C. G. Grey. A History of the Air Ministry. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1940. A valuable compendium of information by a knowledgeable (though, Grey being Grey, hardly detached!) contemporary observer. The first section covers the period up to 1918 (including the Air Ministry’s predecessors); the last the interwar period. In between there is a […]
I’ve put the series of posts I did a couple of years ago on the Sudeten crisis into one big PDF file called, rather grandiosely, Post-blogging the Sudeten Crisis: The British Press, August-October 1938 (147 pages, 5.6 Mb). It’s freely available for download under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. It’s very bloggy in
J. W. Dunne. An Experiment With Time. Library of the Serialist International, 2010 [1934]. Third edition. A curiosity, this. Dunne was Britain’s first military aeroplane designer, and would have been its first military aeroplane pilot too, if his designs had flown at the first attempt in 1907-8. Ultimately Dunne had little lasting influence on British
[Cross-posted at Cliopatria.] Albeit for very large values of ‘nobody’. In 2006 I wrote the following, with regards to John Ramsden’s Don’t Mention the War: The British and the Germans since 1890: […] what’s with having the endnotes not in the book itself but on a website? Do they think websites are permanent? Will the
Thanks to Frank Herrera for pointing me to British Fact and German Fiction. It’s a British propaganda film just under fifteen minutes long, made in 1917 by the Thanhouser Company for the Department of Information. Since it has Portuguese Spanish intertitles (luckily with more recent English subtitles), it was obviously shown overseas, though from the
In late August 1940, as the aerial battle over Britain intensified, the Manchester Guardian published a short, light-hearted account of how the war was affecting a cathedral town in the provinces. For example, a dogfight takes place overhead, and shelterers scatter outside to pick up bullet casings for souvenirs; four of the enemy raiders are
On 3 July 2005, I published Airminded’s first post, making it five years old today. I don’t usually mark blogiversaries, but half a decade is not bad in ‘web blog’ terms. This is a good opportunity to thank all of the commenters here, especially the regulars. I’ve been very fortunate in that regard: the comment
This photograph of Australian soldiers was taken during the First World War. It’s not particularly unusual: just a group of mates getting together to record a memento, perhaps after a weekend’s carousing in the fleshpots of Cairo or Paris. Mateship is a important concept in Australian culture. The OED defines it as ‘The condition of
I have written before about the widespread fear of German paratroops in Britain in May and June 1940. Here’s a sterling example from somewhere in London, as described in the Ministry of Information’s Home Intelligence report for 7 June 1940: A false alarm on a housing estate of parachutists occasioned by a flock of pigeons
I’m not sure if this ever happened, but if it did it’s surely more impressive than shooting bison from a train, or even wolves from a helicopter. ACCORDING to a telegram from Port Elizabeth [South Africa] to the “African World,” bombing aeroplanes are to be used to exterminate “rogue” elephants in the Bush. North-China Herald,
