Rumours

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Wölfchen

While researching a possible British mystery aeroplane in 1936, which turned out to be nothing interesting, I came across a genuine mystery aeroplane scare which I'd never heard of before, from Australia and New Zealand in March and April 1918. I'm sure somebody else must have noticed it before now, as it was trivial to find using Trove and Papers Past. But I haven't been able to find mention of it in my usual sources, so here's what I've got so far.

Firstly, some context. In March 1918, it was getting on for four years since the start of the Great War. The soldiers of Australia and New Zealand had been engaged in combat for just under three of those years, two of them on the Western Front. The armies there seemed to be in a deadlock. All that can be done is to keep the two ANZAC corps supplied with men and munitions; but in Australia it is only a few months since the public rejected conscription for a second time, in a bitterly divisive plebiscite. If victory seemed to be a long way off, at least so did defeat.
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The Times, 17 May 1941, 4

Without even waiting for a response to Eden's warning, on Thursday RAF aircraft bombed three Vichy aerodromes in Syria, as The Times reports (4). According to RAF HQ, Middle East Command:

At Palmyra three Ju90s, two other German aircraft, and one Cr42 were machine-gunned. At least three of these aircraft were severely damaged and one other was burnt out.

General Dentz, the French High Commissioner in Syria, protested these raids, saying that they had killed a French officer. He further claimed that the German aircraft were there due to 'forced landings' and that his officials, 'according to the terms of the Armistice, procured their most rapid departure'. The diplomatic correspondent to The Times comments that Syria 'must now be counted an important arena of war'.
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Manchester Guardian, 10 May 1941, 7

Ten aircraft failed to return from Bomber Command's operations over Germany on Thursday night. Those losses are quite small in relation to the number of British aircraft involved in the raids on Hamburg and Bremen, between three and four hundred, 'certainly the largest number ever used in one night' according to page 7 of the Manchester Guardian.

Moon and weather favoured the attack, and the submarine and shipbuilding yards of both ports were heavily damaged. Pilots' individual reports speak of areas a mass of flames, in which it was impossible to distinguish separate fires, and of great explosions caused by our most powerful bombs being dropped into the heart of the fires.

The report in The Times (4) is more vivid and evocative, which seems to have inspired even the subeditor ('cities seared by fire').

In other industrial quarters of both towns there were widespread fires as well, and many other marks of devastation. At Hamburg a whole wharf was blazing as a single stick of bombs was seen to split open a row of buildings. Here smoke was rising to 10,000ft., and in another part of the town smoke rolled in black eddies and suggested the destruction of great stores of oil.

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The Battle of Los Angeles took place on the night of 24 February 1942. It was more of a 'battle' than a battle: only one side did any shooting, and it's not at all clear that there was a second side. The defenders of Los Angeles thought there was: they claimed they were shooting at aircraft of mysterious (but presumed to be Japanese) origin. This is where I come in.

The incident is mainly known now by a photograph showing ... something... trapped in searchlight beams, which appeared in the Los Angeles Times on 26 February 1942. Its authenticity has never been questioned, but it was clearly heavily retouched. Recently, an earlier copy of the photo turned up in the archives of the LA Times. It's definitely been retouched less, if at all. I'm not even going to reproduce the better-known-but-retouched version (which can be seen elsewhere); instead, here's the newly-found-and-less-retouched version:

Battle of Los Angeles

This photo (or rather its retouched version) has been used to argue that there was in fact ... something... over Los Angeles that night (most likely an extraterrestrial spaceship, obviously). Unlike Kentaro Mori, I do think there is... something... there. But it's not a Zeta Reticulan battlecruiser. It's a cloud.
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Lots of good stuff in the Spectator this week, so let's get into it. The 'News of the week' section starts out on page 281 with a paragraph on the speech Churchill gave last Tuesday. Noting that 'some 1,600 civilians have been killed [in London] and some 6,500 injured in the first half of September', the Spectator goes on to argue that

a civilian's life is not more intrinsically valuable than a soldier's, and in the Battle of the Somme in 1916 British casualties were over 400,000. And distressing though the devastation of some London streets is, it is in no way comparable with the destruction of scores of towns and cities in France -- for example Reims -- in the last war. When London is in the battle-line that it should suffer battle-line experience is inevitable.

