I spent most of the last week at the State Library of Victoria. It’s a grand old pile, built in the 1850s when Melbourne was awash with gold money (apparently, it was one of the richest cities in the British Empire). For the last decade or so, it has been undergoing works of some kind […]
The Royal Navy is about to pay a high price for its neglect of airpower … Front cover of E. F. Spanner, The Broken Trident (London: E. F. Spanner, 1929). I just like this picture for some reason. Spanner was a retired naval architect who evidently had at least one bee in his bonnet, for
Well, OK, the Commonwealth Games then. British Empire Games was the original name: the first were held in 1930 in Hamilton, Canada. Most of the world probably has not heard of the Commonwealth Games, but it’s second only to the Olympics (which it closely resembles) in terms of bringing the greatest number of elite athletes
In my previous post I talked about some Japanese ARP posters from 1938. One in particular (above; click for larger version) is very revealing: it shows exactly whose bombers the Japanese were worried about, by plotting circles on a map of Japan and its neighbours, representing the radius of actionNo more than half the maximum
Boing Boing has a link to a very interesting and oddly beautiful set of Japanese air raid precautions posters at the National Archives of Japan. (Boing Boing says they are from the Second World War, but according to the page itself, they date from 1938.) I am myself somewhat ignorant of Japanese history, but as
Can any better sport or amusement be imagined that could be obtained with an airship of the Zodiac type, endowed with a speed of 40 miles an hour for four hours, or 20 miles an hour for eight times this period, and so on in cubic proportion? Always able to reach a desired goal, but
David List added a most informative comment on my About page the other day, responding to an old post, which I thought I would highlight and respond to here. Regarding my post on a claimed insertion of a German spy by parachute in 1917 (which I doubted), David notes that there were Allied experiments in
I was in the bowels of the ERC library at Melbourne Uni the other day, scavenging for primary sources, when a book called The Peril of the White caught my eye – not because it has anything to do with my topic, but because of the author, who has one of the most splendidly silly
As promised, here are a couple of captures from the 1939 propaganda film The Lion Has Wings, which dramatised the RAF attack on Wilhelmshaven of 4 September 1939. The actual results of the raid were meagre; one Blenheim crashed into the fo’c’sle of the cruiser Emden, while the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer was hit by
