MONSTER EAR TRUMPETS FOR AIR DEFENCE

During the last years of the Great War, sound detectors played an increasingly important part in the air defences of all the belligerents. Since those days they have undergone great development. Here the emperor of Japan is inspecting the huge trumpet-like detectors that work in conjunction with the anti-aircraft guns (seen right)

This last in a series on 'Things of tomorrow' draws upon Boyd Cable, 'Future schemes of air defence', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 310-6. (There was a seventh in the series, but by another author and on a non-military subject, that of stratospheric flight.) The previous posts looked at 'Death from the skies', 'The doom of cities', 'New horrors of air attack', 'If war should come' and 'When war does come: terrifying effects of gas attacks'.

Cable starts off a little defensively, allowing that 'it may have seemed to some readers that I have been unduly gloomy and pessimistic' in his previous articles about the threat of aerial bombardment. He doesn't think so, but here presents 'the other side of the picture'. Even so he immediately argues that the problem of defence is made more difficult by the development of blind flying at night or in bad weather 'by means of his compass and various stabilizing and automatic steering instruments'. Also,

we know it is a commonplace of commercial air routes that by wireless he can, if he is unaware of his position, communicate with his base station, and within a matter of seconds he can be told the exact spot over which he is flying [...] so far no experiments have succeeded in effectively "jamming" or "mixing" a pilot's questions and answers.

He does however note that, especially in war conditions, such flying demands high skilled pilots, and 'Casualties in the first days of intensive air raiding could not but be heavy, and those highly skilled pilots would soon be reduced in numbers'. Interceptor pilots would also take losses, but these are easier to train than bomber pilots.

Cable suggests that while Britain's island nature is disadvantageous because bombers can approach over the sea undetected, it is less of a problem than in the last war:

We have now, for instance, what we had not then, flying boats able to keep in the air or on the sea for days, so that now they can establish patrols and a chain of listening posts far out to sea to pass the word of raiders' approach.

There is also the '"pick-a-back" machine', where a flying boat carries a smaller plane on top and launches it in mid-air, allowing the latter to save fuel and extend its range:

There is now nothing to prevent a large boat or seaplane carrying one or two fast interceptor fighters far out to sea, the latter to save their fuel until they take off on their own to attack any raiders.

Along somewhat similar lines, Cable discusses the recent development of the '"motor" kite balloon', a captive balloon with a small engine for ease of deployment. The 'French Army balloon regiments' are being equipped with these and everyone else is experimenting with them -- except Britain.

It would certainly seem that they might usefully be developed to serve the purpose of carrying a fast fighter, and, while drifting for periods with engine stopped, listening with sound locators for approaching raiders. They could then loose their own fighters and call up others; or, even without a fighter attached, might act as listening outposts.

Cable then segues into a discussion of sound locators. The capabilities of these have increased in recent years, but 'this has been largely offset by the increased speed of aircraft':

They are now required to be capable of detecting an enemy who may be as much as 50 miles away, and to give more warning of impending attack than our present types with their effective range of only a quarter of that distance.

Still, they are an important part of an effective air defence system:

The locators give the defensive aircraft the line, height and direction of an enemy's flight, and the same information goes to the searchlight and anti-aircraft guns' crews. The direction of the light beams and the shell bursts are further pointers to assist the interceptors in finding the enemy. Even if the lights fail to disclose the raiders, the locators can still keep track of their position, and the lights and shells follow them to guide the interceptors to their quarry.

Balloon aprons were used in the last war and seem to have been effective in deterring German pilots from flying low enough to bomb accurately. Kite balloons might be used for something similar:

The plan is to tether a number of kite balloons at about the same height but scattered at intervals, so as to form a sort of roof over a roof. If attacking machines dive down to clear low clouds or get within good bombing height, they must run the risk of dashing into one of the K.B.'s, or the cable holding down.

Even the small chance of this happening 'will shake most pilots' nerve and make them chary of taking the risk'. And 'explosive balloons and "aerial minefields" have been spoken of for defensive purposes'.

