On the inside cover of this week’s Illustrated London News — the outside cover has advertisements on it — is a photograph taken by Cecil Beaton at the Great Ormond Street Hospital. The subject is Eileen Dunne, an air-raid victim aged 3. The caption reads: BOMBERS’ PREY. GOERING’S ATTACKS ON LONDON ACHIEVE LITTLE BUT THE […]
Lots of good stuff in the Spectator this week, so let’s get into it. The ‘News of the week’ section starts out on page 281 with a paragraph on the speech Churchill gave last Tuesday. Noting that ‘some 1,600 civilians have been killed [in London] and some 6,500 injured in the first half of September’,
I wasn’t planning to return to The Listener quite so soon, but I can’t resist the cover of today’s issue. Such perfect symbolism. Take your pick: Britain under siege, the defence of ancient freedoms — or the wartime suppression of liberty. (Another symbolic photo appears on page 414, of the bomb crater in front of
The Prime Minister gave a speech on the war situation to the House of Commons yesterday, which I’ll come back to. The Manchester Guardian has a lot on the air war, of course (5). A big wave of enemy raiders, consisting of ‘more than 200 Messerschmitt and Heinkel fighters’ was broken up over Kent yesterday
Sunday wasn’t just Fighter Command’s day — Bomber Command was also hard at work, bombing targets in Berlin and western Germany and along the invasion coast, sinking three ships and losing no aircraft. And not just Bomber Command, either: The Times prints a message from the Air Minister to Coastal Command (4): I have been
There’s no doubt what’s newsworthy today. The Daily Mail trumpets the big battle over the Home Counties yesterday, the ‘most shattering defeat’ the Luftwaffe has ever experienced (1): The Air Ministry state that between 350 and 400 enemy aircraft were launched in two waves against London and south-east England. Of these no fewer than 175
If it’s Sunday, this must be the Observer. Here are all the headlines from the main news page, page 7.
Let’s try to get a sense of the bigger picture through the various editorial pages of four newspapers published today. What is the meaning of the air raids? Will there be an invasion? What are the Germans trying to do? What does the future hold?
For the last two nights Bomber Command has been hitting hard at both the invasion ports — ‘their heaviest blows yet’ — as well as Hamburg and Berlin, says the front page of the Daily Mail: The Anhalter railway terminus was severely damaged following the previous day’s attack on the Potsdam stations. These stations are
Today I’ll take a break from the press and look at The Listener. This was a weekly publication of the BBC, a higher-brow companion to the Radio Times. Both carried listings of the week’s radio programmes, but whereas these are the main focus of the Radio Times, The Listener confines them to half a page
