What a difference two-thirds of a century makes. This photo was taken from the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral some time after the devastating air raid on the night of 29 December 1940, looking north-north-west. I think the street running diagonally from the lower-right hand corner is Paternoster Row, which had long been the centre of London’s publishing trade.

And the following one was taken in August 2007, from the same place and in roughly the same direction (more N-W than N-N-W). Paternoster Row has gone, and has been replaced by Paternoster Square.

In fact, there aren’t many features common to both photos. That’s not only Goering’s fault, but also that of the post-war urban planners who intentionally obliterated what was left of the old street plan. (And they were apparently inspired by Stalin and Le Corbusier.) The whole area was re-redeveloped around the turn of the millennium, by all accounts a vast improvement.

Image sources: M. J. Bernard Davy, Air Power and Civilization (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1941), facing 144 (1940); me (2007).

This is the talk I gave at Earth Sciences back in May. It’s long and picture heavy and much of it will be be familiar to regular readers, but some people expressed some interest in it so here it is. I’ve lightly edited it, mainly to correct typos in my written copy. I’ve put in links to the Boswell drawings because they’re under copyright, and I’ve replaced one photo because I realised it was of British Army Aeroplane No. 1b, not British Army Aeroplane No. 1a! How embarrassing.

Facing Armageddon: Britain and the Bomber, 1908-1941

Today I’m going to give you an overview of my PhD thesis topic. My broad area is the history of military aviation in the early twentieth century, so first I’ll give you a little background on that.

The first heavier-than-air manned flight was made by the Wright brothers in 1903, as you can see here. Within a few years, countries around the world started thinking about how they could use this new technology for warfare.

This is the British Army’s first aeroplane, which wasn’t very succesful but did at least make the first ever flight in Britain. In 1914, the First World War broke out and this pushed aviation along very quickly. At first, aeroplanes were mostly used to find and report on the movements of enemy troops, but soon they were used to drop bombs on them too.

And when aircraft became powerful enough, they started to bomb targets far behind enemy lines. This is the German Gotha G.IV, which was used to bomb London in 1917 and 1918. Of course, each country also developed fast fighter aircraft to try to shoot down their opponents’ slow bomber and reconnaissance aircraft.

Here’s one of the most famous fighters of the First World War, the British Sopwith Camel, as flown by both Biggles and Snoopy. It was fast, agile, and armed with twin machine guns.

After the war ended in 1918, aviation technology continued to progress, though not quite as quickly. By the 1930s, air forces were starting to be equipped with sleek biplanes such as this Hawker Hart, which was the fastest aeroplane in the Royal Air Force — which is a bit startling since it was actually a bomber and not a fighter!

The late 1930s witnessed the birth of a new generation of aircraft, powerful monoplanes with maximum speeds well in excess of 200 or even 300 miles per hour. They were also better armed than earlier aircraft: these Hawker Hurricane fighters had 8 machine guns.

This is one of the bombers that the Hurricane would be defending Britain against, the Ju 88, Germany’s most effective bomber. It could carry up to 2.5 tons of bombs. Germany built over 14000 of these bombers by the end of 1945.

Finally, this is one of the most powerful bombers of the war, the British Avro Lancaster. It was capable of carrying up to 10 tons worth of high explosive or incendiary bombs to Berlin and beyond.

But that’s all just by way of introduction. My research isn’t actually about aeroplanes as such or how they were used. What I’m looking at is the fear of bombing in Britain in the early twentieth century, from the early days of flight before the First World War, up until the end of the Blitz on British cities in 1941. More specifically, I’m interested in how the threat of aerial bombardment of cities was debated in the public sphere, as distinct from what was being discussed behind closed doors by the government and the armed forces. A number of historians have written excellent studies of British air strategy and air policy. Many of them mention the pervasive fear of bombing on the part of the British public, especially in the 1930s, but nearly always, they just take this fear as a given, and don’t spend much time trying to understand it or its origins. This annoyed me, because the little that they did tell me about the popular fear of bombing was fascinating, and I wanted to know more: why was the public scared of bombing, and what were they afraid would happen? Hence the thesis!

However, it’s very difficult to measure public opinion itself, especially before the introduction of opinion polls (which means virtually all of the period I’m studying). You can get the occasional odd glimpse into what the average person really thought about the dangers of bombers coming over and blowing them up, but perhaps not enough to do a whole thesis on. So instead I’m focusing on some of the most important influences on public opinion: primarily books, journals and newspapers which discussed the air menace and what should be done about it. And to a lesser extent, I also use things like cinema newsreels, films and radio broadcasts. Concerned citizens — often professionals such as military experts, doctors, or scientists — used all of these forums to present predictions of what would happen to cities and civilians under air attack, along with their proposals about how to solve the problem. Novelists took the serious speculations of the experts and turned them into nightmarish visions of what future wars held in store for the inhabitants of great cities. These fictional scenarios in turn coloured much of the debate about bombing. In fact, fictional and non-fictional discussions about bombing were often remarkably similar to each other.

So, what was the threat? Most people today have probably heard of, for example, Guernica, the Blitz or Dresden, which are all still potent symbols of the horrors of total war. This is Guernica, a small town of about 5000 people in the Basque country in northern Spain. In April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War it was devastated by a German air raid.

London was bombed by the Luftwaffe on 57 consecutive nights from 7 September 1940, forcing more than 200,000 people to take shelter in the underground railway stations every night. Here are just some of them in Elephant and Castle.

And this photo was taken from a British aeroplane during the Allied air raids on the German city of Dresden in the middle of February 1945. The little points of light are incendiary bombs, which started a massive firestorm. About 30,000 people — men, women and children — were killed in these raids.

But as terrible as these events were — and there are many more I could have mentioned — they were nothing compared with the predictions made before the war. Essentially, the widespread belief in the 1920s and 1930s was that at the beginning of the next war, a huge fleet of enemy bombers would suddenly strike at London and other cities and destroy them with high explosive bombs, incendiaries, and poison gas, causing hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties within a matter of hours or days, shattering essential infrastructure and leading to mass panic. Under such circumstances, it was widely assumed that Britain’s government would be forced to surrender within days or weeks of the outbreak of war. This is what was sometimes called the ‘knock-out blow’, that is, the sudden blow which would knock Britain out of the war.

This graph shows the effects of the German air raids on Britain in the First World War. ‘Casualties’ means the number of people killed or seriously wounded, in this case in each month. Green shows the casualties caused by airships, and red the casualties caused by aeroplanes. Note that it peaks at about 600 casualties in any one month.

