On the evening of 14 October 1912, several people in Sheerness, an important Royal Navy dockyard on the southern shore of the Thames estuary, saw and heard something passing overhead. An employee of a high street ironmonger's told naval investigators that
[s]he saw a light over Sheerness. Westward from the shore. The light seemed bright & was moving Eastwards fairly fast. She was unable to give any estimate of height. The night was dark but the light enabled her to have the impression of seeing a long dark object. She heard the sound of an engine.Footnote 1
At least three other people, including a naval lieutenant, also saw the object. A telephone call from Sheerness to the naval aerodrome at nearby Eastchurch led to flares being sent up, on the assumption that the unknown aviator would require assistance in landing. But the aircraft passed from view and was not seen again.Footnote 2 The commandant at Eastchurch “thought it might have been a German Zeppelin,” and accordingly notified the Admiralty in London.Footnote 3 On 27 November, the Liberal first lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, confirmed to the House of Commons, in response to a question from William Joynson-Hicks, a rising Conservative MP, that “an unknown aircraft” had indeed been over Sheerness on the night in question; however, all he could say was that “it was not one of our own airships.”Footnote 4 The quick succession of questions from MPs suggested nervousness to one parliamentary correspondent, and the Evening News was dismayed by Churchill's tacit admission that “it is possible for an unknown airship to circle without interruption or interference of any kind over a British dockyard, and over a harbour containing fifty British warships, both ships and dockyard being alike defenceless against aerial attack.”Footnote 5 This minor scare turned into a major panic by early 1913, when hundreds of mysterious airships were being reported from all over the British Isles. It was widely believed, despite German denials, that they could only be Zeppelins. In part, this was because it was thought that only Germany possessed the capability to undertake airship flights from the Continent to, and over, Britain. In addition, it was assumed that only Germany would have the desire to carry out such missions in secret. The airships seemed to be evidence of both Germany's capability and its desire to attack Britain.
In reality, though, all but (at most) a very few of these “phantom airships,” “mystery airships,” or “scareships” were imaginary. So instead of revealing anything about Germany, the airship sightings show how the British people imagined a great war, on a scale they had not experienced for almost a century; especially important given the Great War that was about to take place. Part rumor, part experience, the phantom airships were the naïve projection of private fears onto the public sphere, which reveal how the German aerial threat to Britain was culturally constructed. This threat was not in itself imaginary, as the air raids of the First World War would soon prove, but it was exaggerated and distorted, both reflecting and shaping the popular understanding of aerial warfare in Britain before its experience was a reality.
In recent years, historians have paid increasing attention to seemingly irrational, or at least subjective, forms of evidence such as emotion, rumor, and myth.Footnote 6 This is particularly striking in the case of the First World War—especially since the groundbreaking work of John Horne and Alan Kramer, which has shown that the German army's expectation of franc-tireur attacks during the invasion of Belgium and France led to the false belief by German soldiers that they were being shot at by civilians. This, in turn, led to very real and very brutal reprisals.Footnote 7 More recent work has examined rumors about Russian soldiers passing by train through Britain on their way to defend France against the German invasion and the persistent stories of the Angel of Mons that supposedly saved the retreating British Expeditionary Force.Footnote 8 As Horne and Kramer note, in such situations “myths and other kinds of collective self-suggestion become substantive historical phenomena, with a capacity to shape actions and events.”Footnote 9 One way in which this process can manifest is through defense panics, phenomena recurrent in Britain since at least the 1840s.Footnote 10 Structurally similar to the more familiar sociological concept of moral panics, defense panics substituted external enemies for internal ones, but otherwise retained the cycle of risk identification (and often amplification), press condemnation, expert diagnosis, and, usually, government intervention to resolve the crisis.Footnote 11
The anticipation of war produced almost as much rumor and panic as war itself. The Anglo-German antagonism allied to the pace of technological change led to a number of such episodes in Edwardian Britain, involving the threat posed by spies, dreadnoughts, and invasion.Footnote 12 In March 1909 the possibility that Germany might overcome the Royal Navy's lead in dreadnoughts led to a panic in the conservative press; as the public became aware of Britain's lack of aerial defenses, this was followed in May by the first phantom airship panic.Footnote 13 In imagining Zeppelins in their skies where there were none in 1913, as in 1909, the British people were primarily responding to the rapid and unsettling advance of technology.Footnote 14 The conquest of the air which began in the early years of the twentieth century had been long foreseen, but its ultimate effects were nevertheless unknowable.Footnote 15 The tremendous and widespread optimism that aviation could transform society for the better was always mirrored, especially in Britain, by apprehension that it could bring ruin instead.Footnote 16 It now seemed that “England is no longer an island,” that the Royal Navy's superiority over its German rival would count for little if its dreadnoughts could simply be overflown by Zeppelins.Footnote 17 But if new technologies meant new dangers, they might also mean new defenses—provided that Britain heeded the warnings offered by an increasingly urgent chorus of experts.Footnote 18
