Charles Kingsford Smith was and remains Australia’s most famous pioneer aviator. Among his feats: the first trans-Pacific flight, in both directions in fact (1928, east to west; 1934, west to east); the first non-stop trans-Australian flight (1928); the first trans-Tasman flight (1928). It’s probably fair to think of him as the Australian Lindbergh in terms […]
WILL THEY BE A COMMON SIGHT? Officers of the St. Johns Ambulance Brigade, who, in their black and white uniforms, are familiar and friendly figures to Londoners, are now preparing for the possibility that grim and terrible duties may one day fall to their lot. A number of them have recently received instruction in a
SUCH THINGS WILL HAPPEN In April, 1935, a Kentish Voluntary Aid Detachment of the British Red Cross Society conducted an air raid rehearsal. Here Red Cross men wearing box respirators and anti-gas clothing are rescuing a woman caught by gas in the open. With a heavy concentration of the deadly gases that modern chemists have
N. A. J. Taylor recently asked me on Twitter if I thought the above photograph, purportedly of one of the daylight Gotha raids on London in 1917, was genuine. I said no, due to ‘Experience, intuition, lack of provenance, contemporary photographic technology. The photo has been retouched at very least.’ But I’m coming around to
RAIN OF BOMBS Milan’s wonderful cathedral is here shown under a rain of dummy bombs dropped by 80 aeroplanes during recent manoeuvres of the Italians. To make the display more impressive and to ascertain the results with more certainty, luminous “bombs” were used and fell in a fiery rain upon the city — a dire
This is an image we might particularly associate with the United States in the 1950s, when schoolchildren were taught to duck and cover in the event of the flash of an atomic blast. But its use in civil defence drills predates the Cold War (albeit without a Bert the Turtle to help kids remember the
The images in this post are from Boyd Cable, ‘Death from the skies’, in John Hammerton, ed., War in the Air: Aerial Wonders of our Time (London: Amalgamated Press, n.d. [1936]), 20-4 (see below). The article itself is a short story describing an air raid in the next war. I won’t summarise it in detail,
I received this request for assistance from Jean Dewaerheid, a Belgian writer who is working with Peter Haas and Pierre-Antoine Courouble to track down wooden bomb eyewitnesses: Three authors (from Belgium, Germany and France) have been working for years on a bizarre subject: the dropping of dummy wooden bombs on wooden airplanes. In order to
Looking over the list of Australian mystery aircraft sightings suggests that some generalisations can be made. In the 1910s, mysterious lights in the sky were usually described as being airship-like; after 1910 they were far more likely to be called aeroplanes. Perhaps not coincidentally, 1910 was when aeroplanes first flew in Australia; certainly a search
The title of this little series is a nod to David Walker’s Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850-1939.1 As the title suggests, Walker argues that Australia’s relationship with Asia in the decades before and after Federation was largely characterised by fear about immigration, imports and invasion. Peter Stanley, in Invading Australia: Japan
