In the middle of the First World War, the Australian government found itself preoccupied with the possibility of civil unrest, perhaps even rebellion. In December 1916 the Hughes government passed the Unlawful Associations Act, which proscribed the Australian branch of the Industrial Workers of the World. The Wobblies had campaigned strongly against conscription in the October referendum, and proscription was Hughes's revenge for the No vote. But more than that, he believed that every IWW member was armed, and that many were of German extraction and thus potentially treasonous. Determined to be prepared for any eventuality, by the start of February 1917, the government had assembled 900 armed men, chosen for their political reliability, in each state's capital city, backed up with a machine gun. Melbourne, as the national capital, was the best defended. It had an AIF infantry battalion, a reserve company, the District Guard, two 18-pounder guns, two machine-gun sections, and 50 light-horsemen.

It also had two aeroplanes at its disposal, for 'their great moral effect':

(a) To overawe rioters by their presence in the air.
(b) To cooperate with the Artillery.
(c) To assist in dispersing the rioters by the use of machine guns and revolvers and by dropping bombs or hand grenades.

What was that last part again?

To assist in dispersing the rioters by the use of machine guns and revolvers and by dropping bombs or hand grenades.

I find this quite extraordinary, that an Australian government was preparing to strafe and bomb its own citizens for the crime of rioting. That's the sort of thing that dictators do. But should I be surprised? Let's look at some similar cases from around the same time.

Australia was certainly not the only democracy to make plans to use military force to suppress civil dissent during the war, though it may have done so earlier than others. From March 1918, France held four cavalry divisions behind the front for use against strikers and pacifists (and apparently did use them). Brock Millman has shown that after the Russian revolution in 1917, Britain too was worried about internal dissent possibly spilling over into outright revolt. Emergency Scheme L was drawn up in May 1918; Millman describes it as a 'doomsday scenario':

Scheme L, basically, was a plan for the formation of composite infantry and artillery brigades, and other units, from forces held in the UK but not dedicated to home defence. This would be followed by a levée en masse by battalions of volunteers, and the effective cessation of civilian authority in the British Isles.

A total of 19 infantry brigades would be formed in this way, along with supporting artillery and cyclist units. One group would cover Red Clydeside; another Tyneside, also the scene of labour unrest; and a third would assemble in East Anglia, near London. It's clear that this plan was not for defence against a German invasion (as were most other home defence plans), because the deployment to these areas was automatic and not contingent on where the enemy landed. But as an uprising could quickly spread from one flashpoint to the rest of the country, it makes sense that the Army would keep its options as open as possible while keep watch on the main danger areas. And with as large a force as possible, the better to overawe rioting workers.

Now, Millman focuses on the military aspects of Scheme L. But he also says that the RAF's VI Brigade would assist. This makes sense. VI Brigade formed the backbone of Britain's air defences, and so was the largest combat-ready air force in the country (even if ground support wasn't its forte). Unfortunately Millman doesn't give any details of how it was intended to be used against civil unrest (it might not even have been specified in the plans) but it probably would have been similar to the Australian plans the year before. We'll probably never know because there was no uprising in Britain in 1918 and Scheme L was never invoked.

Then again. Less than two years later Britain was facing a truly revolutionary situation, albeit across the water in Ireland. As of the summer of 1920 two RAF squadrons were deployed there; overcoming low serviceability rates they did useful work in reconnaissance, communications and logistics. Despite the repeated please of British commanders, for most of the war their aircraft were unarmed, apparently for fear of hitting noncombatants. But in March 1921, near the end of the fighting, the Cabinet did in fact authorise arming them for use only over rural areas and only when rebels were actually attacking British forces (or just about to or had just finished, which seems to admit of some uncertainty). According to David Omissi, the RAF flew only a small fraction of total flying hours armed, and 'probably' didn't cause any casualties.

So that's a lot more discretion than it sounds like the Australians were planning to use. Let's turn to a case where there were no rules of engagement at all: the Tulsa race riot of 1921. This was a very different context to the ones discussed above: the riots were more in the vein of a massive lynch mob than a military operation. And the aircraft were not used to put down the riots, but (so it is claimed) to support them. On the morning of 1 June, following an attempted lynching the day before, white mobs surrounded, attacked and set fire to the black district of Greenwood. Thirty-nine people were killed, twenty-six of them black. African-American eyewitnesses claimed that aeroplanes took part, by dropping incendiary bombs or liquids, perhaps petrol (alright, 'gasoline' then). There were also reports of rifle-fire from the aircraft against people on the ground. Here, unlike in Australia, Britain and Ireland, the aircraft in question were civilian, not military; at most they may have private aeroplanes used by the Tulsa police department. It's anyway unclear whether the air attacks did take place; unsurprisingly there was no official investigation. An analysis by Richard S. Warner concludes that:

It is within reason that there was some shooting from planes and even the dropping of incendiaries, but the evidence would seem to indicate that it was of a minor nature and had no real effect in the riot.

Technically, the attacks were in support of civil unrest -- that is, caused by white Tulsans -- not suppressing it, though it's possible that the perpetrators thought they were acting to prevent an uprising.

