To all Englishmen with salt water in their veins !

US citizenship

Whilst still on the above subject, a few of you might be amused to learn that my Dad ( who was as English as roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.........although, since he came from Nottinghamshire would doubtless have preferred to be described as " as English as black pudding and tripe and onions " ! ) moved Heaven and Earth to get me born in the US ! As an apprenticed pre-war naval architect and wartime Torpedo boat skipper, shortly after the war he obtained a contract to offer a range of consultation services to the USN on fast patrol boat construction. He, and my mother ( pregnant with me ), were booked to cross to the US on one of the Queens ( I think it was the "Queen Mary" ), but, in common with many other passengers, lost our booking when they were requisitioned by the US Government, who were desperate to bring back an ever increasing number of G.I's from Europe. So, I never made it to the US in time enough to be born there, and had to wait a long time to ever get my US nationality !
BG

 

Bosworth:
I have not found anything to suggest a date for launching for the USS New York... which also breaks with US naval tradition for naming this ship for a state. That naming convention has up-to-now been reserved for our nuclear attack subs.
I think I just gave you an excuse to visit wit' cher kin in Mississippi an' Loosiana! I do enjoy that cajun-food now, having had the opportunity to down large portions of duck-gumbo in Lake Charles, along with crawfeesh e'tu-fay and boo-dan. Man is that stuff ever addictive... great duck-blind food.
-----------
I do hope you find the opportunity to see an HMS capital ship of the line christened and launched in your lifetime. I"m sure it would be a stirring event to witness.

Tim

 

Food?

Bosworth...... as someone who lives just a few yards from Market Bosworth and an ancient Midlander I'm surprised that your father regarded as a typical Nottingham dish ' black-pudding' and 'tripe and onions'? More 'oop-north' I'd have thought a traditional Lancashire dish.
I'm also rather surprised that he found many Locomotives or gasometers to shoot up in the North Sea or the Channel. :roll:
Was he the same chap that served with the 17/20th in Vietnam in Chieftans??

 

there are times when a skipper is justfied in strikeing his colors to save his remaining crew members . there are other times when he should fight or flee or scuttle ..the pueblo surrender and the skipper who landed his dammaged spy plane at a chinese airbase to me , were a disgrace ..im not totally familiar with the options available to the rn zodiak skipper in the gulf incident but it smells to me of pueblo like sniveling ....i dont think lord nelson or pm winston would say .."well she was right to save her crew after all thats the important thing in war "..we dont want our fighting men being injured , after all...

 

Well as I said previously I really don't see what else they're supposed to have done.

A total of 14 men and 1 woman aboard an Indian Merchantman equipped with small arms against a number or Iranian Destroyers (Note: plural). As much as I believe the 5.56mm NATO round gets quite an unfair bashing their SA80s were really not up to taking out warships. Maybe they could/should have requested aircraft so a flyby, but maybe their were none close enough, maybe they should have stayed closer to their ship, maybe that wouldn't have mattered either or made matters even worse.

As for what's important in war, well that last word is critical here, we're not at war with the Iranians. If there were declared hostilities that would have been a different matter.

Snivelling? Not at all, what would be the point of dying uselessly in a battle you couldn't hope to even have the least effect on besides maybe chipping the paint on an enemy destroyer (That's assuming the rounds would have even made it far enough to hit one)?

 

ok ..but i still think the pueblo skipper and the guy who got bumped into landing his high tech spy plane on a chinese airfeild were not examples of john paul jones or lord nelsonesq behaviour ..i mean a miltary officer is held to a higher code of conduct than a merchant cargo skipper,ESPECIALLY when on the world stage of a potential LOSS OF FACE FOR MY ENTIRE SERVICE AND MY COUNTRY WHICH WOULD LAST AND REEK FOR many DECADES TO COME ....incident AND not " oh goodness me ! you scratched my paint , you brute!! ...can i surrender now?" your right , SIMON ..im not in their shoes but i would hope that i would have enough nerve to at least scuttle or ditch and not surrender my state of the art spy equipment , INTACT !! natioal pride and morale still have some importance even in this modern nanny state age...god ..its a good thing fisher and beatty and halsey and king and mac and patton and winston and ohare and morton and kipling and mountbatten and mccuden and....are all dead ..huh ..

