The current issue of Wartime, the official magazine of the Australian War Memorial, has an article by me on the Australian mystery aeroplane scare of 1918. I’m very pleased with how it’s turned out — it’s beautifully illustrated and put together. The theme of the issue is ‘air warfare’, which I imagine may be of […]
Over at The Appendix, ‘a new journal of narrative & experimental history’ to which you can subscribe, Felipe Fernandes Cruz has reproduced some intriguing declassified US documents from the early 1940s concerning rumours of clandestine German airfields in Brazil. The reason for the US interest in any evidence of German activity in South America, apart
One factlet I’ve enjoyed dropping on the heads of students is the origin of the word ‘blockbuster’. Now it is widely understood to mean a hugely successful movie (as well as a once-highly successful video rental chain — remember those?). It has even been claimed that this is the original sense of the word: supposedly,
[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
On 1 April 1909, the citizens of Pittsburg (between 1891 and 1911 the ‘h’ was omitted) were the victims of a rather cruel April Fool’s joke. An afternoon edition of one of the city’s newspapers (the Pittsburg Dispatch reported the story so probably wasn’t the hoaxer) informed them that Japan had invaded the United States:
[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
Today I attended the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Arts eResearch forum 2012. This was in two parts: firstly, a talk by Tim Sherratt, down from Canberra for the day, entitled ‘Digital Disruptions’, where he exhorted us to find new ways to break things; followed by short spiels by local academics on some of their
Very sad news today. On Monday, VH-UXG, a De Havilland DH.84 Dragon owned and flown by Des Porter, went missing on a flight from Monto to Caboolture in Queensland. A distress call and an emergency beacon were heard briefly, but then nothing more was known until today, when VH-UXG’s wreckage was found in rugged terrain
In my discussion of the ill-fated Sykes Memo, I noted that it included proposed force levels for the Dominion air forces, which I haven’t seen discussed before. This is interesting because it came at an interesting moment. It’s early December 1918, with the Empire was in the flush of victory and all things seeming possible
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
