1910s

Last year I gave a lecture where I said that Things to Come, the 1936 Alexander Korda production of H. G. Wells’ novel The Shape of Things to Come, was not a very popular film, that not many people would have seen it. I had to retract that, but I then said that

I stand by my other point, however, which was that Things to Come is actually very singular, at least in British feature films: there are very few depictions of a city being turned to rubble by air attack

Now I have to retract that too, as since then I’ve compiled an — admittedly short — list of interwar British films which do depict cities being destroyed by bombing, or at least coming under the threat of air attack.

Some of these I did know about, such as The Airship Destroyer (1909). It’s now available on YouTube, under an alternate title, Battle in the Clouds. In it, an airship bombs a city, which is last seen in flames. I’m not sure if either of the sequels, The Aerial Anarchists and Pirates of 1920 (both 1911) had anything comparable.

There’s a long gap after that. The Flight Commander (1927) climaxes with Sir Alan Cobham bombing a Chinese village, which was filmed at the RAF Pageant, but that’s more air control than strategic bombing. In High Treason (1928), written by Noel Pemberton Billing, an aerial war is threatened, but averted. There were a few American films set during the First World War which showed Zeppelin raids on London, including The Sky Hawk (1929) and Hell’s Angels (1930), but they’re, well, American.¹

Things to Come (1936) was actually, I think, the first proper (i.e. scary) depiction in a British film of the effects of a truly devastating air raid. But there were others over the next few years. A pair of short instructional films, The Gap (1937) and The Warning (1939), have long piqued my interest, but unfortunately I didn’t get to see them while in London. The Gap was a recruiting film for the Territorial Army, which manned Britain’s anti-aircraft guns. London is hit by a surprise air raid, and because there are not enough AA gunners it is devastated. The Warning was aimed at drawing in volunteers for air raid precautions, and portrays the terrible aftermath of an air attack on Nottingham. Air defences swing into action, but do little to prevent the carnage.
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1. I think one or the other of these was the source of a similar scene in a British film from the 1930s or 1940s, or perhaps it was from the Korda documentary Conquest of the Air (1936, but not released until 1938). I can’t for the life of me remember what film I saw it in, but the scene was too short and too lavish to have been made specially.

A few months ago I looked at some visions of how aerial warfare might improve the city by blowing away ugly developments. Here’s a similar fantasy of better planning through bombing, though the site in question is a rather surprising one: Stonehenge. From Clough Williams-Ellis’s diatribe against the debeautification of the countryside, England and the Octopus (Portmeirion, 1975 [1928]), 130-1:

It is also to be hoped that some regard may be paid to pre-existing land-lubber amenities in the actual placing of aerodromes, and that the Stonehenge scandal will not be repeated. There, with all Salisbury Plain to choose from, the R.F.C. (as it then was) elected to plump down its hangars and all their sprawling appurtenances within a few hundred yards of what should be the most hallowed stones in England. Never were venerable remains less venerated, for at this very moment of writing, our late enemies having declined our military invitation to obliterate the circle with their bombs, an offensive pink bungalow is being completed hard by that, with the outrageous café adjoining, makes one almost pray for a destructive air raid.

As it now is, Stonehenge is intolerable, and by no means to be visited save by blind archæologists. Hemmed in by iron railings, guarded by a turnstile and a post-card kiosk, glowered at by the derelict aerodrome and smirked at by caré and bungalow, this sacred place is indeed painful beyond bearing. If it were an even chance that a hostile air raid would destroy the circle or, alternatively, obliterate the parasitic growths about it, there are probably those who would favour the place being well and truly bombed.

As it is, Stonehenge is a mockery and a wounding of the spirit, and a fifty-fifty risk of losing it altogether or getting it back once more in its austere and immemorial loneliness might well seem a gamble worth considering.

I can’t believe Williams-Ellis was actually serious: no matter how ugly Stonehenge’s surrounds, surely he must have seen that they could be pulled down at some future date without having to rain bombs on the site. He’s just trying to shock his readers into thinking, yes, Stonehenge really is pretty awful at the moment, maybe we should do something about it. In fact, by mid-1927 the Stonehenge Protection Committee and the National Trust had already raised enough funds to buy much of the surrounding area, as Williams-Ellis must have been aware.
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This is the talk I gave at Earth Sciences back in May. It’s long and picture heavy and much of it will be be familiar to regular readers, but some people expressed some interest in it so here it is. I’ve lightly edited it, mainly to correct typos in my written copy. I’ve put in links to the Boswell drawings because they’re under copyright, and I’ve replaced one photo because I realised it was of British Army Aeroplane No. 1b, not British Army Aeroplane No. 1a! How embarrassing.

Facing Armageddon: Britain and the Bomber, 1908-1941

Today I’m going to give you an overview of my PhD thesis topic. My broad area is the history of military aviation in the early twentieth century, so first I’ll give you a little background on that.

