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.

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).

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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!

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 ...

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:

This one takes a bit more explaining. It's from 1909 or 1910, and would be for the general election held in January-February 1910 (there was another in December). Airship pilot 'Herr von Lloyd George' exclaims, in his best music-hall German, that he although he was trying hit the very stately home with his 'budget bombs', he has in fact some factories (including a 'tobacco factory', 'motor car works' and a 'malthouse'). So, it's obviously attacking the 1909 'People's Budget', which Lloyd George masterminded as Chancellor. He's portrayed as a German because some of the social reforms he introduced, such as sickness benefits, were pioneered in Germany (which he had visited in 1908). Much of the controversy caused by the People's Budget was due to the raft of new taxes needed to pay for the reforms (and dreadnoughts), one of which was a land tax -- which is why LG was trying to bomb the mansion. I think the factories being hit instead is a reference to tariff reform: the Conservatives wanted to tax imports to protect British industries, whereas the governing Liberals believed in free trade. The airship is called 'The Revenge' because it was redistributionist in intent -- taking from the rich through taxes and giving to the poor through welfare.

It's only incidentally about airships, then, though perhaps the bomb-dropping German airship is also a swipe at government inaction in creating an air force (the first airship scare took place earlier in 1909; the RFC wasn't created until 1912). And at the very least, it shows that the idea of Zeppelins being used as bombers was common currency in 1910 -- even if it's only being used for comedic effect. At any rate it's a nice illustration of the popular idea of what an airship looked like, with a huge propeller at the back, a lantern in front, and an anchor dragging below.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image source: anataman.

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

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.

The ultimate refinement of the Spitfire, the F24, introduced in 1946. The five-bladed propeller seen here was only one of the differences from the Mk I: it also had clipped wings (for faster rolls), a tear-drop canopy (greater visibility), three times the firepower, nearly twice the rate of climb and a top speed 160 km/h higher. None of which counted for much in the jet era: only a few dozen F24s were ever built.

The rather distinctive Hawker Typhoon -- just the thing for a spot of tankbusting over France.

It surely must be time for an autogyro revival! Though I suppose there wasn't ever an autogyro era to revive. This is a Cierva C-30A autogyro, built under license by Avro (as the Type 671 Rota) for RAF evaluation in 1935. They were initially evaluated for the army co-operation role but ended up being used during to calibrate the first radars.

A Tornado: about three weeks later I saw another of these, a bit further away but a lot louder.

The beautifully-polished rear fuselage (and unfortunately only the fuselage remains) of a Southampton I flying boat. These entered production in 1925 and were made by Supermarine, which for most of its life was a flying boat specialist -- despite being largely remembered today for just one land-based interceptor. (See above.)

The Beaufort torpedo bomber, which was descended from the Blenheim bomber and from which the Beaufighter was derived in its turn.

Nose art from a Hudson IIIA of the RAAF (surprisingly enough). Of course the paint job isn't original (between 1954 and 1966 it looked like this), but presumably there's evidence that this aircraft (or one like it) had something like this during the war.

Another Supermarine flying boat, the Stranraer: the last of the RAF's biplane flying boats.

A different view of the same Beaufighter at the top of the post. Note the post-D-Day invasion stripes.

This one obviously has a story behind it! It's a Gladiator II which served with 263 Squadron. In April 1940 it was ferried to Norway on the aircraft carrier HMS Glorious, to a base on a frozen lake. But it was very soon damaged in a German air raid and abandoned by the RAF when the base was evacuated. When the ice melted, it sank through and settled on the bottom. In 1968 a RAF diving team located the wreckage, and in 1970 another team salvaged it.

263 Squadron re-equipped with more Gladiators and returned to Norway where it had more success (26 claims from 249 sorties). But it was evacuated again, once more on the Glorious. Unfortunately the Glorious was intercepted by the Scharnhorst and the Gneisenau and sunk. 263 Squadron lost 10 pilots, including its CO.

Yet another Bristol aeroplane, the Bulldog: one of the classic British interwar fighters. Fast and highly maneuverable, but not recommended for extremely low-level rolls.

The bombload of a DH9A (well, most of it), the RAF's standard air control bomber. This particular aircraft was presented by His Highness the Nizam of Hyderabad.

