Australia

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Wartime 61

The current issue of Wartime, the official magazine of the Australian War Memorial, has an article by me on the Australian mystery aeroplane scare of 1918. I'm very pleased with how it's turned out -- it's beautifully illustrated and put together. The theme of the issue is 'air warfare', which I imagine may be of interest to readers of this blog. For example, there's Richard Overy on the legal and ethical status of Bomber Command's campaign against Germany, Richard Frank on whether the Japanese should be considered victims of the atomic bombs, Greg Gilbert on the aerial aspects of the Dardanelles (okay, Gallipoli) campaign, and a lot more. You can read Lachlan Grant's article on 460 Squadron RAAF's daylight raid on Berchtesgaden for free, but for the rest you'll need to buy a copy from the AWM or from any good newsagent, or a few indifferent ones for that matter. Recommended, and not just because I'm in it!

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Over at The Appendix, 'a new journal of narrative & experimental history' to which you can subscribe, Felipe Fernandes Cruz has reproduced some intriguing declassified US documents from the early 1940s concerning rumours of clandestine German airfields in Brazil. The reason for the US interest in any evidence of German activity in South America, apart from the Monroe thing, seems to have been the possibility of an air raid on the Panama Canal. It's not clear how the three documents relate to each other, as they're from different agencies (FBI, US Army) and dates (October and December 1941, July 1942) and don't appear to directly refer to each other. It seems that they reflect an ongoing concern about the possibility of German aerial activity in the Amazon rather than a response to any particularly credible information.

The first document, dated 3 October 1941, is simply J. Edgar Hoover informing the Assistant Secretary of State, Adolf A. Berle, of 'rumors current in Brazil as to a secret German air base, reported to exist in the Rio Negro district of the upper Amazon' and promising to forward any further information as it was received. The second chronologically is dated 18 December 1941 and appears to be an intelligence summary for the US Army Chief of Staff (George C. Marshall) from the Assistant Chief of Staff. It's actually a bit sceptical of the idea, saying 'It is our opinion that the danger from secret landing fields in this region is much less than has formerly been rumored', due to the difficulty in shipping the large quantities of fuel required up the Amazon. However, it also identifies a group of Germans already established in Amazonia who could have been gathering supplies for years:

In this region at the present time is a large group of German monks and their abbeys. They have been firmly established in this region for the past 80 years, and know this region possibly better than any Brazilian. There is a possibility that for some time past air supplies may have been secretly built up at points in this region which might be used for attacks on the Canal. It is to be remembered that this is a vast region, the single State of Amazonas being two and one-half times larger than the State of Texas.

The final document appears to be a report to the War Department from someone named Abbott in Manaos, and is dated 8 July 1942. This is the one that interests me the most:

Reliable reports huge quantity gasoline unknown quality in transit up Beni River in May believed destined Germans Riberalta Bolivia. Small bits unverified information many separate sources indicates possible Axis planeed [sic] series ground facilities for long range planes reach Venezuela: one from Beni River with one halt enroute. Two from Mato Grosso Area with probably two halts. SUch [sic] program logical for approach to Panama but no reports unknow [sic] planes such localities. Major Harlow taking both planes Belem ninth for minor repairs. Plan flight up Rio Negro next week using fuel sent from here. No instructions received except cables.

These rumours about secret German airfields in the Amazon in 1942 are clear analogues to the rumours about secret German airfields in Australia in 1918. So why were there 'no reports [unknown] planes', as there certainly were in Australia? This looks like it could be another useful test case.

It's possible that Brazilians, even in the remote Amazon, were by 1942 reasonably familiar with aircraft and so less likely to mistake non-aircraft for real ones, or to be surprised by real but non-German ones. Mystery aircraft scares were increasingly scarce by this time around the world, for I think just this reason, and were only reinvigorated by the imminence of new jet and rocket technology. I don't know enough (or anything) about aviation in Brazil at this time to say whether this is the case, but there is evidence even in these documents that aircraft were already an essential tool for mobility in what was very inhospitable terrain.

