The short answer is, almost certainly not, but more of that in a moment. One of the nice things about blogging is that people send me emails on topics which they think may interest me. Recently I received scans of a photograph from Peter Edwards, who has the original glass plates. They’re from a box dated 1907, which belonged to the Londesborough family, which was elevated to the peerage in the Victorian period. They owned a country house called Londesborough Hall, near Londesborough in the East Riding of Yorkshire, which is where the majority of the photos appear to have been taken. Peter noticed something unusual in this photo, hiding behind a flagpole:

See it? Here’s a close-up, after a little playing with the contrast:

And this is a close-up of a close-up (plus contrast-playing) taken by Peter, which unfortunately has some reflections from his camera but makes the identity of the object pretty clear, I think:

That’s definitely an airship, and from the shape of the control surfaces at the back, it’s one of the early Zeppelins. My guess is that it’s one of LZ4, LZ5 or LZ6, which would date the photograph to between 1908 and 1910, but it could be a little earlier. For comparison, here’s a contemporary German postcard showing what is probably LZ4 and a Nassau-class dreadnought (from the front cover of my 4th year thesis, but originally from a now-defunct website):

Actually the rudder is shaped slightly differently there, but other images of LZ4 show it to be similar to the one in the photo above.

So what was a Zeppelin doing over Londesborough? It wasn’t taken during the war, as none of those airships I suggested survived to 1915, and anyway they didn’t usually loiter over Yorkshire in broad daylight. Phantom airships were seen over the East Riding, though that was mainly in 1913. And anyway, apart from maybe one incident, I do not believe that the phantom airships corresponded to real airships.

The obvious explanation is that the photo was not taken at Londesborough at all, but in Germany. And I think there is some evidence for this in the photo itself. To my admittedly untrained eye, the rooftops look a bit more urban than rural, and in the lower right it looks like there’s a group of power or telephone lines, which again suggests a city or town rather than the countryside at this time. Then there’s the flagpole obscuring part of the airship. The flag is hanging loosely, so it can’t be seen very clearly, but it looks like a tricolour, and the shades are consistent with the flag of the German Empire (black, white, red). I’ve seen similar rooftop snapshots of passing airships from the same period before, though usually there are spectators in the foreground gazing at the aerial wonder.

Peter can’t confirm that the photo was taken at Londesborough: the rooftops are different although he suggests that there are otherwise some similarities in the architecture. For comparison, here’s a photo of Londesborough Hall from his collection:

So my conclusion is that the photo was taken in the late 1900s in Germany, not in Yorkshire. Peter has kindly consented to my posting the image here in the hopes of confirming its origins, so if anyone has any ideas, please comment!

1908 was the year that aviation, and its possible consequences, burst into British consciousness. In July, the British press reported on a long-duration flight over Germany of the Zeppelin LZ4, which proved that controlled lighter than air flight was practical, and in August, on the flights in France of Wilbur Wright, which very publicly proved that controlled heavier than air flight was too.¹ At home, H. G. Wells’ The War in the Air was published in January and the first controlled heavier than air flight took place in October.²

In amongst all these, culminating a century ago today, was Britain’s first (very minor) air panic.³ (Well, the first since the Napoleonic Wars, perhaps, but I’m not sure what impact that plan had in Britain.) On 11 July 1908, the Daily Mail published an interview with Rudolf Martin, a civil servant who had recently been dismissed from his position in the German Imperial Statistical Bureau for publicly predicting the imminent collapse of the Russian Empire.⁴ In 1907 Martin had written a novel called Berlin-Bagdad, which foresaw a German empire of the air, which tolerated and even helped Britain in its own imperial difficulties. However, in 1908 he was less friendly: he predicted that Germany could conquer Britain by airlanding troops in waves of 350,000, delivered by thousands of Zeppelins.

In my judgment it would take two years for us to build motor-airships enough simultaneously to throw 350,000 men into Dover via Calais. During the same night, of course, a second transport of 350,000 men could follow. The newest Zeppelins airship can comfortably carry fifty persons from Calais to Dover.⁵

I’m not sure that France would be altogether pleased at having 700,000 German soldiers assemble at Calais, but then Martin seems to have thought that one way or another, Germany’s aerial power harnessed to its mighty army would make everyone else fall in line behind it:

The development of motor-airship navigation will lead to a perpetual alliance between England and Germany. The British fleet will continue to rule the waves, while Germany’s airships and land armies will represent the mightiest Power on the Continent of Europe.

This interview was paired with comments from a British aviation expert, Major Baden Baden-Powell, on the recent flight of LZ4:

What this great revelation means is this, so far as we are concerned, although the fact is insufficiently realised. In time of war we should no longer be an island, and our mighty fleet would cease to be our first line of defence. A dozen great Dreadnoughts would be helpless when faced with the task of repelling a swift fleet of foreign airships sailing high above the earth.

He demanded that the government spend at least £100,000 on British airships, at least as fast as the German ones, if not faster, for

Of two opposing airships the faster will be able to outmanœuvre the adversary and hold it at its mercy.

The leading article in the same issue said that both Martin and, to a lesser degree, Baden-Powell were guilty of allowing their ‘imagination to run a little too fast’.⁶ However, it too considered it wise ‘to appropriate money to enable us at least to keep abreast of Continental enterprise.’⁷

What’s interesting about Martin’s proposal, and the reaction to it in Britain, is the obvious link with more traditional invasion panics. His enormous fleet of Zeppelins is not used to rain death and destruction upon London, but to enable a large army to be landed on British shores without having to face the Royal Navy first. The airships are just another way to effect the bolt from the blue, like a Channel tunnel or a secret weapon. Martin apparently didn’t even think of landing the invaders anywhere other than Dover, where every second fictional enemy of Britain had landed in the past generation.

It’s also worth noting that panics of this type, of invasion by air, were very rare; I can think of only one other in my period, the parachutist panic of 1940. I’m not really sure why, but I’d guess it’s a matter of perceptions of relative threat. In 1908, there was no knock-out blow theory: the Mail’s leader seems quite sanguine about its conclusion that dreadnoughts would be safe from bombing whereas ‘a good deal of damage could be done to great industrial centres’.⁸ In mid-1940, the bomber threat had not materialised, for whatever reason,⁹ but the Germans were dropping paratroops all over the place. Momentarily, these dangers may have seemed more worrying than bombing. Or maybe they were just too silly to be believable.

Anyway: along with Wells, Martin is why I start in 1908 and not any other year.

1. Admittedly, LZ4 was wrecked at Echterdingen in August, but the massive and spontaneous response of the German people, raising funds to fund a replacement Zeppelin, more than made up for this.
2. Depending what you think of Horatio Phillips’ multiplane hop in 1907.
3. See Alfred Gollin, No Longer an Island: Britain and the Wright Brothers, 1902-1909 (London: Heinemann, 1984), 334-9.
4. Robert Wohl, A Passion for Wings: Aviation and the Western Imagination, 1908-1918 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 295. The Mail calls him a Privy Councillor, but that seems unlikely: he is described as ‘low-ranking’ by Wohl, 76.
5. Daily Mail, 11 July 1908, p. 5. All quotations from this source unless otherwise specified.
6. Ibid., p. 4.
7. Ibid.
8. Ibid.
9. Not over Britain, anyway, though it had over Warsaw and Rotterdam, of course.

This is the talk I gave at Earth Sciences back in May. It’s long and picture heavy and much of it will be be familiar to regular readers, but some people expressed some interest in it so here it is. I’ve lightly edited it, mainly to correct typos in my written copy. I’ve put in links to the Boswell drawings because they’re under copyright, and I’ve replaced one photo because I realised it was of British Army Aeroplane No. 1b, not British Army Aeroplane No. 1a! How embarrassing.

