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.

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.

A common complaint about this blog is that it doesn't feature nearly enough pictures of airships. So here's one, a 27-metre long non-rigid which belonged to Henry Spencer, scion of a remarkably airminded family (sixteen aeronauts across four generations). Indeed, he built it with his brothers. The photograph was taken on 16 February 1909 and apparently shows the first ever powered flight from Hendon aerodrome, though neither Spencer nor his airship are mentioned in David Oliver's Hendon Aerodrome: A History (Shrewsbury: Airlife Publishing, 1994).

But much more interesting than the airship itself, it must be said, is what it was used for. The clue is the slogan emblazoned on the side of the envelope: 'VOTES FOR WOMEN'. Spencer had hired his airship out as a propaganda platform to Muriel Matters, an Australian-born suffragette who was very active in the Women's Freedom League (a non-violent breakaway from the better-known WPSU). Matters had won some publicity the previous year by chaining herself to the grille of the Ladies' Gallery of the House of Commons. Her airship flight was also designed to make Parliament take notice of the suffragist cause: the new session was opening that very day and it was her intention to fly over Westminster and drop Votes For Women leaflets on it. In the end Spencer and Matters didn't make it there, having been blown off course into a tree in Coulsden, well to the south. Three decades later, Matters herself gave a wonderful account of her flight to the BBC, which can be heard online here. (Ignore the photo there, which is of the Army airship Baby.)

The photograph above is from a scrapbook belonging to an American women's suffrage organisation, so the message did travel quite some distance, albeit to a receptive audience; I couldn't find any mention of Matters' flight in a quick search of the British press. It took nearly a decade for the WFL's demand to be partially fulfilled. And it's nice to see that the part Matters played in using airpower for progressive causes is still remembered in her native South Australia.

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

On 29 March 1939, Croydon airport was the site of an extraordinary scene, as the Daily Express reported:

NEARLY 400 Jewish refugees streamed into Croydon in a succession of air liners yesterday -- the biggest influx the airport had ever experienced.

They came from Danzig, the Polish Corridor, Cologne, Berlin, Vienna, Switzerland -- all over Europe.

Most of them were allowed to enter the country [...]

For example, David Herbst was allowed to stay when his wife Leishi, a former Austrian tennis star, showed up and was able to prove that Herbst 'had money in English Banks'.

[...] when some were told they would have to go back to the Continent in the morning they burst into piteous cries.

One man from Cologne dropped to his knees and pleaded, in tears, with the immigration authorities.

Wailing, he fell on his face and broke his nose. Afterwards he threatened to commit suicide.

He said his father had been taken away manacled and then shot and he believed he would be dealt with in the same way if he returned to Germany.

Herbst's travelling companions were in the same situation. The thirteen of them had chartered a Danish tri-motor for £600 to fly them out of Warsaw (one source says Cracow). Herbst got to go home with his wife; but the other twelve were detained by the police overnight.

"Nobody knows who the people are. They are a mystery crowd," it was stated by an official. "Many had little money and could not give satisfactory reasons why they should be allowed to land in England."

I assume the official was talking about legal reasons why the refugees should be allowed to land, rather than just being utterly dense; the reasons why they were fleeing were quite clear. Two weeks earlier, after threatening to bomb Prague off the map, German troops had been allowed to march in, occupying the Czech portions of Czechoslovakia which remained after the cession of the Sudetenland the previous year. Germany ended Czechoslovakia, taking Bohemia and Moravia for itself; Hungary took Carpatho-Ukraine and Slovakia became independent. This meant that suddenly Czech Jews (and those, like Herbst, who had fled from Austria after the Anschluss a year earlier) were subject to Nazi racial discrimination.

There were (possibly?) conflicting stories about why there was a flood of refugees right now, though: that from 1 April a new visa system would apply to Czechs entering Britain, or that from that date Czechs would be treated as Germans, or that they would need permission from Germany to leave. But whatever the reason, the last aeroplanes did land on 31 March, carrying, among others, 91 year old Frau Krampflicek, a 'Czech Jewess' whose family lived in Manchester. About 150 refugees arrived that day, with 3 being detained. The day before there had been 241, with 20 detained; on the first day 257, 10 detained.

The problem was that refugees qua refugees had no automatic right of entry to Britain. In keeping with poor law principles, refugees would only be allowed to stay if it could be shown they would not be a burden to the public purse. If they could show they had funds to support themselves, that was enough. In the cases of Herr Herbst and Frau Krampflicek they had family already in Britain. Many of the other refugees had sponsors of one sort or another, who would ultimately be responsible for their welfare. Those who were told to leave had little money left, and no family or sponsors in Britain; they were just desperate people.

Like the people on the flight from Warsaw. Hilde Marchant (late war correspondent in Spain) reported for the Express that they resisted being put back on the aeroplane back to Copenhagen, where they had already been refused entry and would presumably be deported again:

The men refused and cried: "We will be shot."

One asked for the Czech Consul. Another offered money, but they all had to be dragged out of the hall on to the tarmac.

