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."

IF GAS BOMBS COME

Registered air raid shelters are one of the precautions provided in Berlin against the dangers of air raids. During practice raids on Berlin these shelters are brought into use, and here mothers and children are seen gathered in a bomb and gas proof dug-out while while the officer in charge reads aloud the official instructions to civilians in time of air raids

REALISM IN BERLIN

Rehearsals of air raid precautions in Berlin have been carried out with characteristic German thoroughness and realism. This photograph shows a motor-car which has actually been set on fire to show what disasters might occur in an actual raid

STAGING DESTRUCTION

Another example of such thoroughness is seen in this photograph showing debris piled high in a street in the Kreuzberg section of Berlin as a grim warning of what might happen if a house were struck by a bomb. But Berlin has never been bombed and no thoroughness in mock destruction can reproduce the panic of the people in a real air raid

On the illustrations, the implication is that since Britain's potential enemies are taking civil defence seriously, Britain should too. In fact, British civil defence had only just begun a few months before this article would have been published (in July 1935, when the first ARP Circular was issued to local governments by the Home Office), so it was in its very early stages. Italy and Germany had been holding quite public civil defence exercises for some years, so it's not surprising that they would be held up as exemplars. But it is surprising (or at least it was to me) to then discover that during the Second World War Italy's ARP, in particular, was actually quite primitive compared with Britain's. (See Claudia Baldoli, Andrew Knapp and Richard Overy, eds, Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe 1940-1945 (London: Continuum, 2011.) The British certainly made up for lost time.

Ronnie Scott, ed. The Real 'Dad's Army': The War Diaries of Col. Rodney Foster. London: Virago, 2011. Foster was a retired Indian Army officer who commanded a Home Guard company in Kent in the Second World War. Looks interesting: takes a lively interest in the progress of the war, but is also engaged with his local community; has a liking for double exclamation marks. What clinched it for me was the first sentence of the entry for 16 July 1944: 'Robots came over at regular intervals all morning from 10 a.m.'

In the middle of the First World War, the Australian government found itself preoccupied with the possibility of civil unrest, perhaps even rebellion. In December 1916 the Hughes government passed the Unlawful Associations Act, which proscribed the Australian branch of the Industrial Workers of the World. The Wobblies had campaigned strongly against conscription in the October referendum, and proscription was Hughes's revenge for the No vote. But more than that, he believed that every IWW member was armed, and that many were of German extraction and thus potentially treasonous. Determined to be prepared for any eventuality, by the start of February 1917, the government had assembled 900 armed men, chosen for their political reliability, in each state's capital city, backed up with a machine gun. Melbourne, as the national capital, was the best defended. It had an AIF infantry battalion, a reserve company, the District Guard, two 18-pounder guns, two machine-gun sections, and 50 light-horsemen.

It also had two aeroplanes at its disposal, for 'their great moral effect':

(a) To overawe rioters by their presence in the air.
(b) To cooperate with the Artillery.
(c) To assist in dispersing the rioters by the use of machine guns and revolvers and by dropping bombs or hand grenades.¹

What was that last part again?

To assist in dispersing the rioters by the use of machine guns and revolvers and by dropping bombs or hand grenades.

I find this quite extraordinary, that an Australian government was preparing to strafe and bomb its own citizens for the crime of rioting. That's the sort of thing that dictators do.² But should I be surprised? Let's look at some similar cases from around the same time.

Australia was certainly not the only democracy to make plans to use military force to suppress civil dissent during the war, though it may have done so earlier than others. From March 1918, France held four cavalry divisions behind the front for use against strikers and pacifists (and apparently did use them). Brock Millman has shown that after the Russian revolution in 1917, Britain too was worried about internal dissent possibly spilling over into outright revolt. Emergency Scheme L was drawn up in May 1918; Millman describes it as a 'doomsday scenario':

Scheme L, basically, was a plan for the formation of composite infantry and artillery brigades, and other units, from forces held in the UK but not dedicated to home defence. This would be followed by a levée en masse by battalions of volunteers, and the effective cessation of civilian authority in the British Isles.³

A total of 19 infantry brigades would be formed in this way, along with supporting artillery and cyclist units. One group would cover Red Clydeside; another Tyneside, also the scene of labour unrest; and a third would assemble in East Anglia, near London. It's clear that this plan was not for defence against a German invasion (as were most other home defence plans), because the deployment to these areas was automatic and not contingent on where the enemy landed. But as an uprising could quickly spread from one flashpoint to the rest of the country, it makes sense that the Army would keep its options as open as possible while keep watch on the main danger areas. And with as large a force as possible, the better to overawe rioting workers.⁴

Now, Millman focuses on the military aspects of Scheme L. But he also says that the RAF's VI Brigade would assist. This makes sense. VI Brigade formed the backbone of Britain's air defences, and so was the largest combat-ready air force in the country (even if ground support wasn't its forte). Unfortunately Millman doesn't give any details of how it was intended to be used against civil unrest (it might not even have been specified in the plans) but it probably would have been similar to the Australian plans the year before. We'll probably never know because there was no uprising in Britain in 1918 and Scheme L was never invoked.