Facing Armageddon: Britain and the Bomber, 1908-1941

Today I’m going to give you an overview of my PhD thesis topic. My broad area is the history of military aviation in the early twentieth century, so first I’ll give you a little background on that.

The first heavier-than-air manned flight was made by the Wright brothers in 1903, as you can see here. Within a few years, countries around the world started thinking about how they could use this new technology for warfare.

This is the British Army’s first aeroplane, which wasn’t very succesful but did at least make the first ever flight in Britain. In 1914, the First World War broke out and this pushed aviation along very quickly. At first, aeroplanes were mostly used to find and report on the movements of enemy troops, but soon they were used to drop bombs on them too.

And when aircraft became powerful enough, they started to bomb targets far behind enemy lines. This is the German Gotha G.IV, which was used to bomb London in 1917 and 1918. Of course, each country also developed fast fighter aircraft to try to shoot down their opponents’ slow bomber and reconnaissance aircraft.

Here’s one of the most famous fighters of the First World War, the British Sopwith Camel, as flown by both Biggles and Snoopy. It was fast, agile, and armed with twin machine guns.

After the war ended in 1918, aviation technology continued to progress, though not quite as quickly. By the 1930s, air forces were starting to be equipped with sleek biplanes such as this Hawker Hart, which was the fastest aeroplane in the Royal Air Force — which is a bit startling since it was actually a bomber and not a fighter!

The late 1930s witnessed the birth of a new generation of aircraft, powerful monoplanes with maximum speeds well in excess of 200 or even 300 miles per hour. They were also better armed than earlier aircraft: these Hawker Hurricane fighters had 8 machine guns.

This is one of the bombers that the Hurricane would be defending Britain against, the Ju 88, Germany’s most effective bomber. It could carry up to 2.5 tons of bombs. Germany built over 14000 of these bombers by the end of 1945.

Finally, this is one of the most powerful bombers of the war, the British Avro Lancaster. It was capable of carrying up to 10 tons worth of high explosive or incendiary bombs to Berlin and beyond.

But that’s all just by way of introduction. My research isn’t actually about aeroplanes as such or how they were used. What I’m looking at is the fear of bombing in Britain in the early twentieth century, from the early days of flight before the First World War, up until the end of the Blitz on British cities in 1941. More specifically, I’m interested in how the threat of aerial bombardment of cities was debated in the public sphere, as distinct from what was being discussed behind closed doors by the government and the armed forces. A number of historians have written excellent studies of British air strategy and air policy. Many of them mention the pervasive fear of bombing on the part of the British public, especially in the 1930s, but nearly always, they just take this fear as a given, and don’t spend much time trying to understand it or its origins. This annoyed me, because the little that they did tell me about the popular fear of bombing was fascinating, and I wanted to know more: why was the public scared of bombing, and what were they afraid would happen? Hence the thesis!

However, it’s very difficult to measure public opinion itself, especially before the introduction of opinion polls (which means virtually all of the period I’m studying). You can get the occasional odd glimpse into what the average person really thought about the dangers of bombers coming over and blowing them up, but perhaps not enough to do a whole thesis on. So instead I’m focusing on some of the most important influences on public opinion: primarily books, journals and newspapers which discussed the air menace and what should be done about it. And to a lesser extent, I also use things like cinema newsreels, films and radio broadcasts. Concerned citizens — often professionals such as military experts, doctors, or scientists — used all of these forums to present predictions of what would happen to cities and civilians under air attack, along with their proposals about how to solve the problem. Novelists took the serious speculations of the experts and turned them into nightmarish visions of what future wars held in store for the inhabitants of great cities. These fictional scenarios in turn coloured much of the debate about bombing. In fact, fictional and non-fictional discussions about bombing were often remarkably similar to each other.

So, what was the threat? Most people today have probably heard of, for example, Guernica, the Blitz or Dresden, which are all still potent symbols of the horrors of total war. This is Guernica, a small town of about 5000 people in the Basque country in northern Spain. In April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War it was devastated by a German air raid.

London was bombed by the Luftwaffe on 57 consecutive nights from 7 September 1940, forcing more than 200,000 people to take shelter in the underground railway stations every night. Here are just some of them in Elephant and Castle.

And this photo was taken from a British aeroplane during the Allied air raids on the German city of Dresden in the middle of February 1945. The little points of light are incendiary bombs, which started a massive firestorm. About 30,000 people — men, women and children — were killed in these raids.

But as terrible as these events were — and there are many more I could have mentioned — they were nothing compared with the predictions made before the war. Essentially, the widespread belief in the 1920s and 1930s was that at the beginning of the next war, a huge fleet of enemy bombers would suddenly strike at London and other cities and destroy them with high explosive bombs, incendiaries, and poison gas, causing hundreds of thousands of civilian casualties within a matter of hours or days, shattering essential infrastructure and leading to mass panic. Under such circumstances, it was widely assumed that Britain’s government would be forced to surrender within days or weeks of the outbreak of war. This is what was sometimes called the ‘knock-out blow’, that is, the sudden blow which would knock Britain out of the war.

This graph shows the effects of the German air raids on Britain in the First World War. ‘Casualties’ means the number of people killed or seriously wounded, in this case in each month. Green shows the casualties caused by airships, and red the casualties caused by aeroplanes. Note that it peaks at about 600 casualties in any one month.

And this is the equivalent graph for the Second World War. The peak casualties per month has shot up to more than 16000. That’s September 1940, when the Blitz began. In all, there were more than 146000 civilian casualties in Britain during the war, around a third of whom were killed.

Now, here’s a comparison between what actually happened in 1939-1945 and what British government officials in 1938 predicted might happen if a war started in 1939 — that’s the knock-out blow: over a million casualties per month, half of them fatalities, over only two months. Nearly two orders of magnitude more destructive than what actually happened. These estimates were not plucked out of thin air, but they weren’t much more than naive extrapolations from the First World War experience: divde the number of casualties between 1914 and 1918 by the tonnage of bombs dropped, and then multiply by the number of bombers the enemy had and the amount of bombs they could carry. This turned out to be a huge exaggeration, but you can see why everyone was so worried!

In extreme versions of the knock-out blow, civilisation itself would collapse, as the complex webs of commerce, transport and social control which bind society together break apart, leaving people to fend for themselves as best they could. From the perspective of a later generation, this sounds a lot like the effects of nuclear war.

And in fact in 1966 Harold Macmillan, a former Conservative Prime Minister who had been a backbench MP in the 1930s, wrote that ‘We thought of air warfare in 1938 rather as people think of nuclear warfare today’. It could in fact mean the end of life as we know it.

I’ll now give you some typical examples of how this fear of the bomber was manifested in literature and the arts. The following quotes are from a knock-out blow novel published in 1934 called Invasion from the Air. Firstly, the enemy air force attacks suddenly, with little or no warning, just after or even before the declaration of war:

At five minutes to twelve on that fateful night Germany struck from the clouds. The blow was totally unexpected, for the declaration of war by Britain against Germany and Italy had no more than been conveyed to the departing Ambassadors [...] London’s bewildered eight millions were precipitated into actual war conditions before the majority of them knew there was a war.

Secondly, the attack is massive in scale:

Squadron after squadron assailed the cities and towns in waves, each wave having its separate duty and aims. Upwards of two hundred enemy aircraft — fighters, bombers and [poison gas] sprayers — were brought down that morning as against only fifty British machines, but eight hundred broke though all attempts to stop them.

And thirdly, it is devastatingly destructive:

Thousands of people were killed or burnt to death or died subsequently insane at the memory of that battle, while, as always after the raids, vast numbers developed later the agonies of poisoned
lungs and throats, eyes and nasal passages [...] When the battle had passed Regent’s Park was scarred with great pits where explosive bombs had fallen [...] the bodies of old and young, broken and mutilated, lay everywhere.

