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Now that I'm back home, it's time to sum up what my UK sojourn achieved. The short answer, at least in terms of my immediate research objectives, is that it yielded only mediocre results.

The ostensible purpose for the trip was to attend the Empire in Peril workshop at Queen Mary and to give a paper on the 1913 phantom airship scare. This I did, and I think it went well enough (though perhaps in future I should revert to actually reading a paper, rather than speaking to slides). It certainly helped that I was after Michael Paris (Central Lancashire), who set the scene with a discussion of early aerial warfare fiction, and Michael Matin (Warren Wilson), who used the phantom airship scare as a starting point to reflect upon invasion scare literature more generally. This capped off a stimulating two days of papers and discussions about, inter alia, inter-service debates regarding the possibility of invasion (Matthew Seligmann, Brunel; Richard Dunley, KCL), the representation of compulsory service in invasion scare fiction (Harry Wood, Liverpool), the Yellow Peril (Robert Brown, Birmimgham; Ailise Bulfin, Trinity College Dublin); and women writers on Germany (Richard Scully, UNE). A usefully discordant note was struck by Ian Hopper (Brandeis) who questioned just how seriously publishers, authors and readers took invasion scare novels: were they reflective of deeply held fears or simply trivial entertainments adapted to the political themes of the day? Perhaps the standout talk was the public lecture given by Nicholas Hiley (Kent), who reconstructed 'Vernon Kell's perfect nightmare', i.e. the German invasion of Britain as supported by the large number of spies and saboteurs believed to be lying in wait for Der Tag, as was fully expected at the outbreak of war by MI5, and hence prepared for -- but played down after the war in favour of the very different, and less impressive, threat posed by the handful of naval spies rounded up in the first days of the war by Kell's men. Apart from the papers themselves, of course, there was the usual networking: identifying a nucleus of researchers interested in broadly the same topic is a useful thing in itself, and may lead to future workshops, research and publications.
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Holger Afflerbach and David Stevenson, eds. An Improbable War? The Outbreak of World War I and European Political Culture before 1914. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007. Sometimes the origin of the First World War seems overdetermined, there are so many theories to account for it. Other times, it seems like, as in the title of this book, an improbable war. Eighteen chapters examine the question from the point of view of the arms races, public opinion, socialism, culture, the non-European powers, and so on.

Scott Anthony and Oliver Green. British Aviation Posters: Art, Design and Flight. Farnham and Burlington: Lund Humphries, 2012. Who doesn't like aviation posters? Chances are, if you're a reader of this blog, not you. This book draws upon the collection of British Airways, but is mostly concerned with its predecessors, Imperial, BOAC and BEA. While there are are occasional excursions into related topics, the content is narrower than the title might suggest: there's next to no military content at all, and not much from manufacturers or other parts of the civil aviation industry. Still, a beautiful book.

Martin van Creveld. Wargames: From Gladiators to Gigabytes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Van Creveld takes a narrow definition of 'war', excluding economic and political simulations (though he would presumably concede that these are essential parts of warfare at the grand strategic level), but a broad definition of games, including things like gladiatorial combat, medieval tournaments, and duels. He also takes a narrow view of women and their role in anything relating to war, and a broad view of relevance and sometimes logic ('Italy, the land where dueling had been invented, was a special case, part European, part African (as adherents of the Lombard League argue to this day)', 131 -- what does this even mean?) Still, it's potentially useful to look at the history of the subject beyond hexes and miniatures.

Colin Cruddas. 100 Years of Advertising in British Aviation. Stroud: History Press, 2008. Complements British Aviation Posters nicely, being much more interested in the companies outside the BA lineage, including aircraft and some component manufacturers, as well as military aviation. It focuses more on print advertising rather than posters, too. On the other hand, the text is more of a gloss than a sustained narrative, and the reproductions less generous (smaller, also less colourful, though that may be because the originals were monochrome), though still perfectly adequate for research purposes.

Robert S. Ehlers, Jr. Targeting the Third Reich: Air Intelligence and the Allied Bombing Campaigns. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009. As is well known, early in the war Bomber Command thought it was doing reasonably well in terms of accuracy and effectiveness in bombing Germany, but was really not. But what of later in the war, and what of the Americans? This should have the answers.

