I've updated my list of British newspapers online, 1901-1950 to reflect the new titles available in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA), a pay-site which was launched with some fanfare about a month ago. Although it has been digitised from (and in partnership with) the British Library's newspapers collections, I must admit to not having paid much attention at the time because it sounded like it only covered 1900 and earlier. While that's mostly true, there's actually enough to interest an early 20th-century historian, especially in terms of regional newspapers, and more titles and pages are promised. Having said that, the price structure isn't very appealing for what's on offer, so I haven't subscribed to BNA and probably won't until I have a specific purpose in mind.

Most of the 20th-century titles are available only up to 1903. But the Western Times (Exeter) is available right up until 1950, and the Tamworth Herald until 1944. Four other newspapers have digitised runs of over a decade: Cheltenham Looker-On (1902 to 1913); North Devon Journal (Barnstaple, to 1923); Nottingham Evening Post (1921 to 1944); Western Daily Press (Bristol, 1915 to 1930). You can download whole pages (though apparently not individual articles), though sadly without a text layer. The free samples are good quality -- of course, they would be, but keyword searches (which you can do for free) suggests that the OCR is generally good. There is also the ability to correct the text where the OCR fails; and you can tag or comment on individual articles. User accounts also come with a 'My Research' section which allows you to bookmark articles as well as view a history of previous searches performed and articles viewed. A potentially handy feature is the ability to perform a keyword search on just the articles you've viewed. Searching in general is fast and powerful; you can quickly narrow a query by period, area, title or section of newspaper. I'm impressed with BNA's user interface overall: it is a lot like (and I'm sure directly inspired by) the National Library of Australia's Trove Digitised Newspapers but with a few more improvements for the dedicated researcher in mind.

Now for the complaints. These all revolve around the non-free nature of BNA. I do have philosophical objections to state institutions handing over their nation's cultural heritage largely preserved at taxpayer expense to free enterprise to make a buck out of, but there are practical problems too. The facilities for tagging, commenting and correcting are great, for example, but I question whether these are going to be used much in a non-open environment like this. Especially corrections: Trove has a community of eager text-correctors who make over a hundred thousand corrections a day; but then Trove is free. Expecting people to pay BNA for the privilege of improving their product is a bit much to ask, it seems to me. Apparently the current commercial arrangement will last for ten years, after which it may become open; but by then the technology will no doubt need updating and probably another commercial arrangement to fund it. I realise that digitisation and hosting costs money and it's not the British Library's fault it had to go down this route if it wanted to make its newspaper collection available to all; but I much prefer the Antipodean ethos on this one. Some of the problems resulting from the non-free, non-open nature of BNA could be fixed, though. As I noted above, given the limited number of titles currently available for the 20th century, subscribing for a whole year is not attractive to me. Why not have a cheaper option for just the 20th century?

This advertisement was placed by the Air League in The Times, 11 June 1940, on page 9 (it also appeared in the Daily Telegraph). The British Expeditionary Force had been ejected from France just a week before; Germany now occupied Belgium and the Netherlands. France was still fighting, but Paris had been declared an open city, and with Italy entering the war its position seemed hopeless. The RAF had evidently not been able to hold back the Luftwaffe, now only a few minutes' flight from British soil, and this is where the Air League came in. It pointed out that

For years the Air League warned the country of the importance of air power. [...] Now is the time for renewed effort and new resolves. Resolve to-day that so long as any danger exists you will use every effort to keep the Royal Air Force strong enough after the war to deter any aggressor from threatening our peace [...] If you support the Air League you can make it your means of ensuring that never again will our country get into a position of inferiority in the air.

I wonder how far away the Air League thought 'after the war' was: years, months, weeks? Given that no money was being solicited (and the advertising itself was expensive), that would seem to suggest sooner rather than later: few people would feel obliged to keep such a pledge made years earlier under different circumstances. J. A. Chamier, the Secretary-General of the Air League whose idea it was, was a fascist fellow-traveller, so we may presume did not wish to fight Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy any longer than necessary. But then again to call for Britain to maintain its airpower at a high level after an armistice, say, is not treasonous. Whether this position is defeatist is debatable, though I tend to think it is, a little.

Note the distinctly petulant tone:

More public support would have made its [the Air League's] warnings more effective [...] The Air League, which founded Empire Air Day and the Air Defence Cadet Corps has never been adequately supported by the public.