But there's also the question of the source of these rumours: they may not be such a clear analogue to the earlier Australian episode after all. Just who was passing these stories of secret German airfields around? Was it ordinary Brazilians? Brazilian military personnel? Expatriate American or German residents? It makes a difference, because such stories would mean different things, and would be used for a different purpose, by different audiences. Did Brazilians themselves fear German infiltration? I doubt they were as worried about a German air raid on the Panama Canal as the Americans were. I need to know more!

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Bomber Command raid on Emden, 31 March 1941

One factlet I've enjoyed dropping on the heads of students is the origin of the word 'blockbuster'. Now it is widely understood to mean a hugely successful movie (as well as a once-highly successful video rental chain -- remember those?). It has even been claimed that this is the original sense of the word: supposedly, in the 1920s a blockbuster was 'a movie whose long line of customers could not be contained on a single city block'. But with Google Books and online newspaper archives it's easy to disprove this etymology: blockbuster does not appear before 1942 and then it referred to a bomb which was so big it could destroy a whole city block.
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[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.]

Washington Post, 2 June 1918, SM1

New York waited for an air raid in June 1918. For thirteen nights from 4 June, much of the city was blacked out to avoid giving German pilots any assistance in locating targets to bomb. The New York Times reported the following day that:

Electric signs and all lights, except street lamps and lights in dwellings, were out in this city last night in compliance with orders issued by Police Commissioner Enright at the suggestion of the War Department, as a precaution against a possible attack by aircraft from a German submarine. A system for signalling by sirens in case the approach of aircraft should be detected was devised by the police and signal officers yesterday to warn persons to get under cover.1

While coastal and anti-aircraft batteries readied their guns, aviators went up to check the effectiveness of the blackout, resulting in its extension. After the third night, it was reported that

The lower part of the city was in almost complete darkness, the number of street lights being reduced and those that burned being dimmer. Every downtown skyscraper was almost entirely dark, the shades in the rooms which were lighted being drawn.2

City officials met to discuss other civil defence measures, including air raid sirens and shelters. A particular concern was the evacuation of skyscrapers during business hours:

It was pointed out that in case of such a raid in the daytime the danger of loss of life from panic in swarming down the stairs and into elevators would be greater than the danger of bomb explosions.3

It was decided that the best thing to do would be to designate certain floors as evacuation points. These plans were probably not put into effect, however, as the last night of blackout was 16 June; on 17 June all police precincts were ordered to 'Resume normal lighting throughout the city until further orders'.4 There was evidently some embarrassment now, as the War Department and the New York Police Department each claimed that the blackout was the other's idea. In any event, the exercise doesn't seem to have been repeated.
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  1. New York Times, 5 June 1918, 1. See also Paul G. Halpern, A Naval History of World War I (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1994), 431. [↩]
  2. New York Times, 7 June 1918, 2. [↩]
  3. Ibid., 15 June 1918, 6. [↩]
  4. Ibid., 18 June 1918, 24. [↩]

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On 1 April 1909, the citizens of Pittsburg (between 1891 and 1911 the 'h' was omitted) were the victims of a rather cruel April Fool's joke. An afternoon edition of one of the city's newspapers (the Pittsburg Dispatch reported the story so probably wasn't the hoaxer) informed them that Japan had invaded the United States:

The report reached Pittsburg about 2 o'clock this afternoon [1 April 1909] through the medium of the early edition of a facetious afternoon which appeared on the street with a flaring red line, 'Japanese Strike Awful Blow to America an [sic] April 1. Japs Invade America, Destroy Fleets, Capture Cities, Slay Inhabitants and Make April 1 an Awful Day in History.'1

The scenario was that a Japanese fleet had bombarded and destroyed San Francisco and Oakland, as well as sinking American ships and landing ground forces. In addition, 'gigantic aerial Japanese monsters' -- presumably meaning airships (though you never know) -- 'were crossing the Rockies, hurling bombs on the earth below and leaving devastation and ruin in their wake'.2 A later bulletin brought the news that recent president Theodore Roosevelt had deposed the captain of the Hamburg (which was taking him to safari in Kenya), and had turned the ship around to bring help to his stricken nation.

