Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics

•

The default explanation for the Australian mystery aeroplane panic of 1918 was a conspiracy theory:

they were enemy aircraft, deployed by German merchant raiders operating off the Australian coast, or perhaps flying from secret aerodromes deep in the bush. Either way they were thought to be collaborating with German spies on shore, as evidenced by the lights sometimes seen flashing signals out to sea. It was feared that Germany was undertaking reconnaissance in preparation for an attack of some kind, perhaps on shipping or even on the nation’s cities and industries.1

If you didn't buy this -- and after all, it wasn't actually true -- then what other explanations were there? Well, you might find a different conspiracy theory to be attractive: that the mystery aeroplanes had been faked by the Australian government on behalf of corrupt politicians and profiteering manufacturers.
...continue reading →

  1. Brett Holman, 'Dreaming war: airmindedness and the Australian mystery aeroplane scare of 1918', History Australia 10, no. 2 (August 2013): 180–201, at 185; doi:10.1080/14490854.2013.11668467 (free: submitted version, before peer review). [↩]

• 2 Comments

•

Critical Survey has just published an early access version of my peer-reviewed article 'William Le Queux, the Zeppelin menace and the Invisible Hand' -- that's right, no subtitle! -- here. Here's the abstract:

In contrast to William Le Queux's pre-1914 novels about German spies and invasion, his wartime writing is much less well known. Analysis of a number of his works, predominantly non-fictional, written between 1914 and 1918 shows that he modified his perception of the threat posed by Germany in two ways. Firstly, because of the lack of a German naval invasion, he began to emphasise the more plausible danger of aerial attack. Secondly, because of the incompetent handling of the British war effort, he began to believe that an 'Invisible Hand' was responsible, consisting primarily of naturalised Germans. Switching form from fiction to non-fiction made his writing more persuasive, but he was not able to sustain this and he ended the war with less influence than he began it.

Unfortunately the publishing agreement doesn't allow me to upload a green open access version of the article for 24 months, but it's based on a post I wrote here a few years ago about Le Queux's wartime spyhunting in Soho and Surrey, so you can get a flavour by reading that. The expanded version includes more of Le Queux's conspiracy theorising, placing it in the context of his wartime literary output and the evolution of 'Hidden Hand' conspiracy theories on the British far right in the First World War.
...continue reading →

• 2 Comments

•

Sea, Land and Air (Melbourne), February 1920, 765

Although the war had been over for more than a year by this point, in 1920 the editor of Sea, Land and Air issued a rather hysterical warning of the danger of foreign pilots being allowed to fly in Australia.1

The passenger-'plane of to-day may be the bomber of to-morrow. It depends on the man who owns the machine, and the one who flies it, upon whom she will drop her bombs. If he be an Australian it is pretty certain that he will not let them fall on his own countrymen. At present there is nothing to say that the man who is learning to fly here, or the man who is going to own the machine for him to fly, shall be even a British subject. In certain parts of Australia it is reasonably probable that he will be a German, for instance.

Australia is quite big enough to offer concealment while the alien airmen replaces passenger seats by bomb-racks. Unless there is control of flying, every possible enemy of Australia can be an aircraft-owner here.2

Hence the need for 'Regulations that insist that no aliens may either fly or own aircraft in Australia'.3 What's going on here?
...continue reading →

  1. Sea, Land and Air has been digitised in its (near?-)entirety and is freely available from American Radio History, which credits the National Library of Australia for the scans although they're evidently not in Trove. [↩]
  2. Sea, Land and Air (Melbourne), February 1920, 732. [↩]
  3. Ibid. [↩]

•

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).
...continue reading →

  1. Northern Whig (Belfast), 26 June 1933, 7. [↩]
  2. Brisbane Courier, 26 June 1933, 12. [↩]

• 2 Comments

•

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. [↩]

•

Brindejonc des Moulinais, Hendon, May 1913

According to David Oliver's Hendon Aerodrome,

International tension remained high during the Whitsun weekend [30-31 May] of 1914, when the country was plunged into a Zeppelin scare that resulted in severe civil flying restrictions.1

