Last year Alun Salt pointed out to me a proposal for a collection of essays on the theme of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit and history, and asked if I'd thought about sending in something on ideas about airpower and the dragon Smaug. I hadn't, but immediately saw what he was on about! I did a little research, wrote up the proposal below (with a couple of small differences), and sent it in. Of course, it was rejected (or not accepted, same thing).
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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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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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Thanks to JDK for forwarding this interesting image. It's the front cover of Bomber Command: The Air Ministry's Account of Bomber Command's Offensive against the Axis, September, 1939-July, 1941 (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1941) (written by Hilary Saunders). So it was part of the same series of propaganda pamphlets as the more famous The Battle of Britain, aimed at informing the British public about how the air war was being waged.
Why is it interesting? It shows a British bomber (a Whitley, it looks like) high over a German city, looking down. The raid is evidently just beginning: the docks are on fire, a bomb seems to be exploding somewhere downtown. Tracer fire and searchlights are seeking out the enemy. In composition it bears an obvious similarity to the (still more famous) German photo of a He 111 over London. The origins of that are still unclear (at least to me), so it may or may not have been an inspiration for Bomber Command's cover. But it clearly projects the same impression of menace, of power.
I think it's also having its cake and eating it too. The Air Ministry was always careful to say that Bomber Command only struck at military objectives, as international law and neutral opinion demanded. Yet its communiqués, and more especially newspaper reports based upon them, often gave the impression of more indiscriminate reprisal bombing, which a vocal section of public opinion wanted. The cover of Bomber Command does this too, it seems to me. The docks are clearly a legitimate target, but there's nothing to identify what the other bombed area is. More generally, in showing the city literally beneath the bomber's wings in this way, it suggests that the clearly-visible streets and buildings are all valid targets too. So whatever the text might actually say, a reader could interpret this image to mean precision bombing or morale bombing, as they preferred.
Image source: AllPosters.com
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
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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Saturday's bombing of London isn't quite as prominent on the front page of the Daily Mail as one might expect. There are a few small items about it (e.g. a panorama of London ablaze, taken from the top of Northcliffe House; a report from Italian radio that Londoners are 'absolutely terrified' by the raids) but there's actually more about the threatened German invasion (including a report of false alarms in Surrey, the south-west and Scotland). And the main article, by air correspondent Noel Monks, deals with both. It reports that yesterday was a fairly quiet day, and that London's casualties are around 400 dead and 1300 or 1400 wounded (presumably not including those from last night's raid). Monks gives much cause for optimism: the Air Staff believe that Germany has recalled aircraft from Norway to take part 'in the Battle of Britain', and that German bomber crews are making up to three sorties a day.
This seems to indicate that the German air force is not so great as Hitler would have the world believe, though it is still ahead of the R.A.F. in numerical terms.
When taken together with the RAF's belief that 'it is a case of "now or never"' and that
If Hitler has not gained aerial superiority by October 1, his invasion plans will be definitely postponed and possibly abandoned
then things are looking up.
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This whimsical illustration, showing Father Neptune beset by all manner of aerial pests, appeared in Murray F. Sueter's Airmen or Noahs: Fair Play for our Airmen; The Great 'Neon' Air Myth Exposed (London: Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1928), opposite 410. Sueter had been a technically-minded naval officer (torpedoes, airships, armoured cars, tanks and of course the first head of the Royal Naval Aerial Service). After retiring with the rank of rear-admiral (albeit an unemployed one), he won election to the House of Commons (succeeding Noel Permberton Billing, and with his blessing) as an independent, but soon joined the Conservatives.
Airmen or Noahs is, in part, an attack on Neon's attack on the airminded. (Defence was not Sueter's style, just as it wasn't Neon's.) But it's also an attack on the Admiralty, and all those boat-obsessed 'Noahs' who preferred battleships to bombers, for being shortsighted in relation to aviation: hence this drawing, 'Neptune feels a draught'. From page 410:
Father Neptune has raised some sturdy sons, but even he is beginning to see, as he watches the transatlantic flights, that they are not the only pebbles on the beach.
A piece of doggerel (I assume by Sueter himself) accompanies the drawing, pointing to the problems airpower posed for the navy, but also how it could also help control the seas:
Shiver my shiny scales!
These bird-men maketh a draught!
They have stolen my trident!
And broken the barb.
And my Crown and Kingdom are threatened.
Unless I rouse myself
I am undone.Boat ahoy! Boat ahoy!
Good old Noahs!
Take Aphrodite and mermaids too.
For I intend to fly with Ruth
Around the seven seas,
And thus control my kingdom
With efficiency, speed and ease.
And Ruth? Who is Ruth? The picture gives a clue. To the right of Father Neptune sits an aviatrix on the wing of a sinking aeroplane, waving an American flag. She must be Ruth Elder, who attempted in October 1927 to become the first woman to fly across the Atlantic. Her aeroplane -- the American Girl, which she flew from Florida with her flight instructor, George Haldeman -- suffered engine trouble near the Azores and ditched in the ocean. She and Haldeman were extraordinarily lucky to be rescued by a passing freighter. (See here for a vastly amusing collection of contemporary opinions on her flight.)
