Periodicals

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Today, a Trove API upgrade, or to be more precise, the decomissioning of the old API, briefly broke Trove Air Bot (and all the other Trove bots). Fortunately Tim Sherratt worked out a solution, and Trove Air Bot is now back in action with all new code, which (with slightly more useful comments) can be found here. Probably nobody noticed anything other than me -- except for when the bot blasted out a few dozen tweets in the space of a few minutes while I was editing the project! Sorry about that...

Bonus! The bot still does basically the same thing as originally, and its tweets look much the same; but it now uses a wider range of keywords, rather than just one. Whereas version 1 searched for newspaper articles containing 'aviation' (or variants, such as 'aviator'), it now randomly searches on one of the following:


aeronautics
aeroplane
aircraft
airplane
airship
aviation
balloon
helicopter

I could have added others, particularly for the aircraft. An obvious one is 'plane', but this gets hundreds of thousands of results every decade in the second half of the 19th century, which will be nothing to do with aviation. (This could be a problem with 'balloon', too.) Conversely I could have included words like 'Zeppelin' or 'autogyro', but that becomes a question of diminishing returns (where do you stop? 'ornithopter'? 'ekranoplan'?? 'vimana'???), and given that the selection of keywords isn't weighted in any way I don't want the results to be dominated by a weird, long tail. The above set of keywords should capture a high proportion of the kind of articles I'm looking for, while remaining reasonably coherent. Hopefully!

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Sphere, 12 December 1936, 496

After the drama of 1934, 'the bomber will always get through' appears less frequently in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA) in 1935 (though still at about twice the level than in 1932 or 1933). But it is still mostly being used in a very political way. This is not surprising, with the general election contested in November to a significant extent on issues of collective security and national defence. In fact, it was most often used by the Labour Party to argue against the National Government's rearmament policy -- which must have irritated Stanley Baldwin, now prime minister again, no end.
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Eric Thake, Vimy flight stamp, 1969

Michael Molkentin. Anzac and Aviator: The Remarkable Story of Sir Ross Smith and the 1919 England to Australia Air Race. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2019.

[Disclaimer: Michael is a friend of mine. But I wouldn't have agreed to review his book if I wasn't confident, based on everything else that he has published, that it was going to be excellent. And I was right.]

Anzac and Aviator is a new biography of Ross Smith, the first Australian aviation pioneer to find global fame.1 This fame rested largely on just one flight in 1919, but it was a truly epic one: the first flight from Britain to Australia. At around 18,000 km, it was the longest to date (albeit carried out in stages, unavoidably). Despite being accompanied by his older brother (and fellow pilot), Keith, Ross -- it's hard to avoid using first names in this review! -- was the driving force behind the flight. With the centenary of the flight this December almost upon us, this biography is timely.
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  1. With the possible exception of Harry Hawker. [↩]

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Distracted boyfriend mem

The man: Stanley Baldwin. The place: the House of Commons. The date: 10 November 1932. The quote:

I think it is well also for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed, whatever people may tell him. The bomber will always get through [...] The only defence is in offence, which means that you have got to kill more women and children more quickly than the enemy if you want to save yourselves.1

I use this quotation all the time in my scholarly writing: in my book, in four peer-reviewed articles, and in two forthcoming publications (as well as a bunch of times on Airminded). It's just such a perfect encapsulation of the knock-out blow theory, and from such a prominent British politician too, that I find it impossible to resist. (To be fair, I'm hardly alone.) The only competitor for my affections is by B. H. Liddell Hart:

Imagine for a moment London, Manchester, Birmingham, and half a dozen other great centres simultaneously attacked, the business localities and Fleet Street wrecked, Whitehall a heap of ruins, the slum districts maddened into the impulse to break loose and maraud, the railways cut, factories destroyed. Would not the general will to resist vanish, and what use would be the still determined fraction of the nation, without organization and central direction?2