As I've never come across this mystery aircraft panic before -- a not unknown occurrence! -- I naturally got very excited, wrote down a note to myself to look into it, and just as naturally forgot all about it. Now that I've rediscovered my note and tried to find out more, I've worked out why I've not heard of it before: because it didn't happen -- or rather, it had already happened.
...continue reading →

  1. David Oliver, Hendon Aerodrome: A History (Shrewsbury: Airlife, 1994), 25-26. [↩]

•

George D. Warren, 18 November 1918

NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066, page 416 is a report from Lieutenant Commander George D. Warren RANR, commanding officer, HMAS Coogee, a civilian coastal steamship requistioned by the Navy for use as a minesweeper. Warren is reporting on the results of his investigation of an aeroplane seen from a naval lookout on the northern end of King Island, a large island in Bass Strait, between Victoria and Tasmania. This was seen back on 1 November, first one (NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066, page 426):

Aeroplane sighted 3 50pm to day Victorian time steering south easterly direction skying [sic] very low distance away unc[e]rtain about 7 miles fairly strong wind blowing.

A second report gives a different time (NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066, page 424):

aeroplane sighted 4.50 p.m. north east flying south east lost in clouds 4.58 p.m.

In fact this was originally interpreted as a second aeroplane, but the near-identical descriptions combined with the difference of an hour exactly suggests that this confusion resulted from the new institution of daylight savings time, in force on this date in Tasmana, to which King Island belongs, but not in Victoria, for some reason used as the time reference in the first report.
...continue reading →

•

P. J. Connolly, 3 June 1918

NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066, page 836 is a report by Senior Constable P. J. Connolly regarding 'an aeroplane flying in a Westerly direction' seen at 9pm the previous evening at Charlton, in the Mallee region of Victoria, by William Bannon and no less than 'eight other farmers', who all saw the machine together:

One bright white light could be seen, and the [?] buzzing sound heard.

One of the witnesses, a returned soldier named Kenyon, claims 'that he 'is well used to aircraft, & in his opinion it was about twenty miles away'. Connolly has interviewed all the farmers, and 'they bear out Bannon's statement'. He has also 'wired Secretary of Navy Dept'.
...continue reading →

•

T. J. Wilson, 31 May 1918

NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066, page 529 is a statement by Captain T. J. Wilson, master of the SS Koolonga, a merchant vessel plying the Newcastle-Port Pirie route. At 8.15pm on 26 May 1918, Koolonga was off Cape Willoughby, Kangaroo Island, South Australia; Wilson was on the bridge when, 'Casually looking aloft, he saw a dark square object, which he took to be an aeroplane'.

This is my single favourite mystery aeroplane sighting of the whole 1918 panic, mainly because of all the sailors swearing like sailors, which Wilson freely relayed in his statement, and Captain Fearnley, Senior Naval Officer Newcastle, just as freely censored in his report:

  • Nicolson, 3rd Officer: 'By C[hrist]! there's an aeroplane'
  • AB McKinnon: 'There's a b[lood]y Aeroplane!'
  • Elms, Chief Officer: 'God spare my days, that's a b[lood]y Aeroplane!'
  • Sullivan, 2nd Officer: 'That's an Aeroplane' (okay, that one's less colourful, but he was called up from his cabin to the bridge in his pyjamas, so perhaps he wasn't quite awake yet)

I was so amused by Elms's exclamation in particular that not only did I quote it in my article as an example of an aeroplane sighting, I used it as a section heading too. But more seriously, especially when taken together like this, like the conversation of the four boys at Ouyen these excited utterances speak to the immediate responses of witnesses: they were startled, amazed, stupefied by what they were seeing, but also very sure about what they were seeing. According to Wilson, he'd just seen what 'he took to be an aeroplane' when Nicolson said 'there's an aeroplane'; he avoided asking Elms and Sullivan leading questions when pointing out the object to them, but they both independently identified it as an aeroplane. Still, we don't know the context for the sighting; perhaps they'd just been discussing mystery aeroplanes at the captain's table and guessed what everyone else was thinking. On the face of it, though, it's an impressive report: five experienced seamen who presumably were familiar with the usual natural phenomena seen at sea, all instantly agreeing that this was not natural.
...continue reading →