It seems like only last week that I was spruiking a podcast appearance — actually, it was last month, which is also not very long ago! This time it was on the History of the Second World War podcast with Wesley Livesay, chatting about the German air raids on Britain of the First World War […]
In the previous post I looked at the possible origins of the phrase ‘big bang’ — as in ‘Big Bang’ — in Operation Big Bang, the partial destruction in 1947 of Heligoland, a German island in the North Sea. I also suggested that there was longer history to the phrase ‘big bang’, which I’ll also
A cloud of smoke billows up from a building during a low level bombing attack carried out by biplanes. The First World War? Air control in the Middle East? Fascist bombers over Spain, or Japanese bombers over China? No, it’s an air raid carried out by the RAF against Nottingham on 15 May 1938. Of
The time has finally come to address the claim I’ve made in the title of this series of posts, that the air raid somehow vanished. Why did I say that, and what does it mean? Well, look at the plot above. Previously I looked at how often ‘air raid’ (and related phrases) appeared per issue
From Alan Allport’s excellent new book, Britain at Bay 1938-1941, a couple of sentences about the IRA’s 1939 bombing campaign which were guaranteed to catch my attention as imaginary air raids: Some witnesses to the Broadgate bombing interviewed by the police were convinced that they had seen aircraft in the sky moments before the explosion,
The first air raid on Britain during the Second World War is usually held to have taken place on 16 October 1939, when a dozen Ju 88s struck at the Royal Navy base at Rosyth, on the northern shore of the Firth of Forth. But there was in fact an earlier attack, on 27 September,
I’ve got a chapter entitled ‘Spectre and spectacle: mock air raids as aerial theatre in interwar Britain’ in a new Palgrave Macmillan collection just out, Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, edited by Michael McCluskey and Luke Seaber. Here’s the abstract: This chapter argues that aerial theatre, in the form of annual
I recently came across a few more examples from 1920s and 1930s newspapers of the ‘Red Baron’ being used in reference to Manfred von Richthofen, which I suggested undermined my argument that, in essence, we call him that because of Snoopy. But instead of shrugging my shoulders I decided to get my data on and
Jarrow, a shipbuilding town on the Tyne opposite Newcastle, was attacked from the air on the morning of 19 February 1938. Or rather, its inhabitants thought so, briefly.
