Attachment to Weekly News, 1 June 2025

http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/

Jackspeak

Glory hole                         a name for the stokers quarters.

Glum bunny                      another version of someone who is not a very happy chappie.

DVA – Latest News

https://www.dva.gov.au/about/news/latest-news

Ward Hack forwarded these:

Loretta Swit, the American actress, who has died aged 87, cut a swathe through the male-dominated cast of the television comedy M*A*S*H (1972-83) with her portrayal of Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan, the voluptuous head nurse at the fictional 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital treating battle casualties during the Korean War.

Her character’s nickname derived from a scene in which she and Major Frank Burns (Larry Linville) were trysting in her tent, unaware that the camp PA system was switched on, and she was overheard begging him to kiss her “hot lips”. The name stuck.

While embroiled in her affair with the married Major Burns, Loretta Swit’s vitriolic “Hot Lips” took a dim view of other characters’ sexual misdemeanours, especially those of the chauvinistic surgeon “Hawkeye” Pierce (Alan Alda) and his skirt-chasing colleague “Trapper” John McIntyre (Wayne Rogers) in their pursuit of her nubile nurses. Nor was she amused when the lecherous young medics ogled her in the camp’s makeshift shower.

“The Major is a paradox,” Hawkeye observed in one episode. “A woman of considerable passion, she is also a stickler for military correctness. I wouldn’t mind making a grab for her myself, but I don’t know how to do that and salute her at the same time.”

Attachment to Weekly News, 25 May 2025

http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/

Jackspeak

Sorry, left my book in Dee Why – am in Manning Point

Marty Grogan forwarded these:

These latest weapons would seem to raise the bar...


https://www.navaltoday.com/2025/05/16/german-defense-tech-firm-unveils-new-autonomous-underwater-glider/?branch=premiumarticle

British Navy Guided-Missile Destroyer HMS Dragon Intercepts Supersonic Missile for First Time

https://armyrecognition.com/news/navy-news/2025/breaking-news-british-navy-guided-missile-destroyer-hms-dragon-intercepts-supersonic-missile-for-first-time

Russ Dale forwarded this:

Contact letter #281

https://www.patreon.com/posts/contact-281-129164789?utm_campaign=patron_engagement&utm_source=post_link&post_id=129164789&utm_id=dc415a09-fc00-49da-a472-898b5dfa3671&utm_medium=email

Ward Hack forwarded these:

Mark Jones, who has died of a heart attack aged 59, played rugby for Wales in both codes of the game, beginning with amateur union in the late 1980s before switching to professional league in the early 1990s and then back again to union later in the decade.

Whether in the 15- or 13-man format, Jones was known as a fiercely combative forward whose competitiveness could often boil over into violent conduct. But he was prized by his colleagues – who called him “Scooby” – as a galvanising force, and a great team man on and off the field.

In his 2023 autobiography, Fighting to Speak: Rugby Rage & Redemption, Jones tried to account for his brutal antics on the field of play. “Back then it was par for the course, but that doesn’t excuse some of my actions,” he admitted. “I was out of control as a player. Nothing was ever premeditated, but the red mist just came over me and I used to snap.”

One of the reasons, he suggested, was a lifelong stammer that filled him with self-loathing and frustration and which he found easiest to vent on the pitch. Later in his career he had speech therapy to address the issue. He also felt that his especially volatile behaviour later in his career was partly down to having taken so many blows to the head.Mark Alun Jones was born on June 22 1965 in Tredegar, south Wales, the son of a collier. He began his rugby career at Tredegar Ironsides before moving on to Tredegar RFC and then Neath in 1985, where he played at No 8 as the side won Welsh championships in 1987, 1989 and 1990 and claimed the Welsh Cup twice.

Within two years of arriving at Neath he had been called up for Wales, making his debut against Scotland at Murrayfield at the age of 21 – a 21-15 defeat in which he scored a try. He won a further 13 caps for his country up to 1990, when he decided to make a lucrative switch to rugby league with Hull, signing for £120,000.

Playing at prop and second row, he took to the new code with ease, and won his first league cap with Wales within a year, against Papua New Guinea in 1991. He played a further 10 times for Wales over the next five years, including two matches in the 1995 World Cup, where they reached the semi-finals. He also appeared on one occasion for Great Britain, against France in 1992.

In 1995 Jones left Hull for a season at Warrington before returning to rugby union, which was now professionalised, at Ebbw Vale. Although by then in his early 30s, he showed few signs of mellowing with age, and during his time with the Steelmen was banned for four weeks after a brawl with the Swansea prop Stuart Evans and for three weeks for punching Pontypridd’s Ian Gough, who had to have eye-socket surgery as a result.

Despite his regular disciplinary run-ins, Jones’s form was good enough to win him a 15th and final union cap with Wales, playing at lock against Zimbabwe in Harare in 1998.

He spent his last days at Pontypool and then, after a brief return to Neath, at Aberavon, before retiring aged 40 in 2005.

After coaching at Rotherham Titans, Aberavon and Dunvant, he went on to work as a school laboratory technician and rugby coach at an international school in Qatar, where he met his wife, Julia, a PE teacher, and where he was working at his death.

Mark Jones, born June 22 1965, died 22 May 2025

Two days after Apollo 13 blasted off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center on April 11, 1970, an oxygen tank exploded in its command module, crippling its life support systems. “Houston, we’ve had a problem,” Jim Lovell, the mission commander, famously radioed back to Mission Control more than 200,000 miles away.

Indeed it had. Lovell and his two fellow astronauts were forced to retreat to the lunar module in which they were supposed to land on the moon — a goal that was swiftly abandoned. The problem was that the lunar module was designed only to support two men on the moon’s surface for two days. It would not be able to filter the carbon dioxide exhaled by three men on a four-day journey back to Earth, meaning they would inevitably die.

Ed Smylie, the Nasa engineer in charge of life support systems, was at home in Houston when he learnt of the emergency on the television news, and immediately rushed to his post at the city’s Mission Control.

The specific problem was that the command module’s filters were box-shaped canisters filled with lithium hydroxide while the lunar module’s were cylindrical. “You can’t put a square peg in a round hole, and that’s what we had,” Smylie recalled much later. He and his team urgently had to find a way to adapt the command module’s filters for use in the lunar module using only the surplus materials that the astronauts had on board the spacecraft — rubber tubes, plastic bags, cardboard and duct tape.

They fashioned a system that they thought would work, then radioed instructions to the astronauts in matter-of-fact language that completely failed to reflect the gravity of the situation. “We want you to take the tape and cut out two pieces about three feet long, or a good arm’s length,” the transcript read.

“What we want you to do with them is to make two belts around the side of the canister, one belt near the top and one belt near the bottom, with the sticky side out; wrap it around, sticky side out, as tight as possible. It’ll probably take both of you to get it nice and snug. Over.”

Astonishingly, the makeshift device worked. As depicted in the 1995 Tom Hanks movie Apollo 13, the hobbled spacecraft still had to survive its perilous re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, but it splashed down in the Pacific Ocean six harrowing days after its launch as millions watched on live television.

The following day in Houston, President Nixon singled out Smylie and his deputy, James Correale, when he presented the Apollo 13 mission operations team with the Presidential Medal of Honour, America’s highest civilian award. “They are men whose names simply represent the whole team,” Nixon said. Noting that there was “no plan, no contingency” for the accident that befell the spacecraft, he said: “They had a jerry-built operation that worked, and had that not occurred (the astronauts) would not have gotten back.”

The soft-spoken Mississippi native merely remarked: “If you’re a Southern boy, if it moves and it’s not supposed to, you use duct tap.

Robert Edwin Smylie was born on his grandfather’s farm in Lincoln County, Mississippi, in 1929, one of two sons of an ice salesman. He earned an engineering degree from Mississippi State University, served in the US Navy, then returned to MSU to do a Master’s degree.

From there he moved to California to pursue a doctorate at the University of California in Los Angeles, but never completed it. He instead went to work for the Douglas Aircraft Company until, in 1961, President Kennedy set the bold target of “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth” before the end of that decade. The challenge inspired Smylie. “I was a young engineer and just wanted to be there and help make it happen,” he recalled.

He was hired by Nasa the following year, and started work in its environmental control section days before John Glenn became the first American to orbit the Earth. He had risen through the ranks to become head of the crew systems division by the time Neil Armstrong became the first man to land on the moon in 1969, and he was in that post when Apollo 13 blasted off.

After what he described as his “15 minutes of fame” he went on to work for Nasa at its headquarters in Washington DC, and at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, before retiring from the space agency in 1983. By then he had married Carolyn Hall, who died last year. His first marriage, to June Reeves, had ended in divorce after they had had three children, Steven, Susan and Lisa.

The man Time Magazine dubbed an “improvisational genius” always played down his achievement in bringing Apollo 13’s three astronauts safely back to earth. “It was pretty straightforward, even though we got a lot of credit for it,” Smylie told an interviewer. “A mechanical engineering sophomore in college could have come up with it.”

The astronauts were much less dismissive. One of the three, Fred Haise, who lived only five doors from Smylie in Houston and is now 91, told the Washington Post: “It’s very straightforward. If he and his people had not figured out how to make the filter work, we would have died.”

Robert Edwin Smylie, Nasa engineer, was born on December 25, 1929. He died on April 21, 2025, aged 95

Attachment to Weekly News, 18 May 2025

http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/

Jackspeak

Gloom Room             Operations Room or Combat Information Centre.

Glop                            Any alcoholic beverage; anyone who drinks to excess is a glophead.

Ted Breukel who invites al to attend ANZAC and

Remembrance Day ceremonies in Spain has come

undone.  He writes in part ‘All, I forward this incident between I and a 400 years rock forming the steps of the casino in Marrakesh, Morrocco. This accursed rock had the temerity to trip me as I was departing that establishment. Just for you disbelievers I had not been drinking. Perhaps I I had, this step may have gotten off more lightly.

Any way after a tremendous tussle, i got off with a compound fractures of the left forearm, bruised face, damaged septum, 2 black eyes, bruised ribs, large lump on the fore head, cut lip and a trip in the ambulance with sirens screaming to the hospital. If I was a 6 yo I would have loved this part.

As an aside I am left - handed. Oh yes my darling Nurse Ratchet has lost non of her tender ministrations skills and you should see what is left of the rock

Regards

One armed bandit (for the time being)

By Ed ‘Get well soon Ted’

Submissions to Compensation and Rehabilitation for Veterans Inquiry sought -
https://www.contactairlandandsea.com/2018/05/21/submissions-to-compensation-and-rehabilitation-for-veterans-inquiry-sought/

Marty Grogan forwarded these:

Fishing Net in the Rain

and

New sub base in WA should become a joint facility like Pine Gap to secure US promise to sell boats to Australia: Mike Pezzullo

CAMERON STEWART

Listen to this article

5 min

Australia should seek to declare the planned nuclear submarine shipyard in Henderson, Western Australia, as a joint Australia/US facility on a par with Pine Gap to secure America’s commitment to deliver Virginia-class nuclear submarines to Australia from 2032.

The audacious plan would see the multibillion-dollar shipyard fast-tracked with a promise to Washington that its US nuclear submarines could not only conduct rotational visits but could also undergo a two-year deep maintenance at the facility.

This would help the US navy clear its severe submarine maintenance backlog in American shipyards and allow more of its boats at sea, thereby reducing the risk that the US president in 2032 will veto selling US subs to Australia because it would degrade the US submarine capability.

The requirement under law that the president, ahead of the planned sale to Australia of the first Virginia class sub in 2032, must certify to Congress that it will not harm the US navy’s capability is considered the greatest risk to Australia acquiring US nuclear submarines under the AUKUS pact.

It allows the politics of Washington to potentially derail the sale at a time when the US production of Virginia-class submarines is already lagging at just 1.2 new boats a year compared with the target of 2.3 boats.

The proposal, written by the former author of the 2009 Defence white paper and former Home Affairs secretary Mike Pezzullo is aimed at tackling this problem which critics of AUKUS, such as former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, believe is its greatest weakness.

“Australia should seek to lock in such a treaty, thereby assuring itself of access to Virginia-class boats from 2032, by negotiating a deal with the Trump administration over the next 12-18 months,” Mr Pezzullo says.

“Australia could go further.

“It could reinforce the argument for (the president’s) certification by bringing forward the building of the shipyard planned for Henderson, Western Australia.

“Australia could establish this shipyard, by treaty, as a joint Australian/US facility, in recognition of its vital role in the alliance, which could be at least as significant as the contribution of the Pine Gap satellite ground station.’’

Under current plans Australia has only agreed to the rotational deployment to HMAS Stirling of four USN submarines from 2027 under the Submarine Rotation Force–West (SRF-W) program. But the government has been vague about how long each rotation might be and it has not discussed the possibility – as raised by Mr Pezzullo – that US submarines could undergo their multi-year maintenance at the planned new Henderson shipyard.

Mr Pezzullo said that for the US to be able to both rotate and maintain its submarines at Sterling in an ongoing treaty-level agreement would be of “immense strategic value’’ to the US.

“The Joint Defence Facility Henderson would become the US Navy’s fifth naval shipyard, adding those in Maine, Virginia, Washington State, and Hawaii,” Mr Pezzullo said.

“Becoming a trusted partner in an integrated allied submarine maintenance system would be an invaluable alliance contribution by Australia.”

The yet-to-be-built multibillion-dollar shipyard in Henderson will require multiple dry docks to allow depot-level maintenance to be carried out on Australia’s planned fleet of Virginia-class nuclear-powered submarines and, eventually, the Adelaide-built AUKUS submarines.

But Mr Pezzullo said that the government needed to move faster if it was to provide the option for US submarine maintenance ahead of the 2032 arrival of the first Australian Virginia class boat.

“To achieve this goal, Defence would need to cut through regulatory and construction obstacles, ideally aiming to have two operating dry-docks ready in the Henderson shipyard by 2032, perhaps using nuclear-certified floating docks at first,” he said.

Jacqui Lambie forwarded this:

Ward Hack forwarded these:

Bob Cowper, who has died aged 84, became the first cricketer to score a Test triple century in Australia when he racked up 307 in 1966 against England in Melbourne.

Cowper’s exhausting 12-hour effort – still the longest Test innings on Australian soil – began when he came in at No 4 with Australia at 36 for 2 in reply to England’s 485.

Putting on 212 runs for the third wicket with fellow left-hander Bill Lawry, he carried on doggedly after Lawry’s dismissal, barely lifting the ball off the ground during a risk-averse 589-ball innings in which he hit a record 29 threes, contributing to severe cramp near its finish.

No one else scored a Test triple century in Australia until Matthew Hayden in 2003, and only David Warner, in 2019, has since matched the feat.

Having been dropped for the previous match in the home Ashes series against England, to everyone’s surprise Cowper only played for another two years after his mammoth innings, retiring at 27.

Fed up with earning peanuts as a professional, and having qualified as an accountant while playing cricket, he decided to explore more lucrative avenues in stockbroking and merchant banking, eventually becoming a multi-millionaire tax exile in Monaco.

Attachment to Weekly News, 11 May 2025

http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/

Jackspeak

Glad rags                   the bright colours that Jack wears when going ashore.

glitter                          Marmalade or jam.

Ward Hack forwarded these:

Simon Mann, who has died aged 72, was an Old Etonian, former SAS officer and soldier of fortune who made millions from providing mercenaries to protect diamond mines and oil refineries in Africa; in 2004, however, he bit off more than he could chew when he became involved in an alleged plot to overthrow the government of Equatorial Guinea.

The plot went disastrously wrong when Mann and 67 fellow mercenaries – mostly old sweats from Apartheid-era South Africa’s bush wars – were arrested by Zimbabwean security forces at Harare airport, where they had touched down in order to take on a consignment of arms. Mann claimed that they were on their way to protect diamond interests in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo. But they were accused of setting out to overthrow Equatorial Guinea’s tyrannical president Teodoro Obiang Nguema.

The story of the alleged coup contained more implausible characters and plot twists than an airport paperback thriller. There was an African dictator who allegedly enjoyed feasting on human testicles, there was the promise of liquid gold – offshore oil reserves that promised to make millions for those daring enough to seize them; there were walk-on roles for mercenaries, business tycoons, the disgraced peer Jeffrey Archer, exiled politicians and Baroness Thatcher’s son, Mark.

At the centre of everything was Mann, maverick scion of the Watney’s brewing empire who seemed to be a throwback to the days of Cecil Rhodes, when white buccaneers toppled governments and ran private fiefdoms. The adventures on which Mann embarked would lead him, eventually, to a foetid cell in Harare’s notorious Chikurubi prison, from which he was extradited in secret in February 2008 to Equatorial Guinea, where he was incarcerated in the infamous Black Beach jail.

In November 2009 President Obiang granted Mann a complete pardon on humanitarian grounds.

Simon Mann was born on June 26 1952. His father, George Mann, was a former Guards officer who captained the England cricket team on their 1948-49 tour of the Cape (Simon’s grandfather had also been England cricket captain). Described by the cricketer’s bible Wisden as a “forceful batsman, prone to hitting hard”, he later became chairman of Watney’s.

Simon followed his father and grandfather to Eton, where he bucked the family trend by preferring rowing to cricket and, according to one friend, was always planning African coups at the back of the class; he was always known as “Maps Mann” because he always had maps in his hand.

Lacking academic ability, he sought an outlet for his daredevil instincts in the Army. After training as an officer at Sandhurst he took a commission in the Scots Guards and did a three-year stint as a troop commander in G Squadron of 22 SAS. Returning to the regular Army, he completed a tour of Northern Ireland and had postings in Cyprus, Germany, Norway, Canada and central America.

In the mid-1980s Mann left the Army to go into “business”, the precise nature of which remained a mystery even to some of his closest relatives. After a stint selling computer software he moved into the security business, providing bodyguards to wealthy Arabs to protect their Scottish estates from poachers, before briefly getting back into uniform in 1990 to serve on British Gulf war commander Sir Peter de la Billière’s staff in Riyadh.

In 1993 he set up Executive Outcomes with the entrepreneur Tony Buckingham. A mercenary outfit, it made a fortune protecting oil installations from rebels in Angola’s civil war and training Angolan government troops. Two years later he established an offshoot, Sandline International, with a fellow former Guardsman, Lt-Col Tim Spicer, and shipped arms to Sierra Leone in apparent contravention of a UN embargo.