One man was carried into the plane.

Another man escaped the airport entirely 'across the Purley-way, over the grounds of the swimming pool and through some factories', but was picked up by a police car. A third man, by the name of Vorosov, was pulled off the seat he was clinging onto by two policemen when he got a reprieve: 'an official from the Immigration Department came rushing through the door and said, "There is a permit for Vorosov."' So he was allowed to stay. The others were taken back on board the trimotor.

The refugees then began to beat the sides of the plane and hammered at the windows, breaking one of them.

The Danish pilot refused to take them. "They are crazy," he said to the police sergeant. Later he told me he was afraid they would commit suicide by throwing themselves out of the door of the plane.

Instead of flying out they were taken to a police station again, this time in handcuffs, with the intention that they would be put on a boat to Denmark in the morning.

In this particular story, there was a happy ending. As its name implied, the German Jewish Aid Committee dealt only with helping German Jews. Nevertheless it decided 'as a special measure to provide the necessary guarantees' for the eleven Jewish Czech refugees in question. They were given three month visas; I don't know what happened to them after that. But this was just luck, a fortunate consequence of the publicity they had received. The Manchester Guardian thought there must be a fairer and more humane way to handle such refugees:

it is surely unworthy of this country that anyone coming to these shores for the first time should receive such treatment. Even if papers are not in order it might be thought that the Government could set up an independent tribunal which could consider claims to enter on grounds of equity and real need, thereby tempering the strict and inelastic rules of the Home Office. Expulsion, if decided on then, could at least be attempted in a manner more delicate.

This was not done. Nobody could have known exactly what was in store for those who were sent back to Germany or the late Czechoslovakia, but then that's the point. In 1951, after the Second World War had created many more refugees, a United Nations conference drew up a Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. Britain was one of the original signatories. It defines who is a legitimate refugee and who is not; absolves refugees from criminal charges for not following immigration procedures; and, crucially, protects refugees from being forcibly expelled to a country where they would be in danger.

Australia was also one of the original signatories to the Convention. In the last decade, as increasing numbers of people flee wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Sri Lanka and elsewhere, refugees have become an incredibly toxic issue in Australian politics. Both major parties have done everything they can to dodge meeting our obligations under international law, from effectively declaring that Australian migration law no longer applies to certain areas where refugees arrive, to sending refugees to other countries while their claims are processed (most recently, the so-called Malaysian solution). The point of all this is deterrence, though the tiny numbers of people involved and the fact that the vast majority of them do turn out to be genuine refugees ought to have given someone, somewhere pause. As might the suicides and riots of refugees locked up in detention centres for years on end. Bizarrely, all the refugees that have got Australians so worked up come by boat. Nobody worries about the ones which come by plane, even though about six times as many come that way, or even about the even more numerous non-refugees who overstay their visa. Perhaps the boat people are too brown. One of the stupider political slogans of the 2010 federal election was 'stop the boats'; at least no one in 1939 Britain -- at least to my knowledge -- wanted to 'stop the planes'.

But the High Court of Australia recently put an end to offshore processing; the Government attempted to overturn this by introducing new legislation, but due to its minority position in the lower House needed the support of the Opposition. Even though the Opposition supports offshore processing, for political reasons it refused; and so the bill never came to a vote. As a result, yesterday the Government decided to re-introduce onshore processing after all. Hopefully this will in time lead to a way of treating refugees in a way that is worthy of this country.

WILL SHE FIND REFUGE HERE?

While efforts to deport refugees by air failed at Croydon yesterday, this young refugee, clutching her doll, arrived at the airport from Cologne.

Image sources: Wikipedia; Daily Express, 31 March 1939, p. 13.

This post should probably be called 'Smugglers?' but like many people I owe an intellectual debt to Enid Blyton.

I've seen mentions of mystery aircraft in Britain in the 1930s but until now never a primary source reference. Thomas Bullard's most interesting The Myth and Mystery of UFOs notes that 'Mystery airplanes also appeared at this time over English locations, first to suspicions of criminal activity, then to worries over Nazi espionage', and provides two references. One of them is inaccessible to me (Daily Telegraph, 16 July 1937, 7) but the other is from The Times (16 April 1936, 9) which I can get online. And here it is:

WATCH FOR MYSTERIOUS AEROPLANE

Our Folkestone Correspondent telegraphs:--

A mysterious aeroplane has caused the authorities to keep a watch at Capel le Ferne during the past fortnight. It was reported that a machine had flown low over the village, which is between Folkestone and Dover, on two successive Thursday evenings. On the second occasion it appeared to land at a remote spot, but within a minute or so it was seen making its way across the Channel again. A large grey motor-car was seen to come from the place on the second occasion, and to go towards London. Since then the aeroplane, which is said to be of foreign origin, has not been seen.

