Chatting to Andrew Gray the other day, I realised that I’d never got around to posting about a small discovery I’d made about one of the most sensational sightings from the 1909 phantom airship scare. This is the claim by a Welsh showman named Lethbridge that he had actually seen an airship on the ground, […]
My fifth contribution to ABC New England’s ‘The road to war’ series is now online, covering the period 8-14 October 1914. Today I looked at two major events. The first was the Maritz Rebellion in South Africa, a military mutiny by disaffected Boers who resented British influence and saw the botched invasion of German South-West
I was on ABC New England again today, my fourth contribution to ‘The road to war’, looking at the events of 3-9 September 1914. My main topic was the Battle of the Marne — the advance of the German 1st and 2nd Armies towards Paris, the evacuation of the French government from the capital along
My third contribution to ABC New England’s ‘The road to war’ series is now online. Today I looked at the events of 20-26 August 1914, focusing particularly on events in Belgium: the march of the German 1st Army through Brussels, 320,000-strong; more German atrocities against civilians, as well as the burning of the library at
My second contribution for ABC New England to the increasingly inaccurately named series ‘The road to war’ was broadcast today, and is online here. Increasingly inaccurate because my topic today was the outbreak of war in August 1914 between Germany on the one hand and France and especially poor little Belgium on the other, including
When the present is too painful to think about, there is always the past to retreat into. Japanese planes forced down an airliner which was flying from Hong Kong to Wuchow to-day [24 August 1938], and, it is reported, machine-gunned the passengers. Of 18 people in the plane it is believed that 15 have either
Today I had my very first radio appearance, on ABC New England North West, talking to Kelly Fuller on the Mornings show. I was talking about what was happening in Europe 100 years ago, during the July Crisis of 1914. More specifically, I spoke about the Royal Navy’s test mobilisation at Spithead (above) and the
So my book is a thing that now exists. But although it was formally published on 18 June, many online bookstores have waited until today to actually ship it. (I recommend using Booko to find the cheapest prices, or you can get a 10% discount by ordering directly from Ashgate.) To mark this auspicious day,
Brett Holman. The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908-1941. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate, 2014. :D
We are familiar enough with the Spitfire Funds of the Second World War, in which patriotic individuals and groups could buy aircraft for the nation. There was a fair amount of precedent for this. In the early 1930s, Lady Houston more than once offered the government hundreds of thousands of pounds for air defence, though