With an estimated £10 million in the bank, Mann bought Inchmery, a former residence of the Rothschild family on the banks of the river Beaulieu in Hampshire, together with a Cape Dutch gabled house in Constantia, a secluded suburb of Cape Town whose inhabitants at one time included Earl Spencer and Sir Mark Thatcher.

There, he and his third wife, Amanda, became well-known figures on the Cape social scene. As well as meeting Baroness Thatcher at a party thrown by Mark, in a rare foray into the public domain Mann agreed to play the part of Colonel Derek Wilford, commander of the paratroopers who fired on marchers in Derry, in a 2001 television reconstruction of Bloody Sunday.

The story of the alleged coup plot emerged from “confessions” made in prison by Mann and his alleged co-conspirator Nick du Toit, a former South African special officer and member of Executive Outcomes, who had been arrested a day after Mann in the Equatorial Guinea capital Malabo.

In his testimony Mann said that he had been approached in 2003 by the Chelsea-based Lebanese oil tycoon, Ely Calil, who had made his fortune trading oil in Nigeria and was a friend of Severo Moto Nsá, self-styled president of the Equatorial Guinean government-in-exile. Moto had long sought the overthrow of President Obiang, and at a subsequent secret meeting in Spain the three men allegedly hatched a plot to bring about the tyrant’s downfall.

It was claimed that the three men struck a deal under which Calil and Mann would arrange to put Moto in power in return for a lump-sum payment of $16 million. Mann would also get the rights to supply Guinea’s future security needs and Calil would become the country’s chief oil broker.

With the deal concluded, Mann and Calil were alleged to have set about raising the money needed to pay for the operation. The basic deal was that 10 investors would each contribute £100,000. In return they would share £15 million between them on the coup’s completion, with the hope of further dividends as the oil began to flow.

Du Toit was tasked with recruiting the 80 or so mercenaries needed and, from these, he would take a small advance guard to Guinea in the guise of being involved in a tourist business. Once they were installed, Mann would fly in under cover of darkness with the rest of the men. The president would be seized in his bed and Moto installed.

All began according to the alleged plan, and on March 7, with du Toit in Malabo, 64 mercenaries boarded an old Boeing 727 which Mann had bought for $400,000, and took off for Harare from Wonderboom airport near Pretoria.

When the aircraft touched down at Harare airport, it taxied to the military sector, where those on board were expecting to link up with Mann and pick up their weaponry. Instead, Mann, the three flight crew and all 64 mercenaries on board were arrested and their weapons seized. The next day, du Toit and his 14-strong group were arrested in Malabo.

All those named by Mann and du Toit in their testimonies denied any involvement in the plot and claimed that the men had been tortured to make false statements, and Mann later claimed that his initial statements had been made under duress. Relatives of those arrested in Harare maintained that they had been on their way to Congo to guard diamond mines. It was noted that the small-scale and rather amateurish nature of the operation hardly suggested planning for a military coup.

But other evidence seemed to lend weight to the coup-plot theory. A South African telecoms tycoon, Gianfranco Cicogna, recalled being approached by Mann to invest $120,000 in a “project” in Equatorial Guinea (he declined). Documentary evidence from one of Mann’s offshore companies, Logo Logistics, showed that a person by the name of JH Archer transferred £74,000 to the company just four days before the alleged coup attempt. “JH” are the initials of Lord Archer, a friend of Ely Calil. Archer’s lawyers denied that he had sent money and both he and Calil denied knowing of any coup plot.

The biggest fish to become entangled in the scandal was Baroness Thatcher’s son, Mark, who was alleged to have paid for a helicopter to fly Moto into Guinea on the night of the coup. His name entered the fray after an explosive but hilarious letter from Mann to his wife was intercepted by prison guards.

In the letter, written shortly after his arrest, Mann asked her to elicit the help of chums on the alleged plot’s “wonga list” of financial supporters: “Our situation is not good and it is very URGENT,” Mann wrote. “They [the lawyers] get no reply from Smelly [thought to be Ely Calil] and Scratcher [the nickname Mann used for Thatcher, on account of the acne he suffered while at school]...”

But Mann then went on to suggest that Scratcher’s involvement amounted to more than using his contacts to lobby for their release. “It may be that getting us out comes down to a large splodge of wonga!” he wrote. “Of course investors did not think this would happen. Do they think they can be part of something like this with only upside potential – no hardship or risk of this going wrong? Anyone and everyone in this is in it – good times or bad. Now it’s bad times and everyone has to f---ing well pull their full weight… Once we get into a real trial scenario we are f---ed.”

He ended the letter with the words: “Anyway [another contact] was expecting project funds inwards to Logo from Scratcher… If there is not enough, then present investors must come up with more.”

On July 22 2004 Mann was convicted in Zimbabwe on two counts of attempting to buy firearms illegally. He was sentenced to seven years, later reduced to four. Sir Mark Thatcher was arrested in August 2004 and given a four-year suspended prison term and a hefty fine after pleading guilty to breaking anti-mercenary legislation in South Africa by agreeing to finance the chartering of a helicopter, though he denied knowledge of the coup plot and maintained that his involvement had been unwitting.

Kept in solitary confinement at his own request, Mann was said to have endured torture and privation. In April 2007 he was said to be suffering multiple organ failure and had a life-threatening intestinal condition caused by poor diet. Hopes that the Zimbabwean courts would turn down any request for his extradition to Equatorial Guinea were dashed in May 2007 when, shortly after his release from jail, he was rearrested following a decision by a Harare court to reject defence arguments that he would not be given a fair trial in Guinea and was likely to be tortured.

After his extradition, in March 2008 he was allowed, or possibly encouraged, to give an interview to Channel 4 News in which he again fingered Ely Calil as the mastermind behind the “f***-up”, said that Sir Mark Thatcher was “part of the team”, but dismissed suggestions that Lord Archer or Peter Mandelson were involved.

Urbane, charming and apparently relaxed, despite the shackles and years of solitary confinement, Mann claimed not to have been put under pressure by the Equatorial Guinean authorities, though there were suspicions that he might have agreed to “spill the beans” in return for being spared the death penalty.

Simon Mann was married three times. His first two marriages were dissolved and he married thirdly, in 1995, Amanda Freedman, with whom he had four children. They survive him with three children of his earlier marriages.

Simon Mann, born June 26 1952, death announced May 9 2025

One of last Hitler Youth soldiers

says: ‘It was a suicide mission’

As the Third Reich neared defeat, Ingo Baldermann, then aged 15, answered

Hitler’s call for boys to defend Germany and believed the propaganda they could win

In April 1945, Ingo Baldermann, a 15-year-old boy in the Hitler Youth, was handed a Panzerfaust anti-tank weapon along with a First World War rifle and five rounds of ammunition, and told to go and save Germany.

“We were divided into ‘Panzer destruction squads’ made up of three boys each with one Panzerfaust per squad,” he said. “I remember the officer who was handing out the weapons said, ‘which one of you is taking the Panzerfaust?’ I said, ‘I’ll take it’. They were heavy and I was quite puny. But that’s how eager I was.”

The training consisted of watching the shoulder-launched missile being fired once into a stone sports stand to show its destructive force and being told to get as close to the tank as possible — within a few dozen metres — and be sure to stand clear of the lethal blowback when firing it. The boys were not given helmets.

Baldermann had answered a local call for the generation born in 1929 to join the Volkssturm — “People’s Storm” — militia, Hitler’s appeal to boys and older men in September 1944 in a final push to stave off defeat.

“We were being sent on a suicide mission, although I wasn’t aware of it at the time,” Baldermann, a Protestant pastor and theology professor who is now 96, said. He is among the few members of Hitler’s last reserves still alive as Germany prepares to mark the 80^th anniversary of its defeat on May 8.

In the chaos of the final weeks of the war, Baldermann, who had lived with his family in Berlin before being evacuated with his school to a part of Pomerania on the Baltic coast that is now part of Poland, might have stayed with his mother. She had fled to the safety of Wolfenbüttel, more than 200km west of the bombed-out capital now bracing for the Soviet assault. Registry officers could not keep up as millions of Germans fled the advancing Red Army, and Baldermann never got a personal summons.

“I felt I couldn’t shirk and that I had a duty to my father who was a civil protection officer and to my brother who had lost an arm fighting in Egypt,” he said. “I thought there was no alternative, that it was necessary now to defend Germany.” His father was in Prague and his brother in Berlin, where their home had been gutted by fire.

“It had been instilled in us that our resistance would break the onslaught. I was convinced of our final victory until the very end,” said Baldermann, spritely and alert as he reminisced over tea and marble cake, his eyes glinting in the afternoon sun shining through his garden window. “It was the natural thing to do.”

Baldermann’s optimism had even weathered the panic he had witnessed in early March in Pomerania where the Wehrmacht’s retreat had triggered a mass exodus.

His school in Misdroy [Miedzyzdroje today] had been abruptly evacuated and he and his classmates had travelled west in open lorries on roads clogged with refugees. Throughout his odyssey to Wolfenbüttel, he had lugged a heavy suitcase packed with his prized lead toy tanks and ships.

“My mother and I were so happy to see each other again,” recalled Baldermann. “She told me I didn’t have to join up when the call came. I can still see her crying terribly when I left. What I did to her still weighs on my soul.”

His ragtag unit of boys sang the Hitler Youth hymn Forward! Forward! Blare the Bright Fanfares as they marched through the cobblestone streets of half-timbered buildings. “The flag will lead us into eternity, yes, the flag is greater than death!” The boys were “drugged” by the propaganda songs they sang, said Baldermann.

His unit of about 150 rode westwards in lorries to stop American forces who were advancing rapidly into the Reich having crossed the Rhine at Remagen in late March. Baldermann remembers guarding a road and waiting for the tanks. He said the boys were so cocky that they passed the time checking the papers of passers-by.

“At one point we were shot at by a low-flying plane. The only shot I ever fired was at that plane. But I missed,” he said.

“As we went on, we came across more and more completely exhausted soldiers who were flooding back from the disintegrating front. They said to us ‘go home boys, there’s no point’. But that was totally against our sense of honour. We wanted to set up a resistance line. We thought, they’re kaput. Now it’s our turn.

“It was all so ridiculous but dead serious at the same time. I was so eager that it’s a miracle I came out of it alive.”

The unit melted away as boys drifted back home. Finally, Baldermann and his tank destruction squad of three boys were on their own, with no officer and no clue what to do apart from keep roaming the roads, looking for the enemy.

One night, exhausted from a long march, they reached the village of Repke, northeast of Hanover, where a farmer let them sleep in his barn.

“We hit the straw and fell asleep with our weapons next to us. We woke the next morning to the sound of gunfire and the terrible, frightening sound of tank tracks creaking and churning towards us. I can still hear it.

“We reached for our weapons but they weren’t there any more. The farmer had buried them. He took a big risk doing that. We were furious. But I know today that I owe him my life.

The first American tank appeared. US infantrymen told them to put their hands up.

“We were wearing a mix of uniform and civilian clothes. We had brown shirts on and swastika armbands. We looked like partisans and they could have shot us. But they didn’t want to open fire on us children.

“Instead they pulled us up onto their armoured vehicles and comforted us. They were friendly. They said ‘don’t be sad, boys, the war’s over for you’.”

Even then, sitting on an American tank rolling across his homeland with his Panzerfaust buried on a farm receding into the distance, he still believed Germany would win. “We only stopped believing later on when we heard Hitler was dead. We cried at that.”

The Americans had taken so many prisoners that they didn’t know what to do with them. “We ended up in a huge, airy barn crowded with masses of prisoners, most of them boys like us. We spotted an open door and crept out. No one shouted, no one opened fire.”

They reached a village. “A woman came up to me in the market square and said ‘you can’t walk around here with a swastika armband, boy. I’ve got a jacket that belonged to my son, he’s not coming back.’ I wore it. I’ve still got that jacket.”

It took them three or four days to walk back to Wolfenbüttel.

He is well aware of how lucky he was. An estimated 60,000 youths aged 15 to 17 were killed in the final weeks of the war. Nazi propaganda promised that the Volkssturm would turn the tide by mobilising six million men aged 16 to 60 who were not yet serving in the armed forces.

They were under the command of Heinrich Himmler, the SS leader, and primarily intended for construction and entrenchment work but also to defend their home towns. They were equipped with outdated guns at best. The Panzerfaust was a standard weapon because it was easy to use.

They generally proved of little military use but in some places mounted a strong defence, especially in the east, out of fear and hatred of the “Bolshevist sub-humans” at the gates. Some 15,000 members of the Volkssturm, together with scattered Wehrmacht units, doggedly defended Breslau (Wroclaw in Poland today) which was encircled by the Red Army, for months until May 1945.

Baldermann’s wartime experiences inspired him to become a pastor. He has written books on theology and toured schools to tell students his story about the impact of war and the power of propaganda.

Voices like his are fading but he sees little risk of history repeating itself in Germany as the Nazi era slips out of human memory.

Looking out into the spring sunshine, he said he remained optimistic for Germany despite the surge in support for the hard-right AfD which came second in the February general election.

“I’m convinced Germany as a whole has learnt its lesson. Really learnt,” he added.

JOKES

There was a power failure in a Dublin Department Store last week - and three hundred people were stranded on the escalators for more than two hours.

“O’Leary, your glass is empty, will you be having another one ?”
"And what would I be doing with two empty glasses ?” O’Leary replied.
……………………………….
Young Teresa came home with some dreadful news. “I’m pregnant” she cried.
“And how do you know it’s yours ?” shouts her father
…………………………………
PADDY: “Hey Shaun, what’s Mick’s surname ?”
SHAUN: “Mick who ?”
…………………………………..
PADDY: “If you can guess how many Pheasants I’ve got in me bag you can have both of them”.
SHAUN: Three.
………………………………….
Mrs Murphy said: “ I don’t tink me husband has been faithful to me”.
“Why’s that ?” said Mrs O’Toole.
“Me last child don’t look anything like him”.
…………………………………….
Mrs O’Toole said: “I can only tell you this bit of scandal once, because I promised Mrs O’Leary I would never repeat it”
……………………………………
Shaun and Molly sat up all night on their honeymoon - waiting for their conjugal relations to arrive.
……………………………………
Murphy had a rope hanging from a tree in his garden. Shamus asked him what it was for.
“It’s me weather guide” said Murphy. “If it’s swinging back and forth, it’s windy and if it’s wet, its been raining.
……………………………………..
Murphy was told by the Doctor he had two weeks to live - so he chose the last week in July and the first week in August.
……………………………………
Colleen dropped a Euro coin, intending it to fall into the blind man’s hat on the pavement, but missed. As quick as a flash, he scooped it up and put it in the hat. “You’re not blind” she said. “No I’m not” said Paddy, “Its Murphy whose blind. I’m just filling in for him while he’s gone to the pictures”.

……………………………………
“We’re looking for a Treasurer for the Xmas fund”, said Paddy.
“Didn’t you take on a new one last month ?” said Murphy.
“That’s the one we’re looking for”, Paddy replied.
……………………………………..
Father O’Flaherty asked Mrs O’Reilly how many children she had. Four was the reply. “That’s a good Catholic woman you are, and when will you be having the next ?” he asked. “I’m not Father”, she replied. “I read that every fifth child born in the world is Chinese”.
………………………………….
The Dublin pensioners club go on a mystery tour every Wednesday and, to make it interesting, they have a sweep to guess where they are going. Shamus, the coach driver, has won five weeks on the trot.
…………………………………..
“Mrs O’Leary” said her Doctor, “Do you smoke after intercourse ?”
“I've never looked”, she replied.……………………………………………

Six retired Irishmen were playing poker in O'Leary's apartment when Paddy Murphy loses $500 on a single hand, clutches his chest, and drops dead at the table. Showing respect for their fallen brother,the other five continue playing standing up.
>> >>
Michael O'Connor looks around and asks, 'Oh, me boys, someone got to tell Paddy's wife. Who will it be?
They draw straws. Paul Gallagher picks the short one. They tell him to be discreet, be gentle, don't make a bad situation any worse.
>> >>
Discreet I'm the most discreet Irishmen you'll ever meet.  Discretion is me middle name. Leave it to me.'
>> >>
Gallagher goes over to Murphy's house and knocks on the door. Mrs.Murphy answers, and asks what he wants.
>> >>
Gallagher declares, 'Your husband just lost $500, and is afraid to come home.'
>> >>
Tell him to drop dead!', says Murphy's wife..
>> >>
I'll go tell him.' says Gallagher.
>> >> ______________
>> >>
>> >> Into a Belfast pub comes Paddy Murphy, looking like he'd just been run over by a train. His arm is in a sling, his nose is broken, his face is cut, and bruised, and he's walking with a limp.
>> >>
What happened to you?' asks??Sean, the bartender.

Micheal O'Connor and me had a fight,' says Paddy
>> >>
That little skinny O'Connor ,?? says??Sean, 'How could he do that to you?? He must have had something in his hand.
>> >>
That he did,' says Paddy, 'a shovel is what he had, and a terrible beatin' he gave me with it.'
Well,' says Sean, 'you should have defended yourself ta same.

Didn't you have something in your hand?
>> >>
That I did,' said Paddy. 'Mrs. O'Connor's breast. And a thing of beauty it was; but useless in a fight.
>> >> __________________
>> >>
An Irishman who had a little too much to drink is driving home from the city one night and, of course, his car is weaving violently all over the road.
>> >>

A cop pulls him over. 'So,' says the cop to the driver, 'where have ya been?
>> >>
Why, I've been to the pub of course,' slurs the drunk.
>> >>
Well,' says the cop, 'it looks like you've had quite a few to drink this evening.
>> >>
I did all right,' the drunk says with a smile.
>> >>
Did you know,' says the cop, standing straight and folding his arms across his chest, 'that a few intersections back, your wife fell out of your car?
>> >>
Oh, thank heavens,' sighs the drunk. 'for a minute there, I thought I'd gone deaf.
>> >>
>> >> ___________________

 Mary Clancy goes up to Father O'Grady after his Sunday morning service, and she's in tears.
>> >>
He says, 'So what's bothering you, Mary my dear?
>> >>
She says, 'Oh, Father, I've got terrible news. My husband passed away last night.
>> >>
The priest says, 'Oh, Mary, that's terrible. Tell me, Mary, did he have any last requests?
>> >>
She says, 'That he did, Father.

