The title of this post could refer to my own state of mind as I reach a crossroads in this project. As I said in the previous post, it's time to dig deeper into the 1918 Australian mystery aeroplane scare, to look beneath the surface. What was really going on? Why did people see mystery aeroplanes at this time and att this place? I have several lines of inquiry which should lead to an answer (if not the answer). One is the comparative and transnational perspective; another leads through airmindedness and the early understanding of and responses to flight. I'll address these in later posts. But the key perspective I need to try to recreate is the fear, uncertainty and doubt surrounding the mystery aeroplanes, of which they were (I argue) both a symptom and a cause. Which is the real reason for my choice of title. Really.

Again, there are a number of threads to follow. One is my starting point in all this: the role of the press. As I have already shown, the scare shows up in press accounts only for about four or five weeks after mid-March 1918, even though the number of sightings peaked after then. The terminus date for the press seems to be around 23 April. Up until then there is a steady stream of stories; afterwards I know of nothing until 4 June, when the Melbourne Age reported that about nine or ten people, including a returned soldier, watched an aeroplane fly over Charlton; the story was reprinted the following day in the Ballarat Courier (adding that 'The returned man had considerable experience with aircraft'); and after that there's nothing at all.

One possibility is that the newspapers lost interest in mystery aeroplanes, whether because they stopped believing them or just thought they were no longer newsworthy. Indeed, on 25 April the Adelaide Register declared that it had taken a patriotic stand against publishing 'scare war news'. But that doesn't appear to be the case generally. NAA MP1049/1, 1918/066, the Royal Australian Navy's file on mystery aeroplane sightings, includes at least twenty-nine distinct references to newspapers in a variety of forms, either press clippings or direct or indirect interactions. Four of these date to before 1918 (or at least are indeterminate in date) or relate to New Zealand. Of the balance, twelve are from on or before 23 April 1918, the date after which mystery aeroplane articles stopped appeared, and (logically enough) thirteen appeared afterwards. That suggests that the press were in fact still paying attention to the scare.

A more likely explanation is censorship. Of the twelve references on or before 23 April, ten are to actually published articles, one the WA censor passing on information from the Bunbury Herald's editor about a Zeppelin seen at Fremantle, and one was a notification from the censor that news of a mystery aeroplane sighting at Ballarat West had been suppressed. That is the earliest date for a censored report that I've found, and it's right on the watershed date of 23 April. The thirteen references after that date include only one published article (the Age one noted above), two notifications from the censor of suppressed articles, eight of articles submitted to the censor, and two of direct communications from newspapers to defence authorities regarding mystery aeroplane reports received (including one from the Register, despite its proclaimed scepticism). It's unclear whether the articles submitted to the censors were published or not (at least two were not; the others I'll have to check on microfilm) but even so it's evident that there's a very different censorship regime in this period than there was before 23 April. A check of NAA files relating to censorship should confirm this.

Whether there was formal censorship or not, the lack of stories about mystery aeroplanes means that the press was not the primary vector of mystery aeroplane stories after 23 April. I've suggested that it instead helped fuel it in other ways, by creating alarm about possible defeat in Europe and raids on Australia. But I'll still need to try to explain why the scare then continued; or, put differently, how did people 'know' that mysterious aeroplanes were around? I'll tackle that question in a following post.

View Mystery aircraft, Australia, 1918 in a larger map

My next step in characterising the 1918 Australian mystery aircraft scare was to plot all the sightings Google Maps, which you can see above. I've used differently-coloured icons for different time periods to give an idea of the progression over the course of 1918: blue is January and February; red, March; green, April; cyan, May; yellow, June; purple, July; magenta, August through November. There are too many for Google Maps to show at once in an embedded map (without me learning JavaScript) but the rest can be seen here. Each icon is named for the location and has an attached date, but no other information. I dithered over which map mode to use but in the end settled on good old satellite mode, as it gives an idea of the terrain but also has good social data such as roads and towns (even if these are from 2012, not 1918). Of course you can switch between them yourself.


View Mystery aircraft, Australia, 1914 in a larger map

I've made similar maps for the other war years, without colour-coding by month as there were too few sightings to warrant it. The maps for 1915 and 1916 are for the same reason very uninteresting, so I won't embed them here. The 1914 map is above; the 1917 one below.

View Mystery aircraft, Australia, 1917 in a larger map

As I've discussed, the date is often vague and at this level that applies to the location too. The information provided in the intelligence files is usually reasonably specific as to the town or locality; in only one case was I unable to find, even roughly, the place where a mystery aircraft was said to be seen ('Reef Creek, South East district, SA'; it's not in the national gazetteer or the state one). But below that level it's more variable. Sometimes there were sightings outside towns, on roads or railways or from remote properties. Again I've not been very fussy about this and have generally gone with however the sighting was classed at the time. For example, an aeroplane was reported to have chased a train early one morning from Kaniva to Dimboola. Where do I place the marker: Kaniva, Dimboola, or somewhere in between? I put it on Dimboola because that's where the Navy's index lists it, probably because that's where the police report came from. Also, sometimes the information I have only states where the aircraft was thought to be, not where it was seen from, and that is an estimation fraught with observer bias. So what I'm saying is don't place too much faith in my icon placement. It's another one of those things I don't care about too much -- it's not terribly important to me to be able to distinguish between a sighting in Hope Street or one in Smith Avenue, at this point what I'm trying to see are any large-scale patterns.

