I recently read Sonya O. Rose's Which People's War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), which is interesting on such subjects as anti-Semitism during the Blitz. But I kept being drawn back to the front cover, for a completely trivial reason. The illustration is from a 1941 poster designed by Philip Zec (the Daily Mirror's political cartoonist), 'Women of Britain, come into the factories'. The bombers in flying in the stream over the woman's head are clearly highly stylised, and nearly all identical. But one of them is different, the one above her right arm. In the following close-up, it's the one on the far left:
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Aircraft
The superweapon and the Anglo-American imagination — II
In June 1935, the Daily Express ran a story about three 'secret British air devices'. The source was a story in the Chicago Tribune by that paper's London correspondent, John Steele:
The devices are declared to be a new "mirage" smoke screen, a new seventeen-foot long anti-aircraft rifle, and a robot airplane which, controlled by wireless, can charge an enemy formation.1.
The bare descriptions perhaps don't sound so improbable, but the details ... well, judge for yourself. 'Mirage' was composed of different coloured smokes which created a decoy townscape:
"Brick red, yellow, grey, brown, and black smoke fumes, spreading across the landscape horizontally at different heights from the ground, or, as in the case of the black smoke, rising vertically in columns, create a complete illusion of houses, factory chimney stacks, streets, rivers, and gardens.2
This level of detail and control over smoke seems improbable to me. But supposedly Mirage had been tested in exercises, and had completely fooled some RAF bombers which had been ordered to 'bomb' Croydon; instead they dropped their bombs twenty miles away on open fields!
How about the AA rifle? According to Steele, it was 17 feet long, had a range of 20,000 feet and fired cartridges weighing 39 ounces (2.4 pounds). Again, this isn't too implausible, on the face of it. But wait:
It is precisely like a giant Lee-Enfield with similar sighting apparatus.
"There is an artificial shoulder for the rifle made of rubber, while the rifleman lies on a small platform above the weapon and takes sight. No human frame could support the recoil.2
It doesn't sound like any AA gun I've heard of, but I suppose it could be a garbled description of some predecessor to the 3.75 inch QF. It's a bizarre mental image though; and iron sights wouldn't be much use at 20,000 feet.
As for the robotic Drake:
This airplane, rising above a bombing squadron flying in formation, can keep up a perpetual hail of machine-gun fire, the firing being done automatically under remote control.
"The robot can be heavily loaded with high explosive and from below made to charge like a bull into a formation, and then be exploded by wireless.
"The explosives, projecting inflammable bullets, would fire the [fuel] tanks of the enemy, or even, if close enough, turn the enemy turtle.2
No robot fighter aircraft like this existed in 1935 (although the the DH.82B Queen Bee, a radio-controlled variant of the Tiger Moth, was in use by then as a target tug, and became public around then). It does sound something like Ram, a project under development by the Air Ministry in the late 1920s but which was cancelled in 1930. Ram was briefly under reconsideration in 1935, due to advances in radio technology, but nothing came of it.3
My point here is not so much that these secret weapons didn't exist (though clearly that's what I do think), but that the British press was not interested in the possibility that they did: the Express was the only national daily which relayed the Tribune report (well, nearly all: there are a couple I haven't been able to check). This was only a few months after the existence of the German air force was revealed and the government announced a trebling of the RAF's strength at home in order to maintain air parity. Why was there so little interest in claims that British ingenuity was coming up with clever responses to the bomber threat?
The great air race
It's the 75th anniversary of the MacRobertson Trophy Air Race. More specifically, it's the 75th anniversary of the day the race was won, 23 October 1934. The winners were C. W. A. Scott and Tom Campbell Black of Britain, who took just two days and twenty-three hours to cover the 18200 km from London to Melbourne. They flew in a de Havilland DH.88 Comet, named Grosvenor House, a beautifully streamlined twin-engined monoplane which was specially designed for the race. So a triumph for British aviation, then?
Well, if you've been reading the debate on a recent comments thread, you'll know it's not quite as straightforward as that. Scott and Black did win, but in second place was the Dutch-owned, US-designed Uiver, flown by K. D. Parmentier and J. J. Moll. True, it took 19 hours longer to fly the race route (albeit with an emergency stop at Albury, on the NSW-Victoria border). But that's pretty impressive when you consider that Uiver was a Douglas DC-2 -- an airliner, not designed for speed but for economy and payload. It even carried passengers for most of the race, and made many more stops than required by the race rules, as it was also blazing an air route for KLM. The Dutch actually won the race on handicap. Third was another American airliner, a Boeing 247D. The fastest British equivalent in the race was a New Zealand-owned DH.89 Dragon Rapide, which took nearly two weeks to complete the course.
