Acquisitions

• 2 Comments

•

Had some good luck browsing in secondhand bookshops this week ...

Lee Brimmicombe-Wood. The Burning Blue: The Battle of Britain, 1940. Hanford: GMT Games, 2006. NOT a book, a wargame simulating the "plotting table" war, if you like. Product page. Well-researched, as the support page shows. DOES have Boulton-Paul Defiants, does NOT have Gladiators.

Donald Cowie. An Empire Prepared: A Study of the Defence Potentialities of Greater Britain. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1939. Published for the Right Book Club. About how all the red bits on the map will help Britain if war comes. Introduction by Lord Lloyd, former Governor of Bombay and High Commissioner of Egypt.

Harry Golding, ed. The Wonder Book of Aircraft for Boys and Girls. London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1919. Was I as giddy as a schoolboy when I saw this in a bookshop for only $10? You betcha! Lots of illustrations, though unfortunately some have been cut out (no doubt to grace some long-forgotten school project), including eight by Heath Robinson! Clarification: that was badly phrased -- the Heath Robinson pics weren't the ones that were cut out, luckily.

Robert Graves and Allan Hodge. The Long Week-End: A Social History of Great Britain, 1918-1939. London: Four Square Books, 1961 [1939]. A classic work of contemporary history, in a groovy new edition for the new generation.

Richard Jefferies. After London or Wild England. London: Duckworth, 1929 [1885]. Only very tangentially relevant to my areas of interest, mainly as an early example of some catastrophe doing for London and dramatically re-ordering English society.

George Rochester. The Despot of the World. London: John Hamilton, 1936. A thrilling (one assumes) novel of the Soviet menace, air combat over Siberia, and how world war was averted. Part of the "Ace" series of books, along with Biggles and others (indeed, there's a big selection of other aviation titles in the catalogue at the back of the book). My copy was given to one Peter Johnston at Xmas 1936, as the Third Prize "for improvement in Pianoforte".

•

Andrew P. Hyde. The First Blitz: The German Air Campaign against Britain 1917-1918 . Barnsley: Leo Cooper, 2002. A bit disappointing, looks like your standard pot-boiler account (and no references to speak of). Still, it was dirt cheap.

Joseph Morris. The German Air Raids on Britain, 1914-1918. Darlington: Naval & Military Press, 1993 [1925]. Unlike the above, a classic account!

Winston G. Ramsey. The Blitz Then and Now. Volume 2. London: Battle of Britain Prints International, 1988. I have volume 1; this covers the Blitz proper, September 1940 to May 1941. Massively detailed; a geek's delight.

Barbara Stoney. Twentieth Century Maverick: The Life of Noel Pemberton Billing. East Grinstead: Bank House Books, 2004. P-B is a fascinating figure and it's surprising he hasn't had a biography (other than an auto- one, published in 1917) before now. Unfortunately it's not an academic biography, so it's light on references, but it looks thorough and there is much fascinating material here; well-illustrated too.

• 6 Comments

•

It's been way too hot this week to blog, whatever energy I could muster I put towards that thesis thing. Instead, there's this:

David Edgerton. Warfare State: Britain, 1920-1970. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Expands upon the suggestion put forward in England and the Aeroplane that the fabled British welfare state is more aptly described as a warfare state. DID YOU KNOW: Monty Python's Ministry of Silly Walks sketch is a take-off of Concorde and the Ministry of Technology (p. 264)? Well, you're clever then aren't you.

J.M. Spaight. Aircraft in War. London: Macmillan and Co., 1914. This is a look at the legal do's and do-not-do's of air warfare, as things stood just before the Great War (the book evidently went to press in June 1914). The first of many books on airpower by Spaight.

Dan Todman. The Great War: Myth and Memory. London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2005. Written by Mr Trench Fever himself, this looks like a lot of fun - I am looking forward to reading it. But why is my copy called The Great War when the publishers and the booksellers, claim it's called The First World War? Weird.

C.C. Turner. Britain's Air Peril: The Danger of Neglect, Together with Considerations on the Role of an Air Force. London: Sir Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1933. Major Turner was pro-disarmament - as long as that meant the army and navy only, for he thought the RAF could subsititute for them to a large degree. Otherwise, he was against it, and thought the disarmament process was dangerous for Britain. Lucky Hitler came along then!

