This illustration, by A. C. Michael, is from T. Donovan Bayley's 'When the sea failed her' which appeared in Pall Mall Magazine in May 1909. It's subtitled 'The story of a war between England and the allies, and the terrible way it ended'. It's that terrible ending which makes this story stand out for me.

It takes place during an invasion of Britain by European powers. Britain is losing. The fleet has been defeated off the Nore and London is under siege and is being shelled. But it unknowingly has a secret weapon, thanks to the Tesla-like scientist Angus Grant. He works on top of a hill in a laboratory filled with electrical apparatus which occasionally crackles purple lightning into the sky. One of the rooms inside has some unusual equipment:

One side of it was occupied by a large frame, stretched tightly across which was a transparent sheet of tracing cloth, lighted from behind, and marked with dark lines forming tiny squares. Every tenth line was numbered, and a red arrow pointed to the north, Across the chart was a thin blue line, leading east-north-east, and along this a speck of iron was slowly moving, watched by a young man [...] In front of the luminous screen was an arrangement similar to the keyboard of a typewriter, but containing only ten levers. These were attached to electric leads, and each one, when depressed, established contact with one of the ten copper rods immediately underneath, which stood in a row projecting through a vulcanite slab.¹

The screen is a map of Europe, and the 'thin blue line' shows the path of Grant's 'aero-torpedo' which is on its way to Berlin. What's an aero-torpedo, you ask?

"It carries things in the air, and he directs it from his laboratory."

"The keyboard and the lighted screen?" she asked.

"That's it. That and the moving dot."

"But how?"

"No one but the master knows that. He presses levers and they alter the wireless somehow. Then the aero-torpedo shifts accordingly. It's something to do with ether waves, whatever they are, or so I've heard."

"Are there men up in it?"

"No; that's what makes it so wonderful. It gets its power from our dynamos, and that's how it's steered too. That's why it can carry so much green powder."²

I'll come back to this green powder in a moment.

Two hours later Grant locked down five of the ten keys. The moving dot no longer crept forward, but rotated slowly on its axis. He went across to the wall, unlocked a framed switchboard, and pulled the vulcanite handle down. On the roof another "spark" waked to fury. He took his watch out and counted the minutes by it.

"The cylinder seal is fused," he whispered, reversing the switch, and the "spark" on the roof died away. "It's half-past six in Berlin," he thought; "they're celebrating their victory, and the streets are full. I've timed it well."³

He did too. Unter den Linden is full of cheering crowds. At first there is just a sound, lasting over an hour, a 'steady, sibilant humming, persistent and penetrating, and indefinably terrifying'. Then the aero-torpedo itself becomes visible, 'a tiny spot in shape like a dragon-fly, dimly glinting brassily'. It is suddenly blotted out by a mist which slowly grows larger in size: the green powder has been released. The sun is eclipsed and birds fall from the sky.

Few could bear the horror of the phenomenon any longer, and there was a rush of panic-stricken men and women to get beneath a roof, but before the crowds could unlock and disperse death came down.

A clammy green rain, gently persistent, fell, and wherever it settled it corroded.

The stone-work of the city seethed as the mist wet it, and screams of pain broke from the lips of those whom it touched. Their eyeballs were seared and blinded; the skin on their faces shrivelled and cracked and peeled, and their hands were rotted down to the raw sinews.

Every breath was a misery. Within a minute not a soul who remained in the streets was left alive. Their lungs were perforated, and the dying wretches were mercifully choked by their gushing blood. By noon nothing remained in the streets of Berlin but a green sludge, out of which protruded fragments of the larger bones of the dead.⁴

After Berlin, Paris and then 'the large industrial towns of Europe' are destroyed. Only those who flee to the countryside survive.

As each report of fresh ruin was spread abroad, the clamour for an end to the war grew more insistent.⁵

The allies soon sue for peace and so, even though 'the sea failed her', Britain has won after all.

What I love about this story is its extreme nature. The struggle for national existence is all. The prospect of a British defeat at the hands of a foreign invader is blithely seen to justify the extermination of millions of enemy civilians. There is an implicit acknowledgement that this might be immoral in Grant's decision to destroy the aero-torpedo at the end of the story, but as he doesn't even show the slightest remorse it in no way invalidates his prior actions.

This sort of thing is partly why I doubt Sven Lindqvist's argument, in A History of Bombing (2002), that the idea of bombing civilians was racist and genocidal in origin, that is, to ensure white supremacy by destroying the other. As evidence he cites stories like Jack London's 'The unparalleled invasion' (1910), in which the Chinese race is wiped out by biological weapons dropped from the air. But in fact the knock-out blow was rarely employed against non-Europeans in speculative fiction: it was about nationalism, not imperialism. In Bayley's story, the millions of Europeans aren't even depicted in any way inferior to the British, who would turn into green sludge just as surely as the Germans and French if the green powder were to be used against them.

'When the sea failed her' is of course also interesting for its early anticipation of, not just aerial bombardment, but chemical warfare too. Discussions of this are fairly rare before 1914. But perhaps most interesting is the portrayal of an unmanned aerial vehicle. Bayley has put some thought into how you might actually control one using contemporary technology, with his typewriter-like keyboard, luminous cloth screens and cylinder seal fuses. The radiant power source is straight out of Tesla.

As for who T. Donovan Bayley was, I sadly have no idea. He did write a few other science fiction stories for British periodicals around this time, at least one of which also deals with a superweapon ('The frozen death'), but otherwise seems to be unknown to history. I suspect an alias.

1. T. Donovan Bayley, 'When the sea failed her', Pall Mall Magazine 9 (May 1909), 541.
2. Ibid., 544.
3. Ibid., 546.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 547.

Thanks to Frank Herrera for pointing me to British Fact and German Fiction. It's a British propaganda film just under fifteen minutes long, made in 1917 by the Thanhouser Company for the Department of Information. Since it has Portuguese Spanish intertitles (luckily with more recent English subtitles), it was obviously shown overseas, though from the comments in Nicholas Reeves' Official British Film Propaganda During the First World War (1986) it does seem it was intended for domestic consumption. I can't embed the film here but you can watch it at the appropriately named Europa Film Treasures website.

