A ‘Baby GDA’: Norwich’s Airspace during the Second World War

Throughout the Second World War, the Luftwaffe attacked Norwich on various occasions. The impact this had on the city was recorded visually on the ‘Norwich Bomb Map’. This cartographic depiction, however, only records a single ‘horizontal’ component of the aerial ‘battlescape’. In reality, the aerial battlefield comprised a combination of Norwich’s air defences and the flightpaths of the Luftwaffe bombers, which existed in three-dimensional space. As other scholars have developed methodologies for reconstructing anti-aircraft ‘fire domes’, this article will combine these concepts with a new approach that reconstructs historic flightpaths to give a three-dimensional overview of Norwich’s ‘Gun Defended Area’. By examining all components of Norwich’s airspace, this article will demonstrate the importance of considering the vertical component of a battlescape

American Military Culture and the Strategic Seduction of Remote Warfare

This essay endeavours to answer the question of why the US National Security establishment puts such ever-expanding faith in remotely piloted drones in a strategic bombing role in fighting twenty-first-century wars. This essay argues, one: the use of strategic air power has been shaped by long-term historical factors surrounding an imbalanced emphasis on the science of warfare in the United States military beginning in the nineteenth century stretching back to the founding of the US Military Academy at West Point. Two, twenty-first-century drone warfare fits into the larger historical context surrounding the development of a uniquely American version of strategic bombing theory during the inter-war period and carried out in World War II. That theory promoted a technological determinism that lives on despite the repeated failure of strategic bombing to live up to expectations largely because the creation of the independent Air Force in 1947 rested upon the perceived achievements of US strategic bombing during the war