Then again. Less than two years later Britain was facing a truly revolutionary situation, albeit across the water in Ireland. As of the summer of 1920 two RAF squadrons were deployed there; overcoming low serviceability rates they did useful work in reconnaissance, communications and logistics. Despite the repeated please of British commanders, for most of the war their aircraft were unarmed, apparently for fear of hitting noncombatants. But in March 1921, near the end of the fighting, the Cabinet did in fact authorise arming them for use only over rural areas and only when rebels were actually attacking British forces (or just about to or had just finished, which seems to admit of some uncertainty). According to David Omissi, the RAF flew only a small fraction of total flying hours armed, and 'probably' didn't cause any casualties.⁵

So that's a lot more discretion than it sounds like the Australians were planning to use. Let's turn to a case where there were no rules of engagement at all: the Tulsa race riot of 1921. This was a very different context to the ones discussed above: the riots were more in the vein of a massive lynch mob than a military operation. And the aircraft were not used to put down the riots, but (so it is claimed) to support them. On the morning of 1 June, following an attempted lynching the day before, white mobs surrounded, attacked and set fire to the black district of Greenwood. Thirty-nine people were killed, twenty-six of them black. African-American eyewitnesses claimed that aeroplanes took part, by dropping incendiary bombs or liquids, perhaps petrol (alright, 'gasoline' then). There were also reports of rifle-fire from the aircraft against people on the ground.⁶ Here, unlike in Australia, Britain and Ireland, the aircraft in question were civilian, not military; at most they may have private aeroplanes used by the Tulsa police department. It's anyway unclear whether the air attacks did take place; unsurprisingly there was no official investigation. An analysis by Richard S. Warner concludes that:

It is within reason that there was some shooting from planes and even the dropping of incendiaries, but the evidence would seem to indicate that it was of a minor nature and had no real effect in the riot.

Technically, the attacks were in support of civil unrest -- that is, caused by white Tulsans -- not suppressing it, though it's possible that the perpetrators thought they were acting to prevent an uprising.

Then, of course, there's the practice of air control in British, French and Spanish colonies and mandates. Britain, for example, had been doing this in a big way since 1919, in Egypt, Somaliland, and the North-West Frontier, though it had first experimented with it in the Sudan in 1916. From 1922 it was used to pacify an Iraq-wide rebellion which had been boiling over since 1920. Spain and France bombed insurgents in the Rif War (and may have even used gas, though Britain did not [Update: Spain did use gas in Morocco: see Sebastian Balfour's Deadly Embrace: Morocco and the Road to the Spanish Civil War]); France bombed Damascus in 1926. It's hard to get a clear idea of the civilian casualties caused by these attacks -- the RAF in effect maintained that its operations were a kind of game which frightened but did not harm -- but Priya Satia argues that for the threat to work it had to be carried out from time to time.⁷ Air control is where the definition of civil unrest stretches almost to breaking point, but in a revealing way: the Europeans were not bombing their own people or even other Europeans, but Arabs and Kurds and Somalis. They were held to be almost incomprehensibly different to Europeans. As the British high commissioner in Iraq warned in 1931,

the term 'civilian population' has a very different meaning in Iraq from what it has in Europe [...] the whole of its male population are potential fighters as the tribes are heavily armed.⁸

That is, they were othered. And so the aeroplane could be turned against them with few moral qualms.

To draw these strands together, it suggests that a government could not in fact turn its aircraft against its own people -- it had to exclude them from the national community first. The Australian government in 1916-7 viewed the Wobblies as traitors, and this presumably would have been the case for the British government dealing with insurrection in 1918; white Tulsan rioters in 1921 certainly did not see their black fellow-citizens as part of their community; colonial regimes in the 1920s and 1930s by definition saw themselves as utterly separate from those they ruled. Ireland in 1921 represents an interesting edge case: the restraint exercised by the British suggests that they themselves believed that their rule was illegitimate, that it was not 'their' country any longer.

The counter-revolutionary value of airpower was predicted in 1909 by L. Cecil Jane, the medievalist brother of Fred T. Jane. In an article entitled 'The political aspect of aviation', Jane argued that aircraft would be invaluable in suppressing revolutions, because by flying high above the rioting crowds their crews would have no opportunity for fraternisation. Anyway, they would tend to be owned by the better sort of people, not the sort to sympathise with rebellions.

But if it be true that aviation has thus given a new strength to the existing order, so far as resistance to forcible changes is concerned; if it be true that masses of people will no longer possess an inevitable supremacy, then we have indeed reached an epoch in the history of political development. The establishment in almost every country of representative institutions, of popular government in some shape or form, may fairly be attributed to the invincibility of the 'the Many.' [...] Popular government, like all other forms of government, rests ultimately upon the unanswerable argument of superior force. If that argument no long support [sic] it, it may be asked whether the institution will itself endure. Visions of a despotism may appear to be no longer mere wild imaginings, of a depotism [sic] of aviators, who will have the one final argument on their side.⁹

He was right about the counter-revolutionary uses of aviation; but fortunately (for believers in democracy, at least) wrong about its 'unanswerable argument'.

And fortunately for Australia, there were no worker riots in 1917, and so our government didn't have to carry out its plans to bomb us.

