Topic: Military history/European military history (Page 6)
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π Anglo-Zanzibar War
The Anglo-Zanzibar War was a military conflict fought between the United Kingdom and the Zanzibar Sultanate on 27 August 1896. The conflict lasted between 38 and 45 minutes, marking it as the shortest recorded war in history. The immediate cause of the war was the death of the pro-British Sultan Hamad bin Thuwaini on 25 August 1896 and the subsequent succession of Sultan Khalid bin Barghash. The British authorities preferred Hamud bin Muhammed, who was more favourable to British interests, as sultan. In accordance with a treaty signed in 1886, a condition for accession to the sultanate was that the candidate obtain the permission of the British consul, and Khalid had not fulfilled this requirement. The British considered this a casus belli and sent an ultimatum to Khalid demanding that he order his forces to stand down and leave the palace. In response, Khalid called up his palace guard and barricaded himself inside the palace.
The ultimatum expired at 09:00 East Africa Time (EAT) on 27 August, by which time the British had gathered three cruisers, two gunboats, 150 marines and sailors, and 900 Zanzibaris in the harbour area. The Royal Navy contingent were under the command of Rear-Admiral Harry Rawson and the pro-Anglo Zanzibaris were commanded by Brigadier-General Lloyd Mathews of the Zanzibar army (who was also the First Minister of Zanzibar). Around 2,800 Zanzibaris defended the palace; most were recruited from the civilian population, but they also included the sultan's palace guard and several hundred of his servants and slaves. The defenders had several artillery pieces and machine guns, which were set in front of the palace sighted at the British ships. A bombardment, opened at 09:02, set the palace on fire and disabled the defending artillery. A small naval action took place, with the British sinking the Zanzibari royal yacht HHSΒ Glasgow and two smaller vessels. Some shots were also fired ineffectually at the pro-British Zanzibari troops as they approached the palace. The flag at the palace was shot down and fire ceased at 09:40.
The sultan's forces sustained roughly 500 casualties, while only one British sailor was injured. Sultan Khalid received asylum in the German consulate before escaping to German East Africa (in the mainland part of present Tanzania). The British quickly placed Sultan Hamud in power at the head of a puppet government. The war marked the end of the Zanzibar Sultanate as a sovereign state and the start of a period of heavy British influence.
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- "Anglo-Zanzibar War" | 2016-05-10 | 19 Upvotes 10 Comments
π Venetian Arsenal
The Venetian Arsenal (Italian: Arsenale di Venezia) is a complex of former shipyards and armories clustered together in the city of Venice in northern Italy. Owned by the state, the Arsenal was responsible for the bulk of the Venetian republic's naval power from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period. It was "one of the earliest large-scale industrial enterprises in history".
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- "Venetian Arsenal" | 2023-05-28 | 27 Upvotes 2 Comments
π W. T. Tutte - mathematician and code breaker
William Thomas "Bill" Tutte OC FRS FRSC (; 14 May 1917 β 2 May 2002) was a British codebreaker and mathematician. During the Second World War, he made a brilliant and fundamental advance in cryptanalysis of the Lorenz cipher, a major Nazi German cipher system which was used for top-secret communications within the Wehrmacht High Command. The high-level, strategic nature of the intelligence obtained from Tutte's crucial breakthrough, in the bulk decrypting of Lorenz-enciphered messages specifically, contributed greatly, and perhaps even decisively, to the defeat of Nazi Germany. He also had a number of significant mathematical accomplishments, including foundation work in the fields of graph theory and matroid theory.
Tutte's research in the field of graph theory proved to be of remarkable importance. At a time when graph theory was still a primitive subject, Tutte commenced the study of matroids and developed them into a theory by expanding from the work that Hassler Whitney had first developed around the mid 1930s. Even though Tutte's contributions to graph theory have been influential to modern graph theory and many of his theorems have been used to keep making advances in the field, most of his terminology was not in agreement with their conventional usage and thus his terminology is not used by graph theorists today. "Tutte advanced graph theory from a subject with one text (D. KΕnig's) toward its present extremely active state."
