You will struggle to find a more jaw dropping story of naval skill and gallantry than that of USS Johnston at Leyte Gulf: In one of those strange & terrible chance events USS Johnston, a little destroyer of 2,000 tons, found itself facing the largest battleship ever built, Yamato, 70,000 tons, talismanic flagship of the Japanese fleet. Capable of firing a broadside twice the weight of Bismarck’s.

The tragedy of the Woods Scawen boys.

A story of two Battle of Britain aces, combat, love, heartbreak and death.

One day this will be a movie.

Patrick Woods Scawen joined the RAF in 1937. He flew a Hurricane over the family home and younger brother Tony was sold. He joined up the following year.
He had poor eyesight so he learned the eye chart off by heart and bluffed his way in.

As a child during WW2 Maxwell hid alone in the woods of what is now Ukraine. He was hunted. He survived by foraging. He rescued a baby in the aftermath of a massacre of other Jews.

He’s now the subject of a major new movie. And he’s on the podcast.

🎧: podfollow.com/dan-snows-hist…
His father had been taken away & murdered soon after the German invasion. He had managed to avoid several sweeps of the ghetto but was finally discovered in his hiding place.
His grandfather was then executed in front of him.

110 years ago this morning Archduke Franz Ferdinand was murdered in Sarajevo, triggering the First World War.

New- subscriber only- podcast now out. Follow minute by minute.

Please click here:

But also here’s a vid from the insta: historyhit.com/subscription/
'I shall never lead a war against Russia. I shall make sacrifices to avoid it. A war between Austria & Russia would end either with the overthrow of the Romanovs or with the overthrow of the Habsburgs – or perhaps the overthrow of both.’
Franz Ferdinand

Here is a thread of some of the more bizarre and wondrous extracts from Carton de Wiart’s memoir ‘Happy Odyssey’

It is simply unbeatable.

(I have made a podcast about him which you can listen to here: )

Enjoy. 🧵👇 lnkfi.re/oh8dG1
He fails an exam.

Hope for all of us. He was soon to be promoted from Captain to Brigadier General in just three years, becoming the youngest general in the British Army

Stefan Zweig's description of Europe after WW1 is familiar:

"An era of frenzied ecstasy & chaotic deception, a unique mixture of impatience & fanaticism. Everything that promised an extreme... experience, every form of narcotic-morphine, cocaine, heroin sold like hot cakes

🧵👇 Schools councils....were set up, with young people keeping a sharp eye on the teachers & making their own changes to the curriculum, because children wanted to learn only what they liked.

The Battle of Austerlitz did not take place on a frozen lake.

But some fascinating military episodes DID occur on ice.

Here's a thread. 🧊🥶 Aeschylus wrote The Persians a few years after the failed 480BC Persian invasion. He suggests that Xerxes' retreating army marched across the frozen river Strymon. It cracked & many were dragged to the depths. Just topping off a shocking campaigning season for the King of Kings

All this talk of Napoleon. Spare a thought for his siblings. All rose to high office. Such a gifted family.

Here’s list:

Joseph. The big brother. King of Naples, in 1806 and became King of Spain in 1808; not bad going!

He opted for a comfortable retirement in New Jersey. Napoleon’s younger brother Lucien. Minister of the Interior and a Prince of France but he disagreed with Napoleon crowning himself Emperor and went into exile. He was cheered when he landed in Britain. Went to live in Worcestershire.

Some actual antiwoke Tsars

A thread. 👇 Ivan the Terrible. The 1st tsar. Literally the original antiwoke tsar.
Disliked:
Muslims
Disrespectful young people
Querulous bourgeois folk
Foreigners
Jews

Liked:
Unfettered power
Empire

Today's wind neatly demonstrates why the French under Team Louis & Napoleon never really had a hope of invading Britain.

Their ports were the wrong shape and size, and in the wrong place.

Thread 🔽 At first glance it's perfect invasion weather. The wind is blowing from France to Britain. Royal Navy square rigged battleships can't maintain their blockade and are blown north under reefed topsails to torment the good people of Torbay and Plymouth.

The coast is, well, clear.

In the long & mostly glorious history of the Royal Navy there are many astonishing acts of heroism, but one in particular is without a doubt, hands down, the greatest.

