Acquisitions

Air Raid Precautions. Stroud: Tempus, 2007. Another one of those books where the publishers have obviously asked themselves, Who’d buy this book? and answered, Well, there’s that Airminded bloke — that’s one copy at least. A collection of facsimile reprints of various Home Office/Lord Privy Seal’s Office ARP booklets and leaflets: The Protection of Your Home Against Air Raids (1938); ARP Handbook No. 1, Personal Protection Against Gas (1938); Public Information Leaflets 1 through 4, Some Things You Should Know If War Should Come, Masking Your Windows, Evacuation Why and How? and Your Food in War-time (all 1939); Organization of the Air Raid Wardens’ Service (1939?); and Inspection and Repair of Respirators and Oilskin Clothing (1940?).

Carl von Clausewitz. On War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989 [1832]. Probably something anybody with pretensions to being a military historian should have to hand, even if other strategists have been more influential in different contexts, places and times. (I recently came across Trenchard speaking of Edward Hamley in the same breath as Clausewitz and Mahan — I must confess I had to look him up!) This is the version edited/translated/introduced/commented on by Michael Howard/Peter Paret/Bernard Brodie.

Basil Mathews. We Fight for the Future: The British Commonwealth and the World of To-morrow. London: Collins, 1940. Found this in a secondhand bookshop for $3. Even at that price I was a bit unsure about buying it — there seems to be some talk in it about setting up an international federal system after the war, but nothing quite in my line. But I had to get it when I saw on the first page that Mathews ascribes Hitler’s success (he’s writing in August 1940, or at least the preface was written then), in part, to his ’spreading wild confusion through mass air-bombing of terrorised refugees’ — yep — ‘and taxi-ing his planes over their writhing bodies’ — wait … what? That’s a use for the bomber I haven’t heard of before! I suppose it must have been some story or rumour which came out of one the German invasions, but that’s about all I can say.

Ron Austin. The Fighting Fourth: A History of Sydney’s 4th Battalion 1914-19. McCrae: Slouch Hat Publications, 2007. Private Mulqueeney’s unit, though the poor sod was with it in the field for only a couple of months before his death. It had earlier landed at Gallipoli, on the first day; and after the Somme fought at 3rd Ypres, Broodseinde, Polygon Wood and the Hindenburg Line, among other places. This is, surprisingly, the first history of the 4th Battalion AIF; it looks to have done it justice as far as writing and production quality goes (it’s fairly sparsely footnoted, but I suppose that’s not what unit histories are about).

Alan Kramer. Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. The barbarisation of warfare from the Balkan wars onward, including the targeting of civilians. This looks the goods (and a worthy successor to the book he co-authored with John Horne, German Atrocities, 1914), though oddly there’s only a little on bombing. Not that I’m complaining, mind …

Peter Stansky. The First Day of the Blitz: September 7, 1940. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. From the blurb, ‘Much of the future of Britain was determined in the first twelve hours of bombing’ — the Blitz spirit was just the start of a social revolution. Hmmm, that’s a big claim, but not necessarily an incorrect one: it’ll be interesting to see if he can pull it off.

I ordered these months before I left for London; of course they only turned up a couple of weeks after I left!

Basil Collier. The Defence of the United Kingdom. Uckfield: Naval and Military Press, 2004 [1957]. The volume of the official British history of the Second World War dealing primarily with air defence, but also the threat of invasion.

Henry Probert. Bomber Harris: His Life and Times. London: Greenhill Books, 2003. The standard biography of Harris. Not all that relevant for me — I think I got it cheap …

Keith Rennles. Independent Force: The War Diaries of the Daylight Squadrons of the Independent Air Force, June — November 1918. London: Grub Street, 2002. I would have preferred a straight history of the Independent Force but this at least tells me what it was actually doing.

So this was the week I finally broke down and bought some books — I made it nearly a month in London without being forced to, thanks to Skoob Books and the Imperial War Museum. I am only human, it turns out.

Norman Angell. The Great Illusion — Now. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938. A Penguin Special (still in dust jacket!) update of the 1908 classic (which is included in an abridged form), arguing that war still isn’t any good for anyone. In part, because of the knock-out blow …

Norman Franks. Air Battle for Dunkirk: 26 May-3 June 1940. London: Grub Street, 2006 [1983]. I don’t read a lot of operational histories; but treating Dunkirk on its own terms (and not just as the prelude to the Battle of Britain) seems like a worthwhile project. For that matter a history of the RAF up to May or June 1940 would be interesting too.

