Last year, Londonist gave us a very nifty map of London's V2 impact sites. Now they've come up with an equivalent for Zeppelin raids. Each of the sunbursts represents a bombfall. Clicking on them brings up a popup with information about the site and casualties (but, annoyingly, not the date). Note, however, that only a 'small selection' of the sites are plotted, however, which makes it hard to draw conclusions from the patterns: I could be wrong but I don't think the cluster in central London is representative. But perhaps more interesting are the tracks of the Zeppelin raiders (to get the key for which raid was when, click on the 'larger map' link). Again, these need to be treated with some caution, as they would only be reconstructions based on logbooks, bombfalls and sightings, but they do suggest that if the raiders could get reasonably close to London they could usually work out where to go. You can see the tracks deviating towards the urban areas, or turning back after the bombing run. London did have a blackout during the First World War (when its fighters couldn't touch the Zeppelins, the government claimed that the best defence against them was 'darkness and composure') but it wasn't as complete as during the Second. And of course the Thames on a clear and moonlit night couldn't be blacked-out at all.

Also, note the link in comments to a sequence of photos showing a Zeppelin being shot down. I hate to say it but I think these are fake ...

This illustration, by A. C. Michael, is from T. Donovan Bayley's 'When the sea failed her' which appeared in Pall Mall Magazine in May 1909. It's subtitled 'The story of a war between England and the allies, and the terrible way it ended'. It's that terrible ending which makes this story stand out for me.

It takes place during an invasion of Britain by European powers. Britain is losing. The fleet has been defeated off the Nore and London is under siege and is being shelled. But it unknowingly has a secret weapon, thanks to the Tesla-like scientist Angus Grant. He works on top of a hill in a laboratory filled with electrical apparatus which occasionally crackles purple lightning into the sky. One of the rooms inside has some unusual equipment:

One side of it was occupied by a large frame, stretched tightly across which was a transparent sheet of tracing cloth, lighted from behind, and marked with dark lines forming tiny squares. Every tenth line was numbered, and a red arrow pointed to the north, Across the chart was a thin blue line, leading east-north-east, and along this a speck of iron was slowly moving, watched by a young man [...] In front of the luminous screen was an arrangement similar to the keyboard of a typewriter, but containing only ten levers. These were attached to electric leads, and each one, when depressed, established contact with one of the ten copper rods immediately underneath, which stood in a row projecting through a vulcanite slab.¹

The screen is a map of Europe, and the 'thin blue line' shows the path of Grant's 'aero-torpedo' which is on its way to Berlin. What's an aero-torpedo, you ask?

"It carries things in the air, and he directs it from his laboratory."

"The keyboard and the lighted screen?" she asked.

"That's it. That and the moving dot."

"But how?"

"No one but the master knows that. He presses levers and they alter the wireless somehow. Then the aero-torpedo shifts accordingly. It's something to do with ether waves, whatever they are, or so I've heard."

"Are there men up in it?"

"No; that's what makes it so wonderful. It gets its power from our dynamos, and that's how it's steered too. That's why it can carry so much green powder."²

I'll come back to this green powder in a moment.

Two hours later Grant locked down five of the ten keys. The moving dot no longer crept forward, but rotated slowly on its axis. He went across to the wall, unlocked a framed switchboard, and pulled the vulcanite handle down. On the roof another "spark" waked to fury. He took his watch out and counted the minutes by it.

"The cylinder seal is fused," he whispered, reversing the switch, and the "spark" on the roof died away. "It's half-past six in Berlin," he thought; "they're celebrating their victory, and the streets are full. I've timed it well."³

He did too. Unter den Linden is full of cheering crowds. At first there is just a sound, lasting over an hour, a 'steady, sibilant humming, persistent and penetrating, and indefinably terrifying'. Then the aero-torpedo itself becomes visible, 'a tiny spot in shape like a dragon-fly, dimly glinting brassily'. It is suddenly blotted out by a mist which slowly grows larger in size: the green powder has been released. The sun is eclipsed and birds fall from the sky.

Few could bear the horror of the phenomenon any longer, and there was a rush of panic-stricken men and women to get beneath a roof, but before the crowds could unlock and disperse death came down.

A clammy green rain, gently persistent, fell, and wherever it settled it corroded.

The stone-work of the city seethed as the mist wet it, and screams of pain broke from the lips of those whom it touched. Their eyeballs were seared and blinded; the skin on their faces shrivelled and cracked and peeled, and their hands were rotted down to the raw sinews.

Every breath was a misery. Within a minute not a soul who remained in the streets was left alive. Their lungs were perforated, and the dying wretches were mercifully choked by their gushing blood. By noon nothing remained in the streets of Berlin but a green sludge, out of which protruded fragments of the larger bones of the dead.⁴

After Berlin, Paris and then 'the large industrial towns of Europe' are destroyed. Only those who flee to the countryside survive.

As each report of fresh ruin was spread abroad, the clamour for an end to the war grew more insistent.⁵

The allies soon sue for peace and so, even though 'the sea failed her', Britain has won after all.

