This is Warrington Crescent, Maida Vale, on the morning of 8 March 1918, after it had been hit by a 1-ton bomb dropped by a Giant bomber the night before — one of the largest to fall on London during the First World War and the most materially destructive. Twelve people were killed (including Lena Ford, who wrote the words to the song “Keep the home fires burning”). It was the first air raid to come in the dark of the moon and, fortunately, the second-last of the war.

In the 1930s, much was made of the fact that a single bomb had destroyed half a dozen houses and heavily damaged a couple of dozen more, as the above map shows: multiply one bomb by hundreds and repeat as necessary and you’ve got a knock-out blow. Basing your forecasts on a few outliers like this is not always sensible.

Image sources: L. E. O. Charlton, War Over England (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1936); Hamilton Fyfe, ‘Gothas and Giants beaten back’, in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1935?]), 520.

The day after the Shuttleworth Collection visit, Trevor again kindly offered his services as chauffeur and guide, this time to Imperial War Museum Duxford. I’d only been to IWM London on my first visit to London; since IWM Duxford has a specific aviation focus I was keen to rectify its omission!

Along with a Victor, this Avro Shackleton stood outside for a long time, exposed to the elements. They’re both now inside; although they haven’t been restored (by the looks of them), at least they won’t deteriorate so rapidly. The Shackleton (a Cold War descendant of the Lancaster, via the Lincoln) was designed for maritime patrol and ASW. The cannon seem optimistic: it’s hard to imagine they would be much use against Soviet fighters, for example.

Inside the AirSpace hangar, which is devoted to British and Commonwealth (okay, mainly British) aviation. On the left is a BAC TSR-2, which has a oddly-menacing look; on the right an Avro Vulcan. The helicopter is a Westland Wessex and suspended from the ceiling is an English Electric Canberra. Canberras entered RAF service as bombers in 1951 and retired only in 2006, by which time they had long been converted to the photo-reconnaissance role. Australia, India and even the US used Canberras, so it wasn’t just the British who liked them.

A de Havilland DH.9 bomber — restored after eight decades in a maharajah’s storeroom! Behind is a much later de Havilland, the Comet in BOAC livery. The world’s first jet airliner, as I’m sure everybody knows.

Very pretty for a transporter, the Handley Page Hastings.

My second Short Sunderland, after the RAF Museum’s one. Above are an R.E.8 and a Hawker Siddeley Harrier.

I can now tell people I’ve been on Concorde. I don’t have to mention the fact that it was stuck firmly on the ground, do I?

An English Electric Lightning. A big, and fast, bruiser.

This shows how crowded AirSpace is. Apart from the aircraft I’ve already named above, there’s an Avro Lancaster, a Westland Lysander, a Gloster Meteor, a Supermarine Spitfire — and a few others left as an exercise for the reader.

The ultimate art deco aeroplane: a de Havilland Dragon Rapide. Based at Duxford but privately-owned.

The last time I’d seen a Brisfit, it was in the air …

This was probably the one thing I most wanted to see at Duxford. Yes, it just looks like a big wooden wheel, and in fact it is a big wooden wheel. From a big wooden bomber, the German Poll triplane. It was never finished; parts were found in a hangar near Cologne in 1919 by Allied inspectors. It would have had ten engines, a wingspan of 165 feet and an endurance of 80 hours — enough to reach New York with a payload of bombs (or leaflets, though why would they bother?) If it had managed to fly at all, of course.

Another war relic.

An ex-Hungarian Air Force MiG-21. With over 11,000 built between 1959 and 1985, it must have been about the world’s last truly mass-produced combat aircraft.

An Avro Rota. As Samuel Johnson said, “When a man is tired of autogyros, he is tired of life.”

Hangar 5 is where preservation and restoration work takes place. Here’s an ex-Spanish Air Force He 111 which seems to be missing a few parts.

