Last night I had my first full-on anxiety dream about nuclear war since the 1980s. As ICBM trails arced across the blue sky overhead, I ran for the safety of a nearby shelter — and confirmed that the Third World War had started by getting out my phone to check my social media feeds. Of […]
This is the cover of a leaflet produced in 1916 by the Australian Air Squadrons Fund, the Australian arm of the Imperial Air Flotilla which raised funds around the British Empire for presentation ‘battle-planes’ for the Royal Flying Corps. My interest in it is not so much for its own sake, though I am struck
I did my second Turning Point for ABC New England radio today, and chose to talk about the founding the League of Nations in 1920. The League is usually considered to be a failure, because it didn’t prevent the Second World War or even play any significant role after the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. But
A key element in any wargame is the scenario. It sets the boundaries in time and space of the simulation, as well as its initial conditions. For a historical wargame, a scenario might be the battle of Cannae, or the British and Canadian sectors at D-Day. Creating such scenarios involves researching orders of battle, contemporary
In my discussion of the ill-fated Sykes Memo, I noted that it included proposed force levels for the Dominion air forces, which I haven’t seen discussed before. This is interesting because it came at an interesting moment. It’s early December 1918, with the Empire was in the flush of victory and all things seeming possible
Here’s something I didn’t know before. In 1939, an Indian chemistry professor and Theosophist named D. D. Kanga edited a collection of articles entitled Where Theosophy and Science Meet: A Stimulus to Modern Thought.1 One of the articles was by Peter Freeman, who had been a Labour MP from Wales between 1929 and 1931 (and
A comment by Gavin Robinson over at Thoughts on Military History reminded me that I’ve been a bit slack with self-archiving. This is the policy some academic journals have which allows authors to upload copies of their articles to their own websites, with certain caveats. For SAGE journals the policy is that you can At
Today’s big story must have caused quite a bit of consternation to readers: it’s scarcely possible to credit it. Here is the full text of the statement issued by 10, Downing Street last night (as reproduced in The Times, 5):
The war news today is much closer to home for the Glasgow Herald than usual. A big air raid last night on ‘a Central district of Scotland’ (5) is vividly described, as though the reporter had witnessed it: readers would know for themselves just how far away it was. One Nazi ‘plane which appeared to
The big news today is that the latest Italian offensive against Greek forces in the Tepelini sector has been a disaster. War correspondents estimate 10,000 Italian casualties, including 2000 dead; yet ‘it was stated in authoritative circles in London yesterday that the Italians do not appear to have made any perceptible progress’ (5). This is
