Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 21 Mar 2023
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March 22, 2023
First Class Breakfast on the RMS Titanic
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March 20, 2023
When 1 Ship Saved 30 others – The Sacrifice of Jervis Bay
Historigraph
Published 25 Nov 2022On the morning of November 5th 1940, the British merchant convoy HX84 was spotted and attacked by a German pocket battleship. Faced with the destruction of 37 merchant ships and a heavy blow against Britain’s survival, it fell to HMS Jervis Bay, the convoy’s only escort, to charge the enemy ship head on and at all costs buy some time for the merchant ships to escape.
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March 15, 2023
An Aircraft Carrier Without A Deck? | The Remarkable Brodie Landing System
Rex’s Hangar
Published 21 Sept 2022Today we’re taking a look at the remarkable Brodie Launch System. This device could be used on land or aboard ships, and it was designed to provide accessibility for light aircraft in extremely remote locations during WW2.
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February 19, 2023
Flower-Class Corvettes – WW2 Atlantic Defender
Matsimus
Published 29 Jun 2020The Flower-class corvette (also referred to as the Gladiolus class after the lead ship) was a British class of 294 corvettes used during World War II, specifically with the Allied navies as anti-submarine convoy escorts during the Battle of the Atlantic. Royal Navy ships of this class were named after flowers, hence the name of the class.
The majority served during World War II with the Royal Navy (RN) and Royal Canadian Navy (RCN). Several ships built largely in Canada were transferred from the RN to the United States Navy (USN) under the lend-lease programme, seeing service in both navies. Some corvettes transferred to the USN were manned by the US Coast Guard. The vessels serving with the US Navy were known as Temptress and Action-class patrol gunboats. Other Flower-class corvettes served with the Free French Naval Forces, the Royal Netherlands Navy, the Royal Norwegian Navy, the Royal Indian Navy, the Royal Hellenic Navy, the Royal New Zealand Navy, the Royal Yugoslav Navy, and, immediately post-war, the South African Navy.
After World War II many surplus Flower-class vessels saw worldwide use in other navies, as well as civilian use. HMCS Sackville is the only member of the class to be preserved as a museum ship. Flower Class corvettes were originally intended for coastal escort and mine clearing work. Derived from a whaler design, they were simple, highly seaworthy vessels that could be constructed in secondary yards. The dire lack of ocean escorts early in the war necessitated their being used to screen convoys traversing the North Atlantic between Nova Scotia and the UK. This was a role for which they were ill-designed, and their crews suffered accordingly. The Flowers were wet, highly cramped and impossibly lively. Many sailors could not adjust to the exhausting routine. Compounding the misery was the inexperience of the crews, most of whom had never been to sea. But any escort was better than none at all, so the yards continued to turn out corvettes. 120 were built in Canadian yards, and slightly more in the UK.
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January 2, 2023
An in-depth look at the Type 26 frigate design
Navy Lookout
Published 31 Dec 2022The Type 26 frigates being built for the Royal Navy [and Royal Canadian and Royal Australian navies] are specialist submarine hunters but with a range of other capabilities. This video provides a primer on the overall warship design, its weapons, sensors and decoys.
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December 7, 2022
Pearl Harbor: Before and After December 7th
Geographics
Published 20 Sep 2022
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December 5, 2022
The Halifax Explosion
[For more on the events leading up to the explosion, you can read my page on the event here.]
OTD Canadian Military History
Published 3 Dec 2022Halifax, Nova Scotia was rocked by a massive explosion on the morning of 6 December 1917 after the French cargo ship SS Mont-Blanc collided with the Norwegian vessel SS Imo in the harbour. Nearly 2000 people were killed and 9000 were injured. More than 25,000 were left without adequate shelter.
This video includes a photo of the Halifax explosion itself and footage from its aftermath as I explain details of the explosion and the relief efforts.
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The sinking of HMS Courageous, 17 September, 1939
The Northern Historian
Published 5 Feb 202117th September 1939, just two weeks after Britain had declared war on Germany, aircraft carrier HMS Courageous was on patrol off the west coast of Ireland. Unbeknown to her, she was being stalked by a hidden predator. Within 20 minutes of being attacked she had slipped beneath the Atlantic surface, taking with her the lives of over 500 men. She became the first British naval casualty of World War Two.
