…er (London, New York and Melbourne: Hutchinson & Co., n.d. [1943]), chapter 16; 15 and 16 are from David Zimmerman, Britain’s Shield: Radar and the Defeat of the Luftwaffe (Stroud: Sutton, 2001), 45-7. The others are sourced as indicated. The dates given are usually when the claim was made public, though in some cases it’s when the invention took place. Some of these are no doubt duplicates — Barwell doesn’t give many details in most cases — on th…
…A mix of things I missed and things which weren’t there last time: The Guernica tapestry at the Whitechapel Gallery. Moctezuma: Aztec Ruler at the British Museum. Outbreak 1939 at the Imperial War Museum. As You Like It at Shakespeare’s Globe. IWM Duxford. HMS Belfast. Museum in Docklands. Victoria and Albert Museum. Tower of London. What else should be on my list?…
…load of 6,125lb (34% all up weight), landing speed 61mph (_Flight_, 1 March 1934, 189–91) At a very conservative consumption rating of .5 lb/hp hr, it should have had a range of 429 miles per 1000lb gasoline carried. Indeed, it was originally intended to install long-range gas tanks in the KLM DC-2 and enter the new Fokker 36 in the race to compete for the handicap prize. (_Flight_, 1 Nov 1934: this is a PDF lift, so I’ll suggest searching for “A…
…Books, 2005 [1980]), 120, and represents the bomb tonnage delivered between 1940 and 1945 by Germany on Britain (including V-weapons) in blue, and by Britain and the United States on Europe as a whole (meaning Germany, mostly, but also France, Italy, the Netherlands, etc) in red. The first two years cover the Battle of Britain and the Blitz; the last four the Combined Bomber Offensive. Germany dealt out more aerial punishment than it (or its allie…
…Thomas Cooper said that ‘search warrants obtained under Defence Regulation 18B were executed on May 3 at certain premises at which it was believed the evidence would be found pointing to the commission by certain persons of acts prejudicial to public safety and the defence of the realm’. Apparently they didn’t find too much: one person was detained under 18B, another for contravening the National Armed Forces Act (presumably failure to register f…
…ontrol, food supply and, of course, world population, from the 1920s to the 1960s — so I bought it. Lara Feigel. The Love-Charm of Bombs: Restless Lives in the Second World War. London: Bloomsbury, 2014. I heard Feigel speak at Exeter a few years back. Here she has written something of a collective emotional biography of five key writers in Britain during the Second World War (Bowen, Greene, Macaulay, Spiel and Green). Inevitably the Blitz (and th…
…tions but also aircraft wing production during the war, with a workforce of 13,500 by November 1918. At issue was management’s refusal to recognise and negotiate with shop stewards. This in itself was an aftershock of the national wave of industrial action in May 1917 which involved 200,000 workers and which led to the formation of stop steward committees around Britain. Six days into the strike, after a failed mediation attempt by the mayor of Co…
…RAAF (surprisingly enough). Of course the paint job isn’t original (between 1954 and 1966 it looked like this), but presumably there’s evidence that this aircraft (or one like it) had something like this during the war. Another Supermarine flying boat, the Stranraer: the last of the RAF’s biplane flying boats. A different view of the same Beaufighter at the top of the post. Note the post-D-Day invasion stripes. This one obviously has a story behin…
…ace of it. Sydney was a modern Leander-class light cruiser, commissioned in 1935. It was much faster than Kormoran (32 knots to 19), more heavily armoured, and more powerfully armed. Kormoran was on its first (and only) cruise: in nearly a year’s sail from Germany it had encountered nothing more fearsome than defenceless merchantmen. Sydney, by contrast, had previously had a successful career in the Mediterranean. In particular, in the Battle of C…
