There aren’t a great many sites of memory left to evoke the first bombing war, so during my recent UK trip I thought I’d make the effort to track a couple of them down. (One, Cleopatra’s Needle, I did see on my first UK trip, but have never managed to make it back.)
So, I’m back from my long-overdue and much-needed research trip to the UK. Was it worth it? Yes! In raw numbers, I took over 11,000 photos across 13 days at 8 archives in 5 cities.1 Obviously, since I’m not a Bomber Command AOC I’m not going to prioritise quantity over quality. But I did pretty
That’s right… … I’m going on a research trip… … to the UK! (I suppose this post should technically be called Archivwochen, but that’s a little too pedantic even for me.) It’s been nearly a decade since my last visit, and that was long before I started working on Home Fires Burning. So I’ve built
In my previous post, I discussed my concerns with the way sources are used in Neil Hanson’s First Blitz.1 Here I turn to the problem of strategy, which goes more to the argument of the book. Again there are two parts to this, one broad and one narrow. I’ll start with the broad. Hanson’s argument
This is a continuation, of sorts, of my series of posts critiquing the recent trend of describing the air raids on Britain in the First World War as the ‘First Blitz’. I’ve separated it out because, although it is about the best-known book to use that phrase in its title – Neil Hanson’s First Blitz
![German propaganda poster with a vibrant and striking image depicting swarms of British aircraft bombing an industrial site to illustrate the following quote, by British Labour Leader Johnston Hicks [sic], which appeared in the 'Daily Telegraph' on January 3rd 1918: 'One must bomb the Rhineland industrial regions with one hundred aircraft day after day, until the treatment has had its effect!’](https://airminded.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/artv05099.jpg)
In the previous post, I discussed some of my objections to the idea that the air raids on Britain in the FIrst World were the ‘First Blitz’. I don’t think my arguments were completely persuasive, even to myself (which is why I decided to work through them in public like this). But I ended by
I admit the term ‘First Blitz’ is a convenient label for the air raids on Britain in the First World War, both as a shorthand and because there really were many similarities with the later Blitz. But nevertheless, I don’t really like it, and I’m avoiding it in my own book on the topic. Why?
You might think that the first Blitz was the Blitz, i.e. the German bombing of British cities in 1940-1941, at the time was understood as a form of blitzkrieg, which was then shortened to ‘blitz’ or ‘Blitz’. Of course, that doesn’t mean a blitz couldn’t be retrospectively recognised, and indeed it was soon applied, for
While looking for something else, I came across this rather incredible photo in the Imperial War Museum collection. That’s a seaplane stuck 300 feet up a 350ft tall radio mast! If that’s not amazing enough, the pilot was rescued by three men who climbed up to retrieve him. And he survived.
John Llewelyn Rhys, The Flying Shadow (Bath: Handheld Press, 2022). John Llewelyn Rhys, England Is My Village and The World Owes Me a Living (Bath: Handheld Press, 2022). John Llewelyn Rees was born on 7 May 1911, got his pilot’s license on 4 July 1934, and was killed in a flying accident on 5 August
