The Coming of the Aerial War

Culture and the Fear of Airborne Attack in Inter-War Britain

Michele Haapamäki

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780857735843
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du 20ème siècle

In the first half of the 20th century the possibility of flight opened up entirely new avenues of thought and exploration. In the age of H.G. Wells and Biggles, the opening up of the air to balloons and planes- the Royal Flying Corps was founded in 1912 - appealed to concepts of courage and bravery which would be both encouraged and undermined by the experiences of World War I. The sky also held new terrors for everyday people who were now within reach of an airborne enemy- these fears included the possibilities of bombing, poison gas, surveillance and social contol. This duality of fear and enthusiasm drove the Air Raid Precaution movement, while vocal elements in the press and in parliament called for radical plans to cope with apocalyptic scenarios. Here, Michele Haapamaki charts the history of flight and of war in the air in the early twentieth century, addressing the key issues of interwar historiography such as patriotism, fear, masculinity and propaganda.

PART I

CHAPTER 1

SITUATING MOODS – AVIATION ENTHUSIASTS AND FEAR

A new mould of men has been cast. Their feats of bravery haunt us, baffle us, and satisfy completely the spirit of romantic daring inherent in our island race.

[The pilot] has just triumphed over time and space; defied gravity; and soaring into the blue empyrean has attained a means of expression that gives him an elasticity denied to all of us bound to the ground […]. He has acquired the ecstasy that only a pilot knows.¹

–Cecil Beaton, Winged Squadrons

England is no longer an island. There will be no sleeping behind the wooden walls of Old England with the Channel our safety moat. It means the aerial chariots of a foe descending on British soil if war comes. ²

–Lord Northcliffe

At the southern end of Park Lane and Mayfair, tucked in behind Hyde Park Corner, stands the building occupied by the Royal Aeronautical Society. Its impressive façade denotes the importance that its founders attached to the conquest of the air, and the depth of resources that the Society has commanded since its inception in 1866 – many years before the first aeroplanes took to the air. Even with the mere existence of hot air ballooning to signal the future, its early members believed it was their destiny to conquer the skies. The Society's stately interior evokes the atmosphere of the storied gentleman's clubs that populate nearby Mayfair, St James, and Pall Mall, looking out to the broad greens of Hyde Park and adjacent landmarks, such as the Dorchester Hotel. But while most legendary clubs catered to the aristocracy, gentlemen of leisure and governing elites, the members of the Society saw themselves as parallel elite – a self-appointed aristocracy of aviation. The early history of aviation is intimately connected with the biographies of flyers, journalists, and aeronautical entrepreneurs. The allure of the air was as much involved with the ‘magnificent men’ (and women) as it was with the wonder of their fantastical ‘flying machines’. This book will feature a great deal of mini-biography, highlighting how devoted admirers of aviation and those who feared its destructive power both contributed to the landscape of optimism and fear in 1930s Britain.

The Aeronautical Society took up residence at its present building in Hamilton Place just prior to the outbreak of World War II, following a period during which national interest in both civilian and military aviation had reached ever-higher levels. Flying was also embedded in competition and nationalism. Early in the 1900s, the newspaper baron Lord Northcliffe enthusiastically supported British aviation, realizing the civilian and military potential of flight. Somewhat dismayed that the Germans and French had sent military observers to speak with the Wright brothers in the United States but that Britain had not, he annoyed officials with his ‘impertinence’ in attempting to interfere with military matters. ³ The Edwardian era featured sensational air races and contests that were followed with great anticipation by broad segments of the population. The Daily Mail sponsored several contests, including a £1,000 prize for the first cross-channel flight, which Frenchman Louis Bleriot won with his legendary 1909 flight. In 1906 the paper had first offered a staggering £10,000 prize for anyone who achieved a London–Manchester flight. The prize remained unclaimed until 1910, when it too was won by an aviator from across the Channel, Louis Paulhan. The French were enthusiastic aviators, deeming themselves ‘the winged nation’. J.T.C. Moore-Brabazon, later Minister of Aircraft Production in the War Cabinet, took the Daily Mail prize of £1,000 as the first Englishman to fly a mile. ⁴

The wide circulation of magazines such as the Aeroplane, Popular Aviation and Popular Flying, which published the Biggles short stories by W.E. Johns, attests to the allure of flying in the public mind. The journal Flying, also edited by Johns, published thrilling tales of heroes of aviation, including a series on war aces from the Great War. ⁵ Aviation was a new frontier where Boys Own fantasies of wartime courage and adventure could be realized in a space equal to the edge of empire in an age when earthbound adventurism seemed to have been done before. Imported Hollywood films emphasized the inherent glamour of flying – from the famed silent picture Wings (1927) to Hell's Angels (1930), which was the most expensive film made to that date. It almost bankrupted producer Howard Hughes, and reflected his lifelong obsession with flying. Box-office successes from the 1930s include Ceiling Zero (1936), Test Pilot (1938), Dawn Patrol (1938) and Only Angels Have Wings (1939) – the latter directed by the legendary Howard Hawks and starring Cary Grant and Jean Arthur.

