1910s

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Slap the Jap and make the Hun pay

28 June 2009 in 1910s, Australia, Books, Quotes by Brett Holman | 2 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Or, Australia strides onto the world stage.

Today is the 90th anniversary of the signing of the Versailles Treaty and thus of the Covenant of the League of Nations (which formed the first thirty articles of the Treaty). This was a fateful moment, with heavy consequences for those who lived through the next quarter-century. But as all of that is well-known (and still debated), I want to draw attention to something that isn’t: Australia’s role in the Paris Peace Conference, which formulated both the Treaty and the Covenant. While Australia had existed as an independent nation since 1901, most Australians would consider the ANZAC participation in the Dardanelles campaign in 1915 to be its true coming of age. Australian forces went on to serve with great distinction on the Western Front, Palestine and elsewhere, a shedding of blood which earned Australia a place among the peacemakers in Paris. But what use did Australia make of its first opportunity to influence the future of the world?
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The Wokingham Whale

15 June 2009 in 1900s, 1910s, Aircraft, Pictures by Brett Holman | 4 comments

Nobody commented on the Wokingham Whale. Above is a photograph of this unlikely beast, dating from 1910 or so. All I know about it is from the Globe and this site, which has several other photos as well.

The Whale was not an airship, although that word was used to describe it. Despite the shape, that’s not a gasbag but a fuselage. A 80hp engine was to drive a 1200rpm ‘rotoscope’ (presumably meaning a propeller, which Patrick Alexander apparently designed). The ‘portholes’ are actually to slide poles through, to support canvas wings. The fuselage was 66 feet long, and was designed to extend ‘telescopically’ to 140 feet in length. It would be fitted for long-distance overseas flights, with seats, electric lights, hammocks and toilets.

It’s clearly an example of reach exceeding grasp: there’s no way something that big and solid could be made to fly with the technologies of 1910. I don’t understand what the point of a telescoping fuselage would be, either. But we do travel overseas today in long enclosed tubes with the amenities mentioned (minus the hammocks!), so the Whale’s inventor, A. M. Farbrother (owner of a Wokingham joinery), did have some insight into the future of aviation.
Unfortunately, Farbrother sold his own cottage to fund his flying machine. He and the locals who also contributed must have been bitterly disappointed when money ran out and the fuselage broken up.

Supposedly Flight had some contemporary articles about the Whale but a quick search didn’t turn up anything.

PB and C³I

5 May 2009 in 1910s, Books, Civil defence, Maps, Pictures, Quotes by Brett Holman | 15 comments

Air War and How to Wage It

Noel Pemberton Billing has received a bit of criticism around here, and mostly for good reason. He couldn’t design a decent aeroplane for toffee, he peddled lurid conspiracy theories, he was a relentless self-promoter. But I don’t think he was a complete fool. He clearly had a fertile imagination (overly so, Maud Allen would have said) and sometimes he was on the money. Take his ideas for Britain’s air defence, as expounded in his 1916 pamphlet Air War: How to Wage It.

There were two major problems at the time. The first was that Zeppelins were raiding British cities and weren’t being intercepted, despite the existence of a substantial home defence establishment. It wasn’t that they couldn’t be intercepted, but that they couldn’t be intercepted consistently. (Shooting them down was another a problem, of course.) The problem was one of command, control, communications and intelligence (C³I, though you can add letters to taste). Information about incoming Zeppelins and their locations usually wasn’t timely or accurate, making it hard for fighters to find them in the dark. And most squadrons were based near the coast, meaning that the enemy was usually past the defences by the time the alarm was raised.

The second problem was that because the targets of the raiders were difficult to determine — and for that matter, the Zeppelin crews themselves often didn’t know where they were and dropped their bombs almost at random — as a precaution alerts had to be sounded and lights blacked-out over large areas of the country. This disrupted sleep and production far more than was necessary.

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Official historians behaving badly

29 April 2009 in 1910s, After 1950, Australia, Books, Film, Quotes by Brett Holman | 17 comments

A belated Anzac Day post.

Here’s C. E. W. Bean, the official historian of Australia’s involvement in the First World War, on why the infamous Suvla landings on 6 August 1915 didn’t cut the Gallipoli peninsula and open the road to Constantinople:

The reasons for the failure, which affected the fate of the Australian and New Zealand forces more profoundly than any other episode in the campaign, may be laid bare by future historians, probing unflinchingly for the causes. Many of the Anzac troops, on whom it left an enduring impression, attributed it partly to the senility of the leadership, partly to the inexperience of the troops, but largely to causes which lie deeper in the mentality of the British people. The same respect for the established order which caused Kitchener to entrust the enterprise to unsuitable commanders simply because they were senior, appeared to render each soldier inactive unless his officer directed, and each officer dumb unless his senior spoke. The men had doubtless the high qualities of their race, among them orderliness, decency, and modesty; they could follow a good leader anywhere as bravely as any troops in the Peninsula. But an enterprise such as that of Suvla demanded more than the ability to follow; it required that each man, or at least a high proportion of the force, should be able to lead; and the necessary quality of decision, which even a few years’ emancipation from the social restrictions of the Old World appeared to have bred in the emigrant, was — to colonial eyes — lacking in the Suvla troops. Moreover a large proportion of the new force had come straight from the highly organised life in or around overcrowded cities, and as a result they lacked the resourcefulness required for any activity in open country. They lacked also the hardness to set a high standard of achievement for themselves, while that demanded of them by the regimental and brigade staffs was — to put it mildly — inadequate for one of the decisive battles of the war. Further, though many reports had been heard concerning the excellent physique of the New Army, the standard in that respect was very uneven. There were in reality two well-defined types, the officers as a class being tall and well developed, but a majority of the men cramped in stature, presumably as the result of life in overcrowded industrial centres under conditions not yet operative to any marked extent in the great cities in Australia.

Hmm, so it’s the fault of the British soldier for being ‘cramped in nature’ and lacking in ‘resourcefulness’ and ‘hardness’, unlike the strapping young colonials, of course. At least Bean allows himself an out, in the form of ‘future historians’. One of these historians, Robin Prior, argues that — contrary to received wisdom — the primary aim at Suvla was actually just to set up a supply base for the northern Allied forces, which it did successfully. Any advances across the peninsula were secondary to this, and in any case were never likely to amount to much given the geography, the forces available and the operational plan. Which last, as it happens, was partly authored by Captain Cecil Aspinall, who later wrote (as Aspinall-Oglander) the British official history of the Gallipoli campaign, where he was quite happy to blame the commander on the ground, the elderly but inexperienced Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Stopford, for the ‘failure’ of his plan.

Something for me to bear in mind when I talk to my students in a few weeks about the (brilliant but misleading) 1981 film Gallipoli. Especially the scene where the radio operator at the Nek, where waves of Australian soldiers have been uselessly slaughtered in assaults against Turkish trenches in support of the landings, reports that the British at Suvla have met no resistance but, instead of advancing inland, are ’sitting on the beach drinking cups of tea’. Peter Weir probably can’t be blamed for portraying the British military, officers and other ranks both, as incompetent when even the official historians are happy to do the same.

See C. E. W. Bean, Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, volume 2: The Story of ANZAC from 4 May, 1915, to the evacuation of the Gallipoli Peninsula, 11th edition (Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1941), 715-6; Robin Prior, Gallipoli: The End of the Myth (Sydney: UNSW Press, 2009), 207-9.

Target: Constantinople!

9 April 2009 in 1910s, Books, Counterfactuals, Quotes by Brett Holman | 13 comments

I’ve been reading a little about the Dardanelles campaign of 1915; not the famous landings in April but the failed naval campaign which preceded them in February and March. The basic idea was that British and French forces would sweep the Bosphorus clear of mines, knock out the Turkish naval guns on either side of the straits, proceed to Constantinople and then receive Turkey’s surrender. In the event, the first two parts of this plan failed rather spectacularly (three battleships were lost to mines in a single day), but even if they hadn’t, just how a fleet of warships was supposed to make a country surrender has never been very clear, at least not to me.

It’s tempting to see this as a sort of naval knock-out blow. Constantinople, the Turkish capital, would be under the guns of the Allied battleships. Turkey had no significant navy of its own, besides the ex-German battlecruiser Goeben which would have been hugely outnumbered, so the city would be open to a devastating naval bombardment. So perhaps the sheer moral effect of this would cause a collapse. And it seems the Turks feared this. On 18 March, the day of the attempted breakthrough, according to Robert Massie:

Meanwhile, in Constantinople, the government and the populace were convinced that the Allied fleet would break through. All Turks respected the near legendary power of the British navy; no one believed that a collection of ancient forts and guns at the Dardanelles could bar its way. Accordingly, word of the massive bombardment precipitated an exodus from the capital. The state archives were evacuated and hidden; the banks were emptied of gold; many affluent Turks already had sent their families away. The distance from Gallipoli to Constantinople was only 150 miles; most Turks expected that less than twelve hours after they entered the Sea of Marmara, British battleships would arrive off the Golden Horn.¹

So if a moral effect was intended, it seems like it was starting to work. But as I say, it’s frustratingly unclear in the histories and biographies I have to hand just what the Allies expected was going to happen. There’s a suggestion that Kitchener thought the morale of the Turkish army would break; maybe there would be another revolution; or maybe the soldiers eventually landed at Gallipoli could have been used to take Constantinople instead. Of course, there would have been other benefits from forcing the straits: opening the sea lanes to Russia, foremost among them.
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Robert K. Massie, Castles of Steel: Britain, Germany and the Winning of the Great War at Sea (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), 464.

Claude Grahame-White

5 April 2009 in 1910s, Biographies, Film, Phantom airships and other panics by Brett Holman | 5 comments

I’ve added another biography to the sidebar, that of devil-may-care flying fool Claude Grahame-White. He is probably most remembered today for his daring night flight in 1910 while attempting to win the Daily Mail London to Manchester prize. (His film career seems to have attracted somewhat less attention.) But for me Grahame-White’s main significance is as an airpower propagandist and as one of the originators, along with his co-author Harry Harper, of the knock-out blow theory.¹

Note the snub to British aeronautics: he was a member of the Aero Club of America in 1937, but not the Royal Aero Club!

And for his involvement with the phantom airship scares: it has been suggested that he was responsible for the Sheerness incident, and he also searched for a phantom airship over London on the night of 5 September 1914.

Bigger, not better

30 March 2009 in 1910s, 1920s, Aircraft, Blogging, Pictures by Brett Holman | 12 comments

The Tarrant Tabor, a prototype bomber designed and built in 1918-9. There were high hopes among strategic bombing advocates (including P. R. C. Groves) for this giant machine, but by the time it was ready for its maiden flight in May 1919, the war was over and its purpose now unclear. Not that this mattered much, for that first flight was abortive:
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The death ray men

27 March 2009 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, Books, Film, Periodicals by Brett Holman | 12 comments

A few articles have been appearing in the British press over the last few days about Harry Grindell Matthews, who (among many other things) claimed in 1924 to have invented a death ray. There’s no actual news attached to these stories, as far as I can tell, other than the fact that a new biography of the man has just come out (Jonathan Foster, The Death Ray: The Secret Life of Harry Grindell Matthews). In them, and presumably in the book, Grindell Matthews is portrayed as an unrecognised scientific genius who will now hopefully get his due. While he’s certainly a fascinating figure, and one who pops up in my thesis, I think he was another of those inventors who was as much showman as scientist, someone who claimed to have invented many amazing things but which somehow rarely seem to have resulted in a finished product.

The death ray itself is a good example of this. It was claimed to be an electromagnetic weapon which could kill over long ranges, or explode gunpowder, or stop an internal combustion engine. The last ability was key to the possible use of the death ray as an anti-aircraft weapon, and this is what most press attention at the time focused on. There was a press campaign waged on Grindell Matthews’ behalf which clamoured for the government to acquire this weapon for Britain. Officials from the Air Ministry were given a demonstration, but were unimpressed. The government was not entirely uninterested, and even offered him a thousand pounds for a successful test under their own conditions. But Grindell Matthews lost patience and hopped over to Paris to hawk the death ray there. He came back to Britain, made a film with Pathé called The Death Ray, and eventually gave up and went to America.

This sounds a lot like charlatanism. Grindell Matthews claimed much for his invention, but was reluctant to submit it to reasonable scrutiny, even when offered when more than fair compensation for his time. On the other hand, the Wright brothers, for example, had been just as suspicious when trying to sell their flyers to the world’s militaries, and ended up not making a whole lot of money from their inspiration and perspiration. So such behaviour wasn’t unprecedented. On the other other hand, the reason why the Wrights didn’t profit fully from their invention of flight was that other people duplicated it, refined it, improved it and marketed it. If Grindell Matthews was just a bad businessman, then why didn’t a practical death ray ever appear from somebody else’s lab?

It certainly wasn’t because nobody else was trying. Here’s a (partial) list of others who claimed to have invented a death ray before 1939:
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First strike?

21 March 2009 in 1910s, 1920s, Books, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Quotes by Brett Holman | 2 comments

No. But let me explain …

One of the nice things about tutoring is that you’re getting paid to learn things (unless you happen to know everything about whatever it is that you are tutoring already, which I don’t). And one thing I’ve learned recently is that the First World War started because French aircraft bombed western Germany. That was the German claim, anyway. Here’s the relevant part of the German declaration of war on France on 3 August 1914, a letter from the German ambassador, Baron Wilhelm von Schoen, to Raymond Poincaré, the President of France:

The German administrative and military authorities have established a certain number of flagrantly hostile acts committed on German territory by French military aviators.

Several of these have openly violated the neutrality of Belgium by flying over the territory of that country; one has attempted to destroy buildings near Wesel; others have been seen in the district of the Eifel; one has thrown bombs on the railway near Carlsruhe and Nuremberg.

I am instructed, and I have the honour to inform your Excellency, that in the presence of these acts of aggression the German Empire considers itself in a state of war with France in consequence of the acts of this latter Power.

I don’t think there is any doubt now that these aerial incidents never happened, and were invented by Germany to excuse its preplanned and unprovoked invasion of France and Belgium. The French government immediately denied the charges — though it would, wouldn’t it?

But that denial didn’t put the question to rest. There was some discussion in the letters columns of the New York Times in 1916, and in 1917 a Liberal MP, J. M. Robertson, published a pamphlet called German Truth and a Matter of Fact. This last seems reasonably convincing, as it based on some unofficial German investigations which found no evidence for any prewar aerial incursions. And at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, the (Allied) commission on war guilt dismissed the charges as ‘entirely false’. As late as 1929, though, the inimitable Harry Elmer Barnes questioned this narrative of falsification (JSTOR, see also transcript at eccentric revisionist website). While Barnes didn’t claim that the air raids had happened, he did argue that the French had tampered with the telegrams sent by Berlin to Schoen so as to mutilate the portions relating to claims of ground incursions by the French. Schoen was therefore unable to mention these in his declaration of war and had to rely on the (admittedly mistaken, though not falsified) bombing stories. The French denied that any such ‘mutilation’ took place.

