As with the Daily Mail yesterday, The Times doesn’t give the bombing of London the biggest headlines (4). Those are reserved for the RAF’s bombing of enemy shipping in the Channel ports, which the Germans are concentrating in readiness for the invasion, and this is the lead story along with Bomber Command’s raid on Hamburg. […]
Daniel Swift. Bomber County. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2010. Partly an account of the attempt by the author — an English lit professor — to understand what happened to his grandfather, a Lancaster pilot shot down during a raid on Münster, as well as to the people he bombed, it also makes the argument that the
Saturday’s bombing of London isn’t quite as prominent on the front page of the Daily Mail as one might expect. There are a few small items about it (e.g. a panorama of London ablaze, taken from the top of Northcliffe House; a report from Italian radio that Londoners are ‘absolutely terrified’ by the raids) but
‘[T]he great daylight attack on London’ (7) yesterday evening came at an awkward time for the Observer. It was too late to do the opinion page over, and so it features editor J. L. Garvin’s thoughts on the destroyer deal and the battle of wills between Hitler and Churchill. So there is less than half
Today’s New Statesman and Nation has little to say about a German invasion or aerial strategy, unlike the Spectator yesterday, aside from a brief paragraph in the editorial comments (221) noting that German bombers now have an equal number of fighters as escorts: The primary object of these attacks has been to engage and destroy
This week’s issue of the Spectator, an influential commentary from the right, has a number of editorial comments and columns about the course of the war. The leading paragraph, on page 234, discusses Hitler’s recent speech (‘bombast […] lies […] threats’), focusing on one of his statements which suggests that ‘the German Air Force is
Bomber Command has been busy bombing German forests, among other targets: the Black Forest on Monday night, the Hartz [sic] in north-west Germany and the Grunewald north of Berlin on Tuesday night. According to the Air Ministry communique, issued last night and reported here in The Times (4), ‘military targets [were] concealed’ in these forests;
The big news in the Manchester Guardian today (5) has nothing to do with the air war but a deal with the United States, which will transfer fifty elderly destroyers to Britain in exchange for 99-year leases on bases in the Western Hemisphere. (It seems that Roosevelt meant what he said at Newfound Gap.) The
Yesterday was another big day for aerial warfare (these headlines are from The Times, 4). Six hundred and fifty German aircraft attacked RAF aerodromes in south-east England; forty-six were shot down and the raids repulsed. Only thirteen British aircraft were lost. London had more air-raid warnings during the day but suffered nothing worse than that.
It’s taken me just over five years to get to my 100th ‘acquisitions’ post… which seems surprisingly slow, I have to say! Michael Molkentin. Fire in the Sky: The Australian Flying Corps in the First World War. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010. A topic I don’t know much about. Looks well-researched, and on p.
