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
R. A. Saville-Sneath. Aircraft Recognition. London: Penguin, 2006 [1941]. Sometimes I think publishers bring out books just for me! This is a cute little facsimile reprint of a wartime Penguin Special guide for aircraft spotters, complete with silhouettes, glossary, identifying features, and so on; everything from Albacores to Wirraways. I’ve been inspired to set up
The earliest cite for the word ‘airport’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is from 1919: 1919 Aerial Age Weekly 14 Apr. 235/1 There is being established at Atlantic City the first ‘air port’ ever established, the purposes of which are..to provide a municipal aviation field,..to supply an air port for trans-Atlantic liners, whether of the
[Cross-posted at Revise and Dissent.] Last month, I mentioned Gavin Robinson’s proposal for a military history carnival. He’s now dropped a note in comments with details of the first Military History Carnival: Everything is ready to go now. The first Military History Carnival will be held at Investigations of a Dog on Thursday 12th April.
Now that I’ve finally undone the damage WordPress 2.1 did to my sidebar (My Link Order was the answer), it’s time to add a few blogs to it. Some I’ve only found recently, others I should have added ages ago. Like everyone else, I’ve quickly become enamoured of Paleo-Future, partly because I’ve long been interested
I haven’t really done any proper (as in critical) book reviews here before, but I’ll be posting one in the near future. This made me worry about possible conflicts of interest. Which is probably completely silly and ridiculously self-important. Nonetheless, I’ve written a review policy for Airminded.
The B-17 is one of the most famous aircraft used in the Second World War. It was known as the Flying Fortress. Or perhaps I should say the Flying FortressTM, for it was actually registered as a trademark by Boeing (well, Wikipedia says so, anyway). The phrase was supposedly coined by a journalist in an
Two big-picture histories this week … David Edgerton. The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. An anti-heroic history of technology, which bids fair to puncture assumptions that higher tech necessarily is better tech, or that the rate of technological change is ever-increasing (take that, singularitarians!)