Graham Keech. Pozières. Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 1998. I don’t know that I’ll make it over to Flanders to see where John Joseph Mulqueeney fought and died, but if not I can at least read about it.

London Can Take It! The British Home Front at War. DD Home Entertainment, 2006. Wartime propaganda on DVD, mainly focused around the experience of bombing, including of course London Can Take It!.

Nicholas Rankin. Telegram from Guernica: The Extraordinary Life of George Steer, War Correspondent. London: Faber and Faber, 2004. Steer’s report on Guernica is still famous, but he also reported on the Italian use of airpower against the Abyssinians.

Wesley K. Wark. The Ultimate Enemy: British Intelligence and Nazi Germany, 1933-1939. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. One of those books cited by everyone, which I’ve never seen before now!

Clive Harris. Walking the London Blitz. Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2006. I haven’t been buying lots of travel-type books, but I could hardly pass this one up!

Nevil Shute. On the Beach. Geneva: Edito-Service S.A., 1968 [1957]. Finally found it.

I’ve been good, I really have! I haven’t bought any books for ages, since I’ve been economising in advance of the UK trip. But yesterday I went looking for a Shute to take with me, and couldn’t find one, but instead came away with an armful of other books.

Midge Gillies. Waiting for Hitler: Voices from Britain on the Brink of Invasion. London: Hodder & Staughton, 2006. Summer, 1940. Should be an interesting complement to my own research on the early Blitz, though this leaves off where I start.

Peter Padfield. The Great Naval Race: Anglo-German Naval Rivalry, 1900-1914. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2005 [1974]. A good narrative history which I’ve used before, now with a new introduction assessing some of the historiography since it was originally published (in particular, the contributions of Sumida and Lambert). Next to it on the shelf was a new book on the same topic, with a very similar title. It looks brilliant but it’s $160 (not far short of £70)! Utterly ridiculous.

Anne Perkins. A Very British Strike: 3 May-12 May 1926. London: Pan, 2007. I’ve been looking for a decent book on the General Strike for ages, and this looks like it fits the bill.

I ordered these before I realised just how broke I’ll be after the UK trip. Oy vey …

David Clarke and Andy Roberts. Flying Saucerers: A Social History of Ufology. Loughborough: Alternative Albion, 2007. A social history of British ufology, at any rate. Did you know that Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding believed that UFOs were interplanetary spacecraft? Well, you do now.

Stanley Cohen. Folk Devils and Moral Panics: The Creation of the Mods and Rockers. Abingdon: Routledge, 2002. Third edition. Classic.

Beau Grosscup. Strategic Terror: The Politics and Ethics of Aerial Bombardment. London and New York: Zed Books, 2006. Rather polemical, and I don’t like his reliance upon Trenchard and Liddell Hart as representative of British airpower advocates. But it seems to have more theoretical approach to the subject than most, which is kind of interesting in itself; and it was cheap!

Ross McKibbin. Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1951. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Another nice, fat social/cultural history which I’ll apparently never have time to read. Didn’t realise the author was Australian.

Ian Patterson. Guernica and Total War. London: Profile Books, 2007. This has already been mentioned here a couple of times in recent days; uses Guernica as a starting point to explore total air war, via the fears of bombing as expressed in popular literature. Unlike Grosscup (above), it looks like he’s read all the right books!

Mark Connelly. Reaching for the Stars: A New History of Bomber Command in World War II. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2001. Since I had this on semi-permanent loan from the library, it seemed only logical to buy my own copy. Only partly an operational history, so not the place to turn to for a bomb-by-bomb account; it’s more concerned with the big picture, including the reactions to area bombing by the British press and public, during and since the war. (NB. Connelly’s latest book has just been reviewed at Trench Fever.)

John D. Anderson, Jr. The Airplane: A History of its Technology. Reston: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2002. As an aviation historian I should have some understanding of the technology of flight, and this seems a more enjoyable avenue into the subject than some dry textbook. It’s a bit US-centric, though that’s justifiable to a large extent.

John Benson. The Working Class in Britain 1850-1939. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003. A bargain-table find at my local quality bookshop; not immediately useful to me but good to have on the bookshelf.

Antony Beevor. Crete: The Battle and the Resistance. London: John Murray, 2005 [1991]. More family history stuff. I thought The Battle for Spain was very good, so hopefully this is of the same calibre.

R. A. Saville-Sneath. Aircraft Recognition. London: Penguin, 2006 [1941]. Sometimes I think publishers bring out books just for me! This is a cute little facsimile reprint of a wartime Penguin Special guide for aircraft spotters, complete with silhouettes, glossary, identifying features, and so on; everything from Albacores to Wirraways. I’ve been inspired to set up my own observer corps post on the roof; first I’ll need to work out which direction France is, though.