Well, that's a bit underwhelming, it must be said. There's nothing in the report itself to suggest that it wasn't, in fact, an actual aeroplane, though that may be because of its brevity (perhaps a local newspaper would have more). Aircraft were reasonably common by the mid-1930s. Smaller ones could still land on improvised airstrips; and with a bit of ground assistance they could probably do so at night. The question is, though, why would anyone want to? The only sensible answer would seem to be to smuggle something into the country, whether it be contraband or people. And it's certainly noteworthy that Capel le Ferne is about the closest point on the English coast to the Continent (the Channel Tunnel passes underneath it; next door is the site of Hawkinge, one of Fighter Command's forward bases during the Battle of Britain). So in theory it would be a good spot to duck across the Channel, land, and take off again before anyone on either side noticed.

And such things did happen. Here's a prosecution for smuggling of cigars and brandy, reported in The Times (18 December 1936, 3) -- as the crimes took place only seven months later than and about five miles north from the Capel le Ferne incident, it could even be the same gang at work:

Mr. Stephenson said that it was a breach of regulations to unload any goods from an aeroplane unless at a proper Customs aerodrome [...] In this case [defendant Frederick] Hayter landed not at a Customs aerodrome but a place called Wickham Bushes, near Dover. He committed a breach of regulations by not reporting either to a police or excise officer that he had landed.

The pilot, Hayter, made a statement to Customs describing 'how he landed from Le Touquet in a field near Dover and hid a suitcase containing 12 bottles of old brandy under a haystack'. One of the accused was a local farmer and presumably the alleged haystack was in one of his fields.

So probably not a visiting spacecraft or even a projection of fears of aerial incursion, but: smugglers!

In 1935, the Emperor of Abyssinia, Haile Selassie, tried to buy the Airspeed Viceroy, an aeroplane which had been built to order for the London-Melbourne air race the year before. The Viceroy (above) was a one-off, customised version of Airspeed's successful Envoy, a twin-engined civil transport which could carry six passengers in addition to its pilot. Improvements included more powerful engines, an auxiliary fuel tank and a higher take-off weight. But it failed to complete the air race, pulling out at Athens due to mechanical troubles. Still, it would have made a nice plaything for an emperor, you might think; but that's not why he wanted it. He wanted it for a bomber.

Nevil Shute, then managing director of Airspeed, tells the story in his autobiography, Slide Rule. In autumn 1935 he was approached by 'Jack Norman' (a pseudonym chosen by Shute) wishing to purchase the Viceroy on behalf of a client, Yellow Flame Distributors, Ltd, 'whose business was the rapid transport of cinema films between the various capital cities of Europe'. As the Viceroy had just been sitting in a hangar for months after being recovered from its former owner (who had refused to pay for it and indeed sued Airspeed for their troubles), Shute was very glad to shift it and so set his men to work getting it ready for flight. But then Norman came back and told Shute that Yellow Flame were worried about the inflammable nature of celluloid and asked, 'Could we fit bomb racks underneath the wings to carry to films on?'

This was where Shute got suspicious. Italy was by then embarked on its invasion of Abyssinia, and Shute told Norman that he was selling a civil aircraft to a British company, not a bomber to a foreign concern. Norman asked if Airspeed could instead fit 'certain lugs' under the wings, to which Yellow Flame could attach whatever they wished. To this Shute agreed, though the distinction seems a fine one to me.

Then Norman asked if Yellow Flame's pilot could test fly the Viceroy. This pilot, who Shute calls 'Ernst Schrader' (again, not his real name), turned out to be a stateless ex-Luft Hansa pilot who was on the run from the Gestapo after having 'spoken disrespectfully of Adolf Hitler in a beer tavern'. Or perhaps he was, as Airspeed's own test pilot, Percy Colman, claimed, 'one of the most famous German pilots of the day', who Colman had recently met in Berlin and who Shute again gives a pseudonym, Weiss. At this point Shute had had enough and demanded that Norman tell him what was really going on. Norman admitted that Yellow Flame was just a cover story and that the real buyer was Abyssinia:

The army of Haile Selassie had no hope of standing up against the Italian invaders of their country unless modern arms and equipment could reach them. The Emperor had the pitiful sum of £16,000 to spend on modern aircraft with which to defend his country. With this he was buying our Viceroy for £5,000 and the remainder was to be spent on three fighters, Gloster Gladiators I think, to shoot down the Italian planes that were harrassing his troops. All four machines would, of course, be flown by soldiers of fortune from Europe.

The Abyssinians had a specific mission in mind for the Viceroy:

The job of the Viceroy was to bomb the Italian oil storage tanks at Massawa and so halt their mechanised advance. The Viceroy was a good deal faster than any aircraft the Italians had in Abyssinia, and this mission was well within the capabilities of the machine. It was, however, vital to maintain complete secrecy, because if the Italians were to get to know about the Viceroy they would move a squadron of first-class fighters from Italy to defend Massawa, with the result that the Viceroy would almost certainly be shot down.

This bold plan came to nothing in the end: Abyssinia fell to the Italians before the Viceroy (and its weaponry) could get there.