And for that it has been useful. It was already clear that Victoria was far and away where most of the mystery aircraft were seen in 1918, with NSW second (Terrigal/Terrigal Haven alone had eleven reports, though only three involved people other than the Moir family or Gunner Naughton) and the other states a long way behind. The map reinforces that impression; but it does more, because it shows that within Victoria some areas were favoured much more than others. Zooming in helps here:

View Mystery aircraft, Australia, 1918 in a larger map

There were no mystery aircraft reported from the Riverina region in the north, nor from the central area around Bendigo or the Alps (of course, there weren't many people living there either). The northeast had only a handful. By contrast, the Mallee and the Wimmera in the west of the state had a significant number of sightings. The red icons in the northeast mostly mark sightings which fell on the same day early in the scare, 21 March, including one by a policeman: it was taken very seriously and a pair of investigators came up from Melbourne travelling through the Mallee seeking out witnesses. There was another burst around Ouyen a month later. The activity in Wimmera included hotspots at Casterton (three sightings) and Hamilton (four), and the only occasion when an aeroplane was seen to land (according to the press, anyway; the eyewitnesses, a drover and a boy, said no such thing when they were eventually interviewed by police and military intelligence).

But the real heartland was the arc from the Kinglake ranges north of Melbourne, through Melbourne itself and right around the southeast coast to Orbost in Gippsland, also taking in the Latrobe Valley inland. Again there are many hotspots within this area: Bairnsdale with at least five sightings was the most visited by mystery aircraft in the whole state, though the first was not until May, quite late in the scare. Inverloch had four, Sale, Orbost and Yarram three. While Melbourne is massively underrepresented, given that in 1918 it had 51% of the state's population, given the difficulty of seeing anything at all in an urban night sky I think it had a reasonable amount, including one from West Footscray where I lived as a child; 'Anxious' of Brighton wrote in to the Herald (which passed the letter on to the censor) to ask whether the 'mysterious aeroplane' they had seen early on 7 May 'might be the German one that is about'. What was going on in these places? Why were they so prone to mystery aeroplane sightings? I don't have an answer, and I may not ever have a convincing one, but it's time to start digging deeper.

In my previous post, I threatened more statistics about Australian mystery aircraft scares of the First World War, and here they are. What I've been doing is collating all the sightings recorded in two NAA files, MP1049/1, 1918/066 and MP367/1, 512/3/1319. The former is the Navy Office's file pertaining to 'Reports of suspicious aeroplanes, lights etc', more than a thousand pages in all, though the majority of it is composed of reports obtained by military intelligence and local police. The Navy was presumably interested because, assuming the reports were genuine, the most likely explanation was that the aircraft were flying from a German raider operating in Australian waters. The file also contains some operational orders and reports relating to the search for the presumed raider, regular reports and analyses of the sightings to date, and related correspondence. The other file contains 'Reports from 2nd M D during War Period on lights, aeroplanes, signals etc.' 2nd Military District covered NSW; presumably there were similar files from the other districts but if so I haven't found them yet (3rd MD would be the one to get, as that was Victoria where the majority of sightings took place). Some of the material in it is duplicated in the Navy's file, but there's much which isn't, including a number of pre-1918 reports.

After going through these two files, I now have a master catalogue of 256 distinct sightings, which is nearly a hundred more than are listed in the Navy's own master index. But the data is quite dirty, I've tried to cull duplicate reports, but there are probably still a few in there. The dates are sometimes vague, sometimes only at the 'about six weeks ago' level of accuracy. Sometimes a sighting is recorded only in the index (with a very brief description) and can't be found anywhere else in the file. What constitutes a 'sighting' also varies. Sometimes a number of sightings are counted as one, sometimes not: multiple reports from one location usually are, but one at the same time from an adjacent town generally are not; reports over a few days are often considered to be single sightings, but not always. I've generally tried to follow the treatment at the time, especially in the indexes and summary reports. But not all cases are listed in those, so I've had to use my own judgement. And sometimes, to be honest, I found some handwritten reports almost impossible to decipher and haven't tried to extract every last sighting from them, just the main details. For the moment that doesn't matter, I just need to be able to characterise the mystery aeroplane scare in overall terms. A few missing sightings or wrong dates here or there won't make much difference.

And it's already proven very educational. I've plotted the sightings by month above. It's clear that, apart from the main scare in 1918 (212 sightings in total -- again, don't take the numbers too literally), there were two or three much smaller outbreaks: one in October 1914 (perhaps corresponding to the departure of the first AIF troopships), one in April-May 1917, and maybe another in October 1917. But it also shows that my earlier understanding of the course of the 1918 scare itself was wrong. Based on reports published in newspapers, I thought it started in March and ended in mid-April. In fact, it was only getting started: the majority of sightings took place after the press stopped reporting the scare. The peak month was April, with 76 sightings; in May this dropped to 48, and in June and July returned to the same level as March, the first month of the scare, at about 20 sightings. The number of reports fell to below 10 for each of the remaining full months of the war, but this was still equal to or higher than any previous month before March 1918 bar October 1914. This means that my suggestion that 'press reports of mystery aeroplanes themselves helped to propagate the wave of sightings' will need to be modified: at most they can only have helped kick off the scare. Why did the press not report any sightings after mid-April? Censorship may be part of the answer; I've found one case from July where the Sydney censor's office notified the Navy Office that it had 'permanently held' one mystery aeroplane report submitted by the local stringer at Gilgandra to two Sydney dailies. There are other notices from censors but I'll have to check to see if the reports they passed on made it into the papers or not.

