Quotulatiousness

January 24, 2019

The Sinking of HMS Glorious: An Avoidable Tragedy?

Filed under: Britain, Germany, History, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Historigraph
Published on 27 Aug 2018

The Sinking of HMS Glorious, on June 8 1940, was one of the worst British naval disasters of the Second World War. Over 1500 losing their lives as two German battleships sunk three British ships. In this video, we will recount the events and the heroism of Glorious’ two escorts (HMS Ardent and HMS Acasta), before looking at the post-war controversy over whether the disaster was ‘covered up’ by the Admiralty.

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Sources:

John Winton, Carrier Glorious (Cassell: 1986)

Stephen Roskill, Churchill and the Admirals (Pen and Sword, 1977)

Corelli Barnett, Engage The Enemy More Closely: The Royal Navy in the Second World War (Penguin, 1991)

Henrik Lunde, Hitler’s Preemptive War: The Battle for Norway, 1940. (kindle edition)

Earl Ziemke, German Northern Theater of Operations 1940-1945. (kindle edition)

Record of the Hansard Debate from 1999: https://api.parliament.uk/historic-ha…

Full Casualty List for HMS Glorious can be found here: http://www.naval-history.net/xDKCas19…

From the comments:

1. Unlike the Battle of the River Plate from my last video, we do not know the precise movements of the ships, particularly the British ones, during the battle. The movements in this video should thus be taken as purely illustrative.

2. As you might be able to tell there is still a pretty intense debate over the reasons for Glorious’ sinking, particularly over what knowledge the officers on board Devonshire had or didn’t have about Glorious’ trouble. In particular there is testimony from one midshipman that the ship’s captain and Admiral Cunningham (who was on board) knew what was happening and took no action. It is only his word, so many of the historians I have read do not seem to have bought much into it, but it appears in this documentary from 1997: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yAahSUiXt4

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