But the whole story, colourful as it may be, illustrates the idea of the commercial bomber, a civil transport aeroplane converted into a military bomber. This was a cheap and usually desperate way of creating airpower. Abyssinia wasn't the only country doing it, either; Airspeed's history provides several other examples. Early in 1936, for example, a more formal conversion was carried out on seven Envoys for the South African State Railways:

It reflected the condition of the world at that time, that these were civil aeroplanes for use on an airline but they were to be readily convertible to military purposes. Bomb racks and release gear were to be provided, a mounting for a forward firing gun, and the roof of the lavatory was detachable and replaceable by another roof which carried a gun turret.

Shute notes that when the Spanish Civil War broke out, demand for such ersatz bombers surged: 'by August [1936] agents for one side or the other were buying up every civil aeroplane that would fly' In fact, thanks to the war Airspeed sold off all of its old stock of Couriers and Envoys in one go. Even its very first Envoy, a test machine with a lot of miles on it, was sold -- for £6,000 in cash -- to the Spanish Nationalists. (We know this because it later flew into the side of a mountain while carrying General Mola, one of Franco's best generals.)

And the Viceroy itself ended up in Spain too, this time flying in Republican colours. After the Abyssinian episode, Airspeed sold the Viceroy to two airmen planning to compete in an air race from London to Johannesburg. They were once again approached by a middleman, who bought it from them for £9,500. Shute says only that they 'handed over the Viceroy, which left for France without delay and was never seen again'. But here is a very grainy photograph of it in Republican service:

What uses the Viceroy was put to in Spain is unclear. What is clear is that this piece of advanced civilian technology had a double life as an object of military desire. And that it was not alone.

Image source: airwar.ru.

TRAVELLING OF THE FUTURE: THE BRITISH AERIAL TERMINUS OF THE WHITE MOON LINE -- The old order is passing. Already glimpses of the future of aerial transport, with all its mighty possibilities, are becoming visible. When the stricken nations return to a state of prosperity, great things are in store. As to what economic and commercial revolutions are latent in the development of flying, the most daring of us hesitates to speculate. The picture shows an aerial terminus of the White Moon Line, raised aloft over a seaport. This is no flat aerodrome, but a huge circular structure. Around its topmost circumference platforms swinging on a circular railed bed are carried by two rotating arms, on which the aero liners alight and from which they ascend. The arms are moved round as the wind changes, so that the aero liners descend and ascend facing it. These arms are inclined a little downwards to bring the liners more quickly to rest -- they alight up the slope -- and to assist them to gather speed more rapidly before the final breathless abandonment of the sloping platform and the upward rush into the heavens. On the left is seen a passenger lift with two cars which rise and sink continually, carrying passengers to and from the high embarking level. A mono-railway penetrates to the heart of the terminus; a footway runs between the tracks. An aero liner is seen just ascending, bound on some far journey; another is stationary, loading up. Inside the structure is a huge lift for lowering the aero liners for refitting and repair, and in its mysterious depths we can picture workshops lit by flickering arc lamps, where hundreds of mechanics work busily day and night... Perhaps some of the future aerial termini will be on the ground; but where a man can find no ground near the starting point, he will raise structures such as this. The sea-captains will look upwards at the air-captains, beholding the fulfilment of a great dream, dreamt by generations of wise men long passed away, who wondered because they knew that such great things would come to pass. From the original by Roderic Hill.

Source: Flight, 6 January 1921, 10-1.

According to Peter Bowler (following David Edgerton), 'the classic image of aviation promoted in the interwar years [in Britain] was that of the futuristic airliner, not the bomber'. I disagree; based on my own research, images like the above were markedly less common than more warlike ones. But this is admittedly just an impression, and could be due to a bias in my research methods. Whether civil aircraft or military ones dominated the projection of aviation is just the sort of question which could in principle be settled in a quantitative manner.

The Mediterranean theatre of war has seen a lot of action in recent days, as these headlines from The Times (4) show. While the Italian outpost at Bardia is besieged from land, sea and air, British armoured units are approaching Tobruk, 70 miles to the west. On Monday night, Italian warships at Taranto were bombed by the RAF: '11 bombs were seen to burst around the target' (though without such striking success as attended the Royal Navy's raid last November). The Greek army is continuing its slow and stubborn advance, though 'the present line of Italian defence shows no clear sign of cracking'.

Yesterday, Blenheims of Bomber Command made snap daylight raids on targets in Germany and the Netherlands, making direct hits on a bridge, a factory, an aerodrome and a flak ship. J. R. B., writing to the editor of the Manchester Guardian from Manchester, would presumably approve of bombing industrial targets in Germany; but would also presumably want 'homes' bombed too, due to 'the obvious demoralising effect that it must have on the workers' (8).

Has it not occurred to the advocates of "no reprisals" that it is not really a question of retaliation, but merely one of prosecution of the war? If the civilian can be so blithely informed that he is in the firing line, does it not make sense that enemy civilians should at least occupy the position that is expected of him?