1. Quoted in Neville Meaney, A History of Australian Defence and Foreign Policy, 1901-23, Volume 2: Australia and World Crisis, 1914-1923 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009), 199. [Update: Meaney likes to combine references for several paragraphs in the one footnote so it's not always clear to me which citation goes with which quote, but I think these are from: letter, Acting Commandant, 3rd Military District, Melbourne to Secretary for Defence, 2 February 1917, NAA B197 1887/1/52.] Two aeroplanes doesn't sound like very much, but it was probably all they had.
2. Though, to be fair to the late Colonel Gaddafi, reports that in February 2011 he ordered his air force to bomb protestors in Tripoli don't seem to ever have been confirmed.
3. Brock Millman, 'British home defence planning and civil dissent, 1917-1918', War in History 5 (1998), 204-32, at 216-7.
4. Perhaps Scheme L was the spiritual ancestor of the suggestion, made in 1931 by the CID's Evacuation Sub-committee, that London needed to be cordoned off by police after a knock-out blow from the air, to prevent mass panic and exodus: Barry D. Powers, Strategy Without Slide-Rule (London: Croom Helm, 1976), 124.
5. David E. Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force 1919-1939 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1990), 43.
6. Jill D. Snider, '"Great shadow in the sky": the airplane in the Tulsa race riot of 1921 and the development of African American visions of aviation, 1921-1926', in Dominick A. Pisano, ed., The Airplane in American Culture (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 105-46, at 108-9. Snider shows how the Tulsa incident led some African American leaders, particularly Marcus Garvey, to start thinking about the need to acquire aircraft for the projected liberation and defence of Africa: ibid, 119-21. She doesn't mention the Nation of Islam's Mother Plane, but I wonder if this also was partly a legacy of Tulsa. The Mother Plane is supposedly a giant spacecraft built in Japan in 1929, which will come and destroy the United States and the white race. It is said that the Nation of Islam's founder, Fard Muhammad, passed this doctrine on to Elijah Muhammad in the early 1930s, though I can't find a definitive citation for it before the 1950s. However, before 1941 Elijah Muhammad was predicting that 'the time will soon come when from the clouds hundreds of Japanese planes with the most poisonous gas will let their bombs fall on the United States and nothing will be left of it': quoted in Gerald Horne, Race War! White Supremacy and the Japanese Attack on the British Empire (New York and London: New York University Press, 2004), 48. Perhaps there is a link through Tulsa to Japan to the Mother Plane.
7. Priya Satia, 'The defense of inhumanity: air control and the British idea of Arabia', American Historical Review 111 (2006), 16-51, at 34-5.
8. Quoted in ibid., 38.
9. L. Cecil Jane, 'The political aspect of aviation', in Fred T. Jane, ed., All the World's Air-ships (Flying Annual) (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1909), 326-30, at 330.

This is an image we might particularly associate with the United States in the 1950s, when schoolchildren were taught to duck and cover in the event of the flash of an atomic blast. But its use in civil defence drills predates the Cold War (albeit without a Bert the Turtle to help kids remember the message). I've seen scattered references to it being used in ARP drills in British schools in the the 1930s, and the same thing may well have happened in the First World War. But details, and photos, seem to be rare. The above photo was actually taken in Melbourne, at Brighton Technical School, probably in 1942. (Here's another Australian one from the 1940s, and here's one from London in July 1940.) It's really just common sense: if the roof and walls are about to come crashing down and there's no time to get to a proper shelter, getting the students under their desks when the bombs started to fall would give them some protection and might save their lives.

I wonder about the handkerchiefs or rags the boys have in their mouths? My guess is that it's intended to guard against being choked with dust and plaster. Also, soaked in water, they might help against some forms of gas attack, such as chlorine. Soaking them in urine would be more effective, but that would probably be beyond the scope of most school gas drills!

Source: State Library of Victoria (via Geoff Robinson).

The images in this post are from Boyd Cable, 'Death from the skies', in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 20-4 (see below).

The article itself is a short story describing an air raid in the next war. I won't summarise it in detail, but it argues for the futility of both air defence and civil defence. The RAF's interceptors never even encounter the enemy bombers (in part because they are stealthy thanks to their silenced engines, only 20% as loud as normal aircraft engines). Though the populace has been drilled well and resists panic, at least at first, they are too vulnerable. A first wave of bombers uses high explosives to block the streets with rubble, making it impossible for fire engines to pass; the second drops incendiaries which set the city ablaze and, crucially, force civilians out of their shelters; and the final wave drops poison gas, which starts killing the now-exposed people on the streets. Now the panic starts and the mob flees, their suffering increased by strafing raiders. The RAF now has its chance, but the city is doomed...

"Proof enough of what we've said so long," growled the one [Air Staff officer]. "Defence as such is a wash-out. Attack is the only useful form of defence."

"If we can hit them harder and faster and oftener than they can hit us, we win," said the other. "We can do it, too, if we have more bombers -- men and machines -- than they have."

"Yes -- if," said the other wearily. "That's what we were arguing as far back as the first R.A.F. expansion scheme in -- what as it -- 1935 and '6, wasn't it?"

THINGS TO COME?

H.G. Wells, in his pre-war fantasy, "The War in the Air," proved himself an astonishing prophet, a fact that makes these "stills" from his film "Things to Come," depicting an air raid in the next war, as disturbing to consider as they are terrible to look upon.

REHEARSAL FOR DEATH

Anti-air raid drills on a mass scale have become a feature of German life. This photograph shows an elaborately staged rehearsal of a gas-bomb attack as it might affect civilians, held in the Technical High School at Charlottenburg, near Berlin.

APPREHENSION...

In "Everytown," a city of the very near future, a crowd watch and strain their ears for the first signs of approaching enemy aircraft; an A.A. gun is ready for action. The photograph is a "still" from H.G. Wells's film, "Things to Come," and though, were war to come, the street would be deserted and lights out, it suggests the atmosphere of apprehension.

... AND THEN INFERNO

In vivid and horrible contrast to the scene in the previous page are these two further impressions of a city's doom, the first representing the street a few moments only after the raid commenced, the second the same street the following day. Though again the limitations of the film studio have perhaps happily prevented the full frightfulness from being shown, there is enough of horror to suggest the fate that may overtake troops and civilians alike in the next war.

Actually, the corresponding scene in Things to Come wasn't set the next day; or at least there's no indication it's not part of the air raid sequence itself.

