The title of this post could refer to my own state of mind as I reach a crossroads in this project. As I said in the previous post, it's time to dig deeper into the 1918 Australian mystery aeroplane scare, to look beneath the surface. What was really going on? Why did people see mystery aeroplanes at this time and att this place? I have several lines of inquiry which should lead to an answer (if not the answer). One is the comparative and transnational perspective; another leads through airmindedness and the early understanding of and responses to flight. I'll address these in later posts. But the key perspective I need to try to recreate is the fear, uncertainty and doubt surrounding the mystery aeroplanes, of which they were (I argue) both a symptom and a cause. Which is the real reason for my choice of title. Really.

Again, there are a number of threads to follow. One is my starting point in all this: the role of the press. As I have already shown, the scare shows up in press accounts only for about four or five weeks after mid-March 1918, even though the number of sightings peaked after then. The terminus date for the press seems to be around 23 April. Up until then there is a steady stream of stories; afterwards I know of nothing until 4 June, when the Melbourne Age reported that about nine or ten people, including a returned soldier, watched an aeroplane fly over Charlton; the story was reprinted the following day in the Ballarat Courier (adding that 'The returned man had considerable experience with aircraft'); and after that there's nothing at all.

One possibility is that the newspapers lost interest in mystery aeroplanes, whether because they stopped believing them or just thought they were no longer newsworthy. Indeed, on 25 April the Adelaide Register declared that it had taken a patriotic stand against publishing 'scare war news'. But that doesn't appear to be the case generally. NAA MP1049/1, 1918/066, the Royal Australian Navy's file on mystery aeroplane sightings, includes at least twenty-nine distinct references to newspapers in a variety of forms, either press clippings or direct or indirect interactions. Four of these date to before 1918 (or at least are indeterminate in date) or relate to New Zealand. Of the balance, twelve are from on or before 23 April 1918, the date after which mystery aeroplane articles stopped appeared, and (logically enough) thirteen appeared afterwards. That suggests that the press were in fact still paying attention to the scare.

A more likely explanation is censorship. Of the twelve references on or before 23 April, ten are to actually published articles, one the WA censor passing on information from the Bunbury Herald's editor about a Zeppelin seen at Fremantle, and one was a notification from the censor that news of a mystery aeroplane sighting at Ballarat West had been suppressed. That is the earliest date for a censored report that I've found, and it's right on the watershed date of 23 April. The thirteen references after that date include only one published article (the Age one noted above), two notifications from the censor of suppressed articles, eight of articles submitted to the censor, and two of direct communications from newspapers to defence authorities regarding mystery aeroplane reports received (including one from the Register, despite its proclaimed scepticism). It's unclear whether the articles submitted to the censors were published or not (at least two were not; the others I'll have to check on microfilm) but even so it's evident that there's a very different censorship regime in this period than there was before 23 April. A check of NAA files relating to censorship should confirm this.

Whether there was formal censorship or not, the lack of stories about mystery aeroplanes means that the press was not the primary vector of mystery aeroplane stories after 23 April. I've suggested that it instead helped fuel it in other ways, by creating alarm about possible defeat in Europe and raids on Australia. But I'll still need to try to explain why the scare then continued; or, put differently, how did people 'know' that mysterious aeroplanes were around? I'll tackle that question in a following post.

View Mystery aircraft, Australia, 1918 in a larger map

My next step in characterising the 1918 Australian mystery aircraft scare was to plot all the sightings Google Maps, which you can see above. I've used differently-coloured icons for different time periods to give an idea of the progression over the course of 1918: blue is January and February; red, March; green, April; cyan, May; yellow, June; purple, July; magenta, August through November. There are too many for Google Maps to show at once in an embedded map (without me learning JavaScript) but the rest can be seen here. Each icon is named for the location and has an attached date, but no other information. I dithered over which map mode to use but in the end settled on good old satellite mode, as it gives an idea of the terrain but also has good social data such as roads and towns (even if these are from 2012, not 1918). Of course you can switch between them yourself.


View Mystery aircraft, Australia, 1914 in a larger map

I've made similar maps for the other war years, without colour-coding by month as there were too few sightings to warrant it. The maps for 1915 and 1916 are for the same reason very uninteresting, so I won't embed them here. The 1914 map is above; the 1917 one below.

View Mystery aircraft, Australia, 1917 in a larger map

As I've discussed, the date is often vague and at this level that applies to the location too. The information provided in the intelligence files is usually reasonably specific as to the town or locality; in only one case was I unable to find, even roughly, the place where a mystery aircraft was said to be seen ('Reef Creek, South East district, SA'; it's not in the national gazetteer or the state one). But below that level it's more variable. Sometimes there were sightings outside towns, on roads or railways or from remote properties. Again I've not been very fussy about this and have generally gone with however the sighting was classed at the time. For example, an aeroplane was reported to have chased a train early one morning from Kaniva to Dimboola. Where do I place the marker: Kaniva, Dimboola, or somewhere in between? I put it on Dimboola because that's where the Navy's index lists it, probably because that's where the police report came from. Also, sometimes the information I have only states where the aircraft was thought to be, not where it was seen from, and that is an estimation fraught with observer bias. So what I'm saying is don't place too much faith in my icon placement. It's another one of those things I don't care about too much -- it's not terribly important to me to be able to distinguish between a sighting in Hope Street or one in Smith Avenue, at this point what I'm trying to see are any large-scale patterns.

And for that it has been useful. It was already clear that Victoria was far and away where most of the mystery aircraft were seen in 1918, with NSW second (Terrigal/Terrigal Haven alone had eleven reports, though only three involved people other than the Moir family or Gunner Naughton) and the other states a long way behind. The map reinforces that impression; but it does more, because it shows that within Victoria some areas were favoured much more than others. Zooming in helps here:

View Mystery aircraft, Australia, 1918 in a larger map

There were no mystery aircraft reported from the Riverina region in the north, nor from the central area around Bendigo or the Alps (of course, there weren't many people living there either). The northeast had only a handful. By contrast, the Mallee and the Wimmera in the west of the state had a significant number of sightings. The red icons in the northeast mostly mark sightings which fell on the same day early in the scare, 21 March, including one by a policeman: it was taken very seriously and a pair of investigators came up from Melbourne travelling through the Mallee seeking out witnesses. There was another burst around Ouyen a month later. The activity in Wimmera included hotspots at Casterton (three sightings) and Hamilton (four), and the only occasion when an aeroplane was seen to land (according to the press, anyway; the eyewitnesses, a drover and a boy, said no such thing when they were eventually interviewed by police and military intelligence).