This plot is the same as above, except that the sightings are also plotted by whether they were interpreted as aircraft or signals (e.g. mysterious lights flashing in the hills, or from a ship out to sea, presumably to or from German spies or vessels; sometimes they were supposed to be electrical flashes from wireless stations). It shows that I'm cheating a bit: some of what I'm calling mystery aircraft were not thought of as aircraft at all, or even as airborne in any way. But only a bit: the mystery aeroplanes almost always outnumbered the mystery signals, usually very greatly when there was a scare on (with the exception of the October 1917 scare, which is revealed to be all signals, no aircraft); and when there was a mystery aeroplane scare on there was a rise in mystery signal reports too. So this suggests they are related phenomena, which makes sense -- an odd light which is on the ground or on the sea is obviously more likely to be interpreted as something which isn't an aeroplane. The clincher is the fact that the military and naval authorities at the time put them together under the one heading: they were part and parcel of the same (potential) German threat. This perhaps complicates the role of airmindedness in the scare; but on the other hand it makes it easier to relate mystery aircraft scares to other types of scares, such as the Edwardian spy mania in Britain.

Here's an initial answer to the question 'where?' I've broken down the sightings by state (and so excluded two sightings in the Navy's files not from Australia: one in New Zealand and one in Papua, effectively an Australian colony). Victoria was clearly mystery aeroplane central in 1918, with 133 sights out of the 212 recorded that year. It was probably the primary source of sightings in 1917 too, but only as a first among equals. NSW was the only other state to even come close, and even then it had less than half the number of mystery aeroplane reports that Victoria had in April 1918. South Australia and Tasmania had significant numbers of mystery aircraft reports across the war; Western Australia and Queensland very little.

Victoria's dominance is a fact which requires some explanation, and I don't know that I've got a convincing one yet. It's not simply due to population. NSW had the greatest population of any state in 1918, 1.9 million; Victoria was second with 1.4 million -- and third was Queensland with 700,000, and it had only two mystery aeroplane sightings for the whole war. Perhaps it had something to do with population density, which was about 2.5 times higher in Victoria than NSW. That is, maybe something odd in the sky had more chance of being seen over Victoria than it did over NSW. But that only works if there were multiple sightings at the same time, which was not the norm (though a couple of the hotspots where that did happen, Ouyen and Gippsland, are in Victoria). Or perhaps rumours spread more easily in more densely-populated Victoria, especially after newspapers stopped printing news of mystery aeroplanes. (Most sightings were from rural districts, but I think this was even more true of Victoria than NSW.) Perhaps Victorians felt more under threat? The temporary capital of Australia, with Parliament and the Department of Defence, was Melbourne, so it could be seen as more likely to be attacked. But that doesn't explain sightings in far-flung corners of the state and I don't think people really think like that anyway (the place where you live is obviously the centre of the universe). It's true that the German raider Wolf had mostly preyed in the seas south of Australia, so maybe the next one would too; but the next one could strike anywhere, and besides, the Wolf's seaplane had (supposedly) flown over Sydney, not Melbourne. I'm not convinced, anyway. Perhaps looking at the data more closely will throw something up. Maybe it was the weather.

Finally, this is a plot of just the sightings from March 1918 onwards, i.e. just the 1918 scare itself, but here the number of reports are daily instead of monthly. This makes it clear that the peak period of the scare was the month from mid-April to mid-May. More precisely, the scare started around 17 March, kicked into higher gear around 18 April, peaked on 29 April, and halted around 13 May (with a couple of resurgences from 31 May and 2 July lasting a week or two). What else was going on around then? I've already suggested that two press stories helped start the scare: the claim that the Wolf's seaplane had flown over Sydney the previous year (published 16 March), and news of the successful start of the German spring offensive (published 25 March, though press reports were anticipating it before then). But if my argument that the mystery aircraft sightings were caused, at least in a general way, by anxiety about the war being lost and/or Australia itself being directly threatened, then the big jump from 18 April suggests that there had been further bad news around that time.

And there was: reports of Haig's famous 'backs to the wall' order of the day were first published in the Australian press on 13 April. It's tempting to follow that logic and try to assign the peaks and troughs in the scare with the fortunes of the German offensive, but it doesn't quite work. The scare did peter out when the offensive did, by the end of July, and maybe the falling away after the end of April was because the Germans had stopped attacking for the moment. But then why did mystery aeroplanes reappear in the first week of July? That was a lull on the Western Front. There might have been some other reason for anxiety that week; I haven't looked yet. But the problem with this -- and it's a more general problem with relating specific incidents like mystery aeroplane sightings with broader trends like the course of the war -- is that I'm really just guessing here. What evidence do I have that people who saw mystery aeroplanes were particularly worried about the way the war was going? There's some evidence, but it's scanty; it's not something that police constables tended to jot down. This is one reason why I'm attempting, in a small way, a comparative study similar scares in other places and other times: the fear of war, of attack, of spying is common to many of them, and teasing out the similarities as well as the differences between these defence scares will, I hope, strengthen my argument. Or I could just end up arguing in circles.

Like Gaul and probably some other things, my mystery aeroplanes paper will be divided into three parts:

1. An overview of the 1918 Australian mystery aeroplane scare itself.
2. The immediate historical context which helps explain the scare, namely the threats from German raiders and of Allied defeat.
3. The bigger picture into which the scare fits, namely other mystery aircraft waves before and since, in Australia and elsewhere.

That's a fair bit to do in limited space (the paper is 20 minutes long with 10 minutes for questions; the formal version no more than 8000 words including references) so I need to have a thorough understanding of my material: what is essential and needs to be included and what is not-essential and should be left out.

