SUCH THINGS WILL HAPPEN In April, 1935, a Kentish Voluntary Aid Detachment of the British Red Cross Society conducted an air raid rehearsal. Here Red Cross men wearing box respirators and anti-gas clothing are rescuing a woman caught by gas in the open. With a heavy concentration of the deadly gases that modern chemists have […]
RAIN OF BOMBS Milan’s wonderful cathedral is here shown under a rain of dummy bombs dropped by 80 aeroplanes during recent manoeuvres of the Italians. To make the display more impressive and to ascertain the results with more certainty, luminous “bombs” were used and fell in a fiery rain upon the city — a dire
This is an image we might particularly associate with the United States in the 1950s, when schoolchildren were taught to duck and cover in the event of the flash of an atomic blast. But its use in civil defence drills predates the Cold War (albeit without a Bert the Turtle to help kids remember the
The images in this post are from Boyd Cable, ‘Death from the skies’, in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 20-4 (see below). The article itself is a short story describing an air raid in the next war. I won’t summarise it in detail,
At about 5.20pm on Friday, 29 July 1938, hundreds of people saw a mysterious aeroplane diving from high over Hobart. According to Pegasus, the Hobart Mercury‘s aviation correspondent, A large crowd collected near the corner of Liverpool and Murray streets, and traffic was impeded. The machine descended to a comparatively low level, yet not low
The RAF Displays held at Hendon between 1920 and 1937 were unique, in that no other air force attempted to project a vision of itself, its capabilities and its responsibilities in so public a way, on such a large scale and over such a long period. Of course, that’s largely because there weren’t many air
MRS. MARY COUCHMAN, twenty-four-year-old warden in a small Kentish village, sat smoking a cigarette in the wardens’ post. She was resting between warnings. Suddenly the sirens sounded again. She saw her little boy, with two friends, playing some distance away. The cigarette still in her hand, Mrs. Couchman ran out of the post. Bombs began
This is the programme for an air display called ‘London Defended’ which was part of the 1925 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley (in Wembley Stadium, in fact, before it became Wembley Stadium). I must admit to having missed this one (and its predecessor in 1924), but it sounds like it was comparable to the longer-lived
Let’s turn now to Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Smaug’s attack on Lake-town (Esgaroth).1 In my PhD thesis I identified six characteristics of the ideal theory of the knock-out blow from the air: it would be a surprise attack, on a large scale, which would strike at the interdependent structures and civilian morale of its targets,
In July, 1917, a new scheme for warning the people of London of impending air raids was adopted. When enemy aircraft were approaching, policemen with a notice warning passers-by to “take cover” went out on bicycles, blowing their whistles to attract attention. When all danger had passed, Boy Scouts went round blowing bugles.
