Brett Holman

In the early twentieth century, the new technology of flight changed warfare irrevocably, not only on the battlefield, but also on the home front. As prophesied before 1914, Britain in the First World War was effectively no longer an island, with its cities attacked by Zeppelin airships and Gotha bombers in one of the first strategic bombing campaigns. Drawing on prewar ideas about the fragility of modern industrial civilization, some writers now began to argue that the main strategic risk to Britain was not invasion or blockade, but the possibility of a sudden and intense aerial bombardment of London and other cities, which would cause tremendous destruction and massive casualties. The nation would be shattered in a matter of days or weeks, before it could fully mobilize for war. Defeat, decline, and perhaps even extinction, would follow. This theory of the knock-out blow from the air solidified into a consensus during the 1920s and by the 1930s had largely become an orthodoxy, accepted by pacifists and militarists alike. But the devastation feared in 1938 during the Munich Crisis, when gas masks were distributed and hundreds of thousands fled London, was far in excess of the damage wrought by the Luftwaffe during the Blitz in 1940 and 1941, as terrible as that was. The knock-out blow, then, was a myth.

But it was a myth with consequences. For the first time, The Next War in the Air reconstructs the concept of the knock-out blow as it was articulated in the public sphere, the reasons why it came to be so widely accepted by both experts and non-experts, and the way it shaped the responses of the British public to some of the great issues facing them in the 1930s, from pacifism to fascism. Drawing on both archival documents and fictional and non-fictional publications from the period between 1908, when aviation was first perceived as a threat to British security, and 1941, when the Blitz ended, and it became clear that no knock-out blow was coming, The Next War in the Air provides a fascinating insight into the origins and evolution of this important cultural and intellectual phenomenon, Britain's fear of the bomber.

Contents: Introduction; Part I Threats: Constructing the knock-out blow, 1908-1931;The bomber ascendant, 1932-1941. Part II Responses: Living with the bomber: adaptation; The only defence is in offence: resistance; Wings over the world: negotiation. Part III Crises: Defence panics and air panics; The German air menace: 1913, 1922 and 1935; Barcelona, Canton and London: 1938; The Battles of London: 1917 and 1940; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

This chapter argues that aerial theatre, in the form of annual air displays at Hendon and on Empire Air Day, was used by the Royal Air Force (RAF) to generate a sensationally modern image of technological sublimity through violent spectacles of aerial warfare, including the performance of mock air raids. This was amplified by a second, incidental kind of aerial theatre, performed as part of Air Defence of Great Britain (ADGB) exercises and air raid precautions (ARP) drills in the form of mock air raids on British cities. These attracted curious and even excited audiences, conscious that they might be seeing previews of their own deaths. In combining spectre and spectacle, the RAF’s mock air raids underscore the ambivalent nature of airmindedness in interwar Britain.

First paragraph: Objectively, Germany posed little direct threat to Australia and New Zealand during the Great War: it was, after all, on the opposite side of the planet. Subjectively, however, it was a different matter. In the public imagination, the two dominions were saturated with German spies, who were passing information back to the Fatherland, carrying out acts of sabotage and subverting the loyalty of ‘British’ Australians and New Zealanders through pacifist and socialist propaganda. This fear of the ‘enemy within the gates’, in historian Ernest Scott’s phrase, is well known. But the fear of the enemy at the gates, the fear of external attack, is not. While the spectre of a German invasion and occupation was frequently employed for propaganda purposes in both Australia and New Zealand during the war, it is not clear how many people saw this as a realistic threat. Perhaps surprisingly, though, at least by the last year of the war, the main danger was perceived to come not on land or from the sea—at least not directly— but from the air. The little-known mystery aeroplane panic of 1918 is the most extreme example of this fear. The hundreds of reports received by the press and the authorities in Australia and, to a lesser extent, New Zealand, of otherwise unexplainable aircraft flying over widely separated parts of both countries were widely interpreted as being German in origin, operating from naval raiders off the coast or from secret bases inland. The reports were spurious, misperceptions or hoaxes, but both governments took them seriously; Australia, at least, undertook substantial defensive precautions as a result, turning what otherwise would have been a minor scare into a major panic.

