Odd this day

5 min readNov 22, 2022

Happy 81st anniversary of the day conclusive proof of the existence of the Loch Ness Monster was printed in a respected journal.

Headline: Italian says he bombed Loch Ness Monster! By an American in London. The text is accompanied by cartoons of a man in a biplane dropping bombs, and a sea monster in a loch, apparently laughing at bombs being dropped into the water and missing it. Some of the text reads: “London has had a good laugh at the claim by Popolo d’Italia, official Fascist organ, that an Italian bomber blitzed the Lock Ness monster! SCOTTISH evidence is that the famous monster is alive and kicking…” — p.7, weekly Australian newspaper The World’s News, November 22 1941

Or, at any rate, the now defunct Australian newspaper The World’s News said that an unverified claim by the Italian air force to have killed Nessie in a bombing raid wasn’t true because someone had seen it since — which is much the same thing in my book.

I like (a) the weirder, stupider bits of history, and (b) marking their anniversaries, so when I read that WWII propaganda had reported a Nessie assassination, I wanted to know more .

I set off on a quest, hoping to be able to do a silly Twitter thread about a preposterous bit of wartime propaganda. Well… that Australian newspaper has been digitised (which is how I came by the full page of the paper at the top).

And that means now we can all enjoy such details as the putative “survivor of a prehistoric past, millions of years ago” being “killed by the latest unnatural horror, a monster mechanical bird that dropped eggs of death”.

The World’s News extract reads: The Italian paper, “Il Popolo d’Italia,” solemnly announced that one of Mussolini’s big planes, while raiding England, had bombed and destroyed a huge, serpent-like animal on the surface of Loch Ness. Nothing perhaps could be more fantastic than this natural horror, perhaps a survivor of a prehistoric past, millions of years ago, to be killed by the latest unnatural horror, a monster mechanical bird that dropped eggs of death

They go on to say that this filthy fascist claim to have murdered a lost plesiosaur was debunked when the Daily Mail reported on a sighting of the monster by “Mr. J. MacFarlan-Barrow and three of his children … out in a dinghy”

“Mr. J. MacFarlan-Barrow and three of his children were out in a dinghy when the monster broke surface near Glendoe pier. They saw a long, snaky neck and 15 to 18 feet of the body, shaped rather like an upturned boat. Obligingly, the monster remained in sight for 10 minutes. Miss MacFarlan-Barrow told me: ‘It raced up and down and across the Loch as if in really high…

spirits. Occasionally it dived and reappeared with the agility of a giant sea bird. It dived and disappeared about half a mile from Fort Augustus.’ “How,” asked the paper facetiously, “could MacFarlan-Barrow have seen the monster when ‘Popolo d’ltalia’ knows it has been killed?”

But is it possible to trace the original story in Mussolini’s very own wartime propaganda sheet, Il Popolo d’Italia? Or the Daily Mail’s monster reports? Well, if there was a sighting, it must have happened between 1 September 1939 and 22 November 1941 — but none is recorded between 1938 and 1954, and if the relevant editions of Il Popolo d’Italia and the Daily Mail are available anywhere, I’m buggered if I’ve found them. Then, in the third column of the World’s News story, it turns out their source is a mysterious letter…

The question arises in one’s mind that perhaps the Fascist paper was trying to brighten the gloomy war news with a little harmless imagination. But I am able to reproduce here a letter, kindly furnished by Count Goffredo Pantaleoni, who resigned some time ago as head of the Italian Tourist Bureau in New York and took out his first American citizen ship papers, in protest against Italy’s entering the war on the side of the Axis. The letter is from an old friend whose name is omitted…

“From an old friend whose name is omitted”? Hmmm. There was a real Goffredo Pantaleoni, who resigned from the Italian information bureau in New York in 1940, but there is a certain whiff emanating from this letter

September 3, 1941. Count Goffredo Pantaleoni. Italian Tourist Information Bureau, 626 Fifth Avenue, New York City. My Dear Goffredo, I am writing to tell you about a most fantastic coincidence. First let me say, however, that I have your letter in which you denounce Fascism ... I was shocked … But about the coincidence I mentioned. You will recall how in the old days you told me about your uncle, Dr. Harrison Cripps, and his villa, Glendaruel, in Scotland, which you visited on your holiday

The sudden segue from “I’m shocked you’re no longer a Fascist” to “Oh, by the way, remember those stories about Scotland that I didn’t believe” doesn’t ring true, never mind “I saw the monster and killed it”.

Italian planes were involved in the Blitz, but the Corpo Aereo Italiano played a subsidiary role to that of the Luftwaffe, and almost exclusively hit sites in East Anglia. Why would an unreported Italian plane visit Scotland? Let’s see how the letter continues.

