BORN TODAY: Air Marshal Sir Peter Guy Wykeham.
Category Archives: War from the air
8th September 1915 (Wednesday)
BORN TODAY: in London – Frank Pullen, entrepreneur, and Bryan Wynter, landscape painter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Pullen
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/bryan-wynter-2176
War!
War from the Air: A German Zeppelin bombs the City of London, killing 22 and injuring another 87.
7th September 1915 (Tuesday)
BORN TODAY: in Milan – Maria Corti, Italian philologist, literary critic and novelist, “considered one of the leading literary scholars of post-World War II Italy”, despite that her “early academic career coincided with Italian Fascism and was curtailed by laws which prohibited women from holding university or liceo teaching positions”. [Wikipedia]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Corti
War!
War from the Air: A German zeppelin air raid on east and south east London bombs residential areas, killing civilians, including women and children.
http://lewishamwarmemorials.wikidot.com/incident:7-september-1915
http://www.iancastlezeppelin.co.uk/78-sept-1915-1/4587505645
2nd September 1915 (Thursday)
BORN TODAY: in the old clubhouse at Prince’s Golf Course, Sandwich Bay in Kent, England – Percy Belgrave “Laddie” Lucas, CBE, DSO and Bar, DFC. Stowe, Cambridge Golf Blue, Royal Air Force, brother-in-law of Mrs Douglas Bader, Conservative Member of Parliament, Sunday Express columnist and Walker Cup Captain. In short: so frightfully British you couldn’t make it up.
31st August 1915 (Tuesday)
War!
DIED TODAY: Europe’s first ever parachutist (in 1913), Adolphe Celestin Pegoud – shot down by his former student, Unteroffizier Kandulski.
http://www.theaerodrome.com/aces/france/pegoud.php
BORN TODAY: Hauptmann Adolf Vogt of the German Wehrmacht, Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross .
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adolf_Vogt
An update from Cairo: Intelligence officer T.E. Lawrence writes home to his family: he has heard that the weather in Britain has been terrible; he sends a request for a book search for him at Blackwell’s bookshop; and, today being his mother’s birthday, he speculates that “For the next one there will probably be peace”.
http://www.telstudies.org/writings/letters/1915-16/150831_family.shtml
12th August 1915 (Thursday)
BORN TODAY: in South River, New Jersey – Alexander Francis Wojciechowicz, NFL Hall of Famer.
http://www.nndb.com/people/340/000166839/
Urban Life: in Exeter, England, the Exeter and Plymough Gazette reports that wagonner Arthur Brealy has been fined 7 shillings and sixpence for dangerous driving of his horse and waggon laden with hay (not keeping in to the left side), resulting in a collision with the post-office mail motor van.
http://www.exetermemories.co.uk/em/_events/1915-this-week.php
War!
War from the air: Six civilians die and twenty three are injured in a Zeppelin raid on the town of Woodbridge, near England’s east coast.
http://www.ucs.ac.uk/About/Events/Event-details-page.aspx?id=23807
9th August 1915 (Monday)
BORN TODAY: in Manchester – Michael Young (Baron Young of Dartington), English socialist, Labour Party propagandist, East-End sociologist, “social visionary and innovator”, consumer champion and co-founder of the University of the Third Age, and of “Grandparents Plus”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Young,_Baron_Young_of_Dartington
War!
War from the air: Sixteen civilians die in a zeppelin raid on Goole in East Yorkshire when the vessel’s Kapitänleutnant mistakenly believes he is targetting the city of Kingston upon Hull.
http://www.iancastlezeppelin.co.uk/910-august-1915-1/4586640763
5th August 1915 (Thursday)
BORN TODAY: in Mannheim, Germany – Major Helmut Paul Emil Wick, Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves, Luftwaffe Ace. At time of his death he was credited with bringing down 56 enemy aircraft in aerial combat, making him the leading German fighter pilot at the time. Shot down and killed in the vicinity of the Isle of Wight on 28th November 1940, aged 25, leaving a widow, a son aged 1, and a daughter not yet born.
1st August 1915 (Sunday)
BORN TODAY: in the skies over the Western Front – The Fokker Scourge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fokker_Scourge
Ireland: At the funeral of exiled Irish Fenian Jeremiah O’Donovan Rosse, Pádraig Pearse gives “one of the most famous speeches of the Irish independence movement stirring his audience to a call to arms” [Wikipedia].
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeremiah_O%27Donovan_Rossa
Some, at least, in Ireland, do not forget the call to arms:
https://www.facebook.com/therising2016
War!
In the Near East: the new (and incomplete) Germany to Baghdad railway begins transporting Armenians out of Anatolia and into Aleppo, now a (still troubled) city in Syria. Within 3 weeks, 20,000 are deported, and tales of abuse and atrocities are multiplying. [a report quoted in: “The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire, 1915-1916”, by Bryce et al]
31st July 1915 (Saturday)
BORN TODAY: in Hawkes Bay, New Zealand – RNZAF pilot Tame Hawaikirangi Thomas Waerea, who died in Europe in 1943, aged 28, and was buried in the Hanover War Cemetery, Niedersachsen, Germany, a long way from home, but is remembered at the Auckland Museum online cenotaph.
http://www.aucklandmuseum.com/war-memorial/online-cenotaph/record/C23803
War!
War at Sea: the British steamer “Iberian” is shelled, torpedoed and sunk off the coast of Ireland by the German submarine U28. The U-boat’s skipper, Georg-Günther Freiherr (Baron) von Forstner, and five of his crewmen see a sea-monster, “a gigantic sea-animal, writhing and struggling wildly… [which shoots] out of the water to a height of 60 to 100 feet.”
All six of the sub-mariners then forget to report this strange incident until 18 years have elapsed, in 1933.
onehundredyearsagotoday 