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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THINGS TO COME?

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

REHEARSAL FOR DEATH

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

APPREHENSION...

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

... AND THEN INFERNO

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

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

NIGHTMARE OF THE FUTURE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I received this request for assistance from Jean Dewaerheid, a Belgian writer who is working with Peter Haas and Pierre-Antoine Courouble to track down wooden bomb eyewitnesses:

Three authors (from Belgium, Germany and France) have been working for years on a bizarre subject: the dropping of dummy wooden bombs on wooden airplanes.

In order to deceive the Allies during the Second World War, the Germans built fake airfields on the continent, often with runways and sometimes with buildings, but always with fake wooden planes, called "Attrappen". Strange stories can be heard in which allied airplanes made fun of them by dropping wooden bombs on which they had sometimes painted remarks like "Wood for Wood".

The French writer, Pierre-Antoine Courouble devoted himself to a structural inquiry to unearth the facts behind this vague legend. His investigations resulted in 137 testimonies from resistants, former employees on German basis, and pilots of the Luftwaffe. His research has been condensed in the book The Riddle of the Wooden Bombs, published at the "Presses du midi" and translated in four languages. He found original sources on this matter in the form of testimonies of servicemen, pilots and veterans' children. He met a dozen witnesses who had personally seen the famous bombs, two of whom were eye witnesses to their droppings. Today, these wooden bombs can be found on the internet. We bought them.

Peter Haas, the German translator of the book, found a pilot from the Luftwaffe named Wern Thiel, who happened to be stationed in 1943, on the fake airfield nearby Potsdam in Germany. He is the living witness of the dropping of a dozen of wooden bombs, with the mention Wood for Wood! At the end of the filmed interview (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_tGOxoIhIE) he addresses the allied pilot who had that typically peculiar sense of humour.

Today we are confronted with a difficulty named TIME! The men who survived (they must be aged between 75 and 95) are very hard to find via internet (we tried!). As the official (mostly British) authorities still deny the existence of the droppings (war is not a game, it's an urban legend, etc.) we eventually decided to explore another possibility.

As we notice that most of the testimonies are American, a basic idea started growing. Couldn’t this typically peculiar sense of British humour not simply be an example of AMERICAN sense of humour? This would explain lots of things and is the reason why we try to contact pilots or members of the American Forces stationed in Europe during WW2 who could have been involved in the dropping of these wooden bombs.

In the meantime we are working on the French-American project to produce a documentary film about the subject. Olivier Hermitant, from « Route07 production », (http://vimeo.com/11526361) is offering his services in order to find the rare bird, a veteran of WW2 who was witness or perhaps actor of the dropping of these wooden bombs on German targets.

Could you help us in our quest finding the rare (American) bird? We would be extremely grateful if you could inform your members about this riddle of the Second World War.

I hope Dewaerheid, Haas and Courourble do succeed in finding new eyewitnesses. I did argue in my review of Courouble's book that the focus should move to searching for documentary evidence in operational records and other archives, but I suppose they aren't going anywhere whereas the veterans are. (But I'd note that it's not the job of 'the official (mostly British) authorities' to confirm or deny the wooden bomb stories, somebody has to go into the archives themselves and do the actual research.)

I'm dubious, though, about this new theory that American airmen were the ones who dropped the wooden bombs. In part this seems to be thanks to the new witness mentioned above, Wern Thiel, a Luftwaffe pilot stationed on a decoy airfield near Potsdam during the war. He does specifically say he'd like to meet the American pilot who dropped wooden bombs on his dummy aeroplanes. But in the brief excerpt shown, he says that when the air raid in question took place (in October 1942 according to the video caption, though it's 1943 above and I can't actually hear him saying the year) that they 'activated the light beacons' which implies it was a night raid. Aside from the question of identifying the nationality of aircraft at night, the Americans of course very rarely carried out night bombing.

It would also need to be explained why the majority of the stories claim it was the British -- even when told by Americans? It could perhaps be claimed that this is a later accretion to the story, but then that puts us back into urban legend territory. Perhaps that's not a problem, as the wooden bomb story clearly is an urban legend as well as (probably) a true story; maybe cross-fertilisation took place.

