MONSTER EAR TRUMPETS FOR AIR DEFENCE

During the last years of the Great War, sound detectors played an increasingly important part in the air defences of all the belligerents. Since those days they have undergone great development. Here the emperor of Japan is inspecting the huge trumpet-like detectors that work in conjunction with the anti-aircraft guns (seen right)

This last in a series on 'Things of tomorrow' draws upon Boyd Cable, 'Future schemes of air defence', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 310-6. (There was a seventh in the series, but by another author and on a non-military subject, that of stratospheric flight.) The previous posts looked at 'Death from the skies', 'The doom of cities', 'New horrors of air attack', 'If war should come' and 'When war does come: terrifying effects of gas attacks'.

Cable starts off a little defensively, allowing that 'it may have seemed to some readers that I have been unduly gloomy and pessimistic' in his previous articles about the threat of aerial bombardment. He doesn't think so, but here presents 'the other side of the picture'. Even so he immediately argues that the problem of defence is made more difficult by the development of blind flying at night or in bad weather 'by means of his compass and various stabilizing and automatic steering instruments'. Also,

we know it is a commonplace of commercial air routes that by wireless he can, if he is unaware of his position, communicate with his base station, and within a matter of seconds he can be told the exact spot over which he is flying [...] so far no experiments have succeeded in effectively "jamming" or "mixing" a pilot's questions and answers.

He does however note that, especially in war conditions, such flying demands high skilled pilots, and 'Casualties in the first days of intensive air raiding could not but be heavy, and those highly skilled pilots would soon be reduced in numbers'. Interceptor pilots would also take losses, but these are easier to train than bomber pilots.

Cable suggests that while Britain's island nature is disadvantageous because bombers can approach over the sea undetected, it is less of a problem than in the last war:

We have now, for instance, what we had not then, flying boats able to keep in the air or on the sea for days, so that now they can establish patrols and a chain of listening posts far out to sea to pass the word of raiders' approach.

There is also the '"pick-a-back" machine', where a flying boat carries a smaller plane on top and launches it in mid-air, allowing the latter to save fuel and extend its range:

There is now nothing to prevent a large boat or seaplane carrying one or two fast interceptor fighters far out to sea, the latter to save their fuel until they take off on their own to attack any raiders.

Along somewhat similar lines, Cable discusses the recent development of the '"motor" kite balloon', a captive balloon with a small engine for ease of deployment. The 'French Army balloon regiments' are being equipped with these and everyone else is experimenting with them -- except Britain.

It would certainly seem that they might usefully be developed to serve the purpose of carrying a fast fighter, and, while drifting for periods with engine stopped, listening with sound locators for approaching raiders. They could then loose their own fighters and call up others; or, even without a fighter attached, might act as listening outposts.

Cable then segues into a discussion of sound locators. The capabilities of these have increased in recent years, but 'this has been largely offset by the increased speed of aircraft':

They are now required to be capable of detecting an enemy who may be as much as 50 miles away, and to give more warning of impending attack than our present types with their effective range of only a quarter of that distance.

Still, they are an important part of an effective air defence system:

The locators give the defensive aircraft the line, height and direction of an enemy's flight, and the same information goes to the searchlight and anti-aircraft guns' crews. The direction of the light beams and the shell bursts are further pointers to assist the interceptors in finding the enemy. Even if the lights fail to disclose the raiders, the locators can still keep track of their position, and the lights and shells follow them to guide the interceptors to their quarry.

Balloon aprons were used in the last war and seem to have been effective in deterring German pilots from flying low enough to bomb accurately. Kite balloons might be used for something similar:

The plan is to tether a number of kite balloons at about the same height but scattered at intervals, so as to form a sort of roof over a roof. If attacking machines dive down to clear low clouds or get within good bombing height, they must run the risk of dashing into one of the K.B.'s, or the cable holding down.

Even the small chance of this happening 'will shake most pilots' nerve and make them chary of taking the risk'. And 'explosive balloons and "aerial minefields" have been spoken of for defensive purposes'.

Rather daringly, Cable admits that the 'axiom that "the bombers must get through" [sic] [...] might be changed if our ground defences had their existing obsolete equipment replaced by the latest and best sound locators, searchlights and guns'. On one night during the 1935 air defence exercises, which simulated an aerial offensive against London, around a third of the attackers were successfully intercepted. True, 'the remaining 67 per cent would have made havoc of London', but if such a loss rate could be inflicted for several nights then 'an enemy's striking power would soon be exhausted'.

The last form of defence Cable examines is the use of infrared radiation to detect aircraft in dark or in cloud. 'We have seen those "infra-red" photographs which show distinctly objects and landscape miles away beyond a barrier of mist'. Now there are reports that 'a young Londoner, Dr. E. J. Rigby', has invented a machine for this purpose:

Dr. Rigby said he was then in a position to demonstrate his fog-piercing apparatus by throwing on a small screen a clear picture of a landscape ten or more miles away, although bad visibility prevented the eye seeing more than a few yards. His apparatus would also show a scene through artificially created fog or smoke clouds. He was then working on an apparatus for the use of ships in fog, but was also experimenting with a smaller set for aircraft use. If this, or any other similar apparatus, should prove successful, the defence will score heavily.

Despite these reasons for hope, Cable concludes that even a successful air defence 'will not prevent the infliction of appalling damage and destruction of property and life'.

The air and military experts have long asserted that "the best means of defence is attack." If that be accepted, our greatest and most promising means of defence lies not in the defensive interceptor but in the possession of a tremendously powerful fleet of long-range bombers with the most highly skilled and practised pilots. The knowledge that we held such a force ready to strike might do more than deter an enemy from attacking; it might even deter him from making war.

EARS OF THE FUTURE

Perhaps the main problem of air defence is to devise mechanism [sic] which can detect and register the position of enemy raiders long before they reach their objective. The elaborate "telesimetre," seen here being tested by the French army, is an indication of future developments

IN THE DAWN

Every summer the R.A.F. try out new schemes and methods during exercises in which the squadrons engage in mock warfare. The defence of London is the main object of these operations, and these pilots on a "war zone" aerodrome are assembling at daybreak by their machines

AUTOMATIC RAIDER FINDER

The 2nd Anti-Aircraft Brigade of the R.A. is shown below during manoeuvres at Watchet, Somerset. The gun is working in conjunction with a Vickers predictor, by means of which the position of the objective is communicated electrically to dials on the gun. Since its introduction both rate of fire and percentage of hits on targets at heights between 9,000 and 10,000 feet have been greatly increased

FINDING A TARGET

The anti-aircraft defences of Britain are largely in the hands of the Territorial Army. The above photo, of a rehearsal by London Territorials, shows the co-operation of searchlights and gun crews. When enemy aircraft are reported overhead, the searchlights, working in pairs, search the night sky. Effective as the present equipment is, the future will witness remarkable developments in anti-aircraft defence

LISTENING POST

The Observer Corps, a voluntary organization of civilians enrolled as special constables, has attained a high pitch of efficiency in its important work of locating, both by sound and sight. Sensitive sound-locators, as seen below in action during the 1935 air exercises, are used by listening "spotters." New and better equipped units are shortly to be formed, particularly around London

