The popular image of the Great Plains Native America is unarmored, of course, but that image fundamentally formed in the late 19th century, when – after centuries of the development of gunpowder weapons – everyone was unarmored. A longer view shows that Plains Native Americans were perfectly capable of both developing or adopting defensive measures which worked. And to get a full sense of that, we need to outline the major phases of the changing warfare on the Great Plains.
F.R. Secoy (op. cit.) essentially breaks warfare into four phases, which happen at different times in different places, based on if they have horses, guns, both or neither. Because horses entered the Great Plains from the South (via the Spanish) but firearms entered the region from the North (via the British and the French, the Spanish having prohibited gun-sales to Native Americans) and spread out from there, for a brief time many of these systems were active on the Plains at once, as both guns and horses diffused through the region.
In the pre-horse, pre-gun phase (described by McGinnis as well, op. cit., 8-9), battles consisted of long-range missile exchanges between warriors who stood behind large shields which protected their whole bodies. Native American warriors in this system also wore armor, heavy leather coats, laminated in multiple layers using thick hide with glue that was sometimes mixed with sand or gravel (one more example of how “leather armor” is almost always hardened leather armor, not modern clothing-leather). Some of this armor may have been effectively quilted leather as well. Clearly, there was plenty of concern about survivability here.
Both guns and horses were apt to disrupt this system. Horses allowed attackers to rapidly close the distance between the two opposing lines of shield-protected foot-missile-warriors, causing the shield-lines to drop away (though smaller shields, used on horseback to ward off arrows and blows were still used) and for both sides to seek instead the mobility of mounted fighting. That was not the end for armor though, because contact with a supply of horses meant contact with the Spanish, and the Apache at least swiftly adopted some of the Spanish methods of making leather “buff coats” into their own armor tradition and copied the shape and pattern of the buff coat itself (while often still making the material using their own tradition). As Secoy notes (op. cit., 18-20), our sources are quite clear that these forms of armor (both original and Spanish-influenced Native armors) were quite effective at resisting the archery fire that dominated both the pre-horse, pre-gun system and the post-horse, pre-gun system.
Meanwhile on the Northern Plains, while the horse had not yet arrived, firearms had, and these had different effects. Firearms spelled the end of the armor once they became common enough, since there was no protection which could resist bullets; some shield use survived, since arrows remained fairly common as well. But this didn’t lead to suicidal warfare. Instead – as had happened on the East Coast as well, Native Americans adapted their warfare to the increased lethality of firearms (on this, note Lee, op. cit. above) by mostly avoiding pitched battles as they became too lethal (which, by the by, the relatively low lethality of pitched battles pre-gunpowder is often taken to mean that Native North American warfare in general was low-lethality; this is wrong. As with most forms of non-state warfare, most of the killing happened in surprise raids and ambushes, which could be extremely lethal and were still quite common).
Once the horse and the firearm were both in wide use in an area, warfare shifted again. War parties became smaller, faster moving and more reliant on surprise (essentially an extension of the raiding-focus of the pre-horse, post-gun system to the high mobility horses supplied). Infantry battle dropped away entirely because it was too lethal and resulted in casualties that low-population density nomads could not sustain (the contrast with the much higher population-density agrarian United States, which was self-immolating in massively costly massed-infantry engagements during the American Civil War, 1861-1865, at exactly this time is striking). These are fairly big, noticeable changes in warfare patterns!
In short, the tactics used in all four of these systems were conditions by casualty aversion, which makes a lot of sense in the context of a low-population density society which simply cannot afford massive losses.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: That Dothraki Horde, Part IV: Screamers and Howlers”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-01-08.
June 30, 2023
QotD: Changing patterns of combat on the Great Plains
June 29, 2023
The End of Nazi Intelligence in 1944 – WW2 Documentary Special
World War Two
Published 27 Jun 2023After years of undermining the Nazi regime and aiding the resistance, Abwehr Chief Wilhelm Canaris finally loses his battle with Heinrich Himmler and the SS. The Abwehr Trojan Horse is no more, and German intelligence is at death’s door at the most crucial moment.
