Kate Darian-Smith. On the Home Front: Melbourne in Wartime: 1939-1945. Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 2009. 2nd edition. Actually, I bought this last week but I don’t suppose anybody cares but me! An excellent survey of life in wartime Melbourne — the phoney war period, the fear of invasion and bombing in early 1942, the arrival […]
I’ve said before that Giulio Douhet’s influence on British ideas about airpower has been greatly overestimated. Nobody was talking about him before the mid-1930s, by which time the knock-out blow paradigm was firmly established. Much the same could be said of Billy Mitchell (although the sinking of the Ostfriesland was certainly noticed, and at least
Alan Allport has a new website, which has information about his forthcoming book, Demobbed: Coming Home After World War Two. (Very spiffy cover too, I must say.) As a companion to the book, he will also be post-blogging the British demobilisation experience from June 1945 to June 1946. That’s right — a whole year’s worth
Here are a couple of interesting but spurious claims about new weapons from 1939, which I’ve come across in my recent reading. The first is from the Melbourne Argus of 19 January 1939. It’s very brief, no more than a simple statement that the Soviet Union has announced that it has developed a death ray.
Nobody commented on the Wokingham Whale. Above is a photograph of this unlikely beast, dating from 1910 or so. All I know about it is from the Globe and this site, which has several other photos as well. The Whale was not an airship, although that word was used to describe it. Despite the shape,
Last year I wrote a post in which I tried to work out the identity of Neon, the author of an eccentric but popular diatribe against aviation entitled The Great Delusion (1928). I concluded it was ‘probably’ Bernard Acworth, and not his third cousin (by marriage) Marion Acworth, as is usually suggested. Giles Camplin kindly
Richard Overy. The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars London: Allen Lane, 2009. One I’ve been looking forward to getting my hands on! It’s not a general history of the 1920s and 1930s, but more a history of ideas, with a particular focus on (as the title suggests) pessimistic ones. There are a couple of
That’s it for the phantom airship scare of 1909. It’s been interesting for me, as I haven’t looked closely at this material since I did my 4th year thesis some time ago (the 1913 scare made it into the PhD, but not 1909). It didn’t last very long, only a couple of weeks. At first,
Yep, me! On current plans, I’m flying in to Heathrow on 9 September and flying out on 1 October (if I’m not mistaken, on an A380 both ways). It’s mainly for a holiday and to catch up with people, but I will also be attending the Bombing, States and Peoples in Western Europe 1940-1945 conference
Punch today has a number of phantom airship items (p. 379). They’re quite amusing (to me, at least) and, in ironic vein, sum up the scare quite well. There’s pride … We are getting on at last. In phantom airships Great Britain is now facile princeps. … fear … Meanwhile, some surprise has been expressed