Rather daringly, Cable admits that the 'axiom that "the bombers must get through" [sic] [...] might be changed if our ground defences had their existing obsolete equipment replaced by the latest and best sound locators, searchlights and guns'. On one night during the 1935 air defence exercises, which simulated an aerial offensive against London, around a third of the attackers were successfully intercepted. True, 'the remaining 67 per cent would have made havoc of London', but if such a loss rate could be inflicted for several nights then 'an enemy's striking power would soon be exhausted'.

The last form of defence Cable examines is the use of infrared radiation to detect aircraft in dark or in cloud. 'We have seen those "infra-red" photographs which show distinctly objects and landscape miles away beyond a barrier of mist'. Now there are reports that 'a young Londoner, Dr. E. J. Rigby', has invented a machine for this purpose:

Dr. Rigby said he was then in a position to demonstrate his fog-piercing apparatus by throwing on a small screen a clear picture of a landscape ten or more miles away, although bad visibility prevented the eye seeing more than a few yards. His apparatus would also show a scene through artificially created fog or smoke clouds. He was then working on an apparatus for the use of ships in fog, but was also experimenting with a smaller set for aircraft use. If this, or any other similar apparatus, should prove successful, the defence will score heavily.

Despite these reasons for hope, Cable concludes that even a successful air defence 'will not prevent the infliction of appalling damage and destruction of property and life'.

The air and military experts have long asserted that "the best means of defence is attack." If that be accepted, our greatest and most promising means of defence lies not in the defensive interceptor but in the possession of a tremendously powerful fleet of long-range bombers with the most highly skilled and practised pilots. The knowledge that we held such a force ready to strike might do more than deter an enemy from attacking; it might even deter him from making war.

EARS OF THE FUTURE

Perhaps the main problem of air defence is to devise mechanism [sic] which can detect and register the position of enemy raiders long before they reach their objective. The elaborate "telesimetre," seen here being tested by the French army, is an indication of future developments

IN THE DAWN

Every summer the R.A.F. try out new schemes and methods during exercises in which the squadrons engage in mock warfare. The defence of London is the main object of these operations, and these pilots on a "war zone" aerodrome are assembling at daybreak by their machines

AUTOMATIC RAIDER FINDER

The 2nd Anti-Aircraft Brigade of the R.A. is shown below during manoeuvres at Watchet, Somerset. The gun is working in conjunction with a Vickers predictor, by means of which the position of the objective is communicated electrically to dials on the gun. Since its introduction both rate of fire and percentage of hits on targets at heights between 9,000 and 10,000 feet have been greatly increased

FINDING A TARGET

The anti-aircraft defences of Britain are largely in the hands of the Territorial Army. The above photo, of a rehearsal by London Territorials, shows the co-operation of searchlights and gun crews. When enemy aircraft are reported overhead, the searchlights, working in pairs, search the night sky. Effective as the present equipment is, the future will witness remarkable developments in anti-aircraft defence

LISTENING POST

The Observer Corps, a voluntary organization of civilians enrolled as special constables, has attained a high pitch of efficiency in its important work of locating, both by sound and sight. Sensitive sound-locators, as seen below in action during the 1935 air exercises, are used by listening "spotters." New and better equipped units are shortly to be formed, particularly around London

KITE BALLOON FOR DEFENCE

This curious craft, constructed by the French, is a kite balloon with a light fuselage attached. The machine is not intended as an airship, the addition of the body with engine being for the purpose of making the balloon quickly and easily mobile without deflating and transporting it on the ground. In this page it is suggested that the "motor" kite balloon could be used for defence purposes

ARCHITECTURE FOR AIR RAIDS

If war is still to be the final arbiter of the nations, the cities of the future must be built, at fantastic expense, not as pleasant homes but as refuges against the horrors of poison gas dropped from raiding aeroplanes. A famous French architect, M. Paul Vauthier, has designed such a city and this sketch gives a grim warning of what civilization may come to

