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So, to the mystery aeroplane sceptics. Again, there are some sceptical opinions to be found in the press and police reports, but relatively few. Very early on, the Age, one of Melbourne's leading newspapers, wrote on 25 March 1918 that

the defence authorities are inclined to laugh at the story told by Police Constable Wright, of Ouyen, that at Nyang on Thursday last [21 March] he saw two aeroplanes flying in a westerly direction at a high altitude. The constable insists that he was not mistaken, but the authorities, being able to account for the movements of all Australian aeroplanes, jokingly suggest that the constable's story is on a par with those told about the Tantanoola tiger.1

It did go on to say that 'the authorities very rightly recognise that it would be unwise not to investigate [...] and inquiries into the reported occurrence are being made by special intelligence officers'.2 This was true, though in the event the 'special intelligence officers' (actually Detective F. W. Sickerdick, Victoria Police, and Lieutenant Edwards of the Royal Flying Corps) weren't despatched from Melbourne until 13 April as part of a broad sweep around western Victoria interviewing witnesses and suspects which took several weeks to complete. The conclusion of Sickerdick's report was unsurprisingly negative:

In my opinion and from the observations taken and from information received, the opinion of the residents, and the country travelled through, I do not believe that aeroplanes ever flew over the MALLEE, and I believe the objects seen at different times and by different people, were either hawks or pelicans.3

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  1. Age (Melbourne), 25 March 1918, copy in NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066. The article also refers to reports 'earlier in the war of a mythical fleet of eight enemy aeroplanes which flew over Hobart'. This would seem to refer to an incident in October 1914 when 'a battery of artillery in training near Hobart observed "several aircraft"': NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066, minute, Director of Military Intelligence (Major E. L. Piesse) to Chief of the General Staff, 'Report of aeroplane at Towamba, N.S.W.', 16 May 1917. [↩]
  2. Age (Melbourne), 25 March 1918, copy in NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066. [↩]
  3. NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066, report, Detective F. W. Sickerdick (Victoria Police) to Major F. V. Hogan (Intelligence Section, General Staff), 1 May 1918. [↩]

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What did Australians in 1918 make of the mystery aeroplane scare? What did they think the aeroplanes meant? This is a question I've already answered in part. There is evidence from the press that in the days before 24 April wild rumours were circulating that Australia was about to be attacked somehow by German raiders, perhaps even to the extent of a landing by enemy troops. These rumours were attributed (at least by the New Zealand press) to anxiety caused by the rash of mysterious aeroplanes seen primarily in Victoria, which were generally presumed to be flying from and hence evidence of said raiders. (The watershed I keep mentioning, the date when the press largely stopped publishing mystery aeroplane reports was 23 April, and this probably is not a coincidence if censorship was involved. Which, alas, I still cannot prove and may not be able to.) In my previous post I discussed some examples of rumours about mystery aeroplanes, which by their nature can give us insights into what people thought the aeroplanes were and what they were doing. James French's letter, for example, shows that he certainly believed that the mystery aeroplanes were connected with German raiders off the coast, but also that he thought they were cooperating with German spies and operating from hidden aerodromes.
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If the wave of reports of mystery aeroplanes after late April 1918 wasn't sustained by newspaper reports (i.e. because there were none) then how was it sustained? Why did people from all over Australia come to hold the same belief, that German aircraft were filling the skies? There are several possible explanations. One is that to interpret odd things in the sky as aeroplanes was simply obvious. But as I argued in the previous post, most Australians had never seen a real aeroplane before, so why would they start thinking like this now? A related explanation is that the press played a role in initiating the scare, but by the time it stopped reporting on the mystery aeroplanes it was no longer necessary: the idea had taken root and the scare was now self-sustaining. That is certainly possible. But there is another vector which, although often hard to trace definitively, did play an important role: rumour.