NIGHTMARE OF THE FUTURE

This reproduction of a German artist's idea of a scene in London during an air raid in the next war forms in all probability an all too lamentably accurate forecast. It has been suggested in responsible quarters that 100 aeroplanes could stifle a great city with a gas cloud that would rise many yards from the earth, an idea even more terrifying than the though of high-explosive bombs.

War in the Air was a partwork issued weekly, costing 7d. The first issue, in which this article would have appeared, came out on 7 November 1935, a few days before Armistice Day; once complete, all the issues were collected together in a bound volume (which is what I have) around the middle of 1936.

Boyd Cable was the pseudonym of Ernest Andrew Ewart, a Boer War veteran and newspaper correspondent during the First World War. I'm not aware of any specific expertise he might have had in aviation outside of his war experience, though he did write several books with suggestive titles: Air Men o'War (really?), The Flying Courier, Air Activity, The Soul of the Aeroplane: the Rolls-Royce Engine (okay, that one's particularly suggestive). He wrote a number of other 'Things of Tomorrow' stories in like vein for War in the Air, which I'll discuss in future posts.

The editor, Sir John Hammerton, was the doyen of partworks; Harmsworth's Universal Encyclopedia sold 12 million copies, and I suspect the wartime The Great War:The Standard History of the All-Europe Conflict and the 1933 A Popular History of the Great War (among other works) were highly influential in shaping the memory of the First World War. (Dan Todman in The Great War: Myth and Memory suggests that these and similar partworks have been neglected by historians, just what I was thinking!) War in the Air also devoted a lot of space to that war, but it was also explicitly framed as a warning about the next war, as the advertisement above, from Daily Express, 7 November 1935, 4, shows:

A Book of Vital Importance to every man, woman and child in the British Empire, called into being by the most urgent problem of our time

WAR IN THE AIR, while brilliantly recording the stirring story of the Past, is mainly concerned with the Future and this, the first publication to deal with the subject in its entirety, gives a vivid picture of the dread menace of aerial warfare [...]

THIS is no mere book of thrills and startling pictures, it is a living, vital thing that ought to enter into your life and help you the better to bear your part in the most urgent need of our time -- the need to make Britain as powerful in the Air as in times gone by she was dominant at sea.

Amidst the scaremongering there's a very hard sell going on here, and not a little hyperbole too ('the most important and significant publication issued in this country for a generation'!) But mixing profit and patriotism never did any harm.

I received this request for assistance from Jean Dewaerheid, a Belgian writer who is working with Peter Haas and Pierre-Antoine Courouble to track down wooden bomb eyewitnesses:

Three authors (from Belgium, Germany and France) have been working for years on a bizarre subject: the dropping of dummy wooden bombs on wooden airplanes.

In order to deceive the Allies during the Second World War, the Germans built fake airfields on the continent, often with runways and sometimes with buildings, but always with fake wooden planes, called "Attrappen". Strange stories can be heard in which allied airplanes made fun of them by dropping wooden bombs on which they had sometimes painted remarks like "Wood for Wood".

The French writer, Pierre-Antoine Courouble devoted himself to a structural inquiry to unearth the facts behind this vague legend. His investigations resulted in 137 testimonies from resistants, former employees on German basis, and pilots of the Luftwaffe. His research has been condensed in the book The Riddle of the Wooden Bombs, published at the "Presses du midi" and translated in four languages. He found original sources on this matter in the form of testimonies of servicemen, pilots and veterans' children. He met a dozen witnesses who had personally seen the famous bombs, two of whom were eye witnesses to their droppings. Today, these wooden bombs can be found on the internet. We bought them.

Peter Haas, the German translator of the book, found a pilot from the Luftwaffe named Wern Thiel, who happened to be stationed in 1943, on the fake airfield nearby Potsdam in Germany. He is the living witness of the dropping of a dozen of wooden bombs, with the mention Wood for Wood! At the end of the filmed interview (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_tGOxoIhIE) he addresses the allied pilot who had that typically peculiar sense of humour.

Today we are confronted with a difficulty named TIME! The men who survived (they must be aged between 75 and 95) are very hard to find via internet (we tried!). As the official (mostly British) authorities still deny the existence of the droppings (war is not a game, it's an urban legend, etc.) we eventually decided to explore another possibility.

As we notice that most of the testimonies are American, a basic idea started growing. Couldn’t this typically peculiar sense of British humour not simply be an example of AMERICAN sense of humour? This would explain lots of things and is the reason why we try to contact pilots or members of the American Forces stationed in Europe during WW2 who could have been involved in the dropping of these wooden bombs.

In the meantime we are working on the French-American project to produce a documentary film about the subject. Olivier Hermitant, from « Route07 production », (http://vimeo.com/11526361) is offering his services in order to find the rare bird, a veteran of WW2 who was witness or perhaps actor of the dropping of these wooden bombs on German targets.

Could you help us in our quest finding the rare (American) bird? We would be extremely grateful if you could inform your members about this riddle of the Second World War.

I hope Dewaerheid, Haas and Courourble do succeed in finding new eyewitnesses. I did argue in my review of Courouble's book that the focus should move to searching for documentary evidence in operational records and other archives, but I suppose they aren't going anywhere whereas the veterans are. (But I'd note that it's not the job of 'the official (mostly British) authorities' to confirm or deny the wooden bomb stories, somebody has to go into the archives themselves and do the actual research.)

