Rumours

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Well, not really, because it didn't exist. But never let the facts get in the way of a good title, I say. But it does mean I have to explain what I mean.

The real V-weapons developed and used by Germany in the Second War War were the V-1 flying bomb and the V-2 ballistic missile, which are well known, and the V-3 multi-chamber cannon which is not. About ten thousand V-1s were launched towards London between June and October 1944; by the time their launch sites had been overrun by the Allied forces in France the longer-ranged V-2 was in operation, and was used to bombard London and south-east England until 27 March 1945. (The last V-1 strike on Britain was actually two days later; this was a long-range variant.) The V-3 was never fired at London but two smaller-scale versions were used against Luxembourg.

V-weapon is from the German Vergeltungswaffe: reprisal weapon. Their use against London was intended as a reprisal for the British bombing of German cities. This was something that had been threatened by Nazi propaganda many times. For example, after the start of Bomber Command's campaign against Berlin in November 1943, a spokesman for the German Foreign Ministry said:

Germany will now use her secret weapon as revenge for the R.A.F. raids.1

On the one hand, Germany did not 'now use her secret weapon' on this occasion, nor on most of the others when similar threats were issued. On the other, it did have secret reprisal weapons in development and they were eventually used. The threats were not completely empty, but their constant repetition made them dubious.

One of the last of these threats emerged in late February 1945 and involved a so-called death ray (and an offensive use at that, not a defensive one as I have argued is more characteristic of the concept):

Latest German secret weapon is a V-bomb which, will release 'death-rays' sound waves of very high frequency which decompose living tissue -- reports Stockholm correspondent of the British United Press.

Hundreds of these bombs, it is reported, are being built in underground factories.

Germans in Berlin and Stockholm are now mysteriously hinting that they will use these bombs if the Germans still retain their V-bases east of the Rhine.2

Other reports suggested that 'the middle of March' had been set 'as the launching date for the new bomb'.3 It sounds like the idea was that the V-bomb would replace the high explosive warhead of the V-2, which was still in action.

Note that these death rays are actually sound waves, which is unusual as they tend to be described as some form of electromagnetic radiation. Apparently Germany did experiment with sonic weapons but it's hard to see how a sound bomb could work as described here. There were other possibilities for superscientific weapons: a rather good newspaper article about the sound bombs also discusses alpha rays, electron rays and dirty bombs in addition to electromagnetic death rays (including radio or 'Hertzian' waves), and notes rumours about German and Japanese research.4

Oddly, this article was published in Australia, as were all of the press reports I've cited here. It's actually quite hard to find references to German death rays in the British press. Perhaps censorship is the reason, whether official or self (though many of the vaguer reprisal threats were published). Or maybe it's just that Australian newspapers weren't hit so hard by newsprint shortages (most British newspapers were mere shadows of their prewar selves by this time) so needed more filler material. Maybe it was simply thought too ridiculous. But the sound bomb death ray threat did make its way to the British people somehow, as the diary entry of London woman Ruby Thompson for 9 March 1945 attests:

Hitler promises to annihilate us with a Death Ray after March 15 He is supposed to have visited Berlin today, which we have bombed now for seventeen nights in succession. Oh, this war! Who will survive it!

Whether she or anyone else believed the death ray threat is hard to say. But with the V-2s still raining down it would have been hard to dismiss completely out of hand.

  1. Advocate (Burnie), 26 November 1943, 1. [↩]
  2. Courier-Mail (Brisbane), 27 February 1945, 1. [↩]
  3. Mail (Adelaide), 10 March 1945, 6. [↩]
  4. Ibid. [↩]

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It has happened before that while I'm focused on some research topic but read something seemingly unrelated, that unanticipated connections serendipitously appear between the two. In this case it was while reading a collection of short stories by Arthur Machen, an influential writer of supernatural horror who wrote his greatest, and most disturbing, works in the 1890s.1 Many drew upon his Welsh heritage (he was born in and grew up near Caerleon; though I kept an eye out during my visit for his blue plaque I managed to miss it), particularly Celtic myths about the Little People which he used to create far, far darker things than most of the fairies fluttering around contemporary fantastic literature. Those were the stories I remember most from reading Machen as a teenager, and they do not disappoint now.

