In my previous post on the possible airship panic of 1915, I used n-grams for ‘Zeppelin’ and ‘rumour’ derived from the British Newspaper Archive to try to work out when exactly it was. The answer was that it began in late December 1914 and finished in early February 1915. But is the answer right? Is […]
My peer-reviewed article ‘The phantom airship panic of 1913: imagining aerial warfare in Britain before the Great War’ has now been published in the Journal of British Studies, and can be found here (or here, for the free, self-archived version). This is the abstract: In late 1912 and early 1913, people all over Britain reported
Jeremy Black. The Cold War: A Military History. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. I already have a book with this title (by David Miller) but that was published in 1999, and another half-generation’s distant might lend some valuable perspective. The indefatigable Black traces the Cold War all the way back to 1917, perhaps
Peter J. Dean, ed. Australia 1944-45: Victory in the Pacific. Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Having devoured Australia 1942 and Australia 1943, I was disappointed when Australia 1944 didn’t appear. This explains why! As with the previous volumes, this is an Australian perspective on the war, although there is a chapter on the Japanese
In order to start characterising the possible airship panic of 1915, let’s generate some n-grams and do some distant reading to get a basic overview of press interest in Zeppelins during the early part of the war. Here are the number of articles per month in the British Newspaper Archive for 1914 and 1915 mentioning
In the middle of January 1915, days before the first, fairly ineffectual Zeppelin raids on Norfolk, the novelist Marie Belloc Lowndes visited some relations of Reginald McKenna, the Home Secretary. There she was told that Mr. Gatty [a London historian] had heard from the Duke of Westminster that Winston Churchill says he expects a fleet
Ian Castle. The First Blitz: Bombing London in the First World War. Oxford and New York: Osprey, 2015. As seen on the Internet! I already own the two books which this combines. But they were review copies so I didn’t pay for them; it seems fair enough to support the author more concretely this time.
An early contribution to the list of strange things dropped from the air in wartime was made by the crew of L13, a German naval Zeppelin under the command of Kapitänleutnant Heinrich Mathy. During a raid on London on the night of 8 September 1915, they dropped bombs from Bloomsbury to the City which killed
In the last decade or so, it seems to have become a thing to refer to the German air raids on Britain during the First World War as the ‘First Blitz’. There are now at least three books on the topic with that title or variations thereof: Andrew Hyde’s The First Blitz: The German Bomber
The novelist William Le Queux is famous, or rather infamous, for beating the drum of the German invasion and spy threat before the Great War. But what did he do during the war? Unsurprisingly, he did much the same thing. On 28 February 1915, for example, The People published an article by Le Queux entitled
