Air defence

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Do these photos, taken early in the Battle of Britain, show a British mystery weapon? (I could just say "no", but that wouldn't be very interesting, would it.)

Evening Independent, 14 August 1940, 1

The above photo appeared on the front page of an American newspaper, the St Petersburg Evening Independent, on 14 August 1940. The caption reads:

This picture taken Aug. 11 shows, according to British censor-approved caption, a German raider plane "caught amidst an anti-aircraft barrage of bursting shells" -- somewhere over the British coast. The balloon-shaped object in lower left-hand corner was not identified, but London caption emphasized it was not a balloon. Whether it was a "mystery weapon" of any nature could not be ascertained. Picture was sent from London by cable as swarms of German raiders continued to batter the British coast.

The same photo, rotated 180 degrees and cropped somewhat differently, appeared on the front page of the Spokane Daily Chronicle the previous day:
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Here are a couple of interesting but spurious claims about new weapons from 1939, which I've come across in my recent reading.

The first is from the Melbourne Argus of 19 January 1939. It's very brief, no more than a simple statement that the Soviet Union has announced that it has developed a death ray. This prompted a response on 20 January (p. 10) from T. H. Laby, Professor of Natural Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. (I attended many a physics seminar in the Laby Theatre, back in the day.)

"Over and over again claims have been made to the discovery of a death-ray, and there has never been any substance in them," he said. The whole electromagnetic spectrum, from the longest wireless waves to the shortest X-rays, is known to physicists, and none of them could be used as death-rays at any intensity at which it is possible to produce them.

Laby allowed that X-rays and sound rays (the latter not, of course, electromagnetic waves but pressure waves) could in theory be used to kill, but not in practice. He was right to be sceptical of the Soviet claim, although there is always the possibility of something new coming along to confound elderly but distinguished scientists (as actually happened with the laser in 1960). And the report from Moscow was so sketchy that all he has to go on is the term 'death ray', which as I've said before doesn't mean its primary effect was to kill directly. As for the report itself, who knows whether the Soviets actually made this claim officially, or whether it was garbled or not. But in such uncertain times, a little misdirection about defence capabilities couldn't hurt a friendless country.

The second dubious claim was made by H. G. Wells in an article for the London Daily Chronicle of 6 March 1939, which was reprinted in his Travels of a Republican Radical in Search of Hot Water. Having returned to Britain from a visit to Australia, Wells notes that

War does not come. That is due to the spreading realisation that the catastrophic anticipations of London, Paris, Berlin and indeed most places, being turned into gigantic holocausts, shambles, heaps of ruin and so forth have been much exaggerated.1

I'd agree with Wells that there was such a 'spreading realisation', but the main reason he gives for this is surprising: it's the invention of the 'air-mine', which seems to be carried by balloon:

The air-mine is a small, unobtrusive floater carrying a high explosive charge, detonators and suitable entanglements, that can be set to drift at any height. And it just drifts about with the wind. It is not merely unobtrusive but, as armaments go today, relatively inexpensive. You can send these things up in shoals, in clouds, in curtains, and aerial mine-sweepers have yet to be invented.2

I don't know where Wells got this from. As far as I know, the British had no such device (although experiments were carried out with something similar during the war, at Frederick Lindemann's insistence). Maybe it was a rumour put about by somebody official in order to boost confidence in air defence? If so, it looked like it worked on Wells, though it hardly made him look on the government with favour:

The fact remains that it is possible to cancel out the air, and that this present waste on excavations, tin-pot shelters and the like is either bare-faced jobbery or patent imbecility ....3

So there are two odd claims, both false and (maybe) both propaganda. Both certainly forgotten today.

  1. H. G. Wells, Travels of a Republican Radical in Search of Hot Water (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939), 68-9. [↩]
  2. Ibid., 69. [↩]
  3. Ibid. [↩]

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Air War and How to Wage It

Noel Pemberton Billing has received a bit of criticism around here, and mostly for good reason. He couldn't design a decent aeroplane for toffee, he peddled lurid conspiracy theories, he was a relentless self-promoter. But I don't think he was a complete fool. He clearly had a fertile imagination (overly so, Maud Allen would have said) and sometimes he was on the money. Take his ideas for Britain's air defence, as expounded in his 1916 pamphlet Air War: How to Wage It.

