In the middle of the First World War, the Australian government found itself preoccupied with the possibility of civil unrest, perhaps even rebellion. In December 1916 the Hughes government passed the Unlawful Associations Act, which proscribed the Australian branch of the Industrial Workers of the World. The Wobblies had campaigned strongly against conscription in the October referendum, and proscription was Hughes's revenge for the No vote. But more than that, he believed that every IWW member was armed, and that many were of German extraction and thus potentially treasonous. Determined to be prepared for any eventuality, by the start of February 1917, the government had assembled 900 armed men, chosen for their political reliability, in each state's capital city, backed up with a machine gun. Melbourne, as the national capital, was the best defended. It had an AIF infantry battalion, a reserve company, the District Guard, two 18-pounder guns, two machine-gun sections, and 50 light-horsemen.

It also had two aeroplanes at its disposal, for 'their great moral effect':

(a) To overawe rioters by their presence in the air.
(b) To cooperate with the Artillery.
(c) To assist in dispersing the rioters by the use of machine guns and revolvers and by dropping bombs or hand grenades.

What was that last part again?

To assist in dispersing the rioters by the use of machine guns and revolvers and by dropping bombs or hand grenades.

I find this quite extraordinary, that an Australian government was preparing to strafe and bomb its own citizens for the crime of rioting. That's the sort of thing that dictators do. But should I be surprised? Let's look at some similar cases from around the same time.

Australia was certainly not the only democracy to make plans to use military force to suppress civil dissent during the war, though it may have done so earlier than others. From March 1918, France held four cavalry divisions behind the front for use against strikers and pacifists (and apparently did use them). Brock Millman has shown that after the Russian revolution in 1917, Britain too was worried about internal dissent possibly spilling over into outright revolt. Emergency Scheme L was drawn up in May 1918; Millman describes it as a 'doomsday scenario':

Scheme L, basically, was a plan for the formation of composite infantry and artillery brigades, and other units, from forces held in the UK but not dedicated to home defence. This would be followed by a levée en masse by battalions of volunteers, and the effective cessation of civilian authority in the British Isles.

A total of 19 infantry brigades would be formed in this way, along with supporting artillery and cyclist units. One group would cover Red Clydeside; another Tyneside, also the scene of labour unrest; and a third would assemble in East Anglia, near London. It's clear that this plan was not for defence against a German invasion (as were most other home defence plans), because the deployment to these areas was automatic and not contingent on where the enemy landed. But as an uprising could quickly spread from one flashpoint to the rest of the country, it makes sense that the Army would keep its options as open as possible while keep watch on the main danger areas. And with as large a force as possible, the better to overawe rioting workers.

Now, Millman focuses on the military aspects of Scheme L. But he also says that the RAF's VI Brigade would assist. This makes sense. VI Brigade formed the backbone of Britain's air defences, and so was the largest combat-ready air force in the country (even if ground support wasn't its forte). Unfortunately Millman doesn't give any details of how it was intended to be used against civil unrest (it might not even have been specified in the plans) but it probably would have been similar to the Australian plans the year before. We'll probably never know because there was no uprising in Britain in 1918 and Scheme L was never invoked.

Then again. Less than two years later Britain was facing a truly revolutionary situation, albeit across the water in Ireland. As of the summer of 1920 two RAF squadrons were deployed there; overcoming low serviceability rates they did useful work in reconnaissance, communications and logistics. Despite the repeated please of British commanders, for most of the war their aircraft were unarmed, apparently for fear of hitting noncombatants. But in March 1921, near the end of the fighting, the Cabinet did in fact authorise arming them for use only over rural areas and only when rebels were actually attacking British forces (or just about to or had just finished, which seems to admit of some uncertainty). According to David Omissi, the RAF flew only a small fraction of total flying hours armed, and 'probably' didn't cause any casualties.

So that's a lot more discretion than it sounds like the Australians were planning to use. Let's turn to a case where there were no rules of engagement at all: the Tulsa race riot of 1921. This was a very different context to the ones discussed above: the riots were more in the vein of a massive lynch mob than a military operation. And the aircraft were not used to put down the riots, but (so it is claimed) to support them. On the morning of 1 June, following an attempted lynching the day before, white mobs surrounded, attacked and set fire to the black district of Greenwood. Thirty-nine people were killed, twenty-six of them black. African-American eyewitnesses claimed that aeroplanes took part, by dropping incendiary bombs or liquids, perhaps petrol (alright, 'gasoline' then). There were also reports of rifle-fire from the aircraft against people on the ground. Here, unlike in Australia, Britain and Ireland, the aircraft in question were civilian, not military; at most they may have private aeroplanes used by the Tulsa police department. It's anyway unclear whether the air attacks did take place; unsurprisingly there was no official investigation. An analysis by Richard S. Warner concludes that:

It is within reason that there was some shooting from planes and even the dropping of incendiaries, but the evidence would seem to indicate that it was of a minor nature and had no real effect in the riot.

Technically, the attacks were in support of civil unrest -- that is, caused by white Tulsans -- not suppressing it, though it's possible that the perpetrators thought they were acting to prevent an uprising.

Then, of course, there's the practice of air control in British, French and Spanish colonies and mandates. Britain, for example, had been doing this in a big way since 1919, in Egypt, Somaliland, and the North-West Frontier, though it had first experimented with it in the Sudan in 1916. From 1922 it was used to pacify an Iraq-wide rebellion which had been boiling over since 1920. Spain and France bombed insurgents in the Rif War (and may have even used gas, though Britain did not [Update: Spain did use gas in Morocco: see Sebastian Balfour's Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War]); France bombed Damascus in 1926. It's hard to get a clear idea of the civilian casualties caused by these attacks -- the RAF in effect maintained that its operations were a kind of game which frightened but did not harm -- but Priya Satia argues that for the threat to work it had to be carried out from time to time. Air control is where the definition of civil unrest stretches almost to breaking point, but in a revealing way: the Europeans were not bombing their own people or even other Europeans, but Arabs and Kurds and Somalis. They were held to be almost incomprehensibly different to Europeans. As the British high commissioner in Iraq warned in 1931,

the term 'civilian population' has a very different meaning in Iraq from what it has in Europe [...] the whole of its male population are potential fighters as the tribes are heavily armed.

