Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/December 2019/Articles


 * 59th (Staffordshire) Infantry Division : A British Army formation of the Second World War, the 59th (Staffordshire) Infantry Division was raised as a motor division before converting to infantry, and was based in the UK until deploying in July 1944 to Normandy. There it was involved in several brief sharp clashes with German forces (Operations Charnwood and Pomegranate) before the British manpower crisis came to a head. In August, as the junior division in Normandy, it was disbanded and its units transferred to other divisions to bring them up to full strength.


 * Soviet destroyer Nezamozhnik ( & ) : Nezamozhnik (Russian for "poor peasant") was a destroyer built for the Imperial Russian Navy during World War I and which subsequently had a very active career in Soviet service. Still under construction at the time of the Russian Revolution, her hull was wrecked in 1920 but refloated and completed after the Russian Civil War. Nezamozhnik formed part of the Black Sea Fleet her entire career, and during World War II helped to evacuate Odessa, supply besieged Soviet forces in Sevastopol, and supported several amphibious operations. She was later converted into a target ship and sunk in the early 1950s.


 * Yugoslav submarine Hrabri : Another in PM's series of articles on warships of the Balkans, this focuses on the Yugoslav submarine Hrabri (meaning "brave"), which was built by the British and served in the Yugoslav Navy from 1927 to 1941, when she was captured by Italian forces during the German-led Axis invasion of Yugoslavia. Hrabri was scrapped that year due to her poor condition.


 * Battle of Cape Ecnomus : Perhaps the largest naval battle in history based on the number of combatants involved, the Battle of Cape Ecnomus was fought in 256 BC between the fleets of Carthage and the Roman Republic, during the First Punic War. The Roman fleet of 330 warships plus an unknown number of transports had sailed from Ostia, the port of Rome, to invade the Carthaginian homeland in North Africa. The Carthaginians intercepted the Romans off the coast of Sicily with a fleet of 350 warships; the two fleets may have been carrying 290,000 crew and marines. After a prolonged and confused day of fighting the Carthaginians were decisively defeated, losing 30 ships sunk and 64 captured against Roman losses of 24 ships.


 * Inter-Allied Women's Conference : SusunW's first FA-class article covers a conference convened in February 1919 to introduce women's issues to the peace process after the First World War. Despite some resistance, on 10 April, women were allowed to present a resolution to the League of Nations Commission. It covered the trafficking and sale of women, their political and suffrage status, and their inclusion in international education with a focus on the humanitarian rights of all persons of each nation. Though the Inter-Allied Women failed to achieve many of their aims, it was the first time women were allowed formal participation in an international treaty negotiation and the conference gained the right for women to work in all roles in the League of Nations.


 * Carlos Castillo Armas : The latest in Vanamonde's series of articles related to the Guatemalan Revolution, Carlos Castillo Armas was a Guatemalan Army Colonel who was exiled, then led a rebellion against the government, then became an authoritarian ruler, and was finally assassinated. His reversal of the reforms of his predecessors sparked a series of leftist insurgencies in the country after his death, culminating in the Guatemalan Civil War (1960–1996).


 * Marwan I : Marwan I, the fourth Umayyad caliph, had a short reign (684–685) but a lasting impact -- the Marwanid house that he founded ruled the caliphate until 750. Marwan reestablished Umayyad power across Syria and Egypt after it was reduced to the environs of Damascus as a result of the Second Muslim Civil War, and launched his sons Abd al-Malik and Abd al-Aziz on the road to political success.


 * Muhammad III of Granada : Like Marwan I, Muhammad III had a relatively short reign (1302–1309). He was rumoured to have poisoned his father, Muhammad II to gain the throne, and had a reputation for cruelty despite his inclinations towards poetry. In later years he was handicapped by near-blindness and was deposed by his half-brother Nasr in 1309.


 * Frank Borman : Frank Borman was one of the first three people to travel to the Moon, as the commander of Apollo 8 in 1968. He was also a USAF colonel, an engineer, a test pilot, a businessman and a rancher. Among the second tranche of US astronauts known as the Next Nine, he set a 14-day space endurance record as the commander of Gemini 7 in 1966. He's now 91 years old, and since the death of John Glenn in 2016 he has become the oldest living former astronaut, being eleven days older than his Apollo 8 crewmate Jim Lovell.


