Motor Boat & Yachting
Published 16 Jan 2019We have the immense privilege of getting behind the wheel (and guns) of MGB 81, the Spitfire of the seas.
Filmed by Paul Wyeth: http://www.pwpictures.com/
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Christopher Howarth on a recent BBC production that threw facts out the window in a rush to condemn British Prime Minister Winston Churchill for the famine in Bengal during 1943:
A 1945 map of Bengali districts as of 1943.
Famine Inquiry Commission (1945): Report on Bengal via Wikimedia Commons.
This argument was put forward by the BBC’s own Yogita Limaye, an Indian engineer and reporter on Women’s safety, based on the book Inglorious Empire by Shashi Tharoor, who was interviewed to give his opinion that Churchill was an “odious figure of reprehensible views and racist attitudes.”
No doubt the narrative of British evil and oppression is believed in India and elsewhere, but that does not make it true or worthy of the BBC reporting it as fact without any semblance of balance. The BBC failed its licence fee paying audience in two main regards, namely, conceptually and factually.
The British ruled India, one of the largest populations on earth, for well over two centuries. Good and bad things happened, just like everywhere else ever. You can join the dots to create whatever picture you like – Dr Tharoor chose the picture he wished to create. Why is the Bengal famine uniquely interesting to a BBC audience in 2020 over say a mini-series on British Railways and development in India? BBC presenters are demonstrably more interested in the first narrative: this is a major conceptual failing on their part. Being equal mixtures primitivism and solipsism. Always the borderline racist Western assumption is that “we” did things to “them”: we had agency, they were passive brutes. They are boring, we are endlessly interesting. Let’s talk about us. However even the slightest knowledge of the British-in-India teaches one that “we” did nothing without them. How on earth could we? There were famously few of us.
Yet it’s the second great BBC failing – over accuracy – which is so especially galling. On the actual allegation the BBC is plain wrong. Churchill was not responsible for the Bengal famine as any actual delving into the facts would have shown. Note well that they didn’t even try.
In 1943 Britain was at war with Japan, who were at the gates of India having occupied Burma, a major supplier of grain to Bengal. Important facts. Bengal was in the grips of a famine, nobody disputes that. But Churchill was not responsible, neither for the weather nor the agriculture nor the Japanese aggression.
Even the BBC did not allege that Churchill instigated the famine, the charge sheet is that he refused to help when he could. There were “stockpiles [of food] in the UK” and shipping which was retained in the northern hemisphere, prioritised for use there. Stockpiles of food in the UK in 1943? Even if there was the food and shipping, transporting US corned beef to Bengal would have been ludicrous. If there was shipping and protection from Japanese naval assault the food would have come from the rest of India. So why was food not transported from other parts of India to Bengal?
Prime Minister Winston Churchill greets Canadian PM William Lyon Mackenzie King, 1941.
Photo from Library and Archives Canada (reference number C-047565) via Wikimedia Commons.
Historigraph
Published 18 Jul 2020For unlimited access to the world’s top documentaries and nonfiction series go to http://go.thoughtleaders.io/166892020… and use the promo code ‘
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“Rynos Theme” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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I’ve posted a few items about the Halifax explosion, so Colby Cosh linking to this CBC News article caught my attention:
Previously unpublished photo of the Halifax explosion in December 1917 taken by Mate Reg Stevens, RCN.
Original image from the Community Archives of Belleville and Hastings County, via CBC News.
“The photo has the look of a very troubling dream,” Dan Conlin says as he studies an old black-and-white image.
Conlin is a transportation historian who’s spent a lifetime studying images of ships, trains and aircraft. He’s also a former curator of Halifax’s Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, which houses a large collection of materials from the 1917 Halifax Explosion.
The image he’s studying surfaced recently on Reddit with a user from Halifax, England, wondering if it was a “new” image of the 1917 disaster.
“You have these tranquil little wavelets in the foreground and some stately, anchored vessels — including a sailing ship,” Conlin said. “But in the background there are these awful, nightmarish clouds, including a horrible column that is rising into the sky. It looks like a surreal nightmare.”
When Conlin first looked at it, the crisp details of the foreground and the blurry background raised his skeptical eyebrows. “There was quite a tradition in the World War I era of faking photos by doing composite photos, where you layer one image on top of another,” he said.
