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Illustrated London News, 6 September 1913, 363

A recent post at Ptak Science Books alerted me to the existence of page 363 of the Illustrated London News for 6 September 1913. Not that I was surprised by this in general terms, but I was unaware of what was on it: an artist's impression of a both a flying aircraft carrier -- which idea I've discussed before -- and an airship drone -- which I haven't.

As the images above and below show, the idea was that the 'parent dirigible' (which looks very much like a Zeppelin) would carry several of these 40-foot long 'crewless, miniature air-ships' slung underneath it, and then launch them when in range of a target (here a fortification). The smaller airship would then be controlled by radio to fly drop its bombs 'on any desired spot'.
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Keith Kyle. Suez: Britain's End of Empire in the Middle East. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2011 [1993]. Suez was not the first time Britain 'intervened' in the Middle East, nor the last; but it was arguably the most disastrously misconceived intervention. A classic (and weighty) account.

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I don't usually do pathos for the sake of pathos, but while reading Juliet Gardiner's The Blitz: The British Under Attack (London: Harper Press, 2010), 316, I came across an account of loss which I've read before, and which I still find as moving as I did the first time. The speaker is an elderly air raid warden from Hull.

The street was as flat as this 'ere wharfside -- there was just my 'ouse like -- well, part of my 'ouse. My missus was just making me a cup of tea when I come 'ome. She were in the passage between the kitchen and the wash 'ouse where it blowed 'er. She were burnt right up to her waist, 'er legs were just two cinders. And 'er face -- the only thing I could recognise 'er by was one of 'er boots -- I'd have lost fifteen homes if I could 'ave kept my missus. We used to read together. I can't read mesen. She used to read to me like. We'd have our armchairs on either side o' the fire, and she read me bits out o' the paper. We'd a paper every evening. Every evening.

The original source -- via Angus Calder's The People's War: Britain 1939-1945 (London: Pimlico, 1992 [1969]), 226-7 -- is Mass-Observation report 844, Hull, 23 August 1941, 5.

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So let's have a look at the responses to Chamberlain's response to Noel-Baker's parliamentary motion of 21 June 1938.

First up was Sir Archibald Sinclair, leader of the Liberal party. He was mainly concerned with foreign policy more generally, asking whether the recent Anglo-Italian agreement was not intended as part of an effort by Mussolini and Hitler to isolate France:

Aerodromes are being constructed near the frontiers of France, and within easy striking distance of the munition industries of the south-west of France. On the borders of Spain, on the German frontier, the Italian frontier, the Balearic Islands, on the flank of the French communications with North Africa, France is being encircled.

He dismissed Chamberlain's excuse that the government is seeking to come up with practical proposals to limit aerial warfare, since the outlines of the problem has been known for years and yet nothing has been done about it. Furthermore, Sinclair attacked the National Government's scrupulous interpretation of neutrality in the Spanish case:

Neutrality between the parties in a civil war, yes; but neutrality between the bomber and his innocent victims, when the bombers are all on one side and the innocent victims all on the other side, is neutrality between right and wrong.

Doing something -- defending British ships, punishing Franco -- just isn't as hard as Chamberlain makes out.
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Captain Thomas Atkinson of the Willunga Volunteers, c. 1870

A belated Anzac Day post.

Willunga is a small town in South Australia, not far south of Adelaide, not far from the coast. It was settled by Europeans in 1839, only a couple of years after the colony itself was established. It was a farming area, cattle mostly, and slate quarrying soon became an important industry. By 1860, it had its own militia unit: the Willunga Rifle Volunteers (or Volunteer Rifles, or Willunga Company -- the name varies from source to source). Why did a small country town need a defence force?

