It is time, once again, for our regular open thread. Talk about whatever you want, so long as it's not culture war. Also, a reminder to everyone that our May virtual meetup is tomorrow, 5/16, at 1 PM Central (GMT-5).
2018 overhauls are Main Guns Part 4, my review of Midway, Russian Battleships Part 3, Falklands Part 1, So You Want to Build a Modern Navy - Strategy Part 2 and the Super-Dreadnoughts. 2019 overhauls are Shells parts three and four, my review of Fort Sill, The Spanish-American War Part 4, Falklands Part 14, Pictures - Mikasa Part 1 and Battleship Aviation Part 1. 2020 overhauls are Coastal Defenses Part 2, Oil Tankers, Nuclear Weapons at Sea - Heavy Attack and my post on the 2004 UFO incident, although that last is less certain thanks to information I've dug up since I wrote it.
It's also the first anniversary of the start of my Aurora tutorial, which coincides with the recent release of C# Aurora V1.13.
Comments
I've been reading up on the German invasion of Norway, and given how hilariously bad their planning was. It seems without a doubt the worst-planned successful amphibious operation of the 20th century, and I wonder how much of the push for Sea Lion had to do with its success. Maybe the Germans were more drunk on their own cool-aid than was usual, even for them.
When fighting swarming speedboat-type threats, are VT-FRAG shells from 5" guns of any use? I've heard several people assert (without much support) that a 5" gun is of no use whatsoever against small boats, but that seems transparently wrong to me. It also doesn't track that a 76mm gun could be effective but not a 127mm, unless the argument is purely that the bigger gun's ROF is inadequate. I had always assumed that AA shells were of some use here and things like KEET were specifically designed to defeat that kind of threat - was I confused?
It's possible there's another way to do it/workaround, but last I checked the standard VT stuff arms improperly when aimed at water.
RE: Sea Lion
How else would you propose knocking Britain out of the war? Building a causeway Alexander-style?
@ike
I'd try answering the British peace overtures when Halifax and Butler were sending messages during June 1940. Beyond that, not much you can do.
@ike: For knocking England out of the war, U-boats (and maritime patrol aircraft and surface raiders and mines) are the best bet. If the British people are starving, England negotiates. If there's no more fuel for the Hurricanes and Spitfires, England negotiates terms.
The Germans would still want to maintain a credible threat of invasion, and of air attack, both to force the English to expend resources countering those threats and to exploit any openings left by their failures in that regard, but there was way too much effort put into both Sea Lion and the Blitz for that purpose.
@Jade: VT-fuzed 76mm or 127mm shells might be an effective counter to small boats, but there's lots of ways for that to be less effective than it seems it ought to be. And too much of the information I'd need to put numbers on that, doesn't seem to be googleable. For example, does anyone know the turning circle of a Boston Whaler at 40 knots?
But for just one issue, at 5000 meters the shell's trajectory will be near horizontal, just three degrees descent. So every meter of variance in the burst height, will have the shell going off twenty meters early or late. Unless you can get the fuze to ignore water and trigger only on the hull (which is a tall order), you're probably going to waste a lot of ammunition that way.
Weren't the Germans about to win the Battle of Britain, when Hitler helpfully switched Luftwaffe targeting priorities from military targets to cities?
If I remember right from Churchill's memoirs, if the Germans had kept at it, air cover over the Channel would have become untenable, and the British estimated that without air cover the RN wouldn't have been able to repel an invasion and deny its logistics indefinitely.
This is a common myth. The British may have had to change their tactics a bit, but they were never actually that close to losing. Actually, I think during the height of the battle, they were gaining in strength relative to the Germans.
I am becoming increasingly convinced that Churchill's memoirs have done more damage than we realize to popular understanding of WWII. He's a much better writer than he is a historian. Basically, there was no way the Germans would have gotten the degree of air superiority necessary to actually cover the invasion. They didn't really even have the anti-ship firepower necessary even in the absence of air opposition, and that was never going to be absent.
The only hope Germany would have wouldn't be an invasion but to convince the British people (or at least parliament) that Britain can't possibly win.
Also don't pick a fight with Uncle Sam, there's no way the British would believe they'll lose once the US enters the fight and fighting Stalin before dealing with Britain is a really bad idea.