•

I noticed that I had a few inches of spare shelf space last week, so ...

Claude Grahame-White and Harry Harper. The Aeroplane in War. London: T. Werner Laurie, 1912. A big survey of military aviation before the First World War - keeping the reading public informed about such innovations as the 'engine-in-front biplane'. Grahame-White was the premier British flyer at this time.

Major Helders. The War in the Air 1936. London: John Hamilton, 1932. A future-war novel, this one from Germany (published under a pseudonym by Robert Knauss as Luftkrieg-1936). And conveniently for Germany, it's France and Britain who are bombing each other's cities, with Britain coming out on top. (Of course, it was also more plausible in that Germany had no air force.) Has a handy fold-out map section at the end, to help you follow the action!

Stephen King-Hall. Our Own Times, 1913-1938: A Political and Economic Survey. London: Nicholson and Watson, 1938. King-Hall was a former naval officer who by this time was a very popular commentator on current affairs, in print and on the wireless.

Bernard Newman. Armoured Doves: A Peace Book. London: Jarrolds, 1937 [1931]. I actually ordered this months ago but it never came, so I ordered another copy! Set in the 1950s and 1960s, the pacifist League of Scientists uses a death ray to impose peace on the world. There is a devastating air war between Poland and the USSR in the 1940s, involving the use of bacteriological weapons. George Lansbury sez, 'All who love peace and hate war will welcome this book'.

Scot Robertson. The Development of RAF Strategic Bombing Doctrine, 1919-1939. Westport and London: Praeger, 1995. I'm slowly acquiring all the standard secondary works in my area ... only a couple or five to go! This is one of the more recent ones; the sections on the RAF's annual air defence exercises in 1927-35 in particular look very interesting.

Arthur Salter. Security: Can We Retrieve It? London: Macmillan and Co., 1939. Salter had played an important role in organising shipping in the First World War, and in the 1920s was a respected figure at the League of Nations. By 1939 he had become a professor at Oxford, and also was the MP for that university. Part of this book deals with air raid precautions, and Salter gives some useful information about the Air Raid Defence League, of which he was a member along with people like Lord Allen and Leo Amery.

J.M. Spaight. Air Power in the Next War. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1938. Spaight had always been ambivalent about the knock-out blow, I think, and by now he is downright sceptical of the idea that the next war will be decided by airpower alone.

•

Basil Collier. Heavenly Adventurer: Sefton Brancker and the Dawn of British Aviation. London: Secker & Warburg, 1959. A big wheel in the RFC, for most of the 1920s he was in charge of civil aviation at the Air Ministry. He was killed in the R101 disaster in 1930.

Peter Lewis. The British Fighter Since 1912: Sixty-seven Years of Design and Development. London: Putnam, 1979. 4th edition. A companion to The British Bomber, which I already have.

W.J. Reader. Architect of Air Power: The Life of the First Viscount Weir, 1877-1959. London: Collins, 1968. A Scottish industrialist, Weir was the second Air Minister (1918-9) and in the late 1930s came back to help plan the RAF's expansion. It's clearly an authorised biography, as the copyright is owned by the second Viscount Weir!

J.M. Spaight. The Sky's the Limit: A Study of British Air Power. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1940. Spaight was one of the main aviation writers of his day, though I don't think I'd heard of this one before. It's about 'the air power that is being fashioned, grimly, remorselessly, by this war-hating, war-winning, Empire of ours', written for an audience made curious by the war (this edition was published in August 1940, and includes a summary of the 'Victory at Dunkirk').

•

Geoffrey Best. Churchill and War. London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2005. As previously noted. There's disappointingly little on Churchill's "wilderness years" - OK, so there wasn't actually a war on then, but this was the time when the foundations of the Churchill-as-prophet-of-war legend were laid. And it's the period of his career that interests me most :)

Richard J. Evans. The Third Reich in Power, 1933-1939. London: Allen Lane, 2005. The Nazis are partly a side-interest of mine, but events in Germany obviously had a huge effect on the airpower politics of Britain, so it's stuff I need to be aware of.

