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Daily Mirror, 19 November 1940, 1

Some inconsistencies in the Daily Mirror's message today. Liverpool was bombed heavily last night in 'One of the most severe raids in the air blitz' (1):

Fire bombs damaged a boys' college and caused casualties; a secondary school was hit by an oil bomb and incendiaries; numbers of houses were destroyed; gas and water mains were fractured. There were no reports of any vital damage to industrial undertakings.

This last statement is presumably the basis for the statement that the raid had 'failed'. However, the Mirror suggests that Liverpool, along the recent lessening of attacks on London and the Coventry raid, 'is a clear indication that Goering is copying the R.A.F. and aiming blows at the production centres and military objectives of the provinces'.

Henceforth, the Germans are expected to copy our devastating raids on military objectives in Germany.

But will they be too late?

In the view of the air experts, they would have achieved considerable success if they had started at the beginning on our military objectives instead of foolishly attempting to break London's morale and win a short war.

Which is the opposite of what actually happened back in August and September, but never mind.
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Daily Mirror, 18 November 1940, 1

The Daily Mirror likes its headlines big and bold. The one above takes up two-thirds of the width of today's front page. The story is that Arthur Greenwood, Minister without Portfolio in the War Cabinet (and deputy leader of the Labour Party; interesting that he is not described as such in an ostensibly left-wing newspaper) has claimed that Germany is suffering from aerial bombardment more than Britain -- fifty times more, to be precise (though I'm not sure if that's just last week or over the whole war). Partly this is due to 'The R.A.F.'s mastery of night flying, which enables them to take off in weather which grounds the Germans'.

Mr. Greenwood, who spoke at Colchester, said the past week had been a bad one for the enemy. It had opened a new chapter in the war. "I myself have gained heart," he said. "I am satisfied of [sic] the result."

He said that serious as were the enemy attacks on such places as London, Coventry, Birmingham and Liverpool, the R.A.F. had handed out greater punishment. "I am not concerned with the killing of people in Germany," he declared. "I am concerned with killing their power to strike at us."

On that subject of killing, the death toll at Coventry has now reached 250.
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I have an embarrassment of Sunday papers now: the Observer, the Sunday Express, News of the World and The People. The last named (which has sales of more than 3 million per issue) has Coventry on the front page, but halfway down and underneath a photograph of a pig (I couldn't say why). US-British cooperation, the brave HMS Jervis Bay and the Italian evacuation of Koritza in the face of the Greek advance are the stories which are given top billing instead.

Sunday Express, 17 November 1940, 1

The other three have chosen Coventry as their lead story. The Sunday Express has this banner headline stretching the entire width of the front page. The story, written by Geoffrey Winn, continues on the back page where the headline is explained as a conversation overheard in the Cathedral (12):

Round me there are old folk, three generations together, grandfather, daughter, son. All of them week have not only looked on the cathedral as the centre point of their city. But have entered there to pray.

AT MY SIDE I HEAR SOME ONE SAY, IN A QUIET VOICE TO A BOY IN AIR FORCE UNIFORM: "PLEASE GOD, YOU WILL AVENGE WHAT WAS DONE TO US AND OUR BEAUTIFUL CATHEDRAL ON THURSDAY NIGHT."

He nods, too moved to speak. Then another voice said to some one else near-by: "Excuse me. But please remember this is still a church."

With a murmur of apology the man at once removes his hat.

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Daily Express, 16 November 1940, 1

News of Coventry's tragedy -- Hilde Marchant, writing on the front page of the Daily Express, above, says the city was 'Guernicaed' all Thursday night -- has reached the morning press (though it was announced by the government yesterday and would have been reported on the BBC and in the evening papers). Initial reports are that casualties amount to about a thousand people, killed or wounded. It is clearly a great shock to the nation: the Manchester Guardian's London correspondent says that the news 'has hit Londoners, I believe, harder than any of the attacks on themselves' (6). It's the first time an urban centre outside the capital has been blitzed in this way. Those who have already experienced London's intense bombardment can imagine how much harder to cope it would have been for the much smaller city of Coventry. For the rest of us, Marchant gives a sense of the devastation:

The shopping centre of Coventry is one choking mass of ruins, fire, and people who, by some miracle, have emerged alive.

They walk through this skeleton of the city centre with faces stained black, breathing the smoke of their homes, trying to find their families and friends, not sure of the way through their own streets.

The front page features a photograph of the suddenly ruined Coventry Cathedral.
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Daily Express, 15 November 1940, 1

It seems that Mussolini's attempt to annex Greece may have been somewhat ill-judged. The Daily Express leads with news of a Greek counteroffensive against the Italian forces invading their country from Albania. A spokesman for the Greek government said that their 'troops were advancing along the whole line'.

The offensive opened with a savage attack from the kilted Evzones, supported by cavalry, infantry, mountain guns, tanks and British and Greek planes.

This is the icing on yesterday's cake. The leading article on page 4 takes the Taranto raid as a turning point in the war:

FROM now on Britain must stay in top gear and go full speed ahead.

More smashing blows against Italy while she still reels from the effects of Taranto.

More bombs on German factories and fields.

And so on. The Daily Mirror takes much the same line (5):

WHAT does our success this week in the Mediterranean prove?

First, obviously, that the process of socking the Wop has begun.

