NASAFAN101 wrote:Dunserving,
Wong again, Here: The German battle-cruiser's magazines blew up and she rolled over and sank, taking with her 1,968 men. A mere 36 survived. At last the Rawalpindi had been avenged.
Nikki
This is becoming quite unbelievable. You make a statement like that with no evidence or justification. Your quote does in fact come from a source that is not in the least academic, referenced, or reliable in the military sense. Had you examined the material carefully you would have seen that the gist of the article, written by Highlanders is about three young Highlanders who died on the Rawalpindi, and that by the sinking of the Scharnhorst those deaths were avenged. It has nothing at all to do with the question of picking up or abandoning survivors, yet that is the sense in which you have tried to use it. You have made the very basic mistake of taking a single sentence out of context and trying to use it to back up your error.
The article is reaonably well written and eminently readable, but it is riddled with statements that can hardly be justified and errors that frankly unforgiveable. For example, it refers to "Beaufort fighter aircraft" - but the Bristol Beaufort was a TORPEDO BOMBER! It goes on to say that Scharnhorst was finally sunk by a torpedo from HMS Belfast (a fine ship that I've spent quite a bit of time on in my day), but that is nonsense. The torpedo that finally did for Scharnhorst was fired by HMS Jamaica, and if you care to take a look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HMS_J ... edomen.jpg you'll find a picture of the men who fired it taken just a few days later. It is true though that HMS Belfast claimed to have made the final hit, but I rather think anyone who fired any kind of weapon that day would have liked to make the same claim. There is also a claim that the final blow was delivered by a Norwegian destroyer.
It states that the Scharnhorst's "magazines blew up and she rolled over and sank". That is very hard to justify as there is a profound lack of first hand evidence. Nobody on a British ship saw her sink, and the statement does not match up with evidence from the survivors.
The article is full of flowery emotive language making statements that are not supported by evidence and which carry the ring of fiction. HMS Rawalpindi is described as a "gallant little ship", yet the truth is she was a converted ocean going passenger liner weighing roughly 17,000 tons, 2,000 tons MORE than the Prinz Eugen.
Statements made about events on board during the battle are not evidenced in any way. Some of the statements are either entirely fiction or are based on the unreliable evidence of survivors. An example of this is Royson Leadbetter who wrote "Our guns opened up in retaliation, and we hit one of the ships several times causing some casualties. " He could not possibly have known they had caused casualties, and his report is therefore including other material that had heard since the sinking and which he then includes as fact from himself.
Nobody writing an accurate reliable academic article would make mistakes like that, certainly not a military historian who would write the kind of material you should be researching from. Ome_Joop has clearly got a much better understanding! Should you see this Ome_Joop her source is
http://www.internet-promotions.co.uk/ar ... lpindi.htm