This Mi-21 Hind gunship has also seen better days. Hinds have been involved in some 23 conflicts since 1977, though I don’t think this one was as it came from East Germany.

A Ju/52m which could have come straight from the title sequences of Where Eagles Dare.

Duxford was a former RAF airfield, part of 12 Group during the Battle of Britain. It has been relatively well-preserved, aside from the odd First World War hangar blown up for the cameras every now and then. The Sector Operations Room is still standing; it was from here that fighters were directed onto incoming German bomber formations. If I read these plotting markers right, there is a flight from each of 19 and 310 Squadrons climbing from Duxford to intercept two German formations at 15,000 feet, one with 30+ aircraft and the other with 90+. Good luck chaps!

A captured German radar, Giant Würzburg type.

The interesting thing here is not the V-1, which is a replica, but the V-1 launching ramp, which is genuine.

Between 1943 and 1945, Duxford operated as a USAAF fighter base, which is a good enough reason for it to host the American Air Museum. In the centre is a Boeing B-52, diving behind it is a North American Super Sabre, and in the foreground to the right is a General Dynamics F-111.

The Boeing Kaydet (AKA Stearman), a ubiquitous trainer (at least in the West, where Tiger Moths weren’t).

The Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird first flew in 1964, but still oozes futurity more than just about any other aeroplane ever made. It also still holds the world speed record for air-breathing aircraft, at 3530 km/h (Mach 3.2).

A rather more sedate Boeing B-17 …

… one of a matching pair!

There was so much to see at Duxford and I didn’t see everything by a long shot before closing time. But on our way back to London, Trevor had a surprise for me — a visit to North Weald, another RAF station from the days of the Battle of Britain (both of them, in fact). It’s now a private airfield, one which is favoured by a number of vintage aircraft operators, including Hangar 11 (above).

We missed seeing it fly, but were in time to see this immaculate Curtiss P-40 Kittyhawk being wheeled back into the hangar.

Inside, there was a North American P-51 Mustang.

And a Hawker Hurricane IIB ‘Hurribomber’. It’s been painted in the colours of a Hurricane last flown by an Australian of 174 Squadron (he was shot down and captured during the Dieppe Raid), and so it was quite appropriate that I got to help shift it to make more room for the Kittyhawk!

After that it was off to The Squadron for a few pints and then back to London. All in all, a pretty good day.

Nick Smart. Neville Chamberlain. Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2010. I’m not a big reader of biographies, partly because they often aren’t ‘historical’ enough and partly because they usually aren’t about the people I’m interested in. This one satisfies on both counts.

‘In the Next War’ was a short series of books published in Britain in 1938 and 1939, edited by Basil Liddell Hart. Unlike the earlier To-day and To-morrow books which attempted to predict things to come, these were much less eclectic and much more narrowly focused on future warfare: airpower; seapower; tanks, infantry and the Territorials; gas, civilians and propaganda. The actual arrival of the next war in 1939 seems to have cut the series short, as two of these were never published (those on infantry and, to my regret, civilians).

The authors were also drawn from a more select group, as they mostly seem to have had prior credentials in their subjects (not always the case with ‘To-day and To-morrow’, where the ability to come up with an interesting take seems to have been at least as important as expertise). J. M. Spaight was a prolific writer on airpower, and late of the Air Ministry; Jonathan Griffin had written a couple of widely read books on similar topics (and also editor of Essential News and, oddly enough, translator of Babar the Elephant) which suggests to me that his book on civilians would have focused on ARP. (Both Spaight and Griffin were now more-or-less sceptical of the knock-out blow paradigm.) Most of the other authors were or had been in the services, mostly in the Army. Henry Thuiller had been head of the wartime Trench Warfare Supply Department (which had a responsibility for manufacture of chemical weapons), while Eric Dorman-Smith was to have a controversial career in the next war, but in the last one had served with distinction and in the meantime had experience with the Army’s experiments with mechanised warfare. Sidney Rogerson was the author of Twelve Days, a popular memoir of the Somme, but I’m not sure what his qualifications for writing on propaganda were. Eric Sheppard had written a couple of books on the American Civil War, as well as what looks like a military history study guide for Sandhurst. Russell Grenfell had served in the Royal Navy and was a veteran of Jutland; he already had a number of books on naval matters to his credit (and in 1940 wrote under the pseudonym T 124, arguing that with adequate sea- and airpower, the capture of the Low Countries by a hostile nation was nothing to fear). I don’t know much about Green; as he had a DFC he must have been in the RFC/RAF but here he is writing about the Territorials, with which he must have had some connection. His volume was actually advertised in advance as being by the Deputy Director General of the Territorial Army, Sir John Brown, but perhaps he had to turn this down due to his official position.

