Basil Collier. Heavenly Adventurer: Sefton Brancker and the Dawn of British Aviation. London: Secker & Warburg, 1959. A big wheel in the RFC, for most of the 1920s he was in charge of civil aviation at the Air Ministry. He was killed in the R101 disaster in 1930. Peter Lewis. The British Fighter Since 1912: […]
We have … under the stress of war, made practical discoveries in the art of government almost comparable to the immense discoveries made at the same time in the art of flying. Economist and social reformer William Beveridge, on the advances in government forced by the First World War; quoted in John Stevenson, British Society
Oh yes he does. Actually this is from a great site, www.biggles.info, which has the front covers and illustrations from all 98 (!) Biggles books, along with plot summaries if you can’t be bothered reading them all. (The covers are on the main page.) The main site, www.wejohns.com, gives the same treatment to all the
OK, I promise to stop doing that. This time, the answer seems to be: probably … Coming via Charlie’s Diary is a New Yorker article by Seymour Hersh on the new US exit strategy in Iraq, which reports that “A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President’s public statements, is that
Well, not really. Still, it’s an interesting parallel. A RAF officer, Flight-Lieutenant Malcolm Kendall-Smith, is being court-martialled for refusing to serve in Iraq. A doctor, he has already served two tours there; now he thinks that the war itself was illegal, in that it was not authorised by the United Nations. This is reminiscent of
Geoffrey Best. Churchill and War. London and New York: Hambledon and London, 2005. As previously noted. There’s disappointingly little on Churchill’s “wilderness years” – OK, so there wasn’t actually a war on then, but this was the time when the foundations of the Churchill-as-prophet-of-war legend were laid. And it’s the period of his career that
Trench Fever reports on a seminar by Stefan Goebel on the post-war memorialisation of Coventry’s bombing in 1940. Hence today’s word for the day: ”coventrate”. It’s a good example of a word or phrase coined in a mean-spirited way (in this case, by the Germans), but which ends up being adopted by those whom it
Ann Curthoys and John Docker. Is History Fiction? Sydney: UNSW Press, 2006.Sic. On truth in history; seems to be attempting a third way between, or at least taking the good bits from both postmodernism and empiricism. My glib answer to the question in the title would be, not if you’re doing it right! (Which probably
As promised, here are a couple of captures from the 1939 propaganda film The Lion Has Wings, which dramatised the RAF attack on Wilhelmshaven of 4 September 1939. The actual results of the raid were meagre; one Blenheim crashed into the fo’c’sle of the cruiser Emden, while the pocket battleship Admiral Scheer was hit by
While looking at the American journalist William Shirer’s Berlin Diary for my earlier post on the wooden bomb tale, I was intrigued to see that immediately after the start of war in September 1939 he simultaneously expected, hoped and feared that there would be an immediate, large-scale air attack on Berlin, by either Poland or
