The front page of the Daily Mirror today is almost wholly given over to a story which the other papers are far less interested in. The recently-installed Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr William Temple (that's him on the left, though what is being done to him I have no idea; and that's his forehead on the right), used a speech in Manchester yesterday to give 'a new charter to Britain -- a charter of social reform which will bring happiness to millions of people if applied in post-war reconstruction' (1). Its nine points are:

1. Provision of decent houses for the people of this country;
2. Every child to have adequate and right nutrition;
3. Equality in education. There shall be genuinely available to every section of society the kind of education will develop their faculties to the full;
4. Adequate leisure for personal and family life. Where the family is separated because of employment, there should be two days' holiday each week;
5. Universal recognition of holidays with wages;
6. The application of science to discover labour-saving devices, to save labour instead of labourers;
7. Wide appreciation of the fact that labour is a partner in industry, just as much as management and capital;
8. Recognition by workers and employers alike that service comes first, and the opportunity to make profit comes afterwards;
9. The opportunity for all people to achieve the dignity and decency of human personality.

An accompanying article by A. W. Brockbank says that Temple also warned against yielding 'to the lure of people who try to persuade us that it would be wise to establish such a non-party State'":

'The minority must have the right to become the majority if it can. It must be lawful to be in opposition to the Government.'

Just who he has in mind here is not made clear.

Speaking of Manchester, the Manchester Guardian reports that in 1941, crime there increased by 20.1% over 1940 (6):

The principal increases are in theft of bicycles, simple larceny, house-breaking and larceny, and false pretences and fraud.

It's not all bad news: the number of shoplifting incidents decreased by 174 to 460, possible due to 'the Limitation of Supplies Order, which reduces the quantity of goods available for display'. Manchester's Chief Constable, Sir John Maxwell, suggested that the crime surge 'might reasonably be attributed to crime conditions, the extra duties imposed on the police, and to the great advantage to the felon operating in the "black-out"'. He didn't mention the opportunities created by air raids (though of course Manchester hasn't had a really heavy blitz since 1940). According to the Daily Mirror, 'the shattered streets of Bath' have experienced 'a wave of looting' since it was bombed (1). There are 'complaints that jewellery, money and goods had disappeared from ruined homes', and 'money boxes had been wrenched from gas and electricity meters'. In response, the Home Guard in Bath was been issued with live ammunition last night:

They patrolled in pairs, and had orders to take drastic action if they saw thieves robbing bombed buildings.

Another consequence of bombing is an increased traffic in rumours. Following an outbreak of them after the Norwich raids, the Eastern Regional Commissioner, Sir Will Spens, has asked the public not to believe or pass on rumours about air raids, (Guardian, 6):

There were rumours of heavy attacks on towns not attacked. Broadcasts were alleged to have been given which were not given. The number killed was in some cases multiplied tenfold.

Norwich and especially Bath have particular cause to thank the National Fire Service -- according to Herbert Morrison, Minister of Home Security, 'now the most powerful in the world' (Daily Express, 4). He said:

The Regional Commissioner has reported to me that the N.F.S. saved a great part of Bath. Under the old system the whole town might -- almost certainly would -- have gone.

Indeed, the NFS 'has justified itself in the concentrated air raids on British "Baedeker" towns', its first real test since '1,450 local fire brigades in Britain were telescoped in 37 fire forces', with a 'Fire Control Room in Whitehall'. This means that 'The question of "town boundaries," which often led to disastrous delays, has been eliminated':

When there is a raid on any part of the country firemen and appliances from surrounding areas concentrate their energies.

Nearly three thousand people attended York Minster yesterday for 'the special service of commemoration of the victims of the air raid on Tuesday night' (Yorkshire Post, 6). The Dean of York, the Very Rev. Eric Milner-White, gave the address, drawing upon 'the motto of the West Yorkshire Regiment, Nec aspera terrent' which is repeatedly inscribed on the walls of the Minster:

'It is a motto,' said the Dean, 'which might stand for York, which its citizens had proved on April 29, 1942, for ever. The desperate moment did not find them afraid, and the rough paths had not dismayed them. On that morning, dawning red before the dawn was due, York gave its toll in the defence of our England, our Empire and our race. We do not grudge it. We have not complained. We will be proud of it. But it is a heavy payment, and there is a sore pain at our hearts. I expect it is always so. The day of grandeur is always a day of suffering.

He predicted that York would one day raise a memorial to the dead, 'a new sort of memorial', dedicated not to 'sailors, soldiers and fighting men who made great sacrifices in far-off places', but to 'warriors like these':

These were the aged who died for children they would never see. These were fathers and mothers who suffered and hallowed England's homes under the ruins of their own; these are the children who gave their years of lovely promise that freedom might play for ever in our streets.

The Yorkshire Post reprints a letter from one of the children who survived the raid, Valerie Johnson, 15, 'a senior pupil at the Convent School' which was hit by at least two bombs, one a delayed-action one. She's far less sombre than the Dean, writing to her father that 'We're school-less! We woke up early this morning with bombs dropping quite close, so we all skedaddled down to the shelters'.

When the bomb fell, the lights went out, the whole place rocked, the gas pipes broke, and we heard debris falling -- it seemed on top of us but it wasn't quite. In the next cellar six lay mistresses and one nun were buried and both the entrances to our cellar were blocked [...] All the smaller children became quite panicky, but we managed to quieten them, while being nearly suffocated by gas and coal dust [...] It was horrid in there though by ourselves, with gas leaking and the air thick with dust and children screaming and black darkness, but we came through O.K.

