Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/July 2021/Articles


 * Battle of Saint-Malo :  This battle was fought between Allied and German forces in August–September 1944, towards the end of the Normandy Campaign. A reinforced US Army division assaulted a heavily fortified French port town garrisoned by around 12,000 Germans. Nick first became aware of this battle at an exhibition of photographs by war correspondent Lee Miller, who described the fighting as "fortress warfare reminiscent of crusader times".


 * Second Battle of Newtonia : Continuing Hog Farm's series on the American Civil War in Missouri, the Second Battle of Newtonia took place on 28 October 1864 and was fought between a Union cavalry force and the rear guard of a Confederate army. Both sides claimed victory at the time, but modern historians believe the Union came out on top. Estimates of casualties during the battle range widely.


 * Lancaster's Normandy chevauchée of 1356 :  Another in Gog's series on the Hundred Year's War, this was an English offensive commanded by Henry, Earl of Lancaster, in northern France during June–July 1356. Chevauchée meant a large-scale mounted raid. The English travelled 330 miles (530 km) in 22 days, resupplying besieged forts, capturing much loot, and damaging the French economy and prestige, all with very few casualties.


 * Deutschland-class battleship :  The latest FA in Parsecboy's series on German capital ships, this article covers the last class of German pre-dreadnought battleships, built in the early 1900s. As PB notes, "Interestingly, most of them were completed after the revolutionary HMS Dreadnought (1906) rendered their design obsolescent, but three of them outlasted Dreadnought by more than a couple of decades." Speaking of decades, the article passed its A-class review over ten years ago, but had a thorough overhaul and a Peer Review before attaining featured status.


 * Assassination of Talat Pasha :  Continuing Buidhe's series of articles on genocide, this FA revolves around the killing of Talat Pasha, a key figure in the Armenian Genocide. The assassin, Soghomon Tehlirian, declared "I have killed a man, but I am not a murderer". This bold defence was so successful that the dead Pasha effectively became the defendant, the charge became the Armenian Genocide, and Tehlirian was acquitted. The trial's effect was such that it inspired Raphael Lemkin to develop the concept of genocide in international law.


 * Shuttle-Centaur : Another in Hawkeye's series on the US space program, this article looks at an unsuccessful joint NASA-USAF effort to develop a launch system for military satellites and deep space probes. It involved launching payloads from Space Shuttles with the Centaur upper stage rocket. Development began in the late 1970s, but the project was cancelled in the wake of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.


 * Spaceflight before 1951 : Spaceflight effectively began during World War II with the Nazi's V2 rocket.  The V2 was the basis of designs employed by both the Americans and the Soviets after the war, and the launches of all these rockets is the subject of this new FL.


 * Operation Cockpit (Nick-D) : Operation Cockpit was the first of a series of hit and run aircraft carrier raids conducted by the British-led Eastern Fleet during 1944 and 1945. Dubbed "perhaps the most cosmopolitan naval operation of the war", it included an American and a British aircraft carrier, a French battleship and ships from the Australian, Dutch and New Zealand navies. The attack on the Japanese-occupied island of Sabang on 19 April 1944 was successful, with the Allies suffering the loss of only a single plane. It failed to divert Japanese forces away from other areas as hoped though.


 * List of protected cruisers of France (Parsecboy) : This list covers all of the protected cruisers built by France from the 1880s to early 1900s - these ships represented a competition between different elements in the French naval officer corps. Some favored long-range commerce raiders, others preferred small fleet scouts, while others wanted ships suitable for patrolling the French colonial empire. This led to a wide variety of ships being built, from small scouts to large but lightly armed raiders and to large and heavily armed colonial cruisers like D'Entrecasteaux. The French eventually decided to rely on armored cruisers for all of these roles by the early 1900s, so no further protected cruisers were built.


 * Armenian Genocide (Buidhe) : The Armenian genocide was the systematic mass murder of around one million ethnic Armenians in the Ottoman Empire during World War I. Spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), it was accomplished primarily through mass executions, death marches leading to the Syrian Desert, and the forced Islamization of Armenian women and children.


 * List of commanders of the British 2nd Division (EnigmaMcmxc) : This article provides a comprehensive list of the men who have commanded the British Army's 2nd Division throughout its long and distinguished history. Major-General Rowland Hill assumed command on the division's first formation in 1809, and Major-General Nick Eeles was the commander at the time of the unit's most recent disbandment in 2012.


 * Operation Pluto (Hawkeye7) : Operation Pluto was an operation by British engineers, oil companies and the British Armed Forces to construct submarine oil pipelines under the English Channel in support of Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Normandy during the Second World War. While the operation is a famous element of the invasion and subsequent campaigns, the Pluto pipelines were responsible for only about 8 per cent of the deliveries of petroleum products from the United Kingdom to the Allied Expeditionary Force in North West Europe.