A couple of weeks ago, I showed how the blitzkrieg became the Blitz. Now I’ll show how the knock-out blow became the blitzkrieg. Despite the abandon with which the term blitzkrieg is thrown around these days to describe the “lightning” German campaigns of the early years of the Second World War, it turns out that […]
I’ve been good, I really have! I haven’t bought any books for ages, since I’ve been economising in advance of the UK trip. But yesterday I went looking for a Shute to take with me, and couldn’t find one, but instead came away with an armful of other books. Midge Gillies. Waiting for Hitler: Voices
Around Easter, I happened to have a camera on me when an airship was passing overhead, and managed to take a couple of pictures before the camera batteries died. But they didn’t look quite right, and eventually I realised that it was because the airship was too red. Everybody knows, at least subconsciously, that airships
The other day I came across a fascinating article by H. L. Mencken, the Sage of Baltimore. Mencken was very interested in colloquial English, and to this end penned “War words in England”, published in the February 1944 American Speech, about new words coming into use in the British press as a result of the
This is very cool: the Australian War Memorial, Australia’s foremost military history museum, seems to be getting into blogging in a big way! Today, there was an announcement on H-War (and Victoria’s cross? is already on the case) of a group blog running in conjunction with an exhibition about Australia’s participation in the big Western
Mark Connelly has written several very fine books on British military history. He also has an amusingly self-referential Wikipedia entry (emphasis added): Mark Connelly is a Senior Lecturer and Head of the School of History, at the University of Kent in Canterbury. He is also the author of a book on the Second World War
Since my previous “web log beg” worked so well, here’s another. Because this is my first trip to Europe, and could well be my last for a long time, I’d like to do a bit of travel in September to have a look around (I get kicked out of the college on 3 September to
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] The German bombing of London and other British cities between September 1940 and May 1941 is referred to as “the Blitz”, a contemporary term which, if not actually coined by the press, was certainly popularised by it. Blitz is short for blitzkrieg, German for “lightning war”, which was the label
I don’t often mention the various history carnivals here, which makes me a bad netizen; but I’m trying to get into the habit of picking out my favourite post from the monthly Military History Carnival. MilHisCar III is now up, and although a great post on the military origins of the phrase “basket case” did
Last year I talked about J. M. Spaight’s The Sky’s the Limit (here, here and here), and how its account of the then-developing Battle of Britain was somewhat surprising to anyone familiar with the standard narrative of the summer of 1940. Which is not at all to say that the standard narrative is wrong, just
