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Eighty years ago a newspaper cartoon touches a raw nerve

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    Little better illustrates the strains with which Churchill and his government were having to cope under the combined assault of military defeats and discontent with his premiership, than the wild and disproportionate reaction to a cartoon in the left-wing and immensely popular tabloid  Daily Mirror : one of the most famous of the war. Philip Zec's savage image of a survivor from a torpedoed ship clinging to a raft above the line, "The price of petrol has been increased by one penny - Official", hardly deserves to be considered subversive. Zec's claim that it was an attack on waste might have been somewhat disingenuous; the sailor's suffering is the true price of petrol. But Churchill's assertion that it was an attack on profiteering by petrol companies barely stands up to examination. The Labour Home Secretary Herbert Morrison supported Churchill but, perhaps fortunately for them, the government failed to suppress or punish the Mirror . Labour
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Eighty years ago Colonel Lindbergh's mask slips

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    After months of being the most effective voice of isolationism and the leading figure in the America First movement against US involvement in the war, Colonel Lindbergh hero of the first solo flight across the Atlantic, let the mask slip to reveal publicly the hateful sub-text of his appeal. In a speech at Des Moines that was broadcast on the radio he denounced the “war agitators”: “three important groups have been pressing this country toward war: the British, the Jewish, the Roosevelt administration.” Some of his claims could have come from the mouth of Goebbels: the Jews’, “greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.” He claimed to admire both the British and Jewish races, but made it plain that he did not consider Jews to be American. He issued barely veiled threats, “Instead of agitating for war, the Jewish groups in this country should be opposing it in every possible way for they
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Eighty years ago Polish fliers and airborne radar blunt the Luftwaffe assault on Exeter

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  The Luftwaffe launched what proved to be the last sizeable air raid of the Baedeker Blitz on historical towns. Forty or so bombers attacked Exeter killing 136 people and inflicting considerable damage, notably to the cathedral. This would have been worse but for presence of four Beaufighter radar-equipped night-fighters of 307 (Polish) Squadron, City of Lvov, which shot down four of the raiders before they could drop their bombs. It was a daunting loss rate for the attackers (and an impressive success rate for the defenders) and showed that the attrition cost of these chiefly vandalistic operations far outweighed any military value when the Luftwaffe was already hugely over-stretched. It was also an illustration of what radar-equipped fighters could achieve against night bombers and would soon be be inflicting on RAF bombers over Germany. Hitler and Mussolini met at the luxuriously appointed Schloss Klessheim in Austria. The conference consisted mainly of monologues by the Fuehrer, b
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