But the real heartland was the arc from the Kinglake ranges north of Melbourne, through Melbourne itself and right around the southeast coast to Orbost in Gippsland, also taking in the Latrobe Valley inland. Again there are many hotspots within this area: Bairnsdale with at least five sightings was the most visited by mystery aircraft in the whole state, though the first was not until May, quite late in the scare. Inverloch had four, Sale, Orbost and Yarram three. While Melbourne is massively underrepresented, given that in 1918 it had 51% of the state's population, given the difficulty of seeing anything at all in an urban night sky I think it had a reasonable amount, including one from West Footscray where I lived as a child; 'Anxious' of Brighton wrote in to the Herald (which passed the letter on to the censor) to ask whether the 'mysterious aeroplane' they had seen early on 7 May 'might be the German one that is about'. What was going on in these places? Why were they so prone to mystery aeroplane sightings? I don't have an answer, and I may not ever have a convincing one, but it's time to start digging deeper.

In my previous post, I threatened more statistics about Australian mystery aircraft scares of the First World War, and here they are. What I've been doing is collating all the sightings recorded in two NAA files, MP1049/1, 1918/066 and MP367/1, 512/3/1319. The former is the Navy Office's file pertaining to 'Reports of suspicious aeroplanes, lights etc', more than a thousand pages in all, though the majority of it is composed of reports obtained by military intelligence and local police. The Navy was presumably interested because, assuming the reports were genuine, the most likely explanation was that the aircraft were flying from a German raider operating in Australian waters. The file also contains some operational orders and reports relating to the search for the presumed raider, regular reports and analyses of the sightings to date, and related correspondence. The other file contains 'Reports from 2nd M D during War Period on lights, aeroplanes, signals etc.' 2nd Military District covered NSW; presumably there were similar files from the other districts but if so I haven't found them yet (3rd MD would be the one to get, as that was Victoria where the majority of sightings took place). Some of the material in it is duplicated in the Navy's file, but there's much which isn't, including a number of pre-1918 reports.

After going through these two files, I now have a master catalogue of 256 distinct sightings, which is nearly a hundred more than are listed in the Navy's own master index. But the data is quite dirty, I've tried to cull duplicate reports, but there are probably still a few in there. The dates are sometimes vague, sometimes only at the 'about six weeks ago' level of accuracy. Sometimes a sighting is recorded only in the index (with a very brief description) and can't be found anywhere else in the file. What constitutes a 'sighting' also varies. Sometimes a number of sightings are counted as one, sometimes not: multiple reports from one location usually are, but one at the same time from an adjacent town generally are not; reports over a few days are often considered to be single sightings, but not always. I've generally tried to follow the treatment at the time, especially in the indexes and summary reports. But not all cases are listed in those, so I've had to use my own judgement. And sometimes, to be honest, I found some handwritten reports almost impossible to decipher and haven't tried to extract every last sighting from them, just the main details. For the moment that doesn't matter, I just need to be able to characterise the mystery aeroplane scare in overall terms. A few missing sightings or wrong dates here or there won't make much difference.

And it's already proven very educational. I've plotted the sightings by month above. It's clear that, apart from the main scare in 1918 (212 sightings in total -- again, don't take the numbers too literally), there were two or three much smaller outbreaks: one in October 1914 (perhaps corresponding to the departure of the first AIF troopships), one in April-May 1917, and maybe another in October 1917. But it also shows that my earlier understanding of the course of the 1918 scare itself was wrong. Based on reports published in newspapers, I thought it started in March and ended in mid-April. In fact, it was only getting started: the majority of sightings took place after the press stopped reporting the scare. The peak month was April, with 76 sightings; in May this dropped to 48, and in June and July returned to the same level as March, the first month of the scare, at about 20 sightings. The number of reports fell to below 10 for each of the remaining full months of the war, but this was still equal to or higher than any previous month before March 1918 bar October 1914. This means that my suggestion that 'press reports of mystery aeroplanes themselves helped to propagate the wave of sightings' will need to be modified: at most they can only have helped kick off the scare. Why did the press not report any sightings after mid-April? Censorship may be part of the answer; I've found one case from July where the Sydney censor's office notified the Navy Office that it had 'permanently held' one mystery aeroplane report submitted by the local stringer at Gilgandra to two Sydney dailies. There are other notices from censors but I'll have to check to see if the reports they passed on made it into the papers or not.

This plot is the same as above, except that the sightings are also plotted by whether they were interpreted as aircraft or signals (e.g. mysterious lights flashing in the hills, or from a ship out to sea, presumably to or from German spies or vessels; sometimes they were supposed to be electrical flashes from wireless stations). It shows that I'm cheating a bit: some of what I'm calling mystery aircraft were not thought of as aircraft at all, or even as airborne in any way. But only a bit: the mystery aeroplanes almost always outnumbered the mystery signals, usually very greatly when there was a scare on (with the exception of the October 1917 scare, which is revealed to be all signals, no aircraft); and when there was a mystery aeroplane scare on there was a rise in mystery signal reports too. So this suggests they are related phenomena, which makes sense -- an odd light which is on the ground or on the sea is obviously more likely to be interpreted as something which isn't an aeroplane. The clincher is the fact that the military and naval authorities at the time put them together under the one heading: they were part and parcel of the same (potential) German threat. This perhaps complicates the role of airmindedness in the scare; but on the other hand it makes it easier to relate mystery aircraft scares to other types of scares, such as the Edwardian spy mania in Britain.

Here's an initial answer to the question 'where?' I've broken down the sightings by state (and so excluded two sightings in the Navy's files not from Australia: one in New Zealand and one in Papua, effectively an Australian colony). Victoria was clearly mystery aeroplane central in 1918, with 133 sights out of the 212 recorded that year. It was probably the primary source of sightings in 1917 too, but only as a first among equals. NSW was the only other state to even come close, and even then it had less than half the number of mystery aeroplane reports that Victoria had in April 1918. South Australia and Tasmania had significant numbers of mystery aircraft reports across the war; Western Australia and Queensland very little.

