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Charles Kingsford Smith

Charles Kingsford Smith was and remains Australia's most famous pioneer aviator. Among his feats: the first trans-Pacific flight, in both directions in fact (1928, east to west; 1934, west to east); the first non-stop trans-Australian flight (1928); the first trans-Tasman flight (1928). It's probably fair to think of him as the Australian Lindbergh in terms of his iconic status -- and his flirtation with far-right politics (he was a member of the New Guard, an early 1930s fascist paramilitary group) -- though his entrepeneurial activties and self-promotion remind me more of Sir Alan Cobham, with his ambitious attempt (with his frequent copilot, Charles Ulm) to get into the airline business. 'Smithy' was himself knighted, in 1932; in 1953 Sydney's major airport (and hence Australia's busiest) was named after him; for thirty years his image graced the Australian twenty dollar note. Like so many of the great pioneer aviators he met an early death, in his case in November 1935 after crashing somewhere in the Andaman Sea while trying to recapture the Australia-England speed record.

All of that is well-known. But what isn't is that in 1918, Kingsford Smith witnessed a mystery aeroplane flying over the Australian coast -- what in later decades would be called a flying saucer or an unidentified flying object. I can find no reference to this incident in a quick check of three Smithy biographies (admittedly none very scholarly); as it's buried in an archive with no obvious connection to his career it's possible it hasn't been noticed before now.
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If war should come

WILL THEY BE A COMMON SIGHT?

Officers of the St. Johns Ambulance Brigade, who, in their black and white uniforms, are familiar and friendly figures to Londoners, are now preparing for the possibility that grim and terrible duties may one day fall to their lot. A number of them have recently received instruction in a hall beneath one of London's biggest blocks of flats in methods of first aid in the streets, in the use of shelters and airlocks and the gas-proofing of private premises. A group of them is here seen clothed from head to foot in anti-gas equipment

These photographs are from the fourth of a series of articles on the future of aerial warfare: Boyd Cable, 'If war should come', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 201-4. The preceding articles were 'Death from the skies', 'The doom of cities', and 'New horrors of air attack'.
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Darwin, 19 February 1942

Thirteen days ago, it was the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Darwin, the first and most devastating Japanese air raid on Australia. In fact, there were two air raids on 19 February 1942: one from the same carrier task force which had attacked Pearl Harbor a little over two months previously, and another later in the day by land-based bombers from recently-occupied airfields in the Netherlands East Indies. Around 250 people were killed, mostly from the military since two-thirds of its pre-war population of 5800 had already been evacuated. Ten ships were sunk, including an American destroyer, the USS Peary. The RAAF station was hard hit too. Electricity and water services were cut (though soon restored); port and oil facilities severely damaged (shown above).

Despite Darwin's status as Australia's northern gateway (it was a prewar QANTAS staging post on the Singapore route) it was poorly defended. There were few anti-aircraft guns, no radars, and only two RAAF squadrons, one of general purpose Wirraways and the other of Hudson light bombers. Only the accidental presence of a squadron of American P-40s returning from an abortive flight to Timor allowed any sort of defence to be mounted in the air. Of the ten P-40s, five were out of fuel and had to land; four were shot down; one claimed two Val dive bombers. Anti-aircraft accounted for another Val and two Zeroes. Wing Commander Archibald Tindal was killed manning a Lewis gun against the enemy; RAAF Tindal is named after him.
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Well, not quiet so much as oddly obscure...

