Contemporary

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I've previously mentioned the Holden airship. At the moment it is at Brisbane, and there are concerns that it will be flown over the Gabba during the first Ashes test next month.1 The problem is that Holden isn't paying Cricket Australia anything for the privilege of flying a billboard over the cricket ground, where it might well catch the eye of 40000 spectators bored with Australia's on-field drubbing of the puny English team. So the Queensland state government is planning to introduce legislation to ban such overflights of major sporting events, along with skywriting. Otherwise, the downfall of Australian civilisation could result, or something.

Now, I've said it before and I'll say it again: there's no need for legislation here. It would likely just impose a fine for infractions, anyway, which might not be an effective deterrent to a sufficiently determined advertiser. A FAR more effective solution would be a belt of anti-aircraft guns around the Gabba, along with a squadron or two of Sopwith Camels and a system of sound locators and ground observers in surrounding suburbs. It worked in the First World War; it can work again.

Of course, the enemy advertisers may adapt, seeking to overwhelm the defences with masses of airships, or to escort the raiders, perhaps with trapeze fighters. Maybe the blimp will always get through, in which case a deterring counter-advertising strategy might well be called for -- holding a force of airships in readiness to instantly fly over sporting events sponsored by the opposition, should they dare to use their airships in a hostile manner. Perhaps the ultimate solution is the international control of all airships, which would then only be used over stadiums as directed by the League of Nations -- I mean, United Nations.

At any rate, I'm available, for only a moderately immoderate fee, to consult with any sporting venues wishing to develop a state-of-the-art-c.-1918 air defence system.

  1. Note to journos: outside of a few not-notably-successful experiments, blimps AKA airships do not rely upon hot air for lift. This one has 5 million litres of helium inside it. [↩]

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Some recent airship sightings:

Holden airship

An airship is currently gracing Melbourne skies, thanks to Holden. I've seen it but not with a camera handy, so this picture by Dr Snafu will have to serve. It's nice to see it floating around, but at only 54 metres in length, I'm forced to say: that's not an airship. THIS is an airship! Still, I'd love to fly in it ...

Great War Fiction has the trailer for the upcoming First World War aviation movie, Flyboys. Looks like great fun, with Nieuports and Fokkers slugging it out over the Western Front. And towards the end of the trailer, there's even a Zeppelin! While the producers seem to have done at least some research, it would be wise not too expect too much in the way of historical accuracy. I see they've gone for the usual massive Hollywood explosion with the Zep -- maybe they should have watched the Hindenburg disaster footage a few more times.

The Avia-Corner reports on an upcoming expedition to examine the wreckage, via submersible, of the USS Macon -- last of the US Navy's flying aircraft carriers. It crashed off the Californian coast in 1935. For understandable reasons none of the great airships of the early twentieth century have survived (aside from their unfortunate propensity for catastrophic failure, they take up rather a lot of room), so seabed wrecks are about all we have left, aside from a few fragments here and there.

Finally, Boing Boing notes that today is the 90th anniversary of the tank's combat debut. Or should I say "travelling caterpillar fort" instead? No, I probably shouldn't -- like many somewhat insecure nations, Australia sometimes likes to take credit for inventions it oughtn't to. Yes, Lance de Mole did come up with the basic idea, but so did a few others, even earlier. And he didn't build it -- others did. Which is the (rather tenuous) link with airships here: one of the men who did help make the tank a practical device was Commodore (later Rear-Admiral) Murray Sueter, who was the Royal Navy's first Inspecting Captain of Airships in 1909. He also helped develop torpedo bombers and anti-aircraft defence. His claim to be a co-inventor of the tank rests on his work on armoured cars for the defence of airfields in Flanders, and in persuading Churchill that caterpillar tracks were the way to go, rather than rollers or a giant wheel! After the war, Sueter was a long-serving and outspoken Conservative MP; his Airmen or Noahs: Fair Play for our Airmen; The Great "Neon" Air Myth Exposed (London: Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1928) is a rollicking good read on these and other matters.