There were two major problems at the time. The first was that Zeppelins were raiding British cities and weren't being intercepted, despite the existence of a substantial home defence establishment. It wasn't that they couldn't be intercepted, but that they couldn't be intercepted consistently. (Shooting them down was another a problem, of course.) The problem was one of command, control, communications and intelligence (C3I, though you can add letters to taste). Information about incoming Zeppelins and their locations usually wasn't timely or accurate, making it hard for fighters to find them in the dark. And most squadrons were based near the coast, meaning that the enemy was usually past the defences by the time the alarm was raised.

The second problem was that because the targets of the raiders were difficult to determine -- and for that matter, the Zeppelin crews themselves often didn't know where they were and dropped their bombs almost at random -- as a precaution alerts had to be sounded and lights blacked-out over large areas of the country. This disrupted sleep and production far more than was necessary.

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A few articles have been appearing in the British press over the last few days about Harry Grindell Matthews, who (among many other things) claimed in 1924 to have invented a death ray. There's no actual news attached to these stories, as far as I can tell, other than the fact that a new biography of the man has just come out (Jonathan Foster, The Death Ray: The Secret Life of Harry Grindell Matthews). In them, and presumably in the book, Grindell Matthews is portrayed as an unrecognised scientific genius who will now hopefully get his due. While he's certainly a fascinating figure, and one who pops up in my thesis, I think he was another of those inventors who was as much showman as scientist, someone who claimed to have invented many amazing things but which somehow rarely seem to have resulted in a finished product.

The death ray itself is a good example of this. It was claimed to be an electromagnetic weapon which could kill over long ranges, or explode gunpowder, or stop an internal combustion engine. The last ability was key to the possible use of the death ray as an anti-aircraft weapon, and this is what most press attention at the time focused on. There was a press campaign waged on Grindell Matthews' behalf which clamoured for the government to acquire this weapon for Britain. Officials from the Air Ministry were given a demonstration, but were unimpressed. The government was not entirely uninterested, and even offered him a thousand pounds for a successful test under their own conditions. But Grindell Matthews lost patience and hopped over to Paris to hawk the death ray there. He came back to Britain, made a film with Pathé called The Death Ray, and eventually gave up and went to America.

This sounds a lot like charlatanism. Grindell Matthews claimed much for his invention, but was reluctant to submit it to reasonable scrutiny, even when offered when more than fair compensation for his time. On the other hand, the Wright brothers, for example, had been just as suspicious when trying to sell their flyers to the world's militaries, and ended up not making a whole lot of money from their inspiration and perspiration. So such behaviour wasn't unprecedented. On the other other hand, the reason why the Wrights didn't profit fully from their invention of flight was that other people duplicated it, refined it, improved it and marketed it. If Grindell Matthews was just a bad businessman, then why didn't a practical death ray ever appear from somebody else's lab?

It certainly wasn't because nobody else was trying. Here's a (partial) list of others who claimed to have invented a death ray before 1939:
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The 19th Military History Carnival has been posted at Military History and Warfare. For my pick from this edition I can't go past the first entry, on the interwar RAF at Thoughts on Military History. It's part of the first chapter of his thesis, and it's a very good overview of the financial and operational problems faced by the RAF. I particularly like Ross's point that the perception that the RAF was all about strategic bombing was never wholly true -- it always devoted brainpower and scarce resources to problems such as army co-operation. And the perception has distorted the historiography since then. If I had to quibble, then it would be with this part:

The RAF also had to deal with the gradually changing geo-strategic situation in Europe. For example, in the mid-twenties, in a period of deteriorating relation with France, the RAF had to deal with the potential threat of what has been described as the French air menace. This, coupled with the emergence of the threat of Germany in the 1930’s led to the materialisation of a distinct home fighter force based around the concept of strategic air defence. This force starting out in 1923 as the Home Defence Air Force with a projected strength of 52 squadrons would eventually emerge as RAF Fighter Command.