And this is the equivalent graph for the Second World War. The peak casualties per month has shot up to more than 16000. That’s September 1940, when the Blitz began. In all, there were more than 146000 civilian casualties in Britain during the war, around a third of whom were killed.

Now, here’s a comparison between what actually happened in 1939-1945 and what British government officials in 1938 predicted might happen if a war started in 1939 — that’s the knock-out blow: over a million casualties per month, half of them fatalities, over only two months. Nearly two orders of magnitude more destructive than what actually happened. These estimates were not plucked out of thin air, but they weren’t much more than naive extrapolations from the First World War experience: divde the number of casualties between 1914 and 1918 by the tonnage of bombs dropped, and then multiply by the number of bombers the enemy had and the amount of bombs they could carry. This turned out to be a huge exaggeration, but you can see why everyone was so worried!

In extreme versions of the knock-out blow, civilisation itself would collapse, as the complex webs of commerce, transport and social control which bind society together break apart, leaving people to fend for themselves as best they could. From the perspective of a later generation, this sounds a lot like the effects of nuclear war.

And in fact in 1966 Harold Macmillan, a former Conservative Prime Minister who had been a backbench MP in the 1930s, wrote that ‘We thought of air warfare in 1938 rather as people think of nuclear warfare today’. It could in fact mean the end of life as we know it.

I’ll now give you some typical examples of how this fear of the bomber was manifested in literature and the arts. The following quotes are from a knock-out blow novel published in 1934 called Invasion from the Air. Firstly, the enemy air force attacks suddenly, with little or no warning, just after or even before the declaration of war:

At five minutes to twelve on that fateful night Germany struck from the clouds. The blow was totally unexpected, for the declaration of war by Britain against Germany and Italy had no more than been conveyed to the departing Ambassadors [...] London’s bewildered eight millions were precipitated into actual war conditions before the majority of them knew there was a war.

Secondly, the attack is massive in scale:

Squadron after squadron assailed the cities and towns in waves, each wave having its separate duty and aims. Upwards of two hundred enemy aircraft — fighters, bombers and [poison gas] sprayers — were brought down that morning as against only fifty British machines, but eight hundred broke though all attempts to stop them.

And thirdly, it is devastatingly destructive:

Thousands of people were killed or burnt to death or died subsequently insane at the memory of that battle, while, as always after the raids, vast numbers developed later the agonies of poisoned
lungs and throats, eyes and nasal passages [...] When the battle had passed Regent’s Park was scarred with great pits where explosive bombs had fallen [...] the bodies of old and young, broken and mutilated, lay everywhere.

So the knock-out blow would bring the horrors of the trenches of the Great War into everyone’s homes.

The Fall of London: Waterloo, by James Boswell (1933)

Next, here are some drawings which were actually commissioned for the novel I’ve just quoted from, but in the end weren’t actually used. They show the aftermath of the attacks, as the terrified mob revolts and rampages through London. Wrecked trains at Waterloo Station.

The Fall of London: Corner House, by James Boswell (1933)

A patrolling soldier in gas gear tramping past the body of a woman.

The Fall of London: The Colosseum, by James Boswell (1933)

The rioting crowds, clashing with troops. An upper and middle-class fear of the unruly mob goes back at least to the time of the French revolution; more recently, since 1918 there had been an increase in working-class assertiveness and the example of the Russian Revolution to worry about. So the fear of the knock-out blow was not only about the possibility of war but also reflected other anxieties about British society.

Now, I’ll show you a clip from the 1936 film Things To Come, which was adapted from a novel by HG Wells. This was a history of the future in three parts, and was a big-budget spectacular for its day. The first part of Things To Come features a graphic depiction of a gas attack on a city called Everytown, which bears a suspicious similarity to London. It was Wells’ argument that the destruction of modern society by total warfare was a necessary prelude to its recreation into a technocratic, utopian world state.

So much for the threat of the knock-out blow. What could be done about it? Surprisingly, the obvious answer, the one that actually did work in the Battle of Britain — air defence by fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft guns, harnessed to a sophisticated command and control system — was given little credit. It was widely believed that bombers were too fast and too well-armed to be shot down, at least in sufficient numbers to stop an attack.

I’ll show you a graph which helps explain this pessimism. First here’s a map showing Britain in relation to Europe, and some of the directions from which enemy bombers might attack. Ideally, the defending fighters would intercept the bombers before they reached London, the biggest and most important city. But there weren’t nearly enough fighters to keep up a standing patrol, so they’d have to wait until an air raid was detected, and then take off to intercept it. However incoming aircraft could usually only be detected once they’d crossed the coast. And it’s only about 50 miles, give or take, from the coast to London. The problem was that as technology improved and bombers got faster, there was less and less time for the fighters to react.

This graph shows in blue the time in minutes it would take for a bomber to cross the 50 miles from the coast to London. In the First World War, this could take around half an hour. By the Second World War, this time was down to only 10 minutes or so. The points in red show the time taken for the defending fighters to take off and climb to the height of the attacking bombers. As you can see this time is generally less than the crossing time, so in theory the fighters would have time to find the bombers and hopefully shoot them down. But lots of things could go wrong — the bombers might be detected late, the detection might not be reported soon enough, the bombers might have changed course or be hiding in cloud and so on. So the greater the margin of safety the better. In the 1930s, this margin was only 5 to 10 minutes which was not reassuring at all. Air defence exercises in the early 1930s seemed to confirm the difficulty of intercepting bombers before they could reach their target.

As the former and future prime minister Stanley Baldwin pessimistically told Parliament in 1932,

I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed, whatever people may tell him. The bomber will always get through

A widely-quoted remark at the time and for years afterwards. He went on to offer the standard alternative: essentially to bomb the enemy harder than they bombed Britain.

The only defence is in offence, which means that you have got to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves. I mention that so that people may realise what is waiting for them when the next war comes.

One solution, then, was a bigger air force so that Britain could kill more women and children more quickly than any enemy.

This was a solution generally favoured by those on the political right, such as the Hands Off Britain Air Defence League. This is a leaflet they distributed in 1933 or 1934. As you can see, they ask ‘Why wait for a bomber to leave Berlin at 4 o’clock and wipe out London at 8?’

Their demand is for the creation of ‘a new winged army of long-range British bombers to smash the foreign hornets in their nests’. This was in fact the official Royal Air Force strategy at the time, pretty much, though due to years of disarmament and budget cuts, it did not have nearly enough aircraft to carry it out. The British governments of the 1930s did begin to rearm, but were reluctant to do so too quickly for fear of harming the economic recovery or offending the Germans.

