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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Additional image source: The Retronaut.

Let's begin at the beginning:

In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.

No, that's not the beginning. For understanding J. R. R. Tolkien and the aeroplane, the beginning is the Great War. He may have seen one flying overhead at Birmingham, where he grew up and went to school, or at Oxford, at which he enrolled in 1911. But they were quite rare birds at this time, and Tolkien doesn't seem like the sort of young man who would have been particularly interested in them. He probably would have encountered them when training as an Army officer in 1915, or, at the very latest, when he was posted to frontline service in France in July 1916.

Here Tolkien was thrown into the thick of things, as a signals officer in the 11th Lancashire Fusiliers fighting on the Somme, and aeroplanes were a common sight (there was a dogfight over the village where he was billeted when he arrived at the front). But the only trace of anything aeronautical in his writings at this time are blimps. These seem to have made quite an impression on him. In 1924, he recalled that 'German captive balloons ... hung swollen and menacing on many a horizon'. Perhaps he thought they were menacing because they made him think of some weird monster; but they were also menacing in a more direct way, because observers in the balloons recorded British positions and movements, for use in German counterattacks and barrages.

But Tolkien's interest was philological too. After the war he speculated that the world 'blimp' was a portmanteau word deriving from 'blister' and 'lump': 'the vowel i not u was chosen because of its diminutive significance -- typical of war humour'. But more significantly, in a lexicon he worked on during the war for his invented Elvish language, Quenya, he added an entry for pusulpë, 'gas-bag, balloon'. This was probably added sometime after the Somme and so would seem to be inspired by the 'swollen and menacing' German balloons he had seen: an obvious connection between Tolkien's war experience and his developing legendarium (all the more so because, as far as I'm aware, Elves are not known for their ballooning).

There's another clear influence of the technology of the Great War in Tolkien's work at this time, one involving dragons destroying a city. Unfortunately for me, the technology in question is not the aeroplane but the tank. Having come down with trench fever after the Somme, Tolkien wrote 'The Fall of Gondolin', the first of his many prose tales of Middle Earth, in 1917 while convalescing back in Blighty. Gondolin was a city of the Noldor elves, founded by Turgon the Wise in the First Age. It was betrayed from within and fell to the forces of Melko (better known as Morgoth, Sauron's master). John Garth argues that Melko 'represents the tyranny of the machine over life and nature, exploiting the earth and its people in the construction of a vast armoury'. Key to Garth's argument here are Melko's dragons, which appear to be more machine than flesh. I'll quote Garth's passage on them in full here, as he quotes Tolkien extensively:

'From the greatness of his wealth of metals and his powers of fire' Melko constructs a host of 'beasts like snakes and dragons of irresistible might that should overcreep the Encircling Hills and lap that plain and its fair city in flame and death'. The work of 'smiths and sorcerers', these forms (in three varieties) violate the boundary between mythical monster and machine, between magic and technology. The bronze dragons in the assault move ponderously and open breaches in the city walls. Fiery versions are thwarted by the smooth, steep incline of Gondolin's hill. But a third variety, the iron dragons, carry Orcs within and move on 'iron so cunningly linked that they might flow ... around and above all obstacles before them'; they break down the city gates 'by reason of the exceeding heaviness of their bodies' and, under bombardment, 'their hollow bellies clanged ... yet it availed not for they might not be broken, and the fires rolled off them'.

Garth quotes a number of contemporary accounts of the tank -- which of course was a new British weapon which made its debut at the Somme -- to show how it was already seen by others as a kind of mythical beast. (One he misses is my favourite: 'A tank is walking up the High Street of Flers with the British Army cheering behind', my italics.) Tolkien was doing the same, just using his own original mythology to understand the new warfare.

But what about the aeroplane? Did Tolkien mythologise this too? I'll try to answer that in another post.

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

As Alan Allport has noted, Winston Churchill's famous speech of 20 August 1940 was and is remembered for a 'single, unrepresentative sentence', i.e.:

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

The speech was given during the Battle of Britain, and 'the Few' are universally taken to be the pilots of Fighter Command, the last line of defence against the Luftwaffe. But, as Alan says, Churchill had relatively little to say about the Battle that day -- he did talk about it, but only as part of a general speech on the war situation. I suggested that if you read the line in context, it actually looks like Churchill is talking about Bomber Command, as he doesn't dwell on Fighter Command at all.