The first heavier-than-air manned flight was made by the Wright brothers in 1903, as you can see here. Within a few years, countries around the world started thinking about how they could use this new technology for warfare.
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Since coming home from London, I keep coming across interesting things which I could have seen while I was there, but didn’t. Which is not at all surprising, given the city’s size and history, but it’s true even in the relatively restricted confines of Bloomsbury, where I was staying and got to know fairly well (or so I thought). My first inkling of this came when I was watching Black Books for the nth time, and idly wondered where the exterior location filming was done. Practically around the corner from where I was staying, as it happens; I must have walked past the street it’s in on an almost daily basis, if not down the very street itself. If I’d known I would have gone in and bought a book, even at the risk of being verbally abused for my troubles!

But there were also things I didn’t know about which were more relevant to my research. Chronologically, I stumbled across the earliest when flipping through a new Osprey book, London, 1914-1917: The Zeppelin Menace by Ian Castle. It’s got these nice maps showing the tracks of individual Zeppelins across the city, and where their bombs fell. And from one of the raids, there were two nearby, one in the south-east corner of Russell Square Gardens and the other in Queen Square. Unfortunately I was too poor (or at least too responsible) to buy the book, and I can’t remember what the date of the raid was. Judging from this, it would appear to be 8 September 1915. And the Bedford Hotel on Southampton Row was hit on 24 September 1917 by one of the first Gotha night raiders.

Anyway, I’ve been to former bomb sites before. A more truly unique event which took place in Bloomsbury was the discovery of the nuclear chain reaction which underpins all nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors — or at least the idea of the chain reaction. This flash of inspiration took place in the brain of Leó Szilárd, a refugee Jewish physicist, on 12 September 1933, at the traffic lights at the intersection of Southampton Row and Russell Square (in fact, only a few metres from where the Zeppelin bomb had fallen). Again, I walked past this spot several times a week, at least. It would have been an appropriate, if noisy, place from which to contemplate the subsequent atomic age.

Even that place, significant though it may be, has nothing to mark its connection to this past. That’s not true for the final (so far) thing I missed in Bloomsbury, the Goodge Street Deep Level Shelter. This was one of eight air raid shelters excavated between 1940 and 1942, parallel to existing Tube stations on the Northern Line. During the war, they were intended to hold 8000 people each; afterward, they could be used as the basis for an express line. Due to the end of the Blitz, none of them were used as shelters until 1944, and the new tunnel was never built. Goodge Street was in fact used by Eisenhower as a headquarters (though I think SHAEF itself was in Bushy Park); apparently he announced D-Day from here and one of the two entrances is called the Eisenhower Centre. That’s on Chenies Street, which I’m not sure I walked down; but the other is on Tottenham Court Road, and I most certainly walked past that more than once without even noticing.

Well, darn it all to heck.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Nick at Mercurius Politicus has an excellent post up on the The Mowing-devil, an English pamphlet from 1678 which is famous among forteans because it contains an illustration of something that looks a lot like a crop circle, three centuries before the term was coined. If it is an account of the mysterious appearance of a circle in a farmer’s field, then it is evidence that crop circles long preceded the activities of circlemakers Doug and Dave, and so are presumably a real, and as yet unexplained, phenomenon.

But Nick’s analysis suggests that the anonymous writer of the The Mowing-devil was not presenting an account of a strange but true event, but rather a cautionary tale about class relations in rural England. He concludes that

In short, The Mowing-Devil is probably not the representation of an early crop-circle that enthusiasts want it to be. In focusing on the woodcut, they’ve missed a much more interesting side to the text that tells us something about late seventeenth-century popular politics and religion.

Deleriad, a folklorist, made an interesting comment:

Although your analysis of the narrative is pretty reasonable I think it’s also worthwhile applying Hufford’s notion of the experiential source hypothesis. Put simply, it works on the basis that people explain anomalous experiences within the pre-existing worldview of a particular culture. So for example, encounters which might once have been explained in terms of fairies are nowadays explained in terms of aliens, lights in the sky which were explained as zepplins at the dawn of the 20th century are now explained as UFOs and so on.

Now, I’m aware of David Hufford’s work, though mainly by reputation: The Terror That Comes in the Night (1982), a study of old hag folklore in Newfoundland, is a book I’ve heard much about. Hufford’s experiential source hypothesis (ESH) was put forward as an alternative to the prevailing cultural source hypothesis (CSH), which would explain supernatural claims almost entirely in terms of pre-existing beliefs, or else misperceptions, hoaxes or hallucinations.¹ According to the CSH line of thinking, as I understand it, The Mowing-devil is probably best explained by something like Nick’s suggestion, or maybe there was an early modern Doug and Dave having a laugh, or something like that. The ESH, by contrast, would posit that that something odd happened in Hertfordshire — for example, a circle appearing overnight in a field of crops — and that the writer of The Mowing-devil described it in terms that he and his audience could understand — for example, a devil with a flaming scythe who appears after a farmer’s ill-tempered rejection of a workman’s offer to mow the field. To simplify grossly, a CSHer would say there’s no reason to believe that anything freaky is going on here, so let’s look for a mundane explanation; an ESHer would respond that this attitude risks throwing the extraordinary baby out with the ordinary bathwater.

