Britain's Airship Program: Royal Navy vs. the Royal Air Force after World War I 1919-1930

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alex Spencer
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Air Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Royal Air Force

‘Grey Dawn’ in the British Pacific: Race, Security and Colonial Sovereignty on the Eve of World War I

2016 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 32-54 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Tumblin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War I ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Building Projects ◽  
Cooperative Security ◽  
Strategic Defense ◽  
Racial Discourses ◽  
The Way

This article examines the way a group of colonies on the far reaches of British power – Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and India, dealt with the imperatives of their own security in the early twentieth century. Each of these evolved into Dominion status and then to sovereign statehood (India lastly and most thoroughly) over the first half of the twentieth century, and their sovereignties evolved amidst a number of related and often countervailing problems of self-defence and cooperative security strategy within the British Empire. The article examines how security – the abstracted political goods of military force – worked alongside race in the greater Pacific to build colonial sovereignties before the First World War. Its first section examines the internal-domestic dimension of sovereignty and its need to secure territory through the issue of imperial naval subsidies. A number of colonies paid subsidies to Britain to support the Royal Navy and thus to contribute in financial terms to their strategic defense. These subsidies provoked increasing opposition after the turn of the twentieth century, and the article exlpores why colonial actors of various types thought financial subsidies threatened their sovereignties in important ways. The second section of the article examines the external-diplomatic dimension of sovereignty by looking at the way colonial actors responded to the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. I argue that colonial actors deployed security as a logic that allowed them to pursue their own bids for sovereignty and autonomy, leverage racial discourses that shaped state-building projects, and ultimately to attempt to nudge the focus of the British Empire's grand strategy away from Europe and into Asia.

When the Bombs Fell

Strange Bird ◽  
2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michele K. Troy
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Air Force ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
World War ◽  
Royal Air Force ◽  
Joint Chiefs Of Staff ◽  
Winston Churchill ◽  
Strategic Bombing ◽  
German Capital ◽  
Franklin Roosevelt

This chapter examines how the Allied bombings of Germany affected the lives of people in the Albatross-Tauchnitz fold, particularly Max Christian Wegner and Walter Gey. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of Adolf Hitler's reign, the Nazi elite gathered with thousands of party loyalists on January 30, 1943 for an evening of rousing speeches at the Berlin Sportpalast. The Allies commemorated Hitler's tenth anniversary by sending Royal Air Force Mosquito light bombers on a daylight air raid on the German capital. For Prime Minister Winston Churchill, President Franklin Roosevelt, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, this attack marked the beginning of the “strategic bombing” campaign they had agreed upon at the Casablanca Conference days earlier. This chapter considers Wegner's arrest and imprisonment at the height of World War II as well as Gey's efforts to make the best of the Albatross Press's ever-shrinking terrain.

War and Vanity

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lars Öhrström
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
World War ◽  
Swedish West Coast ◽  
The North ◽  
Bearing Factory ◽  
North Eastern ◽  
Disastrous Effect ◽  
Nail Varnish

In my childhood, visits to Gothenburg would always include a long (it seemed at the time) tram ride with my mother, from the centre of town to the north-eastern districts, past the old, red brick, ball-bearing factory of SKF to the vast Kviberg Cemetery to put flowers on my grandmother’s grave. I never ventured on any longer excursions among the neat flower-decorated graves on these well-kept lawns, but had I done so I would perhaps have discovered a different, more uniform, part of the cemetery that relatives seldom visited: the war graves. War graves form a somewhat unexpected discovery in the suburbs of a country that was neutral in both world wars, but there it is. Among the mostly German, American, and British graves we find, in the Commonwealth section, that of Arthur Cownden who, at 17, was probably the youngest to be buried there. He was boy telegraphist on a Royal Navy destroyer, and on the morning of 1 June 1916 his body was washed ashore close to the small fishing village of Fiskebäckskil on the Swedish west coast. His ship, the HMS Shark , was one of many British losses during the preceding day’s Battle of Jutland—the only clash between the main forces of the Royal Navy and the German Hochseeflotte during World War I. By all accounts this was a terrible battle, with loss of lives in the thousands on both sides, and one of the largest naval battles ever fought. The Battle of Jutland remains somewhat controversial for two reasons: the enduring argument between the two British commanders, David Beatty and his superior John Jellicoe, and the purported role of the Royal Navy’s smokeless gunpowder cordite in the sinking of a number of its own ships. We have no business with naval tactics, but the cordite question is related to one of the lesser-known supply problems of World War I, that of acetone. You may be familiar with this molecule as nail varnish remover, but perhaps you also know the disastrous effect it has on the glossy surface of cars.

