[Edited version of an oral summary of ‘Mutual aid in an air-raid? Community civil defence in Britain, 1914-18’, International Society for First World War Studies Virtual Conference 2021: Technology, online, 16-18 September 2021.] The first thing to note is that the German air raids on Britain of the First World War were much smaller in […]
A cloud of smoke billows up from a building during a low level bombing attack carried out by biplanes. The First World War? Air control in the Middle East? Fascist bombers over Spain, or Japanese bombers over China? No, it’s an air raid carried out by the RAF against Nottingham on 15 May 1938. Of
After its early showing in the 1909 mystery airship wave, Australia was rarely visited by phantom airships proper. Maybe that’s because real airships were even rarer, with none that I know of between 1914 and the late twentieth century: they just weren’t a very plausible thing to think you saw. But they did turn up
I’m a bit of a podcast sceptic, meaning not that I don’t believe in their existence but rather that I don’t really get the appeal (which probably puts me in a similar position to a blog sceptic about 15 years ago). Since they aren’t actually going away any time soon, I guess it was bound
Recently I’ve been playing around with AI-generated images. This is far less impressive than it may sound: there’s a small community on Twitter and elsewhere doing this stuff already, many using scripts and tutorials which mean you don’t need any more skill than the ability to log in to Google Colab, type in some keywords
The term ‘air raid’ has been around a long time. Not since the first air raid, or even the first air raid of the twentieth century, but from not long after that. The first definite use in the British Newspaper Archive is in the Sheffield Daily Telegraph, during the 1913 phantom airship panic, as it
To mark May Day, the Fleet Air Arm Museum, @FleetAirArmMus, tweeted about the Royal Navy’s first rigid airship, which was built by Vickers at Barrow-in-Furness in 1911 in an attempt to match Germany’s Zeppelins: I was surprised by the comment about the airship’s name. Probably because of its brief, non-flying existence, it’s known by a
A few weeks back I previewed my cohosting of the 1943 Disney film Victory Through Air Power for History at the Movies Australia and Aviation Cultures Mk.V. Both the conference and the livetweeting went splendidly (I think!), but I didn’t get around to lazyblogging the latter… until now. The evening began with the half-hour short
Yesterday marked the centenary of the founding of the Royal Australian Air Force on 31 March 1921. I celebrated in the usual way (buying books, talking about myself):[tweet id=”1377043532775493636″ conversation=false][tweet id=”1377044249552678913″ conversation=false][tweet id=”1377044649374715908″ conversation=false]But I also decided to use the occasion to talk about something that’s missing from the usual RAAF origin story, and that’s
Back in the depths of last winter (and the great Melbourne pandemic lockdown of 2020) I had great fun as the co-host for the Historians at the Movies Australia (#HATMAus) livetweet of Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. Tomorrow I’m going to be doing it again, this time along with James Kightly and Daniel
