1920s

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The other day I received an email from Andrew Gray, a reader of this blog, alerting me to the existence of a new online newspaper archive available at ukpressonline. I've used ukpressonline before for its complete runs of the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror, which were the most popular British dailies for most of the 1930s and 1940s. But it's not a free service. I don't mind paying, but the annual subscription rates are too prohibitive for me, and so when I do pay it's only for short-term access with a specific topic in mind. So it's not something I routinely draw upon.

But what Andrew pointed out (thanks Andrew!) was a new 'World War II' subscription package covering just the years 1933 to 1945, ie from the rise of Hitler to the end of the Second World War. It's only available by annual subscription, but I think £50.00 is more than reasonable for what it offers: not only the Express and the Mirror, but also the Yorkshire Post (one of the few conservative newspapers to take a stand against appeasement), the Daily Worker (owned by the Communist Party of Great Britain), and Action and Blackshirt (published by the British Union of Fascists and its successors). And it is promised that 'In the coming months, we aim to add major regional newspapers and some of the further-left press' (I would guess that the Yorkshire Post and the Daily Worker are the first of these, actually). This is a really excellent resource for anyone interested in the British press in this period; I've already signed up and started using it.
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The Scareship Age, 1892-1946

A couple of months ago, Alun Salt did a very nice thing for me: he unexpectedly assembled some of the posts I've written here about phantom airships into an e-book. Using that as the basis, I've had a go at learning how to do e-books myself. (Alun recommended using Jutoh, an e-book project manager, and I'm glad he did.) So I've tweaked things a bit; added a few of the recent phantom airship posts I've written recently, played with the cover image, and the result is The Scareship Age, 1892-1946, available in the two most common e-book formats: EPUB, an open format, and MOBI, the format used by Amazon's Kindle. You can download them here, from the Downloads page, or from the sidebar on Airminded's front page. They are of course free, as in Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.

I have tried this sort of thing before, with my Sudeten crisis posts, but that was as a PDF which is not really suited for e-books; and with all the images it turned out to be quite bloated at 5.6 Mb. The Scareship Age comes in at 0.5 Mb for the EPUB and 0.9 Mb for the MOBI, which is much better. Now that I have a better idea about how e-books work, I'll have another go at the Sudeten crisis. But not now!

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Flightpath, vol 22 no 4

I have an article in the May 2011 issue of Flightpath, an Australian warbirds magazine. It's on one of my pet interests, the fear of the commercial bomber between the wars. James Kightly, who will be familiar to regular commenters here as JDK, contributes a complementary look at the reality of transport-bomber conversions. There are many other articles of interest, including one on Tiger Force (also by James), along with some glorious photographs, so get into it! It's available in all good newsagents in Australia and New Zealand, and I suspect really, really good ones overseas.

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Illustrated London News, 6 September 1913, 363

A recent post at Ptak Science Books alerted me to the existence of page 363 of the Illustrated London News for 6 September 1913. Not that I was surprised by this in general terms, but I was unaware of what was on it: an artist's impression of a both a flying aircraft carrier -- which idea I've discussed before -- and an airship drone -- which I haven't.

As the images above and below show, the idea was that the 'parent dirigible' (which looks very much like a Zeppelin) would carry several of these 40-foot long 'crewless, miniature air-ships' slung underneath it, and then launch them when in range of a target (here a fortification). The smaller airship would then be controlled by radio to fly drop its bombs 'on any desired spot'.
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Aerial terminus of the White Moon Line

TRAVELLING OF THE FUTURE: THE BRITISH AERIAL TERMINUS OF THE WHITE MOON LINE -- The old order is passing. Already glimpses of the future of aerial transport, with all its mighty possibilities, are becoming visible. When the stricken nations return to a state of prosperity, great things are in store. As to what economic and commercial revolutions are latent in the development of flying, the most daring of us hesitates to speculate. The picture shows an aerial terminus of the White Moon Line, raised aloft over a seaport. This is no flat aerodrome, but a huge circular structure. Around its topmost circumference platforms swinging on a circular railed bed are carried by two rotating arms, on which the aero liners alight and from which they ascend. The arms are moved round as the wind changes, so that the aero liners descend and ascend facing it. These arms are inclined a little downwards to bring the liners more quickly to rest -- they alight up the slope -- and to assist them to gather speed more rapidly before the final breathless abandonment of the sloping platform and the upward rush into the heavens. On the left is seen a passenger lift with two cars which rise and sink continually, carrying passengers to and from the high embarking level. A mono-railway penetrates to the heart of the terminus; a footway runs between the tracks. An aero liner is seen just ascending, bound on some far journey; another is stationary, loading up. Inside the structure is a huge lift for lowering the aero liners for refitting and repair, and in its mysterious depths we can picture workshops lit by flickering arc lamps, where hundreds of mechanics work busily day and night... Perhaps some of the future aerial termini will be on the ground; but where a man can find no ground near the starting point, he will raise structures such as this. The sea-captains will look upwards at the air-captains, beholding the fulfilment of a great dream, dreamt by generations of wise men long passed away, who wondered because they knew that such great things would come to pass. From the original by Roderic Hill.

Source: Flight, 6 January 1921, 10-1.
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The Royal Australian Air Force turns 90 today. It was officially formed as an independent service out of the old Australian Flying Corps on 31 March 1921 (making it three years less one day younger than the Royal Air Force). At first it was just the Australian Air Force: it didn't get the Royal prefix until August, thus becoming the familiar RAAF (usually pronounced 'raff').

