Thick end of the wedge - by Richard... Friday, July 16, 2010

Thick end of the wedge - by Richard... Friday, July 16, 2010

"EU to be given prominent UN role," writes Bruno Waterfield, noting that the EU is to be given similar rights and powers to a fully fledged nation state in the United Nations general assembly.

This is the general assembly, not the Security Council, so it isn't taking our seat, and all that garbage. Not that it really makes much difference. On UN matters, we tend to follow the EU lead, only disguise it to make it look as if we are still in control ... just as we do with other EU-related issues.

The special significance here is that this is implementing the Lisbon treaty, and it is happening under the Tory watch – with absolutely no difference from what would have happened if Labour had managed to cling on to power. In other words, in this vital area of international relations, nothing at all is affected by a change in administration. We're shocked!

Little Willie Hague, conscious of the embarrassment quotient, is trying to put a brave face on it. EU sources are giving the game away though. They are telling Bruno that he was forced to "back down" and accept this enhanced role for the EU as part of the creation of a Brussels diplomatic service under the Lisbon Treaty. So much for "in Europe but not ruled by Europe", but then that always was fantasy.

We are also getting extruded verbal material from David Lidington, the Europe minister. He is stressing that Britain had imposed strict conditions on the EU's new UN role. Yeah, yeah. And Red Riding Hood imposed strict conditions on Big Bad Wolf before granny visiting rights were extended.

"The UK's support is strictly limited and does not imply agreement to seek additional rights in any other forums and does not prejudge whether the EU should actually exercise those rights on any particular issue," says Lidington.

Farage is in his element, with something happening that even he can understand. "This is the thin end of the wedge. How long before David Cameron concedes our seat at the UN Security Council?" he asks, throwing in an unmemorable one-liner to boot. "The Tory government has swallowed EU federalism hook, line and rusty old sinker," says his PR man on his behalf.

The thin end of the wedge analogies are a bit late though. We're well past the thin end, choking on the thick end ... and they're still hammering it in. You can see the wedge at the back of the picture and we're about two-thirds down it.

Funny enough, the only real opposition is coming from Arab and African countries. They have expressed anger because their own regional organisations will not be given the same privileges as the EU. But that will be the next step. Regional governments, as part of the New World Order. 

Little Willie is watching it all happen, of course. But he can do (or will do) precisely nothing about it.

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Day 6 – Battle of Britain - by Richard... Thursday, July 15, 2010

A little known but vital part of the Battle of Britain was the RAF's reconnaissance effort. And, by the time the Luftwaffe was conducting operations across the Channel, the RAF was operating a variety of types, including Spitfire Mk 1Cs (pictured). This specially modified aircraft had cameras in the blister under the starboard wing. The port blister held extra fuel.

That there came to be this capability is almost a matter of accident, and certainly not through any great enthusiasm of the RAF, which disliked specialist units and men. Initially, therefore, before the official start of hostilities, the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6) working with the French commissioned the Australian Sidney Cotton to fly clandestine photographic surveillance missions using Cotton's Aircraft Operating Company based at Heston airfield.

Cotton's company was formally taken over by the RAF in September 1939, the secret Flight at Heston became No 2 Camouflage Unit. Cotton (pictured) was given a commissioned rank of Squadron Leader with the acting rank of Wing Commander. He then went on to fight for the best he could obtain from the Air Ministry in both equipment and men. 

In a period of 12 months, Cotton revolutionised the role of photographic reconnaissance in the RAF. Sadly, the Air Ministry in their minds could see that Cotton's Unit was becoming his own private air force, "Cotton's Circus" it has been called, so on the 16 June 1940 Cotton was handed a letter stating that he had been dismissed as OC of the Unit and it was being placed under the command of C-in-C Coastal Commander with Wing Commander G W Tuttle appointed has the new CO.

The specialist Spitfires came into being after Flying Officer Maurice Longbottom, inspired by Sidney Cotton, filed in August 1939 a memorandum on Photographic Reconnaissance of Enemy Territory in War with RAF Headquarters. Longbottom advocated that airborne reconnaissance would be a task better suited to fast, small aircraft which would use their speed and high service ceiling to avoid detection and interception. 

As a result of a meeting with Dowding, two Spitfires, N3069 and N3071, were released and sent to the "Heston Flight", a highly secret reconnaissance unit under the command of Cotton. These two Spitfires were "Cottonised" by stripping out the armament and radio-transmitters. 

After filling the empty gun ports and all panel lines, the airframe was rubbed down to remove any imperfections. Coats of a special very pale blue-green called Camoutin were applied and polished. Initially, two F.24 cameras with five inch (127 mm) focal length lenses, which could photograph a rectangular area below the aircraft, were installed in the wing space vacated by the inboard guns. Heating equipment was installed on all PR Spitfires to stop the cameras from freezing and the lenses from frosting over at altitude. 

