Alexander Rose. Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men’s Epic Duel to Rule the World. New York: Random House, 2020. The two men of the title both led a great aviation enterprise. Both dreamed of spanning the world with their passenger aircraft. Both struggled at times, and prospered at others. But one was […]
On Wednesday, 27 May 2020, I was privileged to give a seminar to the Contemporary Histories Research Group at Deakin University on my aerial theatre research — via Zoom, as is the current fashion. I really enjoyed giving it, and I think it was a great success (and thanks to everyone who listened in and
Resuming from where I left off with Modern Wonder — here are some rather fantastic French and British ‘battle planes’ from the cover of the 23 April 1938 issue. I’ve never seen these designs before and I’m sure they never got off the drawing board — if, that is, there was even any drawing board
For nearly four years from May 1937, Modern Wonder (Modern World from March 1940) was a British weekly magazine, priced at 2d. and aimed at, presumably, boys and young men who were interested in high technology, big machines and vehicles that go really, really fast — sometimes fantastical, but mostly real, if on or near
In the previous post I looked at Nigel Biggar’s use of the Berlin Airlift and Richard Hillary in his paean to the RAF. Now I will look at his other argument in Providence, that ‘In the past 100 years then, the Royal Air Force has made a vital contribution to the military defense of the
Critical Survey has just published an early access version of my peer-reviewed article ‘William Le Queux, the Zeppelin menace and the Invisible Hand’ — that’s right, no subtitle! — here. Here’s the abstract: In contrast to William Le Queux’s pre-1914 novels about German spies and invasion, his wartime writing is much less well known. Analysis
Shortly after the declaration of war Londoners lifted fearful eyes to the skies, as it seemed that bombs might be about to rain down on them from the skies…
So, to conclude my survey of the career of Stanley Baldwin’s phrase ‘the bomber will always get through’ in the British press (or at least in the British Newspaper Archive), here’s how it fared during the Second World War.
I showed in an earlier post that scepticism of Baldwin’s dictum that ‘the bomber will always get through’ begins to appear in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA) in 1937, if only in a very small way. In 1938, the majority opinion still takes it to be axiomatic. For example, town alderman W. A. Miller, attacked
After the drama of 1934, ‘the bomber will always get through’ appears less frequently in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA) in 1935 (though still at about twice the level than in 1932 or 1933). But it is still mostly being used in a very political way. This is not surprising, with the general election contested
