Last year, Londonist gave us a very nifty map of London's V2 impact sites. Now they've come up with an equivalent for Zeppelin raids. Each of the sunbursts represents a bombfall. Clicking on them brings up a popup with information about the site and casualties (but, annoyingly, not the date). Note, however, that only a 'small selection' of the sites are plotted, however, which makes it hard to draw conclusions from the patterns: I could be wrong but I don't think the cluster in central London is representative. But perhaps more interesting are the tracks of the Zeppelin raiders (to get the key for which raid was when, click on the 'larger map' link). Again, these need to be treated with some caution, as they would only be reconstructions based on logbooks, bombfalls and sightings, but they do suggest that if the raiders could get reasonably close to London they could usually work out where to go. You can see the tracks deviating towards the urban areas, or turning back after the bombing run. London did have a blackout during the First World War (when its fighters couldn't touch the Zeppelins, the government claimed that the best defence against them was 'darkness and composure') but it wasn't as complete as during the Second. And of course the Thames on a clear and moonlit night couldn't be blacked-out at all.

Also, note the link in comments to a sequence of photos showing a Zeppelin being shot down. I hate to say it but I think these are fake ...

This is Warrington Crescent, Maida Vale, on the morning of 8 March 1918, after it had been hit by a 1-ton bomb dropped by a Giant bomber the night before -- one of the largest to fall on London during the First World War and the most materially destructive. Twelve people were killed (including Lena Ford, who wrote the words to the song "Keep the home fires burning"). It was the first air raid to come in the dark of the moon and, fortunately, the second-last of the war.

In the 1930s, much was made of the fact that a single bomb had destroyed half a dozen houses and heavily damaged a couple of dozen more, as the above map shows: multiply one bomb by hundreds and repeat as necessary and you've got a knock-out blow. Basing your forecasts on a few outliers like this is not always sensible.

Image sources: L. E. O. Charlton, War Over England (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1936); Hamilton Fyfe, 'Gothas and Giants beaten back', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1935?]), 520.

William le Queux's The Invasion of 1910 is today one of the best-remembered of the Edwardian invasion novels (at least to anyone interested in the topic). Not because of any literary value -- very few people read it today, and I can't blame them -- but because of its contemporary success. It was commissioned by the press magnate Lord Northcliffe and serialised in his Daily Mail in 1906. And heavily promoted in all his papers, as we can see here -- this is a full page ad from The Times (13 March 1906, 11). The Invasion of 1910 was a huge hit, selling many newspapers and over a million books in a couple of dozen languages, making it the most successful future war story since The Battle of Dorking back in 1871. Northcliffe being Northcliffe, there was also a political objective: the scuppering of the government's proposed Territorial Force, which was widely derided by Conservatives as an ineffective substitute for conscription (sorry, 'national service'). The ad and the book both feature a personal recommendation by Field Marshal Lord Roberts, president of the National Service League.

Here you can see a portion of the map above, showing the German landings in Norfolk and Essex, the unsuccessful defence of London, and its investment, bombardment and sacking. The underlined names are 'Places specifically referred to and described in the text'. Northcliffe apparently ordered the advance of the German army to pursue his circulation objectives rather than follow strategic necessity, though if that's so I wonder why little Oakham is underlined and not nearby Leicester, for example. The rest of the map shows battles between the German and British fleets and the retreat of Parliament from London to Bristol and then Manchester, where it is at the time of the British surrender.

What may be original about le Queux's style here -- it's a few years now since I read most of his competitors so I can't be sure -- is that his narrative is historical or at least journalistic. There are no characters to follow except various generals and politicians as they flit in and out of the story. The book has many more maps along with mock proclamations and newspaper hoardings. It's a campaign narrative of a war that never happened, not an eyewitness account or soldier's tale, and I think this must have been one of the keys to its success (along with the catalogue of fatal mistakes made by and awful fates in store for Britain). And many of the most effective successors to The Invasion of 1910, such as Hector Bywater's The Great Pacific War (1925) and General Sir John Hackett's The Third World War: August 1985 (1978), also used this technique. It's all about the verisimilitude -- it makes it seem like it could happen here, tomorrow, if we don't do something to stop it, today.

