The following quote is from Winston Churchill’s famous “their finest hour” speech, delivered in the House of Commons on 18 June 1940 (and repeated for radio that evening). It’s four days after the occupation of Paris: ‘the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin’. After assuring […]
Found via Military History Carnival #2, an interesting post by Alan Baumler at Frog in a Well: China on airmindedness in China in the 1930s. If I had to compare it to another country, it would probably be Russia, where aviation was also part of a modernization effort. But something Alan mentions reminds me of
During the Second World War, several million foreign servicemen and -women were stationed in Britain for varying periods of time. These included many Australians, for most of whom it was their first glimpse of Britain.1 In 1940, one of them described his impressions of the mother country in an article for the Spectator entitled “An
At the end of October 1940, while the British and German air forces were nightly striking at each other’s cities, Captain Norman Macmillan (a decorated RFC veteran and former head of the National League of Airmen) argued in Flight that Britain’s greatest need was for the development of a bomber which was possessed great speed
One of the pleasures of reading period newspapers and magazines, as I am doing now, is chancing upon reviews of old films I know and (usually) love. Here’s what Graham Greene (yes, that Graham Greene) had to say about The Wizard of Oz: The book has been popular in the States for forty years, and
Jörg Friedrich’s book The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945, was first published in Germany in 2002. In 2006, it was published in an English translation (by Allison Brown) by Columbia University Press. The Fire consists of seven sections: Weapon, Strategy, Land, Protection, We, I and Stone. These chart the development of aerial attack on
It’s never too early to start thinking about the shape of the next war, even if the current one is still being fought. At the end of May 1945 — only three weeks after V-E day and over two months before V-J day — some discussion on the subject was held in the House of
And marble, and granite, and wood … I wrote recently that every town in Australia seems to have a war memorial. Here are some examples, photos I took over a three day period without going too far out of my way. This post is image-heavy, but everyone has broadband now don’t they?
This week, I was looking at the service records of some other family members who served in the world wars — those that have been digitised anyway — and as today is ‘Straya Day,1 it seems appropriate to write a little about them. Tags: bonza; strewth; grouse; sorry, ocker, the Fokker’s chocker. [↩]
From a recent review in Technology and Culture: Torgovnick devotes two chapters to Eichmann, the architect of the plan that moved millions to the death camps and the Holocaust, but she should have also considered the man behind the massive bombing of German cities, the Royal Air Force’s General Arthur Harris. If she had devoted