What I love about this story is its extreme nature. The struggle for national existence is all. The prospect of a British defeat at the hands of a foreign invader is blithely seen to justify the extermination of millions of enemy civilians. There is an implicit acknowledgement that this might be immoral in Grant's decision to destroy the aero-torpedo at the end of the story, but as he doesn't even show the slightest remorse it in no way invalidates his prior actions.

This sort of thing is partly why I doubt Sven Lindqvist's argument, in A History of Bombing (2002), that the idea of bombing civilians was racist and genocidal in origin, that is, to ensure white supremacy by destroying the other. As evidence he cites stories like Jack London's 'The unparalleled invasion' (1910), in which the Chinese race is wiped out by biological weapons dropped from the air. But in fact the knock-out blow was rarely employed against non-Europeans in speculative fiction: it was about nationalism, not imperialism. In Bayley's story, the millions of Europeans aren't even depicted in any way inferior to the British, who would turn into green sludge just as surely as the Germans and French if the green powder were to be used against them.

'When the sea failed her' is of course also interesting for its early anticipation of, not just aerial bombardment, but chemical warfare too. Discussions of this are fairly rare before 1914. But perhaps most interesting is the portrayal of an unmanned aerial vehicle. Bayley has put some thought into how you might actually control one using contemporary technology, with his typewriter-like keyboard, luminous cloth screens and cylinder seal fuses. The radiant power source is straight out of Tesla.

As for who T. Donovan Bayley was, I sadly have no idea. He did write a few other science fiction stories for British periodicals around this time, at least one of which also deals with a superweapon ('The frozen death'), but otherwise seems to be unknown to history. I suspect an alias.

1. T. Donovan Bayley, 'When the sea failed her', Pall Mall Magazine 9 (May 1909), 541.
2. Ibid., 544.
3. Ibid., 546.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 547.

Thanks to Frank Herrera for pointing me to British Fact and German Fiction. It's a British propaganda film just under fifteen minutes long, made in 1917 by the Thanhouser Company for the Department of Information. Since it has Portuguese Spanish intertitles (luckily with more recent English subtitles), it was obviously shown overseas, though from the comments in Nicholas Reeves' Official British Film Propaganda During the First World War (1986) it does seem it was intended for domestic consumption. I can't embed the film here but you can watch it at the appropriately named Europa Film Treasures website.

The 'German fiction' referred to was a letter supposedly published in a German newspaper claiming to be an eyewitness account of serious damage caused to various London icons -- the Tower of London, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Bridge, Hyde Park, Piccadilly Circus, Charing Cross Station, the Bank of England, Trafalgar Square, St Paul's Cathedral, Liverpool Street Station, Buckingham Palace -- by German air raids in July, August and September. I say supposedly because as the Imperial War Museum notes (IWM 443), the newspaper is hard to identify based on the English title given, the Westphalia Daily News. But if the German press did claim this, it was an own goal because this film shows that the locations were still all intact, at least as of 25 and 26 September when the film was supposedly shot. Again, I say supposedly, because this is established by a policeman holding a placard showing the date in many of the scenes, but we have to take this on trust.¹ In this case, however, there's no reason I can see for the DOI to fake the date, as it was quite true that the damage done was vastly exaggerated by the letter-writer, and in fact simply made up. There is also footage of some of the places German bombs did hit: working class homes, small businesses, the road in front of a hotel. The text sarcastically says these are the Germans' idea of 'munition factories', though the British (like everyone else who ever dropped bombs in anger) were just as prone to claiming they only bombed military targets.

The resulting film is a fascinating document of London at war. Although it must be said that for the most part it doesn't look much different to London at peace: the streets are full of traffic, people are out doing their shopping, commuters are running to catch their buses (as in the above -- that's Piccadilly Circus, with the base of Eros on the left). There are perhaps a few more men in uniform than usual, including a crowd of Australian soldiers sightseeing in St Paul's.

This is a New Zealand medic who gave first aid to civilians wounded by a bomb dropped outside the Bedford Hotel on Southampton Row (off Russell Square) on the night of 25 September, despite his own head wound. His name isn't given; I like the way he is standing in the shadows, as though uncomfortable with the attention. Thirteen people were killed in this incident (eleven according to the film) after ignoring official instructions to take cover, as the text archly notes.

A 14 year old boy was killed inside this dairy in King's Cross Road when it was hit on the night of 24 September. This period marked the start of the 'harvest moon' raids, when the Gothas and (for the first time) Giants attacked London nearly every night for a week, until 1 October. This led to some interesting reactions, which unfortunately British Fact and German Fiction doesn't show: shops starting closing early to let employees get home before dark, people gathered in parks to watch the show, and others bedded down in the Tube stations. In psychological terms, the harvest moon raids were perhaps more significant than the daylight Gotha raids of June and July, even though they killed fewer people.

While it does implicitly point out the immorality of the German raids, the film ends with some statistics emphasising how tiny the human cost was in statistical terms: for the first nine months of 1917, there were only 940 casualties (191 dead, 749 wounded) in London due to air raids, which amounted to 27 dead per million given the city's population of 7 million. For the same period the number of dead and wounded due to road accidents (probably for Britain as a whole) was 14591. So nothing to worry about, then. If only the British had believed their own propaganda ... I would have had to find a different topic!