There were also those, generally on the political left, who rejected the logic of two nations trading massive blows with each other, for it seemed likely that even the victor in such a war would be devastated. What alternatives were there? One was to mitigate the effects of bombing, by preparing Air Raid Precautions, or ARP as it was known. This could mean everything from training civilians in how to survive poison gas attacks, to the construction of deep shelters able to accommodate thousands of people during air raids. Although this sounds unobjectionable, some pacifists could and did argue that ARP was a mere palliative, and might actually invite war by making Britain feel over-confident about its ability to withstand a knock-out blow. So they favoured more radical solutions such as complete disarmament, or at least the abolition of military aircraft. But this in turn encountered problems. During the 1920s and early 1930s, the idea developed among aviation specialists that large civilian aircraft such as airliners could be easily turned into bombers, more or less by strapping bombs under the wings. This possibility undermined disarmament efforts because it was feared that once all nations had disbanded their air forces, an aggressor could arm its airliners and hold the rest of the civilised world to ransom. So, one proposed solution to this dilemma was to place the civil aviation industries of all countries under international control.

From there it was a logical step for many supporters of collective security to propose the formation of an international air force, a very popular position in the early 1930s for parts of the left and one which was under serious consideration at the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva in 1932. An international air force would harness the devastating power of the bomber to uphold collective security, because if one country attacked another it would immediately be bombed itself by the combined air forces of the world. It was also attractive to some people as a possible foundation of a world state, which would end war forever by ending nations themselves.

So, I’ve explained what people thought bombing would do, and what they thought could be done about it. I would lastly like to talk about the discourse itself, how these problems and solutions were propagated from specialists to the public. In the ordinary course of things, most people don’t pay much attention to even existential threats such as terrorism, nuclear warfare, asteroid impacts, or indeed the knock-out blow. They may well be aware of them, and even anxious about them to some degree, but such information as they may pick up from the media, books or conversations with acquaintances will be random, fragmentary and possibly unpersuasive. It often takes some crisis, real or perceived, to concentrate people’s minds on the supposed threat to society, and here the mass media plays a key role in creating the perception that there is a threat, and in suggesting solutions to the threat. So I suggest that this process is very much like the concept of a moral panic, as proposed by the sociologist Stanley Cohen in 1972. Usually this is a media-driven panic about the danger posed to society by some group within it — like criminals, drug users, religious cults. But it seems to me that something closely analogous can happen in relation to external threats to society. To distinguish these incidents from moral panics, though, I call them defence panics. Defence panics seem almost endemic in Britain in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Initially these expressed fears about the loss of British naval supremacy and the possibility of invasion by a foreign power such as France or later Germany. The most famous expression of this was the great dreadnought panic of 1909, when an intense press campaign called for the laying down of 8 new battleships to pre-empt a supposed acceleration in the German naval construction programme. But only a couple of months later, there was a similar panic, this time time over German airships, and this panic was itself repeated on a larger scale in 1913. From then until the Second World War, the threat of air attack was unparalleled in its ability to create defence panics. Examples include scares over the size of European air forces in 1922 and 1935, claims about German preparations for biological warfare in 1934, the bombing of Spanish and Chinese cities in 1938 which were part of the background to the Munich crisis, itself a major defence panic, and finally the shocks of the Gotha air raids on London in 1917 and the Blitz in 1940.

In the end, the knock-out blow never took place, because the power of the bomber was greatly exaggerated. But the belief that it could happen itself shaped how the British prepared to fight the war that did come. The internationalist solutions such as disarmament or the international air force never worked, because few nations could even contemplate giving up their sovereignty like this. Britain did invest in trying to avoid the worst effects of a knock-out blow, with air raid shelters and plans to evacuate the cities. But their ARP schemes were never very comprehensive, and individuals did little to prepare for bombing on their own behalf until war came. Far more was spent on the armed forces, and most important here was air defence. Even though in the early 1930s nearly everyone was pessimistic about the fighter’s chances against the bomber, effort was still put into improving them, resulting in fighters like the Hurricane which I showed earlier. These played a essential part in blunting the bomber offensive in 1940, at least in daylight. But another crucial technological component of the solution to the the problem of the bomber came, bizarrely, from almost pseudoscientific attempts to find an electromagnetic death ray. Death rays didn’t help shoot down bombers, but radar did help find them.

A top-secret chain of radar stations around the coast was set up in 1939, just in time for the Second World War. This had an effective range of 120 miles. So instead of only being seen when they crossed the coast, bombers could now be detected far out to sea.

Returning to our graph showing how long it took for bombers to cross the 50 miles from the coast to London. With radar, this distance effectively increased to 170 miles.

I’ve factored that into this graph, and as you can see, from 1939 the defenders had a much greater warning time, 30 to 40 minutes. Radar tilted the balance greatly towards the defenders. No longer was it a certainty that the bomber would always get through.

So part of the answer to the problem of the bomber came from an unexpected quarter. But it didn’t just arrive by accident, it only came because people were worried about the problem and were looking hard for a solution. Sometimes, muddling through and hoping for the best just isn’t good enough, not when the survival of civilisation is at stake.

Image sources: Wikimedia Commons (Wright Flyer, Avro Lancaster); RAF (here and here); Gotha GIV; RAFA Costa Blanca; World-War-2-Planes.com; Guernica, specchio del Novecento; Caring on the Home Front; Wikipedia; Airminded (here, here and here); YouTube; Norman Macmillan, The Chosen Instrument (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1938), 21; eBay; David Davies, Suicide or Sanity? An Examination of the Proposals before the Geneva Disarmament Conference (London: Williams and Norgate, 1932); An International Air Force: Its Functions and Organisation (London: The New Commonwealth, 1934). I can’t find where the photo of the Hurricanes came from; but it’s almost certainly under Crown Copyright.

Since coming home from London, I keep coming across interesting things which I could have seen while I was there, but didn’t. Which is not at all surprising, given the city’s size and history, but it’s true even in the relatively restricted confines of Bloomsbury, where I was staying and got to know fairly well (or so I thought). My first inkling of this came when I was watching Black Books for the nth time, and idly wondered where the exterior location filming was done. Practically around the corner from where I was staying, as it happens; I must have walked past the street it’s in on an almost daily basis, if not down the very street itself. If I’d known I would have gone in and bought a book, even at the risk of being verbally abused for my troubles!