I'm dubious, though, about this new theory that American airmen were the ones who dropped the wooden bombs. In part this seems to be thanks to the new witness mentioned above, Wern Thiel, a Luftwaffe pilot stationed on a decoy airfield near Potsdam during the war. He does specifically say he'd like to meet the American pilot who dropped wooden bombs on his dummy aeroplanes. But in the brief excerpt shown, he says that when the air raid in question took place (in October 1942 according to the video caption, though it's 1943 above and I can't actually hear him saying the year) that they 'activated the light beacons' which implies it was a night raid. Aside from the question of identifying the nationality of aircraft at night, the Americans of course very rarely carried out night bombing.

It would also need to be explained why the majority of the stories claim it was the British -- even when told by Americans? It could perhaps be claimed that this is a later accretion to the story, but then that puts us back into urban legend territory. Perhaps that's not a problem, as the wooden bomb story clearly is an urban legend as well as (probably) a true story; maybe cross-fertilisation took place.

And then there's the fact that the wooden bomb stories predate American involvement in the war. William Shirer recorded one version in his diary in November 1940; and there are other examples too. Obviously these can't be attributed to Americans.

It does seem odd that it's so hard to find accounts from Allied airmen who dropped wooden bombs, as opposed to accounts of Allied airmen who dropped wooden bombs. This, along with the wide variation in details from story to story, suggests to me that most of the wooden bombs were urban legends, rumours or just jokes. But given the evidence Courouble and his colleagues have come up with, I think wooden bombs were really dropped, sometimes, rarely. Whether reality inspired rumours or rumours inspired reality may not be possible to determine now.

I really thought I'd finished with this topic, but the primary sources demand one last post. In discussing the July 1938 Hobart mystery aeroplane, I suggested that it may have been a propaganda stunt by some person or persons worried about Tasmania's lack of air defences. And it turns out that there were precedents for this type of thing.

One was over London a year earlier, in July 1937. It was widely reported in the Australian press, but I haven't been able to find it in a British newspaper. Most of the Australian reports quote the Sunday Referee, presumably from the 18 July edition; and I suspect the Daily Telegraph also carried the story on 16 July. Flight also referred to a 'mystery flyer', though only in passing.¹

The claim was that a 'mystery aeroplane' had 'recently frightened Londoners by mid-night low-flying stunts' on more than one occasion prior to 16 July. It returned on that date shortly after midnight, flying at a height of about 500 feet:

Hundreds saw it at 12.15 passing over Trafalgar Square. The fuselage of [sic, other reports say 'and'] the wings was plainly visible in the glare of street lights. It was still circling over the West End at 12.30, but soon afterwards disappeared northwards.²

It appeared again the next night.³ The Sunday Referee reported that the pilot had anonymously telephoned 'defence officials' (possibly at the Air Ministry, which the mystery aeroplane had flown over and which was said to be trying to find out its identity) to say that

"To-night, in order to demonstrate the inadequacy of Britain's defences, I am going to drop flour bombs on the House of Commons and St. Paul's Cathedral.⁴

I've found no record of this actually happening, so maybe the call was a hoax. But some reports claimed that questions were to be asked about the mystery aeroplane in Parliament, and this did happen. In fact, the matter had already been discussed twice in the House of Commons, back in June. Then the Under-Secretary of State for Air, Anthony Muirhead, had to admit that the RAF was unable to identify the aircraft involved. But while some of the questions he received might indicate concern about air defence (I'm assuming the one about whether General Franco was involved was frivolous!) mostly MPs seemed worried about the noise. On 21 July he spoke on the topic again; this time he said that one RAF machine had been over London on the night of 13 July, and that the one on the night of 15 July (presumably the one reported as occurring just after midnight on 16 July) was 'believed to have been a civil machine which had been participating in defence exercises in the East Kent area'.⁵ So it's not clear if the mystery aeroplane was really involved in propaganda -- but that's certainly how it would have looked to newspaper readers in Australia.

Which makes me wonder if it was an inspiration for the second propaganda flyer, a de Havilland Fox Moth piloted by V. James over Perth in February and March 1938.⁶ This one wasn't a mystery aeroplane at all: the people behind it were quite candid about their involvement and their purpose:

The second of the series of altitude flights over Perth designed to draw attention to the possibilities of air attack was made on Monday, when the plane chartered by Mr. Norbert Keenan, M.L.A., Professor W. Murdoch and Mr. C. L. K. Foot flew over the city at a height of 13,000 feet. Numerous reports were subsequently received by Mr. Foot from people who had observed the plane from the ground. A third flight is to be made during the next week when, on a day unspecified, the plane will fly over the city and suburbs at a heigh of 15,000 feet.⁷

This is a pretty high-profile group. Keenan was a senior state politician who had been WA's attorney-general before the war, and more recently opposition leader since 1933. Murdoch was a leading public intellectual, writer and broadcaster; Murdoch University is named after him.⁸ I'm not quite sure who C. L. A. Foot was, but he was evidently a huge aviation buff: he tried to organise trans-Indian flights or routes in 1929, 1936 and 1952, an aerial expedition to the north of WA in 1929, and a circumnavigation of the southern hemisphere via Antarctica in 1949. He also wrote a book entitled Japan in the Rome-Berlin-Tokio Axis, published later in 1938, which apparently argued that the threat from Japan was not invasion but blockade. He owned a sheep property and when war came was active in fundraising for Australia's more beleaguered allies, so I suspect he had a bit of money.

Foot was the spokesman of this little group, explaining that

It has been the principal hope of the promoters to awaken interest in air defence, to accustom people in a small degree to detect and recognise planes at height, to create a greater degree of alertness and to give the civilian population a faint realisation that war in the air largely takes place, almost out of sight, above their heads.⁹

Reports of the first flight in February show that propaganda wasn't the only purpose; the flightpath was designed to test just how easy it was for people to make out aeroplanes at different heights. I can't find any evidence that the third, unannounced flight took place.