Victoria's dominance is a fact which requires some explanation, and I don't know that I've got a convincing one yet. It's not simply due to population. NSW had the greatest population of any state in 1918, 1.9 million; Victoria was second with 1.4 million -- and third was Queensland with 700,000, and it had only two mystery aeroplane sightings for the whole war. Perhaps it had something to do with population density, which was about 2.5 times higher in Victoria than NSW. That is, maybe something odd in the sky had more chance of being seen over Victoria than it did over NSW. But that only works if there were multiple sightings at the same time, which was not the norm (though a couple of the hotspots where that did happen, Ouyen and Gippsland, are in Victoria). Or perhaps rumours spread more easily in more densely-populated Victoria, especially after newspapers stopped printing news of mystery aeroplanes. (Most sightings were from rural districts, but I think this was even more true of Victoria than NSW.) Perhaps Victorians felt more under threat? The temporary capital of Australia, with Parliament and the Department of Defence, was Melbourne, so it could be seen as more likely to be attacked. But that doesn't explain sightings in far-flung corners of the state and I don't think people really think like that anyway (the place where you live is obviously the centre of the universe). It's true that the German raider Wolf had mostly preyed in the seas south of Australia, so maybe the next one would too; but the next one could strike anywhere, and besides, the Wolf's seaplane had (supposedly) flown over Sydney, not Melbourne. I'm not convinced, anyway. Perhaps looking at the data more closely will throw something up. Maybe it was the weather.

Finally, this is a plot of just the sightings from March 1918 onwards, i.e. just the 1918 scare itself, but here the number of reports are daily instead of monthly. This makes it clear that the peak period of the scare was the month from mid-April to mid-May. More precisely, the scare started around 17 March, kicked into higher gear around 18 April, peaked on 29 April, and halted around 13 May (with a couple of resurgences from 31 May and 2 July lasting a week or two). What else was going on around then? I've already suggested that two press stories helped start the scare: the claim that the Wolf's seaplane had flown over Sydney the previous year (published 16 March), and news of the successful start of the German spring offensive (published 25 March, though press reports were anticipating it before then). But if my argument that the mystery aircraft sightings were caused, at least in a general way, by anxiety about the war being lost and/or Australia itself being directly threatened, then the big jump from 18 April suggests that there had been further bad news around that time.

And there was: reports of Haig's famous 'backs to the wall' order of the day were first published in the Australian press on 13 April. It's tempting to follow that logic and try to assign the peaks and troughs in the scare with the fortunes of the German offensive, but it doesn't quite work. The scare did peter out when the offensive did, by the end of July, and maybe the falling away after the end of April was because the Germans had stopped attacking for the moment. But then why did mystery aeroplanes reappear in the first week of July? That was a lull on the Western Front. There might have been some other reason for anxiety that week; I haven't looked yet. But the problem with this -- and it's a more general problem with relating specific incidents like mystery aeroplane sightings with broader trends like the course of the war -- is that I'm really just guessing here. What evidence do I have that people who saw mystery aeroplanes were particularly worried about the way the war was going? There's some evidence, but it's scanty; it's not something that police constables tended to jot down. This is one reason why I'm attempting, in a small way, a comparative study similar scares in other places and other times: the fear of war, of attack, of spying is common to many of them, and teasing out the similarities as well as the differences between these defence scares will, I hope, strengthen my argument. Or I could just end up arguing in circles.

Like Gaul and probably some other things, my mystery aeroplanes paper will be divided into three parts:

1. An overview of the 1918 Australian mystery aeroplane scare itself.
2. The immediate historical context which helps explain the scare, namely the threats from German raiders and of Allied defeat.
3. The bigger picture into which the scare fits, namely other mystery aircraft waves before and since, in Australia and elsewhere.

That's a fair bit to do in limited space (the paper is 20 minutes long with 10 minutes for questions; the formal version no more than 8000 words including references) so I need to have a thorough understanding of my material: what is essential and needs to be included and what is not-essential and should be left out.

So what material do I have? There are next to no secondary sources on the scare that I'm aware of, apart from passing references; conversely, the great majority of my primary sources relate to it. I first came across the scare in Australian and New Zealand newspapers from March-April 1918, and that is certainly a key aspect as I'll be arguing that press reports of mystery aeroplanes themselves helped to propagate the wave of sightings. I'll probably have another look through Trove to see if there's anything I've missed or has been digitised since I last looked. Really, though, I've already got enough here to work with.

But the press reports are only the tip of the iceberg. I've looked through domestic military intelligence files on 'Reports of suspicious aeroplanes, lights etc' held by the National Archives of Australia and these include very many more mystery aeroplane reports than were ever reported in the press. (Including Smithy's sighting.) A hand-written index, which looks like it was compiled by 3rd Military District (i.e. Victoria) late in the scare, in NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/66 lists 152 nationwide for the whole war. Of these, 135 took place in 1918 (the majority in March and April but with a substantial number in May and June and only gradually tailing off towards the Armistice) and of these, 91 were from Victoria. (Expect more statistics in future posts.) The files themselves consist of letters from concerned citizens reporting their sightings, reports on local police investigations of sightings and suspects, press clippings (usually passed on from the censor), naval and military intelligence analyses, and copies of official correspondence regarding air-sea searches for raiders. There's also a separate file, NAA: MP367/1, 512/3/1319, which has reports just from 2nd Military District (i.e. NSW). I haven't compared this with NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/66 yet but it looks like it has some sightings which didn't make it to the master file. Not that it's necessary to get every last detail down, of course. The big picture is more important.

That brings me to the contextual section of the talk/paper. In terms of primary sources, the newspapers and military intelligence files give excellent clues as to how the mystery aeroplanes were interpreted (i.e. as German aircraft operating from raiders off the coast or from inland locations). I would also like to have a look at any NAA files from the Council of Defence (roughly the equivalent of the Committee of Imperial Defence in Britain) to see if it discussed the mystery aircraft and raider threat. But at this point I need to also need to dig into the secondary literature, so I can understand the Australian political and social context. Especially since Australian history is not my thing! So for example I'm currently reading John McQuilton's Rural Australia and the Great War: From Tarrawingee to Tangambalanga (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2011), which I'm finding very useful (though unfortunately the region of Victoria it focuses on seems to have missed out on mystery aeroplanes!) Of course, there is plenty of work I can tap into on the military and naval situation, so that's fine.