There's nothing actually incorrect here, but from my own parochial perspective I'd want to stress that while it is true that HDAF did eventually lead to Fighter Command, in theory it was supposed to be composed of 2 bomber squadrons for every fighter squadron. It was to be a striking force, not primarily an air defence force: it would defend Britain by bombing the enemy. Of course, in practice it had more fighter squadrons than bombers, because they were cheaper to build, and once the supposed French threat disappeared there was no urgency to complete the whole HDAF programme until Hitler came along. But as I say, nothing in what Ross wrote actually contradicts any of that, it's just me being nit-picky :)

Bonus! Because I forgot to nominate anything for the Carnival this time around, here's one I would have nominated from The Bioscope. It's about the 1916 film The Battle of the Somme, which was recently issued on DVD by the Imperial War Museum. A hugely important film and a very illuminating post.

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One of the things I love about the official history of the RFC and RAF in the First World War is all the maps -- multi-panel fold-out jobs showing where bombs fell in London during the Gotha raids, or the Allied front in Macedonia. That's not to mention the accompanying slip-cases stuffed full of more maps of the paths taken by Zeppelin raiders and the like. I could pore over these for hours ...

Here are a couple of the maps (or parts thereof) showing two different kinds of barrages associated with the air defence of Britain.

Aeroplane barrage line. December, 1916.

The first one is entitled 'Aeroplane barrage line. December, 1916.' It's too big to show effectively, so I've just reproduced a portion showing the coast of Lincolnshire and Yorkshire. The red squares show home defence squadron HQs: 33 Squadron at Gainsborough and 76 Squadron at Ripon. The red triangles are flight stations, the red stars flight stations with searchlights, the blue circles are searchlight stations under squadron control ('aeroplane lights') and the black circles are warning control centres (Hull).

As I've discussed before, artillery barrages weren't the only kinds of barrages. Originally they seem to have just been barriers or walls of some kind (barrage originally referred to a dam). Here the barrage is composed of aeroplanes and searchlights, a wall erected to hopefully bar Zeppelins coming in over the North Sea from reaching the industrial cities behind the line. And it does look like a barrier: on the full map it stretches from Suttons Farm (later renamed Hornchurch) near London all the way up to Innerwick, east of Edinburgh (with extensions in Norfolk and Kent). But it's not a physical barrage, for the most part -- it's aerodromes and searchlights. Previously, home defence squadrons had been placed close to target areas, because of doubts about night navigation and interception. Experience had shown that these problems weren't as great as previously thought:

Now that it was clear the aeroplane patrols could be extended, it was suggested that the Flights situated near Birmingham, Sheffield and Leeds should be moved farther east as a step towards the ultimate establishment of a barrage-line of aeroplanes and searchlights parallel with the east coast of England.1

This system worked very well against Zeppelins (as one indication, note the steep drop in casualties due to airship raids from 1917 on). But not so well against Gothas.
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  1. H. A. Jones, The War in the Air: Being the Story of the Part Played in the Great War by the Royal Air Force, volume 3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), 166. The map faces 170. [↩]

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This is the talk I gave at Earth Sciences back in May. It's long and picture heavy and much of it will be be familiar to regular readers, but some people expressed some interest in it so here it is. I've lightly edited it, mainly to correct typos in my written copy. I've put in links to the Boswell drawings because they're under copyright, and I've replaced one photo because I realised it was of British Army Aeroplane No. 1b, not British Army Aeroplane No. 1a! How embarrassing.

Facing Armageddon: Britain and the Bomber, 1908-1941

Today I'm going to give you an overview of my PhD thesis topic. My broad area is the history of military aviation in the early twentieth century, so first I'll give you a little background on that.

Wright Flyer (1903)

The first heavier-than-air manned flight was made by the Wright brothers in 1903, as you can see here. Within a few years, countries around the world started thinking about how they could use this new technology for warfare.
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R33 and Grebe

Everybody loves flying aircraft carriers -- well, I do, anyway! Above is the closest the British got to the concept. In October 1926, the R33 (above) was used to carry and launch two Gloster Grebe fighters (below). These were relatively heavy aircraft, weighing over a ton each; earlier experiments had used only a single, lighter aeroplane. Although the trials seem to have been successful, I don't think any of the R100, the R101 or the planned R102 had any capacity for trapeze-launched aeroplanes.