The 'German fiction' referred to was a letter supposedly published in a German newspaper claiming to be an eyewitness account of serious damage caused to various London icons -- the Tower of London, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Bridge, Hyde Park, Piccadilly Circus, Charing Cross Station, the Bank of England, Trafalgar Square, St Paul's Cathedral, Liverpool Street Station, Buckingham Palace -- by German air raids in July, August and September. I say supposedly because as the Imperial War Museum notes (IWM 443), the newspaper is hard to identify based on the English title given, the Westphalia Daily News. But if the German press did claim this, it was an own goal because this film shows that the locations were still all intact, at least as of 25 and 26 September when the film was supposedly shot. Again, I say supposedly, because this is established by a policeman holding a placard showing the date in many of the scenes, but we have to take this on trust.¹ In this case, however, there's no reason I can see for the DOI to fake the date, as it was quite true that the damage done was vastly exaggerated by the letter-writer, and in fact simply made up. There is also footage of some of the places German bombs did hit: working class homes, small businesses, the road in front of a hotel. The text sarcastically says these are the Germans' idea of 'munition factories', though the British (like everyone else who ever dropped bombs in anger) were just as prone to claiming they only bombed military targets.

The resulting film is a fascinating document of London at war. Although it must be said that for the most part it doesn't look much different to London at peace: the streets are full of traffic, people are out doing their shopping, commuters are running to catch their buses (as in the above -- that's Piccadilly Circus, with the base of Eros on the left). There are perhaps a few more men in uniform than usual, including a crowd of Australian soldiers sightseeing in St Paul's.

This is a New Zealand medic who gave first aid to civilians wounded by a bomb dropped outside the Bedford Hotel on Southampton Row (off Russell Square) on the night of 25 September, despite his own head wound. His name isn't given; I like the way he is standing in the shadows, as though uncomfortable with the attention. Thirteen people were killed in this incident (eleven according to the film) after ignoring official instructions to take cover, as the text archly notes.

A 14 year old boy was killed inside this dairy in King's Cross Road when it was hit on the night of 24 September. This period marked the start of the 'harvest moon' raids, when the Gothas and (for the first time) Giants attacked London nearly every night for a week, until 1 October. This led to some interesting reactions, which unfortunately British Fact and German Fiction doesn't show: shops starting closing early to let employees get home before dark, people gathered in parks to watch the show, and others bedded down in the Tube stations. In psychological terms, the harvest moon raids were perhaps more significant than the daylight Gotha raids of June and July, even though they killed fewer people.

While it does implicitly point out the immorality of the German raids, the film ends with some statistics emphasising how tiny the human cost was in statistical terms: for the first nine months of 1917, there were only 940 casualties (191 dead, 749 wounded) in London due to air raids, which amounted to 27 dead per million given the city's population of 7 million. For the same period the number of dead and wounded due to road accidents (probably for Britain as a whole) was 14591. So nothing to worry about, then. If only the British had believed their own propaganda ... I would have had to find a different topic!

Bonus airminded footage: Wilbur Wright and his Flying Machine, a French film shot in Italy on 24 April 1909. With Wilbur Wright flying his Flyer. And. Flying. With. The. Camera. On. Board! Astounding. I think it must be worth following the Europa Film Treasures blog for their latest gems.

1. There's also a shot of the front page of the Evening Standard, though the date is not visible. The headline -- 'Zeps and Gothas raid together' -- does pretty much tie it down to 26 September.

This photograph of Australian soldiers was taken during the First World War. It's not particularly unusual: just a group of mates getting together to record a memento, perhaps after a weekend's carousing in the fleshpots of Cairo or Paris.

Mateship is a important concept in Australian culture. The OED defines it as 'The condition of being a mate; companionship, fellowship, comradeship' and notes that it is 'Now chiefly Austral. and N.Z.' The Australian National Dictionary gives several more specifically Australian shades of meaning, from 'An acquaintance; a person engaged in the same activity', to 'One with whom the bonds of close friendship are acknowledged, a "sworn friend"', to 'A mode of address implying equality and goodwill; freq. used to a casual acquaintance and, esp. in recent use [...], ironic'. Suffice it to say that pretty much any bloke can have occasion to call another cobber a mate, whether they are good friends or bitter enemies. (Sheilas are another question, of course.)

Mateship is a positive virtue. As C. E. W. Bean wrote in 1921, in the first volume (page 6) of his official history of Australia in the Great War:

The typical Australian [...] was seldom religious in the sense in which the word is generally used. So far as he held a prevailing creed, it was a romantic one inherited from the gold-miner and the bush-man, of which the chief article was that a man should at all times and at any cost stand by his mate. This was and is the one law which the good Australian must never break. It is bred in the child and stays with him through life.

Mateship also has strong military resonances, as Bean's interest in it might suggest. An Army News article on the unveiling of a war memorial in Papua New Guinea commemorating the Kokoda Track, the site of bitter fighting between Australians and Japanese in 1942, notes that the words courage, mateship, endurance and sacrifice are inscribed on its pillars. It further adds that these are 'words that today's Australian Army has built its foundations on'. So mateship is both an expression of Australia's egalitarian spirit and its martial one, as former Prime Minister John Howard explained in a speech given at Australia House in London in 2003:

The two world wars exacted a terrible price from us -- the full magnitude of that lost potential, of those unlived lives can never be measured. And yet, some of the most admirable aspects of Australia's national character were, if not conceived, then more fully ingrained within us by the searing experiences of those conflicts.

None more so than the concept of mateship -- regarded as a particularly Australian virtue -- a concept that encompasses unconditional acceptance, mutual and self respect, sharing whatever is available no matter how meagre, a concept based on trust and selflessness and absolute interdependence. In combat, men did live and die by its creed. 'Sticking by your mates' was sometimes the only reason for continuing on when all seemed hopeless.

I was moved by an account written by Hugh Clarke, who, like thousands of other Australian and British servicemen, endured years of senseless cruelty as a prisoner of the Japanese after the fall of Singapore. He couldn't recall a single Australian dying alone without someone being there to look after him in some way. That's mateship.

Contemporary Australia takes great pride in its egalitarian attitudes. Mud and fear and enemy fire are no respecters of class, rank or parentage and from both wars, our veterans brought back to Australian society a renewed conviction that an individual's worth should be judged -- not by those things -- but by their own talent, courage and personal virtue.

Howard was particularly fond of the concept of mateship; in 1999 he even tried to get it inserted into the preamble of the Australian constitution. It was in fact one of the sites of conflict in Australia's culture wars of the late 1990s and early 2000s: Marilyn Lake has criticised it as reinforcing white solidarity. She has a point; and it's not like Australia is the only country in the world to value mateship, even if it isn't called that. (Although one of the more charming aspects of the word 'mate' is the way it's quickly picked up and used by new arrivals to these shores.) Gender critiques are even more pointed: while women can and do use the word, and can be mates with men and and with each other, it still has a blokey feel. Idealising mateship as an inherently Australian trait is exclusionary, as Martin Ball has argued for the related concept of the 'Anzac spirit':

The Anzac tradition holds many values for us all to celebrate, but the myth also suppresses parts of Australian history that are difficult to deal with. Anzac is a means of forgetting the origins of Australia. The Aboriginal population is conveniently absent. The convict stain is wiped clean. Postwar immigration is yet to broaden the cultural identity of the population. [...] The problem with the simple patriotism of Anzac is that it runs the risk of making some of us are more Australian than others.