I.e., dear British people: if you idiots had listened to us in the first place we wouldn't be in this mess. Did this hectoring work? Though the Air League asked for a million pledges, by October it had received about 500, not an insignificant number compared to its total membership (before the war, in the low thousands) but not a lot either, when the immense gratitude people felt for the RAF after the Battle of Britain is taken into account.

I've recently begun some research at the National Archives of Australia (the Melbourne reading room of which is conveniently only about half a kilometre from my house) into the 1918 mystery aeroplane scare. It's always exciting to get to work on a new set of primary sources; and this is my first time working in a state archive so it's doubly interesting. I can already see that there's a lot of useful material, and my original idea of a short, simple case study is already starting to seem optimistic.

The main file I've looked at so far is NAA: MP367/1, 512/3/1319, 'Reports from 2nd M D during War Period on lights, aeroplanes, signals etc.', a big fat dossier of reports from the public and the results of military and police investigations into them. 2nd Military District seems to have covered New South Wales, so it's actually not what I ultimately want: most of the 1918 sightings took place in Victoria, i.e. 3rd Military District. But as NSW was the other big state (somewhat more people, more important industrially and commercially; but Victoria had the seat of government and defence headquarters) it'll be useful as a control.

There are three main types of reports: signalling, wireless, and aeroplanes. The first is easily the largest, and consists of people seeing lights flashed from houses, from a hill top, on the coast, etc, and reporting them as suspected lights from German agents. For example, in May 1918 Mrs Clara A. Woollard of Pambula wrote that

I think it is my duty to inform you that flashlight signals were being displayed in the sky, to the west, at about eight o'clock last night.

She had seen this light on several previous occasions, and thought that it was 'as if someone were telegraphing messages by that means'. Virtually all of these reports seem to have turned out to be false alarms, often caused by people carrying hurricane lamps late at night so they could see where they were going. Most of the suspect houses turned out to be inhabited by good, solid 'Britishers'.

Nationality and ethnicity was also important in the wireless cases. These were suspected wireless installations, with a big antenna and associated plant, potentially capable of sending and receiving messages to and from -- where? Other secret agents? Ships off the coast? The Fatherland? As with the signals, it's not always clear just what the suspicion was, only that they were suspicious. But who needs something like that, anyway? Conveniently, unauthorised possession of such wireless installations was already prohibited under pre-war legislation, as was pointed out in press notices in September 1914. This led to a rash of reports from the public, which continued at a fairly steady rate until the end of the war. As late as September 1918, for example, the Provost Marshal Office of 2nd Military District investigated the concerns of Mrs Caroline H. Scott of Darlinghurst, who

is of the opinion that there is a Wireless Plant in the vicinity of her residence as she has noticed flashes & also heard the tick tacking [sic] similar to those produced by a Wireless Plant. These noises & flashes occurred about between 3 & 4.o.clock in the mornings & she considered it her duty to inform the Authorities of same.

Often there was a suspicious foreigner involved. Sometimes the wireless installations were real enough (one man was using his to carry out research into the effect of radio waves on plant growth!) but none seem to have been to have been used in espionage or subversion.

And then there were the aeroplanes. This is the smallest category in 2nd Military District's files, nineteen cases for the whole war: seven in 1914, when you might expect some war jitters, and another seven in 1918, mostly after the Hindenburg offensive on the Western Front and the reports of raiders off the coast. A very few were actual aeroplanes, generally sitting in somebody's workshop somewhere. At Hay in November 1914, V. B. Sylvander's activities were investigated by a police detective. Sylvander and his son had already built one aeroplane, which had been damaged in testing; a second one was being built but lacked an engine. Sylvander wisely proposed to give this to the government when it was finished, which perhaps influenced the detective's judgement that he was 'a loyal Britisher' despite being a 'naturalised Russian Finn'. Most others were the more usual lights in the night sky, as seen over Britain, New Zealand and Australia in 1909 and elsewhere/when.

Some were more substantial and unusual: in June 1918, Miss McCann of Beckom was sitting in her room at 1am when she 'heard the buzzing noise of an aeroplane and a ray of light shot across her bed like a searchlight and seem to be going south'. She said that it didn't sound like a motor car (though later she admitted that it might have been just that). In this case, it wasn't just the sound and the light: McCann seems to have suspected a local family of disloyalty. She mentioned to the policeman interviewing her that a 'strange man' had visited the Groth farm nearby, and it turned out that they had recently had a large box of ammunition delivered to them. Three of the family's sons, of age and medically fit, had claimed conscientious objection to military service on religious grounds. The Groth brothers were born in Australia, but their parents were from Germany, and this combined with their 'disloyal' attitude denied them the status of 'Britishers'. A number of followup investigations led to the reluctant conclusion that the Groths weren't up to any mischief (the ammunition was for hunting and pest control), but one suspects the damage to their reputation was done.