And the unit was put to good use. Between July and October – the span of the Battle of Britain - the Photographic Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) as it was then called, flew over 700 sorties, for a loss of seven Spitfires.

The RAF was not alone of course. The Luftwaffe had a significant reconnaissance effort and on Monday 15 July 1940 it was out in full force. Alerted to intense shipping movement in the Channel, II Fleigerkorps then decided to brave the low cloud which dominated the day, otherwise hampering operations. 


Fifteen Do 17s (pictured) went into action, reaching a convoy only to be thwarted by Hurricanes of Nos 56 and 151 Sqn. A small force of bombers also crept inland and bombed the Westland factory at Yeovil, and other targets in the west of England and Wales. 

Overall, in a very light day, the RAF flew 449 sorties and lost one Hurricane. The Germans lost three machines in all, including a He 111 off the coast of Scotland.

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In good hands? - by Richard...

"In many respects I think we've been more successful than I anticipated … Not only has Nato unequivocally proved it can fight but actually, militarily, it has defeated the Taliban." So said General David Richards, in February 2007, as he passed command of Nato forces in Afghanistan from the British Army to his American successor, General Dan McNeil.

This is the same Gen Richards who has been appointed CDS. Col Richard Kemp, who commanded British troops in Afghanistan in 2003, said his role for Cameron will be as important as Winston Churchill's wartime chief, General Sir Alan Brooke. "To have a soldier who has the operational experience, particularly in Afghanistan, will make all the difference."

Well, those three years ago - and some months - he had not made that much of a difference. I was writing that we needed a little bit a realism. In short, I said, we need to be worrying that, in the next few, crucial months of the Afghan campaign, we could very well have an unacceptable number of dead armed forces.

That was in this piece here, which is worth another read. And when you have looked at it, please tell me that, with Richards as CDS, we are in good hands, and that we are really going to see a difference?

So far, it does not look good. The attack this week, reports the Montreal Gazette, on a major Afghan police base in Kandahar that killed nine — including three American soldiers — was the best planned and most advanced that US soldiers who fought it off have seen in the past year, US military officials said Thursday.

"It was definitely well-planned and co-ordinated much better than anything we've seen before," said Capt. Steven J Davis of Lansing, Mich., as US and Afghan forces worked to repair the damage. 

Not bad for a force that has been defeated militarily.

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A troubled soul - by Richard...

An extraordinary attack by Tim Holmes on his blog Climate Safety reveals a great deal about the warmist mentality. Note how Holmes (MA in Media and Communications from Goldsmiths College, University of London and a degree in English and Related Literature from the University of York) luxuriates in the use of the word "falsehood", rolling it out at every possible opportunity, wrapping himself in its embrace and lavishing his affection on it. 

Such are the intellectual contortions though, that he is driven to micro-analysis of extracts from comments taken from a forum to make his (laborious) case, cherry picking the perceived weaknesses and pouring all his resources into his attempt at trashing them.

We can see the technique under the heading: "Did the IPCC make an erroneous, unfounded statement?" - where Holmes offers the sub-header: "Falsehood (in North's 13th comment) ", his example of this "falsehood" being a selected extract from a longer comment. 

Thus Holmes uses: "The only way, therefore, to fix Amazongate is for the IPCC to do the decent thing and admit it is wrong." The entire post is replicated above (click the pic to enlarge). The extract that he quotes is arguable, but then this is an argument. To call it a "falsehood" is bizarre. But then, what do you expect of an "English and Related Literature" graduate from York University?

One could return the compliment and micro-analyse the micro-analysis. But one will not. We simply mark in passing the increasing desperation of the warmists to shore up a collapsing case, evidenced by the fact that there is not a single reference to the IPCC case being reliant on a single non-peer reviewed text from a Brazilian website. Invent a mote and forget the beam? Nice technique.

Meanwhile, that other towering intellect, Prince Charles, is accusing sceptics of peddling "pseudo science" – this from a man who had difficulty as a boy passing his O-levels and who talks to plants and believes in homeopathy. He and Holmes should get on well together.

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When the North wind doth blow - by Richard...

If you read people like Daniel Nepstad (who ever thought I'd ever be writing a post where I did not have to explain who he was?), you'd have got the impression that 2005 was Armageddon year for the Amazon, when the rains stopped and everything shrivelled up and died.

Of course, droughts in the Amazon aren't like that – more often they are characterised by the presence of a dry season when normally there is no break in the rains, or by an extension of the normal dry season. But, such is the vastness of the basin that even drought periods cannot be guaranteed to bring er ... drought.