The priest says, 'What did he ask, Mary?
>> >>
She says, 'He said, Please Mary, put down that?? gun....'
>> >>
>> >> ??
>> >>
>> >> AND THE BEST FOR LAST . . ..
>> >>
A drunk staggers into a Catholic Church, enters a confessional booth, sits down, but says nothing.
>> >>
The Priest coughs a few times to get his attention, but the drunk continues to sit there.
>> >>
Finally, the Priest pounds three times on the wall.
>> >>
The drunk mumbles, 'Ain't no use knockin, there's no paper on this side either.

Attachment to Weekly News, 4 May 2025

http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/

Jackspeak

Give the other end    Comment to a perpetual talker

 a chance 

GL                               An officer of the general list from which all the future Admirals (except Medical and Dental) are appointed.

DVA E-News

https://mailchi.mp/dva.gov.au/dva-e-newsfor-july-august-5728054?e=10b2c67d44

SHEP forwarded this:

You are invited to the launch of a new book by Ross Gillett.

His latest book, 'HMAS Melbourne - 25 Years and Beyond' will be launched at the Australian National Maritime Museum on Friday 9 May from 2:30 to 4:pm.

Guests including Commodore Terry Morrison, DSM, RAN representing the Chief of Navy, former commanding officers, and aviators will recount their experiences in Melbourne. Ross Gillett will describe the book and what you can expect to find in it.

Copies of the book will be on sale at the Museum.  Alternatively, orders for a posted copy can be placed online for delivery in early May.

This is a free event but prior registration is required through Eventbrite. For more information about the book, the event and registration, please click on the link below.

Registration link

Kind regards,

By Editor- I am going- hope to see you there.

Marty Grogan forwarded these:

Submarine Rescue systems

https://www.navaltoday.com/2025/03/05/jfd-australia-to-provide-submarine-rescue-system-to-royal-australian-navy-for-another-four-years/

Gina Rinehart of Defence spending

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/subscribe/news/1/?sourceCode=TAWEB_WRE170_a&dest=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theaustralian.com.au%2Fnation%2Fpolitics%2Fpolitics-election-latest-labor-shifts-gears-in-drive-to-revive-productivity%2Flive-coverage%2Fd6d681f43077cd3243d713ad85d8290f&memtype=anonymous&mode=premium&v21=GROUPB-Segment-1-NOSCORE&V21spcbehaviour=append

Peter Cosgroves ANZAC Day speech

https://u14759160.ct.sendgrid.net/ls/click?upn=u001.MP4r7IZvcboZnKkn1OpA50G7lcSmh-2FBI-2FiNS4YybupwdLxZ7Yb8Yzlt5fuUH-2B12Xixhq_r-2BqTxf2ujLatdLdZzzMP-2F-2FX7sLGVe5x-2B-2BFnx8bNhockA1IZ1f6KhU6sNjiQrMGgSvejZ0QDXPqmMEkVKA2tJY8CULdVlGVEUtCHiIDFEUi69FdNlm-2BkX5kNV9u7oKQP3yJVm5sTkZzP6k9kmlXFSJrMLvTGff-2Bt1nRL0whLWaww8vA7ChJdoQu-2F1ttpYFiOJLEanN9rpuq3olh6yyTzvqS7zC2OHWI5-2FrBj0dlATrWXE29ixdsmrJXI6Njo7cpl73MsbFfz4e0FLlRs2FzljIDdmOaDb6u7dAHi2blTXkDvCACpjOnk85Sw1kTPhmxlmsMOKoICOsPrHmi72SJL-2BDjIFDClm6JapXGzmyYg8xiXiYfqWkP3zTPOBGz9x-2BSxVfbWiKWXLziCS5O97-2Bj5bIpUyHgN7rjOYdIrvBrvQo-2Fae-2FoU0gbt-2FOi7amummk2Dej6tKXxdvliveDNl-2BY0l7tFv3Wkbaa1A88XdCB6i-2FNaeeJf-2BF3YaYZguKqAQI9Y6N

Rob Cavanagh forwarded this:

Australian navy's newest boats made in China - ABC News

https://amp.abc.net.au/article/105205286#amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&aoh=17454506111540&csi=0&referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com

Rocky forwarded this article on Broadside

Members,

Your APRIL edition of BROADSIDE is now available to read in book format:

https://online.fliphtml5.com/qchrf/fpxz/

or,

you can read it at:

https://navyvic.net/broadside/april2025broadside.html

or,

you can download the .pdf file:

https://navyvic.net/broadside/april2025broadside.pdf

Please feel free to distribute widely.

Yours Aye!

NVN Team

Ward Hack forwarded these:

RIP Commander Archibald Buckle DSO and 3 Bars, RNR (died 1927)

Archibald Buckle’s story recounts the courage, leadership, and devotion to duty that was typical of the Royal Naval Division in the First World War – and demonstrates the value that reservists provide as a flexibly deployable resource. The author draws on official history and primary sources to emphasise Archibald Buckle’s exceptional wartime career. A 20 minute read.

The Distinguished Service Order and Three Bars

The Distinguished Service Order (DSO) was instituted in 1886 to award “individual instances of meritorious or distinguished service in war.”[1] Some 20,000 awards have since been won, with Bars issued for subsequent awards after 1916. Only 16 individuals have been awarded Three Bars to their DSO – five of whom did so in the Royal Navy.[2] Brigadier General Frederick Lumsden was the first person to be awarded the DSO four times and the only Royal Marine. Amongst the surface fleet, Adm Sir Richard Onslow, Capt Frederic ‘Johnnie’ Walker, and Capt Edward Albert Gibbs all earned theirs in World War II. The fifth?

Cdr Archibald Walter Buckle RNVR earned his four DSOs in less than a year in the First World War – the only reservist of any Service to achieve this honour. He may not be well remembered today, but Winston Churchill named Buckle as one of the “salamanders born in the furnace” of the Great War who “survived to lead, to command, and to preserve the sacred continuity.”[3] Cdr Buckle’s story exemplifies leadership, the core value of courage, and maintaining coolness in battle. He is a testament to the contribution reservists have made, and the value in having a trained complement of naval personnel that can be flexibly deployed to fill emergent needs.

Life before the war

Archibald Buckle was born on 16^th February 1889 in Chelsea, London; and worked as a teacher at St. Augustine’s Boy’s School in Paddington. On 23^rd January 1908, aged 18, he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) as a rating. He trained on HMS President, moored in West India Docks, and in July 1912 was made a Petty Officer in charge of a section. In the summer of 1914, he married Elsie Meeks at St. Mary’s Church in Fulham, with a guard of honour from his RNVR shipmates. War broke out a few days into his honeymoon in Scotland, and he rushed back to London to report for duty.

The Royal Naval Division

As First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill decided that the RNVR would not be required at sea but would instead be needed to fight as brigades on land. At the time the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) only consisted of six divisions, while the Fleet didn’t have any obvious manpower shortage.

The newly formed Royal Naval Division was organised into two brigades, each consisting of four battalions and named after admirals. Petty Officer Buckle joined the Drake Battalion, led by Cdr Victor Campbell, who had been Capt Scott’s First Officer on his Terra Nova expedition.

On 22^nd August 1914, the day of the first British engagement on the Western Front, they moved to their new camp on Walmer Downs – near Deal, Kent. Towards the end of September, they were issued with antiquated charger-loading rifles. A few days later, around 5 am on 4^th October 1914, PO Buckle was woken for the march to Dover.

The Siege of Antwerp

On 2^nd October the Germans had broken through near Antwerp and were in danger of outflanking the Allied line in the ‘Race to the Sea’. That same evening, Churchill had arrived in Antwerp and agreed to send the Royal Naval Division to bolster the beleaguered defenders. They arrived in the city on 6^th October to the indescribable enthusiasm of cheering crowds.

Despite being untrained and ill-equipped the Official History recounts that the Division, “showed most creditable firmness under heavy artillery fire; without any training in field fortification, they entrenched themselves; without training in musketry, they used their rifles with effect; without any supply service or regimental transport, they lived on such food as could be procured locally from time to time”[5]

But their position was untenable, and on 8^th October they were ordered to retreat. Huge reservoirs of oil on the banks of the Scheldt had been set on fire by the Belgians. The chaotic evacuation of Antwerp was a scene of, “streams of refugees pouring over the bridges and along the roads, huddled together, hurrying on, impelled by the crash of the cannonade and lighted on their way by the blaze of the great oil reserve flowing in rivers of fire along the ditches.”[6]

A Chaplain recounts how the retreating brigade was forced to pass alongside and through the almost unbearable heat of the flames, “it was like entering the infernal regions… there was a tremendous explosion, flames leapt up to a terrific height, and when I stopped running I felt scorched all over.”[7]

For Buckle, the salamander born in the furnace of war, this was his first trial by fire.

Training for Gallipoli

Buckle had been “of material assistance” to the Drake Battalion during the retreat from Antwerp, and a couple of months after their return to England he was commissioned as a Sub-Lieutenant. Three months later in March 1915 he was promoted to Lieutenant.

A Divisional Depot was established in the Crystal Palace in Sydenham, and the job at hand was to train and rebuild the depleted battalions. Lt Buckle was found to be a “supremely useful” training officer, perhaps deriving from his experience as a teacher. The future success of the Division was claimed to be due “in no small measure to those responsible for the early training of officers and men at the Crystal Palace Depot.”[9]

The sight of innocent Belgians driven from their home in Antwerp would have provoked Buckle, as for him, “to see injustice roused his fighting ire.”[10] He wanted to return to the front, but as the Division embarked on the journey to Gallipoli in February 1915, Lt Buckle was retained at Crystal Palace due to his value in training. “Like a hound straining at the leash, he longed to take part in what he felt to be his job in the line, and many were the passages at arms with those in authority in which Buckle was bound to come out second best.”[11]

By January 1916 the Gallipoli Campaign had failed. The Division would be re-deployed to the Western Front. In May 1916 Lt Buckle would finally get his wish, he was to join the Hawke Battalion in France.

Return to the Western Front

Lt Buckle was now experiencing life in the trenches on the Somme. The Division’s living situation at this time was described thus, “The trenches were swarming with rats and great rat hunts were instituted; water was brought up from the support lines by parties of two or three men, each man taking his turn; the water was carried in petrol tins which were very useful, although sometimes too much petrol had been left in them.”[12]

Lt Buckle transferred to the Nelson Battalion, and in early 1917 fought in the Operations on the Ancre. In one action on 3^rd February, they were to assault an enemy trench only 300 yards away. It was a surprise raid calculated to last eight minutes by the Brigade Headquarters but instead saw over fifty hours of fighting. In this action Lt Buckle “played a brave part, and, although the old Burberry which he was wearing was riddled by bullets, he sustained not a scratch.”[13]

What was Buckle like as an officer in battle? Around this time a non-commissioned officer said that if given a choice of which Company to join when out of the line, then Lt Buckle “wouldn’t have many in his Company.” But if choosing when going into the line, then Lt Buckle would “have pretty well the whole Battalion” because “he looks after his men, he never tells you to do a job unless he knows what he is talking about. He knows what he’s doing.”[14] On 16^th March 1917 Buckle was promoted to Lieutenant Commander.

A month later the Arras Offensive would begin. The Royal Naval Division was tasked with capturing Gavrelle, a village east of Arras which had been in German hands since 1914. In the fighting on 23^rd April 1917, Lt Cdr Buckle was wounded but “again proved his worth and firmly established his position as a redoubtable military leader.”[15] It was urban warfare amid the village: “The continuous sniping and machine-gun fire from close quarters, the dense cloud of smoke and dust which clung round the ruined houses, the danger from falling masonry, as the buildings crumbled beneath the indiscriminate bombardment of the heavy artillery of two armies, made it impossible to find most of the men, or to concentrate or reorganise even those who could be found.”[16]

A comrade recalled Lt Cdr Buckle’s “calm parade ground air” and “coolness in organising the men when practically every officer had been lost.” He was recommended for recognition but not yet honoured, though “his undoubted gift for leadership then displayed, laid the foundations for his future promotion and success.”[17]

Passchendaele and the action of Welsh Ridge

Buckle had no love of war, he longed to return to his wife Elsie and to see their son, Geoffrey, born in 1917 whilst he was striving on the battlefield. Such thoughts would no doubt have carried him along as he trudged through the swamp of mud at the Battle of Passchendaele. The situation for the Royal Naval Division on their return to Belgium was bleak, “the attackers clung precariously to muddy shell holes, and worked forward as best they could; communications were practically impossible, men who wandered from the recognized paths were liable to be drowned in mud, which also choked the barrels of the rifles.”[18]

After the battle, the surviving Division was transferred on 15^th December 1917 to a new sector running along a low mound known as Welsh Ridge. They immediately began fortifying the trenches. It was bitterly cold work, with snow on the ground and many days of severe frost.

On 18^th December Arthur Asquith, the Prime Minister’s son, was promoted to Brigadier General. In the re-organistion of the Division Lt Cdr Buckle was transferred to the Anson Battalion as second in command under Lt Col Harry Kirkpatrick. Then two days later disaster struck as Brig Gen Asquith was seriously wounded by a sniper. Lt Col Kirkpatrick took temporary charge of the brigade, and Lt Cdr Buckle temporarily replaced him in command of the Anson. Lt Cdr Buckle had been in charge for 10 days when, at 6.30 am, “an intense and very destructive bombardment smote the divisional front, smashing in trenches and shelters and exploding dumps. Fifteen minutes later the Germans were seen advancing in long lines through the morning mist: they were clothed in white to match the snow, and with the infantry came Flammenwerfer detachments.”[19]

The Germans forced their way into the trenches and engaged in hand-to-hand combat, securing a lodgment in the line. Under extremely heavy artillery fire Lt Cdr Buckle carried out a daring reconnaissance enabling him to “form sound dispositions.” He waited until dusk, then launched a counter-attack in which, “The Germans were so surprised that not one shot was fired at their attackers. They retreated so rapidly before the pursuing Ansons that all the day’s losses were regained with the loss of only three lives.”[20] Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig described this as “an admirably executed counter-attack” which “regained all the essential parts of our former positions.”[21] For this Lt Cdr Buckle was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. The citation again referred to his “coolness” that inspired all ranks.[22]

John Nash captured the action of Welsh Ridge in his painting: ‘Over The Top’. 1st Artists’ Rifles at Marcoing, 30th December 1917.[23]

The Kaiserschlacht

Throughout 1917 “on the Ancre, at Gavrelle, at Passchendaele, and at Welsh Ridge” the Royal Naval Division was “taking part in active fighting almost continuously and almost as a matter of routine.”[24] If they were not yet exhausted, they were about to be. With the Russians out and the Americans yet to join, the Germans had a slender window to deliver a knockout blow to end the war. The principal objective of their Spring Offensive was to ‘beat the British’, forcing the French to capitulate. There were extensive gas attacks on the Allies in March 1918 to soften them before the offensive. The Royal Naval Division lost around a third of its strength, as those affected by mustard gas “had to be led from the front in long lines of men holding each other’s hands as they stumbled, coughing and blind, to the rear.”[25]

On 21^st March the ‘Kaiserschlacht’ began, with artillery, gas, and stormtrooper attacks. The Division was forced into a difficult and exhausting retreat so that, by 26^th March, “The troops had fought continuously and heavily for six days and the march over the old Somme Battlefield had severely tested their endurance. Many were now weary and footsore for the weather had been hot, the roads dusty, and full marching order was carried, and to add to their discomfort there was a shortage of water.”[26] That night around 1 am, Brigadier General Hugo de Pree was riding behind the line when he was fired upon from about five yards and had to drive his horse through a barbed wire barricade to escape. Reports were received that 2,000 Germans had penetrated the line under the cover of darkness at Mesnil near Aveluy Wood. There was machine gun fire on both flanks and the situation was obscure.

The Anson Battalion alongside the two Royal Marine Battalions were ordered to restore the line. Lt Col Kirkpatrick had been seriously wounded during the retreat, so Lt Cdr Buckle was once more in temporary command. The counter-attack was launched just before 3 am, and as the three Battalions swept through the wood the enemy broke and fled in disorder. Lt Cdr Buckle was awarded a Bar to his DSO, as the success of the action was “largely due to his courage, initiative and leadership.”[27] In the words of Brig Gen de Pree this “most gallant feat of arms” had, “frustrated the most dangerous attempt which the Germans made to get through on this front. It showed what could be done by a sudden and vigorous counter-attack, even under the most depressing circumstances. It also spoke volumes for the men of this Brigade, that, worn out with fatigue… they could turn on their pursuers and drive them before them like chaff.”[28]

Later that same day of 27^th March, Lt Col Kirkpatrick died from his wounds. Buckle was promoted to Commander and placed in permanent charge of the Anson Battalion.

The Advance to Victory

What was Buckle like as a Commander? Anson’s Chaplain said he “was strict with the men of his battalion – but he was even stricter with himself” and that “there are many parents and wives of the men who fell in France who will cherish his letters of sympathy to their own dying day – letters he so faithfully wrote out yonder when the rest of the tired battalion were asleep.”[30]

The German Spring Offensive had been the moment of greatest jeopardy, but it had failed to end the war. It was now the Allies’ turn to push for victory in what became known as the Hundred Days Offensive. It began in August 1918 with the Royal Naval Division at the forefront. Adapting to open warfare, Commander Buckle “had again shown inexhaustible determination in the final stages of the advance”[31] at the Battle of Drocourt-Queant. He was awarded another Bar to his DSO,“when the progress of the brigade at a critical moment was checked by machine-gun fire, he went forward himself with his battalion staff, reorganised his battalion and led it forward on to commanding ground, seriously threatening the enemy’s retreat. The success of the operation was largely due to his courage and fine leadership.”[32]

Storming the Hindenburg Line

“On September 30^th, begins that astonishing advance of the Division towards Cambrai,” wrote Churchill, and with, “Buckle once more in the front of the battle, we see them forcing the passage of the Canal du Nord, carrying Anneux and Graincourt, storming the almost impassable defences of the St. Quentin Canal.”[33]

After all this heavy fighting the Division was about to entrain for leave behind the lines. Their General Officer Commanding, Major-General Cyril Blacklock, was already on his way to England. That was until it was decided to use the Division for one more push, to capture Niergnies, the key to Cambrai. The attack was launched on 8^th October 1918, exactly four years since the retreat from Antwerp was ordered. The Germans were driven clear by early morning. Later, seven British tanks approached the village. When they were at close range, they suddenly opened fire on the Division. They had been captured by the enemy. The infantry was taken by surprise and fell back as “this was the first experience the Division had had of the terrifying effect of these monsters.”[34] In this chaos Cdr Buckle showed “great courage and powers of leadership.”[35] He found a German anti-tank rifle left from earlier, engaged three tanks, and put the lead one out of action. Commander Henry Pollock of the Hood Battalion destroyed another tank with a captured fieldgun. Cdr Buckle then restored order, rallying men of various units in his vicinity and leading them forward to the positions they had been forced from.