Bonus airminded footage: Wilbur Wright and his Flying Machine, a French film shot in Italy on 24 April 1909. With Wilbur Wright flying his Flyer. And. Flying. With. The. Camera. On. Board! Astounding. I think it must be worth following the Europa Film Treasures blog for their latest gems.

1. There's also a shot of the front page of the Evening Standard, though the date is not visible. The headline -- 'Zeps and Gothas raid together' -- does pretty much tie it down to 26 September.

This photograph of Australian soldiers was taken during the First World War. It's not particularly unusual: just a group of mates getting together to record a memento, perhaps after a weekend's carousing in the fleshpots of Cairo or Paris.

Mateship is a important concept in Australian culture. The OED defines it as 'The condition of being a mate; companionship, fellowship, comradeship' and notes that it is 'Now chiefly Austral. and N.Z.' The Australian National Dictionary gives several more specifically Australian shades of meaning, from 'An acquaintance; a person engaged in the same activity', to 'One with whom the bonds of close friendship are acknowledged, a "sworn friend"', to 'A mode of address implying equality and goodwill; freq. used to a casual acquaintance and, esp. in recent use [...], ironic'. Suffice it to say that pretty much any bloke can have occasion to call another cobber a mate, whether they are good friends or bitter enemies. (Sheilas are another question, of course.)

Mateship is a positive virtue. As C. E. W. Bean wrote in 1921, in the first volume (page 6) of his official history of Australia in the Great War:

The typical Australian [...] was seldom religious in the sense in which the word is generally used. So far as he held a prevailing creed, it was a romantic one inherited from the gold-miner and the bush-man, of which the chief article was that a man should at all times and at any cost stand by his mate. This was and is the one law which the good Australian must never break. It is bred in the child and stays with him through life.

Mateship also has strong military resonances, as Bean's interest in it might suggest. An Army News article on the unveiling of a war memorial in Papua New Guinea commemorating the Kokoda Track, the site of bitter fighting between Australians and Japanese in 1942, notes that the words courage, mateship, endurance and sacrifice are inscribed on its pillars. It further adds that these are 'words that today's Australian Army has built its foundations on'. So mateship is both an expression of Australia's egalitarian spirit and its martial one, as former Prime Minister John Howard explained in a speech given at Australia House in London in 2003:

The two world wars exacted a terrible price from us -- the full magnitude of that lost potential, of those unlived lives can never be measured. And yet, some of the most admirable aspects of Australia's national character were, if not conceived, then more fully ingrained within us by the searing experiences of those conflicts.

None more so than the concept of mateship -- regarded as a particularly Australian virtue -- a concept that encompasses unconditional acceptance, mutual and self respect, sharing whatever is available no matter how meagre, a concept based on trust and selflessness and absolute interdependence. In combat, men did live and die by its creed. 'Sticking by your mates' was sometimes the only reason for continuing on when all seemed hopeless.

I was moved by an account written by Hugh Clarke, who, like thousands of other Australian and British servicemen, endured years of senseless cruelty as a prisoner of the Japanese after the fall of Singapore. He couldn't recall a single Australian dying alone without someone being there to look after him in some way. That's mateship.

Contemporary Australia takes great pride in its egalitarian attitudes. Mud and fear and enemy fire are no respecters of class, rank or parentage and from both wars, our veterans brought back to Australian society a renewed conviction that an individual's worth should be judged -- not by those things -- but by their own talent, courage and personal virtue.

Howard was particularly fond of the concept of mateship; in 1999 he even tried to get it inserted into the preamble of the Australian constitution. It was in fact one of the sites of conflict in Australia's culture wars of the late 1990s and early 2000s: Marilyn Lake has criticised it as reinforcing white solidarity. She has a point; and it's not like Australia is the only country in the world to value mateship, even if it isn't called that. (Although one of the more charming aspects of the word 'mate' is the way it's quickly picked up and used by new arrivals to these shores.) Gender critiques are even more pointed: while women can and do use the word, and can be mates with men and and with each other, it still has a blokey feel. Idealising mateship as an inherently Australian trait is exclusionary, as Martin Ball has argued for the related concept of the 'Anzac spirit':

The Anzac tradition holds many values for us all to celebrate, but the myth also suppresses parts of Australian history that are difficult to deal with. Anzac is a means of forgetting the origins of Australia. The Aboriginal population is conveniently absent. The convict stain is wiped clean. Postwar immigration is yet to broaden the cultural identity of the population. [...] The problem with the simple patriotism of Anzac is that it runs the risk of making some of us are more Australian than others.

Which brings me back to the photograph at the start of the post. It actually isn't as straightforward as it seems. The men pictured are actually all deserters; and the reason they posed for the photograph was to taunt the military authorities they had escaped from. For it was sent to the Australian Assistant Provost Marshal in Le Havre, along with the following letter:

Sir,
With all due respect we send you this P. C. [post card] as a souvenir trusting that you will keep it as a mark of esteem from those who know you well. At the same time trusting that Nous jamais regardez vous encore [we will never see you again]. Au revoir.
Nous

The deserters -- who were apparently never caught -- are displaying mateship, humour, larrikinism and all those good things which are supposedly part of the Australian essence, but deployed in a way that cuts against the celebration of the Anzac spirit. For whatever reason, these men who had all volunteered for war decided to have nothing more to do with it, and so could be considered to be some of the first war resisters in Australian history.

