Plots and tables

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The Sykes Plan (or Memo, I'll use them interchangeably here) is an infamous document, at least among those airpower historians interested in the early RAF. Major-General Frederick Sykes was the second Chief of the Air Staff (CAS), that is the professional head of the RAF; the Plan is infamous because it cost him his job. He took up the position less than two weeks after the RAF was formed on 1 April 1918, succeeding Major-General Trenchard who had had an unhappy tenure due to clashes with the Air Minister, Lord Rothermere (who ended up resigning himself). Sykes was a key figure in the prewar RFC, commanding its Military Wing, and had played an important role as chief of staff (and sometimes commander) of the RFC in France. After that he had his own field command, of the RNAS in the Dardanelles. Thereafter he served in a number of non-aviation administrative roles, organising the Machine Gun Corps and serving as General Wilson's deputy at the Supreme War Council.

Sykes was CAS for most of the dramatic events of 1918: he took charge when the German spring offensive was at its most threatening and was still in office when the Armistice was signed in November. When peace threatened, Sykes had to consider what form the postwar RAF would take. With the help of Lieutenant-Colonel P. R. C. Groves, his friend and Director of Flying Operations, by early December he produced a 'Memorandum by the Chief of the Air Staff on air-power requirements of the Empire', AKA the Sykes Memo.1 It proved far too ambitious, and more to the point, costly. Churchill, the new Air Minister, needed economy and was not impressed. Sykes was out and Trenchard was back in, and this time he stayed there for more than a decade.

So how did Sykes cut his own throat? Above all he wanted a big RAF, keeping as much as possible of its wartime strength. In fact, at first he proposed 348 squadrons, which was optimistic considering that in March 1918 the RFC and RNAS combined had only 168 squadrons.2 However, I haven't seen that plan and I wonder if those 348 squadrons were actually intended to be mostly cadres in peacetime, say flights rather than whole squadrons, to facilitate rapid expansion in an emergency. In that case it might only be about the same size as the 1918 RAF (though of course the extra aircraft and men required would need to be got from somewhere). The final version of the Plan did use cadre squadrons for just this purpose. But even so it was still larger than Trenchard's more palatable proposal of only 82 squadrons.
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  1. F. H. Sykes, From Many Angles: An Autobiography (London: George G. Harrap & Company, 1942), 558-74. [↩]
  2. John Robert Ferris, Men, Money and Diplomacy: The Evolution of British Strategic Foreign Policy, 1919-26 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 68; John James, The Paladins: A Social History of the RAF up to the Outbreak of World War II (London and Sydney: Macdonald, 1990), 243. [↩]

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Mystery aircraft reported to military intelligence, Australia, 1914-1918

In my previous post, I threatened more statistics about Australian mystery aircraft scares of the First World War, and here they are. What I've been doing is collating all the sightings recorded in two NAA files, MP1049/1, 1918/066 and MP367/1, 512/3/1319. The former is the Navy Office's file pertaining to 'Reports of suspicious aeroplanes, lights etc', more than a thousand pages in all, though the majority of it is composed of reports obtained by military intelligence and local police. The Navy was presumably interested because, assuming the reports were genuine, the most likely explanation was that the aircraft were flying from a German raider operating in Australian waters. The file also contains some operational orders and reports relating to the search for the presumed raider, regular reports and analyses of the sightings to date, and related correspondence. The other file contains 'Reports from 2nd M D during War Period on lights, aeroplanes, signals etc.' 2nd Military District covered NSW; presumably there were similar files from the other districts but if so I haven't found them yet (3rd MD would be the one to get, as that was Victoria where the majority of sightings took place). Some of the material in it is duplicated in the Navy's file, but there's much which isn't, including a number of pre-1918 reports.
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Looking over the list of Australian mystery aircraft sightings suggests that some generalisations can be made.

Aeroplane vs airship, 1900-1918

In the 1910s, mysterious lights in the sky were usually described as being airship-like; after 1910 they were far more likely to be called aeroplanes. Perhaps not coincidentally, 1910 was when aeroplanes first flew in Australia; certainly a search of Trove Newspapers (using Wraggelabs' QueryPic) shows that 1910 was the first year when the word "aeroplane" appeared markedly more frequently than "airship". So that's easy enough to explain.

