… all those years of habitually talking like a pilot to the consternation of all and sundry, then somebody goes along and organises The First International Talk Like A Pilot Day and I go and miss it! It was yesterday, 19 May 2007. Wizard idea though, what — absolutely spiffing. Next year I’ll be there […]
The following quote is from Winston Churchill’s famous “their finest hour” speech, delivered in the House of Commons on 18 June 1940 (and repeated for radio that evening). It’s four days after the occupation of Paris: ‘the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin’. After assuring
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] The Nationalist version of Guernica — that it wasn’t bombed by fascist aircraft, but instead set alight by the Basque defenders themselves — was not widely accepted at the time, but for decades afterwards it was still plausible enough for some people to believe. As late as 1969, letters like
Found via Military History Carnival #2, an interesting post by Alan Baumler at Frog in a Well: China on airmindedness in China in the 1930s. If I had to compare it to another country, it would probably be Russia, where aviation was also part of a modernization effort. But something Alan mentions reminds me of
By the ever-brilliant XKCD. You know, not once in my entire time as a history student have I been given advice on how to deal with Godwin’s Law. Not even in a subject on comparative fascism! I think this is a clear example of academia failing to adapt to the new realities of the Internet
The A-bomb won: I wouldn’t have thought it was necessary to detonate a 19 kiloton nuclear weapon to see what it would do to an airship, but that’s just what the US Department of Energy did on 7 August 1957. Well, to be fair, the primary purpose was probably to test a prototype of the
I ordered these before I realised just how broke I’ll be after the UK trip. Oy vey … David Clarke and Andy Roberts. Flying Saucerers: A Social History of Ufology. Loughborough: Alternative Albion, 2007. A social history of British ufology, at any rate. Did you know that Air Chief Marshal Lord Dowding believed that UFOs
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] News of the bombing of Guernica outraged opinion in Britain, as elsewhere in the world. Or so the simple version of the story goes — the truth seems to be a little more complicated than that. A leading article in The Times, on the same page as George Steer’s account
As I mentioned in the previous post I plan to attend some conferences while I’m overseas. The first is Air Power, Insurgency and the ‘War on Terror’ which is being held at Cranwell, the Royal Air Force College, on 22 and 23 August 2007. I submitted an abstract for this, which wasn’t accepted — which
I’m planning a trip to the UK1 in the July/August/September period. I’ll be based in London for a couple of months or so, and aside from taking in a conference or two, will be spending much of my time at British Library Newspapers at Colindale (yes, I know … cue the violins!); other places of
