Currently, I’m tracing the evolution of the idea of the knock-out blow, the massive aerial bombardment that could knock a country out of the war. Though the idea intself has earlier antecedents, the first use of the phrase itself in this context that I’ve found so far is this, in a well-known (at least to […]
A report from the 14th annual conference of the National Federation of Hairdressers, which opened at Blackpool on 31 May 1915: A Swansea delegate said the trouble was not now. The trouble would be when the war was over, because men who had enlisted would have been trained to shave themselves. The result would be
OK, I promise to stop doing that. This time, the answer seems to be: probably … Coming via Charlie’s Diary is a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh on the new US exit strategy in Iraq, which reports that “A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that
To continue the Australian theme, here’s an excellent article by Leigh Edmonds on the development of airmindedness in Australia, from Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture. (It’s quite long; there’s a shorter version at the Airways Museum & Civil Aviation Historical Society.) My impression from that is that airminded organisations had more influence
On this day in 1952, the United States detonated the first hydrogen bomb, at Eniwetok Atoll in the Marsall Islands. Possibly not coincidentally, the October 2005 issue of History Today features an absorbing article by Geoffrey Best entitled “Winston Churchill, the H-Bomb and nuclear disarmament”. I have a quibble though … Best quotes a 1953
Thanks to Chris Williams for pointing me in the direction of Patrick Wright’s article at openDemocracy about the Anti-Air War Memorial at Woodford Green, Essex. I hadn’t heard of this before. It was made by sculptor Eric Benfield in the form of a bomb falling through the air, and in June 1936 it was put
Aside from the whole shadow-of-the-bomber thing, I have an amateur (okay – more amateur, then) interest in the Cold War and the fear of nuclear war. Partly because of the obvious continuities and parallels with the area I’m studying, but also because I’m old enough to remember the last flowering of nuclear paranoia in the
Leo Amery was a long-serving Conservative MP, minister, imperialist and close contemporary (though not, I think, a close friend) of Winston Churchill’s – they were at Harrow together, where at their first meeting the future staunch foe of Nazi oppression pushed the smaller boy into the school pool. For some reason, he seems to pop