From the little I’ve read of it, I think ‘In the Next War’ is an interesting series, so I’ve put up a short bibliography. It certainly presents a very different take on the future than that of ‘To-day and To-morrow’: rather than bright and exciting, it was going to be bloody. But that the future was still thought worth writing about still reflects a faith that there probably would, after all, be some sort of world worth to live and die for.

Compare and contrast. The Daily Mail in 2007:

During the dark days of the Second World War, British children passed the time with marbles, hopscotch, tiddlywinks and, for a lucky few, a Monopoly set.

But over in Germany, the amusements were far less innocent.

In one version of bagatelle named Bombers over England, children as young as four were encouraged to blow up settlements by firing a spring-driven ball on to a board featuring a map of Britain and the tip of Northern Europe.

Players were awarded a maximum 100 points for landing on London, while Liverpool was worth 40.

And the Daily Mail in 2010:

British children of the time were playing marbles and hidding [sic] in air raid shelters.

But for youngsters under the Third Reich, this board game was invented to teach them the tactics of warfare – against a British foe.

The war time amusement, Adlers Luftverteidigungs spiel, which translates as the Eagle Air Defence Game, involves two or more players attacking enemy positions on a geographically illustrated board while defending friendly territory.

The supposed contrast between pacifist British kids and militarist German kids is as silly now as it was then. Apparently the Daily Mail hasn’t learned anything in the interim. (I checked to see if the same person was responsible for both, but the new article is credited to the improbably-named “DAILY MAIL REPORTER”.) The only difference is in the quality of the comments: last time they took the writer to task for his foolishness, now they’re almost spEak You’re bRanes-worthy.

No doubt there were differences between British and German games of the period — it’s hard to imagine any British equivalent of the 1936 game Juden Raus, where the aim is to force the Jews in your town to emigrate to Palestine — but simplistic dichotomies (as the Daily Mail seems to be fond of) are not going to help us understand what they were.

The final stop on my trip was London, where I stayed for most of a week (thanks, Jakob and Sarah, for putting me up!) I had big plans, but ended up spending most of my time at British Library Newspapers doing research for an article. But first I got to spend a weekend looking at old aeroplanes, thanks to JDK who put me in touch with Trevor, who kindly offered his services as a chauffeur and guide. On the Saturday, we visited the fabled Shuttleworth Collection at Old Warden in Bedfordshire, which was holding an evening flying display.

The collection consists of both vintage aeroplanes and vintage automobiles, nearly all from before the Second World War: here is a Hawker Demon interceptor, the Napier-Railton racing car (actually a visitor from Brooklands) and a 1920 Hucks starter.

(The Hucks starter is used to start the propeller spinning, instead of doing it by hand. All the mod cons here.)

The wonderful thing about the Shuttleworth Collection is that so many of its aircraft can and do fly. (The cars can drive too, but I readily confess to being less interested in that.) This Sopwith Triplane can be seen in the air further down the page.

Well, they fly when they don’t have mechanical difficulties, as with this Westland Lysander. A shame, as I was looking forward to seeing how it handled!

The other factor, of course, is the weather. On the day of my visit, it was overcast early on, but cleared up later on and by dusk the wind had fallen to the merest zephyr, which was perfect as it meant the ‘Edwardians’ would be able to fly.