That is, they were othered. And so the aeroplane could be turned against them with few moral qualms.

To draw these strands together, it suggests that a government could not in fact turn its aircraft against its own people -- it had to exclude them from the national community first. The Australian government in 1916-7 viewed the Wobblies as traitors, and this presumably would have been the case for the British government dealing with insurrection in 1918; white Tulsan rioters in 1921 certainly did not see their black fellow-citizens as part of their community; colonial regimes in the 1920s and 1930s by definition saw themselves as utterly separate from those they ruled. Ireland in 1921 represents an interesting edge case: the restraint exercised by the British suggests that they themselves believed that their rule was illegitimate, that it was not 'their' country any longer.

The counter-revolutionary value of airpower was predicted in 1909 by L. Cecil Jane, the medievalist brother of Fred T. Jane. In an article entitled 'The political aspect of aviation', Jane argued that aircraft would be invaluable in suppressing revolutions, because by flying high above the rioting crowds their crews would have no opportunity for fraternisation. Anyway, they would tend to be owned by the better sort of people, not the sort to sympathise with rebellions.

But if it be true that aviation has thus given a new strength to the existing order, so far as resistance to forcible changes is concerned; if it be true that masses of people will no longer possess an inevitable supremacy, then we have indeed reached an epoch in the history of political development. The establishment in almost every country of representative institutions, of popular government in some shape or form, may fairly be attributed to the invincibility of the 'the Many.' [...] Popular government, like all other forms of government, rests ultimately upon the unanswerable argument of superior force. If that argument no long support [sic] it, it may be asked whether the institution will itself endure. Visions of a despotism may appear to be no longer mere wild imaginings, of a depotism [sic] of aviators, who will have the one final argument on their side.

He was right about the counter-revolutionary uses of aviation; but fortunately (for believers in democracy, at least) wrong about its 'unanswerable argument'.

And fortunately for Australia, there were no worker riots in 1917, and so our government didn't have to carry out its plans to bomb us.

This is an image we might particularly associate with the United States in the 1950s, when schoolchildren were taught to duck and cover in the event of the flash of an atomic blast. But its use in civil defence drills predates the Cold War (albeit without a Bert the Turtle to help kids remember the message). I've seen scattered references to it being used in ARP drills in British schools in the the 1930s, and the same thing may well have happened in the First World War. But details, and photos, seem to be rare. The above photo was actually taken in Melbourne, at Brighton Technical School, probably in 1942. (Here's another Australian one from the 1940s, and here's one from London in July 1940.) It's really just common sense: if the roof and walls are about to come crashing down and there's no time to get to a proper shelter, getting the students under their desks when the bombs started to fall would give them some protection and might save their lives.

I wonder about the handkerchiefs or rags the boys have in their mouths? My guess is that it's intended to guard against being choked with dust and plaster. Also, soaked in water, they might help against some forms of gas attack, such as chlorine. Soaking them in urine would be more effective, but that would probably be beyond the scope of most school gas drills!

Source: State Library of Victoria (via Geoff Robinson).

I really thought I'd finished with this topic, but the primary sources demand one last post. In discussing the July 1938 Hobart mystery aeroplane, I suggested that it may have been a propaganda stunt by some person or persons worried about Tasmania's lack of air defences. And it turns out that there were precedents for this type of thing.

One was over London a year earlier, in July 1937. It was widely reported in the Australian press, but I haven't been able to find it in a British newspaper. Most of the Australian reports quote the Sunday Referee, presumably from the 18 July edition; and I suspect the Daily Telegraph also carried the story on 16 July. Flight also referred to a 'mystery flyer', though only in passing.

The claim was that a 'mystery aeroplane' had 'recently frightened Londoners by mid-night low-flying stunts' on more than one occasion prior to 16 July. It returned on that date shortly after midnight, flying at a height of about 500 feet:

Hundreds saw it at 12.15 passing over Trafalgar Square. The fuselage of [sic, other reports say 'and'] the wings was plainly visible in the glare of street lights. It was still circling over the West End at 12.30, but soon afterwards disappeared northwards.

It appeared again the next night. The Sunday Referee reported that the pilot had anonymously telephoned 'defence officials' (possibly at the Air Ministry, which the mystery aeroplane had flown over and which was said to be trying to find out its identity) to say that

"To-night, in order to demonstrate the inadequacy of Britain's defences, I am going to drop flour bombs on the House of Commons and St. Paul's Cathedral.

I've found no record of this actually happening, so maybe the call was a hoax. But some reports claimed that questions were to be asked about the mystery aeroplane in Parliament, and this did happen. In fact, the matter had already been discussed twice in the House of Commons, back in June. Then the Under-Secretary of State for Air, Anthony Muirhead, had to admit that the RAF was unable to identify the aircraft involved. But while some of the questions he received might indicate concern about air defence (I'm assuming the one about whether General Franco was involved was frivolous!) mostly MPs seemed worried about the noise. On 21 July he spoke on the topic again; this time he said that one RAF machine had been over London on the night of 13 July, and that the one on the night of 15 July (presumably the one reported as occurring just after midnight on 16 July) was 'believed to have been a civil machine which had been participating in defence exercises in the East Kent area'. So it's not clear if the mystery aeroplane was really involved in propaganda -- but that's certainly how it would have looked to newspaper readers in Australia.

Which makes me wonder if it was an inspiration for the second propaganda flyer, a de Havilland Fox Moth piloted by V. James over Perth in February and March 1938. This one wasn't a mystery aeroplane at all: the people behind it were quite candid about their involvement and their purpose:

The second of the series of altitude flights over Perth designed to draw attention to the possibilities of air attack was made on Monday, when the plane chartered by Mr. Norbert Keenan, M.L.A., Professor W. Murdoch and Mr. C. L. K. Foot flew over the city at a height of 13,000 feet. Numerous reports were subsequently received by Mr. Foot from people who had observed the plane from the ground. A third flight is to be made during the next week when, on a day unspecified, the plane will fly over the city and suburbs at a heigh of 15,000 feet.

