Drachinifel
Published 3 May 2025The S-Boats, fast attack craft of the Kriegsmarine, are today’s subject.
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September 28, 2025
S-Boats – Guide 438
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August 14, 2025
D-Day’s Flat Pack Ports OR Lord HT Gets Cross with The Fat Electrician
HardThrasher
Published 13 Aug 2025In which we use the @the_fat_electrician as an excuse to talk about the Mulberry Harbours, make a specific threat to a building in the United States and get to oogle at giant bits of floating concrete.
Primary Source – Codename Mulberry – Guy Hartcup, Pen & Sword Military. Kindle Edition 2014 (org. 1977)
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August 4, 2025
Day Ten – German Victory in the Battle of France – Ten Days in Sedan
World War Two
Published 3 Aug 2025May 19, 1940. Ten days into Fall Gelb, Guderian’s panzers thunder toward the Channel, poised to slam a steel ring around nearly half a million Allied troops. In Paris, Paul Reynaud ousts Daladier and Gamelin, calling back Marshal Pétain and General Weygand as France’s last throw of the dice. The pocket is almost shut, yet the story is far from over. Is there time for one more twist? Keep watching as we follow the fight to its end and discuss the aftermath of this campaign.
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June 3, 2025
Exercise Tiger: The WW2 Cover-Up Before D Day
The History Chap
Published 23 May 2024Exercise Tiger 1944, was a large-scale dress rehearsal for the D-Day landings, off the Slapton Sands in England, that went horribly wrong. Over 700 US servicemen were killed, more than were killed on Utah beach on D-Day itself! With D-Day imminent, Allied Supreme Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, ordered the disaster to be hushed up.
Following a friendly fire incident on Slapton Sands on the 27th April 1944, a convoy carrying US troops was attacked in the early hours of the 28th by German E-Boats. In what is called the Battle of Lyme Bay, two ships in the convoy were sunk resulting in the loss of over 700 US servicemen. Whilst rumours suggest that there were many casualties resulting from the friendly fire on Slapton Sands, the US Army has always remained tight-lipped. To this day, the mystery remains as to what extent the casualty figures were covered up.
In the 1980’s, a Sherman tank was raised from the seabed. It now stands at the end of Slapton Sands (near the village of Torcross) as a memorial to the young men who died 6 weeks before D-Day during Exercise Tiger.
Chapters
0:00 Intro
0:42 D-Day 1944
1:40 Slapton Sands
2:30 Civilian Evacuation
3:22 Military Build-up
4:58 Exercise Tiger
6:07 Live Fire Disaster
7:37 Convoy T-4
9:15 Spotted by Germans
10:03 E-boat attack
11:41 Battle of Lyme Bay
14:06 Casualty Figures
14:43 D-Day Compromised?
15:37 Cover-up?
17:00 D-Day Success
18:08 Exercise Tiger Remembered
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April 26, 2025
A proposal for cutting the Channel crossing phenomenon
In The Conservative Woman, David Wright suggests a concrete plan to stem the tide of “refugees” arriving in the south of England from Calais and other French Channel ports:
Illegal Channel crossings by rubber dinghies overloaded predominantly with young men have been an increasingly worrying trend for many years yet successive governments have made no serious or workable attempts to do anything about it.
Migrant crossings are up by more than 40 per cent on last year and a record for daily arrivals has been set. A total of 705 migrants in 12 boats crossed the Channel on Tuesday April 15, days after the previous record of 656 was set the previous Saturday. The total number of arrivals in 2025, at 8,888, is 42 per cent higher than at the same point last year and 81 per cent higher than at this stage in 2023. More arrivals were recorded in January to April than in the equivalent four-month period in any year since data on Channel crossings began in 2018.
The French authorities are providing lifejackets to ensure migrants can cross the Channel safely. The jackets are returned to the French once the migrants have been escorted to the mid-point of the Channel and are rescued by the British authorities, so that they can be re-used for future crossings.
We have seen French police on the beach at Calais standing idly by while migrants board dinghies to Dover.
[…]
The boats should be painted grey, a small gun mounted on the foredeck, and manned with recently retired RN personnel. (There would be no shortage of volunteers.) A small support base should be built in Folkestone harbour, initially using Portakabins for rapid start-up, with fuelling facilities, a small workshop, an accommodation block and a canteen. This could be achieved relatively quickly and at a modest cost to the defence budget. These boats would be tasked with patrolling the Dover Strait every day from dawn to dusk, three or four at a time. Drones could also be used to detect dinghies and direct the patrolling boats to them. They would not need to be at sea in weather too rough for small smuggler-boat crossings.
