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The superweapon and the Anglo-American imagination — II

20 November 2009 in 1930s, Aircraft, Periodicals, Quotes by Brett Holman | 2 comments

In June 1935, the Daily Express ran a story about three ’secret British air devices’. The source was a story in the Chicago Tribune by that paper’s London correspondent, John Steele:

The devices are declared to be a new “mirage” smoke screen, a new seventeen-foot long anti-aircraft rifle, and a robot airplane which, controlled by wireless, can charge an enemy formation.1.

The bare descriptions perhaps don’t sound so improbable, but the details … well, judge for yourself. ‘Mirage’ was composed of different coloured smokes which created a decoy townscape:

“Brick red, yellow, grey, brown, and black smoke fumes, spreading across the landscape horizontally at different heights from the ground, or, as in the case of the black smoke, rising vertically in columns, create a complete illusion of houses, factory chimney stacks, streets, rivers, and gardens.2

This level of detail and control over smoke seems improbable to me. But supposedly Mirage had been tested in exercises, and had completely fooled some RAF bombers which had been ordered to ‘bomb’ Croydon; instead they dropped their bombs twenty miles away on open fields!

How about the AA rifle? According to Steele, it was 17 feet long, had a range of 20,000 feet and fired cartridges weighing 39 ounces (2.4 pounds). Again, this isn’t too implausible, on the face of it. But wait:

It is precisely like a giant Lee-Enfield with similar sighting apparatus.

“There is an artificial shoulder for the rifle made of rubber, while the rifleman lies on a small platform above the weapon and takes sight. No human frame could support the recoil.3

It doesn’t sound like any AA gun I’ve heard of, but I suppose it could be a garbled description of some predecessor to the 3.75 inch QF. It’s a bizarre mental image though; and iron sights wouldn’t be much use at 20,000 feet.

As for the robotic Drake:

This airplane, rising above a bombing squadron flying in formation, can keep up a perpetual hail of machine-gun fire, the firing being done automatically under remote control.

“The robot can be heavily loaded with high explosive and from below made to charge like a bull into a formation, and then be exploded by wireless.

“The explosives, projecting inflammable bullets, would fire the [fuel] tanks of the enemy, or even, if close enough, turn the enemy turtle.4

No robot fighter aircraft like this existed in 1935 (although the the DH.82B Queen Bee, a radio-controlled variant of the Tiger Moth, was in use by then as a target tug, and became public around then). It does sound something like Ram, a project under development by the Air Ministry in the late 1920s but which was cancelled in 1930. Ram was briefly under reconsideration in 1935, due to advances in radio technology, but nothing came of it.5

My point here is not so much that these secret weapons didn’t exist (though clearly that’s what I do think), but that the British press was not interested in the possibility that they did: the Express was the only national daily which relayed the Tribune report (well, nearly all: there are a couple I haven’t been able to check). This was only a few months after the existence of the German air force was revealed and the government announced a trebling of the RAF’s strength at home in order to maintain air parity. Why was there so little interest in claims that British ingenuity was coming up with clever responses to the bomber threat?

  1. Daily Express, 14 June 1935, 8
  2. Ibid.
  3. Ibid.
  4. Ibid.
  5. See John Farquharson, ‘Britain and the flying bomb: the research programme between the two World Wars’, War in History 13 (2006), 363-79.

The superweapon and the Anglo-American imagination — I

17 November 2009 in 1940s, Periodicals, Pictures, Quotes by Brett Holman | 3 comments

Do these photos, taken early in the Battle of Britain, show a British mystery weapon? (I could just say “no”, but that wouldn’t be very interesting, would it.)

Evening Independent, 14 August 1940, 1

The above photo appeared on the front page of an American newspaper, the St Petersburg Evening Independent, on 14 August 1940. The caption reads:

This picture taken Aug. 11 shows, according to British censor-approved caption, a German raider plane “caught amidst an anti-aircraft barrage of bursting shells” — somewhere over the British coast. The balloon-shaped object in lower left-hand corner was not identified, but London caption emphasized it was not a balloon. Whether it was a “mystery weapon” of any nature could not be ascertained. Picture was sent from London by cable as swarms of German raiders continued to batter the British coast.

