[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
In a discussion of the activities of MI5’s Port Control section during the First World War, Christopher Andrew mentions German musings about using biological weapons against British civilians: The most novel as well as the most sinister form of wartime sabotage attempted by Sektion P was biological warfare. At least one of its scientists in
The Twenty-Fifth Hour (1940), by Herbert Best (better known as the author of the ‘Desmond the dog detective’ books, though not by much), may well be the last knock-out blow novel, the last novel where (conventional) bombers play the decisive part in a war. In this war, indeed, they are too decisive, knocking away the
This was one of several colour images of wartime London published by the Daily Mail (for which see a much bigger version; but do not read the comments). I have nothing interesting to say about it; I just like it, is all. (Via @lucyinglis and @fleming77.)
Since my AAEH talk is in four days, I’d better start actually putting the pieces I’ve scattered over this blog together into something (ideally) coherent which can be presented in 20 minutes (with 10 for questions). So here’s a stab at a plan: First thing is to explain what I’m talking about: the public debate
Another source of information about public opinion on reprisals during the Blitz is hearsay — what people reported that other people thought. This can give us an insight into contemporary judgements of the public mood. But, as with letters to the editor, hearsay is highly problematic too. It’s only possible to get a good grasp
In my previous post I identified three newspapers which published extended correspondence from their readers about reprisals during the Blitz — The Times, the Manchester Guardian and the Daily Mail — one of which provided its own analyses of all the letters it received — the Mail. To try and assess whether these newspapers might
After opinion polls, the rest of the evidence for public opinion on reprisals is more impressionistic. I’ve already noted the conclusions of those who have plumbed the Mass-Observation archives (and Tom Harrisson didn’t just plumb the archives, he ran Mass-Observation during the war), and as I haven’t done that myself I’ll let them stand. But