Why air raids anyway? I was thinking that they were plausible claims which were difficult to disprove, since aeroplanes come and go without leaving much trace (other than the odd bomb crater), unlike, say, a fully-fledged cavalry incursion across the frontier. But if Barnes/Schoen are to be believed, Germany did claim that France violated its terra firma too. It may have been intended to tar France with the brush of frightfulness, though bombs falling harmlessly near a railway track don’t really do much in that direction. Again, if the reports were mistakes and not simply made up, it could be that they were phantom-airship type reports made by members of the public, which would not be at all surprising given the German mobilisation and the expectation that war would soon begin. Though actual explosions are harder to explain, admittedly.

Anyway, it’s an interesting sidelight on the July Crisis, and perhaps an anticipation of the later belief that the next war would begin in the air.

A tale of two cityscapes

27 February 2009 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Books, Counterfactuals, Periodicals, Plots, Thesis by Brett Holman | 5 comments

Primary sources

Some more ~~navel-gazing~~post-thesis analysis. Above is a plot of the number of primary sources (1908-1941) I cite by date of publication. (Published sources only, excluding newspaper articles — of which there are a lot — and government documents. Also, it’s not just airpower stuff, though it mostly is.) I actually have no idea if it’s a lot or not, and I’m sure there are some selection effects in there. But, although I’ve certainly not attempted any sort of statistical analysis (nor will I!), I think some features of the plot reflect real features of the airpower literature of period, at least as it relates to the bombing of civilians.

Firstly, there’s a substantial increase in the number of sources in the 1930s, particularly from 1934 when there is a big peak. I argue in the thesis that this was only partly and indirectly due to the obvious reason (the arrival of Hitler in 1933). The more important reason was the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva, which ran between 1932 and 1934 (actually it went longer, but was dead in the water when Germany walked out). This roused airpower writers — whether pro- or anti-disarmament — to action, and gave them a reason to explain to the public the effects of bombing on cities. The slight rise from the late 1920s is also due to the conference, I think, or rather the optimistic Locarno-era preparations for it. The big peak in 1927 is a bit odd, though. Let’s call that an outlier.

The other two noticeable peaks are in 1909 and 1938. The first was very early in the public’s awareness of flight. That really started in 1908, but the possible defence implications came to the fore in 1909 — the founding of the Aerial League of the British Empire, the first phantom airship panic, the publication of the first serious books on the topic. And of course the dreadnought panic — it was a peak year for Anglo-German rivalry. The 1938 peak was the culmination of the building concern over the previous decade. What the plot doesn’t show is that, unlike previous years, it was largely sceptical, based on evidence from the Spanish Civil War. The Sudeten crisis that September showed that the fear of the knock-out blow still had a strong grip on the public and the press. But afterwards there’s a sharp decline in interest, which I maintain is real.

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Very like a Zeppelin

16 February 2009 in 1910s, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Quotes, Rumours by Brett Holman | 1 comment

Here’s an explanation for phantom airships which I haven’t come across before: whales!

The way in which rumours start and grow is shown by the following incident recorded by the Daily Telegraph correspondent at Harwich:—

“It was rumoured in Harwich this evening that a Zeppelin had been seen flying on the North Sea to-day, surrounded by British destroyers. The story was brought into this port by members of the crew of the Great Eastern Railway Company’s steamer Colchester, which arrived late in the afternoon from Rotterdam. On enquiry I have ascertained that when within twenty-five miles of Harwich the crew of the Colchester saw a large object of a yellowish tint afloat on the water, with two destroyers near by. The weather was hazy, and it was difficult at a distance to determine precisely what the object was. One of the destroyers fired at it; the other steamed away. The true explanation of the incident is now stated in naval circles to be that the supposed Zeppelin was merely a dead whale, and that the carcase was fired at with the object of sinking it.
“‘Did it look like a whale?’ I asked a member of the steamer’s crew.
“‘Oh, yes, it might have been,’ he answered.”

Source: Flight, 23 October 1914, 1065 (link).

Cabbage crates coming over the briny?

6 February 2009 in 1910s, Periodicals, Quotes, Words by Brett Holman | 6 comments

Some perfectly ordinary banter, c. 1917:

First “Hun”: “Did you see old Cole’s zoom on a quirk this morning?”
Second “Hun”: “No, what happened?”
First “Hun”: “Oh, nothing to write home about … stalled his ‘bus and pancaked thirty feet … crashed completely … put a vertical gust up me … just as I was starting my solo flip in a rumpty!”

This is the start of an article by W. A. B. entitled ‘Airmen in the making’, from the Daily Mail, 19 July 1917, p. 4. It’s about some of the new words and phrases used by trainee RFC pilots: ‘no one can claim so many strikingly original terms as the air services’. Most of the examples given weren’t actually new; some of them don’t seem to have survived the war; others are still familiar enough in an aviation context; and yet others are now so widely used that their aeronautical context comes as a surprise.

Hun does not here refer to one of Biggles’ foes but to the trainee pilots themselves. The OED’s earliest cite for this sense is 1916; a later cite from 1925 suggests that the derivation was that flight cadets tended to be highly destructive of training aircraft. Zoom (a ’soul-satisfying word’) is what an aeroplane does when it is ‘hauled up apruptly and made to climb for a few moments at a dangerously sharp angle’. But it seems that zooming was already something that moving objects did, especially if they made some sort of humming or other sound as they did so: an OED cite from 1904 has bees zooming against a window plane. All sorts of vehicles can zoom these days, though aircraft may have been first. But we probably use it more often to refer to cameras or image editing software. A quirk is a training aeroplane (though according to the OED it can also mean a trainee pilot), or just any which is slow and ungainly. But it’s a very old word, in the sense of something odd or unusual, which seems directly related to this usage. A rumpty is a specific type of training aeroplane, namely a Maurice Farman Shorthorn. According to the RAAF Museum, it (or rather Rumpety) is an onomatopoeic word, from the sound it makes while travelling over the ground.

To stall in the aeronautical sense is of course quite familiar, but stalling in the sense of coming to a standstill is quite old (OED’s first cite is c. 1460). ‘Bus is short for omnibus, presumably — a later generation of pilots might have said kite or ship. To pancake I had previously understood just to mean to land, but it can evidently also mean a sudden vertical drop (i.e. from a stall) or a crash. A solo flip is a solo flight — does anyone take a flip anymore? And finally, a vertical gust sounds like a straightforward meteorological term, but in this context it’s a ‘breezy way’ for the Hun to confess that seeing the crash before his own solo had, well, put the wind up him.

The other words in the article are still standard aviation terms, though to gamers of a certain age a joystick doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with even simulated flight. W. A. B. ends by claiming gadget for the airmen:

But the most priceless word of all is “gadget.” If the name of anything escapes you call it a “gadget” and you will be understood!

And it is indeed an excellent word. But sadly for the RFC’s legacy, the OED shows that sailors were using it three decades earlier: ‘if the exact name of anything they want happens to slip from their memory, they call it a chicken~fixing, or a gadjet, or a gill-guy, or a timmey-noggy, or a wim-wom’. Though perhaps we can thank the airmen for choosing to bring gadget into common use instead of chicken~fixing! (And just how do you pronounce ~ anyway?)

Down under up over

26 January 2009 in 1910s, Art, Australia, Maps by Brett Holman | 5 comments

View Larger Map

It’s Australia Day today, so here’s a map of the land down under, appropriately enough upside down. But the map itself is on a hillside in a land up over — near Compton Chamberlayne in Wiltshire to be precise. It was carved from the chalk downs in 1916 or 1917 by Australian troops who were billeted nearby. A reminder of home, or a great big (60 metres across) ‘we were here’? More the latter, I’d say, since it’s not the only chalk figure carved in the area during the war, and the other ones (at nearby Fovant) are all regimental or other military badges. One of them is the Australian Army Badge, the ‘Rising Sun’ (zoom out to see the rest):
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Trust but verify

20 January 2009 in 1900s, 1910s, Phantom airships and other panics, Tools by Brett Holman | 4 comments

A question about the phantom airship scares which has bothered me for a while is, how accurate are the press reports of people seeing something strange in the sky? That is, did people actually see something strange in the sky, or were the press reports made up or otherwise distorted? There is some evidence from other countries that this happened. One case in New Zealand in July 1909 involved a teacher and 23 schoolchildren, who gave their accounts to a journalist and even drew pictures of what they saw. In the late 1960s, three of the now-elderly witnesses were re-interviewed. But although they could remember the fuss at the time, they could not remember having seen anything out of the ordinary. Then there are the American mystery airships of 1896 and 1897, which were sometimes just completely fabricated. For example, the supposed crash of an airship at Aurora, Texas, in April 1897, which was almost certainly a hoax by a town-boosting journalist.

But there are also reasons to think that in the British case, at least, most press reports were accurate enough. Unlike the United States or New Zealand at this time, Britain had many competing national (or at least London) newspapers. I don’t think it was usually in a newspaper’s interests to just make up a story, because a rival could easily enough check it out (through its own reporters or a local stringer — both were done) and cry foul. It might then be argued that all the newspapers were in on the lark, that they were all selling too many newspapers to spoil the fun. But newspapers were divided politically too. Liberal-supporting newspapers were generally much more sceptical than Conservative-supporting ones, and were quick to accuse the latter of credulous scaremongering — but not lying. And the sceptics often reported the same stories bought into the phantom airships, albeit only briefly. This doesn’t seem to fit with widespread fabrication (though of course, it could have happened sometimes).

There are other arguments I could make, but won’t because I want to finish this post sometime. But they basically are enough that I feel I can trust that the phantom airship scares did actually have a reality outside of the press. Now comes the verify bit. Recently, the National Archives released the 1911 census data two years early. Unfortunately, you have to pay to see the full returns (I guess there aren’t too many taxpayers left from 1911 to complain about having to pay again for something they had already paid for a century ago!) That’s a pity, but you can still get some useful information for free: name, age, sex, location. As it happens, 1911 is right between the two phantom airships scares in 1909 and 1913. So there must be a good chance that any witnesses were living in the same place in 1911 as they were when they saw the phantom airship. Hopefully, then, I can take names from the press accounts, feed them into the census search engine and find somebody in the right location. This would at least verify that somebody of that name did exist in that place, and presumably did see something strange in the sky (or else they’d complain when their names were used in vain).
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Phallic symbol envy

15 January 2009 in 1910s, Aircraft, Art, Australia, Periodicals, Pictures by Brett Holman | 16 comments

Review of Reviews for Australasia, May 1913, 248

Source: Review of Reviews for Australasia, May 1913, 248 (link; presumably originally from a British publication).

Hang ‘em high

12 January 2009 in 1910s, 1940s, Books, Periodicals, Quotes by Brett Holman | 10 comments

This is something I’ve been wondering about for ages. In The Impact of Air Power on the British People and their Government, Alfred Gollin notes, but does not explain, a recurring theme: the idea that after a damaging air raid, angry mobs would string up government ministers (or other servants of the public) from lamp-posts for failing to protect them. And I mean literally string them up. It’s not something I’ve come across much in my own sources, but it does seem that Gollin was onto something. Clearly it fits into the idea that bombing would cause civilians to panic, but the lamp-post references seem oddly specific. Presumably there was some inspiration for all this talk.

The first is from Flight, 1 February 1913 (link; the emphasis in each case is mine):

And if war should come suddenly, we most certainly shall not have command of the air — but the lamp-posts of Whitehall may have unfamiliar ornaments. And well it might be under the circumstances.

The second is Alfred Stead in Review of Reviews, also published in February 1913 (very knock-out blow, I must say):

In the past the mistakes of Ministers have been retrieved and this country has muddled through; but with regard to a possible attack from the air there will be no possibility of muddling through, and the disorganised and panic-stricken survivors of the population of London will have the sole, although sorry, satisfaction, before passing under German domination, of hanging the guilty Ministers.

The next one refers to 1917, but was published in 1929. It’s Major-General E. B. Ashmore’s reflection (or lack thereof) upon learning that he was to take charge of the London Air Defence Area:

The fact that I was exchanging the comparative safety of the Front for the probability of being hanged in the streets of London did not worry me.

Finally, jumping forward a bit, these remarks were made by Lord Beaverbrook in 1964. He was talking about 1940, when he became Minister of Aircraft Production:

I was TERRIFIED. If I failed I knew it meant a lamp-post for me. I took a sleeping-draught every night.

What I can’t understand is where this idea that Londoners were prone to summarily executing ministers came from. I can’t claim an encyclopedic knowledge of British history, but I don’t think there was any precedent for that: it just wasn’t done. Maybe the idea was a foreign import? After all, the Parisian mob was the trendsetter for riotous urban behaviour after 1789 — but they went after the nobility, not so much the politicians, didn’t they? Anyway, the guillotine was the symbol of Jacobin terror, not the lamp-post. Perhaps American lynchings were the inspiration? That might fit the mode of execution better, but not the subject, unless I’m missing the extrajudicial dismissal (with extreme prejudice) of a few cabinet secretaries.

So what’s going on here?

Source: Alfred Gollin, The Impact of Air Power on the British People and their Government, 1909-14 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 227-9, 242-3.

The enemy within

8 January 2009 in 1910s, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Quotes, Rumours by Brett Holman | 8 comments

Last month I touched on the Hidden Hand, an alleged German conspiracy during the First World War, supposedly undermining the British war effort from within. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately!) my sources don’t include some of the more extreme publications pushing this conspiracy theory, but I have looked at the Daily Mail, which has published the occasional intemperate article over the years. Here are some examples of Germanophobic scaremongering from the summer of 1917.

On 13 June 1917, London was hit by the worst air raid of the war. 162 people were killed and 432 wounded when a handful of Gotha bombers attacked the city in broad daylight. There was no warning and little sign of any air defences, which was a bit of a shock given that London’s first air raid took place more than two years earlier. Naturally people were angry, and looked for somebody to blame. On 21 June, the City of London’s Common Council met (following a deputation to the Home Secretary) to discuss what should be done in response, or rather what they should request the government to do in response. One idea was to give warnings to the public when enemy aircraft approached London, so that they could take cover. Another was to intensively bomb German cities in reprisal. But the proposal to which the Daily Mail devoted the most space was that enemy aliens should be interned.

Cuthbert Wilkinson, one of the councillors, seemed to have the most to say. He brandished a letter before his peers, the contents of which would ’simply astonish you all’ if he were to read them out; the government had been informed but was unable to act because of ‘the difficulty of absolute substantiation’. But

There are dozens and dozens of cases of enemy aliens working, and no doubt plotting, among us. If we could only get one out of every dozen it would be something, but apparently we can’t! And they laugh at us!

For example, he mentioned a large London hotel, which

was managed and run by men who once were Germans and now are British. It is frequented by a large number of soldiers returning from the front. Conversation is open and unrestricted here — and you may be sure that the ears of the enemy alien are not closed!¹

Just what the connection between enemy aliens and air raids was is not actually made clear, though a leading article in the same edition said something about ‘the unrequited onslaught of the Huns upon the poor bodies of the little London children’. The Daily Mail thought the call for internment was ‘quite in accord with the ancient spirit of the City’, so often ‘quicker to express the common sense of the people that their elected representatives in the House of Commons’.²
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Daily Mail, 22 June 1917, p. 3.
Ibid., p. 2. This was a reference to an incident in 1598 when Elizabeth I ejected German merchants from the London, at the Council’s instigation.

