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Interesting facts of military history

Discussion in 'Military History' started by Kai-Petri, Dec 12, 2003.

  1. ARWR

    ARWR Active Member

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    There is/was a down loadable copy on the Internet - that's where I got mine but I no longer have the link I'm afraid and I got it through the University library portal.
     
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  2. Takao

    Takao Ace

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  3. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    Cheers! :cool:
     
  4. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    "On the night of 25/26 July 1940 ten Wellingtons of No 99 Squadron take part in a raid on Dortmund. The Wellington (P9275 LF-O “Orange”) is about to carry out the bombing run, when is surrounded by searchlights and is attacked by a Me 110 and is shot down. Four of the six-man crew manage to bail out and is captured by the Germans.
    Just a few minutes later, PO Morian Hansen manages to shoot down the German night fighter. According to Edgerley (1993) this is the first German night fighter to be downed by a British night bomber. On 7 July 1941, he is awarded Distinguished Flying Cross for this incident."
    www.danishww2pilots.dk/profiles.php?person=35
     
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  5. OpanaPointer

    OpanaPointer I Point at Opana Staff Member WW2|ORG Editor

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    Just saw footage of a US Army artillery piece that put a round through the window of a Chevy Suburban ... at 43 miles.

    Drunks with guns (I mean militias) take note. That's a eighty-six mile circle they can cover.
     
  6. Takao

    Takao Ace

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    I'll wait till they get in it into operational service. Don't make me call forth the Ghost of the XM2001 Crusader.
     
  7. OpanaPointer

    OpanaPointer I Point at Opana Staff Member WW2|ORG Editor

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    Aw, come on, can't happen twice, can it?
     
  8. Kai-Petri

    Kai-Petri Kenraali

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    Governor-General of Finland murdered

    Nikolay Bobrikov - Wikipedia

    In 1898, Tsar Nicholas II appointed Bobrikov as the Governor-General of Finland as well as the Finnish Military District.

    Upon appointment, he introduced a Russification programme into the Grand Duchy, the 11 main points were:

    • Unification of the Finnish army.
    • Restricting the power of the Minister–Secretary of the State.
    • Introducing of a special programme for dealing with cases common to the Empire and the Grand Duchy.
    • Adoption of The Russian language as the official language of the Senate, education and administration.

    Nikolay Ivanovich Bobrikov (Russian: Никола́й Ива́нович Бо́бриков; January 27 [O.S. January 15] 1839 in St. Petersburg – June 17, 1904 in Helsinki, Grand Duchy of Finland) was a Russian general and politician.[1] He was the Governor-General of Finland and the Finnish Military District from 29 August [O.S. 17] 1898 to 16 June [O.S. ] 1904 during the early reign of Emperor Nicholas II, and was responsible for the Russification of Finland. After appointment as the governor-general, he quickly became very unpopular and was assassinated by Eugen Schauman, a Finnish nationalist born in Kharkov.
     
  9. Kai-Petri

    Kai-Petri Kenraali

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  10. Kai-Petri

    Kai-Petri Kenraali

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    How did radio save the Tower?

    Did you know? The Eiffel Tower was supposed to be dismantled after 20 years. Fortunately, things didn’t happen that way, and we have radio to thank for it! By Bertrand Lemoine.

    In March 1918, a coded radiogram was intercepted and then deciphered over three days of hard work by Polytechnic graduate Georges Painvin. Its contents allowed the French to thwart the German attack and henceforth turn the tide of the war and push through to final victory. The Tower’s strategic importance was thus amply demonstrated. Later, Radio Eiffel Tower would begin broadcasting regularly in December 1921.
     
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  11. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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  12. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    Always wondered where the idea had come from.
    "Józef Stanisław Kozacki 1909-1990
    Inventor of the mine detector

