Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/November 2010/Articles


 * Benedict Arnold's expedition to Quebec (Magicpiano) : In September 1775, early in the American Revolutionary War, Colonel Benedict Arnold led a force of 1,100 Continental Army troops on an expedition from Cambridge, Massachusetts to the gates of Quebec City. Part of a two-pronged invasion of the British Province of Quebec, his expedition passed through the wilderness of what is now Maine.  The other expedition, led by Richard Montgomery, invaded Quebec from Lake Champlain. By the time Arnold reached the French settlements above the Saint Lawrence River in November, his force was reduced to 600 starving men. They had traveled about 350 mi through poorly charted wilderness, twice the distance they had expected to cover. Assisted by the local French-speaking Canadiens, Arnold's troops crossed the Saint Lawrence on November 13 and 14 and attempted to put Quebec City under siege. Failing in this, they withdrew to Point-aux-Trembles until Montgomery arrived to lead an unsuccessful attack on the city.  Arnold was rewarded for his effort in leading the expedition with a promotion to brigadier general.


 * HMS Indefatigable (1909) (Sturmvogel 66 and Dank) : HMS Indefatigable was a battlecruiser of the Royal Navy and the lead ship of her class. Her keel was laid down in 1909 and she was commissioned in 1911. She was an enlarged version of the earlier Invincible-class battlecruisers with a revised protection scheme and additional length amidships to allow her two middle turrets to fire on either broadside. When the First World War began, Indefatigable was serving with the 2nd Battlecruiser Squadron (BCS) in the Mediterranean, where she unsuccessfully pursued the battlecruiser SMS Goeben and the light cruiser SMS Breslau of the German Imperial Navy as they fled towards the Ottoman Empire. Indefatigable was sunk on 31 May 1916 during the Battle of Jutland, the largest naval battle of the war. Part of Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty's Battlecruiser Fleet, she was hit several times in the first minutes of the "Run to the South", the opening phase of the battlecruiser action. Shells from the German battlecruiser SMS Von der Tann caused an explosion ripping a hole in her hull, and a second explosion hurled large pieces of the ship 200 feet (61 m) in the air. Only two of the crew of 1,017 survived.


 * Pedro Álvares Cabral (Astynax and Lecen) : Pedro Álvares Cabral was a Portuguese noble, military commander, navigator and explorer. Cabral conducted the first substantial exploration of the northeast coast of South America and claimed it for Portugal. While details of Cabral's early life are sketchy, it is known that he came from a minor noble family and received a fine education. He was appointed to head an expedition to India in 1500, following Vasco da Gama's newly opened route around Africa. The object of the undertaking was to return with valuable spices and to establish trade relations in India—bypassing the monopoly on the spice trade then in the hands of Arab, Turkish and Italian merchants. His fleet of 13 ships sailed far into the western Atlantic Ocean, perhaps intentionally, where he made landfall on what he initially assumed to be a large island. As the new land was within the Portuguese sphere according to the Treaty of Tordesillas, Cabral claimed it for the Portuguese Crown. He explored the coast, realizing that the large land mass was likely a continent, and dispatched a ship to notify King Manuel I of the new territory. The continent was South America, and the land he had claimed for Portugal later came to be known as Brazil. The fleet reprovisioned and then turned eastward to resume the journey to India.


 * Thomas C. Kinkaid (Hawkeye7) : Thomas Cassin Kinkaid (1888–1972) was an admiral in the United States Navy during World War II. He built a reputation as a "fighting admiral" in the aircraft carrier battles of 1942 and commanded the allied forces in the Aleutian Islands Campaign. He was Commander Allied Naval Forces and the Seventh Fleet under General of the Army Douglas MacArthur in the Southwest Pacific Area, where he conducted numerous amphibious operations, and commanded the Allied ships during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, the last naval battle between battleships in history.


 * SMS Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand (Buggie111, White Shadows) : SMS Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand ("His Majesty's ship Archduke Franz Ferdinand") was an Austro-Hungarian Radetzky class pre-dreadnought battleship commissioned into the Austro-Hungarian Navy on 5 June 1910. She was named after Archduke Franz Ferdinand. She participated in an international naval protest of the Balkan Wars in 1913, during which she helped enforce a blockade of Montenegro. She also was one of the first ships to deploy seaplanes for military use. During World War I, she saw limited service in the 2nd Division of the 1st Battle Squadron, including mobilization to assist the escape of the German ships SMS Goeben and SMS Breslau and the bombardment of Ancona in 1915. At the end of the war, she was ceded to Italy as a war prize and was eventually scrapped in 1926.


 * Chilean battleship Almirante Latorre (The ed17) : Almirante Latorre was a super-dreadnought battleship (Spanish: acorazado) built for the Chilean Navy (Armada de Chile). She was the first of a planned two-ship class. Construction began soon after the ship was ordered in November 1911, and was approaching completion when she was bought by the United Kingdom's Royal Navy for use in the First World War. Commissioned in September 1915, she served in the Grand Fleet as HMS Canada for the duration of the war and saw action during the Battle of Jutland. Canada was repurchased by Chile in 1920. She took back her original name of Almirante Latorre, and served as Chile's flagship and frequently as presidential transport. In September 1931, crewmen aboard Almirante Latorre instigated a mutiny, which the majority of the Chilean fleet quickly joined. After divisions developed between the mutineers, the rebellion fell apart and the ships were returned to government control. The elderly battleship was scrapped in Japan beginning in 1959.
 * September 1964 South Vietnamese coup attempt (YellowMonkey) : Before dawn on September 13, 1964, the ruling military junta of South Vietnam, led by General Nguyen Khanh, was threatened by a coup attempt headed by Generals Lam Van Phat and Duong Van Duc, who sent dissident units into the capital Saigon. They captured various key points and announced over national radio the overthrow of the incumbent regime. With the help of the Americans, Khanh was able to rally support and the coup collapsed the next morning without any casualties.