But there were also things I didn’t know about which were more relevant to my research. Chronologically, I stumbled across the earliest when flipping through a new Osprey book, London, 1914-1917: The Zeppelin Menace by Ian Castle. It’s got these nice maps showing the tracks of individual Zeppelins across the city, and where their bombs fell. And from one of the raids, there were two nearby, one in the south-east corner of Russell Square Gardens and the other in Queen Square. Unfortunately I was too poor (or at least too responsible) to buy the book, and I can’t remember what the date of the raid was. Judging from this, it would appear to be 8 September 1915. And the Bedford Hotel on Southampton Row was hit on 24 September 1917 by one of the first Gotha night raiders.

Anyway, I’ve been to former bomb sites before. A more truly unique event which took place in Bloomsbury was the discovery of the nuclear chain reaction which underpins all nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors — or at least the idea of the chain reaction. This flash of inspiration took place in the brain of Leó Szilárd, a refugee Jewish physicist, on 12 September 1933, at the traffic lights at the intersection of Southampton Row and Russell Square (in fact, only a few metres from where the Zeppelin bomb had fallen). Again, I walked past this spot several times a week, at least. It would have been an appropriate, if noisy, place from which to contemplate the subsequent atomic age.

Even that place, significant though it may be, has nothing to mark its connection to this past. That’s not true for the final (so far) thing I missed in Bloomsbury, the Goodge Street Deep Level Shelter. This was one of eight air raid shelters excavated between 1940 and 1942, parallel to existing Tube stations on the Northern Line. During the war, they were intended to hold 8000 people each; afterward, they could be used as the basis for an express line. Due to the end of the Blitz, none of them were used as shelters until 1944, and the new tunnel was never built. Goodge Street was in fact used by Eisenhower as a headquarters (though I think SHAEF itself was in Bushy Park); apparently he announced D-Day from here and one of the two entrances is called the Eisenhower Centre. That’s on Chenies Street, which I’m not sure I walked down; but the other is on Tottenham Court Road, and I most certainly walked past that more than once without even noticing.

Well, darn it all to heck.

Part of the methodology of the Mass-Observation project was the tracking of paranormal beliefs, perhaps a reflection of its anthropological inspiration. In War Begins at Home, published early in 1940 by Mass-Obs, the following article is reprinted from the December 1939 issue of Prediction (a magazine devoted to astrology, psychic powers and the like):

ON THE WAR FRONT
Join our ‘Thought Barrage’

Last month Prediction published an article which showed how every reader could help win, and end, the war. Our contributor re-affirmed the Occult principle that thoughts are things, and reminded readers that the reverse of this truism is also proved. Things are thoughts; and the power of thinking can, in the present emergency, make a substantial contribution towards our effort to restrain and overthrow the forces of evil.

This month we publish another article illustrating how this vital thought-power can be directed to a given end — the extinction of the U-boat peril.

We believe that every reader who has even a smattering of Occult teaching will realise how valuable is the weapon which is here fashioned for his hands.

No one, better than the Occultist, understands the power of thought. No one, more than he, realises that all material life and action depend on prior vision and effort on the mental plane.

OUR NIGHTLY BROADCAST

Prediction, then, has suggested a way in which this power may be harnessed on the side of the angels. We invite every reader to join in a greatly broadcast, which we firmly believe will soon produce tangible results.

Every night, as the clock strikes ten, let your mind play upon these vivid realities. Tune in, and pass on, the message of victory which will be vibrating in the ether, and which must cheer and encourage our soldiers at the front, our pilots in the air and our sailors who hunt the enemy on the seas.

GOVERNMENT RECOGNITION

Even the Government has in part recognised the importance of thought in the national will for victory. It has issued a poster which acclaims:

Your Courage, Your Cheerfulness, Your Resolution, will bring us Victory?” [sic]

The man in the street reads this slogan, passes by and forgets … But you and I, through the power of visualisation, can make it a living thing.¹

This idea of a thought barrage immediately made me think of vedic defence, which would use transcendental meditation and bouncing on gym mats to protect the United States from missile attack. (No, seriously. I’m sure the Missile Defense Agency has plenty of yogic flyers on staff.) But although Harrisson and Madge’s discussion links this thought barrage with the air menace, the article itself really only refers to the submarine menace. It looks like it was a general purpose occult weapon, able to be deployed against any threat to the nation. I wonder if it inspired, or was inspired by, Dion Fortune’s so-called ‘Magical Battle of Britain’ — which, as far as I can tell — sounds similar in theory and practice to the thought barrage?² It’s easy to laugh at such ideas, but Harrison and Madge point out that Prediction had a higher circulation than New Statesman or Spectator: so, ‘It is an important opinion-forming paper’.³ I don’t know whether anyone has followed up on their lead: it might be interesting to look at the war through the lens of the alternative, non-political press.

Harrisson and Madge suggest that the ethereal thought barrage and the physical balloon barrage were both comforting images — far more than they should have been.⁴ The initial evacuation of children and some mothers from London to country areas at the outbreak of war soon reversed, since the expected holocaust hadn’t happened. An opinion survey in October-November revealed that 66% of working-class women expected that no air raids would take place, as did 47% of middle class women, 40% of working-class men, and only 14% of middle class men. Working-class women (less so the men) strongly believed that the balloon barrage would protect them — that in fact they were safer in London than in the country:

“I wouldn’t go out of London for a hundred pounds. We’re so well protected here.”
“I felt so unprotected, you know, there [in country] — like anything might happen.”
“They look after us so well here, the balloons and that, they’ll never get through.”
“It’s as safe here as anywhere.”
“I wouldn’t have my children out there, Hitler could get through ever so easy.”⁵

As Harrisson and Madge further note, to trust in the balloon barrage in this way was to mistake entirely their purpose, which was merely to discourage low-level and dive-bomber attacks. It could not by itself stop the bomber from getting through. Harrisson and Madge blame poor government information on the matter, and (quite rightly) single out the ludicrous sequence in the film The Lion Has Wings where a German air armada approaches London, only to break off in confusion at the first sight of a barrage balloon. A magic barrage, indeed.

1. Quoted in Tom Harrisson and Charles Madge, War Begins at Home (London: Chatto & Windus, 1940), 132-3.
2. I haven’t been able to find a good account of this, just scattered references on the net. Ronald Hutton alludes to it in The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 186.
3. Harrisson and Madge, War Begins at Home, 131.
4. Well, I’m assuming they believed this of the thought barrage; they only discuss the balloon barrage in this way, but they seem to imply it is magical thinking too.
5. Harrisson and Madge, War Begins at Home, 130.

