1910s

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WA Sportsman (Perth), 9 August 1918, 3

This poem took up about an eighth of page 3 of the 9 August 1918 edition of the Perth WA Sportsman, preaching revenge on Germany for its air raids on Britain (the last of which, until the next war at least, had just taken place). It's prefaced by a claim that 'the Allies expect to soon send air fleets to bomb Berlin', likely a reference to a statement made a week earlier by Major-General Sefton Brancker that 'It is certain that the British will be able to bomb Berlin next spring'. (A week after the Armistice it was being reported that RAF bombers were 'actually in readiness to visit Berlin' when the ceasefire came through.)
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In May 1911, two policemen were sent out from Yamba, a logging town at the mouth of the Clarence River in northern New South Wales, to investigate something odd which had been found on 'top of a sandhill near Ryan's waterhole, about six miles [away] and about 400 yards in from the beach':

a rudely-constructed aeroplane, 30 feet in length and 4 feet wide, with a wing on one side about 2 feet wide. Extending the full length in the middle was a sort of platform with a seat roughly fixed with fencing wire and padded with old bagging. Scores of fine wires were fixed to the platform and extending to all parts of the structure. There were two keels braced together with split bamboo rods, every six inches, like the timbers in a boat. Every joint was securely and neatly capped with fine wire. Only two nails were used in the whole construction [...] The most peculiar thing about the craft was
that it could be plainly seen that the only tool used in preparing the timber had been a knife [...] The whole floor of the structure was covered with newspapers pasted together, forming a very thick pad.1

None of the newspapers was dated later than 3 May 1911, and the aeroplane 'appeared to have been only a short period of time at the spot where it was discovered, as the papers were quite fresh and not discoloured'.2 Another odd detail was

that from low water mark on the beach near the sea is a deep and narrow track from the water's edge up the steep sandhill to where the airship was lying, appearing as if something from the sea had been dragged up to the spot where the structure was lying.3

One report suggested that 'the plane had evidently been damaged, since one of the flaps had been damaged', though here 'plane' should be taken to mean 'wing' rather than 'aeroplane'.4 Since 'There is no trace of any engine about', it was surmised that the machine was a glider:

The builder had evidently taken an aeroplane for a model, and attempted to construct a single plane, which would allow him to float with tbe wind from the top of one of the sand hills of the Terrace.3

But who was this mysterious builder? Suspicion quickly fell on 'an elderly man [...] a stranger to Yamba, who bought stores and papers a few times from local people' and who 'has since disappeared'.3 Within a few days of the initial story, it was being regarded locally as 'a hoax'.5 That can't be ruled out, though the possible motivation (other than sheer perversity) of leaving a fake aeroplane for somebody to stumble across is unclear.
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  1. Sydney Mail, 17 May 1911, 55. This is a fairly close (and much easier to read) paraphrase of the original story in Evening News (Sydney), 13 May 1911, 5, 8. [↩]
  2. Sydney Mail, 17 May 1911, 55. [↩]
  3. Ibid. [↩] [↩] [↩]
  4. The Age (Melbourne), 15 May 1911, 6. [↩]
  5. Sydney Morning Herald, 18 May 1911, 9. [↩]

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Wreck of the Hindenburg

Alexander Rose. Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men's Epic Duel to Rule the World. New York: Random House, 2020.

The two men of the title both led a great aviation enterprise. Both dreamed of spanning the world with their passenger aircraft. Both struggled at times, and prospered at others. But one was outlived by his company, while the other died knowing that his life's work had been reduced to ashes. The former was Juan Terry Trippe, the head of Pan American Airways (PAA; better known as Pan Am) from 1927 to 1968; the latter, Hugo Eckener, who ran Luftschiffbau Zeppelin and DELAG, the Zeppelin airline, after the death of Count Zeppelin in 1917.1 Both wanted to span the world's continents and oceans by air: Trippe championed aeroplanes as the best way to do this; Eckener, obviously, airships. We all know how that turned out, but well-known stories are often worth revisiting because, well, you don't always know what you thought you did. And so Alexander Rose -- who is perhaps best known as the author of Washington's Spies, which was turned into a successful television series, but wrote his PhD on British air defence policy in the 1930s -- has written a thoroughly researched, fully referenced, hugely informative and compellingly readable account of the struggle for the future of civil aviation.
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  1. Citing a newspaper obituary, Wikipedia claims that Trippe got his first name from 'the Venezuelan wife of his great uncle'. But according to Rose he was actually named after his mother's stepfather, Juan Terry, a Venezuelan millionaire. Trippe hated his name and his non-WASP family connections; the fact that PAA's empire began in Latin America was a coincidence. [↩]