Then, of course, there's the practice of air control in British, French and Spanish colonies and mandates. Britain, for example, had been doing this in a big way since 1919, in Egypt, Somaliland, and the North-West Frontier, though it had first experimented with it in the Sudan in 1916. From 1922 it was used to pacify an Iraq-wide rebellion which had been boiling over since 1920. Spain and France bombed insurgents in the Rif War (and may have even used gas, though Britain did not [Update: Spain did use gas in Morocco: see Sebastian Balfour's Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War]); France bombed Damascus in 1926. It's hard to get a clear idea of the civilian casualties caused by these attacks -- the RAF in effect maintained that its operations were a kind of game which frightened but did not harm -- but Priya Satia argues that for the threat to work it had to be carried out from time to time. Air control is where the definition of civil unrest stretches almost to breaking point, but in a revealing way: the Europeans were not bombing their own people or even other Europeans, but Arabs and Kurds and Somalis. They were held to be almost incomprehensibly different to Europeans. As the British high commissioner in Iraq warned in 1931,

the term 'civilian population' has a very different meaning in Iraq from what it has in Europe [...] the whole of its male population are potential fighters as the tribes are heavily armed.

That is, they were othered. And so the aeroplane could be turned against them with few moral qualms.

To draw these strands together, it suggests that a government could not in fact turn its aircraft against its own people -- it had to exclude them from the national community first. The Australian government in 1916-7 viewed the Wobblies as traitors, and this presumably would have been the case for the British government dealing with insurrection in 1918; white Tulsan rioters in 1921 certainly did not see their black fellow-citizens as part of their community; colonial regimes in the 1920s and 1930s by definition saw themselves as utterly separate from those they ruled. Ireland in 1921 represents an interesting edge case: the restraint exercised by the British suggests that they themselves believed that their rule was illegitimate, that it was not 'their' country any longer.

The counter-revolutionary value of airpower was predicted in 1909 by L. Cecil Jane, the medievalist brother of Fred T. Jane. In an article entitled 'The political aspect of aviation', Jane argued that aircraft would be invaluable in suppressing revolutions, because by flying high above the rioting crowds their crews would have no opportunity for fraternisation. Anyway, they would tend to be owned by the better sort of people, not the sort to sympathise with rebellions.

But if it be true that aviation has thus given a new strength to the existing order, so far as resistance to forcible changes is concerned; if it be true that masses of people will no longer possess an inevitable supremacy, then we have indeed reached an epoch in the history of political development. The establishment in almost every country of representative institutions, of popular government in some shape or form, may fairly be attributed to the invincibility of the 'the Many.' [...] Popular government, like all other forms of government, rests ultimately upon the unanswerable argument of superior force. If that argument no long support [sic] it, it may be asked whether the institution will itself endure. Visions of a despotism may appear to be no longer mere wild imaginings, of a depotism [sic] of aviators, who will have the one final argument on their side.

He was right about the counter-revolutionary uses of aviation; but fortunately (for believers in democracy, at least) wrong about its 'unanswerable argument'.

And fortunately for Australia, there were no worker riots in 1917, and so our government didn't have to carry out its plans to bomb us.

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

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

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

After 1918 there is a lull; I couldn't find any mystery aircraft sightings until 1927, when a few start to pop up. (Which certainly doesn't mean they aren't there to be found. I just found another one, albeit for 1928 as well.) Why might that be? Well, looking at the ngram above again is suggestive. This time the plot extends covers 1918 to 1942, and is for 'plane' as well as 'aeroplane' -- the former becomes more common from the late 1920s. After a relatively flat level of interest in aviation during most of the 1920s (actually falling considerably from the immediate postwar years), the number of articles using the word 'plane' almost doubles between 1926 and 1928, after which it is fairly stable until a dip in 1932 and 1933. So once more there's a buzz about aeroplanes (or rather planes), a widespread curiosity about aviation. Why was this so?

It was certainly nothing to do with fear of war in these Locarno years. I haven't tested this quantitatively, but it can't be a coincidence that these were the years of some of the great pioneering long-distance flights. Australia was the destination and, in some cases, the birthplace of many of the aviators who carried out these feats: the Englishman Alan Cobham flew from England to Australia and back in 1926, for which he was knighted; in 1928, Bert Hinkler, an Australian, was the first to make the trip solo. That same year, Charles Kingsford-Smith and Charles Ulm, also Australians, were the first to fly across the vast Pacific and then the smaller Tasman. The excitement that Charles Lindbergh's 1927 New York-Paris flight generated is well-known; something similar happened, if perhaps less intense, must have happened in Australia. The emotional investment in these pioneer aviators and their dangerous lives perhaps explains the number of false reports of aeroplane crashes around 1930.

And it wasn't just the big names either. Here's a plot of the number of civil aircraft registered in Australia from 1922 to 1939. Between 1926 and 1928, this increased from 55 to 90 or 63% (and then another 144% between 1928 and 1930).

Other statistics -- number of flights, number of hours flown, number of passengers carried -- tell the same story. There was a huge increase in flying in the late 1920s, followed by a bust (no doubt due to the Depression) and another boom in the late 1930s. So it makes sense that mystery aeroplanes began to be seen again from 1927-8 or so. It was the golden age of Australian aviation: far more people were talking about and flying in aeroplanes than ever before.