The editorial cartoon from the Melbourne Argus of 9 December 1941, the issue which reported the Japanese landings in Malaya and air raid on Pearl Harbor. I guess it's nice to know I can still be surprised, though, of course, there's really no reason why I should have been.

Noel Pemberton Billing has received a bit of criticism around here, and mostly for good reason. He couldn't design a decent aeroplane for toffee, he peddled lurid conspiracy theories, he was a relentless self-promoter. But I don't think he was a complete fool. He clearly had a fertile imagination (overly so, Maud Allen would have said) and sometimes he was on the money. Take his ideas for Britain's air defence, as expounded in his 1916 pamphlet Air War: How to Wage It.

There were two major problems at the time. The first was that Zeppelins were raiding British cities and weren't being intercepted, despite the existence of a substantial home defence establishment. It wasn't that they couldn't be intercepted, but that they couldn't be intercepted consistently. (Shooting them down was another a problem, of course.) The problem was one of command, control, communications and intelligence (C³I, though you can add letters to taste). Information about incoming Zeppelins and their locations usually wasn't timely or accurate, making it hard for fighters to find them in the dark. And most squadrons were based near the coast, meaning that the enemy was usually past the defences by the time the alarm was raised.

The second problem was that because the targets of the raiders were difficult to determine -- and for that matter, the Zeppelin crews themselves often didn't know where they were and dropped their bombs almost at random -- as a precaution alerts had to be sounded and lights blacked-out over large areas of the country. This disrupted sleep and production far more than was necessary.

So Pemberton Billing proposed dividing up the country (meaning England and Wales) into one hundred air defence districts (which seem to correspond to counties or other civil divisions), as shown in the map above. Each district has five sub-districts; for example the one covering East Yorkshire might look like the map below.

Each sub-district would contain: a listening post, 100 feet high with sound detectors pointing east, west, north and south; a searchlight; an anti-aircraft gun; and one or two aeroplanes. But just as important to PB's scheme was the co-ordination between the centre, the districts and sub-districts.

PB presents a little vignette of how his system would work in practice. In Whitehall is the 'Commander-in-Chief, Air Defence'. He stands before a glass map of England and Wales. When intelligence from the North Sea (presumably from the fleet or trawlers) indicates that four Zeppelins are approaching the coast, he orders a 'Stand to Arms' signal to be sent to all districts via dedicated telegraph lines. This tells them to prepare for a raid. Next, a 'Darken' signal is sent to all coastal districts (only) ordering their commanders to instruct local police and power companies to institute a black-out. Then all districts wait.

More importantly, they listen. When one of the coastal sound detectors hears engine sounds, it informs the district headquarters, which in turn informs the C-in-C 'within ten seconds'. The C-in-C now knows where the Zeppelins are, and orders aircraft in that district and adjacent ones into the air to intercept them. At the same time, those districts are immediately ordered to darken; nearby districts are to darken more gradually. But in most of the country, life carries on as normal, and will continue to do so unless and until raiders actually approach. And 'so complete is the control from Whitehall, so perfect the system of intelligence, that in a moment, should other counties be threatened, the pressing of a button will put in operation the same offensive and defensive plans'.

The above has been written in narrative form in order to convey as simply as possible the principle of a system which, with the existing wireless, telegraphic, and telephonic facilities, could be established within a few weeks. It will be noticed that this plan of mine concentrates on central control, without which any system of aerial defence will prove illusory. Not only is the introduction of some such system imperative, if we are to meet the existing situation calmly, but effectively, but it is on such lines that we can eventually guarantee protection against attack from the air.

Whatever one thinks of the specifics of PB's air defence system, he has clearly grasped the importance of command, control, communications and intelligence. He even uses all of these terms, bar communications, but he has that covered too, with his 'wireless, telegraphic, and telephonic facilities'.