But this time around I was more intrigued by Machen's writing from the First World War, when he was a journalist for the Evening News, part of Lord Northcliffe's empire. Of these, 'The bowmen' (first published in September 1914) has gained some notoriety as the inspiration for the Angel of Mons which supposedly saved the BEF from disaster in its first major battle of the war. Machen story has not angels, but phantom bowmen from Agincourt lending their firepower to the British line as it repels a German attack (another story in this collection, 'The soldiers' rest', also evokes a supernatural link between the Tommy and his medieval predecessors). It was clearly meant to be read as fiction, but seems to have inspired the belief that something like it had actually happened during the retreat from Mons. Machen always denied that 'The bowmen' was anything other than fiction and tried quite publicly to refute the myths/rumours/urban legends his story had generated, but in the end the Angel wasn't going anywhere: people -- at least, some people -- wanted to believe in it.2
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  1. Arthur Machen, The White People and Other Weird Stories (London: Penguin Books, 2011). [↩]
  2. David Clarke, The Angel of Mons: Phantom Soldiers and Ghostly Guardians (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2005). [↩]

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What did Australians in 1918 make of the mystery aeroplane scare? What did they think the aeroplanes meant? This is a question I've already answered in part. There is evidence from the press that in the days before 24 April wild rumours were circulating that Australia was about to be attacked somehow by German raiders, perhaps even to the extent of a landing by enemy troops. These rumours were attributed (at least by the New Zealand press) to anxiety caused by the rash of mysterious aeroplanes seen primarily in Victoria, which were generally presumed to be flying from and hence evidence of said raiders. (The watershed I keep mentioning, the date when the press largely stopped publishing mystery aeroplane reports was 23 April, and this probably is not a coincidence if censorship was involved. Which, alas, I still cannot prove and may not be able to.) In my previous post I discussed some examples of rumours about mystery aeroplanes, which by their nature can give us insights into what people thought the aeroplanes were and what they were doing. James French's letter, for example, shows that he certainly believed that the mystery aeroplanes were connected with German raiders off the coast, but also that he thought they were cooperating with German spies and operating from hidden aerodromes.
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If the wave of reports of mystery aeroplanes after late April 1918 wasn't sustained by newspaper reports (i.e. because there were none) then how was it sustained? Why did people from all over Australia come to hold the same belief, that German aircraft were filling the skies? There are several possible explanations. One is that to interpret odd things in the sky as aeroplanes was simply obvious. But as I argued in the previous post, most Australians had never seen a real aeroplane before, so why would they start thinking like this now? A related explanation is that the press played a role in initiating the scare, but by the time it stopped reporting on the mystery aeroplanes it was no longer necessary: the idea had taken root and the scare was now self-sustaining. That is certainly possible. But there is another vector which, although often hard to trace definitively, did play an important role: rumour.

I don't think Australians are any more prone to rumourmongering than anyone else; on the other hand, we apparently did invent the bush telegraph. And there is some evidence for rumour in a number of the naval intelligence files contained in NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066/378. Here are three.
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Daily Mirror, 4 May 1942, 1

The front page of the Daily Mirror today is almost wholly given over to a story which the other papers are far less interested in. The recently-installed Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr William Temple (that's him on the left, though what is being done to him I have no idea; and that's his forehead on the right), used a speech in Manchester yesterday to give 'a new charter to Britain -- a charter of social reform which will bring happiness to millions of people if applied in post-war reconstruction' (1). Its nine points are:

1. Provision of decent houses for the people of this country;
2. Every child to have adequate and right nutrition;
3. Equality in education. There shall be genuinely available to every section of society the kind of education will develop their faculties to the full;
4. Adequate leisure for personal and family life. Where the family is separated because of employment, there should be two days' holiday each week;
5. Universal recognition of holidays with wages;
6. The application of science to discover labour-saving devices, to save labour instead of labourers;
7. Wide appreciation of the fact that labour is a partner in industry, just as much as management and capital;
8. Recognition by workers and employers alike that service comes first, and the opportunity to make profit comes afterwards;
9. The opportunity for all people to achieve the dignity and decency of human personality.

An accompanying article by A. W. Brockbank says that Temple also warned against yielding 'to the lure of people who try to persuade us that it would be wise to establish such a non-party State'":

'The minority must have the right to become the majority if it can. It must be lawful to be in opposition to the Government.'

Just who he has in mind here is not made clear.
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The Times, 30 April 1942, 4

Most newspapers in my sample today lead with the further grim news from Burma (the Japanese army has now reached the suburbs of Lashio) but The Times chooses to go with the latest Bomber Command raids on Kiel and, for the second night running, Trondheim, both the locations of key German warships (4):

The heavier force was directed against the strongly defended naval base of Kiel, where the Scharnhorst is believed to still be in dock after her dash from Brest. The Tirpitz, Scheer, and Prinz Eugen are thought to be based on Trondheim, while a cruiser of the Hipper class has been in the locality, though she may not be there now.