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Duprée and Ashley, Britannia Must Rule the Air

This stirring scene is the cover for the sheet music for a song published in 1913, Britannia Must Rule the Air, written by Frank Duprée and composed by Charles Ashley. It shows a reasonable (if stubby) approximation of a Zeppelin in the process of being destroyed by gunfire from two aeroplanes, a Farman-type biplane and a monoplane.

The lyrics are a little more subtle:

When wooden walls and straining sails bore Britain's flag afar,
The Nation prospered well in peace and feared no foe in war,
For Britain's might was ev'rywhere and ruled the endless waves,
Proclaiming to the world at large 'we never shall be slaves.'

And when the ironclad replaced the ships that caught the breeze
Britannia still retained her throne up on the charted seas,
For frowning fleets and giant guns outnumbered two to one
The navies of all other lands beneath the sov'reign sun.

And now that ev'ry cloud conceals a lurking bird of prey,
Which threatens our supremacy in peace and war today,
Britainnia must be equal to the peril and prepare
To hold our Empire sacred from these dreadnaughts of the air.

CHORUS

Britannia must rule the air
As still she rules the sea,
To guard this realm beyond compare
And keep her people free.
Britannia, Britannia must like the eagle be;
Britannia, Britannia must rule both air and sea!
Britannia, Britannia must rule both air and sea.1

The message is clear enough: just as Britain's naval superiority has kept it safe from the Napoleonic Wars through the ironclad era to now, so must it have a superiory aerial superiority to safeguard its freedom in the new century. This was exactly the comparison and the message of the Navy League in response to German aerial superiority, as supposedly revealed by the phantom airships supposedly seen flying all over Britain.2
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  1. Frank Duprée and Charles Ashley, Britannia Must Rule the Air (London: Laurence Wright Music Co., 1913). [↩]
  2. Brett Holman, 'The phantom airship panic of 1913: imagining aerial warfare in Britain before the Great War', Journal of British Studies 55, no. 1 (2016): 99–119 (free). [↩]

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On Wednesday, 27 May 2020, I was privileged to give a seminar to the Contemporary Histories Research Group at Deakin University on my aerial theatre research -- via Zoom, as is the current fashion. I really enjoyed giving it, and I think it was a great success (and thanks to everyone who listened in and especially those to took the time to ask questions). Because the seminar pulls together some of the different things I've been working on in some kind of coherent way, I wanted to make it available to a wider audience, and so yesterday I post-tweeted my own seminar. And to make it less (?) ephemeral, now I'm embedding the entire 51-tweet thread here in a blog post. It is of course very much a condensed version of what I said, but it's always surprising how much of the essence gets through in tweet form. (Well, I understand what I'm trying to say, but then I would, wouldn't I?)

The seminar title is 'History from below, looking up: aerial theatre, emotion and modernity'. The abstract is:

In the early 20th century, the aeroplane was the symbol of modernity par excellence. Technological change is an essential part of this sense of modernity, and few technological changes have been as dramatic or as unmistakable as the conquest of the air. For the first few decades of the twentieth century, flying was the object of intense popular fascination, and yet few people actually flew themselves, even as passengers, before the tremendous expansion of aviation during and after the Second World War. Even so, their experience of flight was often intensely exciting, since one of the most common ways to encounter flight was through seeing it, as an aviation spectacle in the form of aerial theatre such as air displays and air races. People flocked to aerodromes in their cumulative millions to watch aircraft in flight, performing aerobatics or fighting mock battles. This was a mass form of popular culture, which explicitly and implicitly made claims about the present and -- even more so -- future ability of technology to change the world, for better or for worse. In this talk I will sketch out an emotional history of aerial theatre, focusing on how it helped to construct popular ideas about modernity, primarily in Britain and Australia.