This is a pretty high-profile group. Keenan was a senior state politician who had been WA's attorney-general before the war, and more recently opposition leader since 1933. Murdoch was a leading public intellectual, writer and broadcaster; Murdoch University is named after him. I'm not quite sure who C. L. A. Foot was, but he was evidently a huge aviation buff: he tried to organise trans-Indian flights or routes in 1929, 1936 and 1952, an aerial expedition to the north of WA in 1929, and a circumnavigation of the southern hemisphere via Antarctica in 1949. He also wrote a book entitled Japan in the Rome-Berlin-Tokio Axis, published later in 1938, which apparently argued that the threat from Japan was not invasion but blockade. He owned a sheep property and when war came was active in fundraising for Australia's more beleaguered allies, so I suspect he had a bit of money.

Foot was the spokesman of this little group, explaining that

It has been the principal hope of the promoters to awaken interest in air defence, to accustom people in a small degree to detect and recognise planes at height, to create a greater degree of alertness and to give the civilian population a faint realisation that war in the air largely takes place, almost out of sight, above their heads.

Reports of the first flight in February show that propaganda wasn't the only purpose; the flightpath was designed to test just how easy it was for people to make out aeroplanes at different heights. I can't find any evidence that the third, unannounced flight took place.

I was fascinated to find that Foot used mystery aircraft as a justification for the exercise. He explained that if war broke it, 'it is only to be expected that a large crop of rumours will come to the Defence Department of mysterious planes flying at great height over different parts' of the state. He suggested that high-flying large birds like eagles were easy to confuse with aeroplanes, with the only tell-tale being 'the glint from the sun's rays shining on the wings of the plane'. Foot then related a long anecdote about a mystery aeroplane crash near Wyndham. Residents were expecting an airmail delivery and thought they saw the aeroplane circle overhead and then crash behind some nearby hills. They spent most of the evening searching for the crash site only to be informed that the mail aeroplane was safe and sound and hadn't even reached the Wyndham area. It's an interesting idea that mystery aircraft reports from the public would swamp the authorities' ability to filter them, and so training the public in basic aircraft recognition might be useful. The 1918 mystery aeroplane scare perfectly illustrates Foot's point here.

Airminded propaganda stunts like the one over Perth, and possibly London and Hobart too, did have the potential to embarrass governments, but probably worked best to educate, or at least alarm, the public. Diving over cities is a crude way to do this (if that's what London and Hobart were), but Foot and co. at least tried to work through the media to promote their ideas about air defence.

And here ends the series. I promise!

Looking over the list of Australian mystery aircraft sightings suggests that some generalisations can be made.

In the 1910s, mysterious lights in the sky were usually described as being airship-like; after 1910 they were far more likely to be called aeroplanes. Perhaps not coincidentally, 1910 was when aeroplanes first flew in Australia; certainly a search of Trove Newspapers (using Wraggelabs' QueryPic) shows that 1910 was the first year when the word "aeroplane" appeared markedly more frequently than "airship". So that's easy enough to explain.

The same search shows that 1909 was the year that aviation really broke through into public consciousness. That's also the year of the Australian phantom airship wave. As it was the first burst of interest in aircraft, the first time that people started to learn about them, it's perhaps not surprising that people might think they saw them flying around where they weren't. The 1918 mystery aeroplane scare came after several years of increasing press coverage of aviation, obviously due to the war. So again that fits. Aeroplanes were something people were reading (and probably talking) about a lot. But that by itself is evidently not enough to generate a mystery aeroplane scare: there were a few seen in 1914, and a handful in the years after that, but nothing on the scale of 1918. There needs to be a plausible reason for aircraft to be flying about: and the reported visit of the Wolf and its Wölfchen to Australian shores provided that, though the desperate situation of the Allied armies in France was also a factor.

After 1918 there is a lull; I couldn't find any mystery aircraft sightings until 1927, when a few start to pop up. (Which certainly doesn't mean they aren't there to be found. I just found another one, albeit for 1928 as well.) Why might that be? Well, looking at the ngram above again is suggestive. This time the plot extends covers 1918 to 1942, and is for 'plane' as well as 'aeroplane' -- the former becomes more common from the late 1920s. After a relatively flat level of interest in aviation during most of the 1920s (actually falling considerably from the immediate postwar years), the number of articles using the word 'plane' almost doubles between 1926 and 1928, after which it is fairly stable until a dip in 1932 and 1933. So once more there's a buzz about aeroplanes (or rather planes), a widespread curiosity about aviation. Why was this so?

It was certainly nothing to do with fear of war in these Locarno years. I haven't tested this quantitatively, but it can't be a coincidence that these were the years of some of the great pioneering long-distance flights. Australia was the destination and, in some cases, the birthplace of many of the aviators who carried out these feats: the Englishman Alan Cobham flew from England to Australia and back in 1926, for which he was knighted; in 1928, Bert Hinkler, an Australian, was the first to make the trip solo. That same year, Charles Kingsford-Smith and Charles Ulm, also Australians, were the first to fly across the vast Pacific and then the smaller Tasman. The excitement that Charles Lindbergh's 1927 New York-Paris flight generated is well-known; something similar happened, if perhaps less intense, must have happened in Australia. The emotional investment in these pioneer aviators and their dangerous lives perhaps explains the number of false reports of aeroplane crashes around 1930.

And it wasn't just the big names either. Here's a plot of the number of civil aircraft registered in Australia from 1922 to 1939. Between 1926 and 1928, this increased from 55 to 90 or 63% (and then another 144% between 1928 and 1930).

Other statistics -- number of flights, number of hours flown, number of passengers carried -- tell the same story. There was a huge increase in flying in the late 1920s, followed by a bust (no doubt due to the Depression) and another boom in the late 1930s. So it makes sense that mystery aeroplanes began to be seen again from 1927-8 or so. It was the golden age of Australian aviation: far more people were talking about and flying in aeroplanes than ever before.

