This advertisement was placed by the Air League in The Times, 11 June 1940, on page 9 (it also appeared in the Daily Telegraph). The British Expeditionary Force had been ejected from France just a week before; Germany now occupied Belgium and the Netherlands. France was still fighting, but Paris had been declared an open […]
Aussie, Aussie, Aussie; oi, oi, oi. Neville Meaney. A History of Australian Defence and Foreign Policy, 1901-23. Volume 1,The Search for Security in the Pacific, 1901-14. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009 [1976]. Neville Meaney. A History of Australian Defence and Foreign Policy, 1901-23. Volume 2, Australia and World Crisis, 1914-1923. Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2009.
I’ve recently begun some research at the National Archives of Australia (the Melbourne reading room of which is conveniently only about half a kilometre from my house) into the 1918 mystery aeroplane scare. It’s always exciting to get to work on a new set of primary sources; and this is my first time working in
In June 1936, Flight published a short story entitled ‘If, 193–? A conjectural story’. It’s interesting as an example of an air force view of the next war. That is, for the RAF it goes pretty much according to plan: the enemy’s attempt at a knock-out blow against Britain fails, whereas the RAF plays a
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] Just a brief note on a conference I attended earlier this week at Monash University, ‘The Pacific War 1941-45: Heritage, Legacies & Culture’. I wasn’t presenting, just listening; in fact I only decided to go at the very last minute, mainly on the basis that it seemed silly not to given that
Military History Carnival #29 is up at Cliopatria. There are quite a few airpower posts this time around; consider this one at Bring the Heat, Bring the Stupid on the DEW Line, the North American continental early warning system built in the 1950s and lasting into the 1980s. I knew about the DEW Line itself,
My main interest in this series about the RAF Displays at Hendon has been in the set pieces with which they ended. But as this is the last post it’s worth looking a bit at the organisation of the Display itself. Flight had some useful articles for this in its preview of the 15th Display,
Martin Middlebrook. The Battle of Hamburg: Allied Bomber Forces Against a German City in 1943. London: Cassell & Co., 2000 [1980]. I picked this up partly because of the topic (obviously), partly because it has an account of the action for which Pilot Officer E. L. Pickles was awarded his first DFC (nursing his Lancaster
The week before the 1932 RAF Display, Flight‘s editor commented on the rationale behind the theme chosen for the finale: Sometimes the story composed for the set piece has been framed with some object, such as to obviate the criticisms of pacifists. Thus at one Display the enemy were called Pirates, so that nobody could
I may or may not have been right in guessing that the Soviet Union was the pretend enemy in the 1928 RAF Display set-piece, but as we shall see I think I’m on safer ground with the next year’s edition (for some reason held slightly later in the summer than usual, on Saturday, 13 July