Air War came out in late February 1916, but evidently it was composed of articles previously published in the Daily Mail, the Referee and Reynolds. (It definitely has a 'cut-and-paste' feel to it.) At this time, authorities were still grasping for an effective response to the Zeppelins, which is why PB published his book and, indeed, why he was in between by-election campaigns in which he ran as independent. (He lost the first one, obviously, but won the second.) Eventually the RFC developed a barrage system which was less complex than PB's area-based defence, but it proved effective enough. Defence against the Gothas spurred on further developments, resulting in LADA, and by the 1930s the air defence of Britain was entrusted to an system not unlike PB's, though with bigger 'districts' (sectors) and more vertical organisation (AA, intelligence, fighters in separate organisations). PB's C-in-C even uses a plotting room not unlike that Dowding was to use in 1940, except with lights on a map to show which districts had raiders overhead, instead of WAAFs pushing counters around.

So, Pemberton Billing was not so dumb after all. And I haven't even mentioned his invention of iTunes in 1925 ...

Source: N. Pemberton-Billing, Air War: How to Wage It (London: Gale & Polden, 1916), 25-32.

Via Bad Astronomy comes news of an update to the Mars component of Google Earth. Most interesting to me are the overlays of historical maps of Mars from the 19th and 20th centuries, including those made by Giovanni Schiaparelli (1890), Percival Lowell (1896) and E. M. Antoniadi (1909). Schiaparelli and Lowell's maps showed the infamous canals of Mars; Antoniadi's more detailed map did not, and is supposed to have finished off the canals as a scientific controversy, at least according to according to Steven J. Dick's brilliant history The Biological Universe: The Twentieth-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate and the Limits of Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). But from some of my own work I've seen evidence that the canals and the associated question of intelligent life on Mars survived into the 1920s. And now Google Earth shows me this beautiful map made by the US Air Force in 1962. This Mars was festooned with canals, half a century after they had largely been discarded by the scientific community.

A little digging shows why. The map, known as the MEC-1 prototype, was prepared to assist with the upcoming Mariner missions to Mars. E. C. Slipher, late director of the Lowell Observatory (a major centre for planetary research), helped make it. Slipher had got his start under Lowell himself in the late 1900s, and used his mentor's old observations to compile MEC-1. So it's no surprise it has canals, then. Slipher seems to have remained an advocate of the canals right up until his death in 1964. Perhaps fortunately for him, he didn't live to witness Mariner 4's flyby of Mars in 1965, which revealed an apparently dead planet. But if it had not, the USAF would have been well placed to explore the Martian megascale hydraulic system.

It's Australia Day today, so here's a map of the land down under, appropriately enough upside down. But the map itself is on a hillside in a land up over -- near Compton Chamberlayne in Wiltshire to be precise. It was carved from the chalk downs in 1916 or 1917 by Australian troops who were billeted nearby. A reminder of home, or a great big (60 metres across) 'we were here'? More the latter, I'd say, since it's not the only chalk figure carved in the area during the war, and the other ones (at nearby Fovant) are all regimental or other military badges. One of them is the Australian Army Badge, the 'Rising Sun' (zoom out to see the rest):


View Larger Map
The badges are maintained by the Fovant Badges Society but unfortunately it's not cheap and in 2001 the decision was made to allow the map of Australia, among others, to grass over. Despite that, it's still perfectly visible from the air, so I don't know whether the situation has changed or if it's just the advantage of an aerial perspective. Perhaps one day I'll pop over and have a look myself.

An article in British Archaeology provides some of the archaeological and heritage context for the Fovant badges. See also The Little Professor for more links on hill figures.

Via Northwest History, Londonist has started plotting London's V2 strikes in Google Maps. Where available, the pop-up has the date, casualties, photos and links. It's incomplete, but updates are promised. See also the Flickr set of LCC bomb damage maps on which it is based, and a tool to find the five closest impact sites to a given address. All very cool. I see that a V2 hit a St Pancras church on 9 February 1945, killing 34 -- a spot I walked past often when I was staying in Bloomsbury (yet another thing I missed). Though I suppose I'm not particularly enlightened by knowing that the closest a V2 came to hitting Melbourne was Romford ...

