Recently, Alexandra Churchill tweeted a photo of an air raid shelter in London in 1917: She’s absolutely right, and I’ll eventually come back to this, sort of; but Rob Langham made a slightly different point which I want to follow up first: That’s an incredible photo for many reasons. @IanCastleRaids @ZeppRaider and @StowAero will likely […]
I’ve got a chapter entitled ‘Spectre and spectacle: mock air raids as aerial theatre in interwar Britain’ in a new Palgrave Macmillan collection just out, Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain, edited by Michael McCluskey and Luke Seaber. Here’s the abstract: This chapter argues that aerial theatre, in the form of annual
Here’s one for the mock air raid file. On the evening of 15 April 1916, a lone aeroplane circled over Washington, D.C., and — without warning — proceeded to (pretend to) attack it. It first flew over the White House, then the State, Army and Navy departments, and then, over the Washington Monument and the
In the Second World War, Japanese aircraft carried out over one hundred air raids on Australia, the most deadly of which, by far, were the first Darwin raid on 19 February 1942, which killed 236 people, and the raid on Broome on 6 March, which killed 88. The major population centres further south were never
I recently came across a few more examples from 1920s and 1930s newspapers of the ‘Red Baron’ being used in reference to Manfred von Richthofen, which I suggested undermined my argument that, in essence, we call him that because of Snoopy. But instead of shrugging my shoulders I decided to get my data on and
Jarrow, a shipbuilding town on the Tyne opposite Newcastle, was attacked from the air on the morning of 19 February 1938. Or rather, its inhabitants thought so, briefly.
This poem took up about an eighth of page 3 of the 9 August 1918 edition of the Perth WA Sportsman, preaching revenge on Germany for its air raids on Britain (the last of which, until the next war at least, had just taken place). It’s prefaced by a claim that ‘the Allies expect to
Exactly six months ago today, I posted about some aerial theatre in the time of coronavirus. That was the first time I mentioned the pandemic on Airminded, and it is, of course, still here (Victoria is — hopefully — nearing the end of its second wave, with 42 new cases reported today, down from a
Here’s my contribution to last night’s livetweet of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow for #HATMAus. It was fast, furious and not always particularly accurate — much like the film itself… Spoilers follow (though equally there are also a lot of tweets that don’t make sense without seeing what was on the screen at
At 8pm AEST/GMT+10 this Sunday, 30 August 2020, I’m co-hosting the Australian version of Historians At The Movies (#HATMAus) along with fellow historians Joel Barnes and Chelsea Barnett as we livetweet the 2004 science fiction film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and dissect it for fun and (alternate) history. With an all-star star