Apart from the air crash theory, other explanations for mystery aircraft in the late 1920s and early 1930s included opium smugglers and -- in 1934 -- a Japanese reconnaissance of the northern coast. Japan was invoked, either explicitly or implicitly, in the Darwin and Hobart sightings in 1938, and the Townsville incidents in 1942. This brings me back to my original purpose in starting this series, which was to see if Australian mystery aircraft sightings can be used as an index of public anxiety about national defence. And my answer is 'yes', but it's a heavily qualified 'yes'. It's quite obviously so in 1918 and 1942, but then the country was at war (and in the latter case actually under attack), so that's no surprise. In the late 1920s and early 1930s there was no cause for Australians to be alarmed, so again it's no surprise that mystery aircraft weren't seen to be hostile. The more difficult cases are in 1909 and, to a lesser extent, 1938. In 1909, the mystery aircraft were the object of curiosity, not suspicion. But that same year Britain was undergoing every sort of defence panic around: invasion, dreadnoughts, airships, spies. Australians were also very worried about invasion, albeit from Japan, not Germany. Why didn't Australians imagine Japanese airships spying from overhead, preparing the way for the Emperor's soldiers?

The answer must have something to do with perceived plausibility, which in turn depends on perceived capability and perceived intent. In 1909, Germany had Zeppelins; Japan had nothing. If Japan had been publicly and successfully experimenting with longrange aircraft in like fashion to Germany, then Australians might have believed that the 1909 mystery airships were Japanese, just as Britons believed that theirs were German. In 1938, things were different. Everyone had aircraft now; and Japan was closer, in the sense that it had forward bases in Micronesia as well as aircraft carriers. It was now plausible to imagine that Japanese aircraft could reach Australia.

I was going to suggest that it was also now more plausible to imagine that Japan intended to attack Australia: after the Marco Polo Bridge incident in 1937 (and setting aside the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 which seems to have made less of an impression) it was clearly in an aggressive, expansionist phase. But the above plot suggests that press interest, at least, in Japan actually declined after 1937. That's a very crude index, of course, but it's consistent with Augustine Meaher's argument that Australians were surprisingly unconcerned about Japan in the late 1930s, contrary to Peter Stanley's view.

This is starting to get confusing. But, paradoxically, considering another problem with mystery aircraft may help here. Why were there no big waves of mystery aircraft sightings after the First World War? This seems to be true worldwide. Between 1896 and 1918 there were a number of times where mystery aircraft are seen in many places by many people over a short period of time: the United States, Canada, Britain, New Zealand, Australia. Afterwards, while there were certainly mystery aircraft sightings, they tended to occur singly, appearing once or twice at one place and then disappearing. They were also interpreted in isolation: nobody seems to have connected the Hobart mystery aeroplane of July 1938 with the Darwin case in February, nobody saw them as part of the same phenomenon. I'm not sure why this is, but I suspect that a greater familiarity with real aircraft must have had something to do with it. Actual aircraft were very rare in all countries when mystery aircraft waves took place: airships and aeroplanes were imagined far more than seen. This ignorance made it easier to believe that a planet, a fire-balloon or a Reticulan battlecruiser was in fact a aeroplane: easier for the witnesses, easier for everyone they told to believe them, easier for the journalists covered the story to treat it seriously. The spread of the idea that Germans (etc) were flying around in the sky met no resistance -- at least for a while: when the press starts to get sceptical the mystery aircraft waves tend to collapse very quickly.

So, while the huge increase in flying in Australia from the late 1920s may have put aviation at the forefront of the national consciousness and provided imaginative fodder for mystery aircraft incidents, it seems to have provided an inoculation against mass waves of sightings. For that to occur there needed to be plausibility, curiosity, and ignorance. All three at once. Mystery aircraft do appear at other times, but don't lead to anything else and are soon forgotten.

I'm not happy with this post; it's long and rambling, unfocused and confusing. Partly that's due to me making it up as I go along rather than planning ahead; but it's also partly due to the fuzzy nature of the mystery aeroplane phenomenon (and indeed history) itself. In trying to find common factors and causes I run the risk of imposing my own order where there is none. Maybe there is really no point to this. Maybe the Scareship Age was no such thing. So people thought they saw aircraft flying around where they were none. So what? Sometimes I think I should focus my research on phantom airships and mystery aeroplanes: it's something that few other historians are interested in and so it's one area where I can make a distinctive contribution. But then again, maybe there's a reason why it's a fallow field.

