Acquisitions

Hector Hawton. Night Bombing. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1944. A rather interesting secondhand bookshop find. Hawton was a novelist, rationalist and during the war a flight lieutenant in the RAFVR. Here he has written an explanation, a history, and a justification of British bombing strategy in the Second World War. It's less overtly propagandistic than J. M. Spaight's wartime writings, I think, Hawton grants that the Blitz was largely directed at industrial targets, as is Bomber Command's campaign; but he also straightforwardly and even proudly lists the urban areas the British have destroyed and the civilians they have killed. Perceptive, too; he speculates about what might happen if the power of the atom were ever harnessed for war (noting that science often moves more quickly than laypeople think) and suggests that no nation would be able to maintain a monopoly of such a weapon, but also that it would be too terrible to be used.

Richard Hillary. The Last Enemy. London: Macmillan, 1950 [1942]. A classic of Australian war literature.

Michael Molkentin. Australia and the War in Air. The Centenary History of Australia and the Great War, volume 1. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 2014. Both an operational and an institutional history of the Australian Flying Corps, as well as the origins of military aviation in Australia before 1914 and the birth of the RAAF, but also a contribution to a much broader historiography about the RFC/RAF and the development of early airpower (think Sydney Wise's Canadian Airmen and the First World War). And it even finds space to mention the Australian mystery aircraft of 1909 and 1918. The book of Michael's PhD thesis, but don't hold that it against it.

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3 thoughts on “Acquisitions

  1. Post author

    No, there's nothing that I can see (a nice drawing of a Zeppelin raid, though!) Can't really think of many interwar accounts of British bombing in the First World War, either, come to think of it; most of the literature focused on German bombing.

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