It is reported that Cdr Buckle was recommended for the Victoria Cross in 1918,[36] which “was no surprise to those who served with him.”[37] It is probable that it was this engagement that warranted his recommendation, but he would instead be awarded a third and final bar to the DSO. He was one of only seven officers in the Great War to achieve this accolade.

If this was the battle where he was recommended for the highest honour, it was also his last. He had been shot in the left shoulder and was invalided from the front. On 11^th October 1918, exactly four years since he had escaped Antwerp, exactly one month before the Armistice, he was taken on a hospital ship back to England. He had been promoted from Petty Officer to Commander, five times mentioned in dispatches, four times awarded the DSO, and thrice wounded. For Archibald Buckle, not yet 30 years old, the war was finally over.

Parade’s End

On the morning of Friday 6^th June 1919 Cdr Buckle was back in charge of the Anson Battalion, formed up on Horse Guards Parade with the rest of the Royal Naval Division. A gathering of two or three thousand people came to watch the ceremony, including Winston Churchill, the current First Sea Lord Rossyln Wemyss, and two predecessors Jacky Fisher and Arthur Wilson. The Prince of Wales, mounted on horseback, rode along the lines and then addressed the parade, “…In every theatre of war your military conduct has been exemplary. Whether on the slopes of Achi Baba, or on the Somme, or in the Valley of the Ancre, or down to the very end of the storming of the Hindenburg line, your achievements have been worthy of the best traditions both of the Royal Navy and of the British Army.”[38]

According to Churchill this was the end of one of the seven or eight most famous Divisions of the Great War. He wrote further that, “Their memory is established in history and their contribution will be identified and recognized a hundred years hence from among the enormous crowd of splendid efforts which were forthcoming in this terrible period,” and deriving from the Royal Navy, “they in turn cast back a new lustre on that mighty parent body which it will ever be proud and for which it must ever be grateful.”[39]

On Horse Guards Parade the Prince took the salute as Cdr Buckle led the Anson Battalion in the march past. The Royal Naval Division had suffered some 47,000 casualties, of whom 11,000 died. A newspaper report describes the scene as the Division came to an end, “Three cheers rang out for the Prince at the end of his speech, and each cheer echoed back from the tall cliff of the Foreign Office with a startling promptness. It was as though the others – the men who were not there – had cheered, too. Then the band rolled out, and the hollow khaki square marched away through the crowd until the last bit of khaki was swallowed up in the Park.”[40]

Life after the war

After the war Archibald Buckle returned to teaching. He became headmaster of the London Nautical School which trained boys for careers in the Royal and Merchant navies. This school was established in 1915 following a government inquiry into the Titanic disaster. Its alumni include a former First Sea Lord, Admiral Sir Mark Stanhope. At Crystal Palace Buckle had trained the next generation of the Royal Naval Division, now at Rotherhithe he was educating the next generation of sailors; and he spent a lot of time helping men from his old battalion in getting boys to sea. A newspaper report from his time stated, “There is a great demand from the mercantile marine for the sailor boys trained under the London County Council. Many of the lessons are given on board vessels in the Surrey Docks, but a staggering amount of algebra and trigonometry has to be mastered before the future marines can begin demonstrations at the modern helm. The boys learn Morse, semaphore and the international code, and the lights and rules of the road for night duty.”[42]

Although wounded several times during the war, his wife Elsie said he, “made light of his injuries and would never complain.”[43] The motto of the Anson Battalion was Nil Desperandum – Never Despair. One of his hobbies was mending cars, and in 1927 whilst doing so he scratched his arm above the wrist. A boil developed, and despite objecting he was taken to Westminster Hospital, but to no avail. The “poison crept into his old war wounds” and he died on 6^th May 1927 aged just 38 years old. The coroner concluded that shrapnel wounds had accelerated his death.

He was conveyed to the cemetery in Brockley on a gun carriage drawn by six horses with outriders. Members of the Anson Battalion escorted the coffin, which was covered in the Union Jack and bore his sword and medals, and boys from the nautical school formed a guard of honour in the church grounds. He left behind a widow and three sons.

Remembrance

What was Archibald Buckle like? A comrade described him as having, “a nature honest and blunt, abhorring cant and pretence, asking favours from none; of a man’s man, yet singularly ignorant and innocent of the grosser facts of life; of a nature devoted to the stern dictates of duty; anxious to please, but not afraid to criticise; appreciating recognition, yet scorning to seek popularity; a nature which some did not appreciate, but which everyone trusted,” [45]and they wrote further that,“the memory of a simple honest gentleman, whom scenes of strife could not coarsen and whom plaudits and honours could not spoil, will remain untarnished while memory lasts.” [46]

Whilst his portrait and medals are in the possession of the Imperial War Museum, unfortunately the memory of his deeds has dimmed with time. His grave in Brockley Cemetery had fallen into disrepair when in 2005 it was ‘re-discovered’ under brambles by Tony Green of the Royal British Legion. In 2012 Mr Green would install a memorial to Cdr Buckle in the gardens of the Bellingham Ex-servicemen’s Club in Catford.

Cdr Buckle deserves to be better remembered. Throughout his service, in his repeated acts of gallantry and devotion to duty, he represents the best of the reserves and the best of the Royal Navy.

As Churchill wrote of the Royal Naval Division: “Long may the record of their achievements be preserved, and long may their memory be respected by those for whom they fought.”[47]

Deputy Chief Constable Blair Wallace, who has died aged 87, was one of the most influential of the senior officers who led the Royal Ulster Constabulary through the worst of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and enabled the force, with the assistance of the military, to hold the line.

Sir Ronnie Flanagan, the last Chief Constable of the RUC, said of him: “When I was Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary I was often invited to inspect police forces throughout the Commonwealth, and many of the recommendations I made were on the basis of innovations introduced by Blair Wallace. Blair left an indelible mark upon Northern Ireland and even global policing.”

Daniel Blair Wallace was born on June 1 1937 in Carrickfergus, Co Antrim, the youngest of six children of Thomas and Maggie. He attended Belfast Royal Academy, where he was an outstanding pupil, gaining his Senior Certificate aged 16.

Wallace had an uncle who had served in the Royal Irish Constabulary before the partition of Ireland in 1922, and this inspired his ambition to become a policeman and join its successor organisation, the RUC. Too young to join up, he worked as a clerk at Gallagher’s tobacco factory in Belfast, at one time the largest in the world, until he enlisted at the first opportunity, in November 1955.

He trained at the RUC Depot in Enniskillen, Co Fermanagh, where officers destined for police forces all over the empire were trained. Recruits were not only taught the fundamentals of police work but also how to handle weapons, and they were imbued with the regimental-type ethos of the RUC.

Wallace later reflected that it was this esprit de corps which was in large part responsible for holding the RUC together while under sustained terrorist attack. More than 300 policemen and women were killed during the Troubles, and several thousand injured. In the 1980s Time magazine declared that being a member of the RUC was the most dangerous job in the world.

In the early 1970s the RUC had been temporarily overwhelmed, but its morale never cracked. Wallace was to reflect after last year’s Southport riots that UK police forces would come to regret the modern rejection of anything too “military” in their ethos and their repudiation of esprit de corps as an essential element of policing.

After training Wallace was posted to east Belfast, and in 1959, in an exceptionally fast elevation, was promoted to sergeant in the Reserve Force in Keady, Co Armagh, near the border with the Republic. The IRA’s 1956-62 campaign, sometimes referred to as “the Border Campaign”, was well under way but it was small in scale compared to the Troubles that followed.

Postings to Rosslea in Fermanagh and Belfast followed before promotion to head constable and transfer to north Belfast, where he arrived in August 1969 just as the public disorder which heralded the outbreak of the Troubles was beginning.

Wallace was to see much disorder and terrorist violence over the next three years and he gained a reputation for leadership. He attended the scenes of numerous bomb explosions and murders and he was injured several times. In October 1969 he was present when the first policeman was killed in the Troubles, and in February 1971 he helped to carry the first soldier to be killed to an ambulance.

In June 1970 the RUC was reorganised along the lines of police forces in Great Britain and Wallace ceased to be a head constable and became a chief inspector. In 1974 he was promoted to detective superintendent and posted to Belfast Special Branch, where his service was to have profound effect.

For Wallace, nothing but the highest standard was acceptable and he was instrumental in clearing away people who were not up to the demands of the job. It was said at the time that “it is the job of the CID to investigate this morning’s murder; it is the job of Special Branch to make sure that this evening’s murder does not take place” – therefore nothing but total commitment would suffice.

Large and physically imposing, Wallace could sometimes intimidate with his famous stares over his glasses. But he was always sympathetic and diplomatic when explaining to subordinates that their true vocation might lie in some other area of policing, and they were invariably able to leave with their heads held high.

Wallace was one of the driving forces behind the establishment of the Tasking and Co-ordination Group, a joint police and Army management team which controlled all aspects of covert intelligence-gathering and exploitation. He pushed hard to obtain funding for essential equipment upgrades and better training and was at the forefront in pressing for legislative changes to enable terrorism to be properly tackled.

Throughout his career Wallace was renowned for his straight talking, but his obvious intellect and integrity meant that many of his opposite numbers in the Army and Security Service became friends for life.

In early 1978 he was promoted to Detective Chief Superintendent as Head of Belfast Special Branch, and in 1984 to Assistant Chief Constable [ACC] South Region, where he worked extensively with the Army. In 1988 he was promoted to Senior ACC in charge of the Crime and Special Branches and in 1992 to deputy chief constable.

Wallace was passionate about the RUC and steadfast in its commitment to providing a police service to all the people of Northern Ireland – and he was uncompromisingly non-sectarian, pursuing both Republican and Loyalist terrorists with equal determination.

In May 1998 Wallace retired from the RUC after more than 42 years service. In retirement he was never happier than when tending his small herd of pedigree Limousin cattle, talking to old RUC comrades and spending time with his family.

Wallace was appointed MBE in 1983 and CBE in 1995. In 1997 he was awarded the Queen’s Police Medal.

He is survived by his wife Heather, to whom he had been married for more than 61 years, and by their daughter.

Blair Wallace, born June 1 1937, died February 26 2025

Attachment to Weekly News, 27 April 2025

http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/

Jackspeak

Give it a draft chit      Ditch it.

Give the ferret a run  Indulge in sexual intercourse

Rocky Freier commented on the article about HOBART from last week

Back in the days, i was on Perth, and we did a full power trial with Brisbane and Hobart from JB to Sydney. We were only 500 yards apart (standard distance) in those days and very close to the beaches. We could see the people on the beach, we were very close inshore, totally mesmerised by the wake. The "Rooster Tails" were magnificent

Wish i had a vision of it

Cheers

Rocky

SHEP forwarded this:

You are invited to the launch of a new book by Ross Gillett.

His latest book, 'HMAS Melbourne - 25 Years and Beyond' will be launched at the Australian National Maritime Museum on Friday 9 May from 2:30 to 4:pm.

Guests including Commodore Terry Morrison, DSM, RAN representing the Chief of Navy, former commanding officers, and aviators will recount their experiences in Melbourne. Ross Gillett will describe the book and what you can expect to find in it.

Copies of the book will be on sale at the Museum. Alternatively, orders for a posted copy can be placed online for delivery in early May.

This is a free event but prior registration is required through Eventbrite. For more information about the book, the event and registration, please click on the link below.

Registration link

Kind regards,

Rick Avery forwarded this article from Jacqui Lambie:

Russ Dale forwarded this:

HMAS Goorangai: The story via the Queenscliff perspective

Next event date: Saturday, 03 May 2025 | 06:45 PM to 09:00 PM

Many stories of Australians’ involvement in WWII have been researched. However, only a few of these stories have taken place in Australia, away from the European theatre of war. Aside from the aerial attacks on Darwin by Japanese forces (1942), and the battle between HMAS Sydney and German auxiliary cruiser Kormoran (1941), the Goorangai tragedy, taking place at the mouth of Port Phillip Bay (1940), remains little known. Join us in the Queenscliffe Maritime Museum’s Gil Allbutt Boatshed on May 3rd to hear historian Andrew Campbell present the full story of the HMAS Goorangai, and its little-known collision with the passenger motorship MV Duntroon. This collision resulted in the sinking of the HMAS Goorangai, which became the first Royal Australian Navy (RAN) ship lost in WW II, and the first RAN surface ship lost in wartime with all hands.

Tickets include the viewing of Queencliffe Maritime Museum galleries.

When

Saturday, 03 May 2025 | 06:45 PM - 09:00 PM

Location

Gil Allbutt Boatshed at the Queenscliffe Maritime Museum, 2 Wharf Street, Queenscliff, 3225,View map

Ward Hack forwarded these:

Battle of Sydney 1955

RAAF and RAN vs Auster Archer over Sydney This is beaut

https://youtu.be/2Rj7B47F9Xs?si=qTKWk8d5KCNW23cU

Keith Stackpole, who has died aged 84, was an Australian cricketer who was once described in The Daily Telegraph as “Australia’s nearest approach to Colin Milburn”.

He had the same broad shoulders and the same unquenchable zest for the game, and as an opening batsman he played with uncommon aggression, delighting in cutting and hooking the pacemen. He relished short-pitched bowling and was an assured crowd-puller who could be relied upon to smash the ball to all corners of the ground at the slightest opportunity. “He had no obvious fear,” said his Australia teammate and captain Ian Chappell.

“Stacky”, as he was known (as well as “Humphrey”, after a fictional bear on Australian children’s television), made an ideal opening Test partner for Bill Lawry, who was a patient accumulator in the manner of Geoff Boycott; while one blocked, the other cut loose. “He would have no qualms hitting the first ball for four,” Lawry recalled of his teammate and great friend. “He played the game as you probably should play it.”

Stackpole was also handy with the ball, a decent leg spinner with the happy knack of taking wickets.

He appeared in 43 Tests between 1966 and 1974, scoring 2,807 runs at an average of 37.42, including seven centuries, and his finest achievement was probably the 207 he made on a bouncy pitch at the Gabba in Brisbane during England’s 1970-71 tour – after avoiding a run-out dismissal on 18 by Boycott, when press photos the next day showed him clearly short of his crease. Though the visitors prevailed 2-1 in the seven-Test series, Stackpole was the top Australian runmaker, scoring 627 at an average of 52.25.

In the Ashes the following year he was at it again. By the final Test, at the Oval, England were 2-1 up and Australia needed 242 to win the match and draw the series. Stackpole took charge with a feisty 79 from 163 balls, calming Aussie nerves and helping to secure a five-wicket victory. He was Australia’s top series scorer again, with 485 runs at an average of 54.

While a ferocious will to win has always been de rigueur for Aussie cricketers, Stackpole took it to another level. In 1973, on the tour of West Indies, he was furious when he discovered that the hosts would be resting their talented but erratic fast bowler, Uton Dowe, for a warm-up match, and was seen pacing the dressing room, muttering in anger.

Attachment to Weekly News, 20 April 2025

http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/

Jackspeak

Gin pennant               Green and white triangular pennant flown to indicate an invitation onboard for drinks.  Smaller versions may be seen in some Wardrooms; when an officer wishes his colleagues to join him in celebration of some happy event, he will fly the gina pennant on the bar.

Gingerbread               Decorative carving and scrollwork on the tern of 15^th to18th century warships; this was often gilded and has led to the modern expression of. ‘knocking the gilt off the gingerbread’

RAN Rugby Museum

For those who aren’t on RANRU’s FB page, CO Kuttabul gave RANRU a direction to remove our Memorabilia from Kuttabul.  Brett Quinn, Ted Breukel and I put it together in the early-mid 90’s and I have been maintaining it since then.  Very sad day    not only for RANRU.  Saying that it appears as if the policy of closing down our collection is consistant with current Navy policy.  The Cerberus Museum is a shell of what it was 10 years ago as is the Garden Island collection.  They are now called ‘Learning Centres’ and Wikipedia and Google are the artefacts.  Lunatics running the asylum.  I thought Military ethos was built on history, obviously I am wrong.

Stan Church forwarded this about Spectacle Island

Some time ago I was advised, by a former Curator of the Navy's Heritage Collection at Spectacle Island, that the original two small islands had been joined using the spoil resultant from the creation of Cockatoo Dock. a more recent foray into the WWW reveals that not to be quite true and that it as spoil from the Balmain coalmine that in fact provided the spoil to join the two "spectacle" looking islands.

There is a lot of information in the WWW relating to both islands and I have attached some of that detail. I have also attached an article written by JTR in 2014 that was forwarded to me by Mr Trevor Stobart (I have previously distributed the article but not all may have received it) however the details of JTR have become lost in my "confuzer" somewhere.

Now that winter is approaching, those with an interest may well like to read the two attachments and perhaps explore the links attached.

Spectacle Island, in Sydney Harbour, has a rich history as Australia's oldest naval explosives manufacturing and storage complex. Originally established in 1865 to store gunpowder, it transitioned to a naval armament depot in 1884, and the Royal Australian Navy took over in 1913. The island's shape has been altered through reclamation using waste from the Balmain coalmine, and it now houses the Royal Australian Navy's heritage collection and the Training Ship Sydney.

The spoil from the excavation of Cockatoo Island's dry dock, including Fitzroy Dock, was used to create the surrounding flat apron area. This process helped shape the landscape of the island, making it easier to access and use for shipbuilding and ship repair activities. According to the DCCEEW, "The surrounding flat apron area is partly created by spoil from the excavation of the plateau".

https://www.cockatooisland.gov.au/en/learn/island-history/working-harbour-and-industry/

https://borclaud.au/ranad/about_spectacle.html

There is a glossy attachment which contains a lot of history of Spec Island which is worth the look.  If you would like a copy of it please reply to rugbyron1@gmail.com

Additionally, Spec Island has closed down and all Navy Heritage artefacts have been boxed up, put on pallets and transferred to Banksmeadow for storage.