NB. The photograph comes ultimately from the Australian War Memorial, but I found it in Ashley Ekins, ed., 1918 Year of Victory: The End of the Great War and the Shaping of History (Titirangi and Wollombi: Exisle Publishing, 2010). Ekins' own essay in that book on 'morale, discipline and combat effectiveness' has much to say on this topic, though unfortunately doesn't specifically discuss our ten mates above.

ACCORDING to a telegram from Port Elizabeth [South Africa] to the "African World," bombing aeroplanes are to be used to exterminate "rogue" elephants in the Bush.

North-China Herald, 6 September 1919, 642.

Thanks to Jess Nevins for the tip.

That the deceased died from suffocation and burns, having been murdered by some agent of a hostile force.¹

That was about as far as they could go in assigning blame, as they had no direct evidence as to who the murderer was. But everyone present knew that, as the coroner said,

these two people, man and wife, who were civilians and peaceful inhabitants, had died from shock, suffocation, and burns on May 31 owing to an explosion and consequent fires created by bombs no doubt dropped by a hostile airship. They might say that some unknown agent of the hostile German Army murdered these persons, and beyond that he did not think they could go.

This was the first air raid London ever experienced, ninety-five years ago today. The coronial inquest was therefore one of the first held into air-raid deaths. (At least one other was held in London the same day, and others had taken place after the first Zeppelin attacks in January.) To hold judicial inquiries into civilian deaths due to enemy action now seems like a slightly odd practice, and indeed the practice was not continued in the Second World War (or at least was not reported). But coronial inquests into air raid deaths were common features in the British press in the First World War.

The format allowed for the airing of plenty of tragic details:

A doctor who was called to the scene stated that he found Mr. and Mrs. Good in a back room on the first floor. Both were kneeling beside the bed and were naked. All the man's hair had been burnt off. The room was in ruins. Apart from a smell of burning, there was no smell of any chemical. The woman had a large piece of hair in her right hand.

The CORONER.--Perhaps she had snatched at her own hair in pain?--Yes.

And touching, pathetic details, too:

The witness added that the man's arm was around the woman's waist.

It was also a chance to get a look at the new warfare -- quite literally so, in this case:

The coroner, the jury, and all in the Court leant forward eagerly when, stooping down, the constable picked up two incendiary bombs found in the basement of the house. One, he explained, had fallen through the roof and through the front rooms. The other had dropped through the roof and on to the staircase and had set fire to the stairs. The constable added that both were very heavy.

The CORONER remarked that they did not seem to be very finely finished, but apparently they were very effective. They contained an explosive called "thermit," which was invented some years ago. It gave off enormous heat, as much as 5,000deg., and set everything on fire that it touched. It was a barbarous weapon.

Coroners were well aware that the eyes of the nation were upon them, and that they and their juries has a responsibility to avoid damaging morale:

It is not desirable, he added, to make much commotion about this matter. We do not want alarm to spread around the Metropolis, which has, up to the present, taken these acts very quietly and cooly, although we all stand in danger. It does not seem desirable to go into these matters very deeply, for the simple reason that it can do no possible good. In a case of this sort where it is impossible to get hold of the culprits, there is no good purpose to be served by it.

But equally, coroners knew that they had a unique opportunity to mould public opinion and even official policy. They could express popular outrage at the barbaric Huns:

The aeroplanes and Zeppelin airships of the Germans had created a new sphere for military genius to act in defence and attack. While armed airships, it was an entirely new and barbarous practice to use them as weapons of aggression against defenceless civilians in their beds in the undefended suburbs of our cities, seaside and health resorts, and country villages. Apparently there was a great deal of danger in attacking fortified places, so the German airships did not go to them.

And they could make recommendations on how best to thwart the air raiders:

The CORONER said there seemed to be only one argument that was of any avail. The more men that could be got to enlist the better it would be for the country.

Mapping the coronial inquests into the deaths of air raid victims over the course of the war would tell us much about how the British people learned about and responded to this 'new and barbarous practice'.

1. The Times, 3 June 1915, 3. All quotes taken from this source.

So it does sound a lot like Le Péril Bleu. But before I could cry 'J'accuse!' I noticed the following disclaimer on the first page of Raphael's version:

The central idea and some of the details of this story have been borrowed by permission from "Le Péril Bleu," by Maurice Renaud [sic].²

With that, all my dreams of making a major historical discovery -- the literary fraud of the Edwardian age! -- vanished. I'll have to win fame and fortune some other way.

