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I'm pleased to say that Twentieth Century British History has accepted my article 'The shadow of the airliner: commercial bombers and the rhetorical destruction of Britain, 1917-1935' for publication. It should appear online by the end of the year and in print some time after that. Conceptually, though not really intentionally, this article links with the ones I've written on the international air force and the 1935 air panic. The topic is the idea that civilian aircraft could be swiftly converted into effective bombers, which had its origin in the First World War and became extremely common in airpower discourse between the wars, thanks partly to P. R. C. Groves. This is something which has been little discussed by historians, with the main exception of those working on the proposed internationalisation of aviation. I argue that the commercial bomber functioned rhetorically to create a threat from Germany during the Weimar and early Nazi periods, when it was disarmed in the air but strong in civil aviation. Conversely, the issue quickly disappeared from view when the creation of the Luftwaffe was announced.

I have discussed this article here before, actually, though without saying what it was about: it's the one I asked for crowdsourced help in fixing it, after it had already been rejected and rewritten a number of times. Since it was then accepted by the next journal I sent it to (even if not immediately), for me this vindicates the idea of crowdsourcing the editing process in this way. I wouldn't do it as a matter of course, but I'd certainly do it again if (and when) I run into trouble. So thank you to the following people who provided feedback on the article draft:

Alan Allport, Christopher Amano-Langtree, Corry Arnold, Katrina Gulliver, Wilko Hardenberg, Lester Hawksby, James Kightly, Beverley Laing, Ross Mahoney, Andre Mayer, Bob Meade, Andrew Reid, Alun Salt

You'll all be in the acknowledgements, so if I've forgotten anyone, please let me know!

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LZ16, Lunéville, April 1913

The phantom airships seen over Britain in the early months of 1913 had their counterparts in Europe. It's hard to reconstruct what happened from the scattered references in English-language sources, but it seems that far fewer were seen than in Britain, even in toto. Here are the ones I've been able to find mentioned in the British press.

  • France: according to Santoni, managing director of the British Déperdussin Aeroplane Company, as evidence for the fact of Zeppelin visits to Britain, 'In France the fact of extensive German dirigible expeditions and practice is quite well known'.1 (I might be reading too much into this; the statement is vague and could be referring to expeditions to places other than France; anyway Santoni no doubt wanted to sell aeroplanes to Britain.)
  • Belgium:

    [...] the Brussels correspondent of the Central News telegraphs that the newspapers of that city state that for several nights past [prior to 26 February 1913] mysterious dirigibles have been carrying out evolutions over Peperinghe [sic], in West Flanders. The airships are believed to have come from the French frontier, and one of them is said to have been followed by a motor car fitted with a searchlight, which was flashed at times, apparently to guide the dirigible.2

  • Romania:

    It is reported from Jassy, near the Russian frontier, that at eight o'clock last evening [29 February 1913] an aeroplane with powerful searchlight was observed over the town coming from the direction of Russia. It manœuvred over the town for ten minutes, afterwards making towards the barracks. Troops were ordered out, and signals were made to the aviator to come down. The command was not obeyed, and two guns were fired at the machine. The aviator immediately put out his lights and disappeared. The affair has caused a great sensation.3

  • Austria-Hungary:

    According to the journal 'Slovo Palski' a Russian aeroplane, equipped with a searchlight, was seen manœuvring over Lemberg on Saturday evening. At Tarnopol (Galicia) likewise an aeroplane, making signals, was sighted over the town.4

  • Germany:

    Reuter's Berlin correspondent says that a detachment of the 8th Chasseurs of the Guard spent yesterday morning searching for the remains of a mysterious airship which, according to a story told by peasant women, caught fire, exploded, and fell to earth over the woods at Kaputh, near Potsdam, on Wednesday evening [12 March 1913] The women, who were positive they saw the disaster, reported it to the local authorities, who promptly telephoned for help. The Commandant of Potsdam set out with an ambulance column, with doctors and fifty Chasseurs. The fire brigades from Potsdam and other places in the neighbourhood hurried out and troops and firemen spent the night seeking in vain for the wreck of the airship. Yesterday morning another eighty Chasseurs took up the search without result. All the known airships were reported safe and sound in their various sheds. Nevertheless the women adhered to their story, and insisted that they saw the fire spread from one end of the ship to the other, then a sudden explosion occur, wrapping in flame the whole ship, which plunged headlong to the ground.5

