Claudia Baldoli and Andrew Knapp. Forgotten Blitzes: France and Italy under Allied Air Attack, 1940-1945. London and New York: Continuum, 2012. Ask and ye shall receive! This is a groundbreaking book, as far as the English language is concerned: I know of no other treatments of the bombing of either France or Italy at this length. Of course, it could be argued that there's only half a book on each here, but I suspect the comparative approach will be very fruitful. I'll probably be most interested in the chapter on preparing for bombing in the interwar period, but it all looks good. Incidentally, this is the latest output of the prolific Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe 1940-1945 project centred on the University of Exeter; only last month its members took up an an entire issue of Labour History Review; and I see that Richard Overy has a book coming out next year entitled The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945 -- so now I have something else to look forward to!

Lizzie Collingham. The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food. London: Penguin, 2012. An agrarian interpretation of the Second World War. This has received rave reviews from all over (including one from the aforementioned Richard Overy). I do wonder if the pudding has been over-egged as far as the blurb is concerned: I doubt that the claim that 'the necessity of feeding whole countries led to Germany's invasion of Russia' can be sustained, unless 'led to' is to be read as 'contributed to' rather than 'caused'. Still, looks very interesting.

The title of this post could refer to my own state of mind as I reach a crossroads in this project. As I said in the previous post, it's time to dig deeper into the 1918 Australian mystery aeroplane scare, to look beneath the surface. What was really going on? Why did people see mystery aeroplanes at this time and att this place? I have several lines of inquiry which should lead to an answer (if not the answer). One is the comparative and transnational perspective; another leads through airmindedness and the early understanding of and responses to flight. I'll address these in later posts. But the key perspective I need to try to recreate is the fear, uncertainty and doubt surrounding the mystery aeroplanes, of which they were (I argue) both a symptom and a cause. Which is the real reason for my choice of title. Really.

Again, there are a number of threads to follow. One is my starting point in all this: the role of the press. As I have already shown, the scare shows up in press accounts only for about four or five weeks after mid-March 1918, even though the number of sightings peaked after then. The terminus date for the press seems to be around 23 April. Up until then there is a steady stream of stories; afterwards I know of nothing until 4 June, when the Melbourne Age reported that about nine or ten people, including a returned soldier, watched an aeroplane fly over Charlton; the story was reprinted the following day in the Ballarat Courier (adding that 'The returned man had considerable experience with aircraft'); and after that there's nothing at all.

One possibility is that the newspapers lost interest in mystery aeroplanes, whether because they stopped believing them or just thought they were no longer newsworthy. Indeed, on 25 April the Adelaide Register declared that it had taken a patriotic stand against publishing 'scare war news'. But that doesn't appear to be the case generally. NAA MP1049/1, 1918/066, the Royal Australian Navy's file on mystery aeroplane sightings, includes at least twenty-nine distinct references to newspapers in a variety of forms, either press clippings or direct or indirect interactions. Four of these date to before 1918 (or at least are indeterminate in date) or relate to New Zealand. Of the balance, twelve are from on or before 23 April 1918, the date after which mystery aeroplane articles stopped appeared, and (logically enough) thirteen appeared afterwards. That suggests that the press were in fact still paying attention to the scare.

A more likely explanation is censorship. Of the twelve references on or before 23 April, ten are to actually published articles, one the WA censor passing on information from the Bunbury Herald's editor about a Zeppelin seen at Fremantle, and one was a notification from the censor that news of a mystery aeroplane sighting at Ballarat West had been suppressed. That is the earliest date for a censored report that I've found, and it's right on the watershed date of 23 April. The thirteen references after that date include only one published article (the Age one noted above), two notifications from the censor of suppressed articles, eight of articles submitted to the censor, and two of direct communications from newspapers to defence authorities regarding mystery aeroplane reports received (including one from the Register, despite its proclaimed scepticism). It's unclear whether the articles submitted to the censors were published or not (at least two were not; the others I'll have to check on microfilm) but even so it's evident that there's a very different censorship regime in this period than there was before 23 April. A check of NAA files relating to censorship should confirm this.¹

Whether there was formal censorship or not, the lack of stories about mystery aeroplanes means that the press was not the primary vector of mystery aeroplane stories after 23 April. I've suggested that it instead helped fuel it in other ways, by creating alarm about possible defeat in Europe and raids on Australia. But I'll still need to try to explain why the scare then continued; or, put differently, how did people 'know' that mysterious aeroplanes were around? I'll tackle that question in a following post.

1. A good introduction to Australian censorship in the First World War is Kerry McCallum and Peter Putnis, 'Media management in wartime: the impact of censorship on press-government relations in World War I Australia', Media History 14 (2008), 17-33.

View Mystery aircraft, Australia, 1918 in a larger map

My next step in characterising the 1918 Australian mystery aircraft scare was to plot all the sightings Google Maps, which you can see above. I've used differently-coloured icons for different time periods to give an idea of the progression over the course of 1918: blue is January and February; red, March; green, April; cyan, May; yellow, June; purple, July; magenta, August through November. There are too many for Google Maps to show at once in an embedded map (without me learning JavaScript) but the rest can be seen here. Each icon is named for the location and has an attached date, but no other information. I dithered over which map mode to use but in the end settled on good old satellite mode, as it gives an idea of the terrain but also has good social data such as roads and towns (even if these are from 2012, not 1918). Of course you can switch between them yourself.


View Mystery aircraft, Australia, 1914 in a larger map

I've made similar maps for the other war years, without colour-coding by month as there were too few sightings to warrant it. The maps for 1915 and 1916 are for the same reason very uninteresting, so I won't embed them here. The 1914 map is above; the 1917 one below.