After 'twenty minutes -- it seemed like twenty hours' the occupants of both cellars were rescued. Five of the nuns were killed in the raid; 'three day girls in our class alone are missing' (though obviously they weren't at the school when the raid took place). The school is ruined, though two rooms might be used to teach classes in turns. The boarders have been sent home: 'Mummy was very surprised to see me, as she didn't know York had had a blitz'. There was no blitz on Saturday night, by the way, yet German radio reported in Russian that Vichy French aircraft carried out reprisals for 'the British raid on Paris' (Express, 1). The translation reads:

Last night the first French reprisal raid was carried out on several towns in Southern Britain. French airmen dropped bombs and leaflets saying that every R.A.F. raid on France would be followed by a French raid on Britain twice or three times as powerful.

The Yorkshire Post's London correspondent suggests that this is 'a German attempt to scare Russia by the suggestion that the French Air Force can deal with Britain while the main strength of the Luftwaffe is concentrated on the Eastern Front' (2).

There's so much of interest today that I'll have to pass over -- I haven't even mentioned the continuing bad news from Burma, which dominates most of the big headlines; nor the Express's critique of Saturday's mock invasion of Westminster (much too unrealistic: 'EVEN FIFTH COLUMNISTS REFUSED TO BE "CADS"', 3); nor yet Sir Stafford Cripps on Britain's commitment to Indian independence after the war. But I must at least quote from two letters to the editor. The first, in the Guardian is from E. Lindsay, possibly Erica, the wife of A. D. Lindsay, Master of Balliol (the address is given as 'The Master's Lodging, Balliol College', 4). She says it is 'a terrible thing' in this just war 'to have one's single mind and purpose sullied and hammered from within':

Yet this thing happens when the B.B.C. offers us, as for our encouragement, the evidence of civilian refugees streaming out of a bombed German port.

Surely we are mature enough of mind and purpose to understand that there is a war to be waged involving mortal suffering which all must mourn and of which none need boast, sullying themselves and their cause. If those responsible for the presentation of news on the wireless could hear the comments of simple people who have already tasted the full horrors of bombing they would know how little such descriptions are in tune with the temper of our nation in its great crusade.

The second appears in the Yorkshire Post and is from R. A. Chadwick of Leeds, who urges that to preserve peace after the war the Allies should decree 'that no German, Italian or Japanese shall own an aeroplane, fly an aeroplane, make an aeroplane, operate an air line, or own, occupy, manage, or be employed on any aerodrome', and further 'that no aeroplane can be flown anywhere in the world unless both the 'plane and the pilot are licensed by Britain, the U.S.A., Russia and China (all four of them)' (2).

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the Baedeker Blitz. See here for an introduction to the series.

]]> http://airminded.org/2012/05/04/monday-4-may-1942/feed/ 1 http://airminded.org/2012/04/30/thursday-30-april-1942/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=thursday-30-april-1942 http://airminded.org/2012/04/30/thursday-30-april-1942/#comments Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:45:28 +0000 Brett Holman http://airminded.org/?p=9418

Most newspapers in my sample today lead with the further grim news from Burma (the Japanese army has now reached the suburbs of Lashio) but The Times chooses to go with the latest Bomber Command raids on Kiel and, for the second night running, Trondheim, both the locations of key German warships (4):

The heavier force was directed against the strongly defended naval base of Kiel, where the Scharnhorst is believed to still be in dock after her dash from Brest. The Tirpitz, Scheer, and Prinz Eugen are thought to be based on Trondheim, while a cruiser of the Hipper class has been in the locality, though she may not be there now.

These latter ships are 'a definite threat to our communications with north Russia and in the Atlantic'. While 'the Air Ministry makes no definite claim to have damaged the ships', in the case of Trondheim stronger than usual explosions were heard on the Swedish frontier, which suggests 'a bomb must have hit some explosive target; the explosion of even the biggest bomb could not in itself have caused such an effect'.

All of today's papers do feature prominently a couple of RAF reconnaissance photos of Rostock. The one above of Rostock's main railway station (6) appears to be that referred to in Tuesday's papers), which was interpreted as showing crowds of people trying to get out of Rostock, marked above at 2 (at the station entrance) and 3 (on the platforms). Also visible, at 1 and 4, is damage to the station itself. Reports from Berlin say that around 100,000 people have been evacuated from Rostock, 'virtually the whole pre-war population' (Manchester Guardian, 5). A Swedish newspaper says that

the destruction is estimated at 70 per cent of all buildings. Many trains with homeless refugees have already reached Hamburg. After the raids German propaganda cars travelled round the town exhorting the people through loud-speakers to keep up their spirits.

As for Cologne, 'None of the earlier raids [...] compares with the latest British attack for the amount of destruction caused'.

The latest victim of what the Daily Express refers to as the Luftwaffe's 'Baedeker raids' is an unnamed town in East Anglia (1). Last night, it was attacked by German bombers which 'swooped so low that their markings could be seen in the moonlight' and 'dropped high explosives and incendiaries, wrecking workers' homes and starting fires'. There was damage to churches and 'some of the town's historic buildings', but it is believed that 'the number killed may not be high'. York too has been bombed, by about twenty aircraft early yesterday morning. The Yorkshire Post naturally has the fullest coverage (though it is published in Leeds). Fortunately York Minster was 'untouched', but one unidentified 'historic building' was destroyed along with a church (1). Casualty figures are unknown at this stage, but a fireman was killed when a wall collapsed and the bodies two nuns were recovered from the ruins of a convent school this morning.