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Miller’s Musket Conversion: The Trapdoor We Have At Home
Forgotten Weapons
Published 15 Mar 2023In 1865, brothers William and George Miller of Meriden CT patented a system to convert percussion muskets to use the new rimfire ammunition that was becoming available. Between 1865 and 1867, the local Meridan Manufacturing Company converted 2,000 surplus US Model 1861 muskets (mostly made by Parker & Snow) to the Miller system, using .58 rimfire ammunition. The US military tested one of these conversions in 1867, and found it to suffer from some gas leakage and about a 3% misfire rate. There was no further Army interest, although the New York and Maryland state militias did both purchase small numbers of the guns.
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June 28, 2023
How to Fund a War: Lend Lease, Billion Dollar Gift, and Aid to Britain
OTD Military History
Published 27 Jun 2023Programs like Lend Lease, Mutual Aid, and the Billion Dollar Gift were support from Canada and the United States that helped Britain with war supplies and material in the darkest days of World War 2.
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June 27, 2023
“No one seems to understand what the hell just happened in Russia”
Discussing anything to do with the Russo-Ukraine war is difficult enough due to the signal-to-noise ratio in the information we get from both sides and (theoretically) disinterested observers. Trying to read the tea leaves in the events over the weekend was just an utter waste of time, despite the potentially earth-shaking possibilities being thrown up. The weekend dispatch from The Line doesn’t pretend to have any deep analysis to offer, which I think is by far the wisest approach:
“Sir Humphrey Appleby” tweeted this, saying it was “the intelligence update slide every DI analyst secretly dreams of producing …
As we write this, roughly a day has passed since the sudden end of what briefly looked like a massive event with the potential to reshape global politics for a generation … before it fizzled. The rebellion of Russia’s Wagner mercenary group and its bolt toward Moscow was a stunning story, until it wasn’t. And that itself is a stunning story. Yevgeny Prigozhin, former chef and now Wagner leader, suddenly called off his mutiny, and it just … ended.
Really?
When the mutiny began on Friday, and especially when Wagner seized the southern city of Rostov, home to a major Russian military headquarters overseeing the invasion of Ukraine as well as a million other people, we were surprised, but the more we thought about it, we weren’t particularly shocked. There had been obvious signs of an imminent rupture of some kind in recent months; Line editor Gurney had wondered on Twitter how long it could last before something snapped. That was about three hours before the entire country seemed to snap and Prigozhin marched into Rostov and began moving north.
Events proceeded at a fairly frantic pace after that, with Wagner troops advancing almost all the way to Moscow while Russian security forces fortified the city and tore up roads along the route. It wasn’t clear to us that Wagner had enough men to actually take the city and potentially capture key members of the government. But it wasn’t clear that he didn’t: there are two sides of that equation — the troops Prigozhin had and the troops Putin could count on to oppose Wagner. It was the latter group that captured our interest.
Wagner encountered some resistance along the way, but not much. Most of Russia’s army is deployed in Ukraine, of course, and much of what’s left is now of famously poor quality and morale. But even those military and security forces that were able to block Wagner’s advance didn’t seem that interested in the job. There are reports that some units went over to Prigozhin’s side, but it seems that most of them just did … nothing in particular. And waited to see what happened. For a few hours, we wondered if Prigozhin’s small force would be just large enough in the face of a Russian military that seemed to have no appetite for battle on its own soil.
We can’t pretend to explain the bizarre conclusion to this chaotic day and a half, with an apparent deal brokered by Belarus seeing Wagner’s advance on Moscow called off, a broad amnesty granted to all participants and Prigozhin apparently set to continue to oversee Wagner’s global operations from Belarus in some kind of exile. This is all just wildly unrealistic. Prigozhin cannot be the last person around to realize that he’s put a target on his back and that he’ll soon experience some kind of fatal medical emergency or tragic tumble out of an open window. The moment his mercenaries took Rostov, he had only one path forward: all the way to the Kremlin. What the hell he’s thinking is frankly beyond our ability to guess, and we have fairly vivid imaginations. It’s baffling.
Nor will we try to guess what this will mean for Russia. In a situation like this, your Line editors would normally simply confess that we don’t have the deep knowledge of Russian domestic politics to turn ourselves into credible instant-experts on this. We’d seek out someone with that knowledge. We could interview them, solicit a column from them, or even — as we’ve done in the past — allow someone with deep expertise but who isn’t permitted to speak on the record in public to provide a blurb for one of these dispatches, to run under our shared byline. But in this case, we had to reject all those options, because at least for right now, all the experts seem as baffled as we are. No one seems to understand what the hell just happened in Russia.