[tweet id="1265825214488707074" conversation=false]
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Last year I looked at a couple of fantastic photographs from the State Library of South Australia's collection, taken at Harry Butler's 'Aviation Day' display at Unley on 23 August 1919. They're fantastic because they focus not on the flying but on the crowds watching it. Now I've found two more photos taken on the same day. PRG 280/1/24/250, wonderfully dynamic with the Red Devil (inserted in the lower left) evidently right overhead as the spectators twist and turn to keep it in view:

Spectators watching an aircraft's arrival
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Resuming from where I left off with Modern Wonder -- here are some rather fantastic French and British 'battle planes' from the cover of the 23 April 1938 issue. I've never seen these designs before and I'm sure they never got off the drawing board -- if, that is, there was even any drawing board at all and it's not just massive artistic license. [Update: of course I was wrong! Jakob quickly identified both aircraft in the comments. The French one is an Arsenal-Delanne 10, which did in fact fly (though not until 1941); the British one is an Airspeed AS.31, which did not. On Twitter, Francois Soyer and AusterityAirliners also got one apiece.]

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Illustrated London News, 31 August 1912, 20

This must be one of the first ever photographs ever taken of an air raid, simply because it was one of the first ever air raids, during the Italian invasion of Ottoman Tripolitania of 1911-12. It appeared in the Illustrated London News on 31 August 1912 with the following caption:

PHOTOGRAPHED FROM THE DIRIGIBLE WHICH CAUSED IT BY DROPPING BOMBS: THE FIRE ON THE OASIS OF GHARIUNES

The 'fire' is presumably the white smoke in the centre of the photograph. (In fact I've posted posted a version of this image before, but this one is clearer and earlier.) A short article below explains further:

At the time of the Battle of March 12 [1912] near Benghazi, two Italian dirigibles made a flight from Tripoli beyond Zanzur and over the Turkish encampment at Zavia. When at a height of 1500 metres, they dropped twenty-five bombs on to the enemy's camp, causing great loss of life and confusion.

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The default explanation for the Australian mystery aeroplane panic of 1918 was a conspiracy theory:

they were enemy aircraft, deployed by German merchant raiders operating off the Australian coast, or perhaps flying from secret aerodromes deep in the bush. Either way they were thought to be collaborating with German spies on shore, as evidenced by the lights sometimes seen flashing signals out to sea. It was feared that Germany was undertaking reconnaissance in preparation for an attack of some kind, perhaps on shipping or even on the nation’s cities and industries.1

If you didn't buy this -- and after all, it wasn't actually true -- then what other explanations were there? Well, you might find a different conspiracy theory to be attractive: that the mystery aeroplanes had been faked by the Australian government on behalf of corrupt politicians and profiteering manufacturers.
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  1. Brett Holman, 'Dreaming war: airmindedness and the Australian mystery aeroplane scare of 1918', History Australia 10, no. 2 (August 2013): 180–201, at 185; doi:10.1080/14490854.2013.11668467 (free: submitted version, before peer review). [↩]

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Critical Survey has just published an early access version of my peer-reviewed article 'William Le Queux, the Zeppelin menace and the Invisible Hand' -- that's right, no subtitle! -- here. Here's the abstract:

In contrast to William Le Queux's pre-1914 novels about German spies and invasion, his wartime writing is much less well known. Analysis of a number of his works, predominantly non-fictional, written between 1914 and 1918 shows that he modified his perception of the threat posed by Germany in two ways. Firstly, because of the lack of a German naval invasion, he began to emphasise the more plausible danger of aerial attack. Secondly, because of the incompetent handling of the British war effort, he began to believe that an 'Invisible Hand' was responsible, consisting primarily of naturalised Germans. Switching form from fiction to non-fiction made his writing more persuasive, but he was not able to sustain this and he ended the war with less influence than he began it.

Unfortunately the publishing agreement doesn't allow me to upload a green open access version of the article for 24 months, but it's based on a post I wrote here a few years ago about Le Queux's wartime spyhunting in Soho and Surrey, so you can get a flavour by reading that. The expanded version includes more of Le Queux's conspiracy theorising, placing it in the context of his wartime literary output and the evolution of 'Hidden Hand' conspiracy theories on the British far right in the First World War.
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