And then there's the fact that the wooden bomb stories predate American involvement in the war. William Shirer recorded one version in his diary in November 1940; and there are other examples too. Obviously these can't be attributed to Americans.

It does seem odd that it's so hard to find accounts from Allied airmen who dropped wooden bombs, as opposed to accounts of Allied airmen who dropped wooden bombs. This, along with the wide variation in details from story to story, suggests to me that most of the wooden bombs were urban legends, rumours or just jokes. But given the evidence Courouble and his colleagues have come up with, I think wooden bombs were really dropped, sometimes, rarely. Whether reality inspired rumours or rumours inspired reality may not be possible to determine now.

Looking over the list of Australian mystery aircraft sightings suggests that some generalisations can be made.

In the 1910s, mysterious lights in the sky were usually described as being airship-like; after 1910 they were far more likely to be called aeroplanes. Perhaps not coincidentally, 1910 was when aeroplanes first flew in Australia; certainly a search of Trove Newspapers (using Wraggelabs' QueryPic) shows that 1910 was the first year when the word "aeroplane" appeared markedly more frequently than "airship". So that's easy enough to explain.

The same search shows that 1909 was the year that aviation really broke through into public consciousness. That's also the year of the Australian phantom airship wave. As it was the first burst of interest in aircraft, the first time that people started to learn about them, it's perhaps not surprising that people might think they saw them flying around where they weren't. The 1918 mystery aeroplane scare came after several years of increasing press coverage of aviation, obviously due to the war. So again that fits. Aeroplanes were something people were reading (and probably talking) about a lot. But that by itself is evidently not enough to generate a mystery aeroplane scare: there were a few seen in 1914, and a handful in the years after that, but nothing on the scale of 1918. There needs to be a plausible reason for aircraft to be flying about: and the reported visit of the Wolf and its Wölfchen to Australian shores provided that, though the desperate situation of the Allied armies in France was also a factor.

After 1918 there is a lull; I couldn't find any mystery aircraft sightings until 1927, when a few start to pop up. (Which certainly doesn't mean they aren't there to be found. I just found another one, albeit for 1928 as well.) Why might that be? Well, looking at the ngram above again is suggestive. This time the plot extends covers 1918 to 1942, and is for 'plane' as well as 'aeroplane' -- the former becomes more common from the late 1920s. After a relatively flat level of interest in aviation during most of the 1920s (actually falling considerably from the immediate postwar years), the number of articles using the word 'plane' almost doubles between 1926 and 1928, after which it is fairly stable until a dip in 1932 and 1933. So once more there's a buzz about aeroplanes (or rather planes), a widespread curiosity about aviation. Why was this so?

It was certainly nothing to do with fear of war in these Locarno years. I haven't tested this quantitatively, but it can't be a coincidence that these were the years of some of the great pioneering long-distance flights. Australia was the destination and, in some cases, the birthplace of many of the aviators who carried out these feats: the Englishman Alan Cobham flew from England to Australia and back in 1926, for which he was knighted; in 1928, Bert Hinkler, an Australian, was the first to make the trip solo. That same year, Charles Kingsford-Smith and Charles Ulm, also Australians, were the first to fly across the vast Pacific and then the smaller Tasman. The excitement that Charles Lindbergh's 1927 New York-Paris flight generated is well-known; something similar happened, if perhaps less intense, must have happened in Australia. The emotional investment in these pioneer aviators and their dangerous lives perhaps explains the number of false reports of aeroplane crashes around 1930.

And it wasn't just the big names either. Here's a plot of the number of civil aircraft registered in Australia from 1922 to 1939. Between 1926 and 1928, this increased from 55 to 90 or 63% (and then another 144% between 1928 and 1930).

Other statistics -- number of flights, number of hours flown, number of passengers carried -- tell the same story. There was a huge increase in flying in the late 1920s, followed by a bust (no doubt due to the Depression) and another boom in the late 1930s. So it makes sense that mystery aeroplanes began to be seen again from 1927-8 or so. It was the golden age of Australian aviation: far more people were talking about and flying in aeroplanes than ever before.