Philip Sabin. Simulating War: Studying Conflict through Simulation Games. London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2012. Unlike van Creveld's book, Sabin's interest is squarely on wargames in the usual sense (though perhaps a slightly old-fashioned sense now, given that they are primarily intended to be played on tabletops rather than desktops). Also, it's not a history of wargaming, but an analysis of how wargames can be used to aid history students in understanding how wars are fought -- not only through playing them, but in designing them, as his own students do. As I'm entirely in sympathy with this idea and would to one day use wargames in my own teaching, I'm keen to read this. And maybe even play some of the eight games included with the book -- two of which are on air warfare, Big Week and Angels One Five.

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Pour la patrie

This must be about the strangest image to have ever appeared on this blog. How to explain it?

First of all, it was published in Review of Reviews, May 1913, 457, accompanying the second part of a two-part article by Count Zeppelin on 'The conquest of the air'. However, apart from the obvious aviation theme there's no obvious link to the text. The caption reads:

The Pictorial Postcard issued for sale on behalf of the Swiss National Aviation Fund.

I can't find much about the Swiss National Aviation Fund (which doubtless had a proper name in French and German -- there's a version of the postcard in the latter), apart from a solitary but simultaneous mention in Flight, 3 May 1913, 496:

Having arranged to fly at Aaran in the interest of the Swiss National Aviation Fund to which £16,000 has already been subscribed, Oscar Bider flew over from Berne on his Blériot tandem on the 22nd ult., in 45 mins.

This confirms what was already apparent from the name, that the Swiss National Aviation Fund was an effort to raise funds to buy aircraft, 'pour la Patrie', for the Fatherland, presumably for military purposes. (It seems to have been reissued during the First World War, in which Switzerland of course was neutral, but in need of aircraft more than ever.) Similar efforts were then underway in Britain and the Dominions, such as the Britannia Airship Committee and the Imperial Air Fleet Committee, and during the recent airship panic the Navy League had tried to get British municipalities to volunteer funds to buy aircraft for their own defence -- though I suspect none were as successful as the Swiss National Aviation Fund, if the report in Flight is correct.

All that may help explain the presence of this image in Review of Reviews, but it doesn't explain the image itself, a photograph of a sculpture, probably in clay, by the Italian Domenico Mastroianni. All I can offer is that the woman with the sword and the cross on her breast is Helvetia, the national personification of Switzerland. The grouping of her with the horses almost seems like a statue group; perhaps it is a reference to a well-known depiction, but I haven't been able to find it. Like Helvetia herself, the horses also seem to pull the image away from modernity into a classical past, which is contrary to how you'd expect such a radical new technology to be portrayed -- on the Italian side of the Alps, the even newer literary and artistic movement, Futurism, was filled with images of aviation precisely because it was such a break with the past. But perhaps that was the point of this image -- maybe by classicising the aeroplane and relating it to safe and familiar forms of patriotism and strength it reassured the viewer that the traditional virtues and mores would not be overturned along with transportation and warfare. It this context it might be noted that the British committees and leagues referred to earlier all had, in that typical Edwardian way, aristocratic patrons: Lord Desborough was president of the Imperial Air Fleet Committee, for example. It's a more subtle way of giving the same assurance, that the social order will be upheld.

It's still a bizarre image, though. And it must be pointed out that 3 hp is woefully underpowered for an aeroplane, even in 1913.

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Karl Baedeker. Great Britain: Handbook for Travellers. Old House, 2013 [1937]. As I said, I'm a sucker for facsimile editions, and this one has many nice foldout maps. As the cover doesn't fail to tell you, this is the version supposedly used by the Luftwaffe to plan the Baedeker raids. At any rate, if you were time-travelling back to 1937 Britain and could only take one book, you could take this, but really it would be a waste of luggage allowance because you could buy it when you got there.

Daniel Pick. War Machine: The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993. One of those books I've seen referenced many times but never seen. Looks at the increasing appetite for destruction from the 19th century through to the First World War -- Clausewitz, 1870, the Channel Tunnel all get a look-in. May get a bit psychohistorical at times.

David Reynolds. The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century. London: Simon & Schuster, 2013. Did somebody say 'upcoming centenary of the First World War'? Probably, since the centenary of the the First World War is upcoming. Reynolds usually works on the Second World War period, but that probably makes him a good choice for this contribution to the literature, a reflection upon the effects of the war on the rest of the century, in terms of big themes like war and peace (obviously), democracy, empire and so on.

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C. G. G. [C. G. Grey], 'A real aerial defence', Aeroplane, 12 June 1913, 670:

It has been brought to our attention -- it comes from the City, so it must be true -- that Britain has at last acquired a real means of enforcing the Aerial Navigation Act. It is alleged that a great inventor has persuaded the Secretary of State for War that he has an invention which, by means of Herzian [sic], or some similar waves -- vulgarly known as 'wireless' -- will cause the magneto ignition apparatus of all aircraft within a radius of seven miles to cease from functioning. In other words, the engines of all aircraft within range will be stopped, aeroplanes will be forced to land where they can, and dirigibles will be left at the mercy of the winds.