But there's still some interesting stuff in Raphael's story. For a start, while it's not about aerial warfare as such, it does recapitulate some familiar themes. Most generally, there is the idea of a threat from above. This is so even though humanity itself is itself starting to conquer the sky:

Since, in 1913, the airman, O'Farrell, revolutionised aeroplaning by his invention of the perfect stabilisator, aeroplanes of all kinds, and hydro-aeroplanes had been enabled to hover over a fixed point exactly as a seagull hovers.³

One of the unfortunate victims of the Sky Folk, Mr Verulam, became ill when he was picked up, different to 'the ordinary air sickness which I remember feeling on my first trip to Paris in an aeroplane', which suggests that international air travel is now somewhat common, at least for the well-off.⁴ There's the symbolic demonstration of Britain's aerial weakness, in a scene when a sub-aerine has an accident and crashes onto Trafalgar Square, knocking over Nelson's Column. There's the predictable reaction of the mob to danger:

Then, more quickly than I can tell you, further catastrophe followed. I heard the roar and crash of falling masonry. I heard the screams and shrieks of women, the shouts of men, the hoarse cries of police ordering people to stand back, the yells and confusion of a panic-stricken crowd fighting in semi-darkness to escape from a danger which they only half understood, and trampling one another down to certain death in their efforts to avoid the uncertain death which they feared.⁵

And of course there's also the need for Britain to arm in the air. Having worked out pretty much what's going on, the Professor -- there's always one in these kind of stories -- writes a letter to The Times declaring that it was 'the absolute duty of England to equip an air expedition immediately', for the purposes of vengeance against the Sky Folk.⁶

But there's another possible connection to one of my interests, namely phantom airships. In an article published in Magonia in 1991, the sceptical ufologist Martin Kottmeyer looked for possible connections between the American mystery airship waves of 1896 and 1897 and later UFO sightings:

It is actually easier to trace the development of the UFO mythos to the British airship scare of 1912-13. These flaps were clearly paranoid in character, involving as the did the belief that German Zeppelin airships were secretly visiting Britain for spying out the land in preparation for war. There seems to be no compelling reason to doubt it inspired John N. Raphael to pen "Up above: The story of the sky folk" for the British Pearson's Magazine.

He goes on to suggest (following science fiction historian Sam Moskowitz) that the American anomalist Charles Fort likely read Raphael's story and that it influenced his later suggestion (belief is usually too strong a word for Fort) that extraterrestrials are watching and sometimes interacting with us, and not always to our benefit. When the modern UFO era began in 1947, early ufologists picked up on Fort's -- and hence Raphael's -- idea, and there went the neighbourhood.

I won't deal here with Kottmeyer's argument about Fort being influenced by Raphael, and ufologists being influenced by Fort. But what about the suggestion that Raphael was 'inspired' by the phantom airship wave of 1912-3?

The first problem with this is that, as I've already noted, Raphael quite openly acknowledged his literary debt to Renard's Le Péril Bleu. Given this, and the close similarity in outline between the two stories, there's no need to search for a real-world inspiration. However, I gather that Renard's version of the story was less paranoid than Raphael's. While noting the similarity with Fort's later idea that 'we are property', according to Wikipedia Le Péril Bleu 'retains a humanistic and tolerant rather than fearful and xenophobic philosophy'. 'Up above' is certainly fearful and xenophobic: the fall of red rain noted above is actually blood, which the Sky Folk dump overboard after vivisecting their human specimens. Mr Verulam's body was similarly dumped overboard, partially skinned. In true Lovecraftian fashion he had kept a diary of the terrifying things he had seen and heard:

The boy next to me has gone. I saw what was done to him before he disappeared. It is too awful. I dare not even attempt to describe it. I lay in the farthest corner of my cell shivering and screaming aloud as those awful invisible knives worked and worked on that naked body. I suppose it will be my own turn before long.⁷

So perhaps this hints at a darker relationship between the British and the air above than the French had, and the fearful realisation that England was no longer an island worked its way into Raphael's retelling of Renard as a morbid spin. But again, this is not necessary. The French had their own fears, and anyway The War of the Worlds is a perfectly adequate British precedent for how a technologically-superior 'them' might treat an unjustifiably-complacent 'us' (though arguably vivisection is a step down even from genocide: the Sky Folk don't recognise humans as being intelligent at all. At least Wells's Martians had to fight us.)

Moving from the general to the specific, there's a problem with timing. 'Up above' was published in the December 1912 issue of Pearson's Magazine, which means it was out by the first of the month (the issue is reviewed in The Times, 2 December 1912, 10). But the phantom airship scare of 1912-3 really did not get going until January 1913; while there were some sightings in October, November and December, with one exception they received little or no press attention. Even if Raphael banged his story out in short order, it would still take some time to go to press. What's more, 'Up above' is accompanied by five full pages of (I think) colour illustrations and twelve small line drawings which were clearly specially commissioned and can't have been produced in too much of a hurry. So figuring a month (at least) for all of that and Raphael can't have begun work later than the start of November, say.

Which makes it just possible that the Sheerness incident was an inspiration for Raphael. This took place on 14 October, but again was not widely reported until about a month later, when questions were asked in Parliament. However The Aeroplane reported 31 October on rumours that something -- a Zeppelin or perhaps a naval aviator -- had been flying over Sheerness at night. It's interesting that the Sheerness thing was heard but not seen; this is true also of the invisible sub-aerine in 'Up above', which is notable for the strange sounds it makes, like countless slate pencils grating and squeaking over countless greasy slates'.⁸ Maybe Raphael knew of this rumour and incorporated it into his story, but that's about all the influence I am able to allow for the phantom airship-Raphael connection.

