Poetry

Illustrated London News, 1 March 1913, pp. IV-V
1910s, Art, Periodicals, Phantom airships, mystery aeroplanes, and other panics, Pictures, Poetry, Post-blogging the 1913 scareships

Saturday, 1 March 1913

The Illustrated London News is not really a campaigning newspaper, but it has followed up last week’s striking graphical depictions of the airship menace with this fantastic double-page drawing by Norman Wilkinson, RI, of a German aerial fleet on its way to bomb Britain (pp. IV-V; above). The title asks WILL IT EVER BE SO

1910s, 1920s, 1930s, Air defence, Before 1900, Books, Civil defence, Poetry, Thesis

The dragon will always get through — III

Let’s turn now to Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Smaug’s attack on Lake-town (Esgaroth).1 In my PhD thesis I identified six characteristics of the ideal theory of the knock-out blow from the air: it would be a surprise attack, on a large scale, which would strike at the interdependent structures and civilian morale of its targets,

1930s, 1940s, Books, Poetry, Reviews

Bomber County

Daniel Swift. Bomber County: The Lost Airmen of World War Two. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2010. This book is a very different way to approach the Allied bomber offensives of the Second World War. It is not a history of strategic bombing policy, nor is it a history of the machines used to carry it out,

1930s, 1940s, Poetry

1938 and 1947

Cecil Day Lewis, ‘Bombers’ (1938): Through the vague morning, the heart preoccupied, A deep in air buried grain of sound Starts and grows, as yet unwarning — The tremor of baited deepsea line. Swells the seed, and now tight sound-buds Vibrate, upholding their paean flowers To the sun. There are bees in sky-bells droning, Flares

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