 

Well, they could have done what these handsome chaps did...

http://canberra.yourguide.com.au/detail ... ry=general

The question is would Iran have risked opening fire on British sailors, knowing it would escalate the situation? It is unlikely that they would have...

What happened to the British sailors in Britain, did they get a trial? Here in Australia, a member of the defence force can go to jail for surrendering a ship to 'the enemy'... But as you said, can Iran be qualified as 'the enemy'?

 

Just to point out, quoted from the article:

 

i wonder if merlin and his mates applauded the plucky plump sea tart and her resolute bravery in the face overwhelming odds , did merlins old chums agree that a sudden and unexpected surrender was the right military action to throw the persians into complete dissarray ?...i would be curious to learn how the old school tommys and rn sea dogs reacted to the fast thinking actions of the rn pettycoat officer whose bold selfless bravery caused all in her command to drop their weapons and fall on their backs , lift their heels high in the air... showing the menaceing iranians the ancient agincourt yeomens V sign..i guess she taught those wogs a lesson they will not soon forget...will she get the V.C. ,a knighthood or perhaps have a RN frigate named in her honour some day ? ...surely she saved the lives of all of her men and not even one of her fingernails was broken in the incident...

 

I don't really see the point of this argument. Germany was beaten in two major wars, but that's all the past now, and what matters is the present. Maybe the Germans decided to put their backs into better tech and came up with some better tech? One way or the other, I think this is kind of a dumb argument.

 

LOL - I think Blaster may have posted in the wrong topic.

However, I do agree with his assessment on the argument...

Majorwoody, what would you have liked to see them do? They were positioned on a ladder halfway up the side of a merchant ship, being faced by Iranian destroyers. There is not even the option of 'forming a defensive position', let alone even pretending to be defiant.

The Auusie situation was rather different, they had a better position and were faced with a lesser enemy.

 

Majorwoody, I have several issues with what you have posted. First Wog, is an offensive, derrogatory and in the UK at the very least is regarded as a racist term. I would rather not see this or any other racist term used here personally, it devalues the forum and its members by association.

Second, before you are going to get all scathing about the event you may want to check the facts first. Leading Seaman Faye Tourney was not in command, so before you go slating her for the orders she gave you might want to consider the fact that she almost certainly gave no orders at all. She was not an "rn pettycoat officer" at all.

As for the "Plump sea tart" comment, such petty personal insults are pretty pathetic for this forum and contemptible really. If you have nothing constructive to add and can only resort to such derrogatory remarks, don't bother, you demean yourself and any point you might have been trying to make.

Do you have any reason to believe any of this will happen? If so why?

Frankly your grasp of the details of this incident seems none-existant and the only purpose of your post seems to be to insult the British armed forces and aim personal insults against one individual in particular, Faye Tourney, the only distinguishing detail seems to be the fact that she is a woman. Neither mature or constructive.

Again, I will echo my own earlier and Ricky's question.

What would you have done? Caught halfway down a ladder on the side of a civilian merchantman at sea with your SA80 presumably slung and confronted with Iranian destroyers, how would you have acted?

It's very easy to be scathing and insulting from the safety of your computer desk, but would you really have chanced it that the Iranians were going to allow you to reboard the freighter, or escape to your boat? Would you have risked leaving your children fatherless and having the deaths of 14 of your comrades on your hands? Just for a moment of futile bravado?

A battle where you have a chance of causing some damage to the enemy is one thing, but this would have been more one sided for the Iranians than swatting flies. Winston may have been defiant, but he was not delusional, I doubt he would have been overly judgemental in this case.

As for those involved, there was an enquiry as was pretty much inevitable in cases such as this which concluded that there were lessons to be learnt but no-one was blamed or court martialled.

 

Okay, guys, time to go to a neutral corner and chill out. Woody, please be more careful in your comments and in how you phrase them. Simon does have a point about the term wog, and personal attacks on the RN petty officer are uncalled for. Someone points a couple of destroyers at you, I wonder if you (or me, for that matter) could do any better, under the same circumstances.

And Simon, while you do indeed have a lot of valid points in what you said, please remember in the future to make them in a less hostile and confrontational manner. It's far better, IMHO, to fight fire with water, rather than with more fire, and it does take two to make a fight. Lectures can make a situation worse.

