A GIANT OF THE AIR. A HANDLEY-PAGE FOUR-ENGINED BIPLANE. A Handley Page V/1500, the Kabul bomber. Below is (I think) a S.E.5a. Image source: Harry Golding, ed., The Wonder Book of Aircraft for Boys and Girls (London: Ward, Lock & Co, 1919), frontispiece. Painting by Geoffrey Watson.
Air Raid Precautions. Stroud: Tempus, 2007. Another one of those books where the publishers have obviously asked themselves, Who’d buy this book? and answered, Well, there’s that Airminded bloke — that’s one copy at least. A collection of facsimile reprints of various Home Office/Lord Privy Seal’s Office ARP booklets and leaflets: The Protection of Your
A comment from Melissa got me thinking about gender and the knock-out blow, which is admittedly not something I do very often. There are certainly a number of ways into this subject. The most obvious would be to look at the fact that airpower would bring war onto British soil for the first time since
In late March and early April 1938, the Manchester Guardian ran a competition inviting readers to send in ‘a List, with short reasons, of Six Books with which to Furnish a Gas-proof Room’1 — that is, a room designed to provide a temporary refuge in a gas attack. The article which discussed the entries began
This will end in tears: Zeppelins to make tourist flights over London. (Via Airshipworld.) Image source: from the front cover of Louis Gastine, War in Space: or, an Air-craft War between France and Germany (London and Felling-on-Tyne: Walter Scott Publishing, 1913). (OK, it’s Paris, not London — so I cheated.) The oldest paperback I own,
The Royal Air Force is 90 years old today. It was formed from the merger of the Royal Flying Corps and the Royal Naval Air Service on 1 April 1918 (yes, April Fool’s Day), as the result of an Act of Parliament. This was historic. The RAF may not have been the world’s first independent
A curious snippet from Margaret MacMillan’s account of the Paris Peace Conference, Peacemakers (2002): Why not give it to Hughes of Australia, suggested Clemenceau.1 The ‘it’ was Heligoland, a small island in the North Sea, off the north-western coast of Germany. For most of the 19th century it had belonged to Britain, which swapped it
In 1923, the Salisbury Committee enquired into the proper relationship between the RAF, on the one hand, and the Army and Navy, on the other. According to Andrew Boyle’s biography of Hugh Trenchard, the then Chief of the Air Staff quoted a recent statement by Sir Ian Hamilton (the commander at Gallipoli) at some point
Carl von Clausewitz. On War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989 [1832]. Probably something anybody with pretensions to being a military historian should have to hand, even if other strategists have been more influential in different contexts, places and times. (I recently came across Trenchard speaking of Edward Hamley in the same breath as Clausewitz and
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] Not a phrase I ever expected to come across, but here it is, in David Omissi’s Air Power and Colonial Control, the context being the introduction of one the most successful aircraft of the interwar period, the Hawker Hart: The Hart was soon found to be suitable for India; fifty-seven
