Category: Well I thought it was neat!
HMS Ark Royal early in WWII
The Second World War was the Royal Navy’s finest hour, so says the acclaimed naval historian, Paul Kennedy.
There are many remarkable aspects to Victory at Sea that might be the subject of an individual blog, but one I would like to call attention to is the way the book, and perhaps especially Ian Marshall’s illustrations, confirm how much the 1939-1945 war at sea was the Royal Navy’s War.
It was there at the very start, pushing out patrols and hunting-groups in search of the German surface raiders; and it was there at the every end, with British warships [HMS Duke of York] among the Allied fleets in Tokyo Bay in 1945, and another bidding godspeed to Pres Truman in Plymouth harbor after the Potsdam settlement is over.
By my count, a full 23 out of the 53 beautiful Ian Marshall paintings are of ships and naval actions involving the Royal Navy, and they range from paintings of storm-tossed little escorts to magnificent ones of the HMS Ark Royal being slowly towed into Malta’s Grand Harbour. The very cover of this book shows, dramatically, the Bismarck under attack by the puny [if also very effective] Swordfish torpedo planes.
Chapter after chapter of this book is devoted to what was really the greatest, longest-lasting maritime struggle of all, the Battle of the Atlantic, not concluded until the serried ranks of Doenitz’s U-boats were tied up in Allied harbours. And from chapter 5 there begins another campaign story, that of the Battle of the Mediterranean, including the Taranto Raid and the many Malta convoys. A whole number of Ian Marshall’s paintings are of British warships at Malta, because that was one of his favourite places as a backdrop to his art.
And this was a Royal Navy which was willing to take incredible losses in the fight to keep control of the sea. Of course Churchill would have it no other way, but the service itself never flinched at the high costs of fighting – there is considerable detail throughout this book of the HUGE losses of merchant ships and escorts in the Atlantic and Arctic convoy campaigns, the stupendous cost in Royal Navy destroyers off Dunkirk and Crete, the terrifying Malta convoy experiences – just count how many cruisers and destroyers, not to mention the many original carriers, were lost against enemy action in this war.
And yet this was a navy that was still receiving newer and more effective warships from the hard-working British shipyards throughout the war: new KG-V-class battleships, the Illustrious-class carriers, town-class cruisers then many new light cruiser classes, fleet destroyers, frigates, sloops, corvettes.
If the lengthy conflict wore down the British economy, there was no sign of that until the very end – although it was clear by 1943 (this is one of the big points stressed in this book) that the US Navy was emerging as a far larger force than anything that had been seen in world history. And this is why, surely, the sub-title of this book Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II is most appropriate..”
Paul Kennedy is the author of Victory at Sea: Naval Power and the Transformation of the Global Order in World War II, published by Yale University Press.
Lesson: If you can’t take care of yourself, you can’t take care of those who count on you … and the innermost bastion of security is yourself.
The world remembers Sir Winston Churchill as a long-serving British statesman and the Prime Minister who guided an underdog Great Britain successfully through World War II. What few history students learn about him is Churchill was very much a gun guy. He had killed enemy combatants with a pistol, loved to shoot and routinely carried a gun.
Churchill The Gunfighter
In 1898, at the battle of Omdurman in the Sudan, Churchill was a young cavalry officer. More than half a century later he would tell a biographer, “On account of my shoulder (which had been dislocated in India) I had always decided that if I were involved in hand-to-hand fighting, I must use a pistol and not a sword. I had purchased in London, a Mauser automatic pistol, then the newest and latest design. I had practiced carefully with this during our march and journey up the river.” (1)
Churchill was part of a cavalry charge under way through a gulley when he found he and his comrades were up against a much larger enemy than they had anticipated: an estimated 3,000 fighters who far outnumbered his own contingent. He told one biographer, “I drew my Mauser pistol — a ripper — and cocked it. Then I looked to my front. Instead of the 150 riflemen who were still blazing I saw a line nearly (in the middle) 12 deep of closely jammed spearmen — all in a nullah with steep sloping sides six feet deep and 20 feet broad.” (2)
Churchill was soon amidst a maelstrom of enemy troops, profoundly outnumbered. The great historian William Manchester would later describe what happened to Churchill in those moments, sometimes using Churchill’s own quotes. Churchill saw his men being “dragged from their horses and cut to pieces by the infuriated foe.” Finding himself “surrounded by what seemed to be dozens of men,” he “rode up to individuals firing my pistol in their faces and killing several — three for certain, two doubtful — one very doubtful.”
