Yobs smash First World War memorial to pieces

From Daily Mail Online: Yobs smash First World War memorial to pieces
This sorry sight is the result of mindless vandalism which police are calling a 'crime against our Armed Forces'.
The First World War memorial was knocked over on Friday night, leaving lumps of stone scattered across the grass where people would normally stand to pay their respects.

Villagers in Prestbury, near Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, where the structure has stood proudly since 1920, have placed a £1,000 bounty on the heads of those responsible.

They are now desperately trying to raise funds to get the structure repaired in time for Remembrance Sunday on November 13.
Sergeant Mark Stephens, from Gloucestershire Constabulary, said the cost of the damage could be as much as £5,000.

He said: 'This is a crime against the men and women of our Armed Forces who have in the past, and continue in the present day, to pay the ultimate sacrifice in the service of their country to ensure the freedom and liberty we all enjoy.
'This will have a significant impact on not only the residents of Prestbury, but also the wider Cheltenham community.

'It is particularly poignant as we are so close to Remembrance Sunday when a great many people attend the Prestbury service held at the memorial to honour those who have fallen in service of our country.

'You can rest assured that I will ensure every possible line of inquiry is fully investigated to determine how this damage occurred and, if it were malicious, to bring those responsible before the courts.'

Prestbury Parish Council will debate the matter at a meeting tonight.
Malcolm Stennett, parish council chairman, said: 'It's really horrendous.
'It's terrible when you think that our troops are out fighting at the moment, getting killed and injured, and people are going around desecrating a war memorial.
'It must show an extremely low intellect and I hope the police are able to bring the culprits to book.'

The Reverend Daniel Papworth, of north Cheltenham team ministry, added: 'It is sad and distressing to see the damage and local people are understandably shocked.'

Great War wreck found

From Sydney Morning Herald.com: Great War wreck found
A BRITISH ship sunk in World War I with about 200,000 ounces of silver, worth $US19 million ($19.5 million) at today's prices, has been found in the North Atlantic, a treasure-hunting company says.

Odyssey Marine Exploration said it found the wreckage of the SS Mantola, which sank on February 9, 1917, after being torpedoed by a German submarine, and would begin recovery operations next year.

The Florida company said it discovered the shipwreck about 2500 metres beneath the surface and just 160 kilometres from the SS Gairsoppa, believed to be the most valuable shipwreck ever, with about $US210 million in silver. The firm said it had an agreement with the British government allowing it to keep 80 per cent of the value of anything recovered from the wrecks. It said the British Ministry of War Transport paid an insurance claim in 1917 of £110,000 for silver that was on board the Mantola when it sank.

Advertisement: Story continues below UNESCO estimates there are about 3 million shipwrecks worldwide, with billions of dollars in sunken treasure and priceless knowledge that can be recovered from the depths of the ocean, including copper, silver, gold and zinc deposits still to be discovered.

On travel til Wednesday

I'm visiting elderly relatives in Box Elder, SD who do not have internet.

Will try to sneak out now and again to an internet cafe to post, but more than likely will not be posting until Wedneday.

Sarkozy challenges Turkey to face its history

From Reuters: Sarkozy challenges Turkey to face its history

(Reuters) - French President Nicolas Sarkozy, on a brief trip to the Caucasus, urged Turkey on Thursday to recognise the 1915 massacre of Armenians as genocide, threatening to pass a law in France that would make denying this a crime.

Visiting a genocide memorial and museum in Yerevan, Armenia, with Armenian President Serzh Sarksyan, Sarkozy challenged Turkey -- which is seeking membership of the European Union -- to face up to its past.

"The Armenian genocide is a historical reality. Collective denial is even worse than individual denial," Sarkozy told reporters.

"Turkey, which is a great country, would honour itself to revisit its history like other great countries in the world have done."

Armenia was the first stop on a two-day trip to the region by Sarkozy, who is keen to raise his profile on the international stage before an April presidential election. He visits Azerbaijan and Georgia on Friday.