I was fascinated to find that Foot used mystery aircraft as a justification for the exercise. He explained that if war broke it, 'it is only to be expected that a large crop of rumours will come to the Defence Department of mysterious planes flying at great height over different parts' of the state.¹⁰ He suggested that high-flying large birds like eagles were easy to confuse with aeroplanes, with the only tell-tale being 'the glint from the sun's rays shining on the wings of the plane'.¹¹ Foot then related a long anecdote about a mystery aeroplane crash near Wyndham. Residents were expecting an airmail delivery and thought they saw the aeroplane circle overhead and then crash behind some nearby hills. They spent most of the evening searching for the crash site only to be informed that the mail aeroplane was safe and sound and hadn't even reached the Wyndham area.¹² It's an interesting idea that mystery aircraft reports from the public would swamp the authorities' ability to filter them, and so training the public in basic aircraft recognition might be useful. The 1918 mystery aeroplane scare perfectly illustrates Foot's point here.

Airminded propaganda stunts like the one over Perth, and possibly London and Hobart too, did have the potential to embarrass governments, but probably worked best to educate, or at least alarm, the public. Diving over cities is a crude way to do this (if that's what London and Hobart were), but Foot and co. at least tried to work through the media to promote their ideas about air defence.

And here ends the series. I promise!

1. Flight, 22 July 1937, 107.
2. Western Argus (Kalgoorlie), 27 July 1937, 10.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Which is interesting in itself; I didn't realise that civil machines took part in military exercises.
6. I came across this in Leigh Edmonds, 'How Australians were made airminded'.
7. West Australian (Perth), 3 March 1938, 5.
8. He was also Keith Murdoch's uncle, and hence Rupert's great-uncle.
9. West Australian, 3 March 1938, 5.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Foot doesn't give a date other than 'some years ago', but the situation he describes fits 1927.

Looking over the list of Australian mystery aircraft sightings suggests that some generalisations can be made.

In the 1910s, mysterious lights in the sky were usually described as being airship-like; after 1910 they were far more likely to be called aeroplanes. Perhaps not coincidentally, 1910 was when aeroplanes first flew in Australia; certainly a search of Trove Newspapers (using Wraggelabs' QueryPic) shows that 1910 was the first year when the word "aeroplane" appeared markedly more frequently than "airship". So that's easy enough to explain.

The same search shows that 1909 was the year that aviation really broke through into public consciousness. That's also the year of the Australian phantom airship wave.¹ As it was the first burst of interest in aircraft, the first time that people started to learn about them, it's perhaps not surprising that people might think they saw them flying around where they weren't. The 1918 mystery aeroplane scare came after several years of increasing press coverage of aviation, obviously due to the war. So again that fits. Aeroplanes were something people were reading (and probably talking) about a lot. But that by itself is evidently not enough to generate a mystery aeroplane scare: there were a few seen in 1914, and a handful in the years after that, but nothing on the scale of 1918. There needs to be a plausible reason for aircraft to be flying about: and the reported visit of the Wolf and its Wölfchen to Australian shores provided that, though the desperate situation of the Allied armies in France was also a factor.

After 1918 there is a lull; I couldn't find any mystery aircraft sightings until 1927, when a few start to pop up. (Which certainly doesn't mean they aren't there to be found. I just found another one, albeit for 1928 as well.) Why might that be? Well, looking at the ngram above again is suggestive. This time the plot extends covers 1918 to 1942, and is for 'plane' as well as 'aeroplane' -- the former becomes more common from the late 1920s.² After a relatively flat level of interest in aviation during most of the 1920s (actually falling considerably from the immediate postwar years), the number of articles using the word 'plane' almost doubles between 1926 and 1928, after which it is fairly stable until a dip in 1932 and 1933. So once more there's a buzz about aeroplanes (or rather planes), a widespread curiosity about aviation. Why was this so?

It was certainly nothing to do with fear of war in these Locarno years. I haven't tested this quantitatively, but it can't be a coincidence that these were the years of some of the great pioneering long-distance flights. Australia was the destination and, in some cases, the birthplace of many of the aviators who carried out these feats: the Englishman Alan Cobham flew from England to Australia and back in 1926, for which he was knighted; in 1928, Bert Hinkler, an Australian, was the first to make the trip solo. That same year, Charles Kingsford-Smith and Charles Ulm, also Australians, were the first to fly across the vast Pacific and then the smaller Tasman. The excitement that Charles Lindbergh's 1927 New York-Paris flight generated is well-known; something similar happened, if perhaps less intense, must have happened in Australia.³ The emotional investment in these pioneer aviators and their dangerous lives perhaps explains the number of false reports of aeroplane crashes around 1930.⁴

And it wasn't just the big names either. Here's a plot of the number of civil aircraft registered in Australia from 1922 to 1939.⁵ Between 1926 and 1928, this increased from 55 to 90 or 63% (and then another 144% between 1928 and 1930).

Other statistics -- number of flights, number of hours flown, number of passengers carried -- tell the same story.⁶ There was a huge increase in flying in the late 1920s, followed by a bust (no doubt due to the Depression) and another boom in the late 1930s. So it makes sense that mystery aeroplanes began to be seen again from 1927-8 or so. It was the golden age of Australian aviation: far more people were talking about and flying in aeroplanes than ever before.

