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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 seventh RAF Display was held on Saturday, 3 July 1926. By now it was, as Flight noted, 'amongst the foremost of the functions of the London social season'. Their Majesties the King and Queen were in attendance, along with representatives of three other royal houses (including the King, Queen, Infante and Infanta of Spain, possibly drawn by the appearance of the Cierva autogyro), 'Several Indian Princes', nearly one in three of the combined Houses of Parliament, and about 150,000 less exalted guests. (The graphic above shows the growth of 'Miss Popularity Hendon' since the beginning.) The main feature of the day was massed formation flying: at one point, six fighter squadrons comprising fifty-four aircraft in total were in the air. The set-piece seems to have suffered by comparison. Flight's description seems rather muted when compared to previous years:

After this came the Set Piece -- during which the Royal Party made a tour of inspection of the machine park. The "Story" this year was the combined attack on a hostile aerodrome by fighters and day bombers. It commenced with a low bombing attack with light bombs by the fighters, which followed up with a machine-gun attack to silence the ground defences. Next came along, higher up, the day bombers, with the fighters above them in attendance. The bombers then very effectively finished off the aerodrome and previously-damaged aircraft.

That's all; you'd need to read the photo captions to even find out that the aircraft involved were Gloster Gamecocks and Fairey Fawns. This year's Pathé newsreel also did not feature the set-piece very prominently, though that may be because the surviving copy looks like unedited footage (the action starts around ten minutes in):

Perhaps the 'Story' was lacking? A straightforward attack on an enemy aerodrome lacks the drama of, say, the rescue of a beleaguered garrison. And the apparent lack of a named enemy probably didn't help either: the previous time the set piece featured an aerodrome it was clearly a German one, but this is now the Locarno era and it wouldn't do to pick on Germany. Then again, the RAF organisers may have wanted to downplay the set-piece this year for some reason; unusually they scheduled another event afterwards (a competition between flight instructors representing RAF flying schools) which was itself followed by the arrival of the first night bombers to finish a 500-mile cross-country air race which had begun earlier in the day. If the set-piece was intended to be the climax to the Display it was poorly placed in the programme.

Maybe I wasn't the only one to think so, because in 1927 the set piece was back to its usual form. In a pre-show commentary, F. A. de V. Robertson noted that 'advance stories of [the set-piece] have aroused the indignation of various bodies who decline to believe that non-Europeans could ever display unkindness towards missionaries', but predicted that the crowd will 'none the less enjoy the banging of the guns and bombs, and the glorious flare-up of the village of the disappointed gourmets'. Robertson may have got his story wrong, or perhaps the RAF bowed to its critics, for on the day (Saturday, 2 July) the set-piece seems to have been slightly different: the scene is 'the Eastern village of Hunyadi Janos, in Irquestine' but there are 'European settlers' in it alongside the indigenous inhabitants. Irquestine sounds like Iraq plus Palestine, both areas under British control, but the name of the village suggests Eastern Europe. Perhaps something can be read into the fact that that Hunyadi was a great (European and Christian) commander who held off the (Islamic) armies of the Turks.

Anyway, the Europeans in Hunyadi Janos come under attack for some reason:

as the white women and children (quite healthy youngsters, the latter) escaped into the open, No. 12 Squadron (Fox bombers) flew over from Andover and commenced a repeated series of attacks on the village and natives.

As 'the Europeans, hard pressed by the pretty-coloured natives, were starving', provisions are dropped to them from DH.9as via parachute.

While the Foxes continued to bomb the village -- by now well alight, even to the "mud" fort -- three "Queen Victorias" (as per loud speaker) arrived on the scene, deplaned reinforcements with machine guns, emplaned the women and children, and flew off with them to a place of safety. The sounding of the "Cease Fire" by R.A.F. trumpeters, and the departure of Their Majesties marked the end of a perfect day.

British Pathé this time featured the set-piece prominently in their Hendon newsreel:

So it was both an exciting drama and served as the end of the day's entertainment. Interestingly, it did have a competitor in the form of a mock 'air battle or daylight attack on London', which Flight described as 'splendidly "staged," and immensely thrilling'. The bombers (DH9as and Hyderabads) did not get through the Grebe fighter defences. Advance publicity for Hendon (in the form of a newsreel -- check out the special effect searchlights!) promised that 'The supreme thrill will be an "Aerial Battle in the defence of London"' and showed aircraft flying at night, so perhaps this is further evidence of a late change to the programme.

