Aircraft

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Glasgow Herald, 14 March 1941, 5

The big news today is that the latest Italian offensive against Greek forces in the Tepelini sector has been a disaster. War correspondents estimate 10,000 Italian casualties, including 2000 dead; yet 'it was stated in authoritative circles in London yesterday that the Italians do not appear to have made any perceptible progress' (5). This is despite (perhaps there's a hint of because of) Mussolini's presence at the front lines over the last few days, 'leading or encouraging the Italian troops'. Greek spirits are understandably high. Looking at the bigger picture in the Mediterranean, the Herald's military correspondent suggests that the Germans

are not over-anxious to commit their forces to an attack on Greece while Russia is dissatisfied. Turkey threatens to become actively hostile, and Yugoslavia is, at least, very restless.

The reported presence of three German divisions (or elements thereof) in Tripoli is puzzling. It will certainly bolster Italian morale in Libya after recent defeats there.

It is not likely that an offensive against the Army of the Nile is planned. But it may well be necessary in German interests to safeguard a buffer between British troops and those of the French African Empire.

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Glasgow Herald, 12 March 1940, 7

The Glasgow Herald, like many early-twentieth-century 'provincial' newspapers, made a serious effort to cover war and other international news, as well as reporting on national and local issues. (In fact, it almost seems more interested in what's happening overseas than it is in London or even Edinburgh.) Its highmindedness is also evident in its lack of interest in trivialities (no sports section today!) and in its rather staid appearance, with the outside pages taken up with classified ads, and the news and editorials at the centre of its twelve page. The Herald might be excused for its old-fashioned look: it was first published in 1783, making it two years older than The Times. (Though admittedly the Daily Mail, a jaunty newcomer, was like this too until the start of the war).

Above is the lead item in today's Herald, President Roosevelt's signing into law of the Lease-and-Lend Bill. This will allow (7)

the President to supply Britain and her Allies with almost unlimited supplies of guns, tanks, aeroplanes, ships, and all other war materials and goods.

In fact, he has already begun to do so, approving the transfer to Britain of 'the first allotment of Army and Navy material'. What this consists of was not revealed, but information from 'Well-informed circles in Washington' suggests that it may include 'Army and Navy 'planes, flying fortresses, and patrol bombers' as well as 'ships, tanks, and machine-guns'. And Roosevelt is asking Congress for another $7 billion to buy more weapons for Britain after that.
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Rutland Reindeer

A recent comment by J Campbell raised the question of whether Nevil Shute's 1949 novel No Highway was in fact a prediction of the De Havilland Comet airliner's metal fatigue problems, which led to two crashes ('hull losses', in industry parlance) in 1954. My response was that it seemed unlikely that Shute had any particular insider knowledge which could have led to such a prediction (made before the prototype had even flown) given that he had already been out of the aircraft manufacturing business for some years. (And if he did have reason to think that the Comet would have metal fatigue, why not warn de Havilland instead of writing a novel?) My own suggestion was that instead No Highway might have been loosely inspired by the R101 disaster back in 1930, a formative moment in Shute's life. Having read the novel now, I don't have any actual evidence for this, but there is an intriguing additional parallel which may have been overlooked (or not, I'm no Shute scholar).

In Shute's novel -- spoilers ahead -- the tailplane of the (fictional) Rutland Reindeer (seen above, from the 1951 film version No Highway In The Sky) is believed by an RAE scientist named Theodore Honey to be susceptible to metal fatigue. The story revolves around the efforts of Honey and Scott, his superior at Farnborough, to prove that an earlier Reindeer crash was due to metal fatigue and so ground the Reindeer fleet before disaster strikes. The obstacles include a slapdash investigation of the previous accident, entrenched interests at the Reindeer's manufacturer Rutland and its operator CATO, the (also fictional) Commonwealth Atlantic Transport Organisation, the novelty of Honey's fatigue theory (inspired by recent advances in nuclear physics!), and Honey's own diffident character and his eclectic interests, including pyramidology, British Israelism, the Second Coming (predicted for 1994), interplanetary rocket travel and spiritualism. Of which more in a moment.
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I've previously posted some of Gorden Cullen's artwork for the Tecton Group's 1939 book Planned A.R.P.. Here are some more of his cute drawings dealing with an awful subject. In this case, he is illustrating the 'general agreement among experts' on the threat posed by the bomber.

(a) The range, speed, and carrying capacity of bombers have increased enormously since the last war.1

Planned ARP

This was a commonplace observation and was demonstrably true, as anyone who knew anything at all about aviation would know.

(b) In order to avoid anti-aircraft fire, balloon barrages, etc., the attacking bombers will probably fly at a height of not less than 12,000 to 15,000 feet. Although the pilot might be able to dive to a much lower altitude, he would, in all probability, be afraid to do so, as the risk would not seem worth while.