One well-known photo of the explosion taken from McNabs Island was later suspected to have been doctored by a company. They seem to have added clouds for dramatic effect — and to sell more postcards.
But Conlin thinks in the nightmarish photo, it’s more likely that the clouds are moving from the force of the explosion, while the ships were untroubled by any winds. The disaster killed nearly 2,000 people and badly hurt thousands more. It levelled the Richmond district in the north end.
“It’s carnage and destruction out of Dante at the base of that cloud. People are dying and fires are starting and this awful event has hit Halifax in the distance,” he said.
“That angry cloud gives you an idea of the violence and tragedy that is unfolding even as the shutter clicks. It’s really rare and that photo, as far as I can tell, has never been published.”
The Tank Museum
Published 10 May 2020Curator David Willey talks to you about military camouflage, from home! He takes a look at military uniform and vehicles.
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Military History Visualized
Published 14 Aug 2018Determining the impact of the Western Aid that was provided to the Soviet Union in the Second World War is quite controversial. This aid was provided under the Lend-Lease act, as such it is usually just called Lend-Lease. The majority of the support was provided by the United States, yet other countries like the United Kingdom and Canada aided the Soviet Union as well.
Thank you to VonKickass for the Thumbnail Design!
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Boris V. Sokolov: “The role of lend‐lease in Soviet military efforts, 1941–1945”, The Journal of Slavic Military Studies, 7:3 (1994) p. 567-586
Hill, Alexander: The Red Army and the Second World War. Armies of the Second World War. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 2017.
Glantz, David M.; House, Jonathan M.: When Titans Clashed. How the Red Army stopped Hitler. Revised and Expanded Edition. University Press of Kansas: USA, 2015
Harrison, Mark: THE SOVIET ECONOMY AND RELATIONS WITH THE UNITED STATES AND BRITAIN, 1941-1945, Draft 25 August, 1993
Hill, Alexander: “British Lend Lease Aid and the Soviet War Effort, June 1941 June 1942”, in: The Journal of Military History, Vol. 71, No. 3 (Jul., 2007), pp. 773-808
Cambridge History of the Second World War. Volume 1: Fighting the War. Cambridge University Press: UK (2015)
Broadberry, Stephen; Howlett, Peter: “The United Kingdom: ‘Victory at all costs'”, in: Harrison, Mark (ed.): The Economics of World War II. Cambridge University Press: UK (1998), p. 43-80
Strydwolf: Lend-Lease to Soviet Union, significance, impact and myths
Protocol and Area Information Staff of the U.S.S.R. Branch and the Division of Research and Reports: REPORT ON WAR AID FURNISHED BY THE UNITED STATES TO THE U.S.S.R, November 28, 1945
Harrison, Mark: “The USSR and Total War: Why Didn’t the Soviet Economy Collapse in 1942?” In: Chickering, Roger (ed.); Förster, Stig (ed.); Greiner, Bernd (ed.): A World at Total War: Global Conflict and the Politics of Destruction, 1939-1945, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2005), p. 137-156.
Tooze, Adam: The Wages of Destruction. The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy. Penguin Books: United Kingdom (2006).
Overy, Richard: Why the Allies Won. Pimlico: London, UK (2006).
