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


 * Chevauchée of Edward III of 1346 : Also known as the Crécy campaign, this is another in Gog's series on the Hundred Year's War. The bloody campaign led by Edward III took an English army across northern France from Normandy to Calais between July 1346 and August 1347, and included the famous Battle of Crécy.


 * SMS Hannover : The second of five Deutschland-class battleship pre-dreadnoughts of the German Imperial Navy, Hannover  differed slightly from the lead ship SMS Deutschland (1904) in her propulsion system and slightly thicker armor. In any case, the ships of her class were outdated by the time they entered service, being inferior in size, armor, firepower, and speed to the new British battleship HMS Dreadnought (1906).


 * Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan : The latest in Al Ameer's series on rulers associated with ancient Syria, this article is about a particularly successful caliph. Not only did Abd al-Malik (646–705) reunify a broken Umayyad Caliphate, he introduced a uniquely Islamic currency, made Arabic the language of administration, and founded the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. According to Al Ameer, "no caliph before him and few after him played such a formative role in the creation of the Muslim state".


 * North-Western Area Command (RAAF) : Another in Ian's series on RAAF area commands, NWA was responsible for defending northern Australia and conducting aerial counter-offensives over the Netherlands East Indies during World War II. It was formed shortly before the first, and largest, Japanese air raid on Darwin, and spent most of 1942–43 exchanging tit-for-tat raids against Japanese forces. As the Allied offensive in the South West Pacific gained pace, the command stepped up its attacks on the NEI and further afield, its aircraft ranging as far as China. The command shrank after the war, and disbanded in 1955.


 * French battleship Jean Bart (1911) : Jean Bart was a World War I-era French dreadnought but, like other French dreadnoughts,  saw little action in the war. She was modernized twice between the wars but was judged to not be worth the cost of a third refit before World War II. She instead was converted into an accommodation ship and gave up her name for a newly building battleship. She was captured when the Germans occupied Vichy France although they only made use of her as a target for new warheads. The ship was sunk by Allied airstrikes in 1944 and scrapped after the war.


 * British logistics in the Normandy Campaign : Although the British Army's combat performance during the Normandy Campaign has been long debated, its logistical services were highly successful. The British learned from experiences earlier in the war, and dedicated a vast amount of resources to supporting the combat troops. This article provides an overview of these efforts, covering everything from how the assault troops were supplied on D-Day to the rapid adjustment that took place as the army broke out of Normandy and rapidly advanced into Belgium.


 * French battleship Jauréguiberry ( & ) : Jauréguiberry was one of five roughly similar battleships built in the early 1890s in response to a British naval expansion program. Constrained by fiscal and size limitations, they were inferior to their British counterparts and took much longer to build. Jauréguiberry was particularly accident prone, running aground and experiencing boiler and torpedo explosions. She played a minor role in World War I, spending most of the conflict as a guard ship in Egypt. She was then used as an accommodation hulk until 1934.


 * Battle of Blanchetaque : The prolific Gog's second entry in this issue's list, and another in a major series on the Hundred Years' War, this article covers a battle fought on 24 August 1346 between an English army under King Edward III and a French force commanded by Godemar I du Fay. The English force was attempting to seize a crossing of the River Somme to escape from a trap, and engaged a smaller French force defending it. The English were victorious, the French suffering heavy casualties.
 * SOLRAD 2 : Following on from the nominator's earlier SOLRAD 1, SOLRAD (SOLar RADiation) 2 was the public name of a combination scientific and surveillance satellite developed by the US Navy's Naval Research Laboratory.  The scientific apparatus aboard the satellite was cover for an electronic surveillance package designed to map the Soviet Union's air defence radar network. SOLRAD 2 never made it into orbit, as the booster rocket it launched with broke up over Cuba.


 * Horncastle helmet fragment : Another in Usernameunique's series on fragments of ancient helmets, the Horncastle fragment depicts a boar's head and dates from around 600–650. Discovered in Horncastle, Lincolnshire, in 2002, it is on permanent display at Lincolnshire's City and County Museum.


 * Battle of Sluys (Gog the Mild) : The Battle of Sluys was the first significant engagement of the Hundred Years' War. The naval battle was a disaster for the French, who lost 90% of their ships captured and 90% of their men killed, including the two senior military officers of the realm. Illustrating why the war was to last so long, it had virtually no operational or strategic effect.


 * Fatimid invasion of Egypt (914–915) (Cplakidas) : This was the first attempt by the newly founded Fatimid Caliphate to push east into the heartlands of the Muslim world and replace the Abbasids, and the event which actually made them noticed for the first time in Baghdad. Although at times it seemed on the verge of overrunning Egypt, the enterprise was a failure, not least because it was a gamble, with the Fatimid regime itself too unstable to sustain such a costly effort for long, against the still relatively intact resources of the Abbasid empire.