There's also a paragraph on 'The War in the Air': 'The week that has passed has been one of air warfare such as the world has never before experienced'. On the one side, there is 'ruthless indiscriminate bombing' and on the other 'persistent attacks on military objectives' -- see if you can guess which refers to the RAF and which the Luftwaffe! The daylight air battles, especially the 'amazing result' of last Sunday, 'have given the measure of the real fighting quality of the two forces in legitimate warfare' -- in the week ending 15 September, Germany lost 471 aircraft and Britain only 96.
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Daily Mail, 16 September 1940, 1

There's no doubt what's newsworthy today. The Daily Mail trumpets the big battle over the Home Counties yesterday, the 'most shattering defeat' the Luftwaffe has ever experienced (1):

The Air Ministry state that between 350 and 400 enemy aircraft were launched in two waves against London and south-east England.

Of these no fewer than 175 were shot down, four of them by A.A. fire. This is a proportion of nearly one in two destroyed. All these are "certainties," for the total does not include "probables."

The R.A.F. lost 30 'planes, and ten of the pilots are safe.

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Daily Mail, 9 September 1940, 1

Saturday's bombing of London isn't quite as prominent on the front page of the Daily Mail as one might expect. There are a few small items about it (e.g. a panorama of London ablaze, taken from the top of Northcliffe House; a report from Italian radio that Londoners are 'absolutely terrified' by the raids) but there's actually more about the threatened German invasion (including a report of false alarms in Surrey, the south-west and Scotland). And the main article, by air correspondent Noel Monks, deals with both. It reports that yesterday was a fairly quiet day, and that London's casualties are around 400 dead and 1300 or 1400 wounded (presumably not including those from last night's raid). Monks gives much cause for optimism: the Air Staff believe that Germany has recalled aircraft from Norway to take part 'in the Battle of Britain', and that German bomber crews are making up to three sorties a day.

This seems to indicate that the German air force is not so great as Hitler would have the world believe, though it is still ahead of the R.A.F. in numerical terms.

When taken together with the RAF's belief that 'it is a case of "now or never"' and that

If Hitler has not gained aerial superiority by October 1, his invasion plans will be definitely postponed and possibly abandoned

then things are looking up.
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Since May, the Home Intelligence Department of the Ministry of Information has been preparing daily reports on the state of British morale: what people are talking about, what they are worried about, what they are happy about, and what are thought the government should do. A wide variety of sources is used for this, both formal and informal: BBC listener surveys, Mass-Observation reporters (AKA 'Cooper's snoopers'), overheard conversations on buses or in pubs, gossip from friends and relatives. Each region of the country has its own information office which sends data in to London; and London itself has a more extensive (but still somewhat informal) network of informants reporting on what is going on in their part of town. The resulting reports are, of course, secret.
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There have been a lot of stories in the press recently with titles like 'Churchill ordered UFO cover-up, National Archives show'. Actually, the TNA files -- part of an ongoing series of releases of UFO-related files -- don't show this at all, as is clear if you read the article more closely.

The cover-up is supposed to have taken place in the Second World War.

Nick Pope, who used to investigate UFO sightings for the MoD, said: "The interesting thing is that most of the UFO files from that period have been destroyed.

"But what happened is that a scientist whose grandfather was one of his [Churchill's] bodyguards, said look, Churchill and Eisenhower got together to cover up this phenomenal UFO sighting, that was witnessed by an RAF crew on their way back from a bombing raid.

"The reason apparently was because Churchill believed it would cause mass panic and it would shatter people's religious views."

The scientist 'said' this in 1999, nearly half a century after the incident is supposed to have taken place and a quarter century after his grandfather died. So it's only hearsay: there is no evidence from the war itself or from any witnesses that this cover-up actually took place.
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I have written before about the widespread fear of German paratroops in Britain in May and June 1940. Here's a sterling example from somewhere in London, as described in the Ministry of Information's Home Intelligence report for 7 June 1940:

A false alarm on a housing estate of parachutists occasioned by a flock of pigeons resulted in about half the tenants rushing to the roof and the rest rushing to the shelters in the basement. In the melee several women fainted. These people are normally calm and collected. They seem to need more advice as to what to do and how to do it on such occasions.1

It's hard to imagine how an ordinary flock of pigeons could be mistaken for descending parachutists. But if there's one thing I've been hammering over and over on this blog, it's this: fear can make people see danger in the innocuous, whether it's footpaths, meteors, motor cars, Venus, Venus, weather balloons, or even nothing at all. Having said that, there's less evidence of widespread misperception of this sort (as opposed to rumours, of which there are many, though with frustratingly few details) in the MOI reports than I might have expected.

  1. Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang, eds., Listening to Britain: Home Intelligence Reports on Britain's Finest Hour, May to September 1940 (London: The Bodley Head, 2010), 91. [↩]