Around Easter, I happened to have a camera on me when an airship was passing overhead, and managed to take a couple of pictures before the camera batteries died. But they didn’t look quite right, and eventually I realised that it was because the airship was too red. Everybody knows, at least subconsciously, that airships […]
This post is an exercise in — well, I’m not sure if there’s a name for it, but I found some medium-resolution images on eBay of a pamphlet printed by the Hands Off Britain Air Defence League in 1934. (The seller says 1933, but all other evidence I have on this group is from 1934;
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] Here’s a confession: I don’t really get Guernica — the painting, that is, not the event (which is why I haven’t mentioned it in this series until now). I understand that it’s a passionate reaction by a great artist to the tragedy unfolding in his own country. It’s physically imposing,
The latest Fortean Times (June 2007) has a great article by Kim Newman on Hammer Films, the much-loved British horror film production company. While discussing the early 1970s, when Hammer’s fortunes were declining, he refers in passing to ‘the tragically unmade Zeppelin vs Pterodactyls‘. That’s all he said, but it was enough … could it
The other day I was wondering why Winston Churchill wanted the soon-to-be-blitzed British to bear themselves like the ‘brave men of Barcelona’, and not the equally brave men1 of Madrid or Chungking, which had also undergone heavy bombardments for long periods of time. I must admit I didn’t actually think it was ever likely that
Found via Military History Carnival #2, an interesting post by Alan Baumler at Frog in a Well: China on airmindedness in China in the 1930s. If I had to compare it to another country, it would probably be Russia, where aviation was also part of a modernization effort. But something Alan mentions reminds me of
By the ever-brilliant XKCD. You know, not once in my entire time as a history student have I been given advice on how to deal with Godwin’s Law. Not even in a subject on comparative fascism! I think this is a clear example of academia failing to adapt to the new realities of the Internet
The A-bomb won: I wouldn’t have thought it was necessary to detonate a 19 kiloton nuclear weapon to see what it would do to an airship, but that’s just what the US Department of Energy did on 7 August 1957. Well, to be fair, the primary purpose was probably to test a prototype of the
During the Second World War, several million foreign servicemen and -women were stationed in Britain for varying periods of time. These included many Australians, for most of whom it was their first glimpse of Britain.1 In 1940, one of them described his impressions of the mother country in an article for the Spectator entitled “An
At the end of October 1940, while the British and German air forces were nightly striking at each other’s cities, Captain Norman Macmillan (a decorated RFC veteran and former head of the National League of Airmen) argued in Flight that Britain’s greatest need was for the development of a bomber which was possessed great speed
