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1BoB is The First Battle of Britain: The Air War Over England, 1917–1918 (hereafter 1BoB), which sounds like a book but is actually a wargame. I bought my copy back in April 2009, not long after I submitted my PhD, at which point I noted that 'I try to avoid buying wargames because I never seem to actually play them'. It took me nearly 16 years, but over the end-of-year break I finally got around to having a crack at 1BoB! My rather thin reasoning was that I should be writing the 1917 chapter of Home Fires Burning later this year, so playing it out as a game might give me some insight into the operational dynamics of the Gotha raids. I mean, it could also be fun, that's a sufficient reason too, I guess?

I won't go too much into the game itself here; the 1BoB page at BoardGameGeek has reviews and discussions as well as images of the game components, if you'd like a better idea of what it's actually like to play. It was fun (even played solitaire), and there's a lot I appreciate as a historian of the raids about the design of 1BoB and the thinking behind it. For example, morale (both civilian and military) is a key concept: the accumulation of morale points (MP) is important for determining victory, but also for enabling the expansion of forces and infrastructure. (If London gets a big raid, that's good for Germany's chance of winning the game, but it also allows the British to build up its air defences in response to public outrage.) Both sides start out with relatively minimal forces, but they can be expanded in a number of directions according to different strategic choices. (Civil defence and early warning are both modelled, along with air units and AA. Or the British player can build up a bomber force in Flanders and try a counterforce strategy - they can even bring an aircraft carrier into operation, if they want to try and Tondern the German aerodromes.) Aircraft are rated for speed, pursuit, combat, bombardment/strafing and endurance ability; the map extends from Aldershot to Ghent. So a lot of research and thought has gone into 1BoB. (The accompanying article – it's a game-in-a-magazine – lists Cole and Cheesman, Fredette, and Morris, among its sources.) This is almost the only game to model the Gotha raids; luckily it's a pretty good one.1

However! As I began to play (as documented in a very messy Bluesky thread), I did come across rules and gameplay which were at variance with my understanding of how the air war over Britain unfolded in 1917 and 1918. So I started thinking about how 1BoB could be adapted to make it more historically, and soon I had a bunch of rule modifications that I'm, rather arrogantly, calling 1BoB+. I mainly used game mechanics and concepts which are already in the game, and I tried to avoid making the game unplayable. But I haven't tested it extensively (or much at all...), and it's very unlikely unbalanced now. Nevertheless, here are the notes explaining my suggested changes. The changes themselves are in a separate PDF (see the link at the bottom of the post). Caveat emptor and all that. They won't make much sense without a copy of 1BoB itself, but the rules are online if you're interesting in digging into that level of detail.

First, though, while my comments below are often framed as criticisms of 1BoB, one thing I learned in this process is that game design is actually very hard! It's one thing to come up with a 'more historical' rule; it's another thing altogether to figure out how that change interacts with the other rules, let alone how it affects gameplay. I continually dithered over to whether to make this change or that change, decisively deciding one way before completely changing my mind a few minutes later. (In fact, I've kept tinkering with 1BoB+ even while writing this post…) And I had the advantage of having something to work with – creating a whole game from scratch would be far harder! More philosophically, I had to think about whether I wanted to merely allow historical behaviour or outcomes, or encourage them, or actually enforce them. It turns out that sometimes one approach is best, while sometimes another provides a better balance. One example is fighter escorts. 1BoB allows fighters to accompany bomber groups; if I've done my sums right, the Albatros D.1s in the game can (just) escort all the way to Woolwich on the eastern edge of London. The Germans absolutely did not use fighter escorts over Britain during the First World War. So should I ban this somehow? Well, in terms of contemporary capabilities, it does seem that it was technically possible, even allowing a fuel margin for combat. So why didn't it happen? James Kightly rightly warned that we shouldn't project backwards what we think was obvious based on later experience; Dreadnought Holiday pointed to problems in coordinating fighters and bombers flying together over a long distance, especially given the lack of W/T. I'd agree with both, but I also note that in game terms, a D.1 is no better in defensive air-to-air combat than a Gotha (though it is slightly superior to a Giant); and there is a limit to how many aircraft can be stacked together. So the German player can include fighter escorts if they want, but it would only provide a marginal increase in combat survivability, and would come at a substantial drop in bombardment power. It's up to them which way they want to go. Details aside, this allows and even encourages historical behaviour, but it doesn't enforce it. It allows experimentation and deviation from what did happen which, after all, is part of the point of turning a war into a game. Props to Joseph Miranda for a fundamentally solid design!