While the various machines were being moved around outside, I had a wander through the hangars. This is a propeller from the R101, damaged in a collision with the mooring mast at Cardington.

A Bristol Scout Type D replica, probably built by RAF apprentices in 1960.

One of the most historically significant aircraft in the collection, the de Havilland DH.88 Comet Grosvenor House which won the 1934 London-Melbourne air race. Say what you like about its almost-variable-pitch propellers, it’s a gorgeous aeroplane.

Back outside. One of the nice things about this display was that the flight-line was behind the rope, so you could get a good look at the aeroplanes and chat to the pilots. This Hawker Sea Hurricane IB was very popular.

A Blériot XI undergoing an engine check. (A replica — I think. But see below.)

A Sopwith Pup and a German Schneider S.G.38 training glider, the one from the First World War, the other from the 1930s.

The primary trainer for the US Army in the Second World War, the Ryan PT-22 Recruit.

As I said, these things fly! This is the Sea Hurricane seen above. You might just be able to make out the fairing for the arrester hook, used for landing on the deck of a merchant aircraft carrier (i.e. a merchant ship fitted with a landing deck, to provide some air cover for convoys).

The RAF’s last biplane interceptor, the Gloster Gladiator.

Spectacles require an audience.

A Klemm Kl 35, a near-contemporary equivalent of the American PT-22.

Another trainer, the Bücker Bü 131 Jungmann, which equipped all the nicest air forces of the 1930s and 1940s: the Luftwaffe, the Japanese army, Franco’s air force.

I think this was my favourite aeroplane of the day, the Avro Tutor, which is why it gets three photos (including the one at the start of the post).

Photogenic and aerobatic.

A very rare type: the only surviving Blackburn B-2, a side-by-side trainer. Only 42 were built, most of them used by civilian flying schools rather than the RAF.

Another rare trainer, the Hawker Tomtit, which first flew in 1928. It lost out to the Tutor for a RAF contract, and only 35 were ever built.

As you may have guessed, the programme was ordered by reverse chronology. Now we’re up to the late First World War (and the very late afternoon), with the Bristol F.2 Fighter, uninspiringly named but amazingly agile, especially given that its a two-seater.

Probably the best British fighter of the war, the Royal Aircraft Factory S.E.5a.

And it’s a Great War veteran. 84 Squadron’s CO was flying it when he shot down a Fokker D.VII on 10 November 1918.

The Sopwith Triplane seen above. Only a reproduction, but one endorsed by Tom Sopwith himself.

The oldest British aeroplane, the Blackburn Type D. The only one built, it first flew in late 1912, crashed on a farm in 1914, was recovered in 1938 and restored for its first flight in thirty-three years in 1947. And here it is, still flying, another sixty-three years further on!

A replica Bristol Boxkite, Britain’s first military production aircraft.

An Avro Triplane, another replica. This and the Boxkite were made for the 1965 film Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines (which I watched on the A380 coming home — first time I’ve ever seen an inflight movie with even one plane crash!) and the Shuttleworth got to keep them afterwards. The Triplane was flown by that bounder, Sir Percy Ware-Armitage.

And finally, the most amazing survivor in the collection, a Blériot XI built in 1909. It’s the same type Louis Blériot himself used in his historic flight across the English Channel that year. It’s the world’s oldest aeroplane which is still flyable, and I got to see it fly! Of course, when I say ‘fly’, it really only hopped. It’s too fragile to do turns — especially given that it doesn’t use ailerons to steer, but Wright-style wing-warping — so all they did with it was get up enough speed to get into the air and then land again, turn it around and do the same thing in the other direction. But pretty amazing all the same. I was lucky that my camera’s batteries just lasted long enough; between that and the low light my best photo of the Blériot gives a somewhat misleading impression of great speed. But it kinda works for me!

