Books

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In 2016 I contributed a chapter on the 1918 mystery aeroplane panic to Australia and the Great War: Identity, Memory and Mythology, an edited collection published by Melbourne University Press. While I'd already published a peer-reviewed article on the same topic, this was broader in scope as it attempted to provide a transnational narrative and analysis of the panic as it unfolded in both Australia and New Zealand -- my one and only contribution to the history of the latter, and for that matter the only published account of these events on that side of the Tasman (that I know of). Since I believe in the virtues of open access, both for the wider public and for my own self-promotion, I like to make whatever versions of my publications I'm allowed to under the agreements I sign with the publisher available as free downloads. But while this is usually possible with journal articles, books (and book chapters) are a different matter: authors do not usually have any re-use rights until the work goes out of print. With my first book, I was able to get around this by uploading my PhD thesis, since they are similar but not the same. In this case, the copyright to my chapter's text is owned by the collection editors, Michael J. K. Walsh and Andrekos Varnava, and I am very grateful to both of them for giving me permission to make it available it here, so it can reach a wider audience.

So, as the very first event in Nyang Week, I'm making 'The enemy at the gates: the 1918 mystery aeroplane panic in Australia and New Zealand' available to download and read for free!

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As long-time (and very patient) readers of this blog will know, I am fascinated by the historical evidence for what I term air panics. Most obviously this includes phantom airship and mystery aeroplane panics, but also rearmament panics, Zeppelin base panics, red balloon panics... anything and everything which provides evidence for what the British people thought and felt about the danger of aviation.

Perhaps the best-known example of an air panic is the exodus from London in September 1938 at the peak of the Sudeten crisis. Supposedly some 150,000 middle or upper class people fled west in anticipation of a German air attack.1 Such a large movement of people represents impressive evidence for the reality of a fear of a knock-out blow from the air. But I've never looked into this in any detail, and nor, as far as I know, has anyone else. So we don't know much about what actually happened during the 1938 exodus, or why.

The 1938 exodus was not, of course, unique. (People had trekked out to the countryside to avoid air raids in the First World War.) It wasn't the only one in the British Empire. (There was one in Australia.) In fact, it wasn't even the biggest. As I was surprised to learn from reading Srinath Raghavan's India's War, numerous spontaneous evacuations due to the fear of air raids took place in India in 1941 and 1942.2 Admittedly this was during wartime, but some of these panics took place before Japan entered the war, and others from places that were never even threatened by air attack.
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  1. Richard M. Titmuss, Problems of Social Policy (London: His Majesty's Stationery Office, 1950), 31. [↩]
  2. Srinath Raghavan, India's War: The Making of Modern South Asia 1939-1945 (Penguin, 2017). [↩]

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Peter J. Bowler. A History of the Future: Prophets of Progress from H.G. Wells to Isaac Asimov. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017. An excellent survey of the way that the future was imagined in the public sphere, mostly in Britain and mostly in the first half of the 20th century. The title suggests a focus on science fiction authors, but Bowler also looks at the influence of experts. And there's a whole chapter on aviation and another on war.

Clare Brant. Balloon Madness: Flights of Imagination in Britain, 1783-1786. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017. A fascinating look at the cultural importance of balloonmania: spectacle, literature, fashion, the sublime and aeronationalism. Needs a sequel!

Fernando Esposito. Fascism, Aviation and Mythical Modernity. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. A much-needed analysis of the relationship between fascism and aviation, in both Italy and Germany (perhaps with an emphasis on the former, which is about right). Add in 'mythical modernity' and I'm sold.

David Hall. Worktown: The Astonishing Story of the 1930s Project that Launched Mass-Observation. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016. Worktown was where Mass-Observation started, in fact even before it was Mass-Observation. Weaves together the progress, difficulties and findings of the project itself with a portrait of Bolton and of the observers themselves, including the somewhat difficult Tom Harrisson.

Adam Hochschild. To End All Wars: A Story of Protest and Patriotism in the First World War.. London: Pan Books, 2012. I know too little about the reaction against the war, or rather what I do know is very piecemeal. Hopefully this will help.

Stephen Morillo with Michael F. Pavkovic. What is Military History?. Cambridge and Medford: Polity, 2018. Third edition. Looking forward to finding out what military history is!

Chris Northcott. MI5 at War, 1909-1918: How MI5 Foiled the Spies of the Kaiser in the First World War. Ticehurst: Tattered Flag Press, 2015. As the title suggests, takes a less sceptical view of the German spy menace than do Thomas Boghardt or Nicholas Hiley (or myself). Nevertheless very useful, not least for tracing the wartime name and function changes of the Secret Service Bureau/MO5/MI5 and its various branches!

