…d by the firestorms – war is a brutal business and total war is even more brutal and inhuman. One only has to think of what the alternative would have been if the Allies hadn’t won to see why they had to win. The point is not to make extreme claims one way or the other. Bomber command were not the saviours of Britain as is claimed by some nor were they the war criminals claimed by others. But it is legitimate to question whether they could have be…
…n be corrected. It’s a shame that in trying to contribute you seem to have run across difficult editors, but most users aren’t crusaders and there are check-and-balance mechanisms to deal with partisan and tendentious editing. Of course, to access these mechanisms one has to know they exist and how to use them… a constant problem for new and inexperienced users. Many fall into the trap mentioned by Mike Dash of edit-warring (making repeated tit-…
…s reckoned that only the best trained and most disciplined crews could be trusted to fire at will, sloppy crews had to be restricted to controlled broadsides. The general failure of men to follow the leads suggested by empirical evidence is very striking in the Age of Enlightenment. Improvements like the adoption of lemon or lime juice to control scurvy took an amazing amount of time. But in that respect human nature has changed very little, there…
…ected the Hobart mystery aeroplane of July 1938 with the Darwin case in February, nobody saw them as part of the same phenomenon. I’m not sure why this is, but I suspect that a greater familiarity with real aircraft must have had something to do with it. Actual aircraft were very rare in all countries when mystery aircraft waves took place: airships and aeroplanes were imagined far more than seen. This ignorance made it easier to believe that a pl…
…le. A first wave of bombers uses high explosives to block the streets with rubble, making it impossible for fire engines to pass; the second drops incendiaries which set the city ablaze and, crucially, force civilians out of their shelters; and the final wave drops poison gas, which starts killing the now-exposed people on the streets. Now the panic starts and the mob flees, their suffering increased by strafing raiders. The RAF now has its chance…
…aircraft rockets, though much smaller than Fuller’s, eventually bore some fruit, though more for ground attack than air defence.12 The case of the aerial mine programme is fairly well known, which had the support of Frederick Lindemann, Churchill’s confidant and scientific advisor. Aerial mines consisted of a long length of cable with a parachute on one end and a small bomb on the other: bombers would lay these in the path of an oncoming air raid….
…sh bombing of the capital had spread. Here you can see how the Oslo people rush out of town on foot, on bicycles, in trucks and buses. The clip is without audio. From NRK via the excellent RealTimeWWII. (The caption has been run through Google Translate and tweaked by me so it makes more sense, so I can’t vouch for its accuracy.) This one of the many things I didn’t know before. I can’t find much about it on the web in English; Wikipedia says: The…
…rought to a standstill by the vast mudfield, which, like so many things in Russia, is easily the largest in the world’. Germany is however still attacking on the Leningrad front, where the [German] soldiers in some parts are obliged to stand in flooded trenches with water up to their hips, and where during the nights their coats freeze into a sort of ice armour as the soldiers frequently sink into the water breast-high. It is obvious from such des…
…r newspaper (of those available to me) which exults in the news of the destruction of German cities is the Daily Express. Its front page headline for the Rostock raid is HELL-RAID SMASHES ROSTOCK IN 1 HOUR / BALTIC WAR PORT BLITZED and for Lübeck’s postmortem (4) LUBECK — 40% IS NO MORE / 200 acres vanish in biggest blitz of all The article about the destruction of Lübeck, by the Express‘s air correspondent, opens: THIS is what happened to the cit…
…N MUST RENDER ACCOUNT of our LIVES AND ACTIONS TO T.G.A.O.T.U. – WHOSE INSCRUTABLE WAYS AT PRESENT HIDDEN FROM BLIND HUMANITY WILL BE REVEALED IN THE LIGHT! I’m not sure when he wrote this, but another set of cards is evidently from the early 1960s as one intriguingly says ’50 years / FMy [?] – TITANIC – ANZAC / MYSTERY’. A detail of an embroidered silk memento of Australia’s naval contribution to the First World War dated c. 1918, according to th…