KITE BALLOON FOR DEFENCE

This curious craft, constructed by the French, is a kite balloon with a light fuselage attached. The machine is not intended as an airship, the addition of the body with engine being for the purpose of making the balloon quickly and easily mobile without deflating and transporting it on the ground. In this page it is suggested that the "motor" kite balloon could be used for defence purposes

ARCHITECTURE FOR AIR RAIDS

If war is still to be the final arbiter of the nations, the cities of the future must be built, at fantastic expense, not as pleasant homes but as refuges against the horrors of poison gas dropped from raiding aeroplanes. A famous French architect, M. Paul Vauthier, has designed such a city and this sketch gives a grim warning of what civilization may come to

SMOKE-SCREEN DEFENCE AGAINST RAIDERS

During the Great War the Navy used smoke screens with great success to hide the movements of warships from the enemy. The discharge of smoke from aeroplanes, invented by Major Savage, was first used for sky-writing, for advertising purposes, and has now been developed into an important factor in aerial warfare. In this photograph, an army aeroplane belonging to the United States Air Force [sic] is emitting a dense smoke screen over the city of Sacramento, California, to obscure it from the view of enemy air raiders

GAS-PROOF PIGEON-COTE

During the Great War all the belligerents learned that, despite the mechanization of armies, the horse, the dog and the carrier pigeon were still of value on the battlefields, and in the future they will certainly be required for similar purposes. In Germany, where precautions against gas have been rehearsed with characteristic thoroughness, gas-proof pigeon-houses, one of which is here shown, have been devised. The pigeons live in the upper compartment when there is no danger, but when gas is about they are placed in the lower one, which is provided with anti-gas filters

Some of these photographs are very well-known. The one at the top of the Japanese sound locators is usually described as showing 'war tubas' (and cropped and low-resolution compared with this version), but here they are called 'monster ear trumpets': a more apt (if even less martial) description as their function was to detect sound, not to make it. The other sound locators shown here can also be found in many places around the internet.

Of the rest, the kite balloon (or as we, living after the Blitz, would describe it, a barrage balloon) is of the motorised variety described by Cable in the article. The gas-proof pigeon-cote seems to have been chosen at random; it's not mentioned in the article. The same is true of the drawing of the town designed to withstand air attack, but it's a fascinating image. Vauthier is either a French architect who influenced Le Corbusier, or a French general who wrote about Douhetism, or maybe they are one and the same. His basic idea seems to have been to spread buildings out and to build them high with a minimal cross-section from above; that way most bombs will fall on empty ground. It's taken from the Illustrated London News in 1934 (or maybe 1933); Ptak Science Books has more.

In 1910, two Army officers, Second Lieutenant Bowle-Evans and Lieutenant Cammell independently put forward a new idea for an anti-aircraft weapon: the vortex ring gun.

In principal, it involved the formation of a vortex in the air, by the firing of an explosive charge inside a conical 'gun' which, if it were pointed upwards, would propel the vortex towards the intended airborne target on which, it was suggested, the violent air movement within the vortex would have a sufficiently destructive effect. Some practical support for the theory was provided firstly by a Dr Pernter of Germany who had some years earlier carried out some experimental firings which were said to have torn apart birds and other objects, and secondly by the farmers of a large region ranging from Hungary to northern Italy, who appeared to use such guns routinely in the belief that they could disperse hailstorms.

These proposals seem to have been made to the War Office; in any case a year later the Secretary of State for War, Richard Haldane, was corresponding on the subject with Sir Oliver Lodge, the eminent physicist. Lodge told Haldane that 'I really think the thing is worth a trial', but although he proposed acquiring a vortex ring gun from Piedmont for testing purposes it's unclear whether this ever happened.

The idea of using a vortex ring gun for air defence was aired in public at an Aeronautical Society lecture given on 3 December 1913 by Captain C. M. Waterlow, Royal Engineers, on the topic of the 'The coming airship'. In a discussion of the potential for aerial combat between aeroplanes and airships, Waterlow thought the former would be disadvantaged because of its inferior weight-carrying capacity: the airship could afford to be much better armed. This is perhaps not surprising since he was himself an airship pilot. When it came to the weapons which would be used, he suggested vortex rings:

The question of a suitable weapon had hardly been considered, but he would remark that there were great possibilities in the use of vortex rings, such as had been used in France in connection with vineyards. To show the destructive effects that they can produce, he stated that when fired horizontally they were capable of breaking up a wooden fence at a distance of 100 yards.

The basic principle behind vortex ring guns is quite sound: a smoke ring is a common form of vortex ring, and toy vortex guns can bought or even made at home. Practical uses are a bit more dubious. The use of vortex ring guns (or hail cannon) to disperse hailstorms has a long history but little scientific evidence to back it up. More recently, militaries have looked at vortex ring guns as non-lethal weapons, to knock people down, but they don't seem to be able to do this even over a distance as short as 30 metres.

So the utility of vortex rings in air defence seems doubtful -- to us. It wasn't as clear a century ago. Pernter was a respected scientist who demonstrated vortex rings at the British Association in 1903 (and apparently eventually concluded that they didn't work for weather modification, so he wasn't simply a crank). There was at least widespread anecdotal evidence, from the United States as well as Europe, for the effectiveness of hail cannon. And in the era of wood and wire the idea of knocking an aeroplane out of the sky by, more or less, pushing some air at it wasn't as silly as it would have been a decade or two later. They hardly needed any encouragement to crash as it was. (I read Waterlow's reported comment about vortex ring guns in aeroplane vs airship combat as referring to the aeroplane's armament but it seems to me it would profit the airship more.)

However. If we step back and take a broad overview of ideas for anti-aircraft weapons in the first few decades of the twentieth century then, taken as a whole they do look rather mad ('wildly creative' was how I put it in my thesis). Setting aside spiritual forms of air defence, at one extreme there was the death ray, which I've discussed here several times, which had varied proposed applications but was most desired for its ability to stop engines and bring bombers down. At the other are what we would consider mundane anti-aircraft weapons, because they actually existed and were effective to some degree: anti-aircraft guns and balloon barrages. Even these could have some odd ideas attached to them, such as the giant Lee-Enfield rifle described by the Daily Express in 1935. It was sometimes suggested that the cables used to tether Britain's barrage balloons were enhanced somehow, to make them more dangerous beyond the physical damage caused to a colliding aeroplane. Shaw Desmond, in his 1938 novel Chaos, imagined London defended by a balloon apron with 'Lethal wires [...] suspended which, upon contact, could wipe out the enemy bombers automatically'. This was somewhat science-fictional, but around the same time two more serious and well-informed writers, J. M. Spaight and C. C. Turner, also used the word 'lethal' to describe barrage balloon cables: it could just mean 'electrified'.

That was far from the end of the barrage's potential. Desmond also proposed explosive balloons, detonated either by radio or by proximity. Again, he wasn't alone: Stefan Possony, a Czech diplomat Air Ministry official, proposed 'a barrage of bombs suspended either from balloons or some type of machine built on the principle of the helicopter'. He also thought that helicopters or autogyros could be used to replace barrage balloons and fighter interceptors, as they could be armed with guns, bombs and searchlights: any 'aeroplanes, which manage to pierce the wall of ropes, can easily be destroyed by dropping bombs fitted with time fuzes on them'.