However, the 1913 phantom airship panic was only partly the result of the developing understanding of the potential threat posed to Britain by a new kind of technology. It was also the culmination of those older panics centered on Britain's vulnerability to German infiltration or attack, intertwining to create something like what Horne and Kramer term a myth-complex.Footnote 19 Technological change modified and extended the nature of the German threat: airships could spy on any part of the British Isles; they could evade any defenses; they could strike without warning. The phantom airships appeared to prove that Britain's superiority at sea could do nothing to defend it against Germany's superiority in the air. But the fear was not yet, as it was in the 1920s and 1930s, of the aerial bombardment of cities. This is not because the idea did not exist: it had been common enough in science fiction since the 1890s.Footnote 20 But mere imagination was not enough; the idea needed to be combined with some experience for the intentional bombing of civilians to seem plausible. The German air raids on Britain in the First World War supplied the requisite combination of death and destruction for the theory of the knock-out blow from the air to become the dominant—if also highly exaggerated—public understanding of how the next war would be fought.Footnote 21 However, before 1914 this experience was lacking, and the aerial threat was therefore conceived in already familiar terms: it was Britain's naval superiority which was threatened by German aerial superiority, not its civilian population. The 1913 phantom airship panic was, ultimately, yet another of the naval panics which had periodically disturbed the public's complacency since the 1840s. Not only was it one of the first air panics, but it was, in fact, the last naval panic of all.Footnote 22
AIRMINDEDNESS IN 1913
The British public had started to become conscious of living in a new, aerial age since about 1908—the year that British Army Aeroplane No. 1 made the first controlled, heavier-than-air flight in Britain. Their increasing fascination with everything to do with flying indicates that, to borrow the phrase of a later generation, they were becoming airminded.Footnote 23 Every week, tens of thousands of people flocked to pioneer aviator Claude Grahame-White's Hendon aerodrome in north London to watch aerobatic displays; for the inaugural Aerial Derby in June 1912 some forty thousand spectators turned up, with perhaps another three million watching along the eighty-one-mile circuit around London.Footnote 24 Exhibitions of British and foreign aircraft held annually at Olympia from 1909 were seen by thousands of people, including the king.Footnote 25
But flying was not merely a civilian entertainment. Even during its infancy, the seemingly limitless potential of aviation made it obvious that it would revolutionize war, though exactly how remained unclear. At the very least aircraft could be used to locate and observe enemy troops or ships from above. More troubling was the possibility that they might drop bombs on battlefields, on battleships, on dockyards—or on cities. Whether the large and relatively costly airship, or the nimble but less powerful airplane should be favored was hotly debated.Footnote 26 In the absence of any practical examples of Tennyson's “airy navies grappling in the central blue,” imagination held sway, and airships, with their unparalleled ability to fly long distances while carrying heavy loads, featured more prominently than airplanes in discussions of aerial bombardment.Footnote 27 In January 1908, the Pall Mall Magazine began serializing H. G. Wells's latest novel, The War in the Air, in which the coming of flight leads to a world war, the destruction of cities and the end of civilization.Footnote 28 Wells was then at the height of his fame and The War in the Air was read widely in both serial and book forms.Footnote 29 Others followed in his footsteps, bringing forth a stream of publications, fictional and nonfictional, sensible or not, about the use of aircraft in war.Footnote 30 One particularly early and influential such book, journalist R. P. Hearne's Aerial Warfare (1909), warned that “before war were declared, an aerial fleet might be massed some forty or fifty miles away from our coasts, and on receiving a wireless message could strike within two hours of war being declared!”Footnote 31
Aircraft were soon enough being used in real warfare, during Italy's invasion of Ottoman Tripolitania (now Libya). At first they were employed for reconnaissance, but on 1 November 1911 an Italian airplane bombed two Ottoman-held towns, an operation that quickly became routine. This was followed in March 1912 by the first operational use of airships; these, too, were soon used as bombers.Footnote 32 Aircraft were also used in the First Balkan War, when Adrianople (now Edirne), a city of more than one hundred thousand people, was bombed by Bulgarian airplanes in October and November 1912.Footnote 33 While casualties were few, a precedent had been set: civilians were now targets for airpower.