One mystery aeroplane stands out because it was actually a phantom airship: a Zeppelin seen at Young in July 1918 by W. G. Rogers, a professional photographer. In a letter to the Minister for Defence, Senator George Pearce, Rogers said that

I saw what appeared to me be [sic] an airship of the Zeppelin type due west from this town in size it appeared to be about 40ft. long but no doubt it was much larger as it was some miles distant. It was steering zig-zag course as though it was having trouble with the heavy wind which was blowing that morning.

It sunk out of sight to the west at around 8am. Just what a Zeppelin would be doing at Young, more than 250 km inland from Sydney, is not clear. Rogers's account was taken seriously, but a police sergeant detailed to investigate reported that nobody else had seen the Zeppelin. Furthermore,

Mr Roger's [sic] is a very respectable resident of Young, but very near sighted and I am of the opinion that he saw a snow cloud, and believed it to be an airship.

About the time mentioned by Mr Roger's [sic] there was a strong wind blowing with rain and snow.

My favourite find, though, is the one that made me laugh inappropriately at the archive. The Captain-in-Charge of His Majesty's Australian Naval Establishments, Sydney, wrote in December 1917 to 2nd Military District's Military Intelligence Officer about a purported illegal wireless installation at St Ignatius College:

I would point out the peculiar merits of this supposed apparatus,

1. Peculiar flashes.
2. Finding imaginary earthquakes.

I would suggest it might also be applied for finding the supposed brains of the Prime Minister's correspondent.

As the writer was John Glossop, formerly commander of HMAS Sydney and victor over the raider SMS Emden in 1914, he probably had good reason to feel his time was being wasted. But scepticism didn't stop the reports of strange signals, illegal aerials, and mystery aeroplanes. Only the end of the war did that.

The other day I received an email from Andrew Gray, a reader of this blog, alerting me to the existence of a new online newspaper archive available at ukpressonline. I've used ukpressonline before for its complete runs of the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror, which were the most popular British dailies for most of the 1930s and 1940s. But it's not a free service. I don't mind paying, but the annual subscription rates are too prohibitive for me, and so when I do pay it's only for short-term access with a specific topic in mind. So it's not something I routinely draw upon.

But what Andrew pointed out (thanks Andrew!) was a new 'World War II' subscription package covering just the years 1933 to 1945, ie from the rise of Hitler to the end of the Second World War. It's only available by annual subscription, but I think £50.00 is more than reasonable for what it offers: not only the Express and the Mirror, but also the Yorkshire Post (one of the few conservative newspapers to take a stand against appeasement), the Daily Worker (owned by the Communist Party of Great Britain), and Action and Blackshirt (published by the British Union of Fascists and its successors). And it is promised that 'In the coming months, we aim to add major regional newspapers and some of the further-left press' (I would guess that the Yorkshire Post and the Daily Worker are the first of these, actually). This is a really excellent resource for anyone interested in the British press in this period; I've already signed up and started using it.

Still, this made me make, yet again, the invidious comparison between the state of online newspaper archives in Britain and in Australia -- in particular, the National Library of Australia's aptly-named Trove. Here, among many other things, you can get free access to many Australian newspapers, including the major capital dailies, in one place, using one (open-ish) interface. There's nothing like it for British newspapers, where everything is scattered all over the web, sometimes free but mostly not, often with no rhyme or reason as to the years available, and of course with highly variable user experiences. There are some advantages to the British approach (would the NLA be comfortable making Australian fascist literature available on the same basis as the mainstream press?), and the sheer volume of newspapers is vastly larger, so it's not practicable to have, say, the British Library digitise it all and publish it for free.

Instead of just griping about the situation, I decided to at least collate the various sources of online British newspapers for 1901-1950 (roughly, 'my period') and put it up in a list, which can be found on the sidebar on Airminded's home page. I used bigger lists compiled by Mike Dash and at The Bioscope, and added a few more I've found. I've excluded Irish newspapers (outside of Ulster), even though they were technically 'British' before 1922; but there is a good site for those already. Also, I decided not to link to archive sites which only allow institutional access (e.g. by libraries); they're a tease for the independent researcher. I'll try to keep the list updated, so please let me know if there is anything I've missed.

