Air defence

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Times, 30 August 1940, 4

Interestingly, after yesterday's coordinated pro-bombing campaign, today's headlines in The Times (4) emphasise the efforts of Bomber Command over those of Fighter Command. In particular, a raid on Berlin on Wednesday night (or Thursday morning) is described in some detail. A 'large number of bombs, high explosive and incendiary' were dropped 'on a series of carefully selected military objectives and on works vital to war production', including a power station and railway yards. A pair of squadrons made a 'special attack' on an (unspecified) objective just four miles from Berlin's centre. A number of the aircrew (all of whom returned safely) gave accounts of the mission, including this 'young pilot officer':

We bombed at 24.00 hours -- dead on midnight (he said). Somebody had been there before us. When we arrived we found the target well on fire. We could see it when we were 25 minutes' flying time away from the target. We came in more or less North to South and put our stick of bombs down just to the left of this big fire. Then four more fires started. They were burning with very bright white lights. Altogether we were cruising round over Berlin for about half an hour.

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Manchester Guardian, 29 August 1940, 5

The daylight air battles over the south of England intensified yesterday, as these headlines from the Manchester Guardian (5) show. The RAF shot down 24 enemy aircraft while losing 12 of its own (4 of the pilots are safe). Churchill visited the south-east coast and saw some of the action. He was driven out from Dover to inspect the site of one crashed fighter:

An officer saluted as the Premier drove up. "Is it one of theirs or one of ours?" asked Mr Churchill, indicating the still-burning wreckage. "One of theirs, sir," replied the officer. "Good," exclaimed Mr. Churchill. "That's another one off the list."

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Times, 27 August 1940, 4

Today we're reading The Times. London was again menaced by German bombers last night, though it seems bombs fell only on the 'outskirts' (4), in particular 'one bomb' hit 'a building in the outskirts of London'. Folkestone was much harder hit by a daytime raid in which 'German bombers swooped out of the sun [...] people saw the bombs leaving the racks as the raiders dived to within a few hundred feet of the roof tops'. Three people were killed, laundry workers all. British fighters chased the bombers ('believed to be Messerschmitt Jaguar bomber-fighters') out over the Channel, claiming three.
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Observer, 25 August 1940, 5

These are the headlines from the Observer (5). Yesterday was another good day for the RAF, which on Air Ministry figures shot down 45 German aircraft with 10 of its own missing. There were 'Battles all day long':

Until mid afternoon the attacks were concentrated on aerodromes in East Kent. Then large numbers of German bombers and fighters were flung into two new mass raids.

While some of them were attacking aerodromes almost up to the outskirts of London, others were raiding the Portsmouth area.

The Portsmouth raiders were largely turned back by 'an intensive A.A. barrage' assisted by fighters. Casualties 'are believed to be relatively few in view of the number of bombs dropped', though a cinema was hit during a showing, burying some patrons in rubble.
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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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In lieu of a more substantial post, here are some flying aeroplanes. Clicking the above picture will take you to a British Pathé newsreel issued on 7 July 1938, showing 'Britain's latest air fighter', also known as the Supermarine Spitfire Mk I. Unfortunately the narration is missing, but I think this is the first production Spitfire, K9787 (at least, I can make out a -87 serial number in places), which first flew in May 1938. That looks like Jeffrey Quill in the cockpit about a third of the way through. A photo on page 18 of the 28 June issue of The Times shows a Spitfire in flight, noting that it was 'undergoing acceptance trials', and the newsreel footage was presumably part of the same Air Ministry propaganda exercise. Other newsreel companies produced similar items.

This was the British public's introduction to the Spitfire, at least on a large scale. The prototype, K5054, was on display at the 1936 RAF Pageant, but it took two years to get into production, and in those years biplanes still formed the air defence of Britain. I'm surprised that the British government didn't make more of their fast new fighters (the Hurricane debuted only a little earlier) in propaganda terms in late 1938. Of course, there weren't very many of them yet. But just the sight of them cavorting across cinema screens might have increased public confidence in Fighter Command, and weakened support for appeasement. On second thoughts, perhaps I shouldn't be surprised after all.

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On the last night of January 1916, a large force of seven Zeppelins crossed over the Wash into Norfolk, heading for the industrial cities of the Midlands. Unsure of their location, most of them instead dropped their bombs on relatively unimportant targets. But at least they got home okay. The defending aircraft of the RFC and RNAS had an awful night: 22 sorties resulted in six aircraft being written off, two squadron commanders killed and no contacts with the enemy.