The same photo, rotated 180 degrees and cropped somewhat differently, appeared on the front page of the Spokane Daily Chronicle the previous day:
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The mystery car of Maldon

7 November 2009 in 1910s, Civil defence, Periodicals, Phantom airships and other panics, Quotes, Rumours by Brett Holman | 3 comments

Here’s an interesting inversion of my usual phantom airship scare. The Zeppelin was real enough — it was L6, raiding Essex on the night of 15 April 1915. The phantom was instead a motor-car:

Since the visit of the Zeppelin early on Friday morning the Maldon district has been full of rumours of mysterious motor-cars with flaming headlights which, passing along the highways, guided the airship to the area where the majority of the bombs were dropped.1

A ’special correspondent’ wrote that only one of the stories seems very plausible, presumably because it was the only one with several independent witnesses. Three couples — two ‘London ladies’ staying at ‘the Hut’ near Lathingdon (Latchingdon?), a Mr. and Mrs. Woods who lived at ‘the Cottage’ also near Lathingdon, and an elderly couple in Mundon, a couple of miles away. They all told a consistent story: the ladies saw the car first, the Woods’ bedroom was then illuminated by the car’s headlights, and a little later it was heard in Mundon, heading towards Maldon. Half an hour later, after Maldon was bombed, the car apparently retraced the same path but in the opposite direction, and with its headlights now much dimmer.

But there were problems with the theory. Heading into Lathingdon, the car was seen arriving from a road junction, but the people living near that junction were adamant that no car passed the junction in the direction of Lathingdon. And on the other side of Lathingdon, a policeman manning a police station was equally adamant that no car passed him either (although he did see a car coming back from Maldon, the occupants of which were known to him):

Altogether the evidence is very contradictory. If the car really existed it cannot have gone so far as Lathington police station, and there is no side road upon which it could have turned off. It may be said that the lights could have been extinguished and the car taken into one of the fields, but in that case it could never have passed through Mundon, where the inhabitants believe it went to pick up the men who, according to their firm belief, had been signalling to the Zeppelin.2

This was a common story in the aftermath of air raids. After the first airship raid on Britain (19 January 1915), inhabitants of Snettisham in Norfolk reported seeing two cars pacing the airship invader, one to the right and one to the left, with occasional flashes of light upwards or onto a significant target, such as the town’s medieval church which indeed suffered some bomb damage. A similar tale was told in nearby King’s Lynn.3
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  1. The Times, 19 April 1915, 5.
  2. Ibid.
  3. Ibid., 21 January 1915, 10; 22 January 1915, 34; 23 January 1915, 10.

Runs on the board

2 November 2009 in International air force, Periodicals, Publications by Brett Holman | 10 comments

I’m pleased to announce that my first paper has been accepted for publication, by War in History. It’s about the international air force idea and is entitled ‘World police for world peace: British internationalism and the threat of a knock-out blow from the air, 1919-1945′. It won’t actually appear for some time, but under the terms of the publishing agreement I’m allowed to make the originally-submitted version (i.e. before peer review) available for download. It can be found from my publications page.

Do not procrastinate

28 October 2009 in 1910s, Civil defence, Ephemera, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Periodicals, Pictures by Brett Holman | 4 comments

The danger of gas bombs - Times, 26 May 1915, p. 5

This is an advertisement from The Times, 26 May 1915, 5, for the ‘Life-Saving “CAVENDISH” Anti-Gas INHALER’ — in other words, a gas mask. It’s a surprisingly early attempt to combine (and to cash in on) the twin threats of aerial bombardment and chemical warfare — that is, ‘The Danger of GAS BOMBS’:

You can effectually avert the threatened peril to yourself and family from asphyxiating bombs dropped by the enemy’s airships if you are provided with enough “CAVENDISH” INHALERS.