John Andreas Olsen (ed.). A History of Air Warfare. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2010. With authors like Freedman, Overy, Mason, Stephens, Corum, and so on, this textbook is solid in more than the physical sense. It's aimed at potential practioners as much as history students: around two-fifths of the text is on the period since 1990.

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A snippet from David Hall's Worktown, on the Mass-Observation project in Bolton, a textile town near Manchester:

At 2.40 [pm] the most interesting event of the day took place. Eight aeroplanes flew over -- a rare sight in Worktown, which is nowhere near a military airport and some distance from a civil one. 'Two men in the garden of no. 84 [Davenport St] shout to attract the attention of two women. Young woman points and says, 'Look at them!' Other woman points and says, 'That's war!' and laughs. The butcher at the Co-op shop and the landlord of the Royal pub come out to see.'1

The date is not clear but it's a workday in (probably) 1937, perhaps in spring; the quotation within the quotation is evidently from the much later account of Brian Barefoot, one of the observers, or possibly from a M-O report written up at the time. This particular episode is from the compilation of 'A Day in the Life of a Street', Davenport St, the location of the M-O HQ.

Without any more information it would be difficult to identify the aircraft, though I would say the formation flying suggests they were likely RAF. There is a bit more we can dig out, though. In emotional terms, there's curiosity, with at least six people stopping what they were doing to look upwards (and the M-O judgement that it was 'the most interesting event of the day'!) There's also the assumption that other people will find the sight interesting ('Look at them!')

Beyond that, there is evidence for the response of one woman, older or at least not young. She laughed but not, it would seem, out of joy. Instead it appears to have been either a sardonic or a nervous laugh at her own comment: 'That's war!' Presumably, she didn't think the formation of aircraft literally meant war; but equally clearly she did relate it in some way to war. Whether that's because she knew or guessed that aircraft flying like that were likely to be military, or whether she associated formations of aeroplanes with militarised aerial theatre she'd seen at the cinema or air displays, I can't say. But she certainly didn't associate the spectacle above her with peaceful civilian flying. And this was just one street: similar scenes must have been replicated all over Bolton (population approx. 163,000). Probably hundreds of others witnessed this spontaneous aerial theatre; how they responded can only be guessed. But there must be more nuggets in the Mass Observation Archives.

  1. David Hall, Worktown: The Astonishing Story of the Project that Launched Mass-Observation (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2016), 113. [↩]

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So, who was behind the drop of propaganda leaflets on the striking workers at Coventry in December 1917? Most of the press accounts in fact avoid identifying the aeroplanes involved or who was flying them. At least one, however, says they were 'military pilots' and this seems likely. While civilian flying didn't stop entirely during the war, it was restricted and there were simply far more military aircraft around at this stage of the war. Radford aerodrome nearby was used for testing; it was originally owned by Daimler but at some point came under military control as No. 1 Aircraft Acceptance Park. So this could be where the leaflet-droppers came from, one way or another. But whoever the pilots were, presumably they were acting on somebody's orders. Whose?
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As I discussed in a previous post, the arrival of the Armistice on 11 November 1918 suddenly made the Aerial League of the British Empire's foray into wartime propaganda films irrelevant. Yet the bizarre coincidence that the film happened to give a prominent place to the time and date of the Armistice suggested the possibility that the League's investment might be recouped by somehow marketing Eleven, Eleven, Eleven as a novelty. The sole mention of the film in the British press, in the Preston Herald in December 1918, was pretty clearly planted with a friendly journalist in an attempt to do just that.1
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  1. Possibly through the offices of E. Jerome Dyer, in effect the film's producer; his name turns up in the Preston press quite frequently in connection with the Vegetable Products Committee which was active there. [↩]

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Jon Cooksey. The Vest Pocket Kodak & The First World War. Lewes: Ammonite Press, 2017. A small book on an interesting topic. The utility and portability of the Vest Pocket Kodak camera made it incredibly popular with soldiers in the front lines and behind them, mostly British here (though the French and Germans are not excluded). As you'd hope, well-illustrated, including one or two photos of actual combat and even atrocities -- and a koala!

Lawrence Freedman. The Future of War: A History. Allen Lane, 2017. This looks like a lot of fun. Exactly what you'd expect from the title, though it does concentrate on the post-1945 era (not surprisingly given Freedman's own areas of expertise). I'm please to see the knock-out blow features prominently in the early chapters, though!