In his Behind the Smoke Screen (1934), probably the most influential book written on the theory of a knock-out blow from the air, P. R. C. Groves related the following story of angry civilians attacking an RFC aerodrome after an air raid, because they felt they had not been defended adequately:

On several occasions such attacks from the air were followed by episodes indicative of high nervous tension among sections of the public. One of the worst, to which for obvious reasons no reference was made in the Press at the time, occurred at Hythe where, after the raid on May 25th, 1917, a mob invaded a local aerodrome, stoned the mechanics and attempted to wreck the hangars, because the Royal Air Force [sic] unit had not protected the town. As a matter of fact the unit in question was a training school and did not possess a single machine capable of reaching the raiders.1

Along with deaths caused by panic-stricken crowds rushing for shelter and the nightly trekking of people from cities to countryside when an air raid was anticipated, Groves uses this incident as evidence for the fragility of civilian morale under aerial bombardment, with the implication that such things would happen on a far greater scale in the next war. But did it really happen like that? Groves doesn't give a source, and while he was in the RFC himself, in May 1917 he was a staff officer in the Middle East. He wouldn't have had any direct or official knowledge of a riot at Hythe.2
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  1. P. R. C. Groves, Behind the Smoke Screen (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), 156. [↩]
  2. It's conceivable that he found out about it when he was Director of Flying Operations at the Air Ministry from May 1918, though the riot would have been ancient history by then. [↩]

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Peter Adey. Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. The title isn't very revealing of its contents. But here's a partial list of the topics covered: airminded youth groups such as the Air Defence Cadet Corps and the Skybird League (chapter 2), air shows including Hendon (chapter 3), the birth of aerial surveying (chapter 4), RAF pilot selection techniques (chapter 5), wartime experiments on the effects of bomb-blast on buildings and bodies (chapter 6), the effectiveness of ARP drills (chapter 7). There is even room for scareships! While it is framed as cultural geography the history looks solid and this book should interest anyone interested in British airmindedness.

Susan R. Grayzel. At Home and Under Fire: Air Raids and Culture in Britain from the Great War to the Blitz. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. As will this one, which is even closer to my own particular interests. In fact the topic is broadly that of my PhD thesis and my book; and if it had been published ten or even five years ago I probably would have picked something else to do! Having said that, I think our approaches are sufficiently different not to make my book redundant: at first glance, hers is more cultural history with some political history, mine is more intellectual history with some cultural history. Plus, mine has scareships. Still, I'm both looking forward to and dreading reading this...

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New horrors of air attack

SUCH THINGS WILL HAPPEN

In April, 1935, a Kentish Voluntary Aid Detachment of the British Red Cross Society conducted an air raid rehearsal. Here Red Cross men wearing box respirators and anti-gas clothing are rescuing a woman caught by gas in the open. With a heavy concentration of the deadly gases that modern chemists have now evolved there is little chance she would survive for more than a few minutes.

These images are from Boyd Cable, 'New horrors of air attack', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 143-6, the third article in a series on 'Things of tomorrow', following on 'Death from the skies' and 'The doom of cities'.
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Here's something I didn't know before. In 1939, an Indian chemistry professor and Theosophist named D. D. Kanga edited a collection of articles entitled Where Theosophy and Science Meet: A Stimulus to Modern Thought.1 One of the articles was by Peter Freeman, who had been a Labour MP from Wales between 1929 and 1931 (and would be again from 1945 until his death in 1956). He had also been general secretary of the Welsh branch of the Theosophical Society since 1922. His contribution to Kanga's volume was entitled 'The practical application of Theosophy to politics and government'; I'm not sure when it was originally published, assuming it wasn't written specially for this volume, but it would probably be the early to mid-1930s.

Freeman's basic premise is that of Theosophy: that the universe and everything in it is evolving in accordance with what he calls '"the Plan"'.2 This applies to societies too, 'in the gradual civilization and progress of humanity towards its destined end -- the full realization of Universal Brotherhood'.3 But this process is helped along both by enlightened people (e.g. Theosophists) and by 'a body of super-men, the Masters [...] who, having passed through the many stages of life, are now competent to help and guide the affairs of the earth'.