Apart from the air crash theory, other explanations for mystery aircraft in the late 1920s and early 1930s included opium smugglers and -- in 1934 -- a Japanese reconnaissance of the northern coast. Japan was invoked, either explicitly or implicitly, in the Darwin and Hobart sightings in 1938, and the Townsville incidents in 1942. This brings me back to my original purpose in starting this series, which was to see if Australian mystery aircraft sightings can be used as an index of public anxiety about national defence. And my answer is 'yes', but it's a heavily qualified 'yes'. It's quite obviously so in 1918 and 1942, but then the country was at war (and in the latter case actually under attack), so that's no surprise. In the late 1920s and early 1930s there was no cause for Australians to be alarmed, so again it's no surprise that mystery aircraft weren't seen to be hostile. The more difficult cases are in 1909 and, to a lesser extent, 1938. In 1909, the mystery aircraft were the object of curiosity, not suspicion. But that same year Britain was undergoing every sort of defence panic around: invasion, dreadnoughts, airships, spies. Australians were also very worried about invasion, albeit from Japan, not Germany. Why didn't Australians imagine Japanese airships spying from overhead, preparing the way for the Emperor's soldiers?

The answer must have something to do with perceived plausibility, which in turn depends on perceived capability and perceived intent. In 1909, Germany had Zeppelins; Japan had nothing. If Japan had been publicly and successfully experimenting with longrange aircraft in like fashion to Germany, then Australians might have believed that the 1909 mystery airships were Japanese, just as Britons believed that theirs were German. In 1938, things were different. Everyone had aircraft now; and Japan was closer, in the sense that it had forward bases in Micronesia as well as aircraft carriers. It was now plausible to imagine that Japanese aircraft could reach Australia.

I was going to suggest that it was also now more plausible to imagine that Japan intended to attack Australia: after the Marco Polo Bridge incident in 1937 (and setting aside the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 which seems to have made less of an impression) it was clearly in an aggressive, expansionist phase. But the above plot suggests that press interest, at least, in Japan actually declined after 1937. That's a very crude index, of course, but it's consistent with Augustine Meaher's argument that Australians were surprisingly unconcerned about Japan in the late 1930s, contrary to Peter Stanley's view.

This is starting to get confusing. But, paradoxically, considering another problem with mystery aircraft may help here. Why were there no big waves of mystery aircraft sightings after the First World War? This seems to be true worldwide. Between 1896 and 1918 there were a number of times where mystery aircraft are seen in many places by many people over a short period of time: the United States, Canada, Britain, New Zealand, Australia. Afterwards, while there were certainly mystery aircraft sightings, they tended to occur singly, appearing once or twice at one place and then disappearing. They were also interpreted in isolation: nobody seems to have connected the Hobart mystery aeroplane of July 1938 with the Darwin case in February, nobody saw them as part of the same phenomenon. I'm not sure why this is, but I suspect that a greater familiarity with real aircraft must have had something to do with it. Actual aircraft were very rare in all countries when mystery aircraft waves took place: airships and aeroplanes were imagined far more than seen. This ignorance made it easier to believe that a planet, a fire-balloon or a Reticulan battlecruiser was in fact a aeroplane: easier for the witnesses, easier for everyone they told to believe them, easier for the journalists covered the story to treat it seriously. The spread of the idea that Germans (etc) were flying around in the sky met no resistance -- at least for a while: when the press starts to get sceptical the mystery aircraft waves tend to collapse very quickly.

So, while the huge increase in flying in Australia from the late 1920s may have put aviation at the forefront of the national consciousness and provided imaginative fodder for mystery aircraft incidents, it seems to have provided an inoculation against mass waves of sightings. For that to occur there needed to be plausibility, curiosity, and ignorance. All three at once. Mystery aircraft do appear at other times, but don't lead to anything else and are soon forgotten.

I'm not happy with this post; it's long and rambling, unfocused and confusing. Partly that's due to me making it up as I go along rather than planning ahead; but it's also partly due to the fuzzy nature of the mystery aeroplane phenomenon (and indeed history) itself. In trying to find common factors and causes I run the risk of imposing my own order where there is none. Maybe there is really no point to this. Maybe the Scareship Age was no such thing. So people thought they saw aircraft flying around where they were none. So what? Sometimes I think I should focus my research on phantom airships and mystery aeroplanes: it's something that few other historians are interested in and so it's one area where I can make a distinctive contribution. But then again, maybe there's a reason why it's a fallow field.

