Reprisal bombs on London following ‘Dam Busters’ raid
Operation Chastise which destroyed the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe Dams was launched on the night of the 16th May 1943.
Imperial War Museums Blog
Geoffrey Malins-early adopter?
One of the recurrent pleasures of historical research is proving that something we assume to be up-to-the-minute in fact has a long back-story…
Beyond Camps and Forced Labour, 7-9 January 2015: Day 3
On the third and last day of the conference the themes ranged from visual testimonies, and repatriation and resettlement, to the legacy of the euthanasia programmes and medical experiments, and the uses of the International Tracing Service (ITS) digital collection.
Beyond Camps and Forced Labour, 7-9 January 2015: Day 2
The second day of the conference promised, and gave, a very full programme of 32 papers across nine panels. Papers touched on repatriation and resettlement, children, compensation, early testimonies, remembrance, displaced persons and forced labour.
‘Beyond Camps and Forced Labour: current International Research on Survivors of Nazi Persecution’, 7 – 9 January 2015
Commentary on Day One. The opening plenary session of this conference focused on the world’s newest Jewish Museum - Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, Warsaw.
‘We hope to give the lads a little cheer’: marking Christmas during the First World War
During the First World War, the troops made an effort to mark Christmas, despite the obvious difficulties. Words, objects and images from Imperial War Museums’ collections and elsewhere reveal how the soldiers negotiated some space for family, sharing and festivity.
The RAF in the Cold War 1950-1970
For over forty years the Royal Air Force was in the frontline of Britain’s Cold War defences. Recording the first half of this dynamic period were a small number of specialist aviation photographers from the Air Ministry’s (later Ministry of Defence’s) Photographic Reproduction Branch (PRB) who produced a unique collection of 10,000 colour images. PRB’s chief photographer for much of this period was Mike Chase MM, one of the country’s most experienced aviation photographers.
Remembrance Day 2014: Break of Day in the Trenches
On the first Remembrance Day of the Centenary, Isaac Rosenberg’s acclaimed poem ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ is set alongside images of troops at dawn during the First World War. A moment of quiet and reflection, before the business of the day began, for troops from the fields of France to the deserts of Egypt and Palestine. Isaac Rosenberg, from the impoverished East-End of London and of Lithuanian-Jewish descent, had gone to war as a private soldier primarily to provide his mother with the separation allowance - a payment given to soldiers' families due to the loss of income of them going to war.
A Website from Scratch
Research Officer at the American Air Museum (AAM), Lucy May Maxwell, candidly discusses her experience of working on the team that created the American Air Museum's new interactive archive of images and information. The American Air Museum is located within IWM Duxford.
The new American Air Museum Website launched at the beginning of October when the AAM team opened up our online archive to the public and invited them to ‘help us make these records better’. And so far they have done just that. Each day new people are registering on the site and editing the information on there about the American airmen who served in or flew from Britain during the Second World War.
IWM Short Film Festival 2014
On a sunny Autumn afternoon, I moved through the crowds pouring into IWM London to attend a screening of this year’s Film Festival. Launched in 2001 as a student competition by Toby Haggith, the Founding Director, the film festival is back from a three year absence to mark the reopening of the Museum.