In contrast to William Le Queux's pre-1914 novels about German spies and invasion, his wartime writing is much less well known. Analysis of a number of his works, predominantly non-fictional, written between 1914 and 1918 shows that he modified his perception of the threat posed by Germany in two ways. Firstly, because of the lack of a German naval invasion, he began to emphasise the more plausible danger of aerial attack. Secondly, because of the incompetent handling of the British war effort, he began to believe that an 'Invisible Hand' was responsible, consisting primarily of naturalised Germans. Switching form from fiction to non-fiction made his writing more persuasive, but he was not able to sustain this and he ended the war with less influence than he began it.

The annual Royal Air Force Display at Hendon was a hugely popular form of aerial theatre, with attendance peaking at 195,000. Most discussions of Hendon have understood it as 'a manifestation of popular imperialism', focusing on the climactic set-pieces which portrayed the bombing of a Middle Eastern village or desert fortress. However, scenarios of this kind were a small minority of Hendon’s set-pieces: most depicted warfare against other industrialised states. Hendon should rather be seen as an attempt to persuade spectators that future wars could be won through the use of airpower rather than large armies or expensive navies.

Aerial theatre, the use of aviation spectacle to project images of future warfare, national power and technological prowess, was a key method for creating an airminded public in the early twentieth century. The most significant and influential form of aerial theatre in interwar Britain was the Royal Air Force Display at Hendon, in which military aircraft put on impressive flying performances before large crowds, including an elaborate set-piece acting out a battle scenario with an imaginary enemy. Hendon was emulated by other air displays in Britain and in Australia, even civilian ones. Indeed, the inability of the much smaller Royal Australian Air Force to regularly project spectacle on the scale of Hendon across a much larger nation created a gap which civilian aviation organisations then tried to fill. Hendon thus helped to propagate a militarised civilian aerial theatre, and hence airmindedness, in both Britain and Australia.

This article explores the false rumours of secret German gun platforms and Zeppelin bases which swept Britain in the early months of the First World War and climaxed with the fall of Antwerp in October 1914, so persistently that they were repeatedly investigated by both the police and the military. They were the latest manifestation of a long-standing myth-complex around the threatening figure of an enemy within. They also represent an important moment in the British people's imaginative transition between the cautious optimism of the early months and the increasingly obvious likelihood of a long, total war.

In late 1912 and early 1913, people all over Britain reported seeing airships in the night sky, yet there were none. It was widely assumed that these 'phantom airships' were German Zeppelins, testing British defenses in preparation for the next war. The public and press responses to the phantom airship sightings provide a glimpse of the way that aerial warfare was understood before it was ever experienced in Britain. Conservative newspapers and patriotic leagues used the sightings to argue for a massive expansion of Britain’s aerial forces, which were perceived to be completely out-classed by Germany’s in both number and power. In many ways this airship panic was analogous to the much better known 1909 dreadnought panic. The result was the perfect Edwardian panic: the simultaneous culmination of older fears about Germany and the threat of espionage, invasion, and, above all, the loss of Britain’s naval superiority. But, in reality, there was little understanding about the way that Zeppelins would be used against Britain in the First World War—not to attack its arsenals and dockyards, but to bomb its cities.

Aerial bombardment was widely believed to pose an existential threat to Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. An important but neglected reason for this was the danger from civilian airliners converted into makeshift bombers, the so-called ‘commercial bomber’: an idea which arose in Britain late in the First World War. If true, this meant that even a disarmed Germany could potentially attack Britain with a large bomber force thanks to its successful civil aviation industry. By the early 1930s the commercial bomber concept appeared widely in British airpower discourse. Proponents of both disarmament and rearmament used, in different ways and with varying success, the threat of the commercial bomber to advance their respective causes. Despite the technical weakness of the arguments for convertibility, rhetoric about the commercial bomber subsided only after rearmament had begun in earnest in 1935 and they became irrelevant next to the growth in numbers of purpose-built bombers. While the commercial bomber was in fact a mirage, its effects on the disarmament and rearmament debates were real.

Numerous false sightings of mysterious aeroplanes, thought to be German and hostile, were reported by ordinary people around Australia in the Autumn of 1918. These reports were investigated by defence authorities, who initiated a maximum effort to find the merchant raiders presumed to be the source of the aeroplanes. The scare is interpreted in the context of reports that a German seaplane had flown over Sydney in 1917; fears that the German offensive in France would lead to an Allied defeat; wartime paranoia about German subversion; and the growth of negative airmindedness thanks to the wartime press.