The title of this little series is a nod to David Walker's Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850-1939. As the title suggests, Walker argues that Australia's relationship with Asia in the decades before and after Federation was largely characterised by fear about immigration, imports and invasion. Peter Stanley, in Invading Australia: Japan and the Battle for Australia, 1942, fleshes out the last of these fears through a discussion of novels and books from the 1930s which discussed the prospect of war with Japan (or at least an unnamed or Ruritanian Asian enemy). For example, in Erle Cox's Fool's Harvest (1938/1939), Australia is attacked and invaded by 'Cambasia' in September 1939, beginning with a massive air raid on Sydney which causes 200,000 civilian casualties. Britain is unable to help, as it has been attacked by Germany, Italy and France; a British fleet at Singapore is sunk. The Australian armed forces are ill-equipped to defend the nation, and after a month Cambasia is victorious at the last battle of the war, at Seymour in central Victoria. A resistance movement is eventually suppressed after increasingly brutal reprisals. The south-eastern part of Australia eventually regains a limited independence in 1966, but the majority of the population still labours under the Cambasian yoke.

But I've also been reading Augustine Meaher's The Australian Road to Singapore: The Myth of British Betrayal. Meaher argues that Australians were not in fact particularly concerned about Japan in the 1930s. The few attempts at warning the public and the elites were confused and ineffectual; the armed forces were too busy fighting with each other to seriously think about fighting Japan. Even the start of the Sino-Japanese war and events like the Nanking Massacre didn't seem to cause any great alarm. And it must be said that Walker's account of the 1930s doesn't do much to contradict this. He focuses on the increasing interest of Australian elites in closer ties with Asia and the Pacific, rather than the fears which had preoccupied earlier generations. At the risk of caricature, Meaher's thesis is that Australians weren't too worried about the Japanese threat; and Stanley's is that they were too worried.

Meaher is convincing on his core argument: that Britain never promised it would be able to defend Australia under all circumstances and that Australia misunderstood the consequent need to invest in its own defences. But I do wonder if he is too quick to dismiss those efforts which were made to warn Australians of the Japanese threat, though. For example, I don't think he discusses the famous refusal of dock workers in 1938 to load iron onto ships bound for Japan, explicitly for the reason that it might come back in the form of bombs. This idea must have come from somewhere. He argues persuasively that the press and the ruling elites were ill-equipped to provide cogent analyses of Australia's strategic situation; the few attempts which were made were usually simplistic where they weren't plain silly. The depth of debate about strategic affairs does seem very poor when compared with Britain.

Still, that doesn't mean such debate as existed was without effect. Stanley describes Fool's Harvest as 'hugely popular' and notes that it was first serialised in the Melbourne Argus, one of the nation's leading newspapers. It also seems to be a good example of a novelist popularising the ideas of more serious thinkers, as Thomas Blamey advised Cox on the military side of things. Blamey had been Monash's chief of staff in France during the last war and at this time was in charge of recruitment for the Citizen Military Force (i.e. the Militia) and a regular commentator for the ABC on military and foreign affairs. The same sort of nexus between next-war novelists, military intellectuals and the press could be found in Britain, though by this time such blatant le Queux-like propagandising was no longer common. It looks to me like there was at least a nascent next-war literature by the late 1930s.

On the other hand, I put that that question mark in the title of these posts before I read Meaher's book. That's because I was concerned that I was projecting forwards my (not particularly deep) knowledge of the fear of Japan in the first decades after Federation, and backwards my (also not particularly deep) knowledge of the fear of Japanese invasion in 1942, as exemplified by the wonderful piece of scaremongering at the start of this post. But it's also because it didn't look like the mystery aeroplane sightings I'm looking at here can simply be put down to fear of Japan. I'll tackle that in a final post in this series.

Airmindedness is a word which gets bandied around a lot these days -- okay, not actually a lot, but it's not just me either. But I think it's too broad a concept; at the very least, it needs to be divided into positive airmindedness and negative airmindedness. I mostly write about negative airmindedness. This more or less is the attitude 'Aviation is vitally important to the nation because it is incredibly dangerous'; the previous post is a good example of this. In Britain, I would argue, this was the predominant form of airmindedness in Britain between the wars, due to the perceived danger of a knock-out blow from the air. But mixed in with that there was also positive airmindedness: 'Aviation is vitally important to the nation because it is incredibly beneficial'. (Before 1914 this was stronger, though the phantom airship panics would suggest that even then negative airmindedness held sway.) Above is an example, a 1926 London Underground poster by Montague B. Black.