Higham, Robin (ed.); Kagan, Frederick W. (ed.): The Military History of the Soviet Union. Palgrave: New York, 2002
Havlat, Denis: Western aid for the Soviet Union during World War II, Wien, 2015 (Master Thesis)
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Song: Ethan Meixsell – “Demilitarized Zone”
CGP Grey
Published 2 Jun 2020‣ Adapted largely from The Invisible Hook. It’s great, go read it: https://amzn.to/36PLKSE
‣ Director’s Commentary later today: https://www.patreon.com/cgpgrey## Special Thanks
Peter T. Leeson for reviewing a draft of the script. Check out his newest book, WTF?!: An Economic Tour of the Weird: https://amzn.to/3eEMm09
## Crowdfunders
Steven Snow, Bob Kunz, John Buchan, Nevin Spoljaric, Donal Botkin, BN-12, Chris Chapin, Richard Jenkins, Phil Gardner, Martin, سليمان العقل, Steven Grimm, Colin Millions, Saki Comandao, Jason Lewandowski, Andrea Di Biagio, David F Watson, Ben Schwab, Elliot Lepley, rictic, Bobby, Marco Arment, Shallon Brown, Shantanu Raj, emptymachine, George Lin, Henry Ng, Jeffrey Podis, Thunda Plum, Awoo, David Tyler, Derek Bonner, Derek Jackson, Fuesu, iulus, Jordan Earls, Joshua Jamison, Mikko, Nick Fish, Nick Gibson, Orbit_Junkie, Ron Bowes, Tómas Árni Jónasson, Tyler Bryant, Zach Whittle, Oliver Steele, Kermit Norlund, Kevin Costello, Ben Delo, Arctic May, Bear, chrysilis, David Palomares, Emil, Erik Parasiuk, Esteban Santana Santana, Freddi Hørlyck, Frederick The Great, John Rogers, ken mcfarlane, Leon, Maarten van der Blij, Peter Lomax, Rhys Parry, ShiroiYami, Tijmen van Dien, Tristan Watts-Willis, Veronica Peshterianu, Dag Viggo Lokøen, John Lee, Maxime Zielony, Bryan McLemore, Elizabeth Keathley, Alex Simonides, Felix Weis, Melvin Sowah, Giulio Bontadini, Paul Alom, Ryan Tripicchio, Scot Melville
## Music
David Rees: http://www.davidreesmusic.com
CGP Grey
Published 30 May 2020‣ Adapted largely from The Invisible Hook. It’s great, go read it: https://amzn.to/36PLKSE
‣ Thank you, my Patrons, for making this video possible: https://www.patreon.com/posts/37699725## Special Thanks
Peter T. Leeson for reviewing a draft of the script. Check out his newest book, WTF?!: An Economic Tour of the Weird: https://amzn.to/3eEMm09
## Crowdfunders
Steven Snow, Bob Kunz, John Buchan, Nevin Spoljaric, Donal Botkin, BN-12, Chris Chapin, Richard Jenkins, Phil Gardner, Martin, سليمان العقل, Steven Grimm, Colin Millions, Saki Comandao, Jason Lewandowski, Andrea Di Biagio, David F Watson, Ben Schwab, Elliot Lepley, rictic, Bobby, Marco Arment, Shallon Brown, Shantanu Raj, emptymachine, George Lin, Henry Ng, Jeffrey Podis, Thunda Plum, Awoo, David Tyler, Derek Bonner, Derek Jackson, Fuesu, iulus, Jordan Earls, Joshua Jamison, Mikko, Nick Fish, Nick Gibson, Orbit_Junkie, Ron Bowes, Tómas Árni Jónasson, Tyler Bryant, Zach Whittle, Oliver Steele, Kermit Norlund, Kevin Costello, Ben Delo, Arctic May, Bear, chrysilis, David Palomares, Emil, Erik Parasiuk, Esteban Santana Santana, Freddi Hørlyck, Frederick The Great, John Rogers, ken mcfarlane, Leon, Maarten van der Blij, Peter Lomax, Rhys Parry, ShiroiYami, Tijmen van Dien, Tristan Watts-Willis, Veronica Peshterianu, Dag Viggo Lokøen, John Lee, Maxime Zielony, Bryan McLemore, Elizabeth Keathley, Alex Simonides, Felix Weis, Melvin Sowah, Giulio Bontadini, Paul Alom, Ryan Tripicchio, Scot Melville
## Music
David Rees: http://www.davidreesmusic.com
World War Two
Published 28 May 2020The Bismarck is without a doubt a force to be reckoned with. But with the Kriegsmarine experiencing an identity crisis throughout the 1930s, the Bismarck‘s design and strategic purpose foreshadow a dramatic ending.
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Written by: Joram Appel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Joram Appel
Edited by: Mikołaj Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)Colorizations by:
Ruffneck88, Wikimedia Commons
Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/Sources:
Bundesarchiv
IWM HU 374, HU 67486, HU 1041, HU 108392, A 6155, D 2373, HU 55631
From the Noun Project: Game by Ecem Afacan, Shield by Nikita KozinSoundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Phoenix Tail – “At the Front”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Rannar Sillard – “March Of The Brave 10”
Max Anson – “Ancient Saga”
Johannes Bornlof – “Deviation In Time”
Reynard Seidel – “Deflection”Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
Helen of Troy was renowned as a very beautiful woman, said to have possessed “the face that launched a thousand ships” (i.e. to invade Troy and rescue her). Her name has thus become a unit of measure of beauty. For example, a millihelen has been defined as “the amount of beauty needed to launch a single ship”, whereas a negative helen is “the amount of negative beauty (i.e. ugliness) that can beach a thousand ships”.
