Patrick Deer. Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Argues that Britain developed a ‘war culture’ in the Second World War which was very different to that of the First and which ‘colonised’ the national consciousness in the rest of the century. It’s from a […]
Daniel Swift. Bomber County. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2010. Partly an account of the attempt by the author — an English lit professor — to understand what happened to his grandfather, a Lancaster pilot shot down during a raid on Münster, as well as to the people he bombed, it also makes the argument that the
Today’s New Statesman and Nation has little to say about a German invasion or aerial strategy, unlike the Spectator yesterday, aside from a brief paragraph in the editorial comments (221) noting that German bombers now have an equal number of fighters as escorts: The primary object of these attacks has been to engage and destroy
It’s taken me just over five years to get to my 100th ‘acquisitions’ post… which seems surprisingly slow, I have to say! Michael Molkentin. Fire in the Sky: The Australian Flying Corps in the First World War. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010. A topic I don’t know much about. Looks well-researched, and on p.
Alan Allport. Demobbed: Coming Home After the Second World War. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009. The book of the dissertation, on which the blog of the book of the dissertation is based! Gordon Pirie. Air Empire: British Imperial Civil Aviation, 1919-39. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009. A book which
This whimsical illustration, showing Father Neptune beset by all manner of aerial pests, appeared in Murray F. Sueter’s Airmen or Noahs: Fair Play for our Airmen; The Great ‘Neon’ Air Myth Exposed (London: Isaac Pitman & Sons, 1928), opposite 410. Sueter had been a technically-minded naval officer (torpedoes, airships, armoured cars, tanks and of course
Graham Greene. The Ministry of Fear. London: Vintage Books, 2001 [1943]. One of Greene’s lesser-known thrillers. Some evocative portraits of London during the Blitz, as when the protagonist looks out over battered Battersea and sees that ‘Most of the church spires seemed to have been snapped off two-thirds up like sugar sticks’. The world is
Peter Ewer. Wounded Eagle: The Bombing of Darwin and Australia’s Air Defence Scandal. Chatswood: New Holland, 2009. Based on the author’s PhD thesis, this looks at the politics of Australia’s air policy before the war as well as the air attacks on Australia during it. It was a random find — surprised I hadn’t heard
This illustration, by A. C. Michael, is from T. Donovan Bayley’s ‘When the sea failed her’ which appeared in Pall Mall Magazine in May 1909. It’s subtitled ‘The story of a war between England and the allies, and the terrible way it ended’. It’s that terrible ending which makes this story stand out for me.
C. G. Grey. A History of the Air Ministry. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1940. A valuable compendium of information by a knowledgeable (though, Grey being Grey, hardly detached!) contemporary observer. The first section covers the period up to 1918 (including the Air Ministry’s predecessors); the last the interwar period. In between there is a