 * List of breastwork monitors of the Royal Navy (Sturmvogel 66) : The breastwork monitor was developed during the 1860s by Sir Edward Reed, Chief Constructor of the Royal Navy, as an improvement of the basic monitor design developed by John Ericsson during the American Civil War. Reed gave these ships a superstructure to increase seaworthiness and raise the freeboard of the gun turrets so they could be worked in all weathers. The superstructure was armoured to protect the bases of the turrets, the funnels and the ventilator ducts in what he termed a breastwork. The ships were conceived as harbour defence ships with little need to leave port. This meant that they could dispense with the masts, sails and rigging needed to supplement their coal-fired steam engines over any distance. Reed took advantage of the lack of masts and designed the ships with one twin-gun turret at each end of the superstructure, each able to turn and fire in a 270° arc. These ships were described by Admiral George Alexander Ballard as being like "full-armoured knights riding on donkeys, easy to avoid but bad to close with." Reed later developed the design into the Devastation-class ironclad, the first ocean-going turret ships without masts, the direct ancestors of the pre-dreadnought battleships and the dreadnoughts.


 * List of Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves recipients (1940–1941) (MisterBee1966) : The Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross (German: Ritterkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes) and its variants were the highest awards in the military of the Third Reich during World War II. This military decoration was awarded for a wide range of reasons and across all ranks, from a senior commander for skilled leadership of his troops in battle to a "low ranking" soldier for a single act of extreme gallantry. The Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves (Ritterkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes mit Eichenlaub) was introduced on 3 June 1940 to further distinguish those who had already received the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross and who continued to show merit in combat bravery or military success. A total of 7 awards were made in 1940; 50 in 1941; 111 in 1942; 192 in 1943; 328 in 1944, and 194 in 1945, giving a total of 882 recipients&mdash;excluding the 8 foreign recipients of the award.


 * 766th Independent Infantry Regiment (North Korea) (Ed!) : The 766th Independent Infantry Regiment was a light infantry regiment of the North Korean People's Army (KPA) that existed briefly during the Korean War. It was headquartered in Hoeryong, North Korea, and was also known as the 766th Unit. Trained extensively in amphibious warfare and unconventional warfare, the 766th Regiment was considered a special forces commando unit. The regiment was trained to conduct assaults by sea and then to lead other North Korean units on offensive operations, to infiltrate behind enemy lines and to disrupt enemy supplies and communications.


 * Black Friday (1945) (Nick-D) : On 9 February 1945 a force of Allied Bristol Beaufighter aircraft and their escort of North American P-51 Mustang fighters attacked the German destroyer Z33 and escorting vessels. The German ships were sheltering in a strong defensive position in Førde Fjord, Norway, forcing the Allied aircraft to attack through heavy anti-aircraft defences. The Beaufighters and their escort were also surprised by twelve German Focke-Wulf Fw 190 fighters. Although the Allies damaged at least two of the German ships and downed four or five German fighters, they lost seven Beaufighters shot down by flak guns and another two Beaufighters and one Mustang to the Fw 190s. The operation was labelled "Black Friday" by the surviving Allied aircrew.


 * Leslie Groves : Lieutenant General Leslie Richard Groves, Jr. (1896–1970) was a United States Army Corps of Engineers officer who oversaw the construction of the Pentagon and was in charge of the Manhattan Project that developed the atomic bomb during World War II. As the son of a United States Army chaplain, Groves lived at a number of Army posts. He graduated fourth in his class at the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1918 and was commissioned into the United States Army Corps of Engineers. In 1940 Groves, who "had a reputation as a doer, a driver, and a stickler for duty", became special assistant for construction to the Quartermaster General. In August 1941 he was charged with responsibility for a gigantic office complex to house the War Department's 40,000 staff, which would ultimately become The Pentagon. In September 1942, Groves took charge of the Manhattan Project. He decided to leave the Army in 1948 and was promoted to lieutenant general just before his retirement on 29 February 1948 in recognition of his leadership of the bomb program. By a special Act of Congress his date of rank was backdated to 16 July 1945, the date of the Trinity nuclear test.


 * List of battlecruisers of Japan (Cam and Ed) : The Imperial Japanese Navy (Nippon Kaigun) built four battlecruisers, with plans for an additional four, during the first decades of the 20th century. The battlecruiser was an outgrowth of armored cruiser designs, which had proved highly successful against the Russian Baltic Fleet in the Battle of Tsushima at the end of the Russo-Japanese War. In the aftermath, the Japanese Empire immediately turned her focus to the two remaining rivals for imperial dominance in the Pacific Ocean: Britain and the United States. Japanese naval planners calculated that in any eventual conflict with the U.S. Navy, Japan would need a fleet at least 70 percent as strong as the United States' in order to emerge victorious. To that end, the concept of the Eight-eight fleet was developed, with eight battleships and eight battlecruisers forming a cohesive battle line.