These evolved men are known as the Great White Brotherhood, or the Inner Government of the World. All forms of government on earth are but pale reflections of their activities, nevertheless everyone can assist, in however humble a manner, in their mighty task of bringing about the perfection of all life.4

In this spirit, Freeman asked:

What are the immediate political steps that should be taken to secure World Peace and to establish the Brotherhood of Man?5

His answer was that 'a World Power acting on behalf of the League of Nations' was required, so that nations would feel secure and consent to disarmament.6
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  1. The British Library catalogue says 1938, but the preface is dated October 1939 and notes that war had broken out in Europe. [↩]
  2. Peter Freeman, 'The practical application of Theosophy to politics and government', in D. D. Kanga, ed., Where Theosophy and Science Meet: A Stimulus to Modern Thought (Adyar: Adyar Library Association, 1939), 130. [↩]
  3. Ibid., 130 [↩]
  4. Ibid., 130. [↩]
  5. Ibid., 134 [↩]
  6. Ibid., 134. [↩]

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A comment by Gavin Robinson over at Thoughts on Military History reminded me that I've been a bit slack with self-archiving. This is the policy some academic journals have which allows authors to upload copies of their articles to their own websites, with certain caveats. For SAGE journals the policy is that you can

At any time, circulate or post on any repository or website the version of the article that you submitted to the journal (i.e. the version before peer-review) or an abstract of the article.

Which I did do for my first peer-reviewed article, 'World police for world peace: British internationalism and the threat of a knock-out blow from the air, 1919-1945' which appeared in War in History, a SAGE journal, in 2010. That version is only slightly different from the one which was accepted for publication, so I was quite happy to make it available for download.

But I'd forgotten that SAGE's policy also allows you to

At least 12 months after publication, post on any non-commercial* repository or website* the version of your article that was accepted for publication.

Since 'World police for world peace' was published in July 2010 I could have put the accepted, peer-reviewed version up five months ago. Well, I've now rectified this omission: that version is now available for download. Of course, that doesn't have the same pagination as the published article, which has also been copyedited; so the absolute, definitive version is the one available from War in History itself.

Is self-archiving worth the trouble? I think so. Since August last year (when I installed a proper download counter) 'World police for world peace' has been downloaded by 26 different people, from Thailand to the UK. While that's not an earth-shattering number, these are presumably people who are interested enough to download and (hopefully) read my research on the international air force concept, but don't have access to or can't afford the journal's version. That is to say, they probably wouldn't have read my article in any form, if it hadn't been available for free. I don't know how many people have ever read the official version, but 26 sounds like a reasonably substantial fraction. So self-archiving is helping to get my research out there.

As it happens, my second article, 'The air panic of 1935: British press opinion between disarmament and rearmament', was also published by SAGE (in the Journal of Contemporary History) which means the same policy applies. I didn't put up the submitted version because it was radically different from the accepted version. But when the first anniversary of its publication comes around in April, I'll be self-archiving that one too.

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Gotha raid, 7 July 1917

N. A. J. Taylor recently asked me on Twitter if I thought the above photograph, purportedly of one of the daylight Gotha raids on London in 1917, was genuine.

I said no, due to 'Experience, intuition, lack of provenance, contemporary photographic technology. The photo has been retouched at very least.' But I'm coming around to the idea that it is real. A bit.
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The doom of cities

RAIN OF BOMBS

Milan's wonderful cathedral is here shown under a rain of dummy bombs dropped by 80 aeroplanes during recent manoeuvres of the Italians. To make the display more impressive and to ascertain the results with more certainty, luminous "bombs" were used and fell in a fiery rain upon the city -- a dire portent of future terrors

The images in this post are from Boyd Cable, 'The doom of cities', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 96-8. It was Cable's second article in a series on 'Things of tomorrow'. The text doesn't actually connect with the illustrations very well. Cable's main point is given away in the title, that in the next war cities will be ruthlessly destroyed from the air, since 'the murderous slaughter of non-combatants' is the most effective way to force a nation to surrender. While he notes that some experts are sceptical of this (Captain Turner, late of Woolwich Arsenal, Lord Castlerosse, Frederick Handley Page), he argues that 'they are flatly contradicted both by the known facts of the last war and by the preparations which we know have been made in anticipation of the next great struggle'.

Today, and as far as we can see into the future, War first of all means Air War; and Air War spells, literally and actually, the "doom of cities."

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