They should be tasked to intercept the smugglers wherever they are in the Channel, approaching our shores, over the mid-way line or just leaving French beaches, and turned back and escorted. On approach to the smugglers’ beach the Border Force vessel should stand off and launch a RIB (rigid inflatable boat) manned by four staff who would escort them until they grounded on the beach. With two of them standing guard with weapons the others, using box cutters, would slash long holes in the rubber dinghies and remove the outboard motors and drop them into the water to render them unserviceable. On completion the RIB should return to its vessel and the vessel withdraw to resume patrol. Input from serving senior naval officers would be needed to provide detailed operating procedures. Once deployed this division would be under the command of a senior serving officer.
Of course, French President Emmanuel Macron would immediately be protesting. But he hasn’t got a leg to stand on. France is a signatory to the Schengen Agreement which requires migrants/asylum seekers to be processed in the first safe country they enter. Not only that but Britain has paid France almost half a billion pounds to stop the migrants arriving at the beaches and boarding dinghies to Dover.
France has not only done nothing but trouser this cash while its navy continues to escort the dinghies into UK waters and hand them off to our Border Force or the RNLI.
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March 24, 2025
The Concorde of the English Channel – Hoverspeed
Ruairidh MacVeigh
Published 23 Nov 2024Hello all! 😀
In something a little different from cars, trains and planes, we take a look at what has often been considered the Concorde moment for cross-channel ferry operations, the introduction of routine hovercraft services between Britain and France by the Hoverlloyd and Seaspeed companies, and later the Hoverspeed firm following their merger.
Hoverspeed was a truly exceptional mixture of speed and technological prowess, skirting across the surface of the English Channel and reducing journey times to but a fraction of what they were aboard regular ferry boats, but due to increasing costs, a fragile business case, and the arrival of the Channel Tunnel, Hoverspeed, much like Concorde, is now but a fading memory of a bygone era for international travel.
Chapters:
0:00 – Preamble
0:44 – Rise of the Hovercraft
3:04 – Tapping an Untapped Market
7:15 – Into Service
10:33 – Heyday of the Hovercraft
13:05 – Fragile Foundations
17:21 – Coming to the End
21:55 – Conclusion
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January 2, 2025
Why Germany Lost the Battle of Britain
Real Time History
Published 2 Aug 2024Summer 1940. The United Kingdom is gripped by the fear of a German invasion. Even if the Luftwaffe secures the sky over Britain, could Germany’s Operation Sea Lion ever really work?
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October 23, 2024
The Last Surviving Giant Passenger Hovercraft
The Tim Traveller
Published Jul 2, 2024In early 1968, Britain launched a revolutionary new form of sea transport: the giant SRN4-class hovercraft. They are the largest passenger hovercraft ever built, and they could fly between England and France in just 30 minutes — three times faster than anything else on the water. So why don’t we have anything like them any more?
MORE INFO
The Hovercraft Museum: https://www.hovercraft-museum.org/
The museum’s “Support Us” page, if you’d like to help them out: https://www.hovercraft-museum.org/sup…
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September 8, 2024
Romney Marsh and the Battle of Britain (BBC 1976)
BBC Archive
Published Jun 2, 2024Romney Marsh has been dubbed the “sixth continent”, due to its size and the sense that it has its own rules.
A shingle beach that silently grows bigger every year, scattered debris from the Battle of Britain, an old-fashioned lighthouse hidden from the sea by a nuclear power station. It has a character unlike anywhere else in the UK.
Presented by Dilys Morgan and Bernard Clark.
Clip taken from Nationwide on the Road: Romney Marsh, originally broadcast on BBC One, Wednesday 7 April, 1976.
You have now entered the BBC Archive, a time machine that will transport you back to the golden age of TV to educate, entertain and enlighten you with classic clips from the BBC vaults.
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April 21, 2024
How The Channel Tunnel Works
Practical Engineering
Published Jan 16, 2024Let’s dive into the engineering and construction of the Channel Tunnel on its 30th anniversary.
It is a challenging endeavor to put any tunnel below the sea, and this monumental project faced some monumental hurdles. From complex cretaceous geology, to managing air pressure, water pressure, and even financial pressure, there are so many technical details I think are so interesting about this project.
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January 7, 2024
“Of course, you know that you Eeenglish invented modern people smuggling?”
In The Critic, Peter Caddick-Adams talks about the huge problems faced by European nations in combatting people smuggling:
Title page of a book covering the trial of seven smugglers for the murder of two revenue officers. In the preface the author says “I do assure the Public that I took down the facts in writing from the mouths of the witnesses, that I frequently conversed with the prisoners, both before and after condemnation; by which I had an opportunity of procuring those letters which are herein after inserted, and other intelligence of some secret transactions among them, which were never communicated to any other person.”
