What was the response to the Canterbury Baedeker raids? There was actually surprisingly little direct comment in the British press, but the major theme was to reaffirm that British raids on German cities were not reprisals but attacks on legitimate targets; whereas German raids on British cities were not even reprisals but merely spite. In […]
On 1 April 1909, the citizens of Pittsburg (between 1891 and 1911 the ‘h’ was omitted) were the victims of a rather cruel April Fool’s joke. An afternoon edition of one of the city’s newspapers (the Pittsburg Dispatch reported the story so probably wasn’t the hoaxer) informed them that Japan had invaded the United States:
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] In the published version of his 2008 Lord Trenchard Memorial Lecture, Richard Overy concluded that now air power is projected for its potential political or moral impact. In Kosovo, Iraq and Afghanistan it is the political dividend that has been central to the exercise of air power, just
I’m pleased to say that Twentieth Century British History has accepted my article ‘The shadow of the airliner: commercial bombers and the rhetorical destruction of Britain, 1917-1935’ for publication. It should appear online by the end of the year and in print some time after that. Conceptually, though not really intentionally, this article links with
The phantom airships seen over Britain in the early months of 1913 had their counterparts in Europe. It’s hard to reconstruct what happened from the scattered references in English-language sources, but it seems that far fewer were seen than in Britain, even in toto. Here are the ones I’ve been able to find mentioned in
Another update to my list of early 20th century British newspapers online. There are a number of new titles available: Dundee Courier Gloucestershire Echo Hereford Times Herts Advertiser Lincolnshire Echo Surrey Mirror Yorkshire Gazette In addition, the coverage for another dozen titles has been increased, though in some cases only by a year. There’s additional
As with the Lübeck and Rostock raids over a month earlier, the RAF’s thousand bomber raid on Cologne on 30 May 1942 triggered reprisal attacks by the Luftwaffe (though in far smaller numbers than Bomber Command was able to muster). Another round of Baedeker raids, in other words. This time, however, there was only one
In my reprisals article I argue that historians have, for the most part, underestimated popular support during the Blitz for counterbombing of German cities. I think Tom Harrisson, both during the war as head of Mass-Observation and after as author of Living Through the Blitz, had a lot to do with this. But there were
One painful lesson I learned while seeing my Blitz reprisals article through to press was to stick. To. The. Bloody. Word. Limit! The article as accepted was well over and as a result I caused myself and the editors much grief while we worked to cut it down to an acceptable size. Never again. Because
My peer-reviewed article ‘”Bomb back, and bomb hard”: debating reprisals during the Blitz’ has just been published in the Australian Journal of Politics and History, an invited submission for a special issue on the topic ‘War and Peace, Barbarism and Civilization in Modern Europe and Its Empires’. It can be downloaded from here. Here’s the