Two big-picture histories this week …

David Edgerton. The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. An anti-heroic history of technology, which bids fair to puncture assumptions that higher tech necessarily is better tech, or that the rate of technological change is ever-increasing (take that, singularitarians!) Or so I gather from a quick skim.

Azar Gat. War in Human Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. I’m ashamed to say I still haven’t read his Fascist and Liberal Visions of War. This new one looks at the evolutionary roots of war, and the way in which technology and culture have (overall) limited the incidence of war more recently, and tackles many other big questions along the way. Or so I gather from a quick skim.

Adrian Gilbert. POW: Allied Prisoners in Europe, 1939-1945. London: John Murray, 2006. Due to recent findings, a subject I’d like to know more about. (Over and above the thorough grounding I’ve received from watching The Great Escape, Hogan’s Heroes, etc.) Not to be confused with the celebrated author of The Mayan Prophecies and The Cosmic Wisdom Beyond Astrology. Thankfully.

K. S. Inglis. Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2005 [1998]. A classic book which I’ve only just gotten around to buying. Just as in Britain (as I am led to believe, anyway), nearly every city, town and suburb in Australia, large or small, has a war memorial to commemorate their dead soldiers.

N. J. McCamley. Cold War Secret Nuclear Bunkers: The Passive Defence of the Western World during the Cold War. Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2002. Who wouldn’t be fascinated by a title like that? Well, most people probably. Mostly about British bunkers and post-apocalyptic contingency planning, but also has a few chapters on America and Canada. Well-illustrated.

Frank Furedi. Culture of Fear Revisited. London and New York: Continuum, 2006. 4th edition. The sociology of fear, including that of terrorism. A well-timed chance discovery for me, as my current chapter is about fear, and the mass media’s role in propagating (and amplifying, if not creating) it.

L. E. O. Charlton. The Royal Air Force and U.S.A.A.F. from July 1943 to September 1944. London: Hutchinson & Co., n.d. [1944?]. I didn’t know of this book by Charlton. It’s a chronology of the air war, with hundreds of great photos; looks like writing these kept Charlton gainfully employed during the war.

Jörg Friedrich. The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2006. A controversial and best-selling book in Germany a few years ago, now translated into English. Note: this is a review copy supplied by the publisher (a first for Airminded).

Kenneth Munson. Airliners Between the Wars 1919-39. London: Blandford Press, 1972. Not a complete survey, just the 70 most significant types. I’ll have to do a plot of the performance data at some stage.

John Ray. The Night Blitz, 1940-1941. London: Arms & Armour Press, 1998. Probably the standard history of the Blitz.

Forgot to write this yesterday … I blame the pre-Xmas social round! Both of these were bought after being seen elsewhere (at least the author was, in the latter case).

Simon Garfield. We Are at War: The Diaries of Five Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times. London: Ebury Press, 2006. Drawn from the Mass-Observation archives, covering from August 1939 to October 1940, so should be a fair bit of air raid stuff to keep me interested. Would have liked to have it go to the end of the Blitz but one can’t have everything.

Peter Hennessy. Never Again: Britain 1945-51. London: Penguin, 2006 [1992]. Post-war Britain is still a bit of an unknown country to me, as I’ve spent so long now reading up on, first the Edwardian period, and now the World Wars and the bit in between, so this is just the ticket.

Duff Cooper. The Duff Cooper Diaries, 1915-1951. London: Phoenix, 2006. Nobleman, socialite, Conservative MP, Cabinet Minister, anti-appeaser, and apparently a fine diarist too. Edited by his son, John Julius Norwich.

Adam Tooze. The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. London: Allen Lane, 2006. I’ve heard good things about this book. Seems to assign a higher value to the Combined Bomber Offensive than do some, but argues that it was often misdirected (e.g. Battle of Berlin).

Arthur Harris. Bomber Offensive. Barnsley: Pen & Sword Military Classics, 2005 [1947]. It’s that man again! And his memoirs.

William Mitchell. Winged Defense: The Development and Possibilities of Modern Air Power — Economic and Military. Mineola: Dover Publications, 1988 [1925]. Mitchell was not hugely influential in Britain, other than for bombing the Ostfriesland and, to a lesser extent, as a cautionary example of the punishment reserved for the visionary by the hidebound military establishment. So I wouldn’t have gone out of my way to get this — but I was in the bookshop, it was in the bookshop, I couldn’t very well say no, could I.