LONDON 2026 A.D. -- THIS IS ALL UP IN THE AIR
TO-DAY -- THE SOLID COMFORT OF THE UNDERGROUND

It presents a vision of London a hundred years' hence, the far-off year of 2026, drawing on the futurism of aviation to sell the (sub)mundane transport of today. (Airmindedness was very often about the potential of aviation than its reality, the future rather than the present.)

The sky is full of exciting promises: autogyro airtaxis! Airships to Australia! A London Bridge Air Depot! These are all good things (except if you value London's architectural heritage, perhaps).

But as I say, this kind of positive airmindedness is not typical of Britain. I think it is safe to say that it was much more typical of the United States, for example, a reflection of that nation's more optimistic attitude towards technology in this period. That's why when talking about airmindedness it's critical to pay attention to the national context: as brilliant as Joseph Corn's The Winged Gospel is, for example, it would be a mistake to think its portrait of positive American airmindedness applied to Britain where negative airmindedness held sway. Different countries had different forms of airmindedness at different times.

I would add one caution: the distinction between positive and negative airmindedness is not quite identical to that between civil and military aviation. For example, military aviation can be seen as positive if you believe that it will deter war or end them quickly and with a minimum of bloodshed (AKA 'the bomber dream'); and civil aviation can be seen as negative if you believe that they can be quickly converted into bombers and used in a knock-out blow (AKA 'the commercial bomber'). It's all in the context.

Additional image source: The Retronaut.

This advertisement was placed by the Air League in The Times, 11 June 1940, on page 9 (it also appeared in the Daily Telegraph). The British Expeditionary Force had been ejected from France just a week before; Germany now occupied Belgium and the Netherlands. France was still fighting, but Paris had been declared an open city, and with Italy entering the war its position seemed hopeless. The RAF had evidently not been able to hold back the Luftwaffe, now only a few minutes' flight from British soil, and this is where the Air League came in. It pointed out that

For years the Air League warned the country of the importance of air power. [...] Now is the time for renewed effort and new resolves. Resolve to-day that so long as any danger exists you will use every effort to keep the Royal Air Force strong enough after the war to deter any aggressor from threatening our peace [...] If you support the Air League you can make it your means of ensuring that never again will our country get into a position of inferiority in the air.

I wonder how far away the Air League thought 'after the war' was: years, months, weeks? Given that no money was being solicited (and the advertising itself was expensive), that would seem to suggest sooner rather than later: few people would feel obliged to keep such a pledge made years earlier under different circumstances. J. A. Chamier, the Secretary-General of the Air League whose idea it was, was a fascist fellow-traveller, so we may presume did not wish to fight Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy any longer than necessary. But then again to call for Britain to maintain its airpower at a high level after an armistice, say, is not treasonous. Whether this position is defeatist is debatable, though I tend to think it is, a little.

Note the distinctly petulant tone:

More public support would have made its [the Air League's] warnings more effective [...] The Air League, which founded Empire Air Day and the Air Defence Cadet Corps has never been adequately supported by the public.

I.e., dear British people: if you idiots had listened to us in the first place we wouldn't be in this mess. Did this hectoring work? Though the Air League asked for a million pledges, by October it had received about 500, not an insignificant number compared to its total membership (before the war, in the low thousands) but not a lot either, when the immense gratitude people felt for the RAF after the Battle of Britain is taken into account.