Most of the casualties occurred when houses were demolished in residential districts, and several working-class localities and rows of Council houses suffered very badly. To-day many of the citizens are homeless, their houses completely demolished and their belongings destroyed.

Commercial districts also suffered heavily, and the raiders machine-gunned an express train (luckily without killing anyone). The Yorkshire Post entitles its first leading article today 'York Ravaged By Vandals', though it is mostly a defence of British bombing policy (2):

Our policy is the only right and realistic one. It is true that the execution of it causes the destruction of a great many non-military buildings and brings death to a great many civilians. Night bombing is not accurate enough to pick out particular targets in crowded cities. It is true also that in total war there can be no precise definition of what is and what is not a military objective. As soon as a country's total energies are devoted to war, any blow which weakens or diverts those energies, or puts a new burden upon them, may be considered to have military value.

But Hitler has chosen to ignore these 'principles of air policy'. This seems to be a strategy born of weakness: the Luftwaffe appears not to have 'immediately available the large bomber forces necessary for heavy raids on big industrial centres'. Instead he wants to inflict 'obvious damage on residential towns, thus ensuring some lurid stories with which to satisfy an insistent reprisals demand from the German people'. But Hitler also seems to have some strange ideas about this country:

He may really believe that Britain has been forced reluctantly into the war by a clique of plutocrats, old-school-tie die-hards and Colonel Blimps, and that places like Bath and York are where these gentry live. By raiding their stately homes he may hope to frighten them into agreeing to some kind of pact which would rule out the night bombing of towns.

In the end, it doesn't matter what the Germans do, for Britain will 'remain sober and steadfast alike in our resistance and in our aims':

Wherever and however they strike, they will find that the spirit of the British people is the same. At Bath [...] it is the same as it was at Coventry. It is the same at York; the same front-line spirit rising up, cool and undaunted, in face of Nazi hate and Nazi savagery.

In similar vein, The Times urges that the RAF policy of attacking military objectives not be 'deflected by the transparent tactics of terror' currently being carried out by the Luftwaffe (5):

The only price too high to pay for safeguarding our visible historic heritage would be a betrayal of the cause to which the British people are committed. It would indeed be a betrayal if the British were for a moment tempted to moderate the onslaught of their Air Force upon the focal centres of German war production and transport in the vain hope of purchasing immunity for their cathedral cities. The anger and pain caused by these blows should not blind us to the spirit of methodical calculation in which the germans have decided upon this campaign.

Herbert Morrison, Minister of Home Security, has released a statement on 'The Nazi crocodile tears over the destruction of certain old German buildings in British raids', recalling 'how those same Nazis openly boasted and gloated' over the destruction of historic buildings during the Blitz (2):

In the raids of last year Nazi bombs destroyed the House of Commons, Guildhall, 19 historic churches in the City, the Temple Church and buildings, many of the famous old halls of the City Companies, Coventry Cathedral, lovely old churches in Bristol, Plymouth, and Southampton, and other splendid monuments of the past in all parts of the country.

Some solace from this sombre list may be taken from the suggestion made in the House of Commons yesterday by Sir William Jowitt, 'charged with planning the [postwar] reconstruction', that 'Possibly many of the bombed areas in cities will be kept as permanent open spaces' after the war: 'Green belts to grow in bombed cities' as the Daily Express puts it in its headline (3). However, no policy has been decided on yet.

Speaking of Parliament, the Express reports that the President of the Board of Trade, Hugh Dalton, 'is astonished at the poor reception his fuel rationing scheme has received' (1). He won't drop it, but 'he will modify it to the point where its reluctant father, Sir William Beveridge, will not recognise it'. The major change is that only solid fuel (i.e. coal, coke and anthracite) will go on ration. The Guardian's London correspondent suggests that Dalton is getting no support from the surprisingly non-committal War Cabinet, and is being left to fend for himself (4):

If he succeeds, well and good. On the other hand, if the opposition is as strong in the debate as it is to-day, then the Government will drop the plan.

I must sadly omit any discussion of the results of the Cripps mission to India (yet again), and the rumours noted in the Guardian of 'three separate peace feelers' from Germany (6) and of 'a complete reversal of Italian policy, some of them even going so far as to prophesy the downfall of Mussolini and the accession to power of Marshal Badoglio' (4). But I can't resist quoting a proposal for large-scale climate engineering made in the Deutsche Volkswirst, reported by The Times (3). The idea is that

certain steps could be taken as a means of providing Europe with a more settled and reliable climate and an adequate and regular rainfall. The channel between Dover and Calais, it says, could be widened and deepened to admit a great volume of the warm Gulf Stream which at present banks up at the mouth of the Channel. A broad and deep channel could be cut between the North Sea and the Baltic so as to admit the Gulf Stream to the Baltic. The Gulf of Finland, Lake Ladoga, Lake Onega, and the White Sea could all be connected by a broad, deep bight so that the warm waters of the Gulf Stream should reach North Europe.

Furthermore, the northern end of the Caspian should be drained 'thus recovering an area of arable land as large as Hungary', and 'The Urals, from farthest north to farthest south, should be reafforested as a bulwark against the Siberian climate'. The headline is 'GERMANY COVETS THE GULF STREAM'.