We can say with at least reasonable confidence that if you happen to be named Vladimir Putin, it isn’t good. When Prigozhin announced that he was ending his mutiny and began withdrawing his forces from Rostov, the locals cheered them like some kind of conquering heroes. That’s gotta be on Putin’s mind. Also on his mind: the apparent, ahem, reluctance of much of his military and domestic security force to rally to his side during the crisis. This has wounded Putin. Time will tell how badly. Time will also tell how many other people in Russia today have carefully watched recent events, have adjusted their understanding of the facts on the ground there, and are now pondering a variety of intriguing options accordingly.
And the last thing time will tell is what Putin feels he must now do to assert his authority, such as it is. We must recall that whatever Putin’s domestic troubles, he has problems on the battlefield, too. While we haven’t yet seen major breakthroughs by Ukrainian forces, they are not yet fully committed, and their counteroffensive does seem to be making gradual progress in multiple sectors. Events of recent days can only hurt Russia’s combat performance and morale.
We wish we could offer you all a more firm and decisive statement to wrap all this up. But the best we can honestly promise you is that we’ll keep pondering this, trying to figure out what the hell happened, and we’ll certainly be watching this. It’s been a strange war. And we suspect it might get stranger still before it finally ends.
The most recent Defence Intelligence update map from the British Ministry of Defence shows what is thought to be a reasonably accurate representation of the battlefront in eastern Ukraine:
Uncancelled History with Douglas Murray | EP. 05 Winston Churchill
Nebulous Media
Published 20 Dec 2022Andrew Roberts joins Douglas Murray on this episode to discuss Winston Churchill. The two discuss the soldier, writer and prime minister in detail, leaving nothing off limits. Should the British Bulldog stay cancelled?
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June 26, 2023
DShK-38: The Soviet Monster .50 Cal HMG
Forgotten Weapons
Published 10 Mar 2023In 1925 the USSR began a program to develop a heavy machine gun for antiaircraft use. After some initial experimentation with a converted Dreyse machine gun, they brought in Degtyarev to scale up his recently-adopted light machine gun to the task. Degtyarev’s first design was ready in 1930, and underwent testing until 1933. It was designated the DK, and used a 30-round drum magazine. This contributed to an unacceptably low rate of fire (~360 rpm), and the feed system was replaced by an ingenious development of Georgiy Shpagin to use belts instead.
Fitted with the Shpagin feed system, the DShK finished field testing in 1939 and was adopted as the model 1938. Production was slow, and the guns were not used on anything like the scale of American M2 use during World War Two. A total of about 9000 were in use at the end of the war, although the subsequent update to the DshKM (aka DShK 38/46) pattern would see it fitted to many armored vehicles, and total production eventually topped one million.
This example is a very early production 1939 example, most likely a Finnish capture piece from the Winter War or Continuation War.
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June 25, 2023
The Greatest Pincer Movement in Military History – WW2 – Week 252 – June 24, 1944
World War Two
Published 24 Jun 2023The Red Army surges forward in Operation Bagration, a mighty new offensive to destroy German Army Group Centre. Fighting continues in Normandy, Italy, and Finland. The United States Navy tears the heart out of the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Philippine Sea even as the Imperial Japanese Army has success in China. The British and Indian armies lift the siege of Kohima.
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June 24, 2023
The Most Reliable and Versatile Sub-orbital Rockets Ever Made; the Black Brant Sounding Rockets
Polyus
Published 31 Aug 2018The Black Brant series of sounding rockets was a great success and a proud contribution to the global race for space. While not as glamorous as an orbital rocket, the Black Brants helped scientists from around the globe research and better understand the Aurora and the Earth’s ionosphere.
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June 23, 2023
The Combat Engineers of D-Day – WW2 Special Documentary
World War Two
Published 22 Jun 2023How do you blast through the obstacles and minefields on the beaches of Normandy? How do you get thousands of tonnes of tanks, guns, and men into the fight? And what about reopening the shattered French ports? You need men who are as skilled in construction as they are destruction. You need the engineers.
