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Devon and Exeter Gazette, 9 January 1913, 4

Alluding to the airship supposedly seen at Dover (assuming Saturday is meant, rather than Sunday as written), the Devon and Exeter Gazette notes (p. 4; above) that 'similar lights have been seen on the Somerset coast line of the Bristol Channel during the last three or four weeks' (so going back to mid-December 1912, at least). This activity is viewed with suspicion:

Throughout this period the low dull clouds which have prevailed would be the best screen or cover for aerial prospectors or scouts. It is to be hoped that the proper Government department has been duly apprised, but somehow the authorities seem to be the last to get knowledge which for a considerable time has been common property.

There is a (ground-based) precedent for this. Citing the Bristol Times and Mirror (possibly the source for the whole story, which provides no names or other verifiable details), the Gazette says that 'Three years ago a series of coast observations were made along the banks of the Severn, and quite openly'.

Getting into conversation with one of these men at Pilning Railway Station, a Bristolian was astonished to hear the German accent. This aroused his curiosity, and on attempting to ask the local military person in question what mission he was engaged on, the latter turned the conversation and terminated it.

The Gazette hopes that the 'authorities are alive to the danger of espionage', but sourly asks what can be expected 'from a Government which disbanded five Regiments of Infantry and Batteries of Field Artillery, and at the same times [sic] poses as encouraging to the full the Territorials'?

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The Times, 6 January 1913, 6

The Times (p. 6; above) has two paragraphs about the reported visit of an unknown flying machine to Dover at about 5am on Saturday morning, 4 January 1913, evidently coming from the direction of the Continent and heading north-east. It was seen by John Hobbs, a corporation employee (i.e. a council worker), though he heard it first:

His attention was first attracted by the noise of the motors, which is well known at Dover, and on looking in the direction from which the sound came he saw a light moving at a great speed from the direction of the sea. The throb of the engines as the machine passed over the town was very distinct.

Two other men, a tradesman named Langley and Police Constable Pierce, also heard the engine sounds though apparently did not see anything. The Times's correspondent in Dover adds that the shape of the machine could not be made out, but that 'owing to the fact that it carried a light and the noise of the engines it is believed to have been an airship and not an aeroplane'. The London Dundee Evening Telegraph and Post, p. 5, has much the same story, but adds a few details: for example that Hobbs was out 'inspecting the roads as to whether they required gravelling for the safety of traffic', which isn't really useful, and that the reason why the 'noise of the motors [...] is a well-known sound at Dover' (as The Times also said) is because 'there has been so much flying' there (presumably referring to the cross-Channel traffic), which is. The Evening Telegraph also adds that 'The wind at the time was blowing nearly half a gale from the westward':

It could only have been a powerfully-engined aircraft to have flown in such a wind, and daring airmanship was also involved in the flight.

The Manchester Courier, p. 7, somewhat more precisely puts the windspeed at 'nearly thirty miles an hour'. It also says that 'police officers', plural, heard the engine whereas the Times and the Evening News mention only one, but that might just be a misinterpretation as it doesn't mention the tradesman. However, the Manchester Guardian, p. 7, also says 'police officers'. It suggests that 'the remarkable thing' is that despite the airship last being seen heading inland, 'no report of her passing or landing has been received from anywhere'.

In introducing its account of the Dover incident, the Liverpool Echo, p. 3, asks 'Are we in danger of another "phantom airship" scare?' Only time will tell.

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Starting tomorrow, I will be be post-blogging the 1913 British phantom airship scare as it appeared in the press, one hundred years earlier to the day. This scare was much longer than the 1909 one: that lasted for less than three weeks, but the 1913 took over three months to run its course. (Longer, if the Sheerness Incident, which took place in October 1912 but wasn't publicised until November, is taken as its beginning.) It was only sporadic at times, especially at the start, but still I'm unlikely to be blogging about much else until April sometime. In an effort to preserve my sanity, I'll try to adhere to a minimalist form of post-blogging, i.e. focusing very narrowly on the topic at hand and not, as has been the recent trend, getting distracted by trying to explain the context or noting interesting but not very related stories that I come across. But I suspect that won't last. In any case, it will all come in very handy when I come to prepare my Wellington talk in July.

