I’m sure everybody has a favourite story about Sir Kingsley Wood. Mine is the one from when he was Air Minister at the start of the Second World War, and he refused to bomb Germany on the grounds that it would damage private property. As A. J. P. Taylor tells it: Kingsley Wood, secretary for […]
Frank McDonough, ed. The Origins of the Second World War: An International Perspective (London and New York: Continuum, 2011). Choc-a-block: twenty-nine essays on the diplomacy of the interwar period (with a heavy emphasis on Europe, though I don’t have a problem with that myself), from pretty much all the experts.
A common complaint1 about this blog is that it doesn’t feature nearly enough pictures of airships. So here’s one, a 27-metre long non-rigid which belonged to Henry Spencer, scion of a remarkably airminded family (sixteen aeronauts across four generations). Indeed, he built it with his brothers. The photograph was taken on 16 February 1909 and
‘The Hum‘ is a mysterious low-frequency sound just at the edge of hearing which seems to infect some places, but which only some people can detect. What causes it is unknown — theories range from factories and air conditioners to gravitational waves — and responsible authorities often deny that it exists at all. The most
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] On 29 March 1939, Croydon airport was the site of an extraordinary scene, as the Daily Express reported: NEARLY 400 Jewish refugees streamed into Croydon in a succession of air liners yesterday — the biggest influx the airport had ever experienced. They came from Danzig, the Polish Corridor, Cologne, Berlin, Vienna, Switzerland
Breaking the morale of a civilian population by means of aerial bombardment is quite difficult. But it’s a lot easier if you only have to do it in graphical form. Here bombs of type ‘killed’, ‘wounded’, ‘evacuated’, ‘deprived of utilities’ and ‘homes destroyed’ come thundering down towards the edifice ‘will to resist’, which is formed
After knocking together The Scareship Age, I started working on turning my Sudeten crisis posts into an e-book version. I knew there’d be a fair amount of work, but I underestimated the value of ‘fair’. Finding and cleaning up formatting errors is a very slow and tedious business, as is creating an index (though it
Roger Moorhouse. Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler’s Capital, 1939-45. London: Vintage, 2010. Bomber Command found Berlin to be of great interest, so it’s something I should know more about. There are two chapters on Berlin under the raids, and the topic appears elsewhere in the book too: for example, how Berliners adapted
So, as I was saying, there doesn’t seem to be much evidence about what was on Tolkien’s mind when he was writing The Hobbit, in particular about the issue of aerial warfare. For example, I don’t know what he made of the bombing of Guernica, which took place about 5 months before The Hobbit (and
Let’s turn now to Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Smaug’s attack on Lake-town (Esgaroth).1 In my PhD thesis I identified six characteristics of the ideal theory of the knock-out blow from the air: it would be a surprise attack, on a large scale, which would strike at the interdependent structures and civilian morale of its targets,