    In the year 1940, during the first year of the Second World War, came the Poles. They came, neither out of choice, nor as tourists, but as a substantial fragment of an army which had rebuilt itself outwith its conquered country; a feat remarkable in itself. Having fought in the Battle for France that year, its survivors extricated themselves, then regrouped and re-equipped, they were stationed on the Eastern Seaboard of Scotland, initially building a long chain of coastal defences against imminent invasion. In their midst was one First Lieutenantt Jozef Stanislaw Kozacki , a signals officer of the first Polish Army, stationed in St Andrews. In 1937 he had been commissioned by the Department of Artillery of the Polish Ministry of National Defence, to develop an electrical machine capable of detecting unexploded ‘duds’ on firing ranges and battlefields.
    Based at the military research centres at Stalowa Wola and Radom, he successfully developed a machine constructed at the famous AVA Electronics factory in Warsaw – the same factory which built the first secret Polish replicas of the German Military ‘Enigma’ cipher machine. The outbreak of war arrested development. Escaping to France, Kozacki continued the same objectives under Polish Command, but altered the purpose of the machine to detect land mines. Evacuated to Scotland and St Andrews, the Polish Military Command, ever mindful of pre-war projects, revived the work. In the Ardgowan Hotel / Eden Court army headquarters complex in Pilmour Place, also the Polish Communications Training Centre, Kozacki was, according to his fellow officer Jan Zakrzewski, ‘given a laboratory, workshop, and an aide with whom to complete and perfect the mine detector’. Prototypes were built and tested, appropriately enough, on the West Sands. In the North African desert theatre of war, the British Army hampered by the lack of an effective land mine detector, appealed to the Ministry of Defence to field a competition for the submission of an effective machine. The Polish Government in Exile, aware of its own accomplishments in this field, submitted Kozacki’s design. In trials it triumphed and was immediately accepted. 500 examples of ‘Mine Detector nr 2 (Polish)’ were rushed to North Africa in time for the Battle of El Alamein, where it proved its worth. The basic design was still in use during the 1991 Gulf War, and the MK 4 version till 1995. Kozacki’s design weighed 30lbs (14 kilos) was portable, reliable, effective, and relatively easy to maintain in the field.
    It is no exaggeration to state the huge beneficial humanitarian implications of Kozacki’s invention; it has saved countless thousands of lives and limbs world-wide, and continues to do so. Kozacki received neither payment nor official recognition for his work, save for a treasured letter of gratitude from King George VI. The mine detector was a ‘first’ for Kozacki, and yet another ‘first’ for St Andrews."
    Scotland – a country of inventors « Polish Scottish Heritage
     
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  13. Kai-Petri

    Kai-Petri Kenraali

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    Not sure but I think I recall the Germans would have put already in Africa tin cans among mines and this would slow down the Allied troops who were digging up as mines everything the detector noticed.
     
  14. Kai-Petri

    Kai-Petri Kenraali

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    Kapitanleutnant Friedrich Christiansen ended the WW1 with 21 accredited victories, including a British coastal airship and the British submarine C25. He was the first of only three naval airmen to receive the coveted Pour le Merite, awarded on 11 December 1917, the only seaplane pilot to do so. He reached the rank of General in the next war and died in December 1972.

    From "Lufwaffe fighter-bombers over Britain" by Chriss Goss
     
  15. Kai-Petri

    Kai-Petri Kenraali

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    Heated shot or "Greek fire".



    Just saw a document on this on tv. During the American Revolutionary War, French artillerymen destroyed the British frigate HMS Charon using heated shot during the Battle of Yorktown in 1781

    HMS Charon (1778) - Wikipedia

    Heated shot - Wikipedia

    Heated shot or hot shot is round shot that is heated before firing from muzzle-loading cannons, for the purpose of setting fire to enemy warships, buildings, or equipment. The use of hot shot dates back centuries and only ceased when vessels armored with iron replaced wooden warships in the world's navies.
     
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  16. Kai-Petri

    Kai-Petri Kenraali

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    The British shipwreck that changed the world

    One of the worst disasters in British maritime history, the wrecking of HMS Association led to two acts of parliament and the establishment of longitude.

    A 90-gun, second-rate English warship, HMS Association was the flagship of Sir Cloudesley Shovell, who had worked his way up from lowly cabin boy to become Admiral of the Fleet in 1705. Shovell had distinguished himself in the Nine Years' War and in early skirmishes of the War of the Spanish Succession, but after a summer spent (unsuccessfully) laying siege to the French port of Toulon, he set sail for home, departing from Gibraltar for England in late September 1707.

