dpt182 wrote: Sun Jul 06, 2025 5:28 pm
I hadn't heard of them, when I was it school it was King Crimson (Fripp the best guitarist I've seen), Led Zep & of course Purple.
David
I liked Led Zeppelin and especially Deep Purple, although I was too young to appreciate either of them in their heyday. King Crimson rather dipped under my radar; I must give them a listen.
8th April 1942
PANIC HQ, San Francisco.
It’s late in the evening, but uncharacteristically Blackadder and his advisors are still sat around the conference table, digesting the day’s reports. Gone is the laughter, the banter, the gentle (and not so gentle) ribbing, the heady optimism, the talk of “sticking it to them”. No more does a general feeling of smugness pervade GHQ. HMS Repulse - sunk. HMS Dorsetshire - sunk. HMAS Australia, badly wounded and within easy reach of Japanese battleships and carrier aircraft, will be lucky, very lucky, to avoid the same fate tomorrow. Darwin is suddenly looking very vulnerable. On Java the Japanese have established a beachhead at Semarang. Yet again, the Allied air forces have suffered heavily for little gain. Striker tried to take a sip from his glass, but his drink problem is starting to worsen; he ended up sloshing most of the water into his face. He poured himself another glass.
“Who,” demanded Blackadder, “ordered Repulse north of Ambon without adequate air cover despite knowing the presence of enemy carriers and shore-based bombers?” No-one, apparently - at least no-one remembered doing so. Perhaps Adm. Somerville did it off his own bat? He wasn’t ordered specifically
not go north of Ambon. Perhaps he should have been. Whose responsibility should this have been? Captain Birdseye’s? General Alexander’s (the theatre commander)? Blackadder’s? No, definitely not Blackadder’s. That suggestion didn’t go down too well. Striker sloshed another glass of water into his face.
Success has many parents, but failure is an orphan.
“And what made Somerville think that the Japanese would be so stupid as to leave their valuable, fragile aircraft carriers in such a vulnerable position without making suitable provision to protect them?” continued Blackadder. No-one answered. This was all getting rather uncomfortable. It was Captain Triggers who decided to try and change the mood.
“Look, this is war, gentlemen; WAR” he roared. “We a going to lose more ships, a lot, lot more, before this is over, and aircraft too. I shudder to think of the number of ground casualties we’ll suffer. Remember the first day of the Somme? Remember Bloody April? Nonetheless, we triumphed in the last war, and we’ll triumph in this one too!
Good ol’ Captain Triggers; stirring stuff! He certainly injected some badly-needed steely determination into the meeting. Unfortunately his outburst also rather drew a bad-tempered Blackadder’s attention to himself.
“We may well have to accept heavy losses” said Blackadder, “but in war it is customary to also occasionally inflict the odd casualty on one’s enemy. Tell me, Triggers; how many ships have your bombers hit off Java in the past two days?
“Well…umm…” stuttered Triggers “I don’t think how many ships were hit is a particularly useful measure of the bombers’ effectiveness”
“He means they didn’t hit any” whispered Mainwaring to Uncle Albert, just loudly enough to be heard all around the table.
Striker tried to help Triggers out. “Why don’t we bring up the B17Es from Australia and use them to hit the beachhead on Java?” he said, inadvertently piling yet more agony on poor Triggers. “The. problem is” replied Triggers, "is that we don’t have any airfields large enough in the region to deploy the B17s effectively. The nearest suitable airbase is Darwin."
“But why didn’t we enlarge them? We’ve had months to prepare our defence of Java!” shouted Blackadder. Triggers explained “We knew that Java and much of the Dutch East Indies was likely to fall to the enemy, we didn’t want to spend time, effort and resources improving the airfields only for the Japanese to make good use of them against us”.
Blackadder was mollified. “Well, at least then the Japanese will have to spend the time, energy and resources building up the airfields to be able to use their bombers properly, that should slow them down somewhat” he said. “That’s some good news”.
It was Dirk Gently who spoiled even this crumb of comfort. “That’s not quite right” he interjected. “According to our intelligence, the Japanese long-range bombers are lighter than ours, and are therefore quite capable of operating at full effectiveness from smaller airfields than the B17s”.
A by now weary Blackadder sought some clarification. “So our airfields in the region aren’t big enough for our B17s to operate effectively from. We made the decision not to enlarge the airfields so as hinder the enemy’s ability to use them for their own bomber operations against us when captured. However, it turns out that the airfields are already large enough for the Japanese to make full use of, it’s just that they were too small for OUR bombers, and all we’ve succeeded in doing is hindering our own operations, not those of the enemy.”
“I think that’s a fair summary” replied Triggers. A third glass of water sloshed into Striker’s face.
