Via Museum of Hoaxes, the Nazi air marker hoax — though it seems to me that it was not a hoax in the sense of a deliberate attempt to deceive, but rather an honest misinterpretation. And taking into account the role of the press in the story’s rise and fall, it looks a lot like what I’d call a defence panic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Source: Department of Veterans’ Affairs, Australia.

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

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

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

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

So, why was the RAF formed at all? The proximate cause, at least, can be traced to Jan Smuts, the South African field marshal who was a member of the Imperial War Cabinet (IWC). After the shocking Gotha air raids on London in June and July 1917, Smuts was tasked with coming up with proposals for dealing with the threat of the bomber. He wrote two reports: the first argued that a co-ordinated air defence system was needed to protect the capital; the other was more far-sighted, and tried to anticipate the future development of airpower, predicting that a time would come when aircraft would operate independently of armies and navies, in potentially decisive fashion, and that there therefore was a need for an air force independent of both of the older services. In other words, in order to effectively carry out strategic bombing of Germany, a mission which had little to do with the objectives of the Army and Navy, an independent air force was needed. So, the standard picture of the RAF’s formation involves a Cabinet shaken by public anger over the bombing of London, its need to be seen to be doing something in response, and coming up with the idea of the independent air force.¹

The other, more revisionist view is that the formation of the RAF was more about solving the problem of allocating aircraft and engine production between the RFC and the RNAS than a visionary attempt to create a strategic air weapon. This is suggested by Eric Ash in his excellent book on Frederick Sykes, the Chief of the Air Staff (i.e., head of the RAF) for most of 1918.² The promised bounty of massive American aircraft production, Ash argues, was an incentive for the British to get their act together, lest it went to Italy instead, who the Americans were working with closely. Ash doesn’t go so far as to actually deny that the desire for some sort of aerial reprisals against Germany was an important factor (actually, he’s more concerned to rebut the charge that the RAF was therefore a bad idea, as not much was achieved in the way of strategic bombing), but he thinks that the American connection has been overlooked by historians, as it doesn’t appear in the Smuts reports.

Which view is correct? It’s not a subject I’ve specifically worked on, so I’m going to sit on the fence and say it’s probably a bit of both. Ash doesn’t really support his argument with primary sources very strongly, to my mind, perhaps because it’s slightly out of the way for him (Sykes was not involved in the creation of the RAF). The Smuts reports are the key documents in the founding of the RAF, because it was they which convinced the IWC to go for the unified air service, so Ash needs to explain why it is that Smuts or the IWC didn’t talk about American aircraft production, if this was so important. That the the RAF was primarily a response to the German bombing of London is supported by the fact that, after agreeing to its foundation in late August 1917, the IWC then began to have second thoughts. This is because the panic over the daylight Gotha raids was subsiding. It was only after the nighttime Gotha raids began, in late September 1917, that the IWC pushed on with forming the RAF.³ But rationalising production was certainly a concern of many of those who, like Montagu of Beaulieu, publicly called for the creation of an ‘Royal Air Service’. Anyway, I’m being a bit unfair to Ash: as I said, he’s not arguing for a wholesale rejection of the received wisdom, just a moderately important revision.

None of that has much relevance to today’s RAF, of course, it being a long time since bombing Germans was a priority mission. It’s just my way of saying: happy birthday, RAF!

1. See, e.g., Barry D. Powers, Strategy Without Slide-Rule: British Air Strategy 1914-1939 (London: Croom Helm, 1976), 90-3.
2. Eric Ash, Sir Frederick Sykes and the Air Revolution, 1912-1918 (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 1999), 113-5.
3. Powers, Strategy Without Slide-Rule, 96-9.

