What did Australians in 1918 make of the mystery aeroplane scare? What did they think the aeroplanes meant? This is a question I’ve already answered in part. There is evidence from the press that in the days before 24 April wild rumours were circulating that Australia was about to be attacked somehow by German raiders, […]
If the wave of reports of mystery aeroplanes after late April 1918 wasn’t sustained by newspaper reports (i.e. because there were none) then how was it sustained? Why did people from all over Australia come to hold the same belief, that German aircraft were filling the skies? There are several possible explanations. One is that
This is from a document issued by the Air Council in October 1918, ‘Identification marks on all aircraft’, FS Publication 89. I think it’s available from the National Archives in London as AIR 10/128 and AIR 10/129, but I found it in the National Archives of Australia as NAA: A1194, 19.03/6255, and because I paid
The title of this post could refer to my own state of mind as I reach a crossroads in this project. As I said in the previous post, it’s time to dig deeper into the 1918 Australian mystery aeroplane scare, to look beneath the surface. What was really going on? Why did people see mystery
View Mystery aircraft, Australia, 1918 in a larger map My next step in characterising the 1918 Australian mystery aircraft scare was to plot all the sightings Google Maps, which you can see above. I’ve used differently-coloured icons for different time periods to give an idea of the progression over the course of 1918: blue is
In my previous post, I threatened more statistics about Australian mystery aircraft scares of the First World War, and here they are. What I’ve been doing is collating all the sightings recorded in two NAA files, MP1049/1, 1918/066 and MP367/1, 512/3/1319. The former is the Navy Office’s file pertaining to ‘Reports of suspicious aeroplanes, lights
Like Gaul and probably some other things, my mystery aeroplanes paper will be divided into three parts: An overview of the 1918 Australian mystery aeroplane scare itself. The immediate historical context which helps explain the scare, namely the threats from German raiders and of Allied defeat. The bigger picture into which the scare fits, namely
My abstract for the Australian Historical Association’s 31st Annual Conference, to be held in Adelaide this July, has been accepted. The title and abstract are as follows: Dreaming war: airmindedness and the Australian defence panic of 1918 Between March and June 1918, Australian newspapers, police forces and military intelligence units were deluged with hundreds of
In 1910, two Army officers, Second Lieutenant Bowle-Evans and Lieutenant Cammell independently put forward a new idea for an anti-aircraft weapon: the vortex ring gun. In principal, it involved the formation of a vortex in the air, by the firing of an explosive charge inside a conical ‘gun’ which, if it were pointed upwards, would
FORETASTE OF THE FUTURE Of all the forms of gas used in the Great War, that which had the least disastrous consequences was “tear gas.” Its effect was to inflict temporary blindness on those who came in contact with it. This pathetic row of figures show men temporarily blinded in that way on the Western