That Sueter has Father Neptune say he intends to fly with a woman may be a reference to the suspected identity of Neon (a woman who didn't think much of flying at all). But I'm not sure why he singled out Elder, an American, for this honour. He refers in the text to 'Miss Ruth Elder and Captain Halderman's [sic] very fine effort' (410) as part of a long list of aviation feats which attracted the interest and admiration of thousands and tens of thousands of people, whom he invited to join him in laughing at the 'Earthbound Noahs' (411) like Neon who thought aviation pointless and impractical. But the list also mentions Lady Bailey and Lady Heath, two British aviatrices of the day, so he could have chosen them instead of Elder. Perhaps I'm cynical in suspecting he didn't think them pretty enough, but the attention paid to the likes of Amy Johnson and the New Zealander Jean Batten the following decade does tend to support this line of thought.
Hmm, how did I end up here?
This illustration, by A. C. Michael, is from T. Donovan Bayley's 'When the sea failed her' which appeared in Pall Mall Magazine in May 1909. It's subtitled 'The story of a war between England and the allies, and the terrible way it ended'. It's that terrible ending which makes this story stand out for me.
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In the summer of 1940, strange patterns like these began to appear in the sky over southern England. Today they wouldn't be thought so unusual (except that they are on the twisty side), for contrails are a common sight now, especially over London. Seventy years ago, however, they were a little mysterious, even to those in the aviation community, and even though similar phenomena had sometimes been seen before. Flight reported in July that year:
Some readers may have observed lately what they at first thought to be sky-writing, and a member of the staff of Flight saw a particularly good example on Sunday afternoon, July 7, over London. The same sort of thing had been seen previously, but this was the best example to date and exhibited some features not observed on other occasions. For the benefit of those who have not seen the phenomenon it consists of a thin line of what looks like white cloud, or perhaps of very white smoke made by a sky-writing aeroplane.
While it was allowed that the clouds might be caused by 'the discharge of white smoke from a military aeroplane for some purpose connected with the war', the explanation ultimately plumped for was pretty close to the mark: so-called 'visible vortices':
The explanation which has been given before as a possible reason for visibility of these vortices is that there is condensation of moisture. Such condensation might perhaps be caused in regions of low pressure which may be those parts of the vortex where the velocity is highest. Perhaps there is significance in the fact that it is at the tip of the airscrew (where the blade velocity is greatest) that the visible ring occurs. A fog formed by reduction of pressure can be seen in tunnelling work under the earth when, in order to keep out water, compressed air is supplied to the working face. The men, to get out, have to go into a chamber where the pressure is reduced before they can go into atmospheric pressure. During this decompression, the whole chamber may be filled with fog.
In the case of the trail behind an aeroplane, the condensation theory might be correct as there is plenty of water vapour in the products of combustion in the exhaust gas. If the atmospheric conditions are right, the condensation would certainly cause a visible trail.
But even though (as we now know) this explanation was essentially correct, there was as yet no proof, and there followed considerable correspondence from readers. (Some helpfully suggested that that the visible vortices might be used to track enemy aircraft, either by fighters underneath during the day, or by searchlights at night.) By September Flight felt it had enough information to tentatively confirm its earlier hypothesis, and also to note that there were two types of visible vortices: long-lived helical ones from engine exhaust ('slipstream trails'), and short-lived ones from wingtips ('wing tip trails'). In 1942 de Havilland published a similar but more technical explanation of both types of contrail, so it seems that Flight's theory had become widely accepted. A mathematical theory of contrail formation was independently formulated in Germany in 1941 and in the United States in 1953.
Science aside, the contrails quickly became part of the Battle of Britain and its memory, tracing out the deadly dogfights overhead, as suggested by Paul Nash's 1941 painting Battle of Britain (IWM ART LD1550):
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It is officially too darn hot today: 43° C. So naturally my thoughts turn to a colder time: the 1950s. The above image (which I found as part of x-ray delta one's wonderful Flickr stream; he also has a suitably breathless blog, ATOMIC-ANNIHILATION) would seem to be part of a public relations exercise from Convair, relating to its interceptor, the F-102A Delta Dagger. I'm not sure what year it's from exactly, but the Dagger entered service in 1956, so probably then or the following year. (So it could be an early effort from Don Draper.) Evidently there were a lot of complaints from the public about sonic booms from the Dagger, the USAF's first supersonic interceptor. The text is really something else; it almost circles right through brazen propaganda to become an honest argument that sonic booms really are good for you. Almost:
Freedom Has a New Sound!
ALL OVER AMERICA these days the blast of supersonic flight is shattering the old familiar sounds of city and countryside.
At U. S. Air Force bases strategically located near key cities our Airmen maintain their round the clock vigil, ready to take off on a moment's notice in jet aircraft like Convair's F-102A all-weather interceptor. Every flight has only one purpose -- your personal protection!
The next time jets thunder overhead, remember that the pilots who fly them are not willful disturbers of your peace; they are patriotic young Americans affirming your New Sound of Freedom!
Presumably the next panel would show the milkman clutching his ears and screaming in pain, and the one after that the homeowners sweeping up the bits of broken glass. That new sound of freedom wasn't free.
