I’m not a fan of Christmas songs, so I thought it would be interesting to make a playlist of music related to, or about history. With one exception, all the songs here are from my personal collection. Consequently, there’s a lot of folk and rock, particularly Billy Bragg and Iron Maiden. I’ve added a few notes about some tracks.
For my birthday this year, my wife gave me a family ticket to this year’s Tracks to the Trenches event. We went to the event…
The SMLE (sometimes pronounced “smelly”), or “Rifle, Short, Magazine, Lee-Enfield”, to give its full designation, entered British army service in 1904. This replaced the MLE (Magazine Lee-Enfield, sometimes pronounced “Emily”), which had been produced in long (with a 30.2″ barrel) and carbine (21.2″ barrel) versions. The new rifle was designated “short” because its barrel length was 25.2″, mid-way between the long rifle and the carbine. The short length was controversial. Many people believed the new rifle’s short barrel would make it too inaccurate. In Canada, the Ross rifle was adopted for service instead of the SMLE, partly for this reason. A long bayonet (known as a “sword bayonet”) was issued with the rifle, to compensate for the shorter length when fighting in close combat.
I’m giving away two paperback copies of A Fleet in Being. Everyone on my mailing list will be entered into the draw. If you’re not…
The Royal Naval Air Service (RNAS) created the first British armoured car squadron in September 1914, requisitioning all Rolls-Royce Silver Ghost chassis for the new…
The idea of merchant submarines, a variation on standard merchant ships, has been suggested on multiple occasions, but has only been put into practice once, during WWI. In 1916 a class of seven u-boats was built by a private shipping company. These new u-boats were large, displacing over 2,200 tons, and with a wide beam to facilitate loading. They had no torpedo tubes or other armament, being civilian vessels operated by a civilian company, the North German Lloyd Line.
Although they were large by u-boat standards, their cargo capacity of around 700 tons was relatively small by surface ship standards. Their ability to submerge to avoid detection, however, was a significant advantage for a country that was under an efficient naval blockade. The blockade, put in place by the Entente powers, was severely hampering German trade and making it difficult for German companies to acquire raw materials. Of the seven merchant submarines built, only two were used in their intended role, and of those two, SMS Bremen sank on her maiden voyage. SMS Deutschland made two successful round voyages to the United States.
My publishing company, Shilka Publishing, has set up two bundles on Wargame Vault (they aren’t available anywhere else). The bundles represent savings of 33-40%, compared…
“The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” The above words were spoken by Sir…
It is generally accepted that the First World War was triggered by the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand by the Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip. In recent years, however, an extra twist has been added: that the only reason Princip was in a position to fire at the Archduke was because he happened to be eating lunch when the Archduke’s car drove past. Millions of lives were lost during the war that followed. The Russian Revolution, the rise of Hitler and Nazism, the Second World War, and even the atomic bomb can arguably be attributed to the First World War, and thus, to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. It’s sobering to think that all of those terrible things might never have happened if Princip hadn’t felt a little hungry and stopped off at Schiller’s delicatessen for a sandwich.
The sandwich theory, however, is deeply flawed. The Smithsonian blog published an excellent debunking of it back in 2011. It appears that the original source of the sandwich was a novel by a Brazilian TV host. The post is very interesting, and well worth a read.
The Otranto Barrage was a naval blockade of the Otranto Straits between Brindisi and Corfu, intended to prevent the Austro-Hungarian navy gaining access to the…