As a target, how does an armed speedboat compare to a light or medium utility vehicle? Both are comparable sizes, have similar top speeds and are either un- or lightly armoured.
It seems to me that hitting an asura with a 127mm gun should be a similar matter to hitting a moving truck with a 155mm gun using direct fire. With KE-ET solving the same sort of problem as beehive flechette rounds did.
@bean What books would you recommend on the Battle of Britain, and/or other World War 2 topics?
@bean
Interesting, I had never heard of those. Do you know off hand what terms Halifax was offering?
@AlexT
IIRC RAF Fighter Command wasn't just gaining strength relative to the Luftwaffe during the BoB, but in absolute terms as well: I think there was one week in which losses of planes and pilots outpaced the total of new additions and the return of repaired aircraft and recuperated men, but they ended every month with more of both on strength than they'd started with.
Even if the Luftwaffe had succeeded in overwhelming 11 Group and forcing Fighter Command to pull back from the Channel coast, they wouldn't have had to retreat very far - just a little north and/or west of London, where they'd have been outside the Bf109's escort radius. From these bases they'd still have been able to cover the coast, and the Luftwaffe couldn't have done a whole lot about it.
Also. As bean said, the Luftwaffe didn't really have the capability to stop the RN from breaking up any attempted cross-Channel invasion. And while the specter of aerial attack may have been daunting (we do benefit from a degree of hindsight in making this assessment; at that time a lot of people believed that sinking ships from aircraft was going to be a whole lot easier than it would prove over the course of the war), there's absolutely no doubt that the RN would have plunged into the fire anyway to oppose an invasion fleet, even if they'd believed it would be a one-way trip. And in hindsight, they would absolutely have succeeded.
And finally, even if both the RAF and RN could have been handwaved out of existence, the German Army's plan for Sea Lion was so ludicrously bad that it would almost certainly have failed in the face of a mob of farmers with torches and pitchforks. It really was awful.
@ike
They didn't send actual terms. Butler passed a message to the Swedish ambassador, Bjorn Prytz, that "no opportunity for reaching a compromise (peace) would be neglected if the possibility were offered on reasonable conditions". The Germans never got back to them, and it's not entirely clear how much hand Halifax had in it.
@AlexT
Don't know on BoB specifically, and I haven't read much on WWII in general recently. Sorry.
@AlexT
For the Battle of Britain you might wish to start with Stephen Bungay's "The Most Dangerous Enemy: A History of the Battle of Britain." Yes, the title is a bit overwrought, but Bungay's work has held up remarkably well and describes the geographical responsibilities of the various air groups. For a 900 word start into the topic look at the link I am posting in reply to Philistine.
@Philistine You and Bean rightly highlight one of the great, if not the greatest, misconceptions of the Battle of Britain--that if 11 Group had been overwhelmed that the Germans would have been able to successfully launch a cross-channel invasion. As you know, it embarrassing that even good writers inextricably link the two. Indeed, had 11 Group been brought completely low it would not have been a happy time, but that does not mean landing craft would be crossing the channel the next day...
You might have read British historian Leo Mckinstry's comments on the B of B in the July 2020 issue of the Speccie: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/we-won-the-battle-of-britain-just
There was a lot of pushback against this article for reasons that are apparent, but I liked his reminder regarding the number of reserves that were extant. "At the beginning of battle, no fewer than 21 squadrons were in Scotland, the North and the Midlands, while at the beginning of September, there were 65 Spitfires in the south-west."
I am loath to use the term "defense in depth," but they should have been able to cover the coast even if 11 Group had been pushed back.
Philistine:
The British didn't know that so if it got to the point at which the RAF and RN didn't exist Sea Lion wouldn't be needed because the British would be willing to negotiate peace on German terms.
Knocking the RAF back was a necessary prerequisite to a successful invasion, but not even close to being sufficient.
To quote myself on Reddit:
Also, there's an excellent discussion of how the RN acted to defend Crete that was linked in the comments, which seems worthy of dropping in here.
I am becoming increasingly convinced that Churchill’s memoirs have done more damage than we realize to popular understanding of WWII.