The third part is in some ways the trickiest. I want to tie this scare into mystery aircraft scares in other countries (as well as invasion and spy scares). But if I'm not expert in Australian history, still less am I expert in American, New Zealand, Canadian, South African, Russian, Romanian, Norwegian, Swedish... There is some excellent work on national airmindedness to draw upon, that's no problem; but unfortunately good, academic secondary sources on the scares themselves are scarce (I hope this is just my ignorance speaking but I fear not). There are some for the 1909 and 1913 British phantom airship waves; a couple of articles on the 1897 mystery airship wave in America. The other scares I know of don't rate even that much, apart from discussions in ufological and sceptical literature. I could cite some primary sources, particularly where English is the relevant language; but for this type of comparative work (and given the word limit) having access to reliable surveys would be much better. I'll seek out secondary literature but fear I will have to resort to some primary sources here, at least to show that these scares happened. I may well end up focusing on the British parallels, as it's what I know best and seems to be the best documented, and just gesture towards the other scares. I can't do everything in this paper, after all!

My abstract for the Australian Historical Association's 31st Annual Conference, to be held in Adelaide this July, has been accepted. The title and abstract are as follows:

Dreaming war: airmindedness and the Australian defence panic of 1918

Between March and June 1918, Australian newspapers, police forces and military intelligence units were deluged with hundreds of reports of mysterious aeroplanes. They were seen in every state, mostly at night, by men and women, young and old, civilians and soldiers. As there were only a tiny number of aircraft operating in Australia, the sightings were presumed to be German aircraft, perhaps flown from unknown merchant raiders operating in Australian waters or by foreign spies working against Australia. The reports were taken seriously, but investigations by the authorities eventually found nothing to substantiate them. The mystery aeroplanes were phantoms.

Australia had been at war for more than three years. But it was a nation both divided and defenceless. It had gone through two bitterly-fought conscription referenda, and appeared to be threatened from within by immigrants, the Irish and the Wobblies. The vast majority of its military forces were deployed overseas, with little more than poorly-equipped training cadres remaining at home. In March 1918, newspapers carried reports that the German merchant cruiser Wolf, which had been raiding Australian waters the previous year, had flown its seaplane over Sydney unopposed and undetected. A few days later, Germany's Spring Offensive opened, nearly breaking the Allied lines for the first time since 1914. The mystery aeroplanes resulted from a new perception that Australia was directly threatened and that the war could be lost.

In this paper I will discuss what this previously obscure episode reveals about the state of mind of the Australian people after nearly four years of total war. I will compare it with other mystery aircraft panics which preceded and followed it, both in Australia and elsewhere. Finally, I will explore what these transnational phenomena tell us about early airmindedness, or the cultural responses to the coming of flight.

Much more briefly, I'll be looking at the 1918 Australian mystery aircraft scare and trying to place it into the context of what was happening at the time, both domestically and overseas, and using it as a case study to probe mystery aircraft panics more generally and what they say about airmindedness. This is the next phase of my grand plan, i.e. blog -> talk -> publish. I've already blogged about this topic a number of times; expect to see a good deal more about it over the next couple of months.

This is good/exciting and bad/scary for a number of reasons. It's good/exciting because it's the first time I'll be talking (and hopefully publishing) about mystery aircraft, despite it being a major research obsession of mine for more than a decade now. Ditto for airmindedness, despite the name of this blog. It's also good/exciting because I've been awarded an AHA/CAL Travel and Writing Bursary, which includes entry into a workshop and mentoring programme. Which is also bad/scary: that means that instead of writing my paper the night before, as is the time-honoured tradition, I have to have written a formal version two weeks beforehand. So I'm going to be busy. And the other bad/scary thing is: I'm doing Australian history! I must be crazy.

In 1910, two Army officers, Second Lieutenant Bowle-Evans and Lieutenant Cammell independently put forward a new idea for an anti-aircraft weapon: the vortex ring gun.

In principal, it involved the formation of a vortex in the air, by the firing of an explosive charge inside a conical 'gun' which, if it were pointed upwards, would propel the vortex towards the intended airborne target on which, it was suggested, the violent air movement within the vortex would have a sufficiently destructive effect. Some practical support for the theory was provided firstly by a Dr Pernter of Germany who had some years earlier carried out some experimental firings which were said to have torn apart birds and other objects, and secondly by the farmers of a large region ranging from Hungary to northern Italy, who appeared to use such guns routinely in the belief that they could disperse hailstorms.

These proposals seem to have been made to the War Office; in any case a year later the Secretary of State for War, Richard Haldane, was corresponding on the subject with Sir Oliver Lodge, the eminent physicist. Lodge told Haldane that 'I really think the thing is worth a trial', but although he proposed acquiring a vortex ring gun from Piedmont for testing purposes it's unclear whether this ever happened.

The idea of using a vortex ring gun for air defence was aired in public at an Aeronautical Society lecture given on 3 December 1913 by Captain C. M. Waterlow, Royal Engineers, on the topic of the 'The coming airship'. In a discussion of the potential for aerial combat between aeroplanes and airships, Waterlow thought the former would be disadvantaged because of its inferior weight-carrying capacity: the airship could afford to be much better armed. This is perhaps not surprising since he was himself an airship pilot. When it came to the weapons which would be used, he suggested vortex rings:

The question of a suitable weapon had hardly been considered, but he would remark that there were great possibilities in the use of vortex rings, such as had been used in France in connection with vineyards. To show the destructive effects that they can produce, he stated that when fired horizontally they were capable of breaking up a wooden fence at a distance of 100 yards.

The basic principle behind vortex ring guns is quite sound: a smoke ring is a common form of vortex ring, and toy vortex guns can bought or even made at home. Practical uses are a bit more dubious. The use of vortex ring guns (or hail cannon) to disperse hailstorms has a long history but little scientific evidence to back it up. More recently, militaries have looked at vortex ring guns as non-lethal weapons, to knock people down, but they don't seem to be able to do this even over a distance as short as 30 metres.

