Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/April 2011/Articles


 * SMS Markgraf (Parsecboy) : SMS Markgraf was the third battleship of the four-ship König-class battleship. She served in the German Imperial Navy during World War I. Laid down in November 1911 and launched on 4 June 1913, she was formally commissioned into the Imperial Navy on 1 October 1914, just over two months after the outbreak of war in Europe. Along with her three sister ships, Markgraf took part in most of the fleet actions during the war, including the Battle of Jutland on 31 May and 1 June 1916. At Jutland, Markgraf was the third ship in the German line of battle and heavily engaged by the opposing British Grand Fleet; Markgraf also participated in Operation Albion, the conquest of the Gulf of Riga, in late 1917. In 1919 Markgraf was scuttled at Scapa Flow along with the rest of the interned German High Seas Fleet. She was never scrapped and the wreck remains at the bottom of the bay.


 * Queen Victoria (DrKiernan) : Queen Victoria was the monarch of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland from 20 June 1837 until her death. From 1 May 1876, she used the additional title of Empress of India. Her reign of 63 years and 7 months, which is longer than that of any other British monarch and the longest of any female monarch in history, is known as the Victorian era. It was a period of industrial, cultural, political, scientific, and military change within the United Kingdom, and was marked by a great expansion of the British Empire. She was the last British monarch of the House of Hanover.


 * Mike Jackson (HJ Mitchell): General Sir Michael David "Mike" Jackson is a retired British Army officer and one of its most high-profile generals since the Second World War. Originally commissioned into the Intelligence Corps in 1963, he transferred to the Parachute Regiment, with whom he served in three tours of Northern Ireland. He was present at the events of Bloody Sunday (1972) as well as the aftermath of the Warrenpoint ambush (1979). He also served in the Balkans, where in the Kosovo War he famously refused to obey an order from American General Wesley Clark earning him the nickname "Macho Jacko" in the British tabloid press. In 2003, Jackson was appointed Chief of the General Staff (CGS), the professional head of the British Army. He took up the post a month before the start of the Iraq War, leaving the post in 2006 ending a career spanning 45 years.


 * John A. Macdonald (Wehwalt): Sir John Alexander Macdonald was the first Prime Minister of Canada. The dominant figure of Canadian Confederation, his political career spanned almost half a century.  Macdonald served almost nineteen years as Canadian Prime Minister; he is surpassed in tenure only by William Lyon Mackenzie King.


 * List of armored cruisers of Germany (Parsecboy): In the late 19th century, the German Imperial Navy (Kaiserliche Marine) experimented with a variety of cruiser types, including small avisos and larger protected cruisers. Due to budget constraints, the navy was unable to build cruisers designed solely for fleet service or for overseas duties. As a result, the naval construction department attempted to design vessels that could fulfill both roles. The protected cruisers, the first of which were the two Irene-class protected cruiser vessels, were laid down starting in 1886. The protected cruisers evolved into more powerful vessels, culminating in SMS Fürst Bismarck (1896), Germany's first armored cruiser. Fürst Bismarck was laid down in 1896, a decade after the first German protected cruiser. Fürst Bismarck proved to be "ideally suited" to overseas duties and formed the basis for subsequent armored cruiser designs. Following this eight more armored cruisers were built, culminating in the SMS Blücher, which was laid down in 1907.


 * Ernst Lindemann (MisterBee1966) : Otto Ernst Lindemann (1894–1941) was a German naval captain and the only commander of the battleship Bismarck during its eight months of service in World War II. Born in 1894, he was the first of three sons of a bank president. Lindemann joined the German Imperial Navy in 1913 and served on a number of warships during World War I. On board SMS Bayern, he participated in Operation Albion in 1917. After World War I, he served in various staff and naval gunnery training positions. One year after the outbreak of World War II, he was appointed commander of the battleship Bismarck, at the time the largest warship in the world and pride of the German Navy. In May 1941, Lindemann commanded Bismarck during Operation Rheinübung. Bismarck and the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen, under the command of Admiral Günther Lütjens, were to break out of their base in German occupied Norway and attack British merchant shipping in the Atlantic. Their first major engagement was the Battle of the Denmark Strait which resulted in the sinking of HMS Hood. Less than a week later, on 27 May, Lindemann and most of his crew lost their lives during Bismarck's last battle. He was posthumously awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross.


