Monthly Archives: August 2012

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The Sykes Plan (or Memo, I'll use them interchangeably here) is an infamous document, at least among those airpower historians interested in the early RAF. Major-General Frederick Sykes was the second Chief of the Air Staff (CAS), that is the professional head of the RAF; the Plan is infamous because it cost him his job. He took up the position less than two weeks after the RAF was formed on 1 April 1918, succeeding Major-General Trenchard who had had an unhappy tenure due to clashes with the Air Minister, Lord Rothermere (who ended up resigning himself). Sykes was a key figure in the prewar RFC, commanding its Military Wing, and had played an important role as chief of staff (and sometimes commander) of the RFC in France. After that he had his own field command, of the RNAS in the Dardanelles. Thereafter he served in a number of non-aviation administrative roles, organising the Machine Gun Corps and serving as General Wilson's deputy at the Supreme War Council.

Sykes was CAS for most of the dramatic events of 1918: he took charge when the German spring offensive was at its most threatening and was still in office when the Armistice was signed in November. When peace threatened, Sykes had to consider what form the postwar RAF would take. With the help of Lieutenant-Colonel P. R. C. Groves, his friend and Director of Flying Operations, by early December he produced a 'Memorandum by the Chief of the Air Staff on air-power requirements of the Empire', AKA the Sykes Memo.1 It proved far too ambitious, and more to the point, costly. Churchill, the new Air Minister, needed economy and was not impressed. Sykes was out and Trenchard was back in, and this time he stayed there for more than a decade.

So how did Sykes cut his own throat? Above all he wanted a big RAF, keeping as much as possible of its wartime strength. In fact, at first he proposed 348 squadrons, which was optimistic considering that in March 1918 the RFC and RNAS combined had only 168 squadrons.2 However, I haven't seen that plan and I wonder if those 348 squadrons were actually intended to be mostly cadres in peacetime, say flights rather than whole squadrons, to facilitate rapid expansion in an emergency. In that case it might only be about the same size as the 1918 RAF (though of course the extra aircraft and men required would need to be got from somewhere). The final version of the Plan did use cadre squadrons for just this purpose. But even so it was still larger than Trenchard's more palatable proposal of only 82 squadrons.
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  1. F. H. Sykes, From Many Angles: An Autobiography (London: George G. Harrap & Company, 1942), 558-74. [↩]
  2. John Robert Ferris, Men, Money and Diplomacy: The Evolution of British Strategic Foreign Policy, 1919-26 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 68; John James, The Paladins: A Social History of the RAF up to the Outbreak of World War II (London and Sydney: Macdonald, 1990), 243. [↩]

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Flight reported on 16 March 1912 that 'A "Mystery" Aeroplane' was recently seen flying over Warmley, near Bristol:

MANY of the residents of Warmley were considerably excited, says a local paper, at the imposing spectacle of a splendidly illuminated aeroplane passing over the village at a tremendous rate. Certain other people at Bristol and neighbouring places apparently saw the same spectacle, but their version of the story is that a brilliant meteor passed over the district. Aeroplanes are getting to be very speedy birds nowadays, but speeds enough to render machines incandescent have not yet been realised. Will some kind pilot go down to Warmley and show the inhabitants what an aeroplane is really like?

The Observatory, an astronomical journal, reported the same sighting in similarly sarcastic terms:

[...] witness the following account of a large triple-headed fireball, visible on March 6 at 8h 5m, which passed over Ireland, ending in the Irish Sea near the Isle of Man. I am indebted to Mr. Denning for the following newspaper extract:--

Excitement was caused among residents of Warmley on Wednesday evening at the imposing spectacle of a splendidly-illuminated aeroplane rate, and came from the direction of Bath and went on towards Gloucester.

Tremendous indeed! But we are prepared for anything now-a-days.

Unfortunately I haven't been able to find the newspaper account apparently used by both Flight and the Observatory (quite possibly the Bristol Western Daily News, which the BNA has but not for 1912). At least the Observatory provides a date, 6 March 1912, and, if its identification is accepted, a time about two hours after sunset so quite dark ('8h 5m' would be 8.05pm; before 1 January 1925 astronomers began their days at noon rather than midnight).
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Yorkshire Post, 1 June 1942, 1

Picking up where I left off nearly a month ago, let's turn to the reaction of the provincial press to the thousand bomber raid on Cologne on the night of 30 May 1942. The Yorkshire Post's main front page story on 1 June 1942 (above) concentrated on the operation itself. It claimed that 'CONSIDERABLY more than 1,000 R.A.F. bombers -- probably 1,250 aircraft' -- were involved, which is one of highest estimates I've seen after the Daily Mirror's 'MORE THAN 1,500' (of course, the true number was little over a thousand). In tactical terms, 'The plan for saturating the defences of Cologne was an undoubted success':

'We had the guns absolutely foxed,' a pilot said. Hundreds of others had the same report to make. Nightfighters were seen, but never enough to interfere with the attack.

An accompanying article by the paper's military correspondent added that 'The Germans were out-manœuvred at interception work [...] the Luftwaffe, short of fighters, failed'. The first leading article (2) pointed out that RAF losses, at 44 aircraft, were proportionately lower than those suffered by the Luftwaffe in its most recent raids ('on east and south-east coastal areas on Friday [29 May] night'), 7 out of 50.
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At Investigations of a Dog, Gavin Robinson (as seen on Twitter!) has started post-blogging the letters of Nehemiah Wharton, a sergeant in the Parliamentary army during the English Civil War. The first letter is up: 16 August 1642. Gavin provides context and interpretation, but he's also transcribing the letters in full since the published transcriptions apparently aren't very good. Even without aeroplanes it should be interesting!