I don't think Australians are any more prone to rumourmongering than anyone else; on the other hand, we apparently did invent the bush telegraph. And there is some evidence for rumour in a number of the naval intelligence files contained in NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/066/378. Here are three.
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NAA: A1194, 19.03/6255

This is from a document issued by the Air Council in October 1918, 'Identification marks on all aircraft', FS Publication 89. I think it's available from the National Archives in London as AIR 10/128 and AIR 10/129, but I found it in the National Archives of Australia as NAA: A1194, 19.03/6255, and because I paid to have it digitised you can see it on their website. It portrays the national identification markings for every country from America (a red, blue and white roundel) to Turkey (a black square inside a white square). I'm not sure how germane it is to the mystery aircraft scare earlier in the year: it probably wouldn't even have arrived in Australia before the Armistice. But it did follow a series of official determinations in the autumn about how to recognise German aircraft and, indeed, how to recognise aircraft at all.
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Claudia Baldoli and Andrew Knapp. Forgotten Blitzes: France and Italy under Allied Air Attack, 1940-1945. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. Ask and ye shall receive! This is a groundbreaking book, as far as the English language is concerned: I know of no other treatments of the bombing of either France or Italy at this length. Of course, it could be argued that there's only half a book on each here, but I suspect the comparative approach will be very fruitful. I'll probably be most interested in the chapter on preparing for bombing in the interwar period, but it all looks good. Incidentally, this is the latest output of the prolific Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe 1940-1945 project centred on the University of Exeter; only last month its members took up an an entire issue of Labour History Review; and I see that Richard Overy has a book coming out next year entitled The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945 -- so now I have something else to look forward to!

Lizzie Collingham. The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food. London: Penguin, 2012. An agrarian interpretation of the Second World War. This has received rave reviews from all over (including one from the aforementioned Richard Overy). I do wonder if the pudding has been over-egged as far as the blurb is concerned: I doubt that the claim that 'the necessity of feeding whole countries led to Germany's invasion of Russia' can be sustained, unless 'led to' is to be read as 'contributed to' rather than 'caused'. Still, looks very interesting.

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The title of this post could refer to my own state of mind as I reach a crossroads in this project. As I said in the previous post, it's time to dig deeper into the 1918 Australian mystery aeroplane scare, to look beneath the surface. What was really going on? Why did people see mystery aeroplanes at this time and att this place? I have several lines of inquiry which should lead to an answer (if not the answer). One is the comparative and transnational perspective; another leads through airmindedness and the early understanding of and responses to flight. I'll address these in later posts. But the key perspective I need to try to recreate is the fear, uncertainty and doubt surrounding the mystery aeroplanes, of which they were (I argue) both a symptom and a cause. Which is the real reason for my choice of title. Really.

Again, there are a number of threads to follow. One is my starting point in all this: the role of the press. As I have already shown, the scare shows up in press accounts only for about four or five weeks after mid-March 1918, even though the number of sightings peaked after then. The terminus date for the press seems to be around 23 April. Up until then there is a steady stream of stories; afterwards I know of nothing until 4 June, when the Melbourne Age reported that about nine or ten people, including a returned soldier, watched an aeroplane fly over Charlton; the story was reprinted the following day in the Ballarat Courier (adding that 'The returned man had considerable experience with aircraft'); and after that there's nothing at all.
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View Mystery aircraft, Australia, 1918 in a larger map

