[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

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

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

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

Deleriad, a folklorist, made an interesting comment:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stories abounded of new German weapons. For example:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last year I talked about J. M. Spaight’s The Sky’s the Limit (here, here and here), and how its account of the then-developing Battle of Britain was somewhat surprising to anyone familiar with the standard narrative of the summer of 1940. Which is not at all to say that the standard narrative is wrong, just that things quite naturally looked different while the Battle was still in progress.

Now I’m looking at press accounts of the beginning of the Blitz, September and early October 1940, and again I’m finding things which don’t seem to have made it into the received picture. One very striking one is the apparently near-universal opinion that the Me 109 fighter was inferior to British fighters: not just a little bit, but greatly; not just to the Spitfire, but to the Hurricane as well.¹ So for example, the Manchester Guardian’s air correspondent confidently reported that

That Göring’s air force has had no single-seat fighter that could compare with the Spitfire or the Hurricane is a fact that has been obvious since the very start of the war in the air against Britain and the replacement of the Messerschmitt 109, that has suffered so heavily at the hands of R.A.F. fighter squadrons, by something better was to be expected.²

Nearly seventy years later, reasonable people still can and do disagree over the relative merits of these fighters. But I think you would be hard-pressed these days to find anyone who would claim that the Me 109 was not comparable in air combat to the Spitfire, and substantially (though certainly not overwhelmingly) superior to the Hurricane. The reason for the underrating of the Me 109 is not hard to find, when British claims for German losses were routinely too high by a factor of two or three. But I suspect Fighter Command pilots wouldn’t have been so sanguine, regardless of the numbers!

The second story was put out by official German sources: that Hermann Goering personally flew a bomber on a raid over London on the evening of 15 September!

Government quarters said that Göring piloted a Junkers 88 bomber, escorted by two Messerschmitt destroyer ‘planes³ on either side of his ‘plane. After returning to his headquarters at a small village in Normandy, Göring, according to these spokesmen, declared that he was most impressed by the effect of the German bombing of London.⁴

I don’t think I’ve ever heard this story before, and I don’t think it’s actually true. Goering was of course a pilot during the First World War, a fighter ace in fact, and flew as a commercial pilot in the early 1920s, but he didn’t take a lot of interest in flying thereafter. This is despite his becoming head of the Luftwaffe in 1933; at that point he hadn’t flown since 1922⁵ and it seems unlikely that he would have found time to get much practice in, what with all his hunting, gourmandising, and whatnot. Presumably, then, this story was concocted to show Goering as a vital man of action, willing and able to lead his troops into action.

The third story — actually a pair of stories — was about the German invasion. Not just the one which, it was feared, was about to take place, but the one which had already taken place and been repulsed! These stories originated from Americans who had recently been in France or who had received letters from there.

The invading German fleet is said to have started from St. Malo, Brittany, with the expectation of landing on the West Coast of England. Reports received, it is said, indicate that the result was “nothing short of suicide.”⁶

A couple of days later, a different source (an American surgeon, late of Paris) claimed that ‘The Germans have already attempted to invade England several times at different points and each time have failed’.⁷ He also ‘told of seeing “hundreds of German bodies in the water near Cherbourg”‘⁸ (presumably something to do with invasion exercises, rather than the real thing, though he said these were not being conducted near there). Of course, none of this actually happened: Operation Sealion was never attempted. I have actually heard these stories before, as James Hayward discusses them in a fascinating little book, The Bodies on the Beach: Sealion, Shingle Street and the Burning Sea Myth of 1940 (Dereham: CD41, 2001).⁹ These rumours and others, such as ones regarding the charred bodies of German soldiers washing up on the English coast, came at the height of the invasion danger period in mid-September, when high tides at dawn provided optimal conditions for an amphibious landing. So it’s hardly surprising that people would fixate on every little scrap of information, no matter how dubious (and to its credit, the Manchester Guardian made no great play of the failed invasion stories, burying them way down the page). What’s more surprising is that some people still believe such things, such as the claim that a German invasion was turned back at Shingle Street, Suffolk, in late August 1940. I don’t think so.