View Mystery aircraft, Australia, 1917 in a larger map

As I've discussed, the date is often vague and at this level that applies to the location too. The information provided in the intelligence files is usually reasonably specific as to the town or locality; in only one case was I unable to find, even roughly, the place where a mystery aircraft was said to be seen ('Reef Creek, South East district, SA'; it's not in the national gazetteer or the state one). But below that level it's more variable. Sometimes there were sightings outside towns, on roads or railways or from remote properties. Again I've not been very fussy about this and have generally gone with however the sighting was classed at the time. For example, an aeroplane was reported to have chased a train early one morning from Kaniva to Dimboola. Where do I place the marker: Kaniva, Dimboola, or somewhere in between? I put it on Dimboola because that's where the Navy's index lists it, probably because that's where the police report came from. Also, sometimes the information I have only states where the aircraft was thought to be, not where it was seen from, and that is an estimation fraught with observer bias. So what I'm saying is don't place too much faith in my icon placement. It's another one of those things I don't care about too much -- it's not terribly important to me to be able to distinguish between a sighting in Hope Street or one in Smith Avenue, at this point what I'm trying to see are any large-scale patterns.

And for that it has been useful. It was already clear that Victoria was far and away where most of the mystery aircraft were seen in 1918, with NSW second (Terrigal/Terrigal Haven alone had eleven reports, though only three involved people other than the Moir family or Gunner Naughton) and the other states a long way behind. The map reinforces that impression; but it does more, because it shows that within Victoria some areas were favoured much more than others. Zooming in helps here:

View Mystery aircraft, Australia, 1918 in a larger map

There were no mystery aircraft reported from the Riverina region in the north, nor from the central area around Bendigo or the Alps (of course, there weren't many people living there either). The northeast had only a handful. By contrast, the Mallee and the Wimmera in the west of the state had a significant number of sightings. The red icons in the northeast mostly mark sightings which fell on the same day early in the scare, 21 March, including one by a policeman: it was taken very seriously and a pair of investigators came up from Melbourne travelling through the Mallee seeking out witnesses. There was another burst around Ouyen a month later. The activity in Wimmera included hotspots at Casterton (three sightings) and Hamilton (four), and the only occasion when an aeroplane was seen to land (according to the press, anyway; the eyewitnesses, a drover and a boy, said no such thing when they were eventually interviewed by police and military intelligence).

But the real heartland was the arc from the Kinglake ranges north of Melbourne, through Melbourne itself and right around the southeast coast to Orbost in Gippsland, also taking in the Latrobe Valley inland. Again there are many hotspots within this area: Bairnsdale with at least five sightings was the most visited by mystery aircraft in the whole state, though the first was not until May, quite late in the scare. Inverloch had four, Sale, Orbost and Yarram three. While Melbourne is massively underrepresented, given that in 1918 it had 51% of the state's population, given the difficulty of seeing anything at all in an urban night sky I think it had a reasonable amount, including one from West Footscray where I lived as a child; 'Anxious' of Brighton wrote in to the Herald (which passed the letter on to the censor) to ask whether the 'mysterious aeroplane' they had seen early on 7 May 'might be the German one that is about'. What was going on in these places? Why were they so prone to mystery aeroplane sightings? I don't have an answer, and I may not ever have a convincing one, but it's time to start digging deeper.

William Feaver. James Boswell: Unofficial War Artist. London: Muswell Press, 2007. A few months ago Ruth Boswell emailed me about the Sudeten crisis posts I wrote in connect with a film script and novel she is working on. It turns out that not only was she the producer of the classic 70s SF show The Tomorrow People which I watched as a kid but also is the widow of James Boswell, a New Zealand-born artist I blogged about when Airminded was still young. The reason I wrote about him was a claim on the Tate's website that his (very evocative) lithographs entitled 'The Fall of London' were commissioned for Frank McIlraith and Roy Connolly's Invasion From the Air (1934), which was and is my favourite knock-out blow novel. While Ruth obviously wasn't around at the time, she tells me that James later said that they had been done for a young Communist Party member, who never turned up to collect them. That doesn't sound quite like either McIlraith or Connolly, from what I know of them (Connolly was an Australian journalist and editor who worked at Labor-affiliated newspapers; McIlraith, again either from Australia or NZ, may have had connections with the left but I haven't been able to pin him down; the book doesn't read as straightforward pro-Communist propaganda, though I suppose it is anti-fascist), which I must admit is a bit disappointing. But I am consoled by Ruth's very kind gift of this lavishly-illustrated catalogue (published by her own press) of James's wartime work, done while serving in ARP and the Army in London, Scotland and the very different landscape of Iraq. His observations of service life are particularly keen, but also some quite disturbing and somewhat surreal nightmare images. There's also a bit on his prewar output for Communist newspapers, including a great one published in Left Review in April 1938 with appeasement serving as a particularly flimsy 'Chamberlain' air raid shelter, entitled 'Design for dying'.

In my previous post, I threatened more statistics about Australian mystery aircraft scares of the First World War, and here they are. What I've been doing is collating all the sightings recorded in two NAA files, MP1049/1, 1918/066 and MP367/1, 512/3/1319. The former is the Navy Office's file pertaining to 'Reports of suspicious aeroplanes, lights etc', more than a thousand pages in all, though the majority of it is composed of reports obtained by military intelligence and local police. The Navy was presumably interested because, assuming the reports were genuine, the most likely explanation was that the aircraft were flying from a German raider operating in Australian waters. The file also contains some operational orders and reports relating to the search for the presumed raider, regular reports and analyses of the sightings to date, and related correspondence. The other file contains 'Reports from 2nd M D during War Period on lights, aeroplanes, signals etc.' 2nd Military District covered NSW; presumably there were similar files from the other districts but if so I haven't found them yet (3rd MD would be the one to get, as that was Victoria where the majority of sightings took place). Some of the material in it is duplicated in the Navy's file, but there's much which isn't, including a number of pre-1918 reports.

