27 January 1923 On 27 January 1923, after an RAF officer was wounded by insurgents in an ambush two miles north of the Iraqi town of Al Diwaniyah, several nearby villages were selected for punitive bombing. These settlements were believed to be inhabited by the Al Hamad, who the British deemed likely suspects in the…
26 January 1852 On 26 January 1852, seven columns of British colonial troops were advancing into the Amatola mountains on the eastern fringes of Cape Colony in what is today South Africa, systematically burning all the crops and settlements belonging to the Xhosa people, and seizing their goats, cattle and horses. Colonial newspapers covered the…
21 January 1920 On the morning of 21 January 1920, five open cockpit R.A.F. biplane bombers attacked the Dervish settlements of Jid Ali and Medishi in the remote interior of British Somaliland. The raid, which was to be the first of several, had been planned to punish the followers of a mystic Mullah, Mohammad Abdille…
10 January 1900 On 10 January 1900, Major General Horatio Herbert Kitchener arrived in Cape Town as the new Chief in Staff of an army of some 200,000 men. The task he had been given was to crush attempts by the descendants of Dutch settlers to form their own Boer homeland in South Africa, independent…
8 January 1925 On 8 January 1925, RAF headquarters in Baghdad ordered No 30 Squadron RAF to bomb and machine gun the grazing sheep flocks of the nomadic Jaff, who inhabited the Kurdish areas of Iraq and Iran. The official pretext given in a confidential Air Ministry report was that it was to punish the…
ONLY APPRENTICES OF ‘PURE EUROPEAN DESCENT’ CAN JOIN THE RAF [ 25 November 1936 ] On 25 November 1936, Sir Philip Sassoon, the Under Secretary of Air, answering a question in the House of Commons, confirmed that RAF apprentices of any rank, whether joining to be pilots, mechanics or any other role, ‘must be of…
BRITISH TROOPS BURN HOMES AND DESTROY RICE STORES IN CEYLONESE VILLAGES [ 7 June 1818 ] On 7 June 1818, a short newspaper article in the Windsor and Eton Gazette carried an opinion piece on the latest reports from the British colony of Ceylon. REPORTS OF THE BURNING OF THE NIGERIAN TOWN OF OGODO FIRST PUBLISHED […