Ah, that was not the bit I meant. Here it is:

But it proves more than that.

It proves that initiative, daring, the offensive spirit, brains directing risky operations can, after all, hasten the end of the war.

From different political positions (the Mirror broadly left, the Express definitely right, both populist and very popular) both papers are saying that Britain needs to take the offensive. But the Express seems a little less optimistic, saying only that this will 'bottle up the enemy's means of attacking us', not help 'hasten the end of the war' as the Mirror has it.
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The Times, 14 November 1940, 4

British and Allied forces have been having a good week, at Italy's expense. The Italians lost Gallabat (in the Sudan), a division in the offensive against Greece and much of a convoy taking supplies to Albania. The greatest Allied success was the carrier strike against the Italian naval base at Taranto, which took place on Monday night (The Times, 4). Three battleships were severely damaged. Last night the First Lord of the Admiralty, A. V. Alexander, told the nation via the BBC (and reported here on page 2) that whereas before the attack the Italian battle fleet had a numerical superiority in the Mediterranean, it is now inferior to the Royal Navy.

For reasons best known to themselves the Italians did not seek to exploit their superiority and they had remained immobile behind the defences of their harbour. Even that, however, had failed to protect them. Within their inglorious shelter the Italian battle fleet had suffered a defeat which could only have been redeemed in the public mind had that fleet shown itself willing to accept battle at sea.

The Italian News Agency has a somewhat different view of the air raid, calling the British account 'clap-trap' and a 'shameless fraud' (3):

If there had not been an urgent necessity to inject optimism into a depressed public opinion Churchill ought to have had the elementary prudence to study the Italian official communiqué of November 12, which said that only one unit was in any way extensively damaged, and added that there were no victims. It is evident that if the massacre of ships imagined by Churchill had really taken place there would have been a number of victims, unless we suppose that on board Italian warships there are no crews.

The truth is that 'the invincible British Navy has not yet scored a single success, however modest'. Who is telling the truth?
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A Part of History: Aspects of the British Experience of the First World War. London and New York: Continuum, 2008. A collection of essays on pretty much what it says on the tin. A slight majority of contributions are on aspects of memory of the war rather than the war itself, including two by bloggers -- Dan Todman of Trench Fever ('Remembrance') and Esther MacCallum-Stewart of the sadly-defunct Break of Day in the Trenches ('A biplane in Gnomeregan: popular culture and the First World War'). I'm grateful to Esther for (1) citing Airminded in an actual book (made out of paper and everything) and (2) thereby getting into print the word 'historioblogosphere', which I invented and carefully crafted to be as off-putting as possible.

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I've recently been reading Peter Ewer's Wounded Eagle: The Bombing of Darwin and Australia's Air Defence Scandal, which I found to be unexpectedly interesting, but not always in a good way. Wounded Eagle has much less about the Second World War than I'd thought: much of the early part of the book is taken up with a detailed analysis of the origins of the Empire Air Mail Scheme (EAMS) in the 1930s, and then there's a long account of the Royal Australian Air Force's pre-war procurement policy. There's a lot of interesting stuff here: one particular surprise for me was the accidental way in which British radar research was accidentally revealed to the Australian government by a young physicist returning home from studying at Cambridge. The Australians asked if this was true, and the British sheepishly said that it was and only then began sharing its data with the Dominions! Even more surprising, perhaps, is that the RAAF, having got its hands on some British radar sets in 1940, showed next to no interest in them. Only the Australian Army did anything with them, for use with coastal defence batteries.

Ewer's book is full of such pointed criticisms, and that's the problem. This polemic has two targets: the British, and pro-British Australian politicians. The latter are outside my area, though I'll talk about them later. But I like to think I know a bit about the British by now, particularly when it comes to aeroplanes, so let's start there.
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Photographs of H.M. Vessels & Auxiliaries and Other Objects Taken from the Air, 8

Someone on the WWI-L mailing list posted a link to a scanned book with the rather excellent title Photographs of H.M. Vessels & Auxiliaries and Other Objects Taken from the Air. This was printed in August 1918 for the Intelligence Department of the Admiralty as CB 848 and was very clearly marked secret, issued in numbered copies so that if it fell into the wrong hands the security breach could be traced. There is also the rather odd restriction that

This book is NEVER to be carried in any Aircraft heavier or lighter than air.

Presumably this again was to prevent the Germans from finding a soggy copy washing up on the shore after some damn fool had taken it up for a joyride to compare the photos with the real thing and ended up in the drink. Eh what? Anyway, I think we can presume that the defence of the realm no longer depends on the secrecy of this book, and so we can enjoy the pretty pictures.

Above are the battlecruisers (from left to right) Princess Royal, Renown, Repulse and Tiger. That looks like the Forth Bridge; beyond it can be seen the rest of the Grand Fleet.
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Daniel Swift. Bomber County: The Lost Airmen of World War Two. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2010.

This book is a very different way to approach the Allied bomber offensives of the Second World War. It is not a history of strategic bombing policy, nor is it a history of the machines used to carry it out, of the men who flew them, or the damage they did. While it is well-researched and has elements of all of these types of history, Bomber County is not really a history at all, but an account of a personal quest to understand the life and death of one airman, and more originally a plea for recognising the importance of the genre of bomber poetry.
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