In Britain, popular memory of the Blitz celebrates civilian resistance to the German bombing of London and other cities, emphasising positive values such as stoicism, humour and mutual aid. This 'Blitz spirit' is still called to mind during times of national crisis, for example in response to the July 2005 terrorist bombings in London. But the memory of such passive and defensive traits obscures the degree to which British civilian morale in 1940 depended on the belief that if Britain had to 'take it', then Germany was taking it as hard or harder. As the Blitz mounted in intensity, Home Intelligence reports and newspaper letter columns featured calls for heavier reprisals against German cities. That the RAF's bombing efforts over Germany at this time were in fact wildly inaccurate and largely ineffective is beside the point: nobody in Britain was aware of this yet. The reprisals debate was the logical legacy of prewar assumptions about the overwhelming power of bombing; it has been forgotten
because it contradicts the myth of the Blitz.

The British fear of bombing in the early twentieth century has aptly been termed ‘the shadow of the bomber’. But the processes by which the public learned about the danger of bombing are poorly understood. This paper proposes that the press was the primary source of information about the threat, and examines a formative period in the evolution of public concern about airpower — the so-called air panic of 1935 — during which German rearmament was revealed and large-scale RAF expansion undertaken in response. A proposed air pact between the Locarno powers enabled a shift from support of disarmament to rearmament by newspapers on the right, while simultaneously supporting collective security. Paradoxically, after initially supporting the air pact, the left-wing press and its readers began to have doubts, for the same reason: the need to support collective security. This episode sheds new light on Britain’s early rearmament, and how the government was able to undertake it, despite the widespread feelings in the electorate in favour of disarmament.

This paper argues that the remarkably widespread enthusiasm in Britain after 1918 for an international air force was due to a confluence of two factors: the long-standing liberal belief that international law could prevent war, and the emergence of a new theory of warfare which claimed that the bomber was a weapon which could not be defended against. The origins of the international air force concept in the 1920s, its apogee in the 1930s, and its decline (and revival) in the Second World War are examined, showing that its fortunes rose and fell with internationalism and the knock-out blow.

During the First World War, several writers began to argue that the main strategic risk to Britain was the possibility of a sudden, intense aerial bombardment of its cities, which would cause tremendous destruction and large numbers of casualties. The nation would be knocked-out of the war very quickly, in a matter of days or weeks, before it could fully realise its military potential. The theory of the knock-out blow solidified into a consensus during the 1920s and by the 1930s had almost become an orthodoxy, accepted by pacifists and militarists alike.

My thesis examines the concept of the knock-out blow as it was articulated in the public sphere, the reasons why it came to be so widely accepted in public life, and the way it shaped the responses of the British public to the great issues facing them in the 1930s: armaments and appeasement, war or peace. It mainly draws on published, but little examined, sources -- books, journals, newspapers -- produced in the period between 1908 (when aviation was first perceived as a threat to British security) and 1941 (when the Blitz ended, and it was obvious that no knock-out blow was coming). And it shows how, after having been taught to fear the bomber as the bringer of destruction to all they knew and held dear, the British people were instead taught to regard it as their best hope for victory.

ABSTRACT We present the results of a spectroscopic survey of 675 bright ð16. 5, bJ, 18Þ galaxies in a 68 field centred on the Fornax cluster with the FLAIR-II spectrograph on the UK Schmidt Telescope. Three galaxy samples were observed: compact galaxies to search for new blue compact dwarfs, candidate M 32-like compact dwarf ellipticals, and a subset of the brightest known cluster members in order to study the cluster dynamics. We measured redshifts for 516 galaxies, of which 108 were members of the Fornax Cluster.

The Second Stromlo Symposium: The Nature of Elliptical Galaxies ASP Conference Series, Vol. 116, 1997 M. Arnaboldi, GS Da Co8ta and P. Saha (eds.) The Nature of Dwarf Ellipticals in Virgo and Fornax Michael J. Drinkwater't, Michael D. Gregg2 & Brett A. Holman3 `Anglo-Australian Observatory, Australia 2Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, USA ~ University of Melbourne, Australia Abstract: We have made large spectroscopic surveys of both the Virgo and Fornax clusters to search for blue compact dwarf (BCD) and compact dwarf elliptical (CdE ...

This is a guide to reducing CCD spectra acquired with the UK Schmidt multi-object bre spectrograph FLAIR-II with the data reduction package IRAF, version 2.10. 2 or later. A familiarity with the reduction of CCD spectral data in IRAF is assumed. You may nd the following references to be of assistance.