Interestingly, after yesterday’s coordinated pro-bombing campaign, today’s headlines in The Times (4) emphasise the efforts of Bomber Command over those of Fighter Command. In particular, a raid on Berlin on Wednesday night (or Thursday morning) is described in some detail. A ‘large number of bombs, high explosive and incendiary’ were dropped ‘on a series of […]
Since May, the Home Intelligence Department of the Ministry of Information has been preparing daily reports on the state of British morale: what people are talking about, what they are worried about, what they are happy about, and what are thought the government should do. A wide variety of sources is used for this, both
You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but you can often pick up a few interesting things about it. Here we have number 77 in the Crime-Book Society series, Black Out by Captain A. O. Pollard. Fifty-four thousand copies have been sold (or at least printed), which makes it a fairly successful title. It’s
The following letter appeared in the Evening News, 13 12 March 1935, 6: On the brick wall at the side of our street door can still be seen faintly two large letters, “P. P.,” which stood for Poplar Patrol. Every Friday night it was my job to collect 3d. from each house-hold that belonged to
Here’s an interesting inversion of my usual phantom airship scare. The Zeppelin was real enough — it was L6, raiding Essex on the night of 15 April 1915. The phantom was instead a motor-car: Since the visit of the Zeppelin early on Friday morning the Maldon district has been full of rumours of mysterious motor-cars
This is an advertisement from The Times, 26 May 1915, 5, for the ‘Life-Saving “CAVENDISH” Anti-Gas INHALER’ — in other words, a gas mask. It’s a surprisingly early attempt to combine (and to cash in on) the twin threats of aerial bombardment and chemical warfare — that is, ‘The Danger of GAS BOMBS’: You can
It’s seventy years today since Britain and France declared war on Germany. At 11.15am on Sunday 3 September 1939, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain spoke to the nation via the BBC. At 11.28am, less than a quarter of an hour later, air raid sirens went off in London and (at differing times) across much of the
The first bombers didn’t fly but sailed: they were warships known as bomb vessels, which mounted heavy mortars firing explosive shells. These could be used in naval battles, but weren’t very accurate and so were usually used to attack targets on land, including cities. The French navy used bomb vessels to bombard Genoa in 1684,
The National Archives have released a couple of files (here and here) relating to mustard gas in the Second World War. I’m too cheap to pay to download them from TNA so I’m relying on news reports — luckily this is a blog and not a refereed publication! The first is about a series of
Here are a couple of interesting but spurious claims about new weapons from 1939, which I’ve come across in my recent reading. The first is from the Melbourne Argus of 19 January 1939. It’s very brief, no more than a simple statement that the Soviet Union has announced that it has developed a death ray.