Historians have taken little notice of the 1913 phantom airship scare, whereas it's reasonably common to come across references to the smaller and, I would argue, less consequential 1909 one.1 That's probably because the main historian to take an interest in scareships, Alfred Gollin, devoted only a few pages to 1913 whereas he spent a whole chapter talking about 1909.2 Still, George Dangerfield did discuss the 1913 sightings in The Strange Death of Liberal England, though perhaps his title is now better known than his book.3 Also noteworthy is that the 1913 produced the only substantial contemporary analysis of the whole Scareship Age to be published, a chapter in a book written by the editor of the Economist, Francis Hirst.4 Outside the mainstream historical literature I can recommend the relevant chapters in Robert Bartholomew and George Howard's UFOs & Alien Contact (sceptical, despite the title) and Nigel Watson's The Scareship Mystery.5 Along with David Clarke and Granville Oldroyd, Watson also compiled from local and national press reports a 500-page catalogue of scareship sightings, The 1912-1913 British Phantom Airship Scare -- a massive undertaking in the pre-Internet age, and in fact one that still couldn't be replicated without spending weeks in the fabled British Library Newspapers at Colindale.6 I'll be working largely independently of their gargantuan effort, as I want to see the primary sources for myself, but I will use it to identify incidents and find sources. Apart from the usual online sources, I will also be using the London newspapers the Daily Mail, the Standard, the Globe and Traveller, the Spectator (all Conservative), the Economist (Liberal) and the Daily Herald (Labour), and two local newspapers, the Norfolk News, Eastern Counties Journal, and Norwich, Yarmouth, and Lynn Commercial Gazette and the Southampton Times and Hampshire Express. And maybe some other things.

Let the scare begin!

  1. E.g. A. J. A. Morris, The Scaremongers: The Advocacy of War and Rearmament, 1896-1914 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 159. [↩]
  2. Alfred Gollin, The Impact of Air Power on the British People and their Government, 1909-14 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), 238-40; cf. ibid., 49-63. [↩]
  3. George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (London: Serif, 1997 [1935]), 106-9. [↩]
  4. F. W. Hirst, The Six Panics and Other Essays (London: Methuen, 1913), 103-18. Actually, long ago I came across a reference to a whole book published on the phantom airship scares at around the same time -- but published in French! I'd be grateful if anyone knows what it is, because I've never been able to find it again. [↩]
  5. Robert E. Bartholomew and George S. Howard, UFOs & Alien Contact: Two Centuries of Mystery (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1998), 125-37; Nigel Watson, The Scareship Mystery: A Survey of Worldwide Phantom Airship Scares (1909-1918) (Corby: Domra, 2000), 61-74. [↩]
  6. Nigel Watson, Granville Oldroyd and David Clarke, The 1912-1913 British Phantom Airship Scare (South Humberside: self published, 1987). [↩]

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I've updated my list of online British newspaper archives. This time, the new titles are:

Aberdeen Journal
AJR Information
Catholic Herald
Connacht Sentinel
Cork Examiner
Jewish Chronicle
Irish Press
Irish Times
Kilkenny People
Louth and North Lincolnshire Advertiser
Nenagh News
Northants Evening Telegraph
The Post/Sunday Post (Dundee)
Sligo Champion
Sowerby Bridge News

Many of these are Irish, mostly from from the Irish Newspaper Archives but a couple from the British Newspaper Archive. [edit: I actually forgot my self-imposed rule to only include Irish newspapers before 1922 -- oops!] Thanks to a list of newspaper archives at Wikipedia, I also found the Irish Times, a couple of London-based Jewish newspapers (one, AJR Research, free) and the free Sowerby Bridge News, which appears to be an individual effort. Another great free resource is the Catholic Herald -- for example, here's their response to Guernica, 'Open town bombing a regular practice of Reds'. In addition, 14 titles have increased year coverage, though sometimes this is only a year or two.