So the utility of vortex rings in air defence seems doubtful -- to us. It wasn't as clear a century ago. Pernter was a respected scientist who demonstrated vortex rings at the British Association in 1903 (and apparently eventually concluded that they didn't work for weather modification, so he wasn't simply a crank). There was at least widespread anecdotal evidence, from the United States as well as Europe, for the effectiveness of hail cannon. And in the era of wood and wire the idea of knocking an aeroplane out of the sky by, more or less, pushing some air at it wasn't as silly as it would have been a decade or two later. They hardly needed any encouragement to crash as it was. (I read Waterlow's reported comment about vortex ring guns in aeroplane vs airship combat as referring to the aeroplane's armament but it seems to me it would profit the airship more.)

However. If we step back and take a broad overview of ideas for anti-aircraft weapons in the first few decades of the twentieth century then, taken as a whole they do look rather mad ('wildly creative' was how I put it in my thesis). Setting aside spiritual forms of air defence, at one extreme there was the death ray, which I've discussed here several times, which had varied proposed applications but was most desired for its ability to stop engines and bring bombers down. At the other are what we would consider mundane anti-aircraft weapons, because they actually existed and were effective to some degree: anti-aircraft guns and balloon barrages. Even these could have some odd ideas attached to them, such as the giant Lee-Enfield rifle described by the Daily Express in 1935. It was sometimes suggested that the cables used to tether Britain's barrage balloons were enhanced somehow, to make them more dangerous beyond the physical damage caused to a colliding aeroplane. Shaw Desmond, in his 1938 novel Chaos, imagined London defended by a balloon apron with 'Lethal wires [...] suspended which, upon contact, could wipe out the enemy bombers automatically'. This was somewhat science-fictional, but around the same time two more serious and well-informed writers, J. M. Spaight and C. C. Turner, also used the word 'lethal' to describe barrage balloon cables: it could just mean 'electrified'.

That was far from the end of the barrage's potential. Desmond also proposed explosive balloons, detonated either by radio or by proximity. Again, he wasn't alone: Stefan Possony, a Czech diplomat Air Ministry official, proposed 'a barrage of bombs suspended either from balloons or some type of machine built on the principle of the helicopter'. He also thought that helicopters or autogyros could be used to replace barrage balloons and fighter interceptors, as they could be armed with guns, bombs and searchlights: any 'aeroplanes, which manage to pierce the wall of ropes, can easily be destroyed by dropping bombs fitted with time fuzes on them'.

Another variation on the barrage used rockets. Arch Whitehouse, writing during the Phoney War, attributed to Harry 'Death Ray' Grindell Matthews the idea of the 'torpedo-rocket', which would explode at a set height 'and release a whole slew of 6-ft. diameter parachutes from which two-pound bombs will dangle at the end of long lengths of entangling steel wires'. J. F. C. Fuller cut out the middleman and proposed using large (anything up to twenty tons) liquid-fuelled rockets to shoot down aircraft directly:

The first nation which discovers how to build a practical rocket of one ton in weight will have at its disposal a most powerful anti-aircraft weapon which, acting like a depth-charge, may render flight in formations highly dangerous.

This too was something Grindell Matthews had been working on in the mid-1930s.

As a last example, J. M. Kenworthy, a Labour MP, past lieutenant-commander in the Royal Navy and the future Lord Strabolgi, claimed in 1927 that 'we now have improved projectiles and improved guns, with gas shells capable of producing a gas barrage in the air'.

Despite the frequent claims, like Kenworthy's, that these weapons were in development or even in service, very few of them ever seem to have been given serious official consideration. But government scientists did sometimes work along the same lines. Experiments with anti-aircraft rockets, though much smaller than Fuller's, eventually bore some fruit, though more for ground attack than air defence. The case of the aerial mine programme is fairly well known, which had the support of Frederick Lindemann, Churchill's confidant and scientific advisor. Aerial mines consisted of a long length of cable with a parachute on one end and a small bomb on the other: bombers would lay these in the path of an oncoming air raid. The idea got a pretty fair run during the Blitz, but was found wanting. Research was also conducted into ways to increase the 'lethality' (there's that word again) of balloon barrage cables by attaching bombs to them. Like the rockets this seems to have been turned into an offensive weapon, as deployed in Operation Outward, Britain's anticipation of the Japanese Fu-Go balloons: 99,000 balloons were released between 1942 and 1944 to drift across the North Sea, about half trailing cables to wreck the German electrical grid and half with incendiaries to start forest fires.

No other form of response to the threat of a knock-out blow from the air elicited such 'wildly creative' technological thinking as did anti-aircraft defences. Many of the ones discussed here do look mad, but the same desire for a defensive superweapon which made the vortex ring gun appealing led to radar (itself inspired by the death ray) and the proximity fuze. It also led, much later, to the Strategic Defense Initiative, of which Possony was an early advocate. Blind alleys are inherent in blue sky research (to mix metaphors); perhaps the price of vigilance is eternal freedom.

FORETASTE OF THE FUTURE

Of all the forms of gas used in the Great War, that which had the least disastrous consequences was "tear gas." Its effect was to inflict temporary blindness on those who came in contact with it. This pathetic row of figures show men temporarily blinded in that way on the Western Front in April, 1918. Affecting as this scene is, the results of the deadly gases of today would be infinitely worse.

Another batch of photographs of 'Things of tomorrow'. After 'Death from the skies', 'The doom of cities', 'New horrors of air attack', and 'If war should come', there followed (and note the shift from the indefinite to the definite) Boyd Cable, 'When war does come: terrifying effects of gas attacks', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 272-4.

Cable's theme this time is the extreme difficulty of defence against poison gas:

I confess that an examination of the methods officially recommended for protection against gas and for the decontamination and treatment of gas casualties is apt to create a depressing feeling of impotence and doubt as to the possibility of escape for more than a small fraction of the people.

These methods include the preparation of a gas-proof refuge in every home and the provision of gas masks for every individual. But can people live for hours on end confined in their gas refuges? Can small children be persuaded to wear gas masks? Moreover, gas masks will not guard against contact gases like mustard and lewisite, which require full-body protection; and 'There is no possibility and no intention of providing such an elaborate outfit for all non-combatants in this or any other densely populated country'.

Paint and wood absorb poison gas so thoroughly that there is no way to decontaminate them short of incineration: 'A badly gassed house would, therefore, require the destruction of doors, window frames, floors, stairs, and wooden furniture'. It might be possible to remove gas from wooden paving, concrete and stone if they were quickly hosed down, but whether this would be practicable with buildings broken and mains burst by high explosive is anyone's guess.