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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.

...continue reading →

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Airfix Spitfire Mk 21

Airfix Spitfire Mk 21, a work in progress. Image source: Airfix gallery, user HawkerTempest5.

It looks like Airfix, Britain's oldest and most famous manufacter of plastic model aeroplanes (among other things), might be going under.

It will probably not surprise readers of this site to learn that I had a collection of model aeroplanes as a boy. It was small but diverse: a Mustang, a Kaydet, a Lancaster, a F-16 (and some ships too, the USS Pennsylvania and the Santa Maria) ... maybe some others I can't remember now. (They did not long survive the arrival of a baby brother.) However, I lacked the patience and the dexterity to be very good at making them. Probably the low point was the Lancaster. I didn't have the right colour paints, so it ended up being painted in the highly distinctive but ... erm ... somewhat unhistorical camouflage scheme of the Desert Air Force. Not only that, but I laid it on so thickly that if it were scaled up to full-size, I doubt it would ever have gotten off the ground under the weight of all that paint!

Airfix started making scale models in the 1950s (its first aeroplane was a 1/72 scale Spitfire in 1955). The first plastic scale models were the Frog Penguins, starting with a Gloster Gladiator in 1936. But it seems that the basic idea goes back a few years earlier, when the components were made from solid wood (so-called "solid scale" models), with some metal and acetate. In fact, an article at CollectAir suggests that the honour for originating the concept should go to the Air League of the British Empire:

A Junior Air League section was formed by A.J. Holladay, called the "Skybird League" in 1933 and the decision was made to market commercial solid-scale model kits of current model airplanes in 1:72 scale. Many "Skybird" members who crafted models from these kits and drawings later became RAF pilots such as Neville Duke. This was a civilian commercial endeavour, nevertheless it was the progenitor of the government recognition model program for the British and for the U.S., both of which would come belatedly.

I haven't been able to verify this yet, but it makes sense. The Air League had always been interested in promoting an airminded youth: as early as April 1909, only two months after it was founded, the Aerial League of the British Empire (as it was then known) staged a balloon flight and leaflet-dropping competition with the Boy Scouts, at Battersea Gasworks. Under J. A. Chamier in the 1930s, the Air League lobbied the government to set up an air cadet scheme, which bore fruit in the shape of the Air Defence Cadet Corps, formed in 1938 (today's Air Cadets Organisation is a direct descendent).

So swearing over the placement of fiddly decals and the smudging of acetate canopies with glue goes back a long way. If Airfix disappears, there will be other companies to carry on the tradition (the industry is particularly strong in Japan), but it will still be a sad day.

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

The British contingent of the historioblogosphere has swung into action upon hearing that their government is planning to pardon over 300 soldiers executed during the First World War. I have little to add to what everyone is saying (broadly, that such a blanket pardon rides roughshod over a complex situation and seems to derive more from politics than history -- not that this is surprising), so I'll just link to the various posts:

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[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.]

The kick-off for the football1 World Cup final is only hours away. To mark the occasion, here's Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, head of the Royal Air Force, on the correct use of airpower (in 1923, in the context of a hypothetical war with France):

Would it be best to have less fighters and more bombers to bomb the enemy and trust to their people cracking before ours, or have more fighters to bring down more of the enemy bombers. It would be rather like putting two teams to play each other at football, and telling one team they must only defend their own goal, and keep all their men on that one point. The defending team would certainly not be beaten, but they would equally certainly not win, nor would they stop the attack on their goal from continuing. I would like to make this point again. I feel that although there would be an outcry, the French in a bombing duel would probably squeal before we did. That was really the final thing. The nation that would stand being bombed longest would win in the end.2

It may not be immediately apparent, but in Trenchard's analogy, the 'goals' to be defended are the great cities of each warring nation. So goals are scored by bombing cities, killing and terrorising their inhabitants; and the 'match' won by causing a collapse in civilian morale, who will then cause their 'team' to give up.