ANZAC Day in Oliva, Spain

Ted Breukel is organising an ANZAC Day ceremony in Spain this coming Friday.  If you are in-country and wish to attend please contact him on tedbreukel@gmail.com

Graham Craker Obituary last week

Peter Craker from our 7^th intake LEEUWIN writes:

Hi Ron, Graham was my cousin, his dad Len was my dad’s brother. I remember when we went around to visit that we would play cops and robbers and Graham would always want to be the copper, go figure. He visited my family in Oz many times and is a spitting image of my youngest son Peter. I did recognize him when the hearse stopped to clear the flowers off the windscreen. I have lost all contact with my UK relatives and did not know of his death.

As I said I have no contact with anyone and they probably don’t know I exist, my parents were the only ones who kept in contact but they are long gone. Maybe an interesting foot note could be added. Grahams dad and another brother were called up in 1940 and both were sent to France with the BEF, my dad was called up shortly after and tried to get a transfer to join them but before that happened they were both captured at Dunkirk and spent the war in a POW camp. My dad went on to serve as a bren gun carrier driver with the famous Rifle Brigade and served in Nth Africa, Sicily, Normandy landings, France and Germany and was kept in Belgium after the war chasing Quislings. He came home without a scratch and told us kids all his experiences. He passed away at the age of 89.

Thanks

Pete

Rob Cavanagh forwarded these:

The AUKUS Submarine Problem Australia Never Saw Coming

https://www.19fortyfive.com/2025/04/the-aukus-submarine-problem-australia-never-saw-coming/

and

China pits humanoid robots against humans in half-marathon

https://www.msn.com/en-au/news/other/china-pits-humanoid-robots-against-humans-in-half-marathon/vi-AA1DeBHn?ocid=socialshare

and

HMAS Hobart's Final Voyage, Speed Trial 36 knots on YouTube

https://youtu.be/2jivOCDahCc?si=O8EkXJD7ey7mbFp-\

Marty Grogan forwarded these:

Future outlook of anti submarine warfare

https://breakingdefense.com/?sponsored_content=whats-the-future-outlook-for-anti-submarine-warfare-in-the-pacific&utm_campaign=Breaking%20Defense%20Sea&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-_Zig6Hg4_y2ZfH2vAdsDo2PHbmqc7pMmvO1WjI38gqzhFN7L-P2GfBloIJqfjxBr1qbV3CT4I2Ghht80pSfLh79VwCPR-AfiwzZaY1kJEDj4rHqrM&_hsmi=357202946&utm_content=357202946&utm_source=hs_email

and

Australia, Japan and US – trilateral intelligence and industrial cooperation

https://breakingdefense.com/2025/04/enter-ajus-australia-japan-us-must-boost-trilateral-intel-industrial-cooperation-experts/?utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-9TKy-ViN7nMO6sxtvS1aD526pjryWNdVawptEvp-NCgjltkYE14t76EdG-LU7NMG6ZOJ4l4n3LwG93I9lvQsljRdmI6JkX0UuUmB_Tz4tw7UGwoI&_hsmi=356857353&utm_content=356857353&utm_source=hs_email

Russ Dale forwarded this:

Sailor rewarded for fight against heavy metal

A Chief Petty Officer received a Conspicuous Service Medal in the 2025 Australia Day Honours for fighting heavy metals in drinking water on subs.

READ MORE...

FIND MILITARY HONOURS LIST HERE...

Ward Hack forwarded these:

CMDR John Goss RAN

https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/every-bite/food-fight-how-war-changed-the-way-we-eat/105115122

Last known veteran of infamous Burma Railway

Private Bert Warne who swam for his life from the sick bay of a sinking troopship before enduring more hardship, dies aged 105

Nothing in the war dismayed Churchill as much as the fall of Singapore, the linchpin of imperial defence in the Far East. General Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the imperial general staff, confided to his diary, “Cannot work out why troops are not fighting better.”

Bert Warne, in 1942 a 22-year-old private in the Royal Army Ordnance Corps, would have liked to have been given the chance. He was ordered to surrender before much opportunity to fight, having had to swim for his life when on February 5 his troopship, the Empress of Asia, came under air attack as it approached Singapore, taking three direct hits, catching fire and sinking.

Warne was in the sick bay with dysentery. The fires made it impossible to go up on deck, where 2000 troops were mustering to abandon ship. Instead, he climbed through a porthole with his life-preserver, dropping 20ft into the warm water of the Johore Strait, where he was eventually picked up by one of the boats sent from the Sultan Shoal lighthouse.

Warne, a shipwright, had enlisted in May 1939, as soon as the compulsory military training act was passed. Given his skills, he was “badged” to the Royal Army Ordnance Corps (RAOC) and in due course posted to the 18th Divisional Ordnance Workshops. The 18th Infantry Division, formed in September, comprised newly raised battalions of, principally, the Norfolk and Suffolk regiments.

The division spent the first months of 1940 training in various parts of the country, including Scotland, and then after Dunkirk were given an anti-invasion role in East Anglia. In early 1941 they were sent for further training in northwest England, where they helped to unload merchant ships in Liverpool during the Blitz.

In October 1941, they sailed for Egypt. Churchill had told the War Office to send the division to north Africa to show the dominions that Britain was doing its fair share of fighting. In early December, as the convoy reached Cape Town, the Japanese launched their surprise attack on the US Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor and had landed in Malaya, then a British colony, north of Singapore.

The 18th Division were therefore diverted to Singapore via Bombay. Churchill told Field Marshal Sir Archibald Wavell, commander-in-chief in India and of allied forces in the Far East: “The 18th Division has a chance to make its name in history. Commanders and senior officers should die with their troops. The honour of the British Empire and of the British Army is at stake. I rely on you to show no mercy to weakness in any form.”

After Warne was put ashore, motor launches sent from the docks in Singapore took him and other sick and injured to Changi hospital at the extreme east of the island. Three days later, the causeway with the mainland of Malaya having been destroyed, the Japanese began their assault landings in the northwest. Warne and the other walking wounded were told to leave the hospital and move into the city as the main landings were still expected — wrongly, as it turned out — in the northeast.

Wrong-footed at the outset, with poor communications and faltering leadership, the British, Indian and Australian defenders found themselves steadily falling back, and their supplies, including water, running out. Warne was knocked unconscious by an exploding shell and taken back to Changi hospital, but discharged himself just before the massacre of some 200 patients and staff, including female nurses, when the Japanese overran it on February 14.

The following day, the general officer commanding Malaya, Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, in part to spare the suffering of the civilian population, ordered his entire command to surrender. Some 80,000 men “went into the bag”, including Warne. Churchill called it “the worst disaster and largest capitulation in British history”.

At first they were corralled in Selarang Barracks, part of the extensive and heavily fortified Changi garrison, the crowding indescribable and the facilities pitiful. When four escapees were recaptured in August, the commandant ordered all other prisoners sign a pledge not to escape. As this was both contrary to the Geneva Convention (which the Japanese had never signed) and to the principle of the duty to escape, they refused. The commandant confined them to the barracks square with little water and no sanitation. Even after the escapees were executed, the rest continued to refuse, until after five days, when men started to fall ill and die from dysentery, the officers decided to order the signing.

British names being unfamiliar to the Japanese, PoWs signed using false ones, the Australians favouring “Ned Kelly”. Warne recalled that he signed as “Micky Mouse” (or perhaps “Errol Flynn”). In 1946, the commandant was executed for war crimes.

Two months later Warne and some 200 men of the Suffolks were sent by rail to Thailand (previously Siam), now in alliance with Japan, to work on the Burma Railway. The Japanese, having overrun Malaya, had now turned north to Burma, then a British colony, too, and made equally rapid advances. After the defeats by the US navy in the Battles of the Coral Sea and Midway in mid-1942, the sea lines of communication between Japan and Burma could no longer be secured, so an overland route to support their forces in the advance on India was deemed necessary. So began construction of the line from Bangkok to Moulmein (now Mawlamyine) on the west coast, much of it along the valley of the River Kwai.

Warne’s journey to Thailand took five days, for the most part in cattle trucks too crowded to lie down in. On arriving at Ban Pong camp 40 miles west of Bangkok, they were immediately set to work on the railway. Initially, his group of 200 men were allocated a stretch to embank each day, and when completed were allowed to return to camp. They made the mistake at first of finishing early: the Japanese simply increased the length of line to embank. As one major section was completed, the whole party would move on to another makeshift camp to begin work on the next.

Food was poor-quality rice with a few vegetables or, for breakfast, rice boiled down to the consistency of porridge. There was no concession when the monsoon broke. Indeed, to compensate for the delays it caused, the Japanese introduced “Speedo”: work from dawn to dusk. Unsurprisingly, sickness — principally malaria, dysentery and enteric fever — increased alarmingly. In later years, although reluctant to talk about it except to other former PoWs, Warne said he did not know how he survived: 27 per cent of Allied PoWs, some 16,000, died or were killed while in Japanese hands. (The death rate in German camps was about 4 per cent).

The Japanese were not invariably brutal. In October 1943, Warne became very sick and with others was put on an empty barge with a sole Japanese soldier in charge and a Thai steering. “We just floated down the River Kwai with the current, passing many disused camps,” he wrote in later years for the Far East Prisoners of War Association (FEPoW) archive.

“Late one afternoon we pulled into a very large Japanese transit camp. We found that the Japs were quite friendly and they gave us food … They had come all the way up from Singapore … to fight our lads near the Indian border. While we were in the camp the Japs had a film show out in the open. We were invited to see the film, which was Japanese propaganda. I remember that towards the end of the film there was a scene of Japanese cycling and the background music was, ‘Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do’, to which we sang the words. To our surprise the Japs were not annoyed and took it all in good part.”

Warne then had to trek through jungle for five days to Nong Pladuk, the main camp at the start of the Burma section of the railway, “housing” some 3000 PoWs. But by then, weighing only six and a half stone (41kg) — he was almost 5ft 10in and on enlisting had weighed 70kg — he was very sick indeed and spent several months in the camp hospital staffed by British medical officers and orderlies. Years later, he learnt that the Thais had smuggled in drugs and other medical supplies.

In late 1944, Allied air raids signalled the hoped-for counteroffensive, although bombs fell on the camp, too, killing 90 PoWs. In April 1945, the Japanese now in retreat, Warne and his fellow PoWs at Nong Pladuk were moved to northern Thailand by rail — over the lines that they themselves had built — and there, soon after August 14, when the Japanese surrendered after the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they learnt they were free at last.

Albert Henry Warne was born in Cowes, Isle of Wight, in 1919. His father, a sail maker who played in the Cowes Concert Band, later joined the orchestra of the White Star liner Aquitania, and the family moved to Southampton. “Bert”, as he was always known, went to Florence Road School near the River Itchen, left at 15 and became a baker’s boy for a while before joining Camper & Nicholsons (now a luxury yacht builder). On release in August 1945, he, like other FEPoWs, were quickly but in a measured way repatriated by air and sea to rebuild their health and constitution.

He arrived in Southampton in late October by rail from Liverpool, where the dockers, on strike at the time, came to help when they heard the ship was full of PoWs. He had changed his cap badge too, his branch of the RAOC having been transferred to the newly formed Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers. In December he married his girlfriend, Freda Miller, a seamstress whom he had not seen for four years. For two years the family had not even known he was alive. Freda died in 1992. Their two daughters Diane and Linda, survive him.

Warne quietly went back to Camper & Nicholsons and in due course became a master craftsman, later transferring to Vosper Thorneycroft. In retirement he continued woodworking, devoted much time to his garden, was an active member of his local FEPoW branch and helped to secure a permanent memorial in Southampton. Three years ago he was made freeman of the city.

He is the last known veteran to have worked on the Burma Railway.

Albert Warne, Far East Prisoner of War, was born on December 10, 1919. He died on March 3, 2025, aged 105

Jack Glover: Naval decoder and bunkmate of writer Alistair MacLean Wartime decoder whose experiences on the Arctic convoys inspired the thriller HMS Ulysses

Jack Glover was 19 when he was posted to HMS Royalist, a newly built Dido-class light cruiser, seeing action in every theatre during the Second World War from the Atlantic and the Arctic to the Mediterranean and the Far East.

As a decoder, he was responsible for encrypting and decrypting wireless messages, communicating with naval headquarters and other warships, and intercepting signals from the German navy.

Although it was a demanding role, Glover considered himself to have got off lightly compared with many of his comrades, especially on the Arctic convoys. “I was operating inside the ship, so I wasn’t exposed to the Arctic weather, so I had a fairly easy time really,” he said. “I just remember the bunks being so close together. You could literally wake and put your feet into someone else’s breakfast.”

His bunkmate and “run-ashore oppo” on HMS Royalist was Alistair MacLean (real name Alistair Patterson), who later wrote the bestselling novel HMS Ulysses (1955), a fictional account of life on the Arctic convoys based on their experiences at sea.

MacLean followed it with The Guns of Navarone (1957), which drew on their time in the Aegean Sea, and Where Eagles Dare (1967), which in 1968 was turned into a film starring Clint Eastwood and Richard Burton.

While Glover is not referred to by name in HMS Ulysses, he recognised himself in some of MacLean’s characters. “I identified myself in them and in a lot of what was going on there as I was with him at the time. I was interested, I was part of that story,” he told a newspaper in 2023. The pair lost touch after the war, but Glover continued to follow his comrade’s career with interest until the author’s death in 1987.

Despite the horrendous conditions on the Arctic convoys, Glover recalled the camaraderie on board. “It was a dangerous job,” he told the BBC, while insisting that the dangers did little to dampen their enthusiasm. “We were young. We were 18, 19. We didn’t worry about things like that. We worried about getting to the nearest port and having a beer. Some things don’t change in the Royal Navy.”

Jack Charles Glover was born in Leeds in 1923, the elder of two children of Ernest Glover, an insurance broker, and his wife Annie (née Russell); his sister, Marie, predeceased him. He left Prince Henry’s Grammar School in Otley at 14 to train as an accountant and in September 1942 was called up and sent to HMS Royal Arthur, a shore establishment based at Butlin’s holiday camp in Skegness. His accountancy background meant he was trained as an ordinary coder.

His first deployment was on Atlantic convoy duties with the anti-submarine trawler HMS Butser, based at Freetown in Sierra Leone. In September 1943, he was assigned to HMS Royalist, which was just coming into service from Scotts, the shipbuilding and engineering company based in Greenock. Six months later, HMS Royalist served as the flagship for Operation Tungsten, targeting the German battleship Tirpitz at its base in Kaafjord in the far north of Norway.

There were more Arctic escort duties that spring and in July 1944 Glover was deployed with HMS Royalist to the central Mediterranean for Operation Dragoon, landing Allied forces in Provence, in the south of France. Sailing east, there were operations in the Aegean Sea and off the Greek mainland before a passage to Ceylon and service in the East Indies with 21st Aircraft Carrier Squadron. They covered the landing operations in Malaya before being present for the surrender of Japanese forces in Singapore on September 12, 1945.

HMS Royalist returned to Britain the following January and Glover was discharged from the navy in May 1946 with an impressive collection of campaign medals that included the Atlantic Star, the Arctic Star and the Burma Star. He returned to Leeds and resumed his accountancy training, qualifying in 1949. Before doing so he visited an ex-Royal Navy friend in London, where he met Joan Taylor at a dance hall in Southall. They were married in 1949.

Glover’s first job was with an accountancy firm in Windsor before joining Price Waterhouse, where he audited several City livery companies including the Watermen and the Fishmongers, of which he was a freeman. He then moved to Deloitte, which posted him to Recife in Brazil. “I remember it took us two weeks to get to Brazil,” he said. “And we had a great life there.”

In 1955, he transferred to Rio de Janeiro, where he and Joan raised their daughter, Jill, who survives him and lives in the US. Joan died in 2017. In due course Glover joined the finance operations of Klabin, the country’s largest paper producer and exporter. Working with the International Finance Corporation, a member of the World Bank Group, and private Brazilian investors he secured funding to build Papel e Celulose Catarinense, a pioneering paper mill at Lages, in the south of the country, which focused on the production of kraft paper and softwood pulp.

Returning to Britain in the early 1990s, he settled in the Millbay area of Plymouth. Until his late eighties he continued to manage the private finances of the Klabin family, industrialists sometimes known as the “Rothschilds of the South”. He followed Formula One racing and football, having played in his younger days. He also taught himself to play the organ and enjoyed singing. “I think he fancied himself as a Frank Sinatra,” Jill said. “When I was young, we used to spend hours singing all the old songs together.”

Like MacLean, Glover would forgo his daily rum tot while at sea, choosing instead to bank the threepence substitute. “It soon added up,” he recalled at the time of his 100th birthday. “And I remember my 21st birthday, although not much of it. They gave me all their drinks to take sips from. I passed out for two days. And I had to make up all the watches I missed.”

Jack Glover, Royal Navy coder, was born on October 23, 1923. He died on April 4, 2025, aged 101

Attachment to Weekly News, 13 April 2025

http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/

Jackspeak

giggle                         Collective noun for a marching squad of WRANS.

Giggling pin               the male member

Rocky Freier forwarded this:

Final Report on Loss of HMNZS Manawanui

https://youtube.com/watch?v=qwkGsfPJX20&si=rcqzFjARMJ_2wfRl

This is a must watch – it takes half an hour – when you are finished watching it scroll down and read the comments.  Some are very telling.

Marty Grogan forwarded this:  New ships

https://www.navaltoday.com/2025/04/03/australia-us-duo-set-to-unveil-innovative-autonomous-naval-attack-vessel/?utm_source=newsletter

Ward Hack forwarded these:

Graham Craker: Well-liked

bodyguard to royal family

Metropolitan Police officer who served as a

bodyguard for princes William and Harry

It was a very British scene. On the morning of August 31, 1997, Graham Craker came across 15-year-old Prince William walking his dog at Balmoral Castle. Hours earlier, the prince’s mother, Diana, Princess of Wales, had died in a car crash in Paris. The prince’s personal bodyguard had been in shock and disbelief. On seeing the pale-faced prince with his head down, he felt the floodgates of his emotions start to open, but he kept his restraint.

