A key element in any wargame is the scenario. It sets the boundaries in time and space of the simulation, as well as its initial conditions. For a historical wargame, a scenario might be the battle of Cannae, or the British and Canadian sectors at D-Day. Creating such scenarios involves researching orders of battle, contemporary […]
As we all1 know, the Aerial League of the British Empire (later the Air League of the British Empire, now just the Air League) was founded in 1909. Less well-known is that the Aerial League also sponsored the formation of the Women’s Aerial League (they are often described as being affiliated, or as the latter
Things are starting to happen with my forthcoming book, The Next War in the Air: Britain’s Fear of the Bomber, 1908–1941, which is being published by Ashgate. The manuscript has just been proofread, the cover design is in the works, I have a marketing questionnaire to fill out. The book is now listed on the
Airminded was down for a couple of days recently, and it now has a new look. The reason for this is that it was hacked, and nuking the entire site from orbit was the only way to be sure. To be more specific, I noticed last week that Google searches for Airminded were throwing up
… are all very far away. But for now, there’s a nice write-up by Emma McFarnon of my commercial bomber research in the news section of History Extra, the website for BBC History Magazine.
So, I want to construct a knock-out blow wargame. In my PhD/book, I define an ideal knock-out blow from the air as having six key characteristics. Three of these describe the attack itself: surprise, scale, and speed. Three describe what it destroyed: infrastructure, morale, and civilisation itself. Starting with the attack, as this will define
Joanna Bourke. Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain, and the Great War. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996. A now-classic gender analysis of the impact of the First World War on masculinity — mostly in social and cultural terms, but the first chapter is entitled ‘Mutilating’ so sometimes the impact is quite literal. Other topics
This is the poster produced by the Navy League in 1913 as a key part of its campaign to force the government to increase the amount it spent on military and naval aviation — or as the poster itself puts it, rather more succinctly: THE NAVY LEAGUE DEMANDS £1,000,000. FOR AERIAL DEFENCE BRITONS WAKE UP!
Joan Beaumont. Broken Nation: Australians in the Great War. Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2013. With the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War looming, it’s high time we had a book like this: a synoptic overview of the whole of Australia’s war, from the fighting overseas to the conflicts at home, from
As I discussed recently, Philip Sabin’s Simulating War: Studying Conflict through Simulation Games (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2012) is primarily about using wargames to understand past wars. This is sensible; apart from the obvious benefit of helping us to understand history better, there’s also the useful featurethat there are some facts to go on
