Michael Molkentin. Anzac and Aviator: The Remarkable Story of Sir Ross Smith and the 1919 England to Australia Air Race. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2019. [Disclaimer: Michael is a friend of mine. But I wouldn’t have agreed to review his book if I wasn’t confident, based on everything else that he has published, that […]
My article, ‘The meaning of Hendon: the Royal Air Force Display, aerial theatre and the technological sublime, 1920–37’, has been accepted for publication in Historical Research (the journal of the Institute of Historical Research). I’m not sure when it will be published yet, and I can’t self-archive the post-peer-reviewed version until 24 months after publication.
The man: Stanley Baldwin. The place: the House of Commons. The date: 10 November 1932. The quote: I think it is well also for the man in the street to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed, whatever people may tell him. The bomber will always get
Swastika Night was written by Katharine Burdekin under the pseudonym Murray Constantine. It’s a dystopian novel in which Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan have conquered the world and divided it between them. Nothing so original in that, you might think — except that Swastika Night was published in June 1937, before the invasion of Poland
From the climactic set-piece at the 1927 RAF Display at Hendon, the destruction of an ‘Eastern village’ by Fairey Foxes — in GIF form:
Tim Sherratt pointed out this remarkable image, PRG 280/1/24/108 in the State Library of South Australia’s collection. The description reads: A large crowd of spectators packed into stands around a show ring looking up into the sky as they watch for the arrival of the local aviator Harry Butler’s aircraft. The date is given as
This is the cover of a leaflet produced in 1916 by the Australian Air Squadrons Fund, the Australian arm of the Imperial Air Flotilla which raised funds around the British Empire for presentation ‘battle-planes’ for the Royal Flying Corps. My interest in it is not so much for its own sake, though I am struck
Walter Sickert, Miss Earhart’s Arrival (1932). A fascinating image. The occasion is Amelia Earhart’s arrival at Hanworth aerodrome on 22 May 1932, after her solo flight across the Atlantic, the first by a woman and in record time. She was already well-known as an aviator, but this feat made her a celebrity. You can see
So if there were no mystery aeroplanes over Berlin on 23 June 1933, and nobody who even saw any mystery aeroplanes, why did the German government and press say otherwise? There are three-ish reasons, that I can see. The first is the most obvious. It was strongly implied in the original English-language reports that the
On the evening of 23 June 1933, Berlin was raided by mysterious aeroplanes of unknown origin: A number of aeroplanes, which were described as being of unidentified foreign origin, are reported to have flown over the working-class areas of the city yesterday evening, and dropped leaflets and pamphlets, in which the Government was attacked. Upon