One was swinging a gleaming, curved sword, trying to hamstring the pony. Another wore a steel helmet and chain-mail hangings. A third came at him “with uplifted sword. I raised my pistol and fired. So close were we that the pistol itself actually struck him.” The dervish mass, he saw, was re-forming. He later recalled, “The whole scene seemed to flicker.” He looked around. His troop was gone. His squadron was gone. He could not see a single British officer or trooper within a hundred yards.
Hunching down over his pommel, he spurred his pony free and found his squadron 200 yards away, faced about and already forming up. His own troop had just finished sorting itself out, but as he joined it a dervish sprang out of a hole in the ground and into the midst of his men, lunging about with a spear. They thrust at him with their lances; he dodged, wheeled and charged Churchill. “I shot him at less than a yard. He fell on the sand and lay there dead. How easy to kill a man! But I did not worry about it. I found I had fired the whole magazine of my Mauser pistol, so I put in a new clip of 10 cartridges before thinking of anything else.”
It occurred to him if he hadn’t injured his shoulder in Bombay, he would have had to defend himself with a sword and might now be dead. Afterward he reflected, “One must never forget when misfortunes come that it is quite possible they are saving one from something much worse.” He wrote his mother Jennie: “The pistol was the best thing in the world.” (3)
Churchill and his biographer were not the only ones to conclude the 10-shot Mauser saved his life, and neither the saber nor a revolver with five or six shots might have sufficed. There had been little time in the melee, needing one hand to control the reins of his horse, to eject spent casings and insert live cartridges into a wheel gun.
Notes another biographer, Martin Gilbert in Churchill: A Life, “The cavalry charge was over, and the troop dispersed. ‘It was, I suppose, the most dangerous two minutes I shall live to see,’ Churchill told Hamilton. Of the 310 officers and men in the charge, one officer and 20 men had been killed, and four officers and 45 men wounded. ‘All this in 120 seconds!’ Churchill commented. He had fired ‘exactly 10 shots’ and had emptied his pistol, ‘but without a hair of my horse or a stitch of my clothing being touched. Very few can say the same.’” (4)
Churchill The Shooter
Winston Churchill owned a substantial collection of fine guns, including magnificent bespoke shotguns from the finest English makers, and loved to hunt.
No one knew his proclivities in firearms better than his long-time bodyguard, Scotland Yard Inspector Walter Henry Thompson. “Churchill offered to pay me five pounds a week as his bodyguard in a purely private capacity. He gave me his Colt automatic to use — and I may say with pride that I am the only man Mr. Churchill has allowed to handle his guns. He is a first-class shot and takes a jealous pride in his personal armory.”
Thompson added, “Although he recognized some measures had to be taken for his security, he was confident in any real pinch he, Winston Churchill, would probably be able to look after himself, personally. When we were at Chequers, the country home of Britain’s prime ministers, he often went to a nearby range and proved himself a first-class shot with his Mannlicher rifle, his .45 Colt automatic and a service .38 Webley. He was particularly deadly with the Colt and there would have been little chance for anyone who came in range of that weapon with unfriendly intent.” (5)
Just what did Thompson mean by “first-class shot”? “We set up an outdoor range at Chequers and to this he would frequently repair and fire a hundred rounds or so with his Mannlicher rifle, 50 rounds from his Colt .45, or an equal number from his .32 Webley Scott. He gets well onto the target with all three, but with the Colt Automatic he is absolutely deadly … A gun is something he understands entirely.”
Adds Thompson, “Near the war’s end, while practicing with me at outdoor targets, with officers of the guard in competition and firing an old Colt .45, only one of Churchill’s bullets was on the fringe of the bullseye, the other nine being dead center. This target was taken down and marked by me and noted by those who were with him then. Later I had it officially entered and dated, and it is now in the Chequers library.” (6)
The Concealed Carrier
Winston Churchill learned early in his adult life the value of a discreetly concealed handgun. In 1899 during the Boer War, he was captured but managed to escape. A sympathizer furnished him with provisions and a concealable revolver before he sneaked onto a train to get farther out of reach of the enemy. He kept the revolver, described as a six-shot pin-fire. A part of his estate, it sold for 32,000 English pounds at auction in 2002.
Richard Law, one of the leading lights fighting for gun owners’ rights in Great Britain, is a prolific writer and skilled researcher. He discovered when he learned Thompson, Churchill’s long-standing bodyguard, carried a .32 caliber mouse gun, Churchill requisitioned a Colt .45 and furnished it to him.
Later, discovering Thompson was still carrying the .32, a disgusted Churchill demanded the .45 back and stuck it in his overcoat pocket to use as his own. Law’s research turned up photos of Churchill in which a remarkably 1911-looking object is printing under his suit coat or his ulster, in the right hip area.