M.J. Gaskin. Blitz: The Story of 29th December 1940. London: Faber and Faber, 2005. Haven't heard anything about this one, it looks like a thorough account of one of the heaviest nights of the London blitz.

Ben Shephard. A War of Nerves: Soldiers and Psychiatrists, 1914-1994. London: Pimlico, 2002. I bought this to answer Mark Grimsley's question - no, well, seriously, shell shock is a subject I've become interested in of late, which means I must buy books about it!

Passed on: my supervisor's new book, mainly because I could buy at least two or three other books for what it costs ... do academic presses not want people to buy their books or something? (Possibly not.)

•

Ann Curthoys and John Docker. Is History Fiction? Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006.Sic. On truth in history; seems to be attempting a third way between, or at least taking the good bits from both postmodernism and empiricism. My glib answer to the question in the title would be, not if you're doing it right! (Which probably tells you where my sympathies lie.)

Philip Eklund. Airships at War 1914-1941. Sierra Madre Games, 2003. Not a book but a wargame, simulating a Zeppelin mission in the First World War or in a hypothetical war between the US and Japan (including the American flying aircraft carriers Macon and Akron). There seems to be a lot of info packed into this game: it even simulates things like onboard sailmakers (for repairing tears in the hydrogen cells), and tossing the wireless overboard in order to gain lift! I'll write a bit more about this game when I have had a chance to play it; for now here's the company's product page for a bit more information. (I'm really annoyed to see that the game listed there now has updated rules and components compared to the one I ordered a whole week ago. They could have at least mentioned the fact that an update was due soon!)

Philip Eklund. Riesenflugzeugabteilungen. Sierra Madre Games, 1997. An expansion for Airships at War which features the giant German, Italian and Russian bombers of WWI. Product page. (Again, a newer edition than the one I've just received ...)

Jay Winter and Antoine Prost. The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Writing (and to a lesser degree, filming) the Great War across time and space (mainly Britain, France and Germany). The structure looks fruitful: it slices the narrative by 'experience' (eg soldiers, workers, civilians).

• 2 Comments

•

Agatha Christie. Death in the Clouds. London: HarperCollins, 2001 [1935]. I am ashamed to admit it, but I have read very little British fiction from the early twentieth century, aside from thesis-related stuff and some science fiction. So I'm trying to remedy that, by reading characteristic and/or significant novels from my period. Christie's Hercule Poirot novels are certainly characteristic, and since this one starts off on an airliner bound from Le Bourget for Croydon, the choice seemed clear!

Tom Harrisson. Living Through the Blitz. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978. A classic book from the co-founder of Mass-Observation, on how the British people coped with the Blitz. Not only does it have a chapter on expectations of the air war-to-come, but there's even one on reactions to the false air raid alarm of 3 September 1939, just moments after Chamberlain's speech announcing the declaration of war. I like it.

Frederic Manning. The Middle Parts of Fortune. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2000 [1929]. Possibly my most serious shortcoming with respect to pre-1939 literature is that I haven't read any of the "war books" that started coming out about a decade after the end of the First World War. This is a start. (I didn't even know that Manning was an Australian!)

Winston G. Ramsey, ed. The Blitz Then and Now. Volume 1. London: Battle of Britain Prints International, 1987. Lots of interesting material for social history - eg, all the false air raid alarms in the first few months of the war, reactions to the propaganda quickie The Lion Has Wings - along with geeky fun like the Starfish decoy airfield system, and diagrams of the detection lobes of the Chain Home/Chain Home Low radar systems. No references, which drives me batty, but much of it is from Home Office daily intelligence logs. This volume covers the period from the start of the war until 6 September, 1940.

P.G. Wodehouse. The Code of the Woosters. London: Penguin, 1999 [1937]. I have at least read a little Wodehouse before (The Swoop! is a great parody of the Edwardian invasion genre), but now I wonder why I haven't read more! (Airminded language: 'And now the All Clear had been blown, and I had received absolute inside information straight from the horse's mouth that all was hotsy-totsy between this blister and himself', p. 42.)