Acquisitions

Alan Brooks. London at War: Relics of the Home Front from the World Wars. Barnsley: Wharncliffe Local History, 2011. What's left? More than you might think -- shelters, bomb damage, memorials (lots of those), even ghost signs. Profusely illustrated.

Zara Steiner. The Triumph of the Dark: European International History 1933-1939. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. With the first volume, The Lights that Failed (which I bought almost exactly six years ago), Steiner has produced the definitive history of the international politics of interwar Europe, at least for a generation or so. Although page 88 could have been improved with a reference to recent work on the British air panic of 1935 :)

Ron Mackay. The Last Blitz: Operation Steinbock, Luftwaffe Operations over Britain January to June 1944. Walton-on-Thames: Red Kite, 2011. It's very unusual to find a book on the Baby Blitz, so I had to have it. I would have liked to have seen more on the British military and civilian responses -- the core of the work is a listing of Luftwaffe losses, similar to the The Blitz Then and Now series -- but I'm grateful for what there is. Plus there are He 177s, Mistels and intruder operations, none of which are very familiar to me. Good illustrations, but no index or bibliography, unfortunately.

Gregory Benford and the Editors of Popular Mechanics. The Wonderful Future that Never Was. New York and London: Hearst Books, 2010. A wonderfully illustrated look at techno-optimism from the early 1900s to the 1960s -- much of it American, of course. It's lighthearted in tone, but Benford is no dummy so hopefully the text is of value too.

William Mulligan. The Origins of the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Argues that the war was not inevitable and in many ways was in fact unlikely and unexpected, which itself seems improbable to me. But he gave a very good talk at the Perth AAEH on the question, so I'll be interested to read his arguments in full.

Claudia Baldoli, Andrew Knapp and Richard Overy, eds. Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe 1940-1945. London and New York: Continuum, 2011. The proceedings of the Exeter conference I attended a couple of years ago, which sought to expand our understanding of the civilian experience of aerial bombardment beyond Britain and Germany by comparison with France and Italy.

Daniel Hucker. Public Opinion and the End of Appeasement in Britain and France. Farnham and Burlingham: Ashgate, 2011. Another comparative work; this time attempt to grapple with the slippery concept of public opinion and its influence by considering its perception by elites in both countries. Looks promising so far; Hucker makes much of what he calls 'war anxiety', which I like.

Rather more seaminded than airminded, the result of having visited two maritime museums today.

Mike Dash. Batavia's Graveyard: The True Story of the Mad Heretic Who Led History's Bloodiest Mutiny. London: Phoenix, 2003. See here.

Richard Guilliatt and Peter Hohnen. The Wolf. North Sydney: William Heinemann, 2009. See here.

M. McCarthy, ed. HMAS Sydney (II). Welshpool: Western Australian Museum, 2010. See here.

Picked these up at the closing-down sale of a very good bookshop (so not Borders, obviously).

Terry Charman. Outbreak 1939: The World Goes to War. London: Virgin Books, 2009. I very distinctly remember not going to the IWM exhibition this accompanied when I was last in London. An almost minute-by-minute account of 3 September 1939, sandwiched between a chronology of the months before and thematic chapters on the remainder of the year. Despite the subtitle, very much from the British point of view.

David Kynaston. A World to Build. London: Bloomsbury, 2008. The first half of Kynaston's acclaimed Austerity Britain 1945-1951, so just covering the years 1945-8 -- a fact of which I may not have been sufficiently aware when I bought it.

John Macleod. River of Fire: The Clydebank Blitz. Edinburgh: Birlinn, 2010. This will complement the press viewpoint I gained of the Clydebank blitz through post-blogging it. And it's always good to get a non-London perspective on the Blitz.

Colin Smith. England's Last War Against France: Fighting Vichy 1940-1942. London: Phoenix, 2010. A certain occasional commenter here would probably love this book. Or maybe not, as it seems to be based on evidence.

Edward M. Spiers. A History of Chemical and Biological Weapons. London: Reaktion Books, 2010. Well, who needs excuses to buy books about CBW? It looks to be weighted more towards recent decades than the First World War and interwar period which interests me most, however.

Martin van Creveld. The Age of Airpower. New York: PublicAffairs, 2011. A history of airpower for the 21st century -- there's about twice as much space devoted to small wars and counterinsurgency as there is to the Second World War. Presentism or rebalancing?

Barrett Tillman. Whirlwind: The Air War Against Japan, 1942-1945. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010. By contrast, this focuses on what was arguably strategic airpower's heydey. Although it's told from the American perspective, it does seem to make some attempt to portray the Japanese experience of the fire raids.

Herbert Best. The Twenty-fifth Hour. London: Jonathan Cape, 1940. This must have been about the last flowering of that forgotten genre, the knock-out blow novel. More than that, it's an example of the exceptionally rare post-apocalyptic sub-genre, as it is set years after the end of civilisation and portrays the grim struggle for survival among the ruins. Fun!

David Edgerton. Britain's War Machine: Weapons, Resources and Experts in the Second World War. London: Allen Lane, 2011. A different kind of history of the war, one which places Britain's economic, industrial and scientific strength at its core: in other words, an application of Edgerton's 'warfare state' thesis. I particularly recommend page 375, note 87 and page 387.

Michael Kerrigan. World War II Plans That Never Happened. London: Amber Books, 2011. That strange zone between what might have been and what was. Looks at various operational plans considered at some stage by one side or the other, usually getting as far as getting a codename -- from Operation Stratford to Operation Downfall. Review copy.