SMOKE-SCREEN DEFENCE AGAINST RAIDERS

During the Great War the Navy used smoke screens with great success to hide the movements of warships from the enemy. The discharge of smoke from aeroplanes, invented by Major Savage, was first used for sky-writing, for advertising purposes, and has now been developed into an important factor in aerial warfare. In this photograph, an army aeroplane belonging to the United States Air Force [sic] is emitting a dense smoke screen over the city of Sacramento, California, to obscure it from the view of enemy air raiders

GAS-PROOF PIGEON-COTE

During the Great War all the belligerents learned that, despite the mechanization of armies, the horse, the dog and the carrier pigeon were still of value on the battlefields, and in the future they will certainly be required for similar purposes. In Germany, where precautions against gas have been rehearsed with characteristic thoroughness, gas-proof pigeon-houses, one of which is here shown, have been devised. The pigeons live in the upper compartment when there is no danger, but when gas is about they are placed in the lower one, which is provided with anti-gas filters

Some of these photographs are very well-known. The one at the top of the Japanese sound locators is usually described as showing 'war tubas' (and cropped and low-resolution compared with this version), but here they are called 'monster ear trumpets': a more apt (if even less martial) description as their function was to detect sound, not to make it. The other sound locators shown here can also be found in many places around the internet.

Of the rest, the kite balloon (or as we, living after the Blitz, would describe it, a barrage balloon) is of the motorised variety described by Cable in the article. The gas-proof pigeon-cote seems to have been chosen at random; it's not mentioned in the article. The same is true of the drawing of the town designed to withstand air attack, but it's a fascinating image. Vauthier is either a French architect who influenced Le Corbusier, or a French general who wrote about Douhetism, or maybe they are one and the same. His basic idea seems to have been to spread buildings out and to build them high with a minimal cross-section from above; that way most bombs will fall on empty ground. It's taken from the Illustrated London News in 1934 (or maybe 1933); Ptak Science Books has more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FORETASTE OF THE FUTURE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GAS BOMBER GETS THROUGH

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

AT THE LAST GASP

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

WILL THEY BE A COMMON SIGHT?

Officers of the St. Johns Ambulance Brigade, who, in their black and white uniforms, are familiar and friendly figures to Londoners, are now preparing for the possibility that grim and terrible duties may one day fall to their lot. A number of them have recently received instruction in a hall beneath one of London's biggest blocks of flats in methods of first aid in the streets, in the use of shelters and airlocks and the gas-proofing of private premises. A group of them is here seen clothed from head to foot in anti-gas equipment

These photographs are from the fourth of a series of articles on the future of aerial warfare: Boyd Cable, 'If war should come', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 201-4. The preceding articles were 'Death from the skies', 'The doom of cities', and 'New horrors of air attack'.

Cable's article concentrates on two aspects of the next war. The first is life after the exodus from the great cities expected after a knock-out blow from the air. This happened to an extent even after the air raids in the Great War, and Cable says that it is 'Beyond question' that next time 'the increased horrors will augment the terror and the urge to get into the country', which will become crowded with refugees. But in seeking safety from the bombs they will be exposing themselves to the danger of starvation and disease:

Obviously, if no more than one or two million people are spilled out of a city into the miles of country around it, the highly developed system of sanitation and essential supplies to which they have been accustomed will be entirely lacking [...] In such circumstances, disease and epidemics would spread like wildfire among them.

Even in the best of circumstances, it would be next to impossible to care for such a flood of people. In wartime, the problem would be insoluble: the attack would probably come suddenly, giving authorities no time to prepare, and enemy bombers would also be attacking the ports from which the food must come. Providing clean drinking water for hundreds of thousands of refugees would also be impossible. In a week, starvation and typhoid would be stalking them.

And there would be no guarantee that the enemy would not attack them even dispersed in the countryside:

Bombers would simply rain incendiary bombs on any patch of woodland and set it blazing from end to end, or drench the wood with poison gas which would contaminate trees, grass and earth for weeks, and turn it into a death-trap and charnel house.