These developments were noted in Britain and in Germany, which in their different ways established and expanded their own aerial forces. Aircraft as yet played only a small role in British defense policy. The Army had occasionally used observation balloons in colonial warfare since 1885; it formed an Air Battalion in 1911, which in turn was absorbed into the Royal Flying Corps (RFC) upon its foundation in April 1912.Footnote 34 By the outbreak of war in August 1914, the RFC and the new Royal Naval Air Service between them numbered no more than 2,073 officers and men, 113 assorted airplanes and seven small airships.Footnote 35 Nor did aviation as yet draw heavily on the nation's finances: the amount allocated to the RFC in the 1912 Army Estimates amounted to just £322,000, less than a sixth of the cost of a single contemporary dreadnought.Footnote 36 The British aircraft industry, though by no means negligible, lagged behind its German and French counterparts.Footnote 37 Germany had a considerably larger air force, although with its much smaller army, Britain possessed more airplanes per soldier.Footnote 38
The divergence was particularly stark in airships. Britain's only attempt at building a large rigid airship before the war, the Navy's HMA 1 (popularly known as the Mayfly), broke up in September 1911 while being taken out of its hangar for its first flight.Footnote 39 An initiative by patriotic citizens and the Morning Post to purchase a French Lebaudy airship for the nation also ended in failure.Footnote 40 By late 1912 the RFC's airship fleet consisted of just three small non-rigid types inherited from the Royal Engineers, useful only for experimental purposes.Footnote 41 A Committee of Imperial Defence (CID) subcommittee chaired by the secretary of state for war, Colonel J. E. B. Seely, was therefore given the task of drawing up a new airship policy.Footnote 42 Germany's clear lead in lighter-than-air flight concerned the subcommittee's members, especially the possibility that it could prevent the Navy from imposing a close blockade of the German coastline in the event of war.Footnote 43 This lead was largely the work of Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, whose eponymous airships outstripped their foreign counterparts in every way. By 1908 he had succeeded in developing a large rigid airship capable of long-distance flights, LZ4. He had also created a large following among the German public, excited by the prospect of seeing their nation at the forefront of the conquest of the air. Within a few years LZ4's successors were flying for the German army and navy as well as with DELAG, the world's first airline.Footnote 44 Four new Zeppelins entered service in 1912 alone: the military Z III, the naval L1, and the civilian Viktoria Luise and Hansa. L1, which first flew on 7 October, was the largest and most powerful aircraft yet constructed, with a length of 518 feet, a volume of 794,000 cubic feet, and a lifting capacity of 20,700 pounds. Hansa, while somewhat smaller, was slightly faster, with a maximum trial speed of fifty miles per hour.Footnote 45 In September, Hansa demonstrated its capabilities in a flight from Hamburg to Copenhagen and back, carrying more than a dozen people for eleven hours over a distance of roughly 370 miles.Footnote 46 In Britain, the press reported that Count Zeppelin had been “keenly desirous of making a demonstration above the British ships” present in Copenhagen harbor, which included the new battlecruiser HMS Lion.Footnote 47
SEEING THINGS
Zeppelin's successes were the context for the rumors of a mysterious airship flight over Sheerness which began to circulate in late October 1912. The Admiralty's Air Department ordered an investigation into whether “the Zeppelin airship ‘Hansa’ came over,” especially since it had reportedly undertaken a thirty-hour flight recently.Footnote 48 But before the results were received, the Aeroplane, an influential aviation weekly under the editorship of C. G. Grey, broke the story that “an aircraft of some sort was heard flying over the town,” noting that “the general opinion seems to be that the mysterious visitor was a German.”Footnote 49 Another possibility was that it was a naval aviator from Eastchurch, attempting the still rare and dangerous feat of night-flying; however, none were airborne at the time.Footnote 50 Two weeks later the Aeroplane declared that “It now seems practically certain that the mysterious aircraft heard over Sheerness on the night of October 14th was actually one of the German Zeppelins.”Footnote 51L1 had indeed left on a long proving flight over the North Sea the previous day, although German reports indicated that it had already landed by the time of the Sheerness incident.Footnote 52 In December, in the privacy of the CID, Churchill claimed that “there was very little doubt that the airship reported recently to have passed over Sheerness was a German vessel.”Footnote 53 At another CID meeting the following February, the Second Sea Lord, vice-admiral Sir John Jellicoe, stated definitely that “A German airship of the Parseval type had flown over Sheerness and back to Germany.”Footnote 54 While these discussions were confidential, cryptic reports in the press hinted that the official conclusion was that the Sheerness airship, along with another mysterious airship seen at Dover on 4 January, was the civilian Zeppelin Hansa.Footnote 55 Jellicoe suggested that both these “recent journeys were probably made with a view to pick up leading marks for future guidance.”Footnote 56
The identity of Sheerness's visitor has never been ascertained. A covert, long-distance flight to Britain could well have been contemplated by the German government to test the limits of airship technology and aerial navigation; the flight of Hansa to Copenhagen in September 1912 and, later, the forced landing of the military Zeppelin Z IV across the French border at Lunéville in April 1913 might suggest such a pattern.Footnote 57 Regardless, no archival evidence has since been found to suggest that any airship, German or otherwise, flew over Sheerness in October 1912.Footnote 58 The same is true for the great numbers of mysterious airships which began to be reported from all over Britain in the following months. Douglas Robinson, who drew upon flight logs for his still-definitive history of the Marine-Luftschiff-Abteilung (Marine Airship Division) of the German Navy, compared “the reports of ‘phantom airships’ over England” to “the ‘flying saucer’ craze of our own day.”Footnote 59 For its part, the German Admiralty categorically stated “that not only has no German airship been over England, but also that no vessel has been near enough to make a casual visit even tempting.”Footnote 60 It is, in fact, impossible that any but a handful of the hundreds of phantom airship sightings were caused by real Zeppelins: Sheerness and Dover apart, there were simply too many of them seen too far from Germany to be accounted for in terms of the small numbers and primitive performance of the Zeppelin fleet in early 1913. The much more numerous and more capable Zeppelins brought into service during the First World War still found navigation over the British Isles an extremely inaccurate and hazardous undertaking.Footnote 61 None ever ventured as far as Ireland, for example, the site of several phantom airship sightings in 1913; at least one appeared to be flying in from over the Atlantic. It is, therefore, inconceivable that the less advanced and less numerous peacetime Zeppelins could have been able to appear over so many parts of Britain at the same time and return to Germany before daylight. This lack of any objective basis for the phantom airships underscores their importance as evidence for the subjective nature of the British people's belief in the German threat from the air in late 1912 and early 1913.