To paraphrase from that well known bible on British politics Yes Minister (the original books, which were written as though the diaries of Jim Hacker.)
The Hon. Mr Hacker was a politician, which means that when he writes that something happened, this may mean that it happened. Or it could mean it's what he thought happened, what he wanted to happen, what he wants people to think happened, or what he wants people to think he thought happened.
@Alsadius: There is an argument that I've seen that Crete is where the Allies won the war in Europe. Up until that point, the wehrmacht had been riding a wave of conquest that was unmatched in Europe since Julius Caesar. Vast and powerful Empires like France were defeated and conquered in mere weeks. The Germans had themselves a timetable that included Greece in 2 weeks, crete in 1 week, then turn against the USSR in the middle of the Russian summer with ample time to gain control of the major cities before settling down for winter. Then Greece turned out to take about 3.5 weeks, and crete took a month. Plus, in the cretan invasion the German paratroopers who had lead every major invasion so far, cracking the particularly difficult fortifications that held up German advances in many areas, those paratroopers were broken by the losses trying to land on Allied positions in crete and never really operated strategically again. Hence the invasion of the USSR started 6 weeks later in the year, without the most effective troops, and we know how that went.
It takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It will take three million years to build a new island. The defense will continue.
@Neal Thank you! I'll give those a read.
As a general argument, wouldn't fighters based north of London be disadvantaged patrolling over the Channel? They'd need to maintain constant patrols, giving them little actual combat time over the Channel. Whereas the German airfields are just to the south. Sounds like an ugly meat grinder.
Also, I believe Churchill agreed that the Royal Navy would have been able to hold off an invasion without air cover, just not indefinitely. Which I understood to mean it would've been attrited down, slowly but surely. A total loss at Dunkirk would have served to increase the rate of attrition, because enough RN ships would have had to be present to repel any size German incursion.
AlexT:
Move them closer to front to replace whatever was lost while training up new units further away.
As with all "tiny event X was the turning point of vastly larger war Y" claims, it's got a germ of truth, but is somewhat overblown. But yeah, Crete was a good example of a Pyrrhic victory for the Germans. They won, but it cost them far more than Crete was worth.
(If you want an actual turning point, it's probably either Lend-Lease, Barbarossa itself, or the Russian counteroffensive in the winter of 1941 as proof that the invasion had turned from blitzkrieg to meat grinder. But those are boring.)
And this is why we love you, Bean.
Actually, if you want a really boring turning point, it'd be the invasion of Poland. After September 1 1939, Germany's odds of getting out of the period without losing a war never broke 50%(in retrospect). Even with the disasters of 1940, the UK just had access to so much more of the world's manpower and resources than the Axis that it'd be hard for them to lose. No US support and no Russian invasion would probably just result in a British nuclear program wrecking Germany around 1947-48.
Yes, but that assumes that they aren't damaging the Germans while they're being attritted, which doesn't make a lot of sense. Amphibious operations take a lot of shipping, so if the RN shows up and smashes it up in mid-channel, then the Germans are out of luck until they can build more, because they'd have had to be even bigger idiots than they actually were to not put everything they could into the first invasion. Not to mention the manpower and morale damage the failure of the invasion would bring. If the British beat the first one, then I don't think there would be a second. Time is definitely not on the side of the Germans in trying to invade.
So, I am reading a book on the siege of Plevna in 1877 war (Son of Crimea). I don't know if I will have the stomach to finish it. It is one thing to know, intellectually, the Christians were treated badly by their Moselem masters. It is another to read page after page of, rotting bodies of women and childing piled high in front of / in churches, skeletons picked clean by birds still carrying their long beautiful hair, mothers raped in front of their daughter, daughters raped in front of their mothers, tiny 3-year-old skeletons...
The book makes the argument that the British stayed neutral this time because technology had improved reporters ability to get news out of the Balkans beyond the ability of the British to censor it.
@AlexT
Yes, there would have been a bit of a range issue if the RAF had to conduct the bulk of its aerial defenses from north of London but actually the imposition is not quite as great as one would think.
