According to the Daily Express, the ‘ever-increasing power behind Air Marshal Sir Charles Portal’s master-plan for crippling Hitler’s war industries’ is beginning to yield results (1). The giant Krupp factory (nearly always rendered as ‘Krupps’ in the British press) at Essen had three ‘sections […] put out of commission’, which must be considered especially impressive […]
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
The Daily Mirror likes its headlines big and bold. The one above takes up two-thirds of the width of today’s front page. The story is that Arthur Greenwood, Minister without Portfolio in the War Cabinet (and deputy leader of the Labour Party; interesting that he is not described as such in an ostensibly left-wing newspaper)
I have an embarrassment of Sunday papers now: the Observer, the Sunday Express, News of the World and The People. The last named (which has sales of more than 3 million per issue) has Coventry on the front page, but halfway down and underneath a photograph of a pig (I couldn’t say why). US-British cooperation,
News of Coventry’s tragedy — Hilde Marchant, writing on the front page of the Daily Express, above, says the city was ‘Guernicaed’ all Thursday night — has reached the morning press (though it was announced by the government yesterday and would have been reported on the BBC and in the evening papers). Initial reports are
It seems that Mussolini’s attempt to annex Greece may have been somewhat ill-judged. The Daily Express leads with news of a Greek counteroffensive against the Italian forces invading their country from Albania. A spokesman for the Greek government said that their ‘troops were advancing along the whole line’. The offensive opened with a savage attack
British and Allied forces have been having a good week, at Italy’s expense. The Italians lost Gallabat (in the Sudan), a division in the offensive against Greece and much of a convoy taking supplies to Albania. The greatest Allied success was the carrier strike against the Italian naval base at Taranto, which took place on
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