The Shuttleworth Collection is named in honour of Richard Shuttleworth, a rich kid who liked fast cars and aeroplanes, winning several motor races in the 1930s and even taking a course record from Sir Malcolm Campbell. But he also liked old cars and aeroplanes, and started collecting machines which even then were becoming rare. He joined the RAF and was killed in August 1940 while flying a Fairey Battle. His mother founded the Shuttleworth Collection (along with an agricultural college) in his memory, and we have cause to be grateful for them both for ensuring the survival of so many unique aircraft from the early days of flight.

[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.]

Welcome to the restored Military History Carnival, a round-up of the best military history blogging of the last month. Since history is just one damn thing after another, let’s try this as a chronology.

327-5 BCE: Alexander the Great’s army fights yeti in India.
122 CE: Construction of Hadrian’s wall begins in order to amuse 20th century children.
1202: Venice builds a fleet of Landing Ships (Knight) for the Fourth Crusade.
1861-5: Black Confederates probably don’t exist, but if they did here’s what it would take to convince reasonable historians.
1914-9: The First World War sees horses used in a wide variety of roles. Men and women had their roles too.
1915: The many burdens of the poor bloody infantry.
1915: The first Zeppelin raid on Britain.
1915: Fighting at Gallipoli inspires a British sailor-poet to write of ancient Ilium.
1915: An earlier American intervention in Haiti.
1918: Gladys Wake, a Canadian nurse who died on active service in France.
1931-7: Why Metrovicks got into gas turbine research.
1939: ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’: then an unused morale-boosting poster, now a wildly successful internet meme.
1939-45: Why most RAF war dead served in bombers.
1940: Coventry and the aeroplane.
1942: George Herbert Walker Bush becomes the youngest American naval aviator to fly solo.
1948: President Truman sets a precedent for today by ordering the end of segregation in the US armed forces.
1948-9: An earlier international humanitarian airlift.

This edition of the Military History Carnival was brought to you by the year 1915. Thanks go to all those who sent in suggestions. If you’d like to host a future carnival, please contact the Battlefield Biker.

[Update: fixed an embarrassingly-bad description which suggests I barely bothered to read the link. Sorry Gavin!]

I’ve just had another article accepted, this time by the Journal of Contemporary History: ‘The air panic of 1935: British press opinion between disarmament and rearmament’ (the panic in question being over the creation of the Luftwaffe). It should appear in early 2011. And it was a difficult article, actually. I originally carved it out of two chapters of my thesis, with a ‘theoretical’ part and 1935 as a case study. But while the referees thought it had merit overall, they weren’t convinced by the theory and thought the case study too weak. So I decided to ditch the theory, do some more research and focus on the 1935 air panic. I spent most of the summer rewriting it, and luckily it’s paid off! Although I’m allowed to put a pre-peer review copy on the web, I’ve decided not to because it has very little in common with the final version. But I’m sure the world can wait to read it!

I hadn’t come across this before. @ukwarcabinet recently linked to some informal notes of a War Cabinet meeting held on 8 February 1940. It was pretty quiet, even for the Bore War, and ‘Some of the subjects discussed were rather discussed by way of filling in time’. Including this:

At the end of the Meeting there was a reference to a scare which had started through a red balloon floating about in the Eastern Counties. This balloon had been sent up for meteorological purposes, but it had apparently given rise to a scare that gas balloons were being let loose by the Germans. The London Passenger Transport Board had told their employees to be ready to put on their gas-masks!

It seems they weren’t particularly concerned by this incident, despite what it might have said about the fragility of morale. The scare wasn’t kept secret; the Manchester Guardian had already reported it that morning (p. 7), with some extra details:

“ENEMY GAS”
Harmless Balloons Start Rumours

Extraordinary rumours in Eastern English and Scottish coastal districts followed the discovery yesterday of a number of small balloons. These were harmless British meteorological balloons but stories which had spread in various parts of the country had suggested that they were of enemy origin and that they contained dangerous gas.