R. J. B. Bosworth. Mussolini’s Italy: Life Under the Dictatorship, 1915-1945. London: Penguin, 2006. I have plenty of books on generic fascism, German fascism, British fascism … so one on the original fascism doesn’t seem excessive!

Paul Kennedy. The Parliament of Man: The United Nations and the Quest for World Government. London: Allen Lane, 2006. Only one chapter on the pre-1945 period, mostly the League of Nations of course. Actually I should track down a decent history of the League one day.

Scott W. Palmer. Dictatorship of the Air: Aviation Culture and the Fate of Modern Russia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. I followed Scott’s advice, but as I don’t have a car or an office, I ended up with only one copy :) It looks like a worthy companion to Corn and Fritzsche, and indeed, now that it’s finally arrived (only 3 months after I ordered it, thanks Amazon.co.uk) I plan to read it alongside those standard works on national airmindedness.

Vera Brittain. One Voice: Pacifist Writings from the Second World War. London and New York: Continuum, 2005. Consists two of her wartime works, Humiliation with Honour (1942) and Seed of Chaos (1944), a condemnation of RAF area bombing. Scholarly introduction by Aleksandra Bennett, foreword by Shirley Williams.

Peter Cooksley. The Home Front: Civilian Life in World War One. Stroud: Tempus, 2006. I don’t normally buy histories without references, but this one has lots of interesting and unusual photos, much of it related to the German air raids (all of Cooksley’s couple of dozen previous books are aviation history). Searchlight trams — who knew?

James S. Corum. The Luftwaffe: Creating the Operational Air War, 1918-1940. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1997. This will be a helpful reality check, as I spend so much time reading (usually greatly exaggerated) accounts of the capabilities and intentions of the German air force.

Peter Fleming. Invasion 1940: An Account of the German Preparations and the British Counter-measures. London: Rupert Hart-Davies, 1957. An early history of Operation Sealion (by Ian Fleming’s older brother; he had the job of organising resistance in Kent and Sussex should the Germans invade). Looks like it has some interesting bits about popular (or at least press) reactions to the threat of invasion as well as the air war.

Lorna Arnold. Britain and the H-bomb. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001. Well, at least they weren’t blowing up bits of Australia this time! Got this cheap — last time I saw it, it was about 6 times the price. Glad I held off.

Lisa Blackman and Valerie Walkerdine. Mass Hysteria: Critical Psychology and Media Studies. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2001. Another cheapie, might be useful for my phantom airship stuff, if I ever get back to that.

J. M. Spaight. An International Air Force. London: Gale & Polden, n.d. [1932]. Spaight’s take on the international air police concept, essentially that if it happens it will be in some distant future after the way has been paved for it by the development of national air forces.

Executive Council of the New Commonwealth. An International Air Force: Its Functions and Organisation. London: The New Commonwealth, 1934. A submission to the International Congress in Defence of Peace, February 1934, detailing the organisation and role of an international air force.

Lawrence Freedman. The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Third edition. An authoritative history. Starts in the right place, with the knock-out blow.

P. R. C. Groves. Our Future in the Air. London, Bombay and Sydney: George G. Harrap & Co., 1935. Not to be confused with his 1922 book of the same name. This is about both the danger of Britain falling behind in civil aviation and the danger of air attack.

Mick Jackson, dir. Threads. BBC Worldwide, 2005 [1984]. The UK’s answer to the The Day After. I’ve never seen it before; I’ll have to track down a copy of The War Game next. Come to that, it’s years since I’ve seen The Day After …

Patrick Kyba. Covenants without the Sword: Public Opinion and British Defence Policy, 1931-1935. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1983. Studying public opinion before polling or even Mass-Observation is extremely difficult; this is a pioneering attempt, drawing upon metropolitan and provincial newspapers, the Peace Ballot, by-elections, and so on.

Reginald Berkeley. Cassandra. London: Victor Gollancz, 1931. A workers’ uprising and a Soviet invasion (including the inevitable aerial bombardment), along with a future archaeologist digging through the ruins of London — as seen via clairvoyant visions of things to come! Looks like fun.

Hamish Blair. Governor Hardy. London: Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1931. Looks to be a sequel to 1957.

Hamish Blair. The Great Gesture. London: Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1931. Might be a knock-out blow novel — doesn’t really look like it. I bought these books by Blair partly on spec, and it doesn’t really look like it has paid off. Though they were quite cheap, I need to be more careful about this in future.

L. E. O. Charlton. The Secret Aerodrome. London: Oxford University Press, 1933. Charlton tries his hand at juvenile fiction, boy’s own stuff out on the fringes of Empire.