The Brisfit (Bristol F2B Fighter), which first saw combat in 1917. Like the Defiant two decades later, it's a two-seat fighter with a rear gunner. Unlike the Defiant, it had a disastrous combat debut (4 out of 6 were lost on their first patrol), but then went on to a brilliant career, since it was as maneuverable as the enemy single-seat scouts. This example is devoid of canvas on one side, in order to show the internal construction.

This is the third airship car (or part thereof) I saw in London; it's nice to know that something survived. This one is from the R33, one of the most successful of the large British rigid airships. (Quite possibly because it was based upon the design of a captured Zeppelin!) It was certainly fortunate: in 1925, it was blown away from its mooring mast in a gale -- bursting the forward gas cell in the process -- and forced out over the North Sea. It had only a skeleton crew on board, who turned R33 into the teeth of the gale and attempted to maintain its position, but it wasn't until after nearly landing in the sea (and jettisoning surplus weight to prevent this) and ending up over the Dutch coast that they managed to bring the airship to a halt and start on the trip back home. It survived until 1928 when it had to be dismantled due to metal fatigue.

Lastly, the last great British interceptor -- indeed, one of the great aircraft of the Cold War -- the supersonic BAC Lightning.

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 ...

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.

Also in the same gardens is the memorial to Arthur Sullivan -- as in Gilbert and Sullivan. Given his numerous love affairs, the form of the memorial seems most appropriate! I wonder whether that was intentional? Not that the Victorians and Edwardians (Sullivan died in 1900) were as buttoned-down as they are popularly thought to be, but it does seem to be a surprisingly blunt sexual allusion.

Outside Somerset House is this rather splendid memorial to those members of 15th (County of London) Battalion, The London Regiment (Prince of Wales's Own, Civil Service Rifles) who were killed in the First World War. The flags are made of copper and presumably need to be repainted fairly regularly!

Yet another First World War memorial; this time it's to the Royal Navy's submariners lost in the war (though it also lists the Australian AE1 and AE2).

A ship anchored in the Thames. Nothing too unusual about that -- except this one doesn't go anywhere. It's permanently moored here and serves as the headquarters of the Honourable Company of Master Mariners. (Personally I'd prefer something less likely to sink ... but then, I'm not a master mariner.) As HMS Wellington, a Grimsby-class sloop, it did service as a convoy escort in the Second World War, and took part in Operation Dynamo, among other things.

Now, moving on to the Strand. Out in front of St Clement Danes, the RAF's central church (which, again I'd intended to have a look at, but found by accident), is this statue of Marshal of the RAF Arthur Harris, head of Bomber Command 1942-5. It's the one which protesters jeered when it was unveiled by the Queen Mum in 1992.

Nearby is the rather less controversial Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Dowding, head of Fighter Command 1936-40.

Directly opposite St Clement Danes is this reminder of home -- Australia House. Apparently the longest-occupied embassy in London, though since it was only opened in August 1918 that's not actually very long. The statue group, by Harold Parker, is either called Awakening of Australia or Prosperity of Australia (there's another one on the opposite side of the door), either way it doesn't do much for me.

Lastly, St Mary le Strand, the second "island church" -- because surrounded by roads on all sides -- St Clement Danes being the other. It was consecrated in 1723, on the site of a famous maypole. The maypole (or perhaps only its base) was bought by Isaac Newton as part of what would have been the world's largest telescope, at Wanstead Park in Essex, a tubeless refractor using a 7.5-inch diameter, 123-foot focal length objective lens donated to the Royal Society by Christiaan Huygens. Though the optics were not good enough for serious work, some wag approved of the maypole's new role, for one morning the following verses were found affixed to it (so it is said):

Once I adorned the Strand,
But now have found
My way to Pound
On Baron Newton's land;
Where my aspiring head aloft is reared,
T' observe the motions of th' ethereal Lord.
Here sometimes raised a machine by my side,
Through which is seen the sparkling milky tide;
Here oft I'm scented with a balmy dew,
A pleasant blessing which the Strand ne'er knew.
There stood I only to receive abuse,
But here converted to a nobler use;
So that with me all passengers will say,
'I'm better far than when the Pole of May.'

I really didn't plan to write about the role played by pagan survivals in the development of modern science when I started this post ...

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!