So what should historians make of all this? I don’t think we can make much at all.
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1. In other words, a sceptical viewpoint. David J. Hufford, The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centred Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 13-4.

A poster from the 1935 general election, showing, quite literally, the shadow of the bomber. The National Government was a coalition comprising the Conservatives and two splinter parties, National Labour and the Liberal Nationals. With Stanley Baldwin at its head, the National Government went to the people on a platform of peace and prosperity. The poster doesn’t spell out how peace was to be secured (no doubt one of its virtues), namely through a commitment to the League of Nations and collective security, and moderate rearmament, particularly in the air. It’s interesting that at this stage, aeroplanes were still evidently equated with biplanes. Monoplanes were certainly becoming prominent by this time, but they weren’t necessarily seen as more ‘modern’ than the familiar biplane. (As indeed they weren’t: Blériot used a monoplane to fly the Channel back in 1909.)

This election poster and others are available from the Conservative Party Archive at the Bodleian. There’s only one other which has an aviation theme:
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I was invited this week to take part in a ’round table’ discussion between Major Paul Moga (USAF), Professor James Arthur Mowbray (Air War College), and selected bloggers with an interest in aviation (including Scott Palmer of the Avia-Corner). I’m not sure the producers realised that I’m down under, but although the scheduled time for the chat actually was at a reasonable hour, my time, I had to decline because of a prior engagement. At least it spared everyone concerned the trouble of translating my native Strine on the fly …

The purpose was to advertise a documentary series called Showdown: Air Combat, which starts this Sunday on the Military Channel. Which I’m happy to do in this case, because the aforementioned discussion has been made freely available online. Of course I won’t be able to watch it, but it looks interesting: the basic idea being to replay, using warbirds or RC models, ten notable dogfights from the First World War on. Sadly, only one episode features a British aeroplane, that on the Red Baron’s last flight.

The discussion can be played below, or listened to here. It lasts for about 45 minutes.

At one point (about 25 minutes in), Prof. Mowbray says that the aeroplane was always viewed as one of the most expensive weapon systems, and that so when Douhet started talking about fleets of thousands of bombers, everybody laughed at him because nobody could afford that many. Of course, in a discussion like this there’s not the time to fully qualify one’s remarks, and I’d hate for anyone to take me to task for a mistake made when speaking off the cuff, but I can’t agree. Before 1914, people like Claude Grahame-White often made the argument that you could buy a thousand aeroplanes, say, for the cost of one dreadnought — and it might only take one bomb from one aeroplane to sink that dreadnought. A bargain at twice the price, if true. And at the end of the war, the great powers did have massive fleets of aircraft — the RAF had over 22000 aircraft on its books (though this number includes every category of aeroplane: reserves, trainers, obsolete models and probably scraps of broken wing sitting in the corner of the hangar). It probably would have had many more had the war continued into 1919. But don’t let my pedantry put you off having a listen!

THE RAIDERS. A FLIGHT OF SEAPLANES SETTING OFF FOR A NIGHT BOMBING RAID.

This one’s got me stumped. It shows a flight of RNAS twin-engined seaplane bombers, but I haven’t been able to find anything with the same profile. Any ideas?

Image source: Harry Golding, ed., The Wonder Book of Aircraft for Boys and Girls (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1919), facing 56.

Some more plots from the talk I gave the other way. I was trying to think of a way to illustrate in concrete terms the problem of speed for the air defence of Britain. I came up with the following:

Simply put, it shows the length of time it would have taken for an attacking bomber to fly from the coast to London (in blue) — call it the crossing time — and the time it would take taken for a defending fighter to climb high enough to intercept (in red) — call it the intercept time. And how these changed over time, obviously. As can be seen, the fighters generally had enough time to climb high enough to intercept the bombers before they got to London, but the margin decreased over time, from 15 or so minutes during the First World War, to less than 5 in the Second.

But all this is not straightforward so I’ll explain further. To begin with, the data is slightly dodgy. It’s mostly drawn from the same source as this, which is fine as far as it goes. But that means that I’m showing how long it would have taken British bombers to penetrate from the coast to London, which was not really a great worry. Having said that, it’s probably reasonable to assume that the performance of British bombers was roughly in line with those used by Continental air forces. (And the RAF’s own air defence exercises had to make this assumption, too, because borrowing somebody else’s air force for a day wasn’t feasible.) One day I’ll create a dataset for European aircraft …
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Via Museum of Hoaxes, the Nazi air marker hoax — though it seems to me that it was not a hoax in the sense of a deliberate attempt to deceive, but rather an honest misinterpretation. And taking into account the role of the press in the story’s rise and fall, it looks a lot like what I’d call a defence panic.