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the Baedeker Blitz. See here for an introduction to the series.

]]> http://airminded.org/2012/04/30/thursday-30-april-1942/feed/ 4 http://airminded.org/2012/04/23/thursday-23-april-1942/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=thursday-23-april-1942 http://airminded.org/2012/04/23/thursday-23-april-1942/#comments Mon, 23 Apr 2012 13:23:51 +0000 Brett Holman http://airminded.org/?p=9279

Most newspapers today lead with the story of a successful Commando raid on the French coast near Boulogne early yesterday morning -- though only the Daily Mirror (above), rather bizarrely, focuses on the fact that 'All wore gym shoes' (1) (apart from the ex-Limehouse police inspector who wore slippers). More colour is provided by the dashing Lord Lovat who led the raid wearing 'the bonnet of his own Lovat Scouts, a body of Highland deerstalkers [...] whose training is ideal for Commando work'. The purpose of the raid is not clear -- the official communique only says it was a reconnaissance mission -- so it's hard to say if it achieved its objective. Perhaps the aim was to tie up German cement supplies:

SO greatly do the Germans fear Commando raids and invasion that they have earmarked more than half the French production of cement -- about one and a quarter million tons a year -- for use on new defence works along the coast.

But in purely operational terms the raid seems to have been a success (8):

Remarkable from the military point of view was that, after spending two hours on enemy-occupied territory, every man was withdrawn with arms. Our casualties were negligible.

The Navy, which delivered and retrieved the Commandos, also got away largely unscathed, and damaged two armed German trawlers in the process.

There is plenty of other war news, of course, but nothing nearly so spectacular. The Times actually leads with the announcement in Delhi by Colonel Louis Johnson, President Roosevelt's personal representative, that 'United States troops are already in India and that more will be coming' (4). Reading more closely, however, these 'troops' appear to be only a 'technical mission', the functions of which are

to collect data, to make industrial explorations, to furnish technical experts if wanted, and to make recommendations to President Roosevelt, and to assist in applying these recommendations in India to the extent that Indian industries desired.

Johnson didn't disparage Indian production but did say that it was still on a peacetime footing. Since British forces are still retreating in Burma -- today it is announced that they have 'completed their withdrawal across the river Pinchaung, "not without some loss of personnel and equipment"' -- that will obviously have to change.

The Russian front is largely quiescent, the Times reports, as 'operations have been brought to a standstill by the vast mudfield, which, like so many things in Russia, is easily the largest in the world'. Germany is however still attacking on the Leningrad front,

where the [German] soldiers in some parts are obliged to stand in flooded trenches with water up to their hips, and where during the nights their coats freeze into a sort of ice armour as the soldiers frequently sink into the water breast-high. It is obvious from such descriptions that little progress is possible at present even along the railways, as troops and arms crowd to them.

The main activity is in the north, where a Russian offensive against the Finns is reportedly 'continuous and heavy' and in the south, where it is thought that the 22nd Panzer Division has been redeployed from France to the Crimea.

Much further south (and east), in New Guinea, it's a lot warmer. The Times relays a report from Allied headquarters in Melbourne that a Japanese air raid on Port Moresby, the twenty-sixth so far, was carried out by 'eight enemy bombers with a fighter escort on Tuesday morning':

Our fighters 'intercepted the enemy brilliantly,' and destroy four '0' type aircraft. We had no losses. Our air force attacked wharves and buildings at Rabaul on Tuesday, starting numerous fires.

A recent article in the Times on the growing closeness between Australia and the United States seems to have provoked some reaction in Australia -- well, at least from the Times's Canberra correspondent, who asserts that this is 'dictated primarily by the facts of world geography [...] Australia is America's obvious base for an ultimate counter-offensive' against Japan (3). The correspondent seeks to reassure British readers that Australians still retain 'ties of sentiment and culture with the Mother Country', as well as 'an economic bond', but pleads for Britain to do more to cultivate the relationship:

The United Kingdom has a tremendous stake in this country, not the least important in which is the affection and gratitude of millions of the best Australians. Every day there is more and more evidence of the wisdom of doing something to protect it if only it be by keeping Australians supplied with facts which would enable them to get a balanced picture of the world scene. A word in season now and then from people in high places addresses directly to Australia is greatly needed. The job should not be left exclusively to Australians who realize this need.

A number of newspapers today carry a story presenting an overview of the bomber war -- no doubt derived from the same Air Ministry briefing. The one in the Yorkshire Post opens by noting that in the period 20 March to 20 April (it actually says 30 April, which still is in the future, but the Manchester Guardian says 20 April), 'under 200 enemy aircraft crossed the coasts of Great Britain by night, and the tonnage of the bombs dropped was nearer 250 than 300' (3).

In the same period we dropped on Germany in one week more than 1,000 tons of bombs, and there were at least six nights on each of which the tonnage dropped there exceeded the Luftwaffe's 'British' total for the month.

Bomber Command has 'suffered some regrettable losses in our European attacks this year', but 'our wastage is not unduly heavy when the scale of recent attacks in taken into account'. Indeed, during the same period 'the Axis' lost more aircraft in its attacks on Malta than the RAF lost in its attacks on Germany, 140 to 112. It is suggested that the the efforts of the 'New British Broadcasting Station' (which pretends to be a British radio station but is actually German black propaganda) to deny the damage done to Germany (as well as in the recent American raid on Tokyo) rather suggests the opposite:

'We should know better than anyone,' said the station after the attack on Tokyo, 'that the bombardment of towns cannot bring the end of the war nearer. London withstood about as heavy a bombardment which could be launched, something compared with the raid on Tokyo cannot have been more than a pinprick.

