At the end of March 1918, the NSW Minister for Education, Augustus James, gave a speech at North Sydney Boys’ High School’s prize day. No doubt with an eye on the press, he spoke rather gloomily about the war situation, especially in light of the continuing German offensive on the Western Front: “We know to-day,” […]
I have an article in the May 2011 issue of Flightpath, an Australian warbirds magazine. It’s on one of my pet interests, the fear of the commercial bomber between the wars. James Kightly, who will be familiar to regular commenters here as JDK, contributes a complementary look at the reality of transport-bomber conversions. There are
While researching a possible British mystery aeroplane in 1936, which turned out to be nothing interesting, I came across a genuine mystery aeroplane scare which I’d never heard of before, from Australia and New Zealand in March and April 1918. I’m sure somebody else must have noticed it before now, as it was trivial to
A recent post at Ptak Science Books alerted me to the existence of page 363 of the Illustrated London News for 6 September 1913. Not that I was surprised by this in general terms, but I was unaware of what was on it: an artist’s impression of a both a flying aircraft carrier — which
Over the years, I’ve written a number of posts about various phantom airship scares (which I take here to mean things seen in the sky which weren’t actually there). There are many more I might do in future, pending access to good sources (and maybe I’ll even get around to writing something for publication!) but
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] Libya now holds an unfortunate record. It is the country which has the longest experience of aerial bombardment. Libya was first bombed in 1911, by Italy; now, in 2011, it is being bombed by its own air force. That makes it just under a century from the first bomb to the latest.
The indefatigable David Silbey has posted Military History Carnival #26 at Cliopatria. The link which inspired this post’s title is at Military Times and concerns the fate of HMS Caroline, a light cruiser which was commissioned in 1914 and remains in service as a floating (albeit permanently moored) headquarters and training ship in Belfast. She
59-61 Farringdon Road in London is also known as the Zeppelin Building. I don’t know when it received this name; possibly only recently. But it owes it to the fact that its predecessor on the site was destroyed during an air raid on the night of 8 September 1915. The most famous of the Zeppelin
Ian Castle. London 1914-17: The Zeppelin Menace. Oxford and New York: Osprey Publishing, 2008. Illustrated by Christa Hook. Ian Castle. London 1917-18: The Bomber Blitz. Oxford and Long Island City: Osprey Publishing, 2010. Illustrated by Christa Hook. As the titles suggest, these two entries in Osprey’s long-running Campaign series dovetail nicely. One takes as its
Finally, something to justify the existence of the Internet. The Google Ngram Viewer takes the corpus of words formed by the Google Books dataset (i.e. books, journals, magazines, but not newspapers) and lets you plot the changes in frequency of selected ones over time. There are all sorts of interesting questions you could (in principle)
