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The Electrical Experimenter was an American science magazine, founded and edited by Hugo Gernsback. These covers were published during the First World War, and illustrate ways in which science could be used to create new weapons and new defences. Many of them are just a little far-fetched, such as the land ironclad shown above.
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Peter J. Bowler. Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2009. How and what the public learned about science was important in an age of technological warfare, and this has a decent number of entries in the index under ‘military applications of science’.
Tom Buchanan. The Impact of the Spanish Civil War on Britain: War, Loss and Memory. Brighton and Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2007. A collection of essays by Buchanan, including a couple on George Steer (of Guernica fame) and John Langdon-Davies (of Barcelona less-fame).
Marion Girard. A Strange and Formidable Weapon: British Responses to World War I Poison Gas. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. Covers both military and civilian responses to gas, and the final chapter looks at the public debate about gas between the wars. Wish I’d had this a year ago!
Peter Sloterdijk. Terror from the Air. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009. Sloterdijk — not a historian, but an intellectual — argues that the 20th century started on 22 April 1915 at Ypres, i.e. because of the use of poison gas. Trivia: this is the first book I’ve ever bought which was published in Los Angeles.
All of a sudden, my time in Cornwall was over. But it was hard to feel too sad, because my next stop was Cardiff, capital of Wales (and, incidentally, scareship central). Cardiff is perhaps not as pretty as the places I’d seen in Cornwall, but it has plenty of culture which kept me occupied. And one big castle!
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… to nominate for the 2009 Cliopatria Awards for history blogging! There are six categories: Best Group Blog, Best Individual Blog, Best New Blog, Best Post, Best Series of Posts, and Best Writer. Nominations close at the end of November.
In June 1935, the Daily Express ran a story about three ’secret British air devices’. The source was a story in the Chicago Tribune by that paper’s London correspondent, John Steele:
The devices are declared to be a new “mirage” smoke screen, a new seventeen-foot long anti-aircraft rifle, and a robot airplane which, controlled by wireless, can charge an enemy formation.1.
The bare descriptions perhaps don’t sound so improbable, but the details … well, judge for yourself. ‘Mirage’ was composed of different coloured smokes which created a decoy townscape:
“Brick red, yellow, grey, brown, and black smoke fumes, spreading across the landscape horizontally at different heights from the ground, or, as in the case of the black smoke, rising vertically in columns, create a complete illusion of houses, factory chimney stacks, streets, rivers, and gardens.2
This level of detail and control over smoke seems improbable to me. But supposedly Mirage had been tested in exercises, and had completely fooled some RAF bombers which had been ordered to ‘bomb’ Croydon; instead they dropped their bombs twenty miles away on open fields!
How about the AA rifle? According to Steele, it was 17 feet long, had a range of 20,000 feet and fired cartridges weighing 39 ounces (2.4 pounds). Again, this isn’t too implausible, on the face of it. But wait:
It is precisely like a giant Lee-Enfield with similar sighting apparatus.
“There is an artificial shoulder for the rifle made of rubber, while the rifleman lies on a small platform above the weapon and takes sight. No human frame could support the recoil.3
It doesn’t sound like any AA gun I’ve heard of, but I suppose it could be a garbled description of some predecessor to the 3.75 inch QF. It’s a bizarre mental image though; and iron sights wouldn’t be much use at 20,000 feet.
As for the robotic Drake:
This airplane, rising above a bombing squadron flying in formation, can keep up a perpetual hail of machine-gun fire, the firing being done automatically under remote control.
“The robot can be heavily loaded with high explosive and from below made to charge like a bull into a formation, and then be exploded by wireless.
“The explosives, projecting inflammable bullets, would fire the [fuel] tanks of the enemy, or even, if close enough, turn the enemy turtle.4
No robot fighter aircraft like this existed in 1935 (although the the DH.82B Queen Bee, a radio-controlled variant of the Tiger Moth, was in use by then as a target tug, and became public around then). It does sound something like Ram, a project under development by the Air Ministry in the late 1920s but which was cancelled in 1930. Ram was briefly under reconsideration in 1935, due to advances in radio technology, but nothing came of it.5
My point here is not so much that these secret weapons didn’t exist (though clearly that’s what I do think), but that the British press was not interested in the possibility that they did: the Express was the only national daily which relayed the Tribune report (well, nearly all: there are a couple I haven’t been able to check). This was only a few months after the existence of the German air force was revealed and the government announced a trebling of the RAF’s strength at home in order to maintain air parity. Why was there so little interest in claims that British ingenuity was coming up with clever responses to the bomber threat?
