The Royal Australian Air Force turns 90 today. It was officially formed as an independent service out of the old Australian Flying Corps on 31 March 1921 (making it three years less one day younger than the Royal Air Force). At first it was just the Australian Air Force: it didn’t get the Royal prefix […]
Thanks to JDK for forwarding this interesting image. It’s the front cover of Bomber Command: The Air Ministry’s Account of Bomber Command’s Offensive against the Axis, September, 1939-July, 1941 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1941) (written by Hilary Saunders). So it was part of the same series of propaganda pamphlets as the more famous The
So, THATCamp Melbourne is over. It was pretty much as I expected, which is to say it was excellent. I’m not going to write a conference report (you should have been following #thatcamp on Twitter for that!) but two sessions did give me ideas for digital history projects I might like to do. One day.
John S. Partington. Building Cosmopolis: The Political Thought of H. G. Wells. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2003. A very highly regarded book on Wells’ ideas about a world state and how to get one, a subject which I have dipped into insofar as it involves airpower (which is frequently).
Later this week I’m going to THATCamp Melbourne. What’s THATCamp, you ask? THATCamp stands for The Humanities and Technology Camp. It’s an unconference devoted to exploring the ways in which the humanities and digital technology can work together. It is informal and collegial: attendees vote on the programme on the first morning. It’s practical and
Lead item in today’s Glasgow Herald is a report that ‘a German U-boat is believed to have reached waters somewhere off the North Atlantic coast of America’ (7). Slow news day? Not really; the real story is the way the war is creeping ever closer to America, and vice versa. The U-boat news was announced
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] Libya now holds an unfortunate record. It is the country which has the longest experience of aerial bombardment. Libya was first bombed in 1911, by Italy; now, in 2011, it is being bombed by its own air force. That makes it just under a century from the first bomb to the latest.
By recapturing from Italian forces Berbera, the capital of British Somaliland, a small part of the British Empire has been restored. Royal Navy warships landed Army troops at the port, suffering ‘negligible’ (Glasgow Herald, 5) casualties. RAF armoured cars assisted too. This adds to the Allied offensive against Addis Ababa: ‘British Empire troops are now
Philip Anthony Towle. Pilots and Rebels: The Use of Aircraft in Unconventional Warfare 1918-1988. London: Brassey’s, 1989. From air control to counterinsurgency. A bit RAF-centric until after 1945.
Today the Glasgow Herald returns to what has been the predominant theme of the last week, America’s increasing commitment to the Allied cause, here represented by a ‘world broadcast’ made by Roosevelt on Saturday (5). Fearlessly he castigated the Axis partners — “these modern tyrants” with their “stuff and nonsense” about the master race. Their