These latter ships are 'a definite threat to our communications with north Russia and in the Atlantic'. While 'the Air Ministry makes no definite claim to have damaged the ships', in the case of Trondheim stronger than usual explosions were heard on the Swedish frontier, which suggests 'a bomb must have hit some explosive target; the explosion of even the biggest bomb could not in itself have caused such an effect'.
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Daily Mirror, 23 April 1942, 1

Most newspapers today lead with the story of a successful Commando raid on the French coast near Boulogne early yesterday morning -- though only the Daily Mirror (above), rather bizarrely, focuses on the fact that 'All wore gym shoes' (1) (apart from the ex-Limehouse police inspector who wore slippers). More colour is provided by the dashing Lord Lovat who led the raid wearing 'the bonnet of his own Lovat Scouts, a body of Highland deerstalkers [...] whose training is ideal for Commando work'. The purpose of the raid is not clear -- the official communique only says it was a reconnaissance mission -- so it's hard to say if it achieved its objective. Perhaps the aim was to tie up German cement supplies:

SO greatly do the Germans fear Commando raids and invasion that they have earmarked more than half the French production of cement -- about one and a quarter million tons a year -- for use on new defence works along the coast.

But in purely operational terms the raid seems to have been a success (8):

Remarkable from the military point of view was that, after spending two hours on enemy-occupied territory, every man was withdrawn with arms. Our casualties were negligible.

The Navy, which delivered and retrieved the Commandos, also got away largely unscathed, and damaged two armed German trawlers in the process.
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Patrie

The Lebaudy-built Patrie, seen above, was France's first military airship. A descendent of the Jaune, in 1906 and 1907 it carried out a number of successful proving and publicity flights, including one where it carried the prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, over Paris. Afterwards it was moved to its operational base near the fortress of Verdun. Due to a mechanical failure during a subsequent flight it had to ground in the open, far from the safety of its hangar. A gale blew up, and even one hundred and eighty soldiers were unable to hold the stricken airship down. At 8pm on 30 November 1907, the Patrie floated off into the distance, fortunately sans crew.
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10 April 1940 has remained in history as "the great panic day". The reason for this designation is the panic that spread through the population of Oslo, after the rumors of the British bombing of the capital had spread. Here you can see how the Oslo people rush out of town on foot, on bicycles, in trucks and buses. The clip is without audio.

From NRK via the excellent RealTimeWWII. (The caption has been run through Google Translate and tweaked by me so it makes more sense, so I can't vouch for its accuracy.)

This one of the many things I didn't know before. I can't find much about it on the web in English; Wikipedia says:

The same day [10 April 1940], panic broke out in German-occupied Oslo, following rumours of incoming British bombers. In what has since been known as "the panic day" the city's population fled to the surrounding countryside, not returning until late the same evening or the next day. Similar rumours led to mass panic in Egersund and other occupied coastal cities. The origins of the rumours have never been uncovered.

It's interesting that the rumours named Britain as the aggressor. Of course Germany bombing a city it already occupied wasn't particularly plausible, so given that the rumour existed it would have to attach itself to Britain. The Altmark incident (and the planned mining of Norwegian waters, though I assume that was not publicly known as it was interrupted by the German invasion which was publicised shortly before the panic) might have suggested that the British were prepared to go further and attack Norway to achieve their own ends. I don't know much about airmindedness in Norway before the war (apart from the ghost flyers) either but in recent months civilians in two small, nearby nations had already suffered aerial bombardment, namely Poland and Finland (and let's not forget China and Spain in 1938) so to that extent the panic was not unreasonable.

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I received this request for assistance from Jean Dewaerheid, a Belgian writer who is working with Peter Haas and Pierre-Antoine Courouble to track down wooden bomb eyewitnesses:

Three authors (from Belgium, Germany and France) have been working for years on a bizarre subject: the dropping of dummy wooden bombs on wooden airplanes.

In order to deceive the Allies during the Second World War, the Germans built fake airfields on the continent, often with runways and sometimes with buildings, but always with fake wooden planes, called "Attrappen". Strange stories can be heard in which allied airplanes made fun of them by dropping wooden bombs on which they had sometimes painted remarks like "Wood for Wood".

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