A few comments. The biggest surprise for me was finding that the Daily Mail is available from its founding in 1896 up until 1923, covering the Northcliffe years nicely. That's at an American paysite, NewspaperARCHIVE. Subscribing to that gives access to a rather random selection of more than a dozen other British newspapers from this period, the most interesting of which are perhaps Black and White (more of a magazine really, but one which often published speculation about future wars and the like) and Primrose League Gazette, a Conservative Party organ. Though if you're interested in Hackney you've got not one but three titles to choose from! (It also has the Guardian, but it's not the Manchester Guardian which became today's Guardian, but a London paper.)

There's nothing from Wales, unfortunately, and only the Belfast Gazette from Ulster -- like its London and Edinburgh equivalents, not a normal newspaper but an official government publication. Scotland has some reasonable coverage, with the Scotsman and the Glasgow Herald from its two biggest cities. There's also the Inverness Courier, though only an index of its articles is online: if you find something you want, you need to ask the poor librarians to scan it for you! Apart from the Yorkshire Post, the only regional English newspaper I've found so far is the Staffordshire Sentinel, published in Stoke-on-Trent.

There are some useful special-interest publications too. The women's suffrage movement is well represented, with Votes For Women (Women's Social and Political Union), The Vote For Women's Freedom (Women's Freedom League) and The Freewoman all freely available. New Age, an important literary journal, has long been online. There's also Temperance Caterer ('For temperance hotels, coffee palaces, coffee taverns and restaurants, cafes, coffee houses, cocoa rooms, refreshment contractors, hotel fitters, furnishers, &c') and the wonderfully named Tongues Of Fire, the official organ of the Pentecostal League ('A journal for the promotion and extension of spiritual life, purity and power'). And, of course, Flight!

One sad omission: The Times. I have institutional access, but it used to be possible to pay for access to The Times archive as an individual. Now that seems to be behind the subscriber paywall. Paying just to get the chance to pay again seems a bit retrograde.

In a discussion of the activities of MI5's Port Control section during the First World War, Christopher Andrew mentions German musings about using biological weapons against British civilians:

The most novel as well as the most sinister form of wartime sabotage attempted by Sektion P was biological warfare. At least one of its scientists in 1916 devised a scheme to start a plague epidemic in Britain, either by infecting rats or, more improbably, by dropping plague bacilli cultures from Zeppelins over ports. The Prusso-German General Staff, however, vetoed bacteriological warfare against humans as totally contrary to international law (the Hague Laws of Warfare).

But he doesn't provide any references. Is this plausible?

The British War Cabinet considered 'The possible Spread of Epidemics by dropping Germs from the Air' during its meeting on 9 February 1917. It accepted the advice from experts from the Royal Society, the Army Medical Service and the Local Government Board that the possibility was remote, and that any outbreak would be easily contained. Consequently Cabinet decided that 'no further action was required'. The expert reports themselves are quite interesting. That from Dr Arthur Newsholme, the chief medical officer of the Local Government Board, notes press reports of 'poisoned sweets and garlic saturated with garlic being stated to have been dropped at Constanza [Romania] from enemy aeroplanes'. Closer to home, the Board itself received a letter claiming that 'according to information "from a reliable source," infected sweetmeats had been dropped over Sheffield'. But, Newsholme added, no evidence had been produced in either case.

None of this relates to bubonic plague, however. And in Martin Hugh-Jones's summary of known (that is, by the British) wartime German biological warfare plans, plague is not mentioned. Most of the actual biological warfare activity by Germany during the First World War was directed towards anthrax and glanders, for use against horses, sheep and cattle. Nor does Hugh-Jones know of German wartime proposals to spread disease from the air (as opposed to proposals after the war, which is the focus of his article).

But bubonic plague can be weaponised and deployed from the air. Japan's Unit 731 proved that in China in 1940 and 1941, not only in controlled experiments but in field trials. And by field trials I mean, of course, bombing civilian areas with bubonic plague. There were at least four separate attacks, involving at most a handful of Japanese aircraft: Chuhsien, 4 October 1940; Ningpo, 27 October 1940; Kinhwa, 28 November 1940; and Changteh, 4 November 1941. The plague was not dropped in bombs but usually by way of fleas and grain; in two cases plague bacilli were detected by local hospitals. Only in Kinhwa did no outbreak of plague follow; a hundred people died in Ningpo alone.