After going through these two files, I now have a master catalogue of 256 distinct sightings, which is nearly a hundred more than are listed in the Navy's own master index. But the data is quite dirty, I've tried to cull duplicate reports, but there are probably still a few in there. The dates are sometimes vague, sometimes only at the 'about six weeks ago' level of accuracy. Sometimes a sighting is recorded only in the index (with a very brief description) and can't be found anywhere else in the file. What constitutes a 'sighting' also varies. Sometimes a number of sightings are counted as one, sometimes not: multiple reports from one location usually are, but one at the same time from an adjacent town generally are not; reports over a few days are often considered to be single sightings, but not always. I've generally tried to follow the treatment at the time, especially in the indexes and summary reports. But not all cases are listed in those, so I've had to use my own judgement. And sometimes, to be honest, I found some handwritten reports almost impossible to decipher and haven't tried to extract every last sighting from them, just the main details. For the moment that doesn't matter, I just need to be able to characterise the mystery aeroplane scare in overall terms. A few missing sightings or wrong dates here or there won't make much difference.

And it's already proven very educational. I've plotted the sightings by month above. It's clear that, apart from the main scare in 1918 (212 sightings in total -- again, don't take the numbers too literally), there were two or three much smaller outbreaks: one in October 1914 (perhaps corresponding to the departure of the first AIF troopships), one in April-May 1917, and maybe another in October 1917. But it also shows that my earlier understanding of the course of the 1918 scare itself was wrong. Based on reports published in newspapers, I thought it started in March and ended in mid-April. In fact, it was only getting started: the majority of sightings took place after the press stopped reporting the scare. The peak month was April, with 76 sightings; in May this dropped to 48, and in June and July returned to the same level as March, the first month of the scare, at about 20 sightings. The number of reports fell to below 10 for each of the remaining full months of the war, but this was still equal to or higher than any previous month before March 1918 bar October 1914. This means that my suggestion that 'press reports of mystery aeroplanes themselves helped to propagate the wave of sightings' will need to be modified: at most they can only have helped kick off the scare. Why did the press not report any sightings after mid-April? Censorship may be part of the answer; I've found one case from July where the Sydney censor's office notified the Navy Office that it had 'permanently held' one mystery aeroplane report submitted by the local stringer at Gilgandra to two Sydney dailies. There are other notices from censors but I'll have to check to see if the reports they passed on made it into the papers or not.

This plot is the same as above, except that the sightings are also plotted by whether they were interpreted as aircraft or signals (e.g. mysterious lights flashing in the hills, or from a ship out to sea, presumably to or from German spies or vessels; sometimes they were supposed to be electrical flashes from wireless stations). It shows that I'm cheating a bit: some of what I'm calling mystery aircraft were not thought of as aircraft at all, or even as airborne in any way. But only a bit: the mystery aeroplanes almost always outnumbered the mystery signals, usually very greatly when there was a scare on (with the exception of the October 1917 scare, which is revealed to be all signals, no aircraft); and when there was a mystery aeroplane scare on there was a rise in mystery signal reports too. So this suggests they are related phenomena, which makes sense -- an odd light which is on the ground or on the sea is obviously more likely to be interpreted as something which isn't an aeroplane. The clincher is the fact that the military and naval authorities at the time put them together under the one heading: they were part and parcel of the same (potential) German threat. This perhaps complicates the role of airmindedness in the scare; but on the other hand it makes it easier to relate mystery aircraft scares to other types of scares, such as the Edwardian spy mania in Britain.

Here's an initial answer to the question 'where?' I've broken down the sightings by state (and so excluded two sightings in the Navy's files not from Australia: one in New Zealand and one in Papua, effectively an Australian colony). Victoria was clearly mystery aeroplane central in 1918, with 133 sights out of the 212 recorded that year. It was probably the primary source of sightings in 1917 too, but only as a first among equals. NSW was the only other state to even come close, and even then it had less than half the number of mystery aeroplane reports that Victoria had in April 1918. South Australia and Tasmania had significant numbers of mystery aircraft reports across the war; Western Australia and Queensland very little.

Victoria's dominance is a fact which requires some explanation, and I don't know that I've got a convincing one yet. It's not simply due to population. NSW had the greatest population of any state in 1918, 1.9 million; Victoria was second with 1.4 million -- and third was Queensland with 700,000, and it had only two mystery aeroplane sightings for the whole war. Perhaps it had something to do with population density, which was about 2.5 times higher in Victoria than NSW. That is, maybe something odd in the sky had more chance of being seen over Victoria than it did over NSW. But that only works if there were multiple sightings at the same time, which was not the norm (though a couple of the hotspots where that did happen, Ouyen and Gippsland, are in Victoria). Or perhaps rumours spread more easily in more densely-populated Victoria, especially after newspapers stopped printing news of mystery aeroplanes. (Most sightings were from rural districts, but I think this was even more true of Victoria than NSW.) Perhaps Victorians felt more under threat? The temporary capital of Australia, with Parliament and the Department of Defence, was Melbourne, so it could be seen as more likely to be attacked. But that doesn't explain sightings in far-flung corners of the state and I don't think people really think like that anyway (the place where you live is obviously the centre of the universe). It's true that the German raider Wolf had mostly preyed in the seas south of Australia, so maybe the next one would too; but the next one could strike anywhere, and besides, the Wolf's seaplane had (supposedly) flown over Sydney, not Melbourne. I'm not convinced, anyway. Perhaps looking at the data more closely will throw something up. Maybe it was the weather.