Other countries had aerial visitors too: Russia, the Netherlands, Luxembourg. Around the start of February, the mayor of a village near Plock in Russian Poland claimed to have kidnapped one night by Austrian airmen and taken for a 60 mile flight, lashed to their aeroplane's fuselage. However, I haven't seen primary sources for any of these, only secondary ones, and ufological works at that -- albeit well-researched ones.6 At least these do draw on some contemporary French- and German-language newspapers, which is better than I can do as a monoglot. There could well be far more incidents than just these few.
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  1. Standard (London), 25 February 1913, p. 9. [↩]
  2. Ibid., 26 February 1913, p. 7. [↩]
  3. Manchester Guardian, 31 January 1913, p. 9. [↩]
  4. Globe (London), 4 February 1913, p. 3. [↩]
  5. Manchester Guardian, 14 March 1913, 7. [↩]
  6. Nigel Watson, Granville Oldroyd and David Clarke, The 1912-1913 British Phantom Airship Scare (South Humberside, 1987); Thomas E. Bullard, 'Newly discovered "airship" waves over Poland', Flying Saucer Review 29 (1984), 12-4. [↩]

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Today I attended the University of Melbourne's Faculty of Arts eResearch forum 2012. This was in two parts: firstly, a talk by Tim Sherratt, down from Canberra for the day, entitled 'Digital Disruptions', where he exhorted us to find new ways to break things; followed by short spiels by local academics on some of their digital humanities work. There was a lot of really interesting stuff on display, and whether by chance or design each one was digital in a very different way:

  • Susan Lowish spoke about creating a databases of Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara artwork, Ara Irititja, which is deployed in remote Indigenous communities in central Australia to preserve their (and our) cultural heritage and, crucially, make it accessible to them and allow them to add their own knowledge. It's a huge logistical task but judging from the use the databases get, a very worthwhile one.
  • Alison Young works on street art and the people and communities involved in creating it. She described how the Internet has enabled her to observe and intereact with these communities, which could be difficult due to the borderline-illegal nature of street art. For example she can use her blog to establish her academic credentials (and her politics) to artists she wants to interview to prove that she isn't an undercover cop!
  • David McInnis's contribution was to talk about the Lost Plays Database. This had perhaps the most traditional academic orientation of any of the projects on display today, but the way it works is anything but. It's a wiki which collates information about plays which we known were written in the late Tudor/early Stuart periods, but about which we have only fragmentary knowledge.1 This information is out there in the published literature and has been for decades, but has never been collected together, as it is now. And combining the power of crowdsourcing (even with a crowd of only a few dozen enthusiastic scholars) with newly digitised sources means when a question arises it can often be answered very quickly.
  • Cate O'Neill described the usability issues faced by the Find & Connect project she edits. This may sound boring, but in fact it was fascinating, and quite moving. Find & Connect is a government resource which provides information for people who were in state or foster care as children (including child migrants and the Stolen Generation). While the site has been designed according to best practice and with the best intentions, investigation has shown that users actually didn't understand how it works. What's interesting about these usability problems is how these usability issues are bound up with the reason for the site's existence. For example, with low computer literacy and self-confidence, it can't be assumed that users will know what things like "glossary" or even "help" are for. Even something as taken for granted as a "home" button was confusing in this context, as it is naturally enough interpreted as something to do with orphanages or foster homes. Similarly, the commonplace experience of clicking on a dead link and getting a 404 page can be read by some users to mean that the government is trying to hide something from them (i.e. again, as it has been doing for most of their lives). This was a real eye-opener: usability matters.
  • Véronique Duché is working on adapting her teaching methods to best serve the current generation of students, who live in their smartphones and tablets. So she is looking at developing an ebook, with embedded video, audio, slideshows, 3D models... It's easy to see how this would be useful for language teaching (well, except for the 3D part).
  • Finally, Nikki Hemmingham spoke about the Australian Women's Register and (forthcoming) online encyclopedia of Australian women leaders. What was interesting here was the way the project has evolved with experience: the encyclopedia was originally intended to be a comprehensive hyperlinked resource, but the problem is that links die. What was available on the web when it was written cannot be guaranteed to be there in the future. So now the encyclopedia is intended to be a snapshot in time, but it will be complemented by the Register, a Trove-like harvester of various online resources and databases. As such the need to curate links disappears; instead you curate the sources which contain them.

All good stuff, and I know there are many more digital things being done in the Arts Faculty which could have been included.

As for Tim Sherratt, I've mentioned him here before and used his tools as well. He's a one man digital history machine: QueryPic, the front page, Archives viewer, the future of the past, Headline roulette, the real face of White Australia (with Kate Bagnall) and more. The amazing thing is, despite all this work he has done to improve the way Australians (historians and not-historians) access their history, Tim's not employed or supported by any of our great universities or cultural institutions: he's just one person with a laptop and a broadband connection. While it's inspiring for others in that situation (as I am) to see what can be done with so little resources, I'd really rather see him be gainfully employed and fully supported. And while it's fantastic that Australian universities like Melbourne are getting serious about the digital humanities, it's not to their credit that they apparently can't find a place for someone as creative and productive as Tim. Somebody fix this please.