What use might a flying aircraft carrier have been? An article in The Times explained that, should the experiment prove successful:

the first result is that the airship can carry an effective means of defence against other aircraft. Thus its value as a long-distance reconnaissance vessel, able to operate for long periods away from any protection, is increased; while and obvious corollary is that the future airships of 5,000,000 cubic feet capacity, with loads of 20 tons or more, can become aircraft carriers of the air. Six or more machines could probably be slung under the vessel and taken speedily to any threatened point in the Empire; or, alternatively, the interior space of the vessel might be designed to take aircraft with their wings folded for compact stowage.1

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  1. The Times, 20 October 1926, p. 13. [↩]

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Some more plots from the talk I gave the other way. I was trying to think of a way to illustrate in concrete terms the problem of speed for the air defence of Britain. I came up with the following:

Bomber time to London vs. fighter time to intercept height

Simply put, it shows the length of time it would have taken for an attacking bomber to fly from the coast to London (in blue) -- call it the crossing time -- and the time it would take taken for a defending fighter to climb high enough to intercept (in red) -- call it the intercept time. And how these changed over time, obviously. As can be seen, the fighters generally had enough time to climb high enough to intercept the bombers before they got to London, but the margin decreased over time, from 15 or so minutes during the First World War, to less than 5 in the Second.

But all this is not straightforward so I'll explain further. To begin with, the data is slightly dodgy. It's mostly drawn from the same source as this, which is fine as far as it goes. But that means that I'm showing how long it would have taken British bombers to penetrate from the coast to London, which was not really a great worry. Having said that, it's probably reasonable to assume that the performance of British bombers was roughly in line with those used by Continental air forces. (And the RAF's own air defence exercises had to make this assumption, too, because borrowing somebody else's air force for a day wasn't feasible.) One day I'll create a dataset for European aircraft ...
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The Royal Air Force is 90 years old today. It was formed from the merger of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service on 1 April 1918 (yes, April Fool's Day), as the result of an Act of Parliament. This was historic. The RAF may not have been the world's first independent air force to become independent of military or naval control: the Finnish Air Force apparently beat it by less than a month. But as the FAF started out with just one aeroplane (and that liberated from Sweden), and the RAF with thousands, the British experiment was the riskier. (Particularly given that -- by chance -- it came in the middle of a massive German offensive on the Western Front.) The British example was assuredly more influential than the Finnish, too. Most air forces around the world are now independent, though the fashion took a while to catch on (the Dominion air forces mostly became independent in the 1920s, as did Italy's; France and Germany followed in the 1930s; the US and Japan fought the Second World War without an independent air force).

I've never been able to form a clear picture of just how smoothly the merger between the RFC and RNAS went. One would expect there to be some problems in integrating branches from two services with very different traditions, cultures, routines, doctrines, equipment and so on, but it doesn't seem to have been much of a problem. There were some longer-term issues -- in 1922, P. R. C. Groves complained about former naval men on the Air Staff, who didn't understand the RAF's unique needs, and equally complained that the RAF still had an Army mindset, at least partly a dig at Hugh Trenchard, a late convert to the idea of an independent air force (who had always been devoted to the Army's needs during the war, and in Groves's view, at least, had obstructed the work of the Independent Force while its commander in 1918). Since the RFC was much larger than the RNAS, this was probably inevitable to start with. Certainly for the first few years of its existence, the RAF had Army-style ranks, and allowed its officers to wear their RFC khaki uniforms until they wore out (which they were probably keen to do, as the first RAF uniform was a very unpopular pale blue). In 1919 the RAF adopted its own rank structure, actually more reminiscent of the Navy's -- 'flight-lieutenant' came directly from the RNAS, where it was a simple modification of the equivalent rank of 'lieutenant'; 'group captain' is equivalent to the Navy's 'captain', and both are much higher in rank to the Army's 'captain'. Of course, the senior services were jealous of their new sibling: there was a concerted attempt to smother it in 1921. This failed, but eventually the idea that the air was indivisible was eroded. The Fleet Air Arm became part of the Navy in 1937, partly undoing the unification of 1917. And in the Second World War, the Army began to acquire some air assets too (twelve squadrons of observation aircraft, lots of gliders).
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