Add to this the horror of bacteriological warfare. Cable admits that this presents difficulties for the aggressor, as epidemic infections are no respecters of national borders and may end up infecting those who spread them. But

Such a consideration is not so likely to deter an attacker of Britain, however, for it would be a simple matter to prevent any infected person or animal from carrying the germs from their country back to the Continent.

Also, he notes evidence that nations are anyway prepared to take the risk, Germany in particular. He notes (quoting here Dr Gertud Woker, a Swiss professor of chemistry) 'the notorious Zurich "bomb and bacilli" case' during the last war; 'a machine for spraying disease germs' said to have been made 'under the direction of Herr Himmler, Munich police commander'; and the secret German experimentation with germ circulation in the Paris Metro, which caused a sensation there in 1934 (oddly, he doesn't mention that the experiments were supposedly carried out in the London Underground too).

Still, Cable concludes on a relatively optimistic note:

Certainly town populations will be safer in the open country than in their own homes, if they can keep moderately scattered. It might even pay an enemy, as a military measure, to leave them reasonably unmolested while they keep out of the towns, because a people living in fields and forests would stop all munition and war work.

FAR WORSE THINGS MAY COME

"Darkness and composure," which it was suggested were the best means of countering the first Zeppelin raids, will be useless against poison gas attacks from the air. There will be a headlong flight from the gas-contaminated cities to the open country, and such scenes as this, when the Belgian people fled before the advancing German armies, will be repeated on a vastly greater and more terrible scale, with the added horror of panic

EVERYWHERE THE FEAR OF GAS

It is obviously impossible to reproduce in peace time the horrible conditions of an actual attack by aerial raiders dropping gas bombs, but in nearly every European country the people of the cities have gone through a course of anti-gas drill, not only for practice purposes, but with the idea of familiarizing the public with such possibilities. Here are girls leaving a house in Munich that has been filled with gas. They wear anti-gas clothing but are not fully equipped with gas masks. Below, first-aid men are helping a woman from a bombed house during a mimic raid on Berlin

HE CARRIES POISON

The gases which would be used in chemical warfare of the future cling to the ground for many hours and precautions must be taken lest the stretcher-bearers should take them into the hospitals. Here their boots are being cleansed of gas during anti-gas instruction course at Salisbury

AS THE ITALIANS DO

In Rome anti-gas precautions are very thorough. Here, during gas drill, chemicals are being spread on the steps of the Ministry of Defence as antidotes to the fumes left by gas bombs

There's a disconnect here between the illustrations and the text. Only the one showing a press of Belgian refugees in 1914 actually pertains at all to one of Cable's topics, giving an idea of what the exodus would be like. All the rest are about precautions for chemical warfare, not biological warfare; and there's no attempt to portray the starvation- and disease-ridden crowds of scared Londoners hiding in Epping Forest. Probably because these things are difficult to represent (what would they choose? Scientists looking through microscopes? Mass starvation in India?) but also because, for its part, bacteriological warfare was not actually high on anyone's civil defence agenda. Also, gas and germs tended to be elided in the public mind, somewhat. Also, pictures of people in gas masks are so vivid and striking that it was an easy an effective way of getting the message (i.e. be afraid!) across. In fact, so vivid and striking that I couldn't resist putting the ambulance men at the top of the post, even though they don't appear until the third page of Cable's article.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SUCH THINGS WILL HAPPEN

In April, 1935, a Kentish Voluntary Aid Detachment of the British Red Cross Society conducted an air raid rehearsal. Here Red Cross men wearing box respirators and anti-gas clothing are rescuing a woman caught by gas in the open. With a heavy concentration of the deadly gases that modern chemists have now evolved there is little chance she would survive for more than a few minutes.

These images are from Boyd Cable, 'New horrors of air attack', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 143-6, the third article in a series on 'Things of tomorrow', following on 'Death from the skies' and 'The doom of cities'.