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A curious snippet from Margaret MacMillan’s account of the Paris Peace Conference, Peacemakers (2002):

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

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

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

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

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

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

This map, taken from The Chosen Instrument (1938) by Norman Macmillan (no relation, as far as I’m aware), shows the ranges from the various ‘heavily-armed air powers’ (France, Germany, Italy) to Britain. I’ve marked the rough range of a hypothetical Chain Home RDF station on Heligoland in red: it covers the entire German north-west coastline very handily.² So, assuming the Luftwaffe respected Dutch neutrality, any bombers they sent to Britain would have to pass through Heligoland’s detection radius. Heligoland could then give warning to London that a knock-out blow was imminent. At the cruising speed of a He 111, and depending on the flight path, that could be 1.5-2 hours additional warning (or even more if the bombers formed up in range of Heligoland). Very handy, even though the actual targets wouldn’t be known until the English coast was crossed.

Obviously, there are a whole bunch of caveats. I’m obviously assuming that, not only is Dutch neutrality respected (and the Low Countries not invaded, for that matter), but also that France has not been conquered. This is not our 1940, in other words, but a scenario often envisaged in the 1930s, where Germany suddenly attacks Britain without any warning. I’m also assuming that Germany doesn’t assault Heligoland first, or cut its communications with Britain (whether radio or cable).³ But even these acts would at least give warning that an attack was imminent, which is more than the British got in the usual nightmare imaginings. Finally, and perhaps least reasonably, I’m assuming that Britain (well, Australia) would not have handed it back to Germany. Heligoland in foreign hands would have been a major irritant to German nationalists, and unlike the case with the ex-German colonies, Hitler wouldn’t have been merely posturing when he said he wanted it back. So, very likely, giving it back to Germany would probably have been one of the first acts of appeasement.

The only reason to keep it, frankly, would be as an early warning post. Even then, would the Air Ministry risk placing such a valuable piece of technology as radar right under the German’s noses, where they could study its emissions at their leisure and quickly capture it in wartime?⁴ Probably not. Though even without RDF (which in any case was secret until 1941), the British public might gain some measure of confidence, whether false or not, just from being told that there were ‘observers’ on Heligoland who would give advance warning of a massive aerial armada heading their way.

Still, it would seem that, even in this alternate history, the Heligoland Mandate would have come to exactly nothing in the end, just as it did in ours. An interesting and diverting nothing, though.

Image source: Norman Macmillan, The Chosen Instrument (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1938), 21.

1. Margaret MacMillan, Peacemakers: The Paris Conference of 1919 and Its Attempt to End War (London: John Murray, 2002), 187.
2. Chain Home Low, for detecting low-level aircraft, had a much shorter range. But it would still cover a useful area of sea.
3. Another thought: a German army which had prepared for an opposed landing on Heligoland might also be a bit better prepared for an opposed landing in Kent …
4. Germany had radar too, of course, but they did not well understand the capabilities of the British system or how it would be used — even after the Graf Zeppelin II made several trips parallel to the English coast, loaded with radio detection gear, in what must have been among the first ELINT air missions ever.

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

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

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

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

Sometimes Jews were referred to in code. For example, the authors of Air Raid Damage in London (1923), published by the British Fire Prevention Committee, referred to ‘aliens’, which I think would have been commonly understood to mean, primarily, Jews (the Aliens Act of 1905 was largely aimed against Jewish immigration). They asserted that during air raids, ‘the average Londoner, both male and female, showed his usual equanimity and sang-froid, often under most trying circumstances’, but then added that:

Any individual who was panic-stricken or lost his morale was the exception, but where he did, it was largely due to the bad influence of the alien or semi-alien population, who, with but few exceptions, behaved in a manner that was both despicable and dangerous.²

So their implication is that while the British behaved splendidly, the aliens did not — but then, they’re not really British anyway, are they? The trashier more popular end of the spectrum of knock-out blow novels was more blatantly anti-Semitic, and often owed as much to fears of ‘the enemy in our midst’ as to the fear of the bomber. William le Queux, the grand master of really, really bad invasion and spy novels, tried his hand at an air-scare story in 1920, The Terror of the Air. In le Queux’s world, even being bombarded with pamphlets is enough to send Jews over the edge:

The atmosphere before was electrical; the fall of the leaflets let loose the storm. Babel broke forth. Miles away people heard the noise of the shouting and screaming. The scene was bad enough in the purely English districts, but in the East End, in Soho, and similar quarters where Jews and foreigners of all types were still herded together, swamping the native population, the panic was indescribable.³

Even the Earl of Halsbury’s relatively classy 1944 features a pretty clear, negative Jewish stereotype: a ‘more than usually fat and prosperous-looking diner’ named Griesheim, ‘with large pudgy hands and an oleaginous smile’ and worth over £2 million. When the air raid begins he tramples over the woman in front of him in his rush to get out of the restaurant, and a young Englishman is forced to punch his ‘bloated jaw’ to show him that this sort of thing just isn’t done.⁴

By the 1930s, this sort of thing was becoming rarer — possibly because events in Germany were making expressions of anti-Semitism less acceptable.⁵ One writer who did repeat it was the retired RAF officer L. E. O. Charlton. In War over England (1936), in a section on the First World War air raids, he wrote that

The foreign folk in the crowded East End district were singularly liable to an unreasoning panic, particularly the preponderating Jewish element […] it is an undoubted fact that in the air-raid periods they were far more subject to alarm than the body of the people with whom they dwelt […] the distress of Jewish mothers and children was very difficult to soothe. They would scream loudly, tearing their clothes and beating their breasts […] bands of young aliens belonging to neutral or allied countries, shedding every vestige of manhood, would behave like animals of the wild, sometimes brutally trampling people to death in a mad, insensate rush for safety.

Charlton at least suggested that this behaviour was ‘probably the result of harsh treatment and persecution through the ages from every nation under the sun’.⁶ But unsurprisingly, the fascist J. F. C. Fuller left out that part when quoting the socialist Charlton’s book the following year.⁷ Again, the message is that the ‘real’ British are made of sterner stuff than the inferior foreign types living among them, who will be a liability in wartime.

To be sure, this repellent anti-Semitic streak was only present in a fairly small fraction of books about the next war from the air in the 1920s and 1930s. (Perhaps because it wouldn’t help their arguments to suggest that only a minority of a city’s inhabitants would break under the pressure of bombing.) But then again, neither did many writers take trouble to refute this libel. The only one I’ve come across is J. M. Spaight, in Air Power and War Rights (1924):

No doubt, on the whole, London took the air raids with dignity and composure, but no one who is acquainted with the facts can admit that the people who left London to crowd into Maidenhead, Manchester, Brighton and other safer towns, were exclusively “Jews and aliens.”⁸

So, thank you, Spaight, for not being an anti-Semite!

1. Andrew Boyle, Trenchard (London: Collins, 1962), 469.
2. E. C. P. Monson and Ellis Marsland, Air Raid Damage in London (London: British Fire Prevention Committee, 1923), 8.
3. William le Queux, The Terror of the Air (London: Herbert Jenkins, n.d [1920]), 71.
4. Earl of Halsbury, 1944 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1926), 89, 97.
5. Not for Hamilton though: by this time he was a Nazi sympathiser, possessed of an anti-Semitism which ‘had a distinct racial edge to it, beyond the conventional anti-Jewish sentiment which was commonplace at the time in much of the British upper class, in that he was prepared to stipulate negative physical features and behavioural characteristics of Jews’. Ian Kershaw, Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and Britain’s Road to War (London: Allen Lane, 2004), 55.
6. L. E. O. Charlton, War over England (London, New York and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1936), 13.
7. J. F. C. Fuller, Towards Armageddon: The Defence Problem and its Solution (London: Lovat Dickson, 1937), 168.
8. J. M. Spaight, Air Power and War Rights (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1924), 9. Spaight also quoted a historian of the war to the same effect, A. F. Pollard’s Short History of the Great War, 308, which I haven’t seen.