The hoax led to dramatic scenes on the streets of Pittsburg:

Within half an hour after the 'news' appeared upon the streets the down town thoroughfares were black with people. Smithfield street, in front of the publication office of the paper was one seething mass of humanity, fighting and struggling to get within reading distance of the bulletin boards [...] So great had the crowd become at this time that extra police had been called to keep order. Men clawed at each other, tore clothes and fought.3

A police detective named George Cole even began recruiting his colleagues into 'a volunteer military company'.3 Others didn't want to wait so long for the violence to start:

[...] one lone Chinaman sauntered down the street. He was not a Japanese, but he was yellow, and the mob was in a mood to vent its spite. But John Chinaman saw them coming and he is possibly running yet.3

The crowds eventually got the idea that they'd been hoaxed after the constant repetition of the date, and then dissipated.
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  1. Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, 12 May 1909, 5. It was reprinted in full in several New Zealand newspapers: e.g., Evening Post (Wellington), 19 May 1909, 2. It also appeared in truncated form in an Australian newspaper, which is where I originally found it: Queenslander (Brisbane), 29 May 1909, 10. [↩]
  2. Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, 12 May 1909, 5. [↩]
  3. Ibid. [↩] [↩] [↩]

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[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.]

In the published version of his 2008 Lord Trenchard Memorial Lecture, Richard Overy concluded that now

air power is projected for its potential political or moral impact. In Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan it is the political dividend that has been central to the exercise of air power, just as it was when Trenchard’s Independent Force flew against German cities in 1918 with the hope that a demoralised urban population might pressure the German government to make peace. In this sense it might be possible to argue, without stretching the history too far, that the RAF has begun to forge a new sense of identity in the past two decades more compatible with the traditions of Trenchardism.1

My interest here is in that last word, 'Trenchardism'. Overy nowhere defines it -- in fact, it's the only time it occurs in his article -- but as an airpower historian I have a pretty good idea what he means, despite the fact that it's actually a relatively uncommon term. Marshal of the Royal Air Force (as he ended up) Lord Trenchard is well-known for his belief in strategic bombing as a war-winning weapon, particularly through its effects on morale, and as the RAF's Chief of the Air Staff from 1919 to 1930 he was in a position to promote it. This sense of Trenchardism, something like Douhetism, seems straightforward enough, and it's the sense in which I've encountered it in the secondary literature.2 But here I'm interested in other uses of this word Trenchardism: specifically the way it is used in a a Wikipedia article of that name which was created recently by Jo Pugh of The National Archives, who invites additions and comments (as discussed on Twitter).3 There, Trenchardism is taken beyond simply an enthusiasm for bombing, indeed beyond the military sphere entirely. The dilemma is that in so doing it risks diluting Trenchardism past the point of usefulness. But equally, it highlights a contemporary understanding of Trenchardism which is very different to that we understand now. Are they reconcilable? And if not, which should we prefer?
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  1. Richard Overy, 'Identity, politics and technology in the RAF's history', RUSI Journal 153 (2008), 74-7. Thanks to Ross Mahoney for this reference. [↩]
  2. E.g. Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Strategic Air Warfare: The Evolution and Reality of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 239, 291. [↩]
  3. I won't here discuss the question of whether Wikipedia is an appropriate place for original research. See also Richard Jenson, 'Military history on the electronic frontier: Wikipedia fights the War of 1812', Journal of Military History 76 (2012), 1165-82. [↩]