What happened was that in August 1942 the US Army issued a press release claiming that its airmen had discovered strange patterns in fields across the eastern United States, which appeared to point in the direction of important nearby military and industrial sites. This was offered as evidence that enemy agents were active in the US, laying down signals for German bombers. Nearly two thousand newspapers (including Time) across the country published the story, and editorialised about the enemy within.

Of course, the patterns weren’t Nazi air markers; they were the result of perfectly ordinary rural activities, which had been appearing for years without anybody paying any attention to them. For example, the one shown above was created in 1938 under the supervision of the Department of Agriculture. It’s just the way the field had been ploughed. It was only now, when the country was at war and people were worried about its security, that such patterns were interpreted as signs of danger. It took a sceptical Washington Star and a sheepish confession from the War Department to lay fears of a fifth column to rest.

One aspect I found interesting is that the same story had circulated in a few newspapers in June, but for some reason didn’t take off as it did a couple of months later. The major difference seems to have been the addition of photos of the supposed markers. Maybe they were the evidence needed to make the stories plausible. Maybe they just made the stories more striking and so more appealing to editors. Or it could just be that they were desperate for news in the slow summer months. But it could also be that there was some domestic reason why security was more of a concern in August.

There are a number of obvious parallels. This was not the first time that Americans had imagined aerial threats to their nation: in the First World War — even before their country was in it — there were reports of aircraft flying across the border from Canada at night, perhaps bringing spies and saboteurs. That there were plenty of less dangerous ways for German agents to enter the country dampened the rumours in 1916 about as much as the improbability of New Jersey or Virginia being bombed did in 1942.

The idea of covert signals to enemy bombers can be found in the British press in both world wars. For example, in September 1940, Emil and Alma Wirth, an elderly Swiss-German immigrant and his British-born wife, were arrested on suspicion of ‘making signals “intended to be received by an aircraft in flight”‘ from their Kensington flat. A neighbour, who presumably reported them to the police, said that during an air raid on the night of 24 August he’d seen ‘flashes from the window of the accused whenever an aeroplane appeared to be overhead’. A porter also gave evidence against the couple. It’s not clear from the press accounts, but as the Wirths first appeared in court on 8 September, they may have been arrested in response to the first day of the Blitz, the day before. At any rate the magistrate dismissed the charges, so evidently he wasn’t particularly impressed by the evidence against them. It seems that they weren’t even fined for violating the black-out, which perhaps suggests that there may have some personal reason for the accusations — and being an ersatz German, Emil was an easy target, of course.¹ Sounds like a bit of a witch-hunt, but as the magistrate’s response — and the Washington Star’s scepticism — shows, just because it was war-time doesn’t mean that paranoia was automatically given free reign.

Update: something very similar happened in Britain too.

1. Manchester Guardian, 9 September 1940, p. 11; The Times, 9 September 1940, p. 9; 13 September 1940, p. 2.

A GIANT OF THE AIR. A HANDLEY-PAGE FOUR-ENGINED BIPLANE.

A Handley Page V/1500, the Kabul bomber. Below is (I think) a S.E.5a.

Image source: Harry Golding, ed., The Wonder Book of Aircraft for Boys and Girls (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1919), frontispiece. Painting by Geoffrey Watson.

Source: Department of Veterans’ Affairs, Australia.

This will end in tears: Zeppelins to make tourist flights over London. (Via Airshipworld.)

Image source: from the front cover of Louis Gastine, War in Space: or, an Air-craft War between France and Germany (London and Felling-on-Tyne: Walter Scott Publishing, 1913). (OK, it’s Paris, not London — so I cheated.) The oldest paperback I own, incidentally.

The Royal Air Force is 90 years old today. It was formed from the merger of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service on 1 April 1918 (yes, April Fool’s Day), as the result of an Act of Parliament. This was historic. The RAF may not have been the world’s first independent air force to become independent of military or naval control: the Finnish Air Force apparently beat it by less than a month. But as the FAF started out with just one aeroplane (and that liberated from Sweden), and the RAF with thousands, the British experiment was the riskier. (Particularly given that — by chance — it came in the middle of a massive German offensive on the Western Front.) The British example was assuredly more influential than the Finnish, too. Most air forces around the world are now independent, though the fashion took a while to catch on (the Dominion air forces mostly became independent in the 1920s, as did Italy’s; France and Germany followed in the 1930s; the US and Japan fought the Second World War without an independent air force).

