…backing given to the submarine story. I don’t know whether any of that is true, I’m sure Tom Frame or somebody must have looked at the wartime rumours. On the signals sent or not sent, a reader sent me this interesting link via email: http://www.dsd.gov.au/sigint/hmas_sydney.html (And yes, she was pleasing to the eye, wasn’t she?) Ric: Thanks for your comment and your corrections! (That’s what happens when I stray outside my usual sphere of incomp…
…undred years since voting began in the 1906 general election, in which the ruling Conservatives lost in a landslide to the Liberal Party. The new government, with Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman as PM (followed in 1908 by H.A. Asquith), had 400 seats; the Conservatives and Liberal Unionists managed only 156 between them.As a percentage of the national vote, however, it was much closer: 49% to 44%. This ushered in a most interesting time in British hi…
…between official and public knowledge can be hard for historians to reconstruct. Do you remember any rumours about other V-weapons, besides the V-1 and V-2? I wrote about some of these (non-existant) V-weapons recently, here, so I’d be interested to know if they were something people talked about. Herbert Woodthorpe No Brett, I don’t recall any discussion of other possible secret weapons. The V1’s pulse jet engine made an incredible throbbing nois…
…nnons during the BoB were useless. Much of the time, the RAF controllers struggled to get the RAF fighters into a good attacking position too. True, later they got better at it, but for most of the battle, the attacks would veer all over to confuse the defenders as to the true target. This regularly resulted in the RAF a/c attacking on the climb or even into sun too. This, and the small numbers of RAF machines in any one attack put the Jerries at…
…cause he was defending the South West immediately around London, bore the brunt of the attacks directed mainly at his airfields, argued that the concept was basically flawed. In essence that the Big Wing spent too much time tooling around forming up. Remember that early Spits and Hurricanes were basically designed as intercept fighters with very short fuel range. Get up. Have a squirt. Land and refuel. So basically it didn’t have the tactical flex…
…the War Office even sent one of its precious few aeroplanes to conduct a fruitless aerial search of the Lake District for the airship rumoured to be based there, and non-existent airships continued to be spotted into 1916. The second ‘curiouser’ is because Britain was not the only country where mystery airships were seen. Other times and places where something comparable (multiple and often widespread sightings of non-existent aircraft) occurred…
…l busy fiddling about with timetables and commandeering trains even as the Russians rolled through Prussia. You could say a lot about Harris, but this comparison is despicable. Chris Williams Bloody hell – this half puts me in mind to write to T&C and say “Don’t bother reviewing that article I just sent you – can I have it back, please?” If you’re going to argue that area bombing is the moral equivalent of the Holocaust (which it isn’t, crime thou…
…ught tomes like ‘Stalingrad’, ‘Berlin’, and ‘Dresden’ would have been such runaway best-sellers? There’s definitely a market. Brett Holman Yeah, I think I’ll be concentrating on actually writing the thesis first :) Not having published anything yet, I might just be a flake for all anyone knows … I don’t see it as bestseller material, anyway; as it stands, it would take a lot of work to make it accessible to a popular audience. But perhaps more i…
…nal instinct and revert to the disembodied voice. Interestingly, the votes run the other way (10 to 4 in favour of ‘I’), though I admit the survey questions are not the most rigourously designed! Jack: Getting a paper out now is like money in the bank, I reckon. You can always catch up on the thesis-writing later! I don’t think I’d be much use in a course on performance and history, but I used to hang around with student theatre types, so I guess…
…ckers (hence “Vickers-Bygrave”). The Air Ministry Laboratory developed instrumentation and bombsights. Bygrave was killed in a riding accident. He was at the time of his death Head of the Instrumentation Physics Dept at the RAE. The AML Teacher was listed as one of 16 “synthetic training” devices in use in the RAF in 1940 (as recorded in the Minutes of the RAF Synthetic Training Committee). The origins of the Link Celestial Navigation Trainer were…