The press reported widely on the phantom airship sightings at both the national and local levels. As at Sheerness, the phantom airships were nearly always seen at night, usually in the evening, and often took the form of an exceedingly bright light or searchlight seen from some distance away. Again as at Sheerness, observers sometimes heard the sound of an engine as well; on other occasions, sounds but no sightings were reported. More than three hundred distinct sightings were reported in the first four months of 1913, around three-quarters in the last week of February and the first week of March.Footnote 62 In geographical terms, many sightings were made along the eastern coast—exactly where an airship coming from Germany might be expected (figure 1). However, more reports came from inland areas—Yorkshire especially—while south Wales, Somerset, and eastern Scotland were also well represented; several reports were made from Ireland. Most sightings were from, or near, villages or market towns. Conversely, most witnesses lived in the provincial cities, where the phantom airships appeared before large crowds of excited onlookers. Judging from press accounts, the great majority of witnesses were working-class male adults: town corporation employees, police constables, postmen, colliers, trawlermen, a lift attendant, a nightwatchman, and so on.Footnote 63 Some were at least middle class: army officers, a solicitor, a town councilor. Observers considered respectable, whether by profession or birth, were often given prominence in press accounts, such as the Scarborough witness who held “a managerial position in connection with a firm of grocers.”Footnote 64 Women saw phantom airships, too—such as Mrs. Schofield, wife of the manager of Singer's Machine Company at Selby—but are noted less often in available accounts.Footnote 65 No definitive conclusions can be drawn about the kind of people who reportedly saw phantom airships, other than that they were broadly representative of the bulk of the population in geographic and social terms, if not gender. They were mostly men of military age but with little military, let alone aeronautical, experience—just the kind, perhaps, to take a distant interest in the possibilities of the new air weapon.
Figure 1 Geographical distribution of phantom airship sightings, October 1912–April 1913. Credit: the author.
At first the reports were few and largely concentrated in the west. After the airship seen at Dover on 4 January came rumors of aerial lights seen from both the Somerset and the Welsh sides of the Bristol Channel.Footnote 66 A sighting at Newport on the northwest coast of Ireland is fairly typical:
On Wednesday [8 January], at 6.40 p.m., some excitement was caused in the little town of Newport, Co. Mayo, by what appeared at first to be a very large, bright star in the southwest. After a little while it was seen to move slightly to and fro, and at times was surrounded by a kind of luminous haze, such as is formed when strong light falls on smoke or vapour. It then occurred to those who were watching it that the light belonged to some airship, probably a dirigible, and that the haze was caused by vapour from the engine being blown across the path of the light. It seemed as if the airship was trying to approach the lights of the town, but was unable to do so owing to the strong easterly wind that was blowing … The light appeared to be about two miles distant, and at an elevation of between 500 and 1,000 feet. Some of the onlookers affirmed that they distinctly heard the whirr of propellers.Footnote 67
A widely publicized sighting at Cardiff by, among others, the chief constable of Glamorganshire, Captain Lionel Lindsay, on 17 January, was quickly followed by reports of airships seen or heard in Staffordshire and Norfolk.Footnote 68 A burst of sightings at the end of January and beginning of February spanned the nation from Chancery in Wales to Chatham on the Medway, from Liverpool and Manchester in the northwest to London in the southeast.Footnote 69 The most impressive of these incidents, at least in terms of the number of witnesses, took place in the Cardiff area on 5 February, where according to one journalist “what is supposed to have been a dirigible airship travelling over the Bristol Channel … was seen by thousands of people.”Footnote 70
The peak of the scare came, after a fortnight's lull, in the last week of February and the first week of March, when around 180 phantom airship sightings were reported. Some of these were, again, from the Bristol Channel region, as well as from London, Manchester, and Liverpool.Footnote 71 However, more sightings came from new areas: the east coast of Scotland, from Kirkcaldy all the way up to the Orkneys; the coastline around and including Hull; the Norfolk coast; and especially a small area around the town of Selby in Yorkshire, where a dozen or more separate incidents took place on the nights of 21 and 22 February.Footnote 72 Among the latter was Mrs. Schofield's sighting; while being driven to Cawood on the night of 22 February 1913, she “was astonished to see a very powerful light, something like the headlight of a motor car, approaching them, with a smaller light about 30 feet to 40 feet behind … . The lights, she said, bobbed up and down, and then turned parallel with their car, and within two or three minutes the airship, or whatever it was that was carrying the lights, had passed out of sight.”Footnote 73 She felt able to judge the airship's height at one to two thousand feet, by comparing it to “the Army airmen she had seen pass Selby on Friday” on their way to Montrose.Footnote 74 The last phantom airship sighting to receive widespread attention in the national press was also one of the most spectacular: on 28 February an airship allegedly shone its searchlight on the trawler Othello in the North Sea, “so low,” according to the crew, “that they thought the craft would touch the trawler's masts.”Footnote 75