Here's a fuller extract from Churchill's speech (emphasis added):

The gratitude of every home in our Island, in our Empire, and indeed throughout the world, except in the abodes of the guilty, goes out to the British airmen who, undaunted by odds, unwearied in their constant challenge and mortal danger, are turning the tide of world war by their prowess and by their devotion. Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. All hearts go out to the fighter pilots, whose brilliant actions we see with our own eyes day after day, but we must never forget that all the time, night after night, month after month, our bomber squadrons travel far into Germany, find their targets in the darkness by the highest navigational skill, aim their attacks, often under the heaviest fire, often with serious loss, with deliberate, careful discrimination, and inflict shattering blows upon the whole of the technical and war-making structure of the Nazi power. On no part of the Royal Air Force does the weight of the war fall more heavily than on the daylight bombers who will play an invaluable part in the case of invasion and whose unflinching zeal it has been necessary in the meanwhile on numerous occasions to restrain.

We are able to verify the results of bombing military targets in Germany, not only by reports which reach us through many sources, but also, of course, by photography. I have no hesitation in saying that this process of bombing the military industries and communications of Germany and the air bases and storage depots from which we are attacked, which process will continue upon an ever-increasing scale until the end of the war, and may in another year attain dimensions hitherto undreamed of, affords one at least of the most certain, if not the shortest of all the roads to victory. Even if the Nazi legions stood triumphant on the Black Sea, or indeed upon the Caspian, even if Hitler was at the gates of India, it would profit him nothing if at the same time the entire economic and scientific apparatus of German war power lay shattered and pulverised at home.

So he gives his famous line, but then says in effect 'yes, yes, the fighter pilots are great, but let's talk about the bomber boys, they're ones who might win the war for us'. As Churchill himself might have said, wars are not won by defence. At most, I think he meant the 'few' to include all Britain's pilots, but the phrase soon narrowed to mean those flying fighters alone. For example, the 1942 film The First of the Few was about the genesis of the Spitfire.

So how were Churchill's words interpreted as he spoke them? The major newspapers all ran leaders on the speech. One which singled out the phrase in question was the Manchester Guardian (21 August 1940, 4):

The work of the R.A.F., both in defence and in offence, has been beyond all expectations and beyond all praise; in a striking sentence he said that "never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

So here it is associated with the RAF as a whole, not just one part of it. The Times (21 August 1940, 5) also noted the phrase, in summing up a lengthy paragraph which itself summarises Churchill's comments on Fighter Command, Bomber Command, the Ministry of Aircraft Production and the Empire Air Training Scheme:

our airmen can look forward to attaining numerical parity with their opponents, and so to playing that dominant part in the whole war which their skill and gallantry have deserved. Already they have given us a clear vision of victory, even under the impact of what the PRIME MINISTER called a cataract of disaster. Truly, as he said, "never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few."

So here too the fighter pilots are just one element of the Few.

The other newspapers I've looked at don't mention the Few explicitly. The Daily Express (21 August 1940, 5) barely even alludes to the Battle, saying only that 'the fight which this nation and this Empire is making has increased the respect' of Americans for Britain:

Soldiers, sailors, and pilots are at their greatest strength yet. Canada and America are hand in hand. We hold the seven seas.

All this the enemy has to beat.

All this -- and more. For we strike, strike, strike through our bombers. And Churchill promises that we shall strike harder yet.

The Daily Mirror (21 August 1940, 5) listed 'several points of real encouragement from Mr. Churchill's review', the first among them (and the only one relating to airpower) being:

Our bombing of military targets in Germany (one of the brilliant achievements of the R.A.F.) is certainly having its effect. And Mr. Churchill realises that this may be the surest of all roads to victory.

Air defence is presumably one of the other 'brilliant achievements of the R.A.F.', but it doesn't seem to be worth mentioning for the Mirror.

Complicating this picture is the Yorkshire Post (21 August 1940, 2), which in fact didn't mention the work of Bomber Command at all. Instead it focused on the Battle:

we can fairly claim that in these last dramatic weeks we have at least blunted the edge of that air terror on which Germany's hopes of final victory must largely depend [...] Unless Hitler can soon beat us in the air -- and even now it is we who are beating him -- he never will.

The Glasgow Herald (21 August 1940, 6) split the difference, remarking that

Our Air Force has faced the greatest aerial war machine ever known or imagined, has beaten back its first great assaults with great and disproportionate loss to the enemy, and has harried Germany far more effectively than the Luftwaffe has raided here [...]

So, out of this sample of half a dozen metropolitan and provincial dailies, only one, the Yorkshire Post, gave precedence to Fighter Command when discussing Churchill's speech, and even it didn't relate this to his praise of the Few.

