Civil aviation

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The Times, 2 January 1941, 4

The Mediterranean theatre of war has seen a lot of action in recent days, as these headlines from The Times (4) show. While the Italian outpost at Bardia is besieged from land, sea and air, British armoured units are approaching Tobruk, 70 miles to the west. On Monday night, Italian warships at Taranto were bombed by the RAF: '11 bombs were seen to burst around the target' (though without such striking success as attended the Royal Navy's raid last November). The Greek army is continuing its slow and stubborn advance, though 'the present line of Italian defence shows no clear sign of cracking'.
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I've recently been reading Peter Ewer's Wounded Eagle: The Bombing of Darwin and Australia's Air Defence Scandal, which I found to be unexpectedly interesting, but not always in a good way. Wounded Eagle has much less about the Second World War than I'd thought: much of the early part of the book is taken up with a detailed analysis of the origins of the Empire Air Mail Scheme (EAMS) in the 1930s, and then there's a long account of the Royal Australian Air Force's pre-war procurement policy. There's a lot of interesting stuff here: one particular surprise for me was the accidental way in which British radar research was accidentally revealed to the Australian government by a young physicist returning home from studying at Cambridge. The Australians asked if this was true, and the British sheepishly said that it was and only then began sharing its data with the Dominions! Even more surprising, perhaps, is that the RAAF, having got its hands on some British radar sets in 1940, showed next to no interest in them. Only the Australian Army did anything with them, for use with coastal defence batteries.

Ewer's book is full of such pointed criticisms, and that's the problem. This polemic has two targets: the British, and pro-British Australian politicians. The latter are outside my area, though I'll talk about them later. But I like to think I know a bit about the British by now, particularly when it comes to aeroplanes, so let's start there.
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The air power race. Great Britain also ran. Saturday Review, 15 December 1934, 514

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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Daily Telegraph

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.

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Here are a couple of photos I used in my AHA talk last week:

Ju 52/3m at Croydon

This is a Lufthansa Ju 52/3m, one of the great airliners of the 1930s, at Croydon aerodrome, ca. 1936. Other operators included Swissair, Aeroflot, and British Airways (an ancestor of the current airline of the same name).
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Short Empire

Director Baz Luhrmann (Strictly Ballroom, Moulin Rouge) has been working on a new film, called Australia. As the name perhaps suggests, it's a sweeping saga of this wide, brown land of ours: the men who conquered it, the women who loved them, the cattle, the dust, the flies ... well, it sounds pretty dull to me, to be honest. But I saw an extended trailer before Indy IV the other day, and it seems that Australia does have a couple of points of interest for the airminded film-goer.

The first is hinted at in this set photo. It shows Nicole Kidman ('our Nic') and, if I'm not mistaken, Bill Hunter (who is contractually obliged to appear in every major Australian motion picture) in a boat with 'QANTAS EMPIRE AIRWAYS LTD' written on the side. Well, since Qantas have not, historically, been known for their watercraft, presumably there'll be a Short Empire flying boat around somewhere! Such as the QEA Empire boat pictured above, VH-ABB Coolangatta. That's excellent -- we don't see enough of these strangely beautiful aircraft these days. But a few scenes with a CGI flying boat are probably not enough to get me into the cinema.

The second is much more central to the story, it seems: the Japanese air raids on Darwin on 19 February 1942, carried out by the four fleet carriers of Nagumo's task force and land-based bombers from the East Indies. About 240 aircraft attacked the harbour and airfield; 10 ships were sunk and about 250 people killed. To date, it's the heaviest and costliest attack by an enemy on an Australian target.

Which would seem to make it a fitting subject for an epic Australian film. Except that there was no Blitz-style, Darwin-can-take-it stoicism here. In fact, what happened was not unlike the pre-war predictions of the effects of an aerial knock-out blow. Half the town's population of 2500 (most women and children had been evacuated in December) fled south after the raid, along with a fair number of RAAF service personnel -- the so-called 'Adelaide River Stakes' (Adelaide River being a small town about 60 km south of Darwin).1 It's true enough that the two air raids were taken as a sign of imminent invasion, not unreasonably since Fortress Singapore had surrendered just four days earlier, along with most of the 8th Division AIF; and Darwin was a long way from any help. And it has been suggested that the deserting servicemen had been given confusing orders. That doesn't explain the fact that one of them got as far as Melbourne (about 4000 km away!) before stopping. Or, more seriously, the looting which took place in Darwin the night after the raid, perpetrated by servicemen (including some military police). There was certainly bravery -- not least from the USAAF pilots who took to the air to defend Darwin in their P-40s, though greatly outnumbered -- but overall, it's a pretty inglorious episode in Australia's military history. (And an example of something which Australians might do well to remember on ANZAC Day.)

