John Bede Cusack. They Hosed Them Out. Kent Town: Wakefield Press, 2012 [1965]. An Australian war novel, originally published nearly half a century ago under the pseudonym John Beede, and republished a number of times since; this edition has been revised and edited by John Brokenmouth and includes a glossary, footnotes, appendices, and a memoir […]
‘Excubitor‘ is Latin for ‘sentinel’; it was the pseudonym chosen by a frequent correspondent on naval affairs for the Fortnightly Review. In March 1908, for example, Excubitor contributed an article entitled ‘The British reply to Germany’s dreadnoughts’; the following January, ‘The blessings of naval armaments’. By May 1913, though, a new theme had appeared. ‘Sea
Charles Emmerson. 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War. New York: PublicAffairs, 2013. Another case where a book seems an apposite purchase, given that it is about the year I’m currently researching. This one has generated a bit of buzz. It’s certainly an interesting approach, providing snapshots of a couple of dozen
In my article about the commercial bomber concept, I began my discussion of the idea that airliners could be turned into bombers in 1918, with the report of the Civil Aerial Transport Committee. But it turns out that it appeared some years earlier, though in a far more fragmentary and undeveloped form than in the
Is this the best conference topic ever? I think it just might be. There’s even a Zeppelin on the poster! Note that abstracts are due by 1 August 2013. EMPIRE IN PERIL: INVASION-SCARES AND POPULAR POLITICS IN BRITAIN 1890-1914 Public Lecture & Interdisciplinary Workshop Queen Mary, University of London, 14-15 November 2013 Speakers: Bernard Porter
After outlining the Anglo-German naval rivalry and the tariff reform debate, Alfred Gollin, one of the few historians to discuss the subject in any depth, has this to say about the origins of the 1909 phantom airship scare: This was the intense condition of Britain affairs when the Prime Minister, H. H. Asquith, made his
Just before the outbreak of the First World War, a curious book was published in New York under the title The Secrets of the German War Office. The author, Dr. Armgaard Karl Graves, is described on the front cover as a ‘Secret Agent’.1 He probably wasn’t a doctor and his name was probably something else,
I haven’t mentioned this before now, partly because it seemed so far off and a little unreal. Exactly one month from today, I will become a lecturer in modern European history in the School of Humanities at the University of New England (UNE), Armidale, New South Wales. Which is both very exciting and ever-so-slightly scary!
A widespread assumption in 1913 was that the mysterious airships then being seen in British skies were real and German. The vast majority certainly were not: there were just too many of them, in too many places, for no conceivable purpose. But it remains a possibility that a few of them really were German airships.
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] An interesting Flickr set of photographs evidently taken in the south of England in the last year of the Second World War was recently posted to a WWII mailing list I’m on. Many show aircraft of various types; others are of people and places. The photographer is unknown
