Last year, Londonist gave us a very nifty map of London's V2 impact sites. Now they've come up with an equivalent for Zeppelin raids. Each of the sunbursts represents a bombfall. Clicking on them brings up a popup with information about the site and casualties (but, annoyingly, not the date). Note, however, that only a 'small selection' of the sites are plotted, however, which makes it hard to draw conclusions from the patterns: I could be wrong but I don't think the cluster in central London is representative. But perhaps more interesting are the tracks of the Zeppelin raiders (to get the key for which raid was when, click on the 'larger map' link). Again, these need to be treated with some caution, as they would only be reconstructions based on logbooks, bombfalls and sightings, but they do suggest that if the raiders could get reasonably close to London they could usually work out where to go. You can see the tracks deviating towards the urban areas, or turning back after the bombing run. London did have a blackout during the First World War (when its fighters couldn't touch the Zeppelins, the government claimed that the best defence against them was 'darkness and composure') but it wasn't as complete as during the Second. And of course the Thames on a clear and moonlit night couldn't be blacked-out at all.

Also, note the link in comments to a sequence of photos showing a Zeppelin being shot down. I hate to say it but I think these are fake ...

Geoffrey Wellum. First Light. London: Penguin, 2009 [2002]. One of the last great airmen's memoirs to come out of the Second World War. I've become more interested in reading some of these since reading The Flyer and Bomber Boys recently: Richard Hillary, Don Charlwood and so on.

This illustration, by A. C. Michael, is from T. Donovan Bayley's 'When the sea failed her' which appeared in Pall Mall Magazine in May 1909. It's subtitled 'The story of a war between England and the allies, and the terrible way it ended'. It's that terrible ending which makes this story stand out for me.

It takes place during an invasion of Britain by European powers. Britain is losing. The fleet has been defeated off the Nore and London is under siege and is being shelled. But it unknowingly has a secret weapon, thanks to the Tesla-like scientist Angus Grant. He works on top of a hill in a laboratory filled with electrical apparatus which occasionally crackles purple lightning into the sky. One of the rooms inside has some unusual equipment:

One side of it was occupied by a large frame, stretched tightly across which was a transparent sheet of tracing cloth, lighted from behind, and marked with dark lines forming tiny squares. Every tenth line was numbered, and a red arrow pointed to the north, Across the chart was a thin blue line, leading east-north-east, and along this a speck of iron was slowly moving, watched by a young man [...] In front of the luminous screen was an arrangement similar to the keyboard of a typewriter, but containing only ten levers. These were attached to electric leads, and each one, when depressed, established contact with one of the ten copper rods immediately underneath, which stood in a row projecting through a vulcanite slab.¹

The screen is a map of Europe, and the 'thin blue line' shows the path of Grant's 'aero-torpedo' which is on its way to Berlin. What's an aero-torpedo, you ask?

"It carries things in the air, and he directs it from his laboratory."

"The keyboard and the lighted screen?" she asked.

"That's it. That and the moving dot."

"But how?"

"No one but the master knows that. He presses levers and they alter the wireless somehow. Then the aero-torpedo shifts accordingly. It's something to do with ether waves, whatever they are, or so I've heard."

"Are there men up in it?"

"No; that's what makes it so wonderful. It gets its power from our dynamos, and that's how it's steered too. That's why it can carry so much green powder."²

I'll come back to this green powder in a moment.

Two hours later Grant locked down five of the ten keys. The moving dot no longer crept forward, but rotated slowly on its axis. He went across to the wall, unlocked a framed switchboard, and pulled the vulcanite handle down. On the roof another "spark" waked to fury. He took his watch out and counted the minutes by it.

"The cylinder seal is fused," he whispered, reversing the switch, and the "spark" on the roof died away. "It's half-past six in Berlin," he thought; "they're celebrating their victory, and the streets are full. I've timed it well."³

He did too. Unter den Linden is full of cheering crowds. At first there is just a sound, lasting over an hour, a 'steady, sibilant humming, persistent and penetrating, and indefinably terrifying'. Then the aero-torpedo itself becomes visible, 'a tiny spot in shape like a dragon-fly, dimly glinting brassily'. It is suddenly blotted out by a mist which slowly grows larger in size: the green powder has been released. The sun is eclipsed and birds fall from the sky.

Few could bear the horror of the phenomenon any longer, and there was a rush of panic-stricken men and women to get beneath a roof, but before the crowds could unlock and disperse death came down.

A clammy green rain, gently persistent, fell, and wherever it settled it corroded.

The stone-work of the city seethed as the mist wet it, and screams of pain broke from the lips of those whom it touched. Their eyeballs were seared and blinded; the skin on their faces shrivelled and cracked and peeled, and their hands were rotted down to the raw sinews.

Every breath was a misery. Within a minute not a soul who remained in the streets was left alive. Their lungs were perforated, and the dying wretches were mercifully choked by their gushing blood. By noon nothing remained in the streets of Berlin but a green sludge, out of which protruded fragments of the larger bones of the dead.⁴

After Berlin, Paris and then 'the large industrial towns of Europe' are destroyed. Only those who flee to the countryside survive.