Finally, this is a plot of just the sightings from March 1918 onwards, i.e. just the 1918 scare itself, but here the number of reports are daily instead of monthly. This makes it clear that the peak period of the scare was the month from mid-April to mid-May. More precisely, the scare started around 17 March, kicked into higher gear around 18 April, peaked on 29 April, and halted around 13 May (with a couple of resurgences from 31 May and 2 July lasting a week or two). What else was going on around then? I've already suggested that two press stories helped start the scare: the claim that the Wolf's seaplane had flown over Sydney the previous year (published 16 March), and news of the successful start of the German spring offensive (published 25 March, though press reports were anticipating it before then). But if my argument that the mystery aircraft sightings were caused, at least in a general way, by anxiety about the war being lost and/or Australia itself being directly threatened, then the big jump from 18 April suggests that there had been further bad news around that time.

And there was: reports of Haig's famous 'backs to the wall' order of the day were first published in the Australian press on 13 April. It's tempting to follow that logic and try to assign the peaks and troughs in the scare with the fortunes of the German offensive, but it doesn't quite work. The scare did peter out when the offensive did, by the end of July, and maybe the falling away after the end of April was because the Germans had stopped attacking for the moment. But then why did mystery aeroplanes reappear in the first week of July? That was a lull on the Western Front. There might have been some other reason for anxiety that week; I haven't looked yet. But the problem with this -- and it's a more general problem with relating specific incidents like mystery aeroplane sightings with broader trends like the course of the war -- is that I'm really just guessing here. What evidence do I have that people who saw mystery aeroplanes were particularly worried about the way the war was going? There's some evidence, but it's scanty; it's not something that police constables tended to jot down. This is one reason why I'm attempting, in a small way, a comparative study similar scares in other places and other times: the fear of war, of attack, of spying is common to many of them, and teasing out the similarities as well as the differences between these defence scares will, I hope, strengthen my argument. Or I could just end up arguing in circles.

Like Gaul and probably some other things, my mystery aeroplanes paper will be divided into three parts:

1. An overview of the 1918 Australian mystery aeroplane scare itself.
2. The immediate historical context which helps explain the scare, namely the threats from German raiders and of Allied defeat.
3. The bigger picture into which the scare fits, namely other mystery aircraft waves before and since, in Australia and elsewhere.

That's a fair bit to do in limited space (the paper is 20 minutes long with 10 minutes for questions; the formal version no more than 8000 words including references) so I need to have a thorough understanding of my material: what is essential and needs to be included and what is not-essential and should be left out.

So what material do I have? There are next to no secondary sources on the scare that I'm aware of, apart from passing references; conversely, the great majority of my primary sources relate to it. I first came across the scare in Australian and New Zealand newspapers from March-April 1918, and that is certainly a key aspect as I'll be arguing that press reports of mystery aeroplanes themselves helped to propagate the wave of sightings. I'll probably have another look through Trove to see if there's anything I've missed or has been digitised since I last looked. Really, though, I've already got enough here to work with.

But the press reports are only the tip of the iceberg. I've looked through domestic military intelligence files on 'Reports of suspicious aeroplanes, lights etc' held by the National Archives of Australia and these include very many more mystery aeroplane reports than were ever reported in the press. (Including Smithy's sighting.) A hand-written index, which looks like it was compiled by 3rd Military District (i.e. Victoria) late in the scare, in NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/66 lists 152 nationwide for the whole war.¹ Of these, 135 took place in 1918 (the majority in March and April but with a substantial number in May and June and only gradually tailing off towards the Armistice) and of these, 91 were from Victoria. (Expect more statistics in future posts.) The files themselves consist of letters from concerned citizens reporting their sightings, reports on local police investigations of sightings and suspects, press clippings (usually passed on from the censor), naval and military intelligence analyses, and copies of official correspondence regarding air-sea searches for raiders. There's also a separate file, NAA: MP367/1, 512/3/1319, which has reports just from 2nd Military District (i.e. NSW). I haven't compared this with NAA: MP1049/1, 1918/66 yet but it looks like it has some sightings which didn't make it to the master file. Not that it's necessary to get every last detail down, of course. The big picture is more important.

That brings me to the contextual section of the talk/paper. In terms of primary sources, the newspapers and military intelligence files give excellent clues as to how the mystery aeroplanes were interpreted (i.e. as German aircraft operating from raiders off the coast or from inland locations). I would also like to have a look at any NAA files from the Council of Defence (roughly the equivalent of the Committee of Imperial Defence in Britain) to see if it discussed the mystery aircraft and raider threat. But at this point I need to also need to dig into the secondary literature, so I can understand the Australian political and social context. Especially since Australian history is not my thing! So for example I'm currently reading John McQuilton's Rural Australia and the Great War: From Tarrawingee to Tangambalanga (Carlton South: Melbourne University Press, 2011), which I'm finding very useful (though unfortunately the region of Victoria it focuses on seems to have missed out on mystery aeroplanes!) Of course, there is plenty of work I can tap into on the military and naval situation, so that's fine.

The third part is in some ways the trickiest. I want to tie this scare into mystery aircraft scares in other countries (as well as invasion and spy scares). But if I'm not expert in Australian history, still less am I expert in American, New Zealand, Canadian, South African, Russian, Romanian, Norwegian, Swedish... There is some excellent work on national airmindedness to draw upon, that's no problem; but unfortunately good, academic secondary sources on the scares themselves are scarce (I hope this is just my ignorance speaking but I fear not). There are some for the 1909 and 1913 British phantom airship waves; a couple of articles on the 1897 mystery airship wave in America. The other scares I know of don't rate even that much, apart from discussions in ufological and sceptical literature. I could cite some primary sources, particularly where English is the relevant language; but for this type of comparative work (and given the word limit) having access to reliable surveys would be much better. I'll seek out secondary literature but fear I will have to resort to some primary sources here, at least to show that these scares happened. I may well end up focusing on the British parallels, as it's what I know best and seems to be the best documented, and just gesture towards the other scares. I can't do everything in this paper, after all!