I’ve never been able to form a clear picture of just how smoothly the merger between the RFC and RNAS went. One would expect there to be some problems in integrating branches from two services with very different traditions, cultures, routines, doctrines, equipment and so on, but it doesn’t seem to have been much of a problem. There were some longer-term issues — in 1922, P. R. C. Groves complained about former naval men on the Air Staff, who didn’t understand the RAF’s unique needs, and equally complained that the RAF still had an Army mindset, at least partly a dig at Hugh Trenchard, a late convert to the idea of an independent air force (who had always been devoted to the Army’s needs during the war, and in Groves’s view, at least, had obstructed the work of the Independent Force while its commander in 1918). Since the RFC was much larger than the RNAS, this was probably inevitable to start with. Certainly for the first few years of its existence, the RAF had Army-style ranks, and allowed its officers to wear their RFC khaki uniforms until they wore out (which they were probably keen to do, as the first RAF uniform was a very unpopular pale blue). In 1919 the RAF adopted its own rank structure, actually more reminiscent of the Navy’s — ‘flight-lieutenant’ came directly from the RNAS, where it was a simple modification of the equivalent rank of ‘lieutenant’; ‘group captain’ is equivalent to the Navy’s ‘captain’, and both are much higher in rank to the Army’s ‘captain’. Of course, the senior services were jealous of their new sibling: there was a concerted attempt to smother it in 1921. This failed, but eventually the idea that the air was indivisible was eroded. The Fleet Air Arm became part of the Navy in 1937, partly undoing the unification of 1917. And in the Second World War, the Army began to acquire some air assets too (twelve squadrons of observation aircraft, lots of gliders).
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A curious snippet from Margaret MacMillan’s account of the Paris Peace Conference, Peacemakers (2002):

Why not give it to Hughes of Australia, suggested Clemenceau.¹

The ‘it’ was Heligoland, a small island in the North Sea, off the north-western coast of Germany. For most of the 19th century it had belonged to Britain, which swapped it for Zanzibar to Germany in 1890 — when relations between the two countries were still friendly. But then the naval arms race started up, and Heligoland became a handy place from any attempt by the Royal Navy to approach the German coast could be interfered with. Which is why, in Paris in 1919, the question arose of what to do about it.

The Admiralty naturally wanted the island back, but presumed that the Americans would object. In the end, the compromise solution adopted was to destroy all of its fortifications. Presumably Clemenceau’s suggestion was that Australia, as a nation almost as far away from Heligoland as possible, be given a Mandate over Heligoland (to add to New Guinea and Nauru), so that neither Britain nor Germany would have control over the disputed territory. I don’t know how seriously he meant it, or whether it ever had a chance of getting up. But in my mind’s eye I could see Australia dominating the North Sea from its Heligoland base with our single battlecruiser … well, no. But what would have happened if Australia had been given a Mandate over Heligoland?

Well, for a start, I don’t think Australia would have been exactly regarded as a disinterested party by Germany: British Empire and all that. In practice, there probably wouldn’t have been much difference between Australia governing Heligoland and Britain governing it: precisely because we were so far away from Europe, we had nothing to gain from it and nothing to lose, except perhaps in terms of our international reputation. I don’t see any reason why we wouldn’t use it to benefit our friend (and protecting power), Britain, in whatever way they wished.

What use would it have been to Britain? MacMillan notes that the coming of the aeroplane was another reason why Heligoland seemed newly valuable. She doesn’t explain, but seems to imply that this is because of their potential use as airbases for offensive action. I doubt that it would have been of much use for Britain in this way — it was too small to have a really big airbase (only 1 sq. km!) to be very powerful, and too close to Germany (only 70 km away) to survive for long.

But what Heligoland might have been very useful for was as a RDF (radar) station, to give Britain early warning of an incoming knock-out blow. It was actually ideally placed for this purpose.

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1. Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2002), 187.

In 1923, the Salisbury Committee enquired into the proper relationship between the RAF, on the one hand, and the Army and Navy, on the other. According to Andrew Boyle’s biography of Hugh Trenchard, the then Chief of the Air Staff quoted a recent statement by Sir Ian Hamilton (the commander at Gallipoli) at some point during this inquiry:

Surely we who have witnessed the Germans doing star turns over London and the second exodus of the Jews, surely we will be worse than Thomas Didymus if we do not put the conquest of the air above the conquest of the sea?¹

This needs a little explaining. The bit about the Germans must be a reference to the Gotha raids on London in 1917-8, when the German bombers seemed to come and go with impunity. Thomas Didymus, Google informs me, was the apostle Thomas, so I suppose this is a reference to doubting Thomas, meaning that with all this evidence, there’s no longer any reason to doubt that the air is more important than the sea. And the second exodus of the Jews? Admittedly, I haven’t read all of Hamilton’s article (or whatever it was), but still, I’m pretty sure that this is an anti-Semitic libel.

Anti-Semitism was not uncommon in interwar Britain. This is well-known, but it’s sometimes represented as merely unpleasant and relatively benign — which it certainly was when compared with some other countries. However, it could go beyond mere unpleasantness into real ugliness. One idea which was floating around in airpower writing in the early 1920s is that Jews were especially likely to crack under the pressure of bombing. And that supposedly, during the Gotha and other air raids on London, rich Jews had fled the city for the safety of the seaside resorts — Hamilton’s ’second exodus’ — while poor ones stayed in the East End but ran around in a blind panic.
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1. Andrew Boyle, Trenchard (London: Collins, 1962), 469.

