This is from a document issued by the Air Council in October 1918, ‘Identification marks on all aircraft’, FS Publication 89. I think it’s available from the National Archives in London as AIR 10/128 and AIR 10/129, but I found it in the National Archives of Australia as NAA: A1194, 19.03/6255, and because I paid […]
The title of this post could refer to my own state of mind as I reach a crossroads in this project. As I said in the previous post, it’s time to dig deeper into the 1918 Australian mystery aeroplane scare, to look beneath the surface. What was really going on? Why did people see mystery
View Mystery aircraft, Australia, 1918 in a larger map My next step in characterising the 1918 Australian mystery aircraft scare was to plot all the sightings Google Maps, which you can see above. I’ve used differently-coloured icons for different time periods to give an idea of the progression over the course of 1918: blue is
In my previous post, I threatened more statistics about Australian mystery aircraft scares of the First World War, and here they are. What I’ve been doing is collating all the sightings recorded in two NAA files, MP1049/1, 1918/066 and MP367/1, 512/3/1319. The former is the Navy Office’s file pertaining to ‘Reports of suspicious aeroplanes, lights
Like Gaul and probably some other things, my mystery aeroplanes paper will be divided into three parts: An overview of the 1918 Australian mystery aeroplane scare itself. The immediate historical context which helps explain the scare, namely the threats from German raiders and of Allied defeat. The bigger picture into which the scare fits, namely
My abstract for the Australian Historical Association’s 31st Annual Conference, to be held in Adelaide this July, has been accepted. The title and abstract are as follows: Dreaming war: airmindedness and the Australian defence panic of 1918 Between March and June 1918, Australian newspapers, police forces and military intelligence units were deluged with hundreds of
Some good news from Burma, or at least less bad than usual. The Yorkshire Post reports that, although still retreating, Allied forces ‘have successfully evaded the enemy attempt to cut them off in the Mandalay area’ (1). The British have been divided from the Chinese, however, with the former retreating up the Chindwin and the
All the newspapers today carry news of the meeting between Hitler and Mussolini in Salzburg; only the Daily Express leads with it. Its angle is that there is ‘STRONG evidence’ that the two dictators agreed that Italy would sent ‘a large part’ of its army to Russia, while Germany would send ‘thousands’ of its soldiers
Just at the moment, this war seems mainly to be an air war. The main news today is that Rostock has been bombed for the third night in a row. In addition Stirling bombers carried out a low-level raid on the Skoda works in Czechoslovakia, and six targets in northern France were were attacked by
Most newspapers today lead with the story of a successful Commando raid on the French coast near Boulogne early yesterday morning — though only the Daily Mirror (above), rather bizarrely, focuses on the fact that ‘All wore gym shoes’ (1) (apart from the ex-Limehouse police inspector who wore slippers). More colour is provided by the
