Geoffrey Best. Churchill and War. London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2005. As previously noted. There’s disappointingly little on Churchill’s “wilderness years” – OK, so there wasn’t actually a war on then, but this was the time when the foundations of the Churchill-as-prophet-of-war legend were laid. And it’s the period of his career that […]
Trench Fever reports on a seminar by Stefan Goebel on the post-war memorialisation of Coventry’s bombing in 1940. Hence today’s word for the day: ”coventrate”. It’s a good example of a word or phrase coined in a mean-spirited way (in this case, by the Germans), but which ends up being adopted by those whom it
Ann Curthoys and John Docker. Is History Fiction? Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006.Sic. On truth in history; seems to be attempting a third way between, or at least taking the good bits from both postmodernism and empiricism. My glib answer to the question in the title would be, not if you’re doing it right! (Which probably
As promised, here are a couple of captures from the 1939 propaganda film The Lion Has Wings, which dramatised the RAF attack on Wilhelmshaven of 4 September 1939. The actual results of the raid were meagre; one Blenheim crashed into the fo’c’sle of the cruiser Emden, while the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer was hit by
While looking at the American journalist William Shirer’s Berlin Diary for my earlier post on the wooden bomb tale, I was intrigued to see that immediately after the start of war in September 1939 he simultaneously expected, hoped and feared that there would be an immediate, large-scale air attack on Berlin, by either Poland or
As befits a self-respecting Unix geek, I’ve pretty much finally decided that I will write my thesis in LaTeX, and not in Word (which is what I have been using for the last few years). I am a bit nervous about this. Most historians, I’m sure, have never heard of it, and indeed the typical
To continue the Australian theme, here’s an excellent article by Leigh Edmonds on the development of airmindedness in Australia, from Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture. (It’s quite long; there’s a shorter version at the Airways Museum & Civil Aviation Historical Society.) My impression from that is that airminded organisations had more influence
I just tried out Bruce’s Australian Name Generator (well, it’s alun‘s, really). Being an actual Australian, I was expecting something special, and I got it: Brett Holman from this day forward you will also be known as: Airborne Bruce the Great Galah That’s almost uncanny.
Today is Remembrance Day. Today I remember Private John Joseph Mulqueeney, of Tumut, New South Wales – my great-grand uncle. A labourer in civilian life, he enlisted in the 4th Battalion of the 1st AIF (Australian Imperial Force) on 9 October 1915, embarking for Egypt on 3 February 1916. His unit was soon redeployed to