INTERPRETING THE PHANTOM AIRSHIPS
By late February, the sheer number of phantom airship sightings from all parts of the British Isles made it impossible for the press to ignore the question of what they really were. Both of the two major explanations on offer had troubling implications. If the airships were German in origin, then Britain was so far behind in the new field of military aviation that its security, and perhaps even its existence, was at risk. But even if the airships were imaginary, the fact that the British people were seeing threats in peacetime which did not, in reality, exist had troubling implications for their fortitude in wartime—all the more so since civilian morale was now coming to be seen as fragile in the face of aerial bombardment.Footnote 76 Inevitably, this theorizing took on a political dimension. The conservative press was already convinced that the Asquith government could not be trusted to safeguard the nation from the German threat, whereas liberal newspapers were more concerned to avoid another costly and dangerous arms race, and unsurprisingly tended to doubt the very existence of the phantom airships.Footnote 77 The Daily Chronicle interviewed a psychologist who explained, “One man says he sees an airship, and by straining the eyes and auditory senses his friends can easily be persuaded that they also see it, and even hear the sound of the engines.”Footnote 78 Some conservative newspapers also kept their distance, with the Daily Mirror abruptly converting to a skeptical position overnight.Footnote 79 The discovery of a wrecked fire balloon on a Yorkshire moor persuaded many newspapers that the numerous sightings around nearby Selby a few days earlier, and perhaps everywhere else, were the result of hoaxes.Footnote 80 Other explanations put forward included Venus, lightning, searchlights, and even geese.Footnote 81 Liberal newspapers were more likely to propose that the airships were in fact British, whether developed by the government or by a private inventor: the radical Manchester Guardian's London correspondent argued that “the direction in which the ‘mystery’ vessel was moving and the places at which it was seen would point even more cogently to experiments conducted from Salisbury Plain,” and hence to tests carried out by “a Government department.”Footnote 82
As reports multiplied across the country, many skeptics were converted, since, as the Globe put it, “to believe that crowds of people … have been deluded by a phantom demands too great a stretch of the imagination to be satisfactory.”Footnote 83 Overall, speculation now centered squarely on the possibility of a German origin for the phantom airships. The apparently official claim that the Sheerness incident was caused by a Zeppelin was constantly invoked by the conservative press in the months that followed as evidence that Germany was also responsible for all of the phantom airships; and even in distant Ireland, many “recalled the airship that was said to have flown over Sheerness some time ago, and the word ‘Germans’ was heard pretty often.”Footnote 84 As the Standard explained,
There is not the smallest doubt but that this country at the present moment is the object of a systematic aerial reconnaissance carried out at night. Carried out by whom? it will be asked. There is only one answer to that question—by Germany, because Germany alone possesses aircraft capable of doing what is being done by the airships that have been seen over England.Footnote 85
The Standard had also pointed out that a nonstop return flight across the North Sea “is easily within the capacity of the present German Zeppelins,” asking “Does Germany hold the secret?”Footnote 86 By the peak of the scare, the whole press, left and right, was almost unanimous in the conviction that the phantom airships were Zeppelins. Maps appeared showing that Zeppelins based at Heligoland or Cuxhaven could reach most of the British Isles; one, originally published in the Review of Reviews, was captioned “The black shadow of the airship” and was republished in the Illustrated London News and elsewhere.Footnote 87 The front page of the Daily Express screamed “NIGHT RAIDS BY AIR. GERMAN DIRIGIBLES' FLIGHTS OVER ENGLAND.”Footnote 88 The evidently covert nature of the flights led to the darkest of suspicions: the Times declared that, whoever was responsible, their “motives are not likely to be friendly.”Footnote 89 According to the Standard, the opinion at RFC headquarters was that the mysterious flights were made by Germany “for the sole purpose of training navigators for future visits, and that these training voyages to England have been more frequent than is generally believed.”Footnote 90 The conclusion was difficult to resist: even the syndicalist Daily Herald accepted the reality of “frequent visits of foreign aircraft over our lands,” calling them “England's Latest Invaders.”Footnote 91