1. The numbered entries actually go up to 153, but the one corresponding to 25 has only been pencilled in: it looks like it reads 'Eyres [sic] Peninsula (Where next?)' which is a nice indication of how perplexing the reports must have been to the official mind.

My abstract for the Australian Historical Association's 31st Annual Conference, to be held in Adelaide this July, has been accepted. The title and abstract are as follows:

Dreaming war: airmindedness and the Australian defence panic of 1918

Between March and June 1918, Australian newspapers, police forces and military intelligence units were deluged with hundreds of reports of mysterious aeroplanes. They were seen in every state, mostly at night, by men and women, young and old, civilians and soldiers. As there were only a tiny number of aircraft operating in Australia, the sightings were presumed to be German aircraft, perhaps flown from unknown merchant raiders operating in Australian waters or by foreign spies working against Australia. The reports were taken seriously, but investigations by the authorities eventually found nothing to substantiate them. The mystery aeroplanes were phantoms.

Australia had been at war for more than three years. But it was a nation both divided and defenceless. It had gone through two bitterly-fought conscription referenda, and appeared to be threatened from within by immigrants, the Irish and the Wobblies. The vast majority of its military forces were deployed overseas, with little more than poorly-equipped training cadres remaining at home. In March 1918, newspapers carried reports that the German merchant cruiser Wolf, which had been raiding Australian waters the previous year, had flown its seaplane over Sydney unopposed and undetected. A few days later, Germany's Spring Offensive opened, nearly breaking the Allied lines for the first time since 1914. The mystery aeroplanes resulted from a new perception that Australia was directly threatened and that the war could be lost.

In this paper I will discuss what this previously obscure episode reveals about the state of mind of the Australian people after nearly four years of total war. I will compare it with other mystery aircraft panics which preceded and followed it, both in Australia and elsewhere. Finally, I will explore what these transnational phenomena tell us about early airmindedness, or the cultural responses to the coming of flight.

Much more briefly, I'll be looking at the 1918 Australian mystery aircraft scare and trying to place it into the context of what was happening at the time, both domestically and overseas, and using it as a case study to probe mystery aircraft panics more generally and what they say about airmindedness. This is the next phase of my grand plan, i.e. blog -> talk -> publish. I've already blogged about this topic a number of times; expect to see a good deal more about it over the next couple of months.

This is good/exciting and bad/scary for a number of reasons. It's good/exciting because it's the first time I'll be talking (and hopefully publishing) about mystery aircraft, despite it being a major research obsession of mine for more than a decade now. Ditto for airmindedness, despite the name of this blog. It's also good/exciting because I've been awarded an AHA/CAL Travel and Writing Bursary, which includes entry into a workshop and mentoring programme. Which is also bad/scary: that means that instead of writing my paper the night before, as is the time-honoured tradition, I have to have written a formal version two weeks beforehand. So I'm going to be busy. And the other bad/scary thing is: I'm doing Australian history! I must be crazy.

John Mueller. Atomic Obsession: Nuclear Alarmism from Hiroshima to al-Qaeda. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. I added this book to my bibliography just this week, tagged 'get'; and then found a very reasonably-priced paperback while browsing in a bookshop. Who am I to argue with fate? There's no doubt that there's a lot of nuclear alarmism about but I wonder if he's talking it too far: one chapter argues that nuclear weapons have only had a 'modest influence on history' and if that's the case, why bother writing a book about it? Then again as a recent discussion here has confirmed I have no business forming first impressions of books without having read every last word...

Keith Robbins. Politicians, Diplomacy and War in Modern British History. London and Rio Grande: Hambledon Press, 1994. Another serendipitous and even cheaper find. A collection of essays, many previously published in fairly obscure places, mostly on Victorian and Edwardian diplomacy with a couple each on the First World War and interwar periods. The most interesting ones for me are three on foreign policy and public opinion and/or the press and/or pressure groups, and one entitled 'Britain in the summer of 1914'. Bonus: the cover has a photo of Sir Edward Grey with a bird on his head.

So in case it isn't obvious by now, my most recent bout of post-blogging covered the period of the Baedeker Blitz, a series of Luftwaffe raids against English cities (unlike in the Blitz proper, there were no targets in Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland) between 23 April and 3 May 1942. The individual blitzes were:

23 April: Exeter
24 April: Exeter
25 April: Bath
26 April: Bath
27 April: Norwich
29 April: Norwich and York
3 May: Exeter

These were reprisals in return for RAF raids on Lübeck and later also Rostock. (There was a second phase from 31 May to 6 June 1942, three raids on Canterbury in response to the thousand bomber raid on Cologne, which I might or might not get around to doing in a few weeks' time.) In addition, there were smaller snap raids by fighter-bombers nipping across the Channel, though these don't seem to have been considered part of the Baedeker raids by the press.