The analogy is starting to get a bit torturous by this point! But football is not a great analogy for the standard RAF view of strategic bombing to begin with. On the one hand, it's true that in football a team which only defends can't win. On the other hand, a strong defence is still desirable, because one goal is often enough to win (or lose) a match. Equally, it's more than possible to have matches end in a draw, and not the decisive knock-out blow Trenchard predicted.

Knock-out blow ... now that's a boxing term.3 Sport and war seem to mix very easily in British history. The Duke of Wellington might not have said that Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, but Henry Newbolt did compare the imperial burden to a schoolboy game of cricket, in his 1897 poem "Vitai Lampada":

There's a breathless hush in the Close to-night --
Ten to make and the match to win --
A bumping pitch and a blinding light,
An hour to play and the last man in.
And it's not for the sake of a ribboned coat,
Or the selfish hope of a season's fame,
But his Captain's hand on his shoulder smote
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"
The sand of the desert is sodden red, --
Red with the wreck of a square that broke; --
The Gatling's jammed and the colonel dead,
And the regiment blind with dust and smoke.
The river of death has brimmed his banks,
And England's far, and Honour a name,
But the voice of schoolboy rallies the ranks,
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"
This is the word that year by year
While in her place the School is set
Every one of her sons must hear,
And none that hears it dare forget.
This they all with a joyful mind
Bear through life like a torch in flame,
And falling fling to the host behind --
"Play up! play up! and play the game!"

Cricket is, of course, much more interesting to Englishmen than is war. At least, this is the case in P. G. Wodehouse's brilliant parody of the Edwardian preoccupation with the possibility of German invasion, "The swoop!" (1909). A newspaper poster proclaims

SURREY
DOING
BADLY
GERMAN ARMY LANDS IN ENGLAND

with a stop-press report that

Fry not out, 104. Surrey 147 for 8. A German army landed in Essex this afternoon. Loamshire Handicap: Spring Chicken, 1; Salome, 2; Yip-i-addy, 3. Seven ran.

Wodehouse may have been on to something. In 1940, newspaper sellers reported the progress of the Battle of Britain as though it were a cricket match: 'Biggest raid ever -- Score 78 to 26 -- England still batting',4 as did BBC radio commentators:

[T]he man's baled out by parachute -- the pilot's baled out by parachute -- he's a Junkers 87 and he's going slap into the sea and there he goes -- smash ... Oh boy, I've never seen anything so good as this -- the RAF fighters have really got these boys taped.5

It does seem a bit unsporting of the Luftwaffe to have tried to take out their defeat on the home of cricket itself, though.

More seriously, that the everyday heroics of the sports field could inspire men on the battlefield is shown by the famous incident on the first day of the Somme, where Captain W. P. Nevill led men of the 8th East Surreys over the top, dribbling a football. Nevill fell, dead -- no faking there, unlike the real thing -- but his men took their objective.

Going the other way, and bringing us back to where we began, since 1966 English football fans have taunted their German counterparts with the chant "Two World Wars and one World Cup!" -- though some might argue that three World Cups is at least an equivalent record. Neither Germany nor England is playing in the final this time around: it's France vs Italy. And as Italy knocked out Australia thanks to a somewhat dubious penalty, I'm hoping that France will squeal, as Trenchard predicted -- not in terror but in joy!