What turned the phantom airship sightings into a panic was the belief that Germany was already so far ahead of Britain in aviation that it would have complete command of the air if war came, justifying—and indeed demanding—an immediate response by the British government. The Daily Mail called it “a bitter and extraordinary fact” that Britain had no airships able to respond to an aerial invasion, “nothing building to compare with the huge German Zeppelins. This is an ignominious position for a great nation, and it would mean grave danger in war.”Footnote 92 In a dynamic that would be repeated in later air panics, the numbers of aircraft possessed by Germany was constantly inflated, while British airpower was, if anything, understated.Footnote 93 A cartoon in John Bull, run by the disgraced former Liberal MP Horatio Bottomley, put German airpower at “about ten times” that of Britain's, while according to a table published in the Daily Mirror, Germany had nine large airships, said to be the aerial equivalent of dreadnoughts, but Britain had none.Footnote 94 The addition of civilian Zeppelins, which were reportedly already being successfully used in bombing experiments, increased this number further: the Manchester Courier estimated that “the total number of serviceable airships, State-owned and private, at the disposal of Germany in case of mobilization is 35,” of which at least 20 could cross the North Sea and return.Footnote 95 Projection into the future amplified the threat: citing German sources, the same paper later predicted “a fleet of fifty of the largest type by 1915 … 60 Zeppelins three years hence, all of which, be it repeated, will be perfectly able to make dynamite raids on our dockyards, ammunition depôts, oil-fuel stations, and stores.”Footnote 96 Striking visualizations of these disparities were published and republished, with the Review of Reviews and Illustrated London News once again in the vanguard.Footnote 97 These figures were greatly inflated: a secret estimate made in June put the number of large German airships built or building at only twenty: two naval, eleven military, seven civilian.Footnote 98 In heavier-than-air machines, too, the RFC seemed deficient: when the secretary of state for war, Colonel J. E. B. Seely, foolishly claimed in Parliament that the RFC had as many as 101 serviceable airplanes, Joynson-Hicks and fellow Conservative MP Arthur Lee attacked his figures and by July had forced the admission that the true number was more like fifty, once unserviceable and inoperative machines had been discounted.Footnote 99 Such was the disparity and the urgency that the Review of Reviews even called on “each county, each great city or town, each collection of villages in the homeland and the Empire [to] give one or more aeroplanes to the State.”Footnote 100 Parliament reflected the public disquiet: one MP, the Liberal unionist Rowland Hunt, told the prime minister that “people all over the country are becoming seriously alarmed at our defencelessness against attack from the air,” thanks to the government's refusal to acquire “big airships” to counter those “of the enemy, which admittedly can be used at night to drop high explosives on our docks, big towns, and other places.”Footnote 101 In every way—number, size, speed, and capability—Britain appeared hopelessly outclassed in the air.
The only apparent response from the Liberal government to the airship menace was to rush an Aerial Navigation Bill through Parliament in just six days; it received the Royal Assent on 14 February.Footnote 102 The resultant Aerial Navigation Act, and the regulations enforcing it, for the first time asserted Britain's sovereignty over its airspace, and provided the government with the legal power to use lethal force to prevent aircraft from entering it.Footnote 103 Many newspapers connected the bill with the phantom airships: the Scotsman called it “a sequel to the report that airships have recently been seen by night in the vicinity of Sheerness and other naval bases.”Footnote 104 While the CID subcommittee which drew up the legislation had been formed without reference to the Sheerness incident, its members were concerned by the growing suspicion that a German airship had flown over such a strategic location.Footnote 105 Due to Britain's perceived weakness in the air, however, the Aerial Navigation Act was generally seen as no more than a first step. The consensus of the conservative press was that, as the Standard put it, “rules which cannot be enforced are as valueless as a law without penalties for breaking it.”Footnote 106 The overall effect was merely to underscore both the German airship peril and Britain's helplessness before it.
