Acquisitions

Richard Overy. The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars London: Allen Lane, 2009. One I’ve been looking forward to getting my hands on! It’s not a general history of the 1920s and 1930s, but more a history of ideas, with a particular focus on (as the title suggests) pessimistic ones. There are a couple of chapters on pacifism which look especially interesting. And while it’s not profusely illustrated, the pictures are well-chosen: the one on the back cover of the Southwark Spain Shop (’Buy a tin of food! We will send it to Spain’) is worth at least a thousand words.

Oliver Stewart. Air Power and the Expanding Community. London: George Newnes, 1944. Thanks to Chris for pointing this one out to me. Looks forward to the post-war period and argues that the airpower (both military and civil) will be fundamental to the power blocs which will emerge, and that armed forces should combine all three arms, of equal status under a unified war ministry.

Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko. The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008. Talks a bit about the Baruch plan, which seems (perhaps naively) to me to be a close relative of the pre-war proposals for an international air force and the international control of civil aviation.

David Faber. Munich: The 1938 Appeasement Crisis. London: Simon & Schuster, 2008. A much-needed narrative history, though I’m sure it won’t quite satisfy me! Mostly political and diplomatic, and mostly from the British point of view. Also some of the street-level stuff — calls ARP Sunday gas mask Sunday.

Matthew J. Flynn. First Strike: Preemptive War in Modern History. New York and London: Routledge, 2008. From 1805 to 2003. Only looks at actual instances of preemptive war, so no knock-out blow or nuclear strategy.

David Cortright. Peace: A History of Movements and Ideas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. A history of pacifism, mainly concentrating on Britain and the United States in the 20th century, with an emphasis on the latter half.

S. P. MacKenzie. The Battle of Britain on Screen: ‘The Few’ in British Film and Television Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. A short but densely-packed book, a series of cases studies of key representations of the Battle: The Lion Has Wings, The First of the Few, Angels One Five, Reach for the Sky, Battle of Britain, Piece of Cake, A Perfect Hero. Of course, The Lion Has Wings was made before the Battle, and so is anticipation, not memory. Note: review copy (not for Airminded).

Jeffry Record. The Specter of Munich: Reconsidering the Lessons of Appeasing Hitler. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2006. Generally speaking, I’m bored by the ritual invocation of Munich every time some foreign crisis dominates the headlines. But it’s not going to stop happening just because it bores me and it’s kinda my area (or adjacent to it, at least), so maybe I should pay more attention to it.

Neil Hanson. First Blitz: The Secret German Plan to Raze London to the Ground in 1918. London: Doubleday, 2008. This is a thick, new narrative history of the German air raids on Britain in the First World War, concentrating mainly on the aeroplane raids in 1917-8. Although written for a popular audience, it’s based on a prodigious number of primary sources, both published and archival (there are plenty of periodical articles listed with which I’m not familiar, for example) — some are even in German. This is all good! But I’m worried about that subtitle. Hanson argues that there was a plan to use Elektron incendiary bombs to burn out London in 1918, which seems plausible enough. A plan is one thing, but Hanson seems to think that it could have actually worked. Is that likely, when the more capable and numerous German bombers of 1940-1 didn’t come close do doing this even on the worst nights of the Blitz? He also speaks of mass panic in London during air raids (346) … well, as I say, he’s read a lot of primary sources that I haven’t, but not even the most extreme airpower advocates between the wars claimed that there had been mass panic, merely isolated cases which they quite happily extrapolated to a larger scale. Hmm. I still look forward to reading it, though.