“I saw William walking his dog outside and said, ‘I’m very sorry to hear your bad news.’ William said very sadly, ‘Thank you’. Not wishing to encroach upon his grief, I then walked on and William continued walking his dog,” said Craker, who achieved the perfect balance between the tough professionalism of a protection officer and genuine kindness towards the princes whose young lives had already been disrupted by their parents’ separation, divorce and continuing mutual animosity.

The princes had been staying with their father, then the Prince of Wales, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip at the royal residence. Craker had been woken at 1am and was asked to call the duty office at Buckingham Palace urgently. “I crept down the stairs to the house phone … They said there were reports there’d been an accident.” Two and a half hours later, Diana’s death was confirmed.

Several officers had been assigned to protect the princes over the years. Princess Diana was said to have been particularly fond of Craker, who in 1990 stepped up to round-the-clock protection duties for the princes, even sitting in on William’s classes at his prep school, Ludgrove in Berkshire. “Willy and I liked him a lot,” recalled Prince Harry in his 2023 memoir, Spare. “We always called him ‘Crackers’. We thought that was hysterical.”

A measure of how well liked Craker was by Princess Diana, as well as the two princes, was that he was chosen to take a seat in the front of the hearse at the conclusion of Diana’s funeral on September 6, 1997. “I was standing at the rear of the hearse and William looked up and acknowledged me,” he recalled. “I looked towards him and nodded. William was comforted that I was with his mum on her final journey.”

After the ceremony, Craker was in the front seat of the hearse as it travelled to Diana’s final resting place at Althorp House in Northamptonshire. At one point the hearse stopped on the M1 and Craker got out to remove the flowers that had clogged up on the windscreen.

The detective sergeant at the Metropolitan Police, who had been handpicked for the sought-after royal protection role in 1986, was perhaps able to offer added empathy and sensitivity because he had dealt with tragedy in his own life when his wife Carole Ann was found dead at the age of 42 in December 1991. The inquest, which gave an open verdict, was told that she had been clinically depressed. The couple had separated amicably in September 1990 and remained friends.

After Craker’s wife’s death, press reports quoted sources claiming that his round-the-clock protection duties for the princes had put a strain on their marriage because of his long absences from home. He rejected the reports as false and implored the media to “highlight the problem of depression, which might help someone else in the world”. Diana was reported to have been “very upset” by the news of Mrs Craker’s death.

Craker would go on to be pictured with William throughout moments of his childhood, such as as on an official visit to Canada with William’s parents in 1991, and as a reassuring presence behind both princes in a rollercoaster at Alton Towers in April 1994. In 1995, after William had passed his entry exam for Eton, Craker was pictured conspiratorially eating a Cornetto with him that the prince had bought for them both. A matronly nanny looked on rather censoriously.

Graham Leonard Craker was born in Wallington, Surrey, 1947. His parents were Arthur (known as Len) and Nel. He joined the Metropolitan Police as a teenager in 1966 and retired in 2001 after 35 years’ service, 15 of them in royal protection work.

Ten years later he attended the royal wedding of William and Kate Middleton (now the Prince and Princess of Wales). He was also appointed a Member of the Royal Victorian Order for services to the royal family and made a Freeman of the City of London.

In retirement he was an active Rotarian and helped out at the Lera Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya. He worked for charities in the Hertfordshire town of Ware, serving as a trustee for Always Bee You, which supports adults with learning disabilities and mental health issues. He later worked as a volunteer at Southern Maltings creative centre in Ware, where he showed all the thoroughness of a royal protection officer. The charity said in a statement: “Graham has been on our journey almost from the very beginning, and has been behind our bar for the whole of that time, making sure everyone has the best of times.

“He was the only volunteer to have a set of keys to the building, such is the measure of how trusted and respected he was, and it was not unusual to find him around, even when there was no event, because he wanted to make sure the bar was clean, stocked and ready for everyone else. He will be remembered for his laugh, his warmth and the way he always just wanted to help people.”

Craker is survived by his sons James and Matthew, who described him as, “Our hero, our rock. Words can’t describe the pride we feel in how he lived his life so selflessly, not only in his professional career but in his personal life, right up to the very end.”

Graham Craker MVO, Metropolitan Police officer and bodyguard, was born on July 15, 1947. He died of colon cancer on April 2, 2025, aged 77

A Second World War bomber, shot down by the Nazis with a British airman aboard, has been found after 82 years.

Leslie Norman Row, from Gravesend, Kent, was flying a mission over the Mediterranean when his Baltimore Bomber was attacked. The aircraft, part of the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF), crashed off the Greek island of Antikythera, with Mr Row and two comrades losing their lives.

After almost 82 years of uncertainty, divers discovered the Bomber 61 metres beneath the Aegean Sea.

Harry Green, president of the Gravesham and Ebbsfleet branch of the Royal British Legion, said the young airman “died in the name of his country”.

He added: “That in itself says it all. He’s given up his life, he’s given up his future, and all his family. It’s taken a long time to find the plane, and respect to the people who have gone out and found it.”

Mr Row, a 25-year-old navigator, flew his final mission on December 3, 1943, tasked with photographing the Greek coast.

Also killed were air gunners Colin William Walker of the RAAF and John Gartside of the Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF).

The only survivor was the Australian pilot, William Alroy Hugh Horsley, who was captured by the Germans and spent the remainder of the war in captivity.

After his release, Mr Horsley described how they had been returning from their mission when they were attacked by two Messerschmitt Bf 109s.

“The Me-109s delivered seven attacks, during which the aircraft was set on fire in the port wing,” he later wrote. “The intercommunications systems were destroyed, and Pilot Officer Walker and Warrant Officer Gartside were wounded – extent unknown.”

A rough landing at sea followed. “When I regained consciousness, the aircraft was submerged at the nose, and sea water was up to my neck. I released my safety harness, stood up and the aircraft submerged under me.

“I swam over the spot where the aircraft submerged, but no one else left the aircraft, which sank in deep water about 300 yards from the northern shore of Antikythera. I then swam to shore in full sight of the spot until picked up by some fishermen.”

For 81 years, the plane remained hidden until AegeanTec, a Greek technical diving group, discovered it last year.

Believing it to be the lost RAAF Baltimore FW282, they contacted the history and heritage branch of the Australian Air Force. The identity of the missing plane has since been confirmed.

Air Chief Marshal Richard Knighton, chief of the air staff at the RAF, said the discovery highlighted the longstanding relationship between the three air forces.

“It’s an honour to acknowledge the bravery of the multinational crew,” Sir Richard said. “This was a generation that embodied the importance of service and comradeship.

“Their efforts were the base on which the RAF continues to maintain the security of the UK at home and abroad. Their sense of duty inspires future generations of all of our air forces.”

Air Marshal Stephen Chappell, chief of the RAAF, hoped the find would bring closure, adding: “The efforts of groups such as AegeanTec are critical for us in accounting for those 3,143 Australian aviators with no known grave from the Second World War and the Korean conflict.

“I am pleased, alongside my colleagues from the RAF and RNZAF, to acknowledge the bravery of this combined crew of aviators from our three nations.”

Air Vice-Marshal Darryn Webb, chief of the RNZAF, echoed the sentiment: “The sacrifice of this brave crew has long been remembered, especially by their families, and we can now honour their final resting-place with the respect they deserve.”

Mr Row was born on March 2, 1918, to Albert Edward and Florence Mabel Row. A commemorative biography of him on the Gravesend Grammar School website lists him as a former pupil, back when it was The County School for Boys.

It says he appeared in a school production of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, was a prefect, and played in the school’s first XV rugby team. He left school in 1937 and joined the RAF in 1941.

His father, who’d served in the merchant navy during the First World War, joined the Royal Navy reserves during the Second, and father and son were briefly reunited in Egypt, but just a few months later, the younger man was killed. He is now commemorated at the Alamein Memorial in Egypt.

JOKES

During a lull at a White House dinner, Melania Trump leaned over to chat with Elon Musk.

"I bought Donald a parrot for his birthday.

That bird is so smart, Donald has already taught him to say over two hundred words!"

“That’s very impressive," said Musk “but you do realize he just speaks the words. He doesn't really understand what they all mean.”

"Oh, I know", replied Melania, “but neither does the parrot!”

A bloke and his wife were in bed making love and she said, “How am I doing?”

“Okay” he said, “but it might help if you move a bit and moan and groan.”

She started wiggling and jiggling and said “What about now?”

“Great” he said, “Now moan and groan a bit”.

“Oh, you are never home, you’re always at the pub or out with your mates”.

Say no more.

AND

Why did God create the female orgasm??

So that women can moan even while they are enjoying themselves

Attachment to Weekly News, 6 April 2025

http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/

Jackspeak

Getting yards             Admiring and slightly jealous description of a sexual athlete.

Gibbering                   Somewhat under the influence

DVA E-News

https://www.dva.gov.au/about/news/latest-news

Virtual War Memorial Memorandum

https://vwma.org.au/

Marty Grogan forwarded this – it is topical

Confucius Institutes in Australia

Top Australian universities close Chinese Confucius Institutes

Getty ImaCritics of Confucius Institutes fear that China use them as propaganda tools

Six Australian universities have quietly closed Chinese government-linked Confucius Institutes (CI) on their campuses.

The Australian government has ramped up scrutiny on the education centres in recent years over concerns that Beijing is using them to spread propaganda and spy on Chinese international students.

China says its Confucius Institutes, which offer Chinese language and cultural classes overseas, are a "bridge reinforcing friendship" with the world.

There have been growing global concerns about the Chinese government's reach overseas through such education centres, with universities in America and Europe also choosing to close some of their branches.

These closures mean nearly half of all the Confucius institutes at Australia's universities have been shuttered. Seven others remain open, according to a report by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC).

Confucius centres have now been removed from the campuses of the University of Melbourne, the University of Queensland (UQ), the University of Western Australia (UWA) and the University of New South Wales (UNSW), and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT).

Several universities cited disruptions caused by the Covid pandemic as the reason for not renewing their CI contracts.

A spokesperson for UNSW said the university was developing its own programme in Chinese studies and is committed to "encouraging open dialogue in the China-Australia bilateral relationship".

In recent years, Australia's federal government had indicated it would not allow more of the centres - which are linked to the Chinese Communist Party - to open in the country.

It also required universities to provide more transparency about the institutes' teachings and in some cases registering them on the Foreign Influence Transparency Scheme.

A UQ spokesperson said its Confucius Institute closed when the contract expired in December 2024, and it had "not been given any direction by the government".

The University of Melbourne closed their CI in August 2024 after it was established through a partnership with Nanjing University in 2007.

The institution already offers a variety of Chinese language and Asia programmes and had "no additional need to renew" the agreement, a spokesperson said.

A University of Adelaide spokesperson did not confirm their CI had been shuttered, but said it continues to foster "connections with other countries, including China" through partnerships and education collaboration.

Human Rights Watch said in a 2019 report that Confucius Institutes were "extensions of the Chinese government" that censored discussions of politically sensitive issues to Beijing.

In Australia, the ABC reported in 2019 that applicants for volunteer teaching positions at the institutes were required to demonstrate political loyalty to the Chinese government.

Dr Jeffrey Gill from Flinders University, who studies Confucius Institutes, said he "wasn't surprised" by the latest closures and that concerns around foreign interference were "likely to be one factor", he told the ABC.

However, Dr Gill said he was not convinced that CIs were promoting "Chinese government propaganda" and had "very little influence on perceptions of China in Australia and the Western world more broadly".

Is China's network of cultural clubs pushing propaganda?

Unis may have to end some overseas partnerships

100% Right...Boys and Girls-this is interesting

An excellent article, I have debated this matter with a number of RAN Flag Officers who sadly, refuse to accept that 'Boys and Girls naturally seek each others company.

Wooden Ships and Iron Men!

https://realclearpolitics.us7.list-manage.com/track/click?u=61572bb8acf7b8704903af7b8&id=230f8591db&e=7262a80b44


Admiral Ralph Wollmer

Ward Hack forwarded these

Trevor Lock, who has died aged 85, was the police constable taken hostage by terrorists during the siege of the Iranian Embassy in London in 1980; for his bravery he was awarded the George Medal, although many in the force felt that his six days of sustained courage merited the highest award of all.

Lock was born in Gants Hill on April 14 1939 and educated locally. Later described in the 1980 Hamlyn publication SIEGE! as “one of the solid, dependable and unambitious men on whom the Metropolitan Police relies”, he joined the force in 1965 and was posted to Dagenham police station. He served there for 15 years as a beat constable before volunteering for duty with the Diplomatic Protection Group, which is responsible for guarding the premises of diplomatic missions in central London.

It was on Wednesday April 30 1980, while still on six months’ probation with the DPG, that Lock was assigned to guard the Iranian Embassy at Prince’s Gate, off Knightsbridge, regarded at the time as one of the less vulnerable targets for terrorism in the capital.

Having taken advantage of the door-keeper’s offer of a cup of coffee, Lock was actually inside the front entrance of the embassy when six armed men burst in and overpowered him. Lock’s commanding officer, Chief Superintendent Roger Bromley, head of the DPG, later said that that cup of coffee undoubtedly saved Lock’s life, for the chief superintendent was well aware that if Lock had been at his post and had drawn his pistol, he would have been shot down in cold blood.

The terrorists, the self-styled Group of the Martyr Muhyiddin al-Nassr, whose object was to secure the release of political prisoners in Iran by their actions, seized the embassy and took hostage the 26 persons who were there at the time. Apart from Lock, the hostages included two BBC men, Simeon Harris, a sound recordist, and Chris Cramer, a news organiser, who were in the embassy applying for visas to go to Iran; and the embassy’s British chauffeur, Ron Morris.

Throughout the six days of the siege, Lock managed to keep his service revolver secreted, and acted as a calming influence on the volatile terrorists and a pillar of strength to the agitated hostages. Properly dressed at all times, he presented to them, and subsequently to the world at large through the medium of television, the image of the archetypal London policeman in the mould of the fictional Dixon of Dock Green.

At one stage, when technicians were placing listening devices in the wall of the embassy, the leader of the terrorists became suspicious of noises. He suggested to Lock that police were trying to break in and ordered him to investigate.

With superb theatrical mime, Lock took a plug from a wall-socket and listened. Then he took up the carpet and pointed to a hole in the floorboards that ran beneath the skirting. “This building is over a hundred years old,” he said. “I expect it’s mice.” Everybody laughed, including the terrorists, and calm was restored.

Attachment to Weekly News, 30 March 2025

http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/

Jackspeak

Gets on my tits          Jack’s usual way of describing something or someone that annoys him; note also grudge fight.

Getting the logbook  Recent sexual activity

stamped                    

Defence Records

including:

• Health records
• Incident and inquiry records
• Psychology records
• Service records

:https://www.defence.gov.au/about/accessing-information/personal-information-requests .

Marty Grogan forwarded these:

Marles give aways

Marles confirms just $1bn in defence spending to be accelerated in federal budget

The Albanese government will accelerate just $1bn worth of Defence spending in Tuesday’s federal budget over and above its already-planned funding trajectory, defying growing calls for a substantial funding boost for new military capabilities.

Richard Marles revealed on Monday that there would be a $10.6bn increase in Defence funding over the four-year forward estimates period, with $1bn of that reallocated into the 2026-27 and 2027-28 budget years.

“Part of the $10.6bn sees the bringing forward of an additional $1bn, and that’s because of the need to accelerate Australia’s capability development,” the Defence Minister said at the Avalon Airshow on Monday.

None of the four-year funding forecasts are new money, as they are part of the government’s promised $50bn in extra Defence spending over a decade.

But Mr Marles said the funding represented “the most significant increase in defence spending in peacetime Australia since the end of the Second World War”.

The brought-forward funding would go towards readying Perth’s HMAS Stirling naval base for the rotation of US submarine rotations, progressing the government’s guided weapons enterprise, and accelerating the purchase of new general purpose frigates, Mr Marles said.

“The acceleration of the $1bn is really there to ensure that the very ambitious timelines that we have in relation to all of this are going to be met,” he said.

The government had been considering bringing forward as much as $5bn in extra spending, according to its discussions with industry, but ultimately opted for just a fifth of that figure.

The announcement came after Treasurer Jim Chalmers played down the likelihood of a big Defence budget boost.

“We’ve already made huge commitments in defence spending,” he said on Sunday.

“We’re taking defence spending from about 2 per cent of our economy to more than 2.3 per cent in the course of the next decade or so.

“An extra $50 billion plus in defence spending that’s already in the budget. That’s an important way that we keep Australians safe and make our country and our economy more secure.”

The small funding boost comes despite mounting US pressure for a substantial increase, with the Trump administration’s nominee for a senior Pentagon post, Elbridge Colby, calling for Australia to lift annual spending by more than $25bn to lift the Defence budget to 3 per cent of GDP.

Peter Dutton has vowed a Coalition government would spend “much more” on Defence, but has declined to put a number on the increase beyond an extra $3bn for a promised extra squadron of F-35 fighters.

LEUT GAVIN CAMPBELL RAN Rtd

Gentlemen,

Today's funeral for LEUT Gavin Campbell RAN (ret) went off superbly, a simple service to a full house.

It was remarkable that men from all three of the Perth ships were there, along with many friends and relatives.

Navy's part in the ceremony was executed perfectly, with the AWE and Gavin's cap, sword and medals adorning the casket. Lee Goddard spoke some well chosen words and presented an ensign to Mrs Sue Campbell. The playing of The Last Post and Reveille was especially moving.

The Campbell family and everyone there were grateful for Navy's participation, and wish to express their deepest thanks to VADM Barrett and all concerned. It was a proud moment.

I've attached the eulogy I gave for those who might want to read it.

Best wishes

Mike Carlton

Funeral Oration

SBLT Gavin Cambell, RAN – survivor from HMAS Perth (I)

Deliverd by Mike Carlton 15 December 2015.

It is a great honour to be asked to speak about Gavin today, because he's perhaps the bravest man I ever met. One of the finest men I ever met.

I ask you to picture this scene. It is the year 1942, on Wednesday the 25th of February. Singapore has fallen to the Japanese, and they are now sweeping south towards the Dutch East Indies, modern day Indonesia. Conquering and crushing all in their path, apparently unbeatable and unstoppable. Australia is in mortal peril.