As each report of fresh ruin was spread abroad, the clamour for an end to the war grew more insistent.⁵

The allies soon sue for peace and so, even though 'the sea failed her', Britain has won after all.

What I love about this story is its extreme nature. The struggle for national existence is all. The prospect of a British defeat at the hands of a foreign invader is blithely seen to justify the extermination of millions of enemy civilians. There is an implicit acknowledgement that this might be immoral in Grant's decision to destroy the aero-torpedo at the end of the story, but as he doesn't even show the slightest remorse it in no way invalidates his prior actions.

This sort of thing is partly why I doubt Sven Lindqvist's argument, in A History of Bombing (2002), that the idea of bombing civilians was racist and genocidal in origin, that is, to ensure white supremacy by destroying the other. As evidence he cites stories like Jack London's 'The unparalleled invasion' (1910), in which the Chinese race is wiped out by biological weapons dropped from the air. But in fact the knock-out blow was rarely employed against non-Europeans in speculative fiction: it was about nationalism, not imperialism. In Bayley's story, the millions of Europeans aren't even depicted in any way inferior to the British, who would turn into green sludge just as surely as the Germans and French if the green powder were to be used against them.

'When the sea failed her' is of course also interesting for its early anticipation of, not just aerial bombardment, but chemical warfare too. Discussions of this are fairly rare before 1914. But perhaps most interesting is the portrayal of an unmanned aerial vehicle. Bayley has put some thought into how you might actually control one using contemporary technology, with his typewriter-like keyboard, luminous cloth screens and cylinder seal fuses. The radiant power source is straight out of Tesla.

As for who T. Donovan Bayley was, I sadly have no idea. He did write a few other science fiction stories for British periodicals around this time, at least one of which also deals with a superweapon ('The frozen death'), but otherwise seems to be unknown to history. I suspect an alias.

1. T. Donovan Bayley, 'When the sea failed her', Pall Mall Magazine 9 (May 1909), 541.
2. Ibid., 544.
3. Ibid., 546.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., 547.

I've put the series of posts I did a couple of years ago on the Sudeten crisis into one big PDF file called, rather grandiosely, Post-blogging the Sudeten Crisis: The British Press, August-October 1938 (147 pages, 5.6 Mb). It's freely available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. It's very bloggy in style, but I've also added a basic index and put in internal links between the chapters (posts). My Sudeten posts are probably the best thing I've done with this blog, and they've been linked to from a few educational sites as well as Wikipedia. So by putting them into this format I hope they'll be made accessible to a wider audience. (I've been inspired in this by the work Evangeline Holland has been doing over at Edwardian Promenade.)

The conversion was done using a nifty tool called WPTEX. This is some PHP which hooks into WordPress's functions and reads out and formats your posts into LaTeX format. It didn't quite do what I wanted but with some PHP and LaTeX hackery I think it turned out pretty nice in the end.

Albeit for very large values of 'nobody'. In 2006 I wrote the following, with regards to John Ramsden's Don't Mention the War: The British and the Germans since 1890:

[...] what's with having the endnotes not in the book itself but on a website? Do they think websites are permanent? Will the 10 pages omitted from the book really improve its profitability by that much? It’s better than none at all, I suppose, but it does potentially diminish the book's useability for research purposes, now and in the future. For shame, Little, Brown, for shame.

And of course, four years later the website no longer exists; the domain name is not even registered any more. It doesn't help that Ramsden died last year, so there's probably nobody looking after his electronic-academic legacy.

Luckily this is a trend which hasn't taken off -- at least not that I've noticed in recent book purchases. But Guy Walters at the Daily Telegraph disagrees (citing Ramsden's website too, which floored me since his post seems to have gone up this very day!) He thinks that the practice of moving footnotes, endnotes and bibliographies from books to the web is becoming more common. I do hope he's wrong.

Thanks to Frank Herrera for pointing me to British Fact and German Fiction. It's a British propaganda film just under fifteen minutes long, made in 1917 by the Thanhouser Company for the Department of Information. Since it has Portuguese Spanish intertitles (luckily with more recent English subtitles), it was obviously shown overseas, though from the comments in Nicholas Reeves' Official British Film Propaganda During the First World War (1986) it does seem it was intended for domestic consumption. I can't embed the film here but you can watch it at the appropriately named Europa Film Treasures website.

The 'German fiction' referred to was a letter supposedly published in a German newspaper claiming to be an eyewitness account of serious damage caused to various London icons -- the Tower of London, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Bridge, Hyde Park, Piccadilly Circus, Charing Cross Station, the Bank of England, Trafalgar Square, St Paul's Cathedral, Liverpool Street Station, Buckingham Palace -- by German air raids in July, August and September. I say supposedly because as the Imperial War Museum notes (IWM 443), the newspaper is hard to identify based on the English title given, the Westphalia Daily News. But if the German press did claim this, it was an own goal because this film shows that the locations were still all intact, at least as of 25 and 26 September when the film was supposedly shot. Again, I say supposedly, because this is established by a policeman holding a placard showing the date in many of the scenes, but we have to take this on trust.¹ In this case, however, there's no reason I can see for the DOI to fake the date, as it was quite true that the damage done was vastly exaggerated by the letter-writer, and in fact simply made up. There is also footage of some of the places German bombs did hit: working class homes, small businesses, the road in front of a hotel. The text sarcastically says these are the Germans' idea of 'munition factories', though the British (like everyone else who ever dropped bombs in anger) were just as prone to claiming they only bombed military targets.