Here’s a final tidbit. In 1940, at least, it seems that it wasn’t “Fighter Command” or “Bomber Command” — they were nearly always “the Fighter Command” and “the Bomber Command”. For example, in Churchill’s tribute to Fighter Command, which began: ‘Yesterday eclipses all previous records of the Fighter Command’.¹⁰ At some point during the war the definite article was dropped. It’s jarring at first, but soon makes sense.

So there it is: in September 1940 the Fighter Command was thrashing those useless Me 109s all over the sky, although unfortunately not doing much to stop old Hermann earn his combat pay; while below the Navy and the Home Guard were busy beating back invasion after invasion. That’s if you believe everything you read in the papers, of course!

1. Since we’re talking day fighters, technically this probably should be classified as the Battle of Britain, not the Blitz, but in some ways this is is an artificial and unhelpful distinction.
2. Manchester Guardian, 19 September 1940, p. 5. The ’something better’ was the mythical He 113.
3. I.e., Me 110s.
4. Manchester Guardian, 17 September 1940, p. 5.
5. According to James S. Corum, The Luftwaffe: Creating the Operational Air War, 1918-1940 (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1987, 124-5.
6. Manchester Guardian, 12 September 1940, p. 2.
7. Manchester Guardian, 14 September 1940, p. 10.
8. Ibid.
9. CD41 are worth checking out, particularly for their music and spoken world CDs relating to the First and Second World Wars.
10. The Times, 17 September 1940, p. 4.

On the night of 23 March 1909, a police constable named Kettle saw a most unusual thing: ‘a strange, cigar-shaped craft passing over the city’¹ of Peterborough, Cambridgeshire. His friends were sceptical, but his story was corroborated, to an extent, by Mr Banyard and Mrs Day, both of nearby March, who separately saw something similar two nights later. In fact, these incidents were only the prelude to a series of several dozen such sightings throughout April and especially May, mostly from East Anglia and South Wales. As the London Standard noted in May, there seemed to be common features to the various eyewitness accounts:

With few exceptions they all speak of a torpedo-shaped object, possessing two powerful searchlights, which comes out early at night.²

So, what was torpedo-shaped and capable of flight in 1909? An airship, of course. The press (metropolitan and provincial) certainly assumed that the most likely explanation for these ‘fly-by-nights’ was an airship or airships, generally terming them ‘phantom airships’, ‘mystery airships’, ’scareships’ or something similar.

But whose airship? Where was it from? There were actually very few airships operating in Britain at this time. The first edition of Jane’s All the World’s Air-ships, first published in 1909, listed just two, with several in the process of being built or bought. One of these was a small army airship, Baby, while the other belonged to the pioneer aviator E. T. Willows. These two small, underpowered aircraft could hardly be responsible for the mystery airship sightings, some of which took place on the same night but at widely separated locations. And although several sightings took place in and around Cardiff, near Willows’ base, he was actually in London at the time, exhibiting one of his airships.

A more sinister origin for the phantom airships seemed likely. For in 1909, the world’s most powerful airships were all German. Count Zeppelin’s monster aircraft were as long as a battleship, could stay aloft for hours or even a day at a time, and could carry a dozen men (or an equivalent load of bombs). No other country had anything nearly so impressive; nor did any aeroplane have remotely the same performance. More importantly, the Anglo-German antagonism was now in full swing. The famous dreadnought panic (’we want eight and we won’t wait’) had taken place just a few months earlier; and since then certain sections of the press had been obsessed with hunting German spies, who were apparently everywhere. One of the most popular plays on the London stage in 1909 was Guy du Maurier’s An Englishman’s Home, which dramatised an invasion of Britain by a thinly-disguised Germany — by now such a cliched plotline that P. G. Wodehouse felt able to parody the genre in his short story, “The swoop!” German periodicals boasted that the Zeppelin would give the British what was coming to them. So it seemed plausible that Germany was sending over its new weapons by night to spy on Britain, or even to practice navigation and bombing techniques for the war-to-come. And Conservative newspapers such as the Daily Mail did not hesitate to use the ‘fact’ of German aerial espionage as a cudgel with which to beat the Liberal government, for its slow progress in forming a military wing. The Wright brothers were then in London trying to sell their aeroplane to the War Office, which showed little enthusiasm, while reports came in from Germany about the wild popular enthusiasm there for Zeppelins as the answer to the Royal Navy. Little wonder then, if nervous people saw things.

