Today I came across an article in an American publication, Science News Letter, dated 24 April 1943. The headline on page 269 reads ‘Gas Attacks Expected’. The opening paragraph reads: HITLER’S BOMBERS, if they make their expected raids on American cities, can be counted on to drop poison gases in bombs or sprays, Col. A. […]
Though Bardia has not yet fallen, Australian infantry and British troops have broken through its perimeter and taken 5000 Italian soldiers prisoner in a dawn attack (The Times, 4). The Australians, who hitherto had taken part only in small-scale raids, had the honour of leading the way through gaps caused first by our guns and
A Bomber Command raid Wednesday night against Bremen, Germany’s second-largest seaport, is described by the Manchester Guardian as ‘R.A.F. Answers London Fire Raid‘ (5). The dropping of 20,000 incendiary bombs seems to be the basis for this. Whether the Bremen raid would technically count as a ‘reprisal’ (from the British point of view, anyway) is
The Mediterranean theatre of war has seen a lot of action in recent days, as these headlines from The Times (4) show. While the Italian outpost at Bardia is besieged from land, sea and air, British armoured units are approaching Tobruk, 70 miles to the west. On Monday night, Italian warships at Taranto were bombed
The Manchester Guardian might have allowed itself a moment for self-congratulation here, as its previous call for compulsory fire-watchers appears to have been heeded (5). (Though it was not alone, as an article on page 10 quotes similar commentary from The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Express and the Daily Mail.) The decision was
The true extent of the destruction caused by Sunday night’s air raid on London has now become clear (the story has now moved to first place on page 4 of The Times, though in the Guardian the ‘Second Great Fire of London‘ shares that honour with news of RAF raids on Germany and Italy). The
President Roosevelt had one of his famous ‘fireside chats‘ (i.e. over the radio) with the American people last night. This one would seem to deserve its lead-story status in the Manchester Guardian, as he firmly committed the United States to Britain’s side in the war, even if not as a non-combatant but as the ‘arsenal
Today seems to be a slow news day, if such a thing can exist in the middle of a world war. The Observer leads today with a non-story (7). Free French radio reports that Hitler has demanded the handover to Germany of the Vichy fleet. Petain’s response to this is unknown; for that matter, so
Finally, something to justify the existence of the Internet. The Google Ngram Viewer takes the corpus of words formed by the Google Books dataset (i.e. books, journals, magazines, but not newspapers) and lets you plot the changes in frequency of selected ones over time. There are all sorts of interesting questions you could (in principle)
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] I know. Writing about Wikipedia is so 2006. And yes, finding errors in Wikipedia articles is not exactly difficult. But I have a bee in my bonnet which needs releasing. Wikipedia’s page on the Blitz has a section entitled ‘Commencement on September 6’. This is how it currently reads (sans hyperlinks and
