What was the response to the Canterbury Baedeker raids? There was actually surprisingly little direct comment in the British press, but the major theme was to reaffirm that British raids on German cities were not reprisals but attacks on legitimate targets; whereas German raids on British cities were not even reprisals but merely spite. In […]
Another update to my list of early 20th century British newspapers online. There are a number of new titles available: Dundee Courier Gloucestershire Echo Hereford Times Herts Advertiser Lincolnshire Echo Surrey Mirror Yorkshire Gazette In addition, the coverage for another dozen titles has been increased, though in some cases only by a year. There’s additional
Recentlyish, someone called dedonarrival left the following comment here on a post about the British demand for reprisal bombing of Germany in return for the Blitz: Such gross ignorance. Google: British terror bombing and note when it started and when Germany retaliated with its twin engined medium bombers and range limited fighter escort . I
As with the Lübeck and Rostock raids over a month earlier, the RAF’s thousand bomber raid on Cologne on 30 May 1942 triggered reprisal attacks by the Luftwaffe (though in far smaller numbers than Bomber Command was able to muster). Another round of Baedeker raids, in other words. This time, however, there was only one
In my reprisals article I argue that historians have, for the most part, underestimated popular support during the Blitz for counterbombing of German cities. I think Tom Harrisson, both during the war as head of Mass-Observation and after as author of Living Through the Blitz, had a lot to do with this. But there were
One painful lesson I learned while seeing my Blitz reprisals article through to press was to stick. To. The. Bloody. Word. Limit! The article as accepted was well over and as a result I caused myself and the editors much grief while we worked to cut it down to an acceptable size. Never again. Because
My peer-reviewed article ‘”Bomb back, and bomb hard”: debating reprisals during the Blitz’ has just been published in the Australian Journal of Politics and History, an invited submission for a special issue on the topic ‘War and Peace, Barbarism and Civilization in Modern Europe and Its Empires’. It can be downloaded from here. Here’s the
The Open University’s Chris A. Williams (who should be confused with the Chris Williams who comments here frequently, since they are the same person) has done a good thing by developing a nifty online simulation called Beat the Ministry, to accompany a joint OU/BBC television series — on which Chris is lead academic consultant —
Well, not really, because it didn’t exist. But never let the facts get in the way of a good title, I say. But it does mean I have to explain what I mean. The real V-weapons developed and used by Germany in the Second War War were the V-1 flying bomb and the V-2 ballistic
Picking up where I left off nearly a month ago, let’s turn to the reaction of the provincial press to the thousand bomber raid on Cologne on the night of 30 May 1942. The Yorkshire Post‘s main front page story on 1 June 1942 (above) concentrated on the operation itself. It claimed that ‘CONSIDERABLY more