Garry Campion analysed Churchill's speech in The Good Fight: Battle of Britain Propaganda and The Few (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009). He notes differing opinions as to whether the Few were just the fighter pilots or all RAF aircrew, both during the war and after. Richard Overy is on the former side; David Reynolds on the other. Campion himself sides with the usual interpretation (as might be guessed from the title of his book). But I think he is too quick to dismiss the idea that the Few included bomber crews too (78):

On this point it is noteworthy that Bomber Command had yet to strike at Berlin, its first attack occurring five days later on 25/26 August [...] It is hard to see at this early point that Bomber Command's undoubtedly heroic attacks had resulted in clear, tangible outcomes -- also capable of being propagandised -- comparable to that of the fighter squadrons.

But as the above quote from Churchill's speech shows, he did claim that there were 'clear, tangible outcomes' from RAF bomber raids, and he clearly was trying to propagandise them. And, as I have argued, Bomber Command's capabilities and effects were wildly overestimated at this time. Campion's is a Fighter Command view of the Battle of Britain. Perhaps mine is a Bomber Command view.

Image source: Spitfire Site.

Since my AAEH talk is in four days, I'd better start actually putting the pieces I've scattered over this blog together into something (ideally) coherent which can be presented in 20 minutes (with 10 for questions). So here's a stab at a plan:

1. First thing is to explain what I'm talking about: the public debate about reprisal bombing of German cities during (and for) the Blitz, especially September and October 1940. A definition of reprisals would be useful here; here's a contemporary one from A. L. Goodhart, What Acts of War are Justifiable? (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1941), 25:
   

   The essence of reprisals is that if one belligerent deliberately violates the accepted rules of warfare then the other belligerent, for the sake of protecting himself, may resort by way of retaliation to measures which, in ordinary circumstances, would be illegal.

   That's a legal definition; it excludes the desire for mere revenge as illegitimate, but of course this was an important motivation for many.

2. Next comes the problem: I will discuss the existing historiography on the reprisals debate, showing that the consensus is that the British people did not demand reprisals, and those who did weren't the ones who were bombed. (Only Mark Connelly differs on this point to any substantial degree.) I think this is wrong; in fact the desire for reprisals predominated at least among those who cared enough to voice their opinion, and possibly among the population as a whole, if only slightly.
3. Now on to the first of the important bits: the shape of the reprisals debate. I'll discuss the two major axes of opinion: morality and effectiveness, and give some examples. I'll also point to an important subset of the reprisals demand, reprisals after notice. And I will show that the near-universal assumption was that Bomber Command was capable of carrying out precise and devastating air raids.
4. The second of the important bits: assessing how popular the demand for reprisals actually was. Here I will discuss the BIPO opinion poll data, letters to the editor, and hearsay, setting these in the context of the editorial positions of the newspapers concerned. These lines of evidence all point towards public opinion being in favour of reprisals.
5. Now to explain it all, largely in terms of pre-war ideas (which wartime reporting had done little to change by this point), with reference to the previous war, the knock-out blow theory, the bomber will always get through and air control. Essentially, the pre-war belief in the power of the bomber was the reason why there was a debate about reprisals at all; if it had been realised just how weak Bomber Command really was the question would not have arisen.
6. Finally, to sum up: overall the British people, I believe, did want reprisal bombing during the Blitz. Any questions?

Previously, I identified a comparison between the reprisals debate in the First World War and the reprisals debate during the Blitz as something I could do that previous writers have not (except in passing, or implicitly). I won't have time in my AAEH paper for a full-blown comparative approach, or for that matter time before then to do the research; though perhaps I could for a version for publication. But it's something I can do briefly, and it helps that I already covered this in my thesis, where I looked at the British press reactions to the Gotha summer in 1917.

Schrecklichkeit is the German word for 'frightfulness'; both words were used by English-language speakers during the war to refer to the perceived German propensity for barbarous acts of war. In terms of British public opinion, the 'Rape of Belgium' was easily the most influential and inflammatory of these early in the war; later came the introduction of gas warfare; the execution of Edith Cavell; unrestricted submarine warfare; and of course the Zeppelin and Gotha raids on Allied cities, including London. Propaganda, mostly unofficial, kept this baleful view of the 'Hun' in the public eye. The photographs above, for example, were published in the Daily Mail after the first Gotha raid. The accompanying caption reads:

Four of the little sufferers in an East End hospital yesterday. Three are only five years of age; the fourth is ten. All were badly injured in the head, arms and legs while in a London County Council school in a densely populated district. All that was left of their classroom was a mass of blood-spattered debris.

(These are victims of the tragic bombing of the Poplar infants school.) Another example is a letter published in an Australian newspaper, but relaying information from the London Chemist and Druggist:

The "Chemist and Druggist" of London, of February 23 [1918], informs us that the German blackguards had, during that month, been dropping poisoned sweets from aeroplanes in the London area. It is quite inconceivable that any British general would issue a similar order for the poisoning of little German children, or, if it were given, of any British airman obeying it. An occurrence like this brings home to one, more than many of their acts, what a degraded being a German can be.