W.J. Smith, Smuggling and Smugglers in Sussex, 1749, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Prime Minister has nailed his colours to his mast and decided we should “stop the boats”. The slogan is everywhere. What Mr Sunak means is the vessels crossing the Channel laden with bedraggled folk seeking succour on the shores of Albion. I attended a conference recently to see how this was to be done. As the perpetrators are highly organised transnational criminals, the response must be a multi-national one. Delegates were given some historical context. Ours is not a unique era. Since pre-recorded history, mankind has been inclined to see the grass as always greener on the other side of the fence. Hollow out a log to cross a river, invade an island, a coastline, Troy, the Euphrates, the Tigris, the Nile. Anywhere, for trade, for adventure, for sanctuary. Leap the Channel by longship to escape overcrowding, poor crops, for plunder, to claim a crown.
However, we were reminded — for the conference was hosted by several coastal nations studying security and crime — that most of Europe’s maritime problems with criminality and smuggling, be it booze, tobacco, narcotics, fake branded goods, or people, involve rivers, not the open sea. An old friend from the Gendarmerie Maritime observed that the great rivers of the world are not only frontiers, but also highways; earlier versions of today’s motorways, as logistically familiar to the Romans as to our own times. Those long gaggles of barges which still shuffle along the Rhine or Danube are a happenstance of trade we Brits tend to overlook, as our canals and rivers have long been consigned to pleasure-boating.
Based in Messina, the gendarme’s opposite number from the Servizio navale of the Italian Carabinieri, wearing the most resplendent braid-laden uniform of anyone at our gathering, then fixed me with his gimlet eye. “Of course, you know that you Eeenglish invented modern people smuggling?” By this he went on to explain that many of the tricks of shifting people covertly through the Mediterranean, along the Dalmatian coast, by patrol boat about the Baltic, trawler braving the North Sea, MTB across the Channel, caïque over the Aegean, among the Ionian islands, and along the Adriatic, were devised by Britain’s Special Operation’s Executive (SOE) during the Second World War.
My Belgian and French friends observed that such smuggling had honourable roots. From 1789 and post-1917, many nations had aided middle class and aristocratic refugees to flee Revolutionary France and Russia. Subsequently, their descendants helped Jewish families quit the Third Reich. Others aided the British to move vast numbers of manpower by small boat in 1940 from Dunkirk, which emboldened fishermen to repeat the manoeuvre on a smaller scale to confound their German foes. Female Greek, Turkish and Croatian officers chipped in with their knowledge of various rat-lines established during World War Two to support partisans with personnel and weapons, and extract downed airmen, spies and important scientists. Post-war, as a Spanish policeman I knew from my days in Gibraltar observed, the same systems exported Nazi war criminals, and imported drugs and guns.
The modus operandi created in those heady days of derring-do were continued for spies during the Cold War, often by the same families, using the same craft. This applied as much to jaunts and japes up and down the Danube, Rhine, Meuse and Elbe waterways as it did to the open seas. Our Danish representative observed that “boat people” were a distraction. Their numbers were vastly overshadowed by far greater numbers of religious refugees and assorted shady characters, then and now, who used stolen genuine, or expertly forged papers; another legacy from the even more distant times that preceded World War Two. The man from Interpol revealed that today’s Italian and Albanian crime families have such advanced facilities for reproducing many of the world’s passports, ID cards, work permits and driving licences, that they will pass muster even at most European electronic frontier posts and airport controls. Our Albanian colonel shifted uncomfortably.
With the fall of the Iron Curtain, espionage went out of business and, casting about for new business, these latter-day privateers and licenced black marketeers started smuggling industrial quantities of things and people, to replace the nocturnal movement of atomic secrets by night over water. A dinghy full of people in mid-Ocean is merely the tip of a giant iceberg of organisation and logistics that started on 22 July 1940 by direct order of Winston Churchill, but has continued in various legal, semi-legal and illegal forms ever since.
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October 23, 2023
Hero-worship of Admiral Nelson seen as (somewhat) harmful
On Saturday, Sir Humphrey noted the anniversary of Trafalgar and indicated that the Royal Navy’s idolization of Admiral Nelson somewhat obscures the rest of the Royal Navy’s historical role:
“Danish privateers intercepting an enemy vessel during the Napoleonic Wars”.
Oil painting by Christian Mølsted, 1888 from the Collection of the Museum of National History via Wikimedia Commons.
There is an argument, which the author has sympathy with, that the RN has perhaps idolised Nelson too much. That while he did much good, the adoration of him comes at the cost of forgetting countless other leaders and battles which have relevance to this day. This is not to denigrate or play down the impact of Trafalgar, but to ask whether we should be equally aware of other parts of Royal Navy history too. Understanding the Royal Navy of the late 18th and early 19th century can provide us with much to consider and learn from in looking at how to shape the Royal Navy of the early 21st century. If you look at the Royal Navy of today and of Nelson’s time (and throughout the Napoleonic Wars), a strong case can be made that although the technology is materially different, the missions, function, and capability that the RN offers to the Government of the day are little changed.