 * Frank Buckles (Neutralhomer) : Frank Woodruff Buckles (born Wood Buckles; 1901 – 2011) was one of the last three surviving World War I veterans, and the last American veteran of that conflict. Buckles enlisted in the US Army in 1917 and went through basic training at Fort Riley in Kansas. Serving in the Army's 1st Fort Riley Casual Detachment, he drove ambulances and motorcycles near the front lines. Given an honorable discharge in 1919, Buckles continued to serve with the New York National Guard from 1922 to 1923. During World War II, he spent the majority of the conflict as a civilian prisoner of war after being captured by the Japanese while working in the shipping business. Following the war, Buckles married in San Francisco in 1946 and moved to Gap View Farm near Charles Town, West Virginia. His wife, Audrey, gave birth to their daughter Susannah in 1955. A widower at age 98, he worked on his farm until the age of 105. In his last years, he was Honorary Chairman of the World War I Memorial Foundation, campaigning to have the District of Columbia War Memorial renamed the National World War I Memorial, including meeting with President George W. Bush and testifying to Congress. He was awarded the World War I Victory Medal in 1918, and the Army of Occupation of Germany Medal retroactively after the medal was created in 1941, as well as the French Legion of Honor in his later years. At the time of his death, Buckles was the oldest World War I veteran in the world and the last field veteran of the war. He was buried on March 15, 2011 at Arlington National Cemetery, with full military honors and President Barack Obama in attendance.


 * SMS Friedrich der Grosse (1911) (Parsecboy): SMS Friedrich der Grosse was the second vessel of the Kaiser-class battleship of battleships of the German Imperial Navy. Friedrich der Grosse's keel was laid on 26 January 1910 at the AG Vulcan dockyard in Hamburg, her hull was launched on 10 June 1911, and she was commissioned into the fleet on 15 October 1912. Assigned to the III Squadron of the High Seas Fleet for the majority of World War I, she served as fleet flagship from her commissioning until 1917. She participated in all the major fleet operations of World War I, including the Battle of Jutland, from which she emerged completely unscathed. After the Armistice in November 1918, Friedrich der Grosse was interned by the British Royal Navy in Scapa Flow and was subsequently scuttled by her crew. In 1936, the ship was raised and broken up for scrap metal. Her bell was returned to Germany in 1965 and is in the Fleet Headquarters in Glücksburg.


 * Horace Robertson (Hawkeye7) : Horace Robertson (1894–1960) was a senior officer in the Australian Army who served in the First World War, the Second World War and the Korean War. He was one of the first graduates of the Royal Military College, Duntroon, to reach the ranks of major general and lieutenant general. He served with the 10th Light Horse in the First World War where he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. During the Second World War, Robertson led the 19th Infantry Brigade at the Battle of Bardia and accepted the surrender of the Italian Navy at Benghazi and later he accepted the surrender of Japanese Lieutenant General Hatazo Adachi. Following the war, he commanded the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in the Occupation of Japan and  the  British Commonwealth Forces Korea in the Korean War. Robertson was a key figure in establishing the Australian Armoured Corps. Its headquarters in Darwin is named Robertson Barracks in his honour.


 * HMS Queen Mary (Sturmvogel 66‎) : HMS Queen Mary was a battlecruiser built by the British Royal Navy before World War I, the sole member of her class. She was similar to the Lion-class battlecruisers, though she differed in details from her half-sisters. She was the last battlecruiser completed before the war and participated in the Battle of Heligoland Bight shortly after the war began. As part of the 1st Battlecruiser Squadron, she attempted to intercept a German force that bombarded the North Sea coast of England in December 1914, but was unsuccessful. She was refitting during the Battle of Dogger Bank in early 1915, but participated in the next major fleet action of the war, the Battle of Jutland in mid-1916. She was hit twice by the German battlecruiser SMS Derfflinger during the "Run to the South" and exploded shortly afterwards. Her wreck was discovered in 1991 and rests partly upside-down, on sand, 60 m down. Queen Mary is designated as a protected place under the Protection of Military Remains Act 1986.