Robert Gerwath. The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End, 1917-1923. Penguin, 2017. I saw a preview of this research back at the Perth AAEH in 2011 and I'm glad to have finally have the results in my hands. Why did the First World War fail to end? Because violence continued in many parts of Europe after the Armistice, not only in actual wars and civil wars but at the paramilitary level too. The focus is rightly on Russia, Germany, and parts in between, but I'll be interested to see what he has to say about western Europe too.

David G. Morgan-Owen. The Fear of Invasion: Strategy, Politics, and British War Planning, 1880-1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. One I've been looking forward to; a critique of the refusal of British military, naval and political leaders to properly think through the implications of decisions such as the committment to a continental expeditionary force over home defence, forcing the Navy into a defensive and reactive posture when war came. A disturbing lack of Zeppelins in the index, however.

Christopher Schaberg. Airportness: The Nature of Flight. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. What does airmindedness look like now, when flying is as routine as most of the early air prophets dreamed -- but also therefore mundane and often tedious? It could look something like airportness.

Alan Stephens. Going Solo: The Royal Australian Air Force, 1946-1971. Canberra: AGPS Press, 1995. A random secondhand bookshop find; doubly appropriate as I was reading Coulthard-Clark's equivalent volume for the 1921-39 period at the time. Yoink!

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Paul Gooding. Historic Newspapers in the Digital Age: 'Search All About It!' London and New York: Routledge, 2017. I was hoping for more of a practical guide to the many methodological issues involving the use of digitised newspapers than this provides; it's much more about the theoretical issues surrounding digitisation and how that connects (or disconnects) with how users actually interact with digitised newspaper archives. Still looks interesting.

Richard F. Hamilton and Holger H. Herwing. War Planning 1914. New York: Cambridge Universty Press, 2010. A useful survey of the evolution of how the major European powers planned to fight in 1914 -- and 1915, since Italy is included, though Turkey is not.

G. Gibbard Jackson. The Splendid Book of the Army and the Air Force. London: Sampson Low, Marston, [1932?]. A very splendid book aimed at splendid children to tell them of the splendid work done by the Army and the Air Force -- in the latter case including Hendon and air control, in a way which Baden-Powell could have found no fault. A gift: thanks, Richard!

Michael John Law. The Experience of Suburban Modernity: How Private Transport Changed Interwar London. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. Cars, bicycles, motorcycles, yes, yes. But there's also a whole chapter on 'Suburban airmindedness', including (but not limited to) the experience of air displays such as (but not only) Hendon. Excellent.

Susan Pedersen. The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. A very well-received study of the mandate system, its limitations, its failures and its critics. Of most interest to me, though, is the chapter on the response to the French bombing of Damascus in its Syrian mandate in 1926, a subject of which I am quite ignorant.

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C. D. Coulthard-Clark. The Third Brother: The Royal Australian Air Force 1921-39. North Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1991. The classic history of the early RAAF (not that there is much serious competition). People, policies, institutions, infrastructure -- it's all here, even air displays!

Richard P. Hallion. Strike from the Sky: The History of Battlefield Air Attack, 1911-1945. Shrewsbury: Airlife, 1989. In a different way to Coulthard-Clark, another classic -- less detailed but equally comprehensive, including coverage of the role of combat air support in the various small and smallish conflicts in the interwar period.

Thomas Hippler. Governing from the Skies: A Global History of Aerial Bombing. London and Brooklyn: Verso, 2017. Follows up Hippler's previous work on Douhet by tracing a thread from air control to area or terror bombing to nuclear war the potentially unlimited (geographical, but also and more importantly legal) reach of drone strikes. Looks like an interesting update of Sven Lindqvist's A History of Bombing.

Stefanie Linden. They Called it Shell Shock: Combat Stress in the First World War. Solihull: Helion, 2016. Based on PhD research into hundreds of case files on British and German shell-shocked soldiers, which should be a fascinating comparison. Also examines the effect of the study and attempted treatment of these men on the practice of medical research itself. One chapter touches on the Angel of Mons, though alas there seem to be no phantom airships.

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A. Bowdoin Van Riper. Imagining Flight: Aviation and Popular Culture. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2004. In some ways this feels like similar territory to Joseph Corn's The Winged Gospel, but as the title suggests it has more of a popular culture focus (especially film). It also has much more of a worldwide and comparative scope, which together with its conciseness might make it a good introductory text on airmindedness.