I’ve finally gotten around to adding Montagu of Beaulieu (pronounced ‘Bewley’, apparently) to my irregular series of biographies of airpower propagandists. He’s an important, but somewhat neglected figure, some of whose papers I’ve examined (those held at King’s College London). He helped found the Air League of the British Empire in 1909, and devised the influential ‘nerve centre’ theory, which argued that the destruction of critical infrastructure would be one of the chief dangers of aerial bombardment in the next war:

an attempt would certainly be made to paralyse the heart of the nation by attacking certain nerve centres in London, the destruction of which would impede or entirely destroy the means of communication by telephone, telegraph, rail, and road.¹

Later, in 1916, he stumped across the country giving speeches criticising the government for its failure to expand aircraft production sufficiently, and to call for the formation of an independent air force, the Imperial Air Service. He was a Conservative MP, then a Conservative peer, and all the time very wealthy (if you call 10,000 acres wealthy, anyway).

But today I’m going to talk about Montagu’s personal life, and the way it impinged on his public one. The photo above shows the ‘Spirit of Ecstasy’, the mascot adorning the bonnet of every Rolls-Royce — every one since Montagu put an early version on his Silver Ghost in 1911, that is, for he was a huge motoring enthusiast, and had his friend, the sculptor Charles Sykes, design it for him. Supposedly, the model Sykes used was Montagu’s own secretary and mistress, Eleanor Thornton. (Though there’s an alternate, and possibly more convincing, theory minimising the role of Thornton and Montagu.)
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1. Montagu of Beaulieu, Aerial Machines and War (London: Hugh Rees, 1910), 2.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Not a phrase I ever expected to come across, but here it is, in David Omissi’s Air Power and Colonial Control, the context being the introduction of one the most successful aircraft of the interwar period, the Hawker Hart:

The Hart was soon found to be suitable for India; fifty-seven aircraft were accordingly fitted with desert equipment, large tyres and extra fuel; they flew with three Indian squadrons until 1939. Their high performance was particularly values on the Frontier as they were the only aircraft which could meet the Afghan air menace on equal terms, especially after 1937 when the Afghans began to employ the Hind, itself a high-speed derivative of the Hart. Others served in Egypt and Palestine.¹

Afghanistan established an independent air force as early as 1924, though it was easy enough for the British to dismiss as the only Afghan who could fly an aeroplane was made its Chief of Air Staff! But though small in European terms, with mainly Soviet assistance and aircraft the Afghan Air Force became quite efficient within a few years, and was used in several air control operations of its own, against rebellious tribes in outlying areas. Britain eventually felt it had to edge the Soviets out in order to gain some influence over it, hence the supply of Hinds (8 in 1937, another 20 ordered in 1939).

Although Omissi’s subject — air control, the use of airpower in Imperial policing, or in other words, the British air menace — is ostensibly quite some distance from strategic bombing, I found that reading his book illuminated aspects of my own work (and sadly, this means I’ve broken my New Year’s resolution already). Partly this is because he has chosen less jarring terms than I have (’mitigation’? what was I thinking?) but it’s more because he provides a typology of indigenous responses (in practice) to being bombed which transfers pretty well to ideas being worked out, at the same time, in Britain (in theory) about how it would or should respond to being bombing. Although Omissi doesn’t describe it as such, it’s almost a spectrum of responses, varying with the capacity of the society under attack to resist, which in turn is going to depend largely on the resources available, but also on other factors such geography and climate. (That doesn’t quite work, though, because the responses aren’t mutually exclusive.)
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1. David E. Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force 1919-1939 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), 142; emphasis added.

A recent post on the new science fiction blog io9 (which I’m enjoying, but is it really so hard to put in spoiler warnings?) claimed that the Vickers Velos was the ‘ugliest and most worthless plane in the world’. Sure, it’s not pretty, but I’ve seen plenty that were uglier — fuglier, even. But there were a couple of links to lists of other ugly aircraft, which are always fun to browse. The first one had some bizarre nominations (the Dragon Rapide should never be on such a list) but I thought I’d found what may be the single ugliest aeroplane ever made, the three-engine variant of the Farman Jabiru airliner (it’s French, naturellement). I was going to write this post about it. But then I clicked through to the second list.

That is where I first saw the Vedo Villi.

I can’t take my eyes off it. I honestly can’t decide whether it’s ugly or beautiful. But it is somehow deeply, fundamentally, disturbingly, horrifyingly wrong. It is eldritch. It’s like something H. P. Lovecraft might have dreamed up, if he’d been an aircraft designer and wanted just the thing for the airminded cultist to nip down from Arkham Aerodrome to the nightmare corpse-city of R’lyeh for the weekend.