Apart from the air crash theory, other explanations for mystery aircraft in the late 1920s and early 1930s included opium smugglers and -- in 1934 -- a Japanese reconnaissance of the northern coast. Japan was invoked, either explicitly or implicitly, in the Darwin and Hobart sightings in 1938, and the Townsville incidents in 1942. This brings me back to my original purpose in starting this series, which was to see if Australian mystery aircraft sightings can be used as an index of public anxiety about national defence. And my answer is 'yes', but it's a heavily qualified 'yes'. It's quite obviously so in 1918 and 1942, but then the country was at war (and in the latter case actually under attack), so that's no surprise. In the late 1920s and early 1930s there was no cause for Australians to be alarmed, so again it's no surprise that mystery aircraft weren't seen to be hostile. The more difficult cases are in 1909 and, to a lesser extent, 1938. In 1909, the mystery aircraft were the object of curiosity, not suspicion. But that same year Britain was undergoing every sort of defence panic around: invasion, dreadnoughts, airships, spies. Australians were also very worried about invasion, albeit from Japan, not Germany. Why didn't Australians imagine Japanese airships spying from overhead, preparing the way for the Emperor's soldiers?

The answer must have something to do with perceived plausibility, which in turn depends on perceived capability and perceived intent. In 1909, Germany had Zeppelins; Japan had nothing. If Japan had been publicly and successfully experimenting with longrange aircraft in like fashion to Germany, then Australians might have believed that the 1909 mystery airships were Japanese, just as Britons believed that theirs were German. In 1938, things were different. Everyone had aircraft now; and Japan was closer, in the sense that it had forward bases in Micronesia as well as aircraft carriers. It was now plausible to imagine that Japanese aircraft could reach Australia.

I was going to suggest that it was also now more plausible to imagine that Japan intended to attack Australia: after the Marco Polo Bridge incident in 1937 (and setting aside the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 which seems to have made less of an impression) it was clearly in an aggressive, expansionist phase. But the above plot suggests that press interest, at least, in Japan actually declined after 1937. That's a very crude index, of course, but it's consistent with Augustine Meaher's argument that Australians were surprisingly unconcerned about Japan in the late 1930s, contrary to Peter Stanley's view.

This is starting to get confusing. But, paradoxically, considering another problem with mystery aircraft may help here. Why were there no big waves of mystery aircraft sightings after the First World War? This seems to be true worldwide. Between 1896 and 1918 there were a number of times where mystery aircraft are seen in many places by many people over a short period of time: the United States, Canada, Britain, New Zealand, Australia. Afterwards, while there were certainly mystery aircraft sightings, they tended to occur singly, appearing once or twice at one place and then disappearing. They were also interpreted in isolation: nobody seems to have connected the Hobart mystery aeroplane of July 1938 with the Darwin case in February, nobody saw them as part of the same phenomenon. I'm not sure why this is, but I suspect that a greater familiarity with real aircraft must have had something to do with it. Actual aircraft were very rare in all countries when mystery aircraft waves took place: airships and aeroplanes were imagined far more than seen. This ignorance made it easier to believe that a planet, a fire-balloon or a Reticulan battlecruiser was in fact a aeroplane: easier for the witnesses, easier for everyone they told to believe them, easier for the journalists covered the story to treat it seriously. The spread of the idea that Germans (etc) were flying around in the sky met no resistance -- at least for a while: when the press starts to get sceptical the mystery aircraft waves tend to collapse very quickly.

So, while the huge increase in flying in Australia from the late 1920s may have put aviation at the forefront of the national consciousness and provided imaginative fodder for mystery aircraft incidents, it seems to have provided an inoculation against mass waves of sightings. For that to occur there needed to be plausibility, curiosity, and ignorance. All three at once. Mystery aircraft do appear at other times, but don't lead to anything else and are soon forgotten.

I'm not happy with this post; it's long and rambling, unfocused and confusing. Partly that's due to me making it up as I go along rather than planning ahead; but it's also partly due to the fuzzy nature of the mystery aeroplane phenomenon (and indeed history) itself. In trying to find common factors and causes I run the risk of imposing my own order where there is none. Maybe there is really no point to this. Maybe the Scareship Age was no such thing. So people thought they saw aircraft flying around where they were none. So what? Sometimes I think I should focus my research on phantom airships and mystery aeroplanes: it's something that few other historians are interested in and so it's one area where I can make a distinctive contribution. But then again, maybe there's a reason why it's a fallow field.

So here's a very incomplete list of mystery aircraft sightings in Australia, along with how they were interpreted at the time. For the most part I've only included reports which were published in the press at the time (and not those which were reported to the authorities in wartime but not publicised).