France is opposed to Turkey's bid for EU membership and his comments on the sensitive subject are likely to be viewed as unwelcome meddling by Ankara.

Turkey denies the deaths of Armenians in 1915 was genocide. It says both Christian Armenians and Muslim Turks died in large numbers as the Ottoman empire collapsed.

Sarkozy suggested that the French parliament might consider a law making denial of the deaths of Armenians as genocide a crime, similar to the French law against Holocaust denial.

FROZEN CONFLICT

While in the region, Sarkozy will try to encourage Sarksyan and the president of Azerbaijan, Ilham Aliyev, to resolve a conflict over Nagorno-Karabakh, a mainly Armenian-populated enclave in Azerbaijan.

France plays a leading role in the Minsk Group of countries from the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which is trying to resolve the conflict in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Armenian-backed forces wrested Nagorno-Karabakh from Azeri control after the Soviet Union collapsed. When the conflict ended in a cease-fire in 1994, 30,000 people had been killed and about 1 million had been driven from their homes.

During a three-hour visit to Georgia, Sarkozy will also urge Georgia to improve relations with Russia, reviving memories of his mediating role when the two countries went to war in 2008.

Sarkozy's success in brokering a cease-fire in that conflict guarantees a warm welcome in the capital Tbilisi, where he will meet President Mikheil Saakashvili and address a crowd in the central Freedom Square.

Sarkozy will urge Saakashvili to look beyond the countries' differences, including over how they interpret the cease-fire terms, and rebuild trust in relations with Moscow.

Each side accuses the other of acting provocatively and sabotaging relations. Moscow has angered Tbilisi and the West by recognising Georgia's breakaway Abkhazia and South Ossetia regions as independent states.

In Moscow on Thursday, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev met Abkhazia's new president and signed legislation ratifying treaties that enable Russia to operate military bases in the two separatist regions for at least 49 years.

It was not clear whether Sarkozy would discuss Russia's bid to join the World Trade Organisation which Georgia, as a member, could block. Moscow hopes to complete its entry to the 153-member trading body this year.

HOPING TO BOOST RATINGS

Sarkozy mediated the 2008 cease-fire on behalf of the European Union as France held the bloc's presidency at the time.

That ended the war over Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but Georgia says Russia has violated the terms by not withdrawing troops to the positions they held before the war.

TV images of Sarkozy addressing jubilant crowds will do him no harm as he tries to improve his poor ratings before the two-round election on April 22 and May 6. An opinion poll on Tuesday put Socialist Francois Hollande well in the lead.

Sarkozy will also promote business during his visit to the region but officials gave no details of any planned contracts.

French oil group Total said last month it had made a major gas discovery at Azerbaijan's Absheron block in the Caspian Sea. French companies could also be in the running to help extend the Baku metro, or subway.

Book Review: Gallipoli, by Peter Hart

From The Economist: A terrible beginning
Gallipoli. By Peter Hart. Oxford University Press; 560 pages; $34.95. Profile; £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

HERE is a marvellous, ghastly book. The story is well known. In the spring of 1915 an Allied expedition comprising troops from Britain, France, Australia, New Zealand, Newfoundland and India attempted to capture the Gallipoli peninsula. The objective was to gain control of the Dardanelles Strait, and then to press on and take Constantinople. The operation was supposed to remove Turkey from the first world war at a stroke. But the result was a bitterly contested stand-off that lasted for eight months. The Allied forces were evacuated at the end of 1915, after both sides had suffered appalling hardships and losses.

The Gallipoli campaign, Peter Hart argues, was doomed from the start. Planning was a matter of wishful thinking, if not outright fantasy. No serious attempt was made to understand the strength of the Turkish army, the nature of the terrain or the numbers of Allied troops. Nor could anyone conceive of logistical support required to make a success of the operation. “Thanks to political interference, lethally combined with the bullish optimism of generals who saw only opportunities, the Gallipoli campaign was launched into a void that guaranteed failure.” The Western Front was the place where the war would be won; Gallipoli was merely “a futile and costly sideshow”, exacerbated by “lunatic persistence in the face of the obvious”.