So what material do I have? There are next to no secondary sources on the scare that I'm aware of, apart from passing references; conversely, the great majority of my primary sources relate to it. I first came across the scare in Australian and New Zealand newspapers from March-April 1918, and that is certainly a key aspect as I'll be arguing that press reports of mystery aeroplanes themselves helped to propagate the wave of sightings. I'll probably have another look through Trove to see if there's anything I've missed or has been digitised since I last looked. Really, though, I've already got enough here to work with.

But the press reports are only the tip of the iceberg. I've looked through domestic military intelligence files on 'Reports of suspicious aeroplanes, lights etc' held by the National Archives of Australia and these include very many more mystery aeroplane reports than were ever reported in the press. (Including Smithy's sighting.) A hand-written index, which looks like it was compiled by 3rd Military District (i.e. Victoria) late in the scare, in NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/66 lists 152 nationwide for the whole war. Of these, 135 took place in 1918 (the majority in March and April but with a substantial number in May and June and only gradually tailing off towards the Armistice) and of these, 91 were from Victoria. (Expect more statistics in future posts.) The files themselves consist of letters from concerned citizens reporting their sightings, reports on local police investigations of sightings and suspects, press clippings (usually passed on from the censor), naval and military intelligence analyses, and copies of official correspondence regarding air-sea searches for raiders. There's also a separate file, NAA: MP367/1, 512/3/1319, which has reports just from 2nd Military District (i.e. NSW). I haven't compared this with NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/66 yet but it looks like it has some sightings which didn't make it to the master file. Not that it's necessary to get every last detail down, of course. The big picture is more important.

That brings me to the contextual section of the talk/paper. In terms of primary sources, the newspapers and military intelligence files give excellent clues as to how the mystery aeroplanes were interpreted (i.e. as German aircraft operating from raiders off the coast or from inland locations). I would also like to have a look at any NAA files from the Council of Defence (roughly the equivalent of the Committee of Imperial Defence in Britain) to see if it discussed the mystery aircraft and raider threat. But at this point I need to also need to dig into the secondary literature, so I can understand the Australian political and social context. Especially since Australian history is not my thing! So for example I'm currently reading John McQuilton's Rural Australia and the Great War: From Tarrawingee to Tangambalanga (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2011), which I'm finding very useful (though unfortunately the region of Victoria it focuses on seems to have missed out on mystery aeroplanes!) Of course, there is plenty of work I can tap into on the military and naval situation, so that's fine.

The third part is in some ways the trickiest. I want to tie this scare into mystery aircraft scares in other countries (as well as invasion and spy scares). But if I'm not expert in Australian history, still less am I expert in American, New Zealand, Canadian, South African, Russian, Romanian, Norwegian, Swedish... There is some excellent work on national airmindedness to draw upon, that's no problem; but unfortunately good, academic secondary sources on the scares themselves are scarce (I hope this is just my ignorance speaking but I fear not). There are some for the 1909 and 1913 British phantom airship waves; a couple of articles on the 1897 mystery airship wave in America. The other scares I know of don't rate even that much, apart from discussions in ufological and sceptical literature. I could cite some primary sources, particularly where English is the relevant language; but for this type of comparative work (and given the word limit) having access to reliable surveys would be much better. I'll seek out secondary literature but fear I will have to resort to some primary sources here, at least to show that these scares happened. I may well end up focusing on the British parallels, as it's what I know best and seems to be the best documented, and just gesture towards the other scares. I can't do everything in this paper, after all!

My abstract for the Australian Historical Association's 31st Annual Conference, to be held in Adelaide this July, has been accepted. The title and abstract are as follows:

Dreaming war: airmindedness and the Australian defence panic of 1918

Between March and June 1918, Australian newspapers, police forces and military intelligence units were deluged with hundreds of reports of mysterious aeroplanes. They were seen in every state, mostly at night, by men and women, young and old, civilians and soldiers. As there were only a tiny number of aircraft operating in Australia, the sightings were presumed to be German aircraft, perhaps flown from unknown merchant raiders operating in Australian waters or by foreign spies working against Australia. The reports were taken seriously, but investigations by the authorities eventually found nothing to substantiate them. The mystery aeroplanes were phantoms.

Australia had been at war for more than three years. But it was a nation both divided and defenceless. It had gone through two bitterly-fought conscription referenda, and appeared to be threatened from within by immigrants, the Irish and the Wobblies. The vast majority of its military forces were deployed overseas, with little more than poorly-equipped training cadres remaining at home. In March 1918, newspapers carried reports that the German merchant cruiser Wolf, which had been raiding Australian waters the previous year, had flown its seaplane over Sydney unopposed and undetected. A few days later, Germany's Spring Offensive opened, nearly breaking the Allied lines for the first time since 1914. The mystery aeroplanes resulted from a new perception that Australia was directly threatened and that the war could be lost.

In this paper I will discuss what this previously obscure episode reveals about the state of mind of the Australian people after nearly four years of total war. I will compare it with other mystery aircraft panics which preceded and followed it, both in Australia and elsewhere. Finally, I will explore what these transnational phenomena tell us about early airmindedness, or the cultural responses to the coming of flight.

Much more briefly, I'll be looking at the 1918 Australian mystery aircraft scare and trying to place it into the context of what was happening at the time, both domestically and overseas, and using it as a case study to probe mystery aircraft panics more generally and what they say about airmindedness. This is the next phase of my grand plan, i.e. blog -> talk -> publish. I've already blogged about this topic a number of times; expect to see a good deal more about it over the next couple of months.