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  1. The only other one I know of is an expansion for Luftschiff, which I also have; but it's more of a mission simulator than an operational or strategic game. [↩]

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A peaceful riverside scene with a palm tree in the foreground and a steamship on the river.

The current drone panic on the eastern US seaboard – which started out in New Jersey about a month ago, but has spread to Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Pennsylvania, and even US bases in the UK and Germany – is, of course, hardly unprecedented. Not only does it bear obvious similarities to the 2019 drone panic in the US Midwest, and to the Gatwick drones panic in 2018, but also to a whole series of much earlier panics involving threatening objects in the sky which are at least partly imaginary. (Some of the drones may well be drones. But many, if not most, are nothing more unusual than civilian aircraft on routine flights. When they're not stars, that is.) I'm thinking less here of the post-1947 UFO phenomenon, which by and large was not initially viewed with suspicion or alarm, or even the mystery airships seen across the US in 1896 and 1897, which similarly were generally the object of curiosity, not fear, but the British phantom airship panics of 1909 and 1913, as well the mystery aeroplane panic in Australia and New Zealand in 1918. It's a whole new Scareship Age.

While the sociological mechanisms of the construction and transmission of the idea of mystery aircraft has probably remained fairly constant over the last 160-odd years, it has certainly accelerated with the coming of various modes of mass media, including, now, social media. More interestingly, their cultural form is greatly dependent on the technological context. Hence the progression from balloons to airships to aeroplanes to rockets to spaceships to helicopters and now to drones (which, although a retrograde step in terms of their lack of cosmic scope, are novel technologies in the way that the artefacts of the space age can no longer be). But even more interestingly is the way that the threat or promise of mystery aircraft shifts with (geo)political context. So the American mystery airships of the 1890s were generally supposed to be flown by American inventors; the British phantom airships before 1914 were German surveillance platforms; the Scandinavian mystery aeroplanes in the 1930s were Soviet infiltrators; after the Second World War, flying saucers were piloted by space brothers or nocturnal abductors (actually, that is something of a break: the UFO phenomenon became its own, much bigger thing to a large extent – one reason why I steer clear of it). And so on.

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Bright orange ventilators of a historic ship against a blue sky.

Time to bring this puppy (of a series of blog posts) home! Duriong the last couple of weeks I spent in London researching, I also managed to tick something which had been on my bucket list since my first UK trip in 2007: the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard. Portsmouth is a little over 2 hours from London by train, which somehow seemed to always mean just a little too much advance planning for me to actually make this happen. Not this time!

The Dockyard is part of an active Royal Navy base, HMNB Portsmouth, which is home port for two-thirds of the British fleet. The first naval dockyard on this site was begun in 1194 – that's during the reign of Richard Lionheart – so this area has been at the heart of British seapower for a very long time. Of course, all of the built heritage that remains is far more recent than that, 18th-19th century or so, precisely because it was a working dockyard for so long.

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Horse-drawn carriage with people seated and standing children in front.

