Giles MacDonogh. 1938: Hitler's Gamble. London: Constable, 2010. 1938 was a big year for Germany, with the army purge, the Anschluss of Austria, the Sudeten crisis, and Kristallnacht. It seems that the fate of the Jews in Germany (including those parts absorbed in the course of 1938) is given a relatively large amount of attention when compared with the diplomatic machinations that are perhaps more usual in accounts of this year, which is fine because I already own more usual accounts. Also: cheap.

John Gooch. Mussolini and his Generals: The Armed Forces and Fascist Foreign Policy, 1922-1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. A big book for a big subject. There's a lot here on strategic debates and policy within the Fascist regime; not just how the military served Italian foreign policy ends in Spain and Abyssinia but also the intellectual responses to the changes in warfare since 1918. So Douhet gets some attention, but Balbo even more so. It's hardly a well-trodden area, at least in English, so I expect to learn a lot from this book.

Craig Stockings, ed. Zombie Myths of Australian Military History. Sydney: New South, 2010. Having enjoyed the sequel, I looked around for a copy of this but it was hard to find. So I grabbed it when I quite randomly found it in one of my regular haunts. This is more focused on the myths Australians like to believe about specific battles and campaigns, a number of which have been discussed here before: Breaker Morant (Craig Wilcox), Gallipoli (Rhys Crawley), HMAS Sydney (Oeter Dennis). Other debunkings include 'Australians broke the Hindenburg Line' (Elizabeth Greenhalgh) and '"There is an idea that the Australian is a born soldier..."' (Stockings). Good stuff.

Christopher Clark. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. London: Allen Lane, 2012. Who doesn't need another book on the origins of the First World War? Not me! This particular one focuses on the Balkan quagmire and its role in Great Power politics. Unlike some other recent interpretations (such as William Mulligan's), Clark emphasises European instability, though appears to fall short of claiming that war was inevitable. Nor, per the title, was it intended: it was essentially a terrible accident.

Peter J. Dean, ed. Australia 1942: In the Shadow of War (Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013). A collection of essays originating in a Military History and Heritage Victoria conference held in Melbourne earlier this year, which I'm now regretting not having attended. There are contributions on the Australia-Japan relationship before the Second World War (Pam Oliver), the RAAF in 1942 (Mark Johnston), Australian home defence (Albert Palazzo) and the home front (Kate Darian-Smith), the battles at Kokoda and Milne Bay (Karl James), Japan's Australia strategy (Steven Bullard), the air raids on Darwin (Alan Powell) and more.

Kevin M. O'Reilly. Flyers of Time: Pioneer Aviation in Country Victoria: The First Fifty Years, a Collection. Dingley Village: Kevin M. O'Reilly, 2012. Mainly a compendium of newspaper articles relating to Victorian aviation outside Melbourne, covering the period 1911-1960. Also lots of contemporary photographs of aeroplanes from various sources, a selection of aviation ephemera such as promotional materials and air show programmes. While many, if not all, of the newspaper articles can be found in Trove, it's useful to see them all arrayed together like this, as a kind of regional index to airmindedness. The mystery aeroplanes of 1918 get a mention, in the form of an article about the Casterton and Byaduk sightings, along with an interesting letter recounting a Yarram local's memories of the aircraft and men briefly based there to search for raiders.

Neil Arnold. Shadows in the Sky: The Haunted Airways of Britain. Stroud: The History Press, 2012. A compilation of, mostly, strange things seen in the sky over Britain. Everything from dragons, fish, battles, and UFOs to, naturally, phantom airships (and ghost aircraft, as in actual ghosts). Lots of interesting details but not much in the way of references.

David Clarke. The UFO Files: The Inside Story of Real-life Sightings. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Second edition. By contrast, though this is also aimed at a popular audience it's well-referenced, mostly to files held by the National Archives. Indeed, it's published in association with and on behalf of the National Archives, with which Clarke, who lectures in journalism at Sheffield Hallam, has been working closely to secure the release of formerly classified UFO files. Aaand there's good coverage of phantom airships, which is not surprising since Clarke was one of the first people to investigate them seriously.

Paul Dickson. Sputnik: The Shock of the Century. New York: Walker & Company, 2001. As the title suggests, this focuses on the psychological responses to Sputnik in America, more than the technological and political ones (though those are covered too). I remember hearing good things about this book when it first came out but never got around to getting it; today I found it in a bargain bookshop so it wasn't a hard purchase to justify.

Robert Boyce. The Great Interwar Crisis and the Collapse of Globalization. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. A big new (well, not so new by now) history of the way the Great Depression (or Slump) wrecked the international order, paving the way for Hitler and the rest of it. So it's not just about failures in economics and politics, but in internationalism and disarmament too.

Robert Citino. The Path to Blitzkrieg: Doctrine and Training in the German Army, 1920-39. Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books, 2008 [1999]. How did the German army do so well in 1939 when it had spent most of the previous two decades crippled in size and armaments? Citino is the person to ask. The bulk of the book focuses on the Reichswehr period rather than the Wehrmacht, so von Seeckt is the dominant figure here (no, not Fuller, Liddell Hart or even Guderian!)