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

1. Koroit, Vic, 1906: an odd object which at one point 'assumed a shape somewhat resembling that of an airship'.
2. 1909 wave, nation-wide: no single interpretation dominated but generally described as airships.
3. Minderoo, WA, 1910: an airship, either a secret Australian invention or from a foreign vessel off the coast.
4. SS Wookata, off Althorpe Island, SA, 1910: strange lights, described by one witness as being 'like German airships flying about'.
5. Ballarat, Vic, 1911: an 'air-ship' or 'biplane'.
6. Melbourne, Vic, 1911: an 'aeroplane'.
7. Cairns, Qld, 1913: a 'mysterious object resembling an aeroplane'.
8. Lameroo, SA, 1914: an 'aeroplane'. February, so before the outbreak of war.
9. Mullumbimby/Billinudgel/Lismore, NSW, 1914: this time it's October, and there seems to have been much debate about whether the 'aeroplane' seen over a period of days (or weeks) belonged to Germany (no, because it would have dropped a bomb) or the Australian Army (then why wasn't it flying in daytime?). Another article intriguingly mentions 'the aeroplane or Zeppelin' alongside an 'awful carronading out to sea' heard at Tweed Heads, but let's not get distracted...
10. Corporoo, QLD, 1915: an 'aeroplane' (though it is also described as an 'airship', I suspect this is as a synonym for aircraft). No defence implications.
11. 1918 wave, nation-wide though most reports were from Victoria and, to a lesser extent, New South Wales. The implication was very definitely that the aeroplanes (rarely, Zeppelins) were German, possibly from raiders offshore.
12. Broome, WA, 1927: two aeroplanes believed to be operating from a ship offshore, involved in opium smuggling.
13. Flinders Island, Tas, 1928: an 'aeroplane engine' was heard followed by the sound of a crash. A search found nothing. This was connected to the missing New Zealand airmen Hood and Moncrieff, who the same day had taken off from Sydney in an attempt to be the first to fly the Tasman Sea. Interestingly, there were similar false sightings in New Zealand -- all very Andrée-like.
14. Broken Hill, NSW, 1929: an aeroplane was seen trailing smoke and believed to have crashed, but an extensive search found no trace.
15. Needles, Tas, 1931: yet another mistaken report of an aeroplane crash.
16. Thursday Island, Qld, 1934: two aeroplanes seen by fishing boats, which also reported a 'Japanese sampan' nearby; the Defence Department was notified. Thursday Island is off the tip of Cape York, about as far north as Australia gets.
17. Bowen, Qld, 1935: an 'aeroplane' reported to be 'in difficulties'; believed to be a hoax report as no such aircraft could be identified and this wasn't the first time this had happened.
18. Darwin, NT, 1938: an aeroplane was heard and seen on two occasions, leading to many different theories being proposed. A long-distance reconnaissance from Palau was one of these, but the Japanese angle only had much traction in Darwin itself.
19. Hobart, Tas, 1938: not-very-convincing attempts to suggest that an aeroplane seen diving on Hobart was from a foreign ship off the coast, but in any case the incident was said to show the city's defencelessness.
20. Broken Hill, NSW, 1941: a 'mysterious object' seen in the air was thought by some to be 'an aeroplane'. This was reported on the very same day as the Japanese declaration of war, though no connection is evident (other than the article being surrounded by war news).
21. Townsville, Qld, 1942: Japan isn't mentioned here either, but it's pretty obvious that's who the 'number of unidentified planes [...] seen over the Atherton Tableland' were assumed to belong to, if only from the black-out and other air-raid precautions which were undertaken.
22. Townsville, Qld, 1942: this time two 'military type' aircraft were seen over Townsville; fighters and anti-aircraft guns failed to shoot them down. Despite the caveat ('If the planes were hostile') it does seem likely that these were Japanese aircraft. Townsville was bombed less than two months later.
23. Port Augusta, SA, 1947: not described as any sort of aircraft at all, actually, just as five 'strange objects' (about the size of 'locomotives'). That's quite unusual but these were quite unusual objects, described as quivering, 'oblong with narrow points' and casting a shadow (at 9am). The consensus seems to have been meteors (though the state astronomer disagreed and also rejected a mirage theory). A few months later the flying saucer craze started in the United States and the Adelaide Advertiser was able to claim that 'Port Augusta "started something"'.

What does it all mean? I'll discuss that in the (hopefully) final post in this series.

I've updated my list of British newspapers online, 1901-1950 to reflect the new titles available in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA), a pay-site which was launched with some fanfare about a month ago. Although it has been digitised from (and in partnership with) the British Library's newspapers collections, I must admit to not having paid much attention at the time because it sounded like it only covered 1900 and earlier. While that's mostly true, there's actually enough to interest an early 20th-century historian, especially in terms of regional newspapers, and more titles and pages are promised. Having said that, the price structure isn't very appealing for what's on offer, so I haven't subscribed to BNA and probably won't until I have a specific purpose in mind.

Most of the 20th-century titles are available only up to 1903. But the Western Times (Exeter) is available right up until 1950, and the Tamworth Herald until 1944. Four other newspapers have digitised runs of over a decade: Cheltenham Looker-On (1902 to 1913); North Devon Journal (Barnstaple, to 1923); Nottingham Evening Post (1921 to 1944); Western Daily Press (Bristol, 1915 to 1930). You can download whole pages (though apparently not individual articles), though sadly without a text layer. The free samples are good quality -- of course, they would be, but keyword searches (which you can do for free) suggests that the OCR is generally good. There is also the ability to correct the text where the OCR fails; and you can tag or comment on individual articles. User accounts also come with a 'My Research' section which allows you to bookmark articles as well as view a history of previous searches performed and articles viewed. A potentially handy feature is the ability to perform a keyword search on just the articles you've viewed. Searching in general is fast and powerful; you can quickly narrow a query by period, area, title or section of newspaper. I'm impressed with BNA's user interface overall: it is a lot like (and I'm sure directly inspired by) the National Library of Australia's Trove Digitised Newspapers but with a few more improvements for the dedicated researcher in mind.

Now for the complaints. These all revolve around the non-free nature of BNA. I do have philosophical objections to state institutions handing over their nation's cultural heritage largely preserved at taxpayer expense to free enterprise to make a buck out of, but there are practical problems too. The facilities for tagging, commenting and correcting are great, for example, but I question whether these are going to be used much in a non-open environment like this. Especially corrections: Trove has a community of eager text-correctors who make over a hundred thousand corrections a day; but then Trove is free. Expecting people to pay BNA for the privilege of improving their product is a bit much to ask, it seems to me. Apparently the current commercial arrangement will last for ten years, after which it may become open; but by then the technology will no doubt need updating and probably another commercial arrangement to fund it. I realise that digitisation and hosting costs money and it's not the British Library's fault it had to go down this route if it wanted to make its newspaper collection available to all; but I much prefer the Antipodean ethos on this one. Some of the problems resulting from the non-free, non-open nature of BNA could be fixed, though. As I noted above, given the limited number of titles currently available for the 20th century, subscribing for a whole year is not attractive to me. Why not have a cheaper option for just the 20th century?