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FG-42: Perhaps the Most Impressive WW2 Shoulder Rifle
Forgotten Weapons
Published 8 Mar 2023The first production version of the FG42 used a fantastically complex milled receiver and a distinctive sharply swept-back pistol grip. A contract to make 5,000 of them was awarded to Krieghoff in late spring of 1943, but by the fall its replacement was already well into development. The milled receiver used a lot of high-nickel steel which was becoming difficult for Germany to acquire, and it was decided to develop a stamped receiver to ease production obstacles. Ultimately only about 2,000 of the early Type E FG42 rifles were actually made, and only 12 or 15 are registered in the US. They are a remarkably advanced rifle, and extremely interesting.
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June 22, 2023
CDR Salamander’s proposal to “encourage” NATO countries to meet or exceed their agreed defence targets
Canada has been a notorious defence freeloader since the first Trudeau government took office in 1968. Every Canadian government since then — until the current government started telling our allies we had no intention of meeting our treaty commitments — has made more-or-less sincere noises about getting back to the 2% of GDP minimum defence budget and none have done much to make it happen (we’re around 1.39% at the moment). Several years ago, CDR Salamander proposed a new way to allocate NATO leadership roles according to how close to the minimum each member country has managed to get, and it’s surprising that something of the sort hasn’t already been implemented:
It should bring to the front that NATO can no longer allow unserious nations to play like they are anything but security free-riders. They need to contribute their fair share or pay some consequence. Alliances have benefits and responsibilities. You should not have one without the other.
While percentage of GDP is an imperfect measure of contribution, it is better than all the other ones. It is as simple benchmark of national effort.
As these are the best numbers we have, let’s look at 2021 and then forward.
It is amazing that after all Russia has shown Western Europe — both of its nature and the nature of modern warfare — that so many of our NATO allies continue to slow walk defense spending, doing the very minimum to be a full and fair partner in the alliance.
Russian victory — however they define it — or Russian defeat — however Ukraine defines it – will not change the geography or nature of Russia. She is not going anywhere.
[…]
There is so much deferred spending from our free-riding European allies.
Between 1999 and 2021, EU combined defence spending increased by 20%, according to reports by the European Defence Agency. That compares with a 66% increase by the US, and 292% by Russia and 592% by China, over the same period.
“Out years” are where dragons live, so anyone not on guide-slope to 2%+ by the end of 2023 — when one way or another the Russo-Ukrainian War should be over — will find someway to not get there in a wave of excuses and bluffing.
We should call their bluff.
As such, and this is generous, we need to finally pursue PLAN SALAMANDER for NATO “Flags-to-Post” that I first proposed almost six years ago.
In NATO, General and Flag Officer billets are distributed amongst nations in a rather complicated way, but this formula is controlled by NATO – and as such – can be changed.
Entering argument: take the present formula for “fair distribution” and multiply by .75 any nation that spends 1.5% to 1.99% GDP on defense. Multiply by .5 any nation that spends between 1.25% to 1.499%. Multiply by .25 1.0% to 1.240%. If you fall below 1%, you get nothing and your OF5 (Col./Capt) billets are halved.
1.25x for 2.01%-2.25%. 1.5X for 2.26%-2.75%; 1.75x for 2.76% -3.0%. 2x for +3.01%.
The math gets funky when a lot of people get over 2%, but we can refine it later. Doesn’t cost a penny and will unquestionably get the attention of those nations. Trust me on this. By January 1st, 2024 no more excuses. A small and symbolic punishment, but a good start that may be all that is needed. This is not the second half of the 20th Century any more.
QotD: Nuclear non-proliferation and the Russo-Ukraine war
As one of Shute’s characters, a scientist, explained, “The trouble is, the damn things got too cheap. The original uranium bomb cost about fifty thousand quid towards the end. Every little pipsqueak country like Albania had a stockpile of them, and every little country that had that, thought it could defeat the major countries in a surprise attack”. Significantly, Shute’s future war, set in 1963, wasn’t triggered by the usual NATO-Warsaw Pact arsenals of nuclear weapons, but the proliferation of them elsewhere. Then, as now, it is not Russian or Chinese aggression that should worry those with nightmares of nuclear cataclysm, but that of other countries. Thanks to the NPT, IAEA and the UN, these possibilities are contained. Today, the world’s weapons of mass destruction stand at one tenth of their number during the Cold War.
