I’ve recently read a trilogy of novels about the next war, by Sydney Fowler Wright, a prolific but largely forgotten poet and novelist: Prelude in Prague (London: Newnes, 1935), Four Days War (London: Robert Hale, 1936), and Megiddo’s Ridge (London: Robert Hale, 1937). Only the first is a true knock-out blow novel: in 1938, after […]
P. R. C. Groves explains why, in his view, Britain in the early 1930s was possessed by a ‘national defeatism’, namely the idea that war was immoral and should be banned, and the nations disarmed: The origins of the malady may be summarized as: the Voluntary System, the Somme and Passchendaele. The sacrifice of the
Some years ago someone invented a gramophone needle that would last for decades. One of the big gramophone companies bought up the patent rights, and that was the last that was ever heard of it. That’s Big Grammo for you, I guess. (Or maybe not …) Source: George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (London:
I’ve been reading George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (London: Penguin, 1989), which was originally published in 1937. Not because it has anything to do with my thesis, but just to broaden my horizons, and because, well, it’s Orwell, ya know? I certainly didn’t expect to read about the possible effects of bombing in
Well, OK, the Commonwealth Games then. British Empire Games was the original name: the first were held in 1930 in Hamilton, Canada. Most of the world probably has not heard of the Commonwealth Games, but it’s second only to the Olympics (which it closely resembles) in terms of bringing the greatest number of elite athletes
There’s an interesting article on the rise of radio news in the United States in the late 1930s, in the February 2006 issue of History Today: “On the right wavelength” by David Culbert. One thing I learned from this article was that it was the Munich crisis in September 1938 which made radio news reporting
A most interesting query and ensuing discussion over on the H-War mailing list, about the so-called “Cuzaux effect”, which I haven’t heard of before: In short, [the Cuzaux effect] is the side ways deviation of a projectile trajectory when fired from a weapon in motion. In the late 1930’s, according to the article, it was
In my previous post I talked about some Japanese ARP posters from 1938. One in particular (above; click for larger version) is very revealing: it shows exactly whose bombers the Japanese were worried about, by plotting circles on a map of Japan and its neighbours, representing the radius of actionNo more than half the maximum
Boing Boing has a link to a very interesting and oddly beautiful set of Japanese air raid precautions posters at the National Archives of Japan. (Boing Boing says they are from the Second World War, but according to the page itself, they date from 1938.) I am myself somewhat ignorant of Japanese history, but as
In a previous post I wondered whether the authors of the 1934 knock-out blow novel Invasion from the Air, Frank McIlraith and Roy Connolly, might have been left-wing, as the artist who (apparently) was supposed to illustrate the book was a communist. I hadn’t been able to turn up any biographical information about either of