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Imperial Airways: now with extra airmail
An advertisement for Imperial Airways from the Daily Telegraph, 30 January 1935, emphasising its role in delivering airmail to the Empire: twice weekly to 'the East' (presumably India, Singapore, Hong Kong), once a week to Australia (a service which had only just begun the previous month), and twice weekly to Cape Town. A lot of effort went into selling the idea of air mail to the public, as this post at The British Postal Museum & Archive shows. Here, the modern lines of the Imperial A.W. 15 Atalanta is contrasted with the traditional garb of the imperial subjects in the background. The message is that technology will modernise the running of the Empire and help bind it together.
An airminded surprise
While walking home tonight I saw something unexpected.
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The Wokingham Whale
Nobody commented on the Wokingham Whale. Above is a photograph of this unlikely beast, dating from 1910 or so. All I know about it is from the Globe and this site, which has several other photos as well.
The Whale was not an airship, although that word was used to describe it. Despite the shape, that's not a gasbag but a fuselage. A 80hp engine was to drive a 1200rpm 'rotoscope' (presumably meaning a propeller, which Patrick Alexander apparently designed). The 'portholes' are actually to slide poles through, to support canvas wings. The fuselage was 66 feet long, and was designed to extend 'telescopically' to 140 feet in length. It would be fitted for long-distance overseas flights, with seats, electric lights, hammocks and toilets.
It's clearly an example of reach exceeding grasp: there's no way something that big and solid could be made to fly with the technologies of 1910. I don't understand what the point of a telescoping fuselage would be, either. But we do travel overseas today in long enclosed tubes with the amenities mentioned (minus the hammocks!), so the Whale's inventor, A. M. Farbrother (owner of a Wokingham joinery), did have some insight into the future of aviation.
Unfortunately, Farbrother sold his own cottage to fund his flying machine. He and the locals who also contributed must have been bitterly disappointed when money ran out and the fuselage broken up.
Supposedly Flight had some contemporary articles about the Whale but a quick search didn't turn up anything.
Bigger, not better
The Tarrant Tabor, a prototype bomber designed and built in 1918-9. There were high hopes among strategic bombing advocates (including P. R. C. Groves) for this giant machine, but by the time it was ready for its maiden flight in May 1919, the war was over and its purpose now unclear. Not that this mattered much, for that first flight was abortive:
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Mirrors and lenses
Via Modern Mechanix comes this supposed Japanese suicide bomb. It's from the April 1933 issue of Modern Mechanix, an American magazine. It's not an aeroplane but a precision guided munition, with the guidance supplied by the pilot inside the bomb itself. The accompanying article claims that Japan was using such bombs in China.
Now, this is a bit outside my area but I'm fairly sure that Japan was doing no such thing. It had pretty complete air superiority in China and it was winning on the ground, so why would it need to resort to suicide tactics? Modern Mechanix has an explanation: it's because 'the Nipponese are conscious of their inferiority in developing new and fearful weapons of war, and are forced to rely on man-power'.
The simple truth of the matter is that -- a man is practically required to steer Japanese bombs to their mark because they haven’t been able to develop the bomb-sighting machinery which makes Uncle Sam’s flyers, for instance, so deadly in their accuracy.
Contrast this with the American way:
A country like the United States would approach the problem of directing bomb flight in an entirely different way. Some method of mechanical control of the bomb would be sought -- in fact, the idea of controlling a bomb or gun shell by radio is already being worked on, as described in Modern Mechanix and Inventions some months ago. It will be seen that, entirely aside from making the sacrifice of a man’s life unnecessary, radio control of a bomb is much more accurate and less liable to error through the failure of the human machine in a moment of critical nervous tension.
So deficiency in Japanese technology + Japanese tradition of suicide = Japanese suicide bomb. Which would be risibly racist -- except that it's not too far from what really happened, only 11 years too early. (The first kamikaze attack was against HMAS Australia at Leyte, in October 1944.) So perhaps I'm being a bit harsh?
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Phallic symbol envy
Source: Review of Reviews for Australasia, May 1913, 248 (link; presumably originally from a British publication).
Turnabout is fair play
OK, so I've poked a bit of fun at French aircraft design here from time to time, with a post on the fugliest aircraft of the Third Republic and another recoiling in horror at the aeroplane which should not be. But turnabout is fair play, and the British aviation industry has had plenty of shockers to its discredit.
Here's my pick: the Westland Lysander P.12. It's like the front half of an ordinary Lysander army co-operation aircraft stuck onto the tail-end of a heavy bomber (maybe a Whitley), with a four-gun power turret at the back. It first flew in 1941, but was never put into production; as far as I can tell, the intended purpose was to fly over beaches filled with German invaders and strafe them with the rear machine guns. It's one freaky flying machine! (Image source.)
So what do you consider to the weirdest or ugliest British aircraft design of the last century?