1910s

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The mystery car of Maldon

7 November 2009 in 1910s, Civil defence, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Quotes, Rumours by Brett Holman | 3 comments

Here’s an interesting inversion of my usual phantom airship scare. The Zeppelin was real enough — it was L6, raiding Essex on the night of 15 April 1915. The phantom was instead a motor-car:

Since the visit of the Zeppelin early on Friday morning the Maldon district has been full of rumours of mysterious motor-cars with flaming headlights which, passing along the highways, guided the airship to the area where the majority of the bombs were dropped.1

A ’special correspondent’ wrote that only one of the stories seems very plausible, presumably because it was the only one with several independent witnesses. Three couples — two ‘London ladies’ staying at ‘the Hut’ near Lathingdon (Latchingdon?), a Mr. and Mrs. Woods who lived at ‘the Cottage’ also near Lathingdon, and an elderly couple in Mundon, a couple of miles away. They all told a consistent story: the ladies saw the car first, the Woods’ bedroom was then illuminated by the car’s headlights, and a little later it was heard in Mundon, heading towards Maldon. Half an hour later, after Maldon was bombed, the car apparently retraced the same path but in the opposite direction, and with its headlights now much dimmer.

But there were problems with the theory. Heading into Lathingdon, the car was seen arriving from a road junction, but the people living near that junction were adamant that no car passed the junction in the direction of Lathingdon. And on the other side of Lathingdon, a policeman manning a police station was equally adamant that no car passed him either (although he did see a car coming back from Maldon, the occupants of which were known to him):

Altogether the evidence is very contradictory. If the car really existed it cannot have gone so far as Lathington police station, and there is no side road upon which it could have turned off. It may be said that the lights could have been extinguished and the car taken into one of the fields, but in that case it could never have passed through Mundon, where the inhabitants believe it went to pick up the men who, according to their firm belief, had been signalling to the Zeppelin.2

This was a common story in the aftermath of air raids. After the first airship raid on Britain (19 January 1915), inhabitants of Snettisham in Norfolk reported seeing two cars pacing the airship invader, one to the right and one to the left, with occasional flashes of light upwards or onto a significant target, such as the town’s medieval church which indeed suffered some bomb damage. A similar tale was told in nearby King’s Lynn.3
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  1. The Times, 19 April 1915, 5.
  2. Ibid.
  3. Ibid., 21 January 1915, 10; 22 January 1915, 34; 23 January 1915, 10.

Do not procrastinate

28 October 2009 in 1910s, Civil defence, Ephemera, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Periodicals, Pictures by Brett Holman | 4 comments

The danger of gas bombs - Times, 26 May 1915, p. 5

This is an advertisement from The Times, 26 May 1915, 5, for the ‘Life-Saving “CAVENDISH” Anti-Gas INHALER’ — in other words, a gas mask. It’s a surprisingly early attempt to combine (and to cash in on) the twin threats of aerial bombardment and chemical warfare — that is, ‘The Danger of GAS BOMBS’:

You can effectually avert the threatened peril to yourself and family from asphyxiating bombs dropped by the enemy’s airships if you are provided with enough “CAVENDISH” INHALERS.

Lest the reader be tempted to take this advice lightly:

You cannot afford to make mistakes in this matter: it is vital. Pads and the like made with the best intentions, but without the necessary chemical knowledge, are only partly — and for a very short time — protective against slowly spreading vapour. They are of no use whatever when the gas is exploded and forced through every cranny into your home [...]

Closing the lower windows and doors of your house is NOT a sufficient protection against the rush of gas driven in by high explosive. You need — for yourself and your family — absolute protection against actual contact with the fumes.

Clearly the ad is reacting to some earlier set of ideas about how to guard against gas, but I’m not sure what their source was. It is claimed that one charge would work for half an hour, ‘quite long enough for absolute security from danger’ — a bargain for 5/6 post-free.

How early is early? This is just over a month after the first large-scale use of gas at Ypres (22 April). It’s also a few days before the first Zeppelin raid on London (31 May). And it’s three weeks before the Metropolitan Police issued official advice to civilians about what to do in an air raid (18 June) — most of which had to do with the possibility of a gas attack. Probably lucky the Surgical Manufacturing Company got in when they did, because the Met’s commissioner gave precisely the opposite advice: no need to buy a specialised respirator, a cotton pad saturated in washing soda should suffice — and do close ground-floor doors and windows. (See The Times, 18 June 1915, 5.)

More generally, fears of aero-chemical warfare are generally regarded as characteristic of the 1930s, which is true but shouldn’t obscure earlier outbreaks of anxiety about the possibility of London being drowned in poison gas.

(I think I came across a mention of this ad in P. D. Smith’s Doomsday Men, but can’t find the precise reference.)

Not all of me shall die

6 September 2009 in 1910s, 1920s, Art, Australia, Pictures by Brett Holman | 3 comments

1888 Building - Gryphon Gallery

I recently attended a function in the Gryphon Gallery of the 1888 Building at the University of Melbourne, where there’s a local war memorial I missed out on when I last wrote on the topic. It was dedicated in 1920 in what was then the Teachers’ College, and takes the form of three stained glass windows. The central window — seen above and below — depicts an Australian soldier, rifle to the ready, bayonet fixed. He represents all those former students and staff members who served in the Australian Imperial Force (including at least two women).
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Representing horrorism

7 August 2009 in 1910s, 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, Air control, Books, Quotes by Brett Holman | 4 comments

At In the Middle, Karl Steel reviews Adriana Cavarero’s book Horrorism, which, as I understand it, seeks to reorient descriptions of violence from the perspective of its perpetrators to that of its victims. This part of the review seems like a good question to ask here:

I suffer an even pettier annoyance when she writes: “Any review of the refined arts of war developed over the course of the century would have to dedicate a separate chapter to the aerial bombardments inaugurated by German forces over Guernica and Coventry” (51). Why not Italian forces over Ethiopia the year before Guernica, or, arguably, RAF forces over Sulaymaniyah? (and while it’s tempting to suggest the Zeppelin raids of English, beginning in 1915, the difference between these and Sulaymaniyah, Ethiopia, or Guernica is that the English could defend themselves: the Kurds, Ethiopians, and Basques could not, and thus stand as better representatives of horrorism (unlike the inhabitants of Coventry)).