I don't think the above was official advertising for the ninth RAF Display: it doesn't have the date, Saturday, 30 June 1928, on it, which would be pretty poor event planning. It's on the cover of Flight's own souvenir programme which formed part of the issue published just before the Display. They clearly went to a lot of trouble over this (there are large photographs of all the aircraft involved, one to a page, so that spectators can identify what they are looking at), and it was doubtless their highest-selling issue of the year. Hendon by now was the biggest event in the airminded calendar, even if crowds seem to have plateaued at 150,000.

The bombing attack on London was repeated this year, though Flight doesn't describe it as such in its account. Perhaps that's because, as Robertson noted before the event, that the air defence exercises held around and over London the previous summer had shown the public that their defenders were all too easy to evade.

In any case, the actual set-piece received star billing, even if it didn't quite live up to its advance publicity. This was, as seen above, a mock attack on an oil refinery. So this immediately tells us we're back in the realm of total war, rather than air control. The role of Fleet Air Arm aircraft seems to have been bigger than in the previous naval-themed set-pieces, suggesting that co-operation has trumped substitution, for now. (Although the FAA was still part of the RAF.)

An oil refinery containing the enemy's supply of fuel was the objective of a British aircraft carrier, which despatched ships' fighters (Fairey "Flycatchers") to attack the adjoining anti-aircraft defences so as to disorganise them whilst the bombing machines arrived. An enemy observation balloon sighted them and gave warning, but it was attacked and shot down in flames, the observer, "Miss November," descending by parachute.

Sadly it seems that the burning balloon set the refinery on fire before the bombers could do it,

but the tanks themselves still required annihilating, and when the Fairey III.F reconnaissance machines arrived from the aircraft carrier they were partly blown up. D.H.9a's from a shore base then appeared, dropped their loads, and the whole destruction was thoroughly and neatly completed.

While in some ways this is a reversion to the aerodrome set-piece of 1926, at least there is a bit more of a narrative, and some human interest in the form of 'Miss November'. Although I must say I don't understand this reference. Why a female observer in the balloon? Why is she called 'Miss November'? Maybe it is meant to be a hint that the enemy in the set piece is the Soviet Union: I'm thinking of the Women's Battalions formed in Russia in 1917, though they were not Bolshevik units, and that the October Revolution took place in November in the Gregorian calendar. But maybe I'm reading too much into too little; it's probably just some obscure pop-cultural reference which would be obvious to all then and nobody now.

Breaking the morale of a civilian population by means of aerial bombardment is quite difficult. But it's a lot easier if you only have to do it in graphical form. Here bombs of type 'killed', 'wounded', 'evacuated', 'deprived of utilities' and 'homes destroyed' come thundering down towards the edifice 'will to resist', which is formed of layers 'belief in victory', 'belief in Nazis', 'confidence in leaders', 'group unity' and 'actual resistance', and buttressed by the Nazi countermeasures 'propaganda', 'air raid protection', 'relief & evacuation' and 'police control & terror'. Will the Allied bombs shatter German morale? Looks to me like it will!

This is taken from the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSB), The Effects of Strategic Bombing on German Morale (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1947), volume 1, 6. However, I came across it (by way of Wikipedia) on the website of the UK National Archives, as part of an exercise for students about the bombing of Dresden. I find it interesting, and perhaps telling, that a British government website would use an American image to illustrate wartime beliefs about the susceptibility of morale to bombing. There was a British version of the USSBS, the British Bombing Survey Unit (BBSU), headed by zoologist Solly Zuckerman, but any comparison between them is undone by the differences in scale. The USSBS employed more than a thousand researchers for two years at the end of the war and published 208 reports on the European theatre alone; the BBSU comprised a few dozen people working for just a few months in 1945, producing a single report which wasn't even published until 1998. For the BBSU to have hired a graphic artist to come up with something like the above would probably would have consumed a considerable fraction of its resources. Nor was it necessary. The USSBS was a genuine research effort, but it was also propaganda for an independent air force (which the USAAF became in 1947, turning into the USAF). The BBSU was far humbler in its aims. Churchill wanted a quick and dirty assessment of the Combined Bomber Offensive ready in time for Bomber Command's redeployment to the far East for use against Japan (which of course never happened). The RAF's leaders, notably the Chief of Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, were reluctant to let the Americans write the history of the bomber war. But, with the possible exception of Bomber Command's airmen, pretty much everyone else in Britain just wanted to forget about it once the war was over. And they did.