The threats posed by the phantom airships rehearsed many aspects of the better-known spy, invasion, and naval panics which preceded them. The idea that they were hovering over strategic points and observing defense installations paralleled the German spies who were believed to be scouring the nation, drawing maps of key defenses, and taking photographs of new warships.Footnote 107 According to the Times,
Airships are already capable of being used to do a great deal of mischief, and their powers in this respect will certainly be extended. Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the possibility of using such powers has entered into the calculations of some foreign country, it is obvious that this reconnoitring in time of peace might be found of great utility should an occasion arise.Footnote 108
One Selby solicitor thought the airship he saw was “a foreign aircraft, attempting to find out the exact position of a government magazine in the district.”Footnote 109 A detachment of Territorial reservists was even placed on guard at Stoneywood, near Aberdeen, after it was found that “several wires of the lofty erection at the Admiralty wireless station have been torn away” following another airship sighting. This was the counterpart of the belief, propagated by novelists and journalists alike, that the many thousands of male German waiters and hairdressers working in Britain constituted an advance guard of the German army, ready to play their part in assisting the inevitable invasion through sabotage.Footnote 110
The scareships were even more closely aligned with the fear of a German invasion, as popularized in plays and novels such as Guy du Maurier's An Englishman's Home (1909) and William Le Queux's The Invasion of 1910, serialized in the Mail in 1906.Footnote 111 The Globe thought that “the fact must be accepted that our country lies open not only to the incursions of the secret fly-by-night, but equally to the invasion of a determined enemy.”Footnote 112 One prospective Conservative MP was even more blunt, painting a lurid picture for his electors of Zeppelins raiding the British coastline “without a declaration of war,” crippling the Navy and leaving the country “open to the German army of five millions.”Footnote 113 Few conservative military commentators thought that the new Territorial Force of part-time reservists set up by the Liberal secretary of state for war, Richard Haldane, could stand up to the might of the German army, even before a huge expansion of the latter was announced in March 1913.Footnote 114 Indeed, due to its presumed destructive power and ability to target coastal defenses and mobilization depots on the outbreak of war, Germany's Zeppelin fleet made the invasion problem even worse; it was only due to the airship threat that Bonar Law, leader of the Conservative Party, was finally convinced of the necessity for conscription.Footnote 115
Above all else, the airship panic most resembled the dreadnought panic of 1909. Evidence of an acceleration in German naval construction and the possibility that Britain could even lose its lead in dreadnoughts led to an intense agitation by the conservative press and the Navy League and, eventually, the laying down of eight new dreadnoughts instead of the four initially planned.Footnote 116 This success was an inspiration for advocates of aerial armaments in 1913: according to the Manchester Courier's special correspondent, “A similar demonstration is needed to-day even more urgently than it was four years since, but this time the demand must be made in the interests of the air fleet.”Footnote 117 The point was frequently made that it didn't matter whether the phantom airships were real or not: what was important was that they dramatized the certain threat of Germany's airships. According to the Observer, “The hoaxer—if there was one—has done good service by awakening public interest in the matter.”Footnote 118 Grey, the first to break the news of the Sheerness incident, was the most candid exponent of this approach. Well before the phantom airships began to be seen in any numbers, he wrote for the Daily Express, explaining, “The more foreign vessels that come over here and act as scare-ships, the better for this country”:
We have not a tenth enough trained pilots nor a twentieth of the proper number of aeroplanes. Without machines we cannot have the pilots. Without trained workmen we cannot have the machines. Without regular employment we cannot have the right class of workmen to build aeroplanes—a class of work which is a thing apart. Without regular Government orders our aeroplane manufacturers cannot give regular employment. Without money the Government officials cannot give out regular orders. Without the pressure of public opinion the Treasury either cannot, or will not, grant enough money to buy aeroplanes. And without being thoroughly scared, the great British public will not bring pressure to bear on the Treasury, through its various representatives in the House of Commons. Therefore, the more scare-ships which visit our shores, the better chance there will be of moving the English mind and getting something done.Footnote 119
This cynicism was echoed from the radical side of the press when the editor of the Economist, F. W. Hirst, argued that after Churchill's standard of a fixed ratio between the British and German fleets of sixteen to ten was accepted by Germany, “the Panic-mongers decided that the naval situation was too unpromising, and fell back upon the Air.”Footnote 120 The airship panic was a naval panic too. According to the Standard's military correspondent, thanks to the experience gained in “these nightly trips to our shores … a fleet of Zeppelins sent upon an errand of destruction would arrive at their various destinations with the certainty and punctuality of an express train.”Footnote 121 After the destruction of the Navy's stores and docks, “the offensive power of the Fleet would be hopelessly crippled,” even if the ships themselves escaped.Footnote 122 Indeed, it was argued that Germany, unable to overtake Britain at sea, was now placing its faith in airpower. According to Excubitor, a pseudonymous naval expert writing in the Fortnightly Review, “German expert opinion believes that by command of the air Germany can neutralise our superiority on the sea … This is the confessed policy of Germany, and we have not a single long-range airship by which we can take the only effective defensive action—the strong offensive.”Footnote 123 As a Review of Reviews headline put it, “THE SEA TO US, THE AIR TO THE FOE.”Footnote 124
Many navalists accepted this line of argument and resolved to force the government to act. At a meeting in February of the Grand Council of the Navy League, the prominent journalist Arnold White noted the “airships in the habit of suspiciously visiting this country at night,” and argued that maintaining British naval dominance now required that “at all costs this country must catch up other nations which had passed them in this struggle in the air.”Footnote 125 The Navy League's executive committee was persuaded, and embarked on an ambitious propaganda campaign in order to impress the urgency of the situation upon the public and the government.Footnote 126 In March, it commissioned an eight-color poster showing Britannia hovering over the British Isles with the aid of a large airship, waving forward the clouds of aircraft behind her, ruling the clouds as she already ruled the waves (figure 2). This demand for “Britons [to] wake up” was displayed around the country, at railway stations and on advertising hoardings.Footnote 127 In May the Navy League formed the National Aeronautical Defence Association (NADA), with an executive committee filled with worthies: six peers, three admirals, four generals, seven MPs, the editors of the Express and the Standard, the Lord Mayor of London, the chairman of Lloyds, and several aviation experts, including Grey.Footnote 128
Figure 2 The Navy (May 1913): 135.