So the knock-out blow would bring the horrors of the trenches of the Great War into everyone’s homes.

The Fall of London: Waterloo, by James Boswell (1933)

Next, here are some drawings which were actually commissioned for the novel I’ve just quoted from, but in the end weren’t actually used. They show the aftermath of the attacks, as the terrified mob revolts and rampages through London. Wrecked trains at Waterloo Station.

The Fall of London: Corner House, by James Boswell (1933)

A patrolling soldier in gas gear tramping past the body of a woman.

The Fall of London: The Colosseum, by James Boswell (1933)

The rioting crowds, clashing with troops. An upper and middle-class fear of the unruly mob goes back at least to the time of the French revolution; more recently, since 1918 there had been an increase in working-class assertiveness and the example of the Russian Revolution to worry about. So the fear of the knock-out blow was not only about the possibility of war but also reflected other anxieties about British society.

Now, I’ll show you a clip from the 1936 film Things To Come, which was adapted from a novel by HG Wells. This was a history of the future in three parts, and was a big-budget spectacular for its day. The first part of Things To Come features a graphic depiction of a gas attack on a city called Everytown, which bears a suspicious similarity to London. It was Wells’ argument that the destruction of modern society by total warfare was a necessary prelude to its recreation into a technocratic, utopian world state.

So much for the threat of the knock-out blow. What could be done about it? Surprisingly, the obvious answer, the one that actually did work in the Battle of Britain — air defence by fighter aircraft and anti-aircraft guns, harnessed to a sophisticated command and control system — was given little credit. It was widely believed that bombers were too fast and too well-armed to be shot down, at least in sufficient numbers to stop an attack.

I’ll show you a graph which helps explain this pessimism. First here’s a map showing Britain in relation to Europe, and some of the directions from which enemy bombers might attack. Ideally, the defending fighters would intercept the bombers before they reached London, the biggest and most important city. But there weren’t nearly enough fighters to keep up a standing patrol, so they’d have to wait until an air raid was detected, and then take off to intercept it. However incoming aircraft could usually only be detected once they’d crossed the coast. And it’s only about 50 miles, give or take, from the coast to London. The problem was that as technology improved and bombers got faster, there was less and less time for the fighters to react.

This graph shows in blue the time in minutes it would take for a bomber to cross the 50 miles from the coast to London. In the First World War, this could take around half an hour. By the Second World War, this time was down to only 10 minutes or so. The points in red show the time taken for the defending fighters to take off and climb to the height of the attacking bombers. As you can see this time is generally less than the crossing time, so in theory the fighters would have time to find the bombers and hopefully shoot them down. But lots of things could go wrong — the bombers might be detected late, the detection might not be reported soon enough, the bombers might have changed course or be hiding in cloud and so on. So the greater the margin of safety the better. In the 1930s, this margin was only 5 to 10 minutes which was not reassuring at all. Air defence exercises in the early 1930s seemed to confirm the difficulty of intercepting bombers before they could reach their target.

As the former and future prime minister Stanley Baldwin pessimistically told Parliament in 1932,

I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed, whatever people may tell him. The bomber will always get through

A widely-quoted remark at the time and for years afterwards. He went on to offer the standard alternative: essentially to bomb the enemy harder than they bombed Britain.

The only defence is in offence, which means that you have got to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves. I mention that so that people may realise what is waiting for them when the next war comes.

One solution, then, was a bigger air force so that Britain could kill more women and children more quickly than any enemy.

This was a solution generally favoured by those on the political right, such as the Hands Off Britain Air Defence League. This is a leaflet they distributed in 1933 or 1934. As you can see, they ask ‘Why wait for a bomber to leave Berlin at 4 o’clock and wipe out London at 8?’

Their demand is for the creation of ‘a new winged army of long-range British bombers to smash the foreign hornets in their nests’. This was in fact the official Royal Air Force strategy at the time, pretty much, though due to years of disarmament and budget cuts, it did not have nearly enough aircraft to carry it out. The British governments of the 1930s did begin to rearm, but were reluctant to do so too quickly for fear of harming the economic recovery or offending the Germans.

There were also those, generally on the political left, who rejected the logic of two nations trading massive blows with each other, for it seemed likely that even the victor in such a war would be devastated. What alternatives were there? One was to mitigate the effects of bombing, by preparing Air Raid Precautions, or ARP as it was known. This could mean everything from training civilians in how to survive poison gas attacks, to the construction of deep shelters able to accommodate thousands of people during air raids. Although this sounds unobjectionable, some pacifists could and did argue that ARP was a mere palliative, and might actually invite war by making Britain feel over-confident about its ability to withstand a knock-out blow. So they favoured more radical solutions such as complete disarmament, or at least the abolition of military aircraft. But this in turn encountered problems. During the 1920s and early 1930s, the idea developed among aviation specialists that large civilian aircraft such as airliners could be easily turned into bombers, more or less by strapping bombs under the wings. This possibility undermined disarmament efforts because it was feared that once all nations had disbanded their air forces, an aggressor could arm its airliners and hold the rest of the civilised world to ransom. So, one proposed solution to this dilemma was to place the civil aviation industries of all countries under international control.

From there it was a logical step for many supporters of collective security to propose the formation of an international air force, a very popular position in the early 1930s for parts of the left and one which was under serious consideration at the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva in 1932. An international air force would harness the devastating power of the bomber to uphold collective security, because if one country attacked another it would immediately be bombed itself by the combined air forces of the world. It was also attractive to some people as a possible foundation of a world state, which would end war forever by ending nations themselves.

So, I’ve explained what people thought bombing would do, and what they thought could be done about it. I would lastly like to talk about the discourse itself, how these problems and solutions were propagated from specialists to the public. In the ordinary course of things, most people don’t pay much attention to even existential threats such as terrorism, nuclear warfare, asteroid impacts, or indeed the knock-out blow. They may well be aware of them, and even anxious about them to some degree, but such information as they may pick up from the media, books or conversations with acquaintances will be random, fragmentary and possibly unpersuasive. It often takes some crisis, real or perceived, to concentrate people’s minds on the supposed threat to society, and here the mass media plays a key role in creating the perception that there is a threat, and in suggesting solutions to the threat. So I suggest that this process is very much like the concept of a moral panic, as proposed by the sociologist Stanley Cohen in 1972. Usually this is a media-driven panic about the danger posed to society by some group within it — like criminals, drug users, religious cults. But it seems to me that something closely analogous can happen in relation to external threats to society. To distinguish these incidents from moral panics, though, I call them defence panics. Defence panics seem almost endemic in Britain in the late 19th century and early 20th century. Initially these expressed fears about the loss of British naval supremacy and the possibility of invasion by a foreign power such as France or later Germany. The most famous expression of this was the great dreadnought panic of 1909, when an intense press campaign called for the laying down of 8 new battleships to pre-empt a supposed acceleration in the German naval construction programme. But only a couple of months later, there was a similar panic, this time time over German airships, and this panic was itself repeated on a larger scale in 1913. From then until the Second World War, the threat of air attack was unparalleled in its ability to create defence panics. Examples include scares over the size of European air forces in 1922 and 1935, claims about German preparations for biological warfare in 1934, the bombing of Spanish and Chinese cities in 1938 which were part of the background to the Munich crisis, itself a major defence panic, and finally the shocks of the Gotha air raids on London in 1917 and the Blitz in 1940.