Another variation on the barrage used rockets. Arch Whitehouse, writing during the Phoney War, attributed to Harry 'Death Ray' Grindell Matthews the idea of the 'torpedo-rocket', which would explode at a set height 'and release a whole slew of 6-ft. diameter parachutes from which two-pound bombs will dangle at the end of long lengths of entangling steel wires'. J. F. C. Fuller cut out the middleman and proposed using large (anything up to twenty tons) liquid-fuelled rockets to shoot down aircraft directly:

The first nation which discovers how to build a practical rocket of one ton in weight will have at its disposal a most powerful anti-aircraft weapon which, acting like a depth-charge, may render flight in formations highly dangerous.

This too was something Grindell Matthews had been working on in the mid-1930s.

As a last example, J. M. Kenworthy, a Labour MP, past lieutenant-commander in the Royal Navy and the future Lord Strabolgi, claimed in 1927 that 'we now have improved projectiles and improved guns, with gas shells capable of producing a gas barrage in the air'.

Despite the frequent claims, like Kenworthy's, that these weapons were in development or even in service, very few of them ever seem to have been given serious official consideration. But government scientists did sometimes work along the same lines. Experiments with anti-aircraft rockets, though much smaller than Fuller's, eventually bore some fruit, though more for ground attack than air defence. The case of the aerial mine programme is fairly well known, which had the support of Frederick Lindemann, Churchill's confidant and scientific advisor. Aerial mines consisted of a long length of cable with a parachute on one end and a small bomb on the other: bombers would lay these in the path of an oncoming air raid. The idea got a pretty fair run during the Blitz, but was found wanting. Research was also conducted into ways to increase the 'lethality' (there's that word again) of balloon barrage cables by attaching bombs to them. Like the rockets this seems to have been turned into an offensive weapon, as deployed in Operation Outward, Britain's anticipation of the Japanese Fu-Go balloons: 99,000 balloons were released between 1942 and 1944 to drift across the North Sea, about half trailing cables to wreck the German electrical grid and half with incendiaries to start forest fires.

No other form of response to the threat of a knock-out blow from the air elicited such 'wildly creative' technological thinking as did anti-aircraft defences. Many of the ones discussed here do look mad, but the same desire for a defensive superweapon which made the vortex ring gun appealing led to radar (itself inspired by the death ray) and the proximity fuze. It also led, much later, to the Strategic Defense Initiative, of which Possony was an early advocate. Blind alleys are inherent in blue sky research (to mix metaphors); perhaps the price of vigilance is eternal freedom.

Don Charlwood's No Moon Tonight has a reputation as one of the best Bomber Command memoirs. Charlwood was a Victorian who joined the RAAF in 1941, trained as a navigator in Canada under the Empire Air Training Scheme, and then flew in Halifaxes and Lancasters with 103 Squadron at Elsham Wolds. Having survived his tour of 30 ops in 1942 and 1943, he stayed in aviation after the war, albeit on the ground as a civil air traffic controller. No Moon Tonight was originally published in 1956 and was the first of more than a dozen books by Charlwood, some memoirs, some aviation history, some Victorian history. In 1986 he wrote that the book was 'kindly received both in Australia and Britain', and that 'letters from ex-aircrew men of various nationalities began to tell me I had not been alone in my response to the Bomber Command experience'. It's one aspect of that response I'm interested in here: his feelings about the morality of area bombing.

Charlwood wrote himself that this had been one of his reasons for writing No Moon Tonight:

I wanted to give some thought to the morality of the task we were called upon to do -- something that after the war led to widespread condemnation of the bomber offensive.

It's not a question that he ever gives a final judgement on, or even really tries to weigh up; but it does from time to time puncture the narrative with great force. Often it is tied up with the fear of death, his own and that of his comrades. This is a theme which is much in evidence throughout the book, much more so than the morality of area bombing per se, as he notes the loss of other members of his squadron and, which touched him more deeply, of many of the 'Twenty Men', as he called them, his fellow Australian classmates from Canada: twelve were killed flying for Bomber Command.

Charlwood initially questions whether area bombing was just enough to justify the deaths of so many good Allied airmen, not enemy civilians. For example, shortly after joining 103 Squadron, before starting on ops himself (apart from one during operational training), Charlwood learns that another Halifax crew has gone missing after a raid on Cologne. Although he only knew their navigator, Munns, slightly, he knew he was a family man and he starts to brood over the loss (I've added the bold emphasis in all the quotations which follow):

In ten years, would the loss of his [Munns's] life appear justifiable, or would it be evident that he had been led into a wrong or unnecessary course, that he had cast the pearl of his life before swine? Perhaps the only man who should go to Bomber Command was the man who had seen for himself that mass killing was the only way to a better world.

I knew, that day, that I had no such conviction. I felt in need of it. I wished that I could believe that we were bombing evil and making way for good. I wished that I could feel this with the intensity that a father would feel in defending his family with no thought of himself. The only alternative was not to think. We had committed ourselves and could now do nothing. If our service life conflicted with our thinking then our thinking must cease. We could not afford to fritter our strength on endless questioning, or in the luxury of frustration or sorrow.

Similarly, being on ops didn't change his feelings about bombing, but being part of a crew did change how he dealt with them: essentially, he had to suppress them. Late in the winter of 1942-3, Max Bryant, one of the Twenty Men, is posted to Elsham. After talking to Max about squadron life, Charlwood realises that he has found what he never had before, something he calls 'enthusiasm':

I still had little belief in the rectitude of our war or any other war, nor could I believe that more good than evil would arise from our mass bombing. That Keith [Webber] and Wilf Burrows and Col Miller and now, probably, Max himself should die, was still something too ghastly to contemplate. And yet, on the squadron one could not for long admit cynicism, or pessimism, even in the face of the worst. Whatever my frame of mind had been when we had come to Elsham, I realized that now it had changed. Then I had been alone; now I had become one with a crew and a squadron. To demean them was impossible.

Thoughts of what they were actually doing to the people below sometimes intruded during operations. Sort of. Here is Charlwood on an attack on Essen, I think on the night of 13 January 1943. (The photo above was taken of Essen's centre after a raid on 5 March.)

I would try to tell myself then that this was a city, a place inhabited by beings such as ourselves, a place with the familiar sights of civilization. But the thought would carry little conviction. A German city was always this, this hellish picture of flame, gunfire and searchlights, an unreal picture because we could not hear it or feel its breath. Sometimes, when the smoke rolled back and we saw streets or buildings, I felt startled. Perhaps if we had seen the white, upturned faces of people, as over England we sometimes did, our hearts would have rebelled....

That last sentence suggests that, in fact, their hearts did not rebel. They were still troubled, though. Of a raid on Turin on the night of 4 February 1943, Charlwood wrote:

We looked down incredulously. Under the light of the moon the city was mercilessly exposed -- houses, churches, gardens, even statuary along the streets. The crews wheeled and dived, exulting as the Germans exulted over lightly-defended Britain in 1940. And yet, perhaps the minds of the attackers would have been easier if the Italians had attempted to defend their city. As it was, we blew women and children to pieces, unopposed by their men.

