The Duke of Bedford. Total Disarmament or an International Police Force? Glasgow: Strickland Press, 1944. Or false a dichotomy? Bedford was a pacifist and (maybe) a fascist. Here he is the author of a twelve-page pamphlet which originally sold for 2d. and which I bought for … much more than 2d.! If I’d known I […]
Oliver Stewart. Air Power and the Expanding Community. London: George Newnes, 1944. Thanks to Chris for pointing this one out to me. Looks forward to the post-war period and argues that the airpower (both military and civil) will be fundamental to the power blocs which will emerge, and that armed forces should combine all three
Noel Pemberton Billing has received a bit of criticism around here, and mostly for good reason. He couldn’t design a decent aeroplane for toffee, he peddled lurid conspiracy theories, he was a relentless self-promoter. But I don’t think he was a complete fool. He clearly had a fertile imagination (overly so, Maud Allen would have
A belated Anzac Day post. Here’s C. E. W. Bean, the official historian of Australia’s involvement in the First World War, on why the infamous Suvla landings on 6 August 1915 didn’t cut the Gallipoli peninsula and open the road to Constantinople: The reasons for the failure, which affected the fate of the Australian and
Joseph Miranda. First Battle of Britain. Decision Games, 2009. A wargame, not a book, included with Strategy & Tactics 255. The German air offensive against Britain in 1917 and 1918. The German player raids British cities and tries to damage civilian morale; the British player tries to intercept the raiders and bomb their aerodromes. It’s
I’ve been reading a little about the Dardanelles campaign of 1915; not the famous landings in April but the failed naval campaign which preceded them in February and March. The basic idea was that British and French forces would sweep the Bosphorus clear of mines, knock out the Turkish naval guns on either side of
Campbell Craig and Sergey Radchenko. The Atomic Bomb and the Origins of the Cold War. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008. Talks a bit about the Baruch plan, which seems (perhaps naively) to me to be a close relative of the pre-war proposals for an international air force and the international control of
A few articles have been appearing in the British press over the last few days about Harry Grindell Matthews, who (among many other things) claimed in 1924 to have invented a death ray. There’s no actual news attached to these stories, as far as I can tell, other than the fact that a new biography
No. But let me explain … One of the nice things about tutoring is that you’re getting paid to learn things (unless you happen to know everything about whatever it is that you are tutoring already, which I don’t). And one thing I’ve learned recently is that the First World War started because French aircraft
I’ve been reading a curious tome by Robert William Cole, called The Struggle for Empire. It’s curious because the empire of the title is the British Empire, or rather the Anglo-Saxon Empire, and the struggle takes place in interstellar space. And because it was published in 1900! It has a good claim to being the