4. The Second World War

2020 ◽  
pp. 45-60
Author(s):  
Frank Ledwidge
Keyword(s):  
Air Force ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Air Power ◽  
Royal Air Force ◽  
Us Army ◽  
The Us ◽  
Political Effect ◽  
Second World

‘The Second World War: air operations in the West’ considers the air capabilities of the main actors of the Second World War including the Polish air force, the German Luftwaffe, the Soviet air force, Britain’s Royal Air Force, and the US Army Air Corps. It discusses the strategies employed by the different forces during the various stages of the war, including securing the control of the air during the Battle of Britain in 1940, which demonstrated that a defensive air campaign could have strategic and political effect. The improving technology throughout the war is discussed along with role of air power at sea, and the results and controversy of the bombing war in Europe.

Introduction

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
High Altitude ◽  
Air Force ◽  
World War ◽  
Air Power ◽  
Us Army ◽  
Strategic Bombing ◽  
The Us

This introduction describes the strategic bombing mission of the US Army Air Forces’ Eighth Air Force against the Fock-Wulfe plant at Bremen, Germany, on April 17, 1943, assessing the use of high-altitude daylight precision bombing,. The introduction then reviews American strategic bombing theory from its origins in World War I to the thinking of three great interwar air power theorists―the Italian Giulio Douhet, the Briton Hugh Trenchard, and the American Billy Mitchell―to the founding of the Air Corps Tactical School (ACTS), the development of the Norden bombsight and B-17 bomber, and the genesis of HADPB theory at the Air Corps Tactical School.

White, Patrick (1912–1990)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorian Stuber
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Air Force ◽  
Nobel Prize ◽  
Boarding School ◽  
World War ◽  
Royal Air Force ◽  
Army Officer ◽  
Patrick White

Born in London to parents from established Australian families, Patrick White became one of Australia’s most influential writers, his career culminating in his receipt of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. After a sickly Australian childhood, he was sent to England in his early teens to attend boarding school, where he felt ostracized due to his colonial upbringing and his nascent homosexuality. After two years as a stockman on a ranch in Australia, White returned to England to attend Cambridge from 1932 to 1935, where he published his first works. He served in the Royal Air Force during World War II. While stationed in Egypt, White met a Greek army officer named Manoly Lascaris, who became his lifelong companion.

scholarly journals Harold Garnet Callan. 5 March 1917 — 3 November 1993 Elected FRS 1963

2003 ◽  
Vol 49 ◽  
pp. 107-118
Author(s):  
Joseph G. Gall
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Air Force ◽  
Personal Information ◽  
World War ◽  
Royal Air Force ◽  
Professional Career ◽  
The Usa ◽  
Chief Interest ◽  
The University ◽  
Insight Into

With the death of Harold Garnet (‘Mick’) Callan on 3 November 1993, the community of cell biologists lost one of the twentieth century's most profound and colourful students of chromosomes. During his 50-year scientific career the study of chromosomes and genes went from purely descriptive and morphological to deeply analytical and molecular. Steeped by training in the earlier tradition, Callan nevertheless contributed enormously to this revolution with his meticulous studies on the giant chromosomes of amphibians, all the while maintaining that he was a ‘mere cytologist’ on whom much of the molecular analysis was lost. Mick Callan and I were professional colleagues and close personal friends whose careers intersected at many points. We visited and worked in each other's laboratories, we published together, we generated a voluminous correspondence (much of it in the days when letters were handwritten), and our families enjoyed many good times together in Scotland and the USA. My most difficult task in writing this biography has been to extract from the vast amount of public and personal information in my possession those parts of Mick Callan's life and work that will be of chief interest to a broader audience. I have been helped in this by a 30 000-word autobiography written by him near the end of his life, covering the period from his birth in 1917 to the end of World War II in 1945. This account provides considerable insight into the factors that shaped his later professional career and is an engrossing account of the life of a boy in prewar England and a young man at Oxford and in the Royal Air Force (RAF) during the worst days of the war. Callan's autobiography has been deposited in the University library, St Andrews, Scotland.

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