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What makes Mr Hart’s version so bracing is his method. He is a specialist in oral history at London’s Imperial War Museum, and this book, like others he has written or co-written, gains richness and texture from the use of first-hand testimony. A kaleidoscope of impressions and perceptions tumble before the mind’s eye, constantly shifting from the general to the particular, the political to the personal. A Turkish soldier describes a scene, and his account is immediately followed by that of a British or Australian soldier describing the same event. This helps make the overall picture far more vivid and compelling. The diversity of voices also captures something of the immediacy, terror and illogic of war, although the book is neither confusing nor chaotic.

Three testimonials stand out. There is a brief sketch by Lieutenant Norman King-Wilson of the operating room aboard HMHS Caledonia, “a veritable stinking, bloody shambles, where patients were brought up on a stretcher and left waiting for their predecessor to be taken down, then rapidly chloroformed, placed on the table, a leg or arm whipped off in a couple of minutes, by a circular incision, one sweep of the knife and the bone sawed through, the limb thrown into a basket with many others, awaiting incineration.” Then there is the damning summation of General Sir Charles Monro, sent in late to assess the Allies’ prospects: “The positions occupied by our troops presented a military situation unique in history… The force, in short, held a line possessing every possible military defect.”

Lastly there are the words of Kemal Ataturk, first president of modern Turkey and previously, as Lieutenant Colonel Mustafa Kemal, chief architect of the Allies’ torment at Gallipoli. In 1934 he unveiled a memorial dedicated to “Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives” at Anzac Cove. The inscription reads: “You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore, rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours. You, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries, wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.”

Divers survey Scottish graveyard of first world war submarine disaster

From The Guardian: Divers survey Scottish graveyard of first world war submarine disaster
An underwater war grave containing the victims of one of the worst British naval disasters of the first world war has been surveyed for the first time so it can be preserved in the middle of a windfarm.

The two K Class submarines were destroyed on 31 January 1918 during the so-called battle of the Isle of May, in which 270 lives were lost. The two submarines were sunk and three more damaged along with a surface cruiser.

But no enemy ships were involved in the sinkings, 20 miles off Fife Ness on Scotland's east coast. The deaths were all caused by a series of night-time collisions within the British fleet.

So embarrassing was the incident that even though one officer was court-martialed, the facts were not generally admitted for more than 60 years, until after the death of the last survivor.

Jim Rae, secretary of the Scottish branch of the Submariners Association, said: "It was an absolute bloody disaster from the beginning. The K Class submarines did not have a very impressive record. You can see why those who served in them were known as the suicide club."

The submarines proved far more lethal to their crews than to the enemy, so much so that the K was said to stand for Kalamity. Driven by oil-fired steam turbine engines, they were large and cumbersome, too slow to keep up with surface ships, hard to manoeuvre and stifling for their crews. Of the 18 that were built, none were lost in action but six were sunk in accidental collisions.

In January 1918, as British warships steamed north from Rosyth to join their fleet at Scapa Flow in the Orkneys, they were accompanied by two flotillas of the submarines. The first two subs found themselves bearing down on two minesweepers and changed course. The third, K14, veered to starboard to avoid colliding with them but performed a complete circle as its rudder jammed.

That brought it back into line just in time to be rammed by the last submarine in the group, K22. A battlecruiser, HMS Inflexible, then ploughed into K22.

The first ships in the convoy turned back to rescue the submarines and steamed straight into the chaos. A cruiser, HMS Fearless, rammed K17, another of the subs, sinking it within eight minutes. Then two further submarines, K4 and K6, collided. To complete the disaster, a destroyer then carved through the survivors of K17, killing many of those who had been left in the water. The entire 59-man crew of K4 was lost and all but eight of K17's.