This is good/exciting and bad/scary for a number of reasons. It's good/exciting because it's the first time I'll be talking (and hopefully publishing) about mystery aircraft, despite it being a major research obsession of mine for more than a decade now. Ditto for airmindedness, despite the name of this blog. It's also good/exciting because I've been awarded an AHA/CAL Travel and Writing Bursary, which includes entry into a workshop and mentoring programme. Which is also bad/scary: that means that instead of writing my paper the night before, as is the time-honoured tradition, I have to have written a formal version two weeks beforehand. So I'm going to be busy. And the other bad/scary thing is: I'm doing Australian history! I must be crazy.

The Lebaudy-built Patrie, seen above, was France's first military airship. A descendent of the Jaune, in 1906 and 1907 it carried out a number of successful proving and publicity flights, including one where it carried the prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, over Paris. Afterwards it was moved to its operational base near the fortress of Verdun. Due to a mechanical failure during a subsequent flight it had to ground in the open, far from the safety of its hangar. A gale blew up, and even one hundred and eighty soldiers were unable to hold the stricken airship down. At 8pm on 30 November 1907, the Patrie floated off into the distance, fortunately sans crew.

That was not the last of the Patrie, however. It was feared that it would drift eastwards into Germany, giving the (likely) enemy a good look at the latest French aeronautical technology. Luckily the breeze took it northwest towards Britain, France's partner in the Entente Cordiale. The Daily Mail reported that the Patrie was seen the following morning over Wales about 450 miles away, at Cardigan and at Llanelly in Carmarthen. That afternoon, the S.S. Olivine and the S.S. Captain saw the airship over the Irish sea, and then it was spotted at Larne and at Whitehouse, both near Belfast in northern Ireland. The airship actually dragged along the ground at one point, ploughing a furrow in a field at Ballysallagh, tearing a hole in a dyke, and leaving behind a number of mechanical artefacts. The War Office put a propeller under guard, presumably handing it back to its ally in due course. Then a report came in from the Lloyd's signalling station at Torr Head, the extreme north-east of Ireland, to say that 'a yellow dirigible balloon' had passed overhead at 4.05pm, 'going backwards'. About an hour later, Patrie was near Islay in the Western Isles, where it was seen by the steam trawler Lark heading north-northwest. After that there were no more reports, and we may presume that it eventually crashed and sank somewhere in the North Atlantic. Following so hard on the heels of the wreck in October of the British military airship Nulli Secundus, also in a gale (again, fortunately without casualties), some parts of the press discussed the need for 'an organization of aerial ship "docks" and stations for emergency purposes'. According to the Cornishman, the Royal Engineers' Balloon School had already prepared a map marking 'specially-chosen hollows in woods, at the foot of sheltering hill-sides, and in deep gravel-pits, where an airship may descend in case of an emergency and lie sheltered even though a gale of wind be blowing above'.

Now this is interesting to me as a very close analogue of a mystery aircraft panic, for example the false sightings of the Andree expedition balloon in Canada in 1896 and 1897. Here, though, it appears that the reports that the Patrie was floating over Wales and Ireland were real, as they follow each other in a fairly logical progression in time and space, tracing an arc from Verdun northwest to the sea beyond Ireland. They can indeed be plotted on a map, as above (though it is missing the Llanelli and the Captain sightings, and point 6 is wrong; though the Olivine's was almost the last sighting to be published it actually took place at 2pm on 1 December, that is between the sightings in Wales and the ones in Ireland, which makes sense because it took place at 'lat. 53.48N, long. 5.27W -- i.e. fully half-way between Holyhead and Dundalk, on the Irish coast', so between points 2 and 3 and not at 58° N as on this map). This episode shows that ordinary people can accurately report what they see when confronted with something unexpected in the sky, which is something worth bearing in mind given all the episodes of mass aerial misperception I've discussed here in the past. When somebody says they saw an airship where it shouldn't be, they aren't always wrong.

And yet. Not all of the reports were accurate. Here is the Daily Mail's report from Cardiff:

The few residents of Carmarthen who were astir at eight o'clock this morning witnessed the flight of an airship over the district. All agree that the cigar-shaped craft was flying at a great speed at a very great height. According to one report the county police, with the aid of marine glasses, were able to distinguish three or four occupants in the cage.

Another rumour afloat is that when the airship was over Carmarthen a carrier pigeon was released, but at such a height that it became a mere speck, and the direction in which it flew could not be seen.

Some observers claim to have seen the name La Patrie through a telescope. The airship took a very erratic course, now so low as to look almost as big as a house, and anon rising to great heights, resembling a large cigar speeding rapidly through the air. The mystery is deepened by the fact that a second airship or balloon is alleged to have been seen about the vicinity.

So. 1. Nobody was aboard the Patrie. 2. If nobody was aboard then there was nobody to release any pigeons (though perhaps some object broke loose and fell away). 3. While it can be seen in the photograph at the top of the post that 'Patrie' (not 'La Patrie') was inscribed on the envelope, the letters appear to be only a couple of feet high and it scarcely seems credible that they could be read even with a telescope. 4. Needless to say, there was only one airship!

In addition, there was another sighting of the Patrie which isn't plotted on the Wikipedia map because it was entirely false. This was in Scotland on the banks of the Clyde. Lord Blythswood, an amateur scientist with a laboratory at his estate at Erskine Ferry near Glasgow, was at this time experimenting with large box kites made of bamboo. He happened to choose the day the Patrie was adrift over the British Isles for a flight to investigate local air currents, lofting it to a height of 2000 feet where it hovered over Clydebank on the north side of the Clyde.