To say 'we blew women and children to pieces' is quite explicit. It's almost self-incriminating, except that the blame is displaced onto Italian men for failing to defend their women and children. If it wasn't for that, Charlwood seems to say, he would have felt much better about blowing the women and children of Turin to pieces.

After completing his tour, Charlwood was posted to Lichfield as a navigation instructor. From this period, early summer 1943, he quotes a letter from another of the Twenty Men, Johnnie Gordon, who also has finished his first tour. Gordon is even blunter about his qualms:

'Sometimes my conscience troubles me about the blind mass-murdering of the "main force". I think Bomber Command's policy is fixed too relentlessly on mere victory by annihilation. That is impossible. Britain at present seems to lack men who can look beyond the victory. I think Bomber Command's policy, though it makes the victory more certain and earlier, may make a real peace impossible.'

Here, the 'blind mass-murdering of the "main force"' (the heavy bomber groups which comprised the bulk of Bomber Command), which used area bombing tactics, is implicitly contrasted with the precision bombing of the Pathfinders and, even more, 617 Squadron, which had spectacularly broken the Ruhr dams only a month or two before. In fact soon afterwards, Gordon turns up in Lichfield on leave and tells Charlwood that he has volunteered for another tour, this time with the Dam Busters. Charlwood asks him straight out what he thinks of area bombing (which he usually refers to as 'mass bombing'):

'What is your opinion of the mass bombing the main force do?' I said.

'I don't like it,' he answered. 'I suppose it achieves its purpose, but it's wrong. Now it has reached fantastic proportions and we haven't anyone big enough to stop it. I suppose it will go on until all the beauty and culture are bombed out of Europe.'

Later Gordon asks Charlwood why he thinks he volunteered for 617 Squadron:

'[...] Why do you think I volunteered for special duties? Tell me honestly now. I have such a poor opinion of my own motives that I won't mind what you say.'

I said, 'It might have been because you believed mass bombing to be wrong and this move was perhaps a sort of atonement. That and the fascination of ops life.'

Nowhere in this section does Charlwood indicate his own opinion of area bombing, whether he agreed with his friend's critique or not. He himself tried unsuccessfully to get back onto ops with a regular squadron, but tellingly only as part of his old crew: comradeship was more important than life or death, his own or others.

Because No Moon Tonight was written in the decade after the war, it is difficult to know to what extent Charlwood's memory of his thoughts and feelings during it might have changed by the time he came to set them down in writing. 1956 was not 1943 and, whether consciously or not, events in the years in between might have introduced biases. As noted above, he himself referred to 'widespread condemnation of the bomber offensive' after the war as a reason why he discussed the morality question. That could have led him to give more weight to it in his book than he had done during the war itself. (Though 'widespread condemnation' strikes me as more characteristic of the 1980s, when he wrote those words, than the 1950s, and more of Britain than Australia.)

The passage about 617 Squadron and the suggestion that it carried out a less morally suspect form of strategic bombing is also interesting. The film version of The Dam Busters came out in 1955, the year before Charlwood's book, and was a big success in Australia as in Britain. Perhaps, just as Charlwood suggested Gordon joined the Dam Busters as an atonement, the success of the film functioned as a sort of atonement by proxy for him. But he doesn't mention the film (or Paul Brickhill's book) so that's only speculation on my part.

Finally, one postwar context which can be glimpsed in No Moon Tonight is the Cold War. Of the briefing before his crew's final op, Charlwood writes:

Burton and Harding his Canadian navigator peered at the screen, listening to the usual recitation of defences, Pathfinder plans and weather. So it would go on after tonight had passed; so it might go on for another generation in another war against another enemy.

In 1956, 'another war against another enemy' was very much a possibility. The wartime alliance had fractured into opposing camps. The former enemy had itself been split into two: in May 1955 West Germany was admitted into NATO and the same month East Germany became a founding member of the Warsaw Pact. A war would have been fought with new weapons: both the United States and the Soviet Union now had hydrogen bombs, the latter first testing its version in 1955. But Charlwood's intuition that the same scenes he had witnessed would be reenacted probably wasn't too far off the mark: the year before Sputnik, nukes were still carried by bombers. Not long after Charlwood's No Moon Tonight was published and not many miles away, Nevil Shute would have been writing On The Beach. Is it fanciful to suggest that in his own way Charlwood was responding to the same existential threat to civilisation as Shute?

Charlwood did keep a wartime diary, which he quoted from occasionally, both here and probably in Journeys Into Night (which I haven't read, but is based on the diaries and letters of The Twenty). The State Library of Victoria holds a copy of his diary; if I'm there with a spare hour or two I must have a look at it.

FORETASTE OF THE FUTURE

Of all the forms of gas used in the Great War, that which had the least disastrous consequences was "tear gas." Its effect was to inflict temporary blindness on those who came in contact with it. This pathetic row of figures show men temporarily blinded in that way on the Western Front in April, 1918. Affecting as this scene is, the results of the deadly gases of today would be infinitely worse.

Another batch of photographs of 'Things of tomorrow'. After 'Death from the skies', 'The doom of cities', 'New horrors of air attack', and 'If war should come', there followed (and note the shift from the indefinite to the definite) Boyd Cable, 'When war does come: terrifying effects of gas attacks', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 272-4.

Cable's theme this time is the extreme difficulty of defence against poison gas:

I confess that an examination of the methods officially recommended for protection against gas and for the decontamination and treatment of gas casualties is apt to create a depressing feeling of impotence and doubt as to the possibility of escape for more than a small fraction of the people.

These methods include the preparation of a gas-proof refuge in every home and the provision of gas masks for every individual. But can people live for hours on end confined in their gas refuges? Can small children be persuaded to wear gas masks? Moreover, gas masks will not guard against contact gases like mustard and lewisite, which require full-body protection; and 'There is no possibility and no intention of providing such an elaborate outfit for all non-combatants in this or any other densely populated country'.

Paint and wood absorb poison gas so thoroughly that there is no way to decontaminate them short of incineration: 'A badly gassed house would, therefore, require the destruction of doors, window frames, floors, stairs, and wooden furniture'. It might be possible to remove gas from wooden paving, concrete and stone if they were quickly hosed down, but whether this would be practicable with buildings broken and mains burst by high explosive is anyone's guess.

Cable stresses that he not being in the least bit imaginative in his description of the effects of gas, and refers readers to the Home Office's official handbooks or to the Red Cross for 'still more of the ghastly details'. And,

There is always a possibility or probability that new gases have been discovered and are being kept secret for use only when war does come, and that these may defeat our methods of protection and decontamination.

While he sceptical of ARP generally, Cable allows that is as well for families to be aware of the steps they can take to minimise the danger from gas; and the emergency workers who have been trained to control crowds of scared people may save many lives by leading them to safety.

But the greatest hope of the most practical results coming from all this teaching and drilling all over Europe, is that the people of every country are learning what gas attacks must mean to civilian non-combatants. The more thoroughly the people of each nation understand that War means Air War, and that Air War means inescapable and horrible death to hundreds of thousands, or to millions, the more we may hope that no nation will allow its rulers to lead or drag it into war.

GAS BOMBER GETS THROUGH

A scene such as that here depicted might easily occur if even one aeroplane got through the defences of a city and dropped a few gas bombs. Police and Red Cross men only are protected against the fumes, and the panic-stricken passengers from the omnibus have little chance of reaching a gas-proof shelter before they are overcome.