Kathryn Spurling. A Grave Too Far Away: A Tribute to Australians in Bomber Command Europe. Sydney: New Holland, 2012. Tells the stories of many (but still only a small fraction) of the Australians who served in Bomber Command, drawing on official and personal archives as well as interviews. I have my concerns about writing history as tribute, but since I have previously argued that Australians ought to remember Bomber Command I hope that this book can be part of that process.

Mark Atherton. There and Back Again: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Origins of The Hobbit. London: I. B. Tauris, 2012. With The Hobbit published 75 years ago this very day and the (first of three!) movies coming out in a couple of months, this is very well-timed. The author is, like Tolkien, an Oxford philologist specialising in Old English, so he's also very well-placed to explore where The Hobbit came from, in terms of language, mythology and biography. I'm pleased to see that attention is paid to the connections between Smaug's attack on Lake-town and the technological warfare Tolkien experienced on the Western Front, though there is nothing one way or the other on whether it reflects a more general fear of the knock-out blow.

Suzanne Jillian Evans. The Empire Air Training Scheme: Identity, Empire and Memory. N.p. [Melbourne]: Custom Book Centre, 2011. A reprint of a recent University of Melbourne PhD thesis on EATS from an Australian perspective (though the larger international context is well set out, and it's nice to see my trinity of Groves, Charlton and Spaight getting a guernsey). The emphasis is on how EATS was portrayed during the war (e.g. as a realisation of Empire unity) and how the men who took part saw themselves (there's a fair bit of oral history); and the questions of why Australia's very substantial involvement has disappeared from the national memory. You can actually get a PDF of this for free from here, but I don't mind supporting a fellow Melbourne graduate by buying the self-published version!

Some common themes here, more or less unintentional...

Pam Oliver. Raids on Australia: 1942 and Japan's Plans for Australia. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2010. The title is a bit misleading. Oliver examines Japanese activities in Australia, commercial, government, and individual, in the decades before 1942, as well as Australian government and popular suspicions of Japanese espionage and hostile intentions. Not a believer in the 'he's coming south' myth, I'm glad to see, though surprisingly she doesn't seem to cite Peter Stanley on this.

Michael Swords and Robert Powell, with Clas Svahn, Vicente-Juan Ballester Olmos, Bill Chalker, Barry Greenwood, Richard Thieme, Jan Aldrich, and Steve Purcell. UFOs and Government: A Historical Enquiry. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2012. Not your usual UFO book by any means. In fact it's not about UFOs as such, but rather the way governments have responded to UFOs: a perfectly legitimate line of historical inquiry! The focus is inevitably on the United States and from 1947 on. But there are also chapters on Australia, Spain and France. Of most interest to me are the ones on the foo fighters of the Second World War and even more so, on the ghost flyers of 1932-4 and the ghost rockets of 1946. It's very hard to get sober, reliable accounts of these episodes so I'm very glad to have this book.

H. F. B. Wheeler and A. M. Broadley. Napoleon and the Invasion of England: The Story of the Great Terror. Stroud: Nonsuch, 2007 [1908]. Covers both French plans and British fears. I'm sure it's been overtaken by more recent scholarship but it uses a lot of primary sources, which extends the shelf life. Moreover I'm intrigued by the fact that it was first published in the middle of another invasion scare, this time with the Kaiser as the bogey; the introduction even refers to the contemporary debate about whether the proposed Channel Tunnel would (literally) undermine Britain's security.

David S. Bird. Nazi Dreamtime: Australian Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany. North Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2012. An Australian equivalent of Richard Griffiths' Fellow Travellers of the Right, though this covers the Second World War period as well. The title isn't an affectation: it seems that the Aboriginal idea of the dreamtime was appropriated by pro-Nazis here as part of an attempt to forge a distinctively Australian fascism.

Jeremy Black. Avoiding Armageddon: From the Great War to the Fall of France, 1918-1940. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. Black must be one of the most productive historians in history; this is the sixth book of his I've bought and that's less than 5% of the number of works listed on his LibraryThing page. Some of it doubtless recycled and I'm sure he has an army of research assistants, but still! This one is closer to my interests than most of his other books. It's a synoptic look at the anticipation of war in the 1920s and 1930s: how governments and militaries (primarily) digested the lessons of the First World War as well as the minor conflicts which came along in the interim. Black makes an effort not to be Anglo- or even Eurocentric: there's a chapter on war in the Far East and a couple each on imperial wars and third world wars. There's also a chapter on airpower, which looks like a decent overview, if necessarily brief given the scope. I must, however, query how he came to cite Neville Parton's The Evolution and Impact of Royal Air Force Doctrine 1919-1939 as a 2011 publication, when it hasn't been published even now; in fact the publisher is currently saying September 2013.