…and late of the Air Ministry; Jonathan Griffin had written a couple of widely read books on similar topics (and also editor of Essential News and, oddly enough, translator of Babar the Elephant) which suggests to me that his book on civilians would have focused on ARP. (Both Spaight and Griffin were now more-or-less sceptical of the knock-out blow paradigm.) Most of the other authors were or had been in the services, mostly in the Army. Henry Thui…
…ice in 1956, so probably then or the following year. (So it could be an early effort from Don Draper.) Evidently there were a lot of complaints from the public about sonic booms from the Dagger, the USAF’s first supersonic interceptor. The text is really something else; it almost circles right through brazen propaganda to become an honest argument that sonic booms really are good for you. Almost: Freedom Has a New Sound! ALL OVER AMERICA these day…
…sh kids and militarist German kids is as silly now as it was then. Apparently the Daily Mail hasn’t learned anything in the interim. (I checked to see if the same person was responsible for both, but the new article is credited to the improbably-named “DAILY MAIL REPORTER”.) The only difference is in the quality of the comments: last time they took the writer to task for his foolishness, now they’re almost spEak You’re bRanes-worthy. No doubt ther…
…efore I had a chance to do more than leaf through it… Ross Ditto. Read a bit of both of them. So it will be interesting to hear your thoughts Brett. Brett Holman Well, I hope to read them soon. There have been some (what look like) really interesting books on aviation and British society published in the last year or two and the campus library doesn’t look like it’s in a hurry to get any of them. So I’ve got some book-buying to do in order to st…
…here are a few memorials and exhibits, but when we think of Anzacs we usually think of slouch hats, not flying helmets. Eight Royal Australian Air Force squadrons served with RAF Bomber Command at various times: 455, 458, 460 (members of which can be seen above arranged in front of — and on top of — one of their Lancasters), 462, 463, 464, 466 and 467. Many other Australians flew with RAF heavy bomber squadrons, just as many non-Australians did wi…
…think) colour illustrations and twelve small line drawings which were clearly specially commissioned and can’t have been produced in too much of a hurry. So figuring a month (at least) for all of that and Raphael can’t have begun work later than the start of November, say. Which makes it just possible that the Sheerness incident was an inspiration for Raphael. This took place on 14 October, but again was not widely reported until about a month lat…
…they can learn lessons. Does this happen much in other areas of history? A bit but not as widely I fear. In actual fact the launch of the new Security and Conflict Hub at Birmingham has come about for the very reason that there was a need to bridge the gap between the two areas as the Birmingham War Studies course was, uniquely in the UK, all historically based. This will change with time. Based on my time as an undergrad my interaction with the ‘…
…ll! Neil and Gavin: Yes, it does sound like a lot — but it works out to only 216 words a day! JDK: Not enough, I think is the answer — including five of the commenters on this post :) Jakob: I think the secret is mutual procrastination. If you can make blogging the thing you do to avoid writing the thesis, and writing the thesis the thing you do to avoid blogging, then you can’t fail. Unless you end up writing neither, of course… Anyway, the o…
…ways) and even the great astrophysicist Arthur Eddington, who perhaps should have known better. This is a facsimile edition published by the Library of the Serialist International, for which this post will shortly be the only Google hit! I think it’s a local print-on-demand production; even though I doubt it has much aviation content I couldn’t very well pass it up when I saw in the university bookshop….
…any price! Erik Lund At its worst, _The Aeroplane_ was a horrible read, only barely enlivened by some of the better ad writers. At its best, and that largely means when Grey’s RAF correspondent, C. M. McAlery was writing, it was a revelation. I’m reaching for the right metaphor, here. She added a third dimension to the two-dimensional scholarly narrative of the interwar service that the veil of the war has left us with. Grey could have done worse…