For a comparison of the USSBS and the BBSU, see Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Strategic Air Warfare: The Evolution and Reality of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 270-81.

A while back, The National Archives made all Cabinet papers from 1915 to 1980 freely available for download. Now TNA Labs have created a visualisation tool for said papers, allowing you to see clouds of the 25 most frequent words and contributors for any year (month in wartime) or, using the 'flexible querying' mode, any period you specify (up to ten years). Mouse-overing each result gives the actual count and links to the relevant DocumentsOnline entries. It's something of a toy at the moment (though they encourage you to download the XML dataset it is based upon and play with it yourself). For blogging purposes, it's annoying that there's no export function: I've had to grab some screen shots to show the results. And it's not possible to search for specific words or change the stop word list. But the potential is easy to see.

When looking at the lifetime of the National Government (1931-1940, spanning three prime ministers: Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, and Neville Chamberlain) one word inevitably caught my eye: air. At 1970 mentions over the decade, it's the fourth most common word after war (2537) , foreign (2125) and meeting (2059). Air could be used in a number of contexts, of course: the Secretary of State for the Air (a Cabinet position at this time) or Air Ministry, Royal Air Force, German air force, air routes, air raids, air raid precautions, air defence, air attack and so on. (I assume the tool is sophisticated enough to match only whole words and not just substrings.) But it suggests that the National Government spent a great deal of its time talking about the air, that it was, so to speak, airminded. (Naval, which admittedly has a somewhat narrower compass, is the only similar term and was used only 1204 times.)

Is that impression accurate, though? If we take a closer look, the answer is: not entirely. For 1931-1933, the first three years of the National Government's existence (actually less, as it was only formed in August 1931), air does not show up at all in the top 25 words. It comes across as a fairly pacific period, with the only warlike word being war itself, which sneaks into the top 20.

I would expect that to change for the next three years, 1934-1936, which corresponds to Britain's early rearmament, which favoured the RAF, and the (behind the scenes) start of air raid precautions. And so it does. Air is now in there at equal 15th (with trade), with 217 mentions, beating war (184), though not defence (243). To get an idea of the context in which air was used, the first reference in 1934 was to the 'Air Force Reserve (Pilots and Observers)'; in 1935 it was to German rearmament; and in 1936 Italian air attacks on the Red Cross in Abyssinia.

In 1937-1939, the air really becomes a hot topic. It rates 653 mentions: only foreign (677) and war (791) get more. Again, that's expected from an air policy point of view: there's the last pre-war RAF rearmament schemes, ARP propaganda in full swing, the bombing of Guernica and Barcelona, and of course the Sudeten crisis and the start of the Second World War itself (which accounts for more than half of the 653). Still, it is striking just how much the word is used compared to other words which might have been equally topical: military is used only 400 times, admiralty only 370. In 1937, the first air discussion was about the 'Defence Programme' and the visit of Air Staff officers to Germany; in 1938; the arms trade with the far east and defensive armament for merchant vessels; and in 1939 the move of the Air Ministry's headquarters to Whitehall.

Just to round things off, here's 1940 (of course, the National Government fell with Chamberlain in May). It being wartime -- and the year of Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, and the start of the Blitz -- of course the Cabinet would talk about the air a lot. It's still impressive that it is the second most common word, with 918 occurrences (war gets 1326). And now a second airminded word reaches the top 25: aircraft (519). The first War Cabinet meeting of 1940 discussed the 'Air Situation', supply of aircraft to beleaguered Finland, and anti-aircraft guns for the BEF.

So the National Government became increasingly airminded over its lifetime, though not by choice. It was forced to pay increasing attention to aviation thanks to the deteriorating foreign and military situation. Negative airmindedness, not positive airmindedness.

Finally, something to justify the existence of the Internet. The Google Ngram Viewer takes the corpus of words formed by the Google Books dataset (i.e. books, journals, magazines, but not newspapers) and lets you plot the changes in frequency of selected ones over time. There are all sorts of interesting questions you could (in principle) answer with this tool, so let's give it a whirl.

