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The red balloon scare of 1940

12 February 2010 in 1940s, Archives, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Rumours by Brett Holman | 6 comments

I hadn’t come across this before. @ukwarcabinet recently linked to some informal notes of a War Cabinet meeting held on 8 February 1940. It was pretty quiet, even for the Bore War, and ‘Some of the subjects discussed were rather discussed by way of filling in time’. Including this:

At the end of the Meeting there was a reference to a scare which had started through a red balloon floating about in the Eastern Counties. This balloon had been sent up for meteorological purposes, but it had apparently given rise to a scare that gas balloons were being let loose by the Germans. The London Passenger Transport Board had told their employees to be ready to put on their gas-masks!

It seems they weren’t particularly concerned by this incident, despite what it might have said about the fragility of morale. The scare wasn’t kept secret; the Manchester Guardian had already reported it that morning (p. 7), with some extra details:

“ENEMY GAS”
Harmless Balloons Start Rumours

Extraordinary rumours in Eastern English and Scottish coastal districts followed the discovery yesterday of a number of small balloons. These were harmless British meteorological balloons but stories which had spread in various parts of the country had suggested that they were of enemy origin and that they contained dangerous gas.

At King’s Lynn (Norfolk) these stories led to the police issuing the following statement:–

The enemy has dropped balloon toys which may contain gas, highly inflammable, and explode on being touched or handled by lines attached. Police and observer corps should be informed if any are found.

The balloons are used for testing atmospheric conditions and occasionally they sink to the ground without bursting. They are harmless except that they contain hydrogen, and are therefore likely to explode if brought into contact with a naked flame.

So the story is that British meteorologists launched some weather balloons which came down in the eastern parts of England and Scotland. Passers-by found them, thought them suspicious, and reported them to authorities, which in turn made public statements that they were dangerous German weapons — either incendiary devices or actual poison gas bombs. In more normal times, it’s unlikely that a stray weather balloon would be interpreted as something dangerous, just something curious. Now, with the war strangely calm and the expected bombers nowhere to be seen, it’s more understandable that people would be jittery and overreact to mundane (if rare) sights (it had happened before and would happen again). And it certainly had to be considered that the Germans might try to use some sort of secret weapon against Britain. But the fact that the scare seems to have happened simultaneously in widely separated places — London, Norfolk, Scotland — suggests that there was something else going on too. Was the Met Office trying out a new balloon design? Perhaps it was the red colour mentioned in the War Cabinet discussion which made the balloons look especially sinister? Anyway, it’s another scare to add to my list.

PS I think I should get credit for not mentioning Nena. Until now.

Gas!

27 June 2009 in 1940s, Archives, Civil defence, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Periodicals by Brett Holman | 5 comments

The National Archives have released a couple of files (here and here) relating to mustard gas in the Second World War. I’m too cheap to pay to download them from TNA so I’m relying on news reports — luckily this is a blog and not a refereed publication!

The first is about a series of seminars held in 1943 by the Ministry of Food and the Ministry of Home Security. Their purpose was to inform ‘civilians’ — just who exactly is not clear from the article, but I’m guessing civil defence personnel rather than people pulled off the street — about the effects of mustard gas on food, by way of practical demonstrations. The overall conclusion seems to have been that it was more of a nuisance than anything else, as most things could be decontaminated. (Cheese is particularly resistant, apparently.) This would have been a relief to a number of prewar writers, who predicted that that food supplies were vulnerable to gas attack. Two points. One is that I’m glad that I don’t go to the kind of seminars which involve a risk of mustard gas exposure (22 civilians suffered ’side-effects’, according The Times, along with 3 officials.) The second is the question of why 1943? Early in that year Allied victory was sealed in North Africa and a German army surrendered at Stalingrad. Perhaps the worry was that with Germany now on the retreat, Hitler might try something desperate to regain the initiative. Or, if the seminars were organised after the devastating raids on Hamburg in July, perhaps it was thought that the Luftwaffe might retaliate. (It did still have this capability, as the Baby Blitz the following year showed — though this was conventional, not chemical.)