 

No, Ricky, I was intending to post what I did on this topic, and I do think this is kind of pointless, at least the way bosworth ganaway phrased it. So what if Germany lost two major wars in the past?

 

Sorry Blaster - you wre obviously referring back to the actual topic, rather than the interruption about the Iranian navy. My mistake,

 

I do not believe my post was hostile or confrontational at all. My comments were aimed at the wording and langauge of Majorwoody's posts which I felt were beneath the level I have come to expect of this forum and I explained why I felt that way. I do not feel my response was unfair, hostile or confrontational. Harsh perhaps, but I feel that it was not unwarranted.

I was not attempting to start a fight and I really do not think it comes over that way, I was however disagreeing with Majorwoody on account of the poor, even insulting wording of his post and the inaccuracies it contained.

As for lecturing, perhaps, yet this is not the first time in this thread that Majorwoody has seen fit to pass judgement on the participants in this incident, including blaming Leading Seaman Tourney for decisions that she did not make and indeed as a rating was not even in a position to make, in spite of the fact he has demonstrated a near complete ignorance of the events he is criticising.

 

...sry simon ,it may seem silly but i am sort of embarrassed by this loss of face for the RN .. i guess our common language and heritage .... even when we had to stay on the sidelines and watch the falklands war ...americans were by and large , openly rooting for the uk forces... and our being close allies in the debacles of the last century may be it ...if it were the dutch,french ,italian ,s.korean or norwegien navy it really wouldnt have smarted at all ...the RN is the father of the US navy ....and at least tourny did not surrender a bunch of state of the art spy equipment as did the US navy as pointed out by me in this very thread ....i didnt realize that TOURNY had orders from above to surrender ..i was under the impression that she was in command of the boarding partie , i apologise to ms tourney and i dont think she is too plump either ...who did order this heroic action ,was tournys boss in the helicopter above , who dun it?

 

What loss of face? What could fifteen individuals armed with small arms and in a totally exposed position have hoped to have achieved against Destroyers (Plural)? They had no chance of any other outcome that might not have involved a catastrophic loss of life among RN personel and a zero impact on Iranian personel. Where is the loss of face? Yet again I ask, what would you have done in their place?

Who exactly is claiming that this incident was heroic? I am not, no-one on here has claimed so, infact you have been the only one to make any direct reference to heroism in connection to this event.

I do not understand why you are under the impression that Tourney was in command at all, she was a Rating, no more than the equivilent of an Army Corporal if I understand the Navy equivalent correctly. It was not a case of her being directly ordered from a helicopter above and she certainly wasn't in command of the boarding party. Lieutenant Felix Carman RN was in command of the boarding party aboard the ship and he was among the hostages taken. Faye Tourney's significance in the incidence seems to have been taken out of all proportion, by yourself especially.

 

was it really a dark foggy night ,or were the detroyers submerged until the last second ...how did the iranian warshps sneak up and catch these rn men "halfway down the ladder" ? ..could not carran stayed aboard the vessel turned towards help and sent an sos..was the RN command happy with this action did they agree ?..it was his best option , or his only option ...

 

Majorwoody has a point... If it was two detroyers that they were up against, why did the RN let that happen? What happened to intelligence, shouldn't the sailors have been informed that there were detroyers in the area? And how can you be snuck up upon by a destroyer, a vessel 100m long and with a speed of 30 knots? Was anyone actually on lookout for Iranian vessels? It seems as much (if not more) a failure on the part of RN intelligence as it does upon the sailors.

If they were indeed caught with their pants down, halfway down the ladder, how did they allow that to happen? Didn't they see the boats coming? Were they not aware of the Iranian presence and if not, why not? They certainly could have been more vigilant.

And then theres the question whether the Iranian sailors would have been agressive if the Brits had refused to comply. Would they really risk violence knowing it would incur unwanted attention from the RN and USN?

I agree that is seems like a loss of face for the RN.
That said I don't know what actually happened and there may be reasonable excuses for all these questions. After all it was indeed a very dire situation for the sailors, and it was a tough decision to make, but it nevertheless does seem as if the RN made some very big blunders. Perhaps weather was extremely bad and the sailors could not see a thing. Being 'snuck up' upon by TWO destroyers, does sound embarassing...