Here Cable really steps up the scaremongering by examining the destructive powers of bombers. For example:

• 'An explosive or "brianz" bomb of about 1,000 lb. will now demolish a whole block of houses, even if it only falls close to and not on them'.
• A thermite incendiary can burn at up to 5000°C:
  

  It will melt steel, eat through stone, cause anything even moderately inflammable near it to burst into flames. Water actually increases the incendiary effect, and there is no known means of extinguishing the mixture.

• 'A formation of ten bombers can start 10,000 fires in a city.'
• On 'poison-gas bombers':
  

  It will almost be a matter of indifference to the bombers whether their poison kills or injures 5 per cent. or 50 per cent. of their victims. The main purpose will be achieved by forcing all air defence workers who have gas-masks to put them and wear them continuously, and by inflicting such torture and death, by choking and blistering gas, on even a small proportion of men, women and children drive the panic-stricken people into mad stampeding efforts to fly from the area.

• On new gases: 'only those in the laboratories of the various nations know what other terrors have been invented and kept hidden but ready for the next war'.
• On mustard gas: 'Anyone walking on it or brushing against it, carries the poison into house or dug-out, where it vaporizes and kills'.
• On Lewisite:
  

  Bombers carrying 16 cwt. of Lewisite can spread a 20-foot-thick blanket of deadly poison over one square mile. Putting it another way, 10 bombers carrying 5,000 lb. of Lewisite each can poison an area of 10 miles long by seven miles wide.

• On the prospects for civil defence:
  

  It is plainly impossible that entire cities can be made impervious to explosive or incendiary bombs, and no less impossible that all the men, women and children in our cities can be provided with the 'essential' masks and 'special clothing' to protect us all against all the various types of poison gas.

Unsurprisingly, Cable can offer little hope to his readers. The only defence is deterrence, the ability to do the same to any attacker; beyond that,

It may be a question whether it would pay the most sadistic seeker of victory so to wreck and ruin an enemy country that at the finish the smoking ruins of cities, the maimed, crippled, disease-ravaged population would not be worth the conquering, possessing and ruling.

And maybe, just maybe, air defence, which he hints he will discuss in a future article.

MASKED AGAINST DEATH

These are men of a Voluntary Aid Detachment undergoing anti-gas instruction at Winchester. They are wearing the latest type of box respirator, and the grotesque and horrible appearance that the equipment gives them emphasizes the ghastliness of the form of warfare for which they are prepared.

RAID PAST: DEATH STILL LURKS

Here is a scene in a Berlin street after a mimic air raid. In this quarter of the city, mustard gas was actually used, and road sweepers, equipped with masks and anti-gas clothing, are cleansing the contaminated streets which would otherwise have emitted poisonous fumes for many hours after the raid was over.

JAPAN PREPARES FOR GAS ATTACK

In Japan, anti-gas drill has been carried out under Government control with the same thoroughness that it has been in Germany, and the traffic of cities has been held up while war-time conditions were reproduced. This photograph shows a scene near Nippon Bridge, Tokio, while a mimic raid was in progress. Soldiers, police and ambulance men in gas-masks are attending to those who have been gassed, and civilians, including women and children, have been pressed into service to represent casualties.

HOW DEATH COMES FROM THE AIR

After Germany re-armed in the air, opportunity was taken not only to let the people see the efficiency of the men and machines but also to give them visual warning of possible 'things to come.' Here models of scattered buildings have been erected and a squadron of aeroplanes swooping down demonstrates the accuracy of aim now possible. The bomb seen exploding is of a new type, capable of completely obliterating a substantial building.

Some of these photographs bear on earlier posts. The one of the crowd of men wearing gas masks is a differently cropped version of a photo published in Poison Gas (London: Union of Democratic Control, 1935) which I reproduced here (I think it was taken at the same exercise as the top photograph). The Tokyo exercise predates the Japanese ARP posters discussed here by at least a year or two, showing that fear of gas attacks was growing even in the mid-1930s. And the final shot of the Luftwaffe's biplane bombers attacking mock buildings looks very much like a Hendon set-piece analogue.