Attention was at once directed to the object, and the greatest excitement prevailed, everyone jumping to the conclusion that La Patrie, the missing French airship, had drifted to Scotland. In the shipyards the platers neglected their chalk and line, the smiths their anvils, the engineers their callipers -- all to stare at what they thought was the airship, which appeared to be traveling fast in a northerly direction.

No doubt was entertained of its identity, but as somehow it seemed to preserve a well-defined circuit and never to get beyond the horizon of easy vision, a newer excitement arose in the belief that it was collapsing and likely to fall at their feet. What fame for Clydebank! The Lusitania was forgotten. Alas! the usual sharp boy detected the string, and the excitement turned to laughter.

In Glasgow the afternoon papers gave a fresh vent to the excitement by announcing the arrival of the airship six miles away. The roofs of Glasgow's tallest buildings were at once utilised and telescopes were levelled, but the strongest glass, owing to the haze, failed to discover anything. Instead of allaying interest these features rather intensified it, and when the late editions of the papers were compelled to explain away their own story there was quite as much chagrin as laughter.

Setting the amused tone to one side, this account has several interesting features. 1. News that the Patrie was adrift had already reached Clydebank, presumably in the morning papers. 2. The witnesses quite confidently identified what was presumably a relatively small box kite with a much larger airship. 3. The afternoon newspapers spread the idea of an errant airship to Glasgow on the opposite bank. 4. Despite this priming, nothing was seen from Glasgow, whether airship or kite.

In the end the last flight of the Patrie, while providing a useful reminder that people didn't (always) make their airships out of whole cloth, shows that even when a real airship was involved it was still very possible for them to add their wrinkles to the fabric.

Image source: 100 Years Ago Today.

10 April 1940 has remained in history as "the great panic day". The reason for this designation is the panic that spread through the population of Oslo, after the rumors of the British bombing of the capital had spread. Here you can see how the Oslo people rush out of town on foot, on bicycles, in trucks and buses. The clip is without audio.

From NRK via the excellent RealTimeWWII. (The caption has been run through Google Translate and tweaked by me so it makes more sense, so I can't vouch for its accuracy.)

This one of the many things I didn't know before. I can't find much about it on the web in English; Wikipedia says:

The same day [10 April 1940], panic broke out in German-occupied Oslo, following rumours of incoming British bombers. In what has since been known as "the panic day" the city's population fled to the surrounding countryside, not returning until late the same evening or the next day. Similar rumours led to mass panic in Egersund and other occupied coastal cities. The origins of the rumours have never been uncovered.

It's interesting that the rumours named Britain as the aggressor. Of course Germany bombing a city it already occupied wasn't particularly plausible, so given that the rumour existed it would have to attach itself to Britain. The Altmark incident (and the planned mining of Norwegian waters, though I assume that was not publicly known as it was interrupted by the German invasion which was publicised shortly before the panic) might have suggested that the British were prepared to go further and attack Norway to achieve their own ends. I don't know much about airmindedness in Norway before the war (apart from the ghost flyers) either but in recent months civilians in two small, nearby nations had already suffered aerial bombardment, namely Poland and Finland (and let's not forget China and Spain in 1938) so to that extent the panic was not unreasonable.

It's now a year since my article 'The air panic of 1935: the British press between disarmament and rearmament' was published in the Journal of Contemporary History. As noted noted previously, as it was with SAGE this means I can now self-archive the accepted version (i.e. which has passed peer review).

This is the abstract:

The British fear of bombing in the early 20th century has aptly been termed 'the shadow of the bomber'. But the processes by which the public learned about the danger of bombing are poorly understood. This paper proposes that the press was the primary source of information about the threat, and examines a formative period in the evolution of public concern about airpower, the so-called air panic of 1935, during which German rearmament was revealed and large-scale RAF expansion undertaken in response. A proposed air pact between the Locarno powers enabled a shift from support of disarmament to rearmament by newspapers on the right, while simultaneously supporting collective security. Paradoxically, after initially supporting the air pact, the left-wing press and its readers began to have doubts, for the same reason: the need to support collective security. This episode sheds new light on early rearmament, and how the government was able to undertake it, despite the widespread feelings in the electorate in favour of disarmament.

And the article itself can be downloaded from here or from the Downloads page.

Charles Kingsford Smith was and remains Australia's most famous pioneer aviator. Among his feats: the first trans-Pacific flight, in both directions in fact (1928, east to west; 1934, west to east); the first non-stop trans-Australian flight (1928); the first trans-Tasman flight (1928). It's probably fair to think of him as the Australian Lindbergh in terms of his iconic status -- and his flirtation with far-right politics (he was a member of the New Guard, an early 1930s fascist paramilitary group) -- though his entrepeneurial activties and self-promotion remind me more of Sir Alan Cobham, with his ambitious attempt (with his frequent copilot, Charles Ulm) to get into the airline business. 'Smithy' was himself knighted, in 1932; in 1953 Sydney's major airport (and hence Australia's busiest) was named after him; for thirty years his image graced the Australian twenty dollar note. Like so many of the great pioneer aviators he met an early death, in his case in November 1935 after crashing somewhere in the Andaman Sea while trying to recapture the Australia-England speed record.

All of that is well-known. But what isn't is that in 1918, Kingsford Smith witnessed a mystery aeroplane flying over the Australian coast -- what in later decades would be called a flying saucer or an unidentified flying object. I can find no reference to this incident in a quick check of three Smithy biographies (admittedly none very scholarly); as it's buried in an archive with no obvious connection to his career it's possible it hasn't been noticed before now.

