What time is it?

Via Maritime Compassa simple diagram for working out how many bells it is and which watch it is.

Blowing up Boer-dom

As well as reenacting 1919 we also travelled back in time to the Second Boer War. This was an arena display with the Heilbron Commando taking the staring role together with several groups portraying British units. The Bluejackets were manning the artillery, unfortunately this meant that we also had to get it to the field of battle as well. Normally our gun would have had a crew of 18 to move it. We had 7. Even doing this over the fairly flat and smooth ground of the fields near Kelmarsh Hall certainly showed me how hard it would have been to maneaver one of these weapons though the South African veld.

The battle started with an Australian mounted partol coming across a Boer farmstead. At the point that we were reenacting the Boers
were heavily outnumbered by the British. They could not win in a pitched battle so instead they used their mobility to mount guerilla style raids on British infrastructure like railways and telegraphs. The members of a commando were recruited from the area that they operated in and wore no uniforms, so anybody of military age could have been one. Unable to tell friend from foe, or lure the enemy into an open battle which they could win, the British resorted to more extreme tactics. Remember, we didn't get such a huge empire by being nice.

In our demonstration the bread steallers find a man or military age in the farmstead and decide that he must be part of the Boer Commando that is terrorising the area. Since he was not in uniform they were going to treat him as a spy, but just as the execution was about to take place the real Beor Commando rides to the rescue. A Boer sharp shooter takes out the officer commanding the British contingent, there were many excelent snipers amoungst the Boer forces, and then the cavalry scatters the Aussies. The tables are turned and it could be all over for the British, but it turns out that the Australian partol is just a scouting party for a larger British contingent. Fresh British infantry marches in to engage the enemy, with supporting fire from a naval detachment. Outgunnned and outnumbered the Boers do what any good guerilla force does, they race off to fade into vast expanse of the veld ready to fight again another day.

A not so dazzling paint job

If you go to Portsmouth Historic Dockyards to have a look at the M. 33, the ship that I was reenacting a landing party from last weekend, you will see that she is currently painted as she was during the First World War in dazzle camoflage. At first sight you might think that painting high contrast geometrical shapes onto a ship's hull could not possibly be good camoflage, and you would be right. It doesn't actually work. The idea was to try and break up the outlines of the ship making it harder to target and came from observing herds of Zebra on the plains of africa. As they run and dodge to get away from preditors their stripes can create an optical illustion fooling their preditors to launch themselves at a places where the Zebra isn't. So it was decided to try doing the same thing with warships, but they forgot two things:

1. Warships are much slower than Zebra.
2. Warships are much bigger than Zebra.

Needless to say using dazzle paint camoflage didn't last long and was soon replaced by various shades of battleship grey after the war.

The train to fame

One of the technologies used by the British during the Boer War was the armoured train. Mostly the British tactics were to do with locking down territory using barbed wire and blockhouses then sweeping it clean or Boer. On the other hand the Boer were all about mobility. The armoured train was one of the few technologies deployed by the British to help keep them mobile, but it was not the first time they had been used.

In 1882 Jackie Fisher, then a Captain, assisted by Lieutenant Richard Poore built an armoured train for use by the Naval Brigade that they had landed in Egypt to gain control of the strategically vital Suez Canal. Fisher had always been a technology nut so this was right up his street, and proved to be very useful. In fact that it was so useful that it gained quite a bit of publicity for him back in Britian, however the role that Poore played was generally understated in the press. According to biographies that I have read this is something that Fisher felt bad about, and is the only time that I have every heard of Jackie Fisher ever feeling bad about getting all of the limelight.

Dial M for Missiles (and seasickness)

Last weekend I was reenacting a landing party from HMS M 33 in North Russia in 1919. Despite the slightly odd name the M 33 was a real ship and she did fight in Russian Civil War. She is also one of only two ships from the First World War left, which is a shame. Especially because she was such a poor sea holding boat like all the other ships of her class.

The M 33 was a Monitor, which meant that she was little more than a gun platform for a pair of 6 inch guns. She was designed to get in as close to shore as possible and bombard targets on land. To get in close the Monitors had a much shallower draft than any other ships of a similar size at barely 6 feet. This was great for getting in close, but that very shallow draft meant that she simply did not handle well out at sea.

If you would like to now how she was used then try this analogy. In any modern conflict the first thing that you will see on your TV is a ship firing off cruise missiles in order to soften up the enemies defences ready for an invation. That is what the M 33 did, she was the cruise missile of her day.

A warm weekend in Northern Russia

This weekend was the first major reenactment of the season at Kelmarsh Hall. I was with the Bluejackets group and for most of the day we were on our static display doing a detachment from HMS M. 33 in northern Russia in 1919. Most people do not realise that when the guns fell silent on the western front in 1918 there was still conflict in Russia, and the western powers were very much part of it. Russia had stopped fighting with the central powers after their first revolution in February 1917. Getting out of that meat grinder had been one of the principal reasons for the revolt. This allowed the Germans to free up men for what was to be their final push on the western front before the naval blockade imposed by the Royal Navy finally staved them into surrender.

In the end the Entente Cordial powers won the First World War not because they were victorious on the feild of battle but because they had better logistical support. The British Empire could draw in material from the four corners of the globe to supply it, and its navy could block off the sea lanes to prevent the German Empire trading with anybody that did not share a land border with it. Once the almost unlimited resources of the United States were finally brought to bear there was simply no way that Germany and Austro-Hungary could realistically expect to win anymore.

However the Central Powers where not the only ones with resource problems. The Russian Empire was still basically an agricultural economy, and much of it still ran on a system which would have seemed familiar to the Feudal lord of the manor in Medieval England. They were not an advanced industrial power like their enemy Germany, but luckily for them they were allied to two of the biggest, France and Britain. So to try and make sure that Russia could continue to fight and so force the Central Powers into a war on two fronts Britain supplied Russia with the material that it could not have produced itself. This was shipped up through the arctic circle to the Barents Sea port of Murmansk. Before the war this had been nothing, barely even a village. The British soon changed that building it up into a port city with enough warehouse space to store the millions of tons of material that they were shipping in. Being British they also built a railway to connect this new city with the rest of the country.

When the Tsar fell from power and the Russians declared a cease-fire this left the other allied powers with a problem. They had been shipping all of this stuff into Murmansk and stockpiling it there so that there would still be material during the winter when the sea route closed. There where millions of tons of stuff there ready to be used by the Imperial Russian forces, but now there was no Imperial Russia. They could not ship it back out, there was too much stuff, and if Germany or their Finnish allies got hold of it then that could extend the war considerably. Murmansk needed to be defended, there was no Russian force that they trusted to do it, so they had to do it themselves; and because of that we slowly got drawn into the Russian Civil War on the side of the Whites. Britain continued to fight all the way into the 1920s before finally being able to disengage and retire home, leaving our White allies to the (non-existent) mercy of the Bolsheviks.

Airship ahoy

On this day in 1919 the first airship to make a return journey over the Atlantic landed in Norfolk, and surprisingly the airship in question was British.

U-boats get where you least expect them

There are many sunken ships around, including many sunken U-Boats. However one place you might not expect to find the wreak of a First World War U-Boat is at the bottom of Lake Michigan, but that is where U-97 ended up.