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Achtung, Achtung, welcome to We Have Ways of Making You Talk with me, Al-Mari and James Holland

and we are delighted today to be joined by David Edgerton, England and the Air of

Plain Britain's War Machine, books that have made everyone think again, I think David,

was that the intention when you sat down to write these books?

Well, the first one, definitely yes actually, to think again and to tell a different sort

of story of what the relationship between the history of England in that case, the United

Kingdom, more generally, and war was. The airplane came out a long time ago, it's 30 years

old now amazingly. Really? Yeah, it's incredible isn't it? That's incredible, because I remember

the first time I read it and it's a book I have gone back to a couple of times thinking,

goodness me, this is all, when you put it like this, this is all really quite different.

I mean one of the stories you, one of the things you really focus in on is that who aviation

sort of belonged to into war and how it, for instance the people run it, the famous Schneider

trophy which of course in the myth of the Spitfire, the Spitfires, the sea plane that turns

into the fighter plane was of course you point out the dead quite different aircraft,

the K-popla doing quite different things, but the people backing that were fascists basically

worked. Well, yes, Lady Houston who financed the race after the Labour government with

Joyce funding in the great economic crisis was an out and out fascist, he was the owner

of a weekly call, the Saturday review. She had a dog called Benito if I remember correctly.

I just love that. There was a whole new world of the British far right that was very closely

linked up with aviation, Oswald Mosley was a offline call pilot and he very much presented

himself as a man for the modern age and that involved aeroplanes of course. The Daily

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