Some perfectly ordinary banter, c. 1917: First “Hun”: “Did you see old Cole’s zoom on a quirk this morning?” Second “Hun”: “No, what happened?” First “Hun”: “Oh, nothing to write home about … stalled his ‘bus and pancaked thirty feet … crashed completely … put a vertical gust up me … just as I was […]
View Larger Map It’s Australia Day today, so here’s a map of the land down under, appropriately enough upside down. But the map itself is on a hillside in a land up over — near Compton Chamberlayne in Wiltshire to be precise. It was carved from the chalk downs in 1916 or 1917 by Australian
A question about the phantom airship scares which has bothered me for a while is, how accurate are the press reports of people seeing something strange in the sky? That is, did people actually see something strange in the sky, or were the press reports made up or otherwise distorted? There is some evidence from
Source: Review of Reviews for Australasia, May 1913, 248 (link; presumably originally from a British publication).
This is something I’ve been wondering about for ages. In The Impact of Air Power on the British People and their Government, Alfred Gollin notes, but does not explain, a recurring theme: the idea that after a damaging air raid, angry mobs would string up government ministers (or other servants of the public) from lamp-posts
Last month I touched on the Hidden Hand, an alleged German conspiracy during the First World War, supposedly undermining the British war effort from within. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately!) my sources don’t include some of the more extreme publications pushing this conspiracy theory, but I have looked at the Daily Mail, which has published the
The 19th Military History Carnival has been posted at Military History and Warfare. For my pick from this edition I can’t go past the first entry, on the interwar RAF at Thoughts on Military History. It’s part of the first chapter of his thesis, and it’s a very good overview of the financial and operational
One of the things I love about the official history of the RFC and RAF in the First World War is all the maps — multi-panel fold-out jobs showing where bombs fell in London during the Gotha raids, or the Allied front in Macedonia. That’s not to mention the accompanying slip-cases stuffed full of more
In contrast to the King’s message to the RAF, Flight‘s reaction to the end of the war, in the same issue of 14 November 1918, seems rather grumpy. It’s true that the editorial section is rounded off, on p. 1274 (source), by a short section which expresses a certain amount of glee at the news
It’s 90 years to the day since the guns fell silent, and the bombs stopped falling. I don’t feel that I have anything particularly insightful to say, so here’s how Flight marked the occasion, by publishing the King’s message to the RAF on its front page, 14 November 1918, p. 1270 (source): THE KING’S MESSAGE