In the end, the knock-out blow never took place, because the power of the bomber was greatly exaggerated. But the belief that it could happen itself shaped how the British prepared to fight the war that did come. The internationalist solutions such as disarmament or the international air force never worked, because few nations could even contemplate giving up their sovereignty like this. Britain did invest in trying to avoid the worst effects of a knock-out blow, with air raid shelters and plans to evacuate the cities. But their ARP schemes were never very comprehensive, and individuals did little to prepare for bombing on their own behalf until war came. Far more was spent on the armed forces, and most important here was air defence. Even though in the early 1930s nearly everyone was pessimistic about the fighter’s chances against the bomber, effort was still put into improving them, resulting in fighters like the Hurricane which I showed earlier. These played a essential part in blunting the bomber offensive in 1940, at least in daylight. But another crucial technological component of the solution to the the problem of the bomber came, bizarrely, from almost pseudoscientific attempts to find an electromagnetic death ray. Death rays didn’t help shoot down bombers, but radar did help find them.

A top-secret chain of radar stations around the coast was set up in 1939, just in time for the Second World War. This had an effective range of 120 miles. So instead of only being seen when they crossed the coast, bombers could now be detected far out to sea.

Returning to our graph showing how long it took for bombers to cross the 50 miles from the coast to London. With radar, this distance effectively increased to 170 miles.

I’ve factored that into this graph, and as you can see, from 1939 the defenders had a much greater warning time, 30 to 40 minutes. Radar tilted the balance greatly towards the defenders. No longer was it a certainty that the bomber would always get through.

So part of the answer to the problem of the bomber came from an unexpected quarter. But it didn’t just arrive by accident, it only came because people were worried about the problem and were looking hard for a solution. Sometimes, muddling through and hoping for the best just isn’t good enough, not when the survival of civilisation is at stake.

Image sources: Wikimedia Commons (Wright Flyer, Avro Lancaster); RAF (here and here); Gotha GIV; RAFA Costa Blanca; World-War-2-Planes.com; Guernica, specchio del Novecento; Caring on the Home Front; Wikipedia; Airminded (here, here and here); YouTube; Norman Macmillan, The Chosen Instrument (London: John Lane The Bodley Head, 1938), 21; eBay; David Davies, Suicide or Sanity? An Examination of the Proposals before the Geneva Disarmament Conference (London: Williams and Norgate, 1932); An International Air Force: Its Functions and Organisation (London: The New Commonwealth, 1934). I can’t find where the photo of the Hurricanes came from; but it’s almost certainly under Crown Copyright.

[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Nick at Mercurius Politicus has an excellent post up on the The Mowing-devil, an English pamphlet from 1678 which is famous among forteans because it contains an illustration of something that looks a lot like a crop circle, three centuries before the term was coined. If it is an account of the mysterious appearance of a circle in a farmer’s field, then it is evidence that crop circles long preceded the activities of circlemakers Doug and Dave, and so are presumably a real, and as yet unexplained, phenomenon.

But Nick’s analysis suggests that the anonymous writer of the The Mowing-devil was not presenting an account of a strange but true event, but rather a cautionary tale about class relations in rural England. He concludes that

In short, The Mowing-Devil is probably not the representation of an early crop-circle that enthusiasts want it to be. In focusing on the woodcut, they’ve missed a much more interesting side to the text that tells us something about late seventeenth-century popular politics and religion.

Deleriad, a folklorist, made an interesting comment:

Although your analysis of the narrative is pretty reasonable I think it’s also worthwhile applying Hufford’s notion of the experiential source hypothesis. Put simply, it works on the basis that people explain anomalous experiences within the pre-existing worldview of a particular culture. So for example, encounters which might once have been explained in terms of fairies are nowadays explained in terms of aliens, lights in the sky which were explained as zepplins at the dawn of the 20th century are now explained as UFOs and so on.

Now, I’m aware of David Hufford’s work, though mainly by reputation: The Terror That Comes in the Night (1982), a study of old hag folklore in Newfoundland, is a book I’ve heard much about. Hufford’s experiential source hypothesis (ESH) was put forward as an alternative to the prevailing cultural source hypothesis (CSH), which would explain supernatural claims almost entirely in terms of pre-existing beliefs, or else misperceptions, hoaxes or hallucinations.¹ According to the CSH line of thinking, as I understand it, The Mowing-devil is probably best explained by something like Nick’s suggestion, or maybe there was an early modern Doug and Dave having a laugh, or something like that. The ESH, by contrast, would posit that that something odd happened in Hertfordshire — for example, a circle appearing overnight in a field of crops — and that the writer of The Mowing-devil described it in terms that he and his audience could understand — for example, a devil with a flaming scythe who appears after a farmer’s ill-tempered rejection of a workman’s offer to mow the field. To simplify grossly, a CSHer would say there’s no reason to believe that anything freaky is going on here, so let’s look for a mundane explanation; an ESHer would respond that this attitude risks throwing the extraordinary baby out with the ordinary bathwater.

So what should historians make of all this? I don’t think we can make much at all.

Deleriad notes that ‘lights in the sky which were explained as zepplins at the dawn of the 20th century are now explained as UFOs’, a reference to the phantom airships which are one of my particular interests.² The trouble is that, in general, all we have in this case are the explanations themselves. When Hufford interviewed people who woke up in the middle of the night to find they were being suffocated by an old hag sitting on their chest, he could ask them if they’d ever heard of something like that happening before — that is, whether they were aware of the cultural tradition of the old hag. He found that a significant proportion were not, from which he concluded that perhaps the old hag was, in some way, something real. But I can’t do that with the phantom airships: these events took place nearly a century ago. There are still some people alive today who were alive back then, but even if any of them witnessed a phantom airship — which is extremely improbable — they would have been only very young, and it wouldn’t be very meaningful if they now failed to remember hearing about the airship menace before they had their sighting.

So, the best I can do is to argue from probabilities. I can show, for example, that airships were being constructed by the media as a threat to Britain before the phantom airship scares of 1909 and 1913, that such ideas were widespread. So it’s likely that phantom airship witnesses had come across the idea that German airships were something which one might see in the skies over Britain one day. I can also show that, in all but a vanishingly small number of cases, it’s most improbable that real airships were seen, either German or British: these are all accounted for. I can further show that, in some cases, phantom airships were probably misperceptions of mundane (or rather, celestial) phenomena. For example, in early February 1913, Venus was almost at its most brilliant (as in the photo at the top of this post), and lingered long after sunset in the western sky. And happens that many of the airships seen in the same period, in South Wales for instance, were flying to the west in the evenings, low on the horizon, and shining a bright searchlight. But nobody reported seeing Venus and the airship at the same time. Venus is so startlingly bright near maximum elongation that the explanation has to be that it and the airship were one and the same.

So far, so CSH. But there definitely other incidents which are less clear-cut. For example, on 21 February, a man saw an airship near Selby in Yorkshire. Since he saw it between 10pm and 11pm, it can’t have been Venus, which set at least half an hour earlier. Even more interestingly, his horse was startled by the airship’s light. It’s probably safe to assume that horses were not particularly aware of Germany’s growing Zeppelin fleet (!), and so would only have been spooked by something real. Another intriguing case took place on the last day of February. The captain and crew of the Hull trawler Othello had a close encounter with an airship in the North Sea: so close that they feared it would crash into their mast. It circled their ship twice and then — after flashing its searchlight in response to a blast on the siren — headed west. But in this case it certainly wasn’t Venus. Sailors would have been very familiar with the sight of the planet, and anyway they reported that the Moon and stars were not visible. It would seem they experienced something, but what?

Well, who knows? Maybe it was a scoutship from Zeta Reticuli. Maybe it was an interdimensional being. Maybe it was a fire-breathing dragon. Maybe it was a time-travelling flying disc from Nazi Antarctica. Maybe it was an old hag on her way to Newfoundland. But since none of these has been proven to actually exist, by scientists, folklorists, or anybody else, I can’t use them as part of a historical explanation. And it’s not my job to prove the existence (or, for that matter, the non-existence) of these things. As a historian, it seems to me, I must adopt a position of methodological naturalism as regards these events.