Or at least ... no confirmed contacts with the enemy. Four pilots did report seeing something, but they were well to the south of the probable Zeppelin flightpaths, over London and Essex, and so their reports were dismissed by those higher-up as mistaken identities, phantom airships. At 7.40pm, Lieutenant R. S. Maxwell saw 'an artificial light' north of his B.E.2c while 10000 feet above London, and gave chase before losing it in clouds. 2nd Lieutenant C. A. Ridley, another B.E.2c pilot, also saw a 'moving light' over London at about the same time, and so they may have actually seen each other. Later in the night, at around 9pm, Flight Sub-Lieutenant H. McClelland (also flying a B.E.2c) also thought he saw 'a Zeppelin' by searchlight over London.

Strangest of all was the report of Flight Sub-Lieutenant J. E. Morgan, an RNAS pilot who sortied in his B.E.2c from Rochford in Essex at about a quarter to nine. At 5000 feet, slightly above and to starboard, he spotted

a row of what appeared to be lighted windows which looked something like a railway carriage with the blinds drawn.

(This is apparently a quote from Morgan's after-action report.) Thinking that this was a Zeppelin only a hundred feet away -- and presumably having no time to maneuver for a better shot -- he fired his Webley at it! It then seemed that 'the lights alongside rose rapidly' and disappeared. Morgan then started looking for somewhere to land: he saw some lights below which he thought was Southend Pier but turned out to be a Dutch steamer off Thameshaven. He managed to put down safely and flew back to Rochford the following day.
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If anyone came close to creating a death ray weapon by the end of the Second World War, it was the Japanese army. It wouldn't have helped them much, however, as they weren't at war with rabbits. According to Richard Overy in The Air War 1939-1945 (Washington: Potomac Books, 2005 [1980]), 195:

The lack of satisfactory evaluative machinery led for example to the diversion of considerable resources to the search for a 'death ray'; a search that Western powers had abandoned in the 1930s. By the end of the war the Japanese 'ray' could kill a rabbit after five minutes at a distance of 1,000 yards.

The reference Overy gives for this is the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey, report 15, appendix XX, but this appears to be in error as that's online and has only ten appendices. According to this site, report 63 (Japanese Air Weapons and Tactics) does in fact discuss the death ray. Unfortunately I can't find that one (not for free, any way).
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[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

'To-day and To-morrow' was a series of over a hundred essays on 'the future' of a diverse range of subjects, which were published in pamphlet form by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. between 1924 and 1931. The authors are equally varied: some were acknowledged experts in their fields, others seem to have been chosen for their ability to provoke. Some of the 'To-day and To-morrow' essays have since attained classic status; most have been forgotten. But as a whole they are an impressive testimony to a vibrant, wideranging (and idiosyncratic) kind of British futurism, and I think they deserve more attention. Some of them have been reprinted from time to time, and if you're rich you can buy nearly all of them in collected volumes through Routledge, but otherwise there are so many they are are hard to track down. So I've tried to compile a definitive list of the series' titles (which are mostly classical allusions) with links to online sources for the texts and some sort of author biography, where available. Google Books has many of them, but only snippets or previews, so I've linked to other sources where possible. Additions and corrections are welcome.

Physically, they were very small books (pott octavo, to be precise), easy to slip into a pocket, and numbered only a hundred pages or so, in large type and generous margins. Their price was 2/6, about the same price as a cheap novel, but five times the price of the later, hugely successful Penguins. So they did not attract a mass readership, but do seem to have been much read by the chattering classes. (See Peter J. Bowler, Science for All: The Popularization of Science in Early Twentieth-Century Britain (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2009), 139.) Many of the titles went through multiple impressions. And at least one was discussed in the House of Commons.
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So we've seen American claims of a British secret air defence weapon in the Battle of Britain; American claims of British secret air defence weapons in the mid-1930s; and American ideas for superweapons to break the deadlock of the First World War. What do I mean suggest by these examples? Why have I called these posts 'The superweapon and the Anglo-American imagination'?

Actually, the phrase 'Anglo-American imagination' is misleading, because I think the British and the American imaginations were significantly different, at least when it comes to technology and war. And the difference is this: at least in the period of the two world wars, Americans found it much easier to imagine that technology could help them win wars than the British, who were more pessimistic and tended to see new technologies as a threat. It's easy to get into trouble with big generalisations like this, and I definitely can't quantify it in any useful way. But I don't think it's accidental that it American journalists imagined British superweapons more readily than British journalists, or that American science magazines had superweapons on their covers, and British ones didn't.
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