The RAF Displays held at Hendon between 1920 and 1937 were unique, in that no other air force attempted to project a vision of itself, its capabilities and its responsibilities in so public a way, on such a large scale and over such a long period. Of course, that's largely because there weren't many air forces around. Or rather, they did exist, but not independently of their nation's army and navy. Putting on such a big show was important for the RAF precisely because it was newborn: it needed to convince everyone (parliamentarians, journalists, the public, the other services, other nations) that it was necessary and/or that it was successful. Hendon seemed to have fulfilled this very well, judging by press attention and attendance numbers.

But viewed another way, the RAF Displays weren't unprecedented at all. Both the British Army and the Royal Navy had their own forms of public display. The Army had long performed in public, in fact, such ceremonies as trooping the colours, and the 19th century witnessed a huge growth in the popularity of military reviews, according to Scott Hughes Myerly 'the most popular and elaborate public manifestation of the military spectacle':

The action on the field consisted of evolutions of drill, musket volleys with blanks, and cannon salutes. Often a sham battle or mock, siege would be staged between two opposing units, or a bayonet or cavalry charge would be a part of the show.

I'm not sure of the actual content of these mock battles, though the fact they they were performed during the Napoleonic Wars suggests an obvious ideological function. For it's part, the Navy also developed fleet reviews into what Jan Rüger has termed 'a new form of public theatre'. This happened much later in the century, however, dramatically increasing in frequency after the review held for Victoria in 1887 on the occasion of her golden jubilee. By their nature, naval reviews afforded fewer opportunities for presenting narratives of actual combat. There were some, though, for example a 'mock-attack carried out by torpedo boats and submarines' at the 1909 Spithead review. Like the RAF later, and doubtless the Army before it, the Navy rather dubiously insisted that these were not mere spectacles but training for war.

Although Hendon itself was a pre-war site of aerial spectacle, that was a private enterprise and had nothing to do with the RFC (which probably would have been hard pressed to compete in qualitative terms anyway). So it was only after 1918 that it got into the game. The Navy held its first review in ten years in July 1924, shortly after the fifth Hendon, but as before the opportunities for creativity were limited. The Army began holding its own annual pageant in 1920, the Aldershot Command Searchlight Tattoo, a revival of an smaller event dating to the 1890s which now continued right up until the eve of war in 1939. There are many similarity with Hendon, which began the same year; the RAF seems to have even participated in Aldershot to some degree by providing aeroplanes as required. Like Hendon, Aldershot became very popular, growing from 22,000 spectators in 1922 to 300,000 by 1929 and gaining in social cachet. Again like Hendon, they were carefully choreographed and stage-managed, perhaps even more so -- there were systems of flashing lights backstage to give soldiers their cues and photographs were taken in rehearsal at 1 second intervals to see if anyone was out of step! But while there were some attempts in the early years to depict modern warfare, from 1925 the focus moved to historical re-enactments of the Army's past triumphs, especially Waterloo. So even as the Army was mechanising and experimenting in armoured warfare, to the public it chose to project an outdated style of warfare, dressing its men in redcoats rather than khaki. This is very different to the RAF's instincts when it came to public display, and it would be interesting to know what the reasons were. In any case, by dwelling on the past there was less chance of offending someone (apart from the French).

Another way to compare Hendon is internationally. Was there anything comparable to Hendon overseas? Yes, and Hendon seems to have been the direct inspiration. David Omissi notes that Italo Balbo, the senior Italian fascist, aviator and no mean impresario of aerial propaganda himself, attended Hendon in 1927 and 1932, declared that 'the RAF Display was the finest thing in aviation'. After he became Air Minister in 1929, he laid on two Giornata dell'ala, 'days of the wing' in 1930 and 1932, which sound very like Italian Hendons -- right down to mock air raids on Arab villages. But otherwise I don't know of anything quite like it. According to Peter Fritzsche, Germany had 'Carefully choreographed Nazi airshows' which attracted big crowds, but what messages they attempted to propagate beyond the obvious (i.e. airpower makes Germany powerful) is unclear. Maybe the Soviets? Scott Palmer has described in some detail Soviet airminded propaganda activities, but for the most part these revolved around big flights and agit-flights (that is, long distance record or proving flights and flying visits to remote villages). The exceptions, such as a 1927 'aerial parade in which more than three-dozen aircraft, flying in formation, spelled out the names of [Communist] Party luminaries' -- 'the largest aviation spectacle organized to date in the Soviet Union' -- don't seem to have involved anything like a Hendon set-piece. It's interesting that I'm reaching for comparisons with dictatorships here; they would seem to be the natural home for Hendon-like military aviation spectacles, and indeed the other democracies don't seem to have gone in for them. So what does that say about Britain and aviation between the wars?