AT THE LAST GASP

This scene from Mr. Wells' film "Things to Come" is a forecast of the terrible possibilities of a future war. It shows what might happen in any great city after aerial raiders, dropping gas bombs, had passed over it. Men with steel helmets and gas masks are administering first aid to those caught in the deadly fumes of a gas bomb.

I get the feeling that War in the Air's pictures editor is starting to run out of ideas here. Affecting the photograph of the soldiers may be, but as the caption notes their blindness is temporary: hardly a portent of the collapse of civilisation. The passengers leaving the double-decker look to me no more hurried than they might be on any chilly night, certainly not 'panic-stricken'. And how much more free publicity does Things To Come need? Note what can't apparently be shown: an actual photograph of a gas victim scarred and burned by gas. Instead there are only mock air raids, drawings and film sets, and one image of soldiers with no visible wounds who will recover from their affliction. Flesh must be made to creep, but only so far.

WILL THEY BE A COMMON SIGHT?

Officers of the St. Johns Ambulance Brigade, who, in their black and white uniforms, are familiar and friendly figures to Londoners, are now preparing for the possibility that grim and terrible duties may one day fall to their lot. A number of them have recently received instruction in a hall beneath one of London's biggest blocks of flats in methods of first aid in the streets, in the use of shelters and airlocks and the gas-proofing of private premises. A group of them is here seen clothed from head to foot in anti-gas equipment

These photographs are from the fourth of a series of articles on the future of aerial warfare: Boyd Cable, 'If war should come', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 201-4. The preceding articles were 'Death from the skies', 'The doom of cities', and 'New horrors of air attack'.

Cable's article concentrates on two aspects of the next war. The first is life after the exodus from the great cities expected after a knock-out blow from the air. This happened to an extent even after the air raids in the Great War, and Cable says that it is 'Beyond question' that next time 'the increased horrors will augment the terror and the urge to get into the country', which will become crowded with refugees. But in seeking safety from the bombs they will be exposing themselves to the danger of starvation and disease:

Obviously, if no more than one or two million people are spilled out of a city into the miles of country around it, the highly developed system of sanitation and essential supplies to which they have been accustomed will be entirely lacking [...] In such circumstances, disease and epidemics would spread like wildfire among them.

Even in the best of circumstances, it would be next to impossible to care for such a flood of people. In wartime, the problem would be insoluble: the attack would probably come suddenly, giving authorities no time to prepare, and enemy bombers would also be attacking the ports from which the food must come. Providing clean drinking water for hundreds of thousands of refugees would also be impossible. In a week, starvation and typhoid would be stalking them.

And there would be no guarantee that the enemy would not attack them even dispersed in the countryside:

Bombers would simply rain incendiary bombs on any patch of woodland and set it blazing from end to end, or drench the wood with poison gas which would contaminate trees, grass and earth for weeks, and turn it into a death-trap and charnel house.

Add to this the horror of bacteriological warfare. Cable admits that this presents difficulties for the aggressor, as epidemic infections are no respecters of national borders and may end up infecting those who spread them. But

Such a consideration is not so likely to deter an attacker of Britain, however, for it would be a simple matter to prevent any infected person or animal from carrying the germs from their country back to the Continent.

Also, he notes evidence that nations are anyway prepared to take the risk, Germany in particular. He notes (quoting here Dr Gertud Woker, a Swiss professor of chemistry) 'the notorious Zurich "bomb and bacilli" case' during the last war; 'a machine for spraying disease germs' said to have been made 'under the direction of Herr Himmler, Munich police commander'; and the secret German experimentation with germ circulation in the Paris Metro, which caused a sensation there in 1934 (oddly, he doesn't mention that the experiments were supposedly carried out in the London Underground too).

Still, Cable concludes on a relatively optimistic note:

Certainly town populations will be safer in the open country than in their own homes, if they can keep moderately scattered. It might even pay an enemy, as a military measure, to leave them reasonably unmolested while they keep out of the towns, because a people living in fields and forests would stop all munition and war work.

FAR WORSE THINGS MAY COME

"Darkness and composure," which it was suggested were the best means of countering the first Zeppelin raids, will be useless against poison gas attacks from the air. There will be a headlong flight from the gas-contaminated cities to the open country, and such scenes as this, when the Belgian people fled before the advancing German armies, will be repeated on a vastly greater and more terrible scale, with the added horror of panic

EVERYWHERE THE FEAR OF GAS

It is obviously impossible to reproduce in peace time the horrible conditions of an actual attack by aerial raiders dropping gas bombs, but in nearly every European country the people of the cities have gone through a course of anti-gas drill, not only for practice purposes, but with the idea of familiarizing the public with such possibilities. Here are girls leaving a house in Munich that has been filled with gas. They wear anti-gas clothing but are not fully equipped with gas masks. Below, first-aid men are helping a woman from a bombed house during a mimic raid on Berlin

HE CARRIES POISON

The gases which would be used in chemical warfare of the future cling to the ground for many hours and precautions must be taken lest the stretcher-bearers should take them into the hospitals. Here their boots are being cleansed of gas during anti-gas instruction course at Salisbury

AS THE ITALIANS DO

In Rome anti-gas precautions are very thorough. Here, during gas drill, chemicals are being spread on the steps of the Ministry of Defence as antidotes to the fumes left by gas bombs

There's a disconnect here between the illustrations and the text. Only the one showing a press of Belgian refugees in 1914 actually pertains at all to one of Cable's topics, giving an idea of what the exodus would be like. All the rest are about precautions for chemical warfare, not biological warfare; and there's no attempt to portray the starvation- and disease-ridden crowds of scared Londoners hiding in Epping Forest. Probably because these things are difficult to represent (what would they choose? Scientists looking through microscopes? Mass starvation in India?) but also because, for its part, bacteriological warfare was not actually high on anyone's civil defence agenda. Also, gas and germs tended to be elided in the public mind, somewhat. Also, pictures of people in gas masks are so vivid and striking that it was an easy an effective way of getting the message (i.e. be afraid!) across. In fact, so vivid and striking that I couldn't resist putting the ambulance men at the top of the post, even though they don't appear until the third page of Cable's article.

SUCH THINGS WILL HAPPEN

In April, 1935, a Kentish Voluntary Aid Detachment of the British Red Cross Society conducted an air raid rehearsal. Here Red Cross men wearing box respirators and anti-gas clothing are rescuing a woman caught by gas in the open. With a heavy concentration of the deadly gases that modern chemists have now evolved there is little chance she would survive for more than a few minutes.

These images are from Boyd Cable, 'New horrors of air attack', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 143-6, the third article in a series on 'Things of tomorrow', following on 'Death from the skies' and 'The doom of cities'.

Here Cable really steps up the scaremongering by examining the destructive powers of bombers. For example:

• 'An explosive or "brianz" bomb of about 1,000 lb. will now demolish a whole block of houses, even if it only falls close to and not on them'.
• A thermite incendiary can burn at up to 5000°C:
  

  It will melt steel, eat through stone, cause anything even moderately inflammable near it to burst into flames. Water actually increases the incendiary effect, and there is no known means of extinguishing the mixture.