Cable stresses that he not being in the least bit imaginative in his description of the effects of gas, and refers readers to the Home Office's official handbooks or to the Red Cross for 'still more of the ghastly details'. And,

There is always a possibility or probability that new gases have been discovered and are being kept secret for use only when war does come, and that these may defeat our methods of protection and decontamination.

While he sceptical of ARP generally, Cable allows that is as well for families to be aware of the steps they can take to minimise the danger from gas; and the emergency workers who have been trained to control crowds of scared people may save many lives by leading them to safety.

But the greatest hope of the most practical results coming from all this teaching and drilling all over Europe, is that the people of every country are learning what gas attacks must mean to civilian non-combatants. The more thoroughly the people of each nation understand that War means Air War, and that Air War means inescapable and horrible death to hundreds of thousands, or to millions, the more we may hope that no nation will allow its rulers to lead or drag it into war.

GAS BOMBER GETS THROUGH

A scene such as that here depicted might easily occur if even one aeroplane got through the defences of a city and dropped a few gas bombs. Police and Red Cross men only are protected against the fumes, and the panic-stricken passengers from the omnibus have little chance of reaching a gas-proof shelter before they are overcome.

AT THE LAST GASP

This scene from Mr. Wells' film "Things to Come" is a forecast of the terrible possibilities of a future war. It shows what might happen in any great city after aerial raiders, dropping gas bombs, had passed over it. Men with steel helmets and gas masks are administering first aid to those caught in the deadly fumes of a gas bomb.

I get the feeling that War in the Air's pictures editor is starting to run out of ideas here. Affecting the photograph of the soldiers may be, but as the caption notes their blindness is temporary: hardly a portent of the collapse of civilisation. The passengers leaving the double-decker look to me no more hurried than they might be on any chilly night, certainly not 'panic-stricken'. And how much more free publicity does Things To Come need? Note what can't apparently be shown: an actual photograph of a gas victim scarred and burned by gas. Instead there are only mock air raids, drawings and film sets, and one image of soldiers with no visible wounds who will recover from their affliction. Flesh must be made to creep, but only so far.

Charles Kingsford Smith was and remains Australia's most famous pioneer aviator. Among his feats: the first trans-Pacific flight, in both directions in fact (1928, east to west; 1934, west to east); the first non-stop trans-Australian flight (1928); the first trans-Tasman flight (1928). It's probably fair to think of him as the Australian Lindbergh in terms of his iconic status -- and his flirtation with far-right politics (he was a member of the New Guard, an early 1930s fascist paramilitary group) -- though his entrepeneurial activties and self-promotion remind me more of Sir Alan Cobham, with his ambitious attempt (with his frequent copilot, Charles Ulm) to get into the airline business. 'Smithy' was himself knighted, in 1932; in 1953 Sydney's major airport (and hence Australia's busiest) was named after him; for thirty years his image graced the Australian twenty dollar note. Like so many of the great pioneer aviators he met an early death, in his case in November 1935 after crashing somewhere in the Andaman Sea while trying to recapture the Australia-England speed record.

All of that is well-known. But what isn't is that in 1918, Kingsford Smith witnessed a mystery aeroplane flying over the Australian coast -- what in later decades would be called a flying saucer or an unidentified flying object. I can find no reference to this incident in a quick check of three Smithy biographies (admittedly none very scholarly); as it's buried in an archive with no obvious connection to his career it's possible it hasn't been noticed before now.

Kingsford Smith enlisted in the AIF in 1915, aged 18, serving as a sapper and dispatch rider in Gallipoli, Egypt and France. In March 1917 he was commissioned in the RFC (which is to say he moved from the Australian armed forces to the British) and trained to fly; in July he was posted to 23 Squadron in France and by August had already shot down four German aeroplanes and been shot down and wounded himself. While recovering in England (where the above photograph was taken) he was awarded the Military Cross. But as his recuperation was expected to take some months he was given leave to return to Australia, arriving by March 1918.

While Kingsford Smith no doubt found Australia far more peaceful than France, as I've shown previously at this time it was undergoing a serious case of war nerves, with dozens of mysterious aircraft being reported along the coast, the majority from Victoria but with a significant number from New South Wales. These were generally presumed to be seaplanes from one or more German merchant raiders operating in Australian waters, possibly with assistance from resident foreign nationals; it took the Australian police and military some time to conclude that there weren't any aeroplanes. (In fact, they were still investigating a trickle of reports in the last week of the war.)

One of the most persistent sources of mystery aeroplane reports was Terrigal (seen above as it was in 1926), near Gosford on the NSW coast about halfway between Sydney and Newcastle:

23 March 1918: a light seen moving over the sea at 4am
5 April 1918: aeroplane noise heard around 1am
8 April 1918: strange noise heard between midnight and 1am
11 April 1918: 'a peculiar noise overhead... it sounded like a storm and there was a humming noise apparent as it died away... of about 3 minutes duration'
14 April 1918: lights seen
19 April 1918: three people report seeing aeroplanes out to sea, flashing signals, observed half an hour
23 April 1918: aeroplane heard and seen at 5.45am, flying northwest
28 April 1918: two seaplanes seen at 2am, one circled flashing signals then flew out to sea, the other flew inland and returned at daybreak
29 April 1918: ditto but triplanes this time. Possible signal observed from the ground

That's nine separate sightings in the space of five weeks. As Sergeant Morris of the Gosford police noted in his first report,

The rumour that a seaplane was seen over Sydney in connection with the German raider "WOOLF" [sic] will be remembered and this is a likely locality for a seaplane to hover and locate ships in the harbour and elsewhere.

There was even a plausible suspect in the form of Raymond Lhoist, described by Morris as someone who is 'said to be a Belgian but he is a German in fact and it is quite probable that he received the signals and carries the information to Sydney where he goes frequently' -- though a check of his papers confirmed that he was indeed Belgian.

The only problem -- and one which none of the preserved correspondence between the Terrigal police and military intelligence in Sydney and Melbourne mentions -- is that all but three of these reports involved either the Moir family or Gunner McNaughton, a returned soldier (he sometimes described as driver, presumably his current role). The very first report was made by Lily Moir, a 23 year-old woman; the fourth by her mother; the sixth by Lily Moir, her brother and McNaughton; and the last three by McNaughton alone. (The second and third were made by Mrs Newman, Terrigal postmistress, and a man named Kirkness, respectively. I haven't found who made the fifth report.) That seems suspicious to me, perhaps suggesting a series of folies à deux (or trois or whatever) where the collective belief in the reality of the mystery aeroplanes mutually reinforced each other's delusions. Or perhaps it was a hoax or other form of fabrication.