The same search shows that 1909 was the year that aviation really broke through into public consciousness. That's also the year of the Australian phantom airship wave.1 As it was the first burst of interest in aircraft, the first time that people started to learn about them, it's perhaps not surprising that people might think they saw them flying around where they weren't. The 1918 mystery aeroplane scare came after several years of increasing press coverage of aviation, obviously due to the war. So again that fits. Aeroplanes were something people were reading (and probably talking) about a lot. But that by itself is evidently not enough to generate a mystery aeroplane scare: there were a few seen in 1914, and a handful in the years after that, but nothing on the scale of 1918. There needs to be a plausible reason for aircraft to be flying about: and the reported visit of the Wolf and its Wölfchen to Australian shores provided that, though the desperate situation of the Allied armies in France was also a factor.
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  1. Of course, part of the 1909 data in the ngram above is from the airship sightings. But not many. [↩]

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Flight, 30 June 1927, 431

The seventh RAF Display was held on Saturday, 3 July 1926. By now it was, as Flight noted, 'amongst the foremost of the functions of the London social season'.1 Their Majesties the King and Queen were in attendance, along with representatives of three other royal houses (including the King, Queen, Infante and Infanta of Spain, possibly drawn by the appearance of the Cierva autogyro), 'Several Indian Princes', nearly one in three of the combined Houses of Parliament, and about 150,000 less exalted guests. (The graphic above shows the growth of 'Miss Popularity Hendon' since the beginning.)2 The main feature of the day was massed formation flying: at one point, six fighter squadrons comprising fifty-four aircraft in total were in the air. The set-piece seems to have suffered by comparison. Flight's description seems rather muted when compared to previous years:

After this came the Set Piece -- during which the Royal Party made a tour of inspection of the machine park. The "Story" this year was the combined attack on a hostile aerodrome by fighters and day bombers. It commenced with a low bombing attack with light bombs by the fighters, which followed up with a machine-gun attack to silence the ground defences. Next came along, higher up, the day bombers, with the fighters above them in attendance. The bombers then very effectively finished off the aerodrome and previously-damaged aircraft.3

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  1. Flight, 8 July 1926, 399. [↩]
  2. Ibid., 30 June 1927, 431. [↩]
  3. Flight, 8 July 1926, 406. [↩]

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Effect of strategic bombing on German morale, resistance, and countermeasures

Breaking the morale of a civilian population by means of aerial bombardment is quite difficult. But it's a lot easier if you only have to do it in graphical form. Here bombs of type 'killed', 'wounded', 'evacuated', 'deprived of utilities' and 'homes destroyed' come thundering down towards the edifice 'will to resist', which is formed of layers 'belief in victory', 'belief in Nazis', 'confidence in leaders', 'group unity' and 'actual resistance', and buttressed by the Nazi countermeasures 'propaganda', 'air raid protection', 'relief & evacuation' and 'police control & terror'. Will the Allied bombs shatter German morale? Looks to me like it will!

This is taken from the United States Strategic Bombing Survey (USSB), The Effects of Strategic Bombing on German Morale (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1947), volume 1, 6. However, I came across it (by way of Wikipedia) on the website of the UK National Archives, as part of an exercise for students about the bombing of Dresden. I find it interesting, and perhaps telling, that a British government website would use an American image to illustrate wartime beliefs about the susceptibility of morale to bombing. There was a British version of the USSBS, the British Bombing Survey Unit (BBSU), headed by zoologist Solly Zuckerman, but any comparison between them is undone by the differences in scale. The USSBS employed more than a thousand researchers for two years at the end of the war and published 208 reports on the European theatre alone; the BBSU comprised a few dozen people working for just a few months in 1945, producing a single report which wasn't even published until 1998. For the BBSU to have hired a graphic artist to come up with something like the above would probably would have consumed a considerable fraction of its resources. Nor was it necessary. The USSBS was a genuine research effort, but it was also propaganda for an independent air force (which the USAAF became in 1947, turning into the USAF). The BBSU was far humbler in its aims. Churchill wanted a quick and dirty assessment of the Combined Bomber Offensive ready in time for Bomber Command's redeployment to the far East for use against Japan (which of course never happened). The RAF's leaders, notably the Chief of Air Staff, Sir Charles Portal, were reluctant to let the Americans write the history of the bomber war. But, with the possible exception of Bomber Command's airmen, pretty much everyone else in Britain just wanted to forget about it once the war was over. And they did.

For a comparison of the USSBS and the BBSU, see Tami Davis Biddle, Rhetoric and Reality in Strategic Air Warfare: The Evolution and Reality of British and American Ideas about Strategic Bombing, 1914-1945 (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), 270-81.

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A while back, The National Archives made all Cabinet papers from 1915 to 1980 freely available for download. Now TNA Labs have created a visualisation tool for said papers, allowing you to see clouds of the 25 most frequent words and contributors for any year (month in wartime) or, using the 'flexible querying' mode, any period you specify (up to ten years). Mouse-overing each result gives the actual count and links to the relevant DocumentsOnline entries. It's something of a toy at the moment (though they encourage you to download the XML dataset it is based upon and play with it yourself). For blogging purposes, it's annoying that there's no export function: I've had to grab some screen shots to show the results. And it's not possible to search for specific words or change the stop word list. But the potential is easy to see.