There is a photo of the Villi below. Read on — if you dare.
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Well, not just corpses …

The data for the above plot are drawn from the War Office, Statistics of the Military Effort of the British Empire During the Great War, 1914-1920 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1922), 674-7.¹ It shows the total (i.e. civilian and military)² casualties (i.e. killed and wounded) from all forms of bombardment (i.e. by airship, by aeroplane, and by warship) in Britain for each month of the war.

There are three distinct, colour-coded stories here. The first is that of naval bombardment (blue). I knew of the German navy’s raid on Scarborough, Hartlepool and Whitby in December 1914, but not that there were so many casualties (137 dead, 592 wounded). That one raid caused more casualties than any of the later air raids — more than were caused by air raids in any one calendar month, in fact — and on that basis the post-war Admiralty ought to have been arguing that the battlecruiser will always get through! Of course, it was a highly singular event: no other shore bombardment came anywhere close to doing as much damage. And most places in Britain were not as exposed to attack from the sea as seaside towns in Norfolk.

The second story is that of the airship menace (green). During 1915 and 1916 Zeppelin raiders were fairly successful, often causing about 200 casualties a month — in those months that they did attack. They mostly came during the spring and autumn; I suppose the summer nights were too short and the winter nights too foul. But after 1916, they inflicted much less damage. That’s partly because they came less often, and that’s partly because in the autumn of 1916, seven airships were shot down by British air defences, including that commanded by the legendary Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Mathy. The RNAS and RFC had largely gotten the measure of the Zeppelin raiders by then.

Aeroplane raiders are the final story (red). Though these are largely forgotten today — at least in comparison to the Zeppelins — from the summer of 1917 they caused even more fear than did the Zeppelins, and the graph shows why: they did significantly more damage, and did so over a more sustained period of time. (They kept up the offensive on London over the winter of 1917-8, for example, which the Zeppelins did not.) The two great daylight raids on London on 13 June and 7 July 1917 were particularly shocking. Though the activities of the Gothas and Giants led to the formation of the Royal Air Force and the London Air Defence Area, ultimately the end of major aeroplane raids owed more to the needs of the German army in France than anything else: first the March 1918 offensive, and then the Hundred Days.
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1. Which was kindly scanned by Mike Yared of the WWI-L mailing list, and made available online. Be aware, it’s over 80 Mb in size.
2. Interestingly, Statistics distinguishes between the two categories (with civilians nearly always predominating). I suppose the point of that was that the lives of soldiers and sailors were expected to be at risk in wartime, whereas those of civilians shouldn’t be.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Recently, I read Alan Kramer’s Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War. It’s an excellent book, both illuminating and informative (being airminded, I found the section on the Austrian and German bombing of Italy to be especially fascinating), and I highly recommend it.¹

But there was one section which brought me up short. In a section on Britain’s entry into the war, Kramer says that the breach of Belgian neutrality by Germany was a gift to Asquith and Grey, because it meant that the war could be framed as a just war. Absolutely. Then he goes on to say:

At the time, British decision-makers could only sense intuitively what we know today — this was far more than a conservative defence of the status quo: had Germany succeeded at the Marne in September 1914, which it almost did, the defeat of France and a separate peace would have been followed by a defeat of Russia and, after a pause to build up the German navy, the invasion of Britain from a position of towering strength on the Continent.²

Which is where I went ‘Huh?’ Do we really know that? Because I didn’t know we knew that.
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1. Reading really good books is depressing when you’re in the middle of writing a thesis — Nicoletta F. Gullace’s “The Blood of Our Sons”: Men, Women, and the Renegotiation of British Citizenship During the Great War (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) was another. Which suggests a New Year’s resolution: to read only rubbish …
2. Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 95.

On Friday, I went along to a talk on “Great War aerial photography: a source for battlefield survey and archaeology?”, given by Birger Stichelbaut of Ghent University in Belgium. This brings the total number of in-any-way-related-to-early-20th-century-aviation talks given at the University of Melbourne during my PhD candidacy (as far as I know and excluding a couple I’ve given) to one (1). And even this was archaeological and not historical; but it kept me awake even at the quite indecent hour of 10am, so you know it must have been good!
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The latest post at Axis of Evel Knievel reminds me that today is the 90th anniversary of the Halifax disaster. On 6 December 1917, two ships collided off the Nova Scotian port of Halifax. One, the SS Mont-Blanc, was carrying huge quantities of TNT, guncotton, and other highly combustible materials, destined for the war in Europe. It caught fire and exploded, laying waste to the town for a radius of 2km and killing around 1500 people — mostly ordinary civilians — within seconds; about 500 more died from their wounds over the following days. It’s still one of the biggest man-made, non-nuclear explosions ever.