The second story is that in May 1944, Britain ‘considered’ (as the headline in The Times has it) using mustard gas against Tokyo. But it would be easy to read too much into this. The report in question — entitled ‘Attack on Tokyo with gas bombs’ — clearly isn’t any sort of operational plan but simply an intellectual exercise designed to provide the top brass with the basis for informed decision-making. (One giveaway is that the author was a boffin, a Professor D. Brunt, who I’d guess was the meteorologist David Brunt.) Still, it’s always a bit confronting to ponder the thinking behind statements like ‘In the densely built areas of Japanese-type buildings, where the streets are narrow, the flow of a gas cloud would be hindered by the narrowness of the streets’. Phosgene could also be used, which would cause large civilian casualties, but the conclusion was that incendiaries would be best, perhaps followed up a few days later with mustard as an area-denial weapon. (Another suggestion was gas first to cause civilians to flee, then incendiaries, though there’s no suggestion in the article that this was in order to minimise casualties.) Again, why 1944? It’s not like Bomber Command was about to start operations against Japan. But the invasion of France was imminent, and with it the prospect of a heavy toll of British military casualties. At this stage of the war manpower was starting to run out. So the eventual need to provide forces for the invasion of Japan must have been daunting for British planners; and for that reason, using technology to substitute for manpower would have been attractive.1 And in fact, later in the year Churchill committed a large contingent of heavy bombers to the war against Japan, Tiger Force — which didn’t go in action because it was trumped by another labour-saving device, the atomic bomb. (Well, that and the Soviet Union’s still relatively ample reserves of manpower.)

  1. Just as it had been in a similar stage in the First World War: see Eric Ash, Sir Frederick Sykes and the Air Revolution, 1912-1918 (London and Portland: Frank Cass, 1999).

This post is 100% link-free

29 November 2008 in Archives, Other by Brett Holman | 9 comments

I’ve just noticed this odd condition for the use of the Imperial War Museum’s collections website:

Links to our website may only be included in other websites with our prior written permission.

Source: http, followed by a colon, then two forward slashes, then www, a dot, iwmcollections, another dot, org, a third dot, uk, another forward slash, and then terms, one last dot, and finally php.

One I forgot to write

21 October 2008 in 1900s, Archives, Blogging by Brett Holman | 2 comments

XVIII Military History Carnival is up at Chronologi Cogitationes. This month I’m picking a post from a new blog, Wacht Am Tyne, on the centenary of the first flight (powered, controlled, heavier-than-air) in Britain, which was achieved by Samuel Franklin Cody on 16 October 1908. (I had a photo of British Army Aeroplane No. 1a in an earlier post.) Three reasons: firstly, because I was going to write about this myself but completely forgot; secondly, because it’s an interesting post even though (or because) it’s not at all the one I would have written; thirdly because, according to the blog’s About page, it’s intended for:

anyone who enjoys reading about military history, has ever gone to the IWM on their own, or has ever re-enacted the Battle of Waterloo using condiment packets and empty glasses at their local

Check (obviously), check, and check … well, actually I can’t remember doing Waterloo — Cannae was always my favourite, and more recently Trafalgar, but I think that’s close enough for me to be in the target demographic!

‘The bomber will always get through’ gets through

25 July 2008 in Archives, Blogging, Periodicals by Brett Holman | 1 comment

… to a wider audience! A few weeks back, I received an email from Robert Dudney, editor in chief of Air Force Magazine (published by the Air Force Association — that’s US Air Force, not Royal) seeking permission to reprint the text of Stanley Baldwin’s ‘the bomber will always get through’ speech, which I’d posted here last year. It wasn’t necessary for him to do so, since I don’t own the words, nor was it necessary for him to give me credit for them, nor to send me complimentary copies of the July 2008 issue in which they appeared. But it was very courteous of him to do all of these things, so here’s a plug in return.

Baldwin’s speech appears as part of a regular series called The Keeper File, which excerpts various primary source texts important to the history of airpower. (They’ve put the whole thing online too.) There’s an introductory paragraph, which quite rightly observes that ‘Few famous speeches have been more misunderstood than that by Stanley Baldwin [...]‘, and goes on to explain its significance. Bravo, I say!

