I am afraid that Anthony J. Cumming is quite wrong in his article in November 2007’s BBC History Magazine when he claims that later in the Battle of Britain new pilots were going into combat with as little as ‘10 hours of solo training.’  A new pilot would not be able to even fly a Spitfire with that little training, let alone fight in one.

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A lot of historians like to do their research in libraries, but I’ve never been a fan of that approach. If it’s books I need to look at, I would far rather do it in the comfort of my own office and furthermore, I like to be able to scribble all over them, underlining key sentences or passages and jotting down notes in the margin.  And there’s another advantage to owning them oneself – I’ve then got them forever, which is useful because I never quite know when I might need them again. Read more…

WAR AND PEACE SHOW
I went to this year’s War & Peace Show at Beltring in Kent with a friend of mine, Peter Caddick-Adams, an academic from the Defence Academy at Shrivenham and also, incidentally, one of the best battlefield tour guides in the business.  He had been some years before, but not since, but for me, it was the first time to experience this fascinating but bizarre event.
For those not in the know, it is like a militaria Glastonbury Festival, with huge fields covered with stalls and stands selling every conceivable item of Second World War equipment, and then, away in a further field, a large camp for re-enactors.  The name is, of course, a misnomer – it’s war, not peace, that brings hundreds of thousands through the gates.  It’s military porn at its most unsubtle. Read more…

It was supposed to be a battlefield tour – eight men and four wartime jeeps – following in the footsteps of the Coldstream Guards as they fought their way through Tuscany and the Apennines in the last year of the war. Suddenly, however, as we trundled clear of the back streets on the southern bank of the River Arno, we realised the traffic had been halted and we were being ushered between a stream of Ferraris, Alfas and Maseratis. Seamlessly, and unintentionally, we had joined the Mille Miglia in Florence instead. Read more…

It was a particularly cold February in Germany.  The air was sharp, and piles of snow and compacted ice edged the road, while a monochrome wash of white fields and dark, skeletal woods shrouded the countryside.  All along the autobahn from Berlin the landscape seemed hardly to change at all, but then, south of Leipzig, as I finally left the motorway behind and wound my way through the Thuringen, a different countryside emerged – one of fairytale woods, old world houses and villages seemingly less touched by the modern world. Read more…