Today is the one-hundredth anniversary of the first use of an aeroplane for aerial bombardment. I’ve already written about the longer context of Libya’s history of bombing (to which can be added NATO’s air campaign, which coincidentally enough has just ended), but here’s where it all began, at Ain Zara on 1 November 1911: A […]
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] On 29 March 1939, Croydon airport was the site of an extraordinary scene, as the Daily Express reported: NEARLY 400 Jewish refugees streamed into Croydon in a succession of air liners yesterday — the biggest influx the airport had ever experienced. They came from Danzig, the Polish Corridor, Cologne, Berlin, Vienna, Switzerland
The last time Britain nuked Australia was at Maralinga on 9 October 1957, over half a century ago. The last of the Antler series of tests, code-named Taranaki (above), involved the detonation of a 25 kiloton fission bomb from a captive balloon at a height of 300 metres. The fallout ‘moved east and then north-east
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] I’ve been using the Internet for nearly two decades: in 1992 — after nervously checking with the physics computer lab manager first — I sent an email to my future Honours supervisor while she was visiting Toronto. I was quickly hooked by the promise of overcoming the tyranny of distance and transparently
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] Libya now holds an unfortunate record. It is the country which has the longest experience of aerial bombardment. Libya was first bombed in 1911, by Italy; now, in 2011, it is being bombed by its own air force. That makes it just under a century from the first bomb to the latest.
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] I know. Writing about Wikipedia is so 2006. And yes, finding errors in Wikipedia articles is not exactly difficult. But I have a bee in my bonnet which needs releasing. Wikipedia’s page on the Blitz has a section entitled ‘Commencement on September 6’. This is how it currently reads (sans hyperlinks and
I’ve recently been reading Peter Ewer’s Wounded Eagle: The Bombing of Darwin and Australia’s Air Defence Scandal, which I found to be unexpectedly interesting, but not always in a good way. Wounded Eagle has much less about the Second World War than I’d thought: much of the early part of the book is taken up
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] There’s been much discussion in various places and in various ways recently about the woeful state of the humanities in various university systems around the English-speaking world, particularly in light of the Browne Review in the UK — for example, at Larvatus Prodeo (also here and here), Skepticlawyer, zunguzungu (a response to
There have been a lot of stories in the press recently with titles like ‘Churchill ordered UFO cover-up, National Archives show’. Actually, the TNA files — part of an ongoing series of releases of UFO-related files — don’t show this at all, as is clear if you read the article more closely. The cover-up is
This photograph of Australian soldiers was taken during the First World War. It’s not particularly unusual: just a group of mates getting together to record a memento, perhaps after a weekend’s carousing in the fleshpots of Cairo or Paris. Mateship is a important concept in Australian culture. The OED defines it as ‘The condition of
