The Glasgow Herald today again leads with Lease-and-Lend, specifically the massive appropriation request made by Roosevelt to Congress — over half a billion pounds’ worth of ‘aircraft and aeronautical material, including engines, spares, and accessories’ alone (5). The Bill will be ready for debate early next week: the Speak of the House of Representatives, Sam […]
The Glasgow Herald, like many early-twentieth-century ‘provincial’ newspapers, made a serious effort to cover war and other international news, as well as reporting on national and local issues. (In fact, it almost seems more interested in what’s happening overseas than it is in London or even Edinburgh.) Its highmindedness is also evident in its lack
A recent comment by J Campbell raised the question of whether Nevil Shute’s 1949 novel No Highway was in fact a prediction of the De Havilland Comet airliner’s metal fatigue problems, which led to two crashes (‘hull losses’, in industry parlance) in 1954. My response was that it seemed unlikely that Shute had any particular
I’ve previously posted some of Gorden Cullen’s artwork for the Tecton Group’s 1939 book Planned A.R.P.. Here are some more of his cute drawings dealing with an awful subject. In this case, he is illustrating the ‘general agreement among experts’ on the threat posed by the bomber. (a) The range, speed, and carrying capacity of
Airminded has been archived by the British Library’s UK Web Archive, which ‘contains websites that publish research, that reflect the diversity of lives, interests and activities throughout the UK, and demonstrate web innovation’. It’s one of (at present) 487 blogs, 461 history websites, and 47 international relations, diplomacy and peace websites thus indexed. As you
In Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), Patrick Deer discusses airminded fiction for boys from the 1930s and suggests that (78): In their own cheery way, these boys’ flying stories echo the mythos of the flying übermenschen so dear to the fascist imagination. In their patriotic exuberance,
Today I came across an article in an American publication, Science News Letter, dated 24 April 1943. The headline on page 269 reads ‘Gas Attacks Expected’. The opening paragraph reads: HITLER’S BOMBERS, if they make their expected raids on American cities, can be counted on to drop poison gases in bombs or sprays, Col. A.
59-61 Farringdon Road in London is also known as the Zeppelin Building. I don’t know when it received this name; possibly only recently. But it owes it to the fact that its predecessor on the site was destroyed during an air raid on the night of 8 September 1915. The most famous of the Zeppelin
Though Bardia has not yet fallen, Australian infantry and British troops have broken through its perimeter and taken 5000 Italian soldiers prisoner in a dawn attack (The Times, 4). The Australians, who hitherto had taken part only in small-scale raids, had the honour of leading the way through gaps caused first by our guns and
A Bomber Command raid Wednesday night against Bremen, Germany’s second-largest seaport, is described by the Manchester Guardian as ‘R.A.F. Answers London Fire Raid‘ (5). The dropping of 20,000 incendiary bombs seems to be the basis for this. Whether the Bremen raid would technically count as a ‘reprisal’ (from the British point of view, anyway) is