Which brings me back to the photograph at the start of the post. It actually isn't as straightforward as it seems. The men pictured are actually all deserters; and the reason they posed for the photograph was to taunt the military authorities they had escaped from. For it was sent to the Australian Assistant Provost Marshal in Le Havre, along with the following letter:

Sir,
With all due respect we send you this P. C. [post card] as a souvenir trusting that you will keep it as a mark of esteem from those who know you well. At the same time trusting that Nous jamais regardez vous encore [we will never see you again]. Au revoir.
Nous

The deserters -- who were apparently never caught -- are displaying mateship, humour, larrikinism and all those good things which are supposedly part of the Australian essence, but deployed in a way that cuts against the celebration of the Anzac spirit. For whatever reason, these men who had all volunteered for war decided to have nothing more to do with it, and so could be considered to be some of the first war resisters in Australian history.

NB. The photograph comes ultimately from the Australian War Memorial, but I found it in Ashley Ekins, ed., 1918 Year of Victory: The End of the Great War and the Shaping of History (Titirangi and Wollombi: Exisle Publishing, 2010). Ekins' own essay in that book on 'morale, discipline and combat effectiveness' has much to say on this topic, though unfortunately doesn't specifically discuss our ten mates above.

You shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but you can often pick up a few interesting things about it. Here we have number 77 in the Crime-Book Society series, Black Out by Captain A. O. Pollard. Fifty-four thousand copies have been sold (or at least printed), which makes it a fairly successful title. It's not clear from the photo, but I can tell you it's a paperback and therefore cheap, which helps. The author clearly has a distinguished military background: Victoria Crosses generally weren't handed out for no reason. And, most intriguingly, the Times Literary Supplement is quoted as saying that Black Out 'Will prove very much to the taste of air-minded readers'.

And so it did. This is so even though Pollard's main claim to fame was as a soldier, not an airman: he enlisted in 1914 as a private, ended up a captain, and in addition to the VC won the MC and bar and the DCM. The Oxford DNB compares his autobiography, Fire-eater: The Memoirs of a VC (1932), to Jünger's Storm of Steel for its evocation of the joy of combat. Starting in the 1930s he wrote dozens of crime and spy thrillers, some of which were reviewed in the TLS (though I can't actually find the one quoted on the cover of Black Out seen above).

After the failure of his first marriage in 1924, Pollard joined the RAF and became a pilot. He served for less than three years, but he seems to have made more use of his flying experience in his writing than his fighting experience. He reviewed aviation-themed books for the TLS. He wrote several non-fiction books on aviation (e.g. The Royal Air Force, 1934; Epic Deeds of the RAF, 1940; Bombers over the Reich, 1941). And it seems that many, perhaps most of his thrillers involved aviation in some way. Some of the titles suggest this: The Death Flight, The Phantom 'Plane, Murder in the Air, Air Reprisal (which I think is a knock-out blow novel). Available plot summaries of others confirm this: for example, The Murder Germ features 'an excellent fight in mid-air between the hero and a homicidal maniac' (TLS, 16 October 1937), while The Secret Formula has 'Aeroplane fights and crashes' (TLS, 29 April 1939). His protagonists were often RAF or ex-RAF types: Pirdale Island opens with a flying-officer being drummed out of the service, who then gets involved in a scheme to steal the plans of a new robot aeroplane; Pollard had at least two recurring heroes who were 'air detectives', Wing-Commander Stanley Leach and, post-war, David Wilshaw. (Biggles would be an obvious comparison, but Pollard was writing before W. E. Johns, so perhaps inspiration went the other way.)

Pollard's Black Out follows this airminded formula. (Spoilers follow, if anyone really cares!) The backdrop is a little unusual, however. As the title suggests, it involves air-raid precautions, which were an increasingly prominent part of life by the time the book came out in 1938. (Which was even more the case for ARP Spy, published in 1940.) It starts during an ARP exercise, with a flight of RAF bombers flying in restricted airspace above a blacked-out area. One of the pilots, Flying-Officer Barney Leighton, thinks that mucking about in fog and complete darkness is a mug's game, and decides to 'accidentally' lose touch with his formation so that he can return to the aerodrome and a nice hot mug of cocoa. But he collides with another, unseen aeroplane and is forced to crash land in the grounds of a country mansion. He and his rear-gunner parachute to safety, but the latter is murdered while stumbling around in the dark. Leighton finds the body and the murder weapon, which unfortunately opens himself up to blackmail by the real murderers who he encounters soon after. He realises he's up against it, and he is partly to blame, but he wants to put things right. Who are these men? Why did they kill his gunner? And whose aeroplane did he bump into?

It happens that the mansion belongs to Mrs Browne-Jervoise, a wealthy widow who is well known for her involvement in a pacifist group called the League of International Harmony. And she has some talent as an orator; she is first seen haranguing a League meeting:

"I tell you my friends, that the Government is deliberately preparing for war. All this talk of rearmament, of laying in stocks of food and munitions, of training the people in Air Raid Precautions -- what else can it mean but war? Why otherwise would they spend hundreds of millions of pounds -- money wrung from you and your comrades by unjust measures and crushing taxation -- if it is not to engage in another Armageddon?

"And don't forget for one moment -- let it be written in words of fire so that all shall learn, mark, read and inwardly digest -- most of the Cabinet hold enormous stocks in munitions concerns, and though you and your wives and children may be mutilated, massacred and tortured in tens of thousands of casualties, the capitalist overlords who strut in Whitehall will emerge from the ashes of civilization glutted with riches."¹

Browne-Jervoise clearly has communist sympathies, despite her wealth. And despite her late husband having been an air vice-marshal, she hates the RAF, as is shown by her remarks when she hears Leighton's flight droning overhead:

"The playthings of the warlords!" she cried. "Unless they are destroyed root and crop the day is not far distant when they will be raining death on innocent babes and sucklings."²

Fiery stuff. But we are not meant to sympathise with Browne-Jervoise's sentiments or the League. Her own (half-)brother-in-law, a disabled veteran soldier named Stephen Wrightson, is immediately seen to be poking fun at her lack of education to her own daughter, Phyllis (naturally the novel's love interest), who is embarrassed thereby. And the omniscient narrator tells us that the League was

Formed originally so that a few extremists with pacifist tendencies might air their views to sympathetic listeners, it had now become a vast semi-political faction which interfered in every project inaugurated for National Defence and openly denounced the members of the Government as traitors to the best interests of the people.³

Later, Air Vice-Marshal Sir Humphrey Witherspon, Director-General of Personnel at the Air Ministry, says of the League:

like most peace organizations it is thoroughly militant and aggressive. You know the sort of thing -- disarm to the last gun and then issue an ultimatum to the most heavily armed nation in the world.

