Death from the skies

25 January 2012 in 1930s, Air defence, Art, Books, Civil defence, Film, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Periodicals, Pictures by Brett Holman | 1 comment

Death from the skies

The images in this post are from Boyd Cable, 'Death from the skies', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 20-4 (see below).

The article itself is a short story describing an air raid in the next war. I won't summarise it in detail, but it argues for the futility of both air defence and civil defence. The RAF's interceptors never even encounter the enemy bombers (in part because they are stealthy thanks to their silenced engines, only 20% as loud as normal aircraft engines). Though the populace has been drilled well and resists panic, at least at first, they are too vulnerable. A first wave of bombers uses high explosives to block the streets with rubble, making it impossible for fire engines to pass; the second drops incendiaries which set the city ablaze and, crucially, force civilians out of their shelters; and the final wave drops poison gas, which starts killing the now-exposed people on the streets. Now the panic starts and the mob flees, their suffering increased by strafing raiders. The RAF now has its chance, but the city is doomed...

"Proof enough of what we've said so long," growled the one [Air Staff officer]. "Defence as such is a wash-out. Attack is the only useful form of defence."

"If we can hit them harder and faster and oftener than they can hit us, we win," said the other. "We can do it, too, if we have more bombers -- men and machines -- than they have."

"Yes -- if," said the other wearily. "That's what we were arguing as far back as the first R.A.F. expansion scheme in -- what as it -- 1935 and '6, wasn't it?"

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The wooden bombs return

21 January 2012 in 1940s, Books, Interviews, Pictures, Rumours, Videos by Brett Holman | 15 comments

I received this request for assistance from Jean Dewaerheid, a Belgian writer who is working with Peter Haas and Pierre-Antoine Courouble to track down wooden bomb eyewitnesses:

Three authors (from Belgium, Germany and France) have been working for years on a bizarre subject: the dropping of dummy wooden bombs on wooden airplanes.

In order to deceive the Allies during the Second World War, the Germans built fake airfields on the continent, often with runways and sometimes with buildings, but always with fake wooden planes, called "Attrappen". Strange stories can be heard in which allied airplanes made fun of them by dropping wooden bombs on which they had sometimes painted remarks like "Wood for Wood".

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Anxious nation? -- VII

19 January 2012 in 1930s, Australia, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics by Brett Holman | No comments

I really thought I'd finished with this topic, but the primary sources demand one last post. In discussing the July 1938 Hobart mystery aeroplane, I suggested that it may have been a propaganda stunt by some person or persons worried about Tasmania's lack of air defences. And it turns out that there were precedents for this type of thing.

One was over London a year earlier, in July 1937. It was widely reported in the Australian press, but I haven't been able to find it in a British newspaper. Most of the Australian reports quote the Sunday Referee, presumably from the 18 July edition; and I suspect the Daily Telegraph also carried the story on 16 July. Flight also referred to a 'mystery flyer', though only in passing.
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Anxious nation? -- VI

16 January 2012 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Australia, Civil aviation, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Plots, Tools and methods, Words by Brett Holman | 3 comments

Looking over the list of Australian mystery aircraft sightings suggests that some generalisations can be made.

Aeroplane vs airship, 1900-1918

In the 1910s, mysterious lights in the sky were usually described as being airship-like; after 1910 they were far more likely to be called aeroplanes. Perhaps not coincidentally, 1910 was when aeroplanes first flew in Australia; certainly a search of Trove Newspapers (using Wraggelabs' QueryPic) shows that 1910 was the first year when the word "aeroplane" appeared markedly more frequently than "airship". So that's easy enough to explain.

The same search shows that 1909 was the year that aviation really broke through into public consciousness. That's also the year of the Australian phantom airship wave. As it was the first burst of interest in aircraft, the first time that people started to learn about them, it's perhaps not surprising that people might think they saw them flying around where they weren't. The 1918 mystery aeroplane scare came after several years of increasing press coverage of aviation, obviously due to the war. So again that fits. Aeroplanes were something people were reading (and probably talking) about a lot. But that by itself is evidently not enough to generate a mystery aeroplane scare: there were a few seen in 1914, and a handful in the years after that, but nothing on the scale of 1918. There needs to be a plausible reason for aircraft to be flying about: and the reported visit of the Wolf and its Wölfchen to Australian shores provided that, though the desperate situation of the Allied armies in France was also a factor.
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Acquisitions

13 January 2012 in Acquisitions, Books by Brett Holman | No comments

Herbert A. Johnson. Wingless Eagle: U.S. Army Aviation through World War I. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Looks at not just the actual flying stuff (the first flights, the expedition against Pancho Villa, the expansion for war) but the media portrayal of such (e.g. chapter 2, 'Army aviation in the media fishbowl'). So I think it will be very much to my taste; not bad for a bargain table find!

Helen M. Kinsella. The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian. Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2011. As the title suggests it's not really the sort of book you turn to for who said (or did) what to whom and why; it's also written by a political scientist, not a historian, but we'll let that pass. Starts with medieval codes of warfare but mostly concentrates on the 20th century, especially the 1949 IV Geneva Convention and the 1977 Protocol to it.

