Hector Hawton. Night Bombing. London: Thomas Nelson & Sons, 1944. A rather interesting secondhand bookshop find. Hawton was a novelist, rationalist and during the war a flight lieutenant in the RAFVR. Here he has written an explanation, a history, and a justification of British bombing strategy in the Second World War. It’s less overtly propagandistic […]
John A. Moses and Christopher Pugsley, eds. The German Empire and Britain’s Pacific Dominions 1871-1919: Essays on the Role of Australia and New Zealand in World Politics in the Age of Imperialism. Claremont: Regina Books, 2000. The outcome of a conference held at the University of New England (i.e. where I am, which is how
Ian Mackersey. The Wright Brothers: The Remarkable Story of the Aviation Pioneers Who Changed the World. London: TimeWarner Paperbacks, 2004. Somewhat surprisingly, I’ve never bought any books about the Wrights (apart from Alfred Gollin’s No Longer an Island: Britain and the Wright Brothers, 1902-1909, obviously). I still haven’t, but thanks to a gift from a
Bernhard Rieger. Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890-1945. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. A cultural history of the responses to three particular types of ‘modern wonder’: aviation, passenger liners, and cinema. I read this back when I was doing my PhD, but I’ve moved to a different
[Horatio] Barber. How to Fly a Plane: The First World War Pilot’s Manual. Stroud, Amberley Publishing, 2014 [1917]. Christmas present! Barber was a British aviation pioneer, holder of Aero Club Certificate no. 30, the first occupant of Hendon Aerodrome, the first Briton to get a degree in aeronautics. During the First World War he did
I’m shocked to see that it’s already nearly two weeks since I got back from my UK research trip — it seems like it was just a couple of days ago. It was a fairly long trip: five weeks in total, essentially all of them spent in archives in London (National Archives, British Library, Imperial
So, I bought so many books in the UK that I had to post some of them home to myself; here are some of them. You might ask why I didn’t just note down the names of all these books and order them when I got back to Australia, but such a self-evidently absurd question
While looking for other things in the National Archives today, I came across a proposed ‘aerial attack on Germany’s next grain crop’ in a War Council meeting held at 10 Downing Street on 24 February 1915.1 It was actually two proposed attacks. Mervyn O’Gorman, a civilian engineer who was in charge of the Royal Aircraft
So, in the previous post in this series, I explained why (at least to a proximate cause) in 1914 people around Britain started worrying that German spies had gone around the country building concrete platforms for heavy artillery, as supposedly had been done before the war near Maubeuge and Antwerp. But what I didn’t do
Bryn Hammond. Cambrai 1917: The Myth of the First Great Tank Battle. London: Phoenix, 2009. I was telling my students about Cambrai only yesterday… well, I mentioned it to them, anyway. Hammond argues that it was the improved British artillery doctrine that was the key breakthrough at Cambrai, rather than the massed tank assault it