But this doesn’t matter in the least, because more interesting (to me, anyway) than what people might have really seen, is what they believed they saw — or at least what the newspapers told us they believed they saw. What does it tell us, that people thought there were airships flying around their night sky? Even if they witnessed a real, anomalous phenomenon but interpreted it within their own cultural reference frame, as the ESH would have it, why that interpretation and not another? And did this interpretation have any consequences?

Historicizing rumor [...] may reveal an intellectual world of fears and fantasies, ideas and claims that have not been studied before.³

By the way, I’ve met the old hag myself. I occasionally suffer from sleep paralysis, which sometimes happens in that hazy zone between sleep and consciousness. Your body is rigid, you can’t move or speak, and you feel a crushing weight on your chest, suffocating you. It’s quite terrifying, but it’s not uncommon: perhaps a fifth of the population experience it at least once in their lives. I’ve also had associated hypagogic hallucinations, which are somewhat rarer. On at least three occasions I ’saw’ the face of an entity, which I felt was malevolent. Once it was an old hag. Another time, it was a demonic figure. And another, a grey. In terms of the ESH, this is a bit confusing — it’s like the whole catalogue of old hag traditions in one brain. If there was a real entity attacking me, then why did I interpret it as something different each time? Simpler by far to go with the CSH: I was already well aware of hypnagogic hallucinations when I had my experiences, and I already knew something of the variety they can take (for example, they may help explain alien abduction reports). Easier to believe my mind was playing tricks on me than that all these different supernatural creatures were taking turns to scare me in my sleep. Or to put it another way, what’s the more parsimonious explanation: that I saw something real and my subconscious changed what I saw to fit some image I already held in my mind, or that my subconscious just created what I saw to fit some image I already held in my mind? I think the latter.

And that’s why I can’t quite see the point of the experiential source hypothesis: it’s not actually an alternative to the cultural source hypothesis, but actually requires it, in order to work at all. In the historical context, it seems unnecessary, or at least unprovable, which amounts to much the same thing. But I’m open to being persuaded otherwise.

Image sources: dermod; Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (1781).

1. In other words, a sceptical viewpoint. David J. Hufford, The Terror That Comes in the Night: An Experience-Centred Study of Supernatural Assault Traditions (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), 13-4.
2. A quibble: strictly speaking, ‘UFO’ isn’t an explanation, it’s a non-explanation. An unidentified flying object is just that, unidentified. Of course, UFO is usually interpreted to mean ‘alien spacecraft’, which is an explanation.
3. Luisa White, Speaking with Vampires: Rumor and History in Colonial Africa (Berkeley, Los Angeles and California: University of California Press, 2000), 86.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about American fears in 1942 that German spies were making patterns in fields, as signals to the location of nearby targets of military significance. At the time, I had this feeling that I’d come across something very similar, but couldn’t quite place it. Now I’ve worked out what it was: the exact same thing happened in Britain late in the summer of 1940!

The following is from Midge Gillies’ book Waiting for Hitler, which I’ve discussed before. Her source is the memoir of Major H. R. V. Jordan, who commanded a counter-intelligence unit in the Western Command during the Second World War.

Anxiety that German airmen were being helped on the ground produced a phenomenon similar to the corn circles that appeared in Britain in the summer of 1990. Jordan dealt with several reports from RAF pilots: one had spotted what appeared to be a sign in the middle of a field of wheat that pointed to a nearby Royal Ordnance factory. It was about 150 feet long and seemed to grow more vivid each day. Jordan discovered that the farmer had sown wheat, then found some seed barley and, not wanting to waste it, drilled it down the middle of the field. As the two crops grew the barley appeared to point to the factory. Another pilot noticed that a field had been ploughed in such a way that a hammer and sickle was clearly visible. The farmer confessed that, far from harbouring Soviet sympathies, he had wanted to make his wife laugh. A third pilot became convinced that he could see a white arrow glinting in the sun. It seemed to grow every day, and seemed to point to ICI’s chemical factory, an important target for the Luftwaffe. A close investigation on the ground found that the ‘arrow’ was a granite path under construction in the ground of a sanatorium.¹

The only difference between the American and the British cases is that, as far as I can see, the British spy markers never made the papers. This could be because British counter-intelligence was on the job where their American counterpart was not; but there was a suggestion in the American case that the publicity given to the claims there was because one Army PR officer was a little too eager to provide the press with a good story. I don’t know whether something like that could have happened in Britain in 1940 — my impression is that information flow from the various ministries was too tightly controlled for that, and I doubt anyone in authority wanted to encourage a spy panic. But I don’t know for sure.

The close similarity of the two marker scares suggests similar origins. They both took place relatively early in their respective country’s wars, so obviously there’s an element of war nerves, looking out for anything out of the ordinary which could mean danger. The so-called markers weren’t anything out of the ordinary (except for the hammer and sickle!), of course, except when seen from the air, where things look very different than they do from the ground. It’s just a guess, but I’d say that as both countries expanded their air forces in wartime, there were more inexperienced pilots flying over wider areas than there ever had been before, training and patrolling. But in places like the east coast of the United States or the west coast of Britain, there wasn’t a lot of enemy activity, if any. So bored pilots let their eyes drift downwards and misinterpreted ordinary rural practices as something more sinister.

1. Midge Gillies, Waiting for Hitler: Voices from Britain on the Brink of Invasion (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2007), 247.

On the night of 16 February 1873, the Russian ironclad Kaskowiski slipped into Waitemata Harbour, off Auckland, the largest city in the British colony of New Zealand. She found a British warship at anchor, and sent a ’submarine pinnace’ to disable its crew by means of a ‘mephitic water-gas’ so that their ship could be taken. Having done this, the guns of both ships were trained on the city. The Russian captain began to land his marines on shore, with orders to occupy the armoury and all telegraph stations within 40 miles, as well the banks at Grahamstown, which serviced the nearby goldfields. The Russians began rounding up prominent citizens and colonial officials, holding them at gunpoint in the Provincial Council Chamber. Vice-Admiral Herodskoff demanded from them a ransom of £250,000, or else he would give orders to burn Auckland to the ground. Eventually, a bit over half that sum was handed over. The Kaskowiski sailed away, leaving the provincial capital under the guns of the captured ship. The Daily Southern Cross, which reported this shocking news the morning after, was in despair: ‘WHERE IS THE BRITISH NAVY?’ But the British had problems of their own, for (unknown to the remote colony) war with Russia had already broken out over central Asia and Persia …

Of course, this never happened. It was a hoax, perpetrated by the editor of the Southern Cross, David Luckie. His aim was to draw attention to Auckland’s complete lack of defences, Battle of Dorking-style. But the effects were more War of the Worlds. Despite the clues (”Cask of whisky” and a supposed publication date three months in the future), some people prepared to flee the city, saddling horses and prying their gold from under the floorboards. Pupils skipped school (not that they needed much of an excuse, surely) to look out for the Kaskowisky, while others kept a suspicious eye on the British warship in the harbour. With crowds besieging his newspaper, he wrote a follow-up explaining what, in his opinion, needed to be done to guard against privateers and Russians: a chain of fortifications built to protect Auckland, armed with torpedoes, and a strong Royal Navy squadron for the Australian station.

The idea of a Russian attack on New Zealand wasn’t quite as silly as it might sound today. In 1865, a Confederate warship, Shenandoah, had visited Melbourne en route to plundering the American whalers off Alaska, so there was a precedent for privateering. The Great Game between Britain and Russia did indeed have the potential to turn into a Great War, and was causing concern in New Zealand as early as 1855. News of tension between the two empires led to war fever in early 1871, and in April that year, a Russian clipper called the Gaidamak had left Melbourne, and was last seen heading west for New Zealand … maybe it was scouting out sheltered harbours for use in wartime? (It wasn’t the first or the last Russian ship to visit Australia either.) The Australian colonies were starting to provide for their own defence — Victoria’s powerful monitor Cerberus arrived in the colony in 1871 — so why shouldn’t New Zealand do the same? It was so remote from mother England, after all, a long way for help to come.

