Alexander Rose. Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men’s Epic Duel to Rule the World. New York: Random House, 2020. The two men of the title both led a great aviation enterprise. Both dreamed of spanning the world with their passenger aircraft. Both struggled at times, and prospered at others. But one was […]
Mark Clapson. The Blitz Companion: Aerial Warfare, Civilians and the City Since 1911. London: University of Westminster Press, 2019, https://doi.org/10.16997/book26. Open access has had its travails, but one welcome recent development, particularly in the UK, seems to be the rise of open access monographs and textbooks. An example of the former is Gabriel Moshenska’s Material
Michael Molkentin. Anzac and Aviator: The Remarkable Story of Sir Ross Smith and the 1919 England to Australia Air Race. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2019. [Disclaimer: Michael is a friend of mine. But I wouldn’t have agreed to review his book if I wasn’t confident, based on everything else that he has published, that
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] If I had to recommend one military history book I’ve read this year it would be Philip Sabin’s Simulating War: Studying Conflict through Simulation Games (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2012). Admittedly, this is not your usual military history book. Sabin ranges at will from the 5th century
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] It’s been a good year for reading military history, but then it always is. If I had to recommend one military history book I’ve read this year it would be David Stevenson’s With Our Backs to the Wall: Victory and Defeat in 1918 (London: Penguin, 2012). Stevenson’s previous
Brian Madison Jones. Abolishing the Taboo: Dwight D. Eisenhower and American Nuclear Doctrine, 1945-1961. (Solihull: Helion & Company, 2011). I found Brian Jones’s Abolishing the Taboo interesting for two reasons. Firstly, the subject matter: the Cold War fear of nuclear war was the successor to the interwar fear of strategic bombing. Secondly, it’s the book
Michael Kerrigan. World War II Plans That Never Happened, 1939-1945. London: Amber Books, 2011. As a historian, I’m probably not supposed to like counterfactuals. There are very good reasons for this. It’s hard enough to reconstruct what did happen without worrying about what didn’t. There are no minutes from meetings which never took place, no
Kate Moore. The Battle of Britain. London and Long Island City: Osprey Publishing, 2010. Gavin Mortimer. The Blitz: An Illustrated History. London and Long Island City: Osprey Publishing, 2010. 2010 was seventy years after 1940, and in the usual way saw the publication of a number of new books about the pivotal events of that
Ian Castle. London 1914-17: The Zeppelin Menace. Oxford and New York: Osprey Publishing, 2008. Illustrated by Christa Hook. Ian Castle. London 1917-18: The Bomber Blitz. Oxford and Long Island City: Osprey Publishing, 2010. Illustrated by Christa Hook. As the titles suggest, these two entries in Osprey’s long-running Campaign series dovetail nicely. One takes as its
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,
