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Let's talk about Winston Churchill. In 1915 he was First Lord of the Admiralty, the politician in charge of the Royal Navy, and the Gallipoli campaign was one of his many Good Ideas*. Just one of the thousands of junior officers who served on Gallipoli was one Second Lieutenant Clement Attlee, who survived a number of bouts of dysentry to be the second-last Briton to evacuate Suvla Bay at the end of the year. Attlee survived the rest of the war and went into politics himself. By 1935 he was Leader of the Labour Party, by 1940 he was serving in another War Cabinet (prime minister: W. Churchill), and two months after VE Day he replaced Churchill as Prime Minister, having won a landslide election. Speaking of Gallipoli, did you know that there were as many French Empire casualties (slightly more dead, slightly fewer wounded) during the campaign as there were Australians? They were mostly colonial troops from Africa. Back to Churchill: after the Gallipoli campaign failed miserably he was gradually shut out of government. He subsequently resigned, re-joined the Army, and after a little string-pulling he went to the Western Front as a battalion commander. In about four months at the front in early 1916, he personally led over 30 trench raids. *Other such Good Ideas from his time at the Admiralty include dealing with a pesky German cruiser by literally setting a river on fire (trialled but never put into action, sadly), and breaking the deadlock of trench warfare with giant trench-smashing steamrollers; when the Army wasn't interested in this concept he paid for a committee to discreetly begin development, paid for effectively out of the Admiralty's petty cash, and so the development of the world's first tank was begun by the Navy, designing in secret a new weapon for the Army, that the Army had already said they didn't want.
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Nov 5, 2015 13:38
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Napoleon Bonaparte's Imperial Guard regularly went into battle while singing a jolly little song about onions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE70jrhOrjk Loosely translated: "We love onions fried with oil, let's charge, the onions change us into a lion, let's charge, but no onion for those Austrian bastards, let's charge." The Grenadiers of the Old Guard, the elite of the elite, were also granted the special privilege to bitch and moan as they pleased about the vagaries of military life, and so became known as "the grumblers", or les Grognards. Invisible Clergy posted:Thanks for this. I'm really enjoying it so far. your description is fair and accurate. New Zealand has an official Wizard (no, not Gandalf). He was officially granted the title in 1990 by the Prime Minister. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wizard_of_New_Zealand
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Nov 7, 2015 00:53
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Blue Footed Booby posted:This guy would be the luckiest unlucky gently caress alive were it not for the dude who survived both atomic bombings. In 1914 there was a Royal Navy midshipman who rejoiced in the truly epic name of Wenman Wykeham-Musgrave. On the 22nd of September, the poor sod managed to get himself torpedoed three times in an hour.
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Nov 7, 2015 22:13
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