Next July, the Australasian Association for European History (AAEH) conference is being held at the University of Auckland. My abstract having been accepted, it looks like I'll be going to New Zealand! My presentation is entitled 'Civil defence from below: street patrols and air raid risk in Britain, 1915-1918' and here's what it's about:

As a marker of total war, civil defence is usually seen as a large-scale activity organised by the state which mobilised civilians in defence of the nation against attack from above, with the development of British air raid precautions before and during the Blitz of 1940-41 as a classic exemplar. However, in Britain's first experience of air raids between 1914 and 1918, the state was often curiously absent from civil defence. To a large extent, it was the demands of local communities which drove civil defence policy and practice. I examine here the development of street patrols, which provided warnings of impending air raids in highly localised urban areas so that inhabitants could take measures for their own protection. These patrols were self-organised, often without official sanction, and so represent a form of civil defence from below. While generally justified by a stated need to protect women, children and the elderly from unnecessary anxiety, they were also presented as a form of working-class mutual aid which was necessitated by the lack of state action in providing public raid warnings. Joining a patrol also enabled the construction of a useful masculinity by allowing men who were too young, too old or otherwise unable to join the fighting forces to perform the defence of their communities. I will focus on three such examples of bottom-up patrols with varying success - Hull in 1915, Burton in 1916, and London in 1917 - as well as an example of top-down patrols - Gloucester in 1916 - to show what they reveal about the changing geography and emotions of air raid risk across Britain in the first bombing war.

This will be a great opportunity (read: will force me!) to draw together some of the topics and themes which are emerging in Home Fires Burning. Street patrols are an understudied topic – Mike Reeve has analysed Hull's in depth; see his Bombardment, Public Safety and Resilience in English Coastal Communities During the First World War (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021), 216–226, as well as his post on the Coastal History Blog – and they've cropped up here on Airminded once or twice. But they were more interesting than I'd realised. The photo above, for example, is from Hull in 1919, and doesn't show a street patrol itself; rather, it's children from around Church-street in Drypool, where 'one of the best systems of night patrols was organized', who were being treated to a 'waggonette outing to Beverley Westwood' out of the 'good sum of money obtained' from over three years' (presumably) worth of the 'weekly collection taken in the district' to cover the cost of the patrols.1 This kind of unofficial, community-based civil defence was clearly very different to the patrols carried out by special constables who are usually associated with air raid patrols in the First World War, but also to the even more familiar air raid wardens of the Second World War. So I want to have a closer look.

It's also an great opportunity to see Auckland (my only previous visit to NZ was to Wellington in 2013, also for the AAEH). It was an unfortunate coincidence that my abstract was accepted on the same day that the NZ government announced that from 2025, its Marsden Fund will no longer be funding humanities and social science research (which means, as far as I can tell, no funding in these areas at all), while 50% everything else will need to show an economic benefit to New Zealand. It doesn't seem like there is any recourse or relief in prospect, so it's going to get grim. (Presciently, the AAEH's theme next year is 'Dark Horizons? New Directions in European History'.) But I'm still looking forward to catching up with my historian colleagues across the Ditch next July!

  1. Daily Mail (Hull), 12 August 1919, 3. [↩]

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Close-up of a stone relief sculpture depicting intricately carved armour and shields with floral patterns.

Nearly at the end of these posts! During my two weeks in London researching, I also managed to fit in some sightseeing (it helped that none of my archives were open on Sundays). Mostly this meant the British Museum, but there were also a couple of other favourite haunts plus a museum I'd never managed to make it to before.

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A printed sheet of paper with white text on a red background. The text reads: "AIR RAIDS OWING TO INSUFFICIENT COVER THIS STATION IS UNSUITABLE FOR THE PROTECTION OF PERSONS SHELTERING DURING AN AIR RAID"

So, I'm back from my long-overdue and much-needed research trip to the UK. Was it worth it? Yes!

In raw numbers, I took over 11,000 photos across 13 days at 8 archives in 5 cities.1 Obviously, since I'm not a Bomber Command AOC I'm not going to prioritise quantity over quality. But I did pretty much, er, hit all my high priority targets and look at everything I really wanted to see. I struck archival gold nearly every day; there were only one or two places where the findings were meagre, and those visits were always a bit speculative anyway. I would like to have to visited the Tfl Corporate Archives (though check out the Underground posters I did find, above and below, from 1917-18 and 1917 respectively), or one or two other Home Counties archives. But you can't see everything; and what I did see will make Home Fires Burning a much better book.

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  1. About five-sixths of these were taken at the National Archives alone. [↩]