Some of the sightings themselves did support the idea that Zeppelins were responsible. For example, a Mr. Egerton Free of Clacton-on-Sea, Essex, saw a long sausage-shaped airship manoeuvring over the cliffs for a few minutes at dusk. It hovered at 600 feet for a few minutes, and then departed in a north-easterly direction. The next day, Free found ‘a curious object’, a sort of piston weighing 35 lb and stamped with the words ‘Müller Bremen Fabrik’.³ This was taken to mean that it was made in a factory in Bremen, Germany, and the War Office was reported to have confiscated it. But — aside from the fact that investigations failed to turn up any such factory — we now know that it was virtually impossible for German airships to have visited Britain in 1909. No German record has ever been found of such flights, which would have been would have been hazardous in the extreme for the underpowered and slow airships of that time. Also, while Essex and Norfolk were likely enough landfalls for airships crossing the North Sea from Germany, South Wales was not. And the mystery airships were almost universally seen to be carrying searchlights, which they played on the landscape below — a common enough device in drawings of airships at this time (see image above), but not at all common in practice, and not conducive to secrecy, either.

This is all very curious. But it gets curiouser, and indeed, curiouser. The first ‘curiouser’ comes from the fact that 1909 was not the last year that Britain was visited by phantom airships. A well-publicised incident at Sheerness, Kent, in October 1912, where engine sounds were heard traveling overhead, led to questions being asked in Parliament. And this was followed by dozens of sightings of mystery airships in February 1913, exceeding the 1909 visitations in number and geographic spread, and at times witnessed by crowds of thousands of people. When war came, so did another spate of sightings; in August 1914, the War Office even sent one of its precious few aeroplanes to conduct a fruitless aerial search of the Lake District for the airship rumoured to be based there, and non-existent airships continued to be spotted into 1916.

The second ‘curiouser’ is because Britain was not the only country where mystery airships were seen. Other times and places where something comparable (multiple and often widespread sightings of non-existent aircraft) occurred include:

• Russia: 1892, 1912-3
• United States: 1896-7, 1904-10, 1914-8
• Canada: 1896-7, 1914-7
• South Africa: 1899, 1914
• France: 1903, 1912
• Denmark: 1908
• New Zealand: 1909
• Australia: 1909
• Sweden: 1909
• Belgium: 1913
• Netherlands: 1913
• Germany: 1913
• Romania: 1913
• Austria-Hungary: 1913
• Norway: 1914-6

Forget about old, weird America — there’s clearly an old, weird world thing going on here. A veritable Scareship Age, in fact, 1892-1918. Later instances could be adduced (the Scandinavian ghost flyer of 1932-4, the Battle of Los Angeles in 1942, the Scandinavian and Greek ghost rockets of 1946) but clearly, activity peaked during the years of flight’s infancy.

Many of these episodes can be correlated with wars or war scares. For example, the South African sightings of 1899 took place after Boer officials were warned to be on the lookout for (non-existent) British airships, while those of 1914 were commonly thought to be (actually existing) aeroplanes from neighbouring German South-West Africa, although the range was far too great for this to be possible. Germany’s own phantom airships included a supposed Russian airship and an airship crashing in flames into a forest, perhaps seen as the beginning of another Echterdingen miracle.

But others have little to do with war. In particular, the American waves before the First World War were not fearful reactions to foreign aviation developments, but joyous affirmations of native technical genius. For easily the most common explanation given for the presence of an airship was that some lone inventor had been tinkering away for years in a barn, and was now taking his machine out for a series of test flights. For example, the mystery aircraft seen by thousands of New Englanders in December 1909 was reputed to belong to a local businessman, Wallace E. Tillinghast, who told a journalist that he had flown it from Worcester, Massachusetts to New York City (and once around the Statue of Liberty!) But just as with the British phantom airships, the popular explanation does not hold water, for no evidence in support of any of these rumoured inventors has ever subsequently come to light. And the large number of simultaneous (or nearly so) sightings makes it impossible to believe that so many secret aircraft were out and about on the same night. For example, on 23 December 1909, an airship-with-searchlight was reported to have flown off into the west from Marlboro, Massachusetts in the late evening; while another was seen to do the same thing from Southbridge, 40 miles away — while yet another was seen late that night over Providence and Pawtucket, Rhode Island. (By the way, night flights were a extremely hazardous undertakings for aeroplanes at this time, the first (known!) one took place in Argentina the following March, though I think Zeppelins had already performed this feat.)

