Comments by "" (@walterkronkitesleftshoe6684) on "Historigraph" channel.

"Plummeted"? The vast majority of the 100,000 French troops rescued by the Royal Navy from within the Dunkirk perimeter chose to IMMEDIATELY return to France via the French Atlantic ports, WEEKS before the Mers el Kebir episode. It was only nazi brutality over its newly conquered French colony that eventually saw the numbers of "Free French" start to increase.
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You show your childish, immature ignorance of naval matters. ALL naval men have nothing but respect for other sailors lost at sea, friend or foe. The sea is the common enemy of ALL sailors. When you grow up, if you're lucky you may develop some wisdom, if that happens you'll then look back at the words you've typed above and feel nothing but embarrased shame.
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ALL nations have them... this was not our finest hour.
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Addu Atoll did not have sufficient facilities to resupply the entire Eastern Fleet at short notice and so the two fast cruisers were directed to Colombo for refuelling and to have their AA defences beefed up (the additional AA guns were on the quayside in Colombo awaiting installation), but before they could be fitted they were ordered to make steam and rendezvous with Somerville midway between Addu Atoll and Ceylon.
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There would have been very little, if any, physical human remains left in the wrecks after 80 years. But the plunder of the site is a disgrace nonetheless.
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Or indeed how to spell it.
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"Kudos to the US" Do you mean for profiteering from BOTH sides of the Euorpean war while Britain fought alone against the nazis?
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Nice social history there, underlining the fact the by and large ordinary people do NOT want wars but instead would rather live in peace and quiet, unfortunately we are marshalled into them by lunatic leaders, much like Schwab, Biden and the rest plus their "MIC" backers nowadays.
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@DomWeasel 1,000,000 FAR outstrips the armed forces of Great Britain itself at that stage of the war.
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@DomWeasel Do you honestly believe that Britain was "fully mobilised" in September 1939? My father then aged 20, not in a reserved occupation and prime material for an early "call up" (as "call up" was prioritised by age) received his papers in Oct 1939 to attend for his medical in December 1939, followed by his induction into recruit training in February 1940 where he was until he was posted to unit in June 1940. (I still have all his paperwork). The BEF managed to achieve 2 divisions in France by the end of September 1939 (the "regulars"), a further 3 by the new year (the "terriers") with the final 8 not taking their positions until the end of april 1940 with two of those final 8 divisions not even passed as "combat ready" (The "conscripts"). Countries recovering from the depression of the 1930's did not have massive armies ready at a moments notice, but as you say, reserves and territorials that took time to mobilize from civilian life to standing on the front line. That was a problem faced by France at the outbreak of WW2, she mobilised too quickly and stripped her industry of vital manpower that caused industrial chaos, and that was before the Germans had set a foot over the border. The figures you're quoting as British serving army personnel are not the numbers of serving British personnel in 1939.
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@DomWeasel "I didn't say they were fully mobilised in September 1939", but you DID reel off a series of "serving personnel" numbers that were FAR in excess of what was on the table in Sept 1939, thereby suggesting that those were the numbers then available, c'mon, English comprehension isn't THAT hard.
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wehraboo much?
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Unlike the US and Japan the Royal Navy had a FAR greater area of the world's oceans to cover than the Japanese or US did. The RN fought in the Arctic, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Indian Oceans protecting the wide spread of her imperial colonies trade routes on external lines of communication & supply. The IJN on the other hand controlled the western Pacific on internal lines of communications & supply. The ONLY time it attempted to extend itself beyond that area of operations (The Indian Ocean raid discussed here) it immediately found itself over extended and was forced to withdraw back towards its home islands. The USN confined the vast majority of its efforts to the Pacific.
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Knowledge of genuine factual history is nothing to be ashamed of, and indeed should be applauded. As for the weird niche Japanese "art form" that seems obsessed with sexualised animated children, well I'd keep that under my hat if I were you.
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@whyamiforeverunloved4075 "If the cap fits" as the saying goes. All I'm saying is that after serving 30 years in the fire service with hundreds of grown male adults, not one of them has ever publicly discussed their admiration of a Japanese "artform" which is visibly obsessed with large breasted, giggling school girls who have a tendancy to buy clothes that are 5 sizes too small for them, within my earshot. Just saying.....
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@Rocketsong Force Z was meant to include the RN aircraft carrier Indomitable, which was unable to reach Asia in time having run into a reef in the Carribean. It would have been nice to have the option to hold on for a couple of months to arrange a replacement, but when the enemy is at your doorstep you have to work with what is available. The real error was poor use (or lack thereof) of the sparse British land based air forces.
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Read some more and you'll find that Britain did NOT "forget to send a carrier".... the carrier that was assigned to the RN in SE asia, HMS indomitable, ran aground en route, and was delayed enough that no air cover was avaible for Force Z's operations at Singapore.
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Depends whether you think a network of nazi death camps across Europe is a good thing or not.
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@emperor_msk Absolutely... that's the problem when a megalomaniac with financial backers takes over a country. Rather like the doddering figurehead Biden in the current day US.