There’s plenty of interest in the rest of the magazine, including: an update on the F-35 JSF programme, which will likely be equipping the RAF, RN and RAAF for decades to come (it’s on schedule and under budget, apparently); Phillip Meilinger on the importance of airpower in counterinsurgency operations (which appears to be based on the talk he gave at Cranwell last year); the Allied bombing of Berlin in 1940-5; and Walter Boyne on the USAF’s forgetting and relearning how to do electronic monitoring and control of the combat space over Vietnam. Overall, it’s a useful insight into what the world’s greatest air force is up to these days.

Bonus! Since I don’t talk about the USAF much, here’s a link which peacay sent me ages ago: the US Air Force History Index. This is a searchable index to 550,000 documents (out of 70 million, but you’ve got to start somewhere [correction: it's been pointed out to me that that's 70 million pages, not documents. The 550,000 documents indexed represent nearly all AFHRA documents for the period covered]) held by the Air Force Historical Research Agency, covering the period up to 2001. Not the documents themselves, just descriptions of them. Wish there was something like this for the PRO …

Keep that shadow from them

14 June 2008 in 1900s, 1910s, 1930s, Archives, Art, Ephemera, Pictures by Brett Holman | 3 comments

Vote National

A poster from the 1935 general election, showing, quite literally, the shadow of the bomber. The National Government was a coalition comprising the Conservatives and two splinter parties, National Labour and the Liberal Nationals. With Stanley Baldwin at its head, the National Government went to the people on a platform of peace and prosperity. The poster doesn’t spell out how peace was to be secured (no doubt one of its virtues), namely through a commitment to the League of Nations and collective security, and moderate rearmament, particularly in the air. It’s interesting that at this stage, aeroplanes were still evidently equated with biplanes. Monoplanes were certainly becoming prominent by this time, but they weren’t necessarily seen as more ‘modern’ than the familiar biplane. (As indeed they weren’t: Blériot used a monoplane to fly the Channel back in 1909.)

This election poster and others are available from the Conservative Party Archive at the Bodleian. There’s only one other which has an aviation theme:
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The spirit of grief

25 February 2008 in 1900s, 1910s, Archives, Art, Biographies, Pictures by Brett Holman | No comments

Spirit of Ecstasy

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

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

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

But today I’m going to talk about Montagu’s personal life, and the way it impinged on his public one. The photo above shows the ‘Spirit of Ecstasy’, the mascot adorning the bonnet of every Rolls-Royce — every one since Montagu put an early version on his Silver Ghost in 1911, that is, for he was a huge motoring enthusiast, and had his friend, the sculptor Charles Sykes, design it for him. Supposedly, the model Sykes used was Montagu’s own secretary and mistress, Eleanor Thornton. (Though there’s an alternate, and possibly more convincing, theory minimising the role of Thornton and Montagu.)
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  1. Montagu of Beaulieu, Aerial Machines and War (London: Hugh Rees, 1910), 2.

RAF Museum London 2

19 October 2007 in Archives, Pictures, Travel 2007 by Brett Holman | 13 comments

This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.

Beaufighter TF.X

One of the archives I visited during the second half of my time in London was the Archive Collection at the RAF Museum. Sadly the material I turned up, though interesting, was not overall of much relevance for my thesis. So I couldn’t justify spending a second day there. But, on the bright side, the archives closed at 5pm and the museum itself at 6pm — so I was able to able to use that hour to whiz through and have a look at the Fighter Hall, which I’d missed on my first visit.

Above is a Bristol Beaufighter TF.X torpedo bomber (well, the TF stands for torpedo fighter but that’s a bit of an oxymoron, isn’t it). A very versatile and heavily-armed machine, which according to the museum’s sign was called the “whispering death” by the Japanese — but Wikipedia says this is probably a propaganda legend. In front is a cannon (I assume from a Beaufighter), with a few shells in the magazine. Those things are big.
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Embankment and Strand

3 October 2007 in Archives, Pictures, Travel 2007 by Brett Holman | 15 comments

This post relates to my trip to Europe in July-September 2007.