Holiday reading

19 December 2008 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, Blogging, Film by Brett Holman | 4 comments

The 19th Military History Carnival has been posted at Military History and Warfare. For my pick from this edition I can’t go past the first entry, on the interwar RAF at Thoughts on Military History. It’s part of the first chapter of his thesis, and it’s a very good overview of the financial and operational problems faced by the RAF. I particularly like Ross’s point that the perception that the RAF was all about strategic bombing was never wholly true — it always devoted brainpower and scarce resources to problems such as army co-operation. And the perception has distorted the historiography since then. If I had to quibble, then it would be with this part:

The RAF also had to deal with the gradually changing geo-strategic situation in Europe. For example, in the mid-twenties, in a period of deteriorating relation with France, the RAF had to deal with the potential threat of what has been described as the French air menace. This, coupled with the emergence of the threat of Germany in the 1930’s led to the materialisation of a distinct home fighter force based around the concept of strategic air defence. This force starting out in 1923 as the Home Defence Air Force with a projected strength of 52 squadrons would eventually emerge as RAF Fighter Command.

There’s nothing actually incorrect here, but from my own parochial perspective I’d want to stress that while it is true that HDAF did eventually lead to Fighter Command, in theory it was supposed to be composed of 2 bomber squadrons for every fighter squadron. It was to be a striking force, not primarily an air defence force: it would defend Britain by bombing the enemy. Of course, in practice it had more fighter squadrons than bombers, because they were cheaper to build, and once the supposed French threat disappeared there was no urgency to complete the whole HDAF programme until Hitler came along. But as I say, nothing in what Ross wrote actually contradicts any of that, it’s just me being nit-picky :)

Bonus! Because I forgot to nominate anything for the Carnival this time around, here’s one I would have nominated from The Bioscope. It’s about the 1916 film The Battle of the Somme, which was recently issued on DVD by the Imperial War Museum. A hugely important film and a very illuminating post.

Two barrages

9 December 2008 in 1910s, Books, Maps, Pictures, Quotes, Words by Brett Holman | 6 comments

One of the things I love about the official history of the RFC and RAF in the First World War is all the maps — multi-panel fold-out jobs showing where bombs fell in London during the Gotha raids, or the Allied front in Macedonia. That’s not to mention the accompanying slip-cases stuffed full of more maps of the paths taken by Zeppelin raiders and the like. I could pore over these for hours …

Here are a couple of the maps (or parts thereof) showing two different kinds of barrages associated with the air defence of Britain.

Aeroplane barrage line. December, 1916.

The first one is entitled ‘Aeroplane barrage line. December, 1916.’ It’s too big to show effectively, so I’ve just reproduced a portion showing the coast of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. The red squares show home defence squadron HQs: 33 Squadron at Gainsborough and 76 Squadron at Ripon. The red triangles are flight stations, the red stars flight stations with searchlights, the blue circles are searchlight stations under squadron control (’aeroplane lights’) and the black circles are warning control centres (Hull).

As I’ve discussed before, artillery barrages weren’t the only kinds of barrages. Originally they seem to have just been barriers or walls of some kind (barrage originally referred to a dam). Here the barrage is composed of aeroplanes and searchlights, a wall erected to hopefully bar Zeppelins coming in over the North Sea from reaching the industrial cities behind the line. And it does look like a barrier: on the full map it stretches from Suttons Farm (later renamed Hornchurch) near London all the way up to Innerwick, east of Edinburgh (with extensions in Norfolk and Kent). But it’s not a physical barrage, for the most part — it’s aerodromes and searchlights. Previously, home defence squadrons had been placed close to target areas, because of doubts about night navigation and interception. Experience had shown that these problems weren’t as great as previously thought:

Now that it was clear the aeroplane patrols could be extended, it was suggested that the Flights situated near Birmingham, Sheffield and Leeds should be moved farther east as a step towards the ultimate establishment of a barrage-line of aeroplanes and searchlights parallel with the east coast of England.¹

This system worked very well against Zeppelins (as one indication, note the steep drop in casualties due to airship raids from 1917 on). But not so well against Gothas.
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H. A. Jones, The War in the Air: Being the Story of the Part Played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force, volume 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), 166. The map faces 170.

Flight’s message to the politicians

11 November 2008 in 1910s, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Quotes, Rumours by Brett Holman | 6 comments

In contrast to the King’s message to the RAF, Flight’s reaction to the end of the war, in the same issue of 14 November 1918, seems rather grumpy. It’s true that the editorial section is rounded off, on p. 1274 (source), by a short section which expresses a certain amount of glee at the news of the Armistice:

But the effect of the sudden end is too stunning for us to think coherently of anything but the one great glorious fact — the WAR HAS ENDED.

But it’s mostly preceded by a series of complaints and warnings to Lloyd George’s coalition government, telling them what the country expects of them. (I’m not sure that an aviation trade magazine was the first place senior politicians turned to in order to take the pulse of the nation, but I guess if you’ve got a soapbox, you may as well use it!)

The main concern, on p. 1272 (source), was the nature of the forthcoming peace settlement.

We are in a state now of suspended hostilities — not of final peace. True, we have imposed such terms on the enemy that render it utterly impossible for him to resume the War, but we must in nowise lose sight of the fact that the real position is this: The soldiers have done their part in reducing the enemy to a state of impotency in which he is prepared to be told what we will have him to do and to do it, but now comes the turn of the politicians and the diplomatists, who have it in their power to undo all that our arms have secured for us.

I’ve added the emphasis there, as it sets the tone for the rest of the piece: clearly there’s little trust given to Britain’s leaders. But what exactly does Flight want them to do? The leader continues:

Let it be said at once that we do not for a moment suppose that there is any likelihood of the extreme happening, but we are by no means so certain that the civilian representatives who will draw up the final terms are as determined to punish Germany to the utmost for her crimes as the country would have them.

OK, so maybe Flight did know the nation’s mind, after all! More specifically, the question was: who is going to pay for the war? (A total cost, for all belligerents, is given as £60 billion.)
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The King’s message to the Royal Air Force

11 November 2008 in 1910s, Periodicals, Pictures, Quotes by Brett Holman | 5 comments

It’s 90 years to the day since the guns fell silent, and the bombs stopped falling. I don’t feel that I have anything particularly insightful to say, so here’s how Flight marked the occasion, by publishing the King’s message to the RAF on its front page, 14 November 1918, p. 1270 (source):

Flight, 14 November 1918, p. 1270

THE KING’S MESSAGE
TO THE ROYAL AIR FORCE

To the Right Hon. LORD WEIR, Secretary of State and President of the Air Council.

In this supreme hour of victory I send greetings and heartfelt congratulations to all ranks of the Royal Air Force. Our aircraft have been ever in the forefront of the battle; pilots and observers have consistently maintained the offensive throughout the ever-changing fortunes of the day, and in the war zones our gallant dead have lain always beyond the enemies’ lines or far out to sea.

Our far-flung squadrons have flown over home waters and foreign seas, the Western and Italian battle lines, Rhineland, the Mountains of Macedonia, Gallipoli, Palestine, the plains of Mesopotamia, the
forests and swamps of East Africa, the North-West frontier of India, and the deserts of Arabia, Sinai and Darfur.

The birth of the Royal Air Force, with its wonderful expansion and development, will ever remain one of the most remarkable achievements of the Great War.

Everywhere, by God’s help, officers, men and women of the Royal Air Force have splendidly maintained our just cause, and the value of their assistance to the Navy, the Army, and to Home Defence has been incalculable. For all their magnificent work, self-sacrifice, and devotion to duty, I ask you on behalf of the Empire to thank them.

GEORGE R.I.
November 11, 1918.

In a follow-up post, I’ll look at Flight’s message to the politicians.

Screening the knock-out blow

26 August 2008 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Film by Brett Holman | 4 comments

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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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.

Come friendly bombs and fall on Stonehenge

14 August 2008 in 1910s, 1920s, Books, Maps, Pictures, Quotes by Brett Holman | 2 comments

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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Facing Armageddon

5 July 2008 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Aircraft, Art, Books, Civil defence, Conferences and talks, Film, Maps, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Phantom airships and other panics, Pictures, Plots, Quotes, Thesis, Videos by Brett Holman | 26 comments

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.

Wright Flyer (1903)

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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Oscar foxtrot foxtrot sierra

1 July 2008 in 1910s, 1930s, 1940s, Civil defence, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Television, Travel 2007 by Brett Holman | 5 comments

This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.

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.

Mowing devils, old hags, and phantom airships

18 June 2008 in 1900s, 1910s, Art, Before 1900, Phantom airships and other panics, Pictures, Rumours by Brett Holman | 7 comments

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Venus

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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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.

Keep that shadow from them

14 June 2008 in 1900s, 1910s, 1930s, Archives, Art, Ephemera, Pictures by Brett Holman | 3 comments

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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Showdown

14 June 2008 in 1910s, Aircraft, Blogging, Interviews, Television by Brett Holman | No comments

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

8 June 2008 in 1910s, Aircraft, Art, Books, Pictures by Brett Holman | 5 comments

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.

The widening margin

27 May 2008 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Counterfactuals, Plots by Brett Holman | 13 comments

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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The Germans are coming!

13 May 2008 in 1910s, 1940s, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Pictures by Brett Holman | 6 comments

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.

Supposed Nazi marker

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.

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

A giant of the air

7 May 2008 in 1910s, Aircraft, Art, Books, Pictures by Brett Holman | 11 comments

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.

Allied casualties, Dardanelles campaign, 1915-6

25 April 2008 in 1910s, Australia by Brett Holman | 23 comments

	Died	Wounded	Total casualties
Britain	21255	52230	73485
France (est.)	10000	17000	27000
Australia	8709	19441	28150
New Zealand	2721	4752	7473
India	1358	3421	4779
Newfoundland	49	93	142

Source: Department of Veterans’ Affairs, Australia.

Mark my words

9 April 2008 in 1910s, Books, Contemporary, Other, Pictures by Brett Holman | 1 comment

War in Space

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.

Happy birthday, RAF

1 April 2008 in 1910s, Books by Brett Holman | No comments

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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The Heligoland Mandate

11 March 2008 in 1910s, 1930s, 1940s, Australia, Before 1900, Books, Counterfactuals, Maps, Pictures, Quotes by Brett Holman | 7 comments

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

Anti-Semitism in British airpower literature

1 March 2008 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, Books, Quotes by Brett Holman | 7 comments

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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Andrew Boyle, Trenchard (London: Collins, 1962), 469.

The spirit of grief

25 February 2008 in 1900s, 1910s, Archives, Art, Biographies, Pictures, Quotes by Brett Holman | No comments

Spirit of Ecstasy

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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Montagu of Beaulieu, Aerial Machines and War (London: Hugh Rees, 1910), 2.

The Afghan air menace

12 February 2008 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, Air control, Books, Periodicals, Quotes, Thesis by Brett Holman | 7 comments

[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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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.

The colour out of aerospace

15 January 2008 in 1910s, Aircraft, Other, Pictures by Brett Holman | 12 comments

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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Counting corpses

1 January 2008 in 1910s, Plots by Brett Holman | 2 comments

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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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.
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.

Sealion 1918

14 December 2007 in 1910s, Books, Counterfactuals, Quotes by Brett Holman | 16 comments

[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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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 …
Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 95.

Over Flanders fields

11 December 2007 in 1910s, Conferences and talks, Pictures by Brett Holman | 4 comments

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 Zeppelins of Halifax

6 December 2007 in 1910s, Books, Phantom airships and other panics, Quotes, Rumours by Brett Holman | 8 comments

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.

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

Somewhere in France

11 November 2007 in 1910s, Australia, Family history, Pictures by Brett Holman | 3 comments

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.

The Sheerness Incident

14 October 2007 in 1910s, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Quotes by Brett Holman | 3 comments

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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Short Brothers was also based at Eastchurch at the time, though I’ve not seen this mentioned in reference to the Sheerness Incident.
Flight, 19 October 1912, p. 932.

Destroying London

9 October 2007 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, After 1950, Before 1900, Books, Contemporary, Film, Maps, Pictures, Quotes by Brett Holman | No comments

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 trying to think of the first time this happened. It’s easy enough to find early references to the eventual ruin of London, such as H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895), Richard Jefferies’ After London (1885) (in which a neo-medieval adventurer seeks his fortunes amid the city’s swampy remains), or Macaulay’s New Zealander (1840).² But those only show London long after its fall, and so, properly speaking, are post-apocalyptic. The actual destruction happens off stage; it is inevitable, something to accept rather than prevent. Other candidates might include science fiction stories like Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt (1913), wherein the Earth passes through a region of toxic ether, and Professor Challenger and companions take an eerie trip through dead London afterwards.³ Or H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), with its Martian tripods laying waste to the metropolis with their heat rays. Where else might we look?
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The Day the Earth Caught Fire springs to mind (rather oddly, since I haven’t seen it); Day of the Triffids and 28 Days Later too. There must be others though.
Not actually a novel, a story, a paragraph or even a sentence: merely a few clauses in a book review, referring to some future time ‘when some traveller from New Zealand shall, in the midst of a vast solitude, take his stand on a broken arch of London Bridge to sketch the ruins of St. Paul’s.’ But the image caught the imagination of many who read and spread it, to the point where it practically became a cliché. See David Skilton, “Tourists at the ruins of London: the metropolis and the struggle for empire”, Cercles 17, 93-119.
Even if the ending is a huge cop-out.

After the battle

1 October 2007 in 1910s, 1940s, Pictures, Quotes, Travel 2007 by Brett Holman | No comments

This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.

One of the benefits of living in London for two months is the way it helped me to understand its geography. So when I read, for example, that 500 men, women and children walked from Greenwich to Trafalgar Square on 22 July 1917 to demand ‘improved air defences for London and the adoption of a systematic offensive air offensive against German towns’,¹ I know now that it was actually a fairly long walk (even if they took the omnibus home!) and so shows that their protest march was not a casual affair. And my experience also comes in handy when reading about what was predicted to happen to London when it was bombed, and what actually happened when it was bombed.

In some places, the effects are still easy to see. But sometimes my imagination needed a little help. This is the enclosed garden in the middle of Mecklenburgh Square, where I was staying, in Bloomsbury:

Mecklenburgh Square garden

And this is how the poet John Lehmann described Mecklenburgh Square after being blitzed (possibly in September 1940):

Mecklenburgh Square was a pretty sight when I left it. Broken glass everywhere, half the garden scorched with incendiary bombs, and two houses of Byron Court on the east side nothing but a pile of rubble. Clouds of steam were pouring out of one side, firemen still clambering over it and ambulances and blood transfusion units standing by with ARP workers and police. The road was filled with a mass of rubble muddied by the firemen’s hoses, but the light grey powder that had covered the bushes at dawn had been washed off by the drizzle. The time bomb in the Square garden sat in its earth crater coyly waiting. The tabby Persian cat from No. 40 picked her way daintily and dishevelledly among the splinters of glass on her favourite porch.²

The garden where the UXB fell looks so peaceful and quiet today, but once it was right in the front line.

