The daylight air battles over the south of England intensified yesterday, as these headlines from the Manchester Guardian (5) show. The RAF shot down 24 enemy aircraft while losing 12 of its own (4 of the pilots are safe). Churchill visited the south-east coast and saw some of the action. He was driven out from […]
Since May, the Home Intelligence Department of the Ministry of Information has been preparing daily reports on the state of British morale: what people are talking about, what they are worried about, what they are happy about, and what are thought the government should do. A wide variety of sources is used for this, both
Today we’re reading The Times. London was again menaced by German bombers last night, though it seems bombs fell only on the ‘outskirts’ (4), in particular ‘one bomb’ hit ‘a building in the outskirts of London’. Folkestone was much harder hit by a daytime raid in which ‘German bombers swooped out of the sun […]
Alan Allport. Demobbed: Coming Home After the Second World War. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009. The book of the dissertation, on which the blog of the book of the dissertation is based! Gordon Pirie. Air Empire: British Imperial Civil Aviation, 1919-39. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2009. A book which
Since yesterday’s Observer was actually put to bed on Saturday night, it missed out reporting the German raid on London in the following hours. Of course, most of London would have already known of it thanks to the alerts and the explosions, while the rest of the country would have heard about it on the
These are the headlines from the Observer (5). Yesterday was another good day for the RAF, which on Air Ministry figures shot down 45 German aircraft with 10 of its own missing. There were ‘Battles all day long’: Until mid afternoon the attacks were concentrated on aerodromes in East Kent. Then large numbers of German
Tomorrow I’ll start post-blogging 1940. My starting point will be 25 August 1940 (the day after the first bombs fell on central London, one of the starting points of the Blitz) and will take it through to some point in October. As usual, I’ll be presenting the view from the press, using daily newspapers like
I haven’t seen it yet but the September 2010 issue of BBC History Magazine (out now in the UK, probably in a couple of months in Australia) should have an article of mine in it. It’s not quite the cover story but is one of several articles on the Battle of Britain. Mine looks at
One of the mysteries of Britain’s fear of the bomber is why it wasn’t a fear of the submarine instead. In the First World War Germany attacked Britain directly by air and indirectly by sea, but only the submarine blockade came anywhere close to knocking Britain out. The same was true of the Second World
Military History Carnival #25 is now up at The Edge of the American West. My favourite selection this time around is from Beachcombing’s Bizarre History Blog and concerns the question of the last cavalry charge in history. As an Australian, I am legally obliged (I think it’s in the Constitution, somewhere near the back) to