The writer understands that some people sincerely 'think this form of defence wrong, but they, like the war fiends [...] can be almost equally menacing to a community. They fail to grasp the realities of the situation'. As if to prove J. R. B.'s point, The Times publishes some interesting statistics about the damage done by bombers to sleep and work irrespective of any bombs dropped (4):

London spent approximately 1,180 hours -- equal to 49 whole days -- under alerts during 1940. The sirens sounded over 400 times during the year.

Another, grimmer statistic for 1940 is that road fatalities were up 26 per cent on 1939's figures (8347 to 6628), due in large part to the blackout. The Chief Constable of Oldham can't see things improving any time soon (Manchester Guardian, 8):

With the development of intensified air attacks on this country any further modification of the lighting restrictions does not appear likely, and unless greater care is shown by all road-users there is a distinct possibility that the accident figures throughout the country are likely to show a steady and melancholy rise.

Still, modern cities have a tremendous ability to route around damage (The Times, 2):

The life of the City has adapted itself in great measure to this desolate tragedy. Instructions to staffs have been posted on office doors that open on to nothing but the charred remains of what last week were well-furnished premises. In Basinghall Street a tea shop opposite one of the side entrances to Guildhall was being used yesterday as an office from which permits had to be obtained by people wishing to visit on business buildings which were unsafe. During most of the morning and afternoon there was a long queue outside this office.

You can't stop bureaucracy.

You also can't stop British civil aviation. Despite 'Hitler's boast of having established an aerial blockade of Britain [...] civil aircraft have flown 5,000,000 miles to and from Britain, carrying nearly 30,000,000 air-mail letters alone' (Manchester Guardian, 7). Transatlantic flights even 'at the height of the invasion crisis' are credited with 'enormous propaganda value'.

I'm not sure if Dr. Joseph Needham, a Cambridge biochemist and embryologist, flew across the Atlantic during for his five-month tour of American universities; the report of the Guardian's scientific correspondent on their interview (4) doesn't say. But it does contain much interesting information about the attitude of American scientists to Nazi Germany, and in particular 'the Nazi Philosophies of Science'. Actually, they didn't know much about 'such conceptions as "Wehrwissenschaft," or the conscious direction of science to destructive purposes' at all until they attended one of Needham's lectures:

Dr. Needham found that, as in England, extremely few people had read any of the Nazi literature on science. The writings of Stark and Lenard on physics; of Spann, Klages, and Blüher on philosophy; of Marr, Jung, Haiser, and Möller-Brück on sociology; of Brohmer on biology; of Jeansch, Hommes, Krannhals, and Schulze-Sölde on racialism; of Stapel and Freyer on ethics; and the speculative mythology of Rosenberg and Krieck were virtually unknown. Hommes, for instance, writes that "the concept that twice two make four is somehow differently tinged in the minds of a German, a Frenchman, a Negro, or a Jew."

I suspect G. A. Sutherland of Victoria Park knows where Needham is coming from, even if his target is British broadcasting rather than German scholarship (8):

By its action in protecting the public from the pernicious singing of the Orpheus Choir under the direction of the pacifist Sir Hugh Roberton the B.B.C. has earned the plaudits of all prudent patriots. It therefore came as a great shock to read in the "Radio Times" that a lifelong pacifist, Sir Arthur Eddington, was actually being allowed to disseminate his insidious astronomical theories in a talk with the significant title "Other Worlds." Should not the person responsible for subjecting the nation to so grave a risk be immediately removed from office?

Well played, sir, well played.

I've recently been reading Peter Ewer's Wounded Eagle: The Bombing of Darwin and Australia's Air Defence Scandal, which I found to be unexpectedly interesting, but not always in a good way. Wounded Eagle has much less about the Second World War than I'd thought: much of the early part of the book is taken up with a detailed analysis of the origins of the Empire Air Mail Scheme (EAMS) in the 1930s, and then there's a long account of the Royal Australian Air Force's pre-war procurement policy. There's a lot of interesting stuff here: one particular surprise for me was the accidental way in which British radar research was accidentally revealed to the Australian government by a young physicist returning home from studying at Cambridge. The Australians asked if this was true, and the British sheepishly said that it was and only then began sharing its data with the Dominions! Even more surprising, perhaps, is that the RAAF, having got its hands on some British radar sets in 1940, showed next to no interest in them. Only the Australian Army did anything with them, for use with coastal defence batteries.

Ewer's book is full of such pointed criticisms, and that's the problem. This polemic has two targets: the British, and pro-British Australian politicians. The latter are outside my area, though I'll talk about them later. But I like to think I know a bit about the British by now, particularly when it comes to aeroplanes, so let's start there.

