Very sad news today. On Monday, VH-UXG, a De Havilland DH.84 Dragon owned and flown by Des Porter, went missing on a flight from Monto to Caboolture in Queensland. A distress call and an emergency beacon were heard briefly, but then nothing more was known until today, when VH-UXG’s wreckage was found in rugged terrain […]
In my discussion of the ill-fated Sykes Memo, I noted that it included proposed force levels for the Dominion air forces, which I haven’t seen discussed before. This is interesting because it came at an interesting moment. It’s early December 1918, with the Empire was in the flush of victory and all things seeming possible
Recentlyish, someone called dedonarrival left the following comment here on a post about the British demand for reprisal bombing of Germany in return for the Blitz: Such gross ignorance. Google: British terror bombing and note when it started and when Germany retaliated with its twin engined medium bombers and range limited fighter escort . I
Mark Atherton. There and Back Again: J. R. R. Tolkien and the Origins of The Hobbit. London: I. B. Tauris, 2012. With The Hobbit published 75 years ago this very day and the (first of three!) movies coming out in a couple of months, this is very well-timed. The author is, like Tolkien, an Oxford
As with the Lübeck and Rostock raids over a month earlier, the RAF’s thousand bomber raid on Cologne on 30 May 1942 triggered reprisal attacks by the Luftwaffe (though in far smaller numbers than Bomber Command was able to muster). Another round of Baedeker raids, in other words. This time, however, there was only one
In my reprisals article I argue that historians have, for the most part, underestimated popular support during the Blitz for counterbombing of German cities. I think Tom Harrisson, both during the war as head of Mass-Observation and after as author of Living Through the Blitz, had a lot to do with this. But there were
One painful lesson I learned while seeing my Blitz reprisals article through to press was to stick. To. The. Bloody. Word. Limit! The article as accepted was well over and as a result I caused myself and the editors much grief while we worked to cut it down to an acceptable size. Never again. Because
My peer-reviewed article ‘”Bomb back, and bomb hard”: debating reprisals during the Blitz’ has just been published in the Australian Journal of Politics and History, an invited submission for a special issue on the topic ‘War and Peace, Barbarism and Civilization in Modern Europe and Its Empires’. It can be downloaded from here. Here’s the
The Open University’s Chris A. Williams (who should be confused with the Chris Williams who comments here frequently, since they are the same person) has done a good thing by developing a nifty online simulation called Beat the Ministry, to accompany a joint OU/BBC television series — on which Chris is lead academic consultant —
Well, not really, because it didn’t exist. But never let the facts get in the way of a good title, I say. But it does mean I have to explain what I mean. The real V-weapons developed and used by Germany in the Second War War were the V-1 flying bomb and the V-2 ballistic
