WHAT AUSTRALIA WOULD BE LIKE UNDER HUN RULE. — An original recruiting poster which was used with great success in South Australia. Tasmania, it will be noted, becomes Kaisermania, and the idols of the Huns have provided other place-names. This is from the Daily Mail, 3 July 1917, p. 8, and would appear to be […]
Yet another British war game to add to the pile, this one from 1922: The Raider. A copy of a new game called “The Raider” has been received from Enstone and Lilienfeld, of 47, Berners Street, W.1. The game consists of a large sheet divided into squares, the whole showing a view of a battle-front
I don’t often link to interesting posts from Modern Mechanix because once you start, where do you stop? But I am compelled to point out this one which reprints an October 1934 Modern Mechanix and Inventions article about an American (presumably) idea for a solar-powered flying airfield. It’s as simple as putting a landing strip
I’ve been reading the Daily Mail quite a lot since I’ve been here, but only issues published in 1940 or earlier. So I’m grateful to Jakob for pointing me in the direction of an article in today’s edition about German boardgames from the Second World War. It’s fascinating, but why is it news? Ostensibly because
In my recent post on the Imperial War Museum I remarked upon the commemorative function of the museum, or rather the apparent lack of it. So I was interested to come across this comment made in 1922 by Major-General Sir Frederick Maurice (he of the Maurice Affair), explaining what he thought the true value of
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] One interesting minor theme of my recent museum visits here in London has been, I suppose, the popular origins of wargames (as opposed to the intellectual origins): I’ve been coming across a number of games, produced in the first half of the twentieth century and aimed presumably at children, which
It’s Lord Baden-Powell, Chief Scout, who at one stage in the 1930s seems to have had a regular spot in the Daily Mail’s “Boys & Girls” section, teaching the future imperial overlords all about their wonderful Empire. In the 18 March 1938 issue, he contributed a piece called “Policeman aeroplanes”, along with the following rather
Via the WWII mailing list comes the welcome news that Flight International is putting its entire run of back issues online, as one searchable PDF per magazine page. So far, the following years have been scanned: 1909-1932, 1935-1940, 1948, 1955-1961, 1964, 1966-1968, 1997-2004. The archive can either be browsed (note that you have to click
A couple of weeks ago, I showed how the blitzkrieg became the Blitz. Now I’ll show how the knock-out blow became the blitzkrieg. Despite the abandon with which the term blitzkrieg is thrown around these days to describe the “lightning” German campaigns of the early years of the Second World War, it turns out that
The other day I came across a fascinating article by H. L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore. Mencken was very interested in colloquial English, and to this end penned “War words in England”, published in the February 1944 American Speech, about new words coming into use in the British press as a result of the