My next step in characterising the 1918 Australian mystery aircraft scare was to plot all the sightings Google Maps, which you can see above. I've used differently-coloured icons for different time periods to give an idea of the progression over the course of 1918: blue is January and February; red, March; green, April; cyan, May; yellow, June; purple, July; magenta, August through November. There are too many for Google Maps to show at once in an embedded map (without me learning JavaScript) but the rest can be seen here. Each icon is named for the location and has an attached date, but no other information. I dithered over which map mode to use but in the end settled on good old satellite mode, as it gives an idea of the terrain but also has good social data such as roads and towns (even if these are from 2012, not 1918). Of course you can switch between them yourself.
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William Feaver. James Boswell: Unofficial War Artist. London: Muswell Press, 2007. A few months ago Ruth Boswell emailed me about the Sudeten crisis posts I wrote in connect with a film script and novel she is working on. It turns out that not only was she the producer of the classic 70s SF show The Tomorrow People which I watched as a kid but also is the widow of James Boswell, a New Zealand-born artist I blogged about when Airminded was still young. The reason I wrote about him was a claim on the Tate's website that his (very evocative) lithographs entitled 'The Fall of London' were commissioned for Frank McIlraith and Roy Connolly's Invasion From the Air (1934), which was and is my favourite knock-out blow novel. While Ruth obviously wasn't around at the time, she tells me that James later said that they had been done for a young Communist Party member, who never turned up to collect them. That doesn't sound quite like either McIlraith or Connolly, from what I know of them (Connolly was an Australian journalist and editor who worked at Labor-affiliated newspapers; McIlraith, again either from Australia or NZ, may have had connections with the left but I haven't been able to pin him down; the book doesn't read as straightforward pro-Communist propaganda, though I suppose it is anti-fascist), which I must admit is a bit disappointing. But I am consoled by Ruth's very kind gift of this lavishly-illustrated catalogue (published by her own press) of James's wartime work, done while serving in ARP and the Army in London, Scotland and the very different landscape of Iraq. His observations of service life are particularly keen, but also some quite disturbing and somewhat surreal nightmare images. There's also a bit on his prewar output for Communist newspapers, including a great one published in Left Review in April 1938 with appeasement serving as a particularly flimsy 'Chamberlain' air raid shelter, entitled 'Design for dying'.

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Mystery aircraft reported to military intelligence, Australia, 1914-1918

In my previous post, I threatened more statistics about Australian mystery aircraft scares of the First World War, and here they are. What I've been doing is collating all the sightings recorded in two NAA files, MP1049/1, 1918/066 and MP367/1, 512/3/1319. The former is the Navy Office's file pertaining to 'Reports of suspicious aeroplanes, lights etc', more than a thousand pages in all, though the majority of it is composed of reports obtained by military intelligence and local police. The Navy was presumably interested because, assuming the reports were genuine, the most likely explanation was that the aircraft were flying from a German raider operating in Australian waters. The file also contains some operational orders and reports relating to the search for the presumed raider, regular reports and analyses of the sightings to date, and related correspondence. The other file contains 'Reports from 2nd M D during War Period on lights, aeroplanes, signals etc.' 2nd Military District covered NSW; presumably there were similar files from the other districts but if so I haven't found them yet (3rd MD would be the one to get, as that was Victoria where the majority of sightings took place). Some of the material in it is duplicated in the Navy's file, but there's much which isn't, including a number of pre-1918 reports.
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Like Gaul and probably some other things, my mystery aeroplanes paper will be divided into three parts:

  1. An overview of the 1918 Australian mystery aeroplane scare itself.
  2. The immediate historical context which helps explain the scare, namely the threats from German raiders and of Allied defeat.
  3. The bigger picture into which the scare fits, namely other mystery aircraft waves before and since, in Australia and elsewhere.

That's a fair bit to do in limited space (the paper is 20 minutes long with 10 minutes for questions; the formal version no more than 8000 words including references) so I need to have a thorough understanding of my material: what is essential and needs to be included and what is not-essential and should be left out.

So what material do I have? There are next to no secondary sources on the scare that I'm aware of, apart from passing references; conversely, the great majority of my primary sources relate to it. I first came across the scare in Australian and New Zealand newspapers from March-April 1918, and that is certainly a key aspect as I'll be arguing that press reports of mystery aeroplanes themselves helped to propagate the wave of sightings. I'll probably have another look through Trove to see if there's anything I've missed or has been digitised since I last looked. Really, though, I've already got enough here to work with.
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