Apart from the air crash theory, other explanations for mystery aircraft in the late 1920s and early 1930s included opium smugglers and -- in 1934 -- a Japanese 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 in 1918 and 1942, but then the country was at war (and in the latter case actually under attack), so that's no surprise. In the late 1920s and early 1930s there was no cause for Australians to be alarmed, so again it's no surprise that mystery aircraft weren't seen to be hostile. The more difficult cases are in 1909 and, to a lesser extent, 1938. In 1909, the mystery aircraft were the object of curiosity, not suspicion. But that same year Britain was undergoing every sort of defence panic around: invasion, dreadnoughts, airships, spies. Australians were also very worried about invasion, albeit from Japan, not Germany. Why didn't Australians imagine Japanese airships spying from overhead, preparing the way for the Emperor's soldiers?

The answer must have something to do with perceived plausibility, which in turn depends on perceived capability and perceived intent. In 1909, Germany had Zeppelins; Japan had nothing. If Japan had been publicly and successfully experimenting with longrange aircraft in like fashion to Germany, then Australians might have believed that the 1909 mystery airships were Japanese, just as Britons believed that theirs were German.⁷ In 1938, things were different. Everyone had aircraft now; and Japan was closer, in the sense that it had forward bases in Micronesia as well as aircraft carriers. It was now plausible to imagine that Japanese aircraft could reach Australia.

I was going to suggest that it was also now more plausible to imagine that Japan intended to attack Australia: after the Marco Polo Bridge incident in 1937 (and setting aside the invasion of Manchuria in 1931 which seems to have made less of an impression) it was clearly in an aggressive, expansionist phase. But the above plot suggests that press interest, at least, in Japan actually declined after 1937. That's a very crude index, of course, but it's consistent with Augustine Meaher's argument that Australians were surprisingly unconcerned about Japan in the late 1930s, contrary to Peter Stanley's view.

This is starting to get confusing. But, paradoxically, considering another problem with mystery aircraft may help here. Why were there no big waves of mystery aircraft sightings after the First World War? This seems to be true worldwide. Between 1896 and 1918 there were a number of times where mystery aircraft are seen in many places by many people over a short period of time: the United States, Canada, Britain, New Zealand, Australia.⁸ Afterwards, while there were certainly mystery aircraft sightings, they tended to occur singly, appearing once or twice at one place and then disappearing.⁹ They were also interpreted in isolation: nobody seems to have connected the Hobart mystery aeroplane of July 1938 with the Darwin case in February, nobody saw them as part of the same phenomenon. I'm not sure why this is, but I suspect that a greater familiarity with real aircraft must have had something to do with it. Actual aircraft were very rare in all countries when mystery aircraft waves took place: airships and aeroplanes were imagined far more than seen. This ignorance made it easier to believe that a planet, a fire-balloon or a Reticulan battlecruiser was in fact a aeroplane: easier for the witnesses, easier for everyone they told to believe them, easier for the journalists covered the story to treat it seriously. The spread of the idea that Germans (etc) were flying around in the sky met no resistance -- at least for a while: when the press starts to get sceptical the mystery aircraft waves tend to collapse very quickly.

So, while the huge increase in flying in Australia from the late 1920s may have put aviation at the forefront of the national consciousness and provided imaginative fodder for mystery aircraft incidents, it seems to have provided an inoculation against mass waves of sightings. For that to occur there needed to be plausibility, curiosity, and ignorance. All three at once. Mystery aircraft do appear at other times, but don't lead to anything else and are soon forgotten.

I'm not happy with this post; it's long and rambling, unfocused and confusing. Partly that's due to me making it up as I go along rather than planning ahead; but it's also partly due to the fuzzy nature of the mystery aeroplane phenomenon (and indeed history) itself. In trying to find common factors and causes I run the risk of imposing my own order where there is none. Maybe there is really no point to this. Maybe the Scareship Age was no such thing. So people thought they saw aircraft flying around where they were none. So what? Sometimes I think I should focus my research on phantom airships and mystery aeroplanes: it's something that few other historians are interested in and so it's one area where I can make a distinctive contribution. But then again, maybe there's a reason why it's a fallow field.

1. Of course, part of the 1909 data in the ngram above is from the airship sightings. But not many.
2. 'Plane' is not as good a word for datamining as 'aeroplane', because it has other meanings, in geometry and carpentry for example. It's also more likely to show up as an OCR error, e.g. for 'place', than 'aeroplane' is. It can also appear as '-plane', that is to say when a typesetter breaks a word over two lines; but the vast majority of those would have been 'aeroplane' anyway. Still, the aviation meaning is the most common one, as you can see from how closely it tracks 'aeroplane' until the mid-1930s.
3. 60,000 people turned out to see Cobham land; 26,000 to see Smithy and Ulm.
4. Hinkler, Kingsford-Smith and Ulm were all killed attempting long-distance flights, though not for a few more years.
5. I've extracted the data for this and the next plot from the Official Year Book of the Commonwealth of Australia series, which first recorded civil aviation statistics in the 1922 edition. The data is for the year ending 30 June.
6. The average length of a flight was very low, e.g. in 1930 only 20 minutes. That suggests that the majority were joyflights; but Edmonds says that the barnstorming phase in Australian aviation was pretty much over by 1921.
7. Having said that, a 1909 Japanese invasion play by Randolph Bedford's, unsubtly entitled White Australia, or The Empty North, does revolve around an airship with great destructive powers. However, in this case the airship is an Australian invention which a Japanese spy tries (unsuccessfully, you'll be glad to know) to steal for use in bombing Sydney. I've read the script, and it's just as bad as you think. See the review in the Argus (Melbourne), 28 June 1909, 9. The airship itself can just be made out in the play's advertising poster.
8. All English-speaking countries, though I wouldn't be surprised if that's simply my ignorance as an monophone.
9. At least, before Sweden in 1946 they did. Or perhaps the foo fighters over Europe during the war, though there the context was very different.

