Looking at it on duckduckgo satellite view, I don't see anything but farm fields, with a few patches of forest and small clumps of buildings.
Has the area been rehabbed?
A Better Rifle at Halloween
- Thread starter diesal
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- britwank rifles ww1 different
Has the area been rehabbed?
TBF, it was a Territorial brigade and a regular battalion.
I'm afraid the Powers that Be are much more likely to see the apparent success of cold steel and massed rifle fire
and miss the effect of the machine gun (in both attack and defence) and the potential benefits of better coordination between infantry and artillery
and we can only hope that the Powers that Be do NOT draw the conclusion that attacking with sheer numbers is all that is needed
AIUI this was coal mining country in 1914. Many villages had a mining tower with the slag pilled high outside it.
This is Loos, but I believe the country was similar:
Indeed. The presence of slag tips and nasty chemical runoffs from mines in the area are well documented. That the same region is lovely farms and villages now speaks wonders to the ability of people to change the landscape.
I think this is part of the same region
Pays Noir - Wikipedia
named similarly to the area of the English Midlands
Black Country - Wikipedia
partly from coal seams near the surface and then the pollution (especially coal soot) from the subsequent industrialisation
I will try and make up another small map to show the action. Doing it improves my skills with surfer which is the software which I use. The area I had the Manchester brigade attack has been rehabbed and has a 17m change in elevation relative to the surrounding area. Which in Belgian terms is huge.
I would expect more prisoners than that, due to wounded who were not evacuated. (E.g. left for dead.)
680 casualties, plus Manchester Brigade wounded, plus captured in both sectors (especially among the Worcesters, who were driven back).
another couple of hundred wounded for the Manchester’s and a small number of prisoners from the Worcesters.
But not necessarily to renaturalize. My stretch of wood was never coal country, so no slag, but I have heard of at least three old dumps - including one for paint refuse that were rehabbed by just paving earth over. And they may or may not haven been official dumps so who knows if they are actually on any map.
Sir Percy Ponders
6th September 1914, London.
Admiral Sir Percy Scott was sitting in his office at the Admiralty, he was reviewing the battle damage from the Battle of Thornton Bank. There was significant concern about the value of Battlecruisers, the rapid destruction of two of them along with the loss of thousands of trained sailors had caused much anguish within the Admiralty.
Shifting his thoughts somewhat, Sir Percy let his mind wander back to the fairly brutal meeting he had had, with Sir John French on the previous day, scheduled before the Battle of Thornton Bank had occurred but impossible to decline or reschedule, owing to the intransigent nature of Sir John. During the meeting, messengers had brought in the first reports of the BEF’s first heavy fighting and the gunnery problems, but Sir John French was more concerned about the fact that the Yeomanry and Territorials seemed to be doing all the fighting and then he randomly spent ten minutes blackening the honour of France. His only other comments were on the unsporting conduct of Sampson machine gunning Cavalry and assuring Admiral Scott that the army had more than enough artillery.
Percy Scott was of the considered opinion that Sir John French was better suited to political intrigue than war, an opinion he had shared with Earl Roberts that evening at their club.
Admiral Scott remembered his efforts in the Boer war, there he had mounted Naval Guns on carriages for land service. Sir Percy had his secretary call for the design document from the admiralty archive where it had lain unreviewed since that fracas in South Africa. In addition, he summoned a pair of junior officers, who he felt could undertake the work of updating the design to accept the Mark VII 6” gun. Calling for one of his gunnery officer assistants and a junior constructor serving at the Admiralty, he gave them a thorough briefing on what he expected and gave them two weeks to have a design ready for mounting. He followed this up by sending orders to Chatham Docks to have a building shed ready to begin construction of the guns within two weeks. He then issued another order release the guns from reserve for land service. His last task was to send an order to whale island that a training draft of 600 seamen were to be trained on serving the gun to be ready for land service in four week’s time. At the same time 60 Naval Officers RNR or RNVR were to be trained as gunnery officers, both as battery commanders but also as Forward Observers, to direct naval gunfire more accurately.
He had all of this then dictated as a minute which he had forward to the Secretary of State for War, who had made a request to the First Lord of the Admiralty for the use of Naval personnel for Land Service. In the note he pointed out that with some 200 guns available in reserve he could provide 50 batteries for service in France. Once the 6” gun was in service he would look at having the same thing done with the 9.2” and 12” guns in reserve. He felt that the use of Bluejackets to provide gunnery support for the Army was entirely in keeping with the traditions of the Service.
He then went back to pondering the altogether more complex issues of ship design and director firing. He directed another letter to Admiral Jellicoe, this was to request that he release Captain Frederic Dreyer for service with Admiral Scott as his principal Gunnery Officer, Dreyer needed to meet with Percy Ludgate and get to work on the next generation of Gunnery Director.