The reason they were called Baedeker raids is that, for a time at least, German propaganda openly acknowledged that the Luftwaffe was choosing its targets for their cultural value (supposedly from the German Baedeker travel guides), not because they were in any sense legitimate military or industrial objectives: that is, their declared purpose was revenge and terror.¹ None of the cities today has a population above 200,000, so they were more Coventrys than Guernicas or Londons: important provincial centres, neither giant metropolises or small towns. And like Coventry, they all possessed beautiful old buildings: especially the cathedrals of Exeter, York and Norwich, and the Roman baths and Georgian architecture of Bath. Unlike Coventry, however, the most precious ancient monuments were largely spared destruction (as I can attest from my own visits to York and Exeter). The losses were still grievous, of course: the chapel of St James at Exeter; York's Guildhall; the Assembly Rooms in Bath. But most of the physical damage was caused to the less aesthetically pleasing (though more useful) commercial and residential districts, and to humans: more than 1600 people were killed in total, at least 400 of them in Bath alone, and 50,000 houses destroyed. Britain's civil defence apparatus had been overhauled since the Blitz just under a year earlier, especially the fire services which were now organised nationally, and this was their first test. On the whole they seem to have performed very well, though by the end of the Baedeker raids there was some criticism of post-raid welfare services in Exeter. Whatever propaganda value the raids may have had in Germany itself, they did nothing to stop Bomber Command's attempts to burn out German cities, regardless of their historical interest.

So what have I learned, if anything, from this exercise? The most interesting aspect for me was not the German raids on Britain but the British raids on Germany. These featured prominently in the press during the Blitz too, but there are differences now. The intensity and scale of attack now possible appears to have increased since the spring of 1941: there was nothing like the four consecutive nights of attacks on Rostock then. True, back in the Blitz period, Bomber Command was also making claims for heavy damage to German cities, but now the evidence it can provide is more specific and, at least superficially, more compelling: photographs of roofless buildings taken by RAF aircraft, stories of crowds of refugees sourced from German press and radio. The Air Ministry and the Ministry of Information seem to have worked out how to keep Bomber Command's activities in the public eye, even when it wasn't doing anything spectacular. First there comes news of the raid itself, often with aircrew testimony as to its effectiveness; then a few days later, there are reports based on post-raid reconnaissance which reinforce the message that heavy damage was done; then weeks afterward there are medal investiture ceremonies at the Palace, perhaps with more firsthand accounts from the raid's heroes. And these stages in the raid news cycle overlap and reinforce each other: in the period I've looked at here, there were first reports of raids on Rostock, Cologne, Kiel, Trondheim, Paris, and Hamburg (as well as Fighter and Coastal Command attacks on targets in northern France and in Norway); reconnaissance reports on the results of the Lübeck and Rostock raids; a swag of medals for the men of the daring low-level Augsburg, raid. In this way, no reader could doubt that Bomber Command was hitting Germany hard and doing so almost nightly.

And that was still true, despite the widening of the war since May 1941. I found these posts much harder to write than the ones during the Blitz, because there's so much more going on. Back then the Blitz itself was the biggest thing going, with only occasional diversions provided by invasions of Dakar or news from the United States. Since then, Germany has invaded Russia (never the Soviet Union) and Japan has attacked and mostly conquered British, American and Dutch possessions in south-east Asia and the Pacific. There's simply a lot more war going on now and it's hard to cover everything, even if in this particular period only Burma is seeing much ground combat. (Which helps explain why it is getting so many headlines, despite its later and current perception as a 'forgotten war'.) The battles at the front intersect with the political infighting behind the lines too, which gives complex but previously obscure (at least for British readers and for me) issues sudden importance. The failure of Sir Stafford Cripps' mission to India, for example, was something I almost completely failed to mention, despite the issue of Indian independence being discussed almost every day (by the 'quality' newspapers anyway); and this problem was clearly lent greater urgency by the approach of Japanese armies to the gates of Bengal.

The situation in Russia is even more critical, even though it is currently static as both armies await the end of General Mud. There's a widespread perception evident in the press that Russia is the decisive front of the war and 1942 the decisive year. If Stalin's armies can hold out, then that should be enough to ensure eventual victory for the Allies by giving time for both the Russian and American juggernauts to get up to speed. If, on the other hand, Russia is conquered or negotiates a separate peace, then Germany can devote all its resources to defending Europe against Britain and America. These potential consequences rarely seem to be voiced so directly. The urgency shows in the repeated references to a second front: demands that Britain open a second front by landing on the Continent; hopes that it was preparing the way for a second front through bomber and commando raids, tying down German forces which could be used against Russia; claims that it was already effectively fighting a second front by bombing and destroying Germany's warfighting capacity. Here again the RAF is to the fore. Not only is it the only service striking back at the enemy on a large scale, it's the only one which hasn't failed spectacularly since the end of the Blitz (with the possible exception of the Channel Dash) -- think the fall of Crete, the loss of the mighty Hood, Rommel's victories, the loss of Force Z, the fall of Singapore, now the retreat from Burma. This point of the war was near to Britain's nadir (which perhaps helps explain the invasion plays and mock fifth columnists) and even with the recognition that a landing on the Continent was probably going to be required, Bomber Command was currently the best weapon it had and the only way it could help relieve Russia's burden of the fighting.

And what of the Baedeker raids themselves? How did the press treat them? It's interesting that they were never considered the most important news of the day by any of the newspapers I've been using (The Times, Manchester Guardian, Daily Express, Daily Mirror, Yorkshire Post and the Observer). It's not that they didn't devote space to it -- sometimes the coverage was quite substantial -- it's just that there was always something more important. That wasn't the case during the Blitz (though that wasn't always the top story either). It could be that this reflects a London bias, but even the Yorkshire Post gave the impending fall of Lashio precedence over the York blitz. While leader writers and air correspondents did discuss the return of German bombing, and sometimes predicted (wrongly, as we now know) that it was something people would have to get used to again, there's no sense at all that this is really a big deal. The destruction is lamentable and lamented, of course, but it's not on the scale of the Blitz and both people and civil defence appear to be taking it (mostly). That the Luftwaffe has resorted to mere reprisals, instead of a considered strategy, is taken rather as a sign that Bomber Command is doing its job and should continue to do so. Similarly, unlike the Blitz there is little or no published correspondence from readers demanding reprisal bombing against German civilians. That could be for a number of reasons: there are fewer or no letters being printed in each newspaper anyway, probably due to restricted newsprint allowances (the poor old Express is down to just four pages), and these things fluctuate for reasons that are not obvious (it could be that a debate flared up the day after I stopped post-blogging). But I would guess there is no demand for reprisals because at this point in time what Bomber Command is doing looks very like reprisal bombing anyway. Compare Rostock and York, with roughly the same population. However much York suffered it was not enough to cause the evacuation of most of the population, which is what happened to Rostock.² People could afford to be so relaxed about the Baedeker blitz because Britain was winning the bomber war.