With respect to the US-based NewspaperArchive, there's some good news, some other good news, and some bad news. The good news is that they have overhauled their interface and it's now much easier to use. For example, they have adopted Trove-style filters so you can quickly narrow a search by time period or location or title. This means it's more useful for discovery purposes, whereas before it was more difficult than it had to be to find things that you didn't already know were there. The other good news is that they have mostly cleaned up the metadata for their British titles. Previously if you went looking for British titles from the 20th century you would get a lot from the 18th especially, but also the 17th and 19th centuries. Maybe poor OCR was to blame (e.g. 1744 looking like 1944) but it's something that could easily have been noticed and fixed if a human had looked over things now and then. It seems that has now happened; while I did find a couple of errant titles the vast majority were correctly dated (or at least, the vast majority of the ones said to be from the 20th century were; it could be that the reverse problem is occurring too). So these are really positive developments, and signs that NewspaperArchive is committed to improving its service. The bad news, however, is really quite bad, at least from my point of view. It seems that NewspaperArchive has run into copyright or permissions problems, because now none of the British titles it carries go beyond 1904 (which also means that a couple of them, Lloyds News and the Staffordshire Sentinel, have been dropped altogether; the Hackney Express and Shoreditch Observer has been added, but this is already in the British Newspaper Archive anyway). Previously they mostly extended into the 1910s or 1920s. For example, the single most useful title, the Daily Mail, used to be covered up to 1921, so you'd get Versailles, the Great War, the People's Budget, the dreadnought race, the beginnings of airmindedness... now you get, I don't know, the Taff Vale decision? So I doubt I'll be renewing my subscription to NewspaperArchive: there's just not enough stuff for me now. But given the great improvements NewspaperArchive has made recently, I'd certainly join up again if the coverage situation improves in the future.

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[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.]

(Or, 'Trenchard at sea'.)

Jamel Ostwald's recent post on urban bombardment in the early modern period, itself partly a response to my post on Trenchardism, prompted me to wonder how straight the line was between aerial bombardment and earlier naval and land bombardments? Was the naval precedent more influential or the military one?

This does not quite answer the question, but in his Air Power and the Cities (1930) the Air Ministry civil servant and lawyer J. M. Spaight, the most prolific British airpower writer of the interwar period, spent an entire chapter talking about the historical precedents afforded by naval bombardments, calling it 'The lesson of the naval bombardments'. Stated negatively, this lesson was that 'it has been no part of the policy of belligerent nations to destroy enemy coastal cities'.1 Or, stated positively, 'there has been a clearly marked tendency to confine attack to certain objectives', mostly (but not exclusively) 'those the destruction of which was calculated to prejudice the enemy's military effort and to which, therefore, the term "military objectives" may be broadly applied'.2 (He was a lawyer, after all.) Spaight projected this naval trend onto aerial bombardment, arguing that air forces in the next war would be unlikely to bomb cities indiscriminately:

On the few exceptional occasions in which objectives not of a military character have been shelled, the result has been protest, excuse, condemnation, never justification on the merits of the practice. It is sufficient to recall the salient facts of the naval campaigns of modern times to conclude that there has been no settled policy of indiscriminate bombardment in naval war. In general, bombardment has been confined to military objectives and undertaken for a military purpose.3

Ultimately, this served to buttress his argument that not only was disarmament a bad idea, but it wasn't even necessary, because airpower itself 'is the great disarmer'.4

How can war go on when air power can leap upon it, smother it, smash it? That would be bad work for civilisation if it meant smashing the cities; but it need not mean that. Indeed, it cannot mean that unless air power is to be mishandled, misdirected, grossly misapplied. Used aright, used to the fullest advantage, it will be kept for smashing the nests and. breeding places of armament not the cities.5

