Jessica Mann
Waiting for the Bombs to Drop
Within ten years of the end of ‘the war to end all wars’ official committees were meeting in secret to prepare for the next one. The assumption was that fighting on battlefields would be replaced by aerial combat, that London would be the enemy bombers’ target, and that it would be defenceless, for, as Prime Minister Baldwin asserted, 'the bomber will always get through’. By the late 1930s the general public shared this apocalyptic pessimism, having seen newsreels showing the full horror of air raids in Manchuria, Abyssinia, and Guernica. Bertrand Russell was not alone in believing that 'London will become one vast raving bedlam, the hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for peace, the city will be a pandemonium’.
As we know, the forecast proved wrong. The air raids of the Second World War were directed at provincial cities as well as London, the Battle of Britain pilots stopped many bombers getting through, and in the nine-month-long 'first' Blitz that started in September 1940, the total number of civilians
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'We must all "shoot down the canard", McManus writes, that the World Cup is going to a nation "that doesn’t know or appreciate the Beautiful Game".'
Barnaby Crowcroft on the rise of Qatar.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/full-of-gas
Delighted to make my debut in @Lit_Review with a review of Philip Short's heavyweight new bio, Putin: His Life and Times
(Yes, it's behind a paywall, but newspapers and magazines need to earn money too...)
https://literaryreview.co.uk/vlad-the-invader
'As we examined more and more data from the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters ... we were amazed to find that there is almost never a case for permanently moving people out of the contaminated area after a big nuclear accident.'
https://literaryreview.co.uk/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying