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 […]
I’ve recently been reading Peter Ewer’s Wounded Eagle: The Bombing of Darwin and Australia’s Air Defence Scandal, which I found to be unexpectedly interesting, but not always in a good way. Wounded Eagle has much less about the Second World War than I’d thought: much of the early part of the book is taken up
Daniel Swift. Bomber County: The Lost Airmen of World War Two. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2010. This book is a very different way to approach the Allied bomber offensives of the Second World War. It is not a history of strategic bombing policy, nor is it a history of the machines used to carry it out,
Cecil Day Lewis, ‘Bombers’ (1938): Through the vague morning, the heart preoccupied, A deep in air buried grain of sound Starts and grows, as yet unwarning — The tremor of baited deepsea line. Swells the seed, and now tight sound-buds Vibrate, upholding their paean flowers To the sun. There are bees in sky-bells droning, Flares
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
One of the mysteries of Britain’s fear of the bomber is why it wasn’t a fear of the submarine instead. In the First World War Germany attacked Britain directly by air and indirectly by sea, but only the submarine blockade came anywhere close to knocking Britain out. The same was true of the Second World
Military History Carnival #25 is now up at The Edge of the American West. My favourite selection this time around is from Beachcombing’s Bizarre History Blog and concerns the question of the last cavalry charge in history. As an Australian, I am legally obliged (I think it’s in the Constitution, somewhere near the back) to
I’ve put the series of posts I did a couple of years ago on the Sudeten crisis into one big PDF file called, rather grandiosely, Post-blogging the Sudeten Crisis: The British Press, August-October 1938 (147 pages, 5.6 Mb). It’s freely available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. It’s very bloggy in
One of the questions which interested me when I originally embarked on my PhD was the extent of the relationship between British aviation and the far right. As it turned out, my research took me elsewhere. But that doesn’t mean I can’t blog about it. In the chart above I’ve attempted to show some of
You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but you can often pick up a few interesting things about it. Here we have number 77 in the Crime-Book Society series, Black Out by Captain A. O. Pollard. Fifty-four thousand copies have been sold (or at least printed), which makes it a fairly successful title. It’s