This sounds more like an urban legend than an actual tactic (and indeed, the only reference I can find to anything like this in The Times at this time is a rumour that strangers were giving children poisoned sweets in Kent), but it illustrates the depths to which it was believed Germans had sunk, and the essential difference between them and 'civilised' peoples like the British.

Though it was not the only response, the demand for reprisals in June and July 1917 was quite loud, and it did not just come from the press. Large public meetings held at Tower Hill and at the London Opera House endorsed resolutions such as one calling on 'the Government to 'pay back the enemy in the same way as he has treated this country'. Others went further. William Joynson-Hicks, a Conservative London MP, told the House of Commons that it was clear that Germany 'has declared deliberate war on the nation, the men, women and children of our country':

I submit to the House and the Government that the time is very rapidly approaching when, whether we like it or not, we shall be forced to declare war in the same way on the German people. Not that I have any desire whatever for the exercise of cruelty, or to slay Germans because they have slain our people. I say this because I believe it is the only possible way of bringing home to the German nation the enormity of what they have done -- that is, the adoption of the policy on their part of destroying the English civilian population in the way they have done. I ask the Government to state, not that there will be a small and insufficient raid on a town like Cologne or any similar German town, but that as soon as a raid of this sort, involving, as it has done, 500 casualties, takes place, stern and swift reprisals will take place on German towns.

Joyson-Hicks was not alone. Robert Bell MD, for example, wrote to the Daily Mail to insist that the Germans be told 'that for every air raid they make upon an innocent community we shall do our best to destroy one of their cities'. The Mail helpfully published this 'reprisal map of Germany', placed on the same page as the above photographs of child victims of the Gotha raid:

A REPRISAL MAP. -- The shaded parts of this map show those parts of Germany within reach of Allied aeroplanes similar to those used against London. All the large towns shown could be attacked.

We can classify opinions in the debate about reprisals for German frightfulness along two axes: morality and effectiveness. People -- at least those writing letters and leading articles -- asked (and then answered) two questions: are reprisals moral? and are reprisals effective? Actually, that's not quite true: they usually considered one or the other of these alone; the answer to the other was simply assumed to support their conclusion. Perhaps surprisingly, my impression is that those with moral concerns tended to be in favour of reprisal bombing, while those worried about effectiveness were more evenly split. Let's look at some examples.

Joynson-Hicks, in his speech quoted above, went on to explain that

the only certain way of stopping these raids, in spite of the defence we may make by means of our aeroplanes and anti-aircraft guns, is that we shall punish, and punish severely, raids of this kind by inflicting similar raids with certainty -- because they are useless without certainty -- on German towns.

So his was an argument based on effectiveness: by bombing German cities you will make them stop bombing ours. (Deterrence, in other words. Others put forward versions of the knock-out blow theory, believing that heavy air raids into Germany would make its people clamour for peace.) Some, however, did not accept this logic. 'Watchman', in a letter to The Times, argued that

The best reprisal is the heaviest military blow. I can conceive of nothing weaker or more contemptible than to send our airmen off on long and hazardous expeditions without any military object, either direct or indirect, but merely to kill a certain number of children, women, and old men in the vain hope that the Germans will then cease from murdering our own civilian population [...] Say we succeeded in killing two or three hundred civilians in Cologne, and lost, as we very well might, 25 aeroplanes out of 50 in achieving this result, how the Prussian High Command would chuckle and slap their thighs at having succeeded in inducing "these English madmen" to play the German game!

In essence such arguments boiled down to the belief that these bombers and their pilots would be better employed on the Western Front, supporting the Allied armies there. (This of course is a major difference with the situation in the Second World War, at least after Dunkirk, where one argument for strategic bombing was that there was no other way to strike at Germany.) But note the bleedthrough of moralising language here: British airmen would 'kill' German civilians to stop German airmen from 'murdering' British civilians. And the cunning 'Prussian High Command', laughing as the foolish Britishers fall into the trap of tit-for-tat reprisals to no military purpose.

The moral arguments against reprisal bombing was straightforward enough: if it was wrong for Germany to bomb civilians then it was wrong for Britain to do so too. One bereaved mother expressed this as follows:

I have given two sons to the war (my only two) and they will never come back to me. I gave them willingly, and I have no regrets; I gave them to help to free the world from tyranny and barbaric savagery, and I believe that by giving up their young lives they have "done their bit" towards that end. But should I live to see Englishmen sent to murder in cold blood German women and children and harmless civilians, then indeed I should begin to ask, "Have my sons died in vain?"

