What would you do if....

Nov 4, 2016

If you feared your nine man unarmed crew would have had little chance of resisting the German airmen if, after being rescued, they had hijacked your vessel? What would you do if your fishing boat King Stephen were in a zone in which fishing was prohibited by the British authorities and you feared that a return to a British port with a large number of German prisoners might have drawn attention?
Commander Martin of the King Stephen, a Brtitsh fish trawler,  ignored the rescue pleas of the German Zeppelin L19 crew which was stranded in the North Sea after a bombing mission to England in 1916 during WW1.

Nov 12, 2016

If you feared humiliating defeat. Fight to the end or commit suicide?  #PubliusCrassus and some of the other leading Romans with him committed suicide rather than fight on hopelessly against the #Parthians (current northeast Iran) during the 53BC  #Battle of Carrhae (small town in modern day Turkey).

Jan 2, 2017

  During the Civil War Yanks and Rebels would sometimes eat lunch together  then return to the battlefield  to kill each other. Would you be hesitant dropping your weapon to fraternize if the "gentelmen" code were in play today?

April 15, 2017

The power of Ice in the winter of 1794-95.What would you do if you're a part of a Dutch fleet  immobilized when the Zuiderzee bay (North Sea) froze overnight, and French calvary on horseback is moving in your direction. You surrender. #battleoftexel.

May 28, 2017

#paganpower What would you do if a meteorite landed between two armies? Scatter.  The two sides feared it was sign from their respective gods  during the Third Mithridatic War of 76–63 B.C. It occurred near the Kingdom of Pontus which is currently a part of Turkey neat the Black Sea coast.

July 16, 2017

What would you do if you're asleep in Baltimore, a shady port and a haven for pirate ships in southern Ireland, and #MuratReis, a Dutch born  sailor , convert to Islam, and a Barbary Coast pirate, is on a slave raid. #WilliamHarris shot warning shots which slowed down the raid, but 108 Baltimoreans would up slaves in North Africa in 1631. #sackofbaltimore

aug 23, 2017

what would you do if Canadian troops won a key battle #hill70 during #WW1 which kept  German troops from getting to Belgium in August, 2017. Finally build a monument

nov 11, 2017

What would you do if you ran the British Navy in WW1 and had an old Lt Commander known as a braggart, a liar, a hot head, who knew the region, #LakeTanganyika which sat between Tanzania (then German East Africa) and the Democratic Republic of Congo (then Belgian Congo)  spoke French and German and was both available and willing to lead the expedition in which the British rolled, floated and dragged their boats through the interior of Africa? You put the thickly tattoed Lt.-Cmdr. Geoffrey Spicer-Simson to work.

Jan 7, 2017  

What will the multi-gender promoters do. Re-write history:  #WWI #Britishtanks were initially categorized as “males” and “females.” Male tanks had cannons,  females had heavy machine guns

feb 21 2018

Turks ran out of ammunition against the Greeks at the Battle of  Tellidede during the Greco-Turkish war (1919-22).  Will it happen again as Turks are fleeing to Greece which refuses to extradite alleged Turkish criminals back to Turkey. Turks are fighting  the Kurds in various places.

april 13,2018

The battle of #Jutland in the North Sea was fought over 36 hours from May 31 to June 1 1916 and involved around 250 ships. Royal Navy's Grand Fleet clash with the German High Seas Fleet. More than 6,000 Britons and 2,500 Germans died. Both sides claimed a victory.

may 2, 2018

What would you do if you saw a stricken steamship going down? #janewhyte waded into the North Sea to save the 15-strong crew of The William Hope ,a stricken iron steamship in the North Sea, in 1884 is to be honoured for her courage. Its not war story but....

july 22, 2018

I'm trying to envision  what it was like for #moltke Chief of German General Staff,  when German forces were temporarily stiffed at #Liege , Belgium in a haphazard  attack on a neutral nation at the start of  #WW1  early August 2014. I'm nearly finish reading July 1914, a book by Sean McMeekin that reminded me of what I didn't know about  how WW1 was started.

aug 27,2018

What would have happened if #Paraguay had been at war?  Officers found that the FN FAL battle rifles had been replaced with wooden and plastic replicas and sold on the black market.

nov 17, 2018

What would you do if an international operation couldn't find your missing submarine? You hire a private firm.  #ArgentineNavy reported that  Ocean Infinity, a private company hired by Argentina, has located the submarine ARA San Juan  2625 feet below the ocean’s surface a year after it "vanished" with 44 crew members aboard.

nov 19

Argentina's defence minister #aguad claims they "does not have the means" to raise  ARA San Juan

feb 3, 2019

 Employees at a #HongKong crisp factory discovered a World War I-era German-made, mud coated grenade in a pile of potatoes imported from France.  It was in an unstable condition because it had been previously discharged in a  trench in #France but failed to detonate.

march 30, 2019

I forgot this part of the Entebbe story:  RIP #MichelBacos , the French pilot who  refused to leave the passengers of  Air France plane that was hijacked on  June 27 1976 by members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and a German radical group.  They were later freed by Israeli commandos at Entebbe, Uganda.

