With war comes confusion, and with confusion comes a need for clarity. So it was with simple, determined messages like this that the National Office of Information kept the undersieged civilians of Britain in a robust frame of mind during the teething pains of the Second World War. The language may be arcane, but the […]
I may be the only person now living to have read all three of Hamish Blair’s novels, published in 1930 and 1931 — I’m certainly the only person on LibraryThing to own any at all.1 I wish I could say that the rest of you are missing out, but you’re really not: they are tedious
An update on the whole Millwall thing. Well, a teaser, anyway. I’ve had an email from Chris Going letting me know how his research into the Luftwaffe’s photoreconnaissance flights over Britain on the first day of the Blitz, 7 September 1940. Can’t say too much, but he did authorise me to say that ‘interesting things
J. M. Spaight was a lawyer by training and a civil servant by profession, and as was such not generally prone to flights of fancy. His prewar books are scholarly and judicious compilations of various opinions and precedents regarding aerial warfare. But his wartime writing, such as The Sky’s the Limit (1940) and Bombing Vindicated
One factlet I’ve enjoyed dropping on the heads of students is the origin of the word ‘blockbuster’. Now it is widely understood to mean a hugely successful movie (as well as a once-highly successful video rental chain — remember those?). It has even been claimed that this is the original sense of the word: supposedly,
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] New York waited for an air raid in June 1918. For thirteen nights from 4 June, much of the city was blacked out to avoid giving German pilots any assistance in locating targets to bomb. The New York Times reported the following day that: Electric signs and all
The phantom airships seen over Britain in the early months of 1913 had their counterparts in Europe. It’s hard to reconstruct what happened from the scattered references in English-language sources, but it seems that far fewer were seen than in Britain, even in toto. Here are the ones I’ve been able to find mentioned in
Very sad news today. On Monday, VH-UXG, a De Havilland DH.84 Dragon owned and flown by Des Porter, went missing on a flight from Monto to Caboolture in Queensland. A distress call and an emergency beacon were heard briefly, but then nothing more was known until today, when VH-UXG’s wreckage was found in rugged terrain
Picking up where I left off nearly a month ago, let’s turn to the reaction of the provincial press to the thousand bomber raid on Cologne on the night of 30 May 1942. The Yorkshire Post‘s main front page story on 1 June 1942 (above) concentrated on the operation itself. It claimed that ‘CONSIDERABLY more
Adelaide (AKA ‘Radelaide’) has more to offer than transport museums, of course. On my last day there I had a look at the South Australian Museum, as well as some of the nearby sights. This copy of a Venus by Antonio Canova was apparently somewhat controversial when presented to the city in 1892, though she