The account further states that the inventor has been allotted a piece of Government land in the neighbourhood of Folkestone, which is to be thoroughly surrounded by sentries to prevent foreign Powers who have neglected to provide themselves with City correspondents or copies of this journal from obtaining the slightest inkling of the fact that experiments are in progress.

This is a rather tongue-in-cheek account (if it's not clear from the quotation above, consider that Grey goes on to suggest that friendly aircraft be equipped with 'a clockwork or elastic drive' for backup -- and there's more where that came from), but it does sound like it derives from a real claim made by a City newspaper or newspaper correspondent, though it could just be a rumour current in financial circles. Even if Grey just made the whole story up, though, it's still a very early example of the idea of a death ray, at least in the sense, which became common from the 1920s, of an electromagnetic means of interfering with internal combustion engines at a distance. And it's in an air defence context, too. I know of no earlier such death rays, which of course means there are probably many.1

  1. H. G. Wells's 'Heat-Ray' from The War of the Worlds (1898) and George Griffith's 'death-rays' in The World Masters (1903) work differently, and weren't used against aircraft. [↩]

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Bradshaw's International Air Guide. Oxford and New York: Old House, 2013 [1934]. I'm a sucker for facsimile reproductions like this. Bradshaw's are best known for their compilations of [added: railway] timetables for the Continental traveller, but beginning in 1934 they did the same for air routes. You also get airport information, hotel advertisements, standard air travel rules and regulations (you couldn't take arms on board, for example, unless they were for 'hunting or sporting' and 'packed in such a manner as to cause no danger to persons or things', 159), and a nice pull-out map showing the world's air routes (which clearly reveals the Anglocentric nature of Bradshaw's: it doesn't show any North American or Australian routes because they didn't connect with flights out of Europe).

Robin Holmes. The Battle of Heligoland Bight 1939: The Royal Air Force and the Luftwaffe's Baptism of Fire. London: Grub Street, 2009. The Battle of Heligoland Bight was a daylight raid on Wilhelmshaven on 18 December 1939 in which just over half the RAF force was lost, leading to the suspicion that the bomber might not always get through. This book focuses on the fortunes of one particular Wellington and its crew, but also takes in the wider story of the raid.

Richard Overy. The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945. London: Allen Lane, 2013. This is a bit of a magnum opus. There are few people as well placed as Overy to write a deep summation of and reflection upon what we know now about strategic bombing in Europe in the Second World War (there's even a chapter on the Soviet experience), and by all accounts he has succeeded brilliantly. I've been waiting for this with some impatience and look forward to reading it (when I have a few weeks to spare -- with endnotes, it's just over 800 pages in length).

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I have previously outlined evidence from the New Zealand press for mystery aeroplane sightings in that country in 1918. I think it is clear that the reports, though not great in number, did amount to a scare. Apart from the claims themselves, and the associated talk of aerial or naval bombardment of New Zealand's major cities, there is also the following overt discussion, published in several papers in early April 1918:

Since the disclosure of the boast by an officer of a German raider than he had passed over Sydney in a seaplane, the authorities in New Zealand have had to cope with quite an epidemic of reports about mysterious seaplanes circling around the more remote parts of New Zealand. In every case careful investigation has to be made, and in every case the report has been found to be without foundation. Some of these reports have found their way into the newspapers, causing somewhat of a scare, and it is intended to prosecute under the War Regulations any person who in future circulates, without good cause, any such report likely to cause public harm. If New Zealanders see any more mysterious visitants in the sky, their best plan will be to carefully verify the sight, and quity [sic; quietly] inform the nearest police or defence officer, avoiding any public mention, for fear that it comes under the scope of the numerous possible offences against these comprehensive War Regulations.1

So this tells us that there were a considerable number of mystery aeroplane sightings, only a fraction of which made it into the press; that the government wanted reports to be made to the police or defence authorities, threatening prosecution if any public statements were made; and that the government took the reports seriously and investigated them. This is very similar to what happened in Australia at around this time (where censorship of mystery aeroplane sightings seems to have been imposed a couple of weeks later), which is promising, because in the National Archives of Australia I found a trove of intelligence files relating to mystery aeroplane scares. So I hoped to find something similar in Archives New Zealand. But I didn't. Here's what I did find.
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  1. Auckland Star, 8 April 1918, 4. [↩]

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Picked up both of these at the Shrine of Remembrance, while visiting to see the new Bomber Command exhibition. Of which, more another day.