 * Russian battleship Sevastopol (1895) (Buggie111) : The Sevastopol (Russian: Севастополь) was the last of three ships in the Petropavlovsk class of pre-dreadnought battleships built for the Imperial Russian Navy in the 1890s. Named after the siege at Sevastopol during the Crimean War, the ship was commissioned into the First Pacific Squadron of the Russian Pacific Fleet and was stationed at Port Arthur. Sevastopol saw service in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, most notably in the Battle of the Yellow Sea, where she was damaged by several shells. Immediately after the surrender of Port Arthur she was scuttled to prevent her capture by the Imperial Japanese Navy and never raised. The remains of the ship still lie outside the entrance to Port Arthur.


 * Walter Bedell Smith (Hawkeye7) : Walter Bedell "Beetle" Smith (1895–1961) was a senior United States Army general who served as Dwight D. Eisenhower's chief of staff at Allied Forces Headquarters (AFHQ) during the Tunisia Campaign and the Allied invasion of Italy. Later he was Eisenhower's chief of staff at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) from 1944 to 1945. Smith enlisted as a private in the Indiana National Guard in 1911. During World War I he was commissioned as an officer in 1917 and wounded in the Aisne-Marne Offensive in 1918. After the war he was a staff officer and an instructor at the United States Army Infantry School. Smith became chief of staff to Eisenhower at AFHQ in September 1942. He acquired a reputation as Eisenhower's "hatchet man" for his brusque and demanding manner. However, he was also capable of representing Eisenhower on sensitive missions requiring diplomatic skill. In 1944 he became Chief of Staff of SHAEF, and in May 1945 met with the representatives of the German High Command to negotiate the surrender of German forces. After the war he served as Ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1946 to 1948. He became Director of Central Intelligence, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, in 1950. He made the CIA the arm of government primarily responsible for covert operations. He left in 1953 to become Under Secretary of State, retiring in 1954.


 * William Brill (Ian Rose) : William Brill was a senior officer and bomber pilot in the Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF). Born in the Riverina district of New South Wales, he was a farmer and a member of the Australian Militia before joining the RAAF as an air cadet in 1940. Training in Australia and Canada, he was posted to Britain in 1941 to take part in the air war over Europe. Brill first saw combat as a member of No. 460 Squadron RAAF, flying Vickers Wellington medium bombers. Following a spell as an instructor with the Royal Air Force (RAF), he returned to the bombing campaign in January 1944 as a flight commander with No. 463 Squadron RAAF, operating Avro Lancaster heavy bombers. Returning to Australia, he remained in the Air Force after the war and commanded No. 10 Squadron in 1949–50. He went on to lead air bases at Rathmines,  Canberra and  Townsville during the 1950s and 60s. Brill served two terms as RAAF Director of Personnel Services, in 1956–59 and 1960–63, by which time he had been promoted to Group Captain. His final posting was at the Department of Air in Canberra, where he died of a heart attack in October 1964.


 * York Castle (Hchc2009) : York Castle, England, is a fortified complex comprising, over the last nine centuries, a sequence of castles, prisons, law courts and other buildings on the south side of the River Foss. The now-ruinous keep of the medieval Norman castle is sometimes referred to as Clifford's Tower. Built originally on the orders of William I to dominate the former Viking city of York, the castle suffered a tumultuous early history before developing into a major fortification with extensive water defences. It fell into disrepair by the 15th and 16th centuries, becoming used increasingly as a jail for both local felons and political prisoners. By the time of Elizabeth I the castle had lost all of its military value but was maintained as a centre of royal authority in York. The outbreak of the English Civil War in 1642 saw York Castle being repaired and refortified, playing a part in the Royalist defence of York in 1644 against Parliamentary forces. York Castle continued to be garrisoned until 1684, when an explosion destroyed the interior of Clifford's Tower. The castle bailey was redeveloped in a neoclassical style in the 18th century as a centre for county administration in Yorkshire. By the 20th century the ruin of Clifford's Tower had become a well-known tourist destination and national monument; today the site is owned by English Heritage and open to the public.