This post should probably be called ‘Smugglers?’ but like many people I owe an intellectual debt to Enid Blyton. I’ve seen mentions of mystery aircraft in Britain in the 1930s but until now never a primary source reference. Thomas Bullard’s most interesting The Myth and Mystery of UFOs notes that ‘Mystery airplanes also appeared at […]
In my reprisals paper abstract, I said that It is often argued that there was little enthusiasm in Britain for reprisals against German cities in retaliation for the Blitz, unlike the First World War. This is a historiographical claim. If I don’t want to be accused of using weasel words or attacking strawmen, it’s one
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
In 1935, the Emperor of Abyssinia, Haile Selassie, tried to buy the Airspeed Viceroy, an aeroplane which had been built to order for the London-Melbourne air race the year before. The Viceroy (above) was a one-off, customised version of Airspeed’s successful Envoy, a twin-engined civil transport which could carry six passengers in addition to its
