…our of duty’. (The mind boggles!) He pleaded not guilty. Also, one undated instance of what looks like drunkenness while in hospital. And I suspect alcohol was also involved in young Warrant Officer Platt’s offence :) In June 1945, while at St Athan, he illicitly entered No. 3 Sergeant’s Mess at 0030 hours; wilfully broke into the refrigerator by breaking the lock; ‘misappropriat[ed] 12oz. Bacon the property of the public’; and then was ‘insolent’…
…ng seen to arrive or to depart, but so far from Germany is Portsmouth, for instance, that one does feel that something else will have to be thought of. The appearances over Liverpool and over towns in Wales might be attributed to German airships by someone who had not seen a map since he left school.4 But Fort goes astray in seeking another explanation for the sightings, namely that there were actually intelligently-controlled objects flying over…
…BBC broadcast calling for volunteers for the LDV, Anthony Eden, the newly installed Secretary of State for War, opened by discussing at length the new danger: I want to speak to you to-night about the form of warfare which the Germans have been employing so extensively against Holland and Belgium — namely, the dropping of troops by parachute behind the main defensive lines.3 He then explained the way in which such parachute raids would be carried…
…at air raids make such foresight inevitable. Planning for war may, in this instance, bring about peace-time playgrounds that philanthropy would never have created.2 Not all visions of the bombproofed cities of the future were so positive. Only two weeks later, the same publication reported on the British delegation’s report to the 1938 International Housing and Townplanning [sic] Congress, held in Mexico City: Here we get in all its nakedness a pi…
…ment of wall). Ignore the black egg thing — that’s part of some modern art installation. This is way cool — it’s basically a Roman shopping centre/office building, which you can walk around in! It’s also where the corn dole (the bread in ‘bread and circuses’) was administered. Here are some of the little shops on the second floor. I’m not sure what exactly was sold in this area, but probably something along the lines of food, oil or wine. Until I…
…pens that many of the airships seen in the same period, in South Wales for instance, were flying to the west in the evenings, low on the horizon, and shining a bright searchlight. But nobody reported seeing Venus and the airship at the same time. Venus is so startlingly bright near maximum elongation that the explanation has to be that it and the airship were one and the same. So far, so CSH. But there definitely other incidents which are less cle…
…e peak body in this country for distributing research grants. In the first instance they are relying on journal impact factors (a measure of how often articles from a journal are cited by other journals), which at first glance would seem to discriminate against historians, for whom monographs are a hugely important means of publishing research. Maybe there’s a way of correcting for that, I don’t know. Anyway, there are four ranks, ranging from C a…
…lashpoints all around the world. And it’s with respect to the geopolitical instability of the time that I end with the following list of all the scenarios played by Joshua in the last few scenes of the film (as far as I can make out anyway): U.S. FIRST STRIKE USSR FIRST STRIKE Pre-emptive nuclear strikes by each superpower against the other’s homeland. NATO / WARSAW PACT FAR EAST STRATEGY Evidently scenarios which begin with friction in Europe and…
…l be transferred in stages to Germany between tomorrow and 10 October. The installations in these areas are to remain intact. An international commission will decide if any other areas should hold plebisicites to decide whether they should also be transferred to Germany, to be held by the end of November. France and Britain guarantee the new Czech borders; Germany and Italy will do so once the Polish and Hungarian claims on Czech territory have be…
…ay. Matthew J. Flynn. First Strike: Preemptive War in Modern History. New York and London: Routledge, 2008. From 1805 to 2003. Only looks at actual instances of preemptive war, so no knock-out blow or nuclear strategy….