It must say something, for Hendon wasn't the only form of official airminded propaganda in Britain -- far from it. The RAF was involved in a whole panoply of flying displays and other spectacles. It participated in flying displays put on by private flying clubs, such as the Birmingham Air Pageant in 1927 which had a hundred thousand visitors over two days. This included the bombing and destruction of a fake castle. A jubilee air review put on for George V in 1935 heralded more mass flypasts in the years of rearmament, helping to emphasise the RAF's strength of numbers. More significantly, in 1934 the first Empire Air Day was held at the suggestion of the Air League of the British Empire. This was the RAF's 'at home' day, where the public could visit their local military aerodrome and see what the flying life was like. Recruitment was surely a motivation, as perhaps was the desire to avoid a less-overtly warlike form of display (like Aldershot, Hendon was under increasing pressure from pacifists and the left for promoting militarism, especially to schoolchildren who were given free admission to the dress rehearsal). The latter concern may have curtailed the spread of displays resembling the Hendon set-pieces in the 1930s. As I discussed here recently, in 1924 and 1925 the RAF staged a mock aerial bombardment of London for the enjoyment of paying customers. The annual Air Defence of Great Britain (ADGB) exercises held between 1927 and 1931, which were public partly by virtue of being held around London and partly by being reported by accompanying journalists, were from 1932 held in more remote locations because they were too visible and open to misinterpretation, according to Tami Biddle. But it's possible that these types of practical propaganda simply transmuted into civil defence drills once ARP preparations began in 1935. The 1935 ADGB exercises, for example, involved practice blackouts in port cities like Chatham and Portsmouth, as Marc Wiggam explains, for the purpose of seeing how easy it was to hide a town in darkness rather than educating the public on how to prepare for air raids. This would necessarily involved aircraft flying overhead, playing the role of enemy bombers. But did RAF aircraft also take part in later, more civilian ARP exercises to increase their realism to the participants on the ground? That seems to have happened overseas, in Italy and Germany, but I'm not sure if it did in Britain.

There's lots to be done.

I've recently begun some research at the National Archives of Australia (the Melbourne reading room of which is conveniently only about half a kilometre from my house) into the 1918 mystery aeroplane scare. It's always exciting to get to work on a new set of primary sources; and this is my first time working in a state archive so it's doubly interesting. I can already see that there's a lot of useful material, and my original idea of a short, simple case study is already starting to seem optimistic.

The main file I've looked at so far is NAA: MP367/1, 512/3/1319, 'Reports from 2nd M D during War Period on lights, aeroplanes, signals etc.', a big fat dossier of reports from the public and the results of military and police investigations into them. 2nd Military District seems to have covered New South Wales, so it's actually not what I ultimately want: most of the 1918 sightings took place in Victoria, i.e. 3rd Military District. But as NSW was the other big state (somewhat more people, more important industrially and commercially; but Victoria had the seat of government and defence headquarters) it'll be useful as a control.

There are three main types of reports: signalling, wireless, and aeroplanes. The first is easily the largest, and consists of people seeing lights flashed from houses, from a hill top, on the coast, etc, and reporting them as suspected lights from German agents. For example, in May 1918 Mrs Clara A. Woollard of Pambula wrote that

I think it is my duty to inform you that flashlight signals were being displayed in the sky, to the west, at about eight o'clock last night.

She had seen this light on several previous occasions, and thought that it was 'as if someone were telegraphing messages by that means'. Virtually all of these reports seem to have turned out to be false alarms, often caused by people carrying hurricane lamps late at night so they could see where they were going. Most of the suspect houses turned out to be inhabited by good, solid 'Britishers'.

Nationality and ethnicity was also important in the wireless cases. These were suspected wireless installations, with a big antenna and associated plant, potentially capable of sending and receiving messages to and from -- where? Other secret agents? Ships off the coast? The Fatherland? As with the signals, it's not always clear just what the suspicion was, only that they were suspicious. But who needs something like that, anyway? Conveniently, unauthorised possession of such wireless installations was already prohibited under pre-war legislation, as was pointed out in press notices in September 1914. This led to a rash of reports from the public, which continued at a fairly steady rate until the end of the war. As late as September 1918, for example, the Provost Marshal Office of 2nd Military District investigated the concerns of Mrs Caroline H. Scott of Darlinghurst, who

is of the opinion that there is a Wireless Plant in the vicinity of her residence as she has noticed flashes & also heard the tick tacking [sic] similar to those produced by a Wireless Plant. These noises & flashes occurred about between 3 & 4.o.clock in the mornings & she considered it her duty to inform the Authorities of same.

Often there was a suspicious foreigner involved. Sometimes the wireless installations were real enough (one man was using his to carry out research into the effect of radio waves on plant growth!) but none seem to have been to have been used in espionage or subversion.

And then there were the aeroplanes. This is the smallest category in 2nd Military District's files, nineteen cases for the whole war: seven in 1914, when you might expect some war jitters, and another seven in 1918, mostly after the Hindenburg offensive on the Western Front and the reports of raiders off the coast. A very few were actual aeroplanes, generally sitting in somebody's workshop somewhere. At Hay in November 1914, V. B. Sylvander's activities were investigated by a police detective. Sylvander and his son had already built one aeroplane, which had been damaged in testing; a second one was being built but lacked an engine. Sylvander wisely proposed to give this to the government when it was finished, which perhaps influenced the detective's judgement that he was 'a loyal Britisher' despite being a 'naturalised Russian Finn'. Most others were the more usual lights in the night sky, as seen over Britain, New Zealand and Australia in 1909 and elsewhere/when.

Some were more substantial and unusual: in June 1918, Miss McCann of Beckom was sitting in her room at 1am when she 'heard the buzzing noise of an aeroplane and a ray of light shot across her bed like a searchlight and seem to be going south'. She said that it didn't sound like a motor car (though later she admitted that it might have been just that). In this case, it wasn't just the sound and the light: McCann seems to have suspected a local family of disloyalty. She mentioned to the policeman interviewing her that a 'strange man' had visited the Groth farm nearby, and it turned out that they had recently had a large box of ammunition delivered to them. Three of the family's sons, of age and medically fit, had claimed conscientious objection to military service on religious grounds. The Groth brothers were born in Australia, but their parents were from Germany, and this combined with their 'disloyal' attitude denied them the status of 'Britishers'. A number of followup investigations led to the reluctant conclusion that the Groths weren't up to any mischief (the ammunition was for hunting and pest control), but one suspects the damage to their reputation was done.