But not much was accomplished. Some work was started on coastal defences in 1877; in 1885, there was another Russian scare, another hoax, and a number of forts were constructed. By 1909, the Russians had been replaced in the New Zealand imagination by Germans, and the commerce raiders were supplemented by airships. Finally, in the Second World War, some Germans and Japanese submarines did come to New Zealand, but didn’t actually do much. And there my knowledge of New Zealand’s defence panics ends, but I doubt there was anything else as curious as the Kaskowiski affair …

Sources: Glynn Barrett, Russophobia in New Zealand 1838-1908 (Palmerston North: Dunmore Press, 1981), 48-53. Impressively, all of the Southern Cross has been scanned and is freely available online: the relevant articles would seem to be this, this, this, and this.

Via Museum of Hoaxes, the Nazi air marker hoax — though it seems to me that it was not a hoax in the sense of a deliberate attempt to deceive, but rather an honest misinterpretation. And taking into account the role of the press in the story’s rise and fall, it looks a lot like what I’d call a defence panic.

What happened was that in August 1942 the US Army issued a press release claiming that its airmen had discovered strange patterns in fields across the eastern United States, which appeared to point in the direction of important nearby military and industrial sites. This was offered as evidence that enemy agents were active in the US, laying down signals for German bombers. Nearly two thousand newspapers (including Time) across the country published the story, and editorialised about the enemy within.

Of course, the patterns weren’t Nazi air markers; they were the result of perfectly ordinary rural activities, which had been appearing for years without anybody paying any attention to them. For example, the one shown above was created in 1938 under the supervision of the Department of Agriculture. It’s just the way the field had been ploughed. It was only now, when the country was at war and people were worried about its security, that such patterns were interpreted as signs of danger. It took a sceptical Washington Star and a sheepish confession from the War Department to lay fears of a fifth column to rest.

One aspect I found interesting is that the same story had circulated in a few newspapers in June, but for some reason didn’t take off as it did a couple of months later. The major difference seems to have been the addition of photos of the supposed markers. Maybe they were the evidence needed to make the stories plausible. Maybe they just made the stories more striking and so more appealing to editors. Or it could just be that they were desperate for news in the slow summer months. But it could also be that there was some domestic reason why security was more of a concern in August.

There are a number of obvious parallels. This was not the first time that Americans had imagined aerial threats to their nation: in the First World War — even before their country was in it — there were reports of aircraft flying across the border from Canada at night, perhaps bringing spies and saboteurs. That there were plenty of less dangerous ways for German agents to enter the country dampened the rumours in 1916 about as much as the improbability of New Jersey or Virginia being bombed did in 1942.

The idea of covert signals to enemy bombers can be found in the British press in both world wars. For example, in September 1940, Emil and Alma Wirth, an elderly Swiss-German immigrant and his British-born wife, were arrested on suspicion of ‘making signals “intended to be received by an aircraft in flight”‘ from their Kensington flat. A neighbour, who presumably reported them to the police, said that during an air raid on the night of 24 August he’d seen ‘flashes from the window of the accused whenever an aeroplane appeared to be overhead’. A porter also gave evidence against the couple. It’s not clear from the press accounts, but as the Wirths first appeared in court on 8 September, they may have been arrested in response to the first day of the Blitz, the day before. At any rate the magistrate dismissed the charges, so evidently he wasn’t particularly impressed by the evidence against them. It seems that they weren’t even fined for violating the black-out, which perhaps suggests that there may have some personal reason for the accusations — and being an ersatz German, Emil was an easy target, of course.¹ Sounds like a bit of a witch-hunt, but as the magistrate’s response — and the Washington Star’s scepticism — shows, just because it was war-time doesn’t mean that paranoia was automatically given free reign.

Update: something very similar happened in Britain too.

1. Manchester Guardian, 9 September 1940, p. 11; The Times, 9 September 1940, p. 9; 13 September 1940, p. 2.

A few days after Xmas, I felt like I should be getting back into reading something thesis-related, but at the same time I still felt like I was still in holiday mode. So I compromised and read something on topic, but a bit lighter than my usual academic fare, namely Waiting for Hitler: Voices from Britain on the Brink of Invasion by Midge Gillies (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 2007). The name suggests that it’s along the lines of the ‘forgotten voices’ type of book that seem to be everywhere lately, but I couldn’t say because I haven’t actually read any of them. While it’s certainly heavy on quoting ‘ordinary’ people (Mass-Observation diarists, Dunkirk veterans, internees) and, I’m sure, doesn’t break any new historiographical ground, it’s based on a lot of research, is well-written, and easily moves between the big picture and the small one. I learned a lot about a topic I don’t know much about, namely the British home front from the start of the Norwegian campaign in April 1940, to the start of the Blitz in September. It’s easy for me to focus too much on the Battle of Britain and the Blitz, but in some ways the period leading up to them is more interesting, because people didn’t know what was going to happen next and that’s often when fears come out to play.

One of the aspects of Waiting for Hitler I appreciated was Gillies’ attention to rumours and panics as an index of the insecurity of the British people as they prepared for a possible German invasion. These are fascinating. For example, the slit trenches being dug in Hyde Park were said to be for mass burials in the aftermath of air raids, not protection from bombs. Troops practicing machine-gunning a buoy in a Cornish harbour turned into the accidental death of a boy by machine-gun fire the next day, and then the massacre of dozens of children on the beach the next, strafed by German aeroplanes. Rumours turned the deputy Labour leader Arthur Greenwood into a traitor locked in the Tower, and pencils and chocolates into the poisoned weapons of fifth columnists. In Southampton, the smell from a pickling plant was responsible for a minor panic, when somebody thought it might be poison gas:

ARP wardens paraded in gas masks, while hairdressers slammed their windows and told customers to keep their heads in washbasins.¹

It may sound silly, but it wasn’t really, because the government’s ARP literature warned people to be wary of strange smells as possible evidence of a gas attack.

Stories abounded of new German weapons. For example:

there were tales of German experiments with a cobweb-like material that they had tested over France in 1939. The substance, which they released in large white balloon-like capsules, had covered several square kilometres and clung to people’s hands and faces. In another version it was reported that the substance had appeared over Britain, but it turned out that this was gossamer produced by spiders mating in mid-air.²

Most of these weapons didn’t exist, but the rumours helped explain to those who passed them on why so many armies were crumbling so quickly before the German onslaught. One of the weapons was quite real, however: the paratrooper.

German paratroopers had featured in the invasion of Denmark and Norway, where they were used to secure airfields as forward Luftwaffe bases or to land occupation forces. Airborne units were also used to capture key fortifications and bridges in Holland and Belgium (in particular, the state-of-the-art Fort Eben-Emael). These spectacular operations seemed to provide a crucial part of the explanation for the stunning success of the German army’s blitzkrieg, and naturally the thought arose — no doubt helped along by the extensive press coverage — that paratroopers might next fall on Britain. This was particularly worrying because much of the army was in France with the British Expeditionary Force.