Lest the reader be tempted to take this advice lightly:

You cannot afford to make mistakes in this matter: it is vital. Pads and the like made with the best intentions, but without the necessary chemical knowledge, are only partly — and for a very short time — protective against slowly spreading vapour. They are of no use whatever when the gas is exploded and forced through every cranny into your home [...]

Closing the lower windows and doors of your house is NOT a sufficient protection against the rush of gas driven in by high explosive. You need — for yourself and your family — absolute protection against actual contact with the fumes.

Clearly the ad is reacting to some earlier set of ideas about how to guard against gas, but I’m not sure what their source was. It is claimed that one charge would work for half an hour, ‘quite long enough for absolute security from danger’ — a bargain for 5/6 post-free.

How early is early? This is just over a month after the first large-scale use of gas at Ypres (22 April). It’s also a few days before the first Zeppelin raid on London (31 May). And it’s three weeks before the Metropolitan Police issued official advice to civilians about what to do in an air raid (18 June) — most of which had to do with the possibility of a gas attack. Probably lucky the Surgical Manufacturing Company got in when they did, because the Met’s commissioner gave precisely the opposite advice: no need to buy a specialised respirator, a cotton pad saturated in washing soda should suffice — and do close ground-floor doors and windows. (See The Times, 18 June 1915, 5.)

More generally, fears of aero-chemical warfare are generally regarded as characteristic of the 1930s, which is true but shouldn’t obscure earlier outbreaks of anxiety about the possibility of London being drowned in poison gas.

(I think I came across a mention of this ad in P. D. Smith’s Doomsday Men, but can’t find the precise reference.)

A question answered

26 October 2009 in 1920s, Air control, Nuclear, biological, chemical, Periodicals by Brett Holman | 4 comments

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

A few days ago, a new article popped up in my RSS reader: R. M. Douglas, ‘Did Britain use chemical weapons in mandatory Iraq?’, Journal of Modern History, 81 (December 2009), 1-29. This was slightly odd, because it’s only October and the rest of the December issue isn’t online yet. The editors of JMH clearly think they’ve got an unusually significant paper here, one worth publishing early and with an accompanying press release. And I agree.

The question in the article’s title is one I’ve asked before. After the First World War, Britain gained control of Iraq (or Mesopotamia) from the Ottoman Empire, not as an outright possession but under a mandate from the League of Nations. Some of Iraq’s inhabitants disapproved of British rule and from 1920 rebelled. A new form of colonial policing known as air control eventually suppressed the revolt, but in the meantime the (rapidly demobilising) Army and the Royal Air Force had their hands full just containing the situation. Hence the attraction of using chemical weapons such as mustard gas against tribesmen with no experience of and no protection against this new form of warfare.
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The great air race

23 October 2009 in 1930s, Aircraft, Australia, Blogging, Civil aviation, Periodicals, Quotes by Brett Holman | 7 comments

The air power race. Great Britain also ran. Saturday Review, 15 December 1934, 514

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

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

18 October 2009 in 1930s, Aircraft, Civil aviation, Ephemera, Periodicals, Pictures by Brett Holman | 20 comments

Daily Telegraph

An advertisement for Imperial Airways from the Daily Telegraph, 30 January 1935, emphasising its role in delivering airmail to the Empire: twice weekly to ‘the East’ (presumably India, Singapore, Hong Kong), once a week to Australia (a service which had only just begun the previous month), and twice weekly to Cape Town. A lot of effort went into selling the idea of air mail to the public, as this post at The British Postal Museum & Archive shows. Here, the modern lines of the Imperial A.W. 15 Atalanta is contrasted with the traditional garb of the imperial subjects in the background. The message is that technology will modernise the running of the Empire and help bind it together.