1. Koroit, Vic, 1906: an odd object which at one point 'assumed a shape somewhat resembling that of an airship'.
2. 1909 wave, nation-wide: no single interpretation dominated but generally described as airships.
3. Minderoo, WA, 1910: an airship, either a secret Australian invention or from a foreign vessel off the coast.
4. SS Wookata, off Althorpe Island, SA, 1910: strange lights, described by one witness as being 'like German airships flying about'.
5. Ballarat, Vic, 1911: an 'air-ship' or 'biplane'.
6. Melbourne, Vic, 1911: an 'aeroplane'.
7. Cairns, Qld, 1913: a 'mysterious object resembling an aeroplane'.
8. Lameroo, SA, 1914: an 'aeroplane'. February, so before the outbreak of war.
9. Mullumbimby/Billinudgel/Lismore, NSW, 1914: this time it's October, and there seems to have been much debate about whether the 'aeroplane' seen over a period of days (or weeks) belonged to Germany (no, because it would have dropped a bomb) or the Australian Army (then why wasn't it flying in daytime?). Another article intriguingly mentions 'the aeroplane or Zeppelin' alongside an 'awful carronading out to sea' heard at Tweed Heads, but let's not get distracted...
10. Corporoo, QLD, 1915: an 'aeroplane' (though it is also described as an 'airship', I suspect this is as a synonym for aircraft). No defence implications.
11. 1918 wave, nation-wide though most reports were from Victoria and, to a lesser extent, New South Wales. The implication was very definitely that the aeroplanes (rarely, Zeppelins) were German, possibly from raiders offshore.
12. Broome, WA, 1927: two aeroplanes believed to be operating from a ship offshore, involved in opium smuggling.
13. Flinders Island, Tas, 1928: an 'aeroplane engine' was heard followed by the sound of a crash. A search found nothing. This was connected to the missing New Zealand airmen Hood and Moncrieff, who the same day had taken off from Sydney in an attempt to be the first to fly the Tasman Sea. Interestingly, there were similar false sightings in New Zealand -- all very Andrée-like.
14. Broken Hill, NSW, 1929: an aeroplane was seen trailing smoke and believed to have crashed, but an extensive search found no trace.
15. Needles, Tas, 1931: yet another mistaken report of an aeroplane crash.
16. Thursday Island, Qld, 1934: two aeroplanes seen by fishing boats, which also reported a 'Japanese sampan' nearby; the Defence Department was notified. Thursday Island is off the tip of Cape York, about as far north as Australia gets.
17. Bowen, Qld, 1935: an 'aeroplane' reported to be 'in difficulties'; believed to be a hoax report as no such aircraft could be identified and this wasn't the first time this had happened.
18. Darwin, NT, 1938: an aeroplane was heard and seen on two occasions, leading to many different theories being proposed. A long-distance reconnaissance from Palau was one of these, but the Japanese angle only had much traction in Darwin itself.
19. Hobart, Tas, 1938: not-very-convincing attempts to suggest that an aeroplane seen diving on Hobart was from a foreign ship off the coast, but in any case the incident was said to show the city's defencelessness.
20. Broken Hill, NSW, 1941: a 'mysterious object' seen in the air was thought by some to be 'an aeroplane'. This was reported on the very same day as the Japanese declaration of war, though no connection is evident (other than the article being surrounded by war news).
21. Townsville, Qld, 1942: Japan isn't mentioned here either, but it's pretty obvious that's who the 'number of unidentified planes [...] seen over the Atherton Tableland' were assumed to belong to, if only from the black-out and other air-raid precautions which were undertaken.
22. Townsville, Qld, 1942: this time two 'military type' aircraft were seen over Townsville; fighters and anti-aircraft guns failed to shoot them down. Despite the caveat ('If the planes were hostile') it does seem likely that these were Japanese aircraft. Townsville was bombed less than two months later.
23. Port Augusta, SA, 1947: not described as any sort of aircraft at all, actually, just as five 'strange objects' (about the size of 'locomotives'). That's quite unusual but these were quite unusual objects, described as quivering, 'oblong with narrow points' and casting a shadow (at 9am). The consensus seems to have been meteors (though the state astronomer disagreed and also rejected a mirage theory). A few months later the flying saucer craze started in the United States and the Adelaide Advertiser was able to claim that 'Port Augusta "started something"'.

What does it all mean? I'll discuss that in the (hopefully) final post in this series.

The title of this little series is a nod to David Walker's Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850-1939. As the title suggests, Walker argues that Australia's relationship with Asia in the decades before and after Federation was largely characterised by fear about immigration, imports and invasion. Peter Stanley, in Invading Australia: Japan and the Battle for Australia, 1942, fleshes out the last of these fears through a discussion of novels and books from the 1930s which discussed the prospect of war with Japan (or at least an unnamed or Ruritanian Asian enemy). For example, in Erle Cox's Fool's Harvest (1938/1939), Australia is attacked and invaded by 'Cambasia' in September 1939, beginning with a massive air raid on Sydney which causes 200,000 civilian casualties. Britain is unable to help, as it has been attacked by Germany, Italy and France; a British fleet at Singapore is sunk. The Australian armed forces are ill-equipped to defend the nation, and after a month Cambasia is victorious at the last battle of the war, at Seymour in central Victoria. A resistance movement is eventually suppressed after increasingly brutal reprisals. The south-eastern part of Australia eventually regains a limited independence in 1966, but the majority of the population still labours under the Cambasian yoke.

But I've also been reading Augustine Meaher's The Australian Road to Singapore: The Myth of British Betrayal. Meaher argues that Australians were not in fact particularly concerned about Japan in the 1930s. The few attempts at warning the public and the elites were confused and ineffectual; the armed forces were too busy fighting with each other to seriously think about fighting Japan. Even the start of the Sino-Japanese war and events like the Nanking Massacre didn't seem to cause any great alarm. And it must be said that Walker's account of the 1930s doesn't do much to contradict this. He focuses on the increasing interest of Australian elites in closer ties with Asia and the Pacific, rather than the fears which had preoccupied earlier generations. At the risk of caricature, Meaher's thesis is that Australians weren't too worried about the Japanese threat; and Stanley's is that they were too worried.

Meaher is convincing on his core argument: that Britain never promised it would be able to defend Australia under all circumstances and that Australia misunderstood the consequent need to invest in its own defences. But I do wonder if he is too quick to dismiss those efforts which were made to warn Australians of the Japanese threat, though. For example, I don't think he discusses the famous refusal of dock workers in 1938 to load iron onto ships bound for Japan, explicitly for the reason that it might come back in the form of bombs. This idea must have come from somewhere. He argues persuasively that the press and the ruling elites were ill-equipped to provide cogent analyses of Australia's strategic situation; the few attempts which were made were usually simplistic where they weren't plain silly. The depth of debate about strategic affairs does seem very poor when compared with Britain.

Still, that doesn't mean such debate as existed was without effect. Stanley describes Fool's Harvest as 'hugely popular' and notes that it was first serialised in the Melbourne Argus, one of the nation's leading newspapers. It also seems to be a good example of a novelist popularising the ideas of more serious thinkers, as Thomas Blamey advised Cox on the military side of things. Blamey had been Monash's chief of staff in France during the last war and at this time was in charge of recruitment for the Citizen Military Force (i.e. the Militia) and a regular commentator for the ABC on military and foreign affairs. The same sort of nexus between next-war novelists, military intellectuals and the press could be found in Britain, though by this time such blatant le Queux-like propagandising was no longer common. It looks to me like there was at least a nascent next-war literature by the late 1930s.