Hence the invention of the ‘parashot’, one of the crop of new war words. A parashot was simply somebody standing guard in a field or somewhere all night, with a weapon such as a shotgun, waiting for a parachutist to come down. Some parashots took up the task spontaneously, but most joined the Local Defence Volunteers, later renamed the Home Guard. What I didn’t realise was that the LDV was announced as early as 14 May, just 4 days after the start of the German offensive in the West. Somehow, I had it in my head that it was a post-Dunkirk affair, only a few weeks later, which would make sense: the BEF had survived, but only just; it had lost all of its equipment; the French had surrendered (or were soon about to). Invasion seemed probable and there was little to stand in the Germans’ way. On 14 May, however, the Allied forces, though shocked by the speed of the German advance, were still intact; the BEF wasn’t yet in retreat. For anyone who remembered the miracle on the Marne in 1914 (ie, all of the senior military and political leaders), to start planning for defeat might have seemed premature. It seems clear that the new menace of the paratrooper helps explain the new zeal for an army of part-timers, schemes for which had been kicked around Whitehall since early in the war. In his BBC broadcast calling for volunteers for the LDV, Anthony Eden, the newly installed Secretary of State for War, opened by discussing at length the new danger:

I want to speak to you to-night about the form of warfare which the Germans have been employing so extensively against Holland and Belgium — namely, the dropping of troops by parachute behind the main defensive lines.³

He then explained the way in which such parachute raids would be carried out:

The troops arrive by aeroplane — but let it be remembered that any such aeroplane seeking to penetrate here would have to do so in the teeth of the anti-aircraft defences of this country. If such penetration is effected, the parachutists are then dropped, it may be by day, it may be by night. These troops are specially armed, equipped, and some of them have undergone specialised training. Their function is to seize important points, such as aerodromes, power stations, villages, railway junctions and telephone exchanges, either for the purpose of destroying them at once, or of holding them until the arrival of reinforcements. The purpose of the parachute attack is to disorganise and confuse, as a preparation for the landing of troops by aircraft.⁴

As well as activities of the contemporary fifth column across the Channel, this strongly resembles the supposed plans of the secret army of German tourists or immigrants so characteristic of the invasion scare novels before 1914, but I’ll let that pass. Eden assured his listeners that plans had been made against to defend against such an attack, however just to be on the safe side …

We want large numbers of such men in Great Britain who are British subjects, between the ages of 17 and 65, to come forward now and offer their service in order to make assurance doubly sure. The name of the new force which is now to be raised will be the “Local Defence Volunteers”. This name, Local Defence Volunteers, describes its duties in three words.⁵

That the government would feel it necessary to call for (it hoped) 150,000 or so volunteers for a second-string army shows how unnerved it was by the blitzkrieg. That 750,000 men would in fact volunteer within the first month shows how unnerved they were. There’s lots of anecdotal evidence to support this, particularly near the south and east coasts — golfers seem to have been particularly concerned that their greens might be perfect landing grounds for gliders, though perhaps this was because an invasion would interrupt their game! Rumours, urban legends practically, of spies parachuting into the country and traveling about disguised as nuns were rife (the give-away was supposedly their hairy arms).

And, on at least one occasion, paratroopers were actually seen floating from the sky:

The concept of the German storm-trooper descending from the sky was so vividly etched on people’s imaginations that it led to a nationwide optical illusion on the stormy Thursday following the invasion of Holland [16 May]. Such was the hysteria about aerial attack that several people mistook silver barrage balloons lit up by flashes of lightning for parachutists. The sightings gained credibility because the Evening Standard had reported that some Germans wore sky-blue uniforms and used transparent parachutes that allowed them to drift to earth invisibly.⁶

Unfortunately, Gillies doesn’t give any references for this, and the extent of the sightings is unclear.⁷ But such a panic fits perfectly into the precedent set by the phantom airships three decades earlier: people are told that strange new enemies are coming by air; they scan the sky anxiously, paying closer attention to it than they normally would; they then see something unfamiliar or under unusual conditions and assume it’s the terrible new weapon they’ve been warned about.⁸ And it’s an air panic too, even if it doesn’t involve Zeppelins or bombers.

So it looks like I’ve got yet more material to try and cram into my thesis somehow. Bigger is better, right?

1. Gillies, Waiting for Hitler, 159.
2. Ibid., 160.
3. The Times, 15 May 1940, p. 3. The full text is online.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Gillies, Waiting for Hitler, 60.
7. It’s ‘a nationwide optical illusion’, yet only involves ’several people’. James Hayward, Myths and Legends of the Second World War (Stroud: Sutton, 2003) has a chapter on the paratrooper panic and hairy nuns, but doesn’t appear to mention this particular incident.
8. It’s true that the phantom airships in 1909 and 1912-3 were seen in peacetime. I would argue that, coming off the back the intense Anglo-German naval rivalry, the spy mania, the invasion novels and all the rest of it, some people felt virtually under siege by Germany already. There’s a degree of circularity in that argument — but I think the loop is broken by the fact that non-existent airships were seen during the First World War itself.

The latest post at Axis of Evel Knievel reminds me that today is the 90th anniversary of the Halifax disaster. On 6 December 1917, two ships collided off the Nova Scotian port of Halifax. One, the SS Mont-Blanc, was carrying huge quantities of TNT, guncotton, and other highly combustible materials, destined for the war in Europe. It caught fire and exploded, laying waste to the town for a radius of 2km and killing around 1500 people — mostly ordinary civilians — within seconds; about 500 more died from their wounds over the following days. It’s still one of the biggest man-made, non-nuclear explosions ever.

Joanna Bourke, in her Fear: A Cultural History, discusses the research of Samuel Prince into the social effects of the Halifax disaster. Prince interviewed many of the survivors (of which he was one!) shortly afterwards; this research formed the basis of his sociology PhD (Columbia University, 1920). Summarising some of Prince’s findings, Bourke writes that

Survivors proved incapable of understanding what was happening. Many hallucinated, their eyes tricking them into seeing German Zeppelins attacking them from the air. A man on the outskirts of the town claimed to have heard a German shell whistling past him. Such visions had been stimulated over the preceding months by rumours of the possibility of a German attack. Residents with German-sounding names were set upon. Some survivors still believed that the Germans had something to do with the disaster.¹

Hallucinations of non-existent Zeppelins? Those would be phantom airships, then. Together with the rumours about an impending German attack, this all sounds a lot like the situation in Britain before the war, when non-existent Zeppelins were also filling the skies: people expected the Germans to come, and, given half an excuse, they saw (and heard) them.

Of course, the explosion itself was a unique circumstance, and might be thought sufficient explanation for any hallucinations. But the rumours of a German attack were already circulating beforehand, so the undercurrents of fear and suspicion necessary for a panic were already present, it would seem. And, the explosion aside, there was nothing very unusual about what people thought they saw: Canada had been visited by mystery aircraft before, almost since the start of the war. Most notably, on 14 February 1915, Ottawa was blacked out because four aircraft had apparently been spotted crossing the St Lawrence from the American side; soldiers getting ready to leave for the Western Front were ordered to patrol the roofs of government buildings with their rifles, in order that there would be at least some resistance when the raiders came. (Which they never did.)²

If anybody ever comes to write the history of the Scareship Age, the Halifax disaster should be part of it.

1. Joanna Bourke, Fear: A Cultural History (London: Virago, 2005), 70. Emphasis added.
2. Nigel Watson, The Scareship Mystery: A Survey of Worldwide Phantom Airship Scares (1909-1918) (Corby: Domra, 2000), 117-20.

Today is the 95th anniversary of the Sheerness Incident. Sheerness is a town at the mouth of the Medway, on the Isle of Sheppey in Kent. For several centuries, it was a dockyard for the Royal Navy (the Nore Mutiny took place nearby in 1797). In 1912, Sheerness was an important part of Britain’s naval defences, helping to guard the Thames Estuary — and hence London — against a possible German invasion.

On Monday, 14 October 1912, between about 6.30pm and 7pm, many people in Sheerness and in Queenborough, two miles to the south, heard a sound like an aeroplane engine coming from the skies overhead. Sunset was shortly after 6pm, and so it was rapidly getting dark. Some witnesses — including a Royal Navy lieutenant — believed they could also make out a red light, and possibly a searchlight, passing to and fro over the town. It was assumed by some townsfolk that the pilot was from the Royal Naval Aerial Service station at nearby Eastchurch, where there was a flight training school;¹ perhaps the pilot was in trouble. The aerodrome was alerted by telephone, and flares were lit in an effort to guide the aircraft in. But although the engine sounds were also heard at Eastchurch, nothing was seen. By about 7pm the sound, and the light, was no longer detectable.