Do these photos, taken early in the Battle of Britain, show a British mystery weapon? (I could just say “no”, but that wouldn’t be very interesting, would it.)
The above photo appeared on the front page of an American newspaper, the St Petersburg Evening Independent, on 14 August 1940. The caption reads:
This picture taken Aug. 11 shows, according to British censor-approved caption, a German raider plane “caught amidst an anti-aircraft barrage of bursting shells” — somewhere over the British coast. The balloon-shaped object in lower left-hand corner was not identified, but London caption emphasized it was not a balloon. Whether it was a “mystery weapon” of any nature could not be ascertained. Picture was sent from London by cable as swarms of German raiders continued to batter the British coast.
The same photo, rotated 180 degrees and cropped somewhat differently, appeared on the front page of the Spokane Daily Chronicle the previous day:
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On my third day in Cornwall I avoided the usual tourist traps entirely, because I was in search of my ancestors’ home: a tiny little place called Tremayne, which is towards Land’s End, in the hundred of Penwith. To get there I caught a train to Camborne, then a bus to Praze-an-Beeble (no, really!), and then walked along a winding country lane with no footpath and some very high hedgerows. Luckily I didn’t get run over, as that would rather have spoiled what was a beautiful day.
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Here’s an interesting inversion of my usual phantom airship scare. The Zeppelin was real enough — it was L6, raiding Essex on the night of 15 April 1915. The phantom was instead a motor-car:
Since the visit of the Zeppelin early on Friday morning the Maldon district has been full of rumours of mysterious motor-cars with flaming headlights which, passing along the highways, guided the airship to the area where the majority of the bombs were dropped.1
A ’special correspondent’ wrote that only one of the stories seems very plausible, presumably because it was the only one with several independent witnesses. Three couples — two ‘London ladies’ staying at ‘the Hut’ near Lathingdon (Latchingdon?), a Mr. and Mrs. Woods who lived at ‘the Cottage’ also near Lathingdon, and an elderly couple in Mundon, a couple of miles away. They all told a consistent story: the ladies saw the car first, the Woods’ bedroom was then illuminated by the car’s headlights, and a little later it was heard in Mundon, heading towards Maldon. Half an hour later, after Maldon was bombed, the car apparently retraced the same path but in the opposite direction, and with its headlights now much dimmer.
But there were problems with the theory. Heading into Lathingdon, the car was seen arriving from a road junction, but the people living near that junction were adamant that no car passed the junction in the direction of Lathingdon. And on the other side of Lathingdon, a policeman manning a police station was equally adamant that no car passed him either (although he did see a car coming back from Maldon, the occupants of which were known to him):
Altogether the evidence is very contradictory. If the car really existed it cannot have gone so far as Lathington police station, and there is no side road upon which it could have turned off. It may be said that the lights could have been extinguished and the car taken into one of the fields, but in that case it could never have passed through Mundon, where the inhabitants believe it went to pick up the men who, according to their firm belief, had been signalling to the Zeppelin.2
This was a common story in the aftermath of air raids. After the first airship raid on Britain (19 January 1915), inhabitants of Snettisham in Norfolk reported seeing two cars pacing the airship invader, one to the right and one to the left, with occasional flashes of light upwards or onto a significant target, such as the town’s medieval church which indeed suffered some bomb damage. A similar tale was told in nearby King’s Lynn.3
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Christopher Andrew. The Defence of the Realm: The Authorized History of MI5. London: Allen Lane, 2009. Most valuable for me on the Edwardian spy mania, but looks like a fun read for the rest of the thousand-odd pages.
R. V. Jones. Most Secret War: British Scientific Intelligence 1939-1945. London: Penguin, 2009 [1978]. A reprint of this important autobiography; no doubt it’s been superseded as a history of the wizard war but at the time it was groundbreaking.
I’m pleased to announce that my first paper has been accepted for publication, by War in History. It’s about the international air force idea and is entitled ‘World police for world peace: British internationalism and the threat of a knock-out blow from the air, 1919-1945′. It won’t actually appear for some time, but under the terms of the publishing agreement I’m allowed to make the originally-submitted version (i.e. before peer review) available for download. It can be found from my publications page.
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