Relations between the Dominion and the Mother Country were not always easy, that much is true. British air force officers, civil servants and cabinet ministers were often contemptuous of their colonial counterparts. The wrangling over the procurement of aircraft for the RAAF does not show them to best advantage, as Ewer shows. They were often not often honest -- that is to say, they lied -- about the shortcomings of the aircraft and engine types they tried (mostly successfully) to push onto the RAAF. Indeed, on Ewer's account British aviation technology was inherently outdated, the product of a lazy, complacent engineering and business culture. He points to the Society of British Aircraft Constructors (SBAC) as a major cause of this, describing it as a 'cartel':

While Conservative Governments [sic] railed through the 1920s against the greed of trade unions, the racket operated by SBAC ensured good profits for its members, regardless of aircraft performance or the cost of construction.

He cites as a source Sebastian Ritchie's Industry and Air Power: The Expansion of British Aircraft Production, 1935-1941. But Ritchie paints a very different picture of SBAC. Profitability for its members was mixed, the competition between them for orders was tough, market leaders of the 1920s such as Handley Page became also-rans in the 1930s. And if SBAC was a cartel, it was a pretty weak one. In 1931 it did indeed try to act in concert to undermine the competitive tendering process, but the Air Ministry held firm. The result was that Hawker's bid to build its Harts at £2300 per aeroplane was undercut by fellow SBAC member Vickers, which quoted at £1800 for the same aircraft. In later contracts the price fell to £1475. This is hardly the sign of a powerful cartel. That aside, it's certainly true the backwardness of the British aviation is something which reasonable people can and do argue about, but Ewer shows no awareness that there's even a debate about this at all (it would have been nice to see some references to David Edgerton for the case against, or even Correlli Barnett for the case for).

For Ewer, the story is one of greedy British capitalists, with Air Ministry collusion, wanting to capture the Australian market for themselves. That may well have been part of the story, but he does not seem to consider that, from the British point of view, there might have been other considerations. For example, the need to preserve, and then to expand, Britain's aircraft production capacity to meet its rearmament and then wartime needs. This was the rationale for SBAC's monopoly on Air Ministry orders in the first place. The RAF itself had to accept designs ordered almost off the drawing board and (often in consequence) large numbers of obsolescent aircraft for these reasons (see, e.g., the Fairey Battle). Why should the RAAF, itself a second-rate air force at the time, have been treated any differently?

Ewer might respond to this that if the British had been upfront about what they wanted, the Australians would have had the freedom to choose alternative American or even Australian designs (Lawrence Wackett is one of his heroes, though he concedes one who needed careful handling). The Bristol Beaufort and its Taurus engines are the villains here. But again there's a bigger picture. He notes but dismisses the British argument that standardisation of types (airframes and/or engines) across the Empire would be an advantage in wartime. Yet he himself is highly critical of the abandonment of a proposed Australian Air Expeditionary Force (AAEF) early in the war. This would have comprised six RAAF squadrons, to accompany the 2nd AIF to the Middle East. But how could such a force have been maintained in the field, on the other side of the world and dependent on the RAF's supply system, if it had been using some weird Wackett fighter or American engines? They would have to be supplied from Australia or (worse) America, something which couldn't be guaranteed in wartime anyway. Using British products was the safer choice.

On EAMS, Ewer again comes down strongly on the Australian side. The British wanted to use flying boats on the route from Singapore to Sydney; the Australians argued that landplanes would be better, as they would have a longer range and be able to carry a greater weight of cargo, making them more economical and hence more profitable to run. (The connection with Australian air defence seems to be that the landplane proposal would have led to more and more useful aerodromes to Australia's north.) On this analysis, the decision to use flying boats does seem pretty stupid. But once again the British point of view is neglected. They weren't just setting up an air route from Singapore to Sydney, but, sensibly or not, a network of air routes linking Britain with the Empire. In his Air Empire: British Imperial Civil Aviation, 1919-39, Gordon Pirie, another ex-colonial (South African this time) explains the attraction of flying boats for the EAMS:

In the face of demand for increasingly large civilian aircraft [...] flying boats of a new 'Empire' design promised considerable savings for passengers and airline operator [...] Constructing landplanes with undercarriages strong enough to bear additional weight was expensive, and the increased dead weight of aircraft diminished their payload [...] Additional financial savings would accrue from using flying boats rather than landplanes because it would not be necessary to strengthen aprons and landing strips so they could bear the weight of increasingly heavy airframes [...] A final consideration was the high cost of aircraft fuel at inland aerodromes compared with the seaboard price that was half as high at many points on the Empire routes.

And then there was safety: flying boats could land on the open sea in an emergency, whether it be technical or political. The British undoubtedly pressured the Australian government, and the resulting scheme was not ideally suited for Australian conditions; but the Australian point of view was not the only one which we should consider.