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

The situation is as follows:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But many bombers get through to London:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My main interest in this series about the RAF Displays at Hendon has been in the set pieces with which they ended. But as this is the last post it's worth looking a bit at the organisation of the Display itself. Flight had some useful articles for this in its preview of the 15th Display, held on Saturday, 29 June 1935. Above is a map showing the aerodrome, the seating arrangements, car parks, access roads and Colindale tube, which opened in 1924 and was a major boon for visitors to the Display. (For those who have been to the area more recently -- say to the RAF Museum or British Library Newspapers -- it's interesting to compare how the area has changed.) We can see from the seating plans some of the groups the RAF was trying to impress: there are boxes for the House of Commons, the House of Lords and public schools -- presumably with an eye to future officer recruitment. Private boxes seating six could be booked for between £4 and £7 (depending on location?); at the other end of the spectrum the groundlings could buy tickets for the least exclusive enclosures on the day for 2s., or a spot on a hillside overlooking the aerodrome for 1s. Attendance peaked in 1931 at 169,000 (bringing in £27,585 6s. 11d.), though including onlookers sitting in places where they didn't have to pay the figure came up to around 500,000 (or so Flight reckoned). The organisation of the Display was a year-round affair, with the 'display office' being closed only for a couple of weeks in August. The programme is 'usually settled fairly exactly by the beginning of the year', but by whom is not clear. The whole thing is overseen by a 'Display Committee' headed by Air Chief Marshal Sir Robert Brooke-Popham; the 'Flying-Subcommittee' chaired by Air Vice-Marshal Joubert de la Ferté handles the exciting bits; and the 'General Purposes Committee', of which Air Commodore B. C. H. Drew is secretary, organises everything else -- ticketing, liaison with transport and police, construction, etc.

Another reason for talking about the organisation is that this year there was no set piece, only a fly-past. Flight's correspondent wasn't sure why:

In past years the final item of the Display has, as everybody knows, been a "set-piece" in which a fort, munition works, aerodrome, ship or other objective belonging to a nefarious enemy has gone up in flames, smoke and terrific noise, to the general delight. This time, for some reason best known to the organisers, the finale took the form of a fly-past by nine squadrons of machines which had taken part in the display.

This, it was thought, was 'unimpressive, either by comparison with the finales of previous years or with several items the same afternoon'. It would be interesting to know why there was no set-piece; perhaps for some reason such play-acting was no longer acceptable given that tension in Europe was rising and the RAF itself was rearming.

Whatever the reason, the set-piece was back for the next Display (held on Saturday, 27 June 1936). Indeed, there were a couple of mini-mock battles earlier in the programme -- one involved Bristol Bulldogs bombing and strafing marauders from 'an unknown race of white savages' ('in some quarters it is thought less reprehensible to bomb white savages than to employ similar tactics against black men'). The set-piece itself involved a much more industrialised target:

Southland's power station -- a most solid and convincing edifice on the far side of the aerodrome -- was the objective of Northland's bombers.

The 'brightening-up' of this year's programme included broadcasting radio transmissions from the participants over loudspeakers for the crowds to hear. So they were able to listen in to 'Southland's operational headquarters receiving raid warnings from ships and the Observer Corps, ordering up its defending fighter squadrons [...] to patrol the expected avenues of attack, and calling on the A.A. guns to stand by in readiness'.

Northland first sends in a Hawker Hart to shoot down the observation balloon; 'the latter, apparently preferring death to dishonour, burst into flame before the Hart was within range'. The commander of one of the defending squadron reports 'we are now engaging the enemy', more Harts, who appear 'out of the heat haze with the defenders and diving in and out among them, and in a few seconds the unlucky power station's volts, amps and ohms are being split into atoms in a terrific welter of smoke, flame and noise'.

And then the guns are told to stand by for a second raid which will be "here in three minutes -- as you were, in one minute." This time the attackers are two squadron V's of Heyfords; they are engaged by No. 17's Bulldogs, and one descends "in flames," doing a genuine loop -- amazing sight -- in the process, and going down out of sight behind the trees in realistic fashion. But the power station suffers again.

A Heyford looping would have been very impressive indeed, as it was a big twin-engined machine, the last of the RAF's biplane night bombers. It does sound like Flight's correspondent found the set-piece quite exciting:

Then we learn that the first raid is turning to reopen the attack, and soon the Harts are approaching in echelon, to fall away one after the other in a steep bombing dive.

A bit oddly, though, the set-piece ends with Southland resigning 'itself to waiting for "another raid at 10 p.m."', even though the power station is already ruined. I'm not sure what this was meant to convey to the audience. That the times of air raids can be predicted? That targets will be bombed over and over again until the rubble is turned into dust? That they should stick around for an encore show that evening?

