…y twentieth century, the new technology of flight changed warfare irrevocably, not only on the battlefield, but also on the home front. As prophesied before 1914, Britain in the First World War was effectively no longer an island, with its cities attacked by Zeppelin airships and Gotha bombers in one of the first strategic bombing campaigns. Drawing on prewar ideas about the fragility of modern industrial civilization, some writers now began to ar…
…se reconnaissance of the northern coast. Japan was invoked, either explicitly or implicitly, in the Darwin and Hobart sightings in 1938, and the Townsville incidents in 1942. This brings me back to my original purpose in starting this series, which was to see if Australian mystery aircraft sightings can be used as an index of public anxiety about national defence. And my answer is ‘yes’, but it’s a heavily qualified ‘yes’. It’s quite obviously so…
…the dynamics of any situation, not very likely, while on the other hand early flying machines in war were famous for their potential to startle the horses – presumably riot control police and militia horses have the same feelings about flying machines as cavalry ones. Or perhaps more accurately, their rider’s views would be the same. I think we have a very unrealistic aerial component to a militia sandbox wargame dream… *The only other working a…
…blicised shortly before the panic) might have suggested that the British were prepared to go further and attack Norway to achieve their own ends. I don’t know much about airmindedness in Norway before the war (apart from the ghost flyers) either but in recent months civilians in two small, nearby nations had already suffered aerial bombardment, namely Poland and Finland (and let’s not forget China and Spain in 1938) so to that extent the panic was…
…p because it was entirely false. This was in Scotland on the banks of the Clyde. Lord Blythswood, an amateur scientist with a laboratory at his estate at Erskine Ferry near Glasgow, was at this time experimenting with large box kites made of bamboo. He happened to choose the day the Patrie was adrift over the British Isles for a flight to investigate local air currents, lofting it to a height of 2000 feet where it hovered over Clydebank on the nor…
…tributed at all shows just how little experience most Australians, especially but not only the civilians, had had with aeroplanes by 1918. Clearly it could be assumed that they would have encountered motor cars and motor bikes, as these were used as points of reference, but not that they would be correctly able to interpret an unidentified flying object. The forced landing of a military aeroplane near Wonthaggi on 11 May showed the novelty of flig…
George Shaner Glad to see another person who finds Gaddis a bit grating; it’s the post Cold War triumphalism. I’m still going to read his bio of Kennan at some point though. Brett Holman You’re not the first person who has said that to me! (Well, okay, you’re only the second though.) Yes, it’s the triumphalism. Apart from not lending itself to objectivity it seems rather misplaced given trends in international relations this last decade or so. I…