Kingsford Smith enlisted in the AIF in 1915, aged 18, serving as a sapper and dispatch rider in Gallipoli, Egypt and France. In March 1917 he was commissioned in the RFC (which is to say he moved from the Australian armed forces to the British) and trained to fly; in July he was posted to 23 Squadron in France and by August had already shot down four German aeroplanes and been shot down and wounded himself. While recovering in England (where the above photograph was taken) he was awarded the Military Cross. But as his recuperation was expected to take some months he was given leave to return to Australia, arriving by March 1918.

While Kingsford Smith no doubt found Australia far more peaceful than France, as I've shown previously at this time it was undergoing a serious case of war nerves, with dozens of mysterious aircraft being reported along the coast, the majority from Victoria but with a significant number from New South Wales. These were generally presumed to be seaplanes from one or more German merchant raiders operating in Australian waters, possibly with assistance from resident foreign nationals; it took the Australian police and military some time to conclude that there weren't any aeroplanes. (In fact, they were still investigating a trickle of reports in the last week of the war.)

One of the most persistent sources of mystery aeroplane reports was Terrigal (seen above as it was in 1926), near Gosford on the NSW coast about halfway between Sydney and Newcastle:

23 March 1918: a light seen moving over the sea at 4am
5 April 1918: aeroplane noise heard around 1am
8 April 1918: strange noise heard between midnight and 1am
11 April 1918: 'a peculiar noise overhead... it sounded like a storm and there was a humming noise apparent as it died away... of about 3 minutes duration'
14 April 1918: lights seen
19 April 1918: three people report seeing aeroplanes out to sea, flashing signals, observed half an hour
23 April 1918: aeroplane heard and seen at 5.45am, flying northwest
28 April 1918: two seaplanes seen at 2am, one circled flashing signals then flew out to sea, the other flew inland and returned at daybreak
29 April 1918: ditto but triplanes this time. Possible signal observed from the ground

That's nine separate sightings in the space of five weeks. As Sergeant Morris of the Gosford police noted in his first report,

The rumour that a seaplane was seen over Sydney in connection with the German raider "WOOLF" [sic] will be remembered and this is a likely locality for a seaplane to hover and locate ships in the harbour and elsewhere.

There was even a plausible suspect in the form of Raymond Lhoist, described by Morris as someone who is 'said to be a Belgian but he is a German in fact and it is quite probable that he received the signals and carries the information to Sydney where he goes frequently' -- though a check of his papers confirmed that he was indeed Belgian.

The only problem -- and one which none of the preserved correspondence between the Terrigal police and military intelligence in Sydney and Melbourne mentions -- is that all but three of these reports involved either the Moir family or Gunner McNaughton, a returned soldier (he sometimes described as driver, presumably his current role). The very first report was made by Lily Moir, a 23 year-old woman; the fourth by her mother; the sixth by Lily Moir, her brother and McNaughton; and the last three by McNaughton alone. (The second and third were made by Mrs Newman, Terrigal postmistress, and a man named Kirkness, respectively. I haven't found who made the fifth report.) That seems suspicious to me, perhaps suggesting a series of folies à deux (or trois or whatever) where the collective belief in the reality of the mystery aeroplanes mutually reinforced each other's delusions. Or perhaps it was a hoax or other form of fabrication.

This is where Kingsford Smith came in. The idea for sending an investigator to Terrigal seems to have been made by the Director of Military Intelligence in Melbourne, though whether he specifically requested Kingsford Smith is unclear (probably not, any experienced airman would have done). Captain W. S. Hinton, head of the 2nd Military District's Intelligence Section, reported on 13 May to the Director that

In accordance with your suggestion, arrangements were made for Lieut. Kingsford Smith, R. F. C. at present on sick leave to go to Gosford. He was accompanied by Driver Macnaughton [sic].

Kingsford Smith arrived at Gosford on 6 May where he spoke with Sergeant Morris, who updated him on the various aeroplane reports (adding one about 4 weeks earlier, where Mr Wood and the whole staff and inmates of his Boy's Reformatory were 'awakened by the noise of an engine passing overhead'). The following day he went with Driver McNaughton to interview Lily Moir, who 'impressed me as being very reliable'. He and McNaughton spent that night on the beach at Terrigal. This is when Smithy saw his mystery aeroplane:

At 2.30 a.m. [8 May 1918] I saw what was extremely like a white Verey [sic] light fired from a point about 3000 feet up and a mile north of us. At the same time I saw a small black object rapidly going inland. I could hear no sound as the Surf there drowns any other local noises. I would not attach any grave importance to this episode, as I know how easily one can be deceived at night by falling meteorites, and passing birds, but I certainly think it was a machine. We were not in a position to see any answering ground light.

The following night they stationed themselves on the verandah of the Moir house, but didn't see anything unusual.

While Kingsford Smith apparently did express some doubts about McNaughton's charactor to Hinton in person:

Whilst Lieut. Kingsford Smith feels he must give credit to Driver Macnaughton's account of the seaplanes, he also stated that in small unessential matters he found Driver Macnaughton untruthful and unreliable.

he said nothing of this in his official report, where he concluded that there was something going on which warranted further investigation:

There is most certainly a foundation for all these reports, and I think that someone should be stationed in that locality (for a couple of weeks or more) who has some experience in connection with aircraft and observation.

(Signed) C. KINGSFORD SMITH
2nd. Lieutenant.
R.F.C.

According to Hinton's letter to the Director of Military Intelligence, Kingsford Smith was going to be that someone:

He will return to Gosford on Monday next [20 May 1918] and continue his observation.