Probably my favourite place to research in London was the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College London, where I spent the better part of two weeks digging through several personal archives. It’s a very pleasant environment to work in, and the staff were very helpful in accommodating this rude colonial’s requests, even at short notice! (Plus they actually sent me the roughly 200 pages of photocopies I ordered; I still haven’t got the batch I ordered from the British Library, and quite possibly won’t now, since it shouldn’t take a month to arrive by airmail …) KCL lies between Strand and the Victoria Embankment, near Waterloo Bridge; I’d usually take the Tube to Embankment and walk up from there, keeping my eye out for anything interesting along the way …

Imperial Camel Corps Memorial

This is the Imperial Camel Corps memorial in Victoria Embankment Gardens. I’ve previously written about a relative who was in the ICC and knew there was a memorial to it in London (in itself a bit odd, as most of them were Australians), which I vaguely thought I should seek out while I was there. Turns out I didn’t have to as I stumbled across it completely by chance! It’s quite a striking — though incongruous, amid all the green — statue, though the photo probably exaggerates the size of it.
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So what was the point of all that?

26 September 2007 in Archives, Thesis by Brett Holman | No comments

I’ve just spent two months at various libraries and archives in the UK. As I’ve noted previously, I now have a huge amount of extra primary source material to go through. Sure, in the abstract, more is better, but in concrete terms, how will this help make my thesis better than it would otherwise have been?

The most immediate benefit is for the chapter I’m currently working on, on defence panics. The primary sources for this are newspapers and other periodicals, a few of which I can get here, but not the single most important one: the right-wing and populist Daily Mail, a major advocate of aerial armaments over my period. I was able to survey the relevant dates (covering periods between 1913 and 1940) of the Daily Mail for all of the panics I’m interested in. (I also looked at a couple of months’ worth of the Evening News, another Rothermere paper, from 1935; and the aviation magazine, the Aeroplane.) Ideally I would have examined other important conservative newspapers such the Daily Express and the Daily Telegraph as well, but realistically I was never going to have enough time for that: scanning page after page of microfilmed newspapers for the occasional article of interest is very time-consuming, and it took me almost a month as it was! But now I know how the most influential press scaremonger in the British press portrayed the aerial menace, and so my chapter will be that much better.

The second chapter with which my research will help is a projected one on the organisation of aerial advocacy: that is, which organisations promoted aerial armaments, who joined them, what did they argue, how were they financed? I’m now in a position to be able to talk about groups such as the Air League of the British Empire, the Navy League (oddly enough), and the National League of Airmen. I will partly be viewing these through the prisms of some of their key figures: P. R. C. Groves, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu, and Norman Macmillan, the personal archives of all of whom I was able to examine in London. I’ll supplement this with information about their activities from their journals and/or the press, and I also have the Air League’s minute books for 1909-1941 to draw upon. I guess with this chapter, the question I want to answer is: where were the leagues? Anyone familiar with navalism before the First World War will recall that the Navy League and Imperial Maritime League were very active in trying to alert public opinion to the need for more battleships to counter the growing German fleet. I expected something similar would be the case with airmindedness, yet the Air League has been almost invisible in my research so far. And it turns out that this was actually a criticism the Air League had to face several times in its early history. Once I’ve sifted through all the data I should be better able to explain why this was.

Finally, my (already-written) chapters on the origin and evolution of the knock-out blow will need to be updated somewhat in light of some of the books and archival sources I looked at. Nothing major — just refining and clarifying the narrative in places. For example, I now know a bit more about when and why F. W. Lanchester wrote Aircraft in Warfare (1916), a key text in the creation of the knock-out blow paradigm. Actually, now that I think of it, the main advantage here is probably an increased confidence that I’ve got the the story largely right: although I obviously can’t be sure that something startling might turn up, I’ve at least now filled in the more glaring gaps in my review of the literature.

Of course I picked up a lot of other things of interest here and there along the way, and there are the intangible benefits of meeting other researchers working on related topics as well. Overall, my thesis will certainly be much the better for the time I spent in the UK; it was two months very well spent!

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