Here are a couple of photos I used in my AHA talk last week:

This is a Lufthansa Ju 52/3m, one of the great airliners of the 1930s, at Croydon aerodrome, ca. 1936. Other operators included Swissair, Aeroflot, and British Airways (an ancestor of the current airline of the same name).

And this is a Ju 52/3m bomber variant over Spain, ca. 1936. Note the defensive machine guns, in the dorsal position and in the ‘dustbin’ below. The Luftwaffe used Auntie Jus as interim combat aircraft up til the invasion of Poland, and used them to destroy Guernica in 1937, though the ones above were actually in Nationalist service.

So the point of showing these was to illustrate the convertibility of airliners into bombers (though it’s cheating slightly as the Ju 52s in the second photo were in regular military service, not adapted quickly and covertly for military purposes, which was what was so worrying about convertibility).

I think the talk went ok, though I wish I’d written it out from scratch rather than trim down an existing paper: it was too formal and stilted. Actually, I’d already learned that lesson, but was pressed for time and this seemed like an easier way to go. One positive thing I noticed was that I had virtually no nerves beforehand, which means I’m getting better compared with a couple of years ago!

It was a really good conference, covering everything from the Aboriginal geography of early Sydney (by Grace Karskens) to the possible Australian inspiration for the Munich conference (by Christopher Waters). I got to meet Mike Cosgrave’s student from Cork, Jonathan Murphy, whose talk exposed the shabby British treatment of the Polish government-in-exile at the end of the Second World War. For the first and probably last time, I was able to work Frankie Goes to Hollywood into a post-talk question, when I asked Erin Idhe about how Hawkwind compared with other British pop-cultural evocations of nuclear apocalypse. I unfortunately didn’t manage to meet Melissa Bellanta. Neither did I meet polymath and Australian Living Treasure Barry Jones, but did at least get to hear him speak at a book launch with his characteristic erudition. But most of all, I was very happy that I got the chance to have a chat with Paul Nicholls, my former supervisor, and favouritist history lecturer ever (sadly retired!), after my talk.

Image sources: vliegmachines.net; Aviones de la Guerra Civil Española (a brilliant site if you want photos of Spanish Civil War aircraft).

Director Baz Luhrmann (Strictly Ballroom, Moulin Rouge) has been working on a new film, called Australia. As the name perhaps suggests, it’s a sweeping saga of this wide, brown land of ours: the men who conquered it, the women who loved them, the cattle, the dust, the flies … well, it sounds pretty dull to me, to be honest. But I saw an extended trailer before Indy IV the other day, and it seems that Australia does have a couple of points of interest for the airminded film-goer.

The first is hinted at in this set photo. It shows Nicole Kidman (’our Nic’) and, if I’m not mistaken, Bill Hunter (who is contractually obliged to appear in every major Australian motion picture) in a boat with ‘QANTAS EMPIRE AIRWAYS LTD’ written on the side. Well, since Qantas have not, historically, been known for their watercraft, presumably there’ll be a Short Empire flying boat around somewhere! Such as the QEA Empire boat pictured above, VH-ABB Coolangatta. That’s excellent — we don’t see enough of these strangely beautiful aircraft these days. But a few scenes with a CGI flying boat are probably not enough to get me into the cinema.

The second is much more central to the story, it seems: the Japanese air raids on Darwin on 19 February 1942, carried out by the four fleet carriers of Nagumo’s task force and land-based bombers from the East Indies. About 240 aircraft attacked the harbour and airfield; 10 ships were sunk and about 250 people killed. To date, it’s the heaviest and costliest attack by an enemy on an Australian target.

Which would seem to make it a fitting subject for an epic Australian film. Except that there was no Blitz-style, Darwin-can-take-it stoicism here. In fact, what happened was not unlike the pre-war predictions of the effects of an aerial knock-out blow. Half the town’s population of 2500 (most women and children had been evacuated in December) fled south after the raid, along with a fair number of RAAF service personnel — the so-called ‘Adelaide River Stakes’ (Adelaide River being a small town about 60 km south of Darwin).¹ It’s true enough that the two air raids were taken as a sign of imminent invasion, not unreasonably since Fortress Singapore had surrendered just four days earlier, along with most of the 8th Division AIF; and Darwin was a long way from any help. And it has been suggested that the deserting servicemen had been given confusing orders. That doesn’t explain the fact that one of them got as far as Melbourne (about 4000 km away!) before stopping. Or, more seriously, the looting which took place in Darwin the night after the raid, perpetrated by servicemen (including some military police). There was certainly bravery — not least from the USAAF pilots who took to the air to defend Darwin in their P-40s, though greatly outnumbered — but overall, it’s a pretty inglorious episode in Australia’s military history. (And an example of something which Australians might do well to remember on ANZAC Day.)

