Content warning: descriptions of death and mutilation. The opening paragraph of the current draft of my next book, about one day over a century ago: And from the Guardian, about one day less than a week ago: The missile hit during the school’s morning session. In Iran, the school week runs from Saturday to Thursday, […]
Like many people – out of the sort of people who know these sorts of things, that is – I knew of Jan Smuts’ key role in the origins of both the RAF and the Air Ministry. It was the so-called ‘Smuts report‘ to the War Cabinet, in August 1917, which set the whole process
Somehow I managed to miss – by exactly a year! – the publication of the third and final volume of Ian Castle’s history of the Zeppelin and Gotha raids: I included Zeppelin Onslaught on my 1914–1918 air raids reading list back in 2022. In the meantime I’ve read Zeppelin Inferno, and having just finished Gotha
Four days after the second great daylight Gotha raid on London, Lady Louise Maxwell (above) wrote a letter announcing the foundation of a new philanthropic fund, the Home Fires Fund. Believing that it was ‘childish to expect a huge city like London […] can escape these occasional air raids’, and accepting that ‘We have come
In August 1940, the letter columns of the Stoke-on-Trent Evening Sentinel raged with an intense (if brief) controversy over the existence of unofficial civil defence groups known as ‘street patrols’. These were nothing to do with the national Air Raid Precautions (ARP) organisation, which among other things recruited air raid wardens to monitor and coordinate
One of the fun things about historical research is finding something when you’re not looking for it. Alan Murdie, in his regular ‘Ghostwatch’ column in a recent Fortean Times, wrote the following: At Folkstone [sic], in 1917, candles in an air-raid shelter were mysteriously extinguished amid other poltergeist events. Natural gas from strata was blamed.1
1BoB is The First Battle of Britain: The Air War Over England, 1917–1918 (hereafter 1BoB), which sounds like a book but is actually a wargame. I bought my copy back in April 2009, not long after I submitted my PhD, at which point I noted that ‘I try to avoid buying wargames because I never
Next July, the Australasian Association for European History (AAEH) conference is being held at the University of Auckland. My abstract having been accepted, it looks like I’ll be going to New Zealand! My presentation is entitled ‘Civil defence from below: street patrols and air raid risk in Britain, 1915-1918’ and here’s what it’s about: As
So, I’m back from my long-overdue and much-needed research trip to the UK. Was it worth it? Yes! In raw numbers, I took over 11,000 photos across 13 days at 8 archives in 5 cities.1 Obviously, since I’m not a Bomber Command AOC I’m not going to prioritise quantity over quality. But I did pretty
![German propaganda poster with a vibrant and striking image depicting swarms of British aircraft bombing an industrial site to illustrate the following quote, by British Labour Leader Johnston Hicks [sic], which appeared in the 'Daily Telegraph' on January 3rd 1918: 'One must bomb the Rhineland industrial regions with one hundred aircraft day after day, until the treatment has had its effect!’](https://airminded.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/artv05099.jpg)
In the previous post, I discussed some of my objections to the idea that the air raids on Britain in the FIrst World were the ‘First Blitz’. I don’t think my arguments were completely persuasive, even to myself (which is why I decided to work through them in public like this). But I ended by