So, this is where Joseph Corn’s idea about the essential difference in the popular response to aviation between Britain and America comes into play. Americans were essentially optimistic about the coming of flight. In seeing airships that weren’t actually there, they were affirming their faith in the beneficial nature of aviation, and in their nation’s ability to master it. But when Britons saw airships that weren’t there, they were projecting their fears of foreign invasion and domination onto the night sky. Very early on, it seems, the British learned to associate aircraft with danger, not opportunity.

It’s not quite that simple, of course. For one thing, it is possible to find more optimistic interpretations of the British scareships. Some newspapers did speculate that it was a local invention, in particular the Liberal Manchester Guardian; but this was not the majority viewpoint, and it certainly wasn’t the “obvious” one. Similarly, one explanation proffered during the massive series of sightings in the United States in 1896-7 was that the airship was a new weapon being developed for use by Cuban rebels against Spain. Even then, however, it was still a reassuringly American invention. It should also be noted out that strange lights in the sky were not always thought to be man-made machines; those seen at Egryn in North Wales in 1905 were interpreted against the backdrop of the Welsh Revival then sweeping the land. Even Martians were invoked, on occasion, or remnants of the lost tribe of Israel (!) Such alternatives seem to have been more the exception than the rule during the Scareship Age.

Another problem is that nearly all we know about the phantom airships comes from contemporary newspaper accounts, and it’s not clear how far these can be trusted. In 1966, for example, a journalist in New Zealand tracked down and interviewed four of the surviving witnesses to one of the spectacular airship sightings of 1909. They had been children at the time, and could remember all the fuss and excitement; but although they had been named and quoted in contemporary newspaper reports, only one could remember actually having seen anything. And journalists were not above outright fabrication: the Aurora, Texas airship crash of 1897 was invented by one such scribe. And of course, even when the witnesses were real, their stories may not have been. Moreover, just because the newspapers thought the phantom airships belonged to German spies or American inventors doesn’t necessarily mean that all their readers did too. But at least some did. A Great Yarmouth, Norfolk man wondered ‘What are the Germans up to?’⁴ when he heard the sound of an engine overhead, and this appears to be what most other people were wondering too.

The astute reader will notice that I haven’t speculated as to what people were actually seeing, since in the vast majority of cases they can’t possibly have seen what they thought they were seeing. The reason is that for my purpose here, belief matters more than reality. And that belief appears to have been shaped by national political and cultural characteristics, hope and paranoia, which shaped what the Manchester Guardian called ‘The gathering cloud of rumour’.⁵ Real or not, the phantom airships were direct reflections of their age: the Scareship Age.

Some suggested reading: on the British scareships, Alfred Gollin, The Impact of Air Power on the British People and their Government, 1909-14 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989) and David Clarke, “Scareships over Britain: the airship wave of 1909”, Fortean Studies 6 (1999), 39-63; on the 1909 New England wave, Stephen Whalen and Robert E. Bartholomew, “The great New England airship hoax of 1909″, New England Quarterly 75 (2002), 466-76; on phantom airships in the English-speaking world more generally, Nigel Watson, The Scareship Mystery: A Survey of Worldwide Phantom Airship Scares (1909-1918) (Corby: Domra, 2000).

Image source: R. P. Hearne, Aerial Warfare (London and New York: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1909), front cover.

1. Standard (London), 17 May 1909, p. 9.
2. Ibid.
3. Globe (London), 17 May 1909, p. 7.
4. Norfolk News (Norwich), 25 January 1913, p. 10.
5. Manchester Guardian, 20 May 1909, p. 7.

Some years ago someone invented a gramophone needle that would last for decades. One of the big gramophone companies bought up the patent rights, and that was the last that was ever heard of it.

That’s Big Grammo for you, I guess. (Or maybe not …)

Source: George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Penguin, 1989 [1937]), 192.