While there is no question that it was best to have 11 Group where it was to provide intercept capabilities, we have to remember that the Germans were fuel limited. Their fighters had to make a there-and-back crossing of the channel while the RAF just needed to intercept. This means the Germans were always fuel conscious and had limited engagement time.
The Germans could try to work around that except for "the" critical factor--radar. The RAF could get a pretty decent fix on where the attacks were coming from and direct its aircraft to that location. The advantage of this can hardly be overstated.
Another element is that even if the RAF had to shift operations to the north of London (and other locales) it still knew Goering's shift to bombing what he considered to be the British center of gravity. In other words, as we know when the fighting started the Germans were directly attacking the RAF bases in an attempt to wipe out the fighters on the ground. When it shifted its emphasis to things like the bombing of London, the RAF basically knew how the German attacks were going to be constituted. Yes they were bad, but the RAF knew how they were going to be carried out which is a significant benefit.
I guess it can all be summed up with the point that the loss of 11 Groups aerial domination would have been a major blow, the Germans were still the ones with the loiter issues. Add it radar and the RAF had advantages to exploit.
Speaking of the turning points in the war, I wonder if the Germans had taken Moscow if the Soviet Union would have capitulated? Some recent reading and viewing is making me think that they would not have. They had a great percentage of their industry already moved into the Urals and had a lot of areas from which to stage. Obviously the winter of '41/'42 stopped the German advance but even then...
Something in the Soviet Storm series caught my attention on this. At one point the Soviets moved 40 divisions from the East to augment the move out of Stalingrad or for Kursk. They just had immense reserves to draw upon so it seems they could have taken Moscow back if needed.
Anyone run across good scholarship on this?
@Anonymous
As I understand the argument, you can't, because everything south of London that resembles an airbase is rubble. That's why they retreat to the north. They did in fact rotate squadrons, or at least pilots, all the time, as a matter of course, and the fighter schools were indeed up north IIRC.
@bean
As I understand it, the RN would have to be permanently based nearby and patrolling the Channel, because without air superiority, they can't bet on advance warning.
@Neal IIRC, Churchill's point is that, assuming Germany can force the RAF north (big assumption), then they have enough superiority over the Channel to, eventually, wear down the Royal Navy enough that a landing is feasible. Southern England is still a battleground that favors the British, for all the reasons you note.
The way I see it, radar negates the attacker's advantage of being able to fight concentrated while the defenders are spread out. With advance warning, the defender can concentrate too, and it's even odds again. That is, of course, when everything works as advertised and nobody screws up. The Channel is still difficult to cover, if the British are based further north.
I think it's also worth pointing out that if 11 Group had been forced back, that wouldn't necessarily mean that the Germans had the air superiority needed to keep the invasion safe from British attack, even if it did mean that the British couldn't cover the RN attacks as well as they'd have liked.
No. The Russians basically don't give up, and Moscow has long been their great strategic decoy. It worked on Napoleon and it worked on Hitler, without them even needing to lose the city.
I don't buy it. Air superiority isn't a binary, and they had other sources of intelligence, too. Not to mention that the Germans would have been lucky to make 4 kts with their bizarre assortment of landing craft, while the British could make 30. And the RN doesn't have to beat the first Germans to shore. They just need to show up within a couple of hours, before the Germans can get supplies and heavy equipment landed. I'm pretty sure that ships from Portsmouth could have made the beaches in plenty of time, and been reasonably safe from air attack while they were waiting. No need to base in Kent.
RE: Moscow
The big problem in loosing Moscow is, as the nexus of the Russian rail system, you risk loosing the advantages of central position. You could easily find yourself in the same boat as the civil war whites - several individually powerful armies unable to effectively coordinate. You also risk a succession crisis ,especially if the Tsar is killed or captured.
Landing most of the supplies and heavy equipment was planned for the second morning of the invasion. No need to curtail anybody's game of bowls in order to reach the channel within a couple of hours.
Even after that point, the RN retaking the channel would cause a lot of problems for German logistics.
Doctorpat:
The traditional reply to “six weeks later” is that the spring rasputitsa lasted an unusually long time in 1941, so that the Germans couldn’t have attacked before mid-June even if they’d been free of other commitments. I don’t know how that claim holds up to modern research.