Which is more vivid, but not as succinct, and doesn't get across that the consequence of the apparent impossibility of air defence is the logic of mutually assured destruction. And so I always come back to Baldwin. I have used the Liddell Hart quote in my book and in one forthcoming publication, but always as well as 'the bomber will always get through', never instead of it. Baldwin is just too quotable.
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  1. Stanley Baldwin, speech, 10 November 1932, Parliamentary Debates, Commons, vol. 270, col. 632. [↩]
  2. B. H. Liddell Hart, Paris, or the Future of War (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1925), 47. [↩]

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Spectators watching an aircraft's arrival

Tim Sherratt pointed out this remarkable image, PRG 280/1/24/108 in the State Library of South Australia's collection. The description reads:

A large crowd of spectators packed into stands around a show ring looking up into the sky as they watch for the arrival of the local aviator Harry Butler's aircraft.

The date is given as 1919; there's no location other than it's in South Australia.
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Walter Sickert, Miss Earhart's Arrival (1932)

Walter Sickert, Miss Earhart's Arrival (1932). A fascinating image. The occasion is Amelia Earhart's arrival at Hanworth aerodrome on 22 May 1932, after her solo flight across the Atlantic, the first by a woman and in record time. She was already well-known as an aviator, but this feat made her a celebrity. You can see that here in the crush of spectators around her and her aeroplane -- except she can barely be seen (hers is the tiny face in the mid-righthand side, with a man in a homburg to her left); and the aeroplane isn't hers, it belongs to National Flying Services which was rushing her from Londonderry to London on behalf of Paramount News; and everyone is getting pelted by a heavy English rain.1 In a further commentary on the nature of modern fame, Sickert painted Miss Earhart's Arrival, in just five days, from a photograph in the Daily Sketch. Flight was highly critical of this aviation celebrity industry, commenting that

So long as the newspapers fill column after column with sensational accounts of 'intrepid bird-men' (or women) who gamble with death and win or lose as the case may be, people will be found who will risk their lives for the sake of the publicity upon which they know full well that they can count. If the newspapers were to confine themselves to giving the news of such flights in half-a-dozen lines, we should soon see the end of these futile 'stunts.'2

But then we wouldn't have this wonderful painting.

Image source: Tate.

  1. Derry Journal, 23 May 1932, 10. [↩]
  2. Flight, 27 May 1932, 457. [↩]

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Junkers A.35b

So if there were no mystery aeroplanes over Berlin on 23 June 1933, and nobody who even saw any mystery aeroplanes, why did the German government and press say otherwise? There are three-ish reasons, that I can see.

The first is the most obvious. It was strongly implied in the original English-language reports that the whole affair was fabricated in order to justify revising the Versailles ban on German military aviation. For example, it was reported that as a 'sequel' to the raid, 'the Nazi Government is to claim equality in the air at the disarmament discussions' in Geneva.1 Hermann Göring, in his capacity as 'Commissioner of Air', or air minister -- and also Prussian minister-president, though not yet commander of the Luftwaffe, since that didn't formally exist until 1935 -- told a British press representative that:

We are denied military aeroplanes under the Versailles Treaty. I am prepared to renounce bombing and aggressive machines of all kinds, but we must have defence aeroplanes. There is not a single machine in all Germany that we could have sent aloft yesterday. The incident shows how defenceless Germany is. Communist machines might come over at any time from Czechoslovakia or Poland. It is grotesque that a great Power, in the heart of Central Europe, should be so defenceless.2

This rather gave the game away. How convenient that the supposed injustice of the Versailles ban on aviation be so clearly demonstrated so soon after the Nazi seizure of power, and by such a conveniently nebulous bogey as Communist air forces in Czechoslovakia or Poland (neither exactly known as bastions of Soviet influence).
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  1. Northern Whig (Belfast), 26 June 1933, 7. [↩]
  2. Brisbane Courier, 26 June 1933, 12. [↩]

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On the evening of 23 June 1933, Berlin was raided by mysterious aeroplanes of unknown origin:

A number of aeroplanes, which were described as being of unidentified foreign origin, are reported to have flown over the working-class areas of the city yesterday evening, and dropped leaflets and pamphlets, in which the Government was attacked. Upon scout aeroplanes ascending the visiting 'planes disappeared.1

Little information was given about the leaflets themselves, except that they were 'insulting [to] the Government in an incredible manner'.2 But that government -- the Nazi government, which had been in power for just under six months -- was quick to profess alarm:

the newspapers have been ordered to publish a police communique on the front page, accompanied by a statement by an official that the air raid emphasises Germany's helplessness in defending herself against attacks from the air. 'In this raid only papers were dropped; next time it may be gas bombs,' it is stated.

The foreign press was immediately suspicious:

It now appears, however, not only that no one saw the air raiders, but no one has even seen the Anti-Hitlerite leaflets that were supposed to have been scattered from the 'planes. The authorities at Weimar state that the raiders flew there also, and that hand-bills were found on the roof of the police headquarters. The authorities in Berlin say that copies of the leaflets fell on the various ministries.3

As a British journalist commented acidly, 'apparently the machines flew at such a height that they were invisible, except to a few official eyes'.4 Even then, according to the 'air police at the Tempelhof Aerodrome (Berlin's Croydon) [...] nothing was known of such a raid'.5 And checks 'at various Continental aerodromes have failed to reveal any information of a 'plane having left to fly over Berlin'.6 The Evening News pointed out that

Not a single newspaper referred to the curious fact that nobody saw this fleet of aeroplanes anywhere on its way from some unstated frontier to Berlin, and nobody took the trouble to ascertain in which direction the aeroplanes went off after passing Berlin.

Although the newspapers were unanimous in saying that the machines were of a type unknown in Germany, and that they were seen by several experts, not a single particular about the points of difference in construction was given.7

In the judgment of International Information (published by the Labour and Socialist International), the incident was a 'faked scare':

The whole swindle recalls only too clearly the fire in the Reichstag and the fable that French aeroplanes appeared over Nuremberg before the German declaration of war in the war of 1914-1918.8

It's difficult to disagree.9 These aeroplanes not only never existed, nobody ever even seems to have thought they existed. They were not just phantom aeroplanes, then: they were phantom phantoms, concocted by the Nazi government and promoted by the German press. But to what end? I'll answer that question in a following post.

UPDATE: I found some more details of the supposed 'handbill air-raid':

Reports from Berlin state that the three planes, which were said to be double-deckers, of a type unknown to Germany, flew over the city on Friday afternoon, hurling down thousands of handbills, which contained abusive matter concerning the Hitler Government.

The weather was cloudy and the planes kept to a height of 10,000 feet and more. They were seen over Cottbus earlier in the afternoon, and later over Mannheim, going from the east to the west.

Similar machines were also reported over Thuringia and the Palatinate. Handbills similar to those dropped over Berlin were distributed over Weimar.10

  1. Brisbane Courier, 26 June 1933, 12. [↩]
  2. Gloucester Echo (Cheltenham Spa), 24 June 1933, 1. [↩]
  3. Brisbane Courier, 26 June 1933, 12. [↩]
  4. Northern Whig (Belfast), 26 June 1933, 7. [↩]
  5. Belfast Telegraph, 24 June 1933, 11. [↩]
  6. Liverpool Echo, 24 June 1933, 8. [↩]
  7. Quoted in Toowoomba Chronicle and Darling Downs Gazette, 26 August 1933, 11. [↩]
  8. Quoted in Daily Standard (Brisbane), 22 August 1933, 10. [↩]
  9. Even though the Reichstag fire probably wasn't a 'Reichstag fire'. [↩]
  10. Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 26 June 1933, 1. [↩]

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Sunday News, 30 July 1944, 4

Since this thread received absolutely no love over on Twitter, some lazyblogging of a 1944 article entitled 'Jargon of the skies' by James E. Wellard on RAF and US Army slang, published in the Toronto Star Weekly (via the Perth Sunday Times):


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