Director Baz Luhrmann (Strictly Ballroom, Moulin Rouge) has been working on a new film, called Australia. As the name perhaps suggests, it’s a sweeping saga of this wide, brown land of ours: the men who conquered it, the women who loved them, the cattle, the dust, the flies … well, it sounds pretty dull to me, to be honest. But I saw an extended trailer before Indy IV the other day, and it seems that Australia does have a couple of points of interest for the airminded film-goer.

The first is hinted at in this set photo. It shows Nicole Kidman (’our Nic’) and, if I’m not mistaken, Bill Hunter (who is contractually obliged to appear in every major Australian motion picture) in a boat with ‘QANTAS EMPIRE AIRWAYS LTD’ written on the side. Well, since Qantas have not, historically, been known for their watercraft, presumably there’ll be a Short Empire flying boat around somewhere! Such as the QEA Empire boat pictured above, VH-ABB Coolangatta. That’s excellent — we don’t see enough of these strangely beautiful aircraft these days. But a few scenes with a CGI flying boat are probably not enough to get me into the cinema.

The second is much more central to the story, it seems: the Japanese air raids on Darwin on 19 February 1942, carried out by the four fleet carriers of Nagumo’s task force and land-based bombers from the East Indies. About 240 aircraft attacked the harbour and airfield; 10 ships were sunk and about 250 people killed. To date, it’s the heaviest and costliest attack by an enemy on an Australian target.

Which would seem to make it a fitting subject for an epic Australian film. Except that there was no Blitz-style, Darwin-can-take-it stoicism here. In fact, what happened was not unlike the pre-war predictions of the effects of an aerial knock-out blow. Half the town’s population of 2500 (most women and children had been evacuated in December) fled south after the raid, along with a fair number of RAAF service personnel — the so-called ‘Adelaide River Stakes’ (Adelaide River being a small town about 60 km south of Darwin).¹ It’s true enough that the two air raids were taken as a sign of imminent invasion, not unreasonably since Fortress Singapore had surrendered just four days earlier, along with most of the 8th Division AIF; and Darwin was a long way from any help. And it has been suggested that the deserting servicemen had been given confusing orders. That doesn’t explain the fact that one of them got as far as Melbourne (about 4000 km away!) before stopping. Or, more seriously, the looting which took place in Darwin the night after the raid, perpetrated by servicemen (including some military police). There was certainly bravery — not least from the USAAF pilots who took to the air to defend Darwin in their P-40s, though greatly outnumbered — but overall, it’s a pretty inglorious episode in Australia’s military history. (And an example of something which Australians might do well to remember on ANZAC Day.)

So, it will be interesting to see how the raid’s aftermath is depicted in Australia. Telling anything like the full story would seem to cut against the intended epic nature of the film. But it sounds like Luhrmann does does intend to tell this part of Australia’s history:

Darwin was attacked 64 times in six months … The government (disguised) the truth: 2000 whites were killed and non-whites were not counted, so the toll was far greater,” he said. “But everything in the film will be in service to a great romance … Facts will be moved around but not in a way that fundamentally disturbs the truth.

I may have to see it after all …

(The title of this post, as Australians of a certain age may have guessed, is an homage to that great maker of epic films, Warren Perso, the ‘last Aussie auteur‘.)

Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

1. See here; the relevant volumes of the official history, Douglas Gillison, Royal Australian Air Force, 1939-1942 (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1962), 426-32, and Paul Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1942-1945 (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1970), 141-4; and the relevant volume of the centenary history of defence, Alan Stephens, The Royal Australian Air Force (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001), 136-9.

Via Old is the New New, MONIAC, the MOnetary National Income Automatic Computer: an analogue hydraulic computer designed by A. W. Phillips, a New Zealander, while a student at the LSE in 1949. The prototype was apparently built out of spare Lancaster parts. And there’s one on display at the University of Melbourne, otherwise known as ‘my uni’, so obviously I had to go and have a look at it!

The MONIAC is currently on the 1st floor of the Economics and Commerce building (on the Parkville campus, off Professors Walk), just opposite the lifts, if anyone wants to visit (though it will probably move to the new building on Berkeley St when that’s finished). It’s a bit over 6 feet high. The bit of paper stuck to the door reads:

MONIAC stands for:
Monetary National Income Analogue Computer

The MONIAC is a hydraulic model of the economy which was used originally in the teaching of economies. Today, econometric modelling is undertaken in modern Research Computer Laboratories. Visit the Commerce Research Laboratory on this floor to compare the vastly changed environment for teaching and research.

The MONIAC was designed by A. W. Phillips, (an engineer turned economist of “Phillips Curve” fame) who constructed a working model of the Keynesian System utilising coloured water (representing incomes, expenditures, etc) flowing through pipes.

Only 3 or 4 models were built and this is the only known model in Australia. A working model is located in London. The cost of restoring this MONIAC to working has been quoted in the vicinity of $40,000+!

BY THE WAY:

The “Computer” had a reputation for leaking during demonstration!

Could this be the origin of terms used a great deal by Keynesian Economists namely, “Injections” and “Leakages”?

Expressions of interest in contributing to the restoration may be made to the Dean of the Faculty of Economics and Commerce.

However, Wikipedia says that there were 12 to 14 units made. MONIAC caused a sensation at the time (at least among economists!), and was lampooned in Punch. His creation probably helped put Phillips on the fast-track to a full professorship.

The working model in London would be one that’s at the Science Museum; there’s another at Cambridge, and the original prototype is being restored at Leeds.

The national income tank, with a blue pipe (on the left) feeding it in to the rest of the economy. Eventually, the tank gets replenished by greater or lesser amounts, depending on how much is diverted to other parts of the economy. One problem I can see is that it’s a closed system — there’s no way for the economy to grow. Though apparently somebody did link a couple of MONIACs together to show how two economies would interact!

This is where the blue pipe leads to. You can see that part of income gets siphoned off as taxes, the rest going into (naturally enough) income after taxes. The taxes go to government expenditure, income after taxes to savings and (mostly) consumption. There’s a diagram here, which explains it all better than I could.

Back when I was doing computational modelling in a very different domain (astrophysics), we’d sometimes refer to running a model as ‘cranking the handle’. It would have been more fun with actual handles to crank, like this one! Though of course, these would be used to modify variables (e.g. how much is paid in taxes) and not to actually run the simulation.

