One of the pleasures of reading period newspapers and magazines, as I am doing now, is chancing upon reviews of old films I know and (usually) love. Here’s what Graham Greene (yes, that Graham Greene) had to say about The Wizard of Oz: The book has been popular in the States for forty years, and […]
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] I haven’t written much about General Giulio Douhet, the Italian prophet of airpower whose name is — almost — synonymous with strategic bombing. His 1921 (revised edition, 1927) book Il dominio dell’aria (usually translated as The Command of the Air) is one of the most definitive expressions of airpower extremism
The crisis is over: sanity has prevailed! Yielding to the unified voice of those millions who desire Internet harmony, Mr. Holman has turned his sword-like challenge into a ploughshare of cooperative and solicitous thoughts! We extend fraternal greetings to Mr. Holman for his wise and beneficent decision! We rejoice in our return to the collective
WE ARE ALWAYS pleased to learn of a new post on Professor Palmer’s most interesting blog, the Avia-Corner. It is the first place one would turn in order to learn about the often murky world of Soviet aviation. However, his latest rant — there is unfortunately no other word for it — caught us by
It’s always interesting to see echoes of the golden age of aviation in today’s pop culture. At the Avia-Corner, Scott Palmer ends an update on the search for Amelia Earhart with a related music video: Amelia Earhart versus the Dancing Bear, by The Handsome Family. Well, I’ll see his ‘aviatrix lost at sea, never to
Antony Beevor. Crete: The Battle and the Resistance. London: John Murray, 2005 [1991]. More family history stuff. I thought The Battle for Spain was very good, so hopefully this is of the same calibre.
The Australian International Airshow 2007 took place last week, at Avalon near Melbourne. All I saw of it was a C-17, a F-111 escorted by two Hawks, four F/A-18s in a diamond formation, and a few helicopters (Tigers?) — presumably all RAAF/ADF aircraft — which buzzed the City and inner suburbs earlier in the week.
Jörg Friedrich’s book The Fire: The Bombing of Germany, 1940-1945, was first published in Germany in 2002. In 2006, it was published in an English translation (by Allison Brown) by Columbia University Press. The Fire consists of seven sections: Weapon, Strategy, Land, Protection, We, I and Stone. These chart the development of aerial attack on
Here’s a treat for (some of) you: the very first aerial warfare movie ever made, in its entirety! Most commonly known as The Airship Destroyer (but sometimes called Battle in the Clouds or The Aerial Torpedo), it’s less than 10 minutes long and was produced in 1909 by Charles Urban, an American pioneer of cinematic
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] With the inaugural Military History Carnival coming up, it seems like a good time to ask: what does the military historioblogosphere look like? The obvious answer to that is another question: what on Earth is a military historioblogosphere anyway? Well, ‘historioblogosphere’ is just a silly word I invented to describe
