Interestingly, after yesterday’s coordinated pro-bombing campaign, today’s headlines in The Times (4) emphasise the efforts of Bomber Command over those of Fighter Command. In particular, a raid on Berlin on Wednesday night (or Thursday morning) is described in some detail. A ‘large number of bombs, high explosive and incendiary’ were dropped ‘on a series of […]
The daylight air battles over the south of England intensified yesterday, as these headlines from the Manchester Guardian (5) show. The RAF shot down 24 enemy aircraft while losing 12 of its own (4 of the pilots are safe). Churchill visited the south-east coast and saw some of the action. He was driven out from
Today we’re reading The Times. London was again menaced by German bombers last night, though it seems bombs fell only on the ‘outskirts’ (4), in particular ‘one bomb’ hit ‘a building in the outskirts of London’. Folkestone was much harder hit by a daytime raid in which ‘German bombers swooped out of the sun […]
Since yesterday’s Observer was actually put to bed on Saturday night, it missed out reporting the German raid on London in the following hours. Of course, most of London would have already known of it thanks to the alerts and the explosions, while the rest of the country would have heard about it on the
These are the headlines from the Observer (5). Yesterday was another good day for the RAF, which on Air Ministry figures shot down 45 German aircraft with 10 of its own missing. There were ‘Battles all day long’: Until mid afternoon the attacks were concentrated on aerodromes in East Kent. Then large numbers of German
I haven’t seen it yet but the September 2010 issue of BBC History Magazine (out now in the UK, probably in a couple of months in Australia) should have an article of mine in it. It’s not quite the cover story but is one of several articles on the Battle of Britain. Mine looks at
One of the mysteries of Britain’s fear of the bomber is why it wasn’t a fear of the submarine instead. In the First World War Germany attacked Britain directly by air and indirectly by sea, but only the submarine blockade came anywhere close to knocking Britain out. The same was true of the Second World
There have been a lot of stories in the press recently with titles like ‘Churchill ordered UFO cover-up, National Archives show’. Actually, the TNA files — part of an ongoing series of releases of UFO-related files — don’t show this at all, as is clear if you read the article more closely. The cover-up is
What was probably the world’s first aviation exhibition was held at the Crystal Palace, London, between 25 June and 4 July 1868. The ‘Aeronautical Exhibition’ was organised by the Aeronautical Society of Great Britain, which itself had only been set up two years earlier (and was renamed the Royal Aeronautical Society in 1918). Here’s what
This illustration, by A. C. Michael, is from T. Donovan Bayley’s ‘When the sea failed her’ which appeared in Pall Mall Magazine in May 1909. It’s subtitled ‘The story of a war between England and the allies, and the terrible way it ended’. It’s that terrible ending which makes this story stand out for me.