The eighteenth RAF Display was held on Saturday, 26 June 1937. Again, some of the earlier events had scripted scenarios (strafing some river pirates, for example) but the main attraction was again the 'old favourite -- the Set Piece. This year it was more theatrical than usual, and well staged'.

The erection represented Port Hendon, complete with lighthouse and a ship in dock. The broadcast came from the control room of the Fighter Command, and one heard the reports coming in of a Blueland raid flying inland very fast and evidently making for Port Hendon. The A.O.C. ordered up No. 3 (Fighter) Squadron to meet it, and we saw the Gladiators (Mercury engines) leap into the sky and make off for their patrol line. Then came in reports of a second raid, and yet a third. After waiting a moment to make sure of its direction, the A.O.C. sent up No. 601 (County of London) (Fighter) Squadron to deal with it, and off went the Auxiliaries in their Demons (Kestrels).

The first wave of bombers were Bristol Blenheims, which easily dodged the Gladiators, though 'Archie' got one ('Bravo the Territorial Army!') Hawker Hinds were intercepted by the Demons, but the port took some damage (as seen in the Pathe Gazette newsreel above).

Meantime some Vildebeests of No. 42 (Torpedo Bomber) Squadron, very proud of their new sleeve-valve Perseus engines, came in low and torpedoed the lock gates, to the discomfiture of the ship inside.

The coup de grâce was delivered by five Vickers Wellesleys ('very shapely'!) and five Armstrong-Whitworth Whitleys ('impressive').

When they had finished, Port Hendon was a sorry mess, but everyone was tremendously cheered to hear that our own bombers had just demolished the chief aero engine factory of Blueland. "That," remarked the A.O.C., "will keep them quiet for a while." The reflection did not seem to console the O.C. Port Hendon, but it did rub it in that after all British bombers are our defenders.

Yes, take that the Fighter Command and also pacifists!

The eighteenth RAF Display was also the last. In January 1938 the Air Council announced that it would no longer be held. The reason given was that the faster aeroplanes now in service meant that it was now too hard for Hendon to be the 'culminating point for the training of squadrons stationed in this country':

A large part of the attraction of the display has been the presentation of intricate evolutions in a comparatively confined space within clear view of all the spectators. The advent of new aircraft of greatly increased power and speed has led to the development of new technique [sic] in training and tactics. If, therefore, the display was to maintain a real connection with the Service training of the Air Force, its character would have to be radically altered. The aircraft taking part would need to manœuvre over a much wider area, and its attractiveness would thus be greatly diminished. For these and other reasons, Hendon is obviously unsuitable.

These 'other reasons' may have included the need to focus more squarely on preparing for war; and perhaps also a feeling that, after Guernica and the other air raids on civilian targets in Spain, mock bombing wasn't suitable entertainment for the masses.

I'll probably write another, more reflective post on the Hendon set-pieces. But not today!

The week before the 1932 RAF Display, Flight's editor commented on the rationale behind the theme chosen for the finale:

Sometimes the story composed for the set piece has been framed with some object, such as to obviate the criticisms of pacifists. Thus at one Display the enemy were called Pirates, so that nobody could object to their flaming end. This year we are to have a battle piece, pure and simple, which is the best thing of all. The R.A.F. exists to defend us, so we may as well get some idea (so far as sham fighting can give it) of what our aircraft would do to those who may attack us.

But on the day (Saturday, 25 June 1932), the set piece seemed to disappoint Flight's correspondent. The set-up (above) was described as follows:

The scene this year represented a main aerodrome of the Enemy, situated alongside a disused fort in which large quantities of bombs were stored [...] The Enemy squadrons having been somewhat worrying, it was decided to carry out a heavy air attack to destroy this base.

A squadron of 'our Single-Seater Fighters' strafes the aerodrome, drawing off 'the Enemy Fighter Squadron' in pursuit. Reconnaissance aircraft (Hawker Audaxes) report the scene to be clear, and so the bombers (Hawker Horsleys and Fairey IIIFs) are sent in.

After shooting up the enemy kite balloon,

out Bombers came on the scene, accompanied by bursting shells from the anti-aircraft guns. The Bombers made several journals across the Enemy 'drome, dropping a salvo each time, and now and again one of our machines would fall out of the formation "in flames."