She began her life as a light cruiser during World War One as part of the Courageous class of cruisers. They were a trio of ships comprising HMS Courageous, HMS Glorious, and HMS Furious. These ships were designed and built to support Admiral Lord Fisher’s Baltic project.
Following heavy losses at The Battle of Jutland, HMS Courageous became the flagship of the 1st Cruiser Squadron and took part in the 2nd Battle of Heligoland.
Following World War 1 and due to the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, limiting new ship constructions, HMS Courageous along with her sisters HMS Glorious and HMS Furious were converted into aircraft carriers and became the Courageous class of aircraft carriers for the Royal Navy.
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October 19, 2022
South Atlantic D-Day: Battle of San Carlos – Falklands War
Historigraph
Published 15 Oct 2022On May 21st 1982, the United Kingdom landed thousands of troops at San Carlos Water in the Falkland Islands, to begin their recapture from Argentina. But only hours after arriving, British forces were under intense attack, as the Argentine air force attempted to push the troops clambering ashore back into the sea. This was the Battle of San Carlos.
0:00 – Intro
0:37 – Britain’s Invasion Plans
2:59 – Bespoke Post
4:16 – The Argentine Onslaught
8:46 – Attack on Coventry and Conveyer
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October 10, 2022
Chinese Warlords and the Royal Canadian Navy – WW2 – OOTF 028
World War Two
Published 9 Oct 2022In today’s episode of Out of the Foxholes, we discuss the role of Chinese warlords played in the war against Japan, while also shining a bit more light on the Canadian Navy and its impact on WW2.
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September 25, 2022
200 Medals Won in an Hour – The Raid on Zeebrugge, 1918
Historigraph
Published 11 May 2022
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September 23, 2022
A Short History of Ships Cats – Floating Felines, Maritime Moggies and Kleptomaniac Kittens
Drachinifel
Published 26 Feb 2020A quick look at the origins of a vital part of the ship’s maintenance crew, and some notable examples.
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September 3, 2022
The impact of the first wave of globalization
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes considers the world in terms of trade before and after the transportation revolution which changed long-distance trade from primarily luxury goods to commodities for the mass market:
Long-distance trade has of course been common since ancient times. Archaeologists often find Byzantine-made glassware from the sixth century all the way out in India, China, and even Japan. Or beads from seventh-century Southeast Asia all the way out in Libya, Spain, and even Britain. Yet such long-distance trades often involved goods that were entirely unique to particular areas — gems, spices, indigo, coffee, tea — or were sufficiently valuable to make the high costs of transportation worthwhile, such as expert-made glassware, silks, and muslin cloths with impossibly high thread counts. Long-distance trade may have been ancient but was restricted to luxuries. It did not involve the everyday goods of life.
That all changed, however, when the innovations of the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries caused transportation costs to dramatically fall. With better sailing ships, canals, and navigational techniques, followed by better roads, railways, refrigeration, steam power, and dynamite (which meant railways could cross mountain ranges, canals could link oceans, and new deep-water ports could be dug), it was soon profitable to transport even the cheapest and bulkiest of goods over vast distances — goods like meat, coal, and grain.
The entire world was brought into a single market, in which even the bulkiest commodities of each continent were suddenly in direct competition with one another. The decisions of farmers in Ukraine, for example, in the nineteenth century came to affect the farmers in America, China, India, or even Australia, and all of them vice versa. The prices of commodities all over the world thus converged to similar levels, falling in some places, but rising in the economies that had previously been too distant from the ready markets of the industrialised nations.
The result was what economic historians call a terms-of-trade boom, with the more agrarian economies’ commodity exports becoming more valuable relative to manufactured imports. Thus, their grain, raw fibres, minerals, and ores suddenly bought many more foreign manufactures like textiles. Countries that specialised in commodities thus specialised even further, devoting even more of their workers, resources and capital to extracting them. They were incentivised to extend their frontiers — to put more of the wilderness under pasture or plough, and to dig deeper for the mineral wealth beneath their feet.
Meanwhile, for the industrial economies, the opposite happened. By gaining access to many more and cheaper sources of raw resources and food, they were able to make their own manufactured exports cheaper too. And this, in turn, further exacerbated the terms-of-trade boom among their newly globalised commodity suppliers. As the great Saint-Lucian economist Sir W. Arthur Lewis put it, the world in the late nineteenth century separated into an increasingly industrialised “core”, fed by an increasingly farming- and mining-focused “periphery”.