So, it will be interesting to see how the raid’s aftermath is depicted in Australia. Telling anything like the full story would seem to cut against the intended epic nature of the film. But it sounds like Luhrmann does does intend to tell this part of Australia’s history:

Darwin was attacked 64 times in six months … The government (disguised) the truth: 2000 whites were killed and non-whites were not counted, so the toll was far greater,” he said. “But everything in the film will be in service to a great romance … Facts will be moved around but not in a way that fundamentally disturbs the truth.

I may have to see it after all …

(The title of this post, as Australians of a certain age may have guessed, is an homage to that great maker of epic films, Warren Perso, the ‘last Aussie auteur‘.)

Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

1. See here; the relevant volumes of the official history, Douglas Gillison, Royal Australian Air Force, 1939-1942 (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1962), 426-32, and Paul Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1942-1945 (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1970), 141-4; and the relevant volume of the centenary history of defence, Alan Stephens, The Royal Australian Air Force (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001), 136-9.

A follow-on of sorts to a recent post.

Imperial Airways was Britain’s main international airline between 1924 and 1939. It enjoyed semi-official status, as it was subsidised by the British government, and had the contract to deliver air mail throughout the Empire. Another international airline was formed in 1935, British Airways,¹ which serviced European routes (and it was apparently subsidised as well, at least for the London-Paris route). Imperial did too, but only it flew the long-distance routes to South Africa, India, Hong Kong, Australia (with help from QANTAS) and points in between. I’m not sure if this was an official monopoly, or just because it was difficult to compete over such long distances without subsidies. I also wonder what would have happened if the Imperial Airship Scheme had gone into operation — would Imperial have run that too? Anyway, in November 1939, Imperial and British were merged into BOAC, the British Overseas Airways Corporation.

Imperial had a reputation for flying slow, doddering old planes (the H.P.42 was its mainstay throughout the 1930s, scorching the skies at 120 mph). David Edgerton quotes an MP and pilot — the endnote says W. Perkin, but I think it was W. R. D. Perkins, a Tory and vice-president of BALPA²– as saying:

Imperial Airways services in Europe are the laughing stock of the world … when I am sitting in some distant aerodrome in Europe in the summer and a kind of Heath Robinson machine descends from the skies and everyone begins to laugh, I feel thoroughly ashamed.³

Perkins seems to have been a real thorn in the side of Imperial — shortly afterwards he introduced a private member’s bill alleging gross mismanagement by the airline and the Air Ministry, producing a ‘really thrilling debate’⁴ according to The Times’s parliamentary correspondent and leading, it seems, to the Cadman commission into civil aviation. British Airways had a more up-to-date image, but was often forced to look to American and German manufacturers for its aircraft. (When Neville Chamberlain arrived back at Heston with ‘peace in our time’, it was in one of British Airways’ Lockheed Super Electras.) Rearmament was partly to blame, as the main suppliers of the Imperial fleet turned to producing Hampdens and Sunderlands instead of airliners. Imperial was finally re-equipping with modern aircraft (Empires, Ensigns and Atalantas) when the war broke out.

Imperial had some defenders in the letters columns of The Times, including Alan Cobham and Nigel Tangye. But it clearly also had a pretty classy advertising department to call upon. The image at the top of the post is from ca. 1930 (the Calcutta it depicts entered service in 1928). Flying boat soars majestically over idyllic tropical beach. Flying there is, it assures us, `The modern way’. The following poster is even more striking. It doesn’t even need to advertise the name of the airline (though I guess it may have put produced on behalf of the Egyptian Marketing Board or equivalent — still, it’s definitely an Imperial H.P.42).

This next one shows air travel as an elegant, refined travel experience, with well-off passengers being served apéritifs by a uniformed waiter, possibly after having seen their inflight movie — the first ever was The Lost World, on an Imperial service to Paris in 1925. According to Wikipedia, anyway. (Not shown: passengers regurgitating the contents of their stomachs due to the turbulence of flying through the lower atmosphere.)

It helpfully notes that Imperial is ‘The only British air-line’ (so before 1935). After all, who would want to trust their lives to foreigners, what?

Imperial’s newspaper ads were not quite as beautiful, but still had good arguments to make.

