...ound showed the German public that the Reich would stop at nothing to win. -- Peter Fritszche, A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1992), 94. The last poster (and possibly the preceding one) is actually not from the 1918 DELKA, but the 1917 one, so it seems to have been a semi-regular event (though possibly only held twice). And possibly a travelling one too -- there's no...
...ign, or, more accurately, Tiger, but that just reflects its boldness. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armstrong_Whitworth_Ensign And the North Atlantic airmail race mattered on another level. It was an outlet for national rivalry on par with the great days of the Blue Riband, and a technological freakshow. Really, if a historian can't be bothered to work on this, a science fiction writer should. There's been some secondary work (Higham and Clark) on...
...oat and chest troubles. Any doctor will tell you that even the common cold -- the beginning of bronchitis and serious lung trouble -- is caused by infectious germs that float about unseen in the air.1 So the eye-catching cover is intended to make you think it's about the peril of the airship, to make you pick it up and start reading, at which point you find out it's about the even more deadly peril of the air germ, against which you can, fortunate...
...that was new to me. Not the machine itself, which is a common Grasshopper observation aircraft, but the mounting of four total bazooka tubes under the wings, for antitank operations and general harassment of the enemy -- not a unique modification. As if flying low and slow over the battlefield wasn't dangerous enough... Image sources: B-17; B-26; Grasshopper; Horsa; Lancaster; P-47; P-51s; P-61; Stirling; York; and the woman....
...d to the railings and there's a local campaign for a proper memorial. http://www.stairwaytoheavenmemorial.org/index.html RAF St Clement Danes Church (complete with bomb damage and controversial Harris statue.) The atmospheric Dennis Severs House Museum. Small but definitely worth the entry fee. http://www.dennissevershouse.co.uk/# London Transport Museum in Covent Garden: good exhibit on the history of the Tube. The National Army Museum: there's a...
...t the popularity of war toys in GB -- especially high quality tin soldiers -- had something to do with the initial popularity of WWI and the high rate of volunteerism. Has this pretty much been debunked at this point? Brett Holman Hmm, I don't know, but offhand I'd say it was unlikely -- toy soldiers were surely popular from some time in the Victorian period, well before WWI (this post would seem to back that up). So they're part of a Victorian or...
...e illustrating how this vital thought-power can be directed to a given end -- the extinction of the U-boat peril. We believe that every reader who has even a smattering of Occult teaching will realise how valuable is the weapon which is here fashioned for his hands. No one, better than the Occultist, understands the power of thought. No one, more than he, realises that all material life and action depend on prior vision and effort on the mental pl...
...calling up masses of trained mechanics is very different --crazy different-- from calling up a mass of schoolboys and issuing them rifles. Neil Datson I find figures that don't tally deeply irritating. I've just been reading The Most Dangerous Enemy, in which (Chap 18) Bungay tells the reader that in the middle of Aug Fighter Command had 1,438 serviceable fighters. This was apparently made up of 855 with the squadrons, 84 with training units and...
...official inquiry (and so no public controversy); however, his career was effectively over and he retired in 1928. Why an example is being made of Kendall-Smith is unclear, since the top brass are said not to want to make him a martyr. Secondly, Charlton's objection was moral, not legal -- he opposed the casual use of bombing against Iraqi civilians. Kendall-Smith's defence explicitly rejects any such argument; he denies being a conscientious obje...
...tory had generated, but in the end the Angel wasn't going anywhere: people -- at least, some people -- wanted to believe in it.2 However, it wasn't 'The bowmen' which piqued my interest, nor the Angel of Mons, except indirectly. Rather it was the way he used his experience to explore the role of rumour and myth in wartime. 'Out of the earth', a short story published in November 1915, begins by explicitly referring to his creation of 'The bowmen' a...