Joanna Bourke, in her Fear: A Cultural History, discusses the research of Samuel Prince into the social effects of the Halifax disaster. Prince interviewed many of the survivors (of which he was one!) shortly afterwards; this research formed the basis of his sociology PhD (Columbia University, 1920). Summarising some of Prince’s findings, Bourke writes that

Survivors proved incapable of understanding what was happening. Many hallucinated, their eyes tricking them into seeing German Zeppelins attacking them from the air. A man on the outskirts of the town claimed to have heard a German shell whistling past him. Such visions had been stimulated over the preceding months by rumours of the possibility of a German attack. Residents with German-sounding names were set upon. Some survivors still believed that the Germans had something to do with the disaster.¹

Hallucinations of non-existent Zeppelins? Those would be phantom airships, then. Together with the rumours about an impending German attack, this all sounds a lot like the situation in Britain before the war, when non-existent Zeppelins were also filling the skies: people expected the Germans to come, and, given half an excuse, they saw (and heard) them.

Of course, the explosion itself was a unique circumstance, and might be thought sufficient explanation for any hallucinations. But the rumours of a German attack were already circulating beforehand, so the undercurrents of fear and suspicion necessary for a panic were already present, it would seem. And, the explosion aside, there was nothing very unusual about what people thought they saw: Canada had been visited by mystery aircraft before, almost since the start of the war. Most notably, on 14 February 1915, Ottawa was blacked out because four aircraft had apparently been spotted crossing the St Lawrence from the American side; soldiers getting ready to leave for the Western Front were ordered to patrol the roofs of government buildings with their rifles, in order that there would be at least some resistance when the raiders came. (Which they never did.)²

If anybody ever comes to write the history of the Scareship Age, the Halifax disaster should be part of it.

1. Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (London: Virago, 2005), 70. Emphasis added.
2. Nigel Watson, The Scareship Mystery: A Survey of Worldwide Phantom Airship Scares (1909-1918) (Corby: Domra, 2000), 117-20.

The grave of Pte John Joseph Mulqueeney, in Courcelette British Cemetery, Somme, France. He was killed on 17 August 1916 near Mouquet Farm.

I am extremely grateful to Steve John for providing me with this photograph.

Today is the 95th anniversary of the Sheerness Incident. Sheerness is a town at the mouth of the Medway, on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. For several centuries, it was a dockyard for the Royal Navy (the Nore Mutiny took place nearby in 1797). In 1912, Sheerness was an important part of Britain’s naval defences, helping to guard the Thames Estuary — and hence London — against a possible German invasion.

On Monday, 14 October 1912, between about 6.30pm and 7pm, many people in Sheerness and in Queenborough, two miles to the south, heard a sound like an aeroplane engine coming from the skies overhead. Sunset was shortly after 6pm, and so it was rapidly getting dark. Some witnesses — including a Royal Navy lieutenant — believed they could also make out a red light, and possibly a searchlight, passing to and fro over the town. It was assumed by some townsfolk that the pilot was from the Royal Naval Aerial Service station at nearby Eastchurch, where there was a flight training school;¹ perhaps the pilot was in trouble. The aerodrome was alerted by telephone, and flares were lit in an effort to guide the aircraft in. But although the engine sounds were also heard at Eastchurch, nothing was seen. By about 7pm the sound, and the light, was no longer detectable.

Where did the sounds come from? Eastchurch had no aircraft up that night, so it wasn’t from there. In fact, night flying was relatively rare at the time: Claude Grahame-White was the first to do it successfully in an aeroplane, in 1910. The world of British aviation in 1912 was a small one, and if a pilot had successfully undertaken a hazardous cross-country night flight it seems unlikely that it would have remained a secret. (An unsuccessful flight, of course, would have been even harder to miss!) Newspapers no longer reported on each and every flight, but weekly aviation magazines seem to have had notices of many of them. For example, Flight reported on flights at Eastchurch by nine different pilots during the week in question, though for 14 October itself only noted that ‘Lieut. Briggs was out with passenger on Monday’.² So it seems unlikely that any British pilot was flying that night over the Isle of Sheppey.
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1. Short Brothers was also based at Eastchurch at the time, though I’ve not seen this mentioned in reference to the Sheerness Incident.
2. Flight, 19 October 1912, p. 932.

I recently had the somewhat guilty pleasure of watching Flood, a film (from a novel) about the sudden devastation of London by a massive storm surge — predicted by a scientist who had long been dismissed as a crank — which swamps the Thames Barrier, submerges most of the city’s landmarks, kills a couple of hundred thousand people and forces most of the rest to evacuate. An even bigger disaster is averted (just in the nick of time, as it happens) and Londoners are left to clean up the mess. All very timely, given the unusually high proportion of England which was under water earlier this year.

Disaster movies are a pretty venerable genre by now (there were at least three films about the Titanic made in the year after it sank). The subset which deals with destruction on the scale of a big city (or larger) — as opposed to aeroplanes or skyscrapers — is relatively small, and that concerned, like Flood, with the fate of London specifically is quite small indeed.¹ No doubt this is because disaster movies are generally loaded with special effects and therefore are expensive, and as the US market for film is so huge, it makes more financial sense to destroy some American city rather than a British one. So there aren’t all that many cinematic depictions of the end of London. But books are much cheaper to make, and in those London has been destroyed many times over.

I’ve been tr