The author's personal journal takes us into the action of the air battles preceding the fall of France, recounting both the unnerving lull right before the violence--and the fatigue of the Blitzkrieg, with its non-stop combat.

    Stansbury Haydon's well-researched book remains the definitive work on the creation of the United States Balloon Corps during the Civil War. Haydon explores his topic down to the last detail, from the amount of fabric used to manufacture every balloon that saw federal service, to the formula for varnish used to seal the envelopes. He explains the technical operation of mobile gas generators that T. S. C. Lowe designed to inflate balloons in the field and provides the precise cost of each rubber hose used in their construction. Military Ballooning during the Early Civil War raises large and important questions about technological change within a military bureaucracy. The book begins with an introduction to the history of military ballooning since the wars of the French Revolution, with special attention to discussions of military aeronautics in the United States since the time of the Seminole Wars. Haydon also demonstrates the complicated maneuvering among American balloonists who sought to aid the army before the Battle of Bull Run and shows how the attitudes of various officers toward the balloons changed during the ensuing months of 1861-62.First published in 1941 as Aeronautics in the Union and Confederate Armies, this volume received compliments in the Times Literary Supplement for its exploration of "the attitude of soldiers toward innovations." This edition includes a new foreword by Tom D. Crouch, senior curator of the Aeronautics Division at the National Air and Space Museum.

    Yet, within a few months Africa had become a key theatre of war. In order to keep any hold on the Mediterranean, Britain needed to protect Egypt and Malta. Naturally, it was also preoccupied with the defence of its own shores. Mussolini seized the opportunity to annexe swathes of empire and in September, the Italian Tenth Army advanced into Egypt. Throughout the first shock retreat and then the counter-attack of Operation Compass, Moorehead was in the thick of the action. Flying in the few aircraft supporting the army, going out on daring night patrols and raids, he experienced the reality of desert war conducted on what he later called a ‘shoestring’ – 36,000 Allied soldiers attempting to hold out against 200,000 Italians. From Cairo, Moorehead reported on the airborne invasion of Crete and the ‘lowpoint for the fortunes of the British in the Middle East’. By the end of the summer, with Axis troops exhausted for the moment, Field-Marshal Wavell, with typical military understatement, summed up the year as ‘some setbacks, some successes’.

    The Prime Minister‘s vivid pen recreates a tragic era.

    350 Pages.