I have an article in the May 2011 issue of Flightpath, an Australian warbirds magazine. It’s on one of my pet interests, the fear of the commercial bomber between the wars. James Kightly, who will be familiar to regular commenters here as JDK, contributes a complementary look at the reality of transport-bomber conversions. There are […]
While researching a possible British mystery aeroplane in 1936, which turned out to be nothing interesting, I came across a genuine mystery aeroplane scare which I’d never heard of before, from Australia and New Zealand in March and April 1918. I’m sure somebody else must have noticed it before now, as it was trivial to
This post should probably be called ‘Smugglers?’ but like many people I owe an intellectual debt to Enid Blyton. I’ve seen mentions of mystery aircraft in Britain in the 1930s but until now never a primary source reference. Thomas Bullard’s most interesting The Myth and Mystery of UFOs notes that ‘Mystery airplanes also appeared at
In my reprisals paper abstract, I said that It is often argued that there was little enthusiasm in Britain for reprisals against German cities in retaliation for the Blitz, unlike the First World War. This is a historiographical claim. If I don’t want to be accused of using weasel words or attacking strawmen, it’s one
Michael Kerrigan. World War II Plans That Never Happened. London: Amber Books, 2011. That strange zone between what might have been and what was. Looks at various operational plans considered at some stage by one side or the other, usually getting as far as getting a codename — from Operation Stratford to Operation Downfall. Review
In 1935, the Emperor of Abyssinia, Haile Selassie, tried to buy the Airspeed Viceroy, an aeroplane which had been built to order for the London-Melbourne air race the year before. The Viceroy (above) was a one-off, customised version of Airspeed’s successful Envoy, a twin-engined civil transport which could carry six passengers in addition to its
I’m giving a talk at the XXII Biennial Conference of the Australasian Association for European History, being held in Perth this July. It’s a big conference with some big names (e.g. Omer Bartov, Richard Bosworth, John MacKenzie), and there’s an appropriately big theme: ‘War and Peace, Barbarism and Civilisation in Modern Europe and its Empires’.
Military History Carnival #27 is now up at Cliopatria. One of the posts featured is from Zenobia: Empress of the East and concerns a recent scholarly suggestion (made by Simon James, an archaeologist) that in the 3rd century CE, Sassanid soldiers used chemical weapons against Dura-Europos, a Roman fortress city on the Euphrates. As a
Time to put this increasingly misnamed trilogy out of its misery. (It’s been going so long I can’t remember why I started it!) To reprise: on 21 June 1938, Philip Noel-Baker initiated a debate in the House of Commons about how Britain should respond to the increasingly-common (and, he asserted, illegal) bombing of civilian targets
I’ve now finished my (somewhat piecemeal) post-blogging of the Blitz. It’s time to step back and see if there is anything to made of the whole thing. I’ll start with the things I wish I’d done differently. I had intended to use a greater diversity of sources, especially the Popular Newspapers during World War II