• 'A formation of ten bombers can start 10,000 fires in a city.'
• On 'poison-gas bombers':
  

  It will almost be a matter of indifference to the bombers whether their poison kills or injures 5 per cent. or 50 per cent. of their victims. The main purpose will be achieved by forcing all air defence workers who have gas-masks to put them and wear them continuously, and by inflicting such torture and death, by choking and blistering gas, on even a small proportion of men, women and children drive the panic-stricken people into mad stampeding efforts to fly from the area.

• On new gases: 'only those in the laboratories of the various nations know what other terrors have been invented and kept hidden but ready for the next war'.
• On mustard gas: 'Anyone walking on it or brushing against it, carries the poison into house or dug-out, where it vaporizes and kills'.
• On Lewisite:
  

  Bombers carrying 16 cwt. of Lewisite can spread a 20-foot-thick blanket of deadly poison over one square mile. Putting it another way, 10 bombers carrying 5,000 lb. of Lewisite each can poison an area of 10 miles long by seven miles wide.

• On the prospects for civil defence:
  

  It is plainly impossible that entire cities can be made impervious to explosive or incendiary bombs, and no less impossible that all the men, women and children in our cities can be provided with the 'essential' masks and 'special clothing' to protect us all against all the various types of poison gas.

Unsurprisingly, Cable can offer little hope to his readers. The only defence is deterrence, the ability to do the same to any attacker; beyond that,

It may be a question whether it would pay the most sadistic seeker of victory so to wreck and ruin an enemy country that at the finish the smoking ruins of cities, the maimed, crippled, disease-ravaged population would not be worth the conquering, possessing and ruling.

And maybe, just maybe, air defence, which he hints he will discuss in a future article.

MASKED AGAINST DEATH

These are men of a Voluntary Aid Detachment undergoing anti-gas instruction at Winchester. They are wearing the latest type of box respirator, and the grotesque and horrible appearance that the equipment gives them emphasizes the ghastliness of the form of warfare for which they are prepared.

RAID PAST: DEATH STILL LURKS

Here is a scene in a Berlin street after a mimic air raid. In this quarter of the city, mustard gas was actually used, and road sweepers, equipped with masks and anti-gas clothing, are cleansing the contaminated streets which would otherwise have emitted poisonous fumes for many hours after the raid was over.

JAPAN PREPARES FOR GAS ATTACK

In Japan, anti-gas drill has been carried out under Government control with the same thoroughness that it has been in Germany, and the traffic of cities has been held up while war-time conditions were reproduced. This photograph shows a scene near Nippon Bridge, Tokio, while a mimic raid was in progress. Soldiers, police and ambulance men in gas-masks are attending to those who have been gassed, and civilians, including women and children, have been pressed into service to represent casualties.

HOW DEATH COMES FROM THE AIR

After Germany re-armed in the air, opportunity was taken not only to let the people see the efficiency of the men and machines but also to give them visual warning of possible 'things to come.' Here models of scattered buildings have been erected and a squadron of aeroplanes swooping down demonstrates the accuracy of aim now possible. The bomb seen exploding is of a new type, capable of completely obliterating a substantial building.

Some of these photographs bear on earlier posts. The one of the crowd of men wearing gas masks is a differently cropped version of a photo published in Poison Gas (London: Union of Democratic Control, 1935) which I reproduced here (I think it was taken at the same exercise as the top photograph). The Tokyo exercise predates the Japanese ARP posters discussed here by at least a year or two, showing that fear of gas attacks was growing even in the mid-1930s. And the final shot of the Luftwaffe's biplane bombers attacking mock buildings looks very much like a Hendon set-piece analogue.

RAIN OF BOMBS

Milan's wonderful cathedral is here shown under a rain of dummy bombs dropped by 80 aeroplanes during recent manoeuvres of the Italians. To make the display more impressive and to ascertain the results with more certainty, luminous "bombs" were used and fell in a fiery rain upon the city -- a dire portent of future terrors

The images in this post are from Boyd Cable, 'The doom of cities', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 96-8. It was Cable's second article in a series on 'Things of tomorrow'. The text doesn't actually connect with the illustrations very well. Cable's main point is given away in the title, that in the next war cities will be ruthlessly destroyed from the air, since 'the murderous slaughter of non-combatants' is the most effective way to force a nation to surrender. While he notes that some experts are sceptical of this (Captain Turner, late of Woolwich Arsenal, Lord Castlerosse, Frederick Handley Page), he argues that 'they are flatly contradicted both by the known facts of the last war and by the preparations which we know have been made in anticipation of the next great struggle'.

Today, and as far as we can see into the future, War first of all means Air War; and Air War spells, literally and actually, the "doom of cities."

IF GAS BOMBS COME

Registered air raid shelters are one of the precautions provided in Berlin against the dangers of air raids. During practice raids on Berlin these shelters are brought into use, and here mothers and children are seen gathered in a bomb and gas proof dug-out while while the officer in charge reads aloud the official instructions to civilians in time of air raids

REALISM IN BERLIN

Rehearsals of air raid precautions in Berlin have been carried out with characteristic German thoroughness and realism. This photograph shows a motor-car which has actually been set on fire to show what disasters might occur in an actual raid

STAGING DESTRUCTION

Another example of such thoroughness is seen in this photograph showing debris piled high in a street in the Kreuzberg section of Berlin as a grim warning of what might happen if a house were struck by a bomb. But Berlin has never been bombed and no thoroughness in mock destruction can reproduce the panic of the people in a real air raid

On the illustrations, the implication is that since Britain's potential enemies are taking civil defence seriously, Britain should too. In fact, British civil defence had only just begun a few months before this article would have been published (in July 1935, when the first ARP Circular was issued to local governments by the Home Office), so it was in its very early stages. Italy and Germany had been holding quite public civil defence exercises for some years, so it's not surprising that they would be held up as exemplars. But it is surprising (or at least it was to me) to then discover that during the Second World War Italy's ARP, in particular, was actually quite primitive compared with Britain's. (See Claudia Baldoli, Andrew Knapp and Richard Overy, eds, Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe 1940-1945 (London: Continuum, 2011.) The British certainly made up for lost time.

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

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

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

The images in this post are from Boyd Cable, 'Death from the skies', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 20-4 (see below).

The article itself is a short story describing an air raid in the next war. I won't summarise it in detail, but it argues for the futility of both air defence and civil defence. The RAF's interceptors never even encounter the enemy bombers (in part because they are stealthy thanks to their silenced engines, only 20% as loud as normal aircraft engines). Though the populace has been drilled well and resists panic, at least at first, they are too vulnerable. A first wave of bombers uses high explosives to block the streets with rubble, making it impossible for fire engines to pass; the second drops incendiaries which set the city ablaze and, crucially, force civilians out of their shelters; and the final wave drops poison gas, which starts killing the now-exposed people on the streets. Now the panic starts and the mob flees, their suffering increased by strafing raiders. The RAF now has its chance, but the city is doomed...

"Proof enough of what we've said so long," growled the one [Air Staff officer]. "Defence as such is a wash-out. Attack is the only useful form of defence."

"If we can hit them harder and faster and oftener than they can hit us, we win," said the other. "We can do it, too, if we have more bombers -- men and machines -- than they have."