Here's a pretty basic one. Blue is aeroplane, red is airplane, the period is 1890-2000. (The smoothing in all these plots is 3 years.) Aeroplane was initially the more popular term, but airplane has predominated since about 1925. Note the peaks during the world wars -- airplane was 5 times more likely to be used in the Second World War than in the 1990s.

But we don't have to use the English corpus: there's also American English and British English. Here's the American version.

Okay, it's very much the same and so not very interesting. Aeroplane was more common initially but was replaced by airplane in the early 1920s. Here's the British version:

This is very much not the same. Aeroplane has easily been the more popular choice throughout the period, only succumbing to airplane in the late 1990s. So I now have an empirical basis for preferring aeroplane. (Incidentally, that the English and American English plots are so similar tells us that American English dominates Google's English corpus.)

Let's try something else. Here's the ngram for bomber, 1900-1950. (From now on I'll stick to British English.)

So it would seem that not many people were talking about bombers until the late 1930s and then bang! The war starts and everybody is. But that's to be expected. We want to (at least I do) filter out that peak and see if there is anything meaningful in the pre-1939 data.

So there are three distinct periods here. First an initial but low level of usage from 1905 to 1912. Then an upswing in the First World War. Then from a post-war low in about 1924 there is an (almost) continuous climb until 1939. The latter section however has an inflection point in about 1934 when the word frequency rises much more rapidly.

What historical reality to these correspond to? The first one is a bit puzzling. Bombers in 1905? That seems a bit early. But since the corpus is drawn from Google Books we can search that to get an idea of where the word is occurring and in what contexts. (There are links to Google Books at the bottom of each Google Ngrams search result which makes this easier, though you may need to modify the years searched by hand.) And here we start to see some problems. Searching Google Books for bomber between 1900 and 1910 yields such sources as Flight, the Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, which seem respectable enough. Except the excerpts show that the particular issues in which bomber appears are clearly not from the period 1900-10. For example, the Australian Year Book excerpt begins 'Up till June, 1952 [...]'; Volume 5 of A History of the Azores Islands talks about the Battle of Britain. These journals and volumes are drawn into this search because they began publishing in the period 1900-10, not because they actually used the word bomber in that period. It seems that Google sometimes isn't able to index each issue or even volume separately, they're all lumped in together. This is not good. Being able to discard periodicals from the Ngram corpus would be a workaround.

Other than that, the explanation for the First World War bump is self-evident (though note that a bomber was also a soldier who 'bombed' enemy positions with grenades, and this sense would also appear in postwar memoirs and histories). Taking into account the 3-year smoothing, the postwar climb begins exactly where I would expect it, shortly after 1922 when P. R. C. Groves published his Times articles. The 1934 upswing is from the failure of the Disarmament Conference and the arrival of Hitler. So overall it makes sense.

Another phrase associated with the shadow of the bomber is poison gas. Here it is plotted over 1910-45:

Most of the discussion in the first peak would be about battlefield use of gas. I would expect much of the second peak to be about its use against civilians (it peaks in about 1938 which would be right). But there's no way to check correlations of terms (e.g. do they occur in the same page?) so I can only guess. Either way it's interesting that the phrase poison gas was used more often in the Second World War than in the First. But is it believable? It's hard to think so; it just wasn't something people would have written about as much. This suggests another bias in the sources of some kind. Perhaps more technical/medical journals are in Google Books for 1939-45 than for 1914-8 -- more places where doctors and engineers might discuss responses to poison gas in (unnecessary, as it turned out) anticipation of its use? A quick look in Google Books for 1942-5 bears this out: there's the Archives Of Otolaryngology and the Journal of Chemical Education. Also, of course, civil defence publications and things like Popular Science. But note again that these are American sources: I don't know if you can just search Google Books for British English books (but I'd love it if you can!)

We can also use the Ngram Viewer to revisit some old friends. Here's the rise of luftwaffe, 1933-45:

Well, it's not so much a rise as a plain. There's nothing at all. Aha -- it turns out that Ngram Viewer is case-sensitive. Putting in Luftwaffe instead of luftwaffe gives a much more sensible result:

Still, it's odd that searching on luftwaffe in the American English corpus yields a non-zero result. I can't believe that British writers and editors were uniformly strict about capitalisation where American ones weren't.

