Latest news with #BattleofJutland
Daily Record
07-07-2025
- General
- Daily Record
Artefacts from WWI ship that sank in Orkney claiming hundreds of lives reclaimed after a century
A bell, a gun badge, and a tampion were recovered from the wreckage of HMS Vanguard and will be loaned to the Scapa Flow Museum More than 100 years after one of the Royal Navy's worst disasters, divers have recovered artefacts from a sunken ship. HMS Vanguard lies on the seabed of Scapa Flow in Orkney, a solemn relic from the tragedy that claimed the lives of 845 lives in 1917. The ship's bell, along with a metal badge from one of the ship's main guns and a tampion, a protective gun barrel plug, have been carefully brought to the surface after three years of planning. All three items were located just outside the wreck's exclusion zone and will be loaned to the Scapa Flow Museum once conservation work is complete. The discovery marks a significant step in preserving the memory of the men who perished in what is believed to be the greatest accidental loss of life in a single incident in Royal Navy history. HMS Vanguard, a St Vincent-class dreadnought and veteran of the Battle of Jutland, was anchored alongside the Grand Fleet at Scapa Flow on July 9, 1917, when a catastrophic explosion in a magazine tore through the ship. She sank in moments. Only three of the 848 men onboard survived, one of whom later died from his injuries. The cause of the explosion remains uncertain, though it's widely believed to have been an accidental detonation of cordite stored near the magazines. The wreck now lies at a depth of 34 metres (110 feet) and is protected under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986 as a Sovereign Immune Wreck. Special permission was granted to recover the artefacts, which were discovered during a 2017 survey led by diver Emily Turton as part of centenary commemorations. Turton's team spent more than 500 hours meticulously mapping the wreck site, which is spread across a large area on the seafloor. Naval historian Nick Hewitt, now culture team leader at Orkney Islands Council, believes the recovered bell in particular will resonate deeply with the public. 'A hundred years-plus ago your relatives looked at it, heard it ringing,' said Wendy Sadler, whose great-grand uncle Henry Metcalf was among those who died in the sinking. 'To think of what happened to them that night, losing their lives, and it is not seen for another 110 years, it is a privilege and an honour,' she told the BBC. 'We can't stop doing things like this, them fading into history, we've got to keep their memory alive somehow.' Join the Daily Record WhatsApp community! Get the latest news sent straight to your messages by joining our WhatsApp community today. You'll receive daily updates on breaking news as well as the top headlines across Scotland. No one will be able to see who is signed up and no one can send messages except the Daily Record team. All you have to do is click here if you're on mobile, select 'Join Community' and you're in! If you're on a desktop, simply scan the QR code above with your phone and click 'Join Community'. We also treat our community members to special offers, promotions, and adverts from us and our partners. If you don't like our community, you can check out any time you like. To leave our community click on the name at the top of your screen and choose 'exit group'. If you're curious, you can read our Privacy Notice. Sadler is currently leading a project to collect photographs of as many of HMS Vanguard's crew members as possible. Experts believe the tampion, possibly made from horsehair and leather, may have been preserved thanks to the silty conditions of the seabed. The ship's bell, now bent and warped by the explosion that sank her, was found some 200 metres from the original location of the vessel. The recovery effort has been a collaborative project involving the Ministry of Defence, the National Museum of the Royal Navy (NMRN), Orkney Islands Council and the Scottish government. After conservation, the artefacts will take pride of place at the Scapa Flow Museum, honouring the memory of those lost in one of the darkest chapters of British naval history.