So it does seem possible that German scientists considered using Zeppelins to rain black death upon Britain, and that it may even have worked. The British experts may have underestimated the potential of this form of aerial attack; and the psychological impact might have been far greater than the medical one. Then again, the great influenza pandemic in 1918 didn't disrupt the war to any great extent, and it killed far more people than any plague would have done. So the War Cabinet's lack of concern was justified, in the non-event.

Fears of poison gas attacks during the Blitz don't receive much attention from historians, and with good reason: not only did they not take place, but the evidence (for example, the number of gas masks being carried about) suggests that most people were complacent about the possibility. But not all. On 2 September 1940, a Mass-Observation investigator in London heard the following from a woman in her mid-30s:

There's a nasty rumour going around that Hitler's going to start using a gas this week that's going to penetrate women's bodies through their sex organs. Women will have to go about wearing sanitary towels all the time. Its [sic] going to cause a lot of disturbance.

Scientific implausibility aside, this rumour encapsulates the horror of gas, that it permeates inside the body and kills from within; and that as a product of science it might be developed into new and even more horrific forms. On the other, though, here the horror is a very gendered one, perhaps drawing upon existing anxieties about women's centrality to total war's front line (i.e. the home front) and the difficulties of maintaining feminine hygiene in a time of rationing and shortages. (The woman who passed on the rumour is described as 'normally much too "respectable" to mention such a subject', suggesting to the investigator how badly it had shaken her morale.) Or perhaps it has something to do with a perceived Nazi obsession with race and reproduction.

I wonder if there's a literary origin to this rumour. Shaw Desmond's rather science-fictional knock-out blow novel Chaos (1938) has a weapon which is reminiscent, though there it affects both sexes:

Then there was the Genital Gas, which was said to destroy the genitals of men and women, to make them childless for ever, and to turn their faces into smiling masks for them to strike horror amidst their fellows.

There's no way of knowing, but the 1940 rumour does sound like it could easily have started out as idle speculation inspired by something like the 1938 novel, and mutated into specifics and certainties from there.

So, THATCamp Melbourne is over. It was pretty much as I expected, which is to say it was excellent. I'm not going to write a conference report (you should have been following #thatcamp on Twitter for that!) but two sessions did give me ideas for digital history projects I might like to do. One day. If I get the time.

One came out of the unofficial API Tim Sherratt reverse-engineered for Trove Newspapers. (Why the National Library of Australia won't release an official API is a bit mysterious.) He uses that to scrape Trove to do searches and display results which aren't possible with the interface offered by the NLA, such as plotting the frequency of Australian vs British/Briton. Are there any publicly accessible datasets which I use which could benefit from the same treatment? Yes, there are. The first one I thought of was the Flight archive, which is a great resource burdened with a limited interface. (But it's fantastic that it exists at all: Flightglobal is a commercial operation and they didn't need to open up their back issues like this at all, if they didn't want to.) I think this is easily doable. A second one is much more ambitious: The National Archives catalogue. It's frustrating that you can't do keyword search across their digitised collections; all you can do is search the descriptions in the catalogue, and these are by their nature limited. A scraper would help here. But the problem there is that you can't download documents directly, even when they are free; you have to add to a 'shopping cart', pay £0.00 for it and wait for an email to arrive. Possibly this could be automated; possibly not.

The other idea I had was to use SahulTime (or its eventual successor, possibly called TemporalEarth) to display the British scareship waves. SahulTime is something like Google Earth, but it allows you to map events/documents/people/objects in time as well as space. Matthew Coller, the developer, originally devised it to represent archaeological data on migration into Australia across the ice-age land bridge, but it is just as useful for historical data. So I could use this to show when and where the scareships were seen, showing how the waves started and evolved, with links to the primary sources. SahulTime is also good at displaying uncertainty in time, which is helpful where I have only vague information about when a sighting happened. The same could be done for uncertainty in space, though that's a bit trickier conceptually.

One day... if I get the time...

There have been a lot of stories in the press recently with titles like 'Churchill ordered UFO cover-up, National Archives show'. Actually, the TNA files -- part of an ongoing series of releases of UFO-related files -- don't show this at all, as is clear if you read the article more closely.