John Connell. David Go Back. London: Cassell and Company, 1935. A Scottish revolution against English rule. Not sure how aerial it is (see above).

David Davies. Suicide or Sanity? An Examination of the Proposals before the Geneva Disarmament Conference. London: Williams and Norgate, 1932. Lord Davies puts forward the case for an international police force.

C. G. Grey. Bombers. London: Faber and Faber, 1941. The pro-German, fascist-leaning former editor of The Aeroplane gives his thoughts on the evolution of bombing and its use in the present war. DID YOU KNOW: the G. stands for “Grey”!

James P. Levy. Appeasement and Rearmament: Britain, 1936-1939. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. Argues that appeasement was ‘an active, logical, and morally defensible foreign policy designed to avoid and deter a potentially devastating war’ (according to the blurb, anyway). Should be interesting!

Leslie Reid. Cauldron Bubble. London: Victor Gollancz, 1934. A bit of an oddity — a Ruritanian novel where Edwal (Wales) rises up against Grendel (England), which in turn gets involved in a war with Belmark (Germany) — including aerial bombardment. The real identities of the countries involved are so obvious that one wonders why the author bothered to obscure them.

Siegfried Sassoon. Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man. London: Faber and Faber, 1999 [1928]. This and the following are part of my ongoing quest for self-improvement.

Siegfried Sassoon. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. London: Faber and Faber, 2000 [1930].

Hamish Blair. 1957. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1930. Something a bit different — an air control novel, instead of a knock-out blow one; India ablaze instead of London. As the dust-jacket ominously says, ‘1857: Indian Mutiny. 1957: ?’ Luckily 1947 came first.

John Ramsden. Don’t Mention the War: The British and the Germans since 1890. London: Little, Brown, 2006. It was all downhill after Three Men on the Bummel … I love the title, and it looks like an insightful book on an important topic; but what’s with having the endnotes not in the book itself but on a website? Do they think websites are permanent? Will the 10 pages omitted from the book really improve its profitability by that much? It’s better than none at all, I suppose, but it does potentially diminish the book’s useability for research purposes, now and in the future. For shame, Little, Brown, for shame.

Antony Beevor. The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2006. The Spanish Civil War was a crucial event in British airpower history. I have the first edition of this book, but I haven’t read it yet, so …

Andrew Milner, Matthew Ryan and Robert Savage, eds. Imagining the Future: Utopia and Dystopia. North Carlton: Arena Publications Association, 2006. The proceedings of a conference held at Monash University in 2005. A bit too litcrit/cultstud for my liking, but ‘topias are part of my thing, so …

Templewood. Empire of the Air: The Advent of the Air Age, 1922-1929. London: Collins, 1957. Before being raised to the peerage as Viscount Templewood, Samuel Hoare had been a long-serving Tory Secretary of State for Air in 1922-4 and 1924-9 (and again, briefly, in 1940). This is his memoir of the golden age of aviation.

H. G. Wells. The World Set Free: A Story of Mankind. London: Macmillan and Co., 1914. The novel that unleashed atomic warfare upon the world. I actually already have a copy but it’s a modern edition, and I’d prefer to reference an original edition, where possible. Besides which, the University of Nebraska Press inexplicably changed the title of their edition from The World Set Free to The Last War, which abomination I don’t want stinking up my bibliography!

John Feather. A History of British Publishing. London and New York: Routledge, 2006. 2nd edition. Most of my primary sources, so far, are books; this will help me understand the economics and the ideologies of the book publishing industry.

Corey Robin. Fear: The History of a Political Idea. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. On the political uses of fear, from an American perspective. I like the titles of the first three chapters: “Fear”, “Terror”, “Anxiety”.

Stephen Dorril. Blackshirt: Sir Oswald Mosley and British Fascism. London: Viking, 2006. I’m always up for books on British fascism. This one is perhaps aiming to do a Kershaw — a sort of history of the BUF through a biography of its leader. ‘[I]mportant and controversial’, according to the blurb.

Medical Manual of Chemical Warfare. London: HMSO, 1939. A chance find in a secondhand bookshop — an Australian reprint of a War Office publication dated March 1939. Lots of fun details of the various gases then known, their effects and how to treat them. Includes pictures and paintings of chemical burns and blisters, if you are into that sort of thing! (Update: it would seem to be the prior edition to this.)