Irish Examiner
26-06-2025
- General
- Irish Examiner
Richard Collins: Baboons walk in line to be close to their friends
'Crossing the T' was a naval-warfare strategy. A commander would manoeuver his ships into a line at right angles to, and in front of, his opponent's. By doing so, he could deploy both his fore and aft guns, while his adversary could use only the forward ones. At the Battle of Jutland in May 1916, the British 'crossed' the German fleet twice, but the tactic failed in poor visibility. The British lost 6,093 sailors, the Germans lost 2,551. Eels, feeding on the corpses that autumn, were said to have grown as fat as human limbs. Sixteen years later, Captain Langsdorf scuttled the Graf Spee, just inside Uruguay's territorial waters, to avoid British cruisers waiting, in crossed T position, beyond the mouth of the River Plate. For wild creatures, moving in a particular order can be just as important. Migrating geese and swans travel in V-formation. The leading birds cut through the air, creating eddies which reduce the energy demands of those following. Elephants often travel in line, one behind the other; hungry big cats may be on the prowl, ready to attack a vulnerable member of the troop. By keeping strong individuals to front and rear, and the weaker ones in between, security is maximised. Musk-oxen, likewise, 'encircle the wagons' to protect their calves from marauding wolf-packs. So-called 'stoat funerals' are sometimes reported. These aggressive little carnivores are highly territorial, so the processions, if they really do occur, must be family-based in structure, a mother moving house, for example, with her youngsters trailing her. Baboons also walk in line, in what researchers call 'progressions'. But why these endearing African primates do so has been much debated. The 'risk hypothesis' suggests that, somehow, being in a line shields the vulnerable from predators. But how does it do so? Another suggestion is that dominant individuals are trying to 'seize the day', by installing themselves as leaders within the troop... the 'competition hypothesis'. Some studies suggested that, when forming processions, baboons follow Lady Macbeth's entreaty 'stand not upon the order of your going, but go at once'. Other researchers, however, maintained that the behaviour can't be random. There must, they suggested, be some underlying structure to a procession. They couldn't, however, suggest what it might be. Now, scientists from Swansea University have come up with a plausible explanation. The Swansea team fitted GPS tracking devices to members of a chacma baboon troop on South Africa's Cape Peninsula. Seventy-eight processions were recorded. The GPS data revealed an underlying order in what had appeared previously to be chaotic. Neither security nor feeding advantages seemed responsible for it. The key to the behaviour is family ties: a procession is not sequence of individuals but of groups. "Baboons show repeatability in their social order, which is best explained by patterns of social affiliation rather than adaptive responses to risk, access to resources, or decision making." As Vladimir says to Estragon in Waiting for Godot 'it's not what you do but the way you do it', that matters. This, it seems, is often the case also in the natural world.
AllAfrica
11-04-2025
- Politics
- AllAfrica
Erik Prince: I'm not so worried about China militarily
The first installment featured critical lessons of the Ukraine war. The second focuses on possible kinetic conflict between the US and China, over Taiwan as many expect, and how US expeditionary forces in the North- and West Pacific might fare against a rapidly arming China. 'I'm not so worried about China militarily,' says Erik Prince. But he warns against blundering into 'a dumb, unnecessary war over Taiwan' with a US Navy that's not ready to fight. What's required is a leaner, more lethal US military equipped by a reformed and innovative US industrial base. Excerpts from a Prince speech at Hillsdale College, his alma mater, and an interview with Hillsdale President Larry Arnn follow: China has an enormous industrial base – 40 to 50 times, by some estimates 200 times, the shipbuilding rate that we have; obviously in drones [production] and components, in a lot of those things that hollowed out the Midwest. Some misguided trade efforts over the last 30 years have moved all that manufacturing to China, and that has definitely accrued to their [China's] advantage. But I'm not so worried about China militarily, I am worried if we blunder into a dumb, unnecessary war in Taiwan. The US Navy is not ready to fight tonight. They are plagued by bad leadership, a lot of misguided training policies, and we spent a lot of money and there's not nearly the readiness that there should be. Four and a half years ago, we lost the 40,000-ton amphibious assault ship, the Bonhomme Richard. A fire started while it was on pier side, in repair, at her home base in San Diego. It took the Navy and took the crew an hour and a half to get first water on that fire, on an active warship. The ship burned up at the dock because of incompetence of the crew and the responding fire services. That's the kind of nonsense, that's a billion, billion-and-a-half-dollar write-off. And that's a big ship, bigger than any aircraft carrier we used in World War II, for example. Now, if the PLA [China's People's Liberation Army] would attack Taiwan, the way they would do it is they'd do a blockade, they'd surround it; they've been exercising that consistently, with no pushback from the US at all, not even any unconventional means to deter them. And if they do that, so what is the Navy going to do? They're going to respond with aircraft carriers. And they'd run a $12 billion aircraft carrier within range of thousands of precision missiles that the Chinese can fire, and that's going to result in a very bad image of a US Navy aircraft carrier, with 5,000 of our citizens on board, smoking or worse. And that ties directly into the geopolitical consequences that we would face then. Because remember the British Empire, after they defeated Napoleon at Trafalgar [in] 1804, ruled the waves for the next century and then they got spanked at the Battle of Jutland during World War I by the Imperial German Navy, just off the coast of Denmark. And that was the beginning of the end of the British Empire. They lost territory, they lost the pound as a dominant currency, and you would see an unwind in that competition of governance. Is it our system of Western capitalism, freedom? Look, democracy in a republic is a mess. It's messy, it's imperfect. It does not have the crispness of a dictatorship, of course. But I would take messy, and innovation, and bottoms-up approach to problem-solving versus top-down dictatorship any day. But we cannot let ourselves blunder into the stupid things like that because history shows, that