Bodyguard Thompson is our most thorough source of information on the Prime Minister’s concealed carry habits. In Thompson’s autobiography he said of Churchill, “People ask me if Mr. Churchill, in times of danger, was not usually armed, and this is my answer. He was when he remembered to carry his weapon. He was an unusually fine shot, with either rifle or revolver, and later became deadly with some of the most lethal of the automatic weapons that we were to develop, including the Sten.
He loved firearms and I believe loved the sound of them. He practiced target shooting in the basements of his various residences and never refused to ‘have a shoot’ with me when I felt it was time to check his handling of arms.
Being a good shot is like being a good pianist: One cannot grow rusty and return suddenly to dependable controls. One can leave his guns alone for weeks and, by practicing a few hours each day for several days, recover all his skills, but he cannot recover them immediately. So, while it was all right for Mr. Churchill, in periods when he was not a protected public servant in high office, to ignore this somewhat realistic side of survival, I never recommended it, knowing these periods would be brief.”
Throughout his book Thompson constantly describes himself as carrying two handguns, usually two revolvers.
Unfortunately, he seems to have the curious habit of describing all handguns as revolvers. One gets the inference he is often referring to the pistol Scotland Yard issued for such close protection details: the 1914 Webley .32 auto. Heavy-for-caliber at 2.5 lbs. and with the pointing characteristics of a T-square, this rickety-looking pistol had a reputation as a jam-o-matic and remains a contestant for the ugliest handgun of all time. Churchill himself owned one, and perhaps his experiences with it were part of his concern when he tried to switch his bodyguard to a Colt 1911.
Thompson’s remark quoted here earlier indicates the Prime Minister wasn’t strictly consistent with carrying a firearm. “His sense of personal safety had largely left him, to the extent that he would tire of carrying his revolver and forget it. He’d lay it down somewhere and leave it if I didn’t check it each time. Sometimes when I found him unarmed, I’d have to give him one of my own revolvers. I didn’t like to do this and didn’t often have to. I’m very used to the few that I work with, but it was of course essential that he should not be alone at any time — even in the middle of the night in his own bed — without a revolver in reach … He would draw his gun and pop it into sudden view and say roguishly and with delight: ‘You see, Thompson, they will never take me alive. I will get one or two before they take me down.’”
Fortunately, Winston Churchill never got the chance to find out. There were many Nazi assassination plots against him: During the Blitz, bombs fell near his residences, obviously targeted. In at least one case, Nazi agents parachuted into Britain to kill him. None got close. Between Scotland Yard and the military, all were scooped up before they could get in position to take a shot at the great man.
The Heads-Up Gunner
Winston Churchill liked his automatic weapons. In one of his most famous photos, he is wearing a pinstripe suit and chomping on his ever-present cigar as he holds a .45 caliber Thompson submachine gun with drum magazine and pistol grip fore-end. Adolf Hitler, historians say, despised Churchill with a venom exceeded only by the Prime Minister’s hatred of him. Hitler used the photo of Churchill with the “tommy gun” to claim the English leader was merely a clone of a stereotype American gangster.
Churchill was also an aficionado of Britain’s signature SMG, the Sten gun. He had his own Mark III Sten, which had been presented to him personally, as well as a Thompson in his own battery. He reportedly had one or the other in his limousine, depending on his conveyance of the day. And he shared his appreciation for buzz guns with others he knew were at risk of assassination.
In his excellent new book on the time of The Blitz, The Splendid and the Vile, Erik Larson focuses primarily on Churchill and those around him. Larson writes, “The queen began taking lessons in how to shoot a revolver. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I shall not go down like the others.’” (7)
Other sources say Churchill arranged for a Thompson — and competent instruction — to be delivered to all the Royal Family. All of them shot it: King George, his consort, and their daughters Elizabeth and Margaret, then 14 and 10 years of age. One source says the Queen Mother liked to shoot rats in the gardens of Buckingham Palace, though presumably not with the tommy gun.
Winston Churchill’s two minutes with a Mauser C96 in his hand during the charge at the Battle of Omdurman had a profound influence that went far beyond his own survival. If you read Churchill, it becomes clear he went to war as a young man seeing combat as a theater for chivalry. The battle of Omdurman changed this for him profoundly. Against a vastly greater force, the English and their allies had decisively prevailed. The enemy had been softened up by massive barrages of British artillery and Maxim machine guns. Winston Churchill rode out of the battle alive only because he had the most modern, high-tech firepower that could be wielded in one hand in the year 1898.