  1. By which I mean soccer ... [↩]
  2. Chief of Air Staff meeting, 19 July 1923, AIR 2/1267; quoted in Neville Jones, The Beginnings of Strategic Air Power: A History of the British Bomber Force 1923-39 (London: Frank Cass, 1987), 29. Emphasis added. [↩]
  3. When the Sun crowed 'Gotcha!' at the Royal Navy's sinking of the General Belgrano in the Falklands War, it reported that 'The Navy had the Argies on their knees last night after a devastating double punch'. [↩]
  4. Quoted in Malcolm Smith, Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory (London and New York: Routledge, 2000), 63. [↩]
  5. Ibid., 62. [↩]

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The War Room reports the short list of names for the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter:

  • Black Mamba
  • Cyclone
  • Lightning II
  • Piasa
  • Reaper
  • Spitfire II

As noted at the War Room, most of these names are really, really bad, and sound like something a 12 year old boy would come up with.1 Of interest here is the homage to great fighter planes of yore -- the Spitfire and the P-38 Lightning. (At least, I assume that Lightning II refers to that and not the English Electric Lightning, itself one of the great post-war fighters.) Presumably, Spitfire II is on the list because of the British participation in the project (though their US$2 billion is just a drop in the bucket, when compared with the projected total cost of US$244 billion). Cyclone sounds like it would have fitted in well alongside the Hurricane, Tempest, Typhoon and Whirlwind, too. Other than those choices, these are some pretty silly names. Piasa is more likely to evoke feelings of slight puzzlement than dread.

Still, fair's fair: the British have made some aircraft with pretty silly names too. Such as the Fawn. The Flycatcher. The Tabloid. The Iris. It's lucky the next war didn't start in 1931, when the Blackburn Iris (a seaplane) entered service; imagine how dreadfully embarassed the aircrew would have been to have been seen by the enemy flying around in something named after a flower.

Of course, the name of a combat aircraft is irrelevant to its actual performance. I guess the only real purpose is for propaganda, particularly on the home front. In that light, it's interesting that the names given to British fighters2 become more aggressive-sounding over time -- think of the difference between the Siskin III (a 'small songbird', according to the OED) of the mid-1920s and the Spitfire of the late 1930s. If you are staring total air war in the face, you might as well put yourself in the mood ...

  1. Of course, the only people, other than 12 year old boys, who will care what the JSF is called are 12 year old boys at heart anyway :) [↩]
  2. Bombers generally were generally named after places -- Overstrand, Bombay, Wellington, Manchester. [↩]

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Essendon Football Club logo

Football, by which I mean Australian Rules, pretty much bores me to tears. Given that I live in the home of Aussie rules, it's something that I just have to put up with. Melbourne is obsessed with the sport for more than half the year, between the start of the pre-game season in February and that one day in September when the Grand Final is held and those of us who aren't fanatics can get some relief. (And look forward to the cricket and the tennis ...)

However, there is some small interest for the airminded historian. Today being Anzac Day, it is the occasion for the "traditional Anzac Day clash" (where apparently "traditional" means since 1995) between two of the original members of the Australian Football League (founded 1897, as the Victorian Football League), Collingwood and Essendon. Now, each team in the competition has a nickname, ranging from the biological (Kangaroos, Lions) to the religious (Saints, Demons) to the oddly abstract (Blues, Power). Collingwood are the Magpies, and Essendon are the Bombers -- and this is obviously where I come in.

So where did they get a name like that? According to the club's website, the name began to be used from 1922. Other sites add that it was because that year, the club moved to new grounds at Windy Hill, near Essendon Airport, which itself was only founded in 1921. That makes some sense, the 1920s were a boom time for aviation in Australia: Qantas, the Royal Australian Air Force and the Royal Flying Doctor Service all got off the ground in that decade, which also saw the rise to fame of such great Australian aviators as Charles Kingsford-Smith and Bert Hinkler. I can see the appeal of an aviation theme for a club wanting to move with the times. But still, I have questions. As far as I can tell Essendon Airport was never used by the RAAF (which in any event was tiny in this period), so there wouldn't have been many bombers around Essendon. So was it just the airport that inspired the name? Also, why bombers, and not the more glamorous fighters, which might seem to have many positive attributes for a sporting emblem -- speed, agility, power?