'The proper use of aircraft is to support land forces in the actual battle zone, and as the R.A.F. is not large enough to fulfil all its tasks, it should be reserved for this purpose only. A daylight raid on Augsburg, for instance, may be spectacular but its practical value is negligible.'

While the Post allows that it can't be assumed that Germany 'could not concentrate a fairly heavy attack on some British target',

There is no evidence, however, that the Luftwaffe is being strengthened at present on the Western Front, and sensational stories which have gained currency concerning big reinforcements of air-borne troops and so forth are known to not have any basis of truth.

On that note, the Guardian reports (5) that

Nazi raiders dropped bombs last night near a town in South-west England. They fell in open country and there are no reports of casualties or damage.

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the Baedeker Blitz. See here for an introduction to the series.

]]> http://airminded.org/2012/04/23/thursday-23-april-1942/feed/ 4 http://airminded.org/2012/04/19/the-last-flight-of-the-patrie/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-last-flight-of-the-patrie http://airminded.org/2012/04/19/the-last-flight-of-the-patrie/#comments Wed, 18 Apr 2012 17:13:10 +0000 Brett Holman http://airminded.org/?p=9236

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Image source: 100 Years Ago Today.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I've recently begun some research at the National Archives of Australia (the Melbourne reading room of which is conveniently only about half a kilometre from my house) into the 1918 mystery aeroplane scare. It's always exciting to get to work on a new set of primary sources; and this is my first time working in a state archive so it's doubly interesting. I can already see that there's a lot of useful material, and my original idea of a short, simple case study is already starting to seem optimistic.

The main file I've looked at so far is NAA: MP367/1, 512/3/1319, 'Reports from 2nd M D during War Period on lights, aeroplanes, signals etc.', a big fat dossier of reports from the public and the results of military and police investigations into them. 2nd Military District seems to have covered New South Wales, so it's actually not what I ultimately want: most of the 1918 sightings took place in Victoria, i.e. 3rd Military District. But as NSW was the other big state (somewhat more people, more important industrially and commercially; but Victoria had the seat of government and defence headquarters) it'll be useful as a control.

There are three main types of reports: signalling, wireless, and aeroplanes. The first is easily the largest, and consists of people seeing lights flashed from houses, from a hill top, on the coast, etc, and reporting them as suspected lights from German agents. For example, in May 1918 Mrs Clara A. Woollard of Pambula wrote that

I think it is my duty to inform you that flashlight signals were being displayed in the sky, to the west, at about eight o'clock last night.

She had seen this light on several previous occasions, and thought that it was 'as if someone were telegraphing messages by that means'. Virtually all of these reports seem to have turned out to be false alarms, often caused by people carrying hurricane lamps late at night so they could see where they were going. Most of the suspect houses turned out to be inhabited by good, solid 'Britishers'.

Nationality and ethnicity was also important in the wireless cases. These were suspected wireless installations, with a big antenna and associated plant, potentially capable of sending and receiving messages to and from -- where? Other secret agents? Ships off the coast? The Fatherland? As with the signals, it's not always clear just what the suspicion was, only that they were suspicious. But who needs something like that, anyway? Conveniently, unauthorised possession of such wireless installations was already prohibited under pre-war legislation, as was pointed out in press notices in September 1914. This led to a rash of reports from the public, which continued at a fairly steady rate until the end of the war. As late as September 1918, for example, the Provost Marshal Office of 2nd Military District investigated the concerns of Mrs Caroline H. Scott of Darlinghurst, who

is of the opinion that there is a Wireless Plant in the vicinity of her residence as she has noticed flashes & also heard the tick tacking [sic] similar to those produced by a Wireless Plant. These noises & flashes occurred about between 3 & 4.o.clock in the mornings & she considered it her duty to inform the Authorities of same.

Often there was a suspicious foreigner involved. Sometimes the wireless installations were real enough (one man was using his to carry out research into the effect of radio waves on plant growth!) but none seem to have been to have been used in espionage or subversion.

And then there were the aeroplanes. This is the smallest category in 2nd Military District's files, nineteen cases for the whole war: seven in 1914, when you might expect some war jitters, and another seven in 1918, mostly after the Hindenburg offensive on the Western Front and the reports of raiders off the coast. A very few were actual aeroplanes, generally sitting in somebody's workshop somewhere. At Hay in November 1914, V. B. Sylvander's activities were investigated by a police detective. Sylvander and his son had already built one aeroplane, which had been damaged in testing; a second one was being built but lacked an engine. Sylvander wisely proposed to give this to the government when it was finished, which perhaps influenced the detective's judgement that he was 'a loyal Britisher' despite being a 'naturalised Russian Finn'. Most others were the more usual lights in the night sky, as seen over Britain, New Zealand and Australia in 1909 and elsewhere/when.