It's been a while since I've noted any new post-blogging initiatives here. The concept is alive and well, but I think it has really taken off on Twitter. I follow a number of 'post-tweeting' accounts there, mostly military in nature: @the_60s_at_50, @missilecrisis62, @gallipoli_live, @ukwarcabinet, and @RealTimeWWII. The last two are my favourites, and are long term projects: the former (run by the National Archives) is up to this day in 1942, the latter this day in 1940. Here are the last three tweets from each, to give a flavour of what they do:

Even more than post-blogging, post-tweeting can convey a sense of the immediacy of events as they happened. But post-blogging is better for providing context and interpretation. There's a place for both.

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Some common themes here, more or less unintentional...

Pam Oliver. Raids on Australia: 1942 and Japan's Plans for Australia. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010. The title is a bit misleading. Oliver examines Japanese activities in Australia, commercial, government, and individual, in the decades before 1942, as well as Australian government and popular suspicions of Japanese espionage and hostile intentions. Not a believer in the 'he's coming south' myth, I'm glad to see, though surprisingly she doesn't seem to cite Peter Stanley on this.

Michael Swords and Robert Powell, with Clas Svahn, Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, Bill Chalker, Barry Greenwood, Richard Thieme, Jan Aldrich, and Steve Purcell. UFOs and Government: A Historical Enquiry. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2012. Not your usual UFO book by any means. In fact it's not about UFOs as such, but rather the way governments have responded to UFOs: a perfectly legitimate line of historical inquiry! The focus is inevitably on the United States and from 1947 on. But there are also chapters on Australia, Spain and France. Of most interest to me are the ones on the foo fighters of the Second World War and even more so, on the ghost flyers of 1932-4 and the ghost rockets of 1946. It's very hard to get sober, reliable accounts of these episodes so I'm very glad to have this book.

H. F. B. Wheeler and A. M. Broadley. Napoleon and the Invasion of England: The Story of the Great Terror. Stroud: Nonsuch, 2007 [1908]. Covers both French plans and British fears. I'm sure it's been overtaken by more recent scholarship but it uses a lot of primary sources, which extends the shelf life. Moreover I'm intrigued by the fact that it was first published in the middle of another invasion scare, this time with the Kaiser as the bogey; the introduction even refers to the contemporary debate about whether the proposed Channel Tunnel would (literally) undermine Britain's security.

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Adelaide (1)

Adelaide (AKA 'Radelaide') has more to offer than transport museums, of course. On my last day there I had a look at the South Australian Museum, as well as some of the nearby sights. This copy of a Venus by Antonio Canova was apparently somewhat controversial when presented to the city in 1892, though she seems fairly demure today. Depending on the angle.
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David S. Bird. Nazi Dreamtime: Australian Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2012. An Australian equivalent of Richard Griffiths' Fellow Travellers of the Right, though this covers the Second World War period as well. The title isn't an affectation: it seems that the Aboriginal idea of the dreamtime was appropriated by pro-Nazis here as part of an attempt to forge a distinctively Australian fascism.

Jeremy Black. Avoiding Armageddon: From the Great War to the Fall of France, 1918-1940. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Black must be one of the most productive historians in history; this is the sixth book of his I've bought and that's less than 5% of the number of works listed on his LibraryThing page. Some of it doubtless recycled and I'm sure he has an army of research assistants, but still! This one is closer to my interests than most of his other books. It's a synoptic look at the anticipation of war in the 1920s and 1930s: how governments and militaries (primarily) digested the lessons of the First World War as well as the minor conflicts which came along in the interim. Black makes an effort not to be Anglo- or even Eurocentric: there's a chapter on war in the Far East and a couple each on imperial wars and third world wars. There's also a chapter on airpower, which looks like a decent overview, if necessarily brief given the scope. I must, however, query how he came to cite Neville Parton's The Evolution and Impact of Royal Air Force Doctrine 1919-1939 as a 2011 publication, when it hasn't been published even now; in fact the publisher is currently saying September 2013.

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He 111 over London

A very long time ago, I wrote a post about the claim that this (here, in cropped form) truly iconic image of the Blitz was a German propaganda fake. The claim was made by Gazza, a Millwall FC fan who maintains a website about the history of the club; and the basis for his claim was that the former Millwall home ground, the Old Den, is apparently missing the roof built over its northern terrace in 1938. Since the photograph was purportedly taken by the Luftwaffe in 1940, it must therefore be a fake. After looking at it and thinking about it far too much, I went back and forth on the issue several times while writing the post, and several more times during the ensuing discussion in the comments; ultimately, I tentatively agreed with Gazza that it was indeed a fake. But since there's only so much that can be told from the image itself, the only way I could see to resolve the question would be for somebody to go into the archives and look at its context and provenance.
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Dr Beachcombing of Beachcombing's Bizarre History Blog kindly dropped me a line to alert me to his post about Public Service Broadcasting, a British music duo who draw on old propaganda and information films for inspiration and samples. A number of these are from the Second World War period, including 'Spitfire', 'London Can Take It', 'Dig For Victory', and 'Lit Up'. My favourite is the one above, 'If War Should Come'. Based on the 1939 GPO film of the same name, despite/because of the remixing and the electronica it is nicely evocative of the shadow of the bomber.
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Port Adelaide

After the AHA, I stayed in Adelaide for a few days to see the sights. I have a bit of a thing for maritime museums, so the South Australian Maritime Museum at Port Adelaide was an obvious choice. It became even more obvious when I discovered that the National Railway Museum and the South Australian Aviation Museum were both within easy walking distance of the Maritime Museum!
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