Tanjung Priok...which is the harbour for Batavia, now Jakarta...is burning in pillars of fire and oily black smoke, the port devastated by waves of Japanese air raids. The cruiser HMAS Perth has just arrived from Australia to join the fight, and she is alongside fuelling at a wharf and fighting off the Japanese bombers as they come over.

In a brief lull between air raids, there is time for a few beers in the wardroom to celebrate a birthday. Sub Lieutenant Gavin Campbell, a lanky young bloke from Portland in Victoria, has turned 21 this day. In the custom of the time, he's officially come of age, become a man. Perth's captain, Hec Waller, comes in for a drink, for Gavin is his secretary. And another guest is Lieutenant Commander Robert Rankin, captain of the little sloop HMAS Yarra, which is berthed nearby. Both these men will be dead within days, killed on the bridge in command, fighting their ships against hopeless, overpowering odds.

Perth sails that afternoon. She is to join an allied force of Dutch, British and American cruisers and destroyers off East Java, in what will be a gallant but hopeless attempt to turn back a Japanese invasion force. At the Battle of the Java Sea, on the night of February 27, that Allied squadron is badly mauled and beaten. Two Dutch cruisers and one British and three Allied destroyers are sunk.

Perth survives, and the next day she is ordered to make a break for it, to head south. But on that night the 28th of February, she and the American cruiser USS Houston are attacked by a swarm of Japanese destroyers in the Sunda Strait, the narrow passage of water between the islands of Java and Sumatra.

Captain Waller fights back, but the odds are hopeless. Perth is struck by three torpedoes and a blizzard of gunfire, left shattered and sinking. Not long after midnight comes the order to abandon ship. The night is black, the water dark and threatening, but men begin jumping into the sea. Gavin leaves his action station at one of the .5 machine guns aft and is on the rail and about to jump himself when the fourth and final enemy torpedo hits the ship and blows him high into the air.

It was like floating through the sky, he told me. Luckily, he was wearing his life jacket, his Mae West, and when he came-to in the water it held him up. But only to find, as he tried to swim, that he had a broken leg, trailing uselessly behind him. The pain must have been excruciating, but somehow he hauled himself onto a raft with some other men and there an Able Seaman named Bob Collins came to his help.

Collins had his sailor's knife with him, his "pusser's dirk." He used it to hack off some strips of wood from a floating packing case, slashed Gavin's overalls to make bandages, and he splinted the leg as best he could on this bobbing, lurching raft. It was the first of countless acts of mateship given and received by these Perth sailors in the months and years ahead, and it saved Gavin's leg and his life.

But his ordeal, though, was far from over in these terrible days after the sinking. It had just begun. When they eventually staggered ashore on Java, Gavin - barely able to move - found himself alone on a beach with another wounded sailor, Able Seaman Denny Maher, a young bloke from Sydney.

"We can't just stay here," Gavin told him. "We've got to move on or we'll die." They decided they would try to escape the Japanese by heading south...their only hope. Perhaps there would be some Allied troops they could link up with. Using sign language, Denny Maher got some local villagers to make a rough crutch from the branch of a tree, which he padded with some kapok pulled out of a life jacket.

And they began their extraordinary trek. An odyssey. For three weeks these two staggered down the coast of Java, in the burning tropical heat of March: Gavin wracked with waves of pain, limping and hobbling...both of them tormented by hunger and thirst. Sometimes the villagers might give them a handful of rice..or they would drink muddy water from puddles. At other times the locals were hostile and threatening, scared of the Japanese, and moved them on.

Three weeks. There were some days when Gavin simply couldn't move at all...but Denny Maher stuck with him. They encouraged each other, abused each other in salty sailor's language, cajoled and cursed each other. But they went on, unbeatable, indomitable. Until eventually they entered a small town, where a Dutch Eurasian nurse discovered them, took them in, and bathed their wounds and fed them. The Japanese arrived the next day.

For Gavin, this was the beginning of three long, agonising years as a prisoner-of-war. Three years of cruel abuse, of atrocities, of savagery the rest of us can only imagine. Three years of your mates sick and dying around you, in the horrors of the Burma-Siam Railway. There were 681 men in Perth's ship's company the night she was lost. Only 328 of them survived the battle. 106 of them died as prisoners of the Japanese. Less than a third of her ship's company, 218 men, lived to return to Australia.

Miraculously, against all the odds, Gavin's broken leg came good and he could walk again, although with a slight limp that would last a lifetime. In October 1942 he was in a group taken from the notorious Changi Prison in Singapore and packed into the hold of what they called a hell-ship, a filthy crowded transport which took them to Burma and the railway. One of those with him was a Perth shipmate who would become, eventually, one of his oldest and best mates, Able Seaman Frank McGovern, a young bloke from Sydney, aged 23. Frank is with us here today.

The nightmare began. Of men worked until they were skeletons, bashed or shot by their guards if they did not. Hunger and disease and sickness were their constant companions - cholera, dengue fever, amoebic dysentery, hideous tropical ulcers. Gavin came down with Beri Beri, a disease caused by starvation and vitamin deficiency...in which the body swells up with fluid, like a great bladder of poison. Untreated, it's fatal, and very swiftly so. But miraculously, he was nursed back to health by an Australian doctor, Albert Coates, and a Dutch chemist, also a prisoner, who had developed a vitamin injection from some local fruit. It was his second, perhaps third escape from death. Not his last.

Gavin endured the endless agony of those three years as a PoW with the strength and courage and unbreakable spirit that were the hallmarks of his life. He found an elder brother on the railway, too: Ian Campbell, an army signaller who'd been captured at the Fall of Singapore. They had a brief, emotional reunion at what they called the 40-kilo mark on the railway before they were dragged their separate ways again.

In 1945, in the last days of the war, it was Gavin's turn to give mateship. The Japanese marched them from a place called Tamarkan to a new camp outside Bangkok. Another of Perth's officers, the assistant navigator, Lieutenant Lloyd Burgess, was too weak to make it on his own. Gavin carried him most of the way, mile after mile after mile through the jungle. That saved Lloyd Burgess's life. Both of them made it back. Lloyd's son and daughter-in-law are with us today.

Gavin was liberated in Thailand. Suddenly, a British commando appeared from out of the jungle with a sub-machine gun, and it was all over. War's end. In what must have been an utterly surreal transformation, they put him up in Bangkok's most luxurious hotel, the Oriental, and eventually got him on a plane to Australia. He arrived at Melbourne's old Essendon airport on the 15th of November, 1945...on a chilly day. There was no one there to meet him, so he went over to a Red Cross Hut and explained to the lady there that he'd just returned from being a prisoner of war of the Japanese.

"Well, " she said. "I suppose you'd like a cup of tea then."

Gavin stayed on in the navy for a while, until 1950, but it must have been tough. In those days nobody had heard of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. They just told you told you to try to forget what had happened - best not to talk about it - just pick yourself up and get on with it. Many men relived the ordeal of the railway with the most terrible nightmares, night after night, and it broke a lot of them. But not Gavin.

He told me his story as I was writing my book about HMAS Perth and her crew a few years ago. We spent a lot of time together, putting it all down. And I am proud to say we became friends. Never once did I hear from him even a hint of boasting or bravado or bullshit. No flag-waving, no attempt to glorify his own part in it all. He was unfailingly modest and humble, to the point where sometimes I had to drag it out of him.

Yet he wanted the story told. Not to brag, or to portray himself as some heroic figure. Nothing could have been further from his mind. But I think it was important to him for his shipmates who had not returned, important that their story should be recorded and not forgotten. So he told it with simplicity and honesty, anxious only that it should be true and accurate.

But, as always with Gavin, there were flashes of a delicious, dry wit and humour - a twinkle in his eye - that made him such a delightful man to be with. I asked him once about one of his former navy captains. "Complete bastard," he said. "Much worse than the Japanese."

The sinking of Perth wasn't all bad, he would say. It meant he hadn't had to pay that wardroom mess bill for all those beers he'd bought on his 21st birthday. A few years ago, when I told him I was taking a television crew up to the Sunda Strait to dive on the wreck of Perth, he looked at me in horror. "If you find that bill, " he said," just leave it there. I couldn't afford the interest." I can see him now, lanky frame hunched in a chair, chuckling at the thought of it.

Most striking of all, there was no bitterness nor hatred to him. Life dealt Gavin a bad hand. Like all his generation, he was a child of the Depression. The war stole the best years of his young manhood. After the war he found happiness in his marriage to Adrienne, until she was stricken by polio. Then, in 1999, he was diagnosed with mesothelioma, the asbestos poisoning that got him in the end.

But never once - never - did I hear a word of complaint, or anger,or regret. He was calm, almost serene, in a way. This surprised and puzzled me at first. It was not what I had expected, and I couldn't quite understand it. But I came to think it was because he had seen so much violence and killing, cruelty and horror, sickness and death - so much of man's inhumanity to man - that he wanted no more part of it. Many of the other PoWs were like that, too. They'd seen enough.

I think he believed that if he had succumbed to hatred, or a thirst for revenge, or if he wallowed in self-pity, these things would eventually corrode his soul and his spirit, and destroy him. And Gavin Campbell was not to be destroyed. It was a characteristic he shared with many of those former Perth POWs I had the good luck and the privilege to meet. Frank McGovern, Arthur Bancroft, Fred Lasslett, Fred Skeels, and many more. Extraordinary men who rose above and triumphed over the worst that life could throw at them. And they stuck together in the HMAS Perth Association, a band of brothers.

In the words of Alfred Lord Tennyson, in his epic poem, Ulysses, they were:

One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Gavin never yielded. Instead, he cherished and nurtured those things most close to him. The things that mattered. Home, family, mates. Small pleasures, like a good whisky or a bad game of golf, or following the Sydney Swans (probably his only major flaw and failing.) The Royal Australian Navy remained an important part of his life, for he was proud of his service. In fact he loved the Navy, and he followed with interest and loyalty the two later ships named Perth, first a guided missile destroyer and the present-day Perth, a frigate. He was a sailor to the end. I'll tell you something Sue told me - Gavin's lying there now wearing his HMAS PERTH ASSOCIATION dress shirt, and a Sydney Swan's scarf.

The navy returned the respect, deeply felt. Gavin's last visitor in hospital before he died was the current commanding officer of HMAS Perth 3, Captain Ivan Ingham. Another former Perth CO is with us today: Commodore Lee Goddard, who knew Gavin and admired him deeply,who loved inviting him to visit the ship and who is here today as a brother officer; a friend ; and also officially representing the Chief of Navy, Vice Admiral Tim Barrett, by whose order the Australian White Ensign adorns Gavin's casket today. Lieutenant Campbell was the last surviving officer of HMAS Perth. The Navy salutes one of its true heroes. One of the men who built the traditions that inspire the Navy today.

But for Gavin it was the people who mattered most. Old shipmates, like Frank McGovern. That shared hell of the railway forged the unbreakable bonds of true mateship which held Frank and Gavin together for 70 years, closer than brothers. Here in Sydney they would meet on the second Thursday of every month, without fail, year in year out, just to share a beer and keep touch, for as long as they lived. Frank felt he couldn't speak today, but reckoned that I'd know what to say on his behalf.

But I don't really. I don't have the words, beyond telling you that these two are the best and finest men I have ever had the privilege to meet. Frank lost his brother Vince, who went down with Perth in the Sunda Strait. Today he farewells another brother, a loss that is profound, infinite. You have our sympathy, mate.

But above all for Gavin there was family. Sue, the wife he loved for 30 years and who loves him still. His children, grandchildren, two great grandchildren, who also have our deepest sympathy in this time of their loss.

But we are all of us in sorrow today, in the sadness of final parting. But I like to think of it, too, as a celebration of a life well lived. And how lucky we were that our lives were touched by this fine man. A sailor and warrior who gave so much in the service of our country in its time of need and peril. It is a debt that we can repay only by keeping the memory alive...

Gavin Campbell was a kind, gentle and humble man of extraordinary grace and humanity. How good it was to know him. How sad it is to say goodbye this one last time.

Gavin, in the sailors' farewell: may you have fair winds and following seas.

You were a truly great Australian.

Rocky Freier forwarded this:

BROADSIDE

Members,

Your MARCH edition of BROADSIDE is now available to read in book format:

https://online.fliphtml5.com/qchrf/fles/

or,

you can read it at:

https://navyvic.net/broadside/march2025broadside.html

or,

you can download the .pdf file:

https://navyvic.net/broadside/march2025broadside.pdf

Please feel free to distribute widely.

Yours Aye!

NVN Team

Ward Hack forwarded these:

Victor Osborne: Second World War naval veteran

Sailor who witnessed the flash of the Nagasaki atomic bomb and who was the last of those who served in the battlecruiser HMS Hood

Victor Osborne joined the Royal Navy as a Boy Second Class at the age of 15, initially at the new training establishment HMS St Vincent.

On November 5, 1934, he joined his first ship, HMS Hood, the largest warship in the world. During his last few months in Hood, it was a part of a Franco-British non-intervention force in Spanish waters, safeguarding British interests, protecting maritime trade and seeking to prevent the civil war from spreading. He left HMS Hood on September 26, 1937, nearly four years before its destruction by the German battleship Bismarck, with the loss of at least 1415 men.

In total, Osborne served in 11 ships and establishments during his career in the Royal Navy, including, notably, the aircraft carrier HMS Eagle. He was serving in Eagle when war was declared in September 1939, and remained on board until mid-1942. During this time the ship was involved in intensive hostilities in the Indian Ocean, the South Atlantic and particularly in the Mediterranean.

His specialisation in torpedoes and explosives allowed him to be landed ashore in Crete with six torpedo men to destroy the airfield. “We very nearly became prisoners of war when German paratroopers dropped right on top of us,” he recalled. “My six colleagues were lost when HMS Eagle was sunk some months later.”

On another occasion he said, “I was landed in Libya with nine Swordfish aircraft, joining a brigade with Australians to capture Benghazi. However, Eagle had to retire to Alexandria as Rommel advanced.” In Egypt, the Italian air force had dropped mines in the Suez Canal. Osborne added: “I volunteered to walk along the bottom of the canal in a rebreathing suit to search for mines to be destroyed.”

In October 1940, Osborne volunteered for service in submarines and in June 1942 was posted to HMS Dolphin, home of the Royal Navy’s submarines. During this time he trained in the submarine HMS Thunderbolt. It had originally been HMS Thetis, lost in Liverpool Bay just before the war with heavy loss of life, and was subsequently salvaged.

Thunderbolt was carrying out trials with “Chariots”, the two-man motorised torpedo that was used successfully in the Mediterranean to attack Italian cruisers. Osborne then returned to general service as it was found that a head wound incurred in Eagle precluded him from submarine service.

On D-Day, June 6, 1944, he was off Normandy, the coxswain of a landing craft. He later related how this was the worst moment of his war. “When the ramp went down, eight soldiers were killed by German machinegun fire. I couldn’t make another run after that as it shook me up so much. I blamed myself for their deaths.”

In July 1944, he was posted to the destroyer HMS Quality. Osborne was involved in the Battle of Leyte Gulf in the Philippines and the Battle of Okinawa. Osborne and his shipmates were responsible for rescuing many downed pilots during these battles, while under the threat of kamikaze attack. He described how this was done. “When picking up crashed pilots, we did a slow 13 knots and sent a good swimmer off the forecastle with a cod line tied to his belt. He would grab hold of the airman and be drawn back to a net with two sailors waiting to lift the very heavy airman in his flight gear to our deck.”

Osborne related how he and his shipmates witnessed the flash when the atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki in 1945, and he was in Tokyo Bay in September 1945 to witness the surrender of Japan, ending the Second World War.

Victor Osborne was born in Hackney, east London, on November 11, 1918, Armistice Day. He was one of 11 children of Edward Osborne and Emily (née Wright). His father had fought in the Boer War and the First World War and survived them both, but died in the Luftwaffe’s first daylight raid on London in 1940.

In December 1941, Osborne married Joyce Fox. They had two sons and a daughter, and were married for 60 years until she died in 2001 at the age of 80. A loving husband, a good provider, a loving but stern father, Osborne believed in honour and honesty, was no sufferer of fools, and enjoyed gardening. He is survived by his sons Roger and Michael, his daughter Suzanne, plus many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Osborne was released from the navy in 1949 and pursued the trade of electrician. In 1950, the family emigrated to Australia, where he helped to build hydroelectric plants, hospitals and schools in Tasmania. After spending a couple of years in British Columbia, Canada, from 1954, the family moved to California in 1956 when Osborne took a job as head of maintenance for Walt Disney at the newly constructed Disneyland. In 1970, Osborne left Disney, and the family moved back to British Columbia, where he worked in the Canadian Forces Base, Esquimalt, building destroyers. He retired in 1983 at the age of 65.

In 2020, he was contacted by the HMS Hood Association, who had discovered that Osborne was the last sailor living to have served in HMS Hood. It led to his writing a three-part story of his life for the Hood magazine The Chough. He had learnt to use a computer in his nineties.

Victor Osborne, Royal Navy veteran, was born on November 11, 1918. He died on February 1, 2025, aged 106

Hazel Picking, who has died aged 100, was a visual signaller in the WRNS during the Second World War.

As a Girl Guide, Hazel Roberts (as she was born) had been good at Morse and semaphore, and, coming from a naval family, it was clear during the war that as soon as she became old enough she would join the Women’s Royal Naval Service. She spent a few months at Kensington Secretarial School, but in 1943, aged 18, she volunteered, and was trained at the signals training centre, HMS Cabbala, outside Wigan. Her job was to relay Morse-code signals by light through an Aldis lamp.

Her first trained job was in Rosyth dockyard before she was sent to the shore establishment HMS Rosemarkie on the Black Isle in the Scottish Highlands. At a party in the “Wrennery” on Christmas Night 1943 she met 26-year-old Royal Marines Captain Bernie “Stormy” Webb. She had first seen him through the lens of her signals telescope and thought him “the best-looking of a bad-looking bunch”.

When Webb was posted to Fort Gilkicker in Gosport, Hazel Roberts wangled an appointment to HMS Hornet, the nearby base for fast motorboats. Webb, she recalled, would send out scouts from his unit to find out which pub had beer, and there they would meet. If across the harbour, they would often rush to catch the last ferry back, sometimes having to jump on as it was leaving. They married at the end of 1944, when Webb was about to embark for the war in the Pacific.

