Interesting reads
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@tim said in Interesting reads:
I guess that's a legacy of the Pal's Battalion. Middlebrook's "The First Day on the Somme" has a piece on the Grimsby Chums, who were one of the first units in action, sent in to the Lochnagar Crater.
https://lochnagarcrater.org/learn/first-day-of-somme/
"In eight successive waves the infantrymen of the 34th Division stood up from their trenches, and in straight lines prescribed, officers in front as ordered, set off at a walk to attack the German front line trenches. One mile behind the British front line the four battalions of the Tyneside Irish Brigade climbed from their trenches, on the Usna and Tara ridges, and started down the hillside. In a matter of minutes this Brigade had sustained heavy casualties from enfilading machine gun fire.
During the intensive bombardment of the previous days the Germans had sheltered in their deep bunkers, tormented by the incessant concussions as they were battered by the British artillery fire. But they had survived and so had most of their barbed wire. The silence of the barrage lifting was the signal for them to come up from their deep dugouts, hauling their machine guns with them, and taking their positions in the line. Through the smoke and the haze of gunfire the German defenders peered out on an astounding site, successive waves of British soldiers marching steadily toward them as if on parade. The enemy were offering themselves as perfect targets.
The slaughter was immense, the machine guns cut down the British infantry like a farmer’s scythe cuts hay. Within minutes German artillery was raining down on the attacking survivors, the regimental rows of British soldiers had disappeared.
Parade ground order was now forgotten, small groups of survivors continued forward taking cover in shell holes. Some of the survivors gained the sanctuary of the Lochnagar Crater, and by the early evening were able to make contact with elements of the 21st and 22nd northumberland Fusiliers, who held a position in the German second line between Lochnagar Crater and the village of La Boisselle.
On the right of the Divisional attack small parties of the 15th and 16th Royal Scots and elements of the 11th Suffolks and 10th Lincolns were to advance 700 yards into the German lines and occupy a position in Wood Alley which guarded the left flank of the advance of the British 21st Division. From information obtained later, and those present at the taking of Contalmaison, it is amply proved that men of the Tyneside Irish Brigade did actually reach this village on the 1st July, but none lived to tell the tale."
The Grimsby Chums were part of the 10th Lincolns. What a fucking tragedy.
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Fucking hell.
Burned to death because of a rumour on WhatsApp - BBC News
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@jc said in Interesting reads:
@tim said in Interesting reads:
I guess that's a legacy of the Pal's Battalion. Middlebrook's "The First Day on the Somme" has a piece on the Grimsby Chums, who were one of the first units in action, sent in to the Lochnagar Crater.
https://lochnagarcrater.org/learn/first-day-of-somme/
"In eight successive waves the infantrymen of the 34th Division stood up from their trenches, and in straight lines prescribed, officers in front as ordered, set off at a walk to attack the German front line trenches. One mile behind the British front line the four battalions of the Tyneside Irish Brigade climbed from their trenches, on the Usna and Tara ridges, and started down the hillside. In a matter of minutes this Brigade had sustained heavy casualties from enfilading machine gun fire.
During the intensive bombardment of the previous days the Germans had sheltered in their deep bunkers, tormented by the incessant concussions as they were battered by the British artillery fire. But they had survived and so had most of their barbed wire. The silence of the barrage lifting was the signal for them to come up from their deep dugouts, hauling their machine guns with them, and taking their positions in the line. Through the smoke and the haze of gunfire the German defenders peered out on an astounding site, successive waves of British soldiers marching steadily toward them as if on parade. The enemy were offering themselves as perfect targets.
The slaughter was immense, the machine guns cut down the British infantry like a farmer’s scythe cuts hay. Within minutes German artillery was raining down on the attacking survivors, the regimental rows of British soldiers had disappeared.
Parade ground order was now forgotten, small groups of survivors continued forward taking cover in shell holes. Some of the survivors gained the sanctuary of the Lochnagar Crater, and by the early evening were able to make contact with elements of the 21st and 22nd northumberland Fusiliers, who held a position in the German second line between Lochnagar Crater and the village of La Boisselle.
On the right of the Divisional attack small parties of the 15th and 16th Royal Scots and elements of the 11th Suffolks and 10th Lincolns were to advance 700 yards into the German lines and occupy a position in Wood Alley which guarded the left flank of the advance of the British 21st Division. From information obtained later, and those present at the taking of Contalmaison, it is amply proved that men of the Tyneside Irish Brigade did actually reach this village on the 1st July, but none lived to tell the tale."