Cabinet Minutes word frequency, 1931-1940

When looking at the lifetime of the National Government (1931-1940, spanning three prime ministers: Ramsay MacDonald, Stanley Baldwin, and Neville Chamberlain) one word inevitably caught my eye: air. At 1970 mentions over the decade, it's the fourth most common word after war (2537) , foreign (2125) and meeting (2059). Air could be used in a number of contexts, of course: the Secretary of State for the Air (a Cabinet position at this time) or Air Ministry, Royal Air Force, German air force, air routes, air raids, air raid precautions, air defence, air attack and so on. (I assume the tool is sophisticated enough to match only whole words and not just substrings.) But it suggests that the National Government spent a great deal of its time talking about the air, that it was, so to speak, airminded. (Naval, which admittedly has a somewhat narrower compass, is the only similar term and was used only 1204 times.)
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Finally, something to justify the existence of the Internet. The Google Ngram Viewer takes the corpus of words formed by the Google Books dataset (i.e. books, journals, magazines, but not newspapers) and lets you plot the changes in frequency of selected ones over time. There are all sorts of interesting questions you could (in principle) answer with this tool, so let's give it a whirl.

aeroplane, airplane, 1890-2000

Here's a pretty basic one. Blue is aeroplane, red is airplane, the period is 1890-2000. (The smoothing in all these plots is 3 years.) Aeroplane was initially the more popular term, but airplane has predominated since about 1925. Note the peaks during the world wars -- airplane was 5 times more likely to be used in the Second World War than in the 1990s.

But we don't have to use the English corpus: there's also American English and British English. Here's the American version.
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Reprisals: all mentions, 1939-1945

The word 'reprisals' popped up during my 1940 post-blogging quite frequently. After one post I had the idea of checking whether it could be used as an index of British attitudes towards the bombing of Germany throughout the rest of the war. The short answer is: not really. But it was still worth trying.

With The Times and the Manchester Guardian/Observer databases I can luckily do this in a semi-automated fashion. Automated because I can do keyword searches on the full text of the newspapers, semi because the interfaces are crude and require manually stepping through the date range to bin the data. For example, searching for the word 'reprisals' in The Times database between 1 and 31 July 1940 gives 16 articles; doing the same between 1 and 31 August 1940 gives 18 articles; and so on. I then put these numbers together and plot the results.
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View Zeppelins over London in a larger map

Last year, Londonist gave us a very nifty map of London's V2 impact sites. Now they've come up with an equivalent for Zeppelin raids. Each of the sunbursts represents a bombfall. Clicking on them brings up a popup with information about the site and casualties (but, annoyingly, not the date). Note, however, that only a 'small selection' of the sites are plotted, however, which makes it hard to draw conclusions from the patterns: I could be wrong but I don't think the cluster in central London is representative. But perhaps more interesting are the tracks of the Zeppelin raiders (to get the key for which raid was when, click on the 'larger map' link). Again, these need to be treated with some caution, as they would only be reconstructions based on logbooks, bombfalls and sightings, but they do suggest that if the raiders could get reasonably close to London they could usually work out where to go. You can see the tracks deviating towards the urban areas, or turning back after the bombing run. London did have a blackout during the First World War (when its fighters couldn't touch the Zeppelins, the government claimed that the best defence against them was 'darkness and composure') but it wasn't as complete as during the Second. And of course the Thames on a clear and moonlit night couldn't be blacked-out at all.

Also, note the link in comments to a sequence of photos showing a Zeppelin being shot down. I hate to say it but I think these are fake ...

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The right and aviation

One of the questions which interested me when I originally embarked on my PhD was the extent of the relationship between British aviation and the far right. As it turned out, my research took me elsewhere. But that doesn't mean I can't blog about it.

In the chart above I've attempted to show some of the links between extreme right-wing groups such as the British Union of Fascists and prominent figures and groups involved with aviation in the 1930s. From the latter group I've excluded purely political groups (such as the BUF's flying club) and anyone whose contribution to flying consisted mostly of their war service. That means no Sir Oswald Mosley, in particular, who was in the RFC for a time. While he did draw upon the image of the airman from time to time he wasn't actively involved in the aviation community as far as I can tell. Having said that, those who did serve (or, in one case, lead) in the air services (RFC, RNAS, RAF) have been marked in blue. The links indicate some concrete degree of support, such as membership, financial contributions or public approval, as opposed to mere sympathy.
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