  1. Humble brag: completely coincidentally, in one of my day (technically night) jobs I'm the sysadmin who looks after the server hosting (among other things) LPD. This is humble because I have nothing to do with the content and in fact LPD was set up before I started; but more particularly so because the server was noticeably sluggish during the demonstration! Oops. [↩]

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Another update to my list of early 20th century British newspapers online. There are a number of new titles available:

Dundee Courier
Gloucestershire Echo
Hereford Times
Herts Advertiser
Lincolnshire Echo
Surrey Mirror
Yorkshire Gazette

In addition, the coverage for another dozen titles has been increased, though in some cases only by a year. There's additional coverage of at least some of the First World War period for seven newspapers, and of the Second World War for five.

Because it was getting a big long I've reorganised the list slightly, with separate sections for English, Irish/Northern Irish, Scottish and Welsh newspapers. Which highlights the fact that there are no Welsh newspapers in the list at all. (The BNA does have a very few for 1900; hopefully they will be extended in future.)

All of the updates are due to the BNA; none of the other major newspaper sources I'm aware of have added anything for this period in the last three months. If you know of any I've missed, please let me know in the comments. However, I did recently come across UNZ.org, which has a huge amount of early 20th century periodicals (as well as books and other things) scanned and available for free, without even any ads. ('A New, Vast and Slightly Right-Wing Archive of Magazines, Books and TV Shows' is a pretty accurate description.) It's nicely organised too; a search function would be nice but you can use Google for that. Unfortunately for my purposes, all of them are American or monthly or both -- well, okay, these are interesting and useful too, but they don't fit into my list. But UNZ.org does have several British literary journals from the early twentieth century: Cyril Connolly's Horizon, F. R. Leavis's Scrutiny, and The Bookman (though this was a Hodder and Staughton publication, it published general reviews and cultural commentary too). For example, here's George Orwell's 'Wells, Hitler and the World State' from the August 1941 Horizon, which I had to pester some poor interlibrary loan librarian to find for me when I was doing my PhD. So this is a good thing.

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Robert Boyce. The Great Interwar Crisis and the Collapse of Globalization. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. A big new (well, not so new by now) history of the way the Great Depression (or Slump) wrecked the international order, paving the way for Hitler and the rest of it. So it's not just about failures in economics and politics, but in internationalism and disarmament too.

Robert Citino. The Path to Blitzkrieg: Doctrine and Training in the German Army, 1920-39. Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books, 2008 [1999]. How did the German army do so well in 1939 when it had spent most of the previous two decades crippled in size and armaments? Citino is the person to ask. The bulk of the book focuses on the Reichswehr period rather than the Wehrmacht, so von Seeckt is the dominant figure here (no, not Fuller, Liddell Hart or even Guderian!)

Kathryn Spurling. A Grave Too Far Away: A Tribute to Australians in Bomber Command Europe. Sydney: New Holland, 2012. Tells the stories of many (but still only a small fraction) of the Australians who served in Bomber Command, drawing on official and personal archives as well as interviews. I have my concerns about writing history as tribute, but since I have previously argued that Australians ought to remember Bomber Command I hope that this book can be part of that process.

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VH-UXG, courtesy Phil Vabre

Very sad news today. On Monday, VH-UXG, a De Havilland DH.84 Dragon owned and flown by Des Porter, went missing on a flight from Monto to Caboolture in Queensland. A distress call and an emergency beacon were heard briefly, but then nothing more was known until today, when VH-UXG's wreckage was found in rugged terrain north of Borumba Dam. Unfortunately, all six on board were killed: Des and Kathleen Porter, Carol and John Dawson, Janice and Les D'evlin. My sympathies go out to their family and friends for their tragic loss.

The aeroplane itself is also a loss, if nowhere near as tragic a one. The Dragon, along with its successor the Dragon Rapide, is perhaps the classic 1930s small commuter airliner, designed for flying feeder routes between regional airports and metropolitan centres. Before Monday, there were apparently only eight Dragon survivors worldwide -- not four, as reported in the media -- of which six, remarkably, were still flying; now there are only seven and five respectively. (One of the seven is here in Melbourne at the RAAF Museum, tucked away in the back of one of the hangars.)