Another correspondent had no such qualms:

After the recent experience of German frightfulness, what other course is open to us but that of fighting the enemy with his own weapons? When the Germans used liquid fire against our brave fellows, were we not justified in resorting to the same method in order to protect our men from the most horrible of deaths, and to "bring home" to "the apostles of culture" the barbarity of their methods? [...] To advocate the policy of "turning the other cheek" under present conditions, seems to me a misuse of Our Lord's teaching. If a man hit me once, I should probably turn the other cheek and let him hit me again; and if that method failed to make him ashamed of himself, I should be compelled to "go for" him in self-defence. But if a man attacked my children, I should knock the brute down without the slightest hesitation.

The author of this letter was J. Stephens Roose, president of the Metropolitan Free Church Association.

I could go on, but won't. Hmm... maybe this is not something I can do briefly after all.

Saturday night's heavy air raid on London damaged some of its greatest buildings. Parliament were hit hard: the House of Commons is 'wrecked', in the words of the Manchester Guardian today; Westminster Abbey is 'open to the sky' (5), though its structure is still intact. Other historic buildings were hit too. From The Times (4):

What some consider the most magnificent roof in the world -- that of Westminster Hall, with its soaring arches and sweeping beams of oak -- has been pierced by bombs, and damage has been done to the interior. The hall was started by William Rufus in 1097 [...]

Big Ben's face was blackened and scarred, but although the apparatus which broadcasts the chimes was for a time put out of action, the hands of the clock continued without interruption telling the time to Londoners.

The Deanery of Westminster, one of the best examples of medieval houses in England, has been destroyed [...]

The British Museum was set alight by a shower of incendiaries, which burnt through the roof and set fire to the back of the building [...] Fortunately most of the treasures had been removed to safety, and the damage was comparatively light.

Is it a sign of increasing indifference that the human cost of the raid is relegated to a few paragraphs at the end of the article, or is just that the destruction in the heart of London was something that could not be underplayed?

One area of London received its worst battering of the war. A street corner of shops was bombed shortly before the raiders passed signal, and rescue parties worked feverishly in daylight to reach a number of people, estimated to be about eight, who were still beneath. A few had been released soon after the bombs fell. A policeman, mortally injured, died on admission to hospital. Not far away the ruins of a demolished block of flats entombed seven people.

There is some good news: London's air defences shot down 33 German bombers (29 by fighters, 4 by anti-aircraft guns). Such tallies are becoming reminiscent of the glory days of Fighter Command, back in September last year. Indeed, even before Saturday night's raid, Ernest Bevin, Minister of Labour, said much the same thing in a speech at Leeds (Guardian, 6):

"Get that up to a couple of hundred," he told his audience of men training as engineers, "and night fighting becomes as expensive to Hitler as day fighting was a year ago. Our bombers are growing in size and in carrying capacity. Our science is developing more rapidly than his. We are proud of our people. We are on the up grade. Never mind the croakers. We are winning and we are winning every hour.

No response is recorded, however, to his later question, 'Isn't it gratifying to realise that in the daytime at least you are safe?'

Bomber Command was out the same night as London was being hit so hard The main raid was on Hamburg, 'as effective as it was fierce':

pilots of the Bomber Command report immense damage throughout the city. Under a clear sky and helped by a full moon, our aircraft went in through the barrage to drop load after heavy load of high-explosives and incendiaries. Once again the industrial quarters and the whole spread of the docks were hammered and left blazing.

The bombing was deadly accurate, too:

Industrial plant and factories, their chimneys standing up like black nine-pins against the moonlit waterway, were easy targets for our bomb-aimers. Sticks of high-explosive bombs fell across goods yards and railway tracks, and yet more fires added to the destruction in the submarine building yards.

This is a view unlikely to be backed up by the German government, which described the London raid as '"a reprisal" for recent R.A.F. raids on Germany, "in which the R.A.F. repeatedly and deliberately damaged residential quarters of Berlin and other cities' (5).

Another sceptic (although for entirely different reasons) is Major General Giffard le Q. Martel, who commands the Royal Armoured Corps. He notes that 'We live on the land and we must beat them on the land' (6).

Bombing Germany cannot subjugate the Germans entirely, however hard you bomb them. The country is so vast. Bombing alone will never win the war.

He was speaking at an exercise on Salisbury Plain, presumably the same one described today by the military correspondent to The Times (5). It simulated a landing on the south coast by, initially, three German divisions whose objective was to secure a port for the disembarkation of a Panzer division. The defences' reserves included a motorised and an armoured division. The writer was very impressed with 'the skill and the realism with which it [the exercise] was mounted. The men were keen, the tanks are 'now coming along well, but there are still certain deficiencies to be filled up'.