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- "W. T. Tutte - mathematician and code breaker" | 2013-05-28 | 27 Upvotes 2 Comments
π British Navy against slave trade
The British Royal Navy established the West Africa Squadron at substantial expense in 1808 after Parliament passed the Slave Trade Act of 1807, an Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade. The squadron's task was to suppress the Atlantic slave trade by patrolling the coast of West Africa. With a home base at Portsmouth, England, it began with two small ships, the 32-gun fifth-rate frigate HMSΒ Solebay and the Cruizer-class brig-sloop HMSΒ Derwent. At the height of its operations, the squadron employed a sixth of the Royal Navy fleet and marines. In 1819 the Royal Navy established a West Coast of Africa Station and the West Africa Squadron became known as the Preventative Squadron. It remained an independent command until 1856 and then again 1866 to 1867. Between 1830 and 1865, more than 1,500 British sailors died on their mission of freeing slaves with the West Africa Squadron.
Between 1808 and 1860 the West Africa Squadron captured 1,600 slave ships and freed 150,000 Africans. It is considered the most costly international moral action in modern history.
The Squadron has been described as being poorly resourced and plagued by corruption; it only managed to capture around 6% of the transatlantic slave ships, but patrolling 3,000 miles of African coast from 1808 to 1860 it liberated 150,000 Africans.
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- "British Navy against slave trade" | 2021-11-28 | 28 Upvotes 1 Comments
π Charge of the Savoia Cavalleria at Izbushensky
The Charge of the "Savoia Cavalleria" at Izbushensky was a clash between the Italian cavalry Regiment "Savoia Cavalleria" (3rd) and the Soviet 812th Rifle Regiment (304th Rifle Division) that took place on August 24, 1942, near the hamlet (khutor) of Izbushensky (ΠΠ·Π±ΡΡΠ΅Π½ΡΠΊΠΈΠΉ), close to the junction between the Don and Khopyor rivers. Though a minor skirmish in the theatre of operation of the Eastern Front, the Izbushensky charge had great propaganda resonance in Italy and it is still remembered as one of the last significant cavalry charges in history.
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- "Charge of the Savoia Cavalleria at Izbushensky" | 2024-04-15 | 22 Upvotes 6 Comments
π Anti-Tank Dog
Anti-tank dogs (Russian: ΡΠΎΠ±Π°ΠΊΠΈ-ΠΈΡΡΡΠ΅Π±ΠΈΡΠ΅Π»ΠΈ ΡΠ°Π½ΠΊΠΎΠ² sobaki-istrebiteli tankov or ΠΏΡΠΎΡΠΈΠ²ΠΎΡΠ°Π½ΠΊΠΎΠ²ΡΠ΅ ΡΠΎΠ±Π°ΠΊΠΈ protivotankovye sobaki; German: Panzerabwehrhunde or Hundeminen, "dog-mines") were dogs taught to carry explosives to tanks, armored vehicles and other military targets. They were intensively trained by the Soviet and Russian military forces between 1930 and 1996, and used from 1941 to 1943, against German tanks in World War II. Initially dogs were trained to leave a timer-detonated bomb and retreat, but this routine was replaced by an impact-detonation procedure which killed the dog in the process. The U.S. military started training anti-tank dogs in 1943 in the same way the Russians used them, but this training exposed several problems and the program was discontinued.
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- "Anti-Tank Dog" | 2022-02-02 | 21 Upvotes 6 Comments
π S3 (Missile)
The S3 was a French land-based Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile, equipped with a single 1.2-megatonne thermonuclear warhead. In France it is called an SSBS, for Sol-Sol Balistique StratΓ©gique, or Ground-Ground Strategic Ballistic Missile.
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- "S3 (Missile)" | 2023-05-20 | 16 Upvotes 8 Comments
π Iannis Xenakis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Iannis Xenakis (also spelt as Yannis Xenakis) (Greek: ΞΞΉΞ¬Ξ½Ξ½Ξ·Ο (ΞάννηΟ) ΞΞ΅Ξ½Ξ¬ΞΊΞ·Ο [ΛΚanis kseΛnacis]; 29 May 1922 β 4 February 2001) was a Greek-French composer, music theorist, architect, performance director and engineer. After 1947, he fled Greece, becoming a naturalized citizen of France. He is considered an important post-World War II composer whose works helped revolutionize 20th-century classical music.