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

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

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

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

Now, Thornton and Montagu’s romance seems to have been a bit, well, romanticised, by a few of the webpages about the Spirit of Ecstasy. Wikipedia, for example, says that claims that their affair was secret because of Thornton’s lowly social status, and that Montagu was forced by family pressure to marry a bit higher up the social scale (the daughter of a baron, as it happened). But I doubt this. I haven’t been able to find out when they met, but everything points to the 1900s. (The earliest date I have seen mentioned in this connection is that Thornton became Montagu’s secretary in 1902.) And the fact is that Montagu, born in 1866, married Cecil (yes, really) in 1889. Their two daughters were probably already born by the time he and Thornton met. So, enough of the star-crossed lovers/upstairs-downstairs/doomed romance cliches — for his part, he was a rich, powerful man who could afford both a wife and family, and a mistress, and was never forced to choose between them. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence that the thought even crossed his mind.²

But he did love her, and in the end, perhaps even felt ashamed of the choices she had been forced to make. On 30 December 1915, Montagu and Thornton were on board the S.S. Persia, sailing across the Mediterranean towards Port Said in Egypt, where he was due to leave her on his way to India. But the Persia was sunk off Crete by a German U-boat. He survived, but she did not. In Montagu’s papers are some pretty clear, if restrained, expressions of grief at her loss. For example, in a letter to H. H. Asquith, the Prime Minister, written in May 1916, he seems to be apologising for an overly emotional declaration of his desire to help the government on aviation matters, and at the end says that the Persia incident was the sort of thing that ended selfish aspirations.³ This could admittedly just mean his own personal brush with death, but there’s more.

In Montagu’s speeches around the country, he often mentioned the need to mobilise women for the war effort. In others, he referred to their role as mothers or lovers, such as one speech for the Navy League in April 1916. Here, he spoke of the sacrifices they made, meaning the men they had loved and lost. Then he says that he too has sacrificed, that this is driving him on his campaign for national aviation, for if he can rouse the country then his sacrifice and his deliverance won’t have been for nothing. I think it’s pretty clear that Montagu is referring to Thornton’s death, and his own guilt at surviving.

Finally, in June 1916, Montagu gave a speech to the British Women’s Patriotic League. Here he again spoke on the problem of airpower, and praised women workers, who have proven their right to a greater (but unspecified) part in government. But he’s also worried about the falling birthrate. He pleads for a change in attitudes towards unmarried mothers, arguing that the shame of bearing a child out of wedlock is erased by the glory of bearing a child. When I first read this, I thought it just an interesting argument along eugenic lines (though Montagu was not talking about the upper classes being outbred by their social inferiors, but women workers). Now that I’ve read a bit more of the story of Eleanor and John, the real reason for this proposal has become clear. As my astute readers will no doubt have guessed, they had an illegitimate child together, a daughter named Joan. Whether or not the British Women’s Patriotic League realised it, I think Montagu was attempting to make amends in some way for his part in his love’s life and death. I don’t think he ever publicly admitted his relationship with her; their daughter was placed with a foster family, although he did stay in her life as an ‘uncle’. Montagu’s wife, Cecil, died in 1919; he remarried the following year.⁴

I wonder if he could ever bear to drive a Rolls again.

Image source: anataman.

1. Montagu of Beaulieu, Aerial Machines and War (London: Hugh Rees, 1910), 2.
2. Divorce was out of the question, given the laws of the day, unless it could be proved that his wife was also committing adultery. Though he could have abandoned her, and then she could have eventually divorced him.
3. I’d quote the letter directly, but I’d need the permission of King’s first … The passages I’m paraphrasing are from the Douglas-Scott-Montagu papers, 5/13, 6/10 and 6/21, King’s College London.
4. Incidentally, Montagu’s son’s sex life was even more historically significant: he was convicted of ‘consensual homosexual offences’ in a high-profile trial in 1954, which led to the Wolfenden Commission and the eventual decriminalisation of homosexual acts.