The invasion of The Invasion of 1910

4 October 2009 in 1900s, Books, Maps, Periodicals, Pictures by Brett Holman | 7 comments

The Invasion of 1910

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.
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The first air bomb: Venice, 15 July 1849

22 August 2009 in Before 1900, Books, Periodicals, Quotes by Brett Holman | 2 comments

On 22 August 1849, the Republic of San Marco surrendered to Austria. The Republic was formed after a revolt in Venice against Austrian rule in March 1848. The Austrians eventually besieged Venice, leading to starvation and outbreaks of cholera in the city. During this siege, they launched the first air raids in history, by unmanned balloons which floated over Venice carrying bombs. The British press didn’t take any notice of this at the time, but the following account appeared in the Morning Chronicle a week after the surrender:

The Soldaten Freund publishes a letter from the artillery officer Uchatius, who first proposed to subdue Venice by ballooning. From this it appears that the operations were suspended for want of a proper vessel exclusively adapted for this mode of warfare, as it became evident, after a few experiments had been made, that, as the wind blows nine times out of ten from the sea, the balloon inflation must be conducted on board ship; and this was the case on July the 15th, the occasion alluded to in a former letter, when two balloons armed with shrapnels ascended from the deck of the Volcano war steamer, and attained a distance of 3,500 fathoms in the direction of Venice; and exactly at the moment calculated upon, i. e., at the expiration of twenty-three minutes, the explosion took place. The captain of the English brig Frolic, and other persons then at Venice, testify to the extreme terror and the morale effect produced on the inhabitants.

A stop was put to further exhibitions of this kind by the necessity of the Vulcan going into docks to undergo repairs, which the writer regrets the more, as the currents of wind were for a long time favourable to his schemes. One thing is established beyond all doubt (he adds), viz., that bombs and other projectiles can be thrown from balloons at a distance of 5,000 fathoms, always provided the wind be favourable. 1

Some comments. It’s hard to find reliable information on these attacks. The best account I’ve seen is by Lee Kennett and he’s not sure how many balloons were released, saying that the largest number he has seen is two hundred.2 This doesn’t fit well with the Morning Chronicle article, which seems to suggest that only two balloon bombs were ever launched. This is supposedly based on a letter written by the inventor of the balloon bombs, Franz von Uchatius, so if it’s accurate should be preferred over secondary sources.3

But whether the number was two or two hundred, it doesn’t seem like the balloon bombs had much effect on the course of the siege, which went on for another five weeks — despite the reference made in the Morning Chronicle to ‘the extreme terror and the morale effect produced on the inhabitants’. That was clearly what was intended, as the bombs were released (or maybe detonated) by a timer, and couldn’t possibly hit specified targets from a balloon drifting above the city.4 More importantly, the bombs used were filled with shrapnel, which isn’t much use for anything but killing and maiming people. So there were few qualms on the part of the Austrians about targeting and killing civilians. Which they went on to do with presumably much greater efficiency when they later bombarded the city with more conventional artillery, averaging a thousand shells a day.5

Finally, the air raids of 1849 seem to have had as little impact on the wider world (at least the English-speaking part of it) as they did on Venice. As noted above, there was very little notice taken in the British press, and I’ve come across only one meager reference to Venice in books published before 1914 (and that in a book translated from the German, written by the German military balloonist Hermann Moedebeck). So it doesn’t seem like they inspired anyone to find a better way to bomb cities from the air; that was an idea which had to be invented all over again. Which it was, of course, and Venice’s next air raid was on 24 May 1915.

  1. Morning Chronicle, 29 August 1849, 5.
  2. Lee Kennett, A History of Strategic Bombing (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982), 6.
  3. Kennett does state that two bombs were used in the first armed test, but that this was carried out on 12 July, with another ’series’ of tests on 15 July.
  4. Which is not to say they were just released at random; the balloon-bombardiers had to take windspeed into account when calculating how long to set the timer for, so that it would go off over Venice — though the wind could then change direction after launch, of course.
  5. Lawrence Sondhaus, Naval Warfare, 1815-1914 (London: Routledge, 2001), 47.

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