"At present the principal bugbear of the League of International Harmony is the Air Raid Precautions scheme. There's a woman named Mrs. Browne-Jervois, their president, who's going up and down the country raging like a wild -- er -- bull, and calling on all and sundry to swear to die in their homes like rates before they will accept a few simple regulations devised solely for their safety.⁴

Obviously Sir Humphrey (and presumably Pollard himself) didn't have much time for pacifists. But whether he fairly described the aims of pacifist organisations or not, his perceptions probably seemed plausible enough to some of the people who read it. And some pacifist groups did oppose ARP as preparations for (and so increasing the likelihood of) war, such as the Peace Pledge Union.

But it's not just an anti-pacifist rant; Sir Humphrey suspects that the League has been working to subvert ARP by less-than-legal means. First was a small-scale strike in a government munitions factory when someone from the Home Office came to lecture them on ARP, followed by possible arson in a Birmingham gas mask store. And this seems to be confirmed when a number of arson attacks are carried out in the town of Lyttleton during a trial black-out, at the same time as Mrs Browne-Jervois is presiding over a public League meeting being held there. Every fire brigade within thirty miles is called in to fight the fires, and at least a million pounds' worth of damage is done. Police arrested a number of men wearing 'air-raid protection-outfits' and two bodies full of bullet holes.⁵ The prisoners, at least some of whom were known communists, admitted to having been paid in order to sabotage ARP for revolutionary purposes. Sir Humphrey is perplexed as to the purpose: the best explanation seems to be that they hoped to discourage other boroughs from participating in ARP, lest the same thing should happen to them.

But in fact the Third International was not behind it all. Nor -- despite a red herring involving Italian immigrants, charmingly referred to more than once as 'dagoes' and 'icecreamios', the latter insult a new one on me -- was it a foreign power. It turns out that Wrightson, Browne-Jervois' half-brother-in-law, was the one using the League as cover for the nefarious arson attacks. But why? This was perhaps the most interesting part of the book. As I noted above, Wrightson was a disabled veteran of the Great War, having joined up in 1914 and had his leg amputated after Passchendaele, and this is key to his motivations. Because of his service and his suffering, and the loss of his hopes for the future, his mind has been twisted.

"Out of the chaos through which I passed emerged a fixed resolve. I swore a mighty oath that if I ever got well again somehow I would avenge myself on the system of society that had allowed such suffering to humanity. He, he, he!''⁶

(Yes, it does actually say, 'He, he, he!' -- this is apparently frenzied laughter.) He used his half-brother's widow's money to recruit American gangsters, and with them began 'upsetting the Government's preparations for the next war'.⁷

By stopping war I shall save millions of men, women and children from suffering the agonies that I've suffered. Don't you understand? I owe it to humanity!"⁸

His interlocutor realises that Wrightson is insane, but tries one last time to get through to him.

Wrightson's face wrinkled in despair.

"There you go again -- atrocities. They're not atrocities. If only I can make the people realize what an air raid will be like, they will rise unanimously to prevent the country being plunged into war."

He sank into a chair and tears started in his eyes.

"It's so hard to make you understand; it's so hard to make anyone understand. I ..."

His voice died to a whisper and he buried his face in his hands.⁹

This portrayal might seem sympathetic, but it's at this moment of vulnerability that one of our RAF heroes launches himself at the damaged veteran and grapples him to the ground. More stuff happens, but rest assured that the madman gets what he deserves in the end, Leighton gets his name cleared and the girl, and (presumably) Britain's preparations for war continue unabated. Still, coming from the pen of such a highly decorated veteran Wrightson is a surprising and interesting villain. Combined with the unusual use of resistance to air-raid precautions as a plot device this makes Black Out an unexpectedly interesting read.

Oh, and it also has an amphibian flying-boat, an 'Aston Arrow' (something like a Defiant) and a two-man autogyro bomber. So it has all that going for it too.

1. A. O. Pollard, Black Out (London: Hutchinson & Co., n.d. [1938]), 24.
2. Ibid., 25-6.
3. Ibid., 25.
4. Ibid., 34-5.
5. Ibid., 106.
6. Ibid., 201
7. Ibid., 201.
8. Ibid., 202.
9. Ibid., 203.

All the cool kids are talking about How to be a Retronaut -- well, they were a month or two ago, I confess it's hard to keep up. How to be a Retronaut is a blog which tries to engage your sense of anachronism to try and shake your assumptions about the past. As the Retronaut puts it:

The power of anachronisms
Its all to do with the power of anachronisms – things which seem to be in the wrong time. They can be objects, words, phrases, technology, ideas, fashions – anything we associate so strongly with one time that it seems wrong in another

Wrong associations
And its that word “associate” – that’s the powerful one. Because the strange thing is, real anachronisms do not exist. They can’t. A “thing” belongs to whatever era its in. Its not the “thing” thats got it wrong, its us, and our associations. Time to change what we believe.

But in that tiny, tiny moment, just before we grasp the fact that our beliefs are wrong, we get to be a Retronaut.

One of the main ways How to be a Retronaut achieves this is through the use of colour photographs taken in periods we don't normally associate with colour photographs -- 1913, for example.

The photograph above struck me with this anachronistic force. It shows RAF biplane fighters which are quite typical of the interwar period, except that they are camouflaged where I would expect them to have a bare metal finish. That's how they typically are seen, both in contemporary photographs and surviving examples. The camouflage patterns these aircraft are sporting are more appropriate to the Second World War. They look a little bit like Hurricanes with slipwings, actually, but they are in fact Furies of 43 Squadron, one of Hawker's long line of fighters. The photograph was taken in 1939, which would explain the sense of anachronism: the RAF didn't start camouflaging its aircraft until the Sudeten crisis in 1938; and aside from the Gladiator, it had mostly phased out its biplanes from frontline service by the time intense fighting began in 1940.

But this also shows how fragile this sense of anachronism can be. If I was more familiar with RAF aircraft in this period before the outbreak of war, this image wouldn't strike me as strange at all. Nor would it strike me as strange if I knew less; it would just be a bunch of old aeroplanes.