Peter Grant, “How do you measure up?”, Mad Genius Club, 2018-01-28.
Colby Cosh linked to this story at gcaptain.com which would have been an unbelievable one in the pre-epidemic world:
A column of ships along the Suez Canal on 3 December, 2011.
Photo by https://web.archive.org/web/20161022104657/http://www.panoramio.com/user/2433337?with_photo_id=64163879 via Wikimedia Commons.
The Suez Canal Authority (SCA) is set to lose over $10m in revenue from container lines routing vessels via the Cape of Good Hope rather than its waterway.
According to new Alphaliner research, “the number of containerships that have opted to use the Cape route and bypass the Suez Canal has risen to a historic peace-time high,” including at least 20 sailings on the Asia-Europe, Europe-Asia and North America east coast-Asia trades.
“A unique combination of a container tonnage surplus and rock-bottom bunker prices has increasingly prompted ocean carriers to avoid the canal – and thus its fees,” the analyst noted today.
“Rather unusually, even three westbound Asia-Europe headhaul sailings have opted for the Cape route, all operated by CMA CGM.
“Carriers very rarely choose this longer route for the time-sensitive headhaul, but the low bunker price and lack of demand in European markets, hit by the Covid-19 lockdowns, have suddenly made such moves viable,” it added.
Moreover, a huge fraction of global trade flows through a few key choke points. A century ago, Jackie Fisher described “Five keys [that] lock up the world! Singapore. The Cape. Alexandria [Suez]. Gibraltar. Dover.” Today, we’d have to add the Strait of Hormuz, but the basic truth remains the same. Control of trade through these critical areas gives immense power, and it is in the interest of a maritime power to have that control, or at least to have great influence over how it is used.
“bean”, “Basics of Naval Strategy”, Naval Gazing, 2018-01-22.
Well, two RCN ships, if not the entire fleet … Joseph Trevithick reports for The Drive:
HMCS Regina in her dazzle camouflage paint taking part in Task Group Exercise 20-1 in April, 2020.
Canadian Forces photo via The Drive.
Air forces around the world will often give their aircraft specialized paint jobs to commemorate anniversaries and other notable occasions, but it’s far less common to see navies do the same thing with their ships. Recently, however, the Royal Canadian Navy’s Halifax class frigate HMCS Regina recently took part in a training exercise wearing an iconic blue, black, and gray paint job, commonly known as a “dazzle” scheme, a kind of warship camouflage that first appeared during World War I.
At the end of March 2020, Regina, and her unique paint job, had joined HMCS Calgary, another Halifax-class frigate, along with the Kingston-class coastal defense vessel HMCS Brandon and two Orca-class Patrol Craft Training (PCT) vessels, Cougar* and Wolf*, for Task Group Exercise 20-1 (TGEX 20-1) off the coast of Vancouver Island in the northeastern Pacific Ocean. The training continued into the first week of April. TGEX 20-1 was part of Calgary‘s Directed Sea Readiness Training (DSRT) in preparation for that particular ship’s upcoming deployment.
Regina had first emerged in the dazzle scheme in October 2019 ahead of the U.S. Navy-led Rim of the Pacific (RIMPAC) exercise, a massive naval training event that takes place every two years and includes U.S. allies and partners from around the Pacific region. It reportedly took 272 gallons of paint and cost the Royal Canadian Navy $20,000 to give Regina the dazzle treatment.
The frigate will wear the camouflage pattern until the end of 2020. The Royal Canadian Navy also painted up the Kingston-class HMCS Moncton, which is homeported in Halifax on the other side of the country, in a similar scheme. The paint job on both ships is in commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the end of the Battle of the Atlantic. This refers to the Allied fight to both enforce a naval blockade of Germany during World War II and secure critical maritime supply routes from North America to Europe. The battle officially ended with the surrender of the Nazi regime in May 1945.
HMCS Moncton in dazzle camouflage, 2020.
Canadian Forces photo via The Drive.
* Wikipedia points out that the Orca-class are not formally commissioned ships in the RCN and therefore do not carry the designation “Her Majesty’s Canadian Ship” (HMCS).