Daily Mail, 23 July 1917, p. 3.
Quoted in Peter Hennessey, Never Again: Britain 1945-1951 (London: Penguin, 2006), 35-6.

G’tag von Zeppelinburg!

30 September 2007 in 1910s, Australia, Counterfactuals, Ephemera, Maps, Periodicals, Pictures by Brett Holman | 8 comments

WHAT AUSTRALIA WOULD BE LIKE UNDER HUN RULE. — An original recruiting poster which was used with great success in South Australia. Tasmania, it will be noted, becomes Kaisermania, and the idols of the Huns have provided other place-names.

This is from the Daily Mail, 3 July 1917, p. 8, and would appear to be a South Australian recruiting poster, showing how the map of Australia might be redrawn if Germany won. Australia itself becomes “New-Germany”; Perth becomes Tirpitzburg; Adelaide, Hindenburg; Brisbane, Bernhardiburg; Sydney, Nietscheburg [sic]; Tasmania (not Hobart), Kaisermania; and, most appropriately from my point of view, Melbourne would be renamed Zeppelinburg!

I don’t think much has been written on German plans for Australia in the event of victory in the First World War, probably because the Germans themselves gave very little thought to the place. However, it seems unlikely that Germany would have wanted to take over Australia lock, stock and barrel; better to turn us into some sort of client state instead. They’d probably have wanted to take a few of Britain’s colonial possessions in the area, and perhaps would have insisted upon reparations or favourable trade terms. And our battlecruiser HMAS Australia — which caused von Spee such headaches in 1914 — would no doubt have had to go. No independent foreign policy, perhaps (not that we had much of one as it was!) But we probably wouldn’t have had to go so far as to need to translate such phrases as “don’t come the raw prawn with me, mate” into German — fortunately!

This idea that we had to fight Germany in France in order to prevent the Kaiser’s victory parade down Swanston St had obvious potential as a motivational device, and was used in stories and films as well. Did people really believe it? The Daily Mail said that the poster had ‘great success’, so perhaps they did.

Dazzled

18 August 2007 in 1910s, Blogging by Brett Holman | No comments

The fifth Military History Carnival is up. A lot of good stuff; the post I enjoyed most was at History is Elementary, on the evolution of camouflage in the First World War — it’s not only informative but enables us to vicariously share in the pleasure of teaching. And all that camouflage reminds me of Fed Square back home …

Ships painted in dazzle camouflage schemes, in particular, look incredible, but I wonder if people at the time found them jarring and disconcerting? These did not look like the familiar symbols of British naval might that people had grown up with. Just another alienating marker of hyperindustrialised warfare to add to the pile, I guess, and I’m sure the topic has been done to death, historiographically speaking.

I wish to register a complaint

10 August 2007 in 1910s, Art, Before 1900, Pictures, Quotes, Travel 2007 by Brett Holman | 1 comment

This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.

Cleopatra's Needle

Yesterday I had occasion to pass Cleopatra’s Needle on the Victoria Embankment. It’s not really Cleopatra’s at all but Thutmose III’s, as it was he who caused it to be erected at Heliopolis, in around 1450 BC. It was eventually transported from Egypt to London and re-erected there in 1878, after trials and tribulations in the Bay of Biscay.
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War games

5 August 2007 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, After 1950, Australia, Cold War, Ephemera, Games and simulations, Maps, Periodicals, Pictures, Quotes, Travel 2007 by Brett Holman | 16 comments

This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

One interesting minor theme of my recent museum visits here in London has been, I suppose, the popular origins of wargames (as opposed to the intellectual origins): I’ve been coming across a number of games, produced in the first half of the twentieth century and aimed presumably at children, which represent war in some way. War games, but not yet wargames. So for example, one exhibit in the Science Museum’s aviation gallery was a First World War-era board game called Aviation: The Aerial Tactics Game of Attack and Defence. The board represents the sky, and the pieces are aircraft and squadrons. Here’s the box:

Aviation

According to the caption, it was published around 1920, and the cover shows ’stylised First World War tanks and Handley Page H.P. 0/400 [sic] bombers’. It doesn’t look particularly like an O/400 to me; the corresponding game-piece is just called a Battle Plane (and the “tanks” are actually anti-aircraft guns on tank chassis, very advanced!)
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The lodgings of the damned

18 July 2007 in 1910s, 1920s, Books, Phantom airships and other panics, Pictures, Quotes, Travel 2007 by Brett Holman | No comments

This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.

Actually, that should be “The lodgings of the compiler of the damned”, but it’s more dramatic this way.

39 Marchmont St, Bloomsbury, WC1

39 Marchmont St, Bloomsbury, WC1, just a few blocks from my own lodgings. The word “unprepossessing” could have been coined in honour of this building,¹ and there are certainly many far more pleasing buildings too look at around here, so why does it warrant a post of its own? The not-actually-blue plaque attached to it explains further:
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Though it does look a bit more inviting when the shop is open.

Panic!

1 June 2007 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Blogging, Conferences and talks, Phantom airships and other panics, Thesis by Brett Holman | 12 comments

The title relates to both the content of a paper I gave yesterday at the School’s Work In Progress Day, and to my own state of mind beforehand! I think it went well, though — at least there was no rotten fruit thrown at the end! — which is good because it was the first real outing for my current chapter on defence panics. The deadly-dull paper title was “Moral panics, defence panics and the British air panic of 1934-5″, and here’s the abstract:

The sociological concept of moral panic was developed to describe and explain how societies react to internal threats to their values and interests, such as crime or deviant behaviour, with particular emphasis on the roles played by the media and expert opinion. In this paper I will argue that the reactions of a society to external, military threats — “defence panics” — can develop in essentially the same way as moral panics, and can be analysed using a similar framework. My main example will be drawn from the British air panic of 1934-5 over the threat of illegal German aerial rearmament.

For the record, these are the main defence panic candidates I’m interested in, some of which I’ve discussed here before:

phantom airship scare, 1913
Gotha raids on London, 1917
“French” air menace, 1922
Hamburg gas disaster, 1928
German germ warfare experiments, 1934
German air menace, 1934-5
Guernica, 1937; Barcelona, 1938; Canton, 1938; Munich crisis, 1938
the Blitz, 1940

I had a slide up with Airminded’s URL but stupidly forgot to actually mention it. So if anyone who heard my talk has managed to find their way here despite this, hello and well done! Amazingly, there was actually one student there who already reads Airminded — I was very chuffed to learn that reading it is less boring than working :) — but I quite rudely forgot to ask their name. If they or anyone else from the session would like to drop me a line, they can drop me a line here in the comments, or via the contact form. I’d like to hear from you!

A tiny revelation

26 May 2007 in 1910s, 1930s, 1940s, Quotes, Words by Brett Holman | 13 comments

This post is about a revelation I had a while back, which those of you with a firmer grasp of the English language than I will think is nothing at all new (and you’re right!) The thing is that I’d always been puzzled by the word barrage. This gets used a lot by journalists: ‘the minister faced a barrage of criticism for her decision’, ‘the home team’s late barrage of goals sealed their victory’, and so on. Obviously, this is related to the artillery barrages so characteristic of trench warfare on the Western Front, intense bombardments which were usually the prelude to an attack across no-man’s land. There were several kinds of artillery barrage, for example hurricane barrages (shorter but even more intense) [edit: bzzzt, wrong, see below] and creeping barrages (moving just ahead of the advancing troops). There was also the anti-aircraft barrage, where the targets are up in the sky instead of on the ground. So it’s easy to see how the civilian uses of barrage came from the military ones (or perhaps vice versa); the sense of the word in both would seem to be something like the raining of blow after furious blow upon an opponent.

OK, but what about barrage balloons? They didn’t rain furious blows upon anything, they just sat there swaying in the breeze, on the off chance that enemy aircraft might fly down low and hit their mooring cables. And what was the deal with balloon barrages,¹ which confusingly were composed of barrage balloons? And then there were anti-submarine barrages, essentially nets stretched across maritime choke-points such as the Strait of Dover or the mouth of the Adriatic. None of these things have the very active quality of the previously-mentioned barrages — they’re all in fact very passive indeed. It’s hard to see what the one sort of barrage has to do with the other, but since they are all called barrages and arose during the same period of the two world wars, presumably there’s some logic to it all. But what?
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In the First World War these were called balloon aprons, a slightly different idea where the balloons were also connected to each other by horizontal cables, from which yet more cables were suspended. I’m not sure why balloon aprons were abandoned by the Second World War; perhaps because they were more fiddly to deploy?

Your name here

14 May 2007 in 1910s, 1930s, 1940s, Blogging, Pictures, Quotes by Brett Holman | No comments

Found via Military History Carnival #2, an interesting post by Alan Baumler at Frog in a Well: China on airmindedness in China in the 1930s. If I had to compare it to another country, it would probably be Russia, where aviation was also part of a modernization effort. But something Alan mentions reminds me of a couple of British parallels:

The Nationalists raised $ 300,000 from the public to purchase planes, including one paid for by the Tianchu glutamate factory that had the name of the company on the wings. I assume this was just for the publicity shot, and that it did not fly into battle with an advertisement on its wings, but it is still a rather remarkable example of commerce and nation-building going together.

This of course sounds very similar to the Second World War Spitfire Fund, where companies, towns and individuals could contribute money towards the cost of a Spitfire or other aircraft for the RAF. (The idea seems to have started with the Nizam of Hyderabad, who paid for a whole squadron. But maybe the Chinese were first?) £5000 paid for one Spitfire, though in reality this was less than half the total cost of production; at least 1500 Spitfires were subsidised in this way. The names of the donors were written on the side of the presentation aircraft so you could say they did go into combat with advertisements, though hardly big enough for anyone to notice!

But I know of one other aeroplane which did indeed go to war with very noticeable advertising under the wings. Michael Paris notes that in 1914 the RFC was short of aircraft, and so it requisitioned a number of privately-owned aeroplanes. One of these was the Daily Mail Blériot, which ‘flew several reconnaissance missions in France with “The Daily Mail” painted under the wings’.¹ I think this is the one (this 1913 photograph is taken from The Early Birds of Aviation):

How very clever of the airminded Lord Northcliffe! The number of new Daily Mail subscriptions taken out by German soldiers is not recorded, however.

Update: see, I told you it reminded me of Russia!

Michael Paris, Winged Warfare: The Literature and Theory of Aerial Warfare in Britain, 1859-1917 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), 230.

The Douhet dilemma

7 April 2007 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, Books, Periodicals, Quotes by Brett Holman | 6 comments

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

I haven’t written much about General Giulio Douhet, the Italian prophet of airpower whose name is — almost — synonymous with strategic bombing. His 1921 (revised edition, 1927) book Il dominio dell’aria (usually translated as The Command of the Air) is one of the most definitive expressions of airpower extremism — the idea that aircraft alone could win wars. In it, he articulated a theory of airpower which is essentially what I call, in the British context, the concept of the knock-out blow: fleets of unstoppable bombers roaming the skies, bombing cities and factories and infrastructure, thereby so undermining the morale of the civilian population that resistance collapses and the nation surrenders. He was widely influential among the staffs of the air forces of Europe, as James Corum has discussed.¹ Whenever the origins of strategic bombing are discussed, Douhet’s name is almost certain to pop up, often linked with that of Hugh Trenchard — sometimes with the implication that Douhet was the source of belief in the bomber. For example:

The ideas [of strategic airpower], emanating from Douhet and Mitchell and strongly supported by Wever in Germany and Trenchard in Britain, strongly called for the exercise of concentrated bombing over the enemy’s homeland.²

So why haven’t I mentioned him more often? Because I don’t believe he had much influence, if any, on the development of airpower theory in Britain. This is not a new idea — Robin Higham argued as much in the 1960s,³ as did Malcolm Smith in the 1980s,⁴ and it seems to be pretty much accepted by specialists today. Both Higham and Smith point out that there was little discussion of Douhet in Britain before the mid-1930s, and The Command of the Air was not published in English until 1942.⁵ There are some important differences in the British and Italian theories: in particular, the latter held that absolute air supremacy was not only possible but necessary. More importantly, there are many plausible, native sources of British airpower theory dating from before 1921.
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James S. Corum, The Luftwaffe: Creating the Operational Air War, 1918-1940 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1997), 89-104.
John Ray, The Night Blitz, 1940-1941 (London: Arms & Armour Press, 1998), 10.
See ‘The place of Douhet’ in Robin Higham, The Military Intellectuals in Britain, 1918-1939 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1981 [1966]), 257-9.
Malcolm Smith, “‘A matter of faith’: British strategic air doctrine before 1939′, Journal of Contemporary History, 15 (1980), 423-42.
Smith says that the RAF Staff College acquired a manuscript translation as early as 1927; but he refers back to Higham for this and I can’t find where Higham talks about it. He does mention a manuscript in the possession of the US Army’s Air Corps Tactical School in 1933.

The changing meaning of air shows

29 March 2007 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, Art, Australia, Contemporary, Ephemera, Periodicals, Pictures, Quotes by Brett Holman | 2 comments

RAF Pageant, Hendon, 1920

The Australian International Airshow 2007 took place last week, at Avalon near Melbourne. All I saw of it was a C-17, a F-111 escorted by two Hawks, four F/A-18s in a diamond formation, and a few helicopters (Tigers?) — presumably all RAAF/ADF aircraft — which buzzed the City and inner suburbs earlier in the week. I did go to the 2003 air show — info and pics here and here — and got to see a variety of interesting aircraft — a B-1B, a Meteor, a Canberra, a Global Hawk, even a flying Blériot replica. And fell in love with Connie, like everyone else who saw her.

One of the highlights was the First World War display, involving a Fokker Triplane, a Sopwith Camel, an SE.5a and a Nieuport 11 (and several chronologically-challenged Tiger Moths and maybe some others). Naturally they put on a mock combat, something these old warbirds do best — yeah, seeing and hearing F-15s scream low over the runway is a thrill, but 2 seconds later and the plane is gone, or else up high in the sky and you have to reach for your binoculars. Biplanes fly low and slow — so everyone can follow the action — but are also very maneuverable — so are fun to watch. Plus there’s that whole “knights of the air” thing going on. Anyway, the climax of the display was an attack on a balloon — I think it was supposed to be an observation balloon, but my memory is fuzzy and I’m not sure if it was in the air or still on the ground. Of course the attack is successful and the hydrogen goes whoosh! and there’s a nice big explosion.
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The Airship Destroyer

22 March 2007 in 1900s, 1910s, Film, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Quotes, Videos by Brett Holman | 8 comments

Here’s a treat for (some of) you: the very first aerial warfare movie ever made, in its entirety! Most commonly known as The Airship Destroyer (but sometimes called Battle in the Clouds or The Aerial Torpedo), it’s less than 10 minutes long and was produced in 1909 by Charles Urban, an American pioneer of cinematic special effects working in Britain. It’s pretty prophetic stuff: airships bombing cities and railways, fighters intercepting them, radio-guided SAMs, even an armoured car thrown in for good measure. I would guess it was inspired in part by the phantom airship scare which took place earlier that year. Here’s a contemporary description taken from an American trade journal, Motion Picture World (date unknown, taken from here, slightly emended):

BATTLE IN THE CLOUDS. – Section 1. – preparation. The Aero camp – Loading supplies – Start of the airships – The inventor of the airship destroyer – His love story – The parting – The alarm – The aero fleet in full flight – The aerial torpedo and its inventor.