This is where Kingsford Smith came in. The idea for sending an investigator to Terrigal seems to have been made by the Director of Military Intelligence in Melbourne, though whether he specifically requested Kingsford Smith is unclear (probably not, any experienced airman would have done). Captain W. S. Hinton, head of the 2nd Military District's Intelligence Section, reported on 13 May to the Director that

In accordance with your suggestion, arrangements were made for Lieut. Kingsford Smith, R. F. C. at present on sick leave to go to Gosford. He was accompanied by Driver Macnaughton [sic].

Kingsford Smith arrived at Gosford on 6 May where he spoke with Sergeant Morris, who updated him on the various aeroplane reports (adding one about 4 weeks earlier, where Mr Wood and the whole staff and inmates of his Boy's Reformatory were 'awakened by the noise of an engine passing overhead'). The following day he went with Driver McNaughton to interview Lily Moir, who 'impressed me as being very reliable'. He and McNaughton spent that night on the beach at Terrigal. This is when Smithy saw his mystery aeroplane:

At 2.30 a.m. [8 May 1918] I saw what was extremely like a white Verey [sic] light fired from a point about 3000 feet up and a mile north of us. At the same time I saw a small black object rapidly going inland. I could hear no sound as the Surf there drowns any other local noises. I would not attach any grave importance to this episode, as I know how easily one can be deceived at night by falling meteorites, and passing birds, but I certainly think it was a machine. We were not in a position to see any answering ground light.

The following night they stationed themselves on the verandah of the Moir house, but didn't see anything unusual.

While Kingsford Smith apparently did express some doubts about McNaughton's charactor to Hinton in person:

Whilst Lieut. Kingsford Smith feels he must give credit to Driver Macnaughton's account of the seaplanes, he also stated that in small unessential matters he found Driver Macnaughton untruthful and unreliable.

he said nothing of this in his official report, where he concluded that there was something going on which warranted further investigation:

There is most certainly a foundation for all these reports, and I think that someone should be stationed in that locality (for a couple of weeks or more) who has some experience in connection with aircraft and observation.

(Signed) C. KINGSFORD SMITH
2nd. Lieutenant.
R.F.C.

According to Hinton's letter to the Director of Military Intelligence, Kingsford Smith was going to be that someone:

He will return to Gosford on Monday next [20 May 1918] and continue his observation.

However, I can't find any further mention of this and I suspect it didn't happen, as Kingsford Smith's leave was up and he was soon on a ship back to Britain, where he spent the rest of the war as a flight instructor. Nor can I find any further references to the mystery aeroplanes of Terrigal, except one: on 13 May three seaplanes were seen by none other than... Gunner McNaughton.

Was Smithy drawn into a shared delusion after spending a few days with McNaughton and the Moirs? It seems unlikely: he was appropriately cautious in drawing conclusions, and reported at least some doubts regarding McNaughton. On the other hand, the 'Verey light' and the 'small black object' could have been a meteor and a bird as he suggested; but he clearly was disposed to think they were a signal and an aeroplane, as per the prevailing theory of German raiders and spies. In the end this episode is no more than a curiosity: Kingsford Smith's sighting seems to have had no bearing on the course of the (already dying) mystery aeroplane scare and probably was soon forgotten even by himself.

Image sources: National Library of Australia, here, here and here.

Well, not quiet so much as oddly obscure...

In his Behind the Smoke Screen (1934), probably the most influential book written on the theory of a knock-out blow from the air, P. R. C. Groves related the following story of angry civilians attacking an RFC aerodrome after an air raid, because they felt they had not been defended adequately:

On several occasions such attacks from the air were followed by episodes indicative of high nervous tension among sections of the public. One of the worst, to which for obvious reasons no reference was made in the Press at the time, occurred at Hythe where, after the raid on May 25th, 1917, a mob invaded a local aerodrome, stoned the mechanics and attempted to wreck the hangars, because the Royal Air Force [sic] unit had not protected the town. As a matter of fact the unit in question was a training school and did not possess a single machine capable of reaching the raiders.

Along with deaths caused by panic-stricken crowds rushing for shelter and the nightly trekking of people from cities to countryside when an air raid was anticipated, Groves uses this incident as evidence for the fragility of civilian morale under aerial bombardment, with the implication that such things would happen on a far greater scale in the next war. But did it really happen like that? Groves doesn't give a source, and while he was in the RFC himself, in May 1917 he was a staff officer in the Middle East. He wouldn't have had any direct or official knowledge of a riot at Hythe.

It's not that the story is inherently unlikely: it actually fits the known context quite well. (Indeed, it's just the sort of thing which might lead a government to start planning to suppress large-scale dissent.) The air raid which led to the riot was the first of the Gotha raids, a daylight attack on the Kentish coast which killed 95 people. Folkestone bore the brunt, but some bombs fell on Hythe and two people were killed there, including the verger of St Leonard's; the vicar and his wife were injured. Local feeling certainly ran high; a town meeting at Folkestone passed a resolution urging that the government 'take such steps as will prevent further attacks of a similar nature and the wholesale murder of women and children of the town'. Censorship there was. The raid was reported in the press but the location was not revealed (even though the German press had done so). On the other hand, reports of post-raid riots in London had certainly been reported, but perhaps the difference was that in those cases the violence was directed at German shops and the like, not the military. And the aerodrome was variously known as Hythe, Dymchurch or Pelmarsh; it was home to the RFC's No. 1 School of Aerial Gunnery (or alternatively the Machine Gun School), a training establishment as Groves says.

The problem is finding corroboration. The Hythe riot is discussed in some recent secondary works like Andrew P. Hyde's The First Blitz (2002) and Neil Hanson's First Blitz (2008). The latter, for example, says that

Local people, infuriated that none of the pilots had even tried to get airborne, later hurled abuse and stones at the cowering trainees.

