Naval History Forums

Hi Paul, The case you are referring to is the notorious Admiral Dudley North affair, which has been covered obliquely in the Court Martial for the Denmark Straits thread including: I am currently reading Action Imminent by Peter C Smith which has a lengthy description of the circumstances under whic...

Hi DLee12, There are no stupid questions, although sometimes conclusions appear dumb. The following is a recollection from Bill Surgi, a midshipman aboard the Yorktown at the time of the incident: The LSO sees an aircraft with wide spread, fixed landing gear coming into the landing pattern. It was a...

Hi All, Mike Rossiter's (who located the wreck) book "Ark Royal" suggests that due to strong currents, even with one, (some accounts say two) tugs, her speed over the ground was so slow, she was making little or no progress toward Gibraltar. The decision to start the port engine and propeller was to...

Hi Fatboy, According to various sources these boats were copies of the German U-125 minelayer ceded to Japan as part of the Versailles Treaty. U-125 sometimes gets confused with UB-125, also ceded to Japan, but this was a shorter coastal boat with no minelaying capability. UB-125 was designated O-6 ...

Hi Paul, All the Germans had to do was have a friend buy a copy of the News Chronicle newspaper for 28th May 1941, price one penny. I have a facsimile copy which mentions most of the ships and their Captain's names. British newspapers may have been available in other neutral countries including the ...

Hi gflotron, According to Mungo Melvin's "Sevastopol's Wars" Osprey 2017, Goeben caused virtually no damage at all in an attack on 29th October 1914. 47 rounds of main armament and 12 of secondary were fired, resulting in the killing and injuring of some patients outside the waterside hospital, and ...

Hi HMSVF, Hitting two birds with one stone is always an attractive prospect for bean counters and Fisher cleverly pushed his Battlecruiser programme forward with "and another thing, we can get these liners with them as well", which transmogrifies in Bacon's eulogistic biography of the great man into...

Hi Byron, Glad you are feeling better and clearly so feisty. From the World War One site wwionline.org/articles/complex-case-rms-lusitania/ The Lusitania and her sister ship the Mauretania were built to dominate the luxury transatlantic passenger trade. At the end of the 19th century, the iconic Cun...

Hi All, According to Anthony Preston's Battleships of WWI Invincible cost £1.6 million so not loaning any money to Cunard wouldn't buy many of them. Additionally the motive for the government loan might be to keep shipyards busy and capability in place, not just to get potential use of these merchan...

Hi Byron, Genuinely sorry to hear you have been unwell and that my observations may have caused any additional distress. However I just don't believe Prof Seligmann's thesis as stated. To put "stupendous" into context, from the Cunard site: "British prestige was at stake. The British Government prov...

Hi HMSVF, Perceptive observations as usual. :ok: I sometimes think these high-level academic types generate strange arguments for their own amusement and status enhancement. Germany "not a maritime threat" for one school (apparently Sumida et al) or they are, but with "Paper Tiger" ersatz warships t...

Hi HMSVF, Are you sure it wasn't Alec Guinness in Kind Hearts and Coronets? Don't you have an opinion on the battlecruiser's origin: super-cruiser or liner chaser wrangle? :cool: Further research in Friedman's British Cruisers of the Victorian Era shows the big cruisers from Powerful and Terrible on...

Hi Admiral Semmes and others, After a little on-line research of reviews of the mighty (and expensive) strategical tomes created by the academical behemoths Sumida, Seligmann et al it seems that their major fight is whether the mercurial mind of Fisher had eventually decided naval war in the constra...

Hi Admiral Semmes and others, For a less-Teutonophilic American writer than Mr Frost, I would suggest seeking out Langhorne Gibson's The Riddle of Jutland, which came out a year or so before that other book. Co-authoring with Gibson was British Vice Admiral J E T Harper whose navigational study lead...

Hello Byron, I do indeed apologise to the shade of H H Frost, having not yet read his book and thus being guilty of basing my biased opinion solely on those passages reproduced by Gary Staff. Frost I discover, having read an article from the US Naval War College review (Dr David Kohnen), was even as...