They losses to the German paratroopers were irrelevant to Barbarossa, though. They were a tiny proportion of the total German force, good for taking point objectives like Fort Eben-Emael or three airfields on Crete^1, provided they didn’t have to worry much about enemy armour. In a campaign of continental scale against an adversary with 20,000 tanks, they would just have contributed a little vulnerable light infantry.
The USSR tapping out after Moscow falls also requires some level of coup d'etat, which, as Pleshakov noted in his book Stalin's Folly, had already been suggested and rejected as a joke.
@Bean
Your point of the Germans making 4 knots reminded me of an amusing remark in a German documentary from just a few years past.
A Naval historian and excellent moderator were discussing the implausibility of Sea Lion and were showing pics of the craft that might have been, under the best of circumstances, cobbled together in an attempt to cross the Channel. Apart from the obvious air and waterborne interdiction attempts the RAF and RN would have undertaken before said craft even launched, the moderator asked what speed they could have attempted to move men and materiel. "I wouldn't want to give them five knots" the historian replied, "so let's round it to four."
Sea Lion just wasn't going to happen.
@Blackshoe
Was Pleshakov's work worth the time? I read Simon Sebag Montefiore's bio on Stalin which, while excellent, did not uncover too much on the thinking in late 1941 other than Stalin decided to stay in Moscow. I was just curious if there was any discussion of a relocation of the government eastward?
Btw, Adam Zamoyski gives a harrowing account of Napoleon's realization in Moscow that it just wasn't going to work out. But the Germans knew better and it was going to all end quickly...
Knowing nothing of the Russian campaign beyond the standard 2 page description and my reading of Tolstoy, I wonder how the French would have gone if they'd decided to hole up in Moscow until spring.
Yes, they didn't have enough supplies. And Moscow was partially burnt (though Tolstoy claims this was just a natural feature of a wood and straw city heated by wood fires as soon as the normal control system leaves for a day) but it must have been better than a forced march, under attack, through a 1000 km of frozen hell.
@Neal: been a long time since I read it, and currently moving so don't have access to it, but I recall it being pretty provocative and well thought out, if depressing to read for how badly prepared the RKKA was. There were two big points in it that I recall from the time:
If the Germans reach Moscow, would it not have just ended up as the sieges of Stalingrad and Leningrad did? It's not like we don't have historical examples of the Soviets defending their cities beyond reason.
@Ian The Reds also defended Kiev, Sevastopol, & Breast in a similar way. Urban warfare may be miserable and expensive for an attacker, but it is not perfect.
Alsadius:
No US support and no Russia invasion means the UK is going to have a much harder time, especially if the US cuts Lend Lease to provide more resources for use against Japan which if Hitler weren't so stupid as to declare war on the US might have actually happened (yes, FDR realized Hitler was dangerous and wanted him dealt with but the US public were too isolationist).
I also doubt if the British could have the bomb by then though their nuclear weapons program was somewhat less crappy than Germany's.
AlexT:
A grass strip and portable buildings can be set up pretty quickly.
Ian Argent:
That assumes the US supplies them with the logistics required to keep a siege going or that they can somehow manufacture enough of their own along with enough weapons.
@doctorpat
If the Germans show up outside Moscow 6 weeks earlier, then I think the likeliest outcome is that Typhoon is planned 6 weeks earlier, Stalin transfers his eastern division 6 weeks earlier and the german assault breaks 6 weeks earlier. The Germans suffered 25% casualties taking crete. That's huge, but that's still only like 5,500 counting the wounded. They were suffering around 45k deaths a month from the day they invaded russia.
Ultimately the problem the germans were facing was one of distance, not time. Combat power for the germans dropped of with every mile they traveled into russia as casualties mounted, logistical problems got worse, and more troops had to be diverted to guarding flanks and police duty. If moscow was 500km from german poland, it would have fallen.
As for the french, by the time they'd got to moscow, they'd already taken more casualties than they would on the way back, from borodino, russian raids, and typhus and other diseases. It wasn't the winter that did napoleon in either (though it didn't help), it was sheer distance.
Ian: If they got there in 1941, there's a decent chance that they could have gotten around it instead. Without a supply line, it'd fall fairly quickly. They never cut the supply lines to the 'grads.