Here are a couple of the maps (or parts thereof) showing two different kinds of barrages associated with the air defence of Britain.

The first one is entitled 'Aeroplane barrage line. December, 1916.' It's too big to show effectively, so I've just reproduced a portion showing the coast of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. The red squares show home defence squadron HQs: 33 Squadron at Gainsborough and 76 Squadron at Ripon. The red triangles are flight stations, the red stars flight stations with searchlights, the blue circles are searchlight stations under squadron control ('aeroplane lights') and the black circles are warning control centres (Hull).

As I've discussed before, artillery barrages weren't the only kinds of barrages. Originally they seem to have just been barriers or walls of some kind (barrage originally referred to a dam). Here the barrage is composed of aeroplanes and searchlights, a wall erected to hopefully bar Zeppelins coming in over the North Sea from reaching the industrial cities behind the line. And it does look like a barrier: on the full map it stretches from Suttons Farm (later renamed Hornchurch) near London all the way up to Innerwick, east of Edinburgh (with extensions in Norfolk and Kent). But it's not a physical barrage, for the most part -- it's aerodromes and searchlights. Previously, home defence squadrons had been placed close to target areas, because of doubts about night navigation and interception. Experience had shown that these problems weren't as great as previously thought:

Now that it was clear the aeroplane patrols could be extended, it was suggested that the Flights situated near Birmingham, Sheffield and Leeds should be moved farther east as a step towards the ultimate establishment of a barrage-line of aeroplanes and searchlights parallel with the east coast of England.¹

This system worked very well against Zeppelins (as one indication, note the steep drop in casualties due to airship raids from 1917 on). But not so well against Gothas.

This map shows the anti-aircraft gun barrage in and around London in October (or so) 1917, which were there to defend against night raiders -- aeroplanes, now, much more than airships. Not that the guns were particularly effective, but they were heavily used. So heavily used, in fact, that there was a serious concern that London would soon run out of AA guns through wear and tear (each gun lasted for a maximum of 1500 rounds, and 14000 rounds total were fired on 30 September alone).²

But the barrages on this map, the red lines, do not show the location of the guns. They show lines in the sky along which a number of guns could be brought to bear (which explains why they are mostly made of arcs). So, again, the barrages are barriers. As the note in the top left corner explains:

Note. This type of barrage, usually known as 'Linear', allotted fuzes, bearings, and quadrant elevations so that fire could be directed at a particular altitude over a definite area. The barrages varied in length and form according to the situation and number of the guns which could be brought to bear. The height of the barrage could be varied at will. Orders for this form of barrage were given only occasionally, usually to 'screen' certain important objectives or to catch raiding aeroplanes whose courses were doubtful.

So, if I understand this correctly, if Gothas were seen approaching Woolwich Arsenal from the south-east, several guns would receive the order 'Ace of Spades' and would then swing to pre-determined settings to set up a barrier of fire for the raiders to fly into. If they flew on instead towards the Isle of Dogs, the order 'Robin Hood' would then be sent, and a new barrier would be set up, probably drawing on some of the same guns but with others joining in too.

There were also guns arrayed along the grid squares, the original scheme to which the linear barrages were a supplement. There is a hint that the linear barrages were meant to be a more efficient, more selective alternative, to help with the wear and tear problem.

As an aside, I wonder who came up with the barrage names? Some of them could be standard military issue: Kingfisher, Mercury, Union Jack. But what about Noisy Norah, Charley's Aunt or Dandy Dick? (The last two, at least, seem to be the names of popular farces.) Did the gun crews have a say in it, or were they named on the whim of some bored junior officer?

1. H. A. Jones, The War in the Air: Being the Story of the Part Played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force, volume 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), 166. The map faces 170.
2. H. A. Jones, The War in the Air: Being the Story of the Part Played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force, volume 5 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935), 85-6. The map faces 89.