Some were more substantial and unusual: in June 1918, Miss McCann of Beckom was sitting in her room at 1am when she 'heard the buzzing noise of an aeroplane and a ray of light shot across her bed like a searchlight and seem to be going south'. She said that it didn't sound like a motor car (though later she admitted that it might have been just that). In this case, it wasn't just the sound and the light: McCann seems to have suspected a local family of disloyalty. She mentioned to the policeman interviewing her that a 'strange man' had visited the Groth farm nearby, and it turned out that they had recently had a large box of ammunition delivered to them. Three of the family's sons, of age and medically fit, had claimed conscientious objection to military service on religious grounds. The Groth brothers were born in Australia, but their parents were from Germany, and this combined with their 'disloyal' attitude denied them the status of 'Britishers'. A number of followup investigations led to the reluctant conclusion that the Groths weren't up to any mischief (the ammunition was for hunting and pest control), but one suspects the damage to their reputation was done.

One mystery aeroplane stands out because it was actually a phantom airship: a Zeppelin seen at Young in July 1918 by W. G. Rogers, a professional photographer. In a letter to the Minister for Defence, Senator George Pearce, Rogers said that

I saw what appeared to me be [sic] an airship of the Zeppelin type due west from this town in size it appeared to be about 40ft. long but no doubt it was much larger as it was some miles distant. It was steering zig-zag course as though it was having trouble with the heavy wind which was blowing that morning.

It sank out of sight to the west at around 8am. Just what a Zeppelin would be doing at Young, more than 250 km inland from Sydney, is not clear. Rogers's account was taken seriously, but a police sergeant detailed to investigate reported that nobody else had seen the Zeppelin. Furthermore,

Mr Roger's [sic] is a very respectable resident of Young, but very near sighted and I am of the opinion that he saw a snow cloud, and believed it to be an airship.

About the time mentioned by Mr Roger's [sic] there was a strong wind blowing with rain and snow.

My favourite find, though, is the one that made me laugh inappropriately at the archive. The Captain-in-Charge of His Majesty's Australian Naval Establishments, Sydney, wrote in December 1917 to 2nd Military District's Military Intelligence Officer about a purported illegal wireless installation at St Ignatius College:

I would point out the peculiar merits of this supposed apparatus,

1. Peculiar flashes.
2. Finding imaginary earthquakes.

I would suggest it might also be applied for finding the supposed brains of the Prime Minister's correspondent.

As the writer was John Glossop, formerly commander of HMAS Sydney and victor over the raider SMS Emden in 1914, he probably had good reason to feel his time was being wasted. But scepticism didn't stop the reports of strange signals, illegal aerials, and mystery aeroplanes. Only the end of the war did that.

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Folk physics (or naive physics -- there's also folk biology, folk psychology, and so on) is the term used in philosophy and psychology to describe the way we all intuitively understand the physical world to work. It's very often at odds with scientific physics (unsurprisingly or else there'd be no need for the latter). For example, we all know that in order for something to move, there has to be some force moving it. If you stop pushing a box across the floor, it will stop moving; if a car's engine stops working, the car will slow down and stop too. That's folk physics. Scientific physics disagrees: force causes acceleration, not velocity; in the absence of any other forces, once an object is set in motion it will keep moving forever. Of course it's that caveat which is responsible for the different conclusions of folk physics and scientific physics in this case: friction with the ground exerts a force on the box and the car and so robs them of their momentum. Folk physics works well enough for us in our everyday lives but would be disastrously misleading in, say, trying to dock a spacecraft to a space station.

I wonder if it's useful to apply this demarcation to military strategy? There have been attempts to formalise principles of strategy, of course, though trying to sciencise (yes, I just made that up) them by making them rigid formulae is not necessarily fruitful. Strategy has always been an art much more than a science, and as such is pretty intuitive itself. But certainly there can be (and probably usually is) a gap between what military leaders do and why they do it, and what everyone else, particularly civilians, understand them to be doing. This gap creates a space for folk strategy to exist.

Here's an example. The Luftwaffe left Glasgow and the Clydeside area alone for the first six months of the Blitz. At the end of that winter, a Mass-Observation team surveyed locals on whether they expected heavy air raids: 30% did, 28% did not, 42% had no opinion. That means that 58% of the population (there are no sample sizes or methodology given so who knows how accurate it is, but the exact numbers don't matter here) had formed some positive opinion about the intentions of the Luftwaffe's commanders concerning the Glasgow area. Based on what? Well, here's a list of the reasons given by the the 28% who thought Glasgow wouldn't be blitzed:

(i) air pockets over the Clyde generally;
(ii) mountainous area too dangerous for night flying;
(iii) a magnetic element in the mountains, which dislocates aircraft engines;
(iv) impossibility of locating the Clyde in a network of lochs and sea;
(v) adequacy of AA defences and depth of guns on the periphery;
(vi) distance inland or overland (very popular);
(vii) too far from German bases;
(viii) Germans not antagonistic to Scotland;
(ix) Germans believe revolution will develop here so long as bombs don't stir up the people (common upper and middle-class opinion).

Some of these reasons are based on an understanding of aeronautics (a folk aeronautics, perhaps): that there are things called 'air pockets' which are dangerous to aeroplanes, for example. Or that magnetic mountains are similarly a hazard (perhaps inspired by death ray stories). The suggestion that the Clyde was too far away from German bases was true in a way -- it explains why Hull, Plymouth and Southampton received more big raids -- but it still involves implicit assumptions about the range of German bombers. More purely folk strategic thinking are the last two suggestion, particularly the very last one: that the Germans don't want to create any Blitz spirit on the Clyde which would just increase solidarity between the classes. That's a clear attempt to divine German strategy, though it probably says more about the mistrust Glasgow's upper and middle-class had for their notoriously red working classes.