    At around 20:00 on 22 October 1707, believing they were off the coast of Brittany and heading into the English Channel, the fleet ploughed on through the darkness and straight into the Western Rocks. The Association, under the command of Captain Edward Loades, struck the Outer Gilstone rock and sank within two minutes. Three other ships – the Eagle, the Romney and the Firebrand – were also wrecked. "The Weather being very hazy and rainy and Night coming on dark…some of them [were] upon the Rocks to the Westward of Scilly before they were aware. Of the Association not a Man was sav'd," reported the Daily Courant, Britain's first daily newspaper, at the time. Some 1,450 men were lost across the four ships, with only 24 survivors between them. It remains one of the worst disasters in British maritime history.

    It took John Harrison 25 years and four attempts, but in 1759 he invented a marine chronometer that allowed a ship to calculate its longitude by comparing the difference in local time at sea with the time in Greenwich. His prize-winning pocket watch, known as H4, overcame the challenging conditions on board – the issues of motion and variation in temperature – and offered the stability required.

    The Association, meanwhile, still lay scattered beneath the Outer Gilstone, as she would for another 200 years. In 1963, Larn, then a Chief Petty Officer First Class in the Royal Navy, initiated the search for the wreck when he approached an admiral to ask if he could borrow a minesweeper. It took Larn and a team of divers from the Naval Air Command Sub Aqua Club (NACSAC) three years to find the Association, but on 4 July 1967 they discovered a bronze cannon and gold coins on the Gilstone Ledge.

    In just six weeks, they raised several French cannons from the seabed – trophies from the War of the Spanish Succession (one of which they donated to the Valhalla Museum on Tresco) – along with gold and silver coins, pewter plates and a phenomenal assortment of artefacts, from buckles and buttons to candlesticks and combs.

    Word quickly got out, though, and amateur salvagers descended on the Scillies. "Anybody with a diving cylinder and a bedroll turned up here," Larn told me. "There was nothing to stop anybody from looting the wreck of the Association after we left, and that's exactly what happened. Coins were so plentiful that people were paying for pints in the pub with them."

    "What happened on the Association was a national disgrace," said Larn, who was moved to petition his local MP to consider a bill to protect historic wrecks – the Mary Rose had recently been discovered in the Solent and Larn feared her treasures would go the same way if nothing was done. The Protection of Wrecks Act was passed in 1973, a second act of parliament, more than 250 years after the first, which safeguarded wrecks from unauthorised interference. There are currently 24 protected wrecks in UK waters, three of which lie off the Scillies; the Association, whose wreck site still holds scores of iron cannon, is one of them.
     
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  17. Kai-Petri

    Kai-Petri Kenraali

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    " No more wars for me at any price!!" declared Edmund Blunden. "Except against the French. If there´s ever a war with them I´ll go like a shot!"

    Edmund Charles Blunden CBE MC (1 November 1896 – 20 January 1974) was an English poet, author and critic. Like his friend Siegfried Sassoon, he wrote of his experiences in World War I in both verse and prose. For most of his career, Blunden was also a reviewer for English publications and an academic in Tokyo and later Hong Kong. He ended his career as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature six times.

    Blunden survived nearly two years in the front line without physical injury (despite being gassed in October 1917[6]) but, for the rest of his life, he bore mental scars from his experiences.[2] With characteristic self-deprecation he attributed his survival to his diminutive size, which made "an inconspicuous target".[7] His own account of his experiences was published in 1928, as Undertones of War.

    Born: 1 November 1896
    London, England
    Died 20 January 1974 (aged 77)
    Long Melford, England
     
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  18. Kai-Petri

    Kai-Petri Kenraali

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    Dreyfus scandal:

    The scandal dragged on for over a decade. In 1899 an emanciated, fever-ridden Dreyfus was brought back to France only to have his conviction upheld by a new court martial. After international protests, not least from Queen Victoria who in an uncoded telegran to the the British Embassy in Paris referred to him as ´the poor martyr Dreyfus ´, he was ´pardoned´though his supporterters insisted that he had done done nothing to be pardoned for. not until 1906 was the artillery officer fully exonerated, restored to the army, promoted and awarded the Legion d´Honneur.

    England´s last war against France by Colin Smith
     
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  19. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    That case has always annoyed me, first read about it when I was a kid.
     
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  20. CAC

    CAC Ace of Spades

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    Serious question Kai...Could Taiwan learn anything from Finland at this point in time? Being an island, could Taiwan learn anything from 1940 Britain?
     

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