This story turned up on the urban legends website Snopes recently:

Another enemy decoy, built in occupied Holland, let to a tale that has been told and retold every since by veteran Allied pilots. The German “airfield,” constructed with meticulous care, was made almost entirely of wood. There were wooden hangers, oil tanks, gun emplacements, trucks, and aircraft. The Germans took so long in building their wooden decoy that Allied photo experts had more than enough time to observe and report it. The day finally came when the decoy was finished, down to the last wooden plank. And early the following morning a lone RAF plane crossed the Channel, came in low, circled the field once, and dropped a large wooden bomb.

Did this really happen? Snopes quite reasonably concludes that ‘we can’t find reason to classify it as anything but fictional’, for several reasons - for example, wouldn’t it make sense to let the enemy think that their deception is working? I couldn’t find anything about a wooden bomb incident in any books on military deception in the Second World War.¹ But I’m not convinced …

The above quote is from Seymour Reit, Masquerade: The Amazing Camouflage Deceptions of World War II (New York: Hawthorn, 1978).² It’s an amusing story, and sounds sort of plausible in a Biggles sort of way. (”I say, Algy,” Biggles ejaculated. “Let’s hop over the Lines and drop a wooden bomb on that silly fake aerodrome we spotted the other day. That’ll show those bally Huns who’s boss!”)³ But as Snopes notes, the problem is that multiple versions of the story exist, which is a classic hallmark of an urban legend. Here are a few I found on the net.

From Jasper Maskelyne: Master of Make-Believe:

Maskelyne sets up a dummy airfield which is soon bombed by the Italians. He repairs the damage and the next week there is a second attack, but the bombs land with a mysterious thump and fail to explode. They are dummy bombs and have obscene messages scrawled on them.

Maskelyne later learns that the retaliatory raid was carried out by Balbo, a famous test pilot before the war, the Italian equivalent of Lindbergh. Shortly afterwards Balbo dies mysteriously in an accident on takeoff (perhaps fired upon by his own air defences?).

Maskelyne was a British stage magician; the quote is a paraphrase from his (ghost-written?) memoirs, Magic - Top Secret (1949). Supposedly, during the Second World War he was involved in setting up elaborate decoys and deceptions in North Africa order to fool the Italians and Germans - a fake Alexandria harbour was one such scheme. The above link notes that Italo Balbo wasn’t killed while taking off down and more importantly, died long before Maskelyne even reached North Africa.

Also noted on that page is the following version of the wooden bomb story (no source is given):

Even Donovan, the head of America’s OSS, is said to have forwarded the following intelligence extract to President Roosevelt : “For months, Berlin has been camouflaging its streets, squares , parks and lakes to confuse Allied fliers,” reported Donovan. “All of Unter der Linden is now covered with giant colored nets under which the traffic moves… A simulated village has been erected in the center of the lake, of painted canvas on thin laths. To show contempt for this German effort at camouflage , a single RAF plane flew over the ‘village’ last night and dropped one wooden bomb.”

That story is hard to date; Donovan became head of the OSS in July 1941; the reference to “Allied fliers” suggests that the US was in the war and probably that its own bombing offensive had begun, so after mid-1942. But it’s clearly nonsense anyway: it would take a lot more to hide Berlin than hiding the traffic! And RAF night bombing wasn’t exactly accurate enough to be able to contempuously drop a bomb on a target as small as a village.

The Air Force Museum Foundation regales us with the following version, heard by the author, George R. Kiare (apparently an American veteran of the bombing campaign himself):

Another method of protecting an operational base that had been relocated involved building what appeared to be a new base some distance away. The service installations for the base were constructed of flimsy wood and the fake runway marked out in the proper dimensions. The builders took care to camouflage their wooden structures for the altitude at which Allied aircraft were likely to fly over them during normal operations. Work during World War II (and perhaps before) had shown that when properly designed, simple dummy structures on the ground can appear very realistic, shadows and all, when viewed from particular altitudes. From certain other altitudes, however, this effect can be lost and the structures seen for what they are. (I have observed this effect myself in a flyover, at two different altitudes, of a camouflaged base in Nebraska during World War II.)

The German planners hoped that their wooden air base would divert enemy fighters from the real base and might also tempt Allied strategists to send bomber crews to destroy it. Raids could subject bomber crews to fighter and anti-aircraft attack and, in the bargain, provide a good laugh for the winners of this wartime game. Such bogus bases could, of course, be cheaply and easily rebuilt after an attack.