One mystery aeroplane stands out because it was actually a phantom airship: a Zeppelin seen at Young in July 1918 by W. G. Rogers, a professional photographer. In a letter to the Minister for Defence, Senator George Pearce, Rogers said that

I saw what appeared to me be [sic] an airship of the Zeppelin type due west from this town in size it appeared to be about 40ft. long but no doubt it was much larger as it was some miles distant. It was steering zig-zag course as though it was having trouble with the heavy wind which was blowing that morning.

It sunk out of sight to the west at around 8am. Just what a Zeppelin would be doing at Young, more than 250 km inland from Sydney, is not clear. Rogers's account was taken seriously, but a police sergeant detailed to investigate reported that nobody else had seen the Zeppelin. Furthermore,

Mr Roger's [sic] is a very respectable resident of Young, but very near sighted and I am of the opinion that he saw a snow cloud, and believed it to be an airship.

About the time mentioned by Mr Roger's [sic] there was a strong wind blowing with rain and snow.

My favourite find, though, is the one that made me laugh inappropriately at the archive. The Captain-in-Charge of His Majesty's Australian Naval Establishments, Sydney, wrote in December 1917 to 2nd Military District's Military Intelligence Officer about a purported illegal wireless installation at St Ignatius College:

I would point out the peculiar merits of this supposed apparatus,

1. Peculiar flashes.
2. Finding imaginary earthquakes.

I would suggest it might also be applied for finding the supposed brains of the Prime Minister's correspondent.

As the writer was John Glossop, formerly commander of HMAS Sydney and victor over the raider SMS Emden in 1914, he probably had good reason to feel his time was being wasted. But scepticism didn't stop the reports of strange signals, illegal aerials, and mystery aeroplanes. Only the end of the war did that.

Military History Carnival #29 is up at Cliopatria. There are quite a few airpower posts this time around; consider this one at Bring the Heat, Bring the Stupid on the DEW Line, the North American continental early warning system built in the 1950s and lasting into the 1980s. I knew about the DEW Line itself, a radar chain built along the north coast of Canada and Alaska to provide early warning of Soviet bombers. But I didn't know about the Texas Towers, effectively radars sited on oil rigs, nor did I know about the radar picket lines formed from destroyer escorts and Lockheed Constellations. The former bring to mind the Maunsell forts in the Thames and Mersey estuaries, some of which were for air defence, fitted with AA and searchlights (though I'm not sure if they were used for early warning as such). The latter remind me of suggestions made in 1939 (April) by the pseudonymous Ajax for both sea pickets ('observation ships equipped with sound locators, detectors, range-finders, and searchlights') and air pickets ('reconnaissance air-cruisers', five-man flying boats with long range and endurance) to extend the pitiful range of land-based sound locators and give some warning of an impending air raid on London. Nothing new etc.

I recently said that I've been meaning to write about the spectacular and dramatic set pieces which usually marked the climax of the RAF Pageants, held at Hendon aerodrome every summer from 1920 to 1937. So here goes! The themes chosen for these set-pieces tell us something about what ideas about airpower the RAF wished the public to absorb. Flight had good coverage of the pageants, and where possible I'll reference British Pathe newsreels. As there were so many I'll have to make this a series.

First, a bit of context. In 1910, Hendon (or London) aerodrome was established on the outskirts of London by Claude Grahame-White as a place where pioneer aviators could come to build, to train and to fly. But it was also the site of hugely popular aerial derbys and flying displays for the public, who came up from London in their many thousands to watch Grahame-White and others stunting over the airfield: the so-called 'Hendon Habit'. During the war, Hendon was requisitioned by the RFC for the purposes of training, test flying and occasional air defence. Grahame-White never got it back after the war, but he did manage to convince the government to allow it to be used once more for airminded propaganda: the Aerial Derby was re-established there in 1919.

The following year, the RAF itself got into the act by staging the first Hendon Pageant. This was held on Saturday, 3 July 1920. The crowd was estimated at about 40,000. While the programme was chock-full of aerobatics and mock combats, by comparison with later years the set-piece seems underdeveloped. In fact, it's hard to find one. The 'event of the day' is described as 'the strafing of Herr Von Rupert', an old kite balloon, by 'Flight-Lieut. Hazell, D.S.O., M.C., D.F.C. (34 Huns, 16 balloons)' flying a Sopwith Snipe. But this was followed by something which sounds more elaborate (photo at the top of the post):

A formation of five Bristol Fighters, flying in line, dived to about 300 ft. towards some "trenches," firing rounds from their machine guns at the same time. When over the trenches (about!) the Bristols "let go" their bombs -- which dropped so fast we could not see them fall -- and up went the trench and away flew the Bristols. It was a very impressive display.

But even this was followed by another display of aerial warfare:

By way of a finale, we were given a sort of aerial firework display; first of all a Handley Page [O/400?] discharged three artificial-cloud producing bombs, the resulting effects of which were really beautiful and convincing. Then some 1,300 small incendiary bombs were dropped from about 1,000 ft. These burst into bright white flames on striking the ground and remained burning for some time. They, also, were very convincing! Yes, these last few events made many think pretty hard on the matter of the next aerial war.

