H/T to Nick Gillespie for the link.
June 6, 2011
April 9, 2011
Rare WW2 German bomber discovered off British coast
What may be the only intact example of the German Dornier 17 bomber has been discovered in the Goodwin Sands off the coast of Kent:
The plane came to rest upside-down in 50 feet of water and has become partially visible from time to time as the sands retreated before being buried again.
Now a high-tech sonar survey undertaken by the Port of London Authority (PLA) has revealed the aircraft to be in a startling state of preservation.
[. . .]
Known as “the flying pencil,” the Dornier 17 was designed as a passenger plane in 1934 and was later converted for military use as a fast bomber, difficult to hit and theoretically able to outpace enemy fighter aircraft.
In all, some 1,700 were produced but they struggled in the war with a limited range and bomb load capability and many were scrapped afterwards.
Striking high-resolution images appear to show that the Goodwin Sands plane suffered only minor damage, to its forward cockpit and observation windows, on impact.
“The bomb bay doors were open, suggesting the crew jettisoned their cargo,” said PLA spokesman Martin Garside.
H/T to Elizabeth for the link.
March 28, 2011
QotD: Even heroes wear out their welcome eventually
Fraternization between soldiers and civilian women in the weeks following libertion was intense, and inhibitions in the traditionally prudish Dutch society fell away. The fighting was over, but a new battlefront now loomed. By the summer of 1945, a medical officer in General Hoffmeister’s Fifth Division was confirming a sharp rise in VD rates among the troops. This was despite an efficient campaign to hand out contraceptives and warn the troops about the dangers of unprotected sex. “Perhaps,” noted the officer, “it was because the Dutch and Canadians get along well together.” There were no reports of rape in the area.
However, as the summer passed, popular resentment about the behavior of Canadian soldiers and Dutch girls began to rise, and the sight of their women arm in arm with their occupiers started to grate. “Dutch men were beaten militarily in 1940, sexually in 1945,” observed one Dutch journalist. Popular songs and doggerel reflected a new mood about the Canadians.
[. . .]
A joke hinting at the number of girls who were “getting into trouble” also began to circulate. “In twenty years, when another world war breaks out, it will not be necessary to send a Canadian expeditionary force to the Netherlands. A few ships loaded with uniforms will be enough.”
David Stafford, Endgame, 1945: The missing final chapter of World War II, Little, Brown 2007. pp 451-452.
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March 25, 2011
French stereotypes
Even if we have to stop calling them “Cheese-eating surrender monkeys”1, we still have all the other stereotypes to fall back on:
The myth of the great Gallic unwashed seems to have travelled back to the US after the second world war with GIs shocked to discover that a still largely rural population with scant access to hot and cold running water should, after four years of German occupation, not always consider irreproachable personal hygiene an overriding priority.
It is, unfortunately, sustained by the odd wayward statistic. According to one 1998 survey only 47% of French people take a daily bath or shower, against 80% of Dutch and Danes. Worse, France’s own health education council calculated that if those 47% were being honest, the country’s annual soap consumption should be 2.2lb a head, whereas it happened to be 1.3lb.
Another 1998 report found that only 60% of French men and 75% of French women pulled on clean underwear every morning.
March 2, 2011
QotD: Humour
A German I know will on occasion tell you his father died in the concentration camps. He waits for the concerned and properly sympathetic faces and then adds that he got drunk and fell out of a watchtower. Europeans find that boorish, faintly crass and rather tasteless; the English love it. It’s a proper joke, and a German doing it is double bubble. The surprise is that neither the Europeans or the English realize that it’s not a joke at all, his father really did fall out of a watch tower and it’s poignant and sad because his son never knew him, never met his dad.
A.A. Gill, The Angry Island: Hunting the English, p. 112.