It was a bright moonlight night when we had our rendezvous over the eastern side of the Channel. The Germans were to blitz London and our Italian contingent was to descend on Ipswich and Harwich from the north.

Well, that checks out. But — wouldn’t you know it — quite by chance, this is where the mission goes awry…

Everything went according to plan until we were in sight of Ipswich when suddenly there was deadly anti-aircraft fire thrown up between us and our objectives. I headed north, without having dropped a bomb. Gigi, my navigator, had considerable difficulty with the instruments and when he finally took our bearings he placed us as somewhere in Scotland. I spotted a large lake, lying still and peaceful in the moonlight and I headed for it, thinking that our navigator could then orient himself

Coming upon that large body of water was a stroke of luck, wasn’t it? And just at that moment — WELL, GOOD LORD, WHAT ARE THE ODDS? — the navigator sees something:

At first I mistook that large object in the water for a boat, perhaps an armed, hostile vessel. Then as my eyes traced its outlines more clearly, I gasped with astonishment. For there, moving slowly across the placid water was a gigantic monster, perhaps forty feet in length! I circled the lake once to observe the creature from all angles. Gigi [the navigator] and Dominick, my bombardier, sat there goggle-eyed, unable to speak.

So, they did what any right-thinking person provided with proof of a prehistoric creature living in a body of Scottish water in the 20th century would: decide this “was as good a place as any” to drop their payload, and bomb the shit out of it.

Looking backwards, I could see the monster flopping violently and then his entire body came to the surface, either stunned by the concussion or killed outright, I do not know. I would very much have liked to stay around longer and observe the effects more fully, but we were running short of petrol, so I had to head for home. Until your next letter. Affectionately, G

At the very end, the article suggests “the whole mystery of the monster might be a combination of hoax and illusion”, which I think we can safely say is code for ‘we made this up’. Not just the Italian newspaper claim and the letter, but the Daily Mail bit, too.

“Of course, the whole mystery of the monster might be a combination of hoax and illusion. A dispassionate observer, familiar with all the tricks the water plays on the eye, was needed, and just such a man made a study of it in 1934. Lieutenant-Commander R. T. Gould set forth the evidence and his findings in “The Loch Ness Monster.” Commander Gould discarded considerable testimony, but he accepted photographs which, though distant and blurred, indicated a huge animal disturbing the surface… — p.29 of The World’s News, 22 Nov 1941 — the article continues

The whole thing’s a spoof story in a weekly tabloid which has been half-remembered, distorted and reproduced on various websites, not necessarily as fact, but not exactly as fiction, either. Whoever wrote the original story had done some research, though.

INVESTIGATION OF UN-AMERICAN PROPAGANDA ACTIVITIES IN THE UNITED STATES, MONDAY, DECEMBER 22, 1940, HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES, SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE SPECIAL COMMITTEE TO INVESTIGATE UN-AMERICAN ACTIVITIES, Washington, D. C. Mr. VOORHIS. Mr. Pantaleoni, will you give us an idea of your background and your reasons why you feel you can speak on the subject before the subcommittee? Mr. PANTALEONI. I have been for about 10 years the head of the Italian Tourist Information Office at 626 Fifth Avenue, NY

The real Goffredo Pantaleoni appeared the previous year before the House of Representatives subcommittee of the special committee to investigate un-American activities, and the address and biographical details he gives in the record are identical to those in the article. Someone presumably read about the committee, and went to at least some effort to give this pure invention a veneer of plausibility.

One of the websites this story appears on suggests that the Italian attempt to murder a prized Scottish water beast followed a denunciation of the very idea of the Loch Ness Monster written by Joseph Goebbels himself:

The Axis powers attempted to exert influence on enemy populations as well as their own. Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels wrote in 1940 that the Loch Ness Monster was just a made-up thing, designed to boost tourism revenues. In a German newspaper, he cited the Loch Ness Monster as a reason the people of the United Kingdom were weak.

So, I tried to track that down as well, and found the only trace of it in James Thurber’s 1957 essay, There’s something out there! — so that seems to be complete balls, too.

20 years ago, while touring the British Isles, I drove to a small inn on the lochside. I had not given the monster much thought. American newspapers, wary of tall tales … had approached the story lightly. The Herald Tribune, in 1933, had dismissed the whole business as a tourist trap. Seven years later, Goebbels devoted a double page in the Hamburger Illustrierte to Nessie, “exposing” it as a myth…

So, in the end, this is really just the 81st anniversary of a wartime newspaper printing some nonsense to entertain a beleaguered public. Ah, well. As a reward for anyone who’s ploughed through all this drivel, here are two adverts that appeared the same day.

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Ah, the joys of being alive in 1941.

Odd this day

Written by Coates

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