Flying was imbued with romance but also was a domain to display individual courage and heroism. The fame of the flying ‘aces’ of the First World War – including Billy Bishop, Edward ‘Mick’ Mannock, Albert Ball, and the ‘Red Baron’ Manfred von Richthofen – provided one chivalric footnote in an otherwise ungentlemanly war and fuelled many fictional tales for young boys. The notion of the ‘Lone Wolf’ tied into many levels of masculinity, and the mythology of the gentleman aviators provided an enduring image of romance and bravery, and served a model for a dynamic military culture. The idea of the gentlemanly aviator was viewed as the equivalent of the man-to-man medieval duel, though the result for the loser was more deadly. Americans found the idea particularly intriguing, and it formed a lasting basis for an obsession, or ‘mesmerizing vision’, with air power and the building of the US Air Force. ⁶ Henry Newbolt's Tales of the Great War (1916) propagated this image, and as a wartime work it was part of an attempt to appeal to volunteers on a remodelled notion of chivalric ideals. Newbolt declared that:

Our airmen are singularly like the knights of the old romances; they go out day by day, singly or in twos and threes, to hold the field against all comers […]. There is something especially chivalrous about these champions of the air; even the Huns, whose military principles are against chivalry, have shown themselves affected by it. ⁷

The Royal Air Force (RAF), established in 1918, its motto Per ardua ad astra (‘Through adversity to the stars’), provides an illuminating summary of how aviators viewed themselves. In the interwar years, the ‘aristocratic’ elements of flying were downplayed, and it was viewed as a more democratic arena, even if officers and enlisted ranks in the Royal Air Force (RAF) continued to largely be divided along class lines. Without a private income, the barriers to entry for flyers were substantial. ⁸ This democratic sentiment perhaps had its epitome in the spectacle of the great T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) enlisting in the RAF simply as ‘Private Shaw’. His startling decision prompted scores of theories about his motivation, and it continues to do so to this day. Whether it was some bizarre sort of inverted vanity, ⁹ or a simple desire to escape from fame, his tenure as Private Shaw before his premature death in a motorcycle accident in 1935 represents the democratic ideals of interwar aviation – participation was determined by passion, ability, and work rather than pedigree.

The art of flying also made international celebrities of civilian aviators such as Louis Bleriot, Charles Lindberg, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Alan Cobham, Jim and Amy Mollison, and the tragic Amelia Earhart. The fame of female aviators, and their not uncommon presence in aerodromes throughout North America and Europe, highlights the full democratizing aspects of the aeroplane, although flying was often equated with masculinity. Heroism, military or otherwise, could now be disassociated from pure muscular brawn. The aircraft itself performed the heavy lifting; the individual provided the courage, dexterity, powers of judgment and technical acumen required to fly successful missions. At this time, of course, there was really no such thing as a routine flight. Weather, mechanical failure, and other difficulties could spell instant peril. The omnipresent element of danger, added to the image, mythology and adventure of flying. The aviator's devil-may-care approach to danger and the possibility of death provide an interesting angle on the question of air power and fear. ¹⁰

The Converse of Awe and Power: Fear

These effusive depictions of interwar aviation may seem a rather strange selection with which to introduce a book purportedly about air warfare and fear. Yet, on the other hand, they also highlight the important range of emotional responses to aviation and aerial warfare that will be explored in the first few chapters. The undercurrent of fear was omnipresent. Hope that aviation would usher in a new age of international understanding, scientific progress, and educational and leisure travel ¹¹ co-existed alongside fears that new technologies would disrupt international relations and the fabric of daily life. Commentators in the interwar period also vacillated between enthusiasm and despair regarding the prospects of British military aviation, particularly its defensive capabilities.

The early 1920s were characterized by increasing optimism regarding the possibilities of the RAF in policing the far-flung empire. British engineering and innovation cemented national pride and martial supremacy. However, by the mid-1930s, the fear that the nation had fallen irretrievably behind in aircraft manufacturing led to a dispirited tone evident in the aviation press. There was pessimism over the preparations against air raids. In the sphere of civilian aviation, enthusiasts such as C.G. Grey, whose controversial writings as the editor of the Aeroplane magazine are explored in Chapter 4, tirelessly touted British aviation. At the same time, they worried that competitors from the continent and the United States would surpass British manufacturing.