Xenakis pioneered the use of mathematical models in music such as applications of set theory, stochastic processes and game theory and was also an important influence on the development of electronic and computer music. He integrated music with architecture, designing music for pre-existing spaces, and designing spaces to be integrated with specific music compositions and performances.
Among his most important works are Metastaseis (1953β54) for orchestra, which introduced independent parts for every musician of the orchestra; percussion works such as Psappha (1975) and Pléïades (1979); compositions that introduced spatialization by dispersing musicians among the audience, such as Terretektorh (1966); electronic works created using Xenakis's UPIC system; and the massive multimedia performances Xenakis called polytopes, that were a summa of his interests and skills. Among the numerous theoretical writings he authored, the book Formalized Music: Thought and Mathematics in Composition (French edition 1963, English translation 1971) is regarded as one of his most important. As an architect, Xenakis is primarily known for his early work under Le Corbusier: the Sainte Marie de La Tourette, on which the two architects collaborated, and the Philips Pavilion at Expo 58, which Xenakis designed by himself.
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- "Iannis Xenakis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia" | 2010-05-20 | 18 Upvotes 5 Comments
π Five Eyes Surveillance Targets
The Five Eyes (FVEY) is an anglophone intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. These countries are parties to the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence.
The origins of the FVEY can be traced back to the postβWorld War II period, when the Atlantic Charter was issued by the Allies to lay out their goals for a post-war world. During the course of the Cold War, the ECHELON surveillance system was initially developed by the FVEY to monitor the communications of the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, although it is now used to monitor billions of private communications worldwide.
In the late 1990s, the existence of ECHELON was disclosed to the public, triggering a major debate in the European Parliament and, to a lesser extent, the United States Congress. As part of efforts in the ongoing War on Terror since 2001, the FVEY further expanded their surveillance capabilities, with much emphasis placed on monitoring the World Wide Web. The former NSA contractor Edward Snowden described the Five Eyes as a "supra-national intelligence organisation that does not answer to the known laws of its own countries". Documents leaked by Snowden in 2013 revealed that the FVEY has been spying on one another's citizens and sharing the collected information with each other in order to circumvent restrictive domestic regulations on surveillance of citizens.
In spite of continued controversy over its methods, the Five Eyes relationship remains one of the most comprehensive known espionage alliances in history.
Since processed intelligence is gathered from multiple sources, the intelligence shared is not restricted to signals intelligence (SIGINT) and often involves defence intelligence as well as human intelligence (HUMINT) and geospatial intelligence (GEOINT). The following table provides an overview of most of the FVEY agencies involved in such forms of data sharing.
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- "Five Eyes Surveillance Targets" | 2014-07-12 | 20 Upvotes 1 Comments
π Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior
The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, codenamed OpΓ©ration Satanique, was a bombing operation by the "action" branch of the French foreign intelligence services, the Direction gΓ©nΓ©rale de la sΓ©curitΓ© extΓ©rieure (DGSE), carried out on 10 July 1985. During the operation, two operatives sank the flagship of the Greenpeace fleet, the Rainbow Warrior, at the Port of Auckland in New Zealand on its way to a protest against a planned French nuclear test in Moruroa. Fernando Pereira, a photographer, drowned on the sinking ship.
France initially denied responsibility, but two French agents were captured by New Zealand Police and charged with arson, conspiracy to commit arson, willful damage, and murder. As the truth came out, the scandal resulted in the resignation of the French Defence Minister Charles Hernu. The two agents pleaded guilty to manslaughter and were sentenced to ten years in prison. They spent a little over two years confined to the French island of Hao before being freed by the French government.
Several political figures, including then New Zealand Prime Minister David Lange, have referred to the bombing as an act of terrorism or state-sponsored terrorism.
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- "Sinking of the Rainbow Warrior" | 2015-07-10 | 18 Upvotes 2 Comments