Section 2. Attack. In the clouds – Dropping like shells from the firing deck of an airship – the chase – High angle firing from a gun on an armored motor car – Total destruction of the car – Railway wrecked by the aerial fleet – Shelling the signal box – The heroic operator meets death at this post – The fight in the air – Airship versus aeroplane – Wreck of the aeroplane – The burning of a town by the aerial fleet – Thrilling rescue of his sweetheart by the inventor.

Section 3. Defense. The inventor with the assistance of his sweetheart sends his airship destroyer on its mission of vengeance. The torpedo, steered through the air by wireless telegraphy – One flash and the airship is doomed – It falls, a mass of scorching fire, into the waters of a lake.

Urban produced a couple of other films along similar lines (The Aerial Anarchists, The Pirates of 1920, both 1911) and had some imitators — possibly including D. W. Griffith, who made a film in 1916 called The Flying Torpedo.

The link can be found on this page at BFI’s screenonline, if the above direct link doesn’t work. Unfortunately it’s only viewable by people in .uk educational establishments. Which sadly doesn’t include me, but that’s ok, I’ve seen it before, in a 16mm copy at what I think is now part of ACMI. So no need to feel guilty on my account :)

A good account of early aviation films can be found in Michael Paris, From the Wright Brothers to Top Gun: Aviation, Nationalism and Popular Cinema (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 10-22.

Air-port ‘13

16 March 2007 in 1910s, Maps, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Pictures, Quotes, Words by Brett Holman | No comments

The earliest cite for the word ‘airport’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1919:

1919 Aerial Age Weekly 14 Apr. 235/1 There is being established at Atlantic City the first ‘air port’ ever established, the purposes of which are..to provide a municipal aviation field,..to supply an air port for trans-Atlantic liners, whether of the seaplane, land aeroplane or dirigible balloon type.

As is often the case with the OED’s cites, earlier ones can be found (though not many, it is true). The following is from March 1914, from a proposal by the Aerial League of the British Empire to decentralise flying by setting up airfields around Britain:

The time will come when, with the development of aviation, every town of any importance will need an air-port as it now needs a railway station.¹

Now, it seems pretty obvious that ‘airport’ was coined by analogy with the much older word ’seaport’, just like ‘air power’ and ’sea power’. I don’t doubt that this is mostly true, but there is another possibility too. The word ‘air-port’ (with hyphen) did in fact exist before the coming of flight: it referred to a hole for ventilation, especially on a ship or in an engine — what today might be called an air intake or outlet. I’ll come back to this in a moment.
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The Times, 16 March 1914, p. 5. Emphasis added.

Concrete memory

11 February 2007 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Art, Australia, Contemporary, Pictures, Quotes by Brett Holman | 26 comments

And marble, and granite, and wood …

I wrote recently that every town in Australia seems to have a war memorial. Here are some examples, photos I took over a three day period without going too far out of my way. This post is image-heavy, but everyone has broadband now don’t they?
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Sons of empire

26 January 2007 in 1910s, 1930s, 1940s, Australia, Family history by Brett Holman | 5 comments

This week, I was looking at the service records of some other family members who served in the world wars — those that have been digitised anyway — and as today is ‘Straya Day,¹ it seems appropriate to write a little about them.
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Tags: bonza; strewth; grouse; sorry, ocker, the Fokker’s chocker.

Historical maps online

28 December 2006 in 1900s, 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, After 1950, Before 1900, Links, Maps, Tools by Brett Holman | 1 comment

New Popular Edition Maps is an attempt to produce a copyright-free database of British postcodes. It does this by asking people to hunt around on a clickable, zoomable map of the UK for places for which they know the postcode (e.g. their home), and then enter that postcode at that spot. It’s a bit like a stripped-down Google Maps; and you can search the map by placename or postcode. But what’s interesting about this is that the maps used are out-of-copyright Ordnance Survey maps (1 mile to the inch) from the 1940s and early 1950s, which could be useful for historians or teachers, though these are obviously not the intended audience. Unfortunately Northern Ireland and most of Scotland is missing. (The National Library of Scotland has the OS maps of Scotland from the 1920s.)

Finding this inspired me to do a bit of a search for other online historical maps of Britain which similarly attempt to cover the whole country. (There’s a useful list of out-of-copyright maps here.) Old-maps.co.uk has been around a while and uses OS maps from the late 19th century. Vision of Britain (which site has lots of historical statistics which you can slice various ways, and which I must explore more thoroughly one day) is more sophisticated, and has a neat trick of switching between different maps depending upon the zoom level: for example going from a 1921 large-scale map to a 1904 OS one to a NPE map. It also has 19th-century maps and a 1930s land utilisation map. But possibly the most interesting is Old Ordnance Survey Maps, which is based upon OS maps from the 1910s, 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. The coverage is very much incomplete; but it uses the Google Maps API, which means that it has a familiar interface for users, and could be used for mashups. It already overlays the regular Google Maps satellite and street maps. There are also handy links to take you to the same location at old-maps.co.uk and Vision of Britain. I can think of some improvements (for example, printing the publication date on each map) but this approach has tremendous potential.

The Scareship Age

22 December 2006 in 1900s, 1910s, Before 1900, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Pictures, Rumours by Brett Holman | 26 comments

Aerial Warfare

On the night of 23 March 1909, a police constable named Kettle saw a most unusual thing: ‘a strange, cigar-shaped craft passing over the city’¹ of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire. His friends were sceptical, but his story was corroborated, to an extent, by Mr Banyard and Mrs Day, both of nearby March, who separately saw something similar two nights later. In fact, these incidents were only the prelude to a series of several dozen such sightings throughout April and especially May, mostly from East Anglia and South Wales. As the London Standard noted in May, there seemed to be common features to the various eyewitness accounts:

With few exceptions they all speak of a torpedo-shaped object, possessing two powerful searchlights, which comes out early at night.²

So, what was torpedo-shaped and capable of flight in 1909? An airship, of course. The press (metropolitan and provincial) certainly assumed that the most likely explanation for these ‘fly-by-nights’ was an airship or airships, generally terming them ‘phantom airships’, ‘mystery airships’, ’scareships’ or something similar.
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Standard (London), 17 May 1909, p. 9.
Ibid.

The air strategist as business guru

14 December 2006 in 1910s, Books, Links, Quotes by Brett Holman | 14 comments

Frederick Lanchester was a clever British engineer. He was one of the pioneers of the British automotive industry, but his main interest was in aviation, particularly aerodynamic theory. In my opinion, he has a good claim to be the first person to elucidate the knock-out blow concept, in his book Aircraft in Warfare: The Dawn of the Fourth Arm (London: Constable & Co., 1916) — which also happens to be a very early example of what was later termed operations or operational research. And as I’ve found out recently, he’s also a business guru in Japan!
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Interwar use of chemical weapons

13 October 2006 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Periodicals by Brett Holman | 13 comments

Between the wars, it was a commonplace that poison gas would be used in the next war, would be used in large quantities, and would probably be used against civilians. This was a natural enough assumption; after all, it was used liberally enough in the Great War, and it was widely assumed that science would have discovered even more lethal gases.¹ As for civilians, they were now in the front line, as the Zeppelins and Gothas had shown.

Of course, gas wasn’t used in the Second World War,² probably because of the fear of retaliation in kind, i.e., deterrence worked. This could not be assumed a priori, of course, particularly since it was in fact in use throughout the period 1919-39. The best known, and the most egregious, example was by the Italians in Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia), in 1935-6. There were other instances too, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a comprehensive list (though this isn’t bad).
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This is leaving aside the argument of those like the chemist J. B. S. Haldane, that the statistics showed that gas warfare led to relatively fewer fatalities than shells and bullets, and so was therefore more humane than conventional war, as well as the argument that all likely gases useful for warfare had already been discovered. The German discovery of nerve gases, had this been publicly known, would have put the lie to these claims.
There are some dubious claims to the contrary, such as that Germany used gas against Soviet troops in the Crimea in 1942.

Airships ahoy!

15 September 2006 in 1910s, 1930s, Aircraft, Australia, Contemporary, Film, Pictures by Brett Holman | 4 comments

Some recent airship sightings:

Holden airship

An airship is currently gracing Melbourne skies, thanks to Holden. I’ve seen it but not with a camera handy, so this picture by Dr Snafu will have to serve. It’s nice to see it floating around, but at only 54 metres in length, I’m forced to say: that’s not an airship. THIS is an airship! Still, I’d love to fly in it …

Great War Fiction has the trailer for the upcoming First World War aviation movie, Flyboys. Looks like great fun, with Nieuports and Fokkers slugging it out over the Western Front. And towards the end of the trailer, there’s even a Zeppelin! While the producers seem to have done at least some research, it would be wise not too expect too much in the way of historical accuracy. I see they’ve gone for the usual massive Hollywood explosion with the Zep — maybe they should have watched the Hindenburg disaster footage a few more times.

The Avia-Corner reports on an upcoming expedition to examine the wreckage, via submersible, of the USS Macon — last of the US Navy’s flying aircraft carriers. It crashed off the Californian coast in 1935. For understandable reasons none of the great airships of the early twentieth century have survived (aside from their unfortunate propensity for catastrophic failure, they take up rather a lot of room), so seabed wrecks are about all we have left, aside from a few fragments here and there.

Finally, Boing Boing notes that today is the 90th anniversary of the tank’s combat debut. Or should I say “travelling caterpillar fort” instead? No, I probably shouldn’t — like many somewhat insecure nations, Australia sometimes likes to take credit for inventions it oughtn’t to. Yes, Lance de Mole did come up with the basic idea, but so did a few others, even earlier. And he didn’t build it — others did. Which is the (rather tenuous) link with airships here: one of the men who did help make the tank a practical device was Commodore (later Rear-Admiral) Murray Sueter, who was the Royal Navy’s first Inspecting Captain of Airships in 1909. He also helped develop torpedo bombers and anti-aircraft defence. His claim to be a co-inventor of the tank rests on his work on armoured cars for the defence of airfields in Flanders, and in persuading Churchill that caterpillar tracks were the way to go, rather than rollers or a giant wheel! After the war, Sueter was a long-serving and outspoken Conservative MP; his Airmen or Noahs: Fair Play for our Airmen; The Great “Neon” Air Myth Exposed (London: Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1928) is a rollicking good read on these and other matters.

Sad news for small boys of all ages

2 September 2006 in 1910s, 1930s, After 1950, Contemporary, Pictures by Brett Holman | 2 comments

Airfix Spitfire Mk 21

Airfix Spitfire Mk 21, a work in progress. Image source: Airfix gallery, user HawkerTempest5.

It looks like Airfix, Britain’s oldest and most famous manufacter of plastic model aeroplanes (among other things), might be going under.

It will probably not surprise readers of this site to learn that I had a collection of model aeroplanes as a boy. It was small but diverse: a Mustang, a Kaydet, a Lancaster, a F-16 (and some ships too, the USS Pennsylvania and the Santa Maria) … maybe some others I can’t remember now. (They did not long survive the arrival of a baby brother.) However, I lacked the patience and the dexterity to be very good at making them. Probably the low point was the Lancaster. I didn’t have the right colour paints, so it ended up being painted in the highly distinctive but … erm … somewhat unhistorical camouflage scheme of the Desert Air Force. Not only that, but I laid it on so thickly that if it were scaled up to full-size, I doubt it would ever have gotten off the ground under the weight of all that paint!

Airfix started making scale models in the 1950s (its first aeroplane was a 1/72 scale Spitfire in 1955). The first plastic scale models were the Frog Penguins, starting with a Gloster Gladiator in 1936. But it seems that the basic idea goes back a few years earlier, when the components were made from solid wood (so-called “solid scale” models), with some metal and acetate. In fact, an article at CollectAir suggests that the honour for originating the concept should go to the Air League of the British Empire:

A Junior Air League section was formed by A.J. Holladay, called the “Skybird League” in 1933 and the decision was made to market commercial solid-scale model kits of current model airplanes in 1:72 scale. Many “Skybird” members who crafted models from these kits and drawings later became RAF pilots such as Neville Duke. This was a civilian commercial endeavour, nevertheless it was the progenitor of the government recognition model program for the British and for the U.S., both of which would come belatedly.

I haven’t been able to verify this yet, but it makes sense. The Air League had always been interested in promoting an airminded youth: as early as April 1909, only two months after it was founded, the Aerial League of the British Empire (as it was then known) staged a balloon flight and leaflet-dropping competition with the Boy Scouts, at Battersea Gasworks. Under J. A. Chamier in the 1930s, the Air League lobbied the government to set up an air cadet scheme, which bore fruit in the shape of the Air Defence Cadet Corps, formed in 1938 (today’s Air Cadets Organisation is a direct descendent).

So swearing over the placement of fiddly decals and the smudging of acetate canopies with glue goes back a long way. If Airfix disappears, there will be other companies to carry on the tradition (the industry is particularly strong in Japan), but it will still be a sad day.

At Mouquet Farm

18 August 2006 in 1910s, 1920s, After 1950, Australia, Family history, Pictures, Quotes by Brett Holman | 21 comments

It’s exactly 40 years since the Battle of Long Tan, a notable feat of Australian arms during the Vietnam War. But I have a more personal anniversary in mind — yesterday was 90 years to the day since my great-grand uncle John Joseph Mulqueeney was killed by an artillery round during the Somme campaign, on 17 August 1916. As I wrote a brief memorial about him last year on Remembrance Day, today I thought I would look at the online sources I used for that post.

The first thing to note is that the Australian War Memorial website is absolutely superb for researching family members who served in wartime. By entering a surname on their search page, choosing a war and specifying whether they were killed in action or not, you can obtain a wealth of information, including Red Cross records, embarkation rolls, lists of decorations awarded, and so on. There are also two important external links: one to the Commonwealth War Graves Commission for the location of graves (though the AWM link is actually broken at the moment), and another to the National Archives of Australia, where service records can be obtained (hopefully online, if not photocopies can be ordered).

In looking through these records, the big surprise was that Private Mulqueeney did not die at Gallipoli, as my family’s oral tradition held. Upon reflection, the reason for this is obvious — over the years, as the family members who could remember John themselves passed away, the succeeding generations assimilated fragments of his story into what little they knew of the war, and that increasingly came to mean Gallipoli. Unlike Gallipoli and in contrast to the situation in Britain, the Somme has little meaning for modern Australians. And in family history terms, having a relative who fought at Gallipoli has a cachet that is probably only second to having First Fleet convict blood running in your veins.