Herbert A. Johnson. Wingless Eagle: U.S. Army Aviation through World War I. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Looks at not just the actual flying stuff (the first flights, the expedition against Pancho Villa, the expansion for war) but the media portrayal of such (e.g. chapter 2, 'Army aviation in the media fishbowl'). So I think it will be very much to my taste; not bad for a bargain table find!

Helen M. Kinsella. The Image before the Weapon: A Critical History of the Distinction between Combatant and Civilian. Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 2011. As the title suggests it's not really the sort of book you turn to for who said (or did) what to whom and why; it's also written by a political scientist, not a historian, but we'll let that pass. Starts with medieval codes of warfare but mostly concentrates on the 20th century, especially the 1949 IV Geneva Convention and the 1977 Protocol to it.

So here's a very incomplete list of mystery aircraft sightings in Australia, along with how they were interpreted at the time. For the most part I've only included reports which were published in the press at the time (and not those which were reported to the authorities in wartime but not publicised).

1. Koroit, Vic, 1906: an odd object which at one point 'assumed a shape somewhat resembling that of an airship'.
2. 1909 wave, nation-wide: no single interpretation dominated but generally described as airships.
3. Minderoo, WA, 1910: an airship, either a secret Australian invention or from a foreign vessel off the coast.
4. SS Wookata, off Althorpe Island, SA, 1910: strange lights, described by one witness as being 'like German airships flying about'.
5. Ballarat, Vic, 1911: an 'air-ship' or 'biplane'.
6. Melbourne, Vic, 1911: an 'aeroplane'.
7. Cairns, Qld, 1913: a 'mysterious object resembling an aeroplane'.
8. Lameroo, SA, 1914: an 'aeroplane'. February, so before the outbreak of war.
9. Mullumbimby/Billinudgel/Lismore, NSW, 1914: this time it's October, and there seems to have been much debate about whether the 'aeroplane' seen over a period of days (or weeks) belonged to Germany (no, because it would have dropped a bomb) or the Australian Army (then why wasn't it flying in daytime?). Another article intriguingly mentions 'the aeroplane or Zeppelin' alongside an 'awful carronading out to sea' heard at Tweed Heads, but let's not get distracted...
10. Corporoo, QLD, 1915: an 'aeroplane' (though it is also described as an 'airship', I suspect this is as a synonym for aircraft). No defence implications.
11. 1918 wave, nation-wide though most reports were from Victoria and, to a lesser extent, New South Wales. The implication was very definitely that the aeroplanes (rarely, Zeppelins) were German, possibly from raiders offshore.
12. Broome, WA, 1927: two aeroplanes believed to be operating from a ship offshore, involved in opium smuggling.
13. Flinders Island, Tas, 1928: an 'aeroplane engine' was heard followed by the sound of a crash. A search found nothing. This was connected to the missing New Zealand airmen Hood and Moncrieff, who the same day had taken off from Sydney in an attempt to be the first to fly the Tasman Sea. Interestingly, there were similar false sightings in New Zealand -- all very Andrée-like.
14. Broken Hill, NSW, 1929: an aeroplane was seen trailing smoke and believed to have crashed, but an extensive search found no trace.
15. Needles, Tas, 1931: yet another mistaken report of an aeroplane crash.
16. Thursday Island, Qld, 1934: two aeroplanes seen by fishing boats, which also reported a 'Japanese sampan' nearby; the Defence Department was notified. Thursday Island is off the tip of Cape York, about as far north as Australia gets.
17. Bowen, Qld, 1935: an 'aeroplane' reported to be 'in difficulties'; believed to be a hoax report as no such aircraft could be identified and this wasn't the first time this had happened.
18. Darwin, NT, 1938: an aeroplane was heard and seen on two occasions, leading to many different theories being proposed. A long-distance reconnaissance from Palau was one of these, but the Japanese angle only had much traction in Darwin itself.
19. Hobart, Tas, 1938: not-very-convincing attempts to suggest that an aeroplane seen diving on Hobart was from a foreign ship off the coast, but in any case the incident was said to show the city's defencelessness.
20. Broken Hill, NSW, 1941: a 'mysterious object' seen in the air was thought by some to be 'an aeroplane'. This was reported on the very same day as the Japanese declaration of war, though no connection is evident (other than the article being surrounded by war news).
21. Townsville, Qld, 1942: Japan isn't mentioned here either, but it's pretty obvious that's who the 'number of unidentified planes [...] seen over the Atherton Tableland' were assumed to belong to, if only from the black-out and other air-raid precautions which were undertaken.
22. Townsville, Qld, 1942: this time two 'military type' aircraft were seen over Townsville; fighters and anti-aircraft guns failed to shoot them down. Despite the caveat ('If the planes were hostile') it does seem likely that these were Japanese aircraft. Townsville was bombed less than two months later.
23. Port Augusta, SA, 1947: not described as any sort of aircraft at all, actually, just as five 'strange objects' (about the size of 'locomotives'). That's quite unusual but these were quite unusual objects, described as quivering, 'oblong with narrow points' and casting a shadow (at 9am). The consensus seems to have been meteors (though the state astronomer disagreed and also rejected a mirage theory). A few months later the flying saucer craze started in the United States and the Adelaide Advertiser was able to claim that 'Port Augusta "started something"'.

What does it all mean? I'll discuss that in the (hopefully) final post in this series.