That was the case in 2005 where, according to this paper, the drought did not affect central or eastern Amazonia. It was thus different from the El Niño-related droughts in 1926, 1983 and 1998, and makes a nonsense of a claim that a combination of ENSO and Atlantic-induced droughts will necessarary produce extended dry periods in the same areas. 

What actually happened in 2005 was that there was a extended dry season which heavily affected parts of southwestern Amazonia, giving rise to a considerable number of forest fires. This same area, currently under El Niño influence, seems now to be rather wet.

Certainly, in 2005 it is good to know that the rains returned in October 2005 and generated flooding after February 2006. And, as we have recorded, the flooding has continued to the present day.

But, according to a paper just published, that has not been all that has been going on. In early 2005 there was a single, huge, violent storm that swept across the whole Amazon forest, killing an estimated half billion trees, the current study being the first to produce an actual body count for this type of event.

The losses are much greater than previously suspected, the study's authors say, suggesting that storms may play a larger role in the dynamics of Amazon forests than previously recognized.

One of the lead researchers, Jeffrey Chambers, points out that the appearance of a forest hit by a storm is very different from one affected by drought – if you know what you are looking for. And, he says, "We can't attribute [the increased] mortality to just drought in certain parts of the basin—we have solid evidence that there was a strong storm that killed a lot of trees over a large part of the Amazon."

Thus, although in in 2005, large parts of the Amazon forest experienced one of the harshest droughts in the last century, with suggestion that drought was the single agent for a basin-wide increase in tree mortality, a very large area with major tree loss (the region near Manaus, in the Central Amazon) was not affected by the drought. 

There, the number of trees killed by the 2005 storm was equivalent to 30 percent of the annual deforestation in that same year for the Manaus region, which experiences relatively low rates of deforestation. And when researchers extrapolated the results to the whole Amazon basin, they came up with the figure of between 441 and 663 million trees destroyed - equivalent to 23 percent of the estimated mean annual carbon accumulation of the Amazon forest.

Given the huge controversy over forest loss due to climate change, one wonders how much of the loss in 2005 possibly attributable to storm damage has previously been attributed to drought, and how that might have affected the findings of the IPCC.

Whatever else though, this further points to the complexities of the Amazon, and underlines how little we know – so little that we really should be avoiding the simplistic nostrums of the warmists. We could be saving the planet from global warming, only to have blown down by the wind. But then, what we lose through more warming could be gained by the expected reduction in storms (or vice versa).

One also wonders whether the kids in the Amazon have their own little rhymes, such as, "when the North wind doth blow, we shall have matchsticks". It's not quite as good as our version, but it might sound better in Portuguese, or whatever.

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Day 5 – Battle of Britain - by Richard... Wednesday, July 14, 2010

July 14, seventy years ago was a Sunday. Kanalkampf was in full swing, on a day when the weather was set fair for another bloody series of contests. And although one of the ostensible Luftwaffe targets was the shipping plying the Channel and the southern ports, the longer game was to entice RAF fighters into to battle, on terms which were marginally favourable to the Germans.

Fortunately, we had a tactician in the form of Air Vice-Marshal Keith Park, boss of 11 Group which covered the south-east. He refused to commit large numbers of aircraft to the battle, husbanding his forces for the main assaults which he knew were to come. The unfortunate result of that was that only modest numbers of Spitfires and Hurricanes were overhead at any one time, and could quickly be overwhelmed, sometimes with fatal results, as this website records - from which much of this narrative is taken.

With battles breaking out all down the south coast, visible to cliff-top watchers for four days, the BBC decided to get in on the act and send commentator Charles Gardner to the cliff-tops of Dover on the afternoon of Sunday 14th July hoping to witness yet another air battle. At around 15:00 hours with microphone in hand, Gardner looked out from his grandstand view as a small convoy of merchant ships with Royal Navy escorts slowly slipped through the Dover Straits. Suddenly the sky out to sea began to reverberate to the sound of aircraft and within moments Gardner began to record his now famous broadcast (5:37 into the video):-

The Germans are dive-bombing a convoy out to sea! There are one, two, three, four, five, six, seven German dive-bombers! - Junkers Eighty-Sevens! There’s one going down on its target now - Bomb! No! He missed the ships – it hasn’t hit a single ship. There are about ten ships in the convoy, but he hasn’t hit a single one and - There! You can hear our anti-aircraft going at them now. There are one, two, three, four, five, six - there are about ten German machines dive-bombing the British convoy, which is just out to sea in the Channel.

Unknown to the BBC man but in accordance with Keith Park's tactics, there were just three Hurricanes belonging to Red Section of No.615 Squadron patrolling over the convoy. Hardly pausing for breath Gardner rattled on in ever growing excitement and glee!