None of these rationales can have been based on any objective knowledge of Luftwaffe strategy, which was after all not discussed publicly by Germany or by Britain (except in general terms). They must have been based on assumptions, guesses, rumours, bits of news and the odd factoid here and there (motors use magnets so maybe a magnetic field can throw them off?) They were indeed naive, and in the end wrong, as the Clydeside blitz on the nights of 13 and 14 March 1941 showed. But do they amount to a folk strategy? Maybe not, at least not in the same way as there is a folk physics. In that case we develop it through our normal experience, and usually don't even need to think about it: it's almost hardwired in. Military strategy is not something most of us have to try and interpret or second-guess. Even in wartime the chance to do this would be limited, and probably wouldn't amount to a consistent picture of how and why events were taking place. The Glaswegians who came up with plausible reasons for why they had not been bombed quite likely found equally plausible reasons after the event to explain why they had been. In any case the very diversity of views points to a lack of coherence. But then again, perhaps that is because, as I suggested earlier, military strategy itself is not too coherent. Humans aren't as consistent as nature.

I do like this idea; I'm just not sure there's any use for it!

Part of my PhD thesis involved conceptualising the various forms of defence against aerial bombardment put forward during the thirty-odd years before the Second World War: things like anti-aircraft guns, air-raid shelters, an international air force, and so on. Something I didn't include was what we might call spiritual air defence. Partly because I didn't come across much like that in my sources, and probably partly because of my own rationalistic bent. This may have been unfortunate.

What do I mean by spiritual air defence? Here's what got me thinking about it: Padre Pio, Italy's flying monk. (Technically, bilocating, but that doesn't scan as well.) Here's a sober, historical account by Claudia Baldoli:

With the intensification of bombing after the armistice in September 1943, a rumour spread across Italy that God had granted Padre Pio could fly and intercept the enemy's bombs [...] it seemed plausible that Padre Pio could fly and intercept the enemy's bombs. With the exception of Foggia, which was repeatedly bombed between May and September 1943, the area of Apulia where he lived in Gargano received no raids, and this convinced many that the rumour must be true. For decades after 1944, the supporters of his case for beatification were even able to find RAF pilots who were willing to confirm that it was indeed an apparition of a flying apparition of a flying Padre Pio which had stared at them so directly that they abandoned the mission and returned to their bases without dropping bombs.

As might be expected, there are a number of accounts on the web which add more details but somehow don't add plausibility. One of the better ones is an article by Malcolm Day from the September 2002 Fortean Times. This doesn't mention the rumours circulating among the Italian population, only to the claims (or claims of claims) made by Allied pilots:

In their approach to the town [San Giovanni], several pilots reported seeing an apparition in the sky in the form of a monk with upheld hands. They also described some sort of 'force-field' that prevented them flying over the target rendering them unable to drop their bombs.

Supposedly this happened repeatedly, and was verified by 'Bernardo Rosini, general of the Aeronautica Italiana, and part of the United Air Command at the time' (presumably this means the Italian Co-Belligerent Air Force, which flew on the Allied side, though not over Italian soil) and an unnamed 'US Commanding General'. Some posts on the ArmyAirForces forum provide some further (albeit conflicting) details, suggesting that the first raid took place on 16 July 1943, carried out by 5th Bombardment Wing, XII Bomber Command. An example of an eye-witness account (though written more than half a century after the event) can also be found there:

I almost killed Padre Pio.....the enclosed flight record of bombing raids, shows that Villa San Giovanni was scheduled to be wiped out with 150,000 pounds of bombs. Allied Intelligence had information (erroneous) that German troops had occupied the hospital, friary and town of San Giovanni. Two minutes from dropping the bombs, the Colonel in the lead aircraft saw an apparition of a Monk, 30,000 feet tall, and broke off the bomb-run and proceeded to the secondary target. The Colonel was a Protestant, and when he was later shown a photo of Padre Pio said that was the apparition.

A 30,000-foot tall monk would certainly seem enough to scare off anyone, but I am worried that more reliable accounts are not available. In any case, I'm more interested in the wartime rumours than the postwar stories which, as Baldoli notes, were used to argue for Pio's beatification. (I guess it helped: he was beatified in 1999 and canonised in 2002.)

This being history, there are always other examples. For example, the yogic flyers who, it was promised, would obviate the need for an anti-ballistic missile shield by jumping around on crash mats. This, they claimed, would reduce hostility throughout the world and so prevent an attack from taking place in the first place. (They scheduled a press conference in Washington DC to announce their plans on the morning of 11 September 2001. I don't know how it went.) Which itself is reminiscent of the efforts of Dion Fortune's Fraternity of the Inner Light, which between 1939 and 1942 used the combined psychic efforts of its members to influence the war in Britain's favour. Another British occultist, Gerald Gardner (a key figure in the founding of Wicca), also used magic to fight for Britain, performing a rite at the Rufus Stone on 31 July 1940, designed to prevent the coming German invasion. Later claims that yet another famous magician used his powers in an MI5 operation designed to lure Rudolf Hess to Britain, appear to be unfounded: Aleister Crowley's diaries show that the Great Beast did no such thing, though in February 1941 he did have an idea for 'a union of magicians to beat the Nazis' which he didn't follow through with.

