MRS. MARY COUCHMAN, twenty-four-year-old warden in a small Kentish village, sat smoking a cigarette in the wardens’ post. She was resting between warnings. Suddenly the sirens sounded again. She saw her little boy, with two friends, playing some distance away. The cigarette still in her hand, Mrs. Couchman ran out of the post. Bombs began […]
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.] I have a favour to ask of you. Would you mind please having a look at this and telling me what’s wrong with it? Thank you. To be somewhat less cryptic, it’s an article for peer-review which I am having no luck getting accepted anywhere, and I don’t really know why. I’ve
In the venerable tradition of lazyblogging, here is a storified version of an exchange of tweets today between myself and @TroveAustralia, concerning an apparently forgotten Australian aviation pioneer, W. T. Carter of Williamstown, formerly a member of the Victorian colonial legislature. In the mid-1890s, Carter dabbled in electric motors (with help from A. U. Alcock,
‘The Hum‘ is a mysterious low-frequency sound just at the edge of hearing which seems to infect some places, but which only some people can detect. What causes it is unknown — theories range from factories and air conditioners to gravitational waves — and responsible authorities often deny that it exists at all. The most
[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
I’ve sometimes wondered if the air raids on Belgrade during the German invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941 can be considered as a knock-out blow from the air. From the accounts I’ve read it seems that the Luftwaffe launched a surprise attack before the declaration of war, intended as a punishment for the pro-British coup.
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] As Alan Allport has noted, Winston Churchill’s famous speech of 20 August 1940 was and is remembered for a ‘single, unrepresentative sentence’, i.e.: Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. The speech was given during the Battle of Britain, and ‘the Few’
Part of my PhD thesis involved conceptualising the various forms of defence against aerial bombardment put forward during the thirty-odd years before the Second World War: things like anti-aircraft guns, air-raid shelters, an international air force, and so on. Something I didn’t include was what we might call spiritual air defence. Partly because I didn’t
The other day I received an email from Andrew Gray, a reader of this blog, alerting me to the existence of a new online newspaper archive available at ukpressonline. I’ve used ukpressonline before for its complete runs of the Daily Express and the Daily Mirror, which were the most popular British dailies for most of