WWI found Churchill as a young member of Parliament, advocating for high-tech warfare. He’s credited with convincing the British government to develop tanks. As Prime Minister in WWII, he consistently funded newer and better airplanes, espionage apparatus and more. The epiphany that brought about those war-winning changes was born in two minutes of shooting the most modern handgun of the day, with his life on the line. And, as we’ve seen, his example of being constantly ready for individual combat against a homicidal foe is an inspiration to every free individual.
Footnotes: (1) Boothroyd, Geoffrey. The Handgun. NYC: Bonanza Books, 1970, p. 397. (2) Manchester, William. The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1983, pp. 277–279. (3) Manchester, William, Ibid. (4) Gilbert, Martin. Churchill: A Life. NYC: Henry Holt & Co., 1991, p. 96. (5) Thompson, W.H. “I Guarded Winston Churchill,” Maclean’s, 10/15/51, pp. 10–11. (6) Thompson, Walter Henry. Assignment: Churchill. Arcole Publishing 2018 edition, originally published 1955. (7) Larson, Erik. The Splendid and the Vile. Random House, 2020, p. 130.
The cocktail that beat the Nazis in Egypt
When considering the origins of legendary cocktails, it’s doubtful that Egypt is the first place to spring into anyone’s mind. Like many culinary innovations made during World War II, “The Suffering Bastard” is a concoction birthed from a world of limited supplies in which everyone had to make do with whatever they could get their hands on – and it shows.
The Suffering Bastard is a legendary beverage, created by a legendary barman, in time and place where new legends were born every day. The unlikely mixture is said to have turned the tides of the war against Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Corps in Egypt. True or not, it succeeded in its original mission: curing the hangovers of British troops so they could push Rommel back to Tunisia.
In 1941, World War II was not going well for the British Empire. Even though the previous year saw British and Imperial troops capture more than 100,000 Italian Axis troops in North Africa, Hitler soon sent in his vaunted Afrika Corps to bolster Axis forces in the region.
Up against crack German troops led by capable tank strategist and Field Marshal, Erwin Rommel, the British experienced a number of defeats in the early months of 1941. They were pushed out of Libya and the lines were within 150 miles of the Egyptian capital of Cairo. His goal was to capture the Suez Canal and cut the British Empire in two.
During the Battle of El-Alamein, Rommel was quoted as saying “I’ll be drinking champagne in the master suite at Shepheard’s soon,” referring to the world-famous Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo. Inside the hotel was the well-known Long Bar and behind that bar was bartender, Joe Scialom, whose stories could rival anyone’s, from Ernest Hemingway to Ian Fleming.
Scialom was a Jewish Egyptian with Italian roots. Born in Egypt, he was a trained chemist who worked in Sudan in his formative years but soon found he enjoyed applying the principles of chemistry to making drinks. The chemist-turned-barman who spoke eight languages would eventually travel the world over, to Cairo, Havana, London, Paris, Rome, Istanbul, and Manhattan, drinking alongside folks like Winston Churchill and Conrad Hilton. Much of that would come later, however. In 1941, he was the barkeep at the Long Bar and he was faced with a unique problem.
The war made it very difficult to get good liquor in Egypt. British officers resorted to drinking liquor that wasn’t made of such high quality and soon began complaining about terrible hangovers. In an effort to do his part for the British, Scialom set out to make a drink that would give them the effect they wanted while curing their inevitable hangovers. He used an unlikely combination of bourbon and gin along with added lime, ginger ale, and bitters to create a drink that did the job perfectly.
Many variations on the original recipe exist, to include ingredients like pineapple syrup and rum, but the original Suffering Bastard used bourbon and gin as its base.
The Recipe:
- Equal parts Bourbon, Gin, and Lime Juice
- A dash of Angostura bitters
- Top off with ginger beer
His creation was so successful in fact, in 1942, he received a telegram from the British front lines asking for eight gallons of the cocktail to be brought to the front at El-Alamein. Scialom filled any container he could find with Suffering Bastard and shipped it off to the war.
The first Battle of El Alamein in 1942 resulted in a stalemate. The Axis supply lines from Libya were stretched out to their breaking point and Rommel could not press on to Alexandria. Before the second Battle of El Alamein, the ranking British general, Claude Auchinleck, was replaced. His spot eventually taken by one General Bernard Montgomery. The next time the two sides met at El Alamein, Montgomery was in command and British hangovers were a thing of the past. Monty and the British Empire troops turned Rommel away and pushed him westward toward an eventual defeat.