The Grimsby Chums were part of the 10th Lincolns. What a fucking tragedy.
I went to the Somme, stood in the field where the battle that inspired the Warhorse film was "fought". They say the bodies were stacked so high you could barely walk on the ground that day, after the horses charged the field straight into the waiting German machine guns. Senseless mechanized slaughter on a scale that dwarfed Gallipoli
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That 9/11 call at the start
150 Minutes of Hell: Death and survival in California’s fire tornado
California’s 2018 fire season brought a cascade of tragedies, from Mendocino County to Malibu to the now-ruined town of Paradise. But when a massive tornado of fire ripped through Redding in July, firefighters and residents experienced a singular horror that gave a clear view of just how dangerous...
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@jegga said in Interesting reads:
That 9/11 call at the start
150 Minutes of Hell: Death and survival in California’s fire tornado
California’s 2018 fire season brought a cascade of tragedies, from Mendocino County to Malibu to the now-ruined town of Paradise. But when a massive tornado of fire ripped through Redding in July, firefighters and residents experienced a singular horror that gave a clear view of just how dangerous...
That's a powerful read. Seeing firestorms is one thing, but one so powerful it creates its own tornado - the sound itself was chilling.
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@antipodean said in Interesting reads:
@jegga said in Interesting reads:
That 9/11 call at the start
150 Minutes of Hell: Death and survival in California’s fire tornado
California’s 2018 fire season brought a cascade of tragedies, from Mendocino County to Malibu to the now-ruined town of Paradise. But when a massive tornado of fire ripped through Redding in July, firefighters and residents experienced a singular horror that gave a clear view of just how dangerous...
That's a powerful read. Seeing firestorms is one thing, but one so powerful it creates its own tornado - the sound itself was chilling.
My neighbors a fireman and I showed him , he’d never heard of a fire tornado before seeing that.
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@jegga That is a pretty big finding if it is true, and opens up some new possibilities for genetic manipulation if it can be converted from theoretical to physical.
It will be funny if in a couple of years, those theoretical physicists win the Nobel price for biology (well, physiology and medicine actually)
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Its safe for work
Oregon Zoo otter, known for slam dunking and self-pleasuring, dies at age 20
“At nearly 21,” a press release from the Oregon Zoo read, “Eddie was considered one of the oldest -- and most talented -- sea otters on the planet.”
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Le Viandier (often called Le Viandier de Taillevent, pronounced [lə vjɑ̃dje də tajvɑ̃]) is a recipe collection generally credited to Guillaume Tirel, alias Taillevent. However, the earliest version of the work was written around 1300, about 10 years before Tirel's birth. The original author is unknown, but it was common for medieval recipe collections to be plagiarized, complemented with additional material and presented as the work of later authors.
Le Viandier is one of the earliest and best-known recipe collections of the Middle Ages, along with the Latin Liber de Coquina (early 14th century) and the English Forme of Cury (c. 1390). Among other things, it contains the first detailed description of an entremet.
The English one (1390) mentions olive oil.
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@jegga Quite a storied life indeed.
Still amazes me how they trained guys in tiger moths, said "right, you are now a pilot" and then strapped them into a spitfire. Its like teaching someone to drive in a mini then pointing at an F1 car and saying "right now go and drive that, oh, and other people in F1 cars are are going to be chasing you, oh, and shooting at you".
He had 146 operational hours when he got his DFC, not even enough for a commercial licence. I'm not too far shy of 20,000 hours (depending on how you log them in various countries) and I still don't feel like I know much.
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@Machpants said in Interesting reads:
Yeah, flying training hours were very situation dependant in WW2. At the worst in BoB RAF pilots could have as little a 50, Soviets post invasion a dozen!
Most soviet flying was done at lower altitudes too, so less margin for error. The upside was they were able to use p40s and p39s too their strengths which the allies struggled to do .
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@Snowy said in Interesting reads:
@jegga Quite a storied life indeed.
Still amazes me how they trained guys in tiger moths, said "right, you are now a pilot" and then strapped them into a spitfire. Its like teaching someone to drive in a mini then pointing at an F1 car and saying "right now go and drive that, oh, and other people in F1 cars are are going to be chasing you, oh, and shooting at you".
He had 146 operational hours when he got his DFC, not even enough for a commercial licence. I'm not too far shy of 20,000 hours (depending on how you log them in various countries) and I still don't feel like I know much.
No OSH back then either!
Le Viandier - Wikipedia