‘Fly to the Cape in 9 days’ doesn’t sound particularly fast, but it was at least a week faster than by sea. Even better, the waiters didn’t need to be tipped!

Reliability is ensured by the 4-engined air liners which are used exclusively on all Imperial Airways routes. Nights are spent quietly on land; each day’s flight is divided into easy stages and the air liners are so comfortable to fly in. ‘Extras’ do not occur as tips, meals and sleeping accomodation are all included in the fare. It’s faster and more luxurious by air — try it

This next ad also stresses the safety factor of having four engines. Indeed, the H.P.42s did have a good safety record — of the eight built, only one was lost before the war, and that to a hangar fire (amazingly, all the other seven were destroyed in 1939-40).

The last ad is for air mail, not air travel. Only sixpence for a letter to Malaya — seems quite reasonable, though it was then 1/3 to get to ‘Australia, New Zealand and Tasmania’:

It also claims that Imperial was ‘The greatest air service in the world’. The American News Week (I assume this is Newsweek) at least agreed that it was one of the greatest, praising its pilots and engineers as well as the British air mail service generally.⁵ The statistics for commercial flights in the first half of 1934⁶ seem to tell another story:

Well, OK, technically it was one of the world’s great air services, but fifth place, behind the Netherlands, does not seem very impressive. Still, who can think poorly of an airline which flew these magnficent machines?

Image sources, in order: AllPosters.com; AllPosters.com; AllPosters.com; The Times, 31 May 1935, p. 44; The Times, 4 June 1935, p. 15; The Times, 5 December 1934, p. 13.

1. Not the current BA, though they are related.
2. ObPythonRef.
3. House of Commons Debates, vol. 329, 1937/8, col. 431; quoted in David Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Academic and Professional, 1991), 32. Looks like the debate took place on 29 October 1937.
4. The Times, 18 November 1937, p. 14.
5. Nigel Tangye, letter, The Times, 1 November 1937, p. 10.
6. ”Commercial aviation in Great Britain”, Round Table 25 (June 1935), 479.
7. Imperial Airways only.
8. Deutsche Lufthansa only.
9. Including Netherlands East Indies.

While writing the post on old maps, I happened upon the following example, which is labelled ‘The world — principal air routes’ and dated to 1920 by the host site, Hipkiss’ Scanned Old Maps:

The only other information given is that it is from The People’s Atlas and produced by the London Geographical Institute.

Now, this is interesting, because it most certainly does NOT show air routes in 1920: there were very, very few, and they certainly didn’t criss-cross the world as this map suggests. Many of these routes had not been flown at all, let alone by regularly scheduled services. For example, here’s a close-up of the North Atlantic:

There are 8 or 9 international routes leaving Britain, 5 of them out over the Atlantic, which had only first been flown in 1919. And I think the only overseas air routes operating from Britain in 1920 were London-Paris, London-Amsterdam and London-Brussels. It’s possible that the date given is wrong, but all evidence points to the early 1920s at the latest, most likely 1919-21. The map shows Petrograd, which was renamed Leningrad in 1924. The ‘Bristol Bomber’ shown would be the Bristol Braemar, which last flew in 1921, and the ‘Handley Page’ is the Handley Page V/1500, withdrawn from RAF service the same year. Most significantly, perhaps, the British airship R34 occupies pride of place, and this was written off in 1921 after being damaged in strong winds, therefore the map was probably printed before this embarrassing accident.

So this map does not show actual air routes; it can only be a prediction of future ones.

More than that, I think it’s a blueprint for British domination of the world’s civil aviation industry. Firstly, note the colours. These show the distance an aircraft could fly from London in one (yellow), two (pink), three (green), four (light green) and five (brown) days, given a (ground?) speed of 100 mph. London is shown as the primary hub for flights to North America and a major European hub.¹

Also, as noted above, R34 is featured prominently, and its primary claim to fame was its two flights across the Atlantic in 1919 — first east-west and then west-east. Although considerably slower than the 100 mph assumed on the map, only an airship could stay aloft for the longest hauls shown, such as the 57 hour flight from Auckland to Valparaiso.² In 1920, Britain was one of the few countries with the capability to build large rigid airships (even if they were largely copied from captured Zeppelins): the other main contender, Germany, was initially prevented from doing so under the Versailles treaty, and so Short Brothers built R38 for the US Navy in 1921. And although the aircraft of several nations are depicted below the R34, the British ones are the most impressive, particularly the V/1500.³ The next largest are the German Gotha and Zeppelin-Staaken,⁴ which again were now illegal for Germany to build. It seems to me that by emphasising the size of the aircraft shown — and by not-always-the-case inference, their long range — and in noting the long-duration flights needed to fly international air routes, the map maker was suggesting that the future of civil aviation belonged to the nation which possessed the longest ranged aircraft, and further, that this nation was Britain.