Here's something I didn't know before. In 1939, an Indian chemistry professor and Theosophist named D. D. Kanga edited a collection of articles entitled Where Theosophy and Science Meet: A Stimulus to Modern Thought. One of the articles was by Peter Freeman, who had been a Labour MP from Wales between 1929 and 1931 (and would be again from 1945 until his death in 1956). He had also been general secretary of the Welsh branch of the Theosophical Society since 1922. His contribution to Kanga's volume was entitled 'The practical application of Theosophy to politics and government'; I'm not sure when it was originally published, assuming it wasn't written specially for this volume, but it would probably be the early to mid-1930s.

Freeman's basic premise is that of Theosophy: that the universe and everything in it is evolving in accordance with what he calls '"the Plan"'. This applies to societies too, 'in the gradual civilization and progress of humanity towards its destined end -- the full realization of Universal Brotherhood'. But this process is helped along both by enlightened people (e.g. Theosophists) and by 'a body of super-men, the Masters [...] who, having passed through the many stages of life, are now competent to help and guide the affairs of the earth'.

These evolved men are known as the Great White Brotherhood, or the Inner Government of the World. All forms of government on earth are but pale reflections of their activities, nevertheless everyone can assist, in however humble a manner, in their mighty task of bringing about the perfection of all life.

In this spirit, Freeman asked:

What are the immediate political steps that should be taken to secure World Peace and to establish the Brotherhood of Man?

His answer was that 'a World Power acting on behalf of the League of Nations' was required, so that nations would feel secure and consent to disarmament.

And was this to be achieved? By an international air force:

As a step to this end the inauguration of an International Air Police Force would appear to be the most practicable means. Much of the Air Service is already under international control. This could be extended and it could act under the general control and jurisdiction of the League of Nations with a minimum of difficulty as outlined in detail in "The New Commonwealth League" proposals.

Air Forces are almost useless for defence, but invaluable for offence. It is, therefore, only the potential aggressor who would insist on their retention under individual national control.

This would, of course, mean that the so-called sovereign rights of Nations would have to be subordinated to the welfare of the World, but only in this way can world Peace be secured. Until some central World Authority has not only been established but has also secured effective power to see its judgments carried out, war will continue. Until international justice can thus be maintained, it is inevitable that disputes between nations will not only break out from time to time but may even grow more ruthless, brutal, bitter and intense.

Now, this is a pretty standard left-liberal viewpoint for the mid-1930s -- apart from the stuff about the Great White Brotherhood benevolently directing the evolution of the human race, which is very weird indeed. (Not to mention Lemuria, the seven root races of man, the akashic records, the Book of Dzyan...) And even then, many liberal internationalists probably did think that something like Freeman's vision was the way the world was evolving, and were certainly in sympathy with the idea that people of conscience should do all they could to bring that about. Still, I wonder if this was just Freeman merging his own particular political and spiritual beliefs, or if Theosophy and the international air force went together in some sense?

One way to answer this would be to find out where Freeman came across the international air force idea. One clue might be in his reference to the New Commonwealth, which was devoted to promoting a world police, which in practice mainly meant an internationalised air force. It was quite prominent in the public debate about collective security in the early and mid 1930s. It's also interesting that the driving force behind the New Commonwealth was Lord Davies, who was also a former Welsh MP, from a neighbouring constituency -- albeit a Liberal one who left the House of Commons just as Freeman was entering. Still, Freeman surely must have known of Davies and his ideas, even if they didn't know each other.

Another possibile source is the psychologist William McDougall, who oddly enough was one of the first people to come up with a fully-fledged international air force scheme, in an appendix to his Ethics and Some Modern World Problems (London: Methuen & Co., 1924). Even though McDougall was quite a successful public intellectual, I can't find many references to his ideas on this topic. But he was also interested in parapsychology, carrying out ESP research with J. B. Rhine in the United States. This was a subject which interested Theosophists very much, and I've found a number of reviews of his books in Theosophical journals. So it's possible this was Freeman's way into international air force advocacy.