can be the beginning of the end. So, can Taiwan be defended at all? I think the best way to deter conflict over Taiwan is for them to build a home guard because – in an era of precision weapons where the Chinese, the PLA, can have pre-registered dozens of weapons at every known valuable location that Taiwan might have, meaning anti-aircraft, submarine bases, command bunkers – all those known locations are going to get erased in the opening moments of a conflict. But what the PLA can't compute for is national will. If you think about the American colonists in 1775, only 3% of them actually took up arms against, at that point, the most powerful military in the world, and they won. Because there was a will, they knew the terrain, they could figure out the basic means to defend themselves and they ended up buying or smuggling in arms from abroad to get their job done. In the case of Taiwan, if you take 3% of the Taiwanese population, I think that's like 720,000 people. That's a lot. Their military is largely very weak. Let's say a lot of soy boys, not all but enough. But if you have people that can step out of their homes and gather weapons from a fire station, police station, civil defense shelter, the complexity and difficulty of trying to occupy a land where there's armed people that know what they're doing – that have maybe four to six weeks of partisan training – makes conquering the island exceedingly difficult because you have urban terrain and you also have massive jungle that they can hide out and operate in. But what about a larger military conflict in the Northwest and West Pacific region, including multiple Asian mainland-based theaters of operation? We are not ready for that. What really helped America, what really helped the allies win World War II was American industry. If you haven't read the book, Freedom's Forge, I highly encourage you to do it. A lot of you are from the Midwest, I'm from the Midwest, from an automotive manufacturing family background. And it makes me really proud to realize all those factories really cranked out and delivered that kind of capability. It made it possible for Marshal Zhukov, of the Soviet Union, to go all the way from Moscow to Berlin with 600,000 vehicles, trucks – to remember, the German army back then was only about half mechanized. We made it possible with tens of thousands of aircraft and hundreds of thousands of vehicles for the Soviets to win. Our industrial base now is nowhere near what it needs to be right now to be competitive. I think, as we've seen, our government manages to spend unlimited amounts of money doing stupid things, especially when it tries to go to war. And we have politicians that completely lose any idea of what something should cost. And I guess maybe that's why Dr. Arnn wanted me back here, because I'm at least having come here as an Austrian economics major. Really, in fact, I remember Dr. Ebeling, who was my professor, and the day right before I graduated, he said, 'Mr. Prince, you've just come to a school that accepts no federal funding and you're going to join the largest socialist organization in the world.' I said, 'Yes, sir, but it's the only thing that's provided, it's the only part of the military that's actually specified in the Constitution, 'Congress shall raise a Navy.' After Hillsdale, I rolled into officer candidate school, joined the Navy, spent a few years in the SEAL teams. In the family business it was policy that you don't come and work in the family business, you have to go do something else first. I really had no interest in it anyway. And so, I was a SEAL, I enjoyed it, was pretty good at it. And then my father died and my wife got cancer, within a few months of each other. So, I got out and to kind of help sort out the family business and that's what led me to start Blackwater, which was a private military training facility. You know, as I built a private military contractor, I never really intended to be notorious. I started Blackwater as a way to stay connected to the SEAL teams that I liked. I loved that job. But as I'm laying it out, and I just looked at what does the military do? It recruits, vets, equips, trains, deploys and supports people to do a difficult job in a difficult place. And we understood it, like the Toyota production system, how to manage our costs in a way that big government never was able to do so. And of course, the politicians' constant answer to us was, 'You're doing something inherently governmental.' And I counter that by saying, 'I was born in the summer of 1969, Woodstock and Apollo 11. If you said that 50 years later after Apollo 11, that the only way the US government gets to the International Space Station is on a Russian rocket or on a contractor rocket, they would have laughed you out of Johnson Space Center.' But that convergence of trying to bring some kind of market solutions into a military industrial complex that's run wild, the amount of spending and waste that occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan, as you're seeing now with a DOGE effort, God bless Elon Musk for cutting it down across the board. I hope we have the same opportunity to do something similar to the Pentagon. I have such respect for that guy. He looked at spacecraft and he said, 'Look, we have to lower the cost of launch to get it to altitude by a thousand-fold.' And he's well on his way to doing that. And as we reach the era of AI, where that technical acceleration is really occurring on the leading and the bleeding edge of battle in theaters like Ukraine, in Israel, where you just saw it in Syria, the required level of innovation and speed is only going to come from the private sector. It's not going to come from big government labs. It's probably not even going to come from DARPA. It's going to come from smart people in America operating from their garages with a dream. I really hope that the Trump team is able to change procurement to allow for the purchase and innovation that the private sector can do. I don't really fear – as much as people get super hyperventilated about China with AI – China with this many missiles, all the rest. it still comes down to individual leadership in the field, at the sergeant level, at the junior officer level. We have still the very, very finest of those kinds of soldiers in the world. And I see units and people from all kinds of places as part of my professional life. We don't have a monopoly in innovation, but we have a critical mass of it. And a lot of that still resides in the military. And – if the innovation that the private sector can provide, that I know it can provide, and as long as DOD opens just a little bit, opens the tap of money, redirecting from the nonsense, hyper, overpriced programs that they like to spend money on – we can certainly not just catch up but surpass any capability that we have to worry about with China.