Indeed, the very origins of the current Ukraine crisis illustrate how the international order has managed to contain potential proliferation. When the Soviet Union disintegrated in 1991, Ukraine possessed the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal, greater than those of Britain, France and China combined. Kyiv soon realised it couldn’t afford to maintain the warheads and remain a credible nuclear military power. A solution was found, whereby the weapons would be destroyed, but only in exchange for security assurances that the United States and Russia would respect Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity.
What Ukraine signed on 5 December 1994 was the Budapest Memorandum of Security Assurances, in which Bill Clinton for the United States, Boris Yeltsin for Russia and John Major for Great Britain promised to protect Ukraine and its territorial integrity in recognition of Kyiv surrendering the protection of its nuclear arsenal. There was no mention of military guarantees, which Ukraine assumed were implied. Additionally, Kyiv promised to adhere to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
After the annexation of Crimea by Russia in 2014, the G7 nations complained that Russia had breached the Budapest Memorandum. Vladimir Putin replied evasively that since, in his view, a new regime had seized power from Ukraine’s previously pro-Moscow premier Viktor Yanukovych, “Russia has not signed any obligatory documents with this new state”. Since then, Russia has lied and prevaricated over its betrayal of Budapest. In 2016, Sergey Lavrov went so far as to claim, “Russia never violated Budapest memorandum. It contained only one obligation, not to attack Ukraine with nukes” — a gross distortion of the Memorandum’s many obligations.
However, the West responded in 2014 only with mild economic sanctions. Arguably, the apathy of the anti-interventionist Barack Obama and David Cameron, influenced by a London awash with Russian money, emboldened Vladimir Putin. Few experts disagree that had the West responded in 2014 as they did in 2022, Russia’s expansionist ambitions into Ukraine would have ended long ago. Yet, there is plenty of room for optimism. The Russo-Ukraine conflict has not spread because of the international order and its treaties. Apart from North Korea and Iran, neither of whom have quite perfected their devilish devices, nuclear proliferation of third parties has been held in check.
The Kremlin shows no sign of taking steps to escalate to a nuclear level. It is not in its interests, or those of its allies, to do so. None of the 32 nations who recently abstained from condemning Russia in the 24 February UN vote would welcome Vladimir Putin and his cronies flinging nukes around. The qualified support of major powers like China, India and Pakistan is attached to the cheap oil and arms procurements they have negotiated with Moscow. Any hint of Tsar Vladimir “going nuclear” would see their abstentions morph into support for the West. Putin, for all his rhetoric, cannot afford to go it alone with just the six who voted with him at the UN. In military terms, they offer nothing.
The world’s various international arms treaties provide plenty of optimism that this will remain a regional war. So far, Putin’s threats have melted away as the morning mist. The scenario he implies, akin that in On the Beach and other nuclear-war-scare novels and films, is so unlikely as to be discounted. They and all the rest of the post-apocalyptic genre are written as nail-biting entertainment, not history or current affairs.
Peter Caddick-Adams, “Putin, Shute and nukes”, The Critic, 2023-03-09.
June 21, 2023
“Luttwak tweets with unparalleled Boomer energy, primarily in a write-only mode, at times seemingly oblivious to the waves he causes”
John Psmith reviews the second edition of Edward Luttwak’s Coup d’État: A Practical Handbook. I read the first edition in the mid-70s, when it seemed like coup attempts were an almost weekly news item from any number of exotic tropical locations:
First things first: you need to get the revised, second edition of this book. Why? Because the introduction to the second edition is an excuse for the author to brag about all the bloodstained and bullet-riddled copies of the first edition that have been found among the personal effects of palace security chiefs, spymasters, and air force officers. Perhaps, he gloats, they should have read it more carefully, or perhaps they should have waited for the second edition.
None of this should come as a surprise if you follow Edward Luttwak on Twitter, where his account is characterized by a judicious degree of irascibility and gloating. Yes, I regret to inform you that he’s on Twitter. But unlike some of my other favorite authors who succumbed to the analgesic call of the Great Blue Bird, the medium has not totally destroyed him yet. Luttwak tweets with unparalleled Boomer energy, primarily in a write-only mode, at times seemingly oblivious to the waves he causes. This is good, because it means we get to read his internal monologue, but without the reward loop of social media hacking his amygdala and progressively turning him into a self-parody.