P. G. Wodehouse. Right Ho, Jeeves. London: Penguin, 1999 [1934]. Somewhat lighter fare than the above!

Paul Addison and Jeremy A. Crang, eds. Firestorm: The Bombing of Dresden, 1945. London: Pimlico, 2006. Scholars of the calibre of Richard Overy and Tami Davis Biddle examine the Dresden raid from a variety of angles. Hew Strachan contributes a chapter on “Strategic bombing and the question of civilian casualties up to 1945″. Why isn’t he off writing the second volume of The First World War instead, that’s what I’d like to know. I mean, just how long does it take to write another 1000-page-plus magisterial magnum opus anyway? :)

J. M. Kenworthy. Peace or War? New York: Boni & Liveright, 1927. I ordered this back in January, before I realised that it’s just Will Civilisation Crash? (London: Ernest Benn, 1927), under a different title. And a different pagination. Oh well.

David Zimmerman. Britain’s Shield: Radar and the Defeat of the Luftwaffe. Stroud: Sutton, 2001. A (the?) standard reference on the invention of radar. Has some details on a couple of unjustly neglected high technologies of the interwar period — sound location and death rays.

A. C. Grayling. Among the Dead Cities: Was the Allied Bombing of Civilians in WWII a Necessity or a Crime? London: Bloomsbury, 2006. I haven’t really come to grips with the moral questions surrounding my subject yet (yes, bombing civilians is bad, but then war is generally not very nice, so …), so I’ll be interested to read this. I’ll have to bear in mind that he’s a philosopher, not an historian, though. (There’s a review of the US edition in a recent Washington Post.)

Christian Wolmar. The Subterranean Railway: How the London Underground was Built and How it Changed the City Forever. London: Atlantic Books, 2005. Or, how Londoners had the foresight to build a system of public air raid shelters, and subsidised it by running trains between them — decades before Kitty Hawk! Brilliant.¹

1. Warning: possibly misleading summary of the book’s argument.

Sebastian Ritchie. Industry and Air Power: The Expansion of British Aircraft Production, 1935-41. London and Portland: Frank Cass, 1997. Just what it says in the title, really. Not, I think, from the declinist school of British historiography.

David Oliver. Hendon Aerodrome: A History. Shrewsbury: Airlife, 1994. Hendon was probably THE most important site for the cultivation of airmindedness in Britain up to the Second World War — first as the home base of pioneer aviator Claude Grahame-White and friends, then from the 1920s as the location of the annual RAF Pageant, always attracting huge crowds. Today it’s the location of the RAF Museum. This well-illustrated little book covers all of Hendon’s aerial history, but of course gives pride of place to the Grahame-White and RAF Pageant days.

Malcolm Smith. Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. Looks like another interesting entry in the burgeoning field of — what do you call it? Mythologisation of war? Memorialisation? Studies of that stuff, anyway. By the author of British Air Strategy Between the Wars. The second chapter, entitled “The projection of war, 1918-1939″ most closely relates to my own research.

John W. R. Taylor. Combat Aircraft of the World From 1909 to the Present. New York: Paragon, 1979. This was recommended to me by members of a mailing list — I wanted a fairly comprehensive guide to combat aircraft that didn’t just focus on the well-known ones from the World Wars, so that it would have the obscure French bombers and Polish fighters (or whatever!) of the 1920s and 1930s that never saw action. And this book is pretty much exactly what I was looking for (and more besides), and it’s very well-illustrated too.

Andrew Boyle. Trenchard. London: Collins, 1962. Finally got around to buying a copy of the standard biography of a crucial figure in the early RAF.

L. E. O. Charlton. Charlton. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1938. Charlton’s autobiography, originally published in 1931 — so after his almost-resignation from the RAF over bombing in Iraq, but before he became a well-known airpower pundit. A nice blue Penguin paperback, still in the original dust-jacket.

Constantine FitzGibbon. London’s Burning. London: MacDonald & Co., 1970. This popular account of the Blitz was recommended to me as a source on pre-war fears of bombing. I’m not sure how useful it will be, but it was very cheap — though still about 6 times the original $1.65 cover price!

Christopher Frayling. Things to Come. London: BFI Publishing, 1995. A little book about the big film of the even bigger book — how it came to be, Wells’ intimate involvement in the whole production, and why everyone in the future wears tunics with those giant triangular things over the shoulders. (Well, that’s what I want to know, anyway …)

Claude Grahame-White and Harry Harper. Air Power: Naval, Military, Commercial. London: Chapman & Hall, 1917. On the lessons of the Great War for the future of airpower, and how after the war Britain can and must exercise control over the air as it has over the sea.