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Today I attended the University of Melbourne's Faculty of Arts eResearch forum 2012. This was in two parts: firstly, a talk by Tim Sherratt, down from Canberra for the day, entitled 'Digital Disruptions', where he exhorted us to find new ways to break things; followed by short spiels by local academics on some of their digital humanities work. There was a lot of really interesting stuff on display, and whether by chance or design each one was digital in a very different way:

  • Susan Lowish spoke about creating a databases of Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara artwork, Ara Irititja, which is deployed in remote Indigenous communities in central Australia to preserve their (and our) cultural heritage and, crucially, make it accessible to them and allow them to add their own knowledge. It's a huge logistical task but judging from the use the databases get, a very worthwhile one.
  • Alison Young works on street art and the people and communities involved in creating it. She described how the Internet has enabled her to observe and intereact with these communities, which could be difficult due to the borderline-illegal nature of street art. For example she can use her blog to establish her academic credentials (and her politics) to artists she wants to interview to prove that she isn't an undercover cop!
  • David McInnis's contribution was to talk about the Lost Plays Database. This had perhaps the most traditional academic orientation of any of the projects on display today, but the way it works is anything but. It's a wiki which collates information about plays which we known were written in the late Tudor/early Stuart periods, but about which we have only fragmentary knowledge.1 This information is out there in the published literature and has been for decades, but has never been collected together, as it is now. And combining the power of crowdsourcing (even with a crowd of only a few dozen enthusiastic scholars) with newly digitised sources means when a question arises it can often be answered very quickly.
  • Cate O'Neill described the usability issues faced by the Find & Connect project she edits. This may sound boring, but in fact it was fascinating, and quite moving. Find & Connect is a government resource which provides information for people who were in state or foster care as children (including child migrants and the Stolen Generation). While the site has been designed according to best practice and with the best intentions, investigation has shown that users actually didn't understand how it works. What's interesting about these usability problems is how these usability issues are bound up with the reason for the site's existence. For example, with low computer literacy and self-confidence, it can't be assumed that users will know what things like "glossary" or even "help" are for. Even something as taken for granted as a "home" button was confusing in this context, as it is naturally enough interpreted as something to do with orphanages or foster homes. Similarly, the commonplace experience of clicking on a dead link and getting a 404 page can be read by some users to mean that the government is trying to hide something from them (i.e. again, as it has been doing for most of their lives). This was a real eye-opener: usability matters.
  • Véronique Duché is working on adapting her teaching methods to best serve the current generation of students, who live in their smartphones and tablets. So she is looking at developing an ebook, with embedded video, audio, slideshows, 3D models... It's easy to see how this would be useful for language teaching (well, except for the 3D part).
  • Finally, Nikki Hemmingham spoke about the Australian Women's Register and (forthcoming) online encyclopedia of Australian women leaders. What was interesting here was the way the project has evolved with experience: the encyclopedia was originally intended to be a comprehensive hyperlinked resource, but the problem is that links die. What was available on the web when it was written cannot be guaranteed to be there in the future. So now the encyclopedia is intended to be a snapshot in time, but it will be complemented by the Register, a Trove-like harvester of various online resources and databases. As such the need to curate links disappears; instead you curate the sources which contain them.

All good stuff, and I know there are many more digital things being done in the Arts Faculty which could have been included.

As for Tim Sherratt, I've mentioned him here before and used his tools as well. He's a one man digital history machine: QueryPic, the front page, Archives viewer, the future of the past, Headline roulette, the real face of White Australia (with Kate Bagnall) and more. The amazing thing is, despite all this work he has done to improve the way Australians (historians and not-historians) access their history, Tim's not employed or supported by any of our great universities or cultural institutions: he's just one person with a laptop and a broadband connection. While it's inspiring for others in that situation (as I am) to see what can be done with so little resources, I'd really rather see him be gainfully employed and fully supported. And while it's fantastic that Australian universities like Melbourne are getting serious about the digital humanities, it's not to their credit that they apparently can't find a place for someone as creative and productive as Tim. Somebody fix this please.