I can't see anything. No! - We thought he had got a German one at the top then, but now the British fighters are coming up! Here they come. The Germans are coming in an absolute steep dive, and you can see their bombs actually leave the machines and come into the water. You can hear our guns going like anything now. I am looking round now - I can hear machine gun fire, but I can't see our Spitfires, they must be somewhere there. Oh! Here's one coming down!

From his vantage point and probably like any less-than-well-informed British patriot, Gardner would not have contemplated the RAF taking losses and believed that every RAF fighter was a Spitfire! The three Hurricanes were in fact heavily outnumbered and there were more than just the Stukas to deal with, as deadly Me 109s from both Jagdgeschwader 3 and 51 were providing escort to the dive-bombers. Watching as the spectacle in the sky continued, Gardner then joyously exclaimed:-

There's one going down in flames! Somebody's hit a German and he's coming down with a long streak - coming down completely out of control - a long streak of smoke. And now a man’s baled out by parachute! The pilot's baled out by parachute! He's a Junkers Eighty-Seven and he's going slap into the sea. And there he goes - SMASH! A terrific column of water and there was a Junkers Eight-Seven. Only one man got out by parachute, so presumably there was only a crew of one in it!

The Operational Record Book of No. 615 Squadron. recorded the following: "At 15:00 hours Red section were patrolling convoy near Dover, when convoy was attacked by 40 JU87s which were escorted by ME109s. Pilot Officer M.R. Mudie (Red 3) was shot down, and jumped by parachute. Red 1 and 2 put several bursts into JU87s but were unable to observe results as they were being attacked.

For 24 years old Michael Mudie had stood little chance in evading the Schwarms of Me 109s on his tail. No less than four Jagdflieger claimed a share in the destruction of his Hurricane (L1584 KW-G). These victorious German pilots included Oberfeldwebel Trebing of JG3, Walter Krieger of JG51 along with two of his better-known unit comrades by the names of Oberleutnant Josef Priller and Hauptmann Horst Tietzen.

Unaware of his error in misidentifying the shot down aircraft, Gardner did nevertheless state in his recording that:

It's impossible to tell which are our machines and which are the Germans!

Keeping his attention upon the battle still on-going he observed:

… I am looking out to sea now. I can see the little white dot of a parachute as the German pilot is floating down towards the spot where his machine crashed with such a big fountain of water about two minutes ago!

Tragically however the "German"’ under the parachute was a severely wounded Michael Mudie, and after commentating further on the air battle, things quietened down briefly for Gardner to remark:

No damage done, except to the Germans, who lost one machine and the German pilot, who is still on the end of his parachute … I can see no boat going out to pick him up, so he'll probably have a long swim ashore!

Knowing that Red Section was in trouble, No.615 Squadron had scrambled Yellow, Green and Blue Sections from their forward operating base at Hawkinge and would soon join the battle. Also about to engage with the enemy attackers were Hurricanes from No. 151 Squadron and the Spitfires of No.610 Squadron whose ensuing combat would begin to "entertain" Gardner quite considerably.

Oh, there's another fight going on, away up now! There we go again! What? - Oh! We have just hit a Messerschmitt. Oh, that was beautiful. He's coming right down … he's coming down like a rocket now!… You can't watch these fights very coherently for long. You just see about four twirling machines, you just hear little bursts of machine-gunning, and by the time you've picked up the machines they've gone! – Hullo, there are one, two, three – and look! There's a dogfight going on up there … now there's something coming right down on the tail of another. Here they come – Yes! They are being chased home – and how they are being chased home! There are three Spitfires chasing three Messerschmitts now. Oh boy! Look at them going! Oh! – Look how the Messerschmitts - ! Oh boy! That was really grand! There's a Spitfire behind the first two. He will get them. Oh yes – oh boy! I’ve never seen anything so good as this. The RAF fighters have really got these boys taped!

The critically hurt Michael Mudie was eventually picked up from out of the sea by a Royal Navy vessel and hastily transferred to Dover Hospital for treatment. That same evening the BBC broadcast Charles Gardner's recording, which was later criticised in some quarters as having lacked dignity towards a life and death struggle!

Very sadly, the gallant Michael Mudie succumbed to his wounds the following day. On Thursday 18 July Flying Officer Lionel Gaunce and Pilot Officer Cecil Montgomery travelled from RAF Kenley to East Molesey in Surrey, to represent No. 615 Sqn. at the funeral of their fallen comrade, where to this day he rests in a well-kept grave respectfully tended to ensure his brave sacrifice is not forgotten.

And the BBC had been there to get it wrong. Nothing much changes.

Battle of Britain thread