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November 11, 2010
In memorium
A simple recognition of some of our family members who served in the First and Second World Wars:
The Great War
- Private William Penman, Scots Guards, died 1915 at Le Touret, age 25
(Elizabeth’s great uncle) - Private David Buller, Highland Light Infantry, died 1915 at Loos, age 35
(Elizabeth’s great grandfather) - Private Walter Porteous, Northumberland Fusiliers, died 1917 at Passchendaele, age 18
(my great uncle) - Corporal John Mulholland, Royal Tank Corps, died 1918 at Harbonnieres, age 24
(Elizabeth’s great uncle)
The Second World War
- Flying Officer Richard Porteous, RAF, survived the defeat in Malaya and lived through the war
(my uncle) - Able Seaman John Penman, RN, served in the Defensively Equipped Merchant fleet on the Murmansk Run (and other convoy routes), lived through the war
(Elizabeth’s father) - Private Archie Black (commissioned after the war and retired as a Major), Gordon Highlanders, captured at Singapore (aged 15) and survived a Japanese POW camp
(Elizabeth’s uncle)
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
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October 20, 2010
The daily Orwell
A few years back, on the old blog, I mentioned that the Orwell Trust was publishing George Orwell’s diary in blog form. It’s now up to October 1940:
19.10.40
The unspeakable depression of lighting the fires every morning with papers of a year ago, and getting glimpses of optimistic headlines as they go up in smoke.
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September 25, 2010
Irony, Polish style
By way of Jon Henke’s twitter feed, the most ironic story so far this year:
Two Polish neo-Nazis who were childhood sweethearts and later became skinheads have discovered what for them is a shocking family secret: They’re actually Jewish.
Pawel and Ola, identified only by their first names, are the subject of a CNN documentary about Poles rediscovering their Jewish roots generations after their ancestors hid their religious identities to escape persecution during World War II.
A few years ago, Ola found out from Warsaw’s Jewish Historical Institute that both she and her husband are technically Jews. “It was unbelievable — it turned out that we had Jewish roots. It was a shock,” she said.
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September 6, 2010
The start of the Blitz, 1940
September, 1940: the start of the Blitz:
The London Blitz started quietly. Less than 100 incidents reported by the London Fire Brigade up to 5pm on September 7, 1940. Only a few weeks after the British victory in the Battle of Britain, what came then must have been a terrible shock for Londoners. You can read the original Guardian archive report of the night here.
At 5.30pm, some 348 German bombers escorted by 617 fighters pounded London until 6.00pm. Guided by the flames, a second group attacked with more incendiary bombs two hours later, lasting into the next day.
Note, that link to the Guardian archive is a bit badly behaved: it resized my browser window.
Update: Rare colour footage of the Blitz.
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August 26, 2010
WWII German spy success in Norway
Newly released MI5 information shows that the allied defeat in Norway in 1940 may have been caused by a German espionage triumph:
[Marina] Lee is said to have infiltrated the headquarters of the British Expeditionary Forces in Norway and obtained information about the plan drawn up by British commander Gen Auchinleck.
German commander, Gen Eduard Dietl, who was holding the Norwegian port of Narvik, was reportedly considering a withdrawal, but the disclosure of these details meant his forces could block the Auchinleck plan.
British, French and Norwegian troops were later forced to withdraw from German-controlled Norway.
Born in St Petersburg, Russia, Lee was married to a Norwegian communist and had trained as a ballerina before becoming “a highly valued and experienced German agent”, according to the files.
She is described as “blonde, tall, with a beautiful figure, refined and languid in manner” and reportedly spoke five languages.
One account says she personally knew Stalin — leading to conjectures she was working for both Berlin and Moscow who, at that time, were on the same side, our reporter says.
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August 7, 2010
QotD: De Gaulle
De Gaulle was great because he knew how to act the part. Actually doing great things was someone’s else problem. The heavy lifting of the Second World War was done by the Russian foot soldier and the English speaking powers. Objectively, Canada did more to defeat Hitler than France. Being a nation of citizen soldiers, who desperately wanted to get home, we did our bit and went home. This allowed a prima donna like De Gaulle to take the credit for liberating France. In gratitude, the Liberator then travelled to Montreal, some twenty years later, and thanked Canada by trying to destroy it.
Publius, “The Saviour of the Nation”, Gods of the Copybook Headings, 2010-08-04
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August 6, 2010
QotD: Nuclear weapons
Sixty-five years ago today: “On Monday, August 6, 1945, the nuclear weapon Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima by the crew of the American B-29 bomber Enola Gay, directly killing an estimated 80,000 people. By the end of the year, injury and radiation brought total casualties to 90,000-140,000. Approximately 69% of the city’s buildings were completely destroyed, and 6.6% severely damaged.” – Hiroshima
“Little Boy,” the aptly named 16 kiloton bomb that took out Hiroshima, was — in comparison to the nuclear devices in the world’s arsenals — sort of a light field artillery shell. There was, at the time, a second bomb called “Fat Man.” Weighing in at 21 kilotons it would put paid to Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. With the erasure of Nagasaki, the world was fresh out of nuclear weapons. It was only a temporary lapse. Today we’ve got about 25,000 of these little items of discipline scattered about.