While we tend to fix attention mostly on the major battle of Trafalgar, the RN fulfilled a wide variety of different missions throughout the war. The fleet was responsible for blockading Europe, monitoring French movements, and providing timely intelligence on the activity of enemy fleets. Legions of smaller ships stood off hostile coasts, outside of engagement range, on lonely picket duties to track the foe. The Royal Navy also maintained forces capable of strategic blockades in locations like Gibraltar and the Skagerrak, relying on chokepoints to secure control of the sea.
The UK was a mercantile nation with a heavy reliance on trade, and with the land routes of Europe closed by Napoleon, the Merchant Navy was vital to victory. The Royal Navy played a key role in escorting ships in convoy, ensuring their protection from hostile forces and helping ensure vitally needed trade goods arrived in British ports. This included timber from colonies in North America, vital to building and repairing warships. Similarly British policy to defeat Napoleon relied on supporting continental land powers, and a steady flow of munitions and materiel were sent by sea, escorted by RN warships to Baltic ports to help support nations fighting France.
The Royal Navy maintained forces of small raiding craft to hold the French coast at risk throughout the wars, sending vessels to attack French coastal locations, capturing intelligence and tying down hundreds of French coastal artillery batteries and thousands of men who could have been deployed elsewhere to protect French soil. More widely the UK engaged in strategic raiding and blockade, for example operations in the Adriatic Campaign (1807-14) where a small number of British warships blockaded ports, conducted amphibious operations and engaged in surface combat with different foes. In the same vein the UK found itself targeted by Danish & Norwegian raiders too, who fought the so-called “Gunboat War” from 1807 to 14 against the UK, where many small scale actions between British brigs and small ships against gunboats in the Baltic. This often forgotten campaign saw violent clashes and victories on both sides with the sinking and capture of many RN vessels to protect convoy trade.
More widely the Royal Navy worked closely with the British Army in a variety of amphibious operations, providing ships to deploy and sustain the Army on campaign. There were a number of impressive amphibious failures, but also some successes too, particularly in the West Indies and Egypt, where working as part of a jointly integrated force, the Royal Navy provided fire support (and even operated Congreve land attack rockets for shore bombardment) as the British Army fought the French ashore. In the Peninsular War the RN was vital for ensuring the supply of Wellington’s forces and, where necessary evacuating them, such as during the retreat from Corunna.
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June 4, 2023
D-Day Series: RCN and Operation Neptune
Valour Canada
Published 28 Dec 2015This video describes the Royal Canadian Navy’s (RCN) invaluable contributions to the invasion on D-Day, June 6, 1944. Operation Neptune was the name of the English Channel-crossing portion of the larger Normandy invasion (named Operation Overlord).
1. Overview (0:00)
Dawn. June 6, 1944. D-Day. Operation Overlord, the largest amphibious invasion in history, is about to begin. This is a description of the battlefield prior to the attack and also tells how the RCN played an important role both in the English Channel and along the French coast.2. Stop the U-boats (2:55)
Churchill said that the only thing that scared him during the war were the U-boats. This describes the problematic German U-boats and how the British and Canadian Navies (Operation Neptune) worked together to find, track, and destroy the underwater menace prior to D-Day.3. Clear the Mines (6:27)
“There is no doubt that the mine is our greatest obstacle to success” – British Admiral Bertram Ramsay. The size and effectiveness of the German minefield that guarded the D-Day beaches and how the Allied Navies worked together to prepare a route through which the invasion could occur.4. Cover the Beaches (9:49)
The Canadian Tribal-class destroyers played a significant role in eliminating the German Navy’s major surface warships’ threat to the invasion fleet. The RCN destroyer squadron and their mission of clearing the English Channel of German ships before, during, and after the invasion. A battle between the Canadian destroyers Haida and Huron and four German ships near the port of Brest on June 9 is discussed. Also covered are the two Canadian destroyers, Algonquin and Sioux, that were tasked with shore bombardment at Juno Beach.5. Land the Troops (13:01)
Shortly after dawn and following a forty-minute naval barrage at Juno Beach, the first Canadian soldiers came ashore. By noon, the beach was held by the Canadians and millions of tons of supplies were being brought ashore. This section describes the first waves of the invasion and the tanks, artillery, vehicles, and supplies that were soon to follow.
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March 16, 2023
History of the Royal Navy – Wooden Walls (1600-1805)
Ryan Doyle
Published 3 Mar 2013
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August 28, 2022
Jersey – Millennia of Maritime Defence Preserved
Drachinifel
Published 4 May 2022Today we take a look at the island of Jersey, part of the Channel Islands off the coast of France, to examine the many generations of maritime defence that have been built and upgraded there.
It’s an excellent place to visit! https://www.jersey.com/
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