1. Possibly a bit of an own goal; I forgot to note this in my posts but after the last Exeter raid the Germans were describing it as a 'harbour town' and 'important traffic junction'; The Times, 5 May 1942, 5.
2. Interestingly, the British press at the time only claimed that most of the city's 116,000 people were evacuated by the government, though sometimes headlines hinted that they were panicked; but Jörg Friedrich says that '150,000 people fled wildly': Jörg Friedrich, The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945 (New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2006), 158.

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the Baedeker Blitz. See here for an introduction to the series.

]]> http://airminded.org/2012/05/09/post-blogging-the-baedeker-blitz-conclusion/feed/ 6 http://airminded.org/2012/05/09/post-blogging-the-baedeker-blitz-conclusion/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=post-blogging-the-baedeker-blitz-conclusion http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/airminded/~3/fkjmSjyXtGc/ http://airminded.org/2012/05/05/tuesday-5-may-1942/#comments Sat, 05 May 2012 10:25:03 +0000 Brett Holman http://airminded.org/?p=9524

Some good news from Burma, or at least less bad than usual. The Yorkshire Post reports that, although still retreating, Allied forces 'have successfully evaded the enemy attempt to cut them off in the Mandalay area' (1). The British have been divided from the Chinese, however, with the former retreating up the Chindwin and the latter up the Irrawaddy. The paper's military correspondent gives credit to General Alexander's 'skilful manœuvring' in avoiding encirclement, but also praises the 'valour' of Chinese soldiers after the fall of Lashio, who 'got across the path of the [Japanese] armoured brigade and even drove its tanks back with losses' and thereby gave the British time to make good their retreat. But the task is before Alexander now, 'one of the hardest ever set before a commander', to retire northwest without being engaged by the Japanese, to link up again with Chinese forces in the north, and 'to avoid being driven on India'. The Manchester Guardian's first leading article today admits that 'Japan's campaign in Burma is now almost won', at least 'the fine delaying actions fought by our troops have given India a previous four months for making ready' (4).

Moving in the same direction as Alexander's army are Indian refugees. Between 250,000 and 300,000 people, about a quarter of the prewar population of Indian immigrants, have now arrived in India, and are still arriving at the rate of 2000 a day. According to the Guardian (6),

The whole organisation for the reception and dispersal of evacuees is non-racial in character. On the Indian side of the land border the elaborate arrangements made in organising food, water, and shelter along a difficult road were completed in a remarkably short time. Under the present arrangements no refugee need pay for anything from the moment he reaches Tamu, on the border, until he reaches the railhead in India.

In fact the Indian government has suffered accusations of 'racial discrimination and general inefficiency' in its handling of the refugee problem, from among others the Congress party. In its defence, the Overseas Department pointed out the huge scale of the problem and explained how cholera had threatened the evacuation route, and only 'drastic medical measures brought it under control'. But Congress itself is not immune to criticism. One of its key figures, Rajagopalachari, has resigned from the Congress Working Committee because it rejected his proposal that Congress 'acknowledge the claim of the Moslem League to separation'; in the words of The Times 'the most serious breach that has been made in the solidarity of Congress in recent years' (4). The same committee's support of 'non-violent con-cooperation' has led to concerns in the United States about 'the advantage [...] it may give to Japanese propaganda, not only in India but elsewhere in the Orient'. One suggestion is that 'a Pacific Charter' be drawn up (not withstanding the fact that India is nowhere near the Pacific!), apparently some sort of commitment to greater independence after the war since the reference follows a comment that 'the actions of the Japanese are in themselves a denial of the pretence of a war of "Asiatic liberation"'.

Where Japan will attack next is the question. The Yorkshire Post's New Delhi correspondent suggests it is unlikely that it will continue pressing overland in Burma, since 'the Japanese have rarely shown themselves in favour of long-strung-out land battles' (1). More likely it will turn to the sea. (Early this morning 'a combined British naval and military force' arrived off Madagascar 'to forestall a Japanese move', so it probably won't be there.) It could try 'to bypass India and to head for the Persian Gulf'; perhaps via Ceylon, which is 'determined to become another Malta'. But Australians in India all seem to agree that Japan will 'concentrate all available forces [...] for a full-scale attack upon Australia':

The attack upon Townsville [sic] is read as an augury of this. It is thought to indicate a projected land invasion.

That opinion is shared in Australia itself, according to the paper's 'Special Correspondent with General MacArthur' (3). In the six months since Pearl Harbor 'she has achieved miracles', not only in raising armies but in making 'changes in the social and economic order in the cause of total war which anyone who knew this tough and politically minded people before the war would find almost incredible'. For example, Australia has 'Ruthlessly streamlined her economic system, thus following Britain's example' in finding labour for factory work; 'Reduced her seven State Governments factually, if not theoretically, to one'; laid the foundations for a postwar economy 'comparable to that of Britain and America, despite her infinitely smaller population'; and

Finally, and this is an historic move, she has turned her thoughts and plans from the coasts which are highly vulnerable to enemy air and sea attack, and begun taming the interior. Much of this country can only be compared which such areas as the Sahara and Gobi Deserts. She has also found quite unexpected riches in her deserts.