The largest nuclear bomb ever detonated in the atmosphere was The Soviet Tsar Bomba , or “Big Ivan” which at 50 Megatons was very harmful to every living think on Novaya Zemlya Island (located above the arctic circle in the Arctic Sea) in October of 1971. Whatever else you might think about them, you can’t deny those Soviets dreamed BIG dreams.
Gerard Vanderleun, “Nukes: Time for a Live Demo”, American Digest, 2010-07-06
May 29, 2010
Random links
- Ceremony on the 70th anniversary of the Dunkirk operation.
- P.J. O’Rourke suggests a new way to make newspapers relevant: pre-obituaries.
- Federal Tories increase their lead over the Liberals. But don’t expect an election call: they’re back to the same margin that delivered a minority last election.
- That “crazy, hateful, fringe lunatic Ron Paul voted” to eliminate the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy in the US armed forces.
- Who’s afraid of cannabis? The Taliban.
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May 19, 2010
Remembering Dunkirk, 70 years on
This is the 70th anniversary of the Dunkirk evacuation, where 338,000 British and French troops were carried out of the German encirclement by just about everything that could float.
“Without Dunkirk, Britain wouldn’t have had an Army and it’s extremely questionable whether Britain could have fought the war,” he explains.
Mr Hewitt gives the credit to the Royal Navy and Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, who led the operation, but also to all the civilians who helped.
“They thought they would bring back 30-40,000. In the end they rescued 338,000 British and French troops. It’s an extraordinary achievement.”
And this pulling together of civilians and the military meant an event that could have been seen as a failure became, in fact, a key turning point in World War II.
“Dunkirk was a military defeat, but it was a symbolic victory,” he adds.
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May 13, 2010
A “secret weapon” from WW2 updated for the 21st century
Strategy Page looks at Operations Research in its modern guise:
It all began back in the 1970s, when some CIA analysts discovered a new way to analyze the mountains of information they were receiving. The new tool was predictive analysis. What does this do for intelligence analysts? Predictive analysis was the result of a fortuitous combination of OR (Operations Research), large amounts of data and more powerful computers. OR is one the major (and generally unheralded) scientific developments of the early 20th century. OR is basically applying mathematical analysis to problems. OR turned out to be a major “weapon” for the Allies during World War II. OR, like radar, was developed in the 1930s, just in time for a major war, when whatever was available was put to work to win the conflict. OR is also, half jokingly, called a merger of math and common sense. It is widely used today in science, industry and, especially, in business (it’s the primary tool of MBAs, where it’s called “management science”.) With predictive analysis, the most important OR tool was the ability to “backtest” (see if the simulation of a situation could accurately predict the outcome of something that had already happened, if the same historical decisions are made). For predictive analysis of contemporary situations, the backtest is, instead, a predictive tool that reveals likely outcomes.
Predictive analysis, like OR in general, creates a framework that points you towards the right questions, and often provides the best answers as well. Like many OR problems, especially in the business world, the simulation framework is often quite rough. But in war, as in commerce, anything that will give you an edge can lead to success over your opponents. A predictive analysis is similar to what engineers call “a 60 percent solution” that can be calculated on the back of an envelope.
The one form of predictive analysis that the general public is aware of is wargames, and these have been increasingly useful in predicting the outbreak, and outcomes, of wars. There have even been commercial manual (like chess) wargames that have successfully applied predictive analysis. The commercial manual wargames produced some impressive results when it came to actual wars.
In late 1972 a game (“Year of the Rat”) was published covering the recent (earlier in the year) North Vietnamese invasion of South Vietnam. This game didn’t predict the outcome of the war, but it got the attention of people in the intelligence community, especially those who knew something about wargames, for it was a convincing demonstration of what a manual wargame, using unclassified data, could do in representing a very recently fought campaign. There was even talk that these games could actually predict the outcome, and details, of a future war. The next year, wargames did just that, accurately portraying the outcome of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. The game (“Sinai”) was about to be published when the war broke out, but some people in the intelligence community knew about it. A member of the Israeli UN delegation had watched the game in development (he was a wargamer), and was assigned to camp out at the publishers offices, while the war raged, and report what the game was predicting.
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