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?).

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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!

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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.

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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.

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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!

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