His service records were perhaps the most interesting, and sobering, find. Here’s part of the attestation paper filled out when he enlisted. Note the bureaucratic scrawls all over it, and in particular the very final KILLED IN ACTION stamped across the top — naturally, such a common occurrance merits a labour-saving device like a rubber stamp.

Attestation Paper

From his casualty form, we can trace his movements in the last months of his life. On 7 March 1916 he disembarked at Alexandria from the troopship Wandilla and on 29 March (presumably after further training) re-embarked, this time on the Transylvania, arriving in Marseilles to join the BEF on 4 April. He then presumably moved to the Australian depot at Etaples, where he remained for over two months: his group of reinforcements joined the 4th Battalion on 13 June. I’m not sure where the unit was then — I’d need to check a unit history or war diary for that — but it was another two months before he was killed, near Mouquet Farm. He was a well-behaved soldier, with nothing to mar his conduct sheet (where his character is recorded as “good”).

John Mulqueeney’s death added more pages to his service record than his life ever did. Six relate to the forwarding of his personal effects to his father, Timothy:

Writing Case, Tie, Key, Letters, Cards, Photo, 2 Pen Holders, Holdall, Housewife, 4 Brushes, 2 Combs, Scarf.

A receipt slip from 1921, to certify that (I think) his mother, Sarah, had received his ‘Memorial Scroll and King’s Message’. Stamps for his service medals: 1914/15 Star (presumably because he enlisted in 1915), British War Medal, Victory Medal.

Service medals

A positive reply to a family request for a photograph of his grave at Courcelette British Cemetary. Perhaps saddest of all, a form letter evidently for the purpose of informing his family which troopship he will be coming home on, never to be filled in, never to be sent.

Coming home

Finally, there are the records of the Australian Red Cross Society Wounded and Missing Enquiry Bureau’s enquiries on behalf of his family. They wrote to his comrades, asking for more information than the terse Department of Defence telegram would have provided.

We should be most grateful for any details you could send us concerning 4572 MULQUEENEY 4th Batt. A.I.F. and would also be glad iff [sic] you would add a short personal description, or any points that would sa tisfy [sic] his relatives that no error had been made.

There were six replies, including one from his sergeant. Pte. Hutchinson (himself recovering in the Eastbourne Military Hospital) provided the following information in December 1916:

Informant states that on Aug.17th. 1916, at the Pozieres Sector, a friend, Pte. McBride asked him to go with him into the next bay to see if “old Mul” [?] was alright as he did not think he had moved for a little time. Informant went, they found Mulqueeney dead, shot through the head, death must have been instantaneous. This was during the big bombardment. They buried him just beyond the bay, and informed the Sergt. Informant took some letters which he is sending to the Mother with details and also has pay book which he will forward to the right quarter as soon as he can do so.

That same month, Pte. Dickman wrote from Etaples:

He was killed at Moquet [sic] Farm about the middle of August. We were in the trenches. He was observing. I saw him killed by a shell, which burst near the parapet, and a piece hit him in the head. He belonged to IV Pl. A.Co. I knew him quite well. He was buried in a shell hole near by. A rough cross was put on his grave.

I hope that knowing how John Mulqueeney died, the return of his effects, the photo of his grave and so on, somehow provided some solace to his family. I can only imagine the pain they carried with them for the rest of their lives. My own sadness in examining these remains of his life can only be the palest (and somehow unearned) reflection of their grief. And of course, this was merely one, not particularly remarkable, death from a very bloody war. Scale all of that up by a factor of 10 or 40 million or so, and that’s one huge reason why the First World War is still worth studying.

Pardon?

18 August 2006 in 1910s, Blogging, Contemporary by Brett Holman | No comments

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

The British contingent of the historioblogosphere has swung into action upon hearing that their government is planning to pardon over 300 soldiers executed during the First World War. I have little to add to what everyone is saying (broadly, that such a blanket pardon rides roughshod over a complex situation and seems to derive more from politics than history — not that this is surprising), so I’ll just link to the various posts:

Anthony Cormack at Blog Them Out of the Stone Age
Dan Todman at Trench Fever
Esther MacCallum-Stewart at Break of Day in the Trenches / Revise and Dissent
George Simmers at Great War Fiction
Tony Keen at Memorabilia Antonina

Speed 2, the need for more

22 July 2006 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Aircraft, Plots by Brett Holman | 3 comments

As promised, here’s a revamped version of the speed plot I did the other day, this time distinguishing between biplanes (and triplanes), monoplanes and jets (just the one — the Meteor). It’s now a bit harder to read, though — it’s still red for fighters and blue for bombers, but now biplanes are represented by crosses (of the appropriate colour), monoplanes by open triangles, and jets by filled triangles. Also I noticed that my criteria for inclusion in the dataset had changed part-way through, so I’ve added a few aircraft to make that consistent (mainly torpedo-bombers) — I’ll update the original post shortly.

This shows very clearly the big jump that came with the move to monoplanes in the mid-1930s. And not just in fighters — bomber speeds increased by around 100 mph. In fact, the last British biplane fighters, introduced in 1937, could barely keep up with their own bombers. Again, cubic spline fits to the various combinations illustrate this. (Referring to the left-hand endpoint of each fit, they correspond to biplane fighters, biplane bombers, monoplane fighters and monoplane bombers.)

Looking at the data again, there is another feature worth remarking upon. Based solely on the number of models entering production (ie, and not on the actual numbers of aircraft that were built), the period up to about 1925 is dominated by fighters, while the period from then up to the start of the Second World War is dominated by bombers. For the 1914-8 period, I think this is explained by the constant battle for air superiority over the Western Front, which saw new fighters rushed into service every few months to counter new German types. But I’m somewhat surprised that there were so many fighter types introduced in the early-to-mid 1920s, given that the bomber orthodoxy was supposedly being established at this time (though some of the fighters were for export or were otherwise speculative ventures, not designed to Air Ministry specifications). For the bombers, the reason would probably be the desire for a heavy bomber as a deterrent, but more so the increasing need for specialised aircraft adapted for different roles, as opposed to the “general purpose” aircraft common in the 1920s.

Speed, the need for

19 July 2006 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Aircraft, Plots, Tools by Brett Holman | 7 comments

Last year I was playing with a plotting program for Mac OS X, which was pretty good, but not quite satisfactory. I’ve found a better one, Plot, which is free (as in beer), fairly easy to use, and very customisable. It has its own idiosyncrasies, but I like it a lot. Here’s an example plot, showing how the top speed of British combat increased up to the end of the Second World War.

The data are drawn from John W. R. Taylor, Combat Aircraft of the World From 1909 to the Present (New York: Paragon, 1979). This excludes aircraft which never saw service as well as those not intended for combat (though not all actually saw combat). The year is that in which it entered service (usually with the RAF), or if this wasn’t given, the year when the prototype first flew. (Some aircraft unfortunately had neither, and so were omitted.) The maximum speeds, in miles per hour, are not necessarily comparable, because they were often obtained at different heights; also, they may not have been sustainable under normal conditions. But they should be broadly indicative of real-world maximums. I’ve classified each aircraft as either fighters (red) or bombers (blue), based upon their actual use. However, that’s fairly arbitrary for the period up to 1915, which is when aircraft adapted for specialised roles began to appear. I haven’t included seaplanes but I have included carrier-borne aircraft. Generally, I have only included data for the most representative version (eg not for each of the innumerable marks of Spitfire). Because of these caveats and inconsistencies, the plot should not be taken too seriously — it’s just for illustrative purposes.

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Beautiful games and others

10 July 2006 in 1910s, 1920s, 1940s, After 1950, Before 1900, Contemporary, Quotes, Words by Brett Holman | 3 comments

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

The kick-off for the football¹ World Cup final is only hours away. To mark the occasion, here’s Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, head of the Royal Air Force, on the correct use of airpower (in 1923, in the context of a hypothetical war with France):

Would it be best to have less fighters and more bombers to bomb the enemy and trust to their people cracking before ours, or have more fighters to bring down more of the enemy bombers. It would be rather like putting two teams to play each other at football, and telling one team they must only defend their own goal, and keep all their men on that one point. The defending team would certainly not be beaten, but they would equally certainly not win, nor would they stop the attack on their goal from continuing. I would like to make this point again. I feel that although there would be an outcry, the French in a bombing duel would probably squeal before we did. That was really the final thing. The nation that would stand being bombed longest would win in the end.²

It may not be immediately apparent, but in Trenchard’s analogy, the ‘goals’ to be defended are the great cities of each warring nation. So goals are scored by bombing cities, killing and terrorising their inhabitants; and the ‘match’ won by causing a collapse in civilian morale, who will then cause their ‘team’ to give up.

The analogy is starting to get a bit torturous by this point! But football is not a great analogy for the standard RAF view of strategic bombing to begin with. On the one hand, it’s true that in football a team which only defends can’t win. On the other hand, a strong defence is still desirable, because one goal is often enough to win (or lose) a match. Equally, it’s more than possible to have matches end in a draw, and not the decisive knock-out blow Trenchard predicted.

Knock-out blow … now that’s a boxing term.³ Sport and war seem to mix very easily in British history. The Duke of Wellington might not have said that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, but Henry Newbolt did compare the imperial burden to a schoolboy game of cricket, in his 1897 poem “Vitai Lampada”:

There’s a breathless hush in the Close to-night –
Ten to make and the match to win –
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it’s not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season’s fame,
But his Captain’s hand on his shoulder smote
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”
The sand of the desert is sodden red, –
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; –
The Gatling’s jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England’s far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of schoolboy rallies the ranks,
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”
This is the word that year by year
While in her place the School is set
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind –
“Play up! play up! and play the game!”

Cricket is, of course, much more interesting to Englishmen than is war. At least, this is the case in P. G. Wodehouse’s brilliant parody of the Edwardian preoccupation with the possibility of German invasion, “The swoop!” (1909). A newspaper poster proclaims

SURREY
DOING
BADLY
GERMAN ARMY LANDS IN ENGLAND

with a stop-press report that

Fry not out, 104. Surrey 147 for 8. A German army landed in Essex this afternoon. Loamshire Handicap: Spring Chicken, 1; Salome, 2; Yip-i-addy, 3. Seven ran.

Wodehouse may have been on to something. In 1940, newspaper sellers reported the progress of the Battle of Britain as though it were a cricket match: ‘Biggest raid ever — Score 78 to 26 — England still batting’,⁴ as did BBC radio commentators:

[T]he man’s baled out by parachute — the pilot’s baled out by parachute — he’s a Junkers 87 and he’s going slap into the sea and there he goes — smash … Oh boy, I’ve never seen anything so good as this — the RAF fighters have really got these boys taped.⁵

It does seem a bit unsporting of the Luftwaffe to have tried to take out their defeat on the home of cricket itself, though.

More seriously, that the everyday heroics of the sports field could inspire men on the battlefield is shown by the famous incident on the first day of the Somme, where Captain W. P. Nevill led men of the 8th East Surreys over the top, dribbling a football. Nevill fell, dead — no faking there, unlike the real thing — but his men took their objective.

Going the other way, and bringing us back to where we began, since 1966 English football fans have taunted their German counterparts with the chant “Two World Wars and one World Cup!” — though some might argue that three World Cups is at least an equivalent record. Neither Germany nor England is playing in the final this time around: it’s France vs Italy. And as Italy knocked out Australia thanks to a somewhat dubious penalty, I’m hoping that France will squeal, as Trenchard predicted — not in terror but in joy!

By which I mean soccer …
Chief of Air Staff meeting, 19 July 1923, AIR 2/1267; quoted in Neville Jones, The Beginnings of Strategic Air Power: A History of the British Bomber Force 1923-39 (London: Frank Cass, 1987), 29. Emphasis added.
When the Sun crowed ‘Gotcha!’ at the Royal Navy’s sinking of the General Belgrano in the Falklands War, it reported that ‘The Navy had the Argies on their knees last night after a devastating double punch’.
Quoted in Malcolm Smith, Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 63.
Ibid., 62.

Am I fake or not?

30 June 2006 in 1910s, Aircraft, Pictures by Brett Holman | 15 comments

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Photographs of actual combat in the First World War are exceedingly rare, in the air as well as on the ground. Both of these are purportedly of Zeppelins flying over Britain. Are they fake or not? My answers are below.

The low down thing that plays the low down game

`The low down thing that plays the low down game’. Source: British postcard, Zeppelin im Krieg.

Over London's roofs

‘Over London’s roofs. London’s defences against Zeppelin raids were never adequate. Searchlights sometimes succeeded in spotting the raiders, as in the actual photograph by an amateur shown in the impression on the opposite page, but the anti-aircraft guns never secured a direct hit. Zeppelin raiders were only checked and finally defeated by aeroplane attack’. Source: Hamilton Fyfe, “Early Zeppelin nights of terror”, in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [ca. 1935]), 17.

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But that happened in France

3 May 2006 in 1910s, Quotes by Brett Holman | 2 comments

An interesting quote from Robert Graves’ autobiography, Goodbye to All That (London: Penguin, 1960 [1929]), 120. He was in London on leave; the date is not specified but it was before Loos, so I’d guess it was late summer, 1915.

The Zeppelin scare had just begun. Some friends of the family came in one night, and began telling me of the Zeppelin air-raids, of bombs dropped only three streets off.

‘Well, do you know,’ I said, ‘the other day I was asleep in a house and in the early morning a bomb dropped next door and killed three soldiers who were billeted there, a woman, and a child.’

‘Good gracious,’ they cried, ‘what did you do then?’

‘It was at a place called Beuvry, about four miles behind the trenches,’ I explained, ‘and I was tired out, so I went to sleep again.’ ‘Oh,’ they said, ‘but that happened in France!’ and the look of interest faded from their faces as though I had taken them in with a stupid catch. ‘Yes,’ I agreed, ‘and it was only an aeroplane that dropped the bomb.’

Graves doesn’t dwell on what’s going on back in the UK very much (at least not so far; I’m only half-way through). But he manages to pack a number of themes into these few sentences: the gulf in experiences and attitudes between soldiers and civilians; the perceived frightfulness of civilians being attacked; and the extreme fear in Britain of the Zeppelin at this time, which Graves gently mocked. J. F. C. Fuller wrote in 1923 (in the context of his version of a knock-out blow theory) that ’soldiers are controlled by discipline, civilians by fear’;¹ Graves’s anecdote might be another expression of the same idea. But this is from the (apparently substantially) revised edition published in 1957, so I’d want to compare it with the 1929 original first.