Ewer is highly critical of the Empire Air Training Scheme (EATS), too. He makes the valid point that in 1939-40 the RAAF was essentially turned into a cadre force, not a fighting one: instead of being posted to Europe or the Middle East and gaining combat and leadership experience, most of its pilots and senior officers had to stay home as flight instructors or airfield commanders to churn out aircrew for Bomber Command and the war over Europe. Air Marshal Richard Williams, three-times former RAAF Chief of the Air Staff, was reduced to surveying for good spots for EATS airfields. Ewer thinks the RAAF should instead have been a fighting force right from the start of the war, sending the AAEF to fight overseas and setting up an air defence system to protect the 'indispensible' Sydney-Wollongong-Newcastle industrial area from Japanese carrier strikes. But again, seen in a bigger context EATS played a vital role in sustaining the RAF's war effort: it otherwise would have found it hard to find the airmen to crew its heavy bombers for the offensive against Germany, and the open skies to train them in. Of course, the strategic bombing offensive, and Australia's contribution to it, can be criticised, but Ewer doesn't do this either, merely criticising the watered-down Australian Article XV squadrons and lack of an Australian air group within Bomber Command. By these lights it would seem the only Australian contributions which should be counted were those made by national formations. Perhaps it would have been better for Australia to have more national formations in the fight. Would it have been better for the Allies, though?

More subtly, there seems to be an Anglophobic strain running through Wounded Eagle. Australian achievements are lauded (Australians, especially Williams, always seem to be writing 'brilliant' memoranda on this or that) while any British ones are passed over in silence. Britons themselves are never portrayed in a positive light. In fact, there's often a bit of what might in cricket be called sledging going on. Here are three examples. The captain and crew of the first EAMS flight to Sydney is said to have only 'modest achievements' to their credit. Marshal of the RAF Sir Edward Ellington, a former RAF Chief of the Air Staff who conducted a review of the RAAF in 1938, is casually described as 'dyspeptic'. And RAF Squadron Leader Harper's air combat victories against the Luftwaffe are qualified with the word 'allegedly'. None of this is necessary; none of this is supported. Perhaps it's because all of them criticised or slighted Australians or Australian institutions (refusing to let an Australian official inspect his aeroplane, pointing out RAAF shortcomings, and being an admittedly appalling and anti-Australian commander of an Australian (albeit RAF/EATS) fighter squadron in Malaya, respectively) and so deserve a bit of rubbishing in return. But I'm Australian myself and can't get too worked up about what the Poms thought of us back then. Ewer cites Babette Smith's book, Australia's Birthstain (i.e. its convict origins), at a couple of points and no doubt many of them did look down on us. But as I said above, the reality was that the RAAF was a small, second-rank air force from a small, remote, not-very-industrialised country and it's to be expected that the British would think they knew better. It's not worth getting upset about.

Which brings me to the real targets of Ewer's attack: those Australians who agreed that the British knew better. He singles out three in particular: S. M. Bruce, a former prime minister who was essentially Australia's first High Commissioner in London (or ambassador, in effect); R. G. Casey, Treasurer from 1935 to 1940, and Robert Menzies, first Attorney-General and then Prime Minister from 1939 to 1941 (and again from 1949 to 1966). In Ewer's view these men were deceitful in their relations with their Australian colleagues while colluding with the British on issues such as the EAMS and RAAF procurement. And I think he's right. He even goes so far as to describe Casey's actions as 'betrayal', while he says of Menzies that 'he delivered up Australian interests to London'. But I would suggest (without, admittedly, knowing any of the secondary literature on the topic) that to use such loaded terms is ahistorical. Australia was not yet a truly independent nation, either legally (the Statute of Westminster, promulgated in 1931, was not enacted here until 1942) or culturally. It is natural enough that there would be those who felt that Britain's interests and Australia's were identical, that defending the Motherland was protecting their homeland, that serving the Empire was a higher duty than just serving the Commonwealth. Ewer himself admits as much when he writes of those who believed in a '"British Australia" as a viable half-way house between colonial life and Mother England"'. As such it is simplistic to view the actions of Bruce, Casey and Menzies in narrowly nationalistic terms: I doubt they thought they were being disloyal to Australia in any way, even if they recognised they were being duplicitous. (Ewer pointedly prefaces each chapter with a quote from The Prince, though I'm not sure if he's thinking of the British or the pro-British as the Machiavellians.) In terms of air policy, Australia was no longer part of Britain's air empire, but it was still a Dominion of the air, so to speak, not yet a republic.

On that note, it's interesting that the National Library of Australia's Cataloguing in Publication service has assigned Wounded Eagle to (among more obvious choices) the subject 'Republicanism -- Australia'. The issue of an Australian republic is not mentioned once in the book, but as I've argued it's a very nationalistic work, and it does seem to be that way inclined. Not that there's anything wrong with that, per se; I'm a republican myself, I voted for an Australian republic in 1999 and hope to see one come to pass in my lifetime. But wanting to cut constitutional ties with Britain need not entail Anglophobia, at least not in my book. (If I ever write one, that is.)

For an excellent example of a national-but-not-nationalistic aviation history, see Michael Molkentin's The Australian Flying Corps in the First World War (Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010), which even covers some of the same ground as Wounded Eagle in its account of the destruction of the Turkish 7th Army by the RAF and the Australian Flying Corps. Molkentin shows that Australians can write military history which incorporates a wider view, as I've called for before; Ewer, I'm sorry to say, does not.

