Cmnd. 124, Defence: Outline of Future Policy, is one of the most famous (and infamous) documents in British military history. It’s better known as the 1957 Defence White Paper, or the Sandys White Paper after the Minister of Defence responsible for it, Duncan Sandys. It ended National Service, committed Britain to nuclear deterrence, and foreshadowed […]
Ian Castle. London 1914-17: The Zeppelin Menace. Oxford and New York: Osprey Publishing, 2008. Ian Castle. London 1917-18: The Bomber Blitz. Oxford and Long Island City: Osprey Publishing, 2010. Kate Moore. The Battle of Britain. Oxford and Long Island City: Osprey Publishing, 2010. Gavin Mortimer. The Blitz: An Illustrated History. Oxford and Long Island City:
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] I know. Writing about Wikipedia is so 2006. And yes, finding errors in Wikipedia articles is not exactly difficult. But I have a bee in my bonnet which needs releasing. Wikipedia’s page on the Blitz has a section entitled ‘Commencement on September 6’. This is how it currently reads (sans hyperlinks and
James Hamilton-Paterson. Empire of the Clouds: When Britain’s Aircraft Ruled the World. London: Faber and Faber, 2010. ‘When’ is the decade or two after 1945. Apparently not quite as triumphalist as the subtitle would suggest. Has a rather Commando cover featuring a Vulcan. Looks like fun. Patrick Wright. Iron Curtain: From Stage to Cold War.
I blame society for our collective failure to suggest enough posts for Military History Carnival #26.
Nominations for the 2010 Cliopatria Awards for history blogging are open until the end of November. As usual there are six categories: Best Group Blog, Best Individual Blog, Best New Blog, Best Post, Best Series of Posts, and Best Writer. I think it’s been a bumper crop this year as far as number of nominations
I was going to end this section of the post-blog with yesterday’s post, but who could resist a front page like this? It’s so emotive and manipulative. The scene itself is tragic enough: the mass burial and funeral of 172 men, women and children killed in the blitz on Coventry last Thursday night. Another seventy
According to the Daily Express, the ‘ever-increasing power behind Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal’s master-plan for crippling Hitler’s war industries’ is beginning to yield results (1). The giant Krupp factory (nearly always rendered as ‘Krupps’ in the British press) at Essen had three ‘sections […] put out of commission’, which must be considered especially impressive
Some inconsistencies in the Daily Mirror‘s message today. Liverpool was bombed heavily last night in ‘One of the most severe raids in the air blitz’ (1): Fire bombs damaged a boys’ college and caused casualties; a secondary school was hit by an oil bomb and incendiaries; numbers of houses were destroyed; gas and water mains
The Daily Mirror likes its headlines big and bold. The one above takes up two-thirds of the width of today’s front page. The story is that Arthur Greenwood, Minister without Portfolio in the War Cabinet (and deputy leader of the Labour Party; interesting that he is not described as such in an ostensibly left-wing newspaper)