Apropos the discussion regarding Napoleon in Moscow, it always merits praise for Charles Minard's famous flow map/info graphic of the number of men lost integrated with temperature, direction of march etc. Fascinating how he thought of presenting this information.
https://datavizblog.com/2013/05/26/dataviz-history-charles-minards-flow-map-of-napoleons-russian-campaign-of-1812-part-5/
Edward Tufte, being the heavyweight that he is in the field, called it the best info graphic ever. Either way,from the time he initially crossed the Nieman to the time he re-crossed it, I have to agree with you @Cassander, the distance was the foundation on which these other factors stood to destroy the Grande Armee.
The RN have announced the names of the new Type 31 (lower cost/general purpose) frigates. I suspect that very few bookmakers will be paying out on their choice...
The class is being referred to as the Inspiration-class. In a departure from current practice, there is no common element in terms of theme (like the Type 26 City-class or Type 23 Duke-class frigates) or initial letter (like the Type 45 Daring-class destroyers or the Astute-class submarines). Instead, the names have been chosen based on historic RN ships that are supposed to be "inspirational" for the ship's mission in some way.
The names are Active, Bulldog, Campbeltown, Formidable and Venturer. Each name is supposed to represent one aspect of the RN's mission- worldwide forward deployment (Active), North Atlantic operations (Bulldog), commando operations (Campbeltown), carrier operations (Formidable) and technology and innovation (Venturer).
I'm not sure what my opinion of the names are- they're all good names individually, and were well chosen in terms of the previous ships that carried them. On the other hand, I like having names that tie a class together...
Putting aside the theming, how is 'technology and innovation' more of a mission for the Royal Navy than continuous at sea deterrent? It might not have a very long history (by the standards of the RN), but they included carrier operations, which have only been going on for around twice as long.
@alexander,
I see 'trade protection' and 'colonial defense' are also missing. I guess the important missions are not necessarily the sexy ones.
I think I'll call them the metanaming class
@ike I was letting Active and Bulldog cover those. I think worldwide deployment should cover colonial defence, and some of trade protection, with the remainder under North Atlantic ops.
I don't love that naming scheme, although the names themselves are fine. Continuous at sea deterrence doesn't get one because the Type 31s probably won't do that, I'd guess.
"Gunboat diplomacy and trade negotiation" doesn't get a mention either. And that has centuries of British tradition behind it.
(Also Rum, buggery and the lash...)
@bean I think we can make that probably a definitely Ü But I took the names as refering to the navy's missions, not the ships. While carrier operations could refer to operating helicopters (or UAVs) I think that most people would see fixed winged aircraft as being implied, and a type 31 is not much more likely to have an F35 on board than a nuclear warhead.
I just found an extremely amusing twitter account of RAF Luton, a base so secret it doesn't actually exist. They take military images and mislabel them, with such inanties as the Eurovision Typhoon (usually an F-16) and Super Army Soldiers.
@bean: I think the "common myth" is not just the fault of Churchill... I daresay more people have seen the 1969 film The Battle Of Britain than have read Churchill's doorstop. (And who can blame them; those aerial sequences are gorgeous.)
Also, yay RAF Luton. (Photographed from a Canberra.)
@Doctorpat: I read somewhere (think it might've been R.V.Jones, but not sure) that certain members of the ULTRA intelligence community were, at the time, somewhat cheesed off at the inability to repel an attack on Crete whose plan and date were known in advance. The standard grumble was that "reading Enigma decrypts is basically just like reading tomorrow's headlines".
HMS Queen Elizabeth is headed out for a spin this evening.
ec429:
How do you know it wasn't partly based on Churchill's book?
Oh, I agree that movies and such have an outsize impact on popular understanding, but the makers of such products get their information from somewhere. Churchill's books are quite prominent as sources, and as such tend to have poisoned the well rather thoroughly, even if the information didn't come directly from them.
@Bean, if you like RAF Luton, you may also enjoy its (approximate) naval equivalent HMS Massive.
@Anonymous: I don't know it wasn't indirectly based on it. But it was directly based on the book The Narrow Margin by [Derek Wood](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DerekWood(author)).
