Thomas Hippler. Bombing the People: Giulio Douhet and the Foundations of Air-Power Strategy, 1884-1939. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. There are very few studies of Douhet in English, and none since Azar Gat’s Fascist and Liberal Visions of War (1998), so I’m very excited to see this. Even leafing through it it’s obvious that there […]
Christy Campbell. Target London: Under Attack from the V-Weapons During WWII. London: Little, Brown, 2012. A popular (and in this case, cheap) account of the V-1 and V-2 campaigns with a nicely over-the-top cover illustration. As the title suggests, it does concentrate on London, but Antwerp’s ordeal also receives some attention. Hugh Dolan. Gallipoli Air
John Horne, ed. A Companion to World War I. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. A collection of essays by an international group of experts who provide a comprehensive overview of the war: origins, strategy, combat, the home fronts, memory, and so on. In many cases the essays are written by exactly who you’d expect, and want. The
One of the most intriguing things to emerge from my post-blogging of the Blitz a few years ago (but which sadly didn’t make it into my Blitz article) was the notion of reprisals after notice, that is to say, of publishing a list of German cities which would be bombed intensively until the Luftwaffe ceased
Colin Dobinson. Building Radar: Forging Britain’s Early Warning Chain, 1935-1945. London: Methuen, 2010. Looks like a useful complement to David Zimmerman’s Britain’s Shield (2001). This covers the scientific and institutional side of the British development of radar in detail too (and adds some texture to the role of death ray desire), but is more concerned
A. O. Pollard. Epic Deeds of the RAF. London and Melbourne: Hutchinson and Co., 1940. Pollard, a VC winner and former RAF pilot, was mostly known for his crime thrillers (some of them airminded) but occasionally turned his hand to non-fiction. This is a fairly generic account of the first year of the Second World
The main reason for my recent New Zealand trip was to go to a conference, but afterwards I spent a week researching in Archives New Zealand and the National Library of New Zealand. My main reason for that was to look into the trans-Tasman counterpart to the 1918 mystery aeroplane scare in Australia. I didn’t
Christopher M. Bell. Churchill and Sea Power. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. I’m on record as pledging to never write a book about Winston Churchill, because there seems to be another new one out every time I go to a bookshop and very few of them can have anything new or even interesting to say
Ritchie Calder. Carry on London. London: English Universities Press, 1941. Calder was a campaigning journalist during the Blitz, who exposed many of the official civil defence failures in the New Statesman. They feature here too, but overall he gives the government much credit for eventually getting its act together. Ends with a call for Britons
Errol W. Martyn. A Passion for Flight: New Zealand Aviation Before the Great War. Volume 1: Ideas, First Flight Attempts and the Aeronauts 1868-1909. Upper Riccarton: Volplane Press, 2012. I mostly bought this for the two pages on the 1909 phantom airship scare, but it also has plenty of fascinating material on early New Zealand