Image source: Flight Image Archive. However, I have my doubts about the caption:

A nice line abreast formation of camouflaged Hawker Fury I of 43 Squadron, Sept 1939. Note that several aircraft do not carry the squadrons 'Fighting Cocks' badge which otherwise negates the camouflage.

I can't get a straight answer as to when 43 Squadron switched from Furies: the RAF says 1939 (to Hurricanes), Air of Authority says January 1939 (to Spitfires), another site says November 1938 (to Hurricanes). Since other images from the archive put the Munich crisis in 1936, there's room to doubt the veracity of the caption!

The aforementioned Mike Dash sent me the above photograph, presumably a fake, wondering if I'd seen it before and if I knew its provenance. I have not, but I agree it's a fake. It can be found in a few places on the web, for example here and here.

It purportedly shows two Italian airships bombing a Turkish encampment in the Italo-Turkish War in 1912, one of the very first air attacks ever made. The airships do look like the airships used by Italy in Libya, namely the three P-types, highly streamlined semi-rigid dirigibles built in 1910-1 -- note the control surfaces at the rear. But they don't look real; at the least they have been heavily retouched. The gondola of the airship on the right doesn't look like it's in the right place, though that could be perspective. Also, from the (real) photos I've seen, the Ps didn't have shiny-silver envelopes, but had a darkened and banded appearance. And there's just too much going on. The airships are swooping, the bombs are exploding, and the cameraman was in the right place at the right time to capture it. I don't buy it. I suspect it was probably faked for Turkish consumption to show how the Italians were using inhumane new methods of warfare (the supposed photographer would have to be Turkish to be plausibly near a Turkish army encampment). That it seems to first appeared on a Turkish website may support this. But if anyone knows anything definite, please comment.

Here are a couple of other images I came across while looking for other photos of the Italian airships at war. They're from Willis J. Abbot, Aircraft and Submarines: The Story of the Invention, Development, and Present-Day Uses of War's Newest Weapons (New York and London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1918), which has a lot of great illustrations.

The caption for this one reads:

German Air Raiders over England.
In the foreground three British planes are advancing to the attack.

No date or location (other than England) given, but with that many aeroplanes in daylight they must be Gothas in 1917. Those are some very dubious-looking aeroplanes there. They look like they've been drawn on. Once again there's too much going on -- I don't think three British fighters ever intercepted a Gotha raid like that. And there's something odd going on with the area around the tree. It's possible that we're not supposed to believe that it's an actual photograph of a Gotha raid; maybe a contemporary viewer would have understood that it's an artist's depiction. The attached image credit says 'Photo by International Film Service', which on the one hand suggests it was presented as a photo; but on the other, International Film Service was an animation company run by Randolph Hearst. That would seem to be the clincher, then.

I'm inclined to lend this last one a bit more credence. The caption:

A Burning Balloon,
Photographed from a Parachute by the Escaping Balloonist.

If it's fake, at least it's more skillfully done -- the smoke plume looks quite realistic. Balloon observers did have parachutes for use in emergencies (at least in British service -- unlike aeroplane crews) and they did have cameras with them, for aerial photography. They would have been valuable, so maybe escaping observers did try to take them with them when they jumped out. But I imagine the cameras were fairly bulky affairs: even if the balloonist did have the presence of mind to take a photo of his burning balloon is it likely he could get such a clear shot from his swaying parachute? And he's a long way from his balloon, for that matter, although perhaps that's down to the wind. I'd have to conclude this is a fake too.

Not that there's anything wrong with that, as such: some of the great Frank Hurley's most effective war photos were composites, which is pretty close to fake. But present them as authentic is to commit genre crime.

In the later 1930s, the 7th Marquess of Londonderry acquired the somewhat unkind nickname of the 'Londonderry Herr', a pun on the Londonderry Air (the tune to which 'Danny Boy' is usually set). This came about because he was thought to be rather too enthusiastic about the prospect of Anglo-German reconciliation. My impression is that he was a sincere but misguided philo-German, rather than a genuine fellow traveller of the right (although he was definitely too eager to excuse German anti-semitism).

But if Londonderry was somewhat misunderstood, he certainly didn't do himself any favours. Above is the cover of his defence of his activities and plea for appeasement of Nazi Germany, Ourselves and Germany (London: Robert Hale, 1938). Yes, that is the Nazi eagle dotted all over the cover, alongside the British lion:

The frontispiece photograph shows Londonderry with a couple of his mates:

To be fair, Ourselves and Germany was well-received when it was published at the start of April 1938. It was well-timed, too: the Anschluss had taken place just three weeks earlier, putting the German problem firmly back on the national agenda. So the thoughts of a former cabinet minister (Secretary of State for Air, 1931-5) who had met with senior Nazi leaders were bound to be of interest. And if Londonderry's fondest hopes had come true, then Ourselves and Germany would have been remembered as his contribution to a lasting peace between the two countries, rather than a collection of hostages to fortune.

As an aside, my copy (technically a long-term loaner, thanks Paul!) came with this 'with compliments' slip in the back:

The recipient, Sir Arthur Robinson KCMG, was an Australian politician, a conservative state and federal MP. I assume W. J. Robinson was a relative, perhaps a cousin or nephew. 95 Gresham Street is in the City, between the Bank of England and the Guildhall, a pretty upmarket address. Whoever he was, he popped a copy off to Melbourne post-haste, only a couple of weeks after publication. He must have assumed Sir Arthur was keen to read it.

It's Anzac Day once again. On Anzac Day, Australia remembers some things but forgets others. We remember the sacrifices of the original Anzacs at Gallipoli, but forget that it wasn't only Australians who suffered. We remember the many thousands of young Australians who have fought in foreign wars since then, but forget to ask why they were there. We remember that war can bring out the best in people, but forget that it can also bring out the worst.

One thing we tend to forget is Australia's part in the bombing of Europe in the Second World War. There are a few memorials and exhibits, but when we think of Anzacs we usually think of slouch hats, not flying helmets.

Eight Royal Australian Air Force squadrons served with RAF Bomber Command at various times: 455, 458, 460 (members of which can be seen above arranged in front of -- and on top of -- one of their Lancasters), 462, 463, 464, 466 and 467. Many other Australians flew with RAF heavy bomber squadrons, just as many non-Australians did with the RAAF squadrons. (Often outnumbering the Australians, in fact: when 462 was formed, only one of its aircrew was Australian.) In total, around 10,000 Australians served in Bomber Command during the war, at stations like this one at Waddington, home to 463 and 467 Squadrons for the war's last eighteen months.