If the late nineteenth century was characterized by lighthearted and fanciful visions of the future and technological change – Jules Verne, undersea vehicles, hot air balloons, and similar contraptions – the twentieth century was quite unmistakably of a darker and gloomier outlook. ¹² By the late 1930s, the optimistic views that air technology would engender an era of international cooperation appeared rather outdated and naive, and narratives of fear dominated public discourse. To quote Ian Patterson from his study of Guernica and its implications for future aerial bombardment:

The catastrophe predictions suited the arguments of the RAF because they strengthened its case for more money, men and machines. They suited the pacifists because the worse the threat, the more powerful their case for strategies of disarmament. And they suited the novelists because people really wanted to read about the apocalyptic collapse of civilization. ¹³

Basil Liddell Hart suggested in the Daily Telegraph that in the event of a severe gas attack, 40 per cent of London's 7 million inhabitants would flee in 48 hours and 80 per cent within the week. ¹⁴ J.F.C. Fuller was another prominent commentator on mechanized warfare who similarly predicted doom following the first enemy air raids of 500 planes carrying 500 ten-pound bombs: ‘London for several days will be one vast raving Bedlam […]. What of the Government of Westminster? It will be swept away by an avalanche of terror.’ ¹⁵ The foremost Marxist military commentator T.H. Wintringham believed that massive fires would render London uninhabitable and result in the deaths of several hundred thousand citizens. ¹⁶

Fears of the next war influenced art, literature, politics, and political decisions, including the now-maligned appeasement of Hitler through the British and French unwillingness to come to the assistance of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Neville Chamberlain is almost universally blamed for the Munich Agreement and for the ‘peace for our time’ speech delivered on 30 September 1938, but it is important to remember that the majority of the populace strongly backed his policy and were in fact relieved at the halt or postponement of the outbreak of war. The dread of aerial warfare was not limited to the civilian population – right up until 1939 military leaders seriously overestimated the power of the Luftwaffe to inflict bomb damage on British cities. Consequently they had their own role to play in advocating the costly and short-lived ‘peace’ struck in 1938.

At the outbreak of war in 1939, military planners assumed that a bombing campaign against London would be imminent and that such a campaign would result in the collapse of civil society and government. These fears were so omnipresent that actual attack seemed anticlimactic. It is almost banal to note that aerial destruction was not as complete as the most pessimistic had predicted, as terrible as it was with the loss of over 60,000 civilian lives. As the founders of the nationwide sociological survey ‘Mass Observation’ noted:

Had not statesmen and thinkers said that [war] would be “the end of civilization?” It was mixed in people's minds with the end of the world, in the supernatural as well as in political events, and the ultimate chaos of the Shape of Things to Come. ¹⁷

Winston Churchill complained that all concerned had been ‘greatly mislead by the pictures that they [the Air Staff] painted of the destruction that would be wrought by Air Raids’. ¹⁸ Yet Churchill himself had made liberal use of these predictions, demonstrating that the use of fear as a political tool was powerful, even if these individuals sincerely believed in the veracity of the claims they were making.

The 1930s has been viewed as a decade of extremes: the ‘Red Decade’, the ‘Hungry Thirties’, or in the words of W.H. Auden, a ‘low dishonest decade’. Others have viewed these years in sad, regretful terms, such as Robert Graves and Alan Hodge's account of the period, The Long Weekend, written in 1940. The book ends with the metaphorical chapter ‘Rain Stops Play, 1939’, depicting politics and war interrupting a languid, gentlemanly cricket match, a foreign imposition on the bucolic shores of a peaceable Britain. ¹⁹ The popular memory of the decade tends towards the polarized ends of the political scale, even though both the far left and far right claimed a tiny minority of committed adherents. On the political left, the images that predominate are of hunger marchers, communists on street corners distributing copies of the Daily Worker, the Trades Union Congress and the miners' strikes, and the ill-fated general strike of 1926. On the opposing political extreme, the powerful image of Oswald Mosley's blackshirts, the British Union of Fascists (BUF) rallies at Olympia, and the ‘battle of Cable Street’ in the East End of London hold similar sway. Yet others have viewed the 1930s as an era of national and individual stagnation, marked by uncertainty and timidity, dominated by the fundamentally conservative ‘little man in the suburbs’. ²⁰ This middle-middle and lower-middle class constituency was the suburban Daily Mail-reading Briton, inhabiting a third space distinct from the ‘green and pleasant land’ mythology of traditional Englishness and the hard-edged urban existence of the working classes in the great industrial cities.

Despite the varied experience of the 1930s, predictions of the end of civilization were one cultural motif that permeated common experience. The reasons for and historical explanations of interwar pessimism are manifold. T.S. Eliot was possibly extreme, but likely not alone, in expressing the view soon after the First World War that ‘Whatever happens will be another step toward the destruction of Europe. The whole of contemporary politics [oppresses] me with a continuous physical horror like the feeling of a growing madness in one's brain.’ ²¹ The very titles of many historical surveys of the interwar peri...