At King’s Lynn (Norfolk) these stories led to the police issuing the following statement:–

The enemy has dropped balloon toys which may contain gas, highly inflammable, and explode on being touched or handled by lines attached. Police and observer corps should be informed if any are found.

The balloons are used for testing atmospheric conditions and occasionally they sink to the ground without bursting. They are harmless except that they contain hydrogen, and are therefore likely to explode if brought into contact with a naked flame.

So the story is that British meteorologists launched some weather balloons which came down in the eastern parts of England and Scotland. Passers-by found them, thought them suspicious, and reported them to authorities, which in turn made public statements that they were dangerous German weapons — either incendiary devices or actual poison gas bombs. In more normal times, it’s unlikely that a stray weather balloon would be interpreted as something dangerous, just something curious. Now, with the war strangely calm and the expected bombers nowhere to be seen, it’s more understandable that people would be jittery and overreact to mundane (if rare) sights (it had happened before and would happen again). And it certainly had to be considered that the Germans might try to use some sort of secret weapon against Britain. But the fact that the scare seems to have happened simultaneously in widely separated places — London, Norfolk, Scotland — suggests that there was something else going on too. Was the Met Office trying out a new balloon design? Perhaps it was the red colour mentioned in the War Cabinet discussion which made the balloons look especially sinister? Anyway, it’s another scare to add to my list.

PS I think I should get credit for not mentioning Nena. Until now.

Some Britons I’ve spoken to claim to be unaware that their country has a National Space Centre. Well, it does and it’s in Leicester. I know this because Chris Williams took me there.

Admittedly, the NSC might have been better known had not Beagle 2 failed to reach Mars back in 2003 (or if it did get there, failed to report back): it was to be the control centre for the mission. It also hosts the UK’s Near Earth Object Information Centre, the designated assembly point for angry British subjects to gather with flaming torches when the big one comes and they find out there’s nothing we can do about it.

But the NSC is also a pretty decent space museum (and planetarium). Lots of spacesuits and simulators and model Mars rovers. This is a first-generation Soyuz, a Soyuz 7K-OK. It’s a real spacecraft, though it obviously didn’t actually go into space, since it’s still in one piece (only the middle section would return to Earth). I guess it was a spare or training unit.

It would have been built between 1967 and 1971, so this is space race-era stuff.

And it’s got this on the side, for the full-on Cold War nostalgia trip.

Speaking of nostalgia, who else watched Giotto fly-by of Halley’s Comet live on TV? This one’s a model, though, because the real Giotto is still out there, orbiting the Sun.

The NSC’s pride and joy: a Blue Streak.

It’s a medium-range ballistic missile, and a first-stage satellite launcher!

To be more precise, Blue Streak started out in 1955 as a carrier for Britain’s independent nuclear deterrent. But as warning times decreased, the fact that it couldn’t be launched in less than 15 minutes became a problem, and so it was cancelled. Cue Skybolt, Polaris, Trident … no end of fun.

So Blue Streak was re-purposed as the first stage of a European satellite launcher, Europa. But it was the only part which worked reliably, and in 1972 that was cancelled too. And that was the end of Blue Streak.

This particular one was the last to be completed — but again, not used. As most of the launches took place from Woomera, there are bits of Blue Streak a lot closer to me than Leicester, but to see a complete one was worth the trip.

But let’s not forget the Thor, the United States’ first ballistic missile (which can be better seen in the first photo in this post). You’d have to count Thor as more successful than Blue Streak, in that it did actually see operational deployment, and that it also led to a highly successful series of launch vehicles, the Deltas.

Finally, a whimsical exhibit which alludes to the fact that Saturn is less dense than water, and so if you could find a big enough bathtub it would float. Or alternatively, if you can find a small enough Saturn, that would float too.

(P.S. Leicester also has at least one decent pub, where Chris and I met Alun for a few. Chris also put me up for the night. Cheers!)