Imperial War Museums Blog

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.

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.

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.

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.

11.30pm HE bomb exploded Walcot Square. Serious damage to property. Known casualties. 1 killed." Civil Defence incident report from Post 9, 195 Kennington Road, 17 September 1940.

"It is difficult enough to justify your action to higher authority and it is made no easier when you fail to obey orders issued for the comfort of your troops and in addition fail to ack[nowledge] or reply to my messages." Major General W D A Lentaigne to Brigadier J M Calvert DSO, 9 July 1944.

Collaborative Doctoral Award student, Rebecca Coll, writes about the IWM's historic commitment to progressive methods of research and collecting.

When IWM London’s First World War Galleries re-opened on 19th July 2014, the queues extended past the big naval guns and out of the gates to the north of the building. On the first day, over 8,000 people came to visit the museum and 60,134 people had come to visit within the first week. Timed entry was also allocated to visitors to prevent overcrowding within the new exhibition. Photographs from 40 years ago show almost identical queues. However, these were for the Radio Times Colditz Escape Exhibition.

IWM's Parveen Sodhi investigates the reports of the Indian Soldiers' Fund to find a new point of access for the history of Indian troops during the First World War.