NB. There's very little about 'Up above' on the web, aside from an Australian review of the subsequent novel. But I must go back in time and take this course.

1. John N. Raphael, 'Up above', Pearson's Magazine 34 (December 1912), 710-60.
2. Ibid., 710.
3. Ibid., 754.
4. Ibid., 738. I was going to say that this must be an early use of the phrase 'air sickness'; in fact the OED has three earlier cites, the first being Horace Walpole in 1784!
5. Ibid., 753-4.
6. Ibid., 733.
7. Ibid., 750.
8. Ibid., 720.

The aforementioned Mike Dash sent me the above photograph, presumably a fake, wondering if I'd seen it before and if I knew its provenance. I have not, but I agree it's a fake. It can be found in a few places on the web, for example here and here.

It purportedly shows two Italian airships bombing a Turkish encampment in the Italo-Turkish War in 1912, one of the very first air attacks ever made. The airships do look like the airships used by Italy in Libya, namely the three P-types, highly streamlined semi-rigid dirigibles built in 1910-1 -- note the control surfaces at the rear. But they don't look real; at the least they have been heavily retouched. The gondola of the airship on the right doesn't look like it's in the right place, though that could be perspective. Also, from the (real) photos I've seen, the Ps didn't have shiny-silver envelopes, but had a darkened and banded appearance. And there's just too much going on. The airships are swooping, the bombs are exploding, and the cameraman was in the right place at the right time to capture it. I don't buy it. I suspect it was probably faked for Turkish consumption to show how the Italians were using inhumane new methods of warfare (the supposed photographer would have to be Turkish to be plausibly near a Turkish army encampment). That it seems to first appeared on a Turkish website may support this. But if anyone knows anything definite, please comment.

Here are a couple of other images I came across while looking for other photos of the Italian airships at war. They're from Willis J. Abbot, Aircraft and Submarines: The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day Uses of War's Newest Weapons (New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1918), which has a lot of great illustrations.

The caption for this one reads:

German Air Raiders over England.
In the foreground three British planes are advancing to the attack.

No date or location (other than England) given, but with that many aeroplanes in daylight they must be Gothas in 1917. Those are some very dubious-looking aeroplanes there. They look like they've been drawn on. Once again there's too much going on -- I don't think three British fighters ever intercepted a Gotha raid like that. And there's something odd going on with the area around the tree. It's possible that we're not supposed to believe that it's an actual photograph of a Gotha raid; maybe a contemporary viewer would have understood that it's an artist's depiction. The attached image credit says 'Photo by International Film Service', which on the one hand suggests it was presented as a photo; but on the other, International Film Service was an animation company run by Randolph Hearst. That would seem to be the clincher, then.

I'm inclined to lend this last one a bit more credence. The caption:

A Burning Balloon,
Photographed from a Parachute by the Escaping Balloonist.

If it's fake, at least it's more skillfully done -- the smoke plume looks quite realistic. Balloon observers did have parachutes for use in emergencies (at least in British service -- unlike aeroplane crews) and they did have cameras with them, for aerial photography. They would have been valuable, so maybe escaping observers did try to take them with them when they jumped out. But I imagine the cameras were fairly bulky affairs: even if the balloonist did have the presence of mind to take a photo of his burning balloon is it likely he could get such a clear shot from his swaying parachute? And he's a long way from his balloon, for that matter, although perhaps that's down to the wind. I'd have to conclude this is a fake too.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, as such: some of the great Frank Hurley's most effective war photos were composites, which is pretty close to fake. But present them as authentic is to commit genre crime.

But there is still much of interest. Hovering in the background of The Final Count is the threat of warfare, especially aero-chemical warfare. George Simmers noted some time back that this novel seems to present an unusually early example of the feeling that the Great War had been futile. That's my impression too, from a slightly different angle. The events described in the novel take place in 1927 (i.e. the near future of the time of publication in 1926), and Europe seems to be on the brink of war again. That's at odds with my impression of the mid-1920s, certainly after the Locarno treaties of 1925; it's not that there were no tensions between nations, but there was little feeling that war was likely any time soon. Perhaps Sapper needed to exaggerate the possibility of conflict in order to find employment for Drummond and his band of merry vigilantes, preferably against the Bolshevik menace.

The poison mentioned above was originally developed near the end of the Great War by Robin Gaunt, a British chemist serving in the British army. It's actually a liquid (as was mustard 'gas') which causes instantaneous (and very painful) death if applied under the skin. This made it impractical as a battlefield weapon, because the intended victims would need to already have some minor cuts to allow the poison to get in. There is also the problem of how to spray a liquid over a large area. The plan put forward was to use tanks for this purpose (a la J. F. C. Fuller in The Reformation of War).

