Alan Brooks. London at War: Relics of the Home Front from the World Wars. Barnsley: Wharncliffe Local History, 2011. What’s left? More than you might think — shelters, bomb damage, memorials (lots of those), even ghost signs. Profusely illustrated. Zara Steiner. The Triumph of the Dark: European International History 1933-1939. Oxford and New York: Oxford […]
I’ve sometimes wondered if the air raids on Belgrade during the German invasion of Yugoslavia in April 1941 can be considered as a knock-out blow from the air. From the accounts I’ve read it seems that the Luftwaffe launched a surprise attack before the declaration of war, intended as a punishment for the pro-British coup.
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] I’ve been using the Internet for nearly two decades: in 1992 — after nervously checking with the physics computer lab manager first — I sent an email to my future Honours supervisor while she was visiting Toronto. I was quickly hooked by the promise of overcoming the tyranny of distance and transparently
I’ve been remiss in not noting the arrival of Military History Carnival #28 at Cliopatria. While it seems to be moving from a round-up of the best military history blogging to covering ‘military history on the Internet’ generally, there are still some good old-fashioned blogs therein. For example, Sellswords, mercenaries and condottieri presents a fascinating
Ron Mackay. The Last Blitz: Operation Steinbock, Luftwaffe Operations over Britain January to June 1944. Walton-on-Thames: Red Kite, 2011. It’s very unusual to find a book on the Baby Blitz, so I had to have it. I would have liked to have seen more on the British military and civilian responses — the core of
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] As Alan Allport has noted, Winston Churchill’s famous speech of 20 August 1940 was and is remembered for a ‘single, unrepresentative sentence’, i.e.: Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few. The speech was given during the Battle of Britain, and ‘the Few’
Some photos I took while in Perth for the AAEH. I didn’t have a lot of time for sightseeing in Perth itself; apart from a bit of a wander through the CBD and a look at the Museum of Western Australia (disappointing after seeing the Fremantle branches), my main outing was to Kings Park. This
Gregory Benford and the Editors of Popular Mechanics. The Wonderful Future that Never Was. New York and London: Hearst Books, 2010. A wonderfully illustrated look at techno-optimism from the early 1900s to the 1960s — much of it American, of course. It’s lighthearted in tone, but Benford is no dummy so hopefully the text is
Part of my PhD thesis involved conceptualising the various forms of defence against aerial bombardment put forward during the thirty-odd years before the Second World War: things like anti-aircraft guns, air-raid shelters, an international air force, and so on. Something I didn’t include was what we might call spiritual air defence. Partly because I didn’t
William Mulligan. The Origins of the First World War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Argues that the war was not inevitable and in many ways was in fact unlikely and unexpected, which itself seems improbable to me. But he gave a very good talk at the Perth AAEH on the question, so I’ll be interested