june 22 , 2019

  Captain Hans Langsdorff  brought the German pocket warship #GRAFSPEE  into Montevideo's harbor, where he was given three days to remove injured and dead sailors after the Battle of River Plate on Dec 13, 1939. He took advantage of this offer and ordered the ship scuttled in the estuary off the coast to prevent the Allies from gaining access to its technology and killed himself days later in a Buenos Aires hotel. This story caught my attention because #Uruguay 's government has been ordered to sell the 800-pound eagle with a swastika under its talons that was  a part of the stern of the German "pocket battleship" .

july 18

 Three French soldiers who were laying explosives to destroy an underground  gold mining complex in French #Guiana, died when they were intoxicated by noxious fumes. Were the sodiers not wearing masks?  It sure appears to be an odd operation.
Miners use mercury to separate gold from grit.

aug 27, 2019

 Barcelona's popular Sant Sebastià beach: #SpanishNavy explosive experts moved an unexploded 154lb TNT bomb from the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War further out to sea, where it was successfully detonated.

sept 6

An American farmer shot a British pig on San Juan Island (now a part of the state of Washington) in 1859. It had escalated to nearly a war  between the USA and Great Britain when  Admiral Baynes of the British Navy refused to engage the USA 9th Infantry unit,  stating that he would not “involve two great nations in a war over a squabble about a pig”.

Nov18 2019

 Maybe it's time to stop fishing with a magnet? Kids snagged several pieces of World War II ammunition and bullet fragments in a pond near the village of Wölfis in the eastern state of Thuringia, Germany on Saturday.

Jan 11,2020

 Construction projects in Germany are  preceded by checks for unexploded ordnance, often using old Allied aerial photos showing WW2 impact craters. Evacuations of 14,000 residents are underway in #Dortmund, as experts prepare to find and disarm four WW2 bombs.

March 22

 What will Afghanistan do with two Presidents, Ghani(declared election winner) and Abdullah, who held parallel inaugurations within minutes of each other in separate venues that were erected inside the grounds of Kabul's presidential palace?

May 10, 2020

  Blue División , was a unit of Spanish volunteers that served in the German Army on the Eastern Front" in WW2. Franco ordered them home in 1943 but some stayed.Yesterday , I watched

Frozen Silence (2011), a movie in which the German High Command ordered  a private in the Blue Division  who was an ex police inspector, to find the person responsible for a series of bodies, hideously mutilated and carved with bizarre symbols and messages. Amidst the chaos of war, his investigation led him to  "russian" roulette wager parties among the Nazi and Blue Divison troops. Plenty of "what would you do questions" in this flick.

Then there 's the question of how Spain kept its Neutral status during WW2.

May 13, 2020

  Mayaguez incident or what some refer to as the last battle of the Vietnam war  started 45 years ago today in Cambodia where the Khmer Rouge had recently seized power. President Ford was determined to not allow it to become another Pueblo incident. The results  were messy  and are still open to debate.

May 25, 2020 

 SS Jeremiah O'Brien, a fully functional Liberty ship and a part of the DDay armada,  was saved during a fire at Pier 45, Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. Bay area firefighters battled flames that were pinching on the side of the vessel.

May 28, 2020

  The Britannic, a sister ship of the Titanic, was converted into a British hospital ship during World War 1, and was sunk by a mine in the Aegean Sea near Greece in 1916. Pending legislation in Greece will allow divers to visit ships, submarines or planes that sank in Greek waters between 1860 and 1970.

June 4, 2020

So you're out fishing on the River Cam in Cambridge , England and you reel in a grenade? The police then the military were called and the grenade was destroyed. Military devices from WW2 are uncommon in Cambridge, which was not targeted by major bombing campaigns.

July 20, 2020

Greece is trying  to declutter its coastline ahead of 2,500th anniversary of key naval battles including the 480 BC Battle of #Salamis , in which the invading Persian navy suffered a huge defeat. The large Persian vessels were unable to  navigate effectively in the narrow seaways.

July 26, 2020

 #borisjohnson is chatting up the prospect of a bridge from Northern Ireland to Scotland , but the presence of dumped munitions in the Irish Sea could cause problems for a potential project.

Sept 3, 2020

 Trump designated Wilmington, N.C., as the country's first American World War II Heritage City. The ceremony took place on decommissioned USS North Carolina, which took part in every major naval offensive in the Pacific area of operation and earned 15 battle stars.

Sept 21, 2020

The Pacific Games , may want to revisit using the Solomon Islands as its host country in 2023. Stephen Atkinson and Trent Lee , employees of Norwegian People's Aid, were killed while attempting to remove un-exploded WW2 bombs in Honiara.

Dec 20, 2020

#Sweden will allow an underwater examination of the ferry Estonia, which sank in the Baltic on Sept. 28, 1994. after a documentary film showed previously unknown holes in the wreck’s hull. It was sailing from Tallinn to Stockholm in bad weather  and 852 people died when it sank.  Two possible explanations for the holes are a collision with a submarine and/or an explosion inside the ship.

