and threw them to the ground like falling leaves. 

I've offered the idea that this is a story about labour. Belfast might serve as a paradigm for our world: a black hole of skills training demonstrating that a supply of skilled labour is not the same as a demand for it. The best efforts of these able, if fractious men were extraordinary machines, byzantine assemblies of remarkable design.

The machines that met them could be described in the same way, with this crucial difference. They were built to meet the unschooled talents of the girls of Germany --among others, if I am going to be accurate, as opposed to romantic--. Stripped of their caissons, they were "static" guns --that much easier to cater to, they were much less flexible in operations. The optical sights and predictors that ought to have allowed them to fight as individual guns, and, for example, shoot tanks, were omitted. Too expensive to provide to every barrel, the guns were instead fought as batteries under the direction of a master predictor and sight. The gunners and Flakhelferin need only swing their guns onto their pointers and fire and feed fixed rounds into the hungry maws of the guns. 

That being said, what I have described is not what actually happened. Anyone who has dealt with the electronics of the era would know differently. The death of the Stirlings tell us that these problems, of unsourced buzzing hums and the acrid smell of burning insulation were solved, battery by battery, German Maiden by German Maiden.  

There is, I suggest, something to learn about the relationship of technology and labour here..

*Although the linked article manages to make it sound as though the USAAC planned for a plane that would roll out of the hangar it was assembled in and promptly break through the tarmac, sitting with its landing gear mired in the California mud for some three months before it could be rescued.

**Tragically for everyone who has lived the song, the Irish Rovers' "When the Shipyards Go Back on Full Time" is not on Youtube. Perhaps it cuts too close.