Why the disappointment? For one thing, the spectacle was not spectacular enough:

For all this, however, the amount of destruction appeared to be comparatively small -- the hangars, it was true, were burnt out, but the flags remained fluttering in the breeze, and that store of bombs remained as silent dawn breaking [sic].

But the lack-lustre scenario also was deemed to blame:

Although the "plot" laid for the Set Piece this year was very much more war-like than the semi-peaceful ones of the last few Displays, somehow or other we were not particularly thrilled by this event. Personally we were much more excited when our aircraft swooped down upon hordes of many-coloured "Wot Knotts," scattering them in all directions, and then blowing everything up with terrific bangs.

Clearly the writer hailed from the G. A. Henty school of airpower.

The next Display, held on Saturday, 24 June 1933, was even more disappointing, though this time that was due to the continuous rain and poor visibility. The show still went on, though I think the set piece itself was cancelled. Flight's online archives appear to be missing the first half of 1933, but The Times's aeronautical correspondent, E. Colston Shepherd, wrote a preview of the set piece, so at least we know what was intended. It sounds similar to 1932's scenario, except the aerodrome is now a submarine base:

Redland is the villain of this piece. She has ignored her covenants and opened war on Blueland. To Blueland sea communications are vital. Her food must come in by sea, and the lives of her people depend on the merchant fleet. This fleet is threatened with extinction by the submarines of Redland. On the principle that submarines, like aircraft, are best dealt with before they set out on their offensive voyages, Blueland organizes an air attack on the submarine base.

Despite the base's defences (fighters, anti-aircraft, observation balloon) it is caught by surprise when three Blueland bomber squadron arrive at high altitude; the Redland fighters go up to intercept but miss them in the cloud. (Shepherd noted that the set-piece 'admits the argument that no place can be made secure with absolute certainty against bombing raids'.) Blueland fighters shoot up the aerodrome (and the balloon, of course) from low level and the bombers start to do their work.

There is a stiff fight eventually over the submarine base, and there are casualties on both sides, but the defending aircraft are outnumbered and the object of the raid is fully achieved.

This was the first RAF Display after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany; but although Shepherd's analysis certainly harks back to the German U-boat offensive against Britain in the First World War, there's no evidence that I can see that he interpreted this set piece in light of a renewed threat from Germany. Rather he talks about the number of submarines currently in commission (110 for France, 80 for Japan, 75 for Italy and 69 for the United States), making the point that whoever the next war is fought against, Blueland will need the 'controversial bomber' to meet Redland's 'submarine threat'.

Unlike the fourteenth, the fifteenth RAF Display (held on Saturday, 30 June 1934) was blessed with brilliant sunshine and half a million people turned up to watch it. But despite this success Flight seems to have gotten a bit weary of it all by now, devoting fewer pages to its Hendon review than usual -- well, it's not quite as good as it was in the 1920s, you know. The set piece this time was an attack on a weapons manufacturing and storage facility (the Pathe Gazette newsreel above has some good footage):

Unknown to Geneva [...] an imposing building on the far side of the aerodrome was a busy hive of industry -- producing and storing high explosives. It was, in fact, a magazine (not the good kind you read, like FLIGHT, but that in which gunpowder, shells, and stalacite and such like high explosives are kept).

The bit about Geneva (i.e. the League of Nations) being unaware of the weapons being made and stored in the magazine seems to me to be a clear reference to the secret German rearmament which was widely assumed to be taking place. Whether that was intended by the Display's planners or is just the interpretation of Flight's writer isn't so clear, though. Probably the latter.

The magazine goes into high alert -- the above Bristol Bulldogs taking off in defence -- as enemy bombers arrive: light bombers (Fairey Gordons, Westland Wallaces) 'dived on to their objective, a salvo of bombs causing some damage' and heavy ones (Handley Page Heyfords) inflicting 'slightly severer punishment'. After casualties on both sides,

Again the bombers came over, this time causing considerable damage, the heavy bombers finally blowing up the complete volume of the magazine.

Oh, and they blew up a balloon too, this time described as part of a 'balloon apron' rather than an observation balloon. It's a wonder Britain had any left by the time the real war started!