Again, though, these are the efforts of (self-appointed, magical) elites. And we're drifting away from the air war too. What about popular beliefs in spiritual air defence? How about the vision of Christ seen by people in the village of Firle, near Lewes in Sussex, in November 1940:

The shepherd, Mr. Fowler, of Firle, told how he saw a white line spread across the sky and from it appeared a vision of Christ crucified on the Cross.

Then six angels took form, he said. They had long, white wings and one was playing a harp.

The vision lasted for two minutes then faded.

[...] he was not the only one who had seen the angels.

A Newhaven evacuee, Mrs. Steer, of The Street, Firle, and her sister, Mrs. Evans, said:

"We could see the nail in the crossed feet of Christ."

But although the vision was seen in the sky, it apparently was not specifically related to the air war in any way by those who saw it. Steer said that 'The village is taking the vision as a sign for a British victory'. A Daily Mirror reporter who interviewed Fowler found the shepherd wondering if 'it really was Christ come to help put our world straight again'. It's not quite what I'm after.

Perhaps A. E. Cook was inspired by the Firle visions. He was a munitions worker who saw believed that he saw angels 'all in white' converging on the cross on top of the dome of St Paul's Cathedral in London:

Those angels... were loved ones that had been taken away from us, but who, nevertheless, are still with us; yes, they and thousands of others... are still with us, watching over London, watching over Coventry, watching over Plymouth, watching over Bristol; watching over all those towns of ours that have felt the ruthlessness of German bombing.

The angels of St Paul's are more clearly related to the bomber war than the Jesus of Firle (though 'watching over' blitzed towns is still much more passive than flying overhead and intercepting bombers or erecting a force field). Vanessa Chambers quotes Cook's vision as an example of resorting to the supernatural in order to cope with the psychological stresses of the Blitz. But she argues that this was a rare response. Much more characteristic was the dramatic increase in interest in superstitions, charms and astrology, particularly in the form of newspaper horoscopes. The latter seems to have replaced the spiritualism of the First World War as the dominant esoteric response of the British people to war.

In fact, Chambers suggests that this supernatural turn can be likened to the fatalistic attitude of soldiers on the battlefield: if there's a bullet out there with your name on it, there's nothing you can do about it but accept what happens. Again, this is a passive, internal form of air defence (which I'm relieved to note is covered in my thesis's schema in the first section of chapter three). It may well be that the British people felt that their active defences were well enough provided for by the government, in the form of Fighter Command, Bomber Command, and Anti-Aircraft Command, whereas Italians felt entirely undefended and so had greater need of supernatural assistance. Or perhaps, as they say, more research is required.

In a discussion of the activities of MI5's Port Control section during the First World War, Christopher Andrew mentions German musings about using biological weapons against British civilians:

The most novel as well as the most sinister form of wartime sabotage attempted by Sektion P was biological warfare. At least one of its scientists in 1916 devised a scheme to start a plague epidemic in Britain, either by infecting rats or, more improbably, by dropping plague bacilli cultures from Zeppelins over ports. The Prusso-German General Staff, however, vetoed bacteriological warfare against humans as totally contrary to international law (the Hague Laws of Warfare).

But he doesn't provide any references. Is this plausible?

The British War Cabinet considered 'The possible Spread of Epidemics by dropping Germs from the Air' during its meeting on 9 February 1917. It accepted the advice from experts from the Royal Society, the Army Medical Service and the Local Government Board that the possibility was remote, and that any outbreak would be easily contained. Consequently Cabinet decided that 'no further action was required'. The expert reports themselves are quite interesting. That from Dr Arthur Newsholme, the chief medical officer of the Local Government Board, notes press reports of 'poisoned sweets and garlic saturated with garlic being stated to have been dropped at Constanza [Romania] from enemy aeroplanes'. Closer to home, the Board itself received a letter claiming that 'according to information "from a reliable source," infected sweetmeats had been dropped over Sheffield'. But, Newsholme added, no evidence had been produced in either case.

None of this relates to bubonic plague, however. And in Martin Hugh-Jones's summary of known (that is, by the British) wartime German biological warfare plans, plague is not mentioned. Most of the actual biological warfare activity by Germany during the First World War was directed towards anthrax and glanders, for use against horses, sheep and cattle. Nor does Hugh-Jones know of German wartime proposals to spread disease from the air (as opposed to proposals after the war, which is the focus of his article).

But bubonic plague can be weaponised and deployed from the air. Japan's Unit 731 proved that in China in 1940 and 1941, not only in controlled experiments but in field trials. And by field trials I mean, of course, bombing civilian areas with bubonic plague. There were at least four separate attacks, involving at most a handful of Japanese aircraft: Chuhsien, 4 October 1940; Ningpo, 27 October 1940; Kinhwa, 28 November 1940; and Changteh, 4 November 1941. The plague was not dropped in bombs but usually by way of fleas and grain; in two cases plague bacilli were detected by local hospitals. Only in Kinhwa did no outbreak of plague follow; a hundred people died in Ningpo alone.

So it does seem possible that German scientists considered using Zeppelins to rain black death upon Britain, and that it may even have worked. The British experts may have underestimated the potential of this form of aerial attack; and the psychological impact might have been far greater than the medical one. Then again, the great influenza pandemic in 1918 didn't disrupt the war to any great extent, and it killed far more people than any plague would have done. So the War Cabinet's lack of concern was justified, in the non-event.