If anyone came close to creating a death ray weapon by the end of the Second World War, it was the Japanese army. It wouldn’t have helped them much, however, as they weren’t at war with rabbits. According to Richard Overy in The Air War 1939-1945 (Washington: Potomac Books, 2005 [1980]), 195: The lack of […]
Because I’m too lazy to write a proper post, here are some of my recent tweets: The 1st use of the word “Luftwaffe” in The Times was on 24 May 1939, as the owner of 2 yachts entered in a race to Germany. The 1st use of the word “Luftwaffe” in the Manchester Guardian was
The war artist is Eric Thake (1904-1982), and the family is mine, although only in the extended sense: Thake’s grandparents, John and Sarah (née Prentice) Thake, were my great-great-grandparents. It was only a couple of weeks ago that my mother found this out. My paternal grandmother (who was born a Thake) did maintain that he
Just as when reading Brave New World I applied my airminded filters and extracted Aldous Huxley’s vision of future warfare, I’m going to do the same for that other great British dystopia, George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four. (Which is what passes for summer reading for me. Quotes taken from this version.) War is much more important
I recently read Sonya O. Rose’s Which People’s War? National Identity and Citizenship in Wartime Britain, 1939-1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), which is interesting on such subjects as anti-Semitism during the Blitz. But I kept being drawn back to the front cover, for a completely trivial reason. The illustration is from a 1941 poster
Field Marshal Jan Smuts, prime minister of South Africa, broadcast a speech on the BBC on 29 September 1946. He talked about the prospects for peace in the post-war world, a subject on which he could claim some authority, since he had helped unify Anglophones and Afrikaners after the Boer War, and was involved in
I’ve just had a go at working out who held the influential position of aeronautical correspondent (or air correspondent, in later years) for The Times for its first third of a century or so. No names were used in the articles themselves, so the easiest way to find them seems to be through the obituary
So we’ve seen American claims of a British secret air defence weapon in the Battle of Britain; American claims of British secret air defence weapons in the mid-1930s; and American ideas for superweapons to break the deadlock of the First World War. What do I mean suggest by these examples? Why have I called these
Do these photos, taken early in the Battle of Britain, show a British mystery weapon? (I could just say “no”, but that wouldn’t be very interesting, would it.) The above photo appeared on the front page of an American newspaper, the St Petersburg Evening Independent, on 14 August 1940. The caption reads: This picture taken
I’m pleased to announce that my first paper has been accepted for publication, by War in History. It’s about the international air force idea and is entitled ‘World police for world peace: British internationalism and the threat of a knock-out blow from the air, 1919-1945’. It won’t actually appear for some time, but under the