It’s odd that all the increased collisions seem to involve Chinese vessels:
Japanese Maritime Self-Defence Force ship JS Shimakaze (DDG-172), the second ship of the Hatakaze class, commissioned in 1988. She was slightly damaged in a collision with a Chinese fishing boat in the East China Sea on 30 March 2020.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.
Sci-fi genius Robert Heinlein warned readers never to attribute to villainy behavior that was adequately explained by stupidity. In other words, he believed malice should be the explanation of last resort for puzzling conduct on the part of people or groups of people; it shouldn’t be the default. Better to hunt for more benign explanations first. With apologies to Heinlein, I would amend his “razor,” or heuristic, slightly. It’s too narrow. There are other candidates than stupidity or purposeful villainy to account for misconduct. Factors like incompetence, bureaucratic inertia, and sheer accident form — and sometimes deform — human thought and action. They belong on the stupidity side of Heinlein’s ledger.
How about this: Never attribute to villainy behavior that can be adequately explained by human failings. That preserves the essence of Heinlein’s razor while widening its scope to fit reality.
Let’s use his revised heuristic to evaluate the Sino-Japanese collision. It’s certainly possible the mishap came about by accident. It took place at night, in crowded waters. If the U.S. Navy collisions of 2017 taught us nothing else, it’s that the crews of even frontline warships can suffer from a host of maladies, from overwork to shoddy personnel practices to doctrinal or training shortfalls. No amount of high technology — whether it’s Aegis radar or satellite navigation — can altogether forestall human error. It may be that the Japanese crew, the Chinese crew, or both blundered around in the dark and came to grief. By Heinlein’s lights that’s the generous and proper assumption until the facts become known. If they do.
Nevertheless, a silent corollary has to be appended to Heinlein’s razor: But don’t rule out villainy, either.
Especially when it comes to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). For decades Beijing has made militiamen embedded in the Chinese fishing fleet an arm of maritime strategy. The maritime militia is an irregular adjunct to regular naval forces, including the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLA Navy) and especially the musclebound China Coast Guard fielded over the past decade. Beijing touted the militia’s combat prowess as long ago as 1974, when Chinese naval forces wrested a tottering South Vietnam’s holdings in the Paracel Islands from it in a brief but bloody sea battle. Militia craft backed by the coast guard have been a fixture in the South China Sea ever since 2009, when Beijing declared “indisputable sovereignty” over the vast majority of that body of water — including seas allocated to its neighbors by treaty. The irregular force went into overdrive in 2012 during the standoff with the Philippine Navy and Coast Guard at Scarborough Shoal, deep within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. Fishing craft flood the zone in CCP-claimed waters and dare local coast guards or navies to repulse them. If the locals resist, the China Coast Guard backs up the militia. PLA regular forces provide a backstop should things go awry.
H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.
Renaissance men developed a delightful, yet horrible way of dealing with their mad denizens: they were put on a ship and entrusted to mariners because folly, water, and sea, as everyone then knew, had an affinity for each other. Thus, “Ships of Fools” crisscrossed the seas and canals of Europe with their comic and pathetic cargo of souls. Some of them found pleasure and even a cure in the changing surroundings, in the isolation of being cast off, while others withdrew further, became worse, or died alone and away from their families. The cities and villages which had thus rid themselves of their crazed and crazy, could now take pleasure in watching the exciting sideshow when a ship full of foreign lunatics would dock at their harbors.
This was such a great piece of historical trivia that I was shocked I’d never heard it before. Some quick research revealed the reason: it is completely, 100% false. Apparently Foucault looked at an allegorical painting by Hieronymus Bosch, decided it definitely existed in real life, and concocted the rest from his imagination.
Foucault apologists try to rescue this, say that he was just being poetic in some way. He wasn’t. Page 8 in my copy: “Of all these romantic or satiric vessels, the Narrenschiff [Ship Of Fools] is the only one that had a real existence — for they did exist, these boats that conveyed their insane cargo from town to town.” He really, really doubled down on this point. As far as I can tell, this is just as bad a failing of scholarship as it sounds – and surprising, since everything else about the book gives the impression of Foucault as an incredibly knowledgeable and wide-ranging scholar.
Scott Alexander, “Book review: Madness and Civilization”, Slate Star Codex, 2018-01-04.
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