Don Charlwood. Journeys into Night. Warrandyte: Burgewood Books, 2013 [1991]. I discussed Charlwood's memoir of the war recently; this is a sort of collective memoir of the twenty men who formed his Empire Air Training Scheme class, three quarters of whom didn't survive the war. Charlwood himself made it, not only through the war, but until last year.

Bruce Scates with Alexandra McCosker, Keir Reeves, Rebecca Wheatley and Damien Williams. Anzac Journeys: Returning to the Battlefields of World War II. Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013. This is a history of the Australian memory of war, specifically in the form of pilgrimage to foreign battlefields, whether by veterans, family, or people without direct connections to war. Includes chapters on Bomber Command and Darwin.

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Talk in the New Zealand press of mystery aeroplanes and the German threat died down by the beginning of May 1918. At the end of the month, though, mystery aeroplanes returned, followed a few weeks later by the German threat -- albeit both in a more muted fashion.

At Greymouth (on the west coast of the South Island) 'A report was circulated in town last evening [29 May 1918] that an aeroplane had been seen over the sea near the hospital last evening' [sic].1 Unfortunately there are no further details, but on the same night at about the same time, near Hokitika, 40 km to the south,

Several people, including a member of the [Hokitika] 'Guardian' staff, saw in the far roadstead last evening [29 May 1918], a number of vessels just before dusk. A pair of field glasses were obtained and nine vessels were counted. It is also stated that an aeroplane could be seen circling around in near vicinity to the ships. Quite a number gathered on the sea beach to view the interesting sight, but the fast approaching dusk soon hid a further view.2

At neither Greymouth nor Hokitika is any speculation recorded regarding the identity of these aeroplanes or ships.

About three weeks later, a story emerged, not of a new mystery aeroplane sighting, but of one which took place more than a year earlier. There were few details; it was only said that 'in the early part of last year [1917] a Clutha farmer stated that he had seen an aeroplane over the land, and that it had disappeared northwards'.3 This was suggested as 'corroboration to some extent' of reports that the German raider Wolf had sailed right around the New Zealand coast, carrying out aerial reconnaissance of various harbours.4 Further evidence that Wolf had been in southern waters at the time came from the crew of a trawler, who saw a light which they took to be another vessel (which turned out to be back in port), and local Māori, who saw searchlights playing over Stewart Island, again presumed to be from a ship (no government steamers were so equipped).5 This belated report prompted G. H. Lysnar to inform the Poverty Bay Herald and 'the authorities at Wellington' that 'in March or April last year [1917] [...] he saw the aeroplane or seaplane [...] from his station a few miles beyond Parikanapa, and it was travelling from Poverty Bay in the direction of between Mohaka and Wairoa':

Mr Lysnar says he regrets not having reported the occurrence at the time, but there then was no talk or thought of a raider with a seaplane visiting New Zealand, and he came to the conclusion at the time it was one of the flying machines from the Auckland Flying School paying a visit to either Napier or Wellington, and which preferred taking the coast line so as to be over cleared country; otherwise in the event of engine trouble it might have had to land in the back ranges in the bush.6

It's an interesting index of how much more probable a German aeroplane visit now seemed, that Lysnar felt compelled to give an elaborate explanation of why he hadn't thought to report what he had seen.
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  1. Grey River Argus (Greymouth), 30 May 1918, 2. [↩]
  2. Guardian (Hokitika), 30 May 1918, via Press (Christchurch), 3 June 1918, 6. [↩]
  3. Otago Daily Times, 20 June 1918, 4. [↩]
  4. Ibid. [↩]
  5. Ibid., 26 June 1918, 4; Nelson Evening Mail, 27 June 1918, 4. [↩]
  6. Poverty Bay Herald (Gisborne), 2 July 1918, 4. [↩]

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[Cross-posted at Society for Military History.]

IWM PST 12249

Above is a poster printed in Australia during the First World War. It very strikingly shows a Zeppelin caught in searchlights (with an aeroplane just visible at the top) over what looks like a town nestled in a valley beside a river. The text reads:

ZEPPELINS OVER YOUR TOWN ON ________

"COME TO OUR DUGOUT"

No Charge

It was pointed out to me by Peter Taylor, who found it in the Imperial War Museum's collections and noted that it seems unusual for a Zeppelin to feature in Australian propaganda. So what's going on here?
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