The butcher's bill was enormous: of those 10,000, nearly 3500 Australian airmen were killed, out of 10,500 RAAF deaths for the whole war and 39,300 for all three services. That is, one in eleven of Australian service personnel who died in the war did so while serving in Bomber Command. One in three of those Australians who fought their war in the night skies above Europe never came home again. Two hundred men from 463 Squadron were killed in the eight months before D-Day, 130 per cent of its establishment strength.

Above is a RAAF Lancaster of 463 Squadron over Normandy in July 1944. One of its engines is on fire and the crew are about to bail out; two were killed and three taken prisoner.

But to focus on just the Australian casualties would also be a form of forgetting. They didn't join Bomber Command to die but to fight. RAAF aircrew and squadrons played an important role in many of Bomber Command's most famous operations: busting the Ruhr dams, the Amiens prison raid, sinking the Tirpitz. But they also took part in all of the RAF's big assaults on German cities: Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin, and so many others.

Above is one of 460 Squadron's Lancasters bombing Freiburg on the night of 27 November 1944, part of a raid which killed about 3000 civilians.

This is Dresden on 14 February 1945, the day after the Allies began their attack on the city. Three RAAF squadrons -- 460, 463 and 467 -- helped to create the firestorm in which 25,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed. At a minimum, the Combined Bomber Offensive killed at least 300,000 civilians in Germany, and many thousands more in occupied Europe. Some proportion of those were killed by Australians -- under British command, true, but with the acquiescence and approval of the Australian government and the great majority of its people. Unlike in Britain, the moral questions surrounding the area bombing of cities in the Second World War have never been controversial in Australia, or even seriously questioned, not at the time, not afterwards. They are glossed over. And when our bomber boys are remembered, just what they bombed is not.

I'm not against Anzac Day at all. It's good to have a day to remember those who fought and those who died for us. But Anzac Day allows us to talk about some things to do with Australia's wars, and not about others. If we remember the great and heroic deeds done in our name, we should also remember those things which are perhaps less comfortable to dwell on. And ask why they happened, and whether they could happen again.

Image sources: Australian War Memorial P03127.002, SUK13470, SUK13775, UK2288, UK2416.

Further reading: Alan Stephens, The Royal Australian Air Force (Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001), chapter 5.

The Boer War of 1899-1902 doesn't often appear in airpower history. This may have something to do with the fact that it took place before the invention of the aeroplane, which I suppose is reasonable. But there are still interesting and even important connections and influences to be traced. Here are a baker's half-dozen.

1. Airpower was actually used during the war, in the form of British observation balloons. The Royal Engineers deployed three balloon sections to South Africa; one was part of the besieged forces at Ladysmith while the others took part in many of the operations from Modder River to the advance on Pretoria, observing enemy troop movements and directing artillery fire. (In the photo above, British infantry are crossing the Zand while a balloon keeps an eye out for Boers.) The balloon sections seem to have been quite useful in the early part of the war, but less so in the later guerrilla phases, where the British tried to hem in the remaining Boer forces against their system of blockhouses and wire fences. It seems it was possible to make the balloons mobile by simply hitching them to a wagon, but obviously they had no independence of action and had to stick to where the main body of the troops were, which was usually where the Boer commandos weren't. Still, I wonder if anybody on the British side thought about bringing in lots of balloons to give the counterinsurgent forces eyes in the sky.
2. The Boer War was, briefly, also a phantom airship, or rather phantom balloon scare. The Boers were initially quite worried about the British balloons, for which they had no counter. It was thought they might be used to float over Boer cities to drop bombs. In October 1899 the following telegraph message was sent from (actually, the source says received by, but that makes little sense) the Transvaal headquarters:
   

   Balloons -- Yesterday evening two balloons were seen at Irene, proceeding in the direction of Springs. Official telegraphists instructed to inform the Commander in Chief about any objects seen in the sky.

Here's an example of the sort of response that was received, in this case from Vryheid:

Airship with powerful light plainly visible from here in far off distance towards Dundee. Telegraphist at Paulpietersburg also spied one, and at Amsterdam three in the direction of Zambaansland to the south east.

Shots were fired at these supposed balloons or airships, and Transvaal apparently bought powerful searchlights from Germany to sweep the skies for them (although if that's true, it must have been done before the outbreak of war, because the British imposed an effective blockade on the Boer republics). The British balloons were nowhere near the Transvaal, so the Boers were seeing what they didn't want to see, so to speak. But lest it be thought that Tommy Atkins was too sober and rational to be afflicted with such visions, General Buller's men thought they were being followed by a light which appeared at dusk, which they called the 'Boer signal'. It was probably Venus. (Source: Nigel Watson, The Scareship Mystery: A Survey of Worldwide Phantom Airship Scares (1909-1918) (Corby: Domra Publications, 2000), 109-10.)

