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 […]
On this day in 1945, the third atomic bomb was dropped on Tokyo. Or, rather, might have been had not Japan surrendered on 15 August. For a long time, I’ve believed that the two bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the only ones which would be available for a month or two. But a
At In the Middle, Karl Steel reviews Adriana Cavarero’s book Horrorism, which, as I understand it, seeks to reorient descriptions of violence from the perspective of its perpetrators to that of its victims. This part of the review seems like a good question to ask here: I suffer an even pettier annoyance when she writes:
Pierre-Antoine Courouble. The Riddle of the Wooden Bombs. Toulon: Les Presses du Midi, 2009. One of my early posts on this blog was about a story which goes something like the following. The Germans are constructing a fake airfield to decoy Allied bombers, with dummy aircraft made out of wood. On the day it is
The National Archives have released a couple of files (here and here) relating to mustard gas in the Second World War. I’m too cheap to pay to download them from TNA so I’m relying on news reports — luckily this is a blog and not a refereed publication! The first is about a series of
The editorial cartoon from the Melbourne Argus of 9 December 1941, the issue which reported the Japanese landings in Malaya and air raid on Pearl Harbor. I guess it’s nice to know I can still be surprised, though, of course, there’s really no reason why I should have been.
I’ve said before that Giulio Douhet’s influence on British ideas about airpower has been greatly overestimated. Nobody was talking about him before the mid-1930s, by which time the knock-out blow paradigm was firmly established. Much the same could be said of Billy Mitchell (although the sinking of the Ostfriesland was certainly noticed, and at least
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] A couple of years ago I outed myself as something of a philistine by admitting that I didn’t ‘get’ Guernica, and thought that direct representations — photographs — of the ruined city were more powerful, more affecting than Picasso’s masterpiece. My incomprehension generated a fair degree of discussion, which was useful, but
Military History Carnival 16 has been posted at American Presidents Blog. There’s an easy choice for me (although the snails did make me go ‘ewwww’): The Blogger will always get through has found an intact trench in East Sussex, which was part of the anti-invasion defences in the Second World War. Sterling work, and there
Some more navel-gazingpost-thesis analysis. Above is a plot of the number of primary sources (1908-1941) I cite by date of publication. (Published sources only, excluding newspaper articles — of which there are a lot — and government documents. Also, it’s not just airpower stuff, though it mostly is.) I actually have no idea if it’s