I think an understanding of post-war airpower might help here. To take the second question first, fighters were faster (though not always by much) and more agile, but on the other hand they lacked the endurance of the bomber. More importantly, perhaps, the twin machine-guns of most fighters in this period hardly compared with the awesome destructive power of the high-explosive, incendiary and gas bombs that bombers could carry. Yes, that's right -- it all comes back to the theory of the knock-out blow, which was debated extensively in public throughout this period. At least, it was in the UK, but the State Library's extensive holdings on the subject leads me to suspect the debate was followed closely over here too (or at least that librarians thought that it was ...)

And that, I suggest, may help answer the first question. So 1922 was the year that Essendon started being called the Bombers; 1922 was also the year that, back in Mother England, P. R. C. Groves published an extremely influential series of articles in The Times which I think mark the real start of the knock-out blow, at least as far as public awareness is concerned.Not that anyone much seems to have actually used that term back then! (Groves' articles along with responses published in many other newspapers were republished in his Our Future in the Air: A Survey of the Vital Question of British Air Power, London: Hutchinson & Co., 1922.) Is it too much of a stretch to think that echoes of this debate made their way out to Australia, and inspired some Essendon fan watching his team train at Windy Hill while some biplanes circled lazily above? The Bombers: they will always get through the enemy defences, they will bombard the goals with devastatingly accurate kicks, they will demoralise the enemy fans with the ferocity of their attack. They will, in short, secure victory by delivering the knock-out blow.

Well, that's all speculation! There are some possible problems. One is that a few sites say that the nickname wasn't used until the 1940s. Another is the possibility that it originally had nothing directly to do with aeroplanes at all, but referred to a style of kick that Essendon players excelled at circa 1922. If either of those is true then my theory has been shot down in flames. I've looked at some academic histories of Aussie rules, but none of them talk about the origins of Essendon's nickname.If anyone is interested, the best one seems to be Rob Hess and Bob Stewart, eds, More Than a Game: An Unauthorised History of Australian Rules Football (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 1998). The chapter on the period 1915-1924 is by Dale Blair, a military historian who usually writes on the First World War. There are some people in my department who would probably know whether my suggestion is off the mark or not, or I could do some, you know, actual primary source research. But I think for the moment I have reached the limits of my extremely small interest in football :)

PS It seems that the Magpies' air defences were too strong this year: the Bombers were downed by 15.16 (106) to 12.17 (89).

Image source: Wikipedia.

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State Library of Victoria

I spent most of the last week at the State Library of Victoria. It's a grand old pile, built in the 1850s when Melbourne was awash with gold money (apparently, it was one of the richest cities in the British Empire). For the last decade or so, it has been undergoing works of some kind -- first of all to refurbish and expand the whole building, for the last few months they have been doing something at the offsite storage area which means that all the old journals like Fortnightly Review and Nineteenth Century and After are unavailable until after Easter (ie this weekend, finally!)

State Library of Victoria - Latrobe Reading Room

I'm sure it's not a patch on, say, the old British Library Reading Room, but the La Trobe Reading Room (above and below) is a rather nice place to sit, read and write. (There's another big reading room, but La Trobe is nicer and quieter.) It was opened in 1913 and is covered by what was apparently the biggest reinforced concrete dome in the world. Well, it is big, certainly. It also has a big collection, 1.5 million books, and I'm always surprised at (and grateful for) the amount of primary source material I can find there. Any time I look up some musty old 1920s book on airpower by J. M. Spaight, say, or "Neon", there must be at least an 80% chance that the SLV has it. (If it's non-fiction, anyway -- 'works of fiction and of the imagination' were specifically excluded back then.) They are not so great on British newspapers, but you can't have everything ...

State Library of Victoria - Dome

To me though, this building will always "really" be the Museum of Victoria, which shared the building up until the mid-1990s -- in fact, I'm not sure I even knew there was a library in there as well, until the museum moved out! I loved the rabbit warren that was the old museum, and visited it many times. I even worked there for a few months as an "Explainer". It's great to have a swish space for the all the library's collections, but I do miss turning around a corner and bumping into a mummy or a racing horse, or even a musty old set of dioramas illustrating the history of warfare, which must have themselves dated to the interwar period. The new Melbourne Museum is great, but lacks the charm (and the dioramas!) of the old museum.

