I hadn’t come across this before. @ukwarcabinet recently linked to some informal notes of a War Cabinet meeting held on 8 February 1940. It was pretty quiet, even for the Bore War, and ‘Some of the subjects discussed were rather discussed by way of filling in time’. Including this: At the end of the Meeting […]
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] ‘To-day and To-morrow’ was a series of over a hundred essays on ‘the future’ of a diverse range of subjects, which were published in pamphlet form by Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. between 1924 and 1931. The authors are equally varied: some were acknowledged experts in their fields, others seem to
Just as when reading Brave New World I applied my airminded filters and extracted Aldous Huxley’s vision of future warfare, I’m going to do the same for that other great British dystopia, George Orwell‘s Nineteen Eighty-Four. (Which is what passes for summer reading for me. Quotes taken from this version.) War is much more important
Field Marshal Jan Smuts, prime minister of South Africa, broadcast a speech on the BBC on 29 September 1946. He talked about the prospects for peace in the post-war world, a subject on which he could claim some authority, since he had helped unify Anglophones and Afrikaners after the Boer War, and was involved in
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
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] A few days ago, a new article popped up in my RSS reader: R. M. Douglas, ‘Did Britain use chemical weapons in mandatory Iraq?’, Journal of Modern History, 81 (December 2009), 1-29. This was slightly odd, because it’s only October and the rest of the December issue isn’t online yet. The editors
On this day in 1945, the third atomic bomb was dropped on Tokyo. Or, rather, might have been had not Japan surrendered on 15 August. For a long time, I’ve believed that the two bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the only ones which would be available for a month or two. But a
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
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] A couple of years ago I outed myself as something of a philistine by admitting that I didn’t ‘get’ Guernica, and thought that direct representations — photographs — of the ruined city were more powerful, more affecting than Picasso’s masterpiece. My incomprehension generated a fair degree of discussion, which was useful, but
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] A random thought while sitting in a lecture today: if there is (or can be) such a thing as total war, does that imply that total peace is a meaningful concept? Firstly, what is total war? One definition, drawn from the ubiquitous set of conference proceedings edited by Stig Förster et al