HMS Princess Mary had reported that they had been hit by a German 11” shell likely from SMS Von der Tann, this shell had failed to explode and it had been disarmed. The ships gunnery officer who had disarmed the shell had sent a report on the advanced features both of the fuze but also on the general quality of the shell itself, which he felt was superior to the British 12” shells.
Scott wrote another note to the First Sea Lord with a circular to the First Lord requesting that an attempt be made to raise SMS Von der Tann, failing that for divers to salvage as much of the ship as possible, they should also do the same with the SMS Seydlitz. He also requested that the wrecks of the British battlecruisers be examined for information which would be pertinent in the future.
Admiral Sir Percy Scott was sitting in his office at the Admiralty, he was reviewing the battle damage from the Battle of Thornton Bank. There was significant concern about the value of Battlecruisers, the rapid destruction of two of them along with the loss of thousands of trained sailors had caused much anguish within the Admiralty.
Shifting his thoughts somewhat, Sir Percy let his mind wander back to the fairly brutal meeting he had had, with Sir John French on the previous day, scheduled before the Battle of Thornton Bank had occurred but impossible to decline or reschedule, owing to the intransigent nature of Sir John. During the meeting, messengers had brought in the first reports of the BEF’s first heavy fighting and the gunnery problems, but Sir John French was more concerned about the fact that the Yeomanry and Territorials seemed to be doing all the fighting and then he randomly spent ten minutes blackening the honour of France. His only other comments were on the unsporting conduct of Sampson machine gunning Cavalry and assuring Admiral Scott that the army had more than enough artillery.
Percy Scott was of the considered opinion that Sir John French was better suited to political intrigue than war, an opinion he had shared with Earl Roberts that evening at their club.
Admiral Scott remembered his efforts in the Boer war, there he had mounted Naval Guns on carriages for land service. Sir Percy had his secretary call for the design document from the admiralty archive where it had lain unreviewed since that fracas in South Africa. In addition, he summoned a pair of junior officers, who he felt could undertake the work of updating the design to accept the Mark VII 6” gun. Calling for one of his gunnery officer assistants and a junior constructor serving at the Admiralty, he gave them a thorough briefing on what he expected and gave them two weeks to have a design ready for mounting. He followed this up by sending orders to Chatham Docks to have a building shed ready to begin construction of the guns within two weeks. He then issued another order release the guns from reserve for land service. His last task was to send an order to whale island that a training draft of 600 seamen were to be trained on serving the gun to be ready for land service in four week’s time. At the same time 60 Naval Officers RNR or RNVR were to be trained as gunnery officers, both as battery commanders but also as Forward Observers, to direct naval gunfire more accurately.
He had all of this then dictated as a minute which he had forward to the Secretary of State for War, who had made a request to the First Lord of the Admiralty for the use of Naval personnel for Land Service. In the note he pointed out that with some 200 guns available in reserve he could provide 50 batteries for service in France. Once the 6” gun was in service he would look at having the same thing done with the 9.2” and 12” guns in reserve. He felt that the use of Bluejackets to provide gunnery support for the Army was entirely in keeping with the traditions of the Service.
He then went back to pondering the altogether more complex issues of ship design and director firing. He directed another letter to Admiral Jellicoe, this was to request that he release Captain Frederic Dreyer for service with Admiral Scott as his principal Gunnery Officer, Dreyer needed to meet with Percy Ludgate and get to work on the next generation of Gunnery Director.
HMS Princess Mary had reported that they had been hit by a German 11” shell likely from SMS Von der Tann, this shell had failed to explode and it had been disarmed. The ships gunnery officer who had disarmed the shell had sent a report on the advanced features both of the fuze but also on the general quality of the shell itself, which he felt was superior to the British 12” shells.
Scott wrote another note to the First Sea Lord with a circular to the First Lord requesting that an attempt be made to raise SMS Von der Tann, failing that for divers to salvage as much of the ship as possible, they should also do the same with the SMS Seydlitz. He also requested that the wrecks of the British battlecruisers be examined for information which would be pertinent in the future.
Not sure if ir feasible but the water there is pretty shallow under 25m. So I would expect they could have got hardsuit divers down to at least inspect the ships.
Early WW1 Is probably the easiest modern conflict to do that, any later and you'll have to contend with aircraft in addition to whatever naval forces sail out to contest this.
If the seabed is less than 25m, then the upperworks should be above the waves, so inspecting gunnery directors etc. could be done without getting wet.
And turrets shouldn't be too far down.
I suspect that the Germans would be unlikely to sail out to contest salvaging of any of their vessels at this stage, given the hammering they would have just had.
That is a very good point, I am using Percy Scotts memoirs as one of my sources, he speaks bitterly of the quality of German gunnery, elevation of guns, directors etc. His memoir includes a note he received from his son who died at Jutland bemoaning the relatively greater range of the German guns on their cruisers.