The New Statesman was a little off in its belief that the Germans have given up ‘blitzkrieg’ tactics, as yesterday they renewed their heavy daylight assaults against RAF aerodromes. According to the Observer (above, 7) they also targeted ‘women shoppers’ in two places near or in London. On page 8, there’s a handy map to […]
Saturday is the day that the new New Statesman and Nation comes out. (The Spectator comes out on Friday, but I missed that yesterday. Not to worry; there’s always next week.) It’s a ‘week-end review’, not a newspaper, but inevitably has much commentary on the war, generally from a left-wing perspective. Indeed, this week it
Interestingly, after yesterday’s coordinated pro-bombing campaign, today’s headlines in The Times (4) emphasise the efforts of Bomber Command over those of Fighter Command. In particular, a raid on Berlin on Wednesday night (or Thursday morning) is described in some detail. A ‘large number of bombs, high explosive and incendiary’ were dropped ‘on a series of
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