This all suggests a more optimistic British take on the aviation age than I generally see. And the time was perhaps right for this. The war was over, the economy was booming and everyone was busy demobilising, reconstructing and beating swords into ploughshares. A country with a near-monopoly of large airship construction, experience with building the largest long-range aircraft then flying and which could lay claim to the first three non-stop flights across the Atlantic would seem to be well placed for the coming era of international air travel.

But it didn’t work out this way. For a start, the British ‘airship moment’ was brief. R38 broke up in mid-air over the Humber before it could be flown to America, and this put an end to military airship development. The 1924 Labour government initiated a civilian airship programme, with the aim of binding the colonies and dominions closer to the mother country. This eventually produced the successful R100, but also the less-fortunate R101, the crash of which put finally an end to Britain’s airship ambitions.

Aeroplanes turned out to be a better bet, but not necessarily a safe one. In February 1921, Britain’s international services were briefly suspended, because they couldn’t compete with subsidised European routes, and only re-opened when they received (smaller) government subsidies of their own. This aside, British civil aviation was generally expected to “fly by itself” and this attitude came in for severe criticism by P. R. C. Groves in 1922, particularly since he saw civil and military aviation as mutually dependent. The RAF’s big V/1500s were scrapped and no civil aircraft with comparable range and payload left British factories until the late 1930s (the Armstrong Whitworth A.W.27 and De Havilland D.H.91). Of course, given the tiny potential market for air travel in the 1920s, gargantuan airliners would never have been profitable to operate, but smaller British civil makes generally didn’t fare well against German and American competitors either. Commentators continued to bitterly lament the sorry state of civilian aviation into the 1930s, Imperial Airways’ lumbering H.P.42 biplanes coming in for particular criticism. Then came the war, the Brabazon, the Britannia and the Comet — but that’s a story for another day.

1. However, that the colours aren’t bounded by ellipses shows that whoever drew the map was not assuming non-stop flights, but ones which would refuel at major hubs where possible.
2. Of course, seaplanes could rendezvous with ships in mid-ocean to refuel, a technique Lufthansa used on its South American routes.
3. It’s odd that the one aeroplane which had flown the Atlantic non-stop — the Vickers Vimy — isn’t shown; but maybe this is because it was a specially modified aircraft operating at the very limit of its endurance, and was not suitable for carrying passengers. The Vimy Commercial airliner variant had a much bigger fuselage, and a range of only 450 miles.
4. Though it’s not the huge R.VI which is shown, or, if it is it’s been shrunk to flatter the V/1500, which had a somewhat shorter wingspan than the German bomber.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Five years ago yesterday, like so many others I watched in horror and confusion as the September 11 attacks unfolded on the other side of the planet and on my TV screen. It seemed so novel and so strange, to think of humble airliners being used as weapons. (I still catch myself looking up at the sky when I hear one flying low, and wondering for a second — ‘Is it going to … ?’) But it wasn’t really all that novel. Airliners and terror go way back.

However, it wasn’t that people were worried that airliners in flight would be seized by terrorists and flown into important buildings. Instead, the fear was that a nation’s airliners could be quickly and easily turned into bombers and used en masse to deliver a knock-out blow against an unsuspecting victim. In the 1920s and early 1930s, this idea was very widespread in Britain, at least among those people who were thinking about how to win, or better yet, prevent the next war.

The basic idea was that a bomber and an airliner or air transport are fundamentally similar: they are both big, heavy aircraft designed to carry a large payload over a long distance. In fact, early airliners were often just war-surplus bombers; conversely, some bombers had civilian origins (such as the Handley Page Hyderabad, developed from the H-P W.8). Strap on some external bomb racks, fit a bombsight and maybe a machine gun or two to ward off enemy fighters, and you have a useful military machine. P. R. C. Groves was the first to sound the tocsin, in 1922:

An aeroplane which can carry a certain number of passengers a certain distance at a certain speed is capable of carrying an equivalent weight in bombs for the same distance at the same speed; and any passenger-carrier which is efficient as such can be transformed into an efficient bomber.¹

Groves continued to fill many column-inches of newsprint with his warnings about the danger of civil-military conversion, and he was followed in this by many writers; Liddell Hart was still discussing the possibility in his The Defence of Britain, written in mid-1939. But why was it considered such a problem? Three reasons.