It's the 75th anniversary of the MacRobertson Trophy Air Race. More specifically, it's the 75th anniversary of the day the race was won, 23 October 1934. The winners were C. W. A. Scott and Tom Campbell Black of Britain, who took just two days and twenty-three hours to cover the 18200 km from London to Melbourne. They flew in a de Havilland DH.88 Comet, named Grosvenor House, a beautifully streamlined twin-engined monoplane which was specially designed for the race. So a triumph for British aviation, then?

Well, if you've been reading the debate on a recent comments thread, you'll know it's not quite as straightforward as that. Scott and Black did win, but in second place was the Dutch-owned, US-designed Uiver, flown by K. D. Parmentier and J. J. Moll. True, it took 19 hours longer to fly the race route (albeit with an emergency stop at Albury, on the NSW-Victoria border). But that's pretty impressive when you consider that Uiver was a Douglas DC-2 -- an airliner, not designed for speed but for economy and payload. It even carried passengers for most of the race, and made many more stops than required by the race rules, as it was also blazing an air route for KLM. The Dutch actually won the race on handicap. Third was another American airliner, a Boeing 247D. The fastest British equivalent in the race was a New Zealand-owned DH.89 Dragon Rapide, which took nearly two weeks to complete the course.

Present-day arguments aside, what did contemporaries think of the result? The British (and Australian) press mostly celebrated Scott and Black's win. For example, the Melbourne Argus had this to say:

Where the pioneers walked, Scott and Black ran. Perhaps the finest evaluation of their victory is found in the lot of the other competitors. Some of them were still in Europe when Darwin revealed itself like the Promised Land to the weary victors. Even the mammoth Dutch airliner, flown by the light-hearted Parmentier, was hundreds of miles behind. Flying-Officer Gilman and Mr. J. K. C. Baines had crashed to a burning death. The nearest Americans were a continent away. The whole world opened its eyes in amazement.

In a representative International race a British aeroplane, flown by British aviators, has triumphed. That is a selfish reason for jubilation, and the result cannot fail to enhance the prestige of Britain in the air.

But the Argus was not blind to the significance of the Uiver's performance:

The others, however, flew bravely and well. They are all in the vanguard of the new age, Parmentier perhaps most of all. For he rode the skies in this great race like the unruffled pilot of a tourist airliner, allowing his passengers, between chicken sandwiches, to watch three continents unfolding beneath them. Could any more striking contrast be imagined than the weariness and exhaustion of Scott and Black and the pleasant excitement of Parmentier's passengers, who flew in the world's most notable race as tourists? All these men and women have been true to a fine tradition; and, although two lives already have been lost, a great advance has been made, lifting the horizon to an astonishing future.

Australians, being so used to isolation, might be expected to celebrate its erosion (the Argus pointed out that only seventy years earlier, it could take up to a hundred days to get from London to Melbourne; even as recently as 1931 the best time by air was 10 days). Whether it was thanks to British technology or not was secondary. But back in Britain, the usual self-congratulations in the press stood against more pessimistic comments. Even before the race, the Daily Mail thought the Comets (two others flew in the race) were marvels, but added that

The unfortunate fact, however, is that the aeroplanes of the Royal Air Force are a whole generation behind them in design and speed.

J. T. C. Moore-Brabazon, a Conservative MP who was the first person to get a British pilot's licence (in 1910) claimed that the 'England-Australia race has opened the eyes of the world [...] to the lamentable position, from the technical point of view, of English aviation'.

It is true, of course, to say that we won the race, but we won it with a machine that was built especially for the race, and although it redounds to the credit of the De Havilland Company that they not only won the race, but also designed and produced the machine in seven months, they would, I think, be the first to admit that it was a machine built for one particular job, and that, in a broad way, it was a speed copy of a commercial American aircraft.

He pointed to two specific innovations becoming common in the United States, but virtually unknown in Britain: retractable undercarriages and variable pitch propellers (which the Comet did actually have).

As a final, somewhat-elliptical example, consider the cartoon at the top of the race, from the Saturday Review (15 December 1934, 514). The Saturday Review also lamented Britain's performance in the MacRobertson air race, but this is another air race, one in which Britain is very definitely lagging: the race for airpower. Britain's air force is shown to be behind those of Germany, the Soviet Union, France, Italy, the United States and Japan. And this was a race which had to be won ...

A note on 'MacRobertson': there's no such name, as far as I know. It was the nickname of Macpherson Robertson, a Melbourne confectionery king, and the name of his company. Aside from giving Australia the Freddo Frog and the Cherry Ripe, he also gave generously to support Melbourne's centenary celebrations in 1934. The air race was part of these celebrations: the first prize was £10,000. He also has a chunk of Antarctica named after him. But in his home town about the only trace of MacRobertson's name is a high school for girls, which is popularly known as Mac.Rob. Sad to say, the great air race itself seems to have been forgotten today in Melbourne, except here at Airminded and at Vintage Aeroplane Writer, JDK's new blog.