Here’s one of the outputs, showing national income over time: presumably the board would move from right to left and a pen would move up or down, recording the level of fluid in the income tank (shown in the second photo from the top). But probably more important than this graph was simply watching the fluid (money) pump around the computer (economy); apparently it gave a very vivid and intuitive understanding of the effects a change in one variable would have on another.

The on-off switches for the recorders and pumps, and the name of the manufacturer: Air Trainers Ltd, of Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire. Now this is interesting. As the name suggests, Air Trainers (later Air Trainers Link; later still, General Precision Systems; then in 1967 it was acquired by Redifon, another pioneer of aircraft simulators, and renamed Redifon Air Trainers) made flight simulators, which attempt to imitate the experience of piloting an aeroplane without the need to actually leave the ground. (Something like the Link Trainer, but more sophisticated.) In 1959, for example, they made a simulator for the new Vickers Vanguard, a turboprop airliner. They also made simulators for military aircraft too.

I’ve written before about something closely related to flight simulators, a bombing teacher and the idea of simulation. With Phillips’ help, admittedly, in MONIAC, Air Trainers seems to have gotten past the idea of simulation by imitation and gone on to simulation by abstraction, if still in a physical way. MONIAC would have drawn on some of the company’s strengths, not only in simulation but in hydraulics (an essential component of a flight simulator). And after MONIAC, Air Trainers/Air Trainers Link seems to have kept dabbling in the field of analogue computers. In 1958, they built MAC (simply, Mechanical Analogue Computer), which could solve 4th-order differential equations: Imperial College had one, which is probably the one now in the possession of the Science Museum. Probably related are two patents taken out by people working at Air Trainers Link in 1954 for ‘Improvements in and relating to analogue computers’. They were evidently also looking towards the digital future — there’s a 1959 paper in The Computer Journal from another Air Trainers Link worker about a method for separation of variables, which includes notes ‘on programming the problem for a digital computer’.

This all sounds a bit warfare state, doesn’t it? (Though whether in a deep way or a shallow way, I’m not sure). Consider: (i) Air Link seems to have specialised in simulators for civil aviation, but they also made military ones too. And presumably their expertise was developed during the war, perhaps with Redifon; and anyway Britain’s civil aviation industry was an offshoot of its military one. (ii) In Britain, analogue computers — admittedly electromechanical, not hydromechanical! — started out as aids in solving problems in atomic physics, but then were used for everything from code-breaking to dam-busting (Barnes Wallis supposedly used a Meccano computer for some of his calculations! Though this could just be a myth) (iii) Phillips built his prototype out of RAF surplus kit — pumps and a Lancaster’s windscreen wipers. Before the war, he studied electrical engineering in Britain and joined the RAF in 1940, which sent him to Singapore as a munitions officer. He spent the years 1942 to 1945 in a POW camp in Java, which was brutally used as a source of labour by the Japanese; those who knew him suggested that this experience led him to turn after the war from engineering to sociology and then economics. (iv) Before 1939, government expenditure in Britain was about 10% of GDP; this rose to a massive 54% in the war. So the idea of modelling a national economy must have been attractive to economists after 6 years of a semi-planned wartime economy. ‘At the level of national planning was the consequence, not the cause, of high arms production. It was a means of accomodation to the needs of the warfare state.’¹

A good source on MONIAC is Chris Bissell, “The Moniac: a hydromechanical analog computer of the 1950s”, IEEE Control Systems Magazine, February 2007, 69-74; on Phillips, see Robert Leeson, “A. W. H. Phillips M.B.E. (Military Division)”, The Economic Journal 104 (1994), 605-18 (JSTOR). Phillips was a remarkable man. In between New Zealand and Britain, he swagged his way around Australia (working as a crocodile hunter for a while), China (just as the Japanese attacked in 1937) and the Soviet Union (took the Trans-Siberian to Europe). His MBE was awarded for his actions during the evacuation from Singapore, when his transport came under air attack. His citation reads, in part:

he obtained an unmounted machine gun, quickly improvised a successful mounting and operated the gun from the boat deck with outstanding courage for the whole period of the attack which lasted for 3½ hours. Even when the section deck from which he was operating was hit by a bomb, Flying Officer Phillips continued to set a most valuable example of coolness, steadiness and fearlessness to all in the vicinity

While in the POW camp at Bandung (where he met the legendary Australian doctor ‘Weary’ Dunlop), he built a secret radio which enabled the prisoners to keep track of news in the outside world, and, perhaps even more impressively, an immersion heater so that two thousand POWs could have a hot cuppa before bedtime. The Japanese guards could never figure out why the camp’s lights dimmed every night at 10pm.

After a successful career in economics, Phillips switched careers yet again, becoming a Sinologist. He died in Auckland in 1975.

1. David Edgerton, Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 72.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about American fears in 1942 that German spies were making patterns in fields, as signals to the location of nearby targets of military significance. At the time, I had this feeling that I’d come across something very similar, but couldn’t quite place it. Now I’ve worked out what it was: the exact same thing happened in Britain late in the summer of 1940!

The following is from Midge Gillies’ book Waiting for Hitler, which I’ve discussed before. Her source is the memoir of Major H. R. V. Jordan, who commanded a counter-intelligence unit in the Western Command during the Second World War.

Anxiety that German airmen were being helped on the ground produced a phenomenon similar to the corn circles that appeared in Britain in the summer of 1990. Jordan dealt with several reports from RAF pilots: one had spotted what appeared to be a sign in the middle of a field of wheat that pointed to a nearby Royal Ordnance factory. It was about 150 feet long and seemed to grow more vivid each day. Jordan discovered that the farmer had sown wheat, then found some seed barley and, not wanting to waste it, drilled it down the middle of the field. As the two crops grew the barley appeared to point to the factory. Another pilot noticed that a field had been ploughed in such a way that a hammer and sickle was clearly visible. The farmer confessed that, far from harbouring Soviet sympathies, he had wanted to make his wife laugh. A third pilot became convinced that he could see a white arrow glinting in the sun. It seemed to grow every day, and seemed to point to ICI’s chemical factory, an important target for the Luftwaffe. A close investigation on the ground found that the ‘arrow’ was a granite path under construction in the ground of a sanatorium.¹

The only difference between the American and the British cases is that, as far as I can see, the British spy markers never made the papers. This could be because British counter-intelligence was on the job where their American counterpart was not; but there was a suggestion in the American case that the publicity given to the claims there was because one Army PR officer was a little too eager to provide the press with a good story. I don’t know whether something like that could have happened in Britain in 1940 — my impression is that information flow from the various ministries was too tightly controlled for that, and I doubt anyone in authority wanted to encourage a spy panic. But I don’t know for sure.