Why did Australia plump for an independent air arm? It went very early for this: of the other Dominions, still largely dependent on Britain for defence, Canada waited until 1924, New Zealand until 1934 and South Africa not until 1951 1920. The major powers were similarly unhurried: Italy's air arm went independent in 1923 but France waited until 1933; the United States and Japan didn't do so until after the Second World War.

According to Alan Stephens, The Royal Australian Air Force (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001), the prime minister, Billy Hughes, was particularly keen on aviation and pushed things along quickly. But there was no strategic theory of independent air power underpinning the precise form this would take. There was little concern about strategic bombing, hardly surprising as the arrival of an aeroplane from anywhere was front page news and potential enemies were many thousands of miles away. So the new air force was intended to be devoted to co-operation with the army and the navy, in support of Imperial defence and the Singapore strategy.

Interservice rivalry and finance were key to the RAAF's actual form. With limited funds available, a single service had the advantage of efficiency, avoiding duplication in flying schools, aircraft repair organisations and other overheads. It also meant that neither senior service would have to see its rival have control over the lion's share of aviation resources. They were happy to see a junior, weak organisation with little real independence, which could be relied upon to support them as needed.

One welcome and immediate result of the new service was jobs, as this list in the Mercury of 31 March shows. (Though there were complaints from ex-AFC men about the pay rates and conditions of employment.) Interestingly, among the usual propeller makers, cooks, machinists and so on, the RAAF declared that it had need of airship riggers and balloon basket makers. As far as I know, the RAAF never operated any airships (or balloons), but I would guess the idea would have been to use them for maritime reconnaissance and anti-submarine warfare.

Otherwise, the formation of the RAAF seems to have excited little interest in the in the Australian press (the most informative article I could find was from the Western Argus of 21 March). The British press paid even less attention: I found nothing in The Times, the Guardian or the Observer, and only one brief article in the 24 March issue Flight. Which strikes me as a bit odd, though perhaps it reflects the insubstantial nature of the shadow of the bomber (and military aviation in general) in Britain during the immediate post-war period.

So: many happy returns, RAAF -- at least until the end of war!

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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Golden fist, crushed jet

Libya now holds an unfortunate record. It is the country which has the longest experience of aerial bombardment. Libya was first bombed in 1911, by Italy; now, in 2011, it is being bombed by its own air force. That makes it just under a century from the first bomb to the latest.

It helps that Libya was the very first country to experience aerial bombardment from aeroplanes and from airships. I'm using the word 'country' here in a loose sense, as it was then part of the Ottoman Empire (technically, the provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica). Italian forces landed in Tripoli in early October 1911, after a (naval) bombardment. Its total air forces in Libya never totalled more than nine aeroplanes and two airships. The aeroplanes first carried out a bombing mission on 1 November 1911, attacking Ain Zara (one bomb) and Taguira (three bombs). The two airships didn't go into action until March 1912, but still managed to carry out over 300 sorties between them before the end of hostilities in October. The effect of airpower on the Italian victory was negligible, but a precedent was set.
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airminded,1920-2000

Following Ross' suggestion I've plugged airminded itself into the Google Ngram Viewer (for British English over 1920-2000 with a smoothing of 3). The word wasn't used until c. 1925 and grew in popularity until the end of the Second World War. It then began its long descent. Around 1960 its heyday was definitely over and by the late 1990s it was less popular than almost ever before. There's a noticeable dip in the years around 1940, which makes me wonder if the menace of aviation had temporarily overwhelmed its promise. But that's probably reading too much into it.

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Finally, something to justify the existence of the Internet. The Google Ngram Viewer takes the corpus of words formed by the Google Books dataset (i.e. books, journals, magazines, but not newspapers) and lets you plot the changes in frequency of selected ones over time. There are all sorts of interesting questions you could (in principle) answer with this tool, so let's give it a whirl.

aeroplane, airplane, 1890-2000

Here's a pretty basic one. Blue is aeroplane, red is airplane, the period is 1890-2000. (The smoothing in all these plots is 3 years.) Aeroplane was initially the more popular term, but airplane has predominated since about 1925. Note the peaks during the world wars -- airplane was 5 times more likely to be used in the Second World War than in the 1990s.

But we don't have to use the English corpus: there's also American English and British English. Here's the American version.
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One of the mysteries of Britain's fear of the bomber is why it wasn't a fear of the submarine instead. In the First World War Germany attacked Britain directly by air and indirectly by sea, but only the submarine blockade came anywhere close to knocking Britain out. The same was true of the Second World War, though the difference was less, as was the danger. Yet between the wars, it was the air menace which preoccupied the public mind, almost to the exclusion of the sea menace. I came across an article today which, although it doesn't directly address this question, does shed some light on it from the naval point of view: Joseph P. Maiolo, 'Deception and intelligence failure: Anglo-German preparations for U-boat warfare in the 1930s', Journal of Strategic Studies 22 (1999), 55-76.

The simple answer is the British development, mostly after 1918, of ASDIC. This is more familiar to us today as sonar, and in simple terms worked by sending out pulses of sound through the water and listening for the echoes as they reflect off submarine hulls. It promised much greater effectiveness than the passive hydrophones used up until then. The Royal Navy was understandably quite pleased with this and worked on trying to perfect it for operational use, albeit with limited success. What emerges from Maiolo's account is the way in which the Admiralty tried to manage the public flow of information about ASDIC for both domestic and foreign consumption. The point of this was to make foreign powers doubt the usefulness of submarines and so, hopefully, not build them.
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