The cover-up is supposed to have taken place in the Second World War.

Nick Pope, who used to investigate UFO sightings for the MoD, said: "The interesting thing is that most of the UFO files from that period have been destroyed.

"But what happened is that a scientist whose grandfather was one of his [Churchill's] bodyguards, said look, Churchill and Eisenhower got together to cover up this phenomenal UFO sighting, that was witnessed by an RAF crew on their way back from a bombing raid.

"The reason apparently was because Churchill believed it would cause mass panic and it would shatter people's religious views."

The scientist 'said' this in 1999, nearly half a century after the incident is supposed to have taken place and a quarter century after his grandfather died. So it's only hearsay: there is no evidence from the war itself or from any witnesses that this cover-up actually took place.

Let's take a closer look at the claim itself. The scientist -- whose name has understandably been redacted from the documents (DEFE 24/2013, pages 205-9 and 273-7) -- was an astrophysicist working on software for 'spacecraft thermal engineering', writing from Leicester. According to his account, his grandfather, who died in 1973, was in the RAF during the war and 'was part of the personal bodyguard of Winston Churchill during the times when the Bunkers were in use for protection'. The Ministry of Defence files don't comment on whether this was the case, but as it could be checked easily enough it doesn't seem likely that the scientist would have made this up. (I don't think the MoD was particularly interested, one way or the other.) Though bound by the Official Secrets Act, the bodyguard did tell one person about this incident: his then-nine-year old daughter (which makes the story that much harder to rely upon). Initially, the scientist said that

My grandfather witnessed the discussion of the event both by Mr. Churchill and Mr. Eisenhower in the United States, and the great concern it caused in both countries.

Taken literally, this would seem to suggest the discussion took place between Churchill and Eisenhower in the US, which would mean it took place in or around one of the Allied conferences in Washington or Quebec in 1942, 1943 or 1944. But as far as I can see Eisenhower didn't attend these, and anyway the reference to 'Bunkers' suggests Britain, where he was much more likely to bump into Churchill. So I think we should probably read the above as Eisenhower of the United States.

Here's the meat of the story.

A report from an RAF aircrew approaching the east coast of England sometime in the early 1940's was discussed by leaders in the UK and the US.

The aircraft was intercepted by an object of unknown origin, which matched course and speed with the aircraft for a time and then underwent an extremely rapid acceleration away from the aircraft probably with non-ballistic or non-aerodynamic flight characteristics. Photographs and/or film was obtained by this aircrew showing a metallic arrow-shaped body [but see below]. This even was discussed by Mr Churchill and General Eisenhower, neither of whom knew what had been observed. There was a general inability for either side to match a plausible account to these observations, and this caused a high degree of concern.

After talking again to his mother, the scientist added some further details in a later letter:

1. The RAF aircraft was a reconnaissance plane returning to England to either France or Germany during the latter part of the War.
2. The encounter with the unknown object occurred close to or over the English coastline.
3. The observed object was undetected until it was close to the aircraft. It was suddenly observed by the aircrew appearing at the side of the aircraft at a very high speed; then it very rapidly matched its speed with that of the aircraft.
4. It appeared to "hover" noiselessly relative to the aircraft for a time. One of the photographic airmen began to take photographs of it. It appeared metallic but its shape was not described. (Please disregard my earlier comment about an "arrow-shaped" body, this appears to have been an error on my part).
5. The object very suddenly disappeared, leaving no trace of its earlier presence.
6. During the discussion with Mr. Churchill, a consultant (who worked in the Cumbria area during the War) dismissed any possibility that the object had been a missile, since a missile could not suddenly match its speed with a slower aircraft and then accelerate again. He declared that the event was totally beyond any imagined capabilities of the time. Another person at the meeting raised the possibility of an unidentified flying object, at which point Mr. Churchill declared that the incident should be immediately classified for at least 50 years and its status reviewed by a future Prime Minister.

Finally, the scientist summarised his claim as follows, adding some information about the motivation behind the cover-up not repeated elsewhere:

It is claimed that my grandfather, [redacted] was present during a debate between Winston Churchill and Mr. Eisenhower during World War II involving making a decision about an unexpected incident experienced by a RAF bomber aircrew returning to the UK after a mission into Germany. Mr Churchill is reported to have made a declaration to the effect of the following:

"This event should be immediately classified since it would create mass panic amongst the general population and destroy one's belief in the Church."