 * Italian battleship Conte di Cavour (Sturmvogel 66) : Conte di Cavour joined Italian Navy in 1915. She was mostly inactive during World War I as the threat from submarines and mines was too high to safely operate battleships in the Adriatic. She was intermittently active after the war until being placed in reserve during 1927. The ship was reconstructed in the mid-1930s, and saw action during World War II. She was torpedoed and badly damaged when British aircraft attacked Taranto in November 1940. She was still under repair when the Germans captured her after the Italians concluded an armistice with the Allies in 1943. They made no effort to complete her repairs, and Conte di Cavour sank after an Allied airstrike in 1945.


 * 77th Infantry Division (United Kingdom) (EnigmaMcmxc) : The British Army's 77th Infantry Division was formed in 1941. Its initial role was coastal defence, and from December 1942 it was converted into a training formation for infantrymen and tank crews. From December 1943 it was the 77th (Holding) Division, responsible for retraining soldiers who had been on medical leave, former prisoners of war, repatriates, and anyone who did not meet the army's physical standards. Notably, the formation was used as a source of reinforcements for the 21st Army Group, which fought in Normandy. After all available British Army troops left the United Kingdom for France, the division was disbanded in September 1944. It was subsequently re-formed as a deception unit, to give Germany the impression that the British Army had more divisions than it actually did.


 * 1st Army Group (Kingdom of Yugoslavia) (Peacemaker67) : This article, which is probably our first A-class article on an army group, covers the forces assigned to defend the north of Yugoslavia during 1941. The 1st Army Group was raised prior to the Axis invasion in April 1941, and comprised the 4th Army, 7th Army, and the 1st Cavalry Division. When the invasion commenced on 6 April, the component formations of 1st Army Group were only partially mobilised. Most of its formations were not fully combat ready, and many were disrupted by revolts. The 1st Army Group ceased to exist on 11 April after fifth column elements arrested its headquarters staff, as well as those of its two armies.


 * Yugoslav destroyer Ljubljana (Peacemaker67) : Ljubljana was a bit of a bad-luck ship. Commissioned in December 1939, she came a cropper soon after, running aground. She was still under repair when the Italians captured her as part of the Axis invasion of her homeland in April 1941. Repairs were completed and she was refitted, and she then mainly worked the North Africa convoys under the Italian flag for six months before running aground again off Tunisia in heavy seas in April 1943. The damage was so extensive she was declared a total loss.


 * Liberté-class battleship (Parsecboy) : This article covers a class of four pre-dreadnought battleships built for the French Navy in the early 1900s. Their peacetime careers were largely uneventful, consisting of a normal routine of training exercises, visits to various French and foreign ports, and naval reviews. However, one of the battleships was destroyed with great loss of life in 1911 due to an accidental magazine explosion. The three surviving ships guarded troop convoys from North Africa in the early days of World War I, and were subsequently sent to the Adriatic Sea in an attempt to bring the Austro-Hungarian Navy to battle. In 1916, the ships were sent to Greece to put pressure on the still-neutral government to join the war, and spent the rest of the conflict there. The battleships operated in the Black Sea and off Constantinople following the war, and were decommissioned between 1919 and 1920.


 * Soviet destroyer Soobrazitelny (1940) (Sturmvogel 66 and Kges1901) : Soobrazitelny was completed for the Black Sea Fleet days before the Germans invaded the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941. She was very active in the first two years of the war, participating in the Raid on Constanta, bombarding Axis troops, escorting supply ships during the Sieges of Odessa and Sevastopol and providing fire support during the Battle of the Kerch Peninsula in 1942 and the amphibious landings at Novorossiysk in early 1943. After three destroyers were lost to German air attacks in October 1943, Stalin banned further operations in the Black Sea except with his permission and the ship was mostly inactive for the rest of the war. Afterwards she was converted to a rescue and decontamination ship and was the last surviving ship of her class when she was scrapped in the late 1960s.


 * Arthur Blackburn (Peacemaker67) : Arthur Blackburn is arguably the most famous soldier from the state of South Australia. He received the Victoria Cross for his role in the Battle of Pozières in 1916, and was medically discharged after being wounded the following year. He juggled high profile civilian roles with a reservist military career between the wars, and was appointed to lead a machine gun battalion during the early years of World War II. He led this battalion in combat against the Vichy French in Syria, and personally accepted the surrender of the city of Damascus. In early 1942 he led the Australian forces in Java, and went into Japanese captivity with his men. Blackburn survived terrible conditions in Japanese POW camps, but suffered bad health for the rest of his life.