March 28, 2021

The whole nine yards(27') derivation:

 British Frigates of the 19th Century hoisted 27'  masts to achieve full speed. 

During WW2  .50 caliber machine gun ammo belts triggered by pilots measured exactly 27'

April 6, 2021

While reading news about Northern Island, I came across an obit on Commander Philip Ball OBE,

a decorated Royal Navy officer who served on the carrier HMS Victorious, which provided air cover for the convoys supplying essential material to the Soviet Union during WW2.

These sailors faced Arctic ice storms, Luftwaffe bombers and  U-boat attacks. 

July 30, 2021

What if you live in  a  federal parliamentary- constitutional monarchy,.and see your government do this? Australia has deployed hundreds of soldiers to Sydney to help enforce a Covid lockdown. They did a similar thing in Melbourne last year.

It's to review your constitution!!!!!!!!!

OCT 19, 2021

What would you do if you found a 900-year-old Crusader sword while diving off the Israel coast at the beach in Carmel?   #ShlomiKatzin gave it to the  Israel Antiquities Authority. Some events from nearly 900 years ago were the Spanish Inquisition and the death of Genghis Khan.  

Oct 30, 2021

John P. Laborde, who died this week at age 97, was a former aide to Gen. MacArthur and later ran Tidewater for nearly 40 years and built the largest fleet of vessels serving offshore drillers. I'm sure he wondered if he'd ever make it to the Pacific WW2 war zone when he sailed on a ship that had once carried pineapples from Hawaii, for 56 days from San Francisco to New Guinea. One of the notes he left his family was some ancient advice:   “Never test the depth of water with both feet.”

Nov 6, 2021

William S. Anderson, who died in July 2021 at 102, got career advice from a fellow prisoner while starving in a Japanese-run camp and later  became the President of NCR . He was born March 29, 1919, in Hankow, China and was imprisoned by the Japs while serving as a member of the Hong Kong volunteer defense corps, backing up regular British troops.  In 1947, he testified at a war-crimes trial of prison-camp leaders in Japan and identified one of the defendants by the nickname of Fishface. When a  defense lawyer asked him why he didn’t know the man’s real name. “Well, you see,” Mr. Anderson recalled replying, “we were never formally introduced.”

Dec 2, 2021

No explanation yet from Munich authorities on why a decades-old bomb dropped from an aircraft in WW2 wasn’t discovered during an advance check for unexploded ordnance. The explosion at a construction site injured four people.

Jan 11, 2022

Sometimes, I forget how many battles continued long after the USA left Nam. Three members of demining team, Cambodia Self Help Demining, were killed by a device from Cambodia’s civil war in the northern province of Preah Vihear, an area where heavy combat between government forces and guerrillas of the communist Khmer Rouge occurred in the 1990s.

Feb 24, 2022

In 2006 the salvage team that found, a bronze eagle from the sunken Admiral Graf Spree, a German  warship, signed a 50/50 deal with the Uruguayan navy for a future sale. Yesterday, Uruguay appealed a 2019 ruling ordering it to sell the bronze eagle.  Graf Spee's captain, Hans Langsdorff, had scuttled the destroyer on December 17, 1939 near Montevido, Uruguay, following a defeat at the Battle of the River Plate to HMS Achilles, a New Zealand "pocket ship".

April 10, 2022

HUBANESWAR, India : Police in India are seeking to arrest members of a gang, who posed as government officials attached with the irrigation Dept and dismantled a 60-feet-long iron bridge. Residents probably assumed that the government officials had finally decided to dismantle the old bridge that was not in use.

Selling scrap metal is a lucrative business in India.

July 5, 2022

Yesterday, I watched a movie made in 1984 about Mata Hari which got me wondering how much of a spy she was and if you had been a French or German high-ranking officer during WW1, would you have whispered in her ear in the bedroom?

During World War I, the Netherlands remained neutral, and since Mata was a Dutch subject, this helped her travel easier during WW1. 

Aug 23, 2022

On Aug. 23, 1958, Communist China bombed the Taiwan-controlled Kinmen and Matsu islands. What did Ike do?  USAF deployed F-100D Super Sabres, F-101C Voodoos, F-104A Starfighters, and B-57B Canberras to Taiwan to demonstrate support for the republic and eventually the Commies stood down.

Oct 21, 2022

What did James A. McDivitt do when he didn’t have the money for college growing up in Kalamazoo, Michigan? He joined the Air Force and later flew 145 combat missions in Korea.

  He was the commander of 1965′s Gemini 4 mission and the Apollo 9 mission.

 He died at the age of 93 on 10/19/22. RIP, Sir!

Nov 15, 2022

What would you do if you're a soldier in a war -zone and bullets are being fired in your direction from an area where a member of the press is? Israel condemns FBI probe into killing of Abu Akleh, a Palestinian-American journalist for Al Jazeera, who was shot dead while wearing a bullet proof PRESS jacket, covering an Israeli military operation at a refugee camp in the city of Jenin in the occupied West Bank in May 2022.

Dec 6, 2022

An antenna manufactured by an Ottawa-based company ended up on the Shahed-136, a drone used by Iran. Don't fret: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is “extremely concerned”.