The hitting power of the armoured fighting vehicle was illustrated not only by what it did but also by the effect of its near presence on other troops. Mr. Menzies was right when he said it was urgently necessary to increase our strength in this arm.

Now, let us turn to a more serious matter, namely the atrocious pronunciation of announcers on the BBC. H.D., writing to the Guardian from London, is prepared to let go when it comes to 'the "Latin longs and shorts"' (4).

But there are a few fixed things that we should surely maintain, and one of them is the inviolable rule that "g" before "a," "o," and "u" is pronounced gutturally and not like "j." Yet the B.B.C. systematically and invariably pronounces "margarine" "marjarine." They might as well say "one got or one tittle." If we must be vulgar, or let us say popular, let a short statute or "Dora" regulation be passed changing the spelling to "margerine" or, going the whole hog, changing the word to "marge"!

The arrival of mass media benefited nobody more than language pedants. Discuss.

So, THATCamp Melbourne is over. It was pretty much as I expected, which is to say it was excellent. I'm not going to write a conference report (you should have been following #thatcamp on Twitter for that!) but two sessions did give me ideas for digital history projects I might like to do. One day. If I get the time.

One came out of the unofficial API Tim Sherratt reverse-engineered for Trove Newspapers. (Why the National Library of Australia won't release an official API is a bit mysterious.) He uses that to scrape Trove to do searches and display results which aren't possible with the interface offered by the NLA, such as plotting the frequency of Australian vs British/Briton. Are there any publicly accessible datasets which I use which could benefit from the same treatment? Yes, there are. The first one I thought of was the Flight archive, which is a great resource burdened with a limited interface. (But it's fantastic that it exists at all: Flightglobal is a commercial operation and they didn't need to open up their back issues like this at all, if they didn't want to.) I think this is easily doable. A second one is much more ambitious: The National Archives catalogue. It's frustrating that you can't do keyword search across their digitised collections; all you can do is search the descriptions in the catalogue, and these are by their nature limited. A scraper would help here. But the problem there is that you can't download documents directly, even when they are free; you have to add to a 'shopping cart', pay £0.00 for it and wait for an email to arrive. Possibly this could be automated; possibly not.

The other idea I had was to use SahulTime (or its eventual successor, possibly called TemporalEarth) to display the British scareship waves. SahulTime is something like Google Earth, but it allows you to map events/documents/people/objects in time as well as space. Matthew Coller, the developer, originally devised it to represent archaeological data on migration into Australia across the ice-age land bridge, but it is just as useful for historical data. So I could use this to show when and where the scareships were seen, showing how the waves started and evolved, with links to the primary sources. SahulTime is also good at displaying uncertainty in time, which is helpful where I have only vague information about when a sighting happened. The same could be done for uncertainty in space, though that's a bit trickier conceptually.

One day... if I get the time...

By recapturing from Italian forces Berbera, the capital of British Somaliland, a small part of the British Empire has been restored. Royal Navy warships landed Army troops at the port, suffering 'negligible' (Glasgow Herald, 5) casualties. RAF armoured cars assisted too.

This adds to the Allied offensive against Addis Ababa: 'British Empire troops are now steadily closing in on the heart of the Italian Empire from 13 points', according to a military representative in Cairo. The Herald noted that when the Italians attacked British Somaliland, they spoke of 'the "expulsion of the British from the Western shore of the Red Sea," and of the "enormous effect" it would have on the Arab world'. That was just seven months ago, so this effect didn't last very long.

Otherwise, most of the news of the war against Italy is aerial in nature. In Tripolitania, the RAF carried out heavy raids against aerodromes at Castel Benito and Makina ('R.A.F. SMASH TRIPOLI AIRPORTS', 5). It has been bombing Italian aerodromes and ground positions in Eritrea, Abyssinia, Greece and Albania -- in its first air raid, Tirana received 'more than ten tons of bombs on the aerodrome and military objectives' on Sunday morning. But the Regia Aeronautica is evidently not yet a broken reed. An unconfirmed report says that Britain has warned 'that the R.A.F. would bomb Rome if the Axis bombed Athens' (6). In a different kind of response, Alexandria will use £10 million worth of frozen Italian assets to 'compensate the victims of the Italian air raids on the city'.

German aircraft were back over Scotland last night and yesterday, but only in small numbers. One bomber 'machine-gunned streets' (5) in a North of Scotland town, but no injuries are reported.

