…History 1919-1933. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. If this is up to the standards of her Britain and the Origins of the First World War, then it’s an instant classic! Over 800 pages long, and a sequel on the period 1933-1939 is promised….
…ed building what appeared to be a new base some distance away. The service installations for the base were constructed of flimsy wood and the fake runway marked out in the proper dimensions. The builders took care to camouflage their wooden structures for the altitude at which Allied aircraft were likely to fly over them during normal operations. Work during World War II (and perhaps before) had shown that when properly designed, simple dummy stru…
…Bombing. Looks to have some useful stuff I haven’t come across before, for instance the phosgene scare of May 1928. Noel Pemberton-Billing. Air War: How to Wage It. Aldershot and Portsmouth: Gale & Polden, 1916. ‘With some suggestions for the defence of great cities.’ This probably helped P-B to be elected as the ‘member for air’; the cover is dominated by a rather dashing photo of him, monocle firmly in place. ‘Awake, arise, or be for ever fallen…
…have the power to immobilise people as well as kill. This is a very early instance of an idea which was to enjoy some currency in the 1930s, of an aviation-based technocratic alternative to democracy – in particular H.G. Wells’ Air and Sea Control in The Shape of Things to Come (1933).Ibid, 29. Paris also suggests that as Kipling and Frederick Sykes (head of the RAF in 1918) were friends, the ABC stories may have had some influence on the latter’…
…s action on a sudden and enormous expansion in volume. Trinitrotoluol, for instance, when detonated with fulminate of mercury expands by something like 500,000 volumes in a fraction of a second. The Kassen bomb, so far as I can gather, is an extension of the principle. Under the influence of the bomb, ordinary silicon rock or earth in its vicinity undergoes an atomic change on detonation, producing huge volumes of some inactive gas such as nitroge…
…y the Italians in Abyssinia (modern Ethiopia), in 1935-6. There were other instances too, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a comprehensive list (though this isn’t bad). So the other day, I dug out an old issue of Strategy and Tactics (July/August 1980).3 S&T is a wargaming and military history magazine, which has a complete wargame in every issue. But it also has well-written articles (or at least did, haven’t bought an issue in many years), and i…
…ne, then you are probably Curtis LeMay or Arthur Harris. So here we see an instance where the rhetoric of the Cold War was developed first for the knock-out blow, long before the Manhattan Project. Carl Sagan, Cosmos (New York and Avenel: Wings Books, 1995 [1980]), 321-2. [↩] Lord Ponsonby, Manchester Guardian, 28 October 1933; quoted in Patrick Kyba, Covenants without the Sword: Public Opinion and British Defence Policy, 1931-1935 (Waterloo: Wilf…
…egy might well be called for — holding a force of airships in readiness to instantly fly over sporting events sponsored by the opposition, should they dare to use their airships in a hostile manner. Perhaps the ultimate solution is the international control of all airships, which would then only be used over stadiums as directed by the League of Nations — I mean, United Nations. At any rate, I’m available, for only a moderately immoderate fee, to…
…he clearly had little time for the Lone Eagle, at least in his role as an instant military aviation expert); it’s such a trivial error. Aside from the possibility that my copy is actually from a parallel universe (I did acquire it through inter-library loan, so anything’s possible), I can only think that Whitehouse (and his editor) had a momentary lapse of reason and confused the plane Lindbergh made his transatlantic flight in with the book Lind…
…of writing advice, here’s a chance to use the WordPress Democracy plugin I installed the other day. Near the start of chapter 3, I have a sentence which begins ‘In this chapter, I will briefly examine …’ ‘I’. ‘I’! While I use the personal pronoun all the time on this blog, and have already done so once this sentence, I find that it really cuts against the grain to do so for academic writing. I don’t think it is such a sin in writing in the humanit…
