Feature History
Published on 12 Nov 2016Hello and welcome to Feature History, featuring religious conflict, tragic war, and a really nifty collaboration with Jabzy.
3 Minute History – German Peasant’s War
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zeQVAUmyLksInvolvement Chart
June 11, 2018
Feature History – Thirty Years’ War
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June 9, 2018
D-Day – IV: The Atlantic Wall – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 29 Jun 2017The Germans had established a secure barrier against the Allied invasion of France – or so they believed, until the D-Day landings in Normandy caught them by surprise and the Atlantic Wall quickly fell apart.
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June 8, 2018
The Battle of Belleau Wood Begins I THE GREAT WAR Week 202
The Great War
Published on 7 Jun 2018The German Army is still threatening Paris and the situation for the Allies looks dire. Reluctantly, General Pershing agrees to put some of the American troops into action at Belleau Wood and Château-Thierry.
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June 7, 2018
D-Day – II: The Secret War – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 13 Jun 2017The Germans expected the Allies to invade France to re-open the Western Front, but they did not know when or where the invasion would start – thanks largely to the operations of MI5, British intelligence services, who staged an elaborate deception called Operation Bodyguard designed to make the Germans think they would be invading Pas de Calais instead of their real target: Normandy.
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June 6, 2018
D-Day – I: The Great Crusade – Extra History
Extra Credits
Published on 6 Jun 2017D-Day: June 6, 1944, the day when Allied forces stormed the beaches of Normandy to retake France from the Germans. They hoped to take the Germans by surprise, and their decision to brave rough weather to make their landings certainly accomplished that, but despite these small advantages, the American forces at Utah and Omaha Beach had to overcome monumental challenges to establish a successful beachhead.
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June 1, 2018
50 Miles To Paris – Third Battle Of The Aisne I THE GREAT WAR Week 201
The Great War
Published on 31 May 2018The German spring offensive has lost some traction over the past few weeks but the Allies are still under pressure. With Operations Blücher and York, the Germans are getting within 50 miles of Paris again, just as they did in 1914.
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May 31, 2018
Admiral David Beatty: “There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today”
One of the outcomes of the Battle of Jutland was that naval opinion finally crystalized over the notion of battle cruisers: the loss of three British battle cruisers during the battle (and near-loss of a fourth) proved to most that the design was flawed and that this class of ships should never have sailed into battle against real battleships. A recent post at Naval Gazing begs to differ on this judgement:
Explosion that sank HMS Queen Mary at the Battle of Jutland, 31 May 1916
Image via Wikimedia Commons.
David Beatty’s famous remark about the destruction of two of his ships by catastrophic magazine explosions during the Battle of Jutland sums up the traditional attitude towards one of the battle’s most famous aspects. Of the 3,326 men aboard the battlecruisers Indefatigable, Queen Mary, and Invincible, only 17 survived. It’s long been believed that the ships themselves were to blame, as they were built with only relatively light armor. Shells supposedly penetrated to the magazines and set them off. Recent research has revealed that this was not the case, and the ships were lost primarily due to defects in operation, not design.
The basic problem with the conventional theory is that no German shell penetrated deep enough into the surviving ships to have been able to set off a magazine if it had hit one. The magazines take up a minority of a battlecruiser’s deck, so if such hits were common, then at least a few of the surviving ships should have seen shells reach their machinery. Instead, German shells were found to detonate with 16-24′ of their first impact with the structure. At the 20° angle the shells were falling at at the time, this puts them no more than 8 feet below the upper deck upon detonation. The only case where shell fragments reached magazine was a hit on Barham at 1758 when fragments from a 12″ shell penetrated the deck over the 6″ magazine. Despite leaving a 12″x15″ hole in the 1″ deck, the fragments had no effect on the powder stored under it.
So is there a different potential cause, one that happened to a surviving ship? A survey of the damage to Beatty’s battlecrusiers reveals a promising candidate. A hit on a turret, such as the one suffered by HMS Lion, could cause a flash to propagate down into the magazine, which would then deflagrate in precisely the manner seen during the battle. A careful examination of Lion‘s damage shows that she came very close to suffering the same fate.
Turret explosions are hardly unknown aboard warships, either as a result of accident or enemy action, and a great deal of care goes into making sure that they don’t set off the magazines. Powder is stored in metal cans or tanks, and flashproof doors and other interlocks are used to make sure that fire does not reach the magazines. Unfortunately, the British had systematically undermined these protections in the search for rate of fire and ammunition capacity, and their magazine practices during the battle can only be described as suicidal.