However, I can't find any further mention of this and I suspect it didn't happen, as Kingsford Smith's leave was up and he was soon on a ship back to Britain, where he spent the rest of the war as a flight instructor. Nor can I find any further references to the mystery aeroplanes of Terrigal, except one: on 13 May three seaplanes were seen by none other than... Gunner McNaughton.

Was Smithy drawn into a shared delusion after spending a few days with McNaughton and the Moirs? It seems unlikely: he was appropriately cautious in drawing conclusions, and reported at least some doubts regarding McNaughton. On the other hand, the 'Verey light' and the 'small black object' could have been a meteor and a bird as he suggested; but he clearly was disposed to think they were a signal and an aeroplane, as per the prevailing theory of German raiders and spies. In the end this episode is no more than a curiosity: Kingsford Smith's sighting seems to have had no bearing on the course of the (already dying) mystery aeroplane scare and probably was soon forgotten even by himself.

Image sources: National Library of Australia, here, here and here.

Well, not quiet so much as oddly obscure...

In his Behind the Smoke Screen (1934), probably the most influential book written on the theory of a knock-out blow from the air, P. R. C. Groves related the following story of angry civilians attacking an RFC aerodrome after an air raid, because they felt they had not been defended adequately:

On several occasions such attacks from the air were followed by episodes indicative of high nervous tension among sections of the public. One of the worst, to which for obvious reasons no reference was made in the Press at the time, occurred at Hythe where, after the raid on May 25th, 1917, a mob invaded a local aerodrome, stoned the mechanics and attempted to wreck the hangars, because the Royal Air Force [sic] unit had not protected the town. As a matter of fact the unit in question was a training school and did not possess a single machine capable of reaching the raiders.

Along with deaths caused by panic-stricken crowds rushing for shelter and the nightly trekking of people from cities to countryside when an air raid was anticipated, Groves uses this incident as evidence for the fragility of civilian morale under aerial bombardment, with the implication that such things would happen on a far greater scale in the next war. But did it really happen like that? Groves doesn't give a source, and while he was in the RFC himself, in May 1917 he was a staff officer in the Middle East. He wouldn't have had any direct or official knowledge of a riot at Hythe.

It's not that the story is inherently unlikely: it actually fits the known context quite well. (Indeed, it's just the sort of thing which might lead a government to start planning to suppress large-scale dissent.) The air raid which led to the riot was the first of the Gotha raids, a daylight attack on the Kentish coast which killed 95 people. Folkestone bore the brunt, but some bombs fell on Hythe and two people were killed there, including the verger of St Leonard's; the vicar and his wife were injured. Local feeling certainly ran high; a town meeting at Folkestone passed a resolution urging that the government 'take such steps as will prevent further attacks of a similar nature and the wholesale murder of women and children of the town'. Censorship there was. The raid was reported in the press but the location was not revealed (even though the German press had done so). On the other hand, reports of post-raid riots in London had certainly been reported, but perhaps the difference was that in those cases the violence was directed at German shops and the like, not the military. And the aerodrome was variously known as Hythe, Dymchurch or Pelmarsh; it was home to the RFC's No. 1 School of Aerial Gunnery (or alternatively the Machine Gun School), a training establishment as Groves says.

The problem is finding corroboration. The Hythe riot is discussed in some recent secondary works like Andrew P. Hyde's The First Blitz (2002) and Neil Hanson's First Blitz (2008). The latter, for example, says that

Local people, infuriated that none of the pilots had even tried to get airborne, later hurled abuse and stones at the cowering trainees.

Hanson gives no source for this (neither does Hyde). He adds nothing to Groves (except for that abuse was hurled at the airmen, but this is obviously implicit in Groves anyway), and since he does list Behind the Smoke Screen in his bibliography it's possible that's where he got it from. The problem is that neither Hanson nor Hyde are among the works I would first turn to for a reliable account of the Gotha raids. (Hyde is a potboiler; Hanson is much better but not very discerning, I find.) And the ones I do trust most -- Raymond Fredette's The Sky on Fire (1966) and Christopher Cole and E. F. Cheesman's The Air Defence of Britain 1914-1918 (1984) -- don't mention the Hythe riot at all. Nor do older reliable accounts, such as Joseph Morris's The German Air Raids on Britain (1925) or the relevant volume of the official history, H. A. Jones's The War in the Air volume 5 (1935). It was discussed a few times in the 1930s by writers such as as Bertrand Russell in Which Way to Peace? (1936) and W. O'D. Pierce in Air War: Its Technical and Social Aspects (1937), but again these add nothing new and given their nature are most likely taken from Groves. A search of Google Books and Google Scholar doesn't turn up anything useful.

With one exception: a near-primary source! Maurice Baring's wartime diary was published in 1920. The entry for contains the following, from the entry for 30 May 1917:

We hear that the people at Hythe have stoned the air mechanics because of the German raid. There is not one machine at Hythe capable of getting within reach of a German machine. They are school machines.

Baring a staff officer with the RFC in France; in fact he was Trenchard's aide-de-camp. While a gunnery school back across the Channel fell outside his area of responsibility, he was in a position to know about it. So the Hythe riot probably did happen. It's definitely possible that Groves used Baring as a source here: his diary is listed in the bibliography for Behind the Smoke Screen, and nearly all the details Baring recounts are used by Groves. But there is one detail which Groves adds: that the mob 'attempted to wreck the hangars'. That adds considerably to the violence and the threat to authority. Dramatic (and hence, in a work of non-fiction, illegitimate) license? Or did Groves have another source?