PS The photos on the Wikipedia page are much nicer than mine, so go look at them too :)

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British Empire Games flag

Well, OK, the Commonwealth Games then. British Empire Games was the original name: the first were held in 1930 in Hamilton, Canada. Most of the world probably has not heard of the Commonwealth Games, but it's second only to the Olympics (which it closely resembles) in terms of bringing the greatest number of elite athletes together in the one festival of sport, some 4500 in all, in 71 teams. That is to say, only those elite athletes who happen to come from Commonwealth countries (more or less, the former British Empire). So no irritating Team USA swimmers to challenge Australian dominance of the pool -- instead the big competition there will be from England and South Africa. I think we're safe! In fact, Australia usually dominates the medal tally, which as a sports-mad nation suits us just fine. (Just don't mention the fact that our arch-rivals New Zealand beat us in the 1930 Games!)

Cornwall Commonwealth Games Association

It's not all about sport, of course, politics can intrude; and there are often controversies -- 32 countries boycotted the 1986 Games because of British sporting contacts with South Africa. This year there was an argument over whether to play "God Save The Queen" at the opening ceremony, a bit of a touchy issue in a republican-leaning country like Australia. (Apparently a few bars were played as a compromise.) And the Stolenwealth Games website (a nicely done parody of the official website) is part of an effort to use the games "to raise awareness about the issues of Genocide, Sovereignty and Treaty" in relation to indigenous Australians. One controversy I haven't seen raised here is that of countries who want to participate but aren't deemed eligible. Well, I say "countries" but they aren't universally acknowledged as countries, which is why there is a problem. An example is Cornwall. England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland, Guernsey, Jersey and the Isle of Man all have their own teams, and the Cornwall Commonwealth Games Association wants a Cornish team to take part in the 2010 Games in Delhi. The problem is that while it can lay claim to a somewhat unique administrative history, has its own not-quite dead language and a recognisably Celtic heritage, Cornwall has not been an independent entity since the Middle Ages. Unlike the other parts of the UK sending teams, it's a part of England. But as my ancestors hailed from Cornwall, and I find the place and its history intriguing, I'm happy to ask "Where's Cornwall?" and display the CCGA's logo above. (The black and white flag is St Piran's, the flag of Cornwall or Kernow as it is in Cornish.)

Empire Air Day programme, 20 May 1939

Getting back to the British Empire Games, it seems to me that there was a vogue in the interwar period, and perhaps especially in the 1930s, for prefixing the word "Empire" or "Imperial" to various events and schemes. Aside from the Games, there was Empire Day and Imperial Preference. In my own area, there was Empire Air Day and the Empire class flying boats; Imperial Airways and the Imperial Airship Programme. Perhaps with the Dominions "growing up" and increasingly going their own way (the Statute of Westminster was passed in 1931), there was a desire to reinforce the ties of culture and sentiment with something more practical. And of course aviation was an ideal technology for such a purpose.

Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games logo

So why am I writing about all this? Because the 2006 Commonwealth Games are being held in my own town of Melbourne; the opening ceremony was just held a few hours ago. Security is of course an issue: helicopters have been flying all over the place, a very visible police presence, and the Australian Defence Force (including my younger brother) is apparently around somewhere, doing security checks and providing backup. Blue "games lanes" have been painted on a nearby road for the exclusive use of officials and athletes, though mere mortals seem to be ignoring the risk of a $165 fine for using it without a permit. The Games proper begin today. Of course, I won't actually be going -- as an inner-city resident, I will be affecting a suitable air of disdain and watching it all on tv.

Image sources: Wikipedia (British Empire Games flag and Melbourne 2006 Commonwealth Games logo); Cornwall Commonwealth Games Association; Plane Crazy Heritage.