1910s

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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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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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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. [↩]

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In the aftermath of the second German daylight Gotha raid on London, crowds watch as smoke pours from the roof of the Central Telegraph Office, struck by a 100 lb bomb, 7 July 1917

In my previous post, I discussed my concerns with the way sources are used in Neil Hanson's First Blitz.1 Here I turn to the problem of strategy, which goes more to the argument of the book. Again there are two parts to this, one broad and one narrow. I'll start with the broad.

Hanson's argument is that Germany, across almost the entire duration of the war, hoped, planned and attempted to destroy London through bombing, specifically by burning it out:

Air-dropped incendiary bombs would create firestorms engulfing entire districts of London, creating mass panic and popular unrest that would 'render it doubtful that the war can continue' and force the British Government to sue for peace.2

In other words, Germany was attempting to carry out a knock-out blow from the air against Britain – in 1915 or 1918 rather than 1940.

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  1. Neil Hanson, First Blitz: The Secret German Plan to Raze London to the Ground in 1918 (London: Doubleday, 2008). [↩]
  2. Ibid., 7. [↩]

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A large biplane Gotha bomber seen from below

This is a continuation, of sorts, of my series of posts critiquing the recent trend of describing the air raids on Britain in the First World War as the 'First Blitz'. I've separated it out because, although it is about the best-known book to use that phrase in its title – Neil Hanson's First Blitz (2008) – my concerns aren't about that usage, but are about the book itself.1 To be clear, I'm not saying this is a bad book; in fact I am broadly in sympathy with his account and I really like some aspects of it (the chapter entitled 'Londoners unnerved' is a terrific account of what I call the Gotha shock). But it is a book that should be used carefully. And as I'm seeing it cited fairly widely (including by academic historians, not excluding me!) I think it's worth putting those concerns out there, particularly since it was not reviewed in any academic publication, as far as I can see.

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  1. Neil Hanson, First Blitz: The Secret German Plan to Raze London to the Ground in 1918 (London: Doubleday, 2008). [↩]

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German propaganda poster with a vibrant and striking image depicting swarms of British aircraft bombing an industrial site to illustrate the following quote, by British Labour Leader Johnston Hicks [sic], which appeared in the 'Daily Telegraph' on January 3rd 1918: 'One must bomb the Rhineland industrial regions with one hundred aircraft day after day, until the treatment has had its effect!’

In the previous post, I discussed some of my objections to the idea that the air raids on Britain in the FIrst World were the 'First Blitz'. I don't think my arguments were completely persuasive, even to myself (which is why I decided to work through them in public like this). But I ended by saying I had another concern, and this one I think carries more weight. However, it's not really about the First World War at all, but the Second. And it's this: the Blitz is too British.

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Borough of Ramsgate ... Public meeting ... To consider recommendations to the responsible authorities for the more adequate protection of the coast against hostile aircraft. T. S. Chayney, Mayor. 26th March 1916.

I admit the term 'First Blitz' is a convenient label for the air raids on Britain in the First World War, both as a shorthand and because there really were many similarities with the later Blitz. But nevertheless, I don't really like it, and I'm avoiding it in my own book on the topic. Why?

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Gotha bomber over Tower Hamlets, seen from above

You might think that the first Blitz was the Blitz, i.e. the German bombing of British cities in 1940-1941, at the time was understood as a form of blitzkrieg, which was then shortened to 'blitz' or 'Blitz'. Of course, that doesn't mean a blitz couldn't be retrospectively recognised, and indeed it was soon applied, for example, to earlier events such as the 'Rotterdam Blitz' on 14 May 1940.1 Much more recently, there has been a vogue for the term among historians writing on the German air raids on British cities in 1914-1918, variously the 'First Blitz', the 'Zeppelin Blitz' or the 'Forgotten Blitz'. Check it out:

  • Andrew P. Hyde, The First Blitz: The German Air Campaign against Britain 1917–1918 (Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2002).
  • Neil Faulkner and Nadia Durrani, In Search of the Zeppelin War: The Archaeology of the First Blitz (Stroud: Tempus, 2008).
  • Neil Hanson, First Blitz: The Secret German Plan to Raze London to the Ground in 1918 (London: Doubleday, 2008).
  • Ian Castle, The First Blitz: Bombing London in the First World War (Oxford: Osprey, 2015).
  • Neil Storey, Zeppelin Blitz: The German Air Raids on Great Britain during the First World War (Stroud: History Press, 2015).
  • Ian Castle, Zeppelin Onslaught: The Forgotten Blitz 1914–1915 (Barnsley: Frontline, 2018).
  • Ian Castle, The First Blitz in 100 Objects (Philadelphia: Frontline Books, 2019).
  • Ian Castle, Zeppelin Inferno: The Forgotten Blitz 1916 (Philadelphia: Frontline, 2022).((There's also a journal article: Paul Fantom, ‘Zeppelins over the Black Country: The Midlands’ first blitz’, Midland History 39, no. 2 (2014): 236–254.))

Even discounting the fact that four of those books are from the one author, this is starting to look like a consensus.2

And why not? Many aspects of the 1940-41 raids were prefigured in 1914-18, from the bleeding obvious stuff (aircraft flying over and dropping bombs on British cities), to the ways in which the British government responded to this threat (air defence, civil defence, air offence), to the ideal emotional response on the part of civilians (British pluck, the Blitz spirit). And I can tell you from personal experience how annoying it gets to keep writing some cumbersome variation on 'the German raids on Britain in 1914-18' or 'the First World War air raids' or 'the Zeppelin and Gotha offensive', etc!

But as you can probably guess, despite my longing for a convenient shorthand I'm not fully sold on the First Blitz.3 This is partly because of the ways in which the British experience of bombing in 1914-18 was significantly different to that in 1940-41. It's also because I think that one of the key works on the above list -– the most popular one, Neil Hanson's First Blitz -- is quite problematic. But I'm not sure how sensible my objections are: analogies don't have to be exact to be useful, after all. So I'm going to post through my confusion and work out if I should learn to stop worrying and love the First Blitz.

Image source: Fredette, The Sky on Fire.

  1. In fact the term 'blitz' in the sense of air raids does seem to have slightly preceded the Blitz proper, judging from BNA, but only by a few days or weeks. [↩]
  2. Compare with the other 'first' contender, the 'First Battle of Britain'. There's only one book I know of with this in the title: Raymond H. Fredette, The Sky on Fire: The First Battle of Britain 1917–1918 and the Birth of the Royal Air Force (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). As that was first published more than half a century ago, it doesn't seem like it's going to catch on. [↩]
  3. It's not in the working title of my next book, currently Home Fires Burning: Britain's First War from the Air, 1914–1918, though admittedly this is not entirely stable from draft to draft! [↩]

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Thanet Advertiser, 29 April 1916, 5

The above facsimile letter was published in the Ramsgate Thanet Advertiser on 29 April 1916. It reads:

April 7th. The writer of the first 'German messages' has been absent from Ramsgate some time now, so the 'Alien’s post-card' is by another hand. If I did not fear prosecution for "failing to register an alien," I could give the police his address to find him, as he is due to return this Wedy. here. The enclosed I found in his overcoat pocket the night before the raid (after he left here on 18th ult.)
Veritas.
To the Editor.((Thanet Advertiser (Ramsgate), 29 April 1916, 5.))

The enclosure referred to was a second letter, 'another foreign missive, addressed to “Herr Chaney, Burgomeister von Ramsgate.” It states that the Zeppelins have a nightly victory and contains some abusive epithets'.((Ibid., 22 April 1916, 2.))

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