In neither of my recent posts on the 1918 Bishopsgate Goods Yard disaster did I mention the 1943 Bethnal Green Tube disaster, despite it being an obvious comparison (as well as showing up as a related post). The death toll was tragically high both times: 14 at Bishopsgate, a staggering 173 at Bethnal Green (in […]
Like many people – out of the sort of people who know these sorts of things, that is – I knew of Jan Smuts’ key role in the origins of both the RAF and the Air Ministry. It was the so-called ‘Smuts report‘ to the War Cabinet, in August 1917, which set the whole process
1BoB is The First Battle of Britain: The Air War Over England, 1917–1918 (hereafter 1BoB), which sounds like a book but is actually a wargame. I bought my copy back in April 2009, not long after I submitted my PhD, at which point I noted that ‘I try to avoid buying wargames because I never
I admit the term ‘First Blitz’ is a convenient label for the air raids on Britain in the First World War, both as a shorthand and because there really were many similarities with the later Blitz. But nevertheless, I don’t really like it, and I’m avoiding it in my own book on the topic. Why?
In September 1909, rather late in Invasion‘s run, an article appeared in Pearson’s Weekly explaining not only some of the pyrotechnical mechanics behind the spectacle, but also the underlying airpower theory. Because it was not merely an popular entertainment and a commercial one at that, but a response to the question ‘Invasion by aeroplane, is
This is the story of the world’s first aerial combat. It is not a true story. It is 30 September, 1870. Revolutionary Paris is under siege by Prussian forces. But it has a secret weapon: Nadar. Nadar is famed as a photographer, a writer, and—more importantly here—an aeronaut. He has taken the lead in organising
After the drama of 1934, ‘the bomber will always get through’ appears less frequently in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA) in 1935 (though still at about twice the level than in 1932 or 1933). But it is still mostly being used in a very political way. This is not surprising, with the general election contested
The first real air raid on Australia was against Darwin on 19 February 1942. I don’t know when the first fake air raid on Australia was, but there was one against Melbourne on 14 October 1929: An aerial attack was made on Melbourne to-day by a group of seagull [sic] machines, which had been sent
After reading Bill Fanning’s Death Rays and the Popular Media, I looked at a murky 1937 claim of an official British death ray, supposedly on the authority of Sir Thomas ‘Caligula’s horse’ Inskip, Minister for Defence Co-ordination. That turned out to be not quite what happened. But I was also intrigued by something else Bill
Because it’s the holidays, I’m reading Bill Fanning’s Death Rays and the Popular Media, which proves that there are far more death ray stories out there than I’d ever dreamed, from many countries and by many more hands. Some of these death rays were purely fictional, but many others were supposedly grounded in fact. It’s