There are two reasons that occur to me. The first is, obviously, for defence. South Australia is a long way from anywhere, even the rest of Australia, so it's hard to imagine anyone invading it. But turn that around: it's precisely because South Australia was so far away from anywhere that South Australians felt the need to make some provision for their own defence. As a colony, South Australia was ultimately defended by Britain. But neither the British Army nor the Royal Navy had any units stationed there: the closest would have been in Western Australia or New South Wales (or, later, Victoria): a very long way indeed before interstate railways began to link up in the 1880s. (And even then each colony used its own gauge. The states still do.)
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Over the years, I've written a number of posts about various phantom airship scares (which I take here to mean things seen in the sky which weren't actually there). There are many more I might do in future, pending access to good sources (and maybe I'll even get around to writing something for publication!) but it seems worth collecting the links together at this point.

Count Zeppelin clearly has a lot to answer for.

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The Battle of Los Angeles took place on the night of 24 February 1942. It was more of a 'battle' than a battle: only one side did any shooting, and it's not at all clear that there was a second side. The defenders of Los Angeles thought there was: they claimed they were shooting at aircraft of mysterious (but presumed to be Japanese) origin. This is where I come in.

The incident is mainly known now by a photograph showing ... something... trapped in searchlight beams, which appeared in the Los Angeles Times on 26 February 1942. Its authenticity has never been questioned, but it was clearly heavily retouched. Recently, an earlier copy of the photo turned up in the archives of the LA Times. It's definitely been retouched less, if at all. I'm not even going to reproduce the better-known-but-retouched version (which can be seen elsewhere); instead, here's the newly-found-and-less-retouched version:

Battle of Los Angeles

This photo (or rather its retouched version) has been used to argue that there was in fact ... something... over Los Angeles that night (most likely an extraterrestrial spaceship, obviously). Unlike Kentaro Mori, I do think there is... something... there. But it's not a Zeta Reticulan battlecruiser. It's a cloud.
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After Philip Noel-Baker's opening speech on 21 June 1938, the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, replied for the government. He began by touching briefly on the Japanese invasion of China, in a way which interestingly foreshadowed something he said just over three months later:

if it were not that China is so far away and the scenes which are taking place there are so remote from our everyday consciousness, I think the sentiments of pity, [horror] and indignation which would be aroused by a full appreciation of those events might drive this people to courses which perhaps they have never yet contemplated.

In response to Noel-Baker's comments about the status of aerial warfare in international law, Chamberlain agreed that 'new weapons [don't] make new laws', but added that new weapons create new circumstances which the old laws may not cover. That is, the laws of war 'do not entirely meet the case which we have to meet to-day'. Having said that, he believes there are 'three principles of international law which are as applicable to warfare from the air as they are to war at sea or on land':

In the first place, it is against international law to bomb civilians as such and to make deliberate attacks upon civilian populations. That is undoubtedly a violation of international law. In the second place, targets which are aimed at from the air must be legitimate military objectives and must be capable of identification. In the third place, reasonable care must be taken in attacking those military objectives so that by carelessness a civilian population in the neighbourhood is not bombed.

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Der Spiegel has a lengthy article based upon a new book by historians Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer called Soldaten (no English version yet, unfortunately). It's based on the transcripts of secret recordings made of the conversations of German POWs captured by British and American forces in the Second World War. They would have talked about many things, but the article focuses on the war crimes which the soldiers, sailors and airmen discuss quite candidly among themselves, as perhaps they never did again in their lives. It's quite horrifying reading. But as far as the German army is concerned, the details of the war crimes committed in the East and elsewhere, while shocking, aren't all that new. It's more unusual to see evidence of the war crimes carried out by the men of the Luftwaffe. I've extracted those particular transcripts from the article.
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Chaz Bowyer. RAF Operations 1918-1938. London: William Kimber, 1988. There were more than you might think -- enough to fill a 300-page book, anyway -- mostly in the Middle East and on the North-West Front. Very well-illustrated (if you like aeroplanes, that is).

Richard Knott. Flying Boats of the Empire: The Rise and Fall of the Ships of the Sky. London: Robert Hale, 2011. The title suggests a somewhat nostalgic view, but then again the Short Empire is a guilty pleasure of mine.