Liberty Ships Disaster loomed. The RAF had blunted Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring’s blitz, but by September 1941 VADM Karl Dönitz’s Type VII U-Boats were regularly decimating Atlantic convoys. It was becoming increasingly obvious that the German submarine offensive was maintaining its horrifying 1940 record and even increasing the rate at which it sank the merchant ships […]
Operation Jaywick and HMAS Krait A remarkable raid, called Operation Jaywick, culminated on the night of 26/27 September 1943, 64 years ago, when six men in three folboat canoes attacked ships in Keppel Harbour, Singapore. They attached limpet mines to seven Japanese ships, sinking two and damaging five others. Facing certain destruction in the event […]
RAN Helicopter Flight Vietnam memorials By Robert Ray Gloria Shipp, widow of LACM Noel Shipp, and Sue Marschaulk, widow of WO I Glen Moore, unveiled a monument at the US Army Aviation Museum, Fort Rucker, Alabama on 27 May 2005. The memorial records the names of the 32 Americans and five Australians killed in action […]
VADM Pierre Charles Jean Baptiste Silvestre Villeneuve (1763-1806) Five years younger than Nelson, VADM Villeneuve commanded the combined French and Spanish fleets at Trafalgar. He was born into a Valensoles, Provence, aristocratic family and joined the French Navy when he was 15. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not resign with the onset of […]
VADM Federico Carlos Gravina y Nápoli (1756-1806) Compared with Villeneuve, about whom much has been written, his junior Spanish counterpart at Trafalgar, VADM Gravina, remains a brave but shadowy figure. Gravina was born not Spanish, but into a noble Sicilian family. He first went to sea at age 12 and quickly developed a reputation as […]
VADM Francois Paul Brueys d’Aigalliers, Compte de Brueys (1753-1798) VADM de Brueys, commander of the French Fleet during Nelson’s Battle of the Nile in Aboukir Bay, was five years older than Nelson. Born in Uzes he joined the French Navy at age 13 and experienced rapid promotion during the revolutionary wars. He caught Napoleon’s eye […]
An Australian RNVR in WW II This essay was awarded second prize in the Naval Officers Club Literary Prize competition, 2001. It was published in the Naval Officers Club Newsletter Number 46, 1 September 2001, pp 12-16. by Noel Buckley The outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 caught most people, including me, […]
Operation Strangle: Naval aviation in Korea. by Fred Lane Paper presented at the Aviation Historical Society of Australia, Sydney, 7 July 2004. To understand naval aviation in the Korean War, it is necessary to understand the context. Before the Americans dropped the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atom bombs, a highly successful Pacific War had been waged […]
The Stalingrad siege Book review by Fred Lane Beevor, A. (1998) Stalingrad. Penguin Books. 494pp, including maps, photos, index and comprehensive chapter footnotes. Paperback $35 Retired British Army officer Antony Beevor won many literary prizes and reviewer acclaim with this book. Together with Harrison Salisbury’s description of the 900-day siege of Leningrad (Salisbury 1969) and […]
The fall of Berlin Book review by Fred Lane Beevor, A. (2002) Berlin: The downfall 1945. Penguin Books: London. 490 pp including index and footnotes. $35.00. Antony Beevor has done it again. On top of his excellent description of the siege of Stalingrad (Naval Officers Club Newsletter 51 pp. 23-4), he now describes in authoritative […]
