Under the terms of an agreement made in 1909 between the three main British aviation bodies, the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain concentrated on ‘the scientific phases of the movement’, the Aero Club of the United Kingdom was responsible for ‘sporting and social aspects’, and the Aerial League of the British Empire, the one I’m […]
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] On 15 February 1915, the Winnipeg Evening Tribune‘s daily astrology column noted the unfavourable positions of Mars and Uranus: The affliction of Mars this month is ominous of outrages against persons in power. A disaster that will shock the people living in cities is threatened. Uranus foreshadows peril
A key element in any wargame is the scenario. It sets the boundaries in time and space of the simulation, as well as its initial conditions. For a historical wargame, a scenario might be the battle of Cannae, or the British and Canadian sectors at D-Day. Creating such scenarios involves researching orders of battle, contemporary
So, I want to construct a knock-out blow wargame. In my PhD/book, I define an ideal knock-out blow from the air as having six key characteristics. Three of these describe the attack itself: surprise, scale, and speed. Three describe what it destroyed: infrastructure, morale, and civilisation itself. Starting with the attack, as this will define
This is the poster produced by the Navy League in 1913 as a key part of its campaign to force the government to increase the amount it spent on military and naval aviation — or as the poster itself puts it, rather more succinctly: THE NAVY LEAGUE DEMANDS £1,000,000. FOR AERIAL DEFENCE BRITONS WAKE UP!
As I discussed recently, Philip Sabin’s Simulating War: Studying Conflict through Simulation Games (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2012) is primarily about using wargames to understand past wars. This is sensible; apart from the obvious benefit of helping us to understand history better, there’s also the useful featurethat there are some facts to go on
While archival research can be slim pickings, I suspect that this may not be such a problem for my Great War panics project, given that on my recent trip the UK I found some really good examples without even trying. The following is an excerpt from a letter dated 7 June 1915, sent to the
I’ve been awarded a small grant by the University of New England to fund research into ‘Popular perceptions of the German threat in Britain, 1914-1918’. I’m very fortunate to have received this and very grateful. The basic idea is this: This project will investigate the British public’s reaction to the threat of German attack during
Now that I’m back home, it’s time to sum up what my UK sojourn achieved. The short answer, at least in terms of my immediate research objectives, is that it yielded only mediocre results. The ostensible purpose for the trip was to attend the Empire in Peril workshop at Queen Mary and to give a
This must be about the strangest image to have ever appeared on this blog. How to explain it? First of all, it was published in Review of Reviews, May 1913, 457, accompanying the second part of a two-part article by Count Zeppelin on ‘The conquest of the air’. However, apart from the obvious aviation theme