Where did the sounds come from? Eastchurch had no aircraft up that night, so it wasn’t from there. In fact, night flying was relatively rare at the time: Claude Grahame-White was the first to do it successfully in an aeroplane, in 1910. The world of British aviation in 1912 was a small one, and if a pilot had successfully undertaken a hazardous cross-country night flight it seems unlikely that it would have remained a secret. (An unsuccessful flight, of course, would have been even harder to miss!) Newspapers no longer reported on each and every flight, but weekly aviation magazines seem to have had notices of many of them. For example, Flight reported on flights at Eastchurch by nine different pilots during the week in question, though for 14 October itself only noted that ‘Lieut. Briggs was out with passenger on Monday’.² So it seems unlikely that any British pilot was flying that night over the Isle of Sheppey.

The next most obvious explanation was that a German airship was responsible, and most press speculation focused on this possibility. Hence the question asked by William Joynson-Hicks in the House of Commons on 18 November 1912: whether J. E. B. Seely, the Minister for War, had any information concerning a ‘Zeppelin dirigible passing over Sheerness on the night of October 14, about 8 p.m’. Seely did not, and neither did Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty. But Churchill promised to make inquiries. In fact, the Air Department of the Admiralty was already on the case, having ordered the commander of HMS Actaeon to prepare a report on the incident as early as 25 October. On 21 and 27 November, Churchill reported to Commons on the results: he could not say whether it was an airship or an aeroplane, nor could he identify its nationality; he could only say that it was ‘not one of our own airships’.³ But that was only what Churchill felt it prudent to say in public. Privately, in a meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence, he said that ‘there was very little doubt that the airship reported recently to have passed over Sheerness was a German vessel’.⁴ In fact, this was of course was implicit in Joynson-Hicks’s use of the word “Zeppelin”. In its giant Zeppelins, Germany had the means to carry out such a long-distance flight. And due to the Anglo-German antagonism, it presumably had the motive. Airminded nationalists in Germany thought that a big fleet of Zeppelins was just the thing to counter British naval superiority, so it seemed plausible — to airminded nationalists in Britain, at least — that the Germans might want to practice flying to a British naval base and back.

There was even a candidate. The German press had reported that the new German naval Zeppelin, L1, had undertaken a proving flight north from Friedrichshafen (in Bavaria), out over the North Sea on 13 and 14 October. But the problem was that, according to those same reports, the L1 had ended its flight at Johannistal, near Berlin, at 3.30pm, 3 hours before the engine sounds were heard at Sheerness. But perhaps it was the case, as naval officers at Sheerness and Portsmouth suggested to the Daily Mail’s correspondent, that the reported times of the L.1’s flight were intentionally altered by 24 hours.⁵ The Germans — including Count Zeppelin himself — publicly denied any involvement, but then they would, wouldn’t they?

Another, much later suggestion is that the Sheerness Incident was hoaxed by Grahame-White and Churchill in order to demonstrate Britain’s vulnerability to German air attack.⁶ This has a superficial plausibility. As I noted above, Grahame-White was an experienced night flier. He was also very concerned about Britain’s lack of aerial defences. And he was Britain’s greatest aerial propagandist. On 26 September 1912, all of these aspects of Grahame-White came together when he held his first “Illuminated Night Flying Display” at Hendon. Accompanied by a fireworks display, and watched by ten thousand spectators, five aeroplanes carrying searchlights “bombed” a dummy battleship.⁷ As for Churchill, he was certainly interested in aviation and worried about the aerial threat to Britain. So perhaps they concocted this stunt to highlight Britain’s vulnerability to air attack.

And the Sheerness Incident certainly did that. The conservative press read between the lines of Churchill’s non-committal statement about the identity of the aircraft, and henceforth used the incident as proof that Germany had the capability and the intention to attack Britain from the air. This lent plausibility to further reports of phantom airships seen in British skies early in 1913, which in turn reinforced the calls from the conservative press for the government to spend a million pounds on air defence. As an anonymous Royal Flying Corps pilot told the Standard:

We are helpless. We have neither aeroplane nor dirigible capable of coping with these vessels [the phantom airships] in the air [...] The fact is that we have been hopelessly left behind in military aeronautics, and there seems very little prospect of any advance being made as long as responsible Ministers give public utterances of their being content to wait to pick the brains of foreigners.⁸

The government didn’t rush to expand its air forces, but it did rush through Parliament legislation banning the overflight of, among other things, naval bases. Although the bill was in preparation before Sheerness, the incident was mentioned in CID discussions as further justification (along with a much less dubious overflight by the Hansa of a British cruiser squadron at Copenhagen).

So what really happened at Sheerness? It’s hard to say. It seems pretty clear that something was definitely heard. There were many witnesses — we have names for some of them — and the press accounts were corroborated by the Admiralty’s investigation. And given that the people of Sheerness knew what an aero engine sounded like, it also seems likely there was an aircraft aloft that night. I don’t buy the theory that it was a conspiracy by Grahame-White and Churchill. Partly because such subterfuge seems out of character for such relentless publicity-seekers as these two were (I can imagine Grahame-White taking part in such a stunt but he would have soon enough revealed his part in it), but mostly because no actual evidence has ever surfaced, despite the vast amount of research done on Churchill since then. And if Churchill was in on it, why wait for a month before drawing attention to the incident?⁹ It’s more likely that a German airship was involved, but again, if so then it’s strange that no evidence for this surfaced in the last 95 years. It’s the sort of thing that would turn up in post-war memoirs, even if the original records had been lost or destroyed.¹⁰ Really, I have nothing better to offer than the possibility that it was in fact some British airman who went out for a jaunt over the Isle of Sheppey one autumn evening, and for some reason the investigators never got wind of the flight. That’s admittedly rather lame, but then I’m more interested in how the incident was interpreted and the conclusions drawn from it, than in what really happened that night over Sheerness …

Further reading: Alfred Gollin, The Impact of Air Power on the British People and their Government, 1909-14 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 223-7.

1. Short Brothers was also based at Eastchurch at the time, though I’ve not seen this mentioned in reference to the Sheerness Incident.
2. Flight, 19 October 1912, p. 932.
3. The Times, 28 November 1912, p. 10.
4. Minutes of Committee of Imperial Defence meeting, 6 December 1912, CAB 38/22/42.
5. Daily Mail, 18 November 1912, p. 7. Another possibility, championed by C. G. Grey of the Aeroplane, was that the civilian Zeppelin Hansa was responsible for the Sheerness Incident: The Times, 13 January 1913, p. 6. Though as its flight from Hamburg reportedly ended at Gotha (in central Germany) at 4 p.m. on 14 October, Hansa doesn’t really seem any more likely a suspect than does the L1.
6. Granville Oldroyd and Nigel Watson, “The Sheerness Incident: did a German airship fly over Kent in 1912?”, Fortean Studies 4 (1998), 151-9.
7. David Oliver, Hendon Aerodrome: A History (Shrewsbury: Airlife, 1994), 19. In fact, as early as July 1910 he had dive-bombed the real fleet — without a real bomb, of course — so he was clearly not averse to stunts.
8. Standard, 25 February 1913, p. 9.
9. Also, Joynson-Hicks, who was the first to mention the matter in Parliament (and presumably would have been tipped off, according to the conspiracy theory), addressed his question to Seely, not Churchill. Besides which, Jix was a Conservative, and Seely and Churchill Liberals — unlikely allies.
10. Douglas Robinson, who wrote what is still the standard work on the operations of the German naval airship division, apparently concluded that it could not have been a Zeppelin, though I haven’t seen his assessment myself.