After the Battle of Dogger Bank, Beatty decided that the reason he was unable to destroy the German battlecruisers was insufficient rate of fire. Not only would opening fire early and firing quickly lead to early hits, but it would also distract the German gunners. However, the British were not particularly confident in their long-range fire control, and began to stuff extra cordite into the handling rooms and other spaces that had been designed to provide flash protection. This was made much worse by a other changes intended to increase rate of fire. Normally, the cordite cases were kept sealed until just before the charges are sent to the gun, but the crews chose to open many of the cases early, take some cordite out of the cases before battle to make it easy to access, and even stored extra charges completely unprotected. In a final effort to make the turrets as dangerous as possible, the majority of the anti-flash safety doors were removed.
The only ship which strongly resisted this trend was Lion, and the efforts of her Gunner, Alexander Grant, deserve most of the credit. When Grant came aboard, he found the situation described above, and quickly reintroduced the traditional magazine safety regulations with the support of Lion‘s captain, Ernle Chatfield. He managed to train the magazine crews to the point where they could provide cordite to the guns faster than the guns could fire it, while observing full safety procedures.
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The Battle of Jutland Explained
Ministry of Defence
Published on 25 May 201610,000 men. 250 ships. 12 hours. Two sides. The Battle of Jutland – 100 years ago.
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May 29, 2018
Allied Defense During Spring Offensives 1918 I THE GREAT WAR Special
The Great War
Published on 28 May 2018MHV about Stormtrooper tactics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNqmA-if-4g
The French and British defenses during the German Spring Offensive 1918 were put to a real test when the Germans attacked. The carefully built defenses had to be abandoned and new lessons had to be learned.
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QotD: Gandhi on the Holocaust
I am aware that for many not privileged to have visited the former British Raj, the names Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Deccan are simply words. But other names, such as Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, somehow have a harder profile. The term “Jew,” also, has a reasonably hard profile, and I feel all Jews sitting emotionally at the movie Gandhi should be apprised of the advice that the Mahatma offered their coreligionists when faced with the Nazi peril: they should commit collective suicide. If only the Jews of Germany had the good sense to offer their throats willingly to the Nazi butchers’ knives and throw themselves into the sea from cliffs they would arouse world public opinion, Gandhi was convinced, and their moral triumph would be remembered for “ages to come.” If they would only pray for Hitler (as their throats were cut, presumably), they would leave a “rich heritage to mankind.” Although Gandhi had known Jews from his earliest days in South Africa — where his three staunchest white supporters were Jews, every one — he disapproved of how rarely they loved their enemies. And he never repented of his recommendation of collective suicide. Even after the war, when the full extent of the Holocaust was revealed, Gandhi told Louis Fischer, one of his biographers, that the Jews died anyway, didn’t they? They might as well have died significantly.
Richard Grenier, “The Gandhi Nobody Knows”, Commentary, 1983-03-01.
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May 25, 2018
Bombs Away – German Thirst For Caucasian Oil I THE GREAT WAR Week 200
The Great War
Published on 24 May 2018In the 200th week of the war, the total nature of modern warfare is truly showing its face. The warring nations escalate their bombing campaigns and the German troops in the Caucasus are so thirsty for Caucasian oil, that they are considering to double cross their own allies.
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May 20, 2018
Black Army of Ukraine – Togoland in WW1I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The Great War
Published on 19 May 2018Chair of Wisdom Time!
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May 14, 2018
The Austro-Prussian War
Epic History
Published on 28 Dec 2015The Austro-Prussian War or Seven Weeks’ War (also known as the Unification War, Prussian–German War, German Civil War, or Fraternal War and in Germany as German War) was a war fought in 1866 between the German Confederation under the leadership of the Austrian Empire and its German allies on one side and the Kingdom of Prussia with its German allies and Italy on the other, that resulted in Prussian dominance over the German states.
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May 13, 2018
Marie Curie in WW1 – Who Killed The Red Baron? I OUT OF THE TRENCHES
The Great War
Published on 12 May 2018Chair of Wisdom Time!
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May 11, 2018
The Ostende Raid – Peace of Bucharest I THE GREAT WAR Week 198
The Great War
Published on 10 May 2018Even though the first raid on Ostende and the Raid on Zeebrugge were not entirely successful, the Royal Navy is still determined to block access to the German submarine ports in Belgium. And this week they attack Ostende again. Meanwhile, the Germans are planning their next offensives for late May 1918 even though ten percent of the Western Front army has become a casualty in the offensives this year alone.
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