The close similarity of the two marker scares suggests similar origins. They both took place relatively early in their respective country’s wars, so obviously there’s an element of war nerves, looking out for anything out of the ordinary which could mean danger. The so-called markers weren’t anything out of the ordinary (except for the hammer and sickle!), of course, except when seen from the air, where things look very different than they do from the ground. It’s just a guess, but I’d say that as both countries expanded their air forces in wartime, there were more inexperienced pilots flying over wider areas than there ever had been before, training and patrolling. But in places like the east coast of the United States or the west coast of Britain, there wasn’t a lot of enemy activity, if any. So bored pilots let their eyes drift downwards and misinterpreted ordinary rural practices as something more sinister.

1. Midge Gillies, Waiting for Hitler: Voices from Britain on the Brink of Invasion (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2007), 247.

Some more plots from the talk I gave the other way. I was trying to think of a way to illustrate in concrete terms the problem of speed for the air defence of Britain. I came up with the following:

Simply put, it shows the length of time it would have taken for an attacking bomber to fly from the coast to London (in blue) — call it the crossing time — and the time it would take taken for a defending fighter to climb high enough to intercept (in red) — call it the intercept time. And how these changed over time, obviously. As can be seen, the fighters generally had enough time to climb high enough to intercept the bombers before they got to London, but the margin decreased over time, from 15 or so minutes during the First World War, to less than 5 in the Second.

But all this is not straightforward so I’ll explain further. To begin with, the data is slightly dodgy. It’s mostly drawn from the same source as this, which is fine as far as it goes. But that means that I’m showing how long it would have taken British bombers to penetrate from the coast to London, which was not really a great worry. Having said that, it’s probably reasonable to assume that the performance of British bombers was roughly in line with those used by Continental air forces. (And the RAF’s own air defence exercises had to make this assumption, too, because borrowing somebody else’s air force for a day wasn’t feasible.) One day I’ll create a dataset for European aircraft …

How are the numbers derived? First, the bombers (blue). This is just the distance from the coast to London divided by each bomber’s maximum speed (which is not necessarily realistic). Why the coast? Because it was only when the incoming raiders crossed the coast that they could be detected by ground observers, and fighters dispatched to intercept them.¹ What is the distance from the coast to London? Well, obviously it varies, depending on which direction the enemy came from (and some writers expressed fears that they would fly up the Thames Estuary and avoid detection). Looking at a map, 50 miles seems like a reasonable approximation.

Next, the fighters (red). The time it takes for a fighter to climb meet the bombers is the height of the raid divided by the climb rate of each fighter. This climb rate is a bit of a problem. I don’t a good source for this number and had to plunder Wikipedia. That’s bad enough in itself, but it’s worse because the data is inconsistent. Sometimes — when it’s not missing — it’s expressed in feet per minute, and sometimes in the number of minutes to reach a given height. Obviously one can be turned into the other, but actually both are only approximations, and I’ve had to extrapolate and interpolate from these to get a usable number.² What height would the bombers be at? Well, that varied — it was higher on average during the Second World War than in the First because aircraft were more capable, and also because bombers tried to climb higher to escape the fighters. I’ve assumed that this height was 10000 ft in the 1910s, 15000 ft in the 1920s, 20000 ft in the 1930s, and 25000 ft in the 1940s.³ I just plucked these numbers out of the air, more or less, but they seem to work well in terms of keeping the red and blue trends in touch with each other. If anything they are probably underestimates.

Some other points. Firstly, the fighters would generally have to move horizontally to intercept the bombers, as well as vertically. This plot says nothing about that. But given the edge fighters had in speed and the location of their aerodromes, they should be able to cover that distance while climbing. Secondly, the data points are for the year each aircraft entered into RAF service. But since they remained in service for several year, at least, the data points should really be horizontal lines.⁴

Thirdly, I’m assuming a perfect command, control, communications and intelligence system. Fighter Command (and its predecessors) was good, but it still took a finite but non-zero amount of time for sightings to be reported, sifted, collated and reported, and then for squadrons to be allocated, given orders, and take off. Also there was a chance that raids might not be observed, that squadrons could be given the wrong vector, that the enemy could be missed in cloud — so the greater the gap between the red data points and the blue ones the better. The more inefficient Fighter Command, the narrower the margin for error.⁵

Now we can show what difference radar made. The Chain Home system came into operation in 1939 and had an effective range of 120 miles. What this means here is that instead of only having to cross 50 miles from the coast to London after being detected by the observers on the coast, the bombers now had to cross 170 miles after being detected. As the above plot shows, this pushed up the crossing time dramatically: from 1939, the defenders could generally expect to have around 40 minutes’ warning of any raids. The margin for error increased dramatically, from only 5 minutes or less, to more than half an hour, which is far better. In theory, the defending fighter squadrons would now have plenty of time to get in position before the enemy arrived. Of course, that’s not the whole battle, but it’s a good start!

Lastly, here’s a counterfactual which I’ve long wondered about. Between 1933 and 1935, the Air Ministry put a fair amount of effort into researching the feasibility of using acoustic mirrors as a comprehensive early warning system. The acoustic mirrors were, mostly, concrete hemispheric dishes for focusing sound, which had been used as early as 1916. The biggest ones, at Dungeness in Kent and Maghtab in Malta, were 200 feet long curved walls. Land was actually purchased along the Thames Estuary for the beginnings of a national acoustic mirror system, but work never started because radar came along. But if it hadn’t, then in 1940 Fighter Command might have relied upon a network of these acoustic mirrors all along the coast.⁶ How useful would they have been?

The experimental mirrors had a maximum detection range of 22 miles (on very windy days it was a lot less). I’ll be generous and call it 25 miles, which is then added to the 50 miles from the coast to London for a total distance of 75 miles. The Thames Estuary acoustic mirrors probably would have come online in 1936, and so again I’ll be generous, and assume that London at least would have a working early warning system from that year.

Taking all this into account, the results can be seen above. And sadly the acoustic mirrors wouldn’t have made much difference — a margin of only about 10 minutes, not much improved on the 5 minutes with no warning system. Of course, even a few minutes’ extra warning was worth having, but the Air Ministry was right to terminate development of the acoustic mirror network in order to concentrate on the far more promising radar.