Or perhaps his descent into self-parody was arrested by the fact that he was already a bit of a self-parody. Luttwak came from a Jewish family in communist Romania, spent some time in Palermo where he totally wasn’t involved in the war between the authorities and the mob,1 and provided “consulting services to multinational corporations and government agencies, including various branches of the U.S. government and the U.S. military”, before retiring to the life of gentleman scholar and cattle rancher (and prolific Twitter poaster) in rural Argentina. Along the way he picked up a PhD and wrote a massive pile of books about history, war, diplomacy, and political theory, all while pissing off the authorities in those fields with his epistemic trespassing.
But all of that was still far in the future when he wrote this book about coups. When the non-recommended first edition came out, Luttwak was a tender twenty-six years old, and working tenderly as a consultant for the energy industry in Africa and the Middle East. This raises some questions, questions that Luttwak absolutely refuses to answer, sometimes coyly and sometimes vehemently. Were I concerned about my reputation as a third-world fixer for oil companies, I would simply not write a practical guide to launching coups, but to each his own.
What is a coup? Also known as a putsch, a palace rebellion, or my personal favorite, a pronunciamiento; there are a lot of words for it, many of them in Spanish (you know what they say about Eskimos and their words for snow). The basic definition is a bloodless or almost bloodless extrajudicial transfer of power whereby a group of conspirators is able to turn the machinery of the state against itself, seizing control quickly and cleanly and without triggering a civil war. Note how different this is from other sorts of exceptional transfers of power. In a revolution, all of the institutions in a society are burned down and replaced. A coup is the opposite — only the very top level of the system is swapped out, and the new boss quickly and seamlessly resumes ruling through the machinery of the old regime. Ideally, citizens who aren’t especially politically engaged wouldn’t even notice.
This leads us to a guess as to the most coup-friendly sorts of polities: ideally they should be highly centralized and efficient bureaucratic states, but with very low democratic engagement or popular investment in politics. The first half is important, because without an efficient government machine, there’s nothing for the coup plotters to grab onto. A coup is an action by a tiny group of people who would lose instantly in any fair fight — the only chance they have is to magnify their power by hijacking a system that was already pretty good at controlling the country. It also helps that soldiers, policemen, and citizens in a bureaucratized society are already conditioned to obey impersonal authority, and therefore are more likely to do what the new guy says if he’s careful to use the old, familiar forms. Anarchists love to talk about how anarchy is like a vaccination against foreign occupation, because occupiers generally lack the state capacity to administer newly acquired territories without existing state machinery to co-opt, and that argument is even more true for coups.
1. Also unclear: which side he was not-involved on.
Scuttling of the German High Seas Fleet at Scapa Flow, Orkney, 21 June 1919 in the Great War
CEFRG (Canadian Expeditionary Force Research Group)
Published 3 Apr 2020The German High Seas Fleet decided to sink as many of its own ships as possible to prevent them from falling into Allied hands. In total, 52 of 74 ships were sabotaged to keep them from Britain, France, Italy and the USA. Most of these nations wanted a share for their navies, and knowing she could not have them all to herself, Britain wanted the ships scrapped to prevent other nations from gaining naval superiority.
On the morning of 21 June 1919, the British fleet left Scapa Flow for exercises, and Rear Admiral Sydney Freemantle, commander of the 1st Battle Squadron guarding the ships, planned to return two days later to board and seize the ships.
Already occupying Germany west of the Rhine, the Allied Powers expected Germany to accept all articles of the Treaty of Versailles by 23 June, and threatened to occupy territory east of the Rhine if all demands were not met. German Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, following orders he had received after the breakdown of negotiations, seized the opportunity with the British fleet having just left the harbour, gave the order to scuttle all ships as his crews opened seacocks, torpedo tubes and portholes to flood them, and once again hoisted the flag of the Imperial German Navy.
The final battle casualties of the Great War occurred on this day, with nine German sailors killed and sixteen wounded by the British during brawls when they refused to help save the ships. For his part, von Reuter was imprisoned along with 1,800 of his men, but was released the following year. Upon his return to Germany, he was praised as the man who had preserved the honour of the German High Seas Fleet (in typical fashion, Freemantle had angrily accused von Reuter of having behaved without honour).
Of the 52 ships scuttled in 1919, seven remain at the bottom of the sea today. They are registered under the Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Areas Act 1979, and provide some of the best shipwreck diving in Europe.
