Yesterday was the 63rd anniversary of the Bethnal Green Tube disaster. On the evening of 3 March 1943, 173 people — men, women and children — died at the Bethnal Green Tube station, the greatest loss of life of any single incident during the German bombing campaign against Britain. The tragedy took place during an […]
A most interesting query and ensuing discussion over on the H-War mailing list, about the so-called “Cuzaux effect”, which I haven’t heard of before: In short, [the Cuzaux effect] is the side ways deviation of a projectile trajectory when fired from a weapon in motion. In the late 1930’s, according to the article, it was
A new addition to the historioblogosphere — and one very close to my own interests! It’s called The Blogger will always get through… and is the work of the indefatigable Peter Hibbs, who runs the amazingly exhaustive and informative NBCD (Nuclear, Biological and Chemical Defence) site, primarily (but not exclusively) covering Britain in the era
A few months back, I posted about my decision to use LaTeX for writing my thesis, in preference to Word or something of that ilk. I seem to get a few Google hits from other people interested in using LaTeX in the humanities, so I will occasionally post useful things I’ve gleaned, even though it
In his comment on my previous post, Alex mentions the “bolt from the blue” strategy as possibly related to the knock-out blow that is my current obsession (and he’s right, in my opinion). My reply started to get long, so I decided to turn it into a post instead … In Edwardian debates about the
Currently, I’m tracing the evolution of the idea of the knock-out blow, the massive aerial bombardment that could knock a country out of the war. Though the idea intself has earlier antecedents, the first use of the phrase itself in this context that I’ve found so far is this, in a well-known (at least to
A report from the 14th annual conference of the National Federation of Hairdressers, which opened at Blackpool on 31 May 1915: A Swansea delegate said the trouble was not now. The trouble would be when the war was over, because men who had enlisted would have been trained to shave themselves. The result would be
David Edgerton wrote in to let me know that he has made his 1991 book England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation available online as a resource for students and scholars (though it may go back into print at some stage). It can be found through his publications page, or
In my previous post I talked about some Japanese ARP posters from 1938. One in particular (above; click for larger version) is very revealing: it shows exactly whose bombers the Japanese were worried about, by plotting circles on a map of Japan and its neighbours, representing the radius of actionNo more than half the maximum
Boing Boing has a link to a very interesting and oddly beautiful set of Japanese air raid precautions posters at the National Archives of Japan. (Boing Boing says they are from the Second World War, but according to the page itself, they date from 1938.) I am myself somewhat ignorant of Japanese history, but as