  1. Humble brag: completely coincidentally, in one of my day (technically night) jobs I'm the sysadmin who looks after the server hosting (among other things) LPD. This is humble because I have nothing to do with the content and in fact LPD was set up before I started; but more particularly so because the server was noticeably sluggish during the demonstration! Oops. [↩]

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VH-UXG, courtesy Phil Vabre

Very sad news today. On Monday, VH-UXG, a De Havilland DH.84 Dragon owned and flown by Des Porter, went missing on a flight from Monto to Caboolture in Queensland. A distress call and an emergency beacon were heard briefly, but then nothing more was known until today, when VH-UXG's wreckage was found in rugged terrain north of Borumba Dam. Unfortunately, all six on board were killed: Des and Kathleen Porter, Carol and John Dawson, Janice and Les D'evlin. My sympathies go out to their family and friends for their tragic loss.

The aeroplane itself is also a loss, if nowhere near as tragic a one. The Dragon, along with its successor the Dragon Rapide, is perhaps the classic 1930s small commuter airliner, designed for flying feeder routes between regional airports and metropolitan centres. Before Monday, there were apparently only eight Dragon survivors worldwide -- not four, as reported in the media -- of which six, remarkably, were still flying; now there are only seven and five respectively. (One of the seven is here in Melbourne at the RAAF Museum, tucked away in the back of one of the hangars.)

As can be seen from the photo above (taken from here, with the kind permission of Phil Vabre), VH-UXG was a beautiful aeroplane and had been lovingly restored. It was built in 1934 and flew in Britain for a couple of years as G-ACRF for Portsmouth, Southsea and Isle of Wight Aviation Ltd before being sold in 1936 to Aircrafts Pty Ltd, a Queensland airline and charter service, and then in 1948 to Queensland Flying Services. It had been sold again, this time into individual ownership, by the time it crashed and was written off at Archerfield in April 1954, and it was this wreckage which Porter eventually restored. Incredibly, his father was the owner and pilot of VH-UXG in that crash, and just a few months later was killed in another Dragon crash along with Des's older brother; Des himself survived. Parts of that aeroplane were apparently incorporated into VH-UXG's tail. (This is what I've pieced together from several online sources; again the media reports differ somewhat, saying that VH-UXG was the actual aeroplane Des's father and brother were killed in. I welcome any corrections.)

This raises the question of whether we should be flying such near-unique and near-irreplaceable vintage aeroplanes at all. I think we should. These machines were not designed to sit in museums, but to soar in the sky. That's their proper context, or at least part of it, and we can better understand them, and the people who built, flew and watched them, by trying to use them as authentic a manner as possible. That entails risk, but risk was and is inherently a part of flying. Statistically, this means we will eventually lose all flightworthy vintage aircraft to accidents (though we are still adding new ones to the list and there is a surprising amount that can be done with wreckage), but we'll at least still have the museum-bound survivors. One day even those will crumble into dust and rust. But that is the fate of all things. We can't pretend otherwise, so we should make use of what we've got while we've got it.

Some more lovely photos of VH-UXG, including when it was new, can be found here, here and here.

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In my discussion of the ill-fated Sykes Memo, I noted that it included proposed force levels for the Dominion air forces, which I haven't seen discussed before. This is interesting because it came at an interesting moment. It's early December 1918, with the Empire was in the flush of victory and all things seeming possible (at least they did to Sykes, which is why he lost his job as Chief of the Air Staff). But it's before any of the Dominions had actually created their own independent air forces (SAAF: 1920; RAAF: 1921; RCAF: 1924; RNZAF: 1937 -- though those dates are inevitably contentious; see Pathfinder 114 for a RAAF perspective). Their decisions to do so inevitably reflected local concerns and conditions, but they also took advice from the RAF, as the Empire's 'mother' air force. So Sykes's proposals provides some insight into how the centre viewed the periphery in an airpower sense at this cusp between war and peace, and what advice he might have given the fledging air forces had he not been ejected from command of the RAF.