The Royal Navy hushed up the catastrophe and it was not until 2002 that a commemorative plaque was erected on a cairn in Anstruther, the nearest village on the coast, though even that does not refer to the cause of the loss of life. The Submariners' Association does, however, now hold an annual commemorative service.

The site of the two sunken submarines, 100 metres apart and about 50 metres down, has long been known, but the wrecks have now been surveyed by divers from the specialist marine consultants EMU. The area is the proposed site for an offshore windfarm, known as the Neart na Gaoithe project, developed by a company called Mainstream Renewable Power.

The project aims to generate 450MW of renewable energy and may eventually provide enough to power 325,000 Scottish homes. The developers claim it will offset more than 400,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions each year, and contribute towards the Scottish government's target of generating the equivalent of all the country's energy demands from renewable resources by 2020.

KAISER’S CHIEFS PREDICTED RIOT

From the Peterlee Mail: KAISER’S CHIEFS PREDICTED RIOT
HARTLEPOOL’S location on the North Sea coast made it a fall guy target for the German Navy in the First World War, a new book by a renowned naval and military author reveals.


Bryan Perrett’s ‘North Sea Battleground: The War at Sea 1914-18’ investigates how the North Sea became “the principal battleground between the navies of Britain and Germany” during the conflict and details a raid on Hartlepool that was not as straightforward as it may have seemed.

Germany’s military leader Kaiser Wilhelm II and his senior commanders were convinced that attacking North Sea coastal towns would cause panic among their inhabitants.

They thought people in Hartlepool and the rest of the North-East’s seaside towns would realise their coast could be reached and breached, leaving them in danger from marauding soldiers coming ashore to murder them in their beds.

This fear, the Kaiser’s chiefs believed, would cause the British to lose their stomach for the fight and revolt, leading to an early end to the war in Germany’s favour.

Employing their new strategy, the German Navy launched an attack on Hartlepool on the morning of December 16, 1914, while at the same time sending ships to attack Scarborough and Whitby to the south.

It was the first time that Britain had been subjected to a serious attack from the sea for centuries and made Hartlepool the first place on mainland Britain to be shelled by the Germans in the First World War.

In total, 118 people died, with 32 of them being women and 37 children.

Buildings crumbled as more than 1,000 shells rained down on the town during the surprise 40-minute attack by three heavy German cruisers.

Targeting Hartlepool would have seemed logical to the townsfolk, who may have assumed the two gun batteries at Heugh and Lighthouse on the Headland, along with a third at South Gare, were an obvious target for an invading enemy looking to disarm the town’s defences protecting extensive industrial and dockland areas.

But the lack of military installations in either Scarborough or Whitby made their attacks somewhat baffling to a population unaware that the Kaiser was simply trying to put the wind up them.

The German plan was a no holds barred attack on the three seaside towns with no regard for civilians, who were considered fair game along with property.

The only thing out of bounds to the German troops was property belonging to the Royal Family, with the Kaiser being grandson of Queen Victoria.

Standing between the attacking Germans and the people of Hartlepool that morning was Lieutenant Colonel Lancelot Robson, a Hartlepudlian who had served the town both as Mayor and soldier, having been commissioned as a gunner 40 years before and recalled into service at the start of the war.

Alongside Robson stood his elite band of troops, who were highly regarded in the British military for their ability to hit moving targets – ships – at long distances in all weathers.

Both Robson and his men were to benefit from the interception of German signal code books by British Intelligence and were at their posts before dawn on that filthy winter morning as sea swells rose and the German commander, Admiral Franz Hipper was warned that his lighter ships would not cope with the rough conditions.

But Hipper refused to back down and three ships headed for Hartlepool.

Thanks to the German signal code books they were to be intercepted by four British Navy ships before a shoot-out at sea as Hartlepudlians hurried to work and school.

Perrett’s book, which is published by Pen & Sword, has a hardback cover price of £19.99. ISBN 184884450-6. For more information logo on to www.pen-and-sword.co.uk