In 1910, two Army officers, Second Lieutenant Bowle-Evans and Lieutenant Cammell independently put forward a new idea for an anti-aircraft weapon: the vortex ring gun. In principal, it involved the formation of a vortex in the air, by the firing of an explosive charge inside a conical ‘gun’ which, if it were pointed upwards, would […]
Don Charlwood’s No Moon Tonight has a reputation as one of the best Bomber Command memoirs. Charlwood was a Victorian who joined the RAAF in 1941, trained as a navigator in Canada under the Empire Air Training Scheme, and then flew in Halifaxes and Lancasters with 103 Squadron at Elsham Wolds. Having survived his tour
Peter Williams. The Kokoda Campaign 1942: Myth and Reality. Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2012. This is one of those topics I should know more about, being a military historian and an Australian and all. Ordinarily I might be wary of a book with ‘myth and reality’ in the title, but it’s unlikely to be sensationalist
WILL THEY BE A COMMON SIGHT? Officers of the St. Johns Ambulance Brigade, who, in their black and white uniforms, are familiar and friendly figures to Londoners, are now preparing for the possibility that grim and terrible duties may one day fall to their lot. A number of them have recently received instruction in a
Well, not quiet so much as oddly obscure… In his Behind the Smoke Screen (1934), probably the most influential book written on the theory of a knock-out blow from the air, P. R. C. Groves related the following story of angry civilians attacking an RFC aerodrome after an air raid, because they felt they had
Peter Adey. Aerial Life: Spaces, Mobilities, Affects. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. The title isn’t very revealing of its contents. But here’s a partial list of the topics covered: airminded youth groups such as the Air Defence Cadet Corps and the Skybird League (chapter 2), air shows including Hendon (chapter 3), the birth of aerial surveying (chapter
Here’s something I didn’t know before. In 1939, an Indian chemistry professor and Theosophist named D. D. Kanga edited a collection of articles entitled Where Theosophy and Science Meet: A Stimulus to Modern Thought.1 One of the articles was by Peter Freeman, who had been a Labour MP from Wales between 1929 and 1931 (and
N. A. J. Taylor recently asked me on Twitter if I thought the above photograph, purportedly of one of the daylight Gotha raids on London in 1917, was genuine. I said no, due to ‘Experience, intuition, lack of provenance, contemporary photographic technology. The photo has been retouched at very least.’ But I’m coming around to
RAIN OF BOMBS Milan’s wonderful cathedral is here shown under a rain of dummy bombs dropped by 80 aeroplanes during recent manoeuvres of the Italians. To make the display more impressive and to ascertain the results with more certainty, luminous “bombs” were used and fell in a fiery rain upon the city — a dire
Ronnie Scott, ed. The Real ‘Dad’s Army’: The War Diaries of Col. Rodney Foster. London: Virago, 2011. Foster was a retired Indian Army officer who commanded a Home Guard company in Kent in the Second World War. Looks interesting: takes a lively interest in the progress of the war, but is also engaged with his