While 'Australia is making the same mistakes as Britain', with 'the same wrangling among the Government departments, and the same threat of black markets',

if this country survives something new is coming out of all this. It will be similar perhaps to Britain's social revolution, yet in many ways it will be characteristically Australian. Rightly or wrongly, Australians believe that they will either go under or become a real nation, and they do not mean to go under.

I wonder how that's going to turn out...

After a lull of a few days, the bomber war has started up again, with a German raid on Exeter and a British raid on Hamburg. Exeter was the first city to be attacked in the Baedeker raids, though little about it reached the press at the time. There's no denying it this time: as the Daily Mirror has it (5),

7 HUNS DOWN IN 3RD TERROR RAID ON EXETER

That's an impressive result for the defenders, since there were only about thirty attacking aircraft. (Two were accounted for over France by Squadron Leader J. A. F. MacLachlan, DFC, who lost his arm flying in defence of Malta and now uses an 'attachment' to help fly his fighter: 'Flying with this new gadget is a piece of cake', 2.) The losses appear to have forced new tactics upon the Luftwaffe, as 'FOR the first time, fighters escorted night bombers', in 'short and fairly intense' raids on two (unidentified) south coast towns last night (Daily Express, 1). But regardless, 'The loss of life is likely to be heavier than in the earlier attacks' (Mirror, 5).

Waves of raiders swept low over the city machine-gunning streets. A number of people were killed. 'Military objectives' included a hospital and almshouses. At least five churches were destroyed, as well as a girls' school and a college. The shopping centre suffered severe damage.

Exeter took it: 'eye-witnesses said that they had never seen people people stand up to a blitz more splendidly', and firefighters and ARP workers all did their part. But the Daily Express's reporter in Exeter has written a blistering attack on the 'muddle' exhibited by the city's post-raid welfare services (4):

NO BUSES FOR EXETER VICTIMS
100 homeless 'forgotten' in rest centre

As of last night, 'NUMBERS of homeless in Exeter, including aged invalids and babies' were still waiting for the promised buses to take them to reception areas out of the city. 'Many had been waiting since dawn', and had arrived in their nightclothes and barefoot. The WVS and NFS had fed and clothed them, 'But at the central relief office I found they knew nothing about this rest centre, and did not know anyone was there'.

At another rest centre people were fed and told to go to the central office a mile and a half away if they wanted to be evacuated.

Some were so old and tired that they sat and slept on benches. Some women cried from exhaustion, but most of the people, even the children, endured muddle and delay stoically.

For its part, on Sunday night Bomber Command attacked the docks and shipyards of Hamburg, though reports in the press are strangely subdued, giving little more than a description of the value of the targets, an account of the flak and fighter defences, and the assertion that the RAF 'left great fires glowing through the cloud' (The Times, 4). For once, much more prominence is given to Coastal Command, which 'had a successful night' over Norway. For example,

An Australian squadron flying Hampdens attacked the aerodrome, troop barracks, and a strongpoint near Kristiansand, on the southern tip of Norway, with high-explosive and incendiary bombs. A few moments after bombs had been dropped in some woods near the barracks pilots saw a succession of green, blue and white flashes, suggesting that an ammunition dump had been hit, and big fires broke out. The next aircraft dropped a stick of bombs right across the barrack block.

Other targets bombed include another aerodrome, another strongpoint, and two 'medium-sized enemy merchant ships lying side by side in a narrow fjord, apparently refuelling'. Coastal Command suffered no losses; Bomber Command lost five aircraft.

The air correspondent for the Yorkshire Post writes that 'there is this contest in bombing' between Britain and Germany, which 'bears some resemblance to that of 1940 with the roles reversed':

At that time the R.A.F. would probably have preferred to make few or no bombing replies to the heavy and sustained German raiding. There was no illusion in the Service, which knew it was yet ready to strike hard at Germany with the bomb.

But the scale of the German raids was such that it demanded some reply by the R.A.F. The consequence was that, with the relatively small forces then available, counter-attacks were made. They were on a comparatively small scale, but they served to show that we were not entirely incapable of hitting back.

Now it is Germany which is being bombed heavily, and which needs to show it is striking back. In fact, this contest will probably escalate:

we must not suppose that we are to-day engaged in air warfare on the largest possible scale. It will certainly increase in intensity and probably soon. The Germans will certainly contrive to throw more bombers into their attacks on this country. The R.A.F. will soon be reinforced -- in accordance with the undertaking of General Marshall -- by units of the United States Army Air Forces working from bases in Britain.

Even if Germany were to redeploy bombers from Russia and Italy 'in order to strike at hated Britain', they are reaching 'the limit of their air power, whereas the United Nations are now coming to the point of greatest augmentation'.

Unless all calculations are proved false; unless every level of computation of productive power and productive resources is wrong, the United Nations should be able to bomb Germany before this autumn is out on a scale never before contemplated; on a scale which will make the German attacks on this country in 1940 and 1941 look comparatively small.

Finally, the Express has an update on the fortunes of 'Storm Troopers Over Perivale', the 'H.G.s invasion play'. The playwright and producer, P. B. Baker, says it has played to 'packed houses' in Basingstoke since the Express reviewed it, and has made more than £100, which isn't bad on a £20 investment. And the future looks bright. The play will have two performances at the Aldershot Theatre Royal next month, and may be staged by 'Army units in Blackpool'. More than that, London beckons: 'Mr. Clifford Hamilton, manager of the original "Journey's End" company [...] was impressed with its qualities and hopes it will be possible to stage the play commercially'.

This post is part of an experiment in post-blogging the Battle of Britain, the Blitz and the Baedeker Blitz. See here for an introduction to the series.

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