…One of the last great airmen’s memoirs to come out of the Second World War. I’ve become more interested in reading some of these since reading The Flyer and Bomber Boys recently: Richard Hillary, Don Charlwood and so on….
…nd Fusiliers reformed after Dunkirk for motorcycle reconnaissance. Apparently, ‘the side-car is rapidly taking its place [..] as a great asset in mobile warfare’. On page 368 begins another regular feature of the ILN at this time, an analysis of the war by military historian Cyril Falls. He has this to say on the nightly air-raids on London: The bombing is, of course, far less accurate than day bombing, and tends to that indiscriminate destruction…
…hat demand for reprisals is blowing up to explosion point. More enigmatically, Molly Roche, of Welwyn, says: For God’s sake put women in charge of the R.A.F. policy before it is too late. I think she’s suggesting that women would implement reprisals to defend their families. There’s one way put forward which potentially satisfies both the desire for moral action and the need for useful action. In The Times (7), V. A. Cazalet, M.P., writes in to cl…
…ack on the government’s refusal to build deep shelters (10). Davies certainly has a political agenda (not surprisingly, as a former long-serving Liberal MP himself): This policy is another legacy of the Chamberlain regime, which obstinately refused to recognise the implications of air warfare. and If Mr. Lloyd George were Prime Minister to-day the job [of building deep shelters] would be done in a few months […] But he also makes some more objecti…
…the enemy’s prospects of victory. The battles over Britain have ‘so naturally and so extensively absorbed public attention that their proper place’ in the wider airpower picture is easy to misjudge. Nearly every night British bombers have been attacking targets in Germany and along the invasion coast: the consensus of reports is that by so doing they have materially contributed both to the frustration of any project of invading these islands and t…
…not your average farm. It was, however, quite close to the coast, relatively speaking, only 22 miles from the port at Onslow. But it was a desolate 22 miles, with hot and dusty roads which would have been travelled by horse in 1910. Minderoo did apparently have its own telegraph station, however. The other thing to note here is that Timperley seems to have investigated the airship mystery on his own initiative. He may have been concerned about th…
…tly the same time. Swift also talks to surviving RAF veterans, most memorably a lively 85-year-old WAAF driver named Alma, who gives him (and his readers) a sense of the urgency of the life led by these young people on a bomber base, constantly in the presence of death. Their need now for their war to be remembered and acknowledged is almost as touching. There are many gaps in the story he is able to tell of his grandfather, but while he sometimes…
…e ships been enemy vessels and perhaps even if they hadn’t – almost certainly have been under fire. Obviously there was a tendency to stamp secret on anything, just to be on the safe side. Perhaps they were jealous about the quality of their aerial photography. A pedant’s note. Surely the ‘first ever carrier strike’ was carried out by the seaplane carriers Empress, Engadine and Riviera on Christmas Day 1914? The Furious carried out the first aircr…
…y like the B-58 Hustler and the A-5 Vigilante. Brett Holman That’s definitely where Hamilton-Paterson is coming from, but it’s not simply a polemic. On the cancellation of the TSR-2, for example, while has a rather bitter quote from its test pilot, Roland Beamont, he has an even longer quote from another test pilot (albeit one who didn’t fly it), John Farley, criticising it for its ‘lack of wing’, for example. It was very fast but would have had t…
…h a world of “brute force” the United States would have to become permanently a militaristic Power’. Early signs are that this is a popular policy; the isolationists are becoming, well, isolated. The other big news is that London was heavily bombed last night. According to the Guardian, The raid, though not the longest, was one of the most intense the capital has experienced. The “alert” was the earliest for some time, but the “raiders passed” was…
