Martin Middlebrook. The Battle of Hamburg: Allied Bomber Forces Against a German City in 1943. London: Cassell & Co., 2000 [1980]. I picked this up partly because of the topic (obviously), partly because it has an account of the action for which Pilot Officer E. L. Pickles was awarded his first DFC (nursing his Lancaster […]
Eric Ash. Sir Frederick Sykes and the Air Revolution 1912-1918. London and Portland: Frank Cass, 1999. An excellent study of a important figure in the early days of the RAF who has been overshadowed by his rival, predecessor and successor Trenchard: he was certainly a stauncher supporter of strategic bombing at this time. Sykes was
Brian Madison Jones. Abolishing the Taboo: Dwight D. Eisenhower and American Nuclear Doctrine, 1945-1961. (Solihull: Helion & Company, 2011). I found Brian Jones’s Abolishing the Taboo interesting for two reasons. Firstly, the subject matter: the Cold War fear of nuclear war was the successor to the interwar fear of strategic bombing. Secondly, it’s the book
I’m very pleased to be able to say that I have signed a book contract with Ashgate Publishing. This contract has two key components: firstly, that I will revise my PhD thesis for publication as a book; and secondly, that Ashgate will publish said book so that people can read it. A thesis is not
Brian Madison Jones. Abolishing the Taboo: Dwight D. Eisenhower and American Nuclear Doctrine 1945-1961 (Solihull: Helion & Company, 2011). Argues that Eisenhower worked to normalise nuclear weapons in both the American arsenal and the American consciousness. This early period of the Cold War, when the bomb took over from the bomber as the threat to
I’m sure everybody has a favourite story about Sir Kingsley Wood. Mine is the one from when he was Air Minister at the start of the Second World War, and he refused to bomb Germany on the grounds that it would damage private property. As A. J. P. Taylor tells it: Kingsley Wood, secretary for
Frank McDonough, ed. The Origins of the Second World War: An International Perspective (London and New York: Continuum, 2011). Choc-a-block: twenty-nine essays on the diplomacy of the interwar period (with a heavy emphasis on Europe, though I don’t have a problem with that myself), from pretty much all the experts.
‘The Hum‘ is a mysterious low-frequency sound just at the edge of hearing which seems to infect some places, but which only some people can detect. What causes it is unknown — theories range from factories and air conditioners to gravitational waves — and responsible authorities often deny that it exists at all. The most
Breaking the morale of a civilian population by means of aerial bombardment is quite difficult. But it’s a lot easier if you only have to do it in graphical form. Here bombs of type ‘killed’, ‘wounded’, ‘evacuated’, ‘deprived of utilities’ and ‘homes destroyed’ come thundering down towards the edifice ‘will to resist’, which is formed
After knocking together The Scareship Age, I started working on turning my Sudeten crisis posts into an e-book version. I knew there’d be a fair amount of work, but I underestimated the value of ‘fair’. Finding and cleaning up formatting errors is a very slow and tedious business, as is creating an index (though it