Thomas Johnston, Secretary of State for Scotland, was in town yesterday to attend funerals for blitz victims and to check up on 'arrangements for the restarting of vital activities of the community'. He said the Clydeside blitz was 'severe as any that has been suffered by any area in Britain'. Both he and Rosebery, the Regional Commissioner, praised the people's spirit. Rosebery noted that Clydeside was 'the first area in Scotland to bear the full weight of the cowardly Luftwaffe':

The attacks were, as usual, concentrated very largely on residential quarters. Many homes were destroyed, and many women and children are among the killed and injured, but the morale of Clydeside is even higher than it was before the raids started.

A letter from a local MP, Major E. G. R. Lloyd, makes similar points while reflecting upon the 'stoic endurance' of Clydesiders: 'My visits have filled me with pride and emotion. The civilian population has been magnificent'. But he also injects a political note:

Nor could one fail to be impressed with countless acts of human kindness and brotherhood which everywhere prevailed -- incidentally completely breaking down the foolish and artificial class barriers, which, I trust, this war will do much to remove finally.

There may be some evidence for Lloyd's thesis in today's paper. Or not. A strike by five hundred Glasgow carters ended yesterday after receiving wage increases of 3s a week and double time on Sundays. An official of their union, the Scottish Horse and Motormen's Association referred to the recent blitzing, implying that it played a part in the settlement:

"After the trouble of the past few days," he said, "it is a good thing to see the men going back to work and pulling their weight. We never doubted they would do so if the call was made upon them."

But if the end of that strike is put down to the Blitz breaking down class barriers, then what are we to make of one of the Herald's leading articles, which makes pretty much exactly that claim about the carters (and an apprentices' strike), but then goes on to attack dockers for rejecting the Ministry of Transport's plan for reorganising Glasgow Harbour? (4)

After the events of Thursday and Friday any unconvincing objections to plans for expediting the work of Glasgow Harbour will fall on deaf ears. And no promises to work "with all possible speed" will put a better complexion on matters [...] Surely it should not be too much to hope that the public-spiritedness displayed by boys and carters will also be shown by Glasgow dockers.

Is it realistic to expect class warfare to stop just because real warfare has started?

A couple of familiar (to me) names pop up on page 6. Air Commodore J. A. Chamier visited Glasgow yesterday to visit the local headquarters of the Air Training Corps. He claimed that the ATC was providing the basis for the RAF's massive expansion.

Four-fifths of this great Air Force would require to be recruited from lads who, through social circumstances, required to leave school at 14 and work for their living. It was the task of the Air Training Corps to give them required standard of education, discipline, and preparatory training.

Otherwise, though they might have 'the "guts and physique" to fly with the R.A.F.', they would not have 'an adequate education in mathematics and kindred subjects'. Chamier is Commandant of the ATC; it is his brainchild. He is also Executive-Controller of the Air League of the British Empire. (And, ahem, fellow traveller of the right.)

The other familiar name is the Rt Hon. Robert Menzies, KC, MP, Prime Minister of Australia. Ming is in Britain to get a 'good eyeful', and described Churchill as 'a bobby-dazzler' and 'a real crackerjack'.

The war news today is much closer to home for the Glasgow Herald than usual. A big air raid last night on 'a Central district of Scotland' (5) is vividly described, as though the reporter had witnessed it: readers would know for themselves just how far away it was.

One Nazi 'plane which appeared to be heading for home was spotted by searchlights, and immediately there was a road of gunfire as battery after battery opened up and poured shells into the apex of the searchlights.

The crackle of bursting shells followed a maze of flashes. When the gunfire stopped and the 'plane emerged from the barrage one of its engines could be heard misfiring. The 'plane seemed to be in difficulties and gradually losing height.

On the ground, civil defence workers 'toiled side by side with firemen after bombs scored a direct hit on a tenement building':

As rescue workers struggled to break down the massive barriers of broken stone and secure the safety of those feared trapped in the debris the fire-fighters poured a continuous stream of water to keep down the creeping flames.

But this isn't all. On the previous night, Clydeside itself received a heavy raid which wrecked 'Houses, churches, schools': some people were killed when an air-raid shelter received a direct hit. ARP services are praised for working smoothly and heroically through the bombing. As for the air raid victims (emphasis in original):

The people of the blitzed districts spent yesterday recovering property and furniture from partially ruined homes and settling down in new billets, while a few had the tragic task of tracing missing relatives.

It was this courageous attitude to the situation which characterised the outlook of every victim of the blitz to their misfortune.

"Tell the world that we here in Scotland can also take it," said a smiling invalid in one of the rest centres.