There are more oddities when we look at Coventrate: it does not appear at all in a British English search. Nor does it appear in an American English search. But it does appear in a simple English search! (The period is 1935-2000.)

Even if English is not simply American English plus British English, I can't see any reason why Coventrate would be used in other English variants and not the two major ones (especially since British English would have been the one to use it at all). So here is another glitch. Still, that before the war the graph is zero shows that the OCR is pretty good; I would have expected some confusion with concentrate but it doesn't look like that has happened.

Finally, to fulfil the promise of autogyros made in the post title. The rise and fall and rise and fall of autogyro between 1920 and 2000 is clearest in American English (read: I'm cherrypicking my data to fit the conclusion -- the second rise and fall is not at all evident in British English, and only just perceptible in English):

The initial rise and fall is the heyday of the autogyro, perhaps sustained after the war by hopes that it would fulfil hopes for practical personal aviation. But what is with the renewed popularity of autogyro from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s?

Getting back to the Google Ngram Viewer, it's not actually quite so useful as to justify the existence of the Internet: there are currently too many problems with it for it to be a killer app. But it is only a test product and it is useful enough as it stands. It's certainly something to keep an eye on.

The word 'reprisals' popped up during my 1940 post-blogging quite frequently. After one post I had the idea of checking whether it could be used as an index of British attitudes towards the bombing of Germany throughout the rest of the war. The short answer is: not really. But it was still worth trying.

With The Times and the Manchester Guardian/Observer databases I can luckily do this in a semi-automated fashion. Automated because I can do keyword searches on the full text of the newspapers, semi because the interfaces are crude and require manually stepping through the date range to bin the data. For example, searching for the word 'reprisals' in The Times database between 1 and 31 July 1940 gives 16 articles; doing the same between 1 and 31 August 1940 gives 18 articles; and so on. I then put these numbers together and plot the results.

So above is the plot for the whole war, binned into quarters (January-March, April-June, July-September, October-December). The numbers represent at least one use of the word 'reprisal' in an article. This is a problem: how articles are defined varies a bit depending on which database it is and what part of the newspaper is being searched; several letters to the editor on diverse topics can be bundled into one 'article', for example). Blue is for The Times, and red the Manchester Guardian/Observer. That's the second problem: the Guardian and the Observer are lumped in together in the ProQuest database I'm using, simply because since 1993 they both have had the same owner. Not only did the two newspapers not have anything to do with each other in the 1940s but they also had very differing political views, the Guardian being liberal and the Observer conservative. Having them in the same dataset like this is thus quite problematic. Because the Observer was published only on Sundays I could have filtered it out at the price of making the whole process more labour intensive, but it's probably not worth the effort anyway.

That's because of the third problem, which is really the problem: reprisals ain't reprisals. Without knowing the context it's impossible to say whether a mention of 'reprisals' in September 1940 meant the same thing as a mention in July 1944. In fact, they almost certainly wouldn't have. It says nothing about whether the comments were 'pro' or 'anti' reprisals. The word could be used in non-military contexts too, of course. So the above graph says nothing particularly interesting in itself. It confirms that the most chatter about 'reprisals' took place during the latter half of 1940, that is to say during the Battle of Britain and the early Blitz, and also that with a few exceptions the chatter seems highly correlated across the press. But it is only illustrative and suggestive: it doesn't obviate the need to actually go and look at the primary sources to see what was actually going on.

That said, what do the peaks in the graph represent? The first one is in late 1939, and refers to economic reprisals taken by both sides: the impounding of enemy contraband in neutral shipping, for example. After all the reprisals talk in 1940, it became a relatively neglected topic until 1942. The contexts there are all over the place: the German press described the Baedeker raids as reprisals for the bombing of Rostock and Lübeck; it came up in relation to collaboration and resistance in occupied Europe (including the assassination of Heydrich); Dr I. Schwarzbart said that only 'immediate reprisals' could deter Hitler from completely annihilating Poland's Jews, a million of whom were already dead (The Times, 30 June 1942, 2). In October, German authorities put British prisoners of war in chains, an act forbidden under the Geneva Convention; both this and Britain's mirror response were described as reprisals. The final peak, in the third quarter of 1944, had nothing to do with V-weapons; instead it was due to the anti-partisan actions taken by the German army after D-Day.

