[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
The seventh RAF Display was held on Saturday, 3 July 1926. By now it was, as Flight noted, ‘amongst the foremost of the functions of the London social season’.1 Their Majesties the King and Queen were in attendance, along with representatives of three other royal houses (including the King, Queen, Infante and Infanta of Spain,
Eric Ash. Sir Frederick Sykes and the Air Revolution 1912-1918. London and Portland: Frank Cass, 1999. An excellent study of a important figure in the early days of the RAF who has been overshadowed by his rival, predecessor and successor Trenchard: he was certainly a stauncher supporter of strategic bombing at this time. Sykes was
Brian Madison Jones. Abolishing the Taboo: Dwight D. Eisenhower and American Nuclear Doctrine, 1945-1961. (Solihull: Helion & Company, 2011). I found Brian Jones’s Abolishing the Taboo interesting for two reasons. Firstly, the subject matter: the Cold War fear of nuclear war was the successor to the interwar fear of strategic bombing. Secondly, it’s the book
I’m very pleased to be able to say that I have signed a book contract with Ashgate Publishing. This contract has two key components: firstly, that I will revise my PhD thesis for publication as a book; and secondly, that Ashgate will publish said book so that people can read it. A thesis is not