Anxious nation? -- V

12 January 2012 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Australia, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics by Brett Holman | 6 comments

So here's a very incomplete list of mystery aircraft sightings in Australia, along with how they were interpreted at the time. For the most part I've only included reports which were published in the press at the time (and not those which were reported to the authorities in wartime but not publicised).
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Anxious nation? -- IV

8 January 2012 in 1930s, 1940s, Australia, Books, Ephemera, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Radio by Brett Holman | 12 comments

He's Coming South

The title of this little series is a nod to David Walker's Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850-1939. As the title suggests, Walker argues that Australia's relationship with Asia in the decades before and after Federation was largely characterised by fear about immigration, imports and invasion. Peter Stanley, in Invading Australia: Japan and the Battle for Australia, 1942, fleshes out the last of these fears through a discussion of novels and books from the 1930s which discussed the prospect of war with Japan (or at least an unnamed or Ruritanian Asian enemy). For example, in Erle Cox's Fool's Harvest (1938/1939), Australia is attacked and invaded by 'Cambasia' in September 1939, beginning with a massive air raid on Sydney which causes 200,000 civilian casualties. Britain is unable to help, as it has been attacked by Germany, Italy and France; a British fleet at Singapore is sunk. The Australian armed forces are ill-equipped to defend the nation, and after a month Cambasia is victorious at the last battle of the war, at Seymour in central Victoria. A resistance movement is eventually suppressed after increasingly brutal reprisals. The south-eastern part of Australia eventually regains a limited independence in 1966, but the majority of the population still labours under the Cambasian yoke.
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2011 Clios

6 January 2012 in Blogging and tweeting by Brett Holman | No comments

The winners of the 2011 Cliopatria Awards have been announced. They are: The Chirurgeon's Apprentice (best blog); Wonders and Marvels (best group blog); Demography and the Imperial Public Sphere Before Victoria (best new blog); Past Imperfect (best post); Lawyers, Guns and Money (best series of posts); Corey Robin (best writer); @katrinagulliver (best Twitter feed); and New Books In History (best podcast episode). Congratulations to everyone!

It's nice to see @katrinagulliver get the inaugural Twitter award, especially since I nominated her; and Corey Robin, whose book Fear: The History of a Political Idea (2004) was useful to me in my PhD research. I can't say I'm surprised to see Wonders and Marvels and Demography and the Imperial Public Sphere Before Victoria win, as I was one of the judges; but I think we made the right decisions.

As usual, I've added the links to the winners' blogs to the sidebar list, if they weren't there already. I figure it's better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick.

Anxious nation? -- III

5 January 2012 in 1920s, Australia, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics by Brett Holman | No comments

Aircraft don't have to be military to be a threat to the nation. The ability to simply fly over frontiers makes them attractive to anyone who wants for some reason to enter a country without observing the legal usual formalities -- smugglers, for example. Or at least, that seems to have been a widely-held belief among non-flying non-smuggling people. Where threatening mystery aircraft are not interpreted as belonging to a hostile foreign power, they have often been seen as smugglers, as happened in Scandinavia and Britain in the 1930s, for example. The smugglers theory was also briefly considered as one possible explanation among many for the Darwin mystery aeroplanes in 1938.
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Anxious nation? -- II

4 January 2012 in 1930s, Air defence, Australia, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics by Brett Holman | 3 comments

In my previous post, I discussed a mysterious aeroplane seen over Hobart in 1938 which was interpreted in a context of concern about vulnerability to air attack. I said that by contrast a similar incident that year over Darwin was seen as a curiosity rather than a threat, but in looking at it more closely I find that the threat element was present in the press accounts more than I thought. Let's see if there's any discernable pattern.

There were actually two aeroplanes seen (and heard) over Darwin, or perhaps the same aeroplane was seen (and heard) on two different occasions.

Last Thursday evening [3 February] two men saw a machine fly over Darwin at a great height heading south. One of the men is employed at the aerodrome and it is considered unlikely that he could have made a mistake. Another man who is an aviation engineer also heard the drone of an engine and stated emphatically that it was an aeroplane engine.

The other sighting was initially a hearing. A foreman at Darwin's electrical power plant by the name of Maurice Holtze quite ingeniously used the sound of the plant's diesel engines as a sound detector:

This engine develops about 1000 revolutions at normal speed, and Holtze observed that the presence of any other machine in the vicinity developing more or less than 1000 revolutions is reflected clearly in the exhaust beat of the power house engine. At 4.30 a.m. yesterday [8 February] he was attending the engine when he noticed a distinct change in the note of the exhaust. Accustomed to the departure of air mail planes from the local aerodrome about 5 o'clock on three mornings of the week he at first paid little attention to the antics of his unofficial sound detector. Then he realised suddenly that no machines were scheduled to leave Darwin on Tuesday morning. He rushed outside and saw a machine in the air.

Holtze couldn't make out any identification marks on the aeroplane, but said that he could see the glow from the cockpit lights; it appeared to be a large, multi-engined machine. Apparently inbound from the Timor Sea, it circled over Darwin and then flew south. A former superintendent of police named Lovegrove also heard an aeroplane at 4.30am, while a post office employee saw 'strange lights moving across the sky [...] similar to those shown by aircraft'. The government was informed of these reports, and while Canberra appeared sceptical it ordered local representatives of the Civil Air Board and the defence forces to investigate.
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