Let's turn then to the Battle and the Blitz, this time looking at the numbers for each month. This shows that reprisals were widely discussed in The Times and the Guardian/Observer only during the first two or three months of the Blitz. Interest fell off during the winter months, declining to practically nothing in February 1941 (why this would be is an interesting question in itself). It was starting to increase again by the time the Blitz ended in May.

While there's a lot to complain about with regards to the interfaces these databases have been saddled with, one good thing is the way you can narrow down searches to particular sections of the paper, e.g. the leading articles or letters to the editor. Doing this filters out the 'news' and gives us 'opinion': what news editors and readers felt was important enough to give their opinions on. The above plot shows this for the letters columns. I'd already noted during the post-blogging that the Manchester Guardian's letters columns were almost silent on the reprisals debate. It looks like this changed in October; and from then on its readers were generally as interested in reprisals as those of The Times, if not more. (In this case I can omit reference to the Observer, as it didn't publish correspondence from readers.) Again, this doesn't tell us why they suddenly became so interested (or, perhaps, why the Guardian started publishing their letters).

This one is just the leading articles, and shows that none of the editorial writers were particularly interested in the reprisals question, usually with no more than one or two references per month for most of the period. The big exception here is the Guardian and/or Observer in September 1940, with a whopping seven articles. On closer inspection, two of these refer to Vichy reprisals for Dakar. Another four refer to the German claim that the raids on London were themselves reprisals for British attacks on Berlin. Only one (in the Guardian) in fact says anything for or against the idea of launching air reprisals against Germany. (Which explains why I didn't notice this 'peak' when I was post-blogging!) It's this sort of uncertainty which makes trawling these databases in this way a fairly fruitless exercise. If they had more powerful search functions (or, in the case of Cengage's Times archive, one that actually worked properly), it might be possible to frame more sophisticated queries to winnow out more of the chaff. But for now the traditional way of doing history ('reading the primary sources') still works best, at least for me and in this area.

View Zeppelins over London in a larger map

Last year, Londonist gave us a very nifty map of London's V2 impact sites. Now they've come up with an equivalent for Zeppelin raids. Each of the sunbursts represents a bombfall. Clicking on them brings up a popup with information about the site and casualties (but, annoyingly, not the date). Note, however, that only a 'small selection' of the sites are plotted, however, which makes it hard to draw conclusions from the patterns: I could be wrong but I don't think the cluster in central London is representative. But perhaps more interesting are the tracks of the Zeppelin raiders (to get the key for which raid was when, click on the 'larger map' link). Again, these need to be treated with some caution, as they would only be reconstructions based on logbooks, bombfalls and sightings, but they do suggest that if the raiders could get reasonably close to London they could usually work out where to go. You can see the tracks deviating towards the urban areas, or turning back after the bombing run. London did have a blackout during the First World War (when its fighters couldn't touch the Zeppelins, the government claimed that the best defence against them was 'darkness and composure') but it wasn't as complete as during the Second. And of course the Thames on a clear and moonlit night couldn't be blacked-out at all.

Also, note the link in comments to a sequence of photos showing a Zeppelin being shot down. I hate to say it but I think these are fake ...

One of the questions which interested me when I originally embarked on my PhD was the extent of the relationship between British aviation and the far right. As it turned out, my research took me elsewhere. But that doesn't mean I can't blog about it.

In the chart above I've attempted to show some of the links between extreme right-wing groups such as the British Union of Fascists and prominent figures and groups involved with aviation in the 1930s. From the latter group I've excluded purely political groups (such as the BUF's flying club) and anyone whose contribution to flying consisted mostly of their war service. That means no Sir Oswald Mosley, in particular, who was in the RFC for a time. While he did draw upon the image of the airman from time to time he wasn't actively involved in the aviation community as far as I can tell. Having said that, those who did serve (or, in one case, lead) in the air services (RFC, RNAS, RAF) have been marked in blue. The links indicate some concrete degree of support, such as membership, financial contributions or public approval, as opposed to mere sympathy.

