Cyril Power, Air Raid (1935): British biplanes tangling with an unidentified enemy against a smoke-filled sky. It is tempting, given the date, to see this as an air raid of the next war, especially given Power’s marked interest in machines and speed and influence by Futurism and Vorticism. But it could just as well be […]
For a country so far from the frontline, there was a surprising amount of discussion in the New Zealand press in the autumn of 1918 about the possibility of Auckland being bombed or Wellington being shelled. It’s true that it was often framed in a joking fashion, as with the above cartoon which appeared in
Previously I looked at Excubitor’s claim that in 1913 the Anglo-German naval race was turning into a more dangerous aero-naval one, and that Britain, having won the first was now in the process of losing the other. Here I’ll look at some related strands of thought in the press more generally, and what the point
John Ptak recently pinned a 1964 science fiction magazine cover depicting a ruined Statue of Liberty, predating the more famous ending of Planet of the Apes by four years. He wondered about earlier images along the same lines, and after a bit of digging I found not many at all. The above is the only
The art of Charles Dellschau has been receiving some attention lately, thanks to the recent publication of a book about his work. Dellschau, who produced thousands of strange and wonderful watercolours, drawings and collages in Houston, Texas, between about 1899 and 1922, is significant as an early outsider artist, but he is mainly of interest
The Illustrated London News is not really a campaigning newspaper, but it has followed up last week’s striking graphical depictions of the airship menace with this fantastic double-page drawing by Norman Wilkinson, RI, of a German aerial fleet on its way to bomb Britain (pp. IV-V; above). The title asks WILL IT EVER BE SO
I may be the only person now living to have read all three of Hamish Blair’s novels, published in 1930 and 1931 — I’m certainly the only person on LibraryThing to own any at all.1 I wish I could say that the rest of you are missing out, but you’re really not: they are tedious
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] New York waited for an air raid in June 1918. For thirteen nights from 4 June, much of the city was blacked out to avoid giving German pilots any assistance in locating targets to bomb. The New York Times reported the following day that: Electric signs and all
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] In the published version of his 2008 Lord Trenchard Memorial Lecture, Richard Overy concluded that now air power is projected for its potential political or moral impact. In Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan it is the political dividend that has been central to the exercise of air power, just
This image and the one below are selections from the The National Archives’ collaboration with Wikimedia Commons, so far comprising 350 examples of war art from the Second World War. These particular ones are propaganda posters (or draft versions of same) but there are also more informational ones as well as portraits and caricatures of