"Yes -- if," said the other wearily. "That's what we were arguing as far back as the first R.A.F. expansion scheme in -- what was it -- 1935 and '6, wasn't it?"

THINGS TO COME?

H.G. Wells, in his pre-war fantasy, "The War in the Air," proved himself an astonishing prophet, a fact that makes these "stills" from his film "Things to Come," depicting an air raid in the next war, as disturbing to consider as they are terrible to look upon.

REHEARSAL FOR DEATH

Anti-air raid drills on a mass scale have become a feature of German life. This photograph shows an elaborately staged rehearsal of a gas-bomb attack as it might affect civilians, held in the Technical High School at Charlottenburg, near Berlin.

APPREHENSION...

In "Everytown," a city of the very near future, a crowd watch and strain their ears for the first signs of approaching enemy aircraft; an A.A. gun is ready for action. The photograph is a "still" from H.G. Wells's film, "Things to Come," and though, were war to come, the street would be deserted and lights out, it suggests the atmosphere of apprehension.

... AND THEN INFERNO

In vivid and horrible contrast to the scene in the previous page are these two further impressions of a city's doom, the first representing the street a few moments only after the raid commenced, the second the same street the following day. Though again the limitations of the film studio have perhaps happily prevented the full frightfulness from being shown, there is enough of horror to suggest the fate that may overtake troops and civilians alike in the next war.

Actually, the corresponding scene in Things to Come wasn't set the next day; or at least there's no indication it's not part of the air raid sequence itself.

NIGHTMARE OF THE FUTURE

This reproduction of a German artist's idea of a scene in London during an air raid in the next war forms in all probability an all too lamentably accurate forecast. It has been suggested in responsible quarters that 100 aeroplanes could stifle a great city with a gas cloud that would rise many yards from the earth, an idea even more terrifying than the though of high-explosive bombs.

War in the Air was a partwork issued weekly, costing 7d. The first issue, in which this article would have appeared, came out on 7 November 1935, a few days before Armistice Day; once complete, all the issues were collected together in a bound volume (which is what I have) around the middle of 1936.

Boyd Cable was the pseudonym of Ernest Andrew Ewart, a Boer War veteran and newspaper correspondent during the First World War. I'm not aware of any specific expertise he might have had in aviation outside of his war experience, though he did write several books with suggestive titles: Air Men o'War (really?), The Flying Courier, Air Activity, The Soul of the Aeroplane: the Rolls-Royce Engine (okay, that one's particularly suggestive). He wrote a number of other 'Things of Tomorrow' stories in like vein for War in the Air, which I'll discuss in future posts.

The editor, Sir John Hammerton, was the doyen of partworks; Harmsworth's Universal Encyclopedia sold 12 million copies, and I suspect the wartime The Great War:The Standard History of the All-Europe Conflict and the 1933 A Popular History of the Great War (among other works) were highly influential in shaping the memory of the First World War. (Dan Todman in The Great War: Myth and Memory suggests that these and similar partworks have been neglected by historians, just what I was thinking!) War in the Air also devoted a lot of space to that war, but it was also explicitly framed as a warning about the next war, as the advertisement above, from Daily Express, 7 November 1935, 4, shows:

A Book of Vital Importance to every man, woman and child in the British Empire, called into being by the most urgent problem of our time

WAR IN THE AIR, while brilliantly recording the stirring story of the Past, is mainly concerned with the Future and this, the first publication to deal with the subject in its entirety, gives a vivid picture of the dread menace of aerial warfare [...]

THIS is no mere book of thrills and startling pictures, it is a living, vital thing that ought to enter into your life and help you the better to bear your part in the most urgent need of our time -- the need to make Britain as powerful in the Air as in times gone by she was dominant at sea.

Amidst the scaremongering there's a very hard sell going on here, and not a little hyperbole too ('the most important and significant publication issued in this country for a generation'!) But mixing profit and patriotism never did any harm.

In June 1936, Flight published a short story entitled 'If, 193-? A conjectural story'. It's interesting as an example of an air force view of the next war. That is, for the RAF it goes pretty much according to plan: the enemy's attempt at a knock-out blow against Britain fails, whereas the RAF plays a key part in Britain's victory. The author and illustrator, H. F. King, was only 21 or so when this story was published; in July 1940 he became a pilot officer in the RAF, and after 1945 wrote a number of books about aeroplanes (including a couple of entries in the authoritative Putnam series). I don't know what his relationship to the RAF was at this point, but he seems to have been pretty well-informed. Or perhaps he just read his Flight cover to cover every week.

The situation is as follows:

Through indefensible aggression Eurland had secured a number of Continental bases, the nearest being not more 400 miles distant from the English coast. It was apparent that the enemy intended to push his way toward the coast and to acquire additional aerodromes from which to operate all manner of aircraft, including his short-range fighters.

One of the few characters in the story, a planespotting young ship's engineer (perhaps modelled on the author himself) muses that it was 'Funny to be thinking about war with Eurland, of all countries. Still, there was no accounting for the machinations of the politicians'. The reader should NOT identify this 'Eurland' with any real Germany, as an editorial comment makes clear. Did I say 'Germany'? Sorry, I meant 'country'.

THIS story is not intended as a forecast. Indeed, any mention of politics, foreign countries or exact period have purposely been omitted. Rather it is intended to tell something of what might be expected should Great Britain be attacked from the air after her Royal Air Force has been made stronger than it is to-day.

This last sentence gives the game away: the story is an argument for the continuation of RAF rearmament (i.e. the one triggered by German rearmament), which had begun only a year or so earlier. King has a paragraph on how expansion has fared by the fateful year of 193-:

Some of the fighter units were still flying the Gauntlet. More were using the four-gun Gladiator and the improved Fury. The Hawker monoplane was just beginning to percolate into the Service and threatened to turn all fighter tactics topsy-turvy. We had scores of Blenheims, Battles, and Wellesleys, in addition to the obsolescent Hinds and Ansons. Our heavy bombers included the Heyford and Hendon (both due for replacement), the Whitley, and various types of more modern design.

'None of these' latter, King remarks, 'bore any trace of the slackening in the pace of bomber development during 1933, when the British Government recommended restrictions on the all-up weight of bombing aircraft', presumably referring to Britain's proposals at the World Disarmament Conference.

While Eurland's ground forces are advancing towards the coast, its bombers 'do their utmost to terrorise London'. Without air bases closer to Britain than 400 miles away, they must attack without fighter escort. Ten squadrons of twin- and four-engined bombers take off at midday and arrive over the Channel about 2pm. There they are met by the RAF:

the Gladiators and Furies had torn into the enemy formations on their way to London. Of the machines which had reached the Metropolis the majority had released their bombs south of the river. Whether by accident or judgement, a complete salvo fell in Kingston not many hundred yards from the Hawker factory. Three hundred dead were reported from the suburbs, and a quarter that number from the city. A number of large fires were started [...]