The red boxes are all organisations involved in aviation advocacy, and were theoretically non-political. Two of them still exist: the Air League of the British Empire (now simply the Air League) and the Royal Aeronautical Society. (The current magazine called Aeroplane is not related to the one I'm talking about. The National League of Airmen was a pressure group which existed for only a few years from 1935.) I am certainly not suggesting that they are in way fascist now! I'll also note that I'm depending largely on the research of others. When it comes to the involvement of mainstream figures in right-wing politics, the evidence is often (and unsurprisingly) rather murky, so false designations are possible. Caveat lector.

The right-wing groups (the grey boxes) were all reasonably respectable (as distinct from shadowy cabals). That doesn't mean they weren't dodgy. The January Club was a front for the BUF; it often served as a half-way house for those who felt unable to come right out and join the Fascists, such as certain Conservative MPs. (On the other hand, Liddell Hart was a member too, and he's generally considered to have been a liberal.) The Anglo-German Fellowship was founded in 1935 to promote friendship between the two countries; many members were businessmen keen to trade with Germany, but it also had a pro-Nazi flavour. The Link was similar in purpose, but less interested in camouflaging its anti-Semitism and pro-Nazism. Founded in 1937 by C. E. Carroll, formerly of the RFC, it was led by Admiral Sir Barry Domvile KBE CB CMG, a convinced and active fascist (he was also on the council of the Anglo-German Fellowship) who was a 18B internee between 1940 and 1943. Finally, the Right Book Club was a much less successful mirror image of Victor Gollancz's Left Book Club. Arthur Bryant was one of the founders, and the selection committee was stuffed with fascist fellow travellers.

Now, on to the people. One of the key figures, it emerges, is Lord Sempill (before 1934, the Master of Sempill). He was a pioneer aviator (among other feats, he flew from London to Berlin in a very light aircraft). At different times, chairman and president of the RAS. He was on the council of the Air League and the Link; in 1939 he joined the British People's Party which had been founded by John Beckett, a former BUF stalwart. Sempill was friends with von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador to Britain in 1936-8, as well as Geoffrey Dorman, who was an editor for The Aeroplane and the BUF newspaper Action (he also wrote the aviation column for the latter, under the pseudonym 'Blackbird'). Dorman's boss at The Aeroplane was, of course, C. G. Grey, who was not averse to airing his anti-Semitic, anti-Bolshevist and pro-fascist opinions in his editorials. He was not a joiner, however; the closest he came to signing up for a fascist group was when he became a regular attendee of Domvile's clandestine meetings of non-Mosleyite, pro-peace fascists after the coming of war in 1939. Perhaps significantly, this was just after Grey's retirement from the editorship of The Aeroplane. Whether he jumped or was pushed, I'm not sure.

Now, Sempill was one of the organisers of the 1933 Everest flight, which needs to be understood not just as an impressive feat of flying, but also as an assertion of Britain's continuing right to rule India. The leader of the expedition was Lord Clydesdale, who himself later joined the Anglo-German Fellowship (and to whom Hess fled in 1941). Its main backer was Lady Houston, the wealthy owner of the Saturday Review as well as the Patriot, a small die hard publication which supported the first British fascists, i.e. the British Fascists, and the Boswell Press, which published many far right authors, such as Domvile and the notorious anti-Semite Nesta Webster. Houston didn't support the BUF, although she did consider writing a big fat cheque for Mosley (but decided against it after being insulted in the pages of Action). But she did help Lord Rothermere, proprietor of the Daily Mail, pay for the Bristol Type 143, the prototype for the Blenheim light bomber which, as it happened, was called 'Britain First', the BUF slogan. As is well-known, Rothermere enthusiastically backed the BUF with both money and press coverage (until the violence at the Olympia meeting put him off). He also founded the NLA, a group to which many airminded people pledged their support. One of these was Admiral Sir Murray Sueter, Conservative MP, wartime head of the RNAS and antagonist of Neon. Sueter was right-wing, even for a Tory, and was a member of the Anglo-German Fellowship and a guest of Ribbentrop at the 1936 Nuremberg Rally.