So, as before, I've tabulated the squadron numbers from the Sykes Memo in From Many Angles, and added some comments after.1
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  1. F. H. Sykes, From Many Angles: An Autobiography (London: George G. Harrap & Company, 1942), 558-74. [↩]

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Well, not really, because it didn't exist. But never let the facts get in the way of a good title, I say. But it does mean I have to explain what I mean.

The real V-weapons developed and used by Germany in the Second War War were the V-1 flying bomb and the V-2 ballistic missile, which are well known, and the V-3 multi-chamber cannon which is not. About ten thousand V-1s were launched towards London between June and October 1944; by the time their launch sites had been overrun by the Allied forces in France the longer-ranged V-2 was in operation, and was used to bombard London and south-east England until 27 March 1945. (The last V-1 strike on Britain was actually two days later; this was a long-range variant.) The V-3 was never fired at London but two smaller-scale versions were used against Luxembourg.

V-weapon is from the German Vergeltungswaffe: reprisal weapon. Their use against London was intended as a reprisal for the British bombing of German cities. This was something that had been threatened by Nazi propaganda many times. For example, after the start of Bomber Command's campaign against Berlin in November 1943, a spokesman for the German Foreign Ministry said:

Germany will now use her secret weapon as revenge for the R.A.F. raids.1

On the one hand, Germany did not 'now use her secret weapon' on this occasion, nor on most of the others when similar threats were issued. On the other, it did have secret reprisal weapons in development and they were eventually used. The threats were not completely empty, but their constant repetition made them dubious.

One of the last of these threats emerged in late February 1945 and involved a so-called death ray (and an offensive use at that, not a defensive one as I have argued is more characteristic of the concept):

Latest German secret weapon is a V-bomb which, will release 'death-rays' sound waves of very high frequency which decompose living tissue -- reports Stockholm correspondent of the British United Press.

Hundreds of these bombs, it is reported, are being built in underground factories.

Germans in Berlin and Stockholm are now mysteriously hinting that they will use these bombs if the Germans still retain their V-bases east of the Rhine.2

Other reports suggested that 'the middle of March' had been set 'as the launching date for the new bomb'.3 It sounds like the idea was that the V-bomb would replace the high explosive warhead of the V-2, which was still in action.

Note that these death rays are actually sound waves, which is unusual as they tend to be described as some form of electromagnetic radiation. Apparently Germany did experiment with sonic weapons but it's hard to see how a sound bomb could work as described here. There were other possibilities for superscientific weapons: a rather good newspaper article about the sound bombs also discusses alpha rays, electron rays and dirty bombs in addition to electromagnetic death rays (including radio or 'Hertzian' waves), and notes rumours about German and Japanese research.4

Oddly, this article was published in Australia, as were all of the press reports I've cited here. It's actually quite hard to find references to German death rays in the British press. Perhaps censorship is the reason, whether official or self (though many of the vaguer reprisal threats were published). Or maybe it's just that Australian newspapers weren't hit so hard by newsprint shortages (most British newspapers were mere shadows of their prewar selves by this time) so needed more filler material. Maybe it was simply thought too ridiculous. But the sound bomb death ray threat did make its way to the British people somehow, as the diary entry of London woman Ruby Thompson for 9 March 1945 attests:

Hitler promises to annihilate us with a Death Ray after March 15 He is supposed to have visited Berlin today, which we have bombed now for seventeen nights in succession. Oh, this war! Who will survive it!

Whether she or anyone else believed the death ray threat is hard to say. But with the V-2s still raining down it would have been hard to dismiss completely out of hand.

  1. Advocate (Burnie), 26 November 1943, 1. [↩]
  2. Courier-Mail (Brisbane), 27 February 1945, 1. [↩]
  3. Mail (Adelaide), 10 March 1945, 6. [↩]
  4. Ibid. [↩]