Yes, that book may have been based on Churchill's. (I haven't read it, so I have no idea.) But I'd attach at least some of the blame to the people downstream of him who were supposed to be historians and yet failed to catch his errors. After all, an academic historian's entire job is taking anything the previous generation of historians said was true and "overturning" it. (Yes, this is cynical snark for comic effect. But it's not entirely untrue.)
Just a note: the BoB myth was a useful propaganda tool during wartime. If you want to keep your population fired up to fight, "By sheer courage and will, we narrowly fended off an invasion by the forces that conquered most of mainland Europe" is a much stronger message than "The only way the enemy were coming HERE was with an invitation." And post-war, the myth was reinforced when ex-German officers seized upon it in their memoirs as one of several instances where that meddlesome Austrian Corporal had interfered with his Generals' "brilliant" conduct of the war, snatching defeat from "inevitable" victory.
So it's not just indifferent scholarship that led to the myth becoming accepted as common received wisdom about the war, at different times there were also various parties actively promoting the myth for their own reasons.
Philistine makes good points, and it's also worth pointing out that it takes time for these myths to be unwound. Decades, even. Archives need to be found and searched for useful material. People who have an emotional investment in the myths need to die off or at least not have a monopoly on looking into the relevant history. Not to say that nobody ever gets it right quicker, but myths are powerful, and it usually takes 30+ years for this stuff to reach the popular consciousness. Vietnam is a good example. Ken Burns is the first time I think we saw a really popular, even-handed treatment of the issue in the US. Academics were at work earlier, but didn't generally get wide traction.
WWII took longer in a lot of areas, because of political stuff like taking German generals at face value in the early years of the Cold War and not having access to Soviet archives until 30 years ago. I know that's transformed our understanding of the Eastern Front. And some of it is that in a conflict as large as that, it just takes time for different historians to build a new understanding, because of the sheer volume of material to sort through.
And then there are myths which are long busted by specialists, but which persist among popular accounts. I just started a book from 2018 which perpetuated the standard battlecruiser myths, debunked at least 20 years ago among the warship-design fraternity. HOOD WAS NOT LIGHTLY-ARMORED, YOU IDIOT! But it's a general history of WWII at sea, so the author didn't think to check Friedman or DK Brown.
@Philistine
It also has a similar effect on the diplomatic picture. If Britain can hold out indefinitely with her own resources, American intervention without compensation starts to look rather foolish.
@bean: I am reading Alistair MacLean's The Lonely Sea; he has a section about the Bismarck, and he noted how most of the myths about Hood were wrong. And that was written in the 50s, I think?
Another factor which I suspect complicated historical revision: the apparent agreement between wartime British accounts of the BoB and post-war German accounts may have made it seem to later historians as if there was nothing much to investigate. But here I'm extrapolating from what seems to have happened to the historiography of the Battle of Midway, as described in Shattered Sword.
@Blackshoe
Hood's armor scheme wasn't classified, so it's not surprising that someone noticed she was really a fast battleship before 1960. I am annoyed that the knowledge seems to be very narrowly known, as evidenced by the time I had an argument with another tour guide about it, and the book I referred to.
Although he was indeed going to be first out of the gate (or at least among the leading pack) after WW2 with his crafted narrative, one shouldn't be too critical of Churchill as he certainly had a wonderful writing style and a way with adjectives. Phrases such as "The morose and purblind visage of Herr Hitler" and "The dull and drilled cohort of Hun soldiery" certainly did add a lively touch to his writing and speaking.
I would agree that 30 or so years is often necessary for scholarship to have reasonable purchase on events. More archival information is often at hand. Scholars can be (and obviously should be) more dispassionate and disinterested than immediately after something as vast and complex as a major war.
I am now reading Plohky's Nuclear Folly and although I thought it would be impossible to find new perspectives in the unfolding of the Cuban Missile Crisis the author does exactly that. I believe, in part, by even more information that has opened up in Russian and Cuban archives.
The trick is finding the sweet spot of not being too close in time from the events under study as well as being able to mine any accurate scholarship that has already been published.
...and yes, I know there are those who argue that even 30 years is, in some cases, a bit close in.
@bean
My book on Schleswig II came in.