The Armistice fortunately made this unnecessary. But by 1924 the world is on the edge of ruin again:

Six years later found Europe an armed camp with every nation snarling at every other nation. Scientific soldiers gave lectures in which they stated their ideas of the next war: civilised human beings talked glibly of raining down myriads of germs on huge cities. It was horrible -- incredible: man had called in science to aid him in destroying his fellowmen, and science had obeyed him -- at a price. It was a price which had not been contemplated: it was a case of another Frankenstein's monster. Man had now to obey science, not science man: he had created a thing which he could not control.¹

Gaunt comes up with the idea of 'inventing a weapon so frightful that its mere existence would control the situation. The bare fact that it was there would act as the presence of a headmaster in a room full of small boys'.² The intention is that a world policeman would threaten its use against potential or actual aggressors. He meets an Australian (!) millionaire who also hates war, having lost two sons at Gallipoli, and who agrees to fund his researches. Gaunt manages to improve his gas by combining it with a blister agent which will rupture the skin and allow the poison to penetrate it. Only a few drops are needed to kill. The problem of deployment is also solved:

The tank scheme, however effective it might have been when a war was actually raging, was clearly an impossibility in such circumstances as I contemplated [wrote Gaunt]. Something far more sudden, far more mobile was essential.

Aeroplanes had great disadvantages. Their lifting power was limited: they were unable to hover: they were noisy.

And then there came to my mind the so-called silent raid on London during the war when a fleet of Zeppelins drifted down-wind over the capital with their engines shut off. Was that the solution?

There were disadvantages there too. First and foremost -- vulnerability. Silent raids by night were not my idea of the function of a world policeman. But by day an airship is a comparatively easy thing to hit; and once hit she comes down in flames.

The solution to that was obvious: helium. Instead of hydrogen she would be filled with the non-inflammable gas helium.³

Gaunt's benefactor buys an airship from Germany; the idea is to present the completed weapons system to the War Office (no mention of the Air Ministry!) and spring the whole scheme on the world as a fait accompli. But Bulldog Drummond's arch-nemesis Carl Peterson intervenes, and the airship is diverted from its noble purpose ...

The idea of a 'world policeman' here might relate to proposals for an international air force which were beginning to percolate at the time. But there's an important distinction: in Gaunt's vision, the death-dealing airships would not be at the service of the international community (the League of Nations is pointedly labelled useless) but instead would be wielded a great power which could be trusted to use them responsibly, i.e. Britain (possibly in concert with the United States and the other English-speaking nations). So this is more a revived pax Britannica, air-based rather than sea-based. The idea of scientists developing a terrible new weapon in order to end war is also suggestive of such novels as W. Holt-White's The Man Who Stole the Earth (1909).

The prospective use of airships as an offensive weapon (and the parallel denigration of aeroplanes for the same purpose) is unusual for a story written after the First World War. Sapper gives their combustibility as the main reason for their unsuitability, which is why he fills his with helium. (Also for important plot reasons.) This strikes me as both backwards and, er, forwards. The combustibility of hydrogen was certainly a problem, as the Hindenburg discovered in 1937. And helium was starting to be used in airships: the USS Shenandoah, built in 1923, was the first to use it. But inflammability was hardly the only reason why airships were no longer thought of as bombers. Being filled with helium didn't stop the Shenandoah from being ripped apart in a storm.

Similarly, Sapper misunderstands the nature of the so-called 'silent raid' of the night of 19 October 1917. This was a big Zeppelin raid which encountered heavy winds when the eleven airships crossed England's east coast. They were driven hard by the wind across the country and even into France; in all five were destroyed, four due to the weather, one by anti-aircraft fire. Accounts differ as to why the raid was 'silent': it may have been because the high wind dispersed the sound of the Zeppelin engines, or it might have been because London's AA defences held fire as L45 flew overhead, figuring that fog hid the city's location and that there was no need to let the Germans know where they were. According to Sapper, however, the silent raid was an intentional tactic in which the Zeppelins switched their engines off, effectively sneaking up on their target. Before radar, when sound location was one of the primary means of detecting enemy bombers, this was indeed a worrying possibility (which the Italians were later accused of making a reality over Barcelona). But Sapper seems not to have realised that the silent raid was an utter disaster for the airship raiders. He might at that have shared in a popular misconception, but accurate accounts of the silent raid were already available, for example in Joseph Morris' The German Air Raids on Britain, 1914-1918 (1925).

So Sapper -- real name H. C. McNeile, a decorated ex-Royal Engineer -- was not particularly well-informed about aerial warfare. He probably picked up his ideas about airships from incomplete reports of the Great War air raids and reading about the Burney and Imperial Airship Schemes in the mid-1920s. Well, not everyone could be an aviation expert. But equally, few readers would have noticed or cared -- his books certainly sold well enough, and The Final Count perhaps helped to sustain the image of the airship as a bomber. But if so, it left few traces that I can find.

1. Sapper, The Final Count (London and Melbourne: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1985 [1926]), 148.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid., 149.