'London trembled at the thought of the night', but has protection in the form of 'night fighters, anti-aircraft guns and searchlights, the sound locators, and the Observer Corps'. Trawlers and destroyers reported the passage of enemy aircraft overhead, as did the yeomen of England:

Somewhere in Kent a little band of villagers -- one of many -- sworn in as Special Constables, took up their vantage points to wait for the raiders they knew must come and to report their height and direction. There was the parson, farmers and the baker, each inwardly thrilled that he was taking part in defending this, his country. As the schoolboys on the village green shouldered their bats and stumps and chattered off into the dusk, a car hummed up the hill and pulled into the roadside, and the constable started forward to open the door for the rubicund squire, who eased himself out on to the grass and snapped at his spaniel to camouflage his excitement.

Such scenes were common all over south-eastern England [...]

The information supplied by all these sources suggests that five waves of Eurland bombers were coming up the Thames for London. Eighty fighters (Gauntlets, Gladiators and Demons) are sent up to patrol Essex and Kent at 12,000 ft. One type in particular has some success:

The Gladiators represented the last of the dog-fighters -- highly manœuvrable biplanes in a class developed by Great Britain to a higher pitch than by any other power. Their spectacular tactics, however -- utilising incredible dives, zooms and turns were soon to be rendered obsolete with the advent of the 300 m.p.h. fighters, which showed that aerial tumbling could be performed only at comparatively low speeds. Anyone attempting to defy the laws of nature was whisked into temporary oblivion by "g" -- a force of unbounded power unleashed by the slightest movements of the hands.

But many bombers get through to London:

A large percentage of the projectiles contained gas, for which London was barely ready, but it was chiefly the high-explosive bombs which made that night so devilish that even the destroyers were stunned by the horror of their handiwork.

Even so, 'It would take many a night's bombing to reduce London to the heaps of ruins talked about so glibly in the pre-war Press'.

And what of Britain's own bombers? The heavies are held back until the enemy munition stores are located, but as soon as the first Eurland raid is detected, the RAF launches immediate 'reprisals' -- not against the enemy's cities but its airfields, so that 'in the event of their return, the enemy squadrons should be unable to recognise their aerodromes'. This is a job for the Blenheims whose 'superlative speed and medium-weight bomb load place them in a class which was much to be desired'. The eight Blenheim squadrons actually pass the first enemy raiders over the Channel, but neither side 'dared deviate one degree from its set course, for an engagement would have ruined any chance of success in its primary mission'. They continue at high speed towards the Eurland frontier, there meeting enemy fighters:

They would have to be good to break the Bristol formation. What luck. Fanhar 34s. No more than 250 flat out -- if that. But plenty to cope with. There must have been fifty of them. And he was the bull's-eye. Funny. Here he was leading a British force in the first aerial battle since 1918, and all his duty required of him was to open the throttle a bit wider.

Then a pneumatic drill got to work on his windscreen and instrument board. It danced around gaily, shattering the glass and clipping fragments from the casings. A boost gauge gone; a rev. counter....

Eight of the Blenheims are shot down and about the same number of Fanhars, meaning that the defenders had about twice the loss rate as the attackers. The Blenheims do their job, as one of the aircrew reflects: 'the personnel of certain squadrons, in the somewhat questionable event of their return, would go without their tea'.

After the first day, the air war repeated the same patterns but with less intensity. Eurland's 'Bombers tried for dockyards, factories, aerodromes' but find it difficult to penetrate inland.

They learned respect for the "Archies" and searchlights in the darkness of the suburbs; for the Furies which seemed to leap at them from the ground; for the incredibly fast Hawker monoplanes which showed themselves more frequently and chased them back to the coast.

For their part, the RAF's bombers had to concentrate on the ground war: 'although they managed to delay the advance of the Eurland forces toward the coast, they failed to stem it entirely'. After two months of war, Eurland arrives at the coast, taking 'four bases just across the Channel from which the fastest of her fighters could be over English soil in fifteen minutes'. The RAF harasses the airfield construction (using Hinds) and makes 'a great concerted effort to wipe out some of the main munition factories'. But it also becomes aware of rumours that Eurland

planned to follow up a period of intensive bombardment on the coastal districts of England by landing troops from a fleet of warships and commandeered liners said to be assembling at a port about 400 miles. Although there was little case to fear him on the sea, it was deemed advisable to send a reasonably strong force to reconnoitre the harbour and at the same time to inflict all possible damage on the shipping.

This operation is carried out by Singapore flying boats and Heyford bombers at dawn (see the illustrations above):

Out of the early morning mists swept the green and silver armada and, by good fortune, caught the entire harbour unprepared. As the Heyfords arranged themselves for their attack they seemed to give the observers in the Singapores just time to note the appearance of the target in its entirety. Then salvos crashed into quays, warehouses and through the thin, unarmoured decks of merchant ships ranged alongside. If ever a plan existed to use that fleet for the invasion of England an extensive revision of the programme was necessary.

The enemy fighters find it difficult to engage the Singapores skimming low over the water's surface, as they are unable to attack from below. The British bombers return home without loss.

The RAF now has the upper hand over Eurland's air force; apparently its counterforce strategy has paid off. Indeed, the war is soon over:

The turning point of the war was a week's merciless bombardment in all weathers by British machines on the big Eurland centres. Day and night, bombers of every type flew out over the Channel, to return, perhaps, after a few hours to rearm and fly off again. On one occasion a squadron of Wellesleys penetrated so far inland that it found the depot which it was to bomb almost completely lacking in defence against air attack.

One evening a squadron of Battles returning from a raid reported much less opposition than was usual. That same night, when well on its way to the target, a squadron of Whitleys was recalled by wireless. And that signified only one thing.

'If, 193-?' is interesting as prediction. Based on the aircraft is use one might pick 1938 as the 'actual' year. But in some ways it's 1940, when Germany advanced to the Channel coast in a few weeks, took aerodromes within fighter range of southern England and began to prepare an invasion force. In most ways, of course, it's not (and one could just as easily say it's 1934, when the Army got money for a Field Force to secure the Low Countries against their occupation and use as a launch site for a knock-out blow, or 1909, when bolts from the blue were all the rage). It seems odd now to read that fast monoplane fighters (the not-yet-Hurricane and the largely unknown Spitfire) would make dogfights a thing of the past; but biplanes are more manoeuvrable in general, and without much experience to go on it wasn't an absurd idea. The special constables/Observer Corps thing, with its popular basis, seems a bit like an airminded Home Guard; though the idealised vision of village life is hardly Tom Wintringham.

As I said, King's scenario pretty much is as the RAF would have written it; some of the episodes even sound like they were inspired by certain of the Hendon set pieces, and it seems a bit unsporting that the British bombers fare are able to press home their attacks in the teeth of air defences when the enemy bombers are not. I'm not sure how closely the idea that counter-bombing aerodromes and aircraft factories in retaliation for a knock-out blow corresponded to actual RAF doctrine; but it was widely described to the public as such in the 1930s. It certainly avoided thorny questions about the morality of bombing cities; and King is noticeably coy on this point when it comes to describing the effects on civilians of British bombing of Eurland's 'centres'. 'If, 193-?' is a relatively rare attempt to imagine the next war in a way that didn't scare the hell out of its readers. But remember that proviso: if. If the RAF continues to expand. P. R. C. Groves and other pro-rearmament writers who did try to scare the hell out of their readers did so by envisaging a world where the RAF was not big enough. King was really just showing the other side of the same coin.