One of the most intriguing things to emerge from my post-blogging of the Blitz a few years ago (but which sadly didn’t make it into my Blitz article) was the notion of reprisals after notice, that is to say, of publishing a list of German cities which would be bombed intensively until the Luftwaffe ceased […]
Colin Dobinson. Building Radar: Forging Britain’s Early Warning Chain, 1935-1945. London: Methuen, 2010. Looks like a useful complement to David Zimmerman’s Britain’s Shield (2001). This covers the scientific and institutional side of the British development of radar in detail too (and adds some texture to the role of death ray desire), but is more concerned
My peer-reviewed article, ‘Dreaming war: airmindedness and the Australian mystery aeroplane scare of 1918’, has now been published in the latest issue of History Australia, which can be found here. This is the abstract: Numerous false sightings of mysterious aeroplanes, thought to be German and hostile, were reported by ordinary people around Australia in the
A. O. Pollard. Epic Deeds of the RAF. London and Melbourne: Hutchinson and Co., 1940. Pollard, a VC winner and former RAF pilot, was mostly known for his crime thrillers (some of them airminded) but occasionally turned his hand to non-fiction. This is a fairly generic account of the first year of the Second World
In between conferencing and researching, I managed to fit in some sightseeing in Wellington. It really was only a day or two, and sometimes the weather was somewhat inclement, but I did see some of the main attractions. Above is a detail of the portico of the beautiful Wellington Railway Station, which opened in 1937.
The main reason for my recent New Zealand trip was to go to a conference, but afterwards I spent a week researching in Archives New Zealand and the National Library of New Zealand. My main reason for that was to look into the trans-Tasman counterpart to the 1918 mystery aeroplane scare in Australia. I didn’t
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] The Australasian Association for European History XXIII Biennial Conference — ‘Faultlines: cohesion and division in Europe from the 18th Century to the 21st’ — lived up to the high standard set by its predecessor. Wellington was much colder and windier than Perth, but the locals were friendly, the
Christopher M. Bell. Churchill and Sea Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. I’m on record as pledging to never write a book about Winston Churchill, because there seems to be another new one out every time I go to a bookshop and very few of them can have anything new or even interesting to say
Ritchie Calder. Carry on London. London: English Universities Press, 1941. Calder was a campaigning journalist during the Blitz, who exposed many of the official civil defence failures in the New Statesman. They feature here too, but overall he gives the government much credit for eventually getting its act together. Ends with a call for Britons
I’ve argued that in 1913 there was a perception that the Anglo-German naval arms race was becoming an aero-naval arms race which Britain was losing, and that there was a response on the part of the Navy League, the Aerial League and others to mobilise public opinion in support of an aerial defence programme in