Success in this game depended on Allied aircraft flying over the wooden base at or near the desired altitude. According to the tale told to me, a British pilot flying a “Mosquito” reconnaissance plane (ironically, a wooden aircraft itself) happened by the base during a phase of construction that aroused his suspicion. He was flying at a level and on a course which led him to do some cautious nosing about, which he reported on his return to England. He then received gleeful permission from his superiors to fly near the base subsequently to confirm what was going on, being careful to avoid both German suspicion and attack by Luftwaffe fighters and antiaircraft guns. When the Germans finished building the wooden base, he was allowed to fly directly over it in his Mosquito-at considerable risk of being shot down-and drop wooden bombs on it.

This version could have been told any time after late 1941 (when the Mosquito entered service). The language used gives some clues as to what the story meant to Kiare at least: the Germans would get a ‘good laugh’ out of luring Allied bombers to the wrong target, while the Mosquito pilot’s superiors gave him ‘gleeful permission’ to drop the wooden bomb. Kiare suggests that the British and the Germans took ’special satisfaction’ in tricking each other.

The last version I found was this one at the 207 Squadron RAF Assocation website:

I had a small house in the village of Gottechain, from which I went to work as an agricultural worker on the airfield of Beauvechain. Of course at the same time I was noting what was going on, passing the information each week, how many aeroplanes etc. This was microphotographed and sent to England. One day, I noted that they had put dummy wooden aeroplanes on the runways. Five days later, the RAF let them know they knew their game, by dropping wooden bombs … !

This sounds like a primary source! The reference given is Vera Lynn with Robin Cross and Jenny de Gex, Unsung Heroines: The Women who won the War (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1990), 125 (I took the above quote from here, as the web version had a few typos). It would seem to be from an interview with Marie Eugénie Jadoul, who was a member of the Belgian intelligence network, Zero. She doesn’t actually say she saw the wooden bombs dropped, but as she was a labourer at the airfield and was collecting intelligence about it, it’s reasonable to infer that she was in a position to know. She may even have helped clean up the mess! On the other hand, the date of the incident is not given (except that it was before July 1944), and there is no indication of where recordings or transcripts of the interview have been deposited. But who am I to question Dame Vera?

So, it looks like the wooden bomb incident may have happened after all. But … Snopes also gives a very early source for the story: the diary of the American journalist William Shirer, who was based in Berlin during the early war years. He recorded the following variant in his entry for 27 November 1940:⁴

X tells me a funny one. He says the British intelligence in Holland is working fine. Both sides in this war have built a number of dummy airdromes and strewn them with wooden planes. X says the Germans recently completed a very large one near Amsterdam. They lined up more than a hundred dummy planes made of wood on the field and waited for the British to come over and bomb them. Next morning the British did come. They let loose with a lot of bombs. The bombs were made of wood.

There’s no suggestion here that X had first-hand knowledge of any such incident, it sounds like just another wartime rumour. But it’s interesting that the story is placed in Holland, since Jadoul’s version took place in Belgium … not a million miles away. The location might have gotten mixed up in the retelling. If Shirer and Jadoul are referring to the same incident, then it must have happened some time between May (the fall of Belgium) and 27 November 1940 - probably more likely towards the end of that period, as the rumour presumably referred to a recent incident; also I guess it would take a few months at least, to set up a resistance organisation to relay information to Britain.⁵ Say October or November 1940. Was the RAF even bombing airfields in Belgium at that time?

Looking through Martin Middlebrook and Chris Everitt, The Bomber Command War Diaries: An Operational Reference Book, 1939-1945 (Harmondsworth: Viking, 1985), there’s no mention of Beauvechain (let alone wooden bombs!) But there are indeed a number of raids on Belgian targets, including airfields - for example, on the night of 1/2 November, 81 aircraft were dispatched to bomb German cities and ‘airfields in Belgium, Holland and France’. Of course, it’s possible that dropping wooden bombs might not be the sort of operation that HQ would be told about, so it’s interesting to read that on 26 November (the day before Shirer’s diary entry), two Blenheims set out for Belgian airfields, but ‘turned back’ before reaching their target. Maybe that’s just what Bomber Command was told …