So, it will be interesting to see how the raid's aftermath is depicted in Australia. Telling anything like the full story would seem to cut against the intended epic nature of the film. But it sounds like Luhrmann does does intend to tell this part of Australia's history:

Darwin was attacked 64 times in six months ... The government (disguised) the truth: 2000 whites were killed and non-whites were not counted, so the toll was far greater," he said. "But everything in the film will be in service to a great romance ... Facts will be moved around but not in a way that fundamentally disturbs the truth.

I may have to see it after all ...

(The title of this post, as Australians of a certain age may have guessed, is an homage to that great maker of epic films, Warren Perso, the 'last Aussie auteur'.)

Image source: Wikimedia Commons.

  1. See here; the relevant volumes of the official history, Douglas Gillison, Royal Australian Air Force, 1939-1942 (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1962), 426-32, and Paul Hasluck, The Government and the People, 1942-1945 (Canberra: Australian War Memorial, 1970), 141-4; and the relevant volume of the centenary history of defence, Alan Stephens, The Royal Australian Air Force (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2001), 136-9. [↩]

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Imperial Airways

A follow-on of sorts to a recent post.

Imperial Airways was Britain's main international airline between 1924 and 1939. It enjoyed semi-official status, as it was subsidised by the British government, and had the contract to deliver air mail throughout the Empire. Another international airline was formed in 1935, British Airways,1 which serviced European routes (and it was apparently subsidised as well, at least for the London-Paris route). Imperial did too, but only it flew the long-distance routes to South Africa, India, Hong Kong, Australia (with help from QANTAS) and points in between. I'm not sure if this was an official monopoly, or just because it was difficult to compete over such long distances without subsidies. I also wonder what would have happened if the Imperial Airship Scheme had gone into operation -- would Imperial have run that too? Anyway, in November 1939, Imperial and British were merged into BOAC, the British Overseas Airways Corporation.
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  1. Not the current BA, though they are related. [↩]

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Note: This map DOES NOT show real air routes, from 1920 or any other year! They are purely imaginary.

While writing the post on old maps, I happened upon the following example, which is labelled 'The world -- principal air routes' and dated to 1920 by the host site, Hipkiss' Scanned Old Maps:

Principal air routes, 1920

The only other information given is that it is from The People's Atlas and produced by the London Geographical Institute.

Now, this is interesting, because it most certainly does NOT show air routes in 1920: there were very, very few, and they certainly didn't criss-cross the world as this map suggests. Many of these routes had not been flown at all, let alone by regularly scheduled services. For example, here's a close-up of the North Atlantic:
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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

Five years ago yesterday, like so many others I watched in horror and confusion as the September 11 attacks unfolded on the other side of the planet and on my TV screen. It seemed so novel and so strange, to think of humble airliners being used as weapons. (I still catch myself looking up at the sky when I hear one flying low, and wondering for a second -- 'Is it going to ... ?') But it wasn't really all that novel. Airliners and terror go way back.

However, it wasn't that people were worried that airliners in flight would be seized by terrorists and flown into important buildings. Instead, the fear was that a nation's airliners could be quickly and easily turned into bombers and used en masse to deliver a knock-out blow against an unsuspecting victim. In the 1920s and early 1930s, this idea was very widespread in Britain, at least among those people who were thinking about how to win, or better yet, prevent the next war.

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To continue the Australian theme, here's an excellent article by Leigh Edmonds on the development of airmindedness in Australia, from Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture. (It's quite long; there's a shorter version at the Airways Museum & Civil Aviation Historical Society.) My impression from that is that airminded organisations had more influence with the government in Australia than in Britain, and also that the Australian government was more successful in encouraging the growth of airlines than was the British (geography no doubt helped - there's far less need for aircraft to get around in a tiny place like the UK). And it might just be because of the focus of the article, but military aviation seems to have taken a distinct second place to civil aviation, though it's interesting to see that in the 1930s, the shadow of the bomber fell across even so remote a country as Australia.