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
Neil Arnold. Shadows in the Sky: The Haunted Airways of Britain. Stroud: The History Press, 2012. A compilation of, mostly, strange things seen in the sky over Britain. Everything from dragons, fish, battles, and UFOs to, naturally, phantom airships (and ghost aircraft, as in actual ghosts). Lots of interesting details but not much in the
[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
The phantom airships seen over Britain in the early months of 1913 had their counterparts in Europe. It’s hard to reconstruct what happened from the scattered references in English-language sources, but it seems that far fewer were seen than in Britain, even in toto. Here are the ones I’ve been able to find mentioned in
Robert Boyce. The Great Interwar Crisis and the Collapse of Globalization. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. A big new (well, not so new by now) history of the way the Great Depression (or Slump) wrecked the international order, paving the way for Hitler and the rest of it. So it’s not just about
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
Recentlyish, someone called dedonarrival left the following comment here on a post about the British demand for reprisal bombing of Germany in return for the Blitz: Such gross ignorance. Google: British terror bombing and note when it started and when Germany retaliated with its twin engined medium bombers and range limited fighter escort . I
Mark Atherton. There and Back Again: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Origins of The Hobbit. London: I. B. Tauris, 2012. With The Hobbit published 75 years ago this very day and the (first of three!) movies coming out in a couple of months, this is very well-timed. The author is, like Tolkien, an Oxford
In my reprisals article I argue that historians have, for the most part, underestimated popular support during the Blitz for counterbombing of German cities. I think Tom Harrisson, both during the war as head of Mass-Observation and after as author of Living Through the Blitz, had a lot to do with this. But there were