3. A very high proportion of senior figures in the early RFC fought in the Boer War: David Henderson (who was in fact in charge of military intelligence in the guerrilla phase of the war), Hugh Trenchard, Frederick Sykes, for example. P. R. C. Groves and L. E. O. Charlton, two early RFC officers who later became well-known airpower pundits, also fought in South Africa (Charlton was wounded and received the DSO). I'm sure there would be others. I've noted a similar geographical funnel before, mostly for the same men as it happens, and the same explanations probably apply: they actively sought out opportunity and adventure (Groves and Charlton, at least, were both volunteers), which is the sort of person most likely to try their hand at a new (and dangerous, possibly career-ending) service. Also, flying was a young man's game, but the decade's span between the end of the Boer War and the formation of the RFC meant that men who had volunteered for South Africa while young (Sykes was 22 when he volunteered for the Imperial Yeomanry) and had remained in the Army were beginning to reach ranks where they could be entrusted with serious responsibility. The other aspect to that is that the Army had expanded massively (relative to Victorian norms) to meet the needs of the war and then contracted again afterwards. Those who did hang around were likely to find themselves underemployed at various times and without prospects for promotion, and a new challenge like flying might appeal (Trenchard's biography bears this out). There are other possible effects of the Boer War which I'll come to presently.
4. From the Boer side, Jan Smuts also fought in the war, as the leader of a commando which raided deep into the Cape Colony. His connection with airpower history is, of course, as that he was asked by David Lloyd George to formulate the Imperial War Cabinet's response to the Gotha raids in 1917. The resulting eponymous reports led to the formation of the RAF in 1918 (though Henderson helped with the writing too). Someone with Smuts' many talents probably would have risen to great prominence anyway (he was already Attorney General of the Transvaal Republic at the outbreak of war) but I think the combination of the military feats he performed during the war and the political leadership he displayed during the negotiations over the peace treaty and then the Union Treaty and made him something special in British eyes. So if not for the Boer War, Smuts might not have been present at the birth of the RAF.
5. Getting into more speculative territory, I wonder if the economic warfare carried out by the British army against the Boers -- burning farms, removing livestock, imprisoning civilians, in order to cut off the commandos from their sources of supply -- influenced later airpower thinkers? Most of the theorising about economic warfare before 1914 came from navalists like Corbett, and there are definite continuities with airpower theory there. But a throwaway comment by Beau Grosscup in Strategic Terror: The Politics and Ethics of Aerial Bombardment (London and New York: Zed Books, 2006), 22, that 'Trenchard was trained in the British military tradition of offensive economic warfare' (i.e. which informed his later advocacy of strategic bombing) got me thinking. My first thought was what tradition?? and as Grosscup has a fair bit of questionable history that's still my considered opinion. But if the Army did have experience with economic warfare which might influence its strategic thought, it would have to have beeen in South Africa, the only time it had fought something like a European economy since the Crimea. And, as noted above, Henderson et al all experienced the war against the Boers at first hand. Having said that, the economic strangulation of the Boers was only part of the answer: their morale remained strong and they kept fighting until well after their military position was hopeless. And the knock-out blow is all about breaking morale. Which leads me to the next point.
6. The Boers engaged in terror warfare against the towns they besieged, Ladysmith, Mafeking and Kimberley, by way of artillery bombardment. (I'm not making a moral judgement by using the word 'terror', and anyway the British killed far more civilians through neglect in the concentration camps.) Boer artillery was few in number, but they did have some heavy pieces, including the famous 'Long Toms'. These would periodically shell the besieged towns, generally causing few casualties but sometimes causing a great deal of fear. The bombardments had the greatest effect in Kimberley where it seems (I don't have figures, unfortunately) that a number of women and children were killed in the shelling. The defenders dug shelters, hid in the diamond mines, built their own artillery piece for counter-battery fire and even improvised a warning system (a lookout on a tower would wave a flag when he saw a puff of smoke from the Long Tom, then buglers would sound the alarm, giving civilians about 15 seconds to take cover). But Cecil Rhodes, who was in Kimberley during the siege, was not at all happy. He continually pestered military authorities about raising the siege, used his newspaper to spew venom at them for doing nothing, and even had to be restrained from physically assaulting the commander of the town's defences for delaying dispatch of yet another plea/threat to Kitchener. He had just been prevented from holding a town meeting criticising military inaction, essentially proclaiming that the town's morale was on the verge of collapse, when the relief column finally arrived. Of course, the food shortages were more important than the bombardment (Kimberley was under siege for 124 days). Still it seems to me that we have here a small-scale model of how, in some of its more genteel versions at least, the knock-out blow was supposed to lead demoralised citizens to force their government to do whatever it took to end the war.
7. Finally, was NATO's air campaign against Serbia in 1999 a vindication of the victory-through-airpower theory? The Boer War says no! At least, that's the conclusion of Kieran Webb, 'Strategic bombardment and Kosovo: evidence from the Boer War', Defense & Security Analysis 24 (2008): 303-15. Here are the concluding two paragraphs:
   

   Keegan’s argument that Kosovo was a turning point is not only countered by its rarity but also by the fact that similar circumstances had happened previously. Analysis from the Boer War found evidence of bombardment having a strategic effect at the Battle of Paardeberg in 1900. Here the leadership was susceptible to domestic pressure, and bombardment managed to minimise human casualties while it destroyed items of economic and personal value. The result was that the besieged Boers rejected the chance to escape when it was available to them and surrendered to the British even though they had not run out of food or ammunition.

   Other battles fought during the Boer War could not be won by bombardment alone. Both Boers and the British managed to find ways to withstand enemy artillery and could be defeated only through the use of ground troops. Just as Kosovo was exceptional in its era, so was Paardeberg in its time.

   Intriguing, but outside my area!

For an excellent overview of the Boer War which isn't unbalanced by an obsession with airpower, I recommend Denis Judd and Keith Surridge, The Boer War (London: John Murray, 2003).

Image source: Library of Congress.

The RAAF Museum, round 2. This time there was less time spent outside looking at aeroplanes in the air (above, see below) and more inside looking at aeroplanes (and other things) on the ground (see below).

A precious relic: a piece of the true crossfabric from the Red Baron's Fokker Dr.I. Why is it here? Because it was 'souvenired' (as the display puts it) by members of No. 3 Squadron, Australian Flying Corps (AFC). Richthofen was shot down in No. 3 Squadron's sector, probably by Australian gunners, and they had responsibility for his body and aircraft.

The AFC was the Australian army's first aviation unit, founded in 1912 at Point Cook -- the same year as the RFC, incidentally. (Technically, only the Central Flying School was established in 1912; references to the AFC don't appear until 1914. But what is a flying school without a flying corps?) It fielded four squadrons in Palestine and France. One of these was No. 4 Squadron, which was also part of the British forces occupying Germany until March 1919. This is part of an Australian flag (i.e. the British part), created to commemorate the end of the First World War and No 4 Squadron's role in it. Supposedly it was 'the first Australian flag flown into Germany 10.45am 7 12 18' (ie 7 December 1918).

Another Australian flag from 1919. This one is a red ensign (with Australia and the British Isles superimposed -- note the still-united Ireland), which at the time was used almost as widely as the more familiar national ensign. It was presented to Ross Smith when he, along with his brother Keith, Jim Bennett and Wally Shears landed at Darwin and became the first to fly from London to Australia in less than 30 days. A nice little earner as it netted them £10,000 from the Australian government. All of them were RFC/AFC/RAF veterans and they flew a Vimy, the same type which bridged the Atlantic the same year.

Something I don't think I've ever seen before: window!

It may seem odd, given their great distance from anywhere, but Australians had to undertake air raid precautions just as people living closer to the front line did. Well, not quite the same: Melbourne had a brownout instead of a blackout, for example. I haven't read this book, but most ARP advice in Australia was derived from British theory and experience, and this one was probably much the same.

The turret from a Bristol Beaufort, sporting twin .303 Browning machine-guns. You can just make out the seat in the middle of the hydraulics, which gives an idea of just how cramped it was for the unfortunate gunner.

A crumpled metal case belong to Sister Marie Craig, a RAAF nurse. She, along with 29 other people, was killed on 18 September 1945 when the RAAF Dakota they were flying on crashed in West Papua.

A flag taken from the Viet Cong near Long Tan, the scene of a hard-fought Australian victory during the Vietnam war. RAAF helicopters resupplied Australian troops from the air during the battle.