A final possibility is also another example of a Theosophist interested in the international air force concept. In September 1932, the Theosophical Magazine printed a notice of a new organisation called the New Political Fellowship. While it declared itself to non-political, it was opposed to 'Communism and partisan policies with their imposition of outside authority', operating on the basis of voluntarism not compulsion. That sounds quite liberal, as far as it goes. To apply this 'New Order of Things -- The New Crusade' to international affairs the following were deemed to be required:

(a) International Police (ex-Army).
(b) International Naval Police and Transport (ex-Navy).
(c) International Air Police and Transport (ex-R.A.F.).
(d) International Codes for Road, Sea and Air Travel.

A news item in Nature reveals that the New Political Fellowship was the brainchild of A. G. Pape, the founding secretary of the Scottish Anthropological and Folklore Society and author of a couple of books on racial themes. And Pape, it turns out, was a Theosophist. Not only did he evidently ask the Theosophical Magazine to publicise the founding of his New Political Fellowship (which in turn suggests he thought it might appeal to Theosophists), but there's also an article by him in... wait for it... Kanga's Where Theosophy and Science Meet (on the subject of anthropology).

Having come full circle it seems appropriate to leave off there, which is convenient because I don't have much more to add. I haven't been able to find any other connections between Theosophy and the international air force idea. On the other hand, Hugh 'Stuffy' Dowding was a Theosophist (and keenly interested in fairies and flying saucers too). And then there's J. F. C. Fuller's Alesteir Crowley and kabbalistic phases...

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RAIN OF BOMBS

Milan's wonderful cathedral is here shown under a rain of dummy bombs dropped by 80 aeroplanes during recent manoeuvres of the Italians. To make the display more impressive and to ascertain the results with more certainty, luminous "bombs" were used and fell in a fiery rain upon the city -- a dire portent of future terrors

The images in this post are from Boyd Cable, 'The doom of cities', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 96-8. It was Cable's second article in a series on 'Things of tomorrow'. The text doesn't actually connect with the illustrations very well. Cable's main point is given away in the title, that in the next war cities will be ruthlessly destroyed from the air, since 'the murderous slaughter of non-combatants' is the most effective way to force a nation to surrender. While he notes that some experts are sceptical of this (Captain Turner, late of Woolwich Arsenal, Lord Castlerosse, Frederick Handley Page), he argues that 'they are flatly contradicted both by the known facts of the last war and by the preparations which we know have been made in anticipation of the next great struggle'.

Today, and as far as we can see into the future, War first of all means Air War; and Air War spells, literally and actually, the "doom of cities."

IF GAS BOMBS COME

Registered air raid shelters are one of the precautions provided in Berlin against the dangers of air raids. During practice raids on Berlin these shelters are brought into use, and here mothers and children are seen gathered in a bomb and gas proof dug-out while while the officer in charge reads aloud the official instructions to civilians in time of air raids

REALISM IN BERLIN

Rehearsals of air raid precautions in Berlin have been carried out with characteristic German thoroughness and realism. This photograph shows a motor-car which has actually been set on fire to show what disasters might occur in an actual raid

STAGING DESTRUCTION

Another example of such thoroughness is seen in this photograph showing debris piled high in a street in the Kreuzberg section of Berlin as a grim warning of what might happen if a house were struck by a bomb. But Berlin has never been bombed and no thoroughness in mock destruction can reproduce the panic of the people in a real air raid

On the illustrations, the implication is that since Britain's potential enemies are taking civil defence seriously, Britain should too. In fact, British civil defence had only just begun a few months before this article would have been published (in July 1935, when the first ARP Circular was issued to local governments by the Home Office), so it was in its very early stages. Italy and Germany had been holding quite public civil defence exercises for some years, so it's not surprising that they would be held up as exemplars. But it is surprising (or at least it was to me) to then discover that during the Second World War Italy's ARP, in particular, was actually quite primitive compared with Britain's. (See Claudia Baldoli, Andrew Knapp and Richard Overy, eds, Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe 1940-1945 (London: Continuum, 2011.) The British certainly made up for lost time.