 * Inter-Allied Women's Conference (SusunW) : SusunW's first A-class article covers a conference which convened in February 1919 to introduce women's issues to the peace process following the end of the First World War. After encountering 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.


 * Rhine Campaign of 1795 (Auntieruth55) : The latest article in Auntieruth's huge series on the French Revolutionary Wars covers the fighting along the Rhine between January 1795 and January 1796. During the campaign two Austro-Hungarian armies defeated a pair of French armies which were attempting to invade the south German states of the Holy Roman Empire. The French enjoyed initial success and captured significant footholds on the east bank of the Rhine. However, in the autumn of 1795 the Austrians mounted successful counter-offensives and captured much of the west bank of the Rhine. The French defeat was attributable to some combination of "treason ... bad generalship and ... the unrealistic expectations of the war planners in Paris".


 * SMS Nymphe (1863) (Parsecboy) : SMS Nymphe was the lead ship of the Nymphe class of steam corvettes built for the Prussian Navy. Ordered as part of a naval expansion program to counter the Danish Navy, she was commissioned in 1863. The ship saw combat against Danish forces the next year, and while hit 70 times in a battle was not seriously damaged. She missed the Austro-Prussian War in 1866, but saw battle with French warships during the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. Nymphe spent 1871 to 1874 in distant waters, and was used as a training ship until the mid-1880s. She was stricken from the naval register in 1887.


 * Battle of Cape Ecnomus (Gog the Mild) : The Battle of Cape Ecnomus was possibly the largest naval battle in history by the number of combatants involved. It 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 to Roman losses of 24 ships.


 * John Gildroy Grant (Zawed) : This article forms part of Zawed's series on NZ Victoria Cross recipients of the First World War. Grant volunteered for the New Zealand Expeditionary Force in 1915, and served on the Western Front as an infantryman from 1916. He received the VC for an action on 1 September 1918 in which he neutralised two German machine gun nests. Grant appears to have suffered from undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder, which after the war contributed to erratic behaviour, the collapse of his marriage and bankruptcy.


 * Battle of Kharistan (Cplakidas) : The Battle of Kharistan was fought between the forces of the Umayyad Caliphate and the Turkic Türgesh in December 737 near the town of Kharistan in Juzjan, eastern Khurasan (modern northern Afghanistan). The Umayyads, under the governor of Khurasan, Asad ibn Abdallah al-Qasri, managed to surprise and defeat the Türgesh khagan, Suluk, and his ally, the Arab renegade al-Harith ibn Surayj. This unexpected victory shored up the threatened Umayyad position in Khurasan, while diminishing the prestige of Suluk, who fell victim to inter-Türgesh rivalries in early 738.


 * Albona-class minelayer (Peacemaker67) : These dinky little mine warfare vessels were originally started for the Austro-Hungarian Navy during World War I, but construction stopped at the end of the war. The Italians had three finished in 1920, and another five were completed a decade later for the Yugoslavs. The remaining six were never completed. Those that had been commissioned all saw service in World War II, in Italian, Yugoslav, German and even Croatian hands. Three survived the war to join the Yugoslav Navy, and one was still in service in 1978.


 * Project Excalibur (Maury Markowitz) : This article covers an American Cold War-era research program which sought to develop an X-ray laser as a ballistic missile defense. The concept involved packing large numbers of expendable X-ray lasers around a nuclear device. When the device detonated, the X-rays released by the bomb would be focused by the lasers, each of which would be aimed at a target missile. Excalibur appeared to offer an enormous leap forward in BMD performance, and considerable funding was dedicated to its development during the early 1980s. Tests undertaken from 1985 were disappointing, and it was alleged that the lab developing the system was misleading the government. The project was greatly scaled back in 1988 and cancelled in 1992.


 * HMS Ramillies (07) (Parsecboy and Sturmvogel 66) : HMS Ramillies was completed after the Battle of Jutland and only played a minor role in World War I. She subsequently supported the Allied interventions in the Russian Civil War and Greco-Turkish War. Despite being obsolete, Ramillies gave varied and useful service in World War II. She saw combat in the Mediterranean, including by escorting convoys to Malta. Ramillies was transferred to the Indian Ocean in late 1941 and was torpedoed by a Japanese midget submarine during the invasion of Madagascar in 1942. The ship bombarded German positions during the landings in Normandy and in the South of France, before being placed in reserve and scrapped in 1945.


 * Russian battleship Dvenadsat Apostolov (Sturmvogel 66) : Dvenadsat Apostolov was one of the earliest pre-dreadnoughts built for the Russian Black Sea Fleet. Completed in the early 1890s, her most notable action was participating in the unsuccessful attempt to recapture the mutinous battleship Potemkin in 1905. The ship was disarmed six years later and became a submarine depot ship in 1912. Immobile, she was controlled by whichever side captured Sevastopol after the Russian Revolution. Dvenadsat Apostolov stood in for Potemkin during the filming of the Battleship Potemkin in 1925 before she was scrapped.