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Book Review: Railways in Britain: An Historical Geographical Perspective

German aviation away from the 'coat and tails' elite that still characterised British pilots in 1939. For the Nazis it was a perfect training ground, not only for future aviators but for a new breed of warriors for whom the affinities between technology 'and the sterner modes of politics were more closely defined'. It was the Nazis who made the most explicit use of aviation's political dimension. The Luft Hansa Ju 52 which Hitler. used in the 1932 Reichstag elections and the swastika-adorned zeppelin Hindenburg both served as instruments of National Socialist propaganda. Nazi air-mindedness also alerted the German people to the aircraft's military threat; the bombing war to come would require a steadfast and well trained civilian population, and only the authoritarian State where everyone was compelled to pull together would survive such a future aerial holocaust. If Frietzsche's book has a weakness it is the lack of a comparative element. The Germans, after all, were not the only people to treat aviation as a measure of national prowess. If the zeppelin's failure brought forth qualities amongst the crew and Fritzsche notes in a telling phrase that 'virtue gathers where technology fails' this might equally apply to the British, who had their own disastrous experience with airships. The strength of the book is its rich descriptive vein. It is erudite and entertaining, if occasionally repetitive, and enlivened by some memorable quotations, such as the radio dispatch sent in 1931 by the novelist Arthur Koestler, at the time a reporter for Ullstein, from over the North Pole on board the airship Gra] Zeppelin. Peter Lyth London School of Economics