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

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

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

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

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

So, one of Omissi’s categories is resistance, which Omissi defines as:

all violent retaliation intended to inflict loss, damage or injury to [enemy] air force personnel and property²

The creation of the Afghan Air Force was, in part, intended to increase Afghanistan’s ability to resist British airpower, of which it had very recent experience. When Afghanistan invaded India in 1919, the RAF supported the Army on the ground to good effect. More importantly — if you believe later claims by airpower writers, which I suspect are exaggerated — the war ended with (probably) the first, (perhaps) the only and (almost certainly) the smallest knock-out blow in history. On 24 May, Kabul was bombed by a solitary Handley Page V/1500, a four-engined bomber which had been designed to bomb another capital city, Berlin. Several of its bombs hit the King’s palace, which seems to have caused some panic, and rather less material damage, but most of all showed that the terrain and the soldiers which had caused more than one bloody defeat for the British were no longer to be relied upon. A few days later, Afghanistan sued for peace.

Therefore Afghanistan strove to acquire an air force of its own. It was a relatively centralised society, close enough to what Europeans would recognise as a state. It didn’t have much in the way of industry or infrastructure, and depended on a foreign power for aircraft, spares, training and technicians, but this was enough to make it a menace to the RAF in India, with only 6 or so squadrons. However, not many societies threatened by British airpower could hope to compete with it on this level. The Imam of Yemen acquired several aircraft in the late 1920s but it seems they were not of much use. (Abyssinia, broadly comparable to Afghanistan many ways, developed a small air force also, which however was no match for the Regia Aeronautica in 1935-6.) But there were other forms of resistance: the acquisition of anti-aircraft guns (Yemen bought eight for its forts, though they lacked effective sights), ground attacks on advanced British aerodromes, rifle fire from soldiers (which could be surprisingly dangerous) or even, at the far end of capacity (or desperation) throwing rocks at low-flying aircraft.

Omissi’s second category is adaptation. He defines this as:

all non-violent means of reducing the impact of aerial action, including both psychological and religious adjustment to air raids and those tactics adopted to diminish their material effects.³

Examples of adaptation include concealment (especially using the cover of darkness to carry out essential work like harvesting crops, as bombers were far less effective at night), dispersal (Omissi means in a tactical context but it could equally apply to evacuating villages of people and livestock), protection (caves, dugouts and even, effectively, air raid shelters — towers and forts of stone in the Yemen turned out to be very resistant to the small bombs used by RAF policing aircraft), early warning (as developed on the North-West Frontier, this involved lookouts lighting bonfires when aircraft approached, allowing villages to be evacuated before they arrived), and deception (e.g., using the British system of ground signals to aircraft to give them false orders, as the Zeidi did in 1928). By psychological adjustment, Omissi basically means familiarity breeding contempt. Religious adjustment is more unusual: for example, he discusses at length the Nuer of Sudan, who built an earthen pyramid, 60 feet high, as a site for animal sacrifice intended (in part) to ward off British air attacks. As the raids would eventually cease, this process could be claimed a success; in any event, if religious beliefs helped sustain morale under air attack then this is a form of psychological adaptation.

The third and last category is the most simple and immediate: terror, generally leading to a sudden, panicked flight from the scene. This was often the first response of indigenous societies, but it did not last, because they quickly learned how to adapt and how to resist. It seems that this was a surprise to the RAF, which had to do some adapting of its own in response. In 1922, Air Vice-Marshal John Salmond had argued that after terror would come indifference, and after that would come weariness and a desire to end the fighting, at which point the tribal leaders would have to sue for peace. This is pretty much what was thought would happen when European societies were bombed too (Salmond said as much), and the same underestimation of powers of adaptation and resistance applied there also. Omissi points out that Salmond’s theory of responses was quite for the RAF, because it meant that if bombing a tribe failed to produce results, all it meant was that they hadn’t been bombed enough yet. As Air Marshal Hugh Trenchard suggested to the Air Conference in 1920, in reference to ’small wars’:

The capacity of the Air Service to deal a swift and unexpected blow may indeed succeed in stifling an outbreak in its early stages, but it is in the power to continue offensive action day by day, and, if necessary, week by week, that the assurance of ultimate success lies.⁴

Almost an article of faith in Trenchard’s RAF, but if this was true in air control operations (and it was, much of the time), it was misleading when it came to wars between European powers.

