[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] I recently came across what appear to be two bad books from what are two good publishers. There’s nothing particularly unusual about that — these things happen, a lot of books get published on military history and they can’t all be good. But it turns out that the […]
John Gooch. Mussolini and his Generals: The Armed Forces and Fascist Foreign Policy, 1922-1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. A big book for a big subject. There’s a lot here on strategic debates and policy within the Fascist regime; not just how the military served Italian foreign policy ends in Spain and Abyssinia but also
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] (Or, ‘Trenchard at sea’.) Jamel Ostwald’s recent post on urban bombardment in the early modern period, itself partly a response to my post on Trenchardism, prompted me to wonder how straight the line was between aerial bombardment and earlier naval and land bombardments? Was the naval precedent more
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] It’s been a good year for reading military history, but then it always is. If I had to recommend one military history book I’ve read this year it would be David Stevenson’s With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 (London: Penguin, 2012). Stevenson’s previous
Christopher Clark. The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. London: Allen Lane, 2012. Who doesn’t need another book on the origins of the First World War? Not me! This particular one focuses on the Balkan quagmire and its role in Great Power politics. Unlike some other recent interpretations (such as William Mulligan’s), Clark
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
Peter J. Dean, ed. Australia 1942: In the Shadow of War (Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013). A collection of essays originating in a Military History and Heritage Victoria conference held in Melbourne earlier this year, which I’m now regretting not having attended. There are contributions on the Australia-Japan relationship before the Second World War
Kevin M. O’Reilly. Flyers of Time: Pioneer Aviation in Country Victoria: The First Fifty Years, a Collection. Dingley Village: Kevin M. O’Reilly, 2012. Mainly a compendium of newspaper articles relating to Victorian aviation outside Melbourne, covering the period 1911-1960. Also lots of contemporary photographs of aeroplanes from various sources, a selection of aviation ephemera such
J. M. Spaight was a lawyer by training and a civil servant by profession, and as was such not generally prone to flights of fancy. His prewar books are scholarly and judicious compilations of various opinions and precedents regarding aerial warfare. But his wartime writing, such as The Sky’s the Limit (1940) and Bombing Vindicated
[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