The conservative press supported the Navy League's demand for a substantial and immediate increase in the sum allocated to aviation in the forthcoming Army Estimates. Newspapers lined up to echo the call for at least £1 million to be spent on aviation in the forthcoming Army Estimates, more than triple the 1912 level.Footnote 129 The Navy League and its more air-minded counterpart, the Aerial League of the British Empire, each issued memorials to the prime minister, members of parliament, and the press; Grahame-White was an early supporter, as was the trade journal Flight, with the Aeroplane trailing, somewhat skeptically, behind.Footnote 130 Even the radical Manchester Guardian, while denying “the slightest need for panic or for extravagance,” admitted that “the inadequacy of our aircraft service should certainly be discussed at length in Parliament, both on the Army and the Navy Estimates.”Footnote 131 Invoking the spirit of Nelson, Flight claimed that this near-unanimity of opinion “made it quite evident that the country at large expects the Government to do its duty in setting about the establishment of England's supremacy in the air.”Footnote 132 When the Army Estimates were announced, the total provision for aviation was only £526,000, which, while a substantial increase from 1912, now fell far short of expectations.Footnote 133 The Daily Telegraph denounced Seely's proposals as “cheese-paring,” and continued to insist on “a round million” instead.Footnote 134 Joynson-Hicks pointed out that “We are going to spend, at the outside, half a million this year. France is to spend one and three-quarter millions, Germany well over one million.”Footnote 135 Worse, for the Express, was that “[n]o mention was made of the danger of the aerial invasion of this country, nor how it was to be met.”Footnote 136
CONCLUSION
The phantom airships continued their mysterious visits into March and April 1913. However, evidence of widespread hoaxing began to mount; and the great number of witnesses now became embarrassing: “The very multiplicity of these reports discredits them,” as the Daily Mail had suggested at the end of February.Footnote 137 Press reports of phantom airships diminished rapidly thereafter. An airship seen by many over central London on the evening of 7 March seemed to have “the dome of St Paul's as its objective”; an “aeroplane” over Galway, Ireland, three weeks later suggested to residents “highly imaginative pictures of a German invasion, evidently an echo of the recent airship scare in England.”Footnote 138 Captain Lindsay saw another at Cardiff on 8 April, another was reported from the Orkneys the following evening.Footnote 139 Soon, however, either sightings were no longer being made, or the press had lost interest. By early May, the panic was nearly at an end. A public meeting held on 5 May at the Mansion House by the Navy League with the support of the Mail failed to meet expectations.Footnote 140 By the autumn, NADA was moribund.Footnote 141 For that matter, other than the low-key announcement that the Navy intended to build several large rigid airships for experimental purposes—only one of which, the Vickers-built HMA 9, was actually ordered, in June—the airship panic had apparent little result in the short term.Footnote 142 In this sense the agitation was not as effective as the dreadnought panic of 1909 had been; despite all the phantom airship sightings, Flight lamented that “the seriousness of the position has not yet gripped the minds of the majority of the British public.”Footnote 143 But, coincidentally or not, the amount devoted to aviation in the 1914 Army Estimates came to £1 million, the exact figure the scaremongers had demanded a year earlier.Footnote 144
The phantom airship panic of 1913 was at the nexus of the technological and geopolitical threats perceived by the British public. While it was undoubtedly colored by commercial, political, and even moral concerns, as well as the voracious appetite of the press for sensation, it is striking that the fears on display originally surfaced from below, rather than being imposed from above: each sighting was first imagined in the mind of a member of the public, and reported to the press, before it fueled wider outrage at the nation's defenselessness in the air. It is true that nearly all of what is known about the phantom airship panic is mediated through press reports, and it is therefore possible that the belief that Zeppelins were responsible was exaggerated by newspapers for political or commercial reasons.Footnote 145 However, evidence from similar episodes during the war, when reports were made directly to the police or the military, suggests that this was not the case.Footnote 146
The phantom airship panic confirmed the idea that airpower was a potent threat to Britain. But the fear of the Zeppelin before 1914 was not the same as the fear of the bomber which became so pervasive after 1918. For the present, airships were threatening not so much in themselves, but because they compounded the danger from German spies, dreadnoughts, and invasion. Zeppelins could spy out Britain's defenses, destroy its ports and arsenals, and prepare the way for invasion. The phantom airships of 1913 were the last, perfect Edwardian panic. But just as there were no secret armies of saboteurs ready to aid the long-awaited German landing when war did come in 1914, neither were Zeppelins used in the way that the British public had foreseen. There were, however, more phantom airships.Footnote 147 Catriona Pennell suggests that British “imaginations literally could not foresee an attack from the air” in the opening months of the war.Footnote 148 In fact, imagination was not lacking; it was understanding that was deficient. The nature of airpower had been misunderstood, and instead of precision strikes on military targets the Zeppelin fleet was largely reduced to using crude terror tactics against civilian targets. The phantom airships may have been a nightmare, but they were only an imperfect vision of the horrors ahead.