On the other hand, I put that that question mark in the title of these posts before I read Meaher's book. That's because I was concerned that I was projecting forwards my (not particularly deep) knowledge of the fear of Japan in the first decades after Federation, and backwards my (also not particularly deep) knowledge of the fear of Japanese invasion in 1942, as exemplified by the wonderful piece of scaremongering at the start of this post. But it's also because it didn't look like the mystery aeroplane sightings I'm looking at here can simply be put down to fear of Japan. I'll tackle that in a final post in this series.

Aircraft don't have to be military to be a threat to the nation. The ability to simply fly over frontiers makes them attractive to anyone who wants for some reason to enter a country without observing the legal usual formalities -- smugglers, for example. Or at least, that seems to have been a widely-held belief among non-flying non-smuggling people. Where threatening mystery aircraft are not interpreted as belonging to a hostile foreign power, they have often been seen as smugglers, as happened in Scandinavia and Britain in the 1930s, for example. The smugglers theory was also briefly considered as one possible explanation among many for the Darwin mystery aeroplanes in 1938.

Smuggling was very much the frame used to understand another mystery aeroplane incident nearly a decade before the Darwin sighting, this time at Broome on the Western Australian coast. On 20 November 1927, aeroplanes were seen over the sea by two separate groups of people, the crew of a pearl lugger and a couple at their holiday house, but 'there are no 'planes in Australia which tally with the description of the machines seen in the West'.

Towards evening on a day in the middle of November, said Mr. [G.] Nelson, one of the coloured members of the crew of a lugger on which he was working turned to him, and said: "Look, very big bird." Mr. Nelson saw a dark object in the sky direct west from the lugger, and towards the setting sun. For a few moments it appeared to remain stationary, but when it changed its course to the north Mr. Nelson saw that it was a large aeroplane or a seaplane. As a lieutenant with the Imperial Forces during the war, Mr. Nelson was accustomed to estimating the altitude and courses of aeroplanes, and he judged that the machine was flying at a height of between 2000ft. and 3000ft. The machine was too far away for Mr. Nelson to detect the hum of the 'plane's engine. At the time the lugger was working at a point about seven miles south-west of Broome lighthouse.

The other people to see it, Mr and Mrs Percy, were also connected with the pearling industry, and the first to see it also initially thought it was a large bird. When they reached their holiday home at Gantheaume Point, the Percys grabbed binoculars from the old lighthouse there.

A few minutes later they saw a 'plane coming from the sea towards the land, but it was too far away for them to distinguish any markings. Soon afterwards they saw another 'plane flying round. Percy says the 'planes were three times as large as those used in the West Australian air service, and, in his opinion, they were taking observations of the coast line.

Although Percy was of the opinion that there must have been a mother ship out at sea, a West Australian Airlines pilot flying in the area the same day saw no vessels which could have served in this capacity, which 'discounted the possibility of the 'planes having been used by a foreign Power for the purpose of military observation, and strengthened the belief that they had come from an island in the vicinity of Java, or one of the adjacent islands, on some private mission' -- that private mission being somehow 'confirmed' by Nelson's statement as 'a scheme to smuggle opium into Australia'.

Across Australia, nearly all of the headlines for this story included phrases such as 'Theory of opium smuggling', 'May be opium smugglers' or 'Opium smuggling suspected'. Where this theory came from is unclear: one report said that 'The general opinion seemed to be that the aeroplanes were being used to smuggle opium into Australia', which sounds like it was idle talk rather than any expert opinion. Customs officials were publicly rather dismissive, with the Comptroller-General of Customs saying 'he did not regard as serious the suggestion that the aeroplanes were engaged in smuggling opium', and a local customs officer pointing out that 'there was no evidence to show that any contraband goods had been landed'. But almost no attention seems to have been paid by the national press to a report that defence officials were 'alarmed' by the mystery aeroplanes, with the RAAF carrying out its own investigation separate to that of Customs. A columnist for the Perth Western Mail didn't feel forced to choose between the two theories, contending that

The incident goes to show how defenceless we are against reconnaissance by hostile aircraft [...] The immensity of Australia's coastline means a bigger air patrol problem than faces most other nations, but face it we must. Civil aviation does much already, but it is not enough.

So on this reading, to defend against one aerial threat was to defend against the other: more airpower needed.

Errata: most of the years in this post, which I incorrectly had as 1928 instead of 1927!

In my previous post, I discussed a mysterious aeroplane seen over Hobart in 1938 which was interpreted in a context of concern about vulnerability to air attack. I said that by contrast a similar incident that year over Darwin was seen as a curiosity rather than a threat, but in looking at it more closely I find that the threat element was present in the press accounts more than I thought. Let's see if there's any discernable pattern.

There were actually two aeroplanes seen (and heard) over Darwin, or perhaps the same aeroplane was seen (and heard) on two different occasions.

Last Thursday evening [3 February] two men saw a machine fly over Darwin at a great height heading south. One of the men is employed at the aerodrome and it is considered unlikely that he could have made a mistake. Another man who is an aviation engineer also heard the drone of an engine and stated emphatically that it was an aeroplane engine.

The other sighting was initially a hearing. A foreman at Darwin's electrical power plant by the name of Maurice Holtze quite ingeniously used the sound of the plant's diesel engines as a sound detector:

This engine develops about 1000 revolutions at normal speed, and Holtze observed that the presence of any other machine in the vicinity developing more or less than 1000 revolutions is reflected clearly in the exhaust beat of the power house engine. At 4.30 a.m. yesterday [8 February] he was attending the engine when he noticed a distinct change in the note of the exhaust. Accustomed to the departure of air mail planes from the local aerodrome about 5 o'clock on three mornings of the week he at first paid little attention to the antics of his unofficial sound detector. Then he realised suddenly that no machines were scheduled to leave Darwin on Tuesday morning. He rushed outside and saw a machine in the air.

