Philipp von Hillgers. War Games: A History of War on Paper. Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 2012. Really only traces one strand of the history of wargaming, the abstract ‘German’ one which passes through 19th-century Kriegspiel and not the boardgame-style ‘American’ one or the ‘British’ miniatures one (not that these aren’t abstract, or purely American […]
The Lebaudy-built Patrie, seen above, was France’s first military airship. A descendent of the Jaune, in 1906 and 1907 it carried out a number of successful proving and publicity flights, including one where it carried the prime minister, Georges Clemenceau, over Paris. Afterwards it was moved to its operational base near the fortress of Verdun.
10 April 1940 has remained in history as “the great panic day”. The reason for this designation is the panic that spread through the population of Oslo, after the rumors of the British bombing of the capital had spread. Here you can see how the Oslo people rush out of town on foot, on bicycles,
MONSTER EAR TRUMPETS FOR AIR DEFENCE During the last years of the Great War, sound detectors played an increasingly important part in the air defences of all the belligerents. Since those days they have undergone great development. Here the emperor of Japan is inspecting the huge trumpet-like detectors that work in conjunction with the anti-aircraft
It’s now a year since my article ‘The air panic of 1935: the British press between disarmament and rearmament’ was published in the Journal of Contemporary History. As noted noted previously, as it was with SAGE this means I can now self-archive the accepted version (i.e. which has passed peer review). This is the abstract:
Virginia Nicholson. Millions Like Us: Women’s Lives During the Second World War. London: Penguin, 2012. Disappointingly, not the novelisation of the film. I haven’t read her Singled Out — I think the ‘lost generation’ thing is a bit exaggerated — but the Daily Mail liked this one a lot, and that’s good enough for me.
In 1910, two Army officers, Second Lieutenant Bowle-Evans and Lieutenant Cammell independently put forward a new idea for an anti-aircraft weapon: the vortex ring gun. In principal, it involved the formation of a vortex in the air, by the firing of an explosive charge inside a conical ‘gun’ which, if it were pointed upwards, would
Don Charlwood’s No Moon Tonight has a reputation as one of the best Bomber Command memoirs. Charlwood was a Victorian who joined the RAAF in 1941, trained as a navigator in Canada under the Empire Air Training Scheme, and then flew in Halifaxes and Lancasters with 103 Squadron at Elsham Wolds. Having survived his tour
Paris, 20 November 1903: the ghostly form of an airship floats past an equally ghostly Eiffel Tower, before a very solid crowd of completely entranced spectators. It is Le Jaune, ‘The Yellow’, the first of the successful Lebaudy series of French semi-rigid airships. The source of this photograph is a postcard sent to me by
FORETASTE OF THE FUTURE Of all the forms of gas used in the Great War, that which had the least disastrous consequences was “tear gas.” Its effect was to inflict temporary blindness on those who came in contact with it. This pathetic row of figures show men temporarily blinded in that way on the Western