This is one of those helicopters, a Bell Iroquois. The RAAF operated helicopters in tactical support of the Army until 1986, a job the Army now does itself.

And with that we've smoothly segued into the static aircraft displays. One of the first things you see is this Macchi MB-326. The Macchis were used for advanced training, and were also very familiar as the type flown by the Roulettes, the RAAF's aerobatic team, for nearly two decades.

A Link Trainer, an early form of flight simulator, used in the 1930s and 1940s. Nothing terribly special about that, lots of museums have them ...

... but as JDK pointed out, the accompanying control desk for the instructor is a lot rarer. The instrument panel of the Link was duplicated in front of the instructor, and a mechanical 'crab' marked the progress of the pilot's simulated flight on a map.

The RAAF's first dedicated trainer was the Maurice Farman Shorthorn. This particular aircraft was purchased in 1917 and was only in air force service for two years. A civilian pilot used it for joyflights into the 1930s; the remains were donated to the RAAF Museum in 1981 and eventually restored to the splendid state it is in today. Which raises the question of whether it is actually appropriate to identify this object with the machine the RAAF bought in 1917? Only 30% of its components are original, meaning that 70% are not (i.e sourced from another aircraft or scratch-built). Obviously we'd like to believe that vintage aircraft are the 'real' thing, but they're always reconstructions to a greater or lesser extent.

Flying Vampires, the Telstars were the predecessors of the Roulettes. Such a 1960s name.

There's no doubt about the authenticity of this Avro 504K: it's all replica. But a very nice one.

A splendid example of the Supermarine Walrus, a ubiquitous amphibian of the late 1930s and 1940s. This one (okay, some of this one ... it is just easier to drop the qualifiers) is in the colours it had during an Australian Antarctic expedition in 1947. It was wrecked on Heard Island after only one flight, and not recovered until 1980.

The Walrus was in fact designed in response to a RAAF specification, for catapult launch from Royal Australian Navy cruisers. The British and Canadian navies liked them too, though they ended being used more for search and rescue than gunnery spotting, the original purpose. A pretty rugged aeroplane, it could supposedly do outside loops (though probably not something you'd want to try if it had been shipping water!)

Some handy hints for the Walrus operator.

A Vampire in bumblebee colours, used as a target tug.

An example of the kind of target it would have towed, incomplete with bullet holes.

The Dassault Mirage III, the RAAF's interceptor from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s. (When I say 'the', there was more than one, okay? Don't be so literal-minded. Sheesh.) It was the main type operating by the RAAF when I was growing up -- the Hornet which replaced it still seems new to me.

A Douglas Boston bomber, also known as the Havoc. The last remaining Boston III, it's looking pretty good for something which spent half a century rusting away. It crashed on landing at Goodenough Island, near Papua New Guinea, on 12 December 1943.

Three times a week, the RAAF Museum holds a flying display, where one of its vintage aircraft gets out of the hangar and into the sky. This makes it fairly unusual among aviation museums; running these things is not cheap. On the day that JDK and I were there, we and the other visitors were treated to some tumbles and turns from a CAC Mustang flown by an airline pilot on his day off. I'm grateful for his sacrifice!

It could be said that putting its artifacts at risk like this is somewhat at odds with a museum's primary mission, to preserve the heritage of [whatever] for future generations. Even the best maintained and piloted aeroplanes have accidents, and it would be a terrible shame if one of these machines were destroyed in such a way (not to mention the risk to the pilot). Of course, the Museum is aware of this, and has a policy that it will only fly aircraft where it has more than one example: one flying and one spare, in effect. But it's also worth remembering that technology is meant to be used. A static display in a museum can only tell people so much. Showing them how the machine works -- and, too, the acts of restoring it, maintaining it, and flying it -- aids in understanding it in a fuller context. Of course that can only be taken so far: it probably wouldn't be a good idea to load up the Mustang with rockets and take it on strafing runs. But it's a step.

And speaking of heritage, behind the taxiing Mustang above can be seen some of Point Cook's original hangars and buildings, the oldest dating back to 1914. In fact, this may be the most complete First World War-era military aerodrome anywhere in the world, an amazing survival. But they are not open to visitors, they are not being used and they are not being maintained. The RAAF Museum (unlike its British counterpart) is part of the air force it represents. This means it has a fairly secure budget and access to resources an independent museum might not other have. But it also means that, as part of the military, it is constrained about seeking funding from outside sources and can't just do as it likes with government property (Point Cook is actually still part of an air force base, RAAF Williams). The buildings are heritage listed, but all this means is that they can't be pulled down or modified without planning authority approval first. Obviously the RAAF has other priorities when it comes to spending money, but it's a crying shame that more isn't being done with these priceless buildings.

That's enough ranting for now! Here's another part of the museum which is rarely seen, one of the workshops. Closest to the camera is the some of the wood from a wooden wonder: the nose of a de Havilland Mosquito undergoing restoration. In the background is a very interesting project, a replica of a Bristol Boxkite, the very first Australian military aeroplane. The aim is to get this in the air by 2014, the centenary of the first flight in Australian service, and it looks like it's well on the way to meeting the deadline. I had an interesting chat with the guys putting it together, and resisted the urge to ask how quickly they'd be able to scale up production in case the JSF is delayed.

(Thanks to JDK for this picture and the Mustang at the top of the post!)

Last hangar of the day, Hangar 180. It is actually just a hangar with the aircraft lined up inside; you can't get up close to them, but it's an economical way of putting them where people can see them, instead of storing them. The white object in the middle here is a GAF Jindivik target drone, which was developed by Australia in the late 1940s to help with Britain's missile development programmes. Quite a successful machine, it first flew in 1952 and was still in use in the 1980s, but it didn't lead to any long term Australian expertise in drone technology: today we buy ours from the United States.

Behind is a Hawker Demon, a CAC Sabre and the fuselage of a Consolidated PBY Catalina.

This is a rare bird indeed, a GAF Pika, the manned prototype of the Jindivik. Only two were built.

A Westland Wapiti. These general purpose aircraft first flew in 1928, and served widely with Commonwealth air forces. If you wanted to bomb subject peoples in the outer reaches of Empire, this is what you'd use.

Update: The preceding paragraph is all very interesting but, as JDK has pointed out, it's actually an Avro Cadet, which looks somewhat similar, but came a bit later and was a trainer rather than a front-line aircraft. Let that be a lesson to anyone who believes everything I write!

A Sikorsky Dragonfly, one of the first practical helicopters (first flight 1943). It must have looked so ungainly next to, well, just about anything else flying. I think the concept has been proved by now, though.

Let's end here with a Boomerang. Thanks again to JDK for providing carlift and expert commentary!