On the night before D-Day, when Hazel had finished her watch by sending messages in readiness for the fleet’s departure, she saw the Solent so full of craft that “you could have walked all the way to the Isle of Wight without getting wet”. But when she returned the next morning, “there was not a boat to be seen – just clear blue water.”

On VE-Day she was at the end of the pier at Ryde signal station, unable to join the celebrations, and spent her night on watch sending chatty messages to the few remaining ships in the Solent. She was demobbed at the end of 1945, and Webb returned home in early 1946.

Hazel Mary Roberts was born on January 17 1925 in Poole. She was brought up along the coast in Southampton and educated at the Parents’ National Educational Union school there, and later at Christ’s Hospital, Hertford.

Her father, Edward Roberts, fought in the battleship Vanguard at the Battle of Jutland in 1916, and an ancestor, 18-year-old midshipman John Aikenhead, was killed in the ship of the line, Royal Sovereign, at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805.

Hazel’s first marriage lasted 10 years, after which she supported herself as a medical secretary, working for Linwood Strong opticians, then for the Blood Transfusion Service in Sutton, and at an X-ray unit in nearby Worcester Park as the medical director’s secretary.

In 1967 she went to Epsom College as school secretary. On Burns Night 1972 she met Thomas Picking on a blind date: during their marriage they travelled extensively in Europe, South Africa and North America, and they later became volunteers and team leaders at Painshill Park in Surrey, where they undertook a wide range of jobs.

Hazel Picking became a donation governor at Christ’s Hospital and presented two pupils to the school. Her husband died in 2009, and she is survived by a son from her first marriage.

Hazel Picking, born January 17 1925, died February 14 2025

JOKES

<><>

Last week, I stated this woman was the ugliest woman I had ever seen. I have since been visited by her sister, and now wish to withdraw that statement.

- Mark Twain

<><>

The secret of a good sermon is to have a good beginning and a good ending; and to have the two as close together as possible.

- George Burns

<><>

Santa Claus has the right idea. Visit people only once a year.

- Victor Borge

<><>

Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.

- Mark Twain

<><>

By all means, marry. If you get a good wife, you'll become happy; if you get a bad one,you'll become a philosopher.

- Socrates

<><>

I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.

- Groucho Marx

<><>

My wife has a slight impediment in her speech. Every now and then she stops to breathe.

- Jimmy Durante

<><>

I have never hated a man enough to give his diamonds back.

- Zsa Zsa Gabor

<><>

Only Irish coffee provides in a single glass all four essential food groups: alcohol, caffeine, sugar and fat.

- Alex Levine

<><>

My luck is so bad that if I bought a cemetery, people would stop dying.

- Rodney Dangerfield

<><>

Money can't buy you happiness. But it does bring you a more pleasant form of misery.

- Spike Milligan

<><>

Until I was thirteen, I thought my name was: 'SHUT UP.'

- Joe Namath

<><>

I don't feel old. I don't feel anything until noon. Then it's time for my nap.

- Bob Hope

<><>

I never drink water because of the disgusting things that fish do in it.

- W. C. Fields

<><>

We could certainly slow the aging process down if it had to work its way through Congress.

- Will Rogers

<><>

Don't worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, it will avoid you.

- Winston Churchill

<><>

Maybe it's true that life begins at fifty, but everything else starts to wear out, fall out, or spread out.

- Phyllis Diller

<><>

By the time a man is wise enough to watch his step, he's too old to go anywhere.

- Billy Crystal

And the cardiologist's diet: if it tastes good spit it out.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

May your troubles be less, may your blessings be more, and may nothing but happiness come through your door.

1. When one door closes and another door opens, you are probably in prison.

2. To me, "drink responsibly" means don't spill it.

3. Age 60 might be the new 40, but 9:00 pm is the new midnight.

4. It's the start of a brand new day, and I'm off like a herd of turtles.

5. The older I get, the earlier it gets late.

6. When I say, "The other day," I could be referring to any time between yesterday and 15 years ago.

7. I remember being able to get up without making sound effects.

8. I had my patience tested. I'm negative.

9. Remember, if you lose a sock in the dryer, it comes back as a Tupperware lid that doesn't fit any of your containers.

10. If you're sitting in public and a stranger takes the seat next to you, just stare straight ahead and say, "Did you bring the money?"

11. When you ask me what I am doing today, and I say "nothing," it does not mean I am free. It means I am doing nothing.

12. I finally got eight hours of sleep. It took me three days, but whatever.

13. I run like the winded.

14. I hate when a couple argues in public, and I missed the beginning and don't know whose side I'm on.

15. When someone asks what I did over the weekend, I squint and ask, "Why, what did you hear?"

16. When you do squats, are your knees supposed to sound like a goat chewing on an aluminum can stuffed with celery?

17. I don't mean to interrupt people. I just randomly remember things and get really excited.

18. When I ask for directions, please don't use words like "east."

19. Don't bother walking a mile in my shoes. That would be boring. Spend 30 seconds in my head. That'll freak you right out.

20. Sometimes, someone unexpected comes into your life out of nowhere, makes your heart race, and changes you forever. We call those people cops.

21. My luck is like a bald guy who just won a comb."

Attachment to Weekly News, 23 March 2025

http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/

Jackspeak

Get up to speed         Absorb all the current or necessary information about a subject; or

                                    Getting up to flying speed describes the first few wets of a drinking session or run ashore.

Get your hat!              Said to a sailor who has just committed an offence, since he will need his hat to take off as an offender when he see the bloke

JOKES

If you have any jokes (they are best in written form, which can be copied in Word) you would like to forward, please do.  I am running out.  Thanks to all who have responded; your jokes are appreciated and will appear in the upcoming weeks.

Russ Dale forwarded this:

Debrief Magazine

https://geelongvietnamvets.us15.list-manage.com/track/click?u=833aae92a568c3929d882ce6a&id=b5560fc670&e=56105c07f4

Marty Grogan forwarded these:

Future of the RAN

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmXyD342lP8

and

"Three-Headed Dog Newsletter" – March 2025

http://www.nhsavic.navyvic.net/.

and

Australian Submarines

failure to upgrade ageing subs sees Australia falter at first AUKUS hurdle

The ageing Collins-class submarines – including HMAS Collins, HMAS Farncomb, HMAS Dechaineux and HMAS Sheean – need major upgrades to keep them in service. Picture: Lt Chris Prescott

Attachment to Weekly News, 16 March 2025

http://hmas-leeuwin-1963.com/attachment-to-weekly-news/

Jackspeak

George                       Euphemism for the act of defaecation.  Supposed to date from the reign of King George VI.  You had to go and say good morning to him twice each day, at ‘colours and at your morning dump’.

Gestapo                      Yet another soubriquet for Regulating Branch personnel.

.

JOKES

If you have any jokes (they are best in written form, which can be copied in Word) you would like to forward, please do.  I am running out.  Thanks to all who have responded; your jokes are appreciated and will appear in the upcoming weeks.

RSL NSW – REVILLE - March

https://rslnsw.org.au/commemorations-ceremonies-and-events-portal/anzac-day/#msdynttrid=TBdqKR4EdJjNxSOJIh0MO-0AonSPAgFUn34FXNZFALw

and Disaster relief for affected veterans and their families

Russ Dale forwarded this:

Community Survey: Open Arms Digital Mental Health Strategy

If you would like to participate emai DVA at OPENARMSPPASSURANCE@dva.gov.au

This service was founded by Vietnam Veterans and now used for all Veterans.

Marty Grogan forwarded these: Good reading

ANZUS

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/nation/joe-biden-acclaims-essential-anzus/news-story/22488a6b29466e7ff6d0da6917cb85ae

Australia's Naval Fleet Renewal Faces Urgent Decisions – Frontline

https://frontline.asn.au/news/australias-naval-fleet-renewal-faces-urgent-decisions/

Biography - Warwick Seymour Bracegirdle

https://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/bracegirdle-warwick-seymour-28425

Ward Hack forwarded these:

Jessie Mahaffey obituary:

Pearl Harbor serviceman

who cheated death twice

The veteran of the 1941 Japanese attack also escaped the sinkingof another warship during the Second World War and lived to 102

Mahaffey swam to the USS Maryland, left, after the Oklahoma, behind it, was struck and capsized in the attack on Pearl Harbor

Jessie Mahaffey was one of the last 15 known American survivors of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and one of the last three known survivors of USS Oklahoma, a battleship that lost 429 members of its crew when it was sunk on what President Roosevelt called that “day of infamy”.

Mahaffey had another distinction, however. He was almost certainly the last Pearl Harbor veteran to survive the sinking of not one, but two US warships during the Second World War.

A week short of a year after Pearl Harbor he was serving in the Pacific on USS Northampton when that heavy cruiser was torpedoed and sunk by Japanese warplanes.

As he told a local television station in his home state of Louisiana when he turned 100 two years ago: “I never thought I would make it this far, but if I make it a little bit further that’s fine.”

Jessie Alton Mahaffey was born in Florien, a tiny community in western Louisiana, in 1922, to John and Mary Mahaffey. After graduating from high school in the summer of 1941 he and two friends hitchhiked 90 miles to Shreveport to enlist in the US navy, spending the night in a police station because they arrived after the recruitment office had closed and had no money.

Mahaffey was sent to a training camp in San Diego, California, then assigned to the Oklahoma.

Early on the morning of December 7 he was preparing the ship for its annual inspection. “We had a holystone on a broomstick, six of us were scrubbing the deck, and we were just talking, talking. It was a quiet Sunday,” he recalled.

Then, just before 8am local time, Japanese torpedo bombers launched the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor’s battleship row that would suck the US into the war and change the course of the conflict. They flew in low above the water and fired their torpedoes at point-blank range. “We heard a siren, saw planes and smoke. It must have only gone on for 45 minutes but it was crazy,” Mahaffey recalled.

Within 10 minutes the Oklahoma had been hit by three torpedoes. As it began to list to port it was struck twice more and quickly capsized. “It turned upside down and we had to slide over the bottom of the ship into the water,” said Mahaffey. He managed to swim to an adjacent ship, USS Maryland, even though the Japanese were strafing the water.

More than 2400 American servicemen and civilians were killed that day, and nearly 1800 wounded. The Oklahoma suffered the second highest toll of the eight battleships sunk or damaged, with hundreds of her 1200-strong crew trapped below deck.

Mahaffey’s grandson, John, told The New York Times that he believed his father had been transferred from the ship’s powder store a month before the attack — “he went from being in the hull to on the deck, and that saved his life”.

Mahaffey was subsequently assigned to USS Northampton, part of a naval force that engaged Japanese warships in the battle of Tassafaronga on November 30, 1942, to prevent them reinforcing a garrison on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands.

Just before midnight the Northampton was hit by two Japanese torpedoes, which tore a huge hole in her port side. Within three hours the crew had to abandon her as she began to sink. “We had to stay on rafts the whole night,” Mahaffey remembered, but on that occasion the loss of life was much less severe, with about 50 sailors killed and nearly 800 rescued.

Mahaffey’s was one of two rafts picked up by PT-109, the patrol boat of which the future president John F Kennedy would take command five months later.

Mahaffey spent most of the rest of the war serving on USS Frederick Funston, an attack transport ship, in the Mediterranean. A month after the conflict ended he received an honourable discharge as a boatswain’s second mate, and returned to his native Louisiana.

There he married Joyce. “My best day would be marrying that little gal that had just turned 18 years old,” he said. “Me, her and her brother went to that church.”

The couple settled outside Many, a town just north of Florien, and had two sons, George and Clarence. Mahaffey worked for more than 30 years as a pole climber for Southwestern Bell, a regional telephone company, and always refused to take a job indoors. His wife died in 2003. He carried on driving, and tending his large garden, until he was nearly 100.

Reflecting on his life, he said: “Finishing school in the 11th grade — that was a highlight. Joining the navy — that was a highlight. Had two ships that were sunk. The first right there at Pearl Harbor, and the second one was in the South Pacific, but I made it through OK.”

Jessie Mahaffey, Pearl Harbor survivor, was born on November 23, 1922. He died on March 1, 2025, aged 102

Richard Fortey, head of palaeontology at the Natural History Museum Credit: Alamy

Richard Fortey, who has died aged 79, enjoyed a long career as head of palaeontology at the Natural History Museum, with a particular interest in trilobites, woodlouse-shaped marine arthropods that roamed the oceans for around 270 million years – well before the dinosaurs and 200 times longer than humans beings have walked the earth – before becoming extinct 250 million years ago; their evolution can help date the history of the earth.

Avuncular, authoritative, slightly craggy, fluent and humorous, Fortey was a born communicator whose documentaries for BBC Four explored such diverse interests as The Secret Life of Rockpools, The Magic of Mushrooms and Islands of Evolution, a three-parter in which he investigated why islands are natural laboratories of evolution.

The wide range of his interests was reflected in popular science books, rich with human stories and literary references, that drew praise from scientists and ordinary readers alike. His Life: An Unauthorised Biography (1997) was listed as one of 10 Books of the Year by The New York Times and cited by John Gribbin as “the best natural history of the first four billion years of life on earth”.

It was a history to which Fortey had contributed through his fascination with trilobites, which had been sparked aged 14 when, fossil hunting in Wales, he saw a promising-looking rock and tapped it with a hammer. “The rock simply parted around the animal like some sort of revelation,” he wrote in Trilobite! Eyewitness to Evolution (2000). “I was left holding two pieces of rock – surely what I held was the textbook come alive. The long, thin eyes of the trilobite regarded me and I returned the gaze. More compelling than any pair of blue eyes, there was a shiver of recognition across five hundred million years.”

Over six decades his search for the fossils took him to Norway, Canada, the Nevada desert and Australian Outback. As well as discovering many examples new to science, he even ate the closest living relative of a trilobite, a horseshoe crab, in a Bangkok restaurant, noting that it had “a rather overwhelming rancid-fishy taste”.

Fortey earned scientific renown by discovering another purpose for the study of trilobites, which take many shapes, each distinct to a geographical area. While it was known that the continents were once joined in a single land mass, it was less well-known that previously they were apart.

“It became clear that trilobites could inhabit three or four major habitat types,” he told The Biologist journal in 2016. “I could find shallow water ones where shallow seas had flooded former continents, deeper-water ones surrounding the edges of the continents, sometimes intercontinental ones. This coincided with a revolution in plate tectonics, when people started to realise that during the age of these trilobites, the continents were totally different… So for 20 years I was involved in trying to reconstruct what the world was like, using trilobites to define the position of the continents.”

In a 2001 interview with The Sunday Times he likened the fossils to “postage stamps issued by a particular continent”: “I kind of remade the world according to them. When I meet one of my commuting acquaintances on the 6.21 home to Henley-on-Thames, they occasionally inquire what I have done that day. I have been known to reply: ‘I moved north Africa 200km to the east.’”

Richard Alan Fortey was born in Ealing, west London on February 15 1946 to Frank Fortey, and Margaret, née Wilshin, and was fascinated by natural history from early childhood, searching out strange-looking fungi to fossils on holidays with his father, who ran a couple of fishing tackle shops and was a keen fly-fisherman.

Unusually, Ealing Grammar School had a geology teacher who took Fortey’s class on a trip to the Natural History Museum and pointed to a door where, he said, lived “experts who work on fossils”. “I thought: ‘I’d like to be that,’” Fortey recalled.

Fortey took his passion for trilobites to King’s College, Cambridge, where he read Natural Sciences, specialising in palaeontology and taking a PhD under Harry B Whittington, one of the world’s foremost experts on trilobites.

He began his career as a research fellow at the Natural History Museum in 1970, eventually retiring as senior palaeontologist at the museum in 2006. As well as publishing more than 250 scientific papers, he wrote the museum’s book on fossils, now in its fifth edition, while indulging a quirky humour in two pseudonymously penned books in 1981, The Roderick Masters Book of Money Making Schemes, and Not Another Cube Book! (as WC Bindweed), which he described as “an opportunistic work [which] hit the Christmas market and sold vast numbers of copies”.

In 2008 Fortey would publish Dry Store Room No 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum, an affectionate look at his former employer (Dry Store Room No 1 is the place where miscellaneous junk ends up in limbo), with amusing accounts of the politics, scandals and intrigues that have shaped it over the centuries.

Fortey’s first foray into popular science was The Hidden Landscape: A Journey into the Geological Past, which was named Natural World Book of the Year in 1993. Trilobite! An Eyewitness to Evolution was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize.

Before becoming a documentary presenter, Fortey appeared in several David Attenborough series including Lost Worlds, Vanished Lives (1989) and First Life (2010), in which the two men travelled to the Atlas mountains to find trilobite fossils.

In 2011 he used some of the proceeds of his television appearances to buy four acres of ancient beech-and-bluebell woodland in the Chiltern Hills near his home in Henley-on-Thames. He spent two years tempting former colleagues from the Natural History Museum – experts on everything from lichens to moths – to carry out a natural inventory of the wood, and wrote a book about it: The Wood for the Trees (2016).

As well as several medals for his academic work, Fortey’s popular science books earned him the Lewis Thomas Prize for science writing (2003) and the 2006 Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize for the public communication of science.

His other books included Earth: An Intimate History (2005), which was shortlisted for the Royal Society’s Aventis prize, and Survivors: Animals & Plants Time Left Behind (2011) about “living fossils” such as horseshoe crabs which have survived almost unchanged for hundreds of millions of years.

In his last book, Close Encounters of the Fungal Kind (2024), he returned to one of his first loves, drawing together history, geography, language, literature, scientific method and even touches of science fiction in celebration of the morels, puffballs, stinkhorns, inkcaps and magic mushrooms found on his rambles over more than 60 years.

Fortey was Collier Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Technology at the Institute of Advanced Studies in the University of Bristol in 2002 and visiting professor of Palaeobiology at the University of Oxford from 1999 to 2009.

He was elected president of the Geological Society of London for its bicentennial year of 2007. Elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1997 and a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2010, he was appointed OBE in 2023.

Fortey had a son from his first marriage, to Bridget Thomas, and two daughters and a son from his second marriage, to Jacqueline Francis.

Richard Fortey, born February 15 1946, died March 7 2025

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