BBC News
27-03-2025
- Health
- BBC News
Wakefield boy receives top Scout award for cancer bravery
The family of a nine-year-old boy who is being treated for brain cancer have said that being a Cub Scout allows him to be "normal again".Harry, from Wakefield, has medulloblastoma and has undergone chemotherapy and Scout Association has awarded him the Cornwell Badge in recognition of his "extraordinary strength, resilience and determination".Harry will now get to meet a member of the Royal Family - an experience he said he was "really excited" about. Harry returned to his Cub Scout pack, 25th Wakefield (St John's), last summer after nine months of hospital treatment."I didn't know as many people as I knew [before surgery]," he said."It was tough but I met loads of new people and I didn't give up on what we were learning about." Harry's parents, Owain and Lisa Evans, are both medics - his father is a children's orthopaedic surgeon and his mother is a neonatal Evans said her son had to "relearn everything" after his treatment."To begin with, he was quite nervous, but he's been taken such good care of that now he just loves Cubs," she Evans added: "He's been on some pretty good adventures that we didn't think he'd be able to do 18 months ago." Charlie Boyes, Harry's Cub leader, said: "He is the most resilient kid I've ever met."She said leaders had worked hard to ensure Harry could take part in activities and camps, as he "doesn't want to be any different to his peers".The Scout group's lead volunteer, Laura Stephenson, said she cried when their award nomination was approved."I actually put him in for a different award, but the panel came to the unanimous conclusion that the Cornwell Badge was better," she said. Harry also received a video message from the Chief Scout, television presenter and polar explorer Dwayne Fields, who said his strength and courage were "an inspiration"."Your positivity, your resilience and that great Scouting spirit you've got has inspired everyone around you," he family will be guests at the Scout Association's achievement event at Windsor Castle in April. The Cornwell Badge The Cornwell Badge was inspired by the actions of a Scout in 1916 and is still awarded today for courage and devotion to Cornwell was a Scout in an east London troop, which was dissolved when World War One began and its leaders joined the armed forces. Jack had left school and was working as a delivery the age of 15 Jack was accepted into the Royal Navy. He ended up serving in the crucial Battle of Jutland aboard HMS role was to set the sights of the gun he manned so it could be fired accurately. After several direct hits, Jack was one of the few men left standing to operate the weapon. He was seriously injured but remained alone at his post awaiting died of his wounds at a hospital in Grimsby and his body was returned to London for burial. His mother, Lily, did not realise that the Navy would have paid for his funeral, and he was instead interred in a shared bravery captured the public imagination, and he had been mentioned in reports of the battle. He was seen as an ordinary boy who had become a national hero, and he was later reburied with full military honours. Hundreds of Scouts lined the route for the was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross for gallantry, which his mother received from King George Scouts set up a memorial fund named after Jack and the Cornwell Badge was launched later in first Scout to receive it was Arthur Shepherd, who was 15 and part of a troop in Middlesbrough. He on a Coastguard patrol in Whitby when the hospital ship Rohilla sank nearby. The Scouts helped to rescue victims and recover had to walk across narrow cliff ledges to deliver messages in a gale while being lashed by waves. The rules have changed over time and now all 6-25-year-olds who are members of any Scout section are eligible. Listen to highlights from West Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North.