Well, that’s about as far as I can pursue the story without finding better sources (and wasting yet more time). Even if Jadoul’s account can be taken at face value, the way in which the story was adapted and re-told suggests that it has some universal appeal, in the way it shows the enemy trying to be clever - but they’re no match for us (and so we will eventually win). It’s not hard to see how this story could be changed around to fit different contexts, especially if beer and/or girls were involved. That makes it all the more interesting that the only German variant still has them looking like fools. Why wasn’t it reversed to make the British the victims of the joke, especially as it was they who were being bombed more at that time (the early days of the Blitz)? I find it suprising that a “defeatist” story/joke/urban legend like that would be doing the rounds in Berlin so early in the war, but it’s perhaps less surprising if it was actually true! So because of this, as well as Jadoul’s story, I am tentatively leaning towards that position.

Just to confuse things, the above 207 Squadron RAF Assocation link has a throwaway comment to the effect that there were similar stories from the First World War! (Naturally, no details or references are provided.) So maybe the story has such a powerful appeal that it’s been enacted more than once, in more than one war. Why be content to just re-tell the legend … when you can be the legend?

1. The best one I found was Charles Cruickshank, Deception in World War II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981). I should point out that wooden bombs really were used back then, for training.
2. A further reference is given, which I don’t have access to: M.E. DeLonge, Modern Airfield Planning and Concealment (New York: Pitman, 1943), 135.
3. Yes, I did just make up that quote!
4. William L. Shirer, Berlin Diary: The Journal of a Foreign Correspondent 1934-1941 (Melbourne: George Jaboor, 1942), 450-1.
5. Belgian Militaria has a page about a Belgian resistance group that was operating as early as August 1940; it also mentions the Zero network which Jadoul was a member of.

While browsing through some nice pictures at Werkost of the Shuttleworth Collection, I found this photo of part of a downed Gotha. It looks like the inside of a wing, but it’s the accompanying text that is interesting. The fragment itself is inscribed GOTHA BLANC NEZ 1917, and the label says:

PIECE OF GOTHA BOMBER WING RIB, RECOVERED FROM AN AIRCRAFT WHICH FELL INTO THE SEA OFF CAP GRIS NEZ IN 1917. THE MACHINE WAS DAMAGED IN COMBAT OVER ENGLAND AND CARRIED A CREW OF THREE IN ADDITION TO A SPY DRESSED IN FRENCH UNIFORM WHO WAS SUPPOSED TO HAVE BEEN LANDED IN ENGLAND.

DONATED BY CAPTAIN J.R.W. GROVES R.N. (RETD.), ORIGINALLY IN THE POSSESSION OF THE LATE MRS W. REVELL SMITH WHO SERVED IN THE FIRST-AID NURSING YEOMANRY AT CALAIS.

I’ve never heard of German spies being inserted by air into Britain in the First World War. German spies there certainly were, but I thought they usually made their way there by neutral countries (mainly the Netherlands), sometimes perhaps by U-boat (much as Roger Casement was landed in Ireland in 1916, though he wasn’t a spy). Presumably the spy would drop in by parachute (bit risky to land a big plane like that in a field!), but then one has to wonder why he didn’t jump after the Gotha was damaged? The information given is unhelpfully vague - it doesn’t say how it was known that there was a spy (probably, they found the body), and only the year is given. As it is, there are several 1917 raids listed in Cole and Cheesman which involved a damaged Gotha crashing off the coast of France, but I don’t see any mention of spies. Thomas Boghardt’s excellent Spies of the Kaiser: German Covert Operations in Great Britain during the First World War Era (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) seems silent on the matter of aerial insertions.

It reminds me of the phantom airships that were rumoured (and in fact, seen) to be flying around Britain in the years before the war, carrying German spies. Not surprisingly, these false sightings continued into the war, until February 1916 at least.¹ Perhaps the rumours later became attached to the Gothas, once they became the principal aerial threat? Or maybe spies really did drop into Britain by air, and I just need to learn more before I speculate …

1. Nigel Watson, ed., The Scareship Mystery: A Survey of Phantom Airship Scares 1909-1918 (Corby: Domra, 2000), 95.