Overall, England had fewer aircraft than the other great powers. The total of 113 compares with 120 for France, 232 for Germany, 226 for Russia and 36 for Austro-Hungary. These figures are commonly cited to indicate England’s relative weakness but such a conclusion is based on the assumption that absolute air strength was important in 1914. If we consider what aircraft were for we may reach a different conclusion. Since aircraft were used for reconnaissance by both armies and navies the number of aircraft should be considered in terms of the sizes of each army and navy. If we do this England comes out as the most aeronautically inclined nation, since its mobilised army numbered less than one million men, whereas the French and German armies each had more than three million.¹

And he's right. There were few advocates of independent airpower in 1914, as the proper use of aircraft was considered to be to support the army and the navy. And so we shouldn't just compare the number of aircraft possessed by each nation to each other: the numbers need to be contextualised. But how?

Here is Edgerton's argument in tabular form. I've used his numbers for the aircraft figures, and have taken the mobilisation strengths of each nation's army from Niall Ferguson's The Pity of War.²

So despite having fewer aircraft than most of the great European powers in absolute terms, Britain actually had more in proportionate terms. Germany may have had twice has many aeroplanes than Britain, but since they had to support a much bigger army they were spread much more thinly: a British army unit had around four times as many aeroplanes to scout for it than its German equivalent.

But wait a moment. Why compare Britain's airpower to the size of its army? Britain was first and foremost a naval power, which is one reason why its army was so much smaller than those on the Continent. If we're trying to establish how seriously it took airpower, wouldn't the correct comparator be the Royal Navy? Indeed, Edgerton does refer to both armies and navies in the above quote, but in the final sentence mentions only armies. Perhaps that is because even the greatest navy in the world didn't add up to much manpower alongside the mighty armies of Europe. But then that's because navies were (and are) much less manpower-intensive than armies. So let's redo the above table in terms of the size of each navy, again drawing on Ferguson.³ (I could use tonnage or numbers of ships but let's keep it simple.)

Britain now comes off worse in this comparison, by a considerable margin. If we accept that Britain's army was relatively well-supported with airpower then we must accept that its navy was relatively poorly-supported.

Except ... my analysis here doesn't make much sense: it treats aircraft as all alike, equally likely to be deployed to support the army or the navy as required. Of course, this wasn't the case. When formed in 1912, the RFC had a military and a naval wing, the latter of which had hived off to become the Royal Naval Air Service by the outbreak of war in 1914. The other powers had similar divisions, whether more or less formal, although Britain had the largest naval air arm -- which doesn't necessarily mean it had the largest naval air arm relative to the size of its navy. So instead of a column for 'aircraft', there should be columns for 'military aircraft' and 'naval aircraft'.

Here is the first table redone purely in terms of military aircraft. Edgerton doesn't split up the aircraft numbers into naval and military (except for Britain), so I have got the latter from John Morrow's The Great War in the Air.⁴ Despite being for military aircraft alone, they are generally higher than Edgerton's figures because he used only 'first line' aircraft (for comparison, he credited the RFC with 63 and the RNAS with 50). Despite this, the ratios of soldiers to aircraft come out pretty much the same, i.e. in line with Edgerton's argument.

And here's the second table above, redone with naval aircraft only. The data here are taken from R. D. Layman's Naval Aviation in the First World War.⁵ Again, these are aeroplanes of all states, even if they are unserviceable, trainers, etc. The result is that Britain comes off a bit better: it doesn't have the worst ratio of sailors to aeroplanes but is in the middle, about equal with Russia and a bit better than Germany. And Austria-Hungary has the most lavish levels of naval aviation support.

So if you accept my premise that Britain's airpower in 1914 should be measured by its seapower, I think I've made my point (though my tweeted claim was wrong): it was under-resourced, though not terribly so. But having said that, Edgerton is still right insofar as British aviation was well-prepared for fighting over land, compared with its likely allies and enemies.

One caveat: despite saying 'aircraft' the numbers I've used don't include airships, which most air forces had at the outbreak of war in 1914. I can get numbers of airships pretty easily, but should they simply be added to the number aeroplanes? No: a single airship represented a considerably greater investment of resources than a single aeroplane, so some other method should be used to capture both types of aircraft: total number of airmen, total aviation funding, total number of engines, total weight of aircraft, and so on. I haven't been able to find a decent set of these, so I've left it as is.

Finally: just for fun, here's Edgerton's aircraft figures (which, remember, are both military and naval aircraft) against the total military and naval personnel for each nation, taken from Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers (I think for standing forces only, i.e. before mobilisation).⁶

Britain doesn't do too badly, but it doesn't do as well as its partner in antagonism, Germany. That's one for the Kaiser, then.

1. David Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Academic and Professional, 1991), 10.
2. Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London: Allen Lane, 1998), 92. On Ferguson's numbers, Britain's strength actually fell after mobilisation, so I presume there's a typo somewhere, or maybe he's using the BEF as the mobilised strength. It flatters Edgerton's position so I'll keep it.
3. Ibid., 85.
4. John H. Morrow, The Great War in the Air: Military Aviation from 1909 to 1921 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993).
5. R. D. Layman, Naval Aviation in the First World War: Its Impact and Influence (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1996), appendix 1.
6. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (London, Sydney and Wellington: Unwin Hyman, 1988), 203.