Holtze couldn't make out any identification marks on the aeroplane, but said that he could see the glow from the cockpit lights; it appeared to be a large, multi-engined machine. Apparently inbound from the Timor Sea, it circled over Darwin and then flew south. A former superintendent of police named Lovegrove also heard an aeroplane at 4.30am, while a post office employee saw 'strange lights moving across the sky [...] similar to those shown by aircraft'. The government was informed of these reports, and while Canberra appeared sceptical it ordered local representatives of the Civil Air Board and the defence forces to investigate.

So much for the mystery aeroplanes themselves. What did people make of them? A number of theories were proposed in the press. The first theory was weather balloons, but none had been sent up on the relevant day. Or maybe it was meteors. The Flying Doctor, Clyde Fenton, operated the only two private aircraft registered in the Northern Territory, but these were quickly ruled out. It wasn't the MacRobertson Miller airmail carrier from West Australia either. Checks at Pine Creek and Katherine -- the only aerodromes within 200 miles, apart from Darwin's own -- proved similarly fruitless. (However, there were many small airstrips littered about, at which an aeroplane could land unobserved.)

Yet another theory advanced here tonight was that a small plane could operate from beaches in the uninhabited stretches of the vast Arnhem Land aborigines' reserve. In this reserve there are only five places at which white men are located -- at the Church of England Mission at Oenpelli, and the Methodist Mission Stations at Goulburn Island, Millingimbi Island and Yirrkala, while Constable Stokes is stationed at Elcho Island, off the Arnhem Land coast. All these places, although hundreds of miles away, are in touch with civilisation by means of pedal wireless sets, but they have not reported the passing of any strange
planes.

Russell Tapp, a Qantas pilot on the Singapore run, reported that no other aircraft had left there or Koepang in Dutch Timor for Darwin recently. It was known the RAF was planning to carry out exercises simulating the defence of an 'an imaginary continental state 1200 miles south of Malaya'; perhaps one of its aircraft had strayed too far south? However, this theory was officially discounted because of the distance. Another idea was that the aeroplanes were launched from some American cruisers which were on their way to Singapore; but these were still only a few days out from Sydney at the time of the first sighting. Nor was it the Tugan Gannett which the RAAF's Chief of Air Staff, Air Vice-Marshal Richard Williams, had just flown to Singapore. (In fact, on his return Williams diverted over Bathurst and Melville Islands to see if anything 'untoward' could be seen.) Drug smugglers were officially ruled out as possible culprits.

So far I haven't mentioned what might seem to be the obvious suspect: Japan. A number of articles did suggest for a Japanese connection. Actually, all of these appear to be edited versions of a report from Darwin, which was reprinted in many newspapers around Australia but with key omissions and additions. The fullest version I've found is from the Darwin Northern Standard, though presumably it is not the original as it not the first to be published. References to local defence anxieties were apt to be cut when the article was redistributed; for example a statement that 'The reports have caused one prominent citizen to declare that he will open an agitation for the immediate stationing of a R.A.A.F. squadron in Darwin' does not seem to have appeared elsewhere. Other points of this kind made in the article appeared in some versions but not in others, for example the conclusion:

Though it may achieve nothing else, the "scare" will at least precipitate defence work at Darwin. Although this is considered one of the most important and strategic defence positions in Australia, it cannot boast of a single anti-aircraft gun. Emplacements for this type of armaments were completed several months ago and tenders for constructional work on the R.A.A.F. base and aerodrome were called early last year. But nothing further has been done.

With respect to Japan, the following was in fact widely copied:

it might be mentioned that Palaou [sic], the big Japanese pearling base in the mandated islands is only 1200 miles away. Planes could fly as far as Darwin and return without refuelling.

One newspaper, from Rockhampton on the Coral Sea, inserted before this discussion a recollection of earlier lights in the sky associated with a visiting Japanese ship:

During the last three months and particularly at the time when the so-called Japanese "fisheries training ship," Kakuio Maru, was in Darwin several residents claim to have seen mysterious lights over and near the town at night.

This in turn may or may not have been connected with another previous sighting, four months previous, of a 'fast monoplane' without lights or markings flying overhead at the Manston Gap water reservoir ('an essential part of the defence base in the course of construction at Darwin'). There's certainly a touch here of the same paranoia as was on display in Hobart six months later.

But in the Hobart case, the focus was consistently on defence implications of the mystery aeroplane. Here in Darwin, the few allusions to the possibility of Japanese incursion do seem to pale in comparison to the plethora of alternative theories noted above. Perhaps the difference is in the way the story of the Darwin mystery aeroplanes was picked up nationally, whereas the Hobart incident seems to have passed relatively unnoticed elsewhere. Local opinion in both Darwin and Hobart does seem to have been very strongly concerned with local air defence (or rather the lack thereof), an issue which the other states -- rather parochially -- seem to not have taken much interest in.

Very soon, the official investigation poured cold water on the idea that there had been an aeroplane over Darwin on 8 February, though it surprisingly did allow that the 3 February report may have been due to single-engined (and presumably short-ranged) aeroplane of unknown origin but possibly a 'commercial machine'.

"The commander of coast defences, the district naval officer and myself consider that it is an exceedingly remote contingency that any strange aircraft was about and that the absence of any fuelling arrangements makes it very improbable that there was any," stated the Administrator [of the Northern Territory, C. L. A. Abbott].

So for some unstated reason, the idea that aeroplanes had flown from a Japanese mandate or a Japanese ship was dismissed. The full report may still exist in the archives of the Civil Air Board, and it would be interesting to see what arguments Abbott gave for this, if any. But the effect of this official scepticism seems to have been to end all serious speculation about Darwin's mystery aeroplanes, relegating them instead to the domain of the fraud Louis de Rougemont who claimed forty years earlier to have seen 'flocks of wombats rising in the dusk' over northern Australia. Almost exactly four years later, of course, Darwin was heavily bombed by aircraft of the Imperial Japanese Navy.

At about 5.20pm on Friday, 29 July 1938, hundreds of people saw a mysterious aeroplane diving from high over Hobart. According to Pegasus, the Hobart Mercury's aviation correspondent,

A large crowd collected near the corner of Liverpool and Murray streets, and traffic was impeded. The machine descended to a comparatively low level, yet not low enough to enable the identification numerals to be read. It was a grey biplane, larger than a Gypsy Moth.