First was the idea that there was little or no defence against bombers, that they could not be stopped, and that the destruction that they would wreak upon a city like London would be catastrophic. The more bombers there were, the more casaulties there would be.

The second reason was that it added a big element of uncertainly into calculations of national airpower. In a matter of days or even hours, an aggressor could add hundreds of bombers to its air force. What was formerly a manageable threat could become an existential one almost overnight.

The final, and most important, reason was Germany. Groves had recently been in involved in the monitoring of German aerial disarmament, as mandated by the Versailles treaty — it was forbidden from possessing any military aircraft whatsoever. But he believed that the booming German civil aviation industry was in part a front for a covert military program, which was laying the basis for a future air force. German airlines came to dominate central European routes and German aircraft were much in demand overseas. And Britain was falling behind: in 1928, the number of air-miles flown by British airliners was less than a third of those flown by German ones, according to the responsible British minister, Samuel Hoare.² So, even though it had been disarmed in the air in theory, in practice Germany was still a threat.

But when the next war came, neither the Germans nor anybody else added clouds of airliner-bombers to their aerial fleets. Why not? There are several reasons, but the main one was probably capitalism. Airlines have to make a profit, so they like fuel-efficient and cost-effective aircraft. These are secondary considerations for air forces (or at least are judged by different criteria): they want bombers which can get in to a target area and out again as fast as possible. These goals were incompatible: flying fast is not, generally speaking, cost-effective (one reason why Concorde is no more). With the occasional exception (such as the surprisingly fast times of the Douglas DC-2 and the Boeing 247 in the 1934 MacRobertson Air Race), by the late 1930s airliners literally couldn’t keep up with military aircraft, and would simply have been target practice for fighter pilots.³

So much for that idea then. But there was one important consequence of this somewhat overdrawn fear. In 1932, the long-awaited Disarmament Conference opened in Geneva. One item on its ambitious agenda was clipping the bomber’s wings, and the obvious way to do this was to ban it altogether. The problem was, of course, that even if every country in the world destroyed their bombers, then they might end up at the mercy of an unscrupulous nation with a big civilian air fleet. Various solutions were contemplated, such as placing either military aviation or civil aviation, or both, under some form of international control. But no agreement could be reached (Britain, for one, was too attached to its use of bombers for Imperial ‘policing’) and so the opportunity was missed. If it had been seized, would it have prevented Guernica, Rotterdam, Dresden — Hiroshima? Or would it have given expansionist countries a free hand? Would Britons have felt more secure, or less? Would appeasement have ended sooner, or later, or never have happened at all? The shadow of the airliner lies over the past, as it once darkened the future.

1. The Times, 22 March 1922, p. 14.
2. There is of course a critique of British aviation and inudstrial policy at work here; Groves believed that the government should subsidise British civil aviation, just as the Continental countries did.
3. The Luftwaffe did use Ju 52 transports as bombers in Spain and Poland, but these were not impressed from civilian life.

To continue the Australian theme, here’s an excellent article by Leigh Edmonds on the development of airmindedness in Australia, from Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture. (It’s quite long; there’s a shorter version at the Airways Museum & Civil Aviation Historical Society.) My impression from that is that airminded organisations had more influence with the government in Australia than in Britain, and also that the Australian government was more successful in encouraging the growth of airlines than was the British (geography no doubt helped - there’s far less need for aircraft to get around in a tiny place like the UK). And it might just be because of the focus of the article, but military aviation seems to have taken a distinct second place to civil aviation, though it’s interesting to see that in the 1930s, the shadow of the bomber fell across even so remote a country as Australia.

A couple of extremely informative websites I’ve just come across: Airshipsonline, home of the Airship Heritage Trust, dealing with most British airships since 1900 (wot, no Willows airships?); and Imperial Airways, home of the HP 42 project, which aims to build a flying replica of the British Handley Page 42 “Hannibal” biplane airliner of the 1920s and 1930s. If it were my project, I’d recreate one of Imperial’s Empire-class flying boats instead, way cooler than the HP 42 which, apparently, people were embarrased to be seen flying in at the time. They did not compare favourably to all those sleek European and American monoplanes. (On the other hand, Le Corbusier did include a photo of a HP 42 in his 1935 book Aircraft, on aeroplanes as expressions of modernity.) But it’s not my project, and a good thing too, because I haven’t got a hundreth of the energy these guys have - their previous triumph being the Vimy replica I’ve posted about previously. Seriously, I’d love to see this fly. Best of luck to them!