The resulting film is a fascinating document of London at war. Although it must be said that for the most part it doesn't look much different to London at peace: the streets are full of traffic, people are out doing their shopping, commuters are running to catch their buses (as in the above -- that's Piccadilly Circus, with the base of Eros on the left). There are perhaps a few more men in uniform than usual, including a crowd of Australian soldiers sightseeing in St Paul's.

This is a New Zealand medic who gave first aid to civilians wounded by a bomb dropped outside the Bedford Hotel on Southampton Row (off Russell Square) on the night of 25 September, despite his own head wound. His name isn't given; I like the way he is standing in the shadows, as though uncomfortable with the attention. Thirteen people were killed in this incident (eleven according to the film) after ignoring official instructions to take cover, as the text archly notes.

A 14 year old boy was killed inside this dairy in King's Cross Road when it was hit on the night of 24 September. This period marked the start of the 'harvest moon' raids, when the Gothas and (for the first time) Giants attacked London nearly every night for a week, until 1 October. This led to some interesting reactions, which unfortunately British Fact and German Fiction doesn't show: shops starting closing early to let employees get home before dark, people gathered in parks to watch the show, and others bedded down in the Tube stations. In psychological terms, the harvest moon raids were perhaps more significant than the daylight Gotha raids of June and July, even though they killed fewer people.

While it does implicitly point out the immorality of the German raids, the film ends with some statistics emphasising how tiny the human cost was in statistical terms: for the first nine months of 1917, there were only 940 casualties (191 dead, 749 wounded) in London due to air raids, which amounted to 27 dead per million given the city's population of 7 million. For the same period the number of dead and wounded due to road accidents (probably for Britain as a whole) was 14591. So nothing to worry about, then. If only the British had believed their own propaganda ... I would have had to find a different topic!

Bonus airminded footage: Wilbur Wright and his Flying Machine, a French film shot in Italy on 24 April 1909. With Wilbur Wright flying his Flyer. And. Flying. With. The. Camera. On. Board! Astounding. I think it must be worth following the Europa Film Treasures blog for their latest gems.

1. There's also a shot of the front page of the Evening Standard, though the date is not visible. The headline -- 'Zeps and Gothas raid together' -- does pretty much tie it down to 26 September.

The article's author, B., sketches the part played by Barchester in the last war and the present one:

In the past Barchester has always fought its wars by proxy. The dignitaries of its historic past, the Proudies, the Arabins, and the Grantleys, followed the fortunes of the Army in the newspapers with a highly vociferous but none the less detached regard. Their successors of 1914 have not yet found a chronicler, but they too, though they wrought manfully in the work of caring for the thousands of troops round about and though most of them suffered the loss of a son, regarded wars as highly distressing events which happened somewhere else. The serene security of Barchester itself remained unquestioned and undisturbed even through that ordeal.

To-day it is undisturbed no longer, and if Bishop Proudie and his redoubtable wife and chaplain were living now they would hardly believe themselves to be in the same world. The Bishop would be required to take himself to shelter on an average twice a day. His wife would make his life even more of a burden, for her temper, never very equable, would not survive the strain of continually interrupted meals. Mr. Slope, like his successor of to-day, would be drafted firmly into the A.F.S., be forced to put on a scratchy uniform at a most undignified speed, and then to work under the firm and fluent direction of one of the cathedral vergers. ¹

It's very dryly done, and I doubt I would have picked it up except that I've read Framley Parsonage. I'm sure that many more people were familiar with Trollope then than now, but even so some Guardian readers were probably left wondering why they should care about this town they'd never heard of where, which seemed no different than any other, and where nothing much was happening. Perhaps that was the point, that as a nowhere it stood for everywhere:

That is the limit of our excitement so far. [Barchester] is an oasis in a desert of alarm signals which have become so frequent and so uneventful that most of us now carry a book about us to read during the next raid.²

I can't help but wonder what happened to other non-existent British places during the war. Was 221B Baker Street blitzed? Did Totleigh Towers get taken over as a rehabilitation hospital for wounded airmen? Was Avalon tilled by the Women's Land Army? Much research remains to be done.

1. Manchester Guardian, 28 August 1940, 3.
2. Ibid.

This is a good opportunity to thank all of the commenters here, especially the regulars. I've been very fortunate in that regard: the comment threads are usually more interesting than the posts themselves. I also appreciate those regular readers who don't leave comments but show up in the web stats. I hope Airminded continues to attract such discerning visitors in the future!