Let's start there. I don't see why there would have been any need for a decision regarding the classification of this incident: it was wartime, and information concerning all military operations was classified unless and until cleared for public release. Of course, the exact level of classification could have been up for debate, but there was surely no great danger that the public was about to learn of an RAF aircraft being intercepted by an ultra-high-tech vehicle of unknown origin.

The bit about it destroying 'belief in the Church' is a bit odd. This is presumably a reference to a belief that this high-tech vehicle had to be of extraterrestrial origin, an idea which is nowhere explicitly addressed in the story above (unless it is the reference to the object as an 'unidentified flying object', a term definitely not in use during the war but which in common usage is often taken to mean an extraterrestrial spacecraft). Some theologians (and Tom Paine) have argued that the plurality of worlds question is problematic for Christianity (e.g. did the crucifixion save all sentient beings everywhere in the universe or did every single inhabited planet have its own salvation event?) But it seems unlikely that this was the first concern that would have popped into Churchill's head. I'm sure he would have read The War of the Worlds at some point; was he not worried about the intentions of this highly advanced alien race? For Churchill to worry about the effect of such revelations on the morale of a war-weary British populace, on the other hand, does sound about right, though people might have found them cause for hope rather than fear.

The weirdly cryptic reference to the consultant who worked in the Cumbrian area (is this really a description you'd pass on to your nine year old daughter?) also leads to the extraterrestrial inference. But I don't see how he could categorically claim that it was impossible for the object to be a missile, because a missile couldn't slow down to match an aircraft's speed and then accelerate again. It certainly implies a high degree of control for a (presumably) unmanned vehicle, but that could have been supplied from a nearby mothership (an aeroplane, not a spaceship!) Still, I can see someone like R. V. Jones making persuasive technical arguments as to why such a vehicle was beyond current technology. (Jones himself would be an obvious choice for the 'consultant', especially given his later interest in ghost rockets and flying saucers, but he worked in London during the war.)

Turning to the purported incident itself, the details are a bit suspect. An RAF photo reconnaissance mission over 'France or Germany during the latter part of the War' would most likely have been carried out by a Spitfire or a Mosquito. There's a suggestion that the aircraft involved had more than one aircrew, in which case it would have to be a Mosquito. But somewhere along the process of retelling the story the idea seems to have crept in that photo reconnaissance work involved pointing a camera out the cockpit window ('One of the photographic airmen began to take photographs of it') which of course was not the case: the cameras were fitted inside special bays and could not have been used in this ad hoc fashion. (Not to mention that all the film probably would have been exposed over enemy territory.) Perhaps this part has just been garbled.

Another detail which doesn't make sense is that the object 'appeared to "hover" noiselessly relative to the aircraft for a time'. I'm not sure how you could tell from inside a multi-engined aircraft whether something outside wasn't making a sound. This is a description common to many (post-war) UFO accounts and I'd suggest that in this part of the story contamination has set in: this is what UFOs sound like (or rather don't sound like), so even if it's not plausible the detail is added, quite probably subconsciously. Much like the whole phantom airship thing, in fact.

Which brings me to my last point. Previously, Churchill's known involvement in the history of the UFO phenomenon essentially consisted of two episodes. The first was the Sheerness incident in 1912, when as First Lord of the Admiralty he oversaw an investigation into the possible overflight of a naval base by a German Zeppelin. This was something he was inclined to believe in, at least if his comments to the Committee of Imperial Defence are to be believed. So I tend to think that thirty years later his tendency would similarly have been to suspect perverted Nazi (but still human) scientists rather than extraterrestrials. Of course, there was the Cumbrian consultant to convince Churchill that nobody on this planet could have been responsible for what the RAF PR crew saw. But if he was so convinced, and on the evidence of the scientist's mother's father's story he was, then why -- in Churchill's other known UFO connection -- did he fire off a memo in 1952, during his second premiership, asking 'What does all this stuff about flying saucers amount to? What can it mean? What is the truth?' Didn't he already know that the truth was disturbing enough to shake the foundations of religious belief?

No, as it stands this story fails a few basic sanity checks and no confidence can be placed in it. The scientist who told it to the MoD seems to have been sincere enough, but I have the feeling that somewhere down the line a leg was being pulled.

Having said all that, the question of wartime UFO sightings by Allied aircrew ('foo fighters') is a very interesting one, which I must one day look into ...

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.

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. 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.)