I’d forgotten that today was the 70th anniversary of the Dresden firestorm, but luckily the producers of Up All Night on BBC Radio 5 Live remembered. I spoke to presenter Dotun Adebayo and fellow historian Raymond Sun this afternoon (just before 5am Greenwich Mean Time), and for the next 29 days you can listen to […]
Today I made my ninth contribution to ABC New England’s Road to War series, talking about U-boats (AKA ‘the Zeppelins of the sea’) and their advantages and disadvantages in warfare. More specifically, I spoke about the German declaration on 4 February 1915 of unlimited submarine warfare in the seas around Britain, switching from their previous
For my eighth contribution to The Road to War on ABC New England, I spoke about the first Zeppelin raid on Britain, on the night of 19 January 1915; certainly more consequential than the first air raid on Britain as it actually killed people in Great Yarmouth and King’s Lynn in Norfolk. I talked about
Back to back Roads to War! This week’s topic is the most airminded yet: the first German air raids on Britain. I had to cheat slightly to fit them in, as technically I’m supposed to talk about the centenary events in the week leading up to the broadcast date, i.e 23 December, but the first
After a break of a few weeks, today I recorded another Road to War episode for ABC New England, covering the period 10–16 December 1914. I focused on the German naval bombardment of Hartlepool, Scarborough and Whitby, which caused the greatest loss of civilian loss of life due to enemy action in Britain for the
My fifth contribution to ABC New England’s ‘The road to war’ series is now online, covering the period 8-14 October 1914. Today I looked at two major events. The first was the Maritz Rebellion in South Africa, a military mutiny by disaffected Boers who resented British influence and saw the botched invasion of German South-West
I was on ABC New England again today, my fourth contribution to ‘The road to war’, looking at the events of 3-9 September 1914. My main topic was the Battle of the Marne — the advance of the German 1st and 2nd Armies towards Paris, the evacuation of the French government from the capital along
My third contribution to ABC New England’s ‘The road to war’ series is now online. Today I looked at the events of 20-26 August 1914, focusing particularly on events in Belgium: the march of the German 1st Army through Brussels, 320,000-strong; more German atrocities against civilians, as well as the burning of the library at
My second contribution for ABC New England to the increasingly inaccurately named series ‘The road to war’ was broadcast today, and is online here. Increasingly inaccurate because my topic today was the outbreak of war in August 1914 between Germany on the one hand and France and especially poor little Belgium on the other, including
Today I had my very first radio appearance, on ABC New England North West, talking to Kelly Fuller on the Mornings show. I was talking about what was happening in Europe 100 years ago, during the July Crisis of 1914. More specifically, I spoke about the Royal Navy’s test mobilisation at Spithead (above) and the
