It’s a little-known fact that Australia had a phantom airship scare of its very own. That’s mostly due to phantom airships themselves being little-known, on the whole. But the Australian sightings of August-September 1909 were also less numerous and less spectacular than the other waves that preceded it that year, in Britain in May and […]
The word ‘reprisals’ popped up during my 1940 post-blogging quite frequently. After one post I had the idea of checking whether it could be used as an index of British attitudes towards the bombing of Germany throughout the rest of the war. The short answer is: not really. But it was still worth trying. With
Philip Towle. Going to War: British Debates from Wilberforce to Blair. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. A short and occasionally polemic book which covers a lot of ground. First looks at how different sections of society have dealt with the question of war — including novelists such as H. G. Wells and Nevil
7 October was not the end of the Blitz or even of the Battle of Britain, but it is the end of my post-blogging of 1940, at least for now. The main reason for this is because I’m running out of primary sources, especially the Daily Mail. But as I think I’ve shown, in the
Justin E. A. Busch. The Utopian Vision of H. G. Wells. Jefferson and London: McFarland & Company, 2009. Not sure about this one. There’s no doubt that Wells had a utopian vision, several of them in fact, but the index has about three dozen references for Plato as well as fifteen or so for F.
‘RAF PREPARING A GREAT NEW BOMBING OFFENSIVE’, Daily Mail, page 1: POWERFUL new R.A.F. bombers now being produced in great numbers and an amazing new long-range fighter are likely to be used, in the immediate future, for a greatly intensified bombing offensive over Germany. Hitler’s people can look forward to more than a taste of
For the third week in a row the Observer reserves its biggest headlines for a story about diplomacy rather than war — here the Hitler-Mussolini Brenner Pass meeting and subsequent threats made against Britain in the Axis press. This is deemed by the diplomatic correspondent to be a ‘bogy-war’ aimed at European neutrals, an ‘elaborate
The Daily Mail today leads with changes at the top of the RAF. The Chief of the Air Staff, Marshal of the Royal Air Force Sir Cyril Newall, has been kicked upstairs to the Governor-Generalship of New Zealand. His replacement, Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal, has come from commanding Bomber Command; and his replacement there
Politics intrudes onto the front page of the Daily Mail today, in the form of a Cabinet reshuffle. But this being wartime, people are perhaps more likely to invest these normally mundane ministerial changes with great significance. The Mail certainly does, leading with the story that Sir John Reith, former Director-General of the BBC (and
Let’s look at how the British aviation press is covering the air war, by way of today’s issue of Flight, its longest-running periodical (and official organ of the Royal Aero Club). The front cover, along with the first and the last few pages, carry advertisements for various aviation-related products. Here Titanine Ltd is promoting ‘the