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Why not keep your shite thoughts to yourself?
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Admiral Raeder was in charge of the German navy at this point. The Germans were a mostly land based military force. They were facing the world's then largest navy, there was NO way they would have gone toe to toe with the RN !!!
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Always have done, always will do... get used to it.
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@MarkHarrison733 "France was neutral" was it? You mean after it aquiesced under nazi pressure to allow Japanese troops to occupy French Indo-China in 1940? Oh THAT kind of "neutral"......
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@niclasjohansson4333 Close !!! But no cigar !!!
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PLease don;t highlight your own ignorance.
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Well done leaving the artifact to a suitable establishmwnt, rather than auctioning it off into a private collection, never to be seen again. 👍
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@ Right place at the right time, Mark. But you saved it for the nation's posterity. Well done !!! Pity they couldn't do the same with the rest of the ship !!!
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By the first week in September 1940 RAF Fighter Command was becoming desperately short of pilots, and an increasing number of it's airfields in the SE of England were repeatedly being put out of action sometime for days at a time.
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@VastKrutEmpire The RAF by late August 1940 was heading towards a situation where it might have to consider abandoning it's southern airfields and withdraw north of the Thames/Severn line, which was the Luftwaffe's stated aim.
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My father was a stoker onboard HMS Dorsetshire during this period. On Sunday 5th April 1942, he was off-watch from his normal station in the boiler rooms and called to his "action station" at about 12pm, at this time he was a leader of a damage control party up near the Dorsetshire's bows adjacent to the ships "paint locker". The ship's company were aware that a Japanese reconaissance aircraft (from the Japanese heavy cruiser "Tone") had passed astern of them earlier in the morning and had disappeared in the hazy sky. They hoped that it had not spotted them as they made their way SSW to rendezvous with the rest of the British Eastern Fleet. At around 12:30pm the approaching Japanese aircraft were spotted. Very shortly after the commencement of the Japanese air attack, all comms in the ship were lost, though it was all too apparent that Dorsetshire was receiving a heavy pounding, with the ship heeling over and quaking from the impact of the Japanese bombs. During the chaos and din in the compartment where dad and his damage control team were stationed, one concussion dislodged a length of heavy suction hose, known as an "elephant's foot", which hit dad on the head, knocking him senseless for several seconds. On regaining his wits in the now blacked out darkness of the compartment, he sensed that the ship was starting to list heavily, and ordered the party to get on the upper deck via a ladder leading to the "bosun's hatch" in the compartment roof. The first man up the ladder shouted that he couldn't unlatch the hatch "dogs". Dad climbed up and used a crowbar to release the latches and the party crawled out into the burning sunlight on the rapidly inclining foredeck. One of the damage control party members, a South African named David van Zyl, confided to dad that he couldn't swim and despite desperate pleas from dad for him to jump overboard, he tragically went down with the ship, the rest of the party all survived. After swimming away from the sinking ship, dad together with nearly 1000 other men from the two ships (which had both been sink within 10 minutes of the start of the attack) found themselves floating in the ocean, hundreds of miles from the nearest land. A few of the Japanese aircraft machine gunned the survivors in the water before departing, and dad said he never forgot the face of one of the Japanese pilots with a large black moustache as he swept overhead before he flew off. Only one boat from the two ships had survived the attack, and it was used to keep the most severely injured sailors safe out of the water. The survivors floated right through the cold of the first night, and then through the burning heat of the second day, most of them were suffering badly from sunburn and being encrusted with salt from the sea water, though to lessen the effects many of them smothered themselves in oil that had started to float up from the 2 sunken ships, which gave some respite. As night approached on the second day, dad said that the general feeling was that they were all going to die from thirst and exposure, but incredibly the men in the one boat had an oar with a biscuit tin lid tied to the top of it and had taken it in turns to keep the upright oar revolving in the boat, and shortly before sunset a swordfish aircraft from Ceylon spotted a reflection of the sun's rays from the biscuit tin lid, and radioed a report of the survivors back to land. Admiral Somerville, the commander of "Force A" had already sent ships to search for the survivors and these ships (HMS Enterprise, Paladin & Panther) which were about to give up the search were instructed by radio to the location and the 1000 survivors were saved. He always said that if the Japanese had been able to shadow the Cornwall and Dorsetshire for another couple of hours, they would have wiped out a large part of the RN Eastern fleet as they rendezvoused with his two ships. After being landed in Durban in East Africa dad went on to serve on the battleships HMS Warspite & Valiant (During the Salerno landings) and also HMS Malaya, and ended the war in Perth (Fremantle), Australia onboard the submarine tender, HMS Adamant. After his return from Australia to the UK onboard the ship "S.S Maidstone Castle" and his subsequent demobilisation in 1946, dad was a tram then a bus driver in Liverpool until his retirement in 1984, and he passed away in 2013, aged 93.
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They prepared for it, and then realised that all their bluff and bluster was for nought.
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With "reduced crews", while being escorted by RN battleships? Yeah like to see how that would have panned out.