As I said earlier, Omissi’s typology can be applied to the ideas of British airpower writers between the Wars (and to actual behaviours in wartime) about how to respond to strategic bombing, though it needs to be extended. I won’t go into detail, but I’d propose something like the following, with my suggested additions in italics:

1. Terror
2. Adaptation
• psychological
• concealment
• dispersal
• protection
• early warning
• deception
3. Resistance
• ground fire
• ground attack
• anti-aircraft
• air defence
• counter-offensive
4. Internationalism
• pacifism and disarmament
• collective security
• international air force

The responses I’ve added weren’t, by and large, available to colonised peoples. For example, by counter-offensive I mean bombing the enemy (aerodromes, cities, or other targets), which by definition moves this out of the realm of Imperial policing and into war between rough equals. Afghanistan almost had this ability, I suppose, though the ‘Afghan air menace’ Omissi talks about is more the ability to interfere with RAF operations rather than attacks on Indian cities. (I could be wrong about that, he doesn’t spell out what the menace consisted of.) Under the heading of internationalism (or ‘co-operation’, perhaps?), collective security and an international air force similarly required the ability to project force, and, in addition, the ability to work closely with other societies in diplomatic and military operations. I suppose pacifism and disarmament were, in theory, available to all of Britain’s opponents, but I doubt they were ever considered except as part of surrender to British wishes. Still, it’s interesting to ponder what might have happened if Gandhian non-violent tactics had been adopted — villagers lying down in the streets when the RAF bombers came over, say, offering their own bodies as human shields. It might have been a second Amritsar, in terms of adverse publicity back in Britain.

So, very broadly speaking, terror and adaptation are responses available to practically all societies, though the latter involves considerable organisation for its more complex forms (e.g. early warning). Resistance requires more organisation and resources than adaptation, and eventually industrialisation (for counter-offensives). Internationalism requires all of that and more — more of what I’m not sure: it gets vague here. But then again, they were never actually successfully carried out by anybody.

A final thought that occurs to me is that while I’ve ordered these responses in a rough order of the resources and organisations needed to carry them out, thinking that these would generally increase over time, it also works in reverse. That is, as the more complex and sophisticated responses are negated (e.g. the RAF starts using wireless for communication with ground forces, ending the use of deception), only the more basic responses remain, until at last, terror returns. In other words, when all else fails, run like hell — exactly the desired result from the RAF’s point of view. I’m starting to think like an interwar air vice-marshal, which probably isn’t a good thing!

Update: a couple of books later, I’ve come across the exact same phrase! John Robert Ferris, Men, Money and Diplomacy: The Evolution of British Strategic Foreign Policy, 1919-26 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 169, says that in 1925 Trenchard cynically attempted to exploit fears in India about the ‘Afghan Air Menace’, presumably to win more funding for the RAF, in much the same fashion as he had done a few years earlier with regards to the French air menace. Only this time he got little out of it.

1. David E. Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force 1919-1939 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), 142; emphasis added.
2. Ibid., 122.
3. Ibid., 113.
4. H. M. Trenchard, “Aspects of service aviation”, Army Quarterly 2 (April 1921), 21.

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

That is where I first saw the Vedo Villi.

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

There is a photo of the Villi below. Read on — if you dare.

I have scoured dusty bookshelves, and plumbed the depths of the infinite archive. But all I can learn of this abomination is that it is from 1911, is French, is a pusher — and, some say, that it flew. It flew. That cannot — should not — be. It undermines my faith in the laws of aerodyamics — indeed, in the essential rationality of the Universe.

It is dark outside, and almost silent. Almost. I think I can hear something circling above in the sky … an engine … it sounds like it is whispering something to me — almost in tempo with the rhythm of my breathing — no, it can’t be — ‘VE-DO VILL-I! VE-DO VILL-I!’

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