Peter J. Dean, ed. Australia 1942: In the Shadow of War (Port Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 2013). A collection of essays originating in a Military History and Heritage Victoria conference held in Melbourne earlier this year, which I’m now regretting not having attended. There are contributions on the Australia-Japan relationship before the Second World War […]
Over at The Appendix, ‘a new journal of narrative & experimental history’ to which you can subscribe, Felipe Fernandes Cruz has reproduced some intriguing declassified US documents from the early 1940s concerning rumours of clandestine German airfields in Brazil. The reason for the US interest in any evidence of German activity in South America, apart
An update on the whole Millwall thing. Well, a teaser, anyway. I’ve had an email from Chris Going letting me know how his research into the Luftwaffe’s photoreconnaissance flights over Britain on the first day of the Blitz, 7 September 1940. Can’t say too much, but he did authorise me to say that ‘interesting things
Kevin M. O’Reilly. Flyers of Time: Pioneer Aviation in Country Victoria: The First Fifty Years, a Collection. Dingley Village: Kevin M. O’Reilly, 2012. Mainly a compendium of newspaper articles relating to Victorian aviation outside Melbourne, covering the period 1911-1960. Also lots of contemporary photographs of aeroplanes from various sources, a selection of aviation ephemera such
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] The current conflict in Gaza has attracted much media attention for the so-called Twitter war being fought between the IDF and Hamas, or, more precisely, between the @IDFSpokesperson and @AlqassamBrigade accounts and their respective followers. Insults are traded back and forth, photos and videos of rocket attacks and
J. M. Spaight was a lawyer by training and a civil servant by profession, and as was such not generally prone to flights of fancy. His prewar books are scholarly and judicious compilations of various opinions and precedents regarding aerial warfare. But his wartime writing, such as The Sky’s the Limit (1940) and Bombing Vindicated
One factlet I’ve enjoyed dropping on the heads of students is the origin of the word ‘blockbuster’. Now it is widely understood to mean a hugely successful movie (as well as a once-highly successful video rental chain — remember those?). It has even been claimed that this is the original sense of the word: supposedly,
When I started my PhD, I hoped to examine fictional representations of aerial bombardment in plays as well as in novels, newspapers and other written sources, but had to abandon this intention because I found very few which discussed the next war in the air in any detail. There are a few where it appears
[Cross-posted at Society for Military History Blog.] New York waited for an air raid in June 1918. For thirteen nights from 4 June, much of the city was blacked out to avoid giving German pilots any assistance in locating targets to bomb. The New York Times reported the following day that: Electric signs and all
Neil Arnold. Shadows in the Sky: The Haunted Airways of Britain. Stroud: The History Press, 2012. A compilation of, mostly, strange things seen in the sky over Britain. Everything from dragons, fish, battles, and UFOs to, naturally, phantom airships (and ghost aircraft, as in actual ghosts). Lots of interesting details but not much in the
