…shells reach the required altitude, and keep firing at that area, preferably with multiple guns, and thereby create a wall of flak for the bombers to fly through. And as for artillery barrages, they too are walls, walls of artillery fire. Because of the spatially linear nature of trench warfare, any bombardment of an opposing section of the front is going to be spread out along a line, and so the continuous pouring of shells along that line creat…
…hat the Me 109 fighter was inferior to British fighters: not just a little bit, but greatly; not just to the Spitfire, but to the Hurricane as well.1 So for example, the Manchester Guardian‘s air correspondent confidently reported that That Göring’s air force has had no single-seat fighter that could compare with the Spitfire or the Hurricane is a fact that has been obvious since the very start of the war in the air against Britain and the replace…
…r aeroplane manufacture. If in doubt, put more weight on the nose. Eventually it’ll fly, or rather ‘fly’, perhaps only ballistically. I’ve printed mine out and will make it on Sunday, aided by a handy 5-year-old. I’m a sucker for this sort of thing. Quite some time ago now, me and my mates arranged a virtual lobby of a G8 summit, whereby we got passers-by to write messages to world leaders on printed-up paper darts. One of us then travelled to the…
…and used transparent parachutes that allowed them to drift to earth invisibly.5 Unfortunately, Gillies doesn’t give any references for this, and the extent of the sightings is unclear.6 But such a panic fits perfectly into the precedent set by the phantom airships three decades earlier: people are told that strange new enemies are coming by air; they scan the sky anxiously, paying closer attention to it than they normally would; they then see some…
…iroshima where fire burned down wooden buildings, and those effects vary only very slowly with yield. The basis of mass destruction collapses when energy is conserved, which it isn’t in the popular source books on predicting the effects of nuclear weapons. Even the apparently solid crater predictions in Glasstone and Dolan are completely false for large weapons because they neglect the energy used to dump material out of large craters against grav…
…re, mostly for the same men as it happens, and the same explanations probably apply: they actively sought out opportunity and adventure (Groves and Charlton, at least, were both volunteers), which is the sort of person most likely to try their hand at a new (and dangerous, possibly career-ending) service. Also, flying was a young man’s game, but the decade’s span between the end of the Boer War and the formation of the RFC meant that men who had v…
…February 1942. Its authenticity has never been questioned, but it was clearly heavily retouched. Recently, an earlier copy of the photo turned up in the archives of the LA Times. It’s definitely been retouched less, if at all. I’m not even going to reproduce the better-known-but-retouched version (which can be seen elsewhere); instead, here’s the newly-found-and-less-retouched version: This photo (or rather its retouched version) has been used to…
…rlapping the comments in IE, but I haven’t had a chance to check it yet. There’s a similar problem on the downloads page, though the cause there is probably different as it doesn’t only happen in IE. That might be one for the developers….
…selected as targets; civilian morale is obviously more abstract, but equally obviously attacking population centres would be the best way to attack morale. (Hello, London.) Alternatively, all these targets could be taken off the map and damage to each type tracked by moving a counter along a track. Much easier, though perhaps less fun. Again, it would probably depend on the scale of the game itself, and whether there is a map at all. Either way,…
…o. I like the moral standpoint, but I took issue with some of its ashistorical elements. Brett Holman I was a bit iffy on whether to include A History of Bombing in this list, precisely because I am a bit iffy on the book itself; but I’d actually included it in my book proposal as a comparable work, so it does belong here!…