F. W. Hirst. The Six Panics and Other Essays. London: Methuen, 1913. Hirst was the editor of the Economist. This is the only contemporary book I know of which discusses the airship panics (and then only in a single brief chapter). I’ve been looking for my own copy for years!

John Langdon-Davies. Air Raid: The Technique of Silent Approach, High Explosive, Panic. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1938. A journalist who had witnessed the air raids on Barcelona applies his first-hand knowledge to the British case. He seems quite critical of the government’s ARP literature.

Lee Kennett. A History of Strategic Bombing. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1982. Looks like a very good short introduction to the subject. Balanced international coverage and the cultural side of things is not neglected.

Robert Graves. Goodbye to All That. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960 [1929]. Another of the classic war books, that I should already have read.

David Powell. The Edwardian Crisis: Britain, 1901-1914. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 1996. New books about Edwardian Britain are pretty thin on the ground (over here, anyway) so I got excited when I saw this and snapped it up. Of course, it’s not new, it’s 10 years old, and in fact I think I’ve actually already borrowed it from the uni library for some essay or other. Oh well, still a nice little book to own, rather expensive though.

Jim Winchester. The World’s Worst Aircraft: From Pioneering Failures to Multimillion Dollar Disasters. London: Amber Books, 2005. I nearly didn’t buy this, as it’s not exactly a scholarly reference text. But I couldn’t resist when I read the entry that ‘the Flying Flea threatened to bring aviation to the man in the street, possibly by falling on him’! Other aircraft falling into (or onto) my area of interest include the Blackburn A.D. Scout, Bristol Braemar (with steam-powered Tramp variant), Sopwith LRTTr, and our man P-B’s Nighthawk, as well as more familiar failures like the Battles, Stirlings, Defiants and Manchesters. Amusingly sarcastic.

Had some good luck browsing in secondhand bookshops this week …

Lee Brimmicombe-Wood. The Burning Blue: The Battle of Britain, 1940. Hanford: GMT Games, 2006. NOT a book, a wargame simulating the “plotting table” war, if you like. Product page. Well-researched, as the support page shows. DOES have Boulton-Paul Defiants, does NOT have Gladiators.

Donald Cowie. An Empire Prepared: A Study of the Defence Potentialities of Greater Britain. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1939. Published for the Right Book Club. About how all the red bits on the map will help Britain if war comes. Introduction by Lord Lloyd, former Governor of Bombay and High Commissioner of Egypt.

Harry Golding, ed. The Wonder Book of Aircraft for Boys and Girls. London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1919. Was I as giddy as a schoolboy when I saw this in a bookshop for only $10? You betcha! Lots of illustrations, though unfortunately some have been cut out (no doubt to grace some long-forgotten school project), including eight by Heath Robinson! Clarification: that was badly phrased — the Heath Robinson pics weren’t the ones that were cut out, luckily.

Robert Graves and Allan Hodge. The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918-1939. London: Four Square Books, 1961 [1939]. A classic work of contemporary history, in a groovy new edition for the new generation.

Richard Jefferies. After London or Wild England. London: Duckworth, 1929 [1885]. Only very tangentially relevant to my areas of interest, mainly as an early example of some catatastrophe doing for London and dramatically re-ordering English society.

George Rochester. The Despot of the World. London: John Hamilton, 1936. A thrilling (one assumes) novel of the Soviet menace, air combat over Siberia, and how world war was averted. Part of the “Ace” series of books, along with Biggles and others (indeed, there’s a big selection of other aviation titles in the catalogue at the back of the book). My copy was given to one Peter Johnston at Xmas 1936, as the Third Prize “for improvement in Pianoforte”.

Andrew P. Hyde. The First Blitz: The German Air Campaign against Britain 1917-1918 . Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2002. A bit disappointing, looks like your standard pot-boiler account (and no references to speak of). Still, it was dirt cheap.

Joseph Morris. The German Air Raids on Britain, 1914-1918. Darlington: Naval & Military Press, 1993 [1925]. Unlike the above, a classic account!

Winston G. Ramsey. The Blitz Then and Now. Volume 2. London: Battle of Britain Prints International, 1988. I have volume 1; this covers the Blitz proper, September 1940 to May 1941. Massively detailed; a geek’s delight.

Barbara Stoney. Twentieth Century Maverick: The Life of Noel Pemberton Billing. East Grinstead: Bank House Books, 2004. P-B is a fascinating figure and it’s surprising he hasn’t had a biography (other than an auto- one, published in 1917) before now. Unfortunately it’s not an academic biography, so it’s light on references, but it looks thorough and there is much fascinating material here; well-illustrated too.