All of these were indeed spectacular, but they don't sound dramatic in the sense of telling a story. They aren't really what I'm talking about here.

The second RAF Pageant was held on Saturday, 2 July 1921. The crowd was more than twice the size of the first pageant. After the usual aerial action (including the downing of another observation balloon, henceforth manned by Major Sandbags), the finale was the destruction of the village of 'Scrappa Plain', built from scrap metal (photo above).

It was supposed that enemy headquarters, under Gen. Blitzenscooter, were quartered in this village -- we certainly observed quite a number of persons in grey-green uniforms foregathered round the Public Libeery [sic]. Several gaily dressed fräuleins were to be seen promenading about, whilst mechanics pottered about an Albatros biplane.

As the following British Pathe newsreel shows, Bristol Fighters appeared over the village. The soldiers leapt to their defences, the civilians 'took to flight', and General Blitzenscooter took off in his Albatros.

Soon the Bristol Fighters swooped down, firing bursts from their machine-guns, scattering the remainder of the occupants of the village, and as they passed over the village "released" their bombs [...] the Bristols made a second attack on the by then merrily burning village and pretty-well wiped it out. Seen from our point of vantage the whole effect was terribly realistic.

A Handley Page next flew over, dropping smoke bombs to screen a hypothetical infantry advance, and then, to close off the pageant, laid on a regular 'Brock's Benefit', i.e. an air-dropped fireworks display.

The next RAF Pageant, somewhat dampened by rain, was held on Saturday, 24 June 1922. The finale by now seems to be established as 'the event of the day', with corresponding effort made by the RAF to make it as memorable as popular. This time it was 'an Eastern drama, depicting the attack and destruction of a desert stronghold [...] intended to illustrate the work that was done by the R.A.F. in the East'.

The "plot" of the drama was quite thrilling, and was well carried out by the "actors". A machine (Bristol Fighter) returning from a reconnaissance, had to make a forced landing near the stronghold, which opened a fierce attack on the disabled machine. [...] Fortunately an armoured car section, returning from a raid, happened to be near at hand, and rushed up to the rescue, keeping off, with heavy machine-gun fire, numbers of gaily clothed Wottnotts, who had emerged from the stronghold.

A RAF bomber squadron then appeared on the scene. One machine lands by the stricken Brisfit bringing 'a spare air-speed indicator', and they are soon in the air again. (Photo above.)

In the meanwhile the bombing squadron attacked the stronghold, under heavy fire from an enemy anti-aircraft battery, mounted on motor lorries, situated some distance away. The bombs soon began to take effect, and after a few salves the stronghold was in flames, and the garrison was observed fleeing in all directions.

This was followed by the usual smokescreen-laying Handley Page.

Of course, the need for spectacle at least partly dictated the need to be destroying something, but what was chosen for destruction is surely significant. The 1920 and 1921 finales clearly look back to the late Great War (in the latter case a somewhat humorous attack on a village housing a German military HQ). In showing the destruction of a village of aggressive Wottnotts (yes, really) in the 1922 set piece, by contrast, was much more up to date: the RAF had earlier that very year assumed overall military control of the Iraq mandate, where it was attempting to use bombers and armoured cars to bring the area under air control. Hopefully it will be interesting to see how these finales evolved over the next decade and a half.

Update: I've added the advertising poster for the 1922 pageant ('Bombing a desert stronghold'); I found it at Onslow Posters.

Today is the one-hundredth anniversary of the first use of an aeroplane for aerial bombardment. I've already written about the longer context of Libya's history of bombing (to which can be added NATO's air campaign, which coincidentally enough has just ended), but here's where it all began, at Ain Zara on 1 November 1911:

A message from Tripoli says the aviator Gavotti, having located to-day a Turkish camp of about 2,000 men near Ain Zara, descended to within 2,000 metres of the spot and threw four bombs which exploded in the midst of the Turks. The explosions had frightful effects, and the Turks fled in all directions, the confusion being so great that not a single soldier thought of firing at the aeroplane. Gavotti had no more bombs with him, since he had contemplated nothing more than an experiment. The Turkish soldiers abandoned their camp and took shelter in caves.

(At least, according the Manchester Guardian; this account differs slightly from Gavotti's own: he dropped the fourth bomb on another oasis, presumably Taguira.) Such bombing seems to have become routine quite quickly; equally terse accounts of similar operations appeared in the British press in following days, and on 5 November the Italian government issued the first ever official communiqué concerning aerial warfare. None of this seemed to have excited much interest in Britain: it was a sideshow compared the more traditional and much bloodier battles on the ground, and the claims and counter-claims of massacres of civilians and wounded soldiers. The world has certainly come a long way since then.

In the venerable tradition of lazyblogging, here is a storified version of an exchange of tweets today between myself and @TroveAustralia, concerning an apparently forgotten Australian aviation pioneer, W. T. Carter of Williamstown, formerly a member of the Victorian colonial legislature. In the mid-1890s, Carter dabbled in electric motors (with help from A. U. Alcock, who has been credited with inventing an ancestor of the hovercraft) and propellors (later patenting one in Britain), and seems in 1894 to have successfully demonstrated a flying model, a small drum-shaped object with two propellors at each end. Long after his death it was claimed that he had actually built and flown an aeroplane at Maidstone, a western suburb of Melbourne, again in the mid-1890s, but it's hard to believe this could have escaped the attention of the press (especially given his evident interest in self-promotion).