This is somewhat unusual; it was more common to denigrate the effective of anti-aircraft defences. The experience of the Spanish civil war might have been responsible for this, though the author(s) do say that the war there isn't likely much of a guide as the conditions are so different there.
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  1. Tecton, Planned A.R.P.: Based on the Investigation of Structural Protection Against Air Attack in the Metropolitan Borough of Finsbury (London: Architectural Press, 1939), 14. [↩]

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Manchester Guardian, 3 January 1941, 5

A Bomber Command raid Wednesday night against Bremen, Germany's second-largest seaport, is described by the Manchester Guardian as 'R.A.F. Answers London Fire Raid' (5). The dropping of 20,000 incendiary bombs seems to be the basis for this. Whether the Bremen raid would technically count as a 'reprisal' (from the British point of view, anyway) is doubtful since the accompanying article from the Air Ministry News Service -- also reprinted in full by The Times (4) -- strongly emphasises the military nature of the targets:

The chief objectives of the night were the great shipbuilding yards in which warships of all kinds, and especially submarines, are under construction, the Deutsche Vacuum Oil refinery, railway communications, warehouses beside the harbours, the Gebrüder Nielson rice and starch mills, the Focke-Wulf air frame factory, and many other industrial targets.

All of these targets were reported to have been hit, in some cases very hard. The fires from the Gebrüder Nielson mills could be seen from the Dutch border, and the whole affair was said in one combat report to be 'Much greater than Mannheim', the previous benchmark of a successful raid. (The Air Ministry modestly describes this one as a 'brilliant offensive operation.)
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The Manchester Guardian might have allowed itself a moment for self-congratulation here, as its previous call for compulsory fire-watchers appears to have been heeded (5). (Though it was not alone, as an article on page 10 quotes similar commentary from The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Express and the Daily Mail.) The decision was broadcast last night by Herbert Morrison, the Minister for Home Security; on the reading of The Times it was 'as a result of the fires in the City of London caused by incendiary bombs' (6). Morrison himself said (4):

I must say this plainly to each one of you: it is your duty to yourself, to your neighbours and friends, to your City and your country, to guard your own home, business, or factory, from fire bombs. You cannot stop a high-explosive bomb from bursting: but you can stop a fire bomb from starting a fire.

The fire services are too few to do this everywhere, and are anyway needed to fight big fires. But while Morrison invokes the volunteer spirit of the Home Guard, he also invokes the principle of compulsion:

Compulsion will apply to every one, of every grade -- managers and office workers, as well as manual workers -- as the needs of the situation may require. Factories and businesses of all kinds, large and small, will be subject to severe penalties for any neglect of their obligations.

Even households 'must, if possible, provide at least one member, man or woman, for its party'. The war is increasingly forcing the British people to subordinate their own will to that of the state.
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Cmnd. 124, Defence: Outline of Future Policy, is one of the most famous (and infamous) documents in British military history. It's better known as the 1957 Defence White Paper, or the Sandys White Paper after the Minister of Defence responsible for it, Duncan Sandys. It ended National Service, committed Britain to nuclear deterrence, and foreshadowed drastic cuts in conventional force levels. Aviation bore the brunt of these last. Fighter Command was to be abolished (though in the end it won a reprieve, at least until 1967) and a large number of advanced fighter types under development for the RAF were cancelled, including the Avro 720, the Fairey Delta 2, the Hawker Siddeley P.1121, and the Saunders-Roe SR.177. Only the English Electric P.1 and TSR-2 were spared (the latter only temporarily). Unsurprisingly, all this was controversial then and remains so today for those who remember such things. Certainly, the White Paper was a cost-cutting exercise: Sandys had a brief from the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, to find savings of £100 million from the defence estimates. But my interest here is the intellectual context of the Sandys White Paper: it wasn't just about saving money.
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I've recently been reading Peter Ewer's Wounded Eagle: The Bombing of Darwin and Australia's Air Defence Scandal, which I found to be unexpectedly interesting, but not always in a good way. Wounded Eagle has much less about the Second World War than I'd thought: much of the early part of the book is taken up with a detailed analysis of the origins of the Empire Air Mail Scheme (EAMS) in the 1930s, and then there's a long account of the Royal Australian Air Force's pre-war procurement policy. There's a lot of interesting stuff here: one particular surprise for me was the accidental way in which British radar research was accidentally revealed to the Australian government by a young physicist returning home from studying at Cambridge. The Australians asked if this was true, and the British sheepishly said that it was and only then began sharing its data with the Dominions! Even more surprising, perhaps, is that the RAAF, having got its hands on some British radar sets in 1940, showed next to no interest in them. Only the Australian Army did anything with them, for use with coastal defence batteries.

Ewer's book is full of such pointed criticisms, and that's the problem. This polemic has two targets: the British, and pro-British Australian politicians. The latter are outside my area, though I'll talk about them later. But I like to think I know a bit about the British by now, particularly when it comes to aeroplanes, so let's start there.
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Observer, 6 October 1940, 7

For the third week in a row the Observer reserves its biggest headlines for a story about diplomacy rather than war -- here the Hitler-Mussolini Brenner Pass meeting and subsequent threats made against Britain in the Axis press. This is deemed by the diplomatic correspondent to be a 'bogy-war' aimed at European neutrals, an 'elaborate propaganda designed to persuade the victims that Germany and Italy will win the war, and will show no mercy to those who oppose them' (7).
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Let's look at how the British aviation press is covering the air war, by way of today's issue of Flight, its longest-running periodical (and official organ of the Royal Aero Club). The front cover, along with the first and the last few pages, carry advertisements for various aviation-related products. Here Titanine Ltd is promoting 'the world's premier dope', cleverly incorporating an appropriate and patriotic symbol in the form of an RAF roundel.
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