It has a solid 15 pages on the war at sea, including the name and cargo of every merchantman captured.
Possible interesting Naval Gazing topics: *warships v. field artillery (Cristian VIII) *Declaration of Paris 1856 (blockade law) *Sea-hound incident *Battle of Helgoland
Would you like me to type up the relevant Bibliography and e-mail it to you?
Are there standardized rules for fire suppression on board container ships?
This is a link of the brand new 186m X-Press Pearl ablaze near Colombo. Fortunately the crew was rescued, but it raises the question how one fights a fire that is in an interior container? Does each container link into a fire warning system?
https://youtu.be/NK8kRKNEfRk
Either way, the crew was fortunate not to have been on the high seas. Wiki says 25 tons of nitric acid and 300m tons of bunkered fuel. The news report says 25,000 tons of nitric acid.
Obviously container vessels don't burn that often so something went grievously wrong here, but it really was ablaze and it appears as if only external vessels could fight the fire?
@Neal
I don't think most containers are much of a fire risk, being naturally air-excluding. That, of course, all goes out the window when you start carrying powerful oxidizers.
I would be curious to hear what grade of nitric acid they were hauling. There is a big difference between 30% and red-fuming. My gut fears there was a temptation to say, "Let's buy the most concentrated grade so, we can and save on freight charges."
A container filled with cans of a variety of acids is another scary thought. HCl and H2SO4 do not play nicely together.
It's been said that the damage control equipment on a merchant ship is the life boats.
@Neal
My position on Churchill isn't that he was completely terrible. A lot of what I say is a reaction to the general view of him, which means that if I shout a lot about him being bad, the general view (at least of the people listening) will shift a bit towards where it should be. Definitely not denying his effectiveness as a writer.
As for cargo fire, there's not really anything they can do. Specialized ships for dangerous cargo might have something, but a normal container ship is just going to use the lifeboats and collect from insurance. Any DC systems will be built into the hazmat containers.
@ike
That would be helpful, thanks. Ships vs shore batteries is one of my interests, and beyond that, I always like obscure wars.
@Ike
I could not find the grade of nitric acid that they were carrying but perhaps that will crop up in one of the reports.
The crew noticed a container leaking nitric acid whilst on the Qatar port call. The port authorities declined to offload the container however, as they said they did not have the equipment or expertise to deal with an acid leak. So the ship set off for Colombo...Hmmmm...
I can sort of/kind of understand that the cargo business on the high seas has always been a bit "free-flowing" to say the least, but I would think port and canal operators would be extremely rigorous in emergency procedures for vessels in transit. Again, bad things don't seem to happen often, but am I wrong in believing that if the Pearl had been ablaze in a port it could have been much worse.
No worries Bean. I didn't think you were being too hard on Churchill. I just was fondly remembering his style in everything from his History of the English Speaking Peoples to The World Crisis. He definately need to be tempered by other scholarship.
The Germans just shipped the book on coastal defenses. The Old World is finally stiring. I assume that further sea, rail, air, and telephonic links will now be reestablished.
"... I would think port and canal operators would be extremely rigorous in emergency procedures for vessels in transit."
From your story, it sounds like the Qataris were extremely safety-conscious.
@Ike
Good point Ike, that was poorly worded on my part. The Qataris were apparently frank in not wanting the leaking container as they were not equipped to deal with it. Sounds like sound judgement on their part.
I need to be fair as I don't yet know what efforts the crew made isolate the container, rate of leakage, strength of the nitric acid, etc., but as a layman leaking HN03 sounds pretty serious so undertaking a subsequent voyage of considerable distance seems to be a "confident" undertaking.
I imagine that it is, even if one can find a leaking container in the middle of a cube, time consuming to re-sequence the cargo.
I know one has to be extremely careful in any accident investigation and causes may lie in pretty obscure places. That was certainly one vigorous blaze however.
@bean
I got it typed up and sent to you. Apparently the reason it is so hard to find anything on the Schleswig Wars is that everything is in German or Danish.
Trying to track down one of the German language sources, Bing trys to send me to ottovonbismarck.net the existence of which make me giggle for reasons I do not fully understand. (also I hate search engines so much)