As can be seen from the photo above (taken from here, with the kind permission of Phil Vabre), VH-UXG was a beautiful aeroplane and had been lovingly restored. It was built in 1934 and flew in Britain for a couple of years as G-ACRF for Portsmouth, Southsea and Isle of Wight Aviation Ltd before being sold in 1936 to Aircrafts Pty Ltd, a Queensland airline and charter service, and then in 1948 to Queensland Flying Services. It had been sold again, this time into individual ownership, by the time it crashed and was written off at Archerfield in April 1954, and it was this wreckage which Porter eventually restored. Incredibly, his father was the owner and pilot of VH-UXG in that crash, and just a few months later was killed in another Dragon crash along with Des's older brother; Des himself survived. Parts of that aeroplane were apparently incorporated into VH-UXG's tail. (This is what I've pieced together from several online sources; again the media reports differ somewhat, saying that VH-UXG was the actual aeroplane Des's father and brother were killed in. I welcome any corrections.)

This raises the question of whether we should be flying such near-unique and near-irreplaceable vintage aeroplanes at all. I think we should. These machines were not designed to sit in museums, but to soar in the sky. That's their proper context, or at least part of it, and we can better understand them, and the people who built, flew and watched them, by trying to use them as authentic a manner as possible. That entails risk, but risk was and is inherently a part of flying. Statistically, this means we will eventually lose all flightworthy vintage aircraft to accidents (though we are still adding new ones to the list and there is a surprising amount that can be done with wreckage), but we'll at least still have the museum-bound survivors. One day even those will crumble into dust and rust. But that is the fate of all things. We can't pretend otherwise, so we should make use of what we've got while we've got it.

Some more lovely photos of VH-UXG, including when it was new, can be found here, here and here.

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In my discussion of the ill-fated Sykes Memo, I noted that it included proposed force levels for the Dominion air forces, which I haven't seen discussed before. This is interesting because it came at an interesting moment. It's early December 1918, with the Empire was in the flush of victory and all things seeming possible (at least they did to Sykes, which is why he lost his job as Chief of the Air Staff). But it's before any of the Dominions had actually created their own independent air forces (SAAF: 1920; RAAF: 1921; RCAF: 1924; RNZAF: 1937 -- though those dates are inevitably contentious; see Pathfinder 114 for a RAAF perspective). Their decisions to do so inevitably reflected local concerns and conditions, but they also took advice from the RAF, as the Empire's 'mother' air force. So Sykes's proposals provides some insight into how the centre viewed the periphery in an airpower sense at this cusp between war and peace, and what advice he might have given the fledging air forces had he not been ejected from command of the RAF.

So, as before, I've tabulated the squadron numbers from the Sykes Memo in From Many Angles, and added some comments after.1
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  1. F. H. Sykes, From Many Angles: An Autobiography (London: George G. Harrap & Company, 1942), 558-74. [↩]

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Recentlyish, someone called dedonarrival left the following comment here on a post about the British demand for reprisal bombing of Germany in return for the Blitz:

Such gross ignorance. Google: British terror bombing and note when it started and when Germany retaliated with its twin engined medium bombers and range limited fighter escort .

I don't know who dedonarrival is; and they apparently never returned to read the responses. Not that they deserved much of one. But I thought I'd do what they suggested and Google British terror bombing to see what came up. Actually, most results refer to terror bombing of, rather than by, Britain, particularly the 7/7 attacks. So I added dedonarrival to the search terms to see if they had discussed this topic before, and it turns out that they (or someone with the same pseudonym) had. I found a comment on a New Statesman article about Hiroshima as a war crime which reads, in part:

2. 'It may be Inconvenient History but England rather than Germany initiated the murderous slaughter of bombing civilians thus bringing about retaliation. Chamberlain conceded that it was "absolutely contrary to International law." The Peoples' War, Angus Calder. London, Jonathan Cape, 1969.*

'Hitler only undertook the bombing of British civilian targets reluctantly three months after the RAF had commenced bombing German civilian targets. Hitler would have been willing at any time to stop the slaughter. Hitler was genuinely anxious to reach with Britain an agreement confining the action of aircraft to battle zones J.M. Spaight, CB, CBE, Principal
Secretary to the Air Ministry,
Bombing Vindicated.

'The inhabitants of Coventry, for example, continued to imagine that their sufferings were due to the innate villainy of Adolf Hitler without a suspicion that a decision, splendid or otherwise, of the British War Cabinet, was the decisive factor in the case.' F.J.P. Veale, Advance to Barbarism, p. 169.

Advice: mentioning such facts while grandads in the vicinity generally proves inexpedient.