The hopes which were raised yesterday by the announcement of a four-power conference at Munich appear to have been justified (Manchester Guardian, p. 11). An agreement has been reached between Britain, Germany, France and Italy that the Sudetenland will be transferred in stages to Germany between tomorrow and 10 October. The installations in these areas are to remain intact. An international commission will decide if any other areas should hold plebisicites to decide whether they should also be transferred to Germany, to be held by the end of November. France and Britain guarantee the new Czech borders; Germany and Italy will do so once the Polish and Hungarian claims on Czech territory have been resolved. War has been averted!

Maybe. The Manchester Guardian's diplomatic correspondent thinks (p. 11) that the agreement is only provisional, and whereas Germany was about to take all of Czechoslovakia, 'it will now take her the whole winter and perhaps the spring to get all she wants'. Moreover, 'many hold that a "next time" is now inevitable'. The leading article in The Times (p. 13), while generally positive, further notes that Czechoslovakia has not yet given its consent. And the outcome is hardly a discouraging precedent for the use of force in international affairs, since the threat of it has been present all along. Still, crowds at public gatherings across London cheered and clapped (Manchester Guardian, p. 11) and it's not hard to understand why. What is hard to understand, at least for the leader-writer for the Daily Mail (p. 10), is how anyone could be less than pleased with the Munich agreement:

The Council of Munich has aroused angry protests from that professedly peace-loving body, the League of Nations Union. They cry shrilly of "menace" and "betrayal" in a resolution filled with malice against the Four-Power meeting. Cannot these fire-eaters give the statesmen a chance? Or are they determined on war at any price?

W. W. Paine, in a letter to The Times (p. 8) similarly asks the Labour Party to realise what their desire for resistance would mean:

It means that they are condemning millions of their fellow-men, women and children to death and mutiliation, and are also condemning their survivors, whatever the result of the war may be, to a condition of poverty, which it must destroy our power to alleviate by any Social Services for 50 years to come.

So the next war will put off the welfare state for another half a century.

Irrespective of Munich, ARP preparations are proceeding apace. More schoolchildren have been evacuated from the great cities. The Daily Mail reports (p. 5) from a holiday camp at St Mary's Bay in Kent. 2200 'semi-invalids' from London's special schools are here, and it's basically a holiday for the poor tykes, 'who will go home bronzed and far fitter than when they arrived'. All the children report having a grand time:

Ruby Strong, a 12-years-old laughing imp of mischief, comes from Gibraltar-road, Bethnal Green. Her father is a motor-driver. "It is thrilling to come here by the sea," she said.

However, children in regular schools are not being evacuated, for the moment. The Manchester Guardian, in a leading article (p. 10), approves of the attention to detail in what has been done so far and in plans released by the Home Office for a future emergency (p. 11), from government payments to billeters right down to a franked postcard to send home. The scheme would be voluntary, one for schoolchildren and another for civilians generally, a million people in total:

The day, we may hope, will never come when large numbers of our city dwellers will set out on appointed trains to destinations unknown, "somewhere in the country," but it would be folly as things are not to provided for the exodus.

Completely unofficially, people have been leaving London on their own accord for 'parts of the country regarded as less liable to air attack' (The Times, p. 6). The Munich conference hasn't lessened the flow appreciably. The stations are crowded: particularly for Scotland and the West Country. Trains for the latter were doubled but were still full.

"Carry on," is the day's order for A.R.P.

The digging of safety trenches, the distribution of gas masks, the creation of bomb-proof shelters, and everything that prepares civilians for modern war, is to continue at emergency pressure.

So says the Daily Mail (p. 7), which also provides instructions for the proper care and handling of gas masks (which remain the property of the government). The Manchester Guardian (p. 13), however, reports that gangs of children are donning their gas masks and having mock battles in air raid trenches! Alderman J. A. Dale of Bradford declares himself 'disgusted'!

Here's a map of the territories which are going to Germany (shaded) and those which will have their fate decided by plebiscite (cross-hatched). The dashed line is the Czech Maginot Line, which is in fact of similar design to the French system of fortifications. The British Legion of ex-servicemen has formed a 'peace force' of 50,000 unarmed men to maintain order in the Sudeten districts during the hand-over (Daily Mail, p. 11). This 'bowler-hatted force of ordinary men' could begin for the Sudetenland at any moment, as soon as they are asked.