Since 2007, the FlightGlobal Archive (AKA the ‘Flight archive’) has been an incredibly useful resource for me, many other aviation historians, and Wikimedia Commons, as it provides online access to high-resolution PDFs (with OCR) of nearly every page of the key British aviation trade magazine Flight (from 1962 Flight International), from the first issue in
This must be one of the first ever photographs ever taken of an air raid, simply because it was one of the first ever air raids, during the Italian invasion of Ottoman Tripolitania of 1911-12. It appeared in the Illustrated London News on 31 August 1912 with the following caption: PHOTOGRAPHED FROM THE DIRIGIBLE WHICH
The default explanation for the Australian mystery aeroplane panic of 1918 was a conspiracy theory: they were enemy aircraft, deployed by German merchant raiders operating off the Australian coast, or perhaps flying from secret aerodromes deep in the bush. Either way they were thought to be collaborating with German spies on shore, as evidenced by
Critical Survey has just published an early access version of my peer-reviewed article ‘William Le Queux, the Zeppelin menace and the Invisible Hand’ — that’s right, no subtitle! — here. Here’s the abstract: In contrast to William Le Queux’s pre-1914 novels about German spies and invasion, his wartime writing is much less well known. Analysis
Although the war had been over for more than a year by this point, in 1920 the editor of Sea, Land and Air issued a rather hysterical warning of the danger of foreign pilots being allowed to fly in Australia.1 The passenger-‘plane of to-day may be the bomber of to-morrow. It depends on the man
Shortly after the declaration of war Londoners lifted fearful eyes to the skies, as it seemed that bombs might be about to rain down on them from the skies…
So, to conclude my survey of the career of Stanley Baldwin’s phrase ‘the bomber will always get through’ in the British press (or at least in the British Newspaper Archive), here’s how it fared during the Second World War.
I showed in an earlier post that scepticism of Baldwin’s dictum that ‘the bomber will always get through’ begins to appear in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA) in 1937, if only in a very small way. In 1938, the majority opinion still takes it to be axiomatic. For example, town alderman W. A. Miller, attacked
Today, a Trove API upgrade, or to be more precise, the decomissioning of the old API, briefly broke Trove Air Bot (and all the other Trove bots). Fortunately Tim Sherratt worked out a solution, and Trove Air Bot is now back in action with all new code, which (with slightly more useful comments) can be
After the drama of 1934, ‘the bomber will always get through’ appears less frequently in the British Newspaper Archive (BNA) in 1935 (though still at about twice the level than in 1932 or 1933). But it is still mostly being used in a very political way. This is not surprising, with the general election contested