Assuming it's the same dedonarrival, it at least shows where they are coming from; and makes some sort of argument which can be examined and critiqued. Moreover, as I'll come to later these quotes can be found elsewhere on the Internet being used for the same purpose, so they're worth treating seriously. Except for the fact that they're mostly bogus.
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Mark Atherton. There and Back Again: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Origins of The Hobbit. London: I. B. Tauris, 2012. With The Hobbit published 75 years ago this very day and the (first of three!) movies coming out in a couple of months, this is very well-timed. The author is, like Tolkien, an Oxford philologist specialising in Old English, so he's also very well-placed to explore where The Hobbit came from, in terms of language, mythology and biography. I'm pleased to see that attention is paid to the connections between Smaug's attack on Lake-town and the technological warfare Tolkien experienced on the Western Front, though there is nothing one way or the other on whether it reflects a more general fear of the knock-out blow.

Suzanne Jillian Evans. The Empire Air Training Scheme: Identity, Empire and Memory. N.p. [Melbourne]: Custom Book Centre, 2011. A reprint of a recent University of Melbourne PhD thesis on EATS from an Australian perspective (though the larger international context is well set out, and it's nice to see my trinity of Groves, Charlton and Spaight getting a guernsey). The emphasis is on how EATS was portrayed during the war (e.g. as a realisation of Empire unity) and how the men who took part saw themselves (there's a fair bit of oral history); and the questions of why Australia's very substantial involvement has disappeared from the national memory. You can actually get a PDF of this for free from here, but I don't mind supporting a fellow Melbourne graduate by buying the self-published version!

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As with the Lübeck and Rostock raids over a month earlier, the RAF's thousand bomber raid on Cologne on 30 May 1942 triggered reprisal attacks by the Luftwaffe (though in far smaller numbers than Bomber Command was able to muster). Another round of Baedeker raids, in other words. This time, however, there was only one target, Canterbury, the site of the Mother Church of the Anglican Communion, bombed on the nights 31 May, 2 and 6 June. In fact, in this period some towns received even heavier raids than Canterbury, such as Southampton and Poole, but are not usually considered part of the Baedeker Blitz, nor were they given then same publicity at the time. The reason for this is presumably that whatever their heritage value those places were also quite clearly valid military targets, whereas Canterbury equally clearly was not. And the Germans didn't claim they were 'a reprisal for the terrorist attack carried out by the British Air Force on the inner city of Cologne', as they did in Canterbury's case.1

So here I'll look at the press reports of the Canterbury raids. One of the first was in the Derby Evening Telegraph on 1 June, which reported that 'CANTERBURY IS HUNS' TARGET':

No doubt the Cathedral, the Mother Church of England, was one of the enemy's chief objectives, but it is not proposed to assist the Germans by giving any information as to whether damage was caused to it or not.2

But since the article went on to describe 'One of the town's churches' as a 'burned out ruin', spire crashing into the ruins and all, it's possible that some readers drew the wrong conclusion and feared the worst. The morning papers the following day still weren't commenting on the cathedral's fate, in fact they largely avoided admitting that it existed at all (though they did mention that the Archbishop was safe, which would seem to imply the existence of his cathedral). Instead, the Daily Mirror focused on the human aspects of the raid, leading with the 75-year old woman said to have a 'spirit [...] typical of the Canterbury people':

She had been buried seven hours beneath 14 feet of debris, but she walked out. While soldiers were digging to free her she called out, 'I could do with a cup of tea, boys.'3

There were of course those who were not so lucky, including the town clerk, G. W. Marks, who was rescued from the ruins of his house alive but died in hospital. (Marks, who was Canterbury's ARP controller, was remembered in the West Country as he had been the chief assistant town clerk in Bristol.)4 Even though the raiding force was only about 25 aircraft, the Daily Express's report indicates fairly heavy damage:

In Canterbury a number of people were killed and injured, scores of homes, two rest centres, two banks, a school, several inns wrecked or damaged.

But it went on to say that 'by nightfall all homeless had been clothed, fed and removed in coaches to private homes or rest centres in other areas'. Lord Monsell, the local civil defence commissioner, sounded pleased: 'The area's mutual aid scheme has worked well'.5 Incidentally, the raid caused the sirens to sound in some parts of London, only 'the second night warning in the capital in seven months'.6
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  1. The Times, 2 June 1942, 4. [↩]
  2. Derby Evening Telegraph, 1 June 1942, 1. [↩]
  3. Daily Mirror, 2 June 1942, 5. [↩]
  4. Bath Weekly Chronicle and Herald, 6 June 1942, 6. [↩]
  5. Daily Express, 2 June 1942, 3. [↩]
  6. Nottingham Evening Post, 1 June 1942, 1. [↩]