Firstly, my petty criticism of the sentence quoted from the book would be that Germany didn’t inaugurate aerial bombardment at either Guernica or Coventry. As Steel notes, there were plenty of earlier instances; I would probably point the Bulgarian bombing of the Turkish city of Adrianople in late 1912 as the inauguration of aerial bombardment of civilians. I would also quibble with Steel, and point out that while Britain as a nation could defend itself against bombing during the First World War, on an individual level its citizens could not shoot back, send up fighters or retaliate through counterbombing. At the point in time when the bombs were actually falling, can we say that the horror experienced by Kurdish victims of British air control was greater than that of British victims of the Zeppelins and Gothas? Conversely, non-Western, non-state targets of bombing tried a surprisingly wide range of strategies, up to and including their own small air forces.

But then what would be the best example of horrorism in the case of aerial bombardment? I’d pick Dresden, February 1945. Not only was is it one of the most devastating episodes in the history of bombing in and of itself, but it was one of the few cases when the horror was so great that it was felt by the perpetrators (or at least the perpetrating culture) as well as the victims. But then that’s probably missing the point of horrorism altogether.

The Riddle of the Wooden Bombs

21 July 2009 in 1910s, 1940s, Books, Reviews by Brett Holman | 3 comments

Pierre-Antoine Courouble. The Riddle of the Wooden Bombs. Toulon: Les Presses du Midi, 2009.

One of my early posts on this blog was about a story which goes something like the following. The Germans are constructing a fake airfield to decoy Allied bombers, with dummy aircraft made out of wood. On the day it is finished, a RAF bomber swoops down and drops a single bomb on it — a bomb made of wood. The Germans look foolish: having tried to outsmart the Allies, it is they who are outsmarted. A moral victory for the good guys!

The details are usually vague and vary between tellings (it happened in France, or Belgium, or Egypt; late in the Second War, early on, or even in the First World War; sometimes it is the British who are on the receiving end of the wooden bomb; rarely does anyone claim to be an eyewitness). It sounds a lot like a joke, or an urban legend, which is what it has usually been dismissed as. I tried to work out if there was any truth to the story but have to admit I didn’t get very far.

You might not think that there was anyway much to be said about such an obscure and perhaps trivial topic. Well, you’d be wrong! Pierre-Antoine Courouble has spent several years researching the wooden bombs and the result is this meticulously-endnoted 237-page book, The Riddle of the Wooden Bombs. He has scoured libraries, stalked bulletin boards, harassed museums and interviewed veterans for any information which might confirm that somebody, somewhere did drop wooden bombs on a fake airfield. And I would say he is successful in this task: he has found some wooden bombs in museum collections, and perhaps more importantly, found some eyewitnesses. There are still some gaps, but it does look like the wooden bomb story did happen in reality, and more than once.

The bigger question is: why? Courouble looks at a number of explanations, the most intriguing of which is that the wooden bombs were part of a SOE psychological warfare operation. This might sound fanciful, and admittedly there’s no hard evidence for it (most SOE files were apparently lost at the end of the war, and many still are not open). But the lift to civilian morale in occupied France is very noticeable in many of the accounts Courouble has unearthed, and the relish with which the stories have been retold by veteran pilots speaks to similar effects in unoccupied Europe. And some of the wooden bombs apparently also carried propaganda leaflets inside (’Wood for wood, iron for iron’). It doesn’t seem too fanciful to suggest that SOE perhaps carried out some wooden bomb operations, and fanned rumours of many more, as part of their brief to set Europe ablaze. But that is speculation, and Courouble rightly hesitates to claim more than the evidence can bear, leaving a (perhaps) final resolution to future researchers. He (again, I think, rightly) decided against looking at operational records and the like, in favour of canvassing the quickly-dwindling veteran community, but that should be the next place to look.

Along the way, Courouble also looks into the history of military decoys and training bombs, and there are some excellent photos of wooden pocket battleships and wooden coastal defence guns, as well as wooden Messerschmitts and Focke-Wulfs. The writing style is lively and always interesting; there are a few places where the translation from the original French perhaps falls short (mostly military terminology) but it’s perfectly readable. (And how many books written in English have a simultaneous publication in French?) Although Courouble never claims to be a professional historian, I certainly appreciate his attention to detail and his doubt over hypotheses; and as noted his endnotes are extensive. I would like to have seen a table of contents and/or an index: the main text is over two hundred pages long, which is a bit too long to be flipping back and forth looking for certain passages.

It might be asked why such an obscure topic deserves a book all to itself. My answer would be: because, as Courouble shows, it happened! And because nobody has studied it in any depth until now. Anyone who likes following historical detective work, or traveling down the lesser-known byways of history, might enjoy Courouble’s book. And certainly anyone with any interest in the wooden bomb riddle at all will want to read The Riddle of the Wooden Bombs.

A question

13 July 2009 in 1910s, Other, Pictures by Brett Holman | 8 comments

When did people wearing monocles stop being taken seriously in public life?

Noel Pemberton Billing

Noel Pemberton Billing, independent candidate for Hertford, in 1916. From N. Pemberton-Billing, Air War: How to Wage It (London: Gale & Polden, 1916).

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

Wokingham Whale, 1910

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 | 16 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.

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