So why did Spaight emphasise the naval precedent and not the military one? Because, regrettably, 'it cannot be denied that the bombardment of a defended, town as a whole has been a practice not unknown to land warfare'.6 Indeed, he noted that both the British and the American manuals on the rules of law took the view that 'an attacking force is under no legal duty to limit the bombardment to the fortifications of a place attacked'.7 Moreover, land bombardments tended not to be decisive: 'the terrible bombardment of Strassburg [1870] only made its inhabitants more determined to resist'.6

The naval bombardments Spaight was referring to included Alexandria (1882), Beirut (1912), Canton (1841), Greytown (1854), Kagoshima (1863), Pisagua (1879), Tripoli (1828), Valparaiso (1866), and others mostly from the Crimean and First World Wars. Not all of these examples really serve his larger argument -- the German naval bombardments of Hartlepool, Scarborough and Whitby (1914) attacked targets of no military value and killed more civilians than any air raid on Britain in the next four years -- but he seems to have missed one that did.

In the Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896, three British cruisers anchored close to the shore and bombarded the ruling Sultan's palace without damaging the surrounding city, as discriminate a bombardment as any. (Though there were at least some civilians among the 500 or so casualties, this was not intended.) It was also decisive, in that it forced the Sultan to flee and allowed the British to install their own preferred candidate, which was the reason for the war in the first place. And it was also incredibly quick: the war began at 9:02am on 27 August 1896 and ended at 9:40am. Indeed, at 38 minutes the Anglo-Zanzibar War is supposedly the shortest war in history. With such effective examples of short, sharp shocks before them, it's easy to see why airpower theorists were drawn to the idea of using the air to strike at cities unreachable by sea. But not why so they so easily discarded the principle of discriminate, precision bombing so easily, confounding Spaight's prediction. The reasons for that lie in the technological and operational limitations of the air weapon, limitations which were not clear when Spaight wrote and would not be clear for some years yet.

  1. J. M. Spaight, Air Power and the Cities (London, New York and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1930), 92. [↩]
  2. Ibid., 93. [↩]
  3. Ibid., 165. [↩]
  4. Ibid., 235. [↩]
  5. Ibid., 234-5. [↩]
  6. Ibid., 95. [↩] [↩]
  7. Ibid., 96. [↩]

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Uses of 'Mars' and 'canals' vs uses of 'Mars' only in peer-reviewed astronomical articles, 1861-1970

So, to wrap up this accidental series. To check whether professional astronomical journals displayed the same patterns in discussing 'Mars' and 'canals' as the more popular/amateur ones I again looked at the peak decade 1891-1900, this time selecting only the more serious, respected journals. However, because of the French problem I had to exclude L'Astronomie and Ciel et Terre (the former was apparently more popular anyway). So for my top three I ended up with Astronomische Nachrichten, Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (PASP) and Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS). Astronomische Nachrichten ('astronomical notes') was the leading astronomical journal of the 19th century, founded 1821. It published articles in a number of languages including English. Fulltext Service seems to be multilingual, as it picks up the German (at least) equivalents of Mars/Martian and canal/canals. That doesn't help with the French problem, but that will only affect a small minority of Astronomische Nachrichten's articles. The Astronomical Society of the Pacific was founded in California as a joint amateur-professional organisation. Its PASP is now a very highly regarded journal, although I must admit I don't know if this was always the case. MNRAS is the journal of the Royal Astronomical Society in Britain. It also happens to be where my solitary peer-reviewed astronomy article was published (and when I say 'my', I think approximately 1 sentence relates to research I actually undertook), but even so it really is a highly-respected journal.
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In my post about the lingering scientific interest in the Martian canals hypothesis after 1909, I said that there was a problem with journal coverage. What do I mean by this? Have a look:

Uses of 'Mars' and 'canals' in peer-reviewed astronomical articles

This is a repeat of the first plot in the previous post, showing the number of articles published in peer-reviewed astronomical journals mentioning 'Mars' and 'canals' between 1861 and 1970, only this time for each of three journals: Observatory, Journal of the British Astronomical Association, and Popular Astronomy. I chose these three because they were the journals which had the most such articles, both over the entire period and in the peak decade of the 1890s.
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Uses of 'Mars' and 'canals' in peer-reviewed astronomical articles

In a recent, hmm, let's call it a discussion resulting from an old post I wrote about the US Air Force's one-time interesting in mapping Mars, I tried to assess how scientific interest in the Martian canals hypothesis lingered after the early 20th century, and said I would run up some figures to illustrate the data. So here they are.

My source is the ADSLabs Fulltext Service. ADS is the Astrophysical Data System, an online database of articles published in astronomy and physics journals. Which doesn't sound so amazing these days, but it was in 1994 when I first used it! (More on its history here.) The interface has changed remarkably little since then, but it is still free and very comprehensive. While it is primarily an abstract service, fulltext is available for many older articles -- but only as non-searchable images. Moreover, not all articles have abstracts. However, the text of articles from most of the major journals have been OCRed into a parallel database, the Fulltext Service. Like the classic ADS Abstract Service, this was not designed with historians in mind, but it's still quite useful.
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[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.]

It's been a good year for reading military history, but then it always is. If I had to recommend one military history book I've read this year it would be David Stevenson's With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 (London: Penguin, 2012). Stevenson's previous book, 1914-1918 (published as Cataclysm in the United States), was a good survey of the First World War, even an excellent one; but it didn't hint at the magisterial nature of this book. In fact, I was worried that With Our Backs to the Wall might simply prove to be a padded-out version of the 130-odd pages in 1914-1918 covering the same period. Of course my fears were groundless.

The first third of With Our Backs to the Wall provides the narrative backdrop for the rest of the book. Here, Stevenson explains the events of 1918: in particular the German gamble on the Western Front in the spring, the successful Allied defence and the ultimately even more successful Allied offensive leading to the Armistice. This section by itself is almost worth the cover price (especially if you bought it in paperback like I did): it's easy to focus on the 'classic' period of trench warfare between 1915 and 1917 and forget the return to a war of movement in 1918. But where Stevenson really shines is in the following thematic chapters which explore how the war was fought in 1918, how it had changed since 1914 and why it didn't continue into 1919, as was widely expected until the autumn. There's something for everyone here: technology, intelligence, logistics, morale, finance, economics, gender. Of course the approach is necessarily largely synthetic, though Stevenson does often use primary source material to great effect. Each topic is treated in depth to a satisfying degree: even if you are familiar with the scholarship you are likely to find something worthwhile (as I did in the section on airpower), and if you aren't you'll learn a lot. But despite the density of the text and its length (nearly 550 pages excluding endnotes), I found With Our Backs to the Wall a compelling and even gripping book. Highly recommended. (But if it's not to your taste, perhaps try Claudia Baldoli and Andrew Knapp, Forgotten Blitzes: France and Italy Under Allied Air Attack, 1940-1945, London and New York: Continuum, 2012.)

So if you had to recommend one military history book you've read this year, what would it be? What one book most impressed you, informed you, surprised you, moved you?

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Disburse contiguum against yet the most squamous bulwark

With war comes confusion, and with confusion comes a need for clarity. So it was with simple, determined messages like this that the National Office of Information kept the undersieged civilians of Britain in a robust frame of mind during the teething pains of the Second World War.

The language may be arcane, but the message is plain: disburse contiguum against yet the most squamous bulwark. Firm and reassuringly steadfast, it is a call to action that still resonates today, during times of national pandæmonium. Will Self has a tattoo of this poster on his tongue.

Source: National Office of Importance.