Comments by "doveton sturdee" (@dovetonsturdee7033) on "Admiral Andrew Cunningham - War, France and Italy (Part 3)" video.

  1. Absolutely, his response during the evacuation of Crete compares with 'England expects.' When urged to abandon the operation because of the total lack of air support, he said :- 'It takes the Navy three years to build a ship. It will take three hundred years to build a new tradition. The evacuation will continue.' Had he seen the inept antics of the British MoD of today, he might well have added another 12 years to the '3 years' however.
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  2.  @sijul6483  He had nothing of the sort. He had considerable experience of what war was actually like. A problem he often faced was that.whilst professional military men looked at issues from a purely military point of view, he had to consider in addition the wider political implications.
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  3. You mean 'Browne?'
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  4.  @ROBERTN-ut2il  Well, ABC thought his middle name was 'Browne.' His mother's maiden name.
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  5. No. The Admiral at Mers-el-Kebir was James F. Somerville.
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  6.  @ROBERTN-ut2il  Then they thought wrongly.
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  7.  @ROBERTN-ut2il  From the standard of your comments, I doubt that you so much thinking at all. Ever heard of Vice Admiral Sir Bernard Rawlins, commander of the British Pacific Fleet at sea in WW2? He asked that the epitaph on his tombstone read ' One of Cunningham's Captains.' Or Bruce Fraser, when told that the appointment to First Sea Lord was between Cunningham & himself, said 'I believe that I have the confidence of my Fleet. But Cunningham has the confidence of the entire Navy.'
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  8. You mean the totally unsubstantiated claims about damage to HMS Warspite? Not quite as credible as the lunatic Argentinian claims about the sinking of HMS Invincible in 1982, but probably more amusing.
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  9. Self-inflicted blast damage is entirely dependent upon the elevation of the guns and how close the 'A' arcs were to being closed. Warspite at Narvik fired at very close range, whereas at Calabria the range was very long. Seriously, if Warspite had suffered a heavy calibre hit, don't you think it would have involved rather more than shelves falling over and a chart being ripped? The use of the definite, rather than indefinite, in a letter to Pound? Is that really all you have? By the way, HMS Neptune & HMS Gloucester were both damaged in the cruiser action prior to Calabria. Furthermore, at Calabria, by 1700 hours the enemy was no longer in sight and WARSPITE was within 25 miles of the Calabrian coast. Does that, seriously, sound like the kind of risk Cunningham would have taken with his only modernised battleship had she already been damaged? The reference to the SKL diary is meaningless, as German liaison officers were simply repeating what the Italians told them. German reports of the same period recorded the sinking of HMS Ark Royal on a regular basis, by the way. 'Does anyone know of that German report from Cairo? Were there German agents there?' Shouldn't you, if you seek to use that as an argument, be answering the question yourself? Warspite's Ship's Cover, by the way, makes no reference to any damage to her at Calabria. She was regularly at sea immediately afterwards, until undergoing a brief refit in Alexandria in early August. Your comments, frankly, make clutching at straws comparatively convincing. Who are these 'researchers' by the way? Perhaps they collaborated with Argentinian 'researchers' who 'proved' that HMS Invincible was sunk during the Falklands?
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  10. No. His orders ensured that it could not be deployed in support of a potential German invasion attempt.
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