John Ferris has argued against the idea that ‘Air defence in Britain began during 1934 and only because radar was developed’, and that the importance of the C³I system — ultimately a legacy of the First World War — has been underestimated by historians: it was ‘ideally preadapted to radar’.⁷ And he’s right. Even without effective early warning, as long as the enemy bombers could be intercepted and shot down on their way back home, air defence could still work by inflicting prohibitive casualties. Except, that is, when the casualties from bombing were predicted to be massive, and then a failure to stop the bomber getting through would have devastating consequences. Radar was part of the antidote to the fear of the knock-out blow. Or rather it could have been, if it hadn’t remained secret until 1941 …

(Just to repeat: the data and assumptions underlying these plots are on the dubious side, and are not fit for any purpose, probably including this one!)

1. I’m neglecting radar, obviously, but see below. I’m also neglecting the fact that sound detectors, of the type that had been developed during the First World War, had a range of about 5 miles. But see even further below. Distant patrol aircraft were also used as a kind of picket line.
2. What I really need are curves showing climbing time vs. height because the higher an aeroplane flies, the harder it is to climb in the thin air. I assume these are available somewhere, but digging them up is too much work for a quick and dirty plot like this!
3. Fighters got a lot better at climbing very rapidly by the late 1940s, but as that happens I’m shifting the goalposts ever higher, as it were, and so the above graph is understating the rate of climb of fighters.
4. E.g., the two red triangles in the late 1930s are the Hurricane and Spitfire, which between them were the RAF’s primary interceptors throughout the war. This plot makes it look like there wasn’t anything able to catch raiders in 1940, which was not the case!
5. I could model this inefficiency by adding a fixed number of minutes to the climb time of the fighters — call it the response time — but I don’t know what a reasonable number is and it might vary a fair bit. For instance, in 1918 LADA (London Air Defence Area) had a response time of 2.5 to 5 minutes, according to John Ferris, “Fighter defence before Fighter Command: the rise of strategic air defence in Great Britain, 1917-1934”, Journal of Military History 63 (1999), 853 (JSTOR). But it presumably rose after LADA was dismantled after the war. David Zimmerman, Britain’s Shield: Radar and the Defeat of the Luftwaffe (Stroud: Sutton, 2001), 25, seems to suggest that 5 minutes was the time it took in 1933 just to transmit observations to ADGB (Air Defence of Great Britain) HQ, but that’s for the big acoustic mirrors which probably required more computation than normal acoustic detectors. So, pending more comprehensive figures, I’ll just leave the response time out of it.
6. See ibid., chapter 2, for more on the acoustic mirror research of the 1930s.
7. Ferris, ibid., 845, 884.

The talk at Earth Sciences went well, I think. It was a good-sized audience and they seemed interested in what I had to say, judging by the questions afterwards. I also found out that one of the honorary fellows had actually lived in London during the war, and though only a child could remember watching out for V1s passing overhead and even the ‘electric’ atmosphere of the day that war was declared.

I was all set to record the talk, but forgot to fire up the audio app. At some point, I may try recording it again at home or just putting the text up. Until then, here are a couple of the graphs I used, along with some different ways of presenting the same numbers. (Except where indicated, the data is courtesy of Dan Todman, who compiled it from Home Office files. Thanks Dan!)

Firstly, this shows the civilian casualties (killed and seriously wounded) each month in Britain due to enemy action between 1939-1945. Most — all? — of these will have the result of bombing, so I’ve labeled it accordingly. (This is the counterpart of a histogram I did for 1914-1918, except that combined civilian and military casualties, and separated different forms of attack.) It’s easy to pick out the Luftwaffe’s major offensives: the biggest peak is September 1940, when the Blitz started; it ended in May 1941, after which casualties were never so high again. There’s a relative lull in January and February 1941, due largely to bad weather conditions. In April-June 1942, there’s the Baedeker Blitz and from January 1944, the Baby Blitz. Then there’s the V-1 offensive in June-September 1944 and the V-2 offensive in September 1944-March 1945.

I thought it might be instructive to compare what actually happened with what was predicted would happen: if the knock-out blow had attempted and if pre-war estimates of German airpower had been correct. I derived this from figures provided by Richard M. Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy (London: H.M.S.O., 1950), 9 and 12-3, which were estimates made circa 1938 by government bodies for a war starting in 1939. These lead to the following assumptions:

1. the Luftwaffe could deliver 3500 tons of bombs on London in the first 24 hours of an attack, and an average of 700 tons per day for some weeks thereafter (Committee of Imperial Defence)
2. the casualties caused per ton of bombs dropped would be 48 (24 killed, 24 seriously wounded) (ARP Department, Home Office)
3. the war would last for 60 days (CID)

It’s then simple to calculate that if a German knock-out blow launched on 3 September 1939 would have led to a bit over 1.1 million casualties in September and a bit over a million in October, 168000 on the first day of war. More than a million fatalities in just two months.

It’s easy to quibble with these assumptions — for example, I’m using the most pessimistic multiplier for casualties, but that’s partly because it’s easy to relate it to the definition of casualties I’m already using. And my assumption that the 700 tons per day could be kept up for 60 days may well be too high, but I can’t find anything better. The CID did estimate in 1937 that an aerial war of this length would kill 600,000 and wound 1.2 million, so that shows that I’m in the right range and also that officials did make these sorts of calculations at the time.

Anyway, the point of the histogram is to show that the actual bombing, as bad as it was, was nothing like as terrible as ‘the expected holocaust’ (as Tom Harrison termed it), and I think it succeeds — you can just make out the Blitz and the V-1 attacks, but they’re just tiny blips. However, precisely because of the huge disparity in scale, it’s hard to make a meaningful comparison.

In his graphs of all British casualties, Dan opted for running cumulative figures rather than monthly ones, and that is indeed better for showing the overall picture — whereas monthly is better at showing intensity, I think. So, here’s my actual vs. predicted plot redone in cumulative fashion. Even by the end of five and a half years of total war, the scale of the knock-out blow isn’t even approached. (In fact, I think that even when military casualties are taken into account, the knock-out blow still wins handily.)

Here’s a different way to present the monthly data. This time I’ve plotted the casualties on a log scale. This is good for showing changes in the order of magnitude, and it’s immediately apparent that the knock-out blow was around two orders of magnitude (i.e., about 100 times) more intense than the worst month of the Blitz.

Finally, the cumulative casualty figures on a log scale. So, overall, the civilian experience of bombing over the whole of the Second World War (mainly meaning the Blitz) was about one order of magnitude (i.e. about 10 times) less devastating than the knock-out blow predicted shortly before the war.

The knock-out blow would have been 100 times more intense and 10 times more devastating than the Blitz was — I’ll have to remember that!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Update: something very similar happened in Britain too.

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