As the watchers were preparing to rush for cover to avoid the expected crash, the machine sheered away and disappeared in the evening mists towards the south-west.

Some observers thought that they could see the aeroplane's navigation lights. Engine sounds ('described as having a peculiar note') were heard in the posh Sandy Bay area (just southwest of Hobart's centre) soon thereafter, and a single-engined aeroplane was heard over Campania (20 miles to the north) by Dudley Ransom, pilot and owner of a private aerodrome, at 7pm. Enquiries at Tasmanian and Victorian aerodromes found no aircraft aloft that evening. Nor, apparently, did it belong to the RAAF.

So where did the aeroplane come from? According to Captain A. Gregory, a flight instructor at Cambridge Aerodrome,

"There is absolutely no technical objection to the theory that that a 'plane could be catapulted from a vessel at sea," he declared, "and it would not be at all difficult for such a machine to fly up the Derwent and over the city before returning to alight on the water alongside the carrier vessel."

Pegasus agreed that it was possible that 'the machine was of foreign origin, and was catapulted from a ship at sea for strategic observations'. But for what ultimate purpose? The Launceston Register had a theory:

It has been pointed out that Tasmania would provide an admirable base for an enemy intending to attack the mainland cities, and it has even been suggested in the present instance, when steps are being taken to erect a new fort in the Derwent, an aerial survey of the locality might be of considerable value to an unfriendly power.

One reader (using the nom-de-plume Prepare) wrote in to the Mercury expressing concern about the apparent ease with which the mysterious aeroplane had penetrated Australian airspace, hinting darkly that 'foreigners have had too much access here, and know the place better than lots of the native-born'. He or she demanded air raid precautions be put in place now:

before it is too late, and we are caught like rats in a trap, cannot something be done to prepare the people in case of an attack from the air? Safety zones could be prepared and allotted, gas masks made available, and citizens, especially school children, trained how to act if occasion demanded.

The Mercury's own Day By Day columnist also believed that 'The Aeroplane That Fled' had worrying implications for Australian air defence, suggesting that

if those organisations pelting the Federal Government with requests for a Citizen Air Force use this incident as an example of how easily Hobart could be wiped off the map, they might find their views receive greater consideration. If that fails, possibly we might induce another mystery aeroplane to come and deliver a few "dud" bombs as earnest to what could be done. Why not try it?

Day By Day here alludes to a contemporary political issue: the same day that the mystery aeroplane was seen over Hobart, the Tasmanian Premier, Albert Ogilvie, was pleading for a Citizen Air Force (the Australian equivalent of the Auxiliary Air Force) squadron to be established in Tasmania, which had no RAAF units at all. Airminded Tasmanians agreed with Olgivie. I don't think it's too fanciful to suggest that the mystery aeroplane was in fact a stunt designed to highlight Tasmania's defencelessness, as Day By Day perhaps was hinting. Soon enough, however, the subject was a matter for ridicule: Mercurius (yet another Mercury columnist) suggested it was just as possible that the pilot was a prospector out looking for Lasseter's reef as 'a Japanese airman engaged on one of those peaceable bombing missions which the Japs are so fond of making as a goodwill gesture to China and Russia'. (Lasseter's reef being a fabulous discovery of gold in central Australia which was lost and never found again, and probably never existed at all: a symbol of foolish and overactive imaginations.)

A mystery aeroplane seen amid anxiety about air raids: a textbook example of negative airmindedness (at least if I were writing the textbook). But it's interesting to note that there was another mystery aeroplane in Australia in 1938, one which at first blush might be expected to fit into the same paradigm since the place where it was seen, Darwin, was in fact bombed repeatedly during the Second World War. However, although it was much more widely reported in Australian newspapers, in nearly all cases it was presented as a curiosity rather than a threat, as we'll see in a future post.

Airmindedness is a word which gets bandied around a lot these days -- okay, not actually a lot, but it's not just me either. But I think it's too broad a concept; at the very least, it needs to be divided into positive airmindedness and negative airmindedness. I mostly write about negative airmindedness. This more or less is the attitude 'Aviation is vitally important to the nation because it is incredibly dangerous'; the previous post is a good example of this. In Britain, I would argue, this was the predominant form of airmindedness in Britain between the wars, due to the perceived danger of a knock-out blow from the air. But mixed in with that there was also positive airmindedness: 'Aviation is vitally important to the nation because it is incredibly beneficial'. (Before 1914 this was stronger, though the phantom airship panics would suggest that even then negative airmindedness held sway.) Above is an example, a 1926 London Underground poster by Montague B. Black.

LONDON 2026 A.D. -- THIS IS ALL UP IN THE AIR
TO-DAY -- THE SOLID COMFORT OF THE UNDERGROUND

It presents a vision of London a hundred years' hence, the far-off year of 2026, drawing on the futurism of aviation to sell the (sub)mundane transport of today. (Airmindedness was very often about the potential of aviation than its reality, the future rather than the present.)

The sky is full of exciting promises: autogyro airtaxis! Airships to Australia! A London Bridge Air Depot! These are all good things (except if you value London's architectural heritage, perhaps).

But as I say, this kind of positive airmindedness is not typical of Britain. I think it is safe to say that it was much more typical of the United States, for example, a reflection of that nation's more optimistic attitude towards technology in this period. That's why when talking about airmindedness it's critical to pay attention to the national context: as brilliant as Joseph Corn's The Winged Gospel is, for example, it would be a mistake to think its portrait of positive American airmindedness applied to Britain where negative airmindedness held sway. Different countries had different forms of airmindedness at different times.

I would add one caution: the distinction between positive and negative airmindedness is not quite identical to that between civil and military aviation. For example, military aviation can be seen as positive if you believe that it will deter war or end them quickly and with a minimum of bloodshed (AKA 'the bomber dream'); and civil aviation can be seen as negative if you believe that they can be quickly converted into bombers and used in a knock-out blow (AKA 'the commercial bomber'). It's all in the context.

Additional image source: The Retronaut.