It’s been way too hot this week to blog, whatever energy I could muster I put towards that thesis thing. Instead, there’s this:

David Edgerton. Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Expands upon the suggestion put forward in England and the Aeroplane that the fabled British welfare state is more aptly described as a warfare state. DID YOU KNOW: Monty Python’s Ministry of Silly Walks sketch is a take-off of Concorde and the Ministry of Technology (p. 264)? Well, you’re clever then aren’t you.

J.M. Spaight. Aircraft in War. London: Macmillan and Co., 1914. This is a look at the legal do’s and do-not-do’s of air warfare, as things stood just before the Great War (the book evidently went to press in June 1914). The first of many books on airpower by Spaight.

Dan Todman. The Great War: Myth and Memory. London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2005. Written by Mr Trench Fever himself, this looks like a lot of fun - I am looking forward to reading it. But why is my copy called The Great War when the publishers and the booksellers, claim it’s called The First World War? Weird.

C.C. Turner. Britain’s Air Peril: The Danger of Neglect, Together with Considerations on the Role of an Air Force. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1933. Major Turner was pro-disarmament - as long as that meant the army and navy only, for he thought the RAF could subsititute for them to a large degree. Otherwise, he was against it, and thought the disarmament process was dangerous for Britain. Lucky Hitler came along then!

I noticed that I had a few inches of spare shelf space last week, so …

Claude Grahame-White and Harry Harper. The Aeroplane in War. London: T. Werner Laurie, 1912. A big survey of military aviation before the First World War - keeping the reading public informed about such innovations as the ‘engine-in-front biplane’. Grahame-White was the premier British flyer at this time.

Major Helders. The War in the Air 1936. London: John Hamilton, 1932. A future-war novel, this one from Germany (published under a pseudonym by Robert Knauss as Luftkrieg-1936). And conveniently for Germany, it’s France and Britain who are bombing each other’s cities, with Britain coming out on top. (Of course, it was also more plausible in that Germany had no air force.) Has a handy fold-out map section at the end, to help you follow the action!

Stephen King-Hall. Our Own Times, 1913-1938: A Political and Economic Survey. London: Nicholson and Watson, 1938. King-Hall was a former naval officer who by this time was a very popular commentator on current affairs, in print and on the wireless.

Bernard Newman. Armoured Doves: A Peace Book. London: Jarrolds, 1937 [1931]. I actually ordered this months ago but it never came, so I ordered another copy! Set in the 1950s and 1960s, the pacifist League of Scientists uses a death ray to impose peace on the world. There is a devastating air war between Poland and the USSR in the 1940s, involving the use of bacteriological weapons. George Lansbury sez, ‘All who love peace and hate war will welcome this book’.

Scot Robertson. The Development of RAF Strategic Bombing Doctrine, 1919-1939. Westport and London: Praeger, 1995. I’m slowly acquiring all the standard secondary works in my area … only a couple or five to go! This is one of the more recent ones; the sections on the RAF’s annual air defence exercises in 1927-35 in particular look very interesting.

Arthur Salter. Security: Can We Retrieve It? London: Macmillan and Co., 1939. Salter had played an important role in organising shipping in the First World War, and in the 1920s was a respected figure at the League of Nations. By 1939 he had become a professor at Oxford, and also was the MP for that university. Part of this book deals with air raid precautions, and Salter gives some useful information about the Air Raid Defence League, of which he was a member along with people like Lord Allen and Leo Amery.

J.M. Spaight. Air Power in the Next War. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1938. Spaight had always been ambivalent about the knock-out blow, I think, and by now he is downright sceptical of the idea that the next war will be decided by airpower alone.

Stephen Bungay. The Most Dangerous Enemy: A History of the Battle of Britain. London: Aurum Press, 2000. Recent-ish and apparently revisionist.

W.E. Johns. Biggles and the Black Peril. London: Red Fox, 2004 [1935]. I felt a bit silly standing in the children’s section of the bookshop looking through all their Biggles books, but I guess I could have pretended I was buying it for a nephew or something …

Basil Collier. Heavenly Adventurer: Sefton Brancker and the Dawn of British Aviation. London: Secker & Warburg, 1959. A big wheel in the RFC, for most of the 1920s he was in charge of civil aviation at the Air Ministry. He was killed in the R101 disaster in 1930.

Peter Lewis. The British Fighter Since 1912: Sixty-seven Years of Design and Development. London: Putnam, 1979. 4th edition. A companion to The British Bomber, which I already have.

W.J. Reader. Architect of Air Power: The Life of the First Viscount Weir, 1877-1959. London: Collins, 1968. A Scottish in