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@marknieuweboer8099 I should have added that 10 Group saw a great deal of action and even 13 group in the north dealt with luftflotte 5's main attack from Scandinavia as well as scattered attacks on Scotland and Scapa Flow. So to say "Only 11 group did the fighting" is not true.
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Not forgetting the intelligence battle, which in the battle of the Atlantic was one of the most decisive aspects of the struggle. The sinkings of uboats rose and fell while mechant sinkings dropped off in time with the the seesaw battle of intelligence strikes and counterstrokes.
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"Warspite rampage" or "The Kriegsmarine fucked about and found out".
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Because you're not using an adblocker. Switch on !!!
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Both Glorious and her 2 escorts were capable of higher speeds than the German ships.
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It tacitly did... allowing the Japanese to occupy French Indo-China without a struggle in 1940.
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They don't always want to.... especially if their political party and themselves are corrupted by money from globalised weapons industries.
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Lieutenant-Commander Gerard Broadmead Roope received a posthumous Victoria cross for his command of HMS Glowworm during the engagement with Admiral Hipper and her escorting destroyers. The recommendation was supported by Kapitän zur See Hellmuth Heye, the captain of Admiral Hipper, who submitted a report to the British admiralty via the International Red Cross, commending the resolve & bravery of Roope in the face of overwhelming odds.
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My father was a stoker onboard HMS Warspite from Sept 1942 until January 1944. He was "off watch" from his station in her boiler rooms when she was hit and near missed by two "Fritz X" radio guided bombs at Salerno, though it was actually on the 16th Sept 1943. (If he'd have been "on watch" I wouldn't be here typing this now), his hearing was permanently damaged by the blast of the second Fritz X just off Warspite's starboard beam. It's incredible that even though the hit went straight through from her weather deck and right the way down through her keel that only NINE sailors were killed in the tragedy. As you said she was then towed to Malta for temporary repairs, but you missed a trick by not reporting that as she approached the Strait of Messina between Sicily and the toe of Italy from the north she parted her tow, and then serenely drifted SIDEWAYS through the strait before exiting the southern end of the strait and another line was able to be secured to her. She was a tough but slightly wilful girl who would never quite do what she was told... right to the last. A travesty that she was not preserved postwar. Great video btw, thanks. Her ship's motto was "Belli Dura Despicio" (I despise the hardships of war).
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Below is the vebatim British ultimatum delivered to Adm Bruno-Marcel Gentoul at Mers-El-Kebir on the 3rd July 1940 "It is impossible for us, your comrades up to now, to allow your fine ships to fall into the power of the German or Italian enemy. We are determined to fight on until the end, and if we win, as we think we shall, we shall never forget that France was our Ally, that our interests are the same as hers, and that our common enemy is Germany. Should we conquer, we solemnly declare that we shall restore the greatness and territory of France. For this purpose, we must make sure that the best ships of the French Navy are not used against us by the common foe. In these circumstances, His Majesty’s Government have instructed me to demand that the French Fleet now at Mers-el-Kébir and Oran shall act in accordance with one of the following alternatives: (a) Sail with us and continue the fight until victory against the Germans and Italians. (b) Sail with reduced crews under our control to a British port. The reduced crews would be repatriated at the earliest moment. If either of these courses is adopted by you, we will restore your ships to France at the conclusion of the war or pay full compensation, if they are damaged meanwhile. (c) Alternatively, if you feel bound to stipulate that your ships should not be used against the Germans or Italians unless these break the Armistice, then sail them with us with reduced crews, to some French port in the West Indies—Martinique for instance—where they can be demilitarised to our satisfaction, or perhaps be entrusted to the United States and remain safe until the end of the war, the crews being repatriated. If you refuse these fair offers, I must, with profound regret, require you to sink your ships within 6 hours. Finally, failing the above I have orders of His Majesty's Government to use whatever force may be necessary to prevent your ships us from falling into German or Italian hands." Jumped up tosser of an inadequate French matelot (Gensoul) thought he would piss about at a time of CRUCIAL importance in European history. To use a modern turn of phrase the French idiot "Fucked about & found out" causing the deaths of 1300 French sailors.
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The Vichy French, or French nazi puppet government.
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Hitler's victorious troops had been smacked out of their heads on crystal meth (Pervitin) for 7 days non-stop. The come down happened at just the wrong time for the nazis. You can only run someone at 120% for so long before the collapse kicks in.
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The two cruisers were at Colombo for refuelling and to have their AA defences beefed up (the additional AA guns were on the quayside in Colombo awaiting installation), but before they could be fitted they were ordered to make steam and rendezvous with Somerville midway between Addu Atoll and Ceylon.
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Not so much "weak" but more to do with having a FAR greater area of the world's oceans to cover than the Japanese did. The RN fought in the Arctic, North Atlantic, South Atlantic, Mediterranean, and Indian Oceans protecting the wide spread of her imperial colonies trade routes on external lines of communication & supply. The IJN on the other hand controlled the western Pacific on internal lines of communications & supply. The ONLY time it attempted to extend itself beyond that area of operations (The Indian Ocean raid discussed here) it immediately found itself over extended and was forced to withdraw back towards its home islands.
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