You see how this works by now. Let's start again, this time with Norman Thwaites, a wartime Army intelligence officer. He was on the book selection committee of the Right Book Club, part of the pro-fascist English Review circle and a member of the January Club. And he was also secretary of the Air League and at one time editor of its semi-popular journal, Air. Air Commodore J. A. Chamier, the long-serving secretary-general of the Air League (still honoured today for his role in founding the Air Cadets) was in the January Club too. According to Labour Party research in 1934, Chamier was a generous financial supporter of the BUF. According to the same source, A. V. Roe (founder of Avro) and Vincent Vickers (former governor of the Bank of England, twenty-two years a member of the Vickers-Armstrong board) were too.

Nearly finished, I promise! Let's just clean up. Lord Mottistone, having swung to the right from his earlier liberalism (he is perhaps better known as Colonel J. E. B. Seely, Secretary of State for War in Asquith's government and Under-Secretary of State for Air in Lloyd George's) was chairman of the Air League, a member of the Anglo-German Fellowship and another friend of Ribbentrop's. Lord Londonderry, Secretary of State for Air in Baldwin's last government was a member of the January Club and on speaking terms with Hitler. J. T. C. Moore-Brabazon was a pioneer aviator -- and president of the Royal Aeronautical Society in 1935-6 -- and a longtime friend of Mosley. He nearly defected from the Conservatives to join Mosley's New Party in 1931. Later, being a sitting Conservative MP didn't stop him from speaking up for the BUF and Mosley, even in the House of Commons. (That in turn didn't prevent him from succeeding Beaverbrook as Minister for Aircraft Production during the war.) Last of all, there's Sir Malcolm Campbell, speedster, airman, probable BUF-pennant carrier and January Club member.

What does all this mean? Is (or was) aviation inherently fascist? I don't think so. There were left-wing aviators, such as L. E. O. Charlton, and left-wing supporters of aviation, such as Lord Thomson. But there's no way I could come up with a similarly complex chart which traced the interconnections between aviation advocates and communist front groups. The left's response to aviation was, in general, not to embrace it but to protect against it. So instead such a chart would look at pro-disarmament and pro-civil defence groups. A liberal chart might instead include pro-collective security and pro-international air force groups. They probably wouldn't be as interesting, though.

Sources: Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany 1933-9 (London: Oxford Paperbacks, 1983); G. C. Webber, The Ideology of the British Right 1918-1939 (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1986); David Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan Academic and Professional, 1991); Colin Cook, 'A fascist memory: Oswald Mosley and the myth of the airman', European Review of History 4 (1997): 147-61; Richard Thurlow, Fascism in Britain: From Oswald Mosley's Blackshirts to the National Front (London and New York: I. B. Tauris Publishers, 1998); Martin Pugh, `Hurrah for the Blackshirts!' Fascists and Fascism in Britain Between the Wars (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005); Stephen Dorril, Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism (London: Viking, 2006); Patrick Glenn Zander, 'Right Modern: Technology, Nation, and Britain's Extreme Right in the Interwar Period (1919-1940)', PhD thesis, Georgia Institute of Technology (2009).

It must be time for some plots. The data here is taken from Richard Overy, The Air War 1939-1945 (Washington: Potomac Books, 2005 [1980]), 120, and represents the bomb tonnage delivered between 1940 and 1945 by Germany on Britain (including V-weapons) in blue, and by Britain and the United States on Europe as a whole (meaning Germany, mostly, but also France, Italy, the Netherlands, etc) in red. The first two years cover the Battle of Britain and the Blitz; the last four the Combined Bomber Offensive. Germany dealt out more aerial punishment than it (or its allies and conquests) received only in 1940; from 1943 Britain and the United States dropped vastly more bombs than the Luftwaffe could ever dream of doing. And here is part of the reason why:

This is the number of bombers built by Germany and by Britain and the United States for the same period, though no data is given for Germany in 1945. I'm not sure if the German numbers include V-weapons this time, and I think the numbers for both sides are for any type of bomber, regardless of how or where it was used. So US Navy dive bombers destined for the Pacific would count, and of course after mid-1941 the Kampfgruppen were otherwise engaged. By the same token, however, a single-engined Stuka carrying less than a thousand pounds of bombs is given equal weight to a four-engined Lancaster carrying 14000 lb, so this plot actually underestimates the true scale of the Anglo-American dominance in the production war.

It all turned out pretty much as 'Bomber' Harris told the British public it would, in June 1942:

The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody else, and nobody was going to bomb them. At Rotterdam, London, Warsaw, and half a hundred other places, they put their rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind, and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.