There's more on Thursday night's raid -- already being called 'The Clydeside Blitz' (7) -- on other pages. One is especially emotive (6):

The long, fierce attack on a Clydeside town on Thursday night, in which working-class homes, trim villas and bungalows, and a few industrial establishments were set ablaze, was carried out with a grim and revolting sadism by relays of raiders.

The article asserts that 'What angered Clydeside' about the raid was that it seemed to be 'a deliberate adventure in terrorism'.

For what other purpose, they argued, could the raiders be bombing again and again an already tenement? For what other reason did renewed showers of bombs fall among little houses which were already blazing and shattered?

But, another article on the same page asserts:

All the violence of a merciless night of incessant bombing of a Clydeside town, with its train of homeless families, many of them suffering the ordeal of sudden bereavement, failed utterly to weaken the splendid morale of the population.

If the raid was intended to strike a blow at industry it failed, the assault falling in the main on a working-class community, which has revealed itself as heroic as any elsewhere affected by air attack on a large scale.

The leading article today is somewhat more restrained. It notes that this, the 'first long and heavy air raid that Clydeside has suffered' (4) could hardly be considered a surprise considering its importance as an industrial centre and as a port. It also notes the 'remarkable record of 13 night raiders brought down' as evidence that Britain's night defences have improved greatly since 'the long weeks of autumn and early winter, when the Germans were able to bomb London and other English towns night after night almost with impunity'. Given that the Luftwaffe's ability to hit 'targets of real military targets has been far below that of the R.A.F.', it predicts that it may be forced to give up 'attacks of a mainly terroristic and indiscriminate type' and stick to 'tactics of the kind which our airmen have made our own', demonstrating 'the inferiority of the Nazis [...] more clearly than ever'. (This is an unusual argument: how does an effective air defence make precision bombing easier instead of harder?)

Meanwhile, the people of Clydeside, by intensifying their effort for victory, can prove to the world and the enemy that their reactions to frightfulness from the air are not less formidable than the reactions of the Londoners or the men of the English Midlands.

One such reaction: Ellen Wilkinson, Labour MP for Jarrow, on a visit to blitzed Swansea: 'Thank God we can hit back. I never realised what a vindictive person I was until I went through this city.'

RAF Bomber Command raided Hamburg for the second night in a row Thursday night, 'the "heaviest yet" raid on the city' (5). The Air Ministry claims that 'Shipbuilding yards, docks, and warehouses suffered badly'. The German News Agency, on the other hand, says that

"Most of the bombs again fell in residential districts as the violent anti-aircraft forced the British pilots to release their bombs without taking aim," it was stated."

Reid wraps up his series of articles on peace aims today by reiterating his call for 'a Military Union modelled on the British Commonwealth of Nations' (4), which must have 'the strongest air force in the world' and 'undertake to protect its members automatically and unquestionally if any of them is attacked'. He considers membership. It sadly can't be assumed that the United States won't withdraw into isolation again. The Union would then have to be restricted to Europe and Africa 'since it dare not repeat the error of the League of Nations by accepting members which it cannot protect'. Ideally it would only be composed of nations with 'Democracy and economic freedom' which, unlike 'socialism and dictatorship', are 'guarantees of peaceable policies'. Finally there is the question of Germany. It can have no place in the military union; it 'will have to be disarmed far more completely than in 1919, and the country will have to be occupied for many years'; its 'industrial power [...] will have to be broken or controlled'. Germany will have to learn its 'lesson of peaceable self-control' before it could join a 'European Union'.

In an earlier article, Reid had discarded the idea of a federal union. But Sir Robert B. Greig, of Barnton, either did not read it or was not convinced by it, for he yesterday gave a speech at Stirling Rotary Club in favour of one. He pointed to the danger of aviation as justification (6):

"When you look at the modern aeroplane you would say it was invented and built by a superman," Sir Robert continued. "But look what has happened. 'Planes have been used by people with an ape mind, not a human mind. That is the danger we are up against. Science will run away from us altogether and we shall destroy civilisation unless there is a controlling power, and the first controlling power should be that of the prevention of war. Unless we have a Federal Union which has an overriding Government over and above national sovereignties I do not see how we can prevent war.

To end on a lighter note, the third leading article today is on war slang. It suggests that the present war has produced fewer than the last one, but notes the following: winkle bag, cigarette; gin palace, a large wireless truck; rompers, 'the Army pet name for the new battle dress' (4); quads, gun-pulling tractor ('an affectionate memorial of the horse').

The "fed up" of the last war has become "browned off" in this -- a phrase in which a culinary reference is retained.

Only time will tell which of these terms, if any, will enter into general use; 'But English will not be English if it does not open hospitable doors to a proportion of these latest outcasts'.