Much has changed in the century that followed, and some of the old core/periphery distinctions have moved or entirely broken down. But the world has remained globalised. Even in periods of higher tariffs, like between the world wars, no amount of protectionism was able to counteract or undo the effects of the dramatic drop in global transportation costs. With the advent of telegraphs, telephones, fax machines, and now the Internet, even many services are becoming globalised as well — a process likely sped up by the pandemic. Those who can easily work from home will increasingly, like nineteenth-century workers the world over, find themselves either the victims or beneficiaries of global price convergence. (Incidentally, I’m not convinced that the very services-heavy economies of Europe or North America are even remotely prepared for this, to the extent that they can prepare at all for what is the economic equivalent of a planetary-scale force of nature.)
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August 25, 2022
The Polish Navy – Founding to the Fall of Poland
Drachinifel
Published 14 Apr 2021Today we take a look at the how the Polish Navy came to be, how the core of their ships got away to form the start of the Free Polish Navy, and the last stand the remaining ships and men undertook.
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August 20, 2022
The historical tourist attractions of Pisa
In the latest Age of Invention newsletter, Anton Howes talks about a recent trip to Italy, specifically the historically interesting places in Pisa and Lucca:
Galileo Galilei circa 1640.
Detail of an oil portrait by Justus Sustermans (1597-1681) from the National Maritime Museum via Wikimedia Commons.
Some are famous. Galileo Galilei, for example, is said to have used the leaning tower of Pisa to drop two spheres of different masses, to show that they would fall at the same speed — at least, that’s what his disciple Vincenzo Viviani claimed, ten years after Galileo’s death, and many decades after the alleged demonstration. Even if Viviani was being accurate, however, Galileo certainly wasn’t the first to demonstrate the concept. And Viviani mistakenly claimed priority for all sort of other scientific breakthroughs for his master, so like most other historians I’m inclined to doubt the story.
Nonetheless, Pisa was certainly Galileo’s birthplace — though it turns out that there are three different locations in the city to have claimed the honour over the years.
Galileo was initially thought to have been born in or near the fortress (its walls are impressive to look at and contain a pleasant garden). But this location was then refuted on the basis that for Galileo’s father Vincenzo Galilei to have lived in the fortress he would have had to have been a master at arms, which he was not. He was in fact a merchant and lute-maker. So in the nineteenth century a new location emerged: the casa Bocca, on the Stretto Borgo, which Vincenzo rented a few months before Galileo’s birth, and where the Galilei family lived for the next decade. It seemed a secure candidate for a while, except for a weird discrepancy: Galileo’s baptismal certificate assigned his birth to the wrong parish.
It then emerged that Galileo’s mother’s family — the Ammannati — lived in the correct parish, and that the custom of the time was for women to return to their parents’ home for the birth of their first child. Thus, the evidence points to Galileo having been born at the Casa Ammanati on the via Giusti. It’s a neat story of how a tourist destination can jump around based on new research, though there’s unfortunately not much to visit there other than a plaque.
In terms of things to actually see, one of the most impressive things in Pisa is the Museo delle Navi Antiche (Museum of Ancient Ships), which we found to be undeservedly deserted. Housed in the old stables for the city’s cavalry, and once the site of the Medici-era naval arsenal, the museum gives a fantastically thorough overview of the city from its Etruscan beginnings through to Roman subjugation, Ostrogothic invasion, Byzantine reconquest, and Longbeard settlement in the sixth century (although they’re usually called the Lombards, this comes from langobardi — literally, longbeards — so I think calling them that is both more accurate and more fun).
The museum’s highlight, however, is the ancient ships for which it is named, and which are incredibly well-preserved. I was stunned to see a massive actual wooden anchor, not just a reconstruction, of a cargo ship from the second century BC. It’s so well-preserved that you can even make out a decoration, carved into the wood, of a ray fish. The same goes for the rest of the various ships’ timbers. You can see almost all of their original hulls and planking, as well as finer details like rudder-oars, benches for the rowers, and in one case even the ship’s name carved into the wood — the Alkedo, which appears to have been a pleasure boat from the first century. Apparently, during excavation, the archaeologists could even make out the Alkedo‘s original red and white paint, as well as the impression left by an iron sheet that had covered its prow. The ships’ contents are often just as astonishing, with well-preserved baskets, fragments of clothing, and even bits of the rigging like its wooden pulleys and ropes. Well worth a visit.
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