Hanson gives no source for this (neither does Hyde). He adds nothing to Groves (except for that abuse was hurled at the airmen, but this is obviously implicit in Groves anyway), and since he does list Behind the Smoke Screen in his bibliography it's possible that's where he got it from. The problem is that neither Hanson nor Hyde are among the works I would first turn to for a reliable account of the Gotha raids. (Hyde is a potboiler; Hanson is much better but not very discerning, I find.) And the ones I do trust most -- Raymond Fredette's The Sky on Fire (1966) and Christopher Cole and E. F. Cheesman's The Air Defence of Britain 1914-1918 (1984) -- don't mention the Hythe riot at all. Nor do older reliable accounts, such as Joseph Morris's The German Air Raids on Britain (1925) or the relevant volume of the official history, H. A. Jones's The War in the Air volume 5 (1935). It was discussed a few times in the 1930s by writers such as as Bertrand Russell in Which Way to Peace? (1936) and W. O'D. Pierce in Air War: Its Technical and Social Aspects (1937), but again these add nothing new and given their nature are most likely taken from Groves. A search of Google Books and Google Scholar doesn't turn up anything useful.

With one exception: a near-primary source! Maurice Baring's wartime diary was published in 1920. The entry for contains the following, from the entry for 30 May 1917:

We hear that the people at Hythe have stoned the air mechanics because of the German raid. There is not one machine at Hythe capable of getting within reach of a German machine. They are school machines.

Baring a staff officer with the RFC in France; in fact he was Trenchard's aide-de-camp. While a gunnery school back across the Channel fell outside his area of responsibility, he was in a position to know about it. So the Hythe riot probably did happen. It's definitely possible that Groves used Baring as a source here: his diary is listed in the bibliography for Behind the Smoke Screen, and nearly all the details Baring recounts are used by Groves. But there is one detail which Groves adds: that the mob 'attempted to wreck the hangars'. That adds considerably to the violence and the threat to authority. Dramatic (and hence, in a work of non-fiction, illegitimate) license? Or did Groves have another source?

N. A. J. Taylor recently asked me on Twitter if I thought the above photograph, purportedly of one of the daylight Gotha raids on London in 1917, was genuine.

I said no, due to 'Experience, intuition, lack of provenance, contemporary photographic technology. The photo has been retouched at very least.' But I'm coming around to the idea that it is real. A bit.

One problem is the ratio of the wingspans to the fuselage lengths. The Gotha G.IV had a very large wingspan for its length, almost twice as long as its fuselage: 77 feet to 40. The plan above (originally from Flight, 27 December 1917, 1380, though I got it from here). Looking at the little aeroplanes in the photograph in question, the ratio in general seems more like one to one than two to one. But the images are small, retouching might have altered the proportions, and the attitude of the aircraft could decrease the ratio (i.e. if they were banking). So that's not definitely definitive.

Another problem I had was provenance. There are a number of fake photographs of aerial combat and air raids from the First World War, as I have discussed before. Newspapers wanted to publish photos of such things, but photographic technology wasn't yet up to the task; after the war, too, there was a desire for images of the air war to illustrate books and magazines but where these weren't available they could be created.

So where did this photograph come from? The web page where it was found gives the source as a book called German Fighter Aces of World War One by Treadwell and Wood. I'm not familiar with it, but I do wonder why a book about German fighter aces would show a photo of German bombers. However I had seen it before somewhere, and it turns out I'd seen it in multiple places. It appears in Ian Castle, London 1917-18: The Bomber Blitz (Oxford and Long Island City: Osprey Publishing, 2010), 32, where the date is given as 7 July 1917 (so it's the second of the daylight Gotha raids on London) and the location is over Essex, on the return flight to Belgium. But no source is given. Those details also match Christopher Cole and E. F. Cheesman, The Air Defence of Britain 1914-1918 (London: Putnam, 1984), 263, where the source is given as the Public Record Office (as was). (They also reprint (262) diagrams of the Gotha formations from an Air Ministry 'publication' of October 1918, but it's not clear if that's their source for the photograph as well.) Cole and Cheesman do in fact consider the possibility that it isn't genuine, but conclude that this is improbable:

Newspapers generally printed crude montage pictures with aircraft scraping the rooftops, but this untidy formation is unlikely to have been faked.

Indeed, I've featured one such crude montage on this blog before:

You can see what Cole and Cheesman mean: this is far less convincing than the photograph in question here.

Getting back to the provenance, I've also found the photograph in books published much closer to the event in question. It's in Hamilton Fyfe, 'Winged killers in British skies', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 190. Here at last there is an attribution, although not a proper citation: the photograph is credited to H. M. Stationery Office and is said to be 'an actual photograph in an official War Office report'. That's also pretty much what is said in the earliest source I've been able find: Joseph Morris, The German Air Raids on Britain 1914-1918 (Dallington: Naval and Military Press, 1993 [1925]), opposite 228. And Morris certainly did have the co-operation of the War Office and the Air Ministry in writing his book.

I haven't been able to locate a citation for this War Office report, but if that's where the photograph did come from then it seems unlikely to have been faked. Not because the War Office wouldn't lie, but because it's hard to see what the point would have been. If it was a confidential report, then presumably the goal was to disseminate accurate information about the raids; perhaps a montage for illustrative purposes would have been included but surely it would have been clearly labelled as such. If it was a public report, then why would they go to the trouble of faking a cloud of German bombers in the sky? Again, presumably they would want to dampen down fear, not enhance it.

So, the photograph itself still seems suspicious, but the provenance is firmer than I had thought. What do you think?

For the sake of completeness, here's another alleged photograph of the Gotha raid of 7 July 1917:

This one most definitely was taken (or made) at the time, as it appeared in the Illustrated London News, 14 July 1917, 38. It is credited to the 'Illustrations Bureau' (presumably the newspaper's own), and the caption is:

AS THOUSANDS SAW THE ENEMY: GERMAN "GOTHA" AEROPLANES OVER THE METROPOLITAN AREA

This could be a fake too, but its unspectacular nature perhaps stands against that.

Finally, here's another photograph of the second daylight Gotha raid:

The vantage point is slightly different than the other ones here, because it was actually taken from one of the Gothas. It's held by Imperial War Museum (Q 108954) but the original source was obviously a German airman. A couple of similar photographs (one actually showing a German bomber, though that doesn't prove anything) appear in Raymond H. Fredette, The Sky on Fire: The First Battle of Britain 1917-1918 and the Birth of the Royal Air Force (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991 [1966]. That's St Paul's in the lower left, and Finsbury Circus in the lower right.