Here's what a particularly handsome Irishman got up to on this day in 1805, at the Battle of Trafalgar:

🧵 Dublin born James Spratt was one of the best looking men in the navy. He was also commander of The Squad who made up the boarding party of HMS Defiance.

Trafalgar was like a wooden, floating Mad Max apocalypse: fire, explosions, smoke.

This is intolerable.

You know which country owes its existence to aid? The USA

Who was one of the biggest aid hounds in recent history? That darling of the American right, Winston Churchill.

Aid has always been a vital and often efficient tool of statecraft. When the US Republic was on death’s door, when it was needy, they signed a treaty
They needed money and guns and half a chance
Who provided those funds?
France

Here is an official State Department historian describing the French aid as ‘crucial’ to securing victory.

A very personal new pod:
My great grandpa was a WW1 general. One of those responsible for the first day of the Somme. The bloodiest day in British military history. Thousands of his troops were killed or wounded

Brilliant @sommecourt talks me through it:
podfollow.com/dan-snows-hist…
Snow’s sector was one of the most catastrophic. His men fought with astonishing bravery into German trenches despite inadequate artillery support. They fought until their ammunition ran out & they were wiped out by counter attacks.

Then. Astonishingly. My grandfather….

Maybe the generation who matured after the monstrous destruction of WW2 do not appreciate the fragility of democracy. Or its importance.
Taking a wrecking ball to the institutions that guard our rights as citizens to advance your own cause is dangerous & historically illiterate. There's a distinctly 1990s assumption that liberal democracy is inevitable & immutable. But it's not. It's vulnerable, contingent. You've got to nurture it. Prof Conway's 'W Europe's Democratic Age 1945-68' is so good on this. They chose to be democrats, worked at it.

Quite the turnout for the book launch of @JohnNicholRAF's great 'Eject! Eject!' last night.

George Dunn. 100

Jack Dark. 99

Jan Stangryciuk. 101

All RAF Bomber Command veterans. 300 years of experience between them. Jack told me simply that survival was a matter of pure luck Wonderful atmosphere in the room. So many were ejectees.

In 1991 Kate Saunders & Ashley Stevenson strucks birds in a Harrier at 250ft. They ejected but she landed too close to the crashed aircraft & was terribly burnt. Although badly injured, he dragged her away, saving her life

The Chinese government deliberately flooded a vast area of its own territory in 1938, successfully halting a Japanese advance, but the price was massive causalities and damage to its own resources and reputation.

Flood as a weapon of war. Thread. 👇 I was on the Normandy beaches this week where before D-day in 1944 the Germans deliberately flooded fields behind the beaches to create obstacles to aircraft landing. The ground behind Utah beach was flooded so that troops could only advance inland using a few narrow causeways.

Camden. The reburial parade begins.

En route to the church for the funeral service. Men of the Royal Regiment of Scotland carry one of their forebears on his final journey.

Another pre-dawn start at Camden, South Carolina.

We are preparing for the reburials of 14 American Revolutionary War soldiers whose remains were found on the 1780 battlefield.

They include one Scottish soldier, a Fraser Highlander.

The @Royal_Scots are acting as pall bearers. 20% of them were teenagers.

One young man had a shattered spine with a musket ball in it.

The Scotsman was around 5'6, very thickly built and had a blunt force injury to the back of the head. Possibly a musket but blow

His body where the hand to hand fighting was most intense

We were mad to let this tradition lapse.

The Champion is a hereditary office currently held by a chartered accountant in his 60s from Lincolnshire.

I want to see him fight Charles' challenger.

https://twitter.com/DrFrancisYoung/status/1648991474480971777

"The claimant of the House of Wessex have announced that they have signed Tyson Fury as their Champion"

Apart from when Charles' grandson invaded & fought his uncle for the crown or when Charles' other grandson invaded & deposed that same uncle ushering in the, um, Glorious Revolution, or when Charles' great grandson invaded, triggering several battles & a savage counter insurgency And if you're eliding 'Britain' and the 'UK' then I feel like the Irish may have notes.

110 years ago today Captain Scott died in the Antarctic. Within three weeks Captain Smith of the Titanic died in the Atlantic.

@Timmaltin has calculated that they may have perished as a result of the same weather phenomenon.

Podcast here:

podfollow.com/dan-snows-hist… 111 years ago obviously! I have forgotten what year it is because I drank too many delicious IPAs last night.