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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This is the cover of a leaflet produced in 1916 by the Australian Air Squadrons Fund, the Australian arm of the Imperial Air Flotilla which raised funds around the British Empire for presentation 'battle-planes' for the Royal Flying Corps. My interest in it is not so much for its own sake, though I am struck by the slightly confusing promise that this aircraft 'will carry your name and message of sympathy and support over the heads of our troops into the enemy capitals', as well as the sadly forlorn hope that 'This is, please God, the only war in which we will be able to take part'. Rather, it's here as an example of the aviation records to be found in the Australian Joint Copying Project (AJCP), which is being digitised and made freely available through Trove.
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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.
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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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
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):
— Brett Holman (@Airminded) April 30, 2019
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.
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Proselytisers are famously early adopters of communications technology (see: the Gutenberg Bible). It shouldn't be surprising that missionaries were intrigued by the development of aviation: a Baptist minister, Reverend F. W. Boreham, even claimed that
It was with a view to winging the Gospel to the uttermost ends of the eaxth that the first airman looked wistfully skywards.1
He was referring to Francesco Lana de Terzi, a Jesuit who proposed the idea of the vacuum airship in 1670, a technological impossibility at the time. Somewhat more realistically, in 1909 Reverend W. Kingscote Greenland, apparently a Methodist minister, argued in his journal The Young Man that 'the coming of the airship will materially affect the diffusion of the Gospel throughout the world':
He looks forward with confidence to the day when the first missionary airship will sail with a precious cargo of heroic hearts and copies of the Holy Scriptures. Already, he says, the airship can travel one hundred miles an hour. That would mean that the missionary could get to America in a day and a quarter; he could leave England on Tuesday, and preach in Calcutta or Hankow on the following Sunday. How this would almost do away with the tragedy of parting with wife and children and dear ones that now makes the missionary's lot so sadly heroic.2
Not only that but
in case of attack by natives, outbreak of fire, or flood, the ability to sail upward into serene air and safety will much lessen the trials of his life.3
A quick followup to my previous posts about the origins of the phrase 'England is no longer an island', supposedly uttered by Lord Northcliffe in 1906 in reference to Alberto Santos-Dumont taking to the air (above). I've tried to run down a primary source for this, but haven't quite managed it. Here's what I have found.
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In my previous post I looked at the phrase 'England is no longer an island' in the British press as an indication of anxiety about the implications of technological progress -- first steam in the 1840s, then the Channel tunnel in the 1880s, and finally aviation in the late 1900s -- for the defence of the nation. Surprisingly, in the 1890s, especially, through to the early 1900s the phrase was also used in a more positive and optimistic way, to suggest that England was now more than an island.
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