J. F. C. Fuller, The Reformation of War (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1923), 105.

The bolt from the blue and the knock-out blow

23 February 2006 in 1900s, 1910s by Brett Holman | 6 comments

In his comment on my previous post, Alex mentions the “bolt from the blue” strategy as possibly related to the knock-out blow that is my current obsession (and he’s right, in my opinion). My reply started to get long, so I decided to turn it into a post instead …

In Edwardian debates about the defence of the UK, the “bolt from the blue” school of naval strategy believed that the German navy could temporarily gain local superiority and throw a few hundred thousand soldiers ashore in Norfolk or somewhere, and Britain’s puny army would be no match for those efficient Prussians. (Read: we need conscription!) It was opposed by the “blue water” school who argued that a strong Royal Navy would be sufficient to stop the Germans from getting ashore in any numbers. (Read: we need more dreadnoughts!) Of course, the dramatic and frightening bolt from the blue was the one favoured by Edwardian war-scare novelists like le Queux and Childers.¹

There’s certainly some similarity between the bolt from the blue and the knock-out blow, though how much the one influenced the other is difficult to say. Both were surprise attacks, and both evaded existing defences (the Royal Navy and the North Sea/English Channel). And both struck directly at the heart of Empire, rather than fighting the war at a safe distance, in Europe or the edges of empire. I think the major difference is that the bolt from the blue was still a military strategy: a way for Germany to bring its overwhelming military superiority to bear on the British army, defeat it and force Britain to surrender.² But the knock-out blow was, generally speaking, aimed at civilians: it was a way of using British civilians themselves to force the government to surrender, directly or indirectly.³ (In that sense, the closest comparison might be a guerre de course like the U-boat campaigns in the World Wars.) After the First World War, the knock-out blow replaced the bolt from the blue as the scaremonger’s nightmare of choice …

But now I’m getting ahead of myself!

See A.J.A. Morris, The Scaremongers: The Advocacy of War and Rearmament, 1896-1914, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984.
I should emphasise that it wasn’t the Germans themselves who thought this, by and large: these were basically unwarranted British fears about what Germany was planning or at least was capable of.
In the pre-1914 period, there was some suggestion that strategic bombing would be best employed to disrupt enemy mobilisation, but that wasn’t seen as a potentially war-winning strategy, merely a helpful one.

The first knock-out blow?

22 February 2006 in 1910s, Periodicals, Quotes, Words by Brett Holman | 4 comments

Currently, I’m tracing the evolution of the idea of the knock-out blow, the massive aerial bombardment that could knock a country out of the war. Though the idea intself has earlier antecedents, the first use of the phrase itself in this context that I’ve found so far is this, in a well-known (at least to airpower historians) lecture given in April 1914 by the engineer Colonel Louis Jackson:

If a flight of aeroplanes passed over the city, each one dropping a dozen incendiary bombs in different places, would not the result be more than the fire brigade could cope with? If a Zeppelin dropped half a ton of guncotton on to the Admiralty or the War Office, as she might do if not interfered with, what would be the result, in disorganization and discouragement? What would be the effect of cutting off the water supply of the East End, or sinking food-ships in the Thames? These things seem incredible to us, who have only known of wars on the frontiers. I confess I am reluctant to go to the length of my own arguments, but if it is conceded that London is within the range of action of a hostile Zeppelin or two, and a flight of aeroplanes, such action will soon be possible; and this is the age of the “knock-out blow” in everything. Would any ruler harden his heart to such action? Who can say?

Source: Louis Jackson, “The defence of localities against aerial attack”, Journal of the Royal United Services Institution, 58 (June 1914), 712-3. (Emphasis added.)

Obviously Jackson isn’t calling such an attack the knock-out blow, it’s just a knock-out blow, so the phrase was not yet synonymous with the concept. I’m not really sure what he means about it being ‘the age of the “knock-out blow” in everything’ … boxing would be the obvious reference, but that alone hardly qualifies as ‘everything’. Perhaps he means that it was used in military/naval circles more generally: for example, a couple of years later, Lloyd George was claiming that the Somme offensive was the ‘knock-out blow’ against Germany,¹ clearly a non-aerial context, and it was applied to other offensives too. At some point thereafter (certainly by the 1930s), though, I think the term was widely understood to refer to aerial bombardment alone, even to a significant extent in popular discourse–at least when preceded by the definite article. Jackson’s lecture and article may have suggested that terminology to air strategists, or it might just be a case of convergent evolution.

Quoted in A.J.P. Taylor, English History 1914-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992 [1965]), 62.

The pity of war

17 February 2006 in 1910s, Other, Periodicals, Quotes by Brett Holman | No comments

A report from the 14th annual conference of the National Federation of Hairdressers, which opened at Blackpool on 31 May 1915:

A Swansea delegate said the trouble was not now. The trouble would be when the war was over, because men who had enlisted would have been trained to shave themselves. The result would be that hundreds of hairdressers would be thrown out of employment.

Source: Manchester Guardian, 1 June 1915, p. 8.

(Nearly) a century of circles

15 February 2006 in 1910s, 1930s, After 1950, Cold War, Ephemera, Maps, Pictures by Brett Holman | 9 comments

In my previous post I talked about some Japanese ARP posters from 1938. One in particular (above; click for larger version) is very revealing: it shows exactly whose bombers the Japanese were worried about, by plotting circles on a map of Japan and its neighbours, representing the radius of action¹ of bombers from potential enemies. It turns out they were afraid of everybody’s, except for the country they were actually at war with (China). The brown circle shows the radius of action of American bombers from the Philippines; black, British bombers from Hong Kong; green, Russian bombers from Vladivostok; yellow, American bombers from Alaska; and blue is in the middle of the ocean — American carrier-borne bombers, most likely. The circles are marked with a number, probably a distance: 2000 km? That would make some sense, as it was very roughly the radius of action of the B-17s that were just entering service in the US Army in 1938 (though not in substantial numbers until 1941).

This sort of map is quite common these days, particularly in highlighting the danger from rogue states. For example, here’s one centred on North Korea, from a website criticising Clinton’s foreign policy:

The circles here are not the radii of action of bombers, of course, but the ranges of missiles.² But the principle is the same. There’s a subtle difference, though: the Japanese one projects a defensive outlook: it shows the circles encroaching on Japanese territory and so emphasizes how vulnerable Japan is. The North Korean map, on the other, does not highlight the threat to any particular country, but instead demonstrates how North Korean missiles threaten all of its neighbours — that is to say, just how rogueish a state it is.

Here’s another missile-era map, this time quite an historic one from the Cuban missile crisis in 1962 (looks like it was drawn up by the CIA). This is more like the Japanese map: though the threat is from Cuba, the centre of the map is shifted towards the United States, to show just how much of the country would fall under the shadow of Soviet missiles (but by the same token, de-emphasising the threat to South America).

I haven’t come across many other pre-Second World War examples, though I’m sure they exist. The only other one I currently know of is British, and is very early, dating from 1913:

This time it’s not bombers or missiles that are the threat, but Zeppelins. (Love that OTT title!) The map is centred on Heligoland, which another map in the same magazine claimed was the site of an airship station. The caption says that the outer circle (600 miles) represents the radius for Zeppelins; the 300 mile circle is for aeroplanes. It ’should bring home to every patriot the vital necessity of Britain putting her house in order forthwith, by the grant of adequate provision in the nation’s Estimates to enable us to make up the heavy leeway from which this country already suffers’. Indeed it should; those circles are very dark, aren’t they? Though that might just be the poor quality of my photocopy …

Image sources: National Archives of Japan; Clinton Foreign Policy Page; John F. Kennedy Library; Flight, 1 March 1913, 248.

No more than half the maximum range of an aircraft, assuming they return to the base from which they took off.
As missiles don’t return to base, their radius of action is equal to their range.

William Benn, and the Black Ship

14 January 2006 in 1910s, Aircraft, Pictures by Brett Holman | 1 comment

David List added a most informative comment on my About page the other day, responding to an old post, which I thought I would highlight and respond to here.

Regarding my post on a claimed insertion of a German spy by parachute in 1917 (which I doubted), David notes that there were Allied experiments in this direction at around the same time:

apropos of your post on ‘airborne spies of the Kaiser’ that parachuting of agents in World War 1 was a British/Italian technique. Tony Wedgewood Benn’s (the retired British MP) father was one of the real practitioner’s and you will find accounts of his missions in Italy both in the published literature and in files at The National Archives at Kew, UK. Further, in fiction, you will also find a ‘Biggles’ story ‘The Rescue Flight’ I think it was called which is based on this.

(A-ha! Biggles strikes again.) I’m very interested to learn of William Wedgwood Benn’s experience here. In the 1920s, he was a very airminded MP: on several occasions during parliamentary debates, he declared that airpower had made the Army and Navy obsolete, and that therefore their budgets should be cut and the money given to the RAF instead (an idea known as ’substituion’). Following David’s lead, I learn from the Oxford DNB that Benn had a distinguished career in the First World War, partly in the RNAS, where he served as an observer and a pilot. (His other exploits included fighting at Gallipoli, guerilla warfare, and privateering in the Red Sea!) So his RNAS service helps explain his airmindedness. And if the Allies were dropping spies by parachute at this time, it makes it more plausible that the Germans might try it too.

Another interesting item related by David is about a British airship used for covert operations:

By extension you will also find acounts in the literature, in ‘Cross and Cockade’ and also, again, the files at TNA accounts of ‘the Black Ship’ which was an RNAS SS dirigible intended for clandestine night landings and pick ups.

Very interesting! Looking through Ces Mowthorpe’s Battlebags: British Airships of the First World War (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), this would appear to be SS-40, which had a silenced engine and was ‘Modified for special night flights over enemy lines’, including a black envelope (hence the name ‘Black Ship’, presumably). In August and September 1916 it undertook ‘experimental night reconnaissance flights over enemy lines and Somme battlefield’ (p. 40). As the experiments were not repeated, I guess they weren’t very successful! I can’t find a picture on the web, so I have scanned in the photo of SS-40 from Battlebags (p. 42). The gondola is actually a modified aeroplane fuselage, a feature of the SS type.

It’s not exactly James Bond material, is it …

The airminded Mr. Kipling

4 January 2006 in 1900s, 1910s, 1930s, Books by Brett Holman | 15 comments

Rudyard Kipling, that poet of empire, also wrote two very airminded science fiction stories: “With the night mail” (1905) and a sequel, “As easy as A.B.C.” (1912). Both were set in the then-remote 21st century, and revolved around the Aerial Board of Control – the ABC of the second story’s title. This is effectively a world government, composed of elite aviators, which had grown out of the necessity to regulate air transport:

Her black hull, double conning-tower, and ever-ready slings represent all that remains to the planet of that odd old word authority. She is responsible only to the Aerial Board of Control– the A.B.C. of which Tim speaks so flippantly. But that semi-elected, semi-nominated body of a few score persons of both sexes, controls this planet. ‘Transportation is Civilization,’ our motto runs. Theoretically, we do what we please so long as we do not interfere with the traffic and all it implies. Practically, the A.B.C. confirms or annuls all international arrangements and, to judge from its last report, finds our tolerant, humorous, lazy little planet only too ready to shift the whole burden of public administration on its shoulders.

The globalising effects of air transport (more airships than airplanes) has helped the world to outgrow war; and more and more countries are becoming tired of messy politics, and place themselves in the ABC’s hands:

The story of the recent Cretan crisis, as told in the A.B.C. Monthly Report, is not without humour. Till 25th October Crete, as all the planet knows, was the sole surviving European repository of ‘autonomous institutions,’ ‘local self-government,’ and the rest of the archaic lumber devised in the past for the confusion of human affairs. She has lived practically on the tourist traffic attracted by her annual pageants of Parliaments, Boards, Municipal Councils, etc. etc. Last summer the islanders grew wearied, as their premier explained, of ‘playing at being savages for pennies,’ and proceeded to pull down all the landing-towers on the island and shut off general communication till such time as the A.B.C. should annex them. For side-splitting comedy we would refer our readers to the correspondence between the Board of Control and the Cretan premier during the ‘war.’ However, all’s well that ends well. The A.B.C. have taken over the administration of Crete on normal lines; and tourists must go elsewhere to witness the ‘debates,’ ‘resolutions,’ and ‘popular movements’ of the old days. The only people who suffer will be the Board of Control, which is grievously overworked already. It is easy enough to condemn the Cretans for their laziness; but when one recalls the large, prosperous, and presumably public-spirited communities which during the last few years have deliberately thrown themselves into the hands of the A.B.C., one cannot be too hard upon St. Paul’s old friends.

In “As easy as A.B.C.”, this theme is expanded upon, with the ABC being called in to Chicago to put down social unrest; as Michael Paris notes, this story shows that as peaceful as Kipling makes the ABC out to be, ultimately its authority rests on the use of its aircraft as weapons.¹

This is a very early instance of an idea which was to enjoy some currency in the 1930s, of an aviation-based technocratic alternative to democracy – in particular H.G. Wells’ Air and Sea Control in The Shape of Things to Come (1933).² Paris also suggests that as Kipling and Frederick Sykes (head of the RAF in 1918) were friends, the ABC stories may have had some influence on the latter’s airpower ideas, particularly air control.³

Although I think I’ve read “With the night mail” before, I’d never seen the faux ads for dirigibles and (air)shipping news reports which (according to Bleiler, Science-fiction: The Early Years) accompanied the 1909 New York edition, obviously to add to the verisimilitude.⁴ These are so fun! Not that newspapers have Edwardian-style “answers to correspondents” sections any more, but perhaps they should:

PLANISTON — (1) The Five Thousand Kilometre (overland) was won last year by L. V. Rautsch, R. M. Rautsch, his brother, in the same week pulling off the Ten Thousand (oversea). R. M.’s average worked out at a fraction over 500 kilometres per hour, thus constituting a record. (2) Theoretically, there is no limit to the lift of a dirigible. For commercial and practical purposes 15,000 tons is accepted as the most manageable.

PATERFAMILIAS — None whatever. He is liable for direct damage both to your chimneys and any collateral damage caused by fall of bricks into garden, etc., etc. Bodily inconvenience and mental anguish may be included, but the average courts are not, as a rule, swayed by sentiment. If you can prove that his grapnel removed any portion of your roof, you had better rest your case on decoverture of domicile (See Parkins v. Duboulay). We sympathize with your position, but the night of the 14th was stormy and confused, and – you may have to anchor on a stranger’s chimney yourself some night. Verbum sap!

Oh, and if anyone is looking for a job:

FAMILY DIRIGIBLE. A Competent, steady man wanted for slow speed, low level Tangye dirigible. No night work, no sea trips. Must be member of the Church of England, and make himself useful in the garden.

M. R., The Rectory, Gray’s Barton, Wilts.

But mind where you drop your grapnel.

(Thanks to Peter Farrell-Vinay for the pointer, and also for noting the similarity to Wells.)

Michael Paris, Winged Warfare: The Literature and Theory of Aerial Warfare in Britain, 1859-1917 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1992), 39. Though they do have the power to immobilise people as well as kill.
Ibid, 29.
Ibid, 39-40.
Kind of like the “Would you like to know more?” hyperlinks in the propaganda inserts in Starship Troopers … oh, I feel so unclean now that I’ve mentioned that film.

4572 Pte. Mulqueeney

11 November 2005 in 1910s, Australia, Family history, Pictures by Brett Holman | 2 comments

4th Battalion colour patch

Today is Remembrance Day. Today I remember Private John Joseph Mulqueeney, of Tumut, New South Wales – my great-grand uncle. A labourer in civilian life, he enlisted in the 4th Battalion of the 1st AIF (Australian Imperial Force) on 9 October 1915, embarking for Egypt on 3 February 1916. His unit was soon redeployed to France, where it fought in the Somme offensive; in the middle of August it was involved in the attempts to capture Mouquet Farm, near Pozières. On 17 August 1916, Pte. Mulqueeney was looking out over the parapet when a shell landed in front of his trench, and he was hit in the head by a piece of shrapnel. He died instantly. He was 25 and, according to his sergeant, a ‘good chap’. His fellow soldiers buried him in a nearby shell-hole, marking it with a rough cross, though his remains are now in Courcelette British Cemetery.

Lest we forget.

Image source: Australian War Memorial.

The Zeppelin in combat (in advertising)

2 November 2005 in 1910s, Australia, Ephemera, Pictures by Brett Holman | 2 comments

Dan Todman has an interesting series of posts at Trench Fever on how the First World War prepared the British to fight the Second – here, here and here. The last post is about a newspaper ad from 1942, and although it’s only one element among several, of course it’s the Zeppelin that leaps out at me (I am Airminded after all!) Apropos of nothing much, here are a few examples of Zeppelins in British advertising from the First World War period – one newspaper advertisement, and two propaganda posters.

The first actually dates from before the war – it’s from The Times, 4 March 1913, p. 17. It was published during the airship panic of that year, and pokes gentle fun at the concerns about the Zeppelin menace. What people should REALLY be worried about is fire, burglary, old age … so buy North British & Mercantile’s insurance! (One wonders why they didn’t offer air raid insurance … they would have made a bundle.)

This recruiting poster would date to 1915 or 1916, as that’s when the Zeppelins were most feared. Joining the Army at the time wouldn’t have been the most direct way to prevent more air raids, as the Navy was actually responsible for British air defences at that time, but I suppose the suggestion is that you can be part of the Big Push that will end the war. (Image source: First World War.com.)

I may be cheating slightly here: although this is mentioned on a few websites as a British poster, the National Library of Australia claims it was a New South Wales recruiting poster from 1915. But it may well have been a copy of a British poster, and anyway, we were all British back then! This time the emphasis is on preventing German frightfulness being visited upon British women and children. (Image source: National Library of Australia.)

Well, I guess these show something of the early development of the Zeppelin-as-threat iconography that Lever Brothers was (in part) drawing upon. By 1942, that iconography seems almost nostalgic, and represented the normalisation and conquest of fears of air war – the Zeppelins were just one of the challenges that Mrs Allaker and Sunlight Soap successfully faced together in the 20th century …

OK, now I’m rambling, no doubt due to insomnia … so I think I’ll sign off!

The unknown scaremonger

23 October 2005 in 1910s, 1920s, Phantom airships and other panics by Brett Holman | 1 comment

On this day in 1922, Andrew Bonar Law, the “unknown Prime Minister”, began his premiership – the shortest of the twentieth century.

Here’s a minor footnote to Bonar Law’s career. Some time before the end of March 1913, while leader of the Unionist Party (as the Conservatives were then called), he told Charles à Court Repington, The Times’s military correspondent, that the aerial threat to Britain had convinced him of the need for conscription.¹ This coincided with agitation by both the Navy League and the Aerial League of the British Empire, amplified by the Conservative press, for a million pounds to be spent immediately on a British aerial fleet to counter the Zeppelin menace – which itself followed hard on the heels of a wave of sightings of mysterious airships in British skies.

This seems a bit odd – I don’t understand how conscription would have helped defend against airships. Nor does it seem that it was a political tactic of some sort, for even though many conservatives supported conscription, he did not propose to make it part of his party’s platform. Maybe he was just trying to convince the influential Repington of his soundness on defence matters!

A.J.A. Morris, The Scaremongers: The Advocacy of War and Rearmament 1896-1914 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 429-30.

Airborne spies of the Kaiser?

21 October 2005 in 1910s, Phantom airships and other panics, Rumours by Brett Holman | 1 comment

While browsing through some nice pictures at Werkost of the Shuttleworth Collection, I found this photo of part of a downed Gotha. It looks like the inside of a wing, but it’s the accompanying text that is interesting. The fragment itself is inscribed GOTHA BLANC NEZ 1917, and the label says:

PIECE OF GOTHA BOMBER WING RIB, RECOVERED FROM AN AIRCRAFT WHICH FELL INTO THE SEA OFF CAP GRIS NEZ IN 1917. THE MACHINE WAS DAMAGED IN COMBAT OVER ENGLAND AND CARRIED A CREW OF THREE IN ADDITION TO A SPY DRESSED IN FRENCH UNIFORM WHO WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN LANDED IN ENGLAND.

DONATED BY CAPTAIN J.R.W. GROVES R.N. (RETD.), ORIGINALLY IN THE POSSESSION OF THE LATE MRS W. REVELL SMITH WHO SERVED IN THE FIRST-AID NURSING YEOMANRY AT CALAIS.

I’ve never heard of German spies being inserted by air into Britain in the First World War. German spies there certainly were, but I thought they usually made their way there by neutral countries (mainly the Netherlands), sometimes perhaps by U-boat (much as Roger Casement was landed in Ireland in 1916, though he wasn’t a spy). Presumably the spy would drop in by parachute (bit risky to land a big plane like that in a field!), but then one has to wonder why he didn’t jump after the Gotha was damaged? The information given is unhelpfully vague – it doesn’t say how it was known that there was a spy (probably, they found the body), and only the year is given. As it is, there are several 1917 raids listed in Cole and Cheesman which involved a damaged Gotha crashing off the coast of France, but I don’t see any mention of spies. Thomas Boghardt’s excellent Spies of the Kaiser: German Covert Operations in Great Britain during the First World War Era (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) seems silent on the matter of aerial insertions.

It reminds me of the phantom airships that were rumoured (and in fact, seen) to be flying around Britain in the years before the war, carrying German spies. Not surprisingly, these false sightings continued into the war, until February 1916 at least.¹ Perhaps the rumours later became attached to the Gothas, once they became the principal aerial threat? Or maybe spies really did drop into Britain by air, and I just need to learn more before I speculate …

Nigel Watson, ed., The Scareship Mystery: A Survey of Phantom Airship Scares 1909-1918 (Corby: Domra, 2000), 95.

Out of (West) Africa

15 October 2005 in 1900s, 1910s by Brett Holman | 6 comments

Here’s a minor curiosity. Many of the leading figures in the RFC/RAF (at least, many of the ones that interest me) had earlier served in West Africa. (They all served in the Boer War too, but that wouldn’t have been uncommon for their cohort.) This is the list:

Hugh Trenchard: Southern Nigeria Regiment, 1903-10
Frederick Sykes: West African Regiment, 1903-5
P.R.C. Groves: West African Regiment, 1903-4
L.E.O. Charlton: Gold Coast Regiment, 1902-7
unnamed officer: Nigeria¹

Too much shouldn’t be made of this; it’s probably just a coincidence. But I can imagine a couple of explanations. One is that adventurous spirits might be drawn to the challenges of serving on the frontiers of Empire as much as to slipping the surly bonds of Earth. (Certainly the biographies of Trenchard and Charlton show evidence of this kind of restlessness.) The other explanation might be that (what I imagine to be) the extreme logistical difficulties of soldiering in West Africa back then may have suggested the advantages of simply being able to fly over all obstacles!

According to Robin Higham, The Military Intellectuals in Britain, 1918-1939 (Westport: Greenwood, 1981 [1966]), 134, an officer whom Trenchard knew from Nigeria was undergoing flight training, and suggested that he take it up.

Be aware of archives!

14 October 2005 in 1910s, Ephemera, Pictures by Brett Holman | No comments

As mentioned at Early Modern Notes, it’s Archive Awareness … something … in the UK. Lots of events showcasing different archives and themes. There’s even a nice aviation-related image on their front page (though it’s not obvious what archive it’s from, the RAF Museum perhaps).
Hendon 1911
It’s an advertisement for the first official British air mail service,¹ from London Aerodrome (Hendon) to Windsor, which was flown on 9 September 1911 by Gustav Hamel. He was the only one of the four pilots who attempted the 21 mile distance to actually make it; a pilot was killed in one of the later flights. The point was to commemorate the coronation of George V, but they were a bit slow off the mark: that happened in June! There’s more information, and many pictures, at the Royal Windsor Website and at Aeroplanes!

Hendon became a very popular entertainment venue in the years just prior to the First World War; many people from all social classes would have gained their first exposure to aeroplanes there.² A useful account of Hendon’s growth is given in chapter 6 of Andrew Horrall, Popular Culture in London, c.1890-1918: The Transformation of Entertainment (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2001).

And not forgetting the Grand Aerial Gymnkhana and Military Tournament the following Saturday!
That the airmail flight was scheduled on a Saturday afternoon suggests that workers (and their families) were part of the intended audience – that’s when many of them had a half-day holiday.

Jet aircraft of the Belle Époque

7 October 2005 in 1910s, Aircraft, Pictures by Brett Holman | 10 comments

Coandă-1910

This is a real oddity, and I still can’t wrap my head around it. In 1910, a Romanian named Henri Coandă built and flew the world’s first jet aircraft. Yes, 1910! That’s two whole decades before Frank Whittle. And less than a decade after the Wright brothers!

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Strategy Without Slide-Rule

4 October 2005 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, Books by Brett Holman | 12 comments

Barry D. Powers. Strategy Without Slide-Rule: British Air Strategy 1914-1939. London: Croom Helm, 1976.

NB. The subtitle is inaccurate; the period covered is really more like 1914-1931!

Powers has two objects in mind: firstly, to show that air policy should be ’seen as a complicated interaction of the factors involved — popular conceptions, press campaigns, political thinking and military concerns’, rather than purely the latter; and secondly, to ’show the extremely close interconnections between defensive concerns and offensive planning’ (that is to say, offence as a form of defence).
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Pictures!

7 September 2005 in 1910s, Links, Pictures by Brett Holman | No comments

Check out Rosebud’s WWI and Early Aviation Image Archive for thousands of wonderful contemporary images of pre-1920 aircraft. Here are a couple, particularly relevant to my interests.

According to the caption, these are the Zeppelins “L 13, L 12, and L 10 on a bombing mission” – clearly taken from a fourth Zeppelin. If this was a raid on Britain, it would have to be that of the night of 9/10 August 1915, according to Cole and Cheeseman the only time when all three airships were on the same mission (and there were two other airships along on the same raid, L9 and L11). It would have to be near the start of the mission, as it’s still light enough for the photo to be taken, and anyway the airships would have separated as they neared the English coast.

Again according to the caption, a “Gotha G.IV of KG3 in flight over London”. Whether true or not, it’s how a Gotha would have looked to frightened Londoners in the summer of 1917 … if it was flying particularly low, anyway! The original source for the photo is evidently here, also well worth a look.

England and the Aeroplane

9 August 2005 in 1910s, 1930s, Books by Brett Holman | 1 comment

David Edgerton. England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation. Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Academic and Professional, 1991.

This is a very short book, only some 108 pages long – as the subtitle says, an essay rather a fully researched monograph. The overall point of the book is to argue that contrary to most of the existing ‘declinist’ literature, Britain is a ‘warfare state’, not a welfare one, which relies on technological superiority rather than numbers (’liberal militarism’), and hence has always given a high priority to development of aviation, rather than being backwards as is often alleged. I think he is generally right on the latter point. On the warfare state, I’m less sure, but I look forward to his forthcoming Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970 (Cambridge University Press, December 2005).

Probably of most interest to me is Edgerton’s discussion of aviation’s relationship with politics. On the right, he begins with Pemberton Billing — founder of Supermarine, right-wing rabble-rouser as an MP during the First World War, agitator for a unified air force — and goes on to discuss Joynson-Hicks, Sueter, Sempill, Londonderry, Rothermere, Mosley, A.V. Roe (as in Avro), Lady Houston, Churchill and Moore-Brabazon and later on the influential and openly pro-fascist editor of The Aeroplane, C.G. Grey. On the left, he draws attention to the liberal conception of the aeroplane as a force for peace and internationalism, particularly with H.G. Wells and (The Shape of) Things to Come, and the idea in the 1930s of a League of Nations air police to replace the disbanded air forces of the world.

Other interesting asides include the contention that imperial commitments helped advance British aviation rather than led it down blind alleys and the important point that Britain was prepared to go to war in 1939 despite fully expecting massive civilian casualties.

All in all, an interesting and thought-provoking book.

scareships update

17 July 2005 in 1900s, 1910s, Phantom airships and other panics by Brett Holman | No comments

I’ve (mostly) finished a big update to my other site, scareships, which is about the British phantom airship scares of 1909 and 1912-3 – essentially, Edwardian UFO waves. To my mind, the fact that people (including, for a time, newspaper editors) believed that German zeppelins were buzzing their country – when in fact they weren’t – shows that fear of airpower (in this case, espionage rather than bombing) came early to Britain. But I’ve created the site so that anyone interested can learn about the sightings, read the primary sources and form their own opinions about what was going on.

Anyway, I have completed entering summaries of all the phantom airship sightings I found while researching my 4th year thesis, 135 in all, using WordPress as a simple content management system. There’s a bit of tidying up to do first, and then the next step will be to finish scanning in and uploading all the primary sources (newspaper articles), which may take some time …

Across the Atlantic by Vimy

10 July 2005 in 1910s, 1920s, Aircraft, Contemporary by Brett Holman | No comments

This happened a week ago, but it’s rather cool – a re-enactment of the first non-stop flight across the Atlantic by the British airmen Alcock and Brown in June 1919. They used a modified Vickers Vimy, a two-engined aircraft designed for bombing German cities. The Vimy was never used in this role, but a flight of just over 3000 km surely proved its potential – even if Brown had to keep climbing out onto the wings to remove ice from the engines! Also of note is that in completing the flight, they won the last of the Daily Mail’s aviation prizes designed to promote innovation and airmindedness, a handsome £10000 – Lord Northcliffe’s final legacy to aviation. (Earlier prizes included £1000 for the first aerial crossing of the English Channel, which was won by Louis Bleriot in 1909; the modern Ansari X-Prize is an astronautical version of the same idea.) The re-enactment used a beautiful replica Vimy.

1919 was a busy year for trans-Atlantic flights (compared to all the previous years, anyway). Alcock and Brown’s flight overshadows the crossing made by the US Navy’s NX-4 flying boat the previous month (which wasn’t non-stop, and took 19 days), as well as the Royal Navy airship R34’s double crossing the following month (ie there and back again). But then Alcock and Brown are themselves overshadowed by Lindbergh’s non